One thing about me is that sometimes - for reasons I myself don't fully understand - I get enamored of doing things the hard way.

Maybe enamored is the wrong word. I become certain that This Way is the way I want to do the thing, and it really doesn't matter how difficult or inconvenient This Way is.

This time, I became certain that the way I wanted to do the thing was Acoustic Guitar Songbook for 70s Kids. (There's an Acoustic Guitar Songbook for 60s Kids, but not for 80s Kids, alas.)

The reason this book appealed to me was this: I do better when I have a set curriculum than when I'm just kind of learning things at random (currently, I'm working through the Canadian Royal Conservatory of Music books for classical guitar even though I don't have a classical guitar and don't want to play classical guitar); if I pick up an American book of acoustic fingerpicking songs, my absolute hatred of a handful of 1970s rock songs gets in the way; I liked the cover.

So I get the book shipped from Japan, and the book itself just has the vocal melody line and the chord names, and I'm thinking, OK, fine, I can work with that, BUT - if you buy the book, you get the password so you can get on the password-protected YouTube videos that actually demonstrate and explain how to play the songs.

In Japanese. So, although my Japanese is good, I definitely cannot understand "You put your ring finger on the third fret of the second string, and you put your middle finger on the second fret of the third string" without rewinding a time or two.

But the whole reason I got the book in the first place is that I do not want to play from a YouTube video! It's tedious! You have to spend all your time rewinding and playing back and rewinding and playing back!

And yet, I do understand why they did it this way, because it takes so much more page space to write out a guitar part in detail, and they couldn't have fit 100 songs into a relatively slim book.

So what I'm doing is laboriously transcribing from the YouTube video to actual sheet music. (Laborious because for this particular song, the guy's not great at explaining, and he's leaving things out, so it's 75% transcribing from his explanations and 25% filling in the gaps by ear.)

I am hoping that as I go on I'll start getting better at recognizing chords, recognizing arpeggio patterns, understanding Japanese guitar words, etc, and this whole process will become less tedious. Because... this kind of seems like the absolute worst way to learn how to play basic coffee shop fingerpicking acoustic guitar, and yet, that's what my heart is set on.

That feeling when you start a new book that you're slightly excited about reading, but the teen-girl character is a wannabe influencer who's right out of central casting, and the voice is laying it on so thickly and stereotypically, and we're hitting all of the expected sentimental notes of Tragic! Backstory! for the dad, and...

It's like the Truck Driver's Gear Change, right? It works - it's crude but it works - but once you know it for what it is, once you see the gears turning, it seems like a cheap trick.

Everything that works just a little too well feels a bit calculated and pandering.

The advice I want to give myself is "Stop reading genre fiction for a second; read out-there litfic, read that queer one narrated by a mountain lion, read some difficult poetry," and I think that's correct but I also don't really have enough brain for it.

1. To pursue joy; to pursue playfulness; to be looser, wilder, bolder, more reckless.

2. To be meticulous and precise, to sweat the details.

3. To not perceive (1) and (2) as being in opposition to one another (and I don't even think that it's a 'write drunk, edit sober' kind of thing.) But rather, the work of sweating the details has to be powered by joy and playfulness and recklessness or you don't have an interesting compass to orient yourself by.

4. To work hard when I can work hard, and rest when I need to rest, and not punish myself for whether I meet the yardstick in my head.

5. To prioritize, above all else, finding the good scent trails that make me feel like I have something worthwhile to say.

Hot take nobody needed:

Cleo in Cleo from 5 to 7 is not a hypochondriac, she is a young woman who's waiting to find out whether she has cancer, and OF COURSE she's anxious and dramatic about it. What if she's been in pain for months trying to get doctors to take her seriously? She knows that any serious illness is likely to be terrible for both her career and her romantic prospects; she's acting the way that any reasonable young person would in that situation!

(This is not a knock on the movie; it's a good movie! But the summaries describe Cleo as a hypochondriac, and I don't see how that's supported by the text.)

As story structure books go, Into the Woods by John Yorke is quite good. It's at least on par with McKee (who I don't agree with 100%, but who gets hated too much) and certainly less formulaic and prescriptive than Syd Field or Save the Cat (which raises the question, "Why do so many people want to take writing advice from a guy whose best movie is Miss Congeniality," but if we think about that too hard, why would anybody take advice from me?)

But there's one thing that it gets badly, incredibly wrong. It quotes E. M. Forster as saying that "story as such can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next."

Yorke parses this very simply: stories should make the audience want to know what happens next.

That's not what Forster meant. I think that if Forster knew he was being misinterpreted like this, he would be turning over in his grave.

I think that it would be more accurate to phrase his argument like this: If we try to isolate the "story" part of a novel, and look at it apart from all the other elements, then the only thing we can find to make one story better than another is whether it makes you want to find out what happens next. But Forster's point is that that's an incredibly reductive way of looking at a novel! If you look at a novel as just a vehicle for finding out what happens next, then you end up overrating The Da Vinci Code and other books that are propulsively plotted but don't have much else to recommend them, and you end up underrating Moby-Dick with its whale chapters and Les Miserables with its sewer chapter. You end up overlooking the philosophical novel, the travelogue-novel, the sociological-commentary-disguised-as-novel, the novel that's heavy on character study, and so on. A novel tells a story, but (in E.M. Forster's view) that's usually not one of the more important or interesting things that it does; in fact, sometimes "what happens next?" is just the shiny thing that's supposed to distract you so you don't notice the sleight-of-hand the writer's doing with their other hand.

Now, if you don't much like the sociological-commentary-disguised-as-novel, the novel where nothing much happens, the chapters that act as a place for the author to monologue about their hyperfixation... I don't necessarily disagree with you. There are some of these books that I love, but what I always really want is a book that's well-plotted AND has a lot more to offer the reader than finding out what happens next. Even with The Da Vinci Code, the people who loved it didn't just love it for the thriller plot; people loved it, in large part, for its church history nonsense. There's something (even if it's something very silly) to stay with you after the excitement of what happens next has faded.

And this, I think, is my problem with books on story structure in general. They rarely recognize that whether a book is well-plotted, badly plotted, or almost unplotted, many of the most interesting things about it are the things happening beside or underneath or orthogonal to the plot.

1. The central thesis of the Barbie movie is that the truly dangerous people are not those who pursue power for its own sake, but those who pursue power as a substitute for the love and respect that they want but cannot obtain.

2. Sarah Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology takes the "orientation" in "sexual orientation" very literally, conceptualizing the "straight lines" of family inheritance and reproduction. To be queer is to deviate from that straight path, to challenge the social order, to need to do some new wayfinding for yourself onto trails that maybe don't exist yet. I think the idea that being "weird and ugly" grants a kind of immunity against being brainwashed by the patriarchy connects to that in interesting ways.

3. There's a chapter in How to Read Donald Duck by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart (a postcolonial critique of Disney in general and the Donald Duck comics in particular) that talks about the strange zero-reproduction world of Disney, where there are a lot of nephews and a few nieces but no sons or daughters. I wonder how their ideas relate to the strange almost-zero-reproduction world of Barbieland, where one person is pregnant but nobody ever gives birth.

4. Does the movie actually bear up to this level of analysis? I don't know, but it's fun to think about when you have to drive an hour in the dark and the rain, and I'll take it.

We have one professor who requires, for who knows what cockamamie reason, that students use a print source.

Article in a database? Not acceptable. An article from the New England Journal of Medicine is totally acceptable if you get it from the magazine, but totally unacceptable if you download the pdf from the database which contains EXACTLY THE SAME CONTENT. It's silly and not educationally useful, but I can't make him change it.

So. What's going to happen now that classes are canceled, the library's open, but students are being strongly encouraged to not come to campus, and are being encouraged to instead do everything virtually?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I am perfectly willing to photocopy or scan a section of a book or magazine for someone, to make a home delivery, or whatever - but if there was ever a time to make an exception, surely this is the time!

(I don't think he wants to teach online, which I understand, but if this reluctance keeps him from asking students to go to the library to find books on color guard and global warming, I will be GLAD.)

I have recently finished the almost-final draft of The Death and Life of the Blackthorn City, my thesis novel that's about what happens when the left-wing Quebecois insurgencies of the late 60s and early 70s result in the growth of an impenetrable thorn-hedge around a section of Montreal -- and what happens several decades later, when the heiress to the powers of the thorn-hedge falls in love with a Vietnamese-Canadian girl from the other side of the city.

So - for my own amusement - here is the playlist that I've made as I was writing the novel, and my notes thereupon!



( Read more... )

I am alternating between being

(a) Extremely Pleased with the hotness level of my thesis - even though it as of yet has no genuinely explicit scenes and just one that is meant to be moderately spicy

and

(b) Extremely Embarrassed because the following people are going to read it: my thesis advisor, the three other men on my thesis committee, my entire cohort of ~10 ppl, and if it gets published then all kinds of friends and relatives and who knows who.

There is a chance that the draft that goes to my thesis defense will just say [[Here THEY HAVE SEX. It is NICE]]

People who've written more fanfic than I have have to deal with this kind of thing all the time, I know; I haven't had that sort of practice.

(Regarding the first third of the novel, which HAS been workshopped, people are telling me to make it sexier unless I actually want to present these characters as asexual - which I don't - but I'm still trying to figure out how much I'm going to tinker with it in revisions; I get awkward when it comes to how much I should write about the sex lives of fictional teenagers, as compared with the sex lives of fictional adults in the latter half of the book.)