Fie on fie!

Fie on goodness, fie

Fie on goodness, fie

Eight years of kindness to your neighbor
Making sure that the meek are treated well
Eight years of philanthropic labor
Derry down dell
Damn, but it's hell
Oh, fie on goodness, fie

Fie, fie, fie

It's no secret that I've always loved a good fie:

"Fie on ’t, ah fie! 'Tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed." –Hamlet

"Fetch him off, I pray you; he speaks nothing but madman: fie on him!"--Twelfth Night

"Fie, fie, on all tired jades, on all mad masters, and all foul ways!" --The Taming of the Shrew

But the truth is, and I wouldn't want this to get around, I had no idea what a fie was. It's got to be pretty awful, right? Nobody ever fies on the dog when he has an accident in the bedroom. You don't fie on the waitress because she forgot to bring ketchup. Fie is reserved for the absolute bastards of the cosmos.

So finally I looked up fie. And effing eff, it doesn't mean ANYTHING. It's not a blast of lightning, or a bright blade that cleaves a knave from the nave to the chops. It's not even the old fewmets hitting the windmill. It's just an interjection of disgust, like Tchaa! or Tsk! or even Pshaw!

Pshaw!

 This is how curiosity killed the cat. This is the curse of Faust. This is the overweening hubris of Oedipus. This is me wishing I'd never looked up fie. Let fie lie.

But where did the word come from? From French, and Latin (fi!) before that, according to etymologists. Thousands of years ago this monosyllable of disgust hovering just on rebellion bubbled up to the lips of a thoroughly tacked off plebeian and those around him in the forum nodded in agreement. Fie on the patricians, the praetorians, the Vandals and the Goths. When Hamlet uttered it something smelled rotten in the state of Denmark--fie has always been associated with olfactory offensiveness.

The interjection seems to be the red-headed stepchild of the parts of speech, barely even given a nod by pencil-neck grammarians. But when you think of it, interjections were probably the first words humans uttered. Just think of Ook in his cave on a cold dark night. He can't hold it till morning. He gets up to go to the outcave, stubs his toe on a rock in the dark and yelps:

Interjection!

And, yes, I looked it up, and it turns out this very same theory, that language arose from interjections, has been held by thinkers from Democritus to Darwin, and even has a name: interjectional theory--also known as (I kid you not) the pooh-pooh theory. 

 But let's return to fie. How did the word lose its potency, become quaint, amusing even? Do words simply wear out over time, like our other tools? Did fie give place to another f-word? Will we ever weary of that one?

F*** if I know.

And if you think I'm ever going to look up "cleave a knave from the nave to the chops", then fie on you.

Camelot--Fie on Goodness. Cut from the show

in 1961, it never made it to the movie. Restored

for the revival. Seemingly the anthem of our time.

Getting emotional with sci-fi

"My heart is full of X."

  

So we can easily imagine an alien, or a mutant with different abilities, different physiologies: four heads or tentacles for arms or the ability to walk through walls, or even an intelligent shade of blue (I think Douglas Adams came up with that one). But what if an alien or mutant or even just a different earthly species were equipped with an entirely different set of emotions, beyond hate, love, fear, doubt and chagrin. Emotions x, y, and z, a whole alien array, so different from our experience that they in no way correspond to anything in our ken?

We could still witness the physical manifestations of their emotions, like tears or blushing or the spraying of ink, but have no idea of their predicates. Would we be able to divide their emotions into positive and negative reflexes, or would that only mean positive or negative outcomes for ourselves if we responded correctly? What would be the key to unlock their "hearts?" We have a name for every shade of human emotion, yet we can barely even read the hearts of our own species. Probing might turn out to be be a highly decorous form of salutation.

Oh, Lord, please don't
let me be misunderstood

If we throw rocks at an alien, and an alien responds by hugging us, could we therefore assume that having rocks thrown at it is a positive experience for E.T.? And we can interpret their pelting us with rocks in turn as a positive sign? Or is its hug meant as a retaliatory response? Or is the alien simply modeling correct behavior in the hope that we will imitate it and leave off with the rock-throwing? (And how would it feel about being be referred to as an "it?" Does it have unimagined pronouns?) Or is it displaying x emotion? 

We may be able to elicit what we consider positive behavior from an alien or a mutant (provided their emotions are consistent and discrete, a very big if, considering our own emotional variability and opaqueness) but we could never know the impetus for that behavior. Are we perhaps aware of only a small sliver of the emotional spectrum? The aliens might even be able to teach us to access emotions hitherto unknown within ourselves. Perhaps those emotions are the key to inner peace that Tibetan lamas have been trying for centuries to tap into. Is there a numinous emotion waiting to flower?

We can only see a small range if the electromagnetic spectrum. Only hear within a small frequency range. Our ability to smell is shamed by every other mammal on this planet. Why should we think we have a grasp of all available emotions? All our fictional aliens display fundamentally human emotions. Even  the "emotionless" Vulcans merely demonstrate stoicism taken to its (ahem) logical conclusion. Science fiction has done a pretty good job of speculating on how we might establish communication with an alien intelligence. But that is only sense, not sensibility.

 I may be wrong. Sci-fi literature may be chock-a-block with examples of this conundrum. Has anyone come across one of them? Let me know. And if not--well, I'm not a sci-fi writer, so I invite, nay challenge any writers reading this to take up the problem and solve for x.

Sondheim in a Tree

"It strikes me that's what technique must be: the control of the information that
flows from a play to its audience; and in particular the ordering of the information."

--Tom Stoppard

 I want to talk about point of view in narration. It might help first if we think of a novel as a large packet of information, just like the data packets governed by the hypertext transfer protocol (http) on the internet, which delivers data, order, and destination-- which we can translate for our purposes as story, plot, and audience. 

Plot--the ordering, revealing or withholding of information in a story--is especially important in a time-based medium like drama, but also in novels, unless the reader elects to subvert the author's intent by reading the ending first, say, or the author subverts it as in The Dictionary of the Khazars (by Milorad Pavic), wherein he invites the reader to assemble the story in any order they like.  

Point of view directs the information spigot in sometimes subtle ways. First it can be can be additive, as in Toni Morrison's Jazz, with multiple narrators slowly bringing the truth into focus, or or subtractive with an unreliable narrator, sometimes severely restrictive, as in the Benjy Compson section of The Sound and the Fury. Even multiple narrators can be subtractive when the different narrators accounts clash so much that we  are left at sea.

Which brings us to Someone in a Tree, a tour de force musical number from Stephen Sondheim's Broadway show Pacific Overtures. The show is about Japan's (unwilling) opening to western trade in the late 19th century. Under threat of force, the emperor's representatives set up a meeting with the Americans to devise a treaty. We begin with the Reciter (the uber-narrator of the play) bemoaning the fact that there is no authentic Japanese account of what was said that day in the treaty house. An old man appears.

[OLD MAN]
Pardon me, I was there.

[RECITER]
You were where?

[OLD MAN]
At the treaty house.

Wonderful! But it turns out that the old man--who was then quite young--was perched in a tree, able to see, but not hear what went on. And his memory has become clouded by time. To underscore this, we're introduced to the old man as a young boy, whose comments will form a contrapuntal narrative. He demands of his older self:

[BOY]
Tell him what I see!

And of course there are discrepancies in their memories:

[OLD MAN]
Some of them have gold on their coats.

[BOY]
One of them has gold—

He was younger then.

Which is the truer memory? The one closer in time to the events, or the one with an experienced adult's understanding of their import?

But then Sondheim adds another thread to his fabric:

[WARRIOR]
Pardon me, I am here
If you please, I am also here—

--a warrior placed underneath the floor of the treaty house, waiting for a signal to jump out and slay the Americans if they draw weapons. He can hear what is being said. And he's speaking not from memory, but from the actual event. Now we're getting somewhere.

Except we aren't. Because he's not listening to the words spoken, he's listening to movement, he's listening for his cue to act:

[WARRIOR]
First I hear a creak and a thump
Now I hear a clink
Then they talk a bit...
Many times they shout when they speak
Other times they think
Or they argue it...

But when they combine their narratives, is there light shed?

[BOY]
Someone reads a list
From a box

[WARRIOR]
Someone talks of laws

[OLD MAN]
Then they fan a bit

[BOY]
Someone bangs a fist

[WARRIOR]
Someone knocks

[OLD MAN]
Now there was a pause

[OLD MAN, BOY & WARRIOR]
Then they argue it

No. 

But they insist on the importance, the primacy of their involvement in the event, even though peripheral:

[BOY]
And there's someone in a tree—

[OLD MAN]
—Or the day is incomplete

[OLD MAN & BOY]
Without someone in a tree
Nothing happened here

The song becomes a commentary on itself, on the solipsism inherent in narration, and the fictional nature of memory. It shows that the information flow can never be complete, therefore choice of narrator is critical for shaping the story. Plot is tightly interwoven with point of view. All narrators are unreliable. Even a camera has a fixed position. The omniscient narrator can only tell you what the author decides is salient, not every detail the reader might judge necessary. 

So how do we choose a narrator? First person provides immediacy, placing the reader on the protagonist's shoulder, but it cuts us off from any wider view; we can be too close to action, clouding judgment. We can describe the same events from many characters' points of view, but it sometimes tells us more about the various characters than the events.

But should it be the goal of narration to make everything clear? Or is ambiguity  desirable? (Clarity of communication is always a virtue, but thematic ambiguity can make a reading experience richer, involving the reader in its resolution.

In the same talk quoted above, Stoppard also says "Art which stays news is, in Ezra Pound's phrase, is art in which the question 'what does it mean?' has no correct answer."

 In the end, devising a protocol which will deliver data in the most efficient order to reach our destination, we must light upon the point of view that best correlates to theme, to the central questions we set out to ask--but not necessarily answer.

Sondheim's favorite of all his songs, 

Someone in a Tree.

Richard Powers on reading

A book is still atemporal. It is you, in silence, hearing voices in your head, unfolding at a time that has nothing to do with the timescale of reading. And for the hours that we retreat into this moratorium, with the last form of private and silent human activity that isn't considered pathological, we are outside of time.

                        --Richard Powers

Favorites:

The Overstory

Generosity: an Enhancement

Gain

Plus, a bonus quote:

“The best arguments in the world won't change a person's mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”

Dylan Thomas on words

"I fell in love – that is the only expression I can think of – at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behaviour very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy."

-- Dylan Thomas

Favorites:

Collected Poem

A Child's Christmas in Wales

Under Milkwood

And a bonus quote:

“A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.”

Review: Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell

 With a couple of his recent Sherlock Holmes pastiches, Nicolas Meyer has stepped up his game. Not in terms of plotting or character, at which he has always been the gold standard, or in his channeling of the voice and more importantly the heart of John Watson (for Watson's heart is Sherlock's heart, much as Watson's voice is Sherlock's voice). But the world of Sherlock Holmes is essentially domestic, with criminals who will be dealt with by the courts (once Holmes has revealed then to Scotland Yard). But in The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols and now his latest, Sherlock Holmes and the Telegraph from Hell, the author moves Holmes onto the world stage, raising the stakes of his investigations enormously.

The plot is simple: what if the outcome of World War I depended upon the contents of a telegram, and Britain were desperate to know the contents of that telegram? Well, it did. The story of the Zimmerman Telegram is historical fact. Meyer's inspired move is to couple that fact to Doyle's (or Watson's) story "His Last Bow," which hints at Holmes's role in the war about to engulf Europe. And thereby hangs a tale that takes Holmes and Watson in their twilight years from London to Washington to Mexico City, dogged by assassins every step of the way.

The truth is, this isn't really a detective story, though it's strewn with Holmes's customary legerdemain. And it's not really a spy story, though Watson can hardly turn around without bumping into a spy. It's a coming of age story for a man in his sixties who has come to realize that his fog-bound streets, hansom cabs, and skills at single-stick are not enough to see him through the dangerous new world of the 20th century. He must confront his own parochialism, the smallness of his lifelong efforts against evil.  

Don't misunderstand me. There's plenty of adventure and derring-do in this novel, but there's an elegiac mood to it, too. And that raises it above Meyer's previous efforts. Which makes it all the more worth the read.

Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell is available at Amazon.

[I wouldn't add this in a review for Amazon or Goodreads since I don't think a review should be about the reviewer, but if you're reading it on my blog, you know that I've written some Sherlock Holmes novels myself, and have some idea of the pitfalls involved in this kind of novel. And you've probably heard me mention that Meyer's The Seven Per-cent Solution was the inspiration for my own efforts. So imagine my consternation when, in the middle of editing The Strange Case of the Pharaoh's Heart, I learned that Meyer was about to come out with his own Sherlock Holmes meets the mummy tale, The Return of the Pharaoh, and how relieved I was to learn that the pharaoh in his tale was not Tutankhamun and his story was nothing like mine. Which is preface to say that I came upon the story of the Zimmerman Telegram about a year ago and contemplated writing a Holmes short story based on it. I thank procrastination I didn't go ahead with that one.]

Night Owl Writer

Nighthawks at the Diner

  Why are so many writers night owls? Is it the peace and quiet, the hush when all the world's asleep? Or the insomnia that arises from trying to resolve insoluble plot problems? Well, I can only speak for myself, and my memories are a little bit hazy, but I blame my oldest brother and sister. Let me take you back. It was probably 1966, and I would have been eight or nine.

Jim, a career Army sergeant, was just back from his first tour of Vietnam and cooling his heels waiting for orders on his next posting. So he got a job as a short-order cook at the Toddle House (chain restaurant), and for good measure got my sister Nancy and his new bride, also named Nancy (both fresh out of the convent in the mass exodus of nuns after Vatican II) jobs as waitresses there. Yes, there were two Nancys with the same last name living at one address, which confused Toddle House corporate no end. They kept trying to pay them with one paycheck.

Bedtime for me and my older brother Asa was still 9:00, and the Toddle House crew didn't get home till about 11 (although in my memory it was more like 3 in the a.m.)

Now here's where it gets interesting. Y'see, Toddle House made pies fresh every day. Which meant they could take home any left-over pie at the end of their shift. Which meant if we could just stay up till they got home (when they would have coffee and pie and gab about their shift into the wee hours) we could cadge some PIE.

"All Home-Made Pies 12¢"

But of course to wander downstairs two or more hours past our bedtime we needed a pretty solid lie, which meant a story, and, like Scheherezade, a different story every night. And a story which would past muster with Jim and Nancy, two seasoned storytellers. Which meant I was developing my story-telling powers while learning to stay up late, all for pie, glorious pie, chocolate, lemon meringue, or the king of them all: black-bottom pie.

Black-bottom pie

Nighthawks at the diner
Of Emma's 49er, there's a rendezvous
Of strangers around the coffee urn tonight

All the gypsy hacks, the insomniacs
Now the paper's been read
Now the waitress said
Eggs and sausage and a side of toast
Coffee and a roll, hash browns over easy
Chile in a bowl with burgers and fries
What kind of pie?  

                            --Tom Waits

Anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking by it.

Review: A Noir Story

 

Noir is all about bad ideas executed badly under the influence of uncontrolled passion. Andrew Sherman understands that and has crafted a cautionary tale that veers from lighthearted to deadly serious in a heartbeat. The story starts with a cuckolded husband crafting an explosive missive to his rival with every possible opportunity for things to go wrong. Then it interrupts its regularly scheduled narrative to show us how we got to this point.

There’s a healthy dose of Quentin Tarantino in this story, or I should say these stories, tales of domestic quarrels that spark out of hand and brush up against each other in unexpected ways with violent results. Yes, there are murders, but no perfect murders, and it’s the imperfections that provide the sudden turns that in less expert hands would send this story crashing through the guardrails. But Sherman keeps a steady hand on the wheel, even if none of his characters do. A Noir Story is a fine debut, and I look forward to reading Sherman’s next effort. 

A Noir Story available at Amazon.