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 |  "Putting on the Game Face" |
  This blog is a doorway into the mind of Percy Goodfellow. Don't be shocked at the lost boys of Namby-Pamby Land and the women they cavort with. Watch as his caricatures blunder about the space between audacious hope and the wake-up calls of tomorrow. Behold their scrawl on the CRT, like graffitti on a subway wall. Examine it through your own lens...Step up my friends, and separate the pepper from the rat poop. Welcome to my abode...the armpit of yesterday, the blinking of an eye and a plank to the edge of Eternity. Note: This blog is my journal. I've no interest in persuading anyone to adopt my views. What I write is whatever happens to interest me when I start pounding the keys. |
| Good Porcelain and Good Writing I am interested in the German porcelain, bathing beauty figurines. You can see examples if you go on line… Mostly examples of what not to buy. An authentic period piece will cost in the $200 plus range. What they have on e-bay are mostly knock-offs. The way you can tell is if you enlarge the picture you see the quality is just not there. It is like they took a period piece and used it for the mold… then painted glazed and put it in the kiln. Another way is to look at the price… They are all priced either $58 or $39. Duh! Is that a give-away or what. This is the aspect of collecting nice things that is frustrating… separating the pepper from the rat poop. However, the up side is that often something authentic is lost in the sea of fakes and can be acquired for a modest price. That is about the only way I can grow my collection. The “Wow” factor is really what drives me in collecting porcelain figurines. It isn’t the rarity, or the manufactures stamp, or the tremendous variety. If I like it that is enough…. It can be made in Germany or Mesopotamia….it can be porcelain, bronze, paste or plastic…. If it Wows me it I will attempt to acquire it if it is within my means. WDC I use the same approach in reading and assessing the work of others. Since I teach a class (One eyed man in the land of the blind) I get to see the normal spread from really good to promising to ho-hum. Lately I have been assessing Comprehensive Outlines that are products the students have produced in the Exploratory Writing Course. As I read these I have to be careful what I say to the students. As a teacher you want to encourage the students to do it themselves but there comes a point when a few helpful suggestions go a long way…. Its like my watercolor teacher demonstrating a few deft strokes to my weak efforts at painting. Still you have to see excellence demonstrated to really appreciate what it looks like… Even if you can’t emulate it yet you have to be able to know it when you see it…. Otherwise you will only be aspiring to mediocrity. Edith Hamilton, who is my favorite writer and certainly a foremost woman (thinker) of our times introduced me to many bold and wonderful concepts the Greeks came up with…. One that sticks to my recollection is Hesiod who said words to the effect… “Excellence in its highest form comes from the mind of exceptional individuals who think it up… However, that too is excellence that a smart person knows when they see it.” I have taken liberties with the quote because I can never remember it exactly and have to recollect it in my own words. At WDC there are some great tactical writers, who for some reason have yet to make it to the big time… Since I have not had the opportunity to read their longer works…. Even though I know they participate in NANO… I can only conclude the don’t have quite the command of Strategic and Operational writing that they do with Tactical writing. This is the feedback I am getting from my students as they finish their comprehensive outlines. It is very exciting to see these outline evolve from vignettes into a full and integrated outline with all the good stuff included. |
| My Undergraduate Experience When I applied to College I was accepted “Provisionally.“ I had to attend Summer School in order to “Prove” myself. It happened that my SAT scores were high but my High School Transcripts were a disaster. Well, I applied myself for perhaps the first time in my life and was accepted. Then I figured out how hard I was going to have to work to maintain a “C” average and what the easiest Major was… You see what I wanted to major in was “Bridge” and that wasn’t offered anywhere. I know how all this sounds but it's true and I'm past the point of caring what others really think or trying to make an impression by selectively presenting facts that would cast me in a better light. Now the College I attended was a military College and all the males were required to be a part of the Corps of Cadets. This is no longer the requirement but it was then. The amazing part was that it was also coeducational and it was there that I met Linda. We soon developed a liking for one another and I taught her how to skate-board and play bridge. The skate boarding was easy because she had been a speed skater in Atlanta. As for the bridge, she was as good a defensive player as I had ever met. No instinct for the jugular mind you, or taste for blood, but when we played together I provided enough of that for both of us. After 4 years I commissioned in the Infantry and was shipped off to Vietnam. When I came home she had an interesting observation. That I had changed. She confided that our marriage had not been anything to crow about but I had become a better person while away. Now stop a moment and think about that….I suppose most everything you have ever heard about war is how it screws everybody up. Well, it didn’t screw me up… not to say that I found the experience pleasant. I saw some bad stuff and was rewarded with some prestigious medals. No, Linda was right… I was screwed up before I went and when I returned… I was still a jerk, but a more decent, mellow and compassionate sort of jerk. I had learned that one of the keys to being successful in life was bringing out the best in those around me. I went on to have a successful career in the army and a marriage that produced two awesome daughters. Last night I had a dream….My roommate when I was a Freshman was a friend from California…Believe it or not a guy from CALIFORNIA came from the West Coast to attend the same college I did. I came from Wisconsin and he came from California. Then when Linda and I got married the start of my Junior year, so did he and they lived right up the street in run down apartment just like ours. Anyway I dreamed about him last night…. He did very well academically and in the Corps of Cadets however, as a “Foreigner” never was invited into the inner circle. At this college I discovered why the South almost won the Civil War….Southern males are the most awesome junior leaders that have ever walked the Planet. As soldiers they have no peer at the tactical level. If you ever wondered why Southerners are so polite it’s because simmering below the surface is a violence that is always on the edge of expression. |
| Concurrent vs. Sequential Writing In reading the outlines of my students I have made another interesting observation. It is interesting for me… it might be “Old Hat” to my readers who have an understanding of many things that I find new and intriguing. It is often said that men tend to be sequential thinkers while women have more facility with multitasking. Be that as it may, I see in the outlines a tendency for my students to write sequentially while many more experienced writers delve into concurrent events that meet up further down the story line. Now I would not recommend having too many of these concurrent threads operating in a novel but I think that two or maybe three is not such a bad idea. One example might be where the antagonist doesn’t show up to begin with. Where this is the case the writer might consider giving the reader an early glimpse of the world that the antagonist operates and lives in. This technique is a form of “Foreshadowing” and the reader assumes (I hope correctly) that a confrontation is coming between the Central Character and his/her nemesis . On the subject of antagonists, it is amazing to me that my students often fail to have one in strong evidence. I am becoming more and more convinced that villains are more an operational or strategic aspect of writing…. That they do not germinate readily and require a more conscious and concerted effort to insure they get their necessary face time with the reader. In the Exploratory Writing Workshop (EWW) I find myself searching for evidence of this villainy at work and seeing it only sprinkled Helter-Skelter about. Perhaps I need to include it as an operational consideration, i.e. “Where in the chapter threads is the antagonist making his/her presence felt?”… Or strategically, i.e. “Is the villainy spread consistently across the story line playing a repetitive role in the conflict/crisis development?” In Tactical Writing which I point out, tends to flow naturally, to most talented writers, the Antagonist’s contribution tends to be more sporadic. It doesn’t seem to want to happen of its own volition and so as in Operational and Strategic writing must be manually forced into the fabric of the Novel . Those who have been involved in the EWW have heard this sort of talk before and understand what I am trying to say regarding Tactical, Operational and Strategic Writing. Like a garment maker I see the pieces cut out and lying on the workbench or pinned to the manikins. For everyone I see a composition that is promising and it remains to be seen who will take the ball to the hoop. As coach I’ve explained the game plan, such as I can, and it passes now to the players to take the process and make it work. |
The Brass Wheel (A dirty song I heard as a kid) This part of the country (Central Wisconsin) is famous not only for its dairy farms but is also a place where they raise a lot of Angus Beef. There is a market in Adams/Friendship where they sell it locally and often the specials are almost too good to be true. They also serve those rotisserie chickens which I am sure you can buy these days everywhere… that are a great meal. Anyway I have been grilling in the snow a couple days each week and everybody has gathered to watch…. When I say everybody I mean all the creatures that live on or around my farmstead. Naturally I use a gas grill because in the winter, charcoal is not practical. The last two days things have warmed up and the snow is almost gone. This is the last week of the Exploratory Writing Workshop (EWW.) It has been a very successful undertaking for both myself and the students. Nobody dropped out, if you can believe that, and here we are coming down to the wire and everybody is working on those outlines. Today on the way back from town I had Linda pull over to the curb and I went to check out the window sticker on the Chevy Volt. It was priced at over $45K. Darn near twice what my Prius went for. Then I heard yesterday that the Volt won “Best Car Award” in Europe….Can you imagine that? They can’t give them away here, had to shut the factory down… and in Europe the fiasco is awarded “Best Car.” What is going on with this…. Do they sell the Oscars in Europe? Actually the press is much freer in the US than over seas and they are riddled with Socialism and corruption even worse than in Chicago… I don’t think they have an equivalent of “Consumer Reports” Actually I am surprised that the Prius survived it’s infancy. I remember being in a Toyota dealership several years back and the sales man showed me a comparison chart between I think it was a Corolla and a Prius. They used basically the same math I did and said that with gas at less than $2 a gallon that the additional expense (at the time) would never make it viable. This was in their own showroom and it wasn’t being spoken in whispers… The chart was on the wall. How times have changed… They have gotten the cost way down and today it is one of their best sellers. This success is sure to embolden other carmakers much to the chagrin of the oil companies. Ever since I was a kid I have heard stories of the oil companies buying up the patents on promising energy saving technologies and burying the blue prints in their archives. I know that sounds a little schizophrenic but I’m only relating here the scuttle-butt that has been circulating for a long time. I remember one rumor back in my teens of a carburetor that could get twenty-five miles to a gallon. |
| Shifting Gears This morning in my summary statistics I was rather surprised. Everything that had been viewed had to do with my blog or classes. Only one dealt with something I had written creatively and had stashed in my portfolio. That one thing was a chapter from Bedelia, “Unexpected Visitor.” My wife likes the Bedelia material… claims it gives her a warm and fuzzy feeling at times; that I should get off my duff and finish Essence and the Stones. (ES) This fantasy material in the ES is related and was written at different times in the past couple of years. At first it started in the Valley of the Men and dealt with a coven of witches who ran things. Then it shifted to Bedelia and an Elven Kingdom and the capitol called Tristan City. Finally it developed a third story in the lands of the Empire and dealt with a hybrid called Creedor Kratz and a Simian Elf named Petra. These three separate but related stories gave rise to some very different characters. Book one is “Roughed” out and I mean “Roughed.” It involves Bedelia on the one hand and the Witches in the valley. Book two will deal more with Creedor and Petra. I have been writing about Felix the cat and her sage of becoming socialized to the house. Linda gave her what was left of her cereal yesterday and Felix was perplexed as to what to do with it. Honey wanted to show her the slurping technique but Felix took a swat at her. Then she dipped her paw into the milk and licked her paw. Honey couldn’t believe what a dumb- ass she was and circled out to paw rang whining. Yesterday the Installers showed up to put in the replacement cabinets we bought at Lowes. They concluded that the old ones fell apart on the wall as a consequence of three things. These were inadequate support in the design, poor construction and bad installation technique. In the first they were too big and heavy to be just attached to the sheetrock, second it was a bad day in the factory (They must have been Monday cabinets) and finally they were improperly shimmed when they were screwed to the wall. All our dishes and glasses have been lying about in boxes for the past three months and today Linda is putting them back where they belong. Tomorrow we are going to Madison and get a language tape on French. We want to be up to speed when we go on our trip in the fall. We will be visiting the village I lived in in France when my dad was assigned there and took us after WW2. My brother and his wife will be accompanying us. |
| Take a good look I bought a Toyota Prius. ($25K at zero percent interest.) Yes, it’s a Yuppie car but after running the numbers I decided, ”What the Heck!” I live way out in farm country and its twenty miles to the nearest town. If I want to visit an Urban Center its seventy-five miles and Madison is One hundred and twenty-five miles distant. Anyway there were a number of newer models in the price range but only one that got fifty miles to a gallon. Considering that I put twenty-thirty thousand miles a year on my “local” wheels, gas mileage was a definite consideration. If gas goes to $5 a gallon it will be even more important. Up ‘till now if I got twenty-five miles to a gallon I thought that was pretty good. So when I crunch the numbers it comes out that I save about S2000 a year on gasoline. Since I usually keep a car ten to fifteen years you can see it will pay for itself in fuel avoidance costs in the time I own it. What other set of wheels out there can make that claim? I hear talk that they are going to build a pick-up that will run on natural gas. I'll be watching that development closely. Not that I would buy one right off. Like the Chevy Volt, they will be too expensive to start with and full of bugs. However, if they can launch and get some momentum, the price will come down, the gigs will get worked out and the public will begin to take them seriously. Imagine a small natural gas diesel type engine running a generator or bank of batteries. I am surprised the President doesn’t point out that in the past, following an energy crisis, there was a lot of investor interest in alternative vehicles…. Then the cost of gas would plummet and those investors would get wiped out. Just like a garden needs to be watered to begin with… new energy initiatives need to be protected from being left high and dry in their infancy. While I consider myself somewhat conservative I understand an argument for $5.00 a gallon fuel “IF” it will get us energy independent from the Middle East. Importing all that fuel is a huge drain on the economy, but what happens after an energy crisis? Prices drop and emerging technologies dry up, leaving us with the same oh... same oh. I know this isn’t the whole story but it’s what I have seen repeated several times in my lifetime. I’m surprised the Liberals aren’t playing that card more to justify the policies they are fostering. We are never going to be energy independent if we don’t wean ourselves off the Arabs. I watched the President today tap dance with the Israelis. After the fiasco with the Catholics he is trying to avoid a repetition with the Jews. All these interest groups are carrying a lot of baggage if you ask me. The Catholics, the Jews, the Blacks, the Mexican’s… The Unions… This country has been a blessing to so many and what do we get for it. A bad rap is what we get… Most of these special groups need to ask themselves why they get the mean spirited treatment they do….Invariable the answer is…at least in part….”Because they bring it on themselves!” Nobody wants to look into the mirror and admit that they are responsible for why others have such an axe to grind. I won’t go into specific examples but ask yourself how each of the above named groups has acted over time to earn the enmity of others? |
A Small but Noteworthy Milestone Kim, one of my students recommended an e-zine (writingraw.com) that was looking for poetry submissions. I submitted one called “Knock on the Door” and it was published. Now I know it might not be something to get excited about but it was the first thing I ever had published. Some of the other submissions I thought were pretty good so it isn’t that they were hurting. Today is Sunday and it’s snowing. There’s about six inches on the ground. Everybody’s hunkered down and we won’t be going anywhere. Honey, my huge Golden-Doodle is lying next to me and Felix just joined us. She gave honey a good sniff on the nose and then zonked out. I have one last review to do for the week. One of my students finds it impossible to finish during the week and catches up on the weekend. I really don’t mind as today is when I usually do them anyway and I got ahead of myself this week. Under the “My Account” on the left hand margin of the Portfolio Page is one called “Summary Statistics?” I am not sure how to really interpret what is happening here. If the number is two or greater I know somebody actually checked out something on my port but if the number is a 1, I have always attributed it to the random read generator activating the number… Yesterday however was Saturday and there was a lot of activity on the site, mostly non- members, and there were twice as many “One Hits” as is normally the case. I am concluding “assuming” that some of the ones are the result of the random number generator and others result when somebody check through your portfolio. One of the reasons I believe this to be the case is because of the sequence of reads… For example the selections might suddenly all come from the same file. I am just curious and wonder if anybody out there knows what is really going on. My friend Mark wants to combine our equipment next year into a wood splitting facility. We have been gathering fallen trees from the storm damage this year and have several semi-loads. When the weather warms up and the ticks come out we don’t want to be in the woods in the April-May time frames. So that’s when we’ll be doing that work. I am generating the gumption to finish a novel using the Essence and Stones material. After shadow taking the EWW course and watching several TV serials I think I have it about figured out. I will begin writing the Outline soon and once that is finished will be in a good position to do a little each day. I write some of my best stuff when I can leisurely do a small part each day. |
| Felix The dead of winter is when the ferals show up. Half dead with starvation they stagger into the barn yard. I feed ‘um and they come alive again. Then they slink around until Spring and meow their appreciation one day as I put their bowl down. Another two weeks and I snatch them up and it's off to the vet. Male or female, desn't matter, they get fixed. It’s not cheap and my friends don’t understand the logic of fixing Tom’s. My answer is that a neutered male won’t go looking for trouble like one that still has his testicals. What those Toms do to one another when a female's in heat makes for some very bad listening and worse watching…So that’s why I do it. Anybody’s seen a cat fight will tell you there’s no such thing as free pussy. My latest one’s named Felix…, before I found out he was a she. Felix has a white moustache that looks like a handle bar worn by some foreigner. The other cats must not be kin because they tried to kill her. So this dumb assed feline decided to become a dog. That’s right a fracking dog… Started hanging out by the front door and began following the dogs around outside. At first they didn’t take to it but Felix persisted…when they took to frolicking in the pasture, Felix went along and joined in…Honest to goodness decided she was a dog. When the weather turned really cold she auditioned for one of the vacant dog positions. My wife put a sand box down in the basement, wondering what was going to happen next. Didn’t take long to find out… Heard this scurrying around in the night as she ridded the house of mice. Ever see a cat eat a mouse whole…? Talk about gross…Damndest thing you ever wanted to see. Then one night she jumped up on the bed and sat on my chest. She defied the other dogs to tell her she couldn’t be there and that’s where she sleeps now. My mother once told me that when a cat sleeps on your chest it draws out the evil spirits and the disease that simmers inside. My wife says I don’t argue as much and act so hateful since the cat took to sleeping on top of me. The only hard part is that you can’t roll over. Then again with the C-Pap machine yammering, rolling over isn’t as easy as it once was. In the morning Felix runs up the tree in front of the house. She gets up on a low limb and then forgets how to get down. Cats are dumb like that. They don’t understand what backwards is and their claws don’t work good in the reverse mode. But mostly, since deciding to become a dog, Felix doesn't have any good role models. So she just falls out of the tree... Usually landing on her feet but sometimes walking with a limp. |
| Light at the end of the Tunnel Getting two looks at the Student’s outline has turned out to be another good idea. Most of the vignettes they have written are in the early chapters of the novel outline. That was to be expected. Having the three Crises included put one in the beginning, one about half way and the last (climax) at the end. What I am seeing is that most of the vignette material is happening in the first half and only one vignette is in the last half. This demonstrates the dreaded “Sag” which is common to many novels to where the mid portion reads like the mid portion of a term paper. Seeing this in the outline is crystal clear to me and I hope it is crystal clear to the students. When I was “Shadow Writing” along with the students it popped up in my outline and I had to create some threads of parallel action to shore it up; then came the issues of pacing and momentum building. If you use an outline these components jump right out at you. You can see the structure of a raw and exposed story line staring up at you. On the workshop table seeing some of the pieces laid out and the creation beginning to emerge is a messy process but like making a dress or other garment the seamstress (writer) can begin to get a sense for what the end product is going to look like. Next week when I see the completed outline, I’ll have a much better idea for how the workshop turned out. The point I try and keep in mind is that for most of my students this is a first try at a longer work. I remember when I built my first truck, how the quality kept falling short of my expectations as I forced myself to see the project through to the end. That as I became more involved and experienced certain tasks and functions became transparent and I began to take them for granted . Sometimes I think that having an expert try and teach anything is an exercise in futility. So much of their expertise has become transparent that they can no longer see what they need to be telling their students. The Exploratory Writing Workshop made some good initial assessments on what needed to be done and by “Shadow Writing” other important lessons learned reared up and allowed for their recognition and recording in the reviews, group letters, and even in this blog showing what the really important stuff was in the EWW process. I don’t want to sound like blowing my horn, but what Karen and I put together has succeeded beyond all expectation. Much of that had to do with having some smart and experienced tactical writers as students. I don’t plan on writing a course for the next step in novel writing… I know some of my fellow instructors have given the matter some thought and even done some developmental work. I hope one of them steps up to fill the gap. |
| The Beat goes on. Right now I am intrigued by the series “Downton Abby.” What intrigues me is not the subject or the period but how the writers managed the wide array of characters in the way they did. When I wrote Essence and the Stones, it had a broad range of characters that were doing things in a story world that was connected but vast in scope. Everybody was on the same time line but in the beginning of the story they were not in close physical proximity. So I am perplexed about how to write this novel with the wide array of characters and the geographical separation without confusing the heck out of the readers. In Downton Abby they accomplish this but everything is centered on the Abby. It is a good model for my story but maybe if I start it with a vista and then a map and then a series of locations I can pull it off. Linda is on a rant over the kitchen cabinets that are falling apart and getting Lows to come out and fix them. Then there is the issue with the taxes. She took the H&R Block course years ago and why we have somebody else do them when she is so knowledgeable makes me scratch my head. Anyway she is not a very patient person and flies off the cuff on occasion. I try and tell her not to shoot from the hip but she does anyway even though she tries to be polite. I have a rule that when something or someone jerks my chain I wait 24 hours to respond. This is particularly the case with e-mails but it also pertains to writing in general. If I would be disturbed at seeing it posted on the church bulletin board I am careful to not write it down to begin with… Not that I really care too much anymore who might not like what I have to say…. On the other hand I don’t want to be insensitive and ruin someone’s day for no reason. Last night I grilled in the snow. Is that a hoot or what? I should have taken a picture… All the outdoor cats were gathered around watching me like it was the media event of the year. The meat was sure were good and I might consider doing it again soon. It put Linda in a great mood. Yesterday I finished an essay, “The Exploratory Writing Workshop (EWW) in a Nutshell. It covered four (4) type written pages. I wanted a condensed form so when I finish my outline later today, giving the example for the final lesson eight (8), I’ll be able to show the students where all the operational and strategic stuff plugs. After reviewing the first of the outline submissions I am wondering how carefully the students are reading the class materials … are they whisking over it or are they trying to make sure they are covering what we talked about in the workshop. Most, I think, will take something away but I sense that the greater part will roll off like the proverbial water and a duck’s back. I think I will send them the Nutshell in one of my “Hello Everybody” group emails. What else is there? Once they submit next week’s outline the class is over… (but the beat goes on…  ) |
| That Warm and Fuzzy Feeling I guess you have probably determined that I like porcelain figurines among some of my other interests. When I was in Germany, an Antique dealer introduced them to me. We had many mutual interests. He had been a soldier in WW2. “Now you will never be able to afford what I am going to show you, but you need to know what they are and how to spot them….” He said, “And how to grade the quality and sort out the fakes and knock-offs.” The tutorial began with Meissen Figurines which are among the most beautiful and most sought after. The glaze and colors and rich variety are absolutely stunning and it doesn’t take long to get hooked. If you want to see some examples go on line and search Meissen, Figurines. You will get to see some great examples. There are however other great manufactures such as Heutsehreuter, Lladro, Royal Dalton, Royal Dux, Dresden and a host of others. After a day of walking about and seeing nothing noteworthy I go on line and search some of these sites so I don’t forget what “awesome” looks like. Many people are familiar with the trademarks but this is not the best place to start. Begin by examining the “Wow” factor. Does the sheer beauty knock you right on your behinder…? That is always the first, foremost and most weighty of the criteria and it applies to all great art, talent and craftsmanship. Yes, a great artist or manufacturer will tend to consistently produce good stuff but everybody has good days and bad days and this applies to most everything. Next I look at the glaze, colors and detail. Is the glaze almost opaque with the colors shining richly up through the surface? Then is it chipped or broken? Some of my best examples have imperfections and sometimes even severe breakage… I would rather have a flawed or broken work of art than a perfect piece of dime store junk. Lastly I look at the name underneath and the trademark. If it is selling inexpensively it is still often authentic….I mean why would anyone want to forge art and then sell it cheap? With a little practice you can spot the knockoffs regardless of the trademark embossed underneath. (They leave you non-pulsed.) I mentioned yesterday that I bought a plastic toy action figure that exuded the WOW and I have it sitting on my desk and every time I look at it I feel the same tingle that I get whenever I see something well done. That is the big lesson to collecting things… Does each example give the “tingle” that warm and fuzzy feeling of being in the presence of an inanimate object that has the spirit of the artist trapped inside? As writers it is something we need to aspire to achieve for we are artists in every bit the sense of others in the creative arts. Sometimes I read back over something I’ve written and feel that same tingle. It tells me that the piece was written on a good day. |
| Day Trips Since Linda retired I have to get her out of the House… She has a “Cray” computer for a brain (Think of it as a bank of IBM servers and mine as a hand held calculator). I might not be smart as she is but I am smart enough to put her in the driver’s seat and find places some distance away to visit. Usually it’s a day trip and whenever we visit an antique shop I pick up a fistful of brochures and when she asks later as she invariably does, “What are we going to do today?” I reply… “There’s a great antique shop in West Puppy Breath, Wisconsin that I have been dying to see all my life….It is an antique Mecca, you’ll love it” To which she replies, “What a wonderful idea, we can do this, this, and this along the way,” and I nod affirmatively. Anyway yesterday we took one of these trips and it was an education in “Quality.” I have a theory that in every antique shop, regardless of how run down and picked over there is hidden, amid the array of objects, an item of real quality. It is like a scavenger hunt going inside and trying to find that one treasure. It is a testimony of faith to suspend all disbelief, self-interest and prejudice and free float searching for that elusive pearl. You get to spend several hours treading about in a sea of moldy and disarrayed displays. I tell my students to do this in their exploratory writing. (They don’t listen but I keep repeating myself.) Yesterday I found my quality object in a locked glass case filled with toys….That’s right toys… and while my preference is always porcelain this figure was plastic…that’s right a child’s toy. It was an action figure… standing tall, amid all the junk surrounding her…, an Amazon, who looked like something that came in the box along with a ”War Quest” video game. It was dated 2002 and the workmanship was exquisite… It was made in China if you can believe that…” I bought it for $10.00. The artist that fabricated (created?) the original was a force who would have been right at home working for Meissen. The features were crisp and sharp and the paint was still dazzling despite being covered with filth. |
| Giving thought to words I have always felt that for all the warts, a collective (democratic) sort of government is superior to an autocratic one. The Greeks, who invented Democracy, thought it was terribly inefficient, but bad as it is the process is better than the second best alternative. The Greeks were always looking for the philosopher King…That is a smart guy who would know best and have the authority to make people do it. They thought they found him in Alexander the Great but he fizzled out. Most “Great” men do… the job gets to be too much and they start chasing skirts or worse, they aren’t very bright to begin with… Often Charismatic but dumb as a box of rocks. I won’t go into that… history is replete with examples from ancient times right up to the present. So forget about a philosopher king for a political leader…. It is almost a certainty that any country will wind up with a dumb-ass for president, however in a Democracy the power is distributed over an array of semi-smart dumb asses… and these guys and gals, when they get to arguing, often stumble onto the optimal solution… Now pay attention… this doesn’t happen in an autocratic regime but it does in nations having collective forms of governance… In the debate a “Best Answer” will often percolate to the top and the elected leaders are often bright enough to know it when they see it…. Not think it up mind you, but see the truth when it smacks them in the face like a wet fish. So I am writing this blog hoping to convince people that a preemptive strike to take out Iran’s nuclear capability is a bad idea. The whole world order is predicated on a card castle of sovereign nations… These nations can do essentially whatever they want inside their borders as long as they don’t bother their neighbors… I am talking about physical bother and not rhetorical bother. Clearly some really bad things that take place inside a nation’s borders, just as they do inside some people’s homes, however that is the rule of thumb and how the fragile world order operates. Perhaps you have heard the term “Real Politic.” What it essentially means is that there is no analogy between a nation state’s moral behavior and a human beings moral behavior. That Nation States are “Amoral” and don’t operate by the same rules of behavior that you and I do. Guess where this idea came from… I doubt you’ll be surprised, but it has become a commonly accepted premise in the world at large. Sorry I have to push the soap box under the desk… My wife is pointing out the really big fish I need to start frying. |
| A Most Ordinary Man Today (Sunday) Linda and I went to Tomah to an Antique Show. Linda and I get a big kick out of them and we don’t spend much…. Just look around for the most part. In Eau Clair last year I bought a small piece called “Naughty Art” which are small porcelain figures from the turn of the century of women scantily clad, usually in bathing suits, that at the time were considered “Risqué” but by today’s standards are quite modest. Anyway most of the good stuff came from Germany and these pieces have become quite expensive and rare. Today I saw a collection of about eight (8) that ranged in price from $125-$375. That was way out of our price range and we passed, but it was fun to see some quality stuff in an otherwise unexceptional show. It used to be that there was a lot of cool stuff out there, but the past thirty years have seen most of it disappear into private collections and what is left… was not anything to get excited about when it was new, and age has done little to alter that sad fact. We did buy a large Delft Platter of a Man and Woman in a horse cart. Twenty years ago I was in Delft Holland and bought an Urn for Linda. Never buy an “Urn” for a woman, regardless of how nice you think it looks… Buy instead an Armani scarf or a tasteful piece of jewelry…. Anyway I couldn’t have bought the platter in Holland back then for ten times what I paid for it today. That is why you need to keep an open mind when you go into an antique store or show… I have never yet gone in looking for something in particular and found it affordable. It is always something totally unexpected. Most of my blog feedback is over some occasional political commentary I decide to write. It never fails that I get a full range of responses from those who agree to those who don’t. It is usually best if I restrict my blogs to writing and related matters, but I think doing that all the time makes my readers yawn. Actually that is not so bad because I am a very ordinary person and I say that not in a self-deprecating sense but with the realization it is absolutely true. If you were to meet me at a book store you would think, Me-O-My what an ordinary and singularly unnoteworthy person standing over there. Then, and only if you got to know me better would you conclude…how right you were to begin with. |
| More on Preempting I have been reading rhetoric on a preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear bomb making facilities. The past head of Isreal’s Mossad thinks it is a bad idea and the Chairman of our Joint Chiefs of Staff essentially agrees. Gingrich was critical of the Chief’s view… said we should not attribute reason to some of the actors who are clearly unreasonable. Now this is an interesting statement. “If a person is unreasonable, i.e. (They do not use the scientific process in their decision making, then we ought to blow them up.) If that is the case Speaker Gingrich ought to ride the bomb like that cowboy general in the Dr. Strangelove movie. I agree with him and I disagree. Even in Western countries the use of reason in its pure form is not a common thing. If the Speaker had applied it to his personal life he'd be carrying less baggage today. On the other hand he is correct… We assume that because we use the process (at times) that the Arabs do too…. With political leaders like Ahmadinejab we know clearly that this is not the case… so we have a range of people from scientists, who use it a lot (except weather scientists) to business men and women, who use it some, to everyday people who use it occasionally to politicians who use it only rarely. What I am referring to is the formal reasoning process where a problem is. defined, facts and assumptions set forth, candidate courses of action assessed and compared, conclusions reached and a plan formulated. This doesn’t happen much anywhere, a bit more among the developed nations and to a much lesser extent in the Middle East. This is not to say that the Arabs can’t be sent to our Universities and learn the process but rather to say it hasn’t percolated down to where it is understood and accepted at the visceral level by most Arabs. Now let me pause here to say that while they don’t understand or embrace the process in its entirety, they are intelligent enough to use some of the components. For example they understand the “This is better than that Component.” They are perfectly capable of understanding the difference between a big semiter and a little one. They understand the difference between weakness and strength… the difference between the Rat-tat-tat of an AK-47 and standing there with noting in your hand but the proverbial “You know What.” They understand the difference between posturing and actually carrying through with an action…. They might not understand yet how to optimally use the tools of the full reasoning process but they are not totally brain dead and have managed to get by for a long time. So Gingrich is right in a sense… they don’t think the way we do, but they aren’t clueless either. Mutually assured Destruction was not what I would call a “Reasonable” policy but it worked after a fashion… It will probably work with the Arabs and if it doesn’t then a preemptive strike is just kicking the ball down the road. If they are prevented from building a bomb, what will keep them from purchasing one eventually, or getting one as a gift from a sympathetic ally? Better the problem come to a head while the capability is in its infancy then later on when it becomes better developed. Blowing up Iran is only going to create more problems than it solves… Israel will lose the moral high ground…. You laugh but the Jews have been playing the Moral card for the last fifty Years… and snapping it loudly. Remember that six million died in WW 2. Now they want to pull the trigger first over an assumption and start a landslide of chaos… in which some really bad things are certain to happen, things worse than doing nothing. Don’t do it is all that I can say….Preemption is a really bad idea. |
| Shoot First and Ask Questions Later I heard the debates the other night… A question was asked about a preemptive strike on Iran to take out their nuclear capability. That seems to be a popular foreign affairs question. Gingrich, Santorum and Romney took a hard line…. “Nuclear weapons for Iran are not acceptable…” they declared and rattled the sabre… I guess they want to sound like they have the toughness to be Presidential or maybe get the Jewish vote. Paul was the only sensible one on the panel. Now you would think that since Gingrich taught history he would realize that that the term “Preemptive Strike” is a euphemism for starting a war. History has not been kind in recent years with those who start wars. Pearl Harbor was a Preemptive Strike and look what it got the Japanese….Hitler attacked Russia as a Preemptive Strike and look what tit got him… Saddam Hussein attacked in Kuwait and it led to his downfall, Osama Bin Laden preempted on 9/11… not a good outcome for him, Bush preempted on Iraq and is still wondering where those weapons of mass destruction went and now Israel and our presidential candidates (less Paul) want to blow the hell out of Iran. Let me offer that… Shooting first and asking questions later is not a good National Policy. Wars suck, as anyone who has ever been in one can tell you… They suck for the soldiers who fight them and the civilians who have to stand around and watch not to mention what it costs in human lives and treasure that could be put to better use. People remember who fires the first shot. When I think about the Civil War the first image isn't about State's Rights, or Slavery, or the Gettysberg Address, it's about a bunch of hot head South Carolinians shooting a cannon at Fort Sumpter. We forget the retoric but remember who shot first. There is no justification for being the trigger man…. even if it means taking one on the chin first. Actually taking one on the chin first is not such a bad idea….Then everybody knows who the aggressor is and you aren't starting a war based upon an assumption. The nation will get behind a president who defends the people. There is even a name for that… “A Moral War.” If you can swallow the contradiction in terms. Taking one on the chin pragmatically translates into “an act of aggression that kills more than 3000 people…” Less than that just doesn’t seem to carry the moment or hold people's attention. Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were in that range and seemed enough to get the ball rolling and sustain it for awhile. Someone needs to tell these ”Presidential Hopefuls” that they don’t want to be remembered as the dumb ass who started WW3 over a "What if." |
| Macro Lessons Learned Well, today I need to do the lesson 6 Reviews. I won’t do them all, maybe, two. I like doing them because I get drawn into the stories my students are writing and see the potential of how things are developing. There were some lessons learned and I will list a few so I don’t forget. Some of these you have heard before but they bear repeating. Lesson1: A writer tends to become linear and rigid if they just go with the first story line idea that comes to mind. Exploratory writing gives them a chance to write a manageable length vignette that examines the possibilities while the thinking is still fluid. Lesson 2: I often resisted using an outline because I lamented… “How do you write an outline of something when you don’t know what it’s about?” Again writing exploratory vignettes lets you get into get into the story and go with the natural flow. Lesson 3: If a student uses the EWW process to validate an existing novel they are already locked in and the cement has dried. When they try to break from the form it tends to shatter before their eyes. Lesson 4: Letting the story line that begins to evolve, reveal the characters and then letting the characters reveal the story answers the “Chicken or Egg” question that perplexes many writers. The vignettes allow for the exploration of both concurrently before the story sets up. Lesson 5: The character the writer thinks is going to be the CC to start with is not always the CC suggested after six vignettes as the natural CC of the story. This happens in the writings of all the students…I am not saying they are always wrong to begin with but rather that interesting possibilities begin to emerge that should be explored before the process begins to firm. Lesson 6: Some candidates for the CC role don’t have the amperage or opportunity to pull the job off. Lesson 7: Six vignettes are enough to reveal the outline of the story. Lesson 8: Taking six weeks to get the outline right is time well spent. Lesson 9: Once the first cut of the outline is completed it provides a framework for the Operational and Strategic components that must be manually inserted into the story. Lesson 10: The structure of the Workshop teaches what these components are and gets the writer thinking about them; however, it is in the outline phase that the student makes sure they are in place. Lesson 11: Having an outline enables a structure that breaks down the story into bite sized chunks that do not have to be suspended in mind and can be developed in an easily workable tactical writing fashion. No doubt there are many more that I could list and these would be subsets of Tactical, Operational and Strategic writing which I need to define with greater specificity in updating the course on these lessons learned. However these are eleven of the Macro ones that have reared their heads as noteworthy. |
| Cranking Along Well today is Thursday and the last of the vignettes are due. One student requested an extension and I can slip her input to the weekend. Then the review will shift in focus from the vignettes to the outline. This will be a big step because it will involve starting with a blank outline of 20 chapters and plugging in the vignette's name, then under each a bullet outline of the vignette's structure. Also there will be the heading material like an illustration, title and brief synopsis. I will be providing an example of my “Shadow Written” story Volusia, applied to the process. In the final lesson the students will complete the outline plugging in the names of the empty chapters and the bullets as they did in lesson 7. That will give them a start on their outline of the novel they are writing with all the good stuff poked in... we have been talking about for the past six weeks. There are a couple of other instructors working on a novel writing class and I am hoping that the outline the students write here will be a good spring board for going on to a higher phased course. I am amazed that nobody dropped out… That is unusual from my experience teaching at New Horizon’s Academy. That and having a student who isn’t ready for an advanced level course sign up. Not only has everyone stuck around and completed their assignments, but they have all been up to the task of understanding and completing the materials. How unusual is that? I am also encouraged that one of the other instructors has expressed an interest in taking the next course as well as several other potential students. Such interest was the case as we were getting ready to launch the initial EWW course and hope it portends the same level of interest and quality of student this time around. I expect that it is only a matter of time before I see one of my students get published. That is how good several are. One has even offered to lend a hand as an assistant instructor. That would be cool. I will have to think about the calibration process that would be necessary to keep us from stepping on each other’s toes. |
| Shazan! This whole process with the Exploratory Writing Workshop (EWW) has worked out better than I had any right to expect. I see the effect of it in my shadow writing example and I see where it is leading each of my students. In each I see the excitement and enthusiasm I feel in myself. In the One Act Play course there was not the synergism I see here and maybe I need to revisit the Program of Instruction there to see what the Lessons Learned from the EWW might add. The EWW seems to answer the question, ”How does a writer outline a story when they don’t know what the story is?” The answer is that the vignettes, written without rigid constraints telegraphy what the outline of the form is going to look like without having to set the foundation of the story in cement to begin with. It allows the writer to explore the options and possibilities for a much longer period by keeping things fluid for a couple of months. Anyway it will be exciting to see how lessons 7 and 8 go… I will be cramming a lot into the final two of these. |
| The chicken or the egg? As I write it often comes to mind, which comes first, the story line or the characters? I have no good answer to that. Sometimes when I sit down to write a story comes to mind but at other times it is the character I find myself struggling with. I suppose there is no real answer… they both happen and who really cares? As I shadow write for my class I am on the last CRISIS. This is the vignette that is like the final exam in a sense. It is supposed to be about the climax to the story the students will be writing that will plug somewhere into the very end of the outline. Anyway I know how the story is now going to come out and I am working on how the characters are going to handle it. A writer learns a lot about his/her characters at this juncture. In a fundamental sense that is… At the end of the Exploratory Writing Phase a writer has a fleshed out outline. There is still plenty of room for developing characters and expanding the framework. The point is that it is no longer necessary to try and hold all that structure in mind and the author can focus now on crafting the work in manageable little chunks… and when the last chunk is finished write “The End”…. And have a seamless work that is not a hode-podge of this and that. |
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