Brain droppings

[Ghost]

Sue: We actually have a sopabox forum, if you go to the :Usergroups: you can join.

[mccormack44]

Ghost
Thanks for the reference to the Soapbox forum. I went to look, sure that I'd find interesting reading, but not much to write about.

More than 60 minutes later, I've contributed to two threads. I guess I have more issues than I'd imagined!

Sue

[felonius]

GHOST: thanks from me too.

SUE: I should have mentioned the Soapbox to you from the get-go. Your contributions are most welcome.

Back to the subject of writing, since this is the Quill and Fountain. Today's dropping from Marge Piercy:

My other early [writer] training was in the importance of viewpoint. My grandmother Hannah, who lived with us part of every year and shared my bed in our tiny house, told me stories of our extended family. My mother told these stories, too, but quite differently. If I heard the same story from my Aunt Ruth, who was midway in age between my mother and me and more like my girlfriend than my other aunts, there were three versions of every story: the spiritual and moralistic, the sensational and the dramatic, and the factual, exactly what happened and what was the evidence for various opinions.

For me the gifts of the novelist are empathy and imagination. I enter my characters and try to put on their world-views, their ways of moving, their habits, their beliefs and the lies they tell themselves, their passions and antipathies, even the language in which they speak and think: the colours of their lives. Imagination has do to with moving those characters through events, has to do with entering another time, whether of the recent past of three hundred or five hundred years ago, in Prague or Paris or London or New York or the islands of the Pacific. It has to do with changing some variables and moving into imagined futures, while retaining a sense of character so strong the reader will believe in a landscape and in cities and worlds vastly different from our own.

[felonius]

Just a short one today, from Robert Frost ( ):

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars - on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

[felonius]

Today: Joan Acocella, from an excellent article she wrote in last June's New Yorker on writer's block:

We are even getting biological theories of literary creativity and its stoppage. In a 1993 book called "Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament," the psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison argued that manic-depressive illness was the source of much of the best poetry produced from the eighteenth century to the twentieth.

This year, we were offered a follow-up hypothesis, in "The Midnight Disease: The Drive To Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain," by Alice W. Flaherty, who teaches neurology at Harvard Medical School. Like Jamison, Flaherty thinks that mood disorders may jump-start the literary imagination. (Also like Jamison, she has suffered from a mood disorder, and she feels that she owes her writing career to her manic phases.)

But she goes further, speculating at length on which parts of the brain are responsible for literary creativity and its interruption. She believes that writing is generated along the pathways that connect the limbic system - a structure deep in the brain, the source of emotion and drive - with the temporal lobe, which controls our ability to grasp linguistic and philosophical meaning. As for block, she thinks the main problem may lie in the frontal lobe, because block shares some characteristics with disorders arising from frontal-lobe damage, such as Broca's aphasia, which destroys the ability to produce normal language.

From same article:

Writing is a nerve-flaying job. First of all, what the Symbolists said is true: clichés come to mind much more readily than anything fresh or exact. To hack one's way past them requires a huge, bleeding effort. (For anyone who wonders why seasoned writers tend to write for only about three or four hours a day, that's the answer.) In the same interview in which Anthony Burgess sneered at crybaby Americans, he concluded by saying that a writer can never be happy: "The anxiety involved is intolerable. And...the financial rewards just don't make up for the expenditure of energy, the damage to health caused by stimulants and narcotics, the fear that one's work isn't good enough. I think, if I had enough money, I'd give up writing tomorrow."

[Darb]

Excellent ... I especially enjoyed the latter quote.

I'm forwarding that one to Charlie Pellegrino, who I'm sure will find it apt indeed.

[Aunflin2]

I'm a cook and keep trying to write: I guess I'm attracted to "nerve flaying" jobs.

[Kahrey]

I'm a cook and keep trying to write: I guess I'm attracted to "nerve flaying" jobs.

Wait a minute, let me check....




















































































No, that wasn't funny.

[felonius]

I can tell Kahrey's recently joined the working world: she's becoming more caustic.

[Aunflin2]

Indeed!

[Kahrey]

I can tell Kahrey's recently joined the working world: she's becoming more caustic.

[Darb]

Here's an exchange I had with Charlie Pellegrino on 2 excerpts from earlier on in thsi thread ...

Charlie,

These are excepts from one of the threads in our "amateur alcove" area up on the IBDoF, in which people share words of wisdom on/about the act of writing:

Enjoy.

----------------------------------
Today: Joan Acocella, from an excellent article she wrote in last June's New Yorker on writer's block:

Quote:
We are even getting biological theories of literary creativity and its stoppage. In a 1993 book called "Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament," the psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison argued that manic-depressive illness was the source of much of the best poetry produced from the eighteenth century to the twentieth.

This year, we were offered a follow-up hypothesis, in "The Midnight Disease: The Drive To Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain," by Alice W. Flaherty, who teaches neurology at Harvard Medical School. Like Jamison, Flaherty thinks that mood disorders may jump-start the literary imagination. (Also like Jamison, she has suffered from a mood disorder, and she feels that she owes her writing career to her manic phases.)

But she goes further, speculating at length on which parts of the brain are responsible for literary creativity and its interruption. She believes that writing is generated along the pathways that connect the limbic system - a structure deep in the brain, the source of emotion and drive - with the temporal lobe, which controls our ability to grasp linguistic and philosophical meaning. As for block, she thinks the main problem may lie in the frontal lobe, because block shares some characteristics with disorders arising from frontal-lobe damage, such as Broca's aphasia, which destroys the ability to produce normal language.


From same article:

Quote:
Writing is a nerve-flaying job. First of all, what the Symbolists said is true: clichés come to mind much more readily than anything fresh or exact. To hack one's way past them requires a huge, bleeding effort. (For anyone who wonders why seasoned writers tend to write for only about three or four hours a day, that's the answer.) In the same interview in which Anthony Burgess sneered at crybaby Americans, he concluded by saying that a writer can never be happy: "The anxiety involved is intolerable. And...the financial rewards just don't make up for the expenditure of energy, the damage to health caused by stimulants and narcotics, the fear that one's work isn't good enough. I think, if I had enough money, I'd give up writing tomorrow."

Regards,
Brad

Dear Brad:

I'm, according to my late great mentor Walter lord, one of those rare writers who loves the peaceful, meditative state of writing as much as painting or looking out the window at the beach. I am rarely more at peace. I don't know what Walter was talking about when he spoke of the agony of looking at the blank page. Isaac Asimov was another who really loved the act of writing. Stephen Jay Gould was another. Stephen King and Arthur Clarke two others. But evidently we are in the minority. To me, the agony would be if someone told me I was not allowed to write, and threatened to lock me away where I couldn't. If I couldn't clear that gunk out of the drain at the bottom of my skull, my brain would probably explode. In Isaac's case, he loved writing so much that if Janet did not drag him out and dust him off, he'd have never gotten any exercise, and he'd have damaged his health sooner. It's a lesson I've learned from him, and taken literally to heart. - - Charlie P.

[felonius]

Wow...thanks for posting that.

I know exactly what he means about "clearing the gunk out in the bottom of the skull" - and sometimes for me it can be a wonderfully meditative state as well - but there's also that hair-tearing feeling when you know you're close to your quarry but you haven't quite nailed it down as well as you know it could be nailed down in your head...

[Aunflin2]

Yes, felonius! I've always dreamt of a device that could (in exact detail) translate my thoughts and imaginings into reality: a veritable living story people could walk into, see, participate in, breath, feel.....

Hmmm...that sounds like a story...

[Kahrey]

Indeed it does, Aunflin! Could probably make for a nice short story.

[Aunflin2]

Indeed it could...but whether I'd write it would be a story in itself...

[Kahrey]

Yes, a story about a man who always thought of stories but could never get to writing/finishing them.

[felonius]

Did anybody ever see that old Twilight Zone episode that tells the story of the man who loved nothing better than to read?

Bespectacled, introverted, for the most part ostracized by society, he's not interested in socializing, or travelling, or pursuing relationships. Nothing of the sort. He just wants to be left in peace to read his books.

There is a nuclear armageddon. Through bizarre circumstance, our protagonist finds himself the sole survivor of a large devastated city, the bulk of it levelled - except for the library. We watch him as, dazed with disbelief and exuberance, he wanders among the massive stacks with the knowledge that he can now read forever without interruption.

He finds a comfortable corner and then mounts a stepladder, reaching up to a high shelf for his first selection....

and slips.

The last shot is slow motion. The spectacles are knocked from his face, arc gracefully, plummet, and shatter upon the library floor.



I couldn't think of any good prose droppings to post today, so I thought I'd go with an old favourite canonized poem of mine by Dylan Thomas. I'm trying to keep the dropping quotes short, but this one's a little lengthier. Worth it though, I think.

FERN HILL

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

[Darb]

FELON: I'm a big fan of the original twilight zone eps, and I remember that one very well.

Burgess Meredith played the main character in that one.

"There's time now ... all the time I want, and all the time I need ... oops (crash)"

[felonius]

Burgess Meredith played the main character in that one.

I couldn't remember who it was, but now that you've written the name I believe you're right...I'll always remember him as the Penguin on the old Batman show, though...

I love the old series, really liked the modern revitalization of the show as well - dark and twisty imaginative short fiction in a film format. But it didn't run for very long. At the risk of sounding elitist, I think it was far too sophisticated for the average couch potato. They like all that "reality" programming better.

[Darb]

I think it was far too sophisticated for the average couch potato.

Rod Serling felt the same way.

Ok, back on topic ...

[Kahrey]

I used to watch it alot. The one I remember most was where the little girl disappeared, and they could hear her calling, but they couldn't find her. So this weird dude comes over and finds a spot in her wall where his arm falls through. So, the dad has to go in after her, but the hole is sealing up. And so the weird dude holds the dad's hand while he goes in so he won't lose the entrance. The part I remember most was when he got back with his daughter and realised that the hole had been closing up and almost got him. The dad says:

"So you mean, half of me would have been here and the other half would have been...."

"Somewhere else," the weird dude replied, in such a tone that I died with laughter.

But anyways......

Ok, back on topic ...

I wasn't aware that there was a topic.

[Aunflin]

Indeed, a topicless topic--my favorite!

[Darb]

I wasn't aware that there was a topic.

/me boggless as kahrey goes on a topic-less posting spree, like Lady Godiva ... albeit with shorter hair.

[felonius]

You're right Kahrey; the topic's definitely loose. Just snippets of prose and poetry on the general subject of writing and/or life with some digressions filled with my usual self-absorbed blather sprinkled in here and there.

Okay, back on topic (such as it is). Anybody ever read E.L. Doctorow? Here's an excerpt of his on subject of film and literature:

What shall we make of this? Today, at the end of the century, film is ubiquitous. There are more movies than ever. They are in theatres, on television; they are cabled, video-taped, CD'd and DVD'd. They are sent around the world by satellite transmission; they are dubbed and translated and available from all their periods for consumers to choose as books are chosen from the library. Their enormous popularity reaches all classes and all levels of education. And their primary producers are major entertainment conglomerates that put lots of money into them and expect even more money in return.

It is not that great and important films will no longer be made. But one can imagine a merger of film aesthetics and profit-making incentives that, apart from the efforts of this or that serious and principled filmmaker, effects a culture of large, beautifully dressed, tactically pigmented, stimulating and only incidentally verbal movies that excite predetermined market tastes and offer societal myths that slightly vary with each recycling: films composed artfully from the palette of such basic elements as car drive-ups, interiors, exteriors, faces, chases and explosions.

Just as significant for the culture of the future may be the declining production costs of computerized, digitally made movies. It is not hard to understand the lure to the creative young when making a film will be as feasible as writing a story.

That pictograms, whether corporately or privately produced, may eventually unseat linguistic composition as the major communicative act of our culture is a prospect I find only slightly less dire than global warming.

Some of the most thoughtful if not ingenious criticism written today is written by critics of film who, often as not, address themselves to work that is hardly worth their attention. The most meretricious or foolish movie will elicit a cogent analysis. Why? It may be a film's auspices that obligate the critics. But it may be that, however unconsciously, they mean to reaffirm or defend print culture by subjecting the nonliterate filmgoing experience, good or bad, to the extensions of syntatical thought.