Some of you might have caught the Nova show a week ago on the Antikythera mechanism, a device from approximately 100 BCE found in 1901 in a Greek shipwreck near the island of Antikythera. It is the world's oldest (yet found) working analog computer:
Reconstruction in Athens Museum
and it generated complete astronomical information and forecasts: sun, moon, planets, and eclipses, from now until... whenever. A very complex machine. It's assumed the found object was a factory reproduction of an original designed by the great Syracusan mathematician, Archimedes. In the process of discovering all of this information, the historians used all sorts of mystery-solving techniques - questions, x-rays, research, reconstructions, debates, etc. - to try and figure out what that super-corroded device was, what it was for, and how it was made. Fascinating. Catch the reruns, or rent the DVD.
And it explains why so many of us historians are also mystery fans/writers/etc. Because history is all about solving mysteries, very cold case mysteries, with limited evidence, almost no eye-witnesses, and a whole lot of deduction. Yes, a lot of people think that history is nothing but names and dates, but I can assure you that's the least of it - the historical equivalent of a GPS system, keeping you afloat in a vast sea of time. But the real purpose for history is to find out how things got the way they are. History is all about solving the mystery of us.
Of course, some things never change: human nature (curiosity, greed, anger, pride, love, lust, all the emotions and desires), and what comes of that human nature (the pursuit of power, pleasure, wealth, appetite, and occasionally peace).
Frontisepiece to Rousseau's "Emile"
Some things change dramatically, in a paradigm shift that makes it inconceivable (to us) that things were ever different: our modern concepts of privacy, romance, childhood, individual rights, and personal comfort are all just that, MODERN concepts. Romantic love used to be considered a form of mental illness (read Chaucer). What we call privacy used to be proof that you were either had no status or were in prison (who would ever be alone if they didn't have to be?). Rousseau practically invented modern childhood in "Emile" (ironic, considering that he put each of his four children in an orphanage). And most societies have always been willing to sacrifice individual rights for societal order, especially if it keeps the barbarians (within and without) at bay.
And some things change all the time, especially fashion and beauty, which are simply exercises in the verb "to change".
Where does technology fit into this? Well, I couldn't help noticing that, even on Nova, the scientists were constantly amazed at the complexity of the Antikythera Mechanism, and the ingenuity of the ancients. And this is a classic example of one of the two great biases that historians face, within themselves and within their students/readers/society:
BIAS # 1. Time is an arrow, leading to us, and we, right now, are living in the best of all possible worlds at the best of all possible times, and anyone in the past who didn't live the way we do, especially in terms of morality, government, technology, and religion, were stupid, not to mention just plain wrong. A major subsection of this bias against our ancestors' intelligence is all about technology. I cannot tell you the number of people who say, well, if the ancients were so smart, how come they didn't come up with the technology of today? The answer is to consider where and how technology was used in the ancient world:
WAR: Greek fire; gunpowder; Archimedes and his war machines (first laser prototype; the Archimedes Claw).
TIMEKEEPING and ASTRONOMY: Chinese paper and compasses, originally used for timekeeping, astronomical observations, divination, and prayers; the Antikythera Mechanism, used for timekeeping and astronomy; water clocks, mechanical clocks, etc.
ENTERTAINMENT: Look no further than the Roman Colosseum, which used a huge amount of technology of all kinds to present battles on land and sea.
PUBLIC HEALTH: Flush toilets and sanitary systems of the Indus Valley (Harappa, 26th c. BCE), Knossos (18th c. BCE) and other ancient civilizations; public baths (Indus Valley, Greece, Rome,Ottomans, Japanese).
Sounds pretty modern to me...
NOTE: I'm well aware that time only moves in one direction (at least in this brane), but it's far more like a tree,
with multiple branches and twigs and stems and leaves, than an arrow.
There have been societies and civilizations that have vanished
completely off of the face of the earth. There are echoes everywhere of
things and people that were, but left no trace. And even if they leave a trace, no
explanation. Not everything connects. History is full of red herrings.
The other major bias is the exact opposite:
BIAS # 2. We are a degenerate and weakened species, and things used to be much better, back in... well, the Greeks believed in a Golden Age before their own Age of Iron; the Hindus for millenia have believed we are in Kali Yuga, the age of the demon; and today a surprising number of people like to tell me how much better things were in the 1950's (and I suppose they were, if you weren't a woman, gay, black, or other minority).
NOTE: Just to show how dangerous this bias can be, a classic work of nostalgia history is Plutarch's (ca. 46-120 CE) "On Sparta", in which that violent, anti-education military slave state is presented as the ideal civilization, strong, brave, and free from the corruptions of commerce and money. Obviously, Plutarch had an axe to grind. But very few people even think about that. Because he himself is an "ancient writer" a lot of people swallow everything he wrote as if it were absolute truth, not paying attention to the fact that he wrote almost 500 YEARS AFTER SPARTA'S DEMISE. That's the kind of thing you have to look out for. And part of the reason yes, you do have to know your dates...
My general analysis of bias holders is that the first is primarily held by the young and/or successful; the second is primarily held by older people and/or those who feel throttled by present-day culture (whatever the present day is). My other great observation is that either bias gives you a perfectly logical reason to ignore the past. They both imply that we can learn nothing from the past, either because we are absolutely superior or infinitely inferior. Either way, we are on our own. Me? I know that everyone who ever lived were just as human as I, and the basic lesson of the past is that, until human nature changes as completely as fashion or song stylings, history is going to continue to be the same damn thing over and over again. We'd better start paying attention.
Not that many movies begin with a guy hiding in a stairwell toilet, peeking through a crack in the door. Warsaw, 1942, the German occupation. A whore is murdered. A major in German intelligence is called in by the Polish police, because the case may have unhappy political considerations. The girl was a German informant. Oh, and the guy in the toilet? He saw somebody coming down the stairs, but he can't identify him, because all he saw was the lower half of a Wehrmacht uniform, with a red stripe down the leg. It happens only German generals wear the red stripe.
Three of the generals posted to Warsaw have no explanation for where they were on the night in question, and Major Grau of Intelligence takes it on himself to narrow the field of suspects. His immediate subordinate, a captain, asks him why it matters who killed the girl, a nobody. Grau asks him in return, Have you ever heard of the Eumenides? Grau's point is that even a whore's lonely death, unrevenged, will call down the Furies. One of the suspected officers, General Tanz, makes the explicit counterargument, later in the picture, when he says, Why should this woman's murder attract any attention at all?---our century has seen millions of deaths more horrible than hers. From this perspective, the moral question is one of degree.
NIGHT OF THE GENERALS is compelling not because of the mystery---it's pretty transparent from the get-go which of our guys is a nutjob---but because it's about a murder in wartime. Everything plays out against the worsening backdrop of Germany's coming collapse, from Warsaw in '42 to Paris in July of '44, after the Allied landings in Normandy, and everybody's got something to hide. One of the major plot strands is the conspiracy in the German high command to assassinate Hitler, for example. This raises the stakes considerably, and while you might not agree with General Tanz, and his moral relativism, you can see where he's coming from. With defeat looming, who seriously cares about dead whores? (There's more than one victim as the movie goes on. It turns out there's a serial killer on the loose.) And the dogged military cop, Grau, keeps getting the brush-off, swatted away by higher ranks, and reassigned because he's a nuisance. Not necessarily by the murderer, either. That's where the real mystery lies, not in the homicide investigation itself, but why all these people are so determined to throw Grau off the scent.
Donald Pleasance, Peter O'Toole, Charles Gray, Omar Sharif
The picture uses an effective structural device, which is basically a frame story, although that's not immediately apparent, since it begins in media res, but then it starts to shift back and forth in time, between the war and the present day---the present day being twenty years later. This allows people to comment on the events of the past, as you see them in flashback, or flash-forward, and often enough, they get it wrong. So there's an element of unreliable narrative mixed in. You don't know whether to trust the witnesses. Their memories may be corrupted by dubious loyalties, or simply self-serving, or they're still protecting old secrets.
Lastly, although this is perhaps parenthetical, when I first saw the movie, in late '67, I think it was, I'd been in Berlin almost two years, and one of the things I thought the picture got dead right was the German habit of mind. In particular, the way the Germans chose to to think about the war, or more to the point, the way they chose not to. In one scene, a veteran officer, now managing an automotive plant, laments that the Wehrmacht might have been able to stop the Allies, if the Army hadn't been stabbed in the back---as usual, he adds. This is willful disbelief, and a denial of history. In another instance, an aging general is writing his memoirs, and he's gotten as far as the July 1944 plot against Hitler. He remarks that one has to be circumspect, so as not to re-open old wounds, particularly, he says, since so many of the convicted war criminals are now being released. This beggars imagination. Most people, on the other hand, can't be blamed for wanting to reinvent themselves, or be cast in a better light. For example, the French, everybody secretly in the Resistance, and nobody a willing collaborator. Or the Russians, or the Brits, or the Japanese, or us. Americans conveniently forget how strong the isolationist sentiment in this country was, before Pearl Harbor, and how many people thought Hitler was right about the Jews. In this sense, then, NIGHT OF THE GENERALS is subversive. It chooses both to forget, or to blur memory, and at the same time to serve as a sharp reminder, that only some of us are guilty, but none of us are innocent. No less than the Germans, we congratulate ourselves on learning the wrong lessons. No matter how this turns out, Rommel says, talking about the soon-to-fail July plot, history will judge us as patriots, or traitors.
At the end, though, NIGHT OF THE GENERALS does in fact turn on justice for those murdered whores, and there's some small satisfaction in that. In spite of its large canvas, and larger issues, the picture manages to keep a tight focus, and the Furies are held at bay. Or as Stalin is said to have remarked, one death is a tragedy, millions are a statistic.
When I was 14 years old (an unbelievable 50 years ago) a friend of mine and I were spending an otherwise boring evening pawing through my parents’ LP records, which were collected in a dusty rack in the knotty-pined basement of our suburban St. Louis home. My friend pulled an abnormally small record from the stack. It was a record I had been ignoring for years.
The cover cried out cheapness – a flimsy cardboard sleeve featuring a drawing of a small man, sporting devil’s horns and tail, seated in front of a stylized piano keyboard. Red flames ringed the borders of the album. The title was Songs by Tom Lehrer.
“This,” my friend opined knowingly (since he had already discovered the record in his parents' collection), “is an awesome album.”
We positioned the 10 inch vinyl record on the nearby turntable, turned up the volume, and laughed for thirty minutes straight. Afterwards, tears still in my eyes, I took the album upstairs where my parents were watching Ed Sullivan, oblivious to the merriment that had transpired below.
“I didn’t know we had this record,’ I said, holding out the album toward my father.
In unison the blood drained from my parents’ faces. My mother stared, aghast, at my father. “You weren’t supposed to,” my father stammered, reaching for the album cover, which by the next morning had been relegated by my parents to a more secure hiding place.
* * * * * * * * *
Every once in a while I get lucky on SleuthSayers. My every other Tuesday rolls up on a “winner.” So far I have drawn New Year’s Day, Valentine’s Day and November 22nd – each of which readily suggests themes for an article. And today, though a bit more obscure, is another such winning Tuesday. I can't really make today's article into something about mysteries, or crime, though it does, at base, have a lot to do with clever writing.
Today professor, satirist, and sporadic performer Thomas Andrew Lehrer celebrates his 85th birthday.
So, what was it about that little record that fifty years ago both sent my 14 year old friend and me into gales of laughter while turning my parents ashen when confronted with the fact that we had discovered it in their collection? One does not have to listen long to Mr. Lehrer’s 1953 collection of songs to understand both reactions. Here, for example, is one of those songs -- My Home Town:
More to come on the musical front, but let’s pause first for a little backstory on one of the greatest satirists of our age.
Tom Lehrer, born this day in 1928, is famous for three record albums released between 1953 and 1965. (While more than three albums show up in various catalogs, do not be fooled – the differences reflect only whether the songs were recorded in a studio or before a live audience. Any way you slice it, there basically are only three albums of songs.) Not only is the list of songs small, by his own count Tom Lehrer also performed a grand total of only 109 concerts. As Lehrer observed in a 2010 interview, writing “37 songs in 20 years is hardly what I would call a career.” But what songs!
It is true that Tom Lehrer apparently never saw himself as a composer or entertainer. His principal career was mathematics professor. He graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard in 1946, went on to earn a master’s degree in mathematics and worked toward, but never completed, his doctorate. He earned his living teaching mathematics at Harvard, MIT, Wellesley, and in later years at the University of California, Santa Cruz. (At Santa Cruz he taught an introductory mathematics class for Bachelor of Arts students that he referred to as “Math for Tenors.”) If we were to ignore his musical contributions, Mr. Lehrer’s published works would consist of pretty thin and dry stuff – he co-authored Random Walks with Restraining Barrier as Applied to the Biased Binary Counter, which appeared in a 1958 issue of the Journal of the Society for Industrial Applied Mathematics, and The Distribution of the Number of Locally Maximal Elements in a Random Sample, published in 1957 in the Annals of Mathematical Statistics. Obviously it is not in honor of these works that we are assembled here today.
It was while studying mathematics at Harvard in the1940s that Lehrer began to compose humorous songs. Trained as a child on the piano, his self-accompanied renditions of his compositions rapidly gained a following among the Harvard student body. Inspired by this success, Lehrer self-funded an LP album – that one with the red flames at the top of the article, the one my father had not quite hidden well enough.
Slowly, but steadily, Tom Lehrer was discovered. As an example, Lehrer performed his songs sporadically in nightclubs in the 1950s, and while playing Boston in October of 1954 a young writer named Isaac Asimov wandered in to listen. Asimov promptly became a fan, and the evening proved memorable enough that it is recounted in Asimov’s autobiography In Joy Still Felt. The song Lehrer reportedly was playing as Asimov entered the nightclub was I Got it from Sally, which over the years morphed into I Got it from Agnes. During the course of the song it became obvious to the audience, including Asimov, as he recounts in his autobiography, that the “it” was a sexually transmitted disease, and that the ways that “it” was acquired grew increasingly, shall we say, less normative as the song progressed. Asimov wrote "I haven't gone to nightclubs often, but of all the times I have gone, it was on this occasion that I had by far the best time." Although, as Asimov marvelled, the song contains no word that standing alone would have been unacceptable to a 1954 listener, in its entirety the piece was nonetheless deemed too over the edge to be included in either of Lehrer’s early albums.
But that does not stop us here at SleuthSayers – in all its glory, here is Tom Lehrer singing I Got it from Agnes.
No further albums were forthcoming, and by all appearances in the late 1950s Tom Lehrer had left satire behind and was concentrating on his day job at Harvard. Then along came an NBC series: That Was the Week That Was.
There are those in my generation who still hold cherished memories of TW3 (as it was known to its sadly few fans). Satire, it is said, closes on Saturday night. TW3, NBC’s experiment in live satire, lasted a scant one and a half seasons, finally expiring on a Tuesday. While it was around it offered a weekly live send-up of the notable news stories of the previous seven days. If you don’t remember this gem, or if you are too young to have been there, the show was sort of a Daily Show, but done in a variety format. Reportedly Professor Lehrer tuned in, liked what he saw, and, upon listening to its musical odes to the events of the week, thought to himself “I could do that.” He began submitting songs to the show. The first one accepted, performed live on TW3 (if memory serves) by Broadway performer Stanley Grover, commemorated National Brotherhood Week.
The songs written for TW3 provided the fodder for Tom Lehrer’s third, and final, album – That Was the Year That Was, recorded live at San Francisco's famous Hungry I, and released in 1965. The album not only contains all of the TW3 songs as performed by Tom Lehrer, it offers the original versions of those songs without the dampening (and damning) revisions made by nervous NBC censors. Fueled by the success of his TW3 songs Tom Lehrer toured briefly in 1965 and 1966. There were several other short tours, but by 1972 Tom Lehrer had once again largely stepped back from the public eye.
Explaining his disdain for touring Lehrer has observed “if you have already gone to Cincinnati, there is really no reason to go on to Cleveland.” There is also an urban legend that Tom Lehrer retired from performing after Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, explaining that the event rendered satire forevermore obsolete.
Nevertheless Tom Lehrer again re-emerged, at least vicariously, in 1981, thanks to the efforts of Sir Cameron Macintosh, the Broadway producer extraordinaire later known for producing Cats, Les Miz, Phantom of the Opera, Lady Saigon and Mary Poppins. Macintosh decided that the world needed a revival of Lehrer’s mischievous musings, and took it upon himself to accomplish this.
Tomfoolery, Macintosh's theatrical revue of Lehrer’s works, was fashioned along the lines of Jacque Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris -- the show is a musical revue, without story, presented in a cabaret setting. The revue played in various cities across the United States – I saw a production at Washington’s Arena Stage in 1982 – and played off Broadway for 120 performances. It featured songs from Tom Lehrer’s three albums, as well as some additional songs he wrote for the PBS children’s television series The Electric Company.
Thereafter, other than some re-issues of his albums, notably a nice newly re-engineered 2010 offering, The Tom Lehrer Collection (highly recommended, purchase it here), that has pretty much been it. What nevertheless has fueled the fire and kept Professor Lehrer popular all of these intervening years? Certainly not his formal reviews. The following are included, tongue in cheek, on his album covers:
• "Mr. Lehrer's muse is not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste." New York Times
• "More desperate than amusing" — New York Herald Tribune
• "He seldom has any point to make except obvious ones" — The Christian Science Monitor
• "Plays the piano acceptably" — The Oakland Tribune
In a 2010 interview Lehrer reflected on the continued vitality of his satiric works. He noted at the time that what he tried to do in his pieces was to use internal rhymes and clever word play so as to produce songs that one not only would want to listen to, but would want to listen to over and over again. It certainly has worked for me over the last 50 years. And why do the songs, with all of their dark humor, continue to resonate, more than 60 years after many of them were written? Again, in the words of Tom Lehrer: “if you predict the worst, you are likely to be hailed as a prophet.”
All of that said, the truly amazing thing about Lehrer’s songs is how well they do in fact (even if darkly) continue to resonate.
A new Pope faced with issues of reform in the Catholic Church? Time for The Vatican Rag.
The Supreme Court re-examining provisions of the Voting Rights Act? Lets listen, once again, to Dixie.
Scandal in the ranks of the Boy Scouts? That calls for Be Prepared.
Harvard unimaginably wins the first round in March Madness? Fight Fiercely, Harvard! (Okay, its about football but you'll get the picture!)
My favorite professor did emerge from the ivy covered halls at least one last time, in 1998, when, after 25 years he agreed to perform in London at a gala tribute to Sir Cameron Macintosh. As we are poised to enter yet another spring, what could be more appropriate than this?
Tom Lehrer has famously observed that "[i]f, after hearing my songs, just one human
being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to
strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while.” Sorry, but it's not going to happen. We are too busy, even after all of these years, laughing.
I'm thrilled the President is backing research on mapping the brain. Mainly, because I'd like to know where my brilliant ideas go inside my brain when I lose them. Does this ever happen to you? I can't understand it and it's wonderful that scientist are going to map out the brain. I wonder if it will be like a file cabinet and things will be labeled alphabetically? Or will they just handle things regionally? Texas things here. NY things here. California things over here. Music, art, literature, science, mathematics, food, wine, sex, uh oh. I really don't care I just want to access those awesome ideas when I have them.
The aggravation is, I know I had a wonderful idea for this post last week. It was on writing and the lessons were perfect for the beginning writer, for the advance writer and for the astute reader. I had examples I planned to use and even thought of book covers I could incorporate. But silly me, I didn't write any of this down. You see, I was laying (lying?) in bed trying to go to sleep and my brain was running about 120 miles per hour. It happens to me at least twice a week. I just can't turn off my brain and go to sleep.
So I'm lying (laying)? there and suddenly I began having a brainstorm. I'll bet at least half of those 86 billion neutrons were popping at the speed of light and the thoughts kept blinking off and on. Off and on. I'd have a good thought and that in turn would melt into another related good thought. The next idea flowed into another and it all made wonderful sense.
I know, I know, I probably should have gotten up, picked up my pad and pen from my night stand and made notes. Problem is, I was so comfortable. I had my body in exactly the right position so that nothing hurt and it was so nice that I just didn't want to move. When you get to be my age, good sleeping positions are to be cherished and the worst thing you can do is move a muscle. Because once you move, that warm comfy position somehow slips away. No matter how much you try, after you get up, to get back into that comfort zone you just can't find it. It's gone. Where I don't know, but perhaps with the brain mapping there will be a cabinet drawer that's labeled "Comfort Zone For Sleeping." Lord, I hope so.
So I'm totally comfortable and I'm not about to move. The next best thing is to sternly tell myself, "Self, this is important. This will make a super article for my SleuthSayers blogspot." Okay, so I repeat several times what I believe is the main theme of my article. I mentally write on my forehead, as if it were a note pad. Number 1: The fantastic way to do this is by writing...this. Number 2: It's very easy to do, all you have to do is...this. Number 3: Show examples of this. Number 4: Get someone to show you how to pull book covers off web sites and put into your article. Finally, Number 5: bring it all together in a meaningful way and wow...you got this.
That's when the danged alarm went off and it was time to get up and get ready for my bowling league. I was exhausted because I had not slept a wink all night because I had this extraordinary idea to write for my blog. However, I couldn't remember any of it except all the meaningless things.. Like being too comfortable to get up and make notes. Like talking sternly to myself and saying "You will remember, you will remember, your will remember." Like mentally writing bullet number points on my forehead as it it was a lined sheet of paper.
BUT I had absolutely no idea what my article idea was about. Nothing. Nada. No way. I've tried every day for nine days to remember. Used every trick I could think of to bring it all back to mind and nothing works. Which means that y'all now have this silly little article about my forgetfulness and my frustration. As my Mama used to say, "It's aggra-fretting."
Please Doctor Scientist, hurry up and get our brains mapped so I can know exactly where to go in my mind to find those super ideas that I manage to come up with. And maybe, just maybe that awesome idea is there, filed away somewhere in my mental file cabinet and I'll be able to resurrect it and write it up for all of you to read.
I write about Florida crime news because it's so weird, offbeat, even kinky and often awful, such as the guy arrested for returning used enemas to a Jacksonville pharmacy or the woman who was arrested this week not for breaking and entering a man's home, not for swimming nekked in his swimming pool, but for answering the call of nature in his backyard. She reportedly blamed President Obama.
But sometimes I stumble upon incidents that grab the throat or seize the heart and won't let go. Years ago, a dear friend told me of a wandering high school classmate who'd been sent from her parents' home in California to Plymouth, Massachusetts. She had trouble fitting in and no one was surprised when she disappeared that autumn, supposedly hitchhiking. The grandparents had a large wooded property and the following spring, they began trimming back the overgrowth. There at the back of the property under an apple tree, they found their granddaughter where she'd hanged herself.
But what shocked me was what the girl had with her: A favorite book, a guitar, and an alarm clock. A god-damned alarm clock. To this day that haunts me, a girl I never met setting a date and time to meet her own destiny with… an alarm clock.
Death. Cold, cold, but very, very personal.
I suppose such an incident might inspire a writer, if one could figure out whether it's the beginning of a story, the end, or the journey itself. Or perhaps it overwhelms an ordinary writer, too existential, too esoteric in its implications.
I've been driving a couple of hours each day mostly on Interstate 4 and the Florida Turnpike, enough that I had to buy a new set of 225-55R16s. Details, fodder for writers, where the rubber meets the road.
So this past week I'm running up the Turnpike at 70mph, 120km/h if you're reading this overseas. Ahead, brake lights. Smoke. Dark smoke, billowing black. Flames reaching into overhead girders.
I'm not a gawker, never have been. Cate says, "Oh, my …."
Out of my peripheral vision, I see a car has smashed into one of the support pilings under an overpass. It's reinforced concrete, two feet in diameter, an immovable object. The Japanese car that plowed into it is not an irresistible force. It's concertinaed into a third of its original length.
Flames, heavy smoke. No ambulance yet. By evening, efficient Turnpike crews will have painted the columns, swept up the glass, repaired the melted asphalt, shampooed the last vestiges of molten metal and fricaseed flesh. That's what your Turnpike tolls pay for.
"Oh," says Cate softly. She turns, drawn by the horror. I focus driving through the traffic and smoke.
Through the flames she can see the rear of the car. "There's writing on the rear window," she says.
"Writing?" I can't turn to look even if I wished.
"Writing, white shoe polish, like…" Only one application comes to mind, a date with destiny. "Like on honeymooners' cars," she says.
Honeymoon bliss, perhaps but certain fiery death in the afternoon.
Sometimes we stumble upon incidents that grab the throat or seize the heart and won't let go. Whether it's the beginning of a story, the end, or the journey itself, it's haunting.
When, for example, did “night and day” (or “day and night”) become “24/7”? When did “back in the old days” or “way back when” become “back in the day”? How did a simple “never” turn into a facetious “not anytime soon”? Actually, that one charmed me the first time I saw it, in Rosemary Harris’s first mystery. When her wisecracking suburban protagonist meets a hostile and suspicious female police detective, she says, “We were not going shopping together anytime soon.” But all too soon, I saw the same expression everywhere. Note to self: if “anytime soon” (or “back in the day” or “24/7”) should inadvertently trickle from your fingertips, delete asap!
I know where “thirtysomething” (and its derivatives, “twentysomething” and “fortysomething,” if not “fiftysomething”) came from: it was the title of a TV series that debuted in 1987. The term entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1993, where it was qualified as “specifically applied to members of the ‘baby boom’ generation entering their thirties in the mid-1980s; also attributed as an adjective phrase (hence, characteristic of the tastes and lifestyle of this group).” But the baby boomers are now “the new thirty,” ie in their sixties, and I’ve seen manuscript after manuscript in which “thirtysomething” appears simply to denote a character in his or her thirties. Published books, “not so much”—another overused phrase that has emerged in the last couple of years.
Have you read advertising copy for clothing lately? When did “pants” or “pair of pants” become “pant”? Men can buy the “Outdoor Research Foray Pant” at Zappo’s—for one-legged mountain climbers, no doubt—or the “Polo Ralph Lauren Hudson “Preston” Pant” at Bloomingdale’s—for one-legged polo players, maybe? My one consolation is that, as far as I know, nobody but advertisers and maybe retailers is using “pant” as a noun.
In my last post, I promised to explain how R.T.’s comments on Louis Willis’ earlier post (the one that set my three-part character diatribe in motion) illustrate the manner in which characters organically changed, in order to add depth and life to a 250-word story that had felt like a skeleton, resulting in a final story of nearly 8,000 words, which sold to EQMM. And, I mentioned that this would naturally result in explaining how plot sometimes changes in my writing, due to character behavior or attitude.
To create that 250-word piece, I let my subconscious (I believe, at least) speak to me through a hard-bitten mercenary’s voice. I typed what “the guy” said into my computer, but then pulled out and incorporated only the key points in the story, because of the word limit.
Naturally, this left me with a lot of left-over parts on my computer, because that character in my head had told me a lot about his life, while I’d used only a small portion of it.
I suppose this is rather similar to all the parts you’d have left over, if you bought a plastic car model, but only glued in the window glass before gluing the chassis to the body and adding the wheels where they belonged. There wouldn’t be any engine in the model, or any interior to see when looking through the windshield. It would merely be the shell of a car model.
And, to me, that analogy seems to stand up, since the 250-word version of “Dancing in Mozambique” felt like only the shell of the story. It had a body and chassis, and I’d built the driveshaft by twining the story around a shooting concept called The Mozambique. But, most of the stuff the main character had told me sat parked in my computer unused.
One day, quite a while after I decided the 250-word version obviously wasn’t going anywhere, I pulled it out and looked it over. I had the notes I’d “dictated” from my mythical mercenary on a separate Word doc contained within the same story file on my computer. And after reading through all of that, I started thinking that it might make a very nice piece.
The problem was:
I felt that there were still some parts of the over-all story that were missing. They weren’t in the short version of the story, but they weren’t in the dictation notes either. I didn’t know where they were, but pawing through all the pieces in my computer, and mentally matching them to the parts already assembled, I could tell that pieces of the story I wanted to write were definitely missing.
Harkening back to my previous example of the plastic car model, we might say the story had no engine to provide true motive force. Thus the story lacked the power it needed, if it were to drive anywhere – particularly anywhere of significance. Nor did it have a comfortable interior that might lend somebody – the reader perhaps? -- a place to “nestle in.”
And, this is where R.T.’s statement on Louis’ post, a few weeks back, helps explain what I did to locate these missing pieces.
In his comment, R.T. made two points I felt very familiar with. The first was:
I usually reach back into the past, mostly for criminals and street people I've run across and how they would act/react . . .
I, too, tend to reach back into my past for characters I’ve known. And, during my time in the army – and since – I’ve known a lot of characters. Since this story dealt with a mercenary who had once been a regular soldier, I found it natural to dredge-up soldiers I’d once known instead of criminals.
One of the problems I had was – though the story’s protagonist had clearly indicated (in my head) that he’d been in the US Army during the Viet Nam conflict, and that experiences there led him to become disenchanted with Regular Army military life, as well as the civilian world at home – he hadn’t told me what the catalyst for this change in his perspective had been.
Not to worry.
Many years ago, long before I ever seriously contemplated joining Special Forces, I had an army buddy we called “Speedy.” Speedy’s nickname – many of you will be happy to learn, I’m sure -- had nothing to do with drug use. In fact, Speedy never used drugs, as long as I knew him. And, the last time we spoke, he had clearance and access up around Battle Star Galactica level, so I’d imagine he’s really not the sort of fellow who’s ever going to start.
No, his nickname, instead, had a lot to do with the brush fire pace at which he ran around a track.
Speedy and I shared upper and lower bunks in Heavy Equipment Operator’s School, and thus became pretty good buddies. We were young (late teens) and spoke often about things “back home.”
One night, while we sat outside the barracks talking, Speedy quietly told me about his father, who had been in Special Forces during Viet Nam. And, he went on to relate a war story his father had once told him concerning the fact that supplies had been disappearing from their convoys, which ran from Saigon out to their SF basecamp in the hinterlands.
It seems that the A-Team’s supplies were definitely on the trucks when they left Saigon, but portions of them disappeared before they reached the basecamp.
Evidently, the Viet Cong guerrillas were hiding in the jungle along the roadway, then running out and snagging supplies off the back, when the trucks slowed to a crawl on certain stretches along the road.
One day, a friend of Speedy’s dad decided to put an end to this pilfering. The guy grabbed a meat cleaver and a .45, then climbed into the back of one of the trucks as they pulled out of Saigon with supplies, saying he was gonna “get Cong!”
I won’t tell you what happened, here. However, the horrific results were completely unexpected, and the dad’s friend wound up feeling extreme guilt and remorse for what he had wound up doing during his attempt to protect their supplies. As Speedy put it: “Dad said he was really f#*&%@d up by it, and was never the same afterward.” And, having heard what happened, I completely understood why.
Recalling the story years later, I also realized this was just the sort of catalyst my protagonist would need to have encountered, in order to find himself becoming a mercenary in Africa. Consequently, the passage in “Dancing in Mozambique” in which the Rangers deal with those pilfering supplies from their trucks, is based very closely on the story Speedy said his dad told him -- an incident that probably really happened.
Sometimes these story characters … get bent to fit the story as it emerges ….
This is something R.T. also mentioned in his comment.
In my writing, characters do sometimes get bent to fit the story, but I often find that the story bends more naturally, to fit the characters. Which is another way of saying that – in my writing style -- the story tends to grow organically from character actions, and sometimes changes in odd little ways.
In the case of Speedy’s story, I thought my protagonist was more likely to have been a Ranger than a Special Forces soldier. I made that decision based on the experience level he seemed to have at the time he was in Viet Nam. So I suppose that’s change number one. Not a big one, but a change to the story, nonetheless. And, one that I made based on where I thought the character would have been at that time in his life.
In the real story, the guy with the cleaver wound up being mentally and emotionally wounded, but he didn’t kill himself over what he had done; he lived with the guilt and remorse for the rest of his life instead. I, on the other hand, only had 8,000 words to work with, so I needed to show the impact of his actions on his psyche, while also stressing the impact it had on my protagonist. My solution was to have the cleaver-wielder commit suicide, since I thought this would work as a quick and dirty demonstration of the impact.
Remember, however, that the voice I’d originally heard in my head was speaking in first person. He was telling me what had happened to him, how he had come to find himself in this dark place – very powerful stuff that could cut a reader to the emotional quick. Consequently, I was writing the story in first person, since that’s where its power clearly lay.
Writing the story Speedy had told me, however, using the first person voice of my protagonist, my protagonist’s voice and mannerisms gradually overtook the narrative. It was as if that voice in my head “switched on” again. And, I was glad, because this is seldom a bad thing for my writing. This change in voice caused several minute changes in the story, and helped fill in some missing blanks to lend verisimilitude. But, then it accomplished something more.
Writing about the aftereffects of the horrifying incident, I found myself writing the protagonist’s story (the words were coming out of his “mouth” and in his voice, remember) in a way that didn’t just demonstrate what the incident had done to the guy with the cleaver. Instead, through his suicide, my protagonist’s buddy had left my main character to shoulder the burden of guilt all alone. It took the guilt of a mistake made by another character, and slammed it on top of my protagonist.
I didn’t plan this. It’s something that happened when the storyline was transmogrified through retelling by the protagonist’s voice. Only after writing it down, did I realize what I’d done.
I’d like to expand on this notion, but this post is already long and my time today is rather short. So, I’ll sign off now, and expand on things some other time.
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I'm thrilled the President is backing research on mapping the brain. Mainly, because I'd like to know where my brilliant ideas go inside my brain when I lose them. Does this ever happen to you? I can't understand it and it's wonderful that scientist are going to map out the brain. I wonder if it will be like a file cabinet and things will be labeled alphabetically? Or will they just handle things regionally? Texas things here. NY things here. California things over here. Music, art, literature, science, mathematics, food, wine, sex, uh oh. I really don't care I just want to access those awesome ideas when I have them.
