Jules Feiffer on writing

 (This post is available in audio format here on Youtube.)

"Writing, I explained, was mainly an attempt to out-argue one's past; to present events in such a light that battles lost in life were either won on paper or held to a draw."

--Jules Feiffer 

Jules left us in January. Cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter. Illustrator of The Phantom Tollbooth. Winner of the Pulitzer prize for editorial cartooning. Inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame.

Review: The Shotgun Approach

  (This post is available in audio format here on Youtube.)

You've got to keep an eye on William Martell. He's a master of misdirection. He lays out the evidence fairly but sneakily in each of his novelettes (novellas? long short stories?).

The Shotgun Approach concerns a formerly hit music duo with more than a passing resemblance to Hall and Oates, except the frontman has had his blonde head blown off with a shotgun and his partner is the prime suspect, along with the victim's ex-wife and his former producer, who all, by odd coincidence, are checked into the same VIP floor of the same luxury hotel on the night of the murder.

Hosting the proceedings are a burnt-out San Francisco police detective and her latest partner, who's been assigned the unenviable task of making sure she doesn't kill anyone. No one has had any luck in that department so far.

Holmes the bohemian

 (This post is available in audio format here on Youtube.)

Bohemia, bordered on the North by hope, work, and gaiety, on the South by necessity and courage; on the West and East by slander and the hospital.”  --Henry Murger,   La Vie de Bohème    We often think of Sherlock Holmes as the epitome of the scientific mind, "a calculating machine," as Watson calls him. But Watson also acknowledges another side to Holmes: the Bohemian. Here's an excerpt from, aptly enough, A Scandal in Bohemia:

"...while Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature.

Another contribution from The Engineer's Thumb:

"I continually visited him, and occasionally even persuaded him to forego his Bohemian habits so far as to come and visit us." 

But was Holmes truly Bohemian?  Or is Watson tossing off the word carelessly, describing Holmes's aversion to society and nothing more? What does the term even mean, beyond its connotation of an anti-social bent? Let's dig in.

Plot and subplot plotted

The Veneerings Dinner, by Sol Eytinge

“Where does he come from? Shares. Where is he going to? Shares. What are his tastes? Shares. Has he any principles? Shares. What squeezes him into Parliament? Shares. Perhaps he never of himself achieved success in anything, never originated anything, never produced anything? Sufficient answer to all; Shares. O mighty Shares! To set those blaring images so high, and to cause us smaller vermin, as under the influence of henbane or opium, to cry out, night and day, 'Relieve us of our money, scatter it for us, buy us and sell us, ruin us, only we beseech ye take rank among the powers of the earth, and fatten on us'!”

--Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend

I'm now going to throw a passel of two-dollar words at you just to work toward an idea that's rather simple. Forgive me, that's the way my mind works, like a popcorn machine-- when it works at all. It's usually because I'm trying to convince myself of what I'm saying. I'm rarely preaching to the choir even when I'm talking to myself.

We're going to start with Cartesian coordinates, the x and y axes. We're going to label the x axis, the horizontal, plot. We'll call the y axis, the vertical, subplot. Or we could just as easily designate them as melody and harmony. Or to borrow the language of semiotics, syntagm and paradigm, which should give us a little more room to work in. What are those rooms?