. Spinning .

Yes, I’m STILL reading Confessions of Nat Turner and will post on it soon, but it’s obvious that I haven’t been the twice-a-day poster girl here for a while. Well, there are some good reasons for that. I’m writing. And, I’m getting quite a few stories published.

So in this age of me-me-me, I’m focusing on my own writing more than reading someone else’s–though I am reading about fifteen stories a day on the writers colony site fictionaut. There’s a sense of enthusiasm and support from the writers gathered here that I’ve not found elsewhere at this high a level of quality writing. These people aren’t wannabes, they’re for the most part, published authors and editors so they have that burning fire and unrelenting drive that makes writing a big part of their lives.

In the past few months, I’ve realized my own ambitions of being published or forthcoming in literary journals such as The Blue Print Review, elimae, Bewildering Stories, The New River Journal, fourpaperletters, metazen, Litsnack, Istanbul Literary Review, and others. A Valentine’s Day Challenge turned into a group of 25 stories and poems that will be published in chapbook form and I’m glad to say that my story is included. But it’s taken me a long time to get to this point and I can’t sit and rest on my laurels. What pleases me very much is that a couple of the stories were written in hypertext and that I’m finding publishers willing to work with me on this and include it in their journals.

So that’s where I’ve been and that’s where I’ll be for a while, particularly now with many of the submission deadlines closing before the summer. I’ve got a whole batch of new stories that need endings, and a long way to go before I can rest, but Spinning and its sister Hypercompendia are not dead, just holding their breath while I play on the railroad tracks.

The reading here is much more welcoming in that the language is beautifully wrought. There is some question in my mind–knowing that this book is considered historical fiction based upon the actual written confessions of Mr. Turner, as to that language. Whether it be as author William Styron suggests or whether I should resort to looking up the confessions and see if the language is what Mr. Turner would use. While risking (again) being labeled a racist here, it would seem obvious that the language Styron uses in the voice of Nat Turner seems extremely formal for a Negro of that period, it is also fact that since he was self-educated and a voracious reader of the Bible, that he might indeed be a man of eloquence as even the most common of men of that period likely speak in a much more formal and correct manner than many of today’s society.

There is something that surprises me even more in this novel, and that is the intimation that Nat Turner was not driven to rebellion by the oppression of slavery as much as seeing it as a divine command by God.

“Near the end of my trapline there was a little knoll, surrounded on three sides by a thicket of scrub oak trees, and here I would make my breakfast. From this knoll (though hardly taller than a small tree, it was the highest point of land for miles) I could obtain a clear and secret view of the countryside, including several of the farmhouses which it had already become my purpose eventually to invade and pillage.

(…) For at such times it seemed that the spirit of God hovered very close to me, advising me in this fashion: Son of man, prophesy, and say, Thus saith the Lord: Say, a sword, a sword is sharpened, and also furbished: it is sharpened to make a sore slaughter.”

This sort of changes the reading for me. For while I was completely prepared for the concept of an uprising in the name of justice I can’t help being influenced by the not quite as comprehensible fanaticism that claims bloodshed in the name of religion a.k.a. terrorism today.

History has indeed proven that so many lives and civilizations have been devastated in the mistaken belief that it is being done in accordance with God’s will. I would more closely be in agreement with war for the sake of obvious repression and injustice, then in the claim of misunderstood Biblical references.

(ADDENDUM: Oddly enough, within an hour after posting this I read this report on Democratic Senator Reid’s comments regarding President Obama during the presidential campaign. It’s just so hard to be honestly interested and yet pc these days.)

Finally. Finished. This. Book.

What should have kept me involved in this book, the prose, the lyrical language, the drilling into the characters and the focus on a single event, somehow lost me. It got tedious to read when I really had no empathy with Hana, the main character perhaps. Or is it Kip? Or Caravaggio? Or the burnt man in the bed of the title of this book.

Hana appears more dopey and self-centered than shell-shocked by war. I see no passion in her relationship with Kip. The English patient just lies there with his little secret love affair with someone’s wife–both parties dead. Caravaggio’s thieving ways provide some sense of adventure and I would have probably enjoyed more background on him. Kip is interesting and yet secretive.

Frankly, the tone of the story is morose and I had the constant feeling of music playing in the background–yes, like a movie. The writing, as I say, is beautifully wrought and yet it is the beauty of words rather than story.  Overall, nnot one of my favorite reads.

. . .or any other excuse I can come up with to explain my relative absence from this weblog as compared to my previous six years of blogging.

In truth, some good things are happening. I am looking forward to announcing the publication of a few of my short stories and a hypertext story towards the end of this month or in early January. So, my writing is going well…

My reading, well, obviously, after blowing through a few books this past summer as not grabbing me I’m just about finished with The English Patient. Just haven’t been reading as much since I got involved in the 100 Days Project that had me writing a hypertext story a day for, well, 100 days. From there I wrote some more hypertext, then got involved with an online writers community that whipped my brain into creative force mode and started submitting some short stories again after getting some good feedback from the members of the group. That’s what you kind of need as a writer; unless of course you’re so self-absorbed and cocky you think you’re great without some validation of your peers.

And the reality of my life is still seeking a higher paying employment even as I freeze my bones in the frameshop handling the Christmas rush.

But I’ll be back in force after the holidays; back, I hope, to my more prolific if not eloquent daily postings.

I can’t say that I’ve been overwhelmed by this novel; the plot is slow, the characters only became interesting halfway through the book, the setting and premise is implausible, and the writing–to me–is a bit vague and murky rather than crisp. It is almost as if the writing tone is as slow and melancholy as the aftermath of war in the story.

But this is good:

When someone speaks he looks at their mouth, not eyes and colors, which, it seems to him, will always alter depending on the light of a room, the minute of the day. Mouths reveal insecurity or smugness or any other point on the spectrum of character. For him they are the most intricate aspect of faces. He’s never sure what an eye reveals. But he can read how mouths darken into callousness, suggest tenderness. One can often misjudge an eye from its reaction to a simple beam of sunlight. (p 219)

This tells just as much about Kip, the “he” of this passage as it does about his methods of reading other people. He is a defuser of bombs; he is meticulous therefore, and cautious. He looks for signs to act upon and he must be sure of the response. This particular element that Ondaatje bestows upon Kip is not only necessary to the character, it is so in contrast to the usual route–almost condemning of the usual route–of believing honesty in one’s eyes.

Boy, the library sales aren’t what they used to be. Only five books picked up this morning:

Next – Michael Crichton
The Tommyknockers – Stephen King
The Shipping News – Annie Proulx
The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pychon
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde

Guess it’s Amazon.com for a birthday present for myself. Or maybe a couple; cause, you know, I like saved so much on the books at the sale.

I don’t even want to look to see when I started this because I know it’s been months and frankly, I’m only a little under a third through it. Not completely the book’s fault, since I spent three or four months doing nothing but writing hyperfiction so at least I have a decent excuse for not being up on my reading.

That said, it’s still a problem of pace for me with this book. What stands out for me here is that while I know this was made into a movie, I did not see the movie but seem to be reading it as if it were a movie I’m watching rather than a book that I’m reading. Even the music seems to com through, you know, that melancholy string sound that holds all the tension, emotion, and mostly despair of the setting of the narrative. The characters seem to have been well-beaten into submission by the events of war long before we come upon them in this bombed-out and abandoned villa in the Tuscany hills. As a matter of fact, I find the drifting in and out of morphined sleep of the English patient not much different than the wanderings of Hana, or Caravaggio.

Finally, the character of Kip, a young sikh soldier who has the job of finding land mines left behind by the retreating enemy armies, enters the small social circle at the villa. This may bring some life into the story which I still feel is following a sweet violinistic mood. Even revelations of who the characters are and how they got to this meeting point have been harrowing war stories, yet presented in a sort of smoky bubble that keep apart from each other.

Perhaps it is this, the fact that we get the characters after they’ve been twisted and ravaged by war, that keeps the tone (for me) in an anticlimactic somberness.

Posner’s little book–and it truly is–is a full yet concise legal analysis of the concept of plagiarism. Evidently the concept of what constitutes the concept has been affected by the society in which time it has occurred, which helped assuage my initial shock at some of the historical references used.

What Posner stresses, and which makes sense to me, is that the plagiarist must have the intent to defraud the public by claiming originality of the copied passage. What surprises Posner and others is that quotation marks would easily clarify and negate any claim of stolen intellectual property yet many feel that this simple punctuation would detract from the natural reading of the work.

It’s definitely an interesting and informative read and actually helped a hard-noser like me to be a little more tolerant.

This passage from Posner’s The Little Book of Plagiarism is interesting:

“Politics may have played the decisive role in [Doris Kearns] Goodwin’s surprisingly swift rehabilitation, as we’ll see; and, speaking of politics, I note that one reason for the ambivalence of reactions to plagiarism is that the Left, which dominates intellectual circles in the United States, is soft on plagiarism. Notions of genius, of individual creativity, and of authorial celebrity, which inform the condemnation of plagiarism, make the leftists uncomfortable because they seem to celebrate inequality and “possessive individualism” (that is, capitalism).” (p. 94)

Yeah, I noticed that, the relatively blase’ attitude towards what I might have become outraged about or taken an overly moralistic stand based on principle. Posner puts it in a straightforward statement that connects the dots.

First, though the definition of plagiarism has changed over the ages, it seems it’s been around a long time:

“–the actual first use may have been much earlier) in something like its modern sense by the Roman poet Martial in the first century A.D. A plagiarius was someone who either stole someone else’s slave or enslaved a free person, In his epigram number 52 Martial applied the term metaphorically to another poet, whom Martial accused of having claimed authorship of verses that Martial had written.”  (Posner, p. 50)

Plagiarists (and students!) take note–here it is almost 2000 years later and people still are talking about it. Sort of the perfect example and a great lesson in “the evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” (William Shakespeare)

Speaking of Shakespeare, Posner goes on to point out a passage from Antony and Cleopatra that is clearly taken from Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch.

The concept at the time evidently was that writing someone else’s words even better was an improvement, not a copying or stealing of those words. True, as Posner notes, Shakespeare said it so eloquently that even our modern interpretation of plagiarism will willingly forgive him.

It still bothers me though.

Shakespeare seems appropriate here

On the subject of plagiarism, Posner establishes the differences between infringement, plagiarism, and fair use. As he states:

“Reliance and hence fraud and hence plagiarism are matters of expectation.” (p. 31)

Which means to me that there is no clearly drawn line, but rather it is easily an arguable state. He would seem to imply an intent to defraud according to the beliefs of the reading public as the defining point. This covers and holds harmless then much research and ghostwriting that is a usual or normal practice to be ascribed to a single or certain authorship.

Fine and dandy, except that isn’t intent a much more difficult concept to prove? I can easily see the “well people knew darn well I didn’t write that but that so and so did” used as a justification. To carry it further into the academic scenario, it would seem that the very thing that tips professors off to check for plagiarism (that idiot couldn’t have written that) would be the idiot’s primary defense.

Mary Ellen, taking a course called Electric Literature (ain’t that cool?) at Trinity College in Hartford, CT recently brought up the question of defining literature beyond the restriction of the written word.

I’ve just started reading Richard A. Posner’s The Little Book of Plagiarism and found this:

“But “plagiarism” turns out to be difficult to define. A typical dictionary definition is ‘literary theft.’ The definition is incomplete because there can be plagiarism of music, pictures, or ideas, as well as of verbal matter, though most of the time I’ll assume that the plagiarist is a writer.”  (p. 11)

Now Posner is not a literature professor; he is a judge on the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School (and I took that pretty much straight off the book jacket). It appears that to him that literature is separate from music, pictures or ideas and verbal matter. Obviously ideas can be expressed in literary form as well as any other.

So, in this day of new media, when novels are written in hypertext and read online, how will the definition of literature be affected?

This is embarrassing; I haven’t read except for short stories and poetry in almost a month. And I call myself a literary weblog? But the excuse for not reading is one of the best–I’ve been writing a short story a day in hypertext format on Hypercompendia (linked so there’s proof!).

But you can’t eat soup for lunch and type on a laptop at the same time, though God know I’ve tried. So it was finally time to stop carrying the book around with me and actually open it up and start reading.

First, some lovely imagery: “a buckle of noise in the air,” “a wedge of light,” “the lowest rib, its cliff of skin,” “I had broken the spareness of the desert,” and of course, “the penis sleeping like a sea horse.”  This is all within the first couple of pages and these images are separated by direct and concise movement of character and story. So no, it’s not an overdose of flowery prose.

And this caught my attention:

He whispers again, dragging the listening heart of the young nurse beside him to wherever his mind is, into that well of memory he kept plunging into during those months before he died. (p. 4)

Yes, page 4! I recall a story I wrote a few year ago that killed off the main character by the second paragraph (short story versus novel here) and was berated by a critique group who said that killing off the main character at the beginning was a big no-no in writing; that the reader had no more reason now to read the book if the ending is known. I, of course, ignored them.

Many, many novels reveal the end before the tale; it is a writing tool, no more and no less than that. There is just as much reason to know the story of a character–in fiction or non-fiction–whether he’s alive or dead. After all, death is the understood ending even for Cinderella and Prince Charming. In other words, they live “happily ever after” only for x number of years. Then they die, just like everyone else.

. . . or ADD? Notice where the bookmarks in each sit.

Actually I’ve been writing and playing in hypertext over at the Hypercompendia Flash Fiction site and haven’t been doing much reading lately except for Chekhov and poetry to keep in the right frame of mind and influence.

And, been learning much about the hypertext form that I really enjoy as a new media narrative form. With this opportunity and the benefit of the Tinderbox software, I’m gaining hands-on experience in html and css, as well.

As far as reading goes, I’ve got Unconsoled and House of Leaves both laid aside as too blah (Unconsoled) and  too demanding (House) right now. I’ve picked out The English Patient as a good option.  A nice, linear work to offset the textbooks and hypertext.

A rather strange little story, I’m not really sure I got the point of it.

Two older men are sitting and talking and we see some strange men and some women who have married them–mostly unwillingly–or we see women who have married the wrong men and loved another.

“When Sophia was almost asleep Varvara pressed against her and whispered in her ear–

“Let us murder Diudya and Aliosha!”

Sophia shuddered and said nothing at first. After a moment she opened her eyes and looked steadfastly at the sky. (p. 104)

They each consider this horrific deed for a while, then decide that they cannot follow through. Worse, they make excuses to each other for even thinking the thought. And life goes on.