A poem

I found
a fairy skeleton--
its spine

no thicker than
the stem that ties
a clover
to the ground.

its sockets wide
enough to sow
a pair of poppy seeds,

its ribcage like two rows
of eyelashes
entwined.

March for Life post 1

 The wolf shall dwell with the lamb: and the leopard shall lie down with the kid: the calf and the lion, and the sheep shall abide together, and a little child shall lead them.

 The calf and the bear shall feed: their young ones shall rest together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

 And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp: and the weaned child shall thrust his hand into the den of the basilisk.

 They shall not hurt, nor shall they kill in all my holy mountain, for the earth is filled with the knowledge of the Lord, as the covering waters of the sea.

                                                                                   - Isaiah 11:6-9 

There's something about animals and kids. They go together. When I was little, almost every picture book that was meant to trick children into sleeping was about saying good-night to all the animals. We'd say good night to, oh, for example, the baby donkey and the baby crow, the puppies, the pigs, the lambs. Then, as a sort of grand finale, there'd be a young representative member of our species getting shied off to bed along with the lot. 

Even the Bible juxtaposes children and animals. Look at the "peaceable kingdom" passage quoted above, which seems to find its fulfillment for a brief, short space in the narrative of the Nativity, when the savior of humanity bedded down in a stable for his first night on earth. When I was very little and my sister Clair was littler, she was discontented, I guess, with all the pre-existing Christmas carols, so she went and wrote her own: "The sheep and the donkey, the camel and the lamb / The cattle and doves are nice. / But Mary and Joseph put Jesus in a manger." Cattle and doves are nice, but a baby is nicer.

That picture jumped into my head, unreasonably, after I'd read a Salon article that my friend Joe Jablonski at Gaudium Dei linked to on his Facebook page. (He's about to write a post about it which will go into a lot more detail.) The article "So what if abortion ends life?" begins with the line, "Of all the diabolically clever moves the anti-choice lobby has ever pulled, surely one of the greatest has been its consistent co-opting of the word 'life.' " It then proceeds to explain, at some length, why we don't have a better word than "life". Pretty devilish clever of us to use the word we mean.

And here's the catch: Mary Elizabeth Williams, its author, was a Salon.com writer that I really liked, due to the fact that she had, in the past, showed a little human compassion towards the much-maligned Duggars, wondering aloud why they shouldn't grieve a miscarriage and even eloquently defending their decision to photograph their stillborn baby. In her article "Stop judging the Duggars", she asked, "So what if they're expecting again? A family of 20 is just another side of reproductive choice." Apparently, knowingly sanctioning the killing of human beings is the side we're accustomed to.

I'm not really sure whether to be relieved or terrified, reading the new article. Upside: we admit that children are being killed. Downside: we're fine with that.

"Here’s the complicated reality in which we live: All life is not equal," writes Williams. "That’s a difficult thing for liberals like me to talk about, lest we wind up looking like death-panel-loving, kill-your-grandma-and-your-precious-baby storm troopers. Yet a fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her. Always."

"All life is not equal." Think about that. Let those words stand against the arguments of those who say we don't need religion to be good. Religion says that human beings have souls, and without it, we suffer a level of detachment that leads us to rate human life in terms of convenience, because, really, are we any better than animals?

Don't read me wrong. I love animals. But if I'm going to see a scene with all the animals stopping and staring at something, I badly want it to be a man and a woman and a baby, not the words, "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

Three Songs

I've been on break. What if I wrote one post per day, no matter how short or no matter how lousy? What if I did that?

I tend to break down in mid-post-write, just as I might break down in writing any old thing. The other day, for instance, I decided to write down my "Top 5 songs at this moment in time", Tumblr-style, but I could only think of three.

1. Green Tambourine - The Lemon Pipers
My newfound appreciation for the 60s music scene got me into this fix. Now whenever I turn around, this odd little hippie song is playing in the back of my head, as if I've got some switch under the nape of my neck that sets it going. It probably helps that it reminds me so much of my own story, Gua Gua, and of my character Donovan Din, who's very much the "music-for-money" sort. And though I don't even know the name of the lead singer of The Lemon Pipers (now there's a Jeopardy answer if ever there was one), I've kind of fallen in love with his voice. He doesn't sound like all the other singers of the era, he doesn't really sound like anyone. He sounds like a sort of decent singer with a voice somewhere in the middle ranges who's experimenting with an echo machine and maybe even trying to imitate Woody Woodpecker.
Drop some silver in my tambour-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-ine.

2. You Probably Get That A Lot - They Might Be Giants
I'm actually going to see TMBG in March, cementing my geek status once and for all. But even though they're esteemed as such, I'm actually tired of thinking of them as mere geeks. They're actually two freakishly innovative guys who allow themselves to casually do things with lyrics that no one else would be caught dead doing. As a random instance, this song here is a love song to a headless girl who's not like all the other headless girls ("Although millions of cephalophores are walking past my door / They're invisible to be except for one cephalophore"). The singer is charmed by her quirks--"the way [she] swing[s] her head"--as she carries it in her hands, naturally--and her habit of "melting down some army guys to make green tea". It may not carry quite the extreme level of charm as "Birdhouse In Your Soul"--which, in case you weren't aware, is about a nightlight serenading its young owner--but it comes close enough.

3. Love Me Do - The Beatles
I find this song hilarious. It was The Beatles' first single, and it's amazing to think that they debuted on the music scene with something so utterly innocuous, instead of the crazed foot-stomping sound of "I Saw Her Standing There" or the Ed Sullivan show-stopper "I Wanna Hold Your Hand", or...well, almost anything else they ever wrote. It's got these dorky, repetitive lyrics ("Love, love me do / You know I love you / I'll always be true / So pleeeeeeease...love me do-oo") and no Ringo drumming on the album version (you can tell it from the single because they give the poor schlep a tambourine to keep him from feeling too bad) and John Lennon wailing into a harmonica, and pretty much everyone except their producer thought that it was a terrible song. If it had come out a couple years ago, we'd Rickroll each other with it.
But here's the thing--it's got, as the Beatles themselves would say, that something. Maybe it's the harmony, maybe it's the singability, maybe it's even the harmonica. It's appealing. I keep returning to it. It's actually the perfect thing to release on a record, because a single is something that you have to keep revolving all day long because you don't have a record or a playlist or anything, and I could see myself spinning the single to death. If my dad ever gets iTunes working again so I can finally spend that $15 gift card I got from my theater company (thanks, Blackfriars!), the Please Please Me album will be mine, and I expect this song to be the top of my "Most Played" list.

I love cheerful folk

"What can you attribute a good nature to, I wonder. Do you think you’re born with it? I suppose you are."
P.G. Wodehouse, 1975

"I've always been more of an optimist than a pessimist--that's just how I was born. It came with the body."
Ringo Starr, 2012

Friday, December 14, 2012

As I was having lunch in the cafeteria today, I was struck by the urge to pray. Now I know why.

In Defense of Hate Disguise

"It is worth remarking as an extremely fine touch in the picture of Bottom that his literary taste is almost everywhere concerned with sound rather than sense. He begins the rehearsal with a boisterous readiness, “Thisby, the flowers of odious savours sweete.” “Odours, odours,” says Quince, in remonstrance, and the word is accepted in accordance with the cold and heavy rules which require an element of meaning in a poetical passage. But “Thisby, the flowers of odious savours sweete”, Bottom’s version, is an immeasurably finer and more resonant line. The “i” which he inserts is an inspiration of metricism."
- G.K. Chesterton, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (essay)

I was always going to give my habitual heroine a minimum of two fellow-passengers on the Gua Gua, and to make them coworkers came naturally after that. The two of them have a simple job, to sell stuff, but it's not simple stuff that they're selling--it's the concentrated essence of the seasons, but it looks a lot like ice cream and, when you get right down to it, that's all it probably is.

I made one of the two a poet as an excuse to throw all sorts of little songs and jingles into the text. The other fellow was a bit more difficult, and I didn't have a name for him until he'd been around three chapters or so, with me growing more fond of him every minute. Then, on a whim, I stuck him with the unusual monicker of "Hate Disguise"--a name, as a bemused Renee puts it, which is "part English-dubbed anime villain and part sneeze."

It's a misnomer, of course. Hate, while not bereft of bitterness, is a sort of gruff, warm, mopey fellow. Any anger his soul may possess is turned inward--as Shakespeare worded it in As You Like It, "I will chide no breather in the world but myself, against whom I know most faults." So why go with Hate Disguise? Well, the name occurred to me and it just sounded right, I can't say it any way else. The meaning was entirely wrong for the character, but what if you didn't know the language? Then "Hate Disguise" would sound like a big, warm, generous name, a name for a man who smokes cigars and then feels guilty over it, not on account of his own lungs but because he's afraid that his friends Renee Rant and Donovan Din might get a dose of secondhand smoke. That kind of guy. I read a play by Clifford Bax, The Poetasters of Ispahan, where one of the titular lyricists is looking for a decent rhyme: "What though the sense be thin?" he says. "Sound is the soul of song." (I might add that the word "poetaster", which means nothing more than "bad poet", sounds fantastic; I'd crown myself with that word over a forest full of laurel wreaths.)

So in the story Hate has some kind of a normal name before Donovan Din the poet inflicts the flagrant "Hate Disguise" on him. It's a little comment about poetic thinking and how sometimes poets make the sounds matter more than the meaning. Still, I can't help but wonder uneasily how readers will react to him, since these days the word "hate" carries such a strong connotation that it can't be regarded as simple nonsense. All the time, we hear about "hate speech," "hate crime"--things that are supposed to crush and kill the spirits of our fellow men. And people will have a hard time trusting Hate, and how much you wanna bet that my editors (if I'm ever lucky enough to have such things) force me to change his name? I wouldn't exactly blame them, but I'd have a hard time prying the name from the identity. He just is Hate, and it can't be helped; don't hate on Hate Disguise. He surprised me by turning up in a chapter with the name attached to him, and ever since then, it's just been like that.

To me, that's the thing that fascinates about Hate--the fact that he keeps turning out not like I planned him to. He was going to be a madman. Then he was going to be a smooth talker, absurdly comfortable in his skin. Then he turned out to be a daydreamy, foggy sort with an inferiority complex. But I tried to make his tongue cease to be sharp, in order to better suit this characterization, and it never did. Like many a foggy daydreamer, he's every bit as clever as his friend of the sharp focus. And you know what? I shouldn't jinx the boy by writing all of this out as if it's finality. Because I'm going to bet you that Hate's just gonna keep on evolving. I'll stay the course, and we'll see what happens.

The lesson I take from this is that I shouldn't let Renee be static, either. She's a first-person narrator, and it's easy to obsess about consistency when you're writing from a single point of view, but the truth is that people aren't consistent and there's always new sides of them, and sometimes the sides conflict. I could have one person in a room and try to inform you, over the phone, who was with me, by throwing out only descriptive terms--and you'd think that I had a crowd in there. People can't be described in three words. People are crowds and should be treated as such.

One Ringo to Rule them All

One of those stories where I had to check the date to know it wasn't the April Fool's Day edition. John Lennon wanted to do a Lord of the Rings movie with the Beatles. Seriously.

I now have incredibly mixed feelings. I mean, I completely understand J.R.R. Tolkien's thinking--not wanting his artistic vision compromised by a couple of kids whom he probably considered the One Direction of his era. I would have felt the same way.

But at the same time, I don't think I'm ever going to fully forgive him for killing my chance to see Ringo Starr as Sam Gamgee. That's better than the casting in the Jackson movie.

Oh, well, at least we'll always have this. (As someone who has the scene they're doing memorized back to front, I must inform you that, contrary to what the uploader claims, George Harrison is not, in fact, cursing out some random audience member. He's actually saying "Look you," which, in Shakespearean English, is exactly the same as beginning a sentence with an impatient "Look..."

Edit: I totally should have entitled this post "Get Back, Frodo."