Posts
Showing posts with label NEW ORLEANS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NEW ORLEANS. Show all posts
Thursday, March 3, 2011
THE WHISPERING WINDS IN THE LISTENING SKY
Here is the article on establishing mood through description that I promised Shannon yesterday.
Look around you.
Hearts have grown cold,
ears dull,
minds impatient.
And this affects you as a writer just how?
Each page of your novel could be the reader's last ...
unless ...
unless you make your novel alive and alluring.
People pick up a book in a store, thumb through it, and read a page at random.
That is your only shot at snaring him/her into buying what cost you years of sweat and effort.
Make each page count. Make each paragraph breathe. Make each moment live in the mind of the reader.
Each of the senses should be touched by your words. And one of the ways you do that is to paint your locale with such brushstrokes of prose, the reader "sees" and "feels" and "smells" the unique flavors of your locale.
New Orleans :
Hollow-eyed mothers hugging hungry children within a block of spacious mansions, framed by lush bushes and gleaming iron lacework fences.
Decaying public schools slowly devolving into raucous social jungles and tribal warfare over gang colors and drug territory.
A hardened, jaded police department that in some seasons can be scarier than the city's criminals. Official corruption at every level. Murder rates ever soaring. And hot, steamy air you can wear 7 months out of the year.
And it is a wonderful place to live :
The morning mists parting as the St. Charles streetcar happily clatters through the shimmering fog under the avenue's great oak trees.
The second-line parade of trumpet blowers high-stepping intricate steps in honor of some event or another.
The mellow, haunting notes of Ellis Marsalis playing piano as you sit at Snug Harbor, sipping a drink light on alcohol, heavy on taste.
You must paint your reader into your locale with words that touch the taste buds, stroke their cheeks, and tug on their heartstrings.
Only then, with the setting so real that they hear the sound of throaty laughter and fine jazz, will the Stetson wearing, doomed hero, Samuel McCord, feel like an actual person to them.
Remember :
Each city whispers in its own voice. Your city. My city.
You know streets that whisper to stay away at night.
You know what scandal has stained some avenue beyond repair. You know what person's name is spoken in hushed tones long after he or she has died and been buried in your city.
Each city has its own personality. Like a human's, it changes with trauma, years of abuse, and moments of historic impact.
Lifting the veil from the distinctive features of the setting of your novel makes your whole narrative come alive for your reader.
But how do you do that verbal sleight of hand?
Details.
Some obvious to tourists. Some that you have to ferret out by research in the library, on the internet, or by listening to a local visitor to your setting.
Feelings.
How does your hero/heroine feel about those details? How have they affected the protagonist and those important to him or her?
Weave those details and emotions into a rich tapestry of irony and longing.
What shadowed corner of your setting is especially dangerous or emotion-laden to your central characters? Why?
Paint a passage where that tapestry flutters in the shadows, not quite completely seen but more evocative because of that.
Time.
What era is it in your setting? Has your protagonist lived through more than one era of time in it?
How has the passing seasons shaped his/her mind, opinions, and outlook for the present? For the future? How does your protagonist view his and the setting's past?
Master these points, and your novel will live for your reader.
***
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
CURSE OF THE GODS_GHOST OF WILLIAM FAULKNER
{"A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream."
- William Faulkner.}
The ghost of William Faulkner here :
I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.
But there is a terrible irony in that.
It took me dying to understand life. I thought I knew what life was as you think you know.
I was wrong, as you are wrong.
Life is ephemeral, elusive, and beyond the capacity of words to adequately convey.
Your worldview, as was mine, is as simplistic and crude as an Etch-A-Sketch rendering of the Mona Lisa.
I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express life,
but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.
You believe McCord is only a creature of Roland's mind.
But then, how can you explain that I can remember meeting McCord in New Orleans in the 1920's?
Is the power of the spirit, of the mind such that it can transcend time itself?
I could try to explain what my ghostly senses have seen but it would be as pointless as giving caviar to an elephant.
Instead I will write of that time when I still was alive, still saw as a human sees.
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.
And that is what I will try to do now for you.
The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel.
In my opinion it's the perfect milieu for an artist to work in. McCord offered it to me. And I took it for awhile.
I got more than money for that job, I received a way of looking at life that transformed me into the writer that I became.
McCord became my Socrates. He hardly ever spoke but guided my thoughts with a stray word or question, letting me come up with my own conclusions.
The first thing he taught me : the past is never dead. It's not even past.
The second thing he helped me see : the salvation of the world is in man's suffering. The scattered tea goes with the leaves, and every day a sunset dies.
One day during the time while McCord and I walked and talked in New Orleans – or I talked and he listened - I found him sitting on a bench in Jackson Square, laughing to himself.
I got the impression that he had been there like that for some time, just sitting alone on the bench laughing to himself.
This was not our usual meeting place. We had none.
He lived in his French Quarter night club, Meilori's. And without any special prearrangement, we would meet somewhere between his club and the Square after I had something to eat at noon.
I would walk in the direction of his club. And if I did not meet him already strolling or sitting in the Square, I would simply sit down on a bench where I could see his doorway and wait until he came out.
I can see him still –
A ramrod straight man in his early fifties, clad entirely in black : black broadcloth jacket, shirt, tie, and slacks. His boots were black, as well, and polished so that the sun struck fire from them. Even his Stetson was black.
All of which made the silver star on his jacket stand out like a campfire in the night. It was said he had once been a Texas Ranger.
He never talked to me of those days - at least not before that afternoon.
This time he was already sitting on the bench, laughing. I sat down beside him and asked what was so funny. He looked at me for a long moment.
"I am," he said.
And to me that was the great tragedy of his character, for he meant it. He knew people did not believe he was who the legends claimed. How could he be?
They thought him an actor paid to play a part.
Except when the darkness came for them, then they came running, praying he was what the tales on the street whispered : a monster who killed monsters.
He expected people nowhere near his equal in stature or accomplishment or wit or anything else, to hold him in scorn and derision ... in the daylight.
In spite of that he worked earnestly and hard at helping each wounded soul he met.
It was as if he said to himself : 'They will not hurt as I have hurt. I will show them that they matter because their pain matters to me.'
"Why do you speak of yourself like that?," I asked.
"Today marks the hundred year anniversary," he said.
"Of what?"
"Drop by my table at the club this evening, and I will tell you."
And that evening I did just that. We sat, with a bottle now, and we talked.
At first he did not mention the hundred year anniversary. It was as if he was slowly working himself up to something long avoided.
We talked of everything it seemed.
How a mule would work ten years for you willingly and patiently just for the privilege of kicking you once. How clocks kill time, that only when the clocks stop does time come to life.
And how given a choice between grief and nothing, he would choose grief.
When he had said those last words, McCord met my eyes with his own deep ones and said,
"There is something about taking a stand against the darkness, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need.
His eyes seemed to sink into his wolf's face. "But there is a price."
"What price?," I whispered.
"To understand the world, you must first understand the human heart. But none of us understand that mystery. So we make mistakes."
He closed his eyes. "And those mistakes kill those we love."
He rose from the table, walking into the shadows and speaking to me from over his shoulder.
"No battle is ever won. They are not even fought for the reasons you tell yourself. The battlefield only reveals your own folly and despair. And victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools."
The darkness swallowed him, and the night suddenly seemed to be my enemy.
***
- William Faulkner.}
The ghost of William Faulkner here :
I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.
But there is a terrible irony in that.
It took me dying to understand life. I thought I knew what life was as you think you know.
I was wrong, as you are wrong.
Life is ephemeral, elusive, and beyond the capacity of words to adequately convey.
Your worldview, as was mine, is as simplistic and crude as an Etch-A-Sketch rendering of the Mona Lisa.
I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express life,
but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.
You believe McCord is only a creature of Roland's mind.
But then, how can you explain that I can remember meeting McCord in New Orleans in the 1920's?
Is the power of the spirit, of the mind such that it can transcend time itself?
I could try to explain what my ghostly senses have seen but it would be as pointless as giving caviar to an elephant.
Instead I will write of that time when I still was alive, still saw as a human sees.
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.
And that is what I will try to do now for you.
The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel.
In my opinion it's the perfect milieu for an artist to work in. McCord offered it to me. And I took it for awhile.
I got more than money for that job, I received a way of looking at life that transformed me into the writer that I became.
McCord became my Socrates. He hardly ever spoke but guided my thoughts with a stray word or question, letting me come up with my own conclusions.
The first thing he taught me : the past is never dead. It's not even past.
The second thing he helped me see : the salvation of the world is in man's suffering. The scattered tea goes with the leaves, and every day a sunset dies.
One day during the time while McCord and I walked and talked in New Orleans – or I talked and he listened - I found him sitting on a bench in Jackson Square, laughing to himself.
I got the impression that he had been there like that for some time, just sitting alone on the bench laughing to himself.
This was not our usual meeting place. We had none.
He lived in his French Quarter night club, Meilori's. And without any special prearrangement, we would meet somewhere between his club and the Square after I had something to eat at noon.
I would walk in the direction of his club. And if I did not meet him already strolling or sitting in the Square, I would simply sit down on a bench where I could see his doorway and wait until he came out.
I can see him still –
A ramrod straight man in his early fifties, clad entirely in black : black broadcloth jacket, shirt, tie, and slacks. His boots were black, as well, and polished so that the sun struck fire from them. Even his Stetson was black.
All of which made the silver star on his jacket stand out like a campfire in the night. It was said he had once been a Texas Ranger.
He never talked to me of those days - at least not before that afternoon.
This time he was already sitting on the bench, laughing. I sat down beside him and asked what was so funny. He looked at me for a long moment.
"I am," he said.
And to me that was the great tragedy of his character, for he meant it. He knew people did not believe he was who the legends claimed. How could he be?
They thought him an actor paid to play a part.
Except when the darkness came for them, then they came running, praying he was what the tales on the street whispered : a monster who killed monsters.
He expected people nowhere near his equal in stature or accomplishment or wit or anything else, to hold him in scorn and derision ... in the daylight.
In spite of that he worked earnestly and hard at helping each wounded soul he met.
It was as if he said to himself : 'They will not hurt as I have hurt. I will show them that they matter because their pain matters to me.'
"Why do you speak of yourself like that?," I asked.
"Today marks the hundred year anniversary," he said.
"Of what?"
"Drop by my table at the club this evening, and I will tell you."
And that evening I did just that. We sat, with a bottle now, and we talked.
At first he did not mention the hundred year anniversary. It was as if he was slowly working himself up to something long avoided.
We talked of everything it seemed.
How a mule would work ten years for you willingly and patiently just for the privilege of kicking you once. How clocks kill time, that only when the clocks stop does time come to life.
And how given a choice between grief and nothing, he would choose grief.
When he had said those last words, McCord met my eyes with his own deep ones and said,
"There is something about taking a stand against the darkness, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need.
His eyes seemed to sink into his wolf's face. "But there is a price."
"What price?," I whispered.
"To understand the world, you must first understand the human heart. But none of us understand that mystery. So we make mistakes."
He closed his eyes. "And those mistakes kill those we love."
He rose from the table, walking into the shadows and speaking to me from over his shoulder.
"No battle is ever won. They are not even fought for the reasons you tell yourself. The battlefield only reveals your own folly and despair. And victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools."
The darkness swallowed him, and the night suddenly seemed to be my enemy.
***
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
WHEN UPSTREAM IS DOWNWIND
Look around you.
Hearts have grown cold,
ears dull,
minds impatient.
And this affects you as a writer just how?
Each page of your novel could be the reader's last ...
unless ...
unless you make your novel alive and alluring.
People pick up a book in a store, thumb through it, and read a page at random.
That is your only shot at snaring him/her into buying what cost you years of sweat and effort.
Make each page count. Make each paragraph breathe. Make each moment live in the mind of the reader.
Each of the senses should be touched by your words. And one of the ways you do that is to paint your locale with such brushstrokes of prose, the reader "sees" and "feels" and "smells" the unique flavors of your locale.
New Orleans :
Hollow-eyed mothers hugging hungry children within a block of spacious mansions, framed by lush bushes and gleaming iron lacework fences.
Decaying public schools slowly devolving into raucous social jungles and tribal warfare over gang colors and drug territory.
A hardened, jaded police department that in some seasons can be scarier than the city's criminals. Official corruption at every level. Murder rates ever soaring. And hot, steamy air you can wear 7 months out of the year.
And it is a wonderful place to live :
The morning mists parting as the St. Charles streetcar happily clatters through the shimmering fog under the avenue's great oak trees.
The second-line parade of trumpet blowers high-stepping intricate steps in honor of some event or another.
The mellow, haunting notes of Ellis Marsalis playing piano as you sit at Snug Harbor, sipping a drink light on alcohol, heavy on taste.
You must paint your reader into your locale with words that touch the taste buds, stroke their cheeks, and tug on their heartstrings.
Only then, with the setting so real that they hear the sound of throaty laughter and fine jazz, will the Stetson wearing, doomed hero, Samuel McCord, feel like an actual person to them.
Remember :
Each city whispers in its own voice. Your city. My city.
You know streets that whisper to stay away at night.
You know what scandal has stained some avenue beyond repair. You know what person's name is spoken in hushed tones long after he or she has died and been buried in your city.
Each city has its own personality. Like a human's, it changes with trauma, years of abuse, and moments of historic impact.
Lifting the veil from the distinctive features of the setting of your novel makes your whole narrative come alive for your reader.
But how do you do that verbal sleight of hand?
Details.
Some obvious to tourists. Some that you have to ferret out by research in the library, on the internet, or by listening to a local visitor to your setting.
Feelings.
How does your hero/heroine feel about those details? How have they affected the protagonist and those important to him or her?
Weave those details and emotions into a rich tapestry of irony and longing.
What shadowed corner of your setting is especially dangerous or emotion-laden to your central characters? Why?
Paint a passage where that tapestry flutters in the shadows, not quite completely seen but more evocative because of that.
Time.
What era is it in your setting? Has your protagonist lived through more than one era of time in it?
How has the passing seasons shaped his/her mind, opinions, and outlook for the present? For the future? How does your protagonist view his and the setting's past?
Master these points, and your novel will live for your reader.
***
Hearts have grown cold,
ears dull,
minds impatient.
And this affects you as a writer just how?
Each page of your novel could be the reader's last ...
unless ...
unless you make your novel alive and alluring.
People pick up a book in a store, thumb through it, and read a page at random.
That is your only shot at snaring him/her into buying what cost you years of sweat and effort.
Make each page count. Make each paragraph breathe. Make each moment live in the mind of the reader.
Each of the senses should be touched by your words. And one of the ways you do that is to paint your locale with such brushstrokes of prose, the reader "sees" and "feels" and "smells" the unique flavors of your locale.
New Orleans :
Hollow-eyed mothers hugging hungry children within a block of spacious mansions, framed by lush bushes and gleaming iron lacework fences.
Decaying public schools slowly devolving into raucous social jungles and tribal warfare over gang colors and drug territory.
A hardened, jaded police department that in some seasons can be scarier than the city's criminals. Official corruption at every level. Murder rates ever soaring. And hot, steamy air you can wear 7 months out of the year.
And it is a wonderful place to live :
The morning mists parting as the St. Charles streetcar happily clatters through the shimmering fog under the avenue's great oak trees.
The second-line parade of trumpet blowers high-stepping intricate steps in honor of some event or another.
The mellow, haunting notes of Ellis Marsalis playing piano as you sit at Snug Harbor, sipping a drink light on alcohol, heavy on taste.
You must paint your reader into your locale with words that touch the taste buds, stroke their cheeks, and tug on their heartstrings.
Only then, with the setting so real that they hear the sound of throaty laughter and fine jazz, will the Stetson wearing, doomed hero, Samuel McCord, feel like an actual person to them.
Remember :
Each city whispers in its own voice. Your city. My city.
You know streets that whisper to stay away at night.
You know what scandal has stained some avenue beyond repair. You know what person's name is spoken in hushed tones long after he or she has died and been buried in your city.
Each city has its own personality. Like a human's, it changes with trauma, years of abuse, and moments of historic impact.
Lifting the veil from the distinctive features of the setting of your novel makes your whole narrative come alive for your reader.
But how do you do that verbal sleight of hand?
Details.
Some obvious to tourists. Some that you have to ferret out by research in the library, on the internet, or by listening to a local visitor to your setting.
Feelings.
How does your hero/heroine feel about those details? How have they affected the protagonist and those important to him or her?
Weave those details and emotions into a rich tapestry of irony and longing.
What shadowed corner of your setting is especially dangerous or emotion-laden to your central characters? Why?
Paint a passage where that tapestry flutters in the shadows, not quite completely seen but more evocative because of that.
Time.
What era is it in your setting? Has your protagonist lived through more than one era of time in it?
How has the passing seasons shaped his/her mind, opinions, and outlook for the present? For the future? How does your protagonist view his and the setting's past?
Master these points, and your novel will live for your reader.
***
***
And since this is election night :
Sunday, August 15, 2010
WILLIAM FAULKNER_CURSE OF THE GODS_GHOST OF A CHANCE Interlude
{"A man's moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream."
- William Faulkner.}
The ghost of William Faulkner here :
I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.
But there is a terrible irony in that.
It took me dying to understand life. I thought I knew what life was as you think you know.
You are wrong.
Life is ephemeral, elusive, and beyond the capacity of words to adequately convey.
Your worldview, as was mine, is as simplistic and crude as an Etch-A-Sketch rendering of the Mona Lisa.
I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express life,
but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.
You believe McCord is only a creature of Roland's mind.
Roland's Lakota blood brings to life all to which he invests his love and care. But then, how can you explain that I can remember meeting McCord in New Orleans in the 1920's?
Is the power of the spirit, of the mind such that it can transcend time itself?
I could try to explain what my ghostly senses have seen but it would be as pointless as giving caviar to an elephant.
Instead I will write of that time when I still was alive, still saw as a human sees.
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.
And that is what I will try to do now for you.
The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel.
In my opinion it's the perfect milieu for an artist to work in. McCord offered it to me. And I took it for awhile.
I got more than money for that job, I received a way of looking at life that transformed me into the writer that I became.
McCord became my Socrates. He hardly ever spoke but guided my thoughts with a stray word or question, letting me come up with my own conclusions.
The first thing he taught me : the past is never dead. It's not even past.
The second thing he helped me see : the salvation of the world is in man's suffering. The scattered tea goes with the leaves, and every day a sunset dies.
One day during the time while McCord and I walked and talked in New Orleans – or I talked and he listened - I found him sitting on a bench in Jackson Square, laughing to himself.
I got the impression that he had been there like that for some time, just sitting alone on the bench laughing to himself.
This was not our usual meeting place. We had none.
He lived in his French Quarter night club, Meilori's. And without any special prearrangement, we would meet somewhere between his club and the Square after I had something to eat at noon.
I would walk in the direction of his club. And if I did not meet him already strolling or sitting in the Square, I would simply sit down on a bench where I could see his doorway and wait until he came out.
I can see him still –
A ramrod straight man in his early fifties, clad entirely in black : black broadcloth jacket, shirt, tie, and slacks. His boots were black, as well, and polished so that the sun struck fire from them. Even his Stetson was black.
All of which made the silver star on his jacket stand out like a campfire in the night. It was said he had once been a Texas Ranger.
He never talked to me of those days - at least not before that afternoon.
This time he was already sitting on the bench, laughing. I sat down beside him and asked what was so funny. He looked at me for a long moment.
"I am," he said.
And to me that was the great tragedy of his character, for he meant it. He knew people did not believe he was who the legends claimed. How could he be?
They thought him an actor paid to play a part.
Except when the darkness came for them, then they came running, praying he was what the tales on the street whispered : a monster who killed monsters.
He expected people nowhere near his equal in stature or accomplishment or wit or anything else, to hold him in scorn and derision ... in the daylight.
In spite of that he worked earnestly and hard at helping each wounded soul he met.
It was as if he said to himself : 'They will not hurt as I have hurt. I will show them that they matter because their pain matters to me.'
"Why do you speak of yourself like that?," I asked.
"Today marks the hundred year anniversary," he said.
"Of what?"
"Drop by my table at the club this evening, and I will tell you."
And that evening I did just that. We sat, with a bottle now, and we talked.
At first he did not mention the hundred year anniversary. It was as if he was slowly working himself up to something long avoided.
We talked of everything it seemed.
How a mule would work ten years for you willingly and patiently just for the privilege of kicking you once. How clocks kill time, that only when the clocks stop does time come to life.
And how given a choice between grief and nothing, he would choose grief.
When he had said those last words, McCord met my eyes with his own deep ones and said,
"There is something about taking a stand against the darkness, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need.
His eyes seemed to sink into his wolf's face. "But there is a price."
"What price?," I whispered.
"To understand the world, you must first understand the human heart. But none of us understand that mystery. So we make mistakes."
He closed his eyes. "And those mistakes kill those we love."
He rose from the table, walking into the shadows and speaking to me from over his shoulder.
"No battle is ever won. They are not even fought for the reasons you tell yourself. The battlefield only reveals your own folly and despair. And victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools."
The darkness swallowed him, and the night suddenly seemed to be my enemy.
***
- William Faulkner.}
The ghost of William Faulkner here :
I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.
But there is a terrible irony in that.
It took me dying to understand life. I thought I knew what life was as you think you know.
You are wrong.
Life is ephemeral, elusive, and beyond the capacity of words to adequately convey.
Your worldview, as was mine, is as simplistic and crude as an Etch-A-Sketch rendering of the Mona Lisa.
I would say that music is the easiest means in which to express life,
but since words are my talent, I must try to express clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.
You believe McCord is only a creature of Roland's mind.
Roland's Lakota blood brings to life all to which he invests his love and care. But then, how can you explain that I can remember meeting McCord in New Orleans in the 1920's?
Is the power of the spirit, of the mind such that it can transcend time itself?
I could try to explain what my ghostly senses have seen but it would be as pointless as giving caviar to an elephant.
Instead I will write of that time when I still was alive, still saw as a human sees.
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.
And that is what I will try to do now for you.
The best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel.
In my opinion it's the perfect milieu for an artist to work in. McCord offered it to me. And I took it for awhile.
I got more than money for that job, I received a way of looking at life that transformed me into the writer that I became.
McCord became my Socrates. He hardly ever spoke but guided my thoughts with a stray word or question, letting me come up with my own conclusions.
The first thing he taught me : the past is never dead. It's not even past.
The second thing he helped me see : the salvation of the world is in man's suffering. The scattered tea goes with the leaves, and every day a sunset dies.
One day during the time while McCord and I walked and talked in New Orleans – or I talked and he listened - I found him sitting on a bench in Jackson Square, laughing to himself.
I got the impression that he had been there like that for some time, just sitting alone on the bench laughing to himself.
This was not our usual meeting place. We had none.
He lived in his French Quarter night club, Meilori's. And without any special prearrangement, we would meet somewhere between his club and the Square after I had something to eat at noon.
I would walk in the direction of his club. And if I did not meet him already strolling or sitting in the Square, I would simply sit down on a bench where I could see his doorway and wait until he came out.
I can see him still –
A ramrod straight man in his early fifties, clad entirely in black : black broadcloth jacket, shirt, tie, and slacks. His boots were black, as well, and polished so that the sun struck fire from them. Even his Stetson was black.
All of which made the silver star on his jacket stand out like a campfire in the night. It was said he had once been a Texas Ranger.
He never talked to me of those days - at least not before that afternoon.
This time he was already sitting on the bench, laughing. I sat down beside him and asked what was so funny. He looked at me for a long moment.
"I am," he said.
And to me that was the great tragedy of his character, for he meant it. He knew people did not believe he was who the legends claimed. How could he be?
They thought him an actor paid to play a part.
Except when the darkness came for them, then they came running, praying he was what the tales on the street whispered : a monster who killed monsters.
He expected people nowhere near his equal in stature or accomplishment or wit or anything else, to hold him in scorn and derision ... in the daylight.
In spite of that he worked earnestly and hard at helping each wounded soul he met.
It was as if he said to himself : 'They will not hurt as I have hurt. I will show them that they matter because their pain matters to me.'
"Why do you speak of yourself like that?," I asked.
"Today marks the hundred year anniversary," he said.
"Of what?"
"Drop by my table at the club this evening, and I will tell you."
And that evening I did just that. We sat, with a bottle now, and we talked.
At first he did not mention the hundred year anniversary. It was as if he was slowly working himself up to something long avoided.
We talked of everything it seemed.
How a mule would work ten years for you willingly and patiently just for the privilege of kicking you once. How clocks kill time, that only when the clocks stop does time come to life.
And how given a choice between grief and nothing, he would choose grief.
When he had said those last words, McCord met my eyes with his own deep ones and said,
"There is something about taking a stand against the darkness, something that makes you feel good. Perhaps it's the risk, the gamble. In any event it's a thing I need.
His eyes seemed to sink into his wolf's face. "But there is a price."
"What price?," I whispered.
"To understand the world, you must first understand the human heart. But none of us understand that mystery. So we make mistakes."
He closed his eyes. "And those mistakes kill those we love."
He rose from the table, walking into the shadows and speaking to me from over his shoulder.
"No battle is ever won. They are not even fought for the reasons you tell yourself. The battlefield only reveals your own folly and despair. And victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools."
The darkness swallowed him, and the night suddenly seemed to be my enemy.
***
Saturday, August 14, 2010
MARK TWAIN_WEATHERFEST_THE WORST STORMS ARE IN THE HUMAN SOUL
Ghostly Samuel Clemens here, on behalf of Roland.
He gave his word to have an entry on whatever they call it …
oh, yes a weather blogfest of all things :
http://littlesliceofnothing.blogspot.com/2010/06/hey-look-its-one-of-them-things.html
The poetry of the earth is never dead, yet Nature is red in tooth and claw. Those two facts clash over and over again inside the human soul.
And to spotlight that fact I have chosen this snippet from Roland’s FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE. (It's worth the ride if you choose to take it.)
It the first evening following Katrina’s destruction of New Orleans.
Samuel McCord and his best friend, the vampire priest, Renfield, are stepping out from McCord’s supernatural jazz club, Meilori’s, to view the carnage Nature has left in their beloved city :
Renfield stiffened as we walked out onto the submerged sidewalk. “Dear God, Sam, did you ever think we’d see our city like this?”
I looked at the battered club fronts, the boarded windows, the two-by-four’s driven like crude knives into the very mortar of the buildings, and the crumpled remains of people’s lives floating down the flooded streets.
It was eerie. The utter blackness of a once bright street. The deep quiet of a mortally wounded city.
I looked about at the shattered world around and within me. Withered leaves of my soul seemed to fall away from me in the dark breeze of this night.
Shadows flowed through my veins. The night and eternity mocked me. They seemed to whisper : “This is all your struggling achieves -- Life runs, falls, and spindles slowly into the abyss.”
Renfield and I were standing on the threshold of something that befell every person, every civilization, but with each at a different cost.
I moved through the moments but was far them. And as the night descended, it felt as if I were leaving home. I was swept up in a sense of the missed opportunity, the lost chance, the closed door.
In my mind, I heard Bette Midler singing “I Think It’s Going To Rain Today.”
“Broken windows and empty hallways,
A pale dead moon in a sky streaked with grey.
Human kindness is overflowing,
And I think it’s going to rain today.”
I sighed, “It’s like looking at the hell in the streets of London after the first Nazi bombing in ‘40. The sheer quiet that follows a whole city being gutted, that stillness that comes right before it screams.”
He bent down and picked up a floating child’s doll, its false hair soaked and hanging. Its glassy eyes reminded me of too many human corpses I had seen floating down this same street.
Renfield stroked the plastic cheek softly as if it had been the flesh of the girl who had lost her doll. Closing his eyes, he dropped the doll with a splash that sounded much too loud.
That splash said it all.
The world had always been dangerous and full of fear. It had only been the lights and the illusion of civilization that had kept it at bay. But the world was patient. It knew its time would come sooner or later.
And in the gamble called life, the House always wins. Renfield looked my way with eyes that clawed at me.
“But the Blitz came from Man. This .... This is from God.”
I just looked at him. From God? I bit back the words that first came to my lips. It was plain he was hurting inside. And I put up with such talk from Renfield. He was my friend. And he was a priest.
Priests were supposed to see life through the filter of faith. Still, I had lost faith in the unseen long ago. It had slowly faded like mist on a summer sea.
But there is a toll to such a thing. I looked around about us, trying to see it through my friend’s eyes of faith. I failed. Not a first for me.
Renfield’s head was down, though his eyes followed the floating body of the plastic doll as the currents pulled it under the black waters. “Do you think He finally has had enough of us, Sam? Enough of our cruelty, our madness?”
I rubbed gloved fingers across my face. Like I said, I was at a loss at whether the Great Mystery even existed or not, much less be able to give a true answer to that question.
But Renfield had his own doubts about God. He was my friend, and I wouldn't push him over that dark edge.
“Hell, Padre, I don’t know. Could be.”
I smiled bitterly. “You know the Lakota Sioux call God The Great Mystery.”
“You call Him that, too, as I recall.”
“Yeah, ‘cause what He’s up to most of the times is surely a great mystery to me.”
He studied me. “You’re not ---”
He waved a hand around us. “ --- mad at Him for all of this?”
Mad at someone who might only exist in empty prayers to equally empty darkness? I saw the anguish in my friend’s eyes. I chose my words carefully.
“Hell, Padre, we all chose to live in a city seven feet below sea level right by the coast, protected by levees built and maintained by a corrupt government. What did we think would happen?”
Renfield shook his head. “We all denied. It’s what humans do.”
His lips twisted. “Even those of us whose humanity is only a memory.”
I clamped a hand on his left shoulder. “You’re human where it counts.”
His face twitched as if his tongue tasted bad. “And where’s that?”
“Your soul, Renfield, your soul.”
“I lost that a long time ago, Sam.”
I might be at a loss about God, mind you. But I was sure about the soul, for I had seen its lack often enough in too many eyes. Just like I saw its solid presence within Renfield's.
“No, you didn’t. Like mine, your soul is a cocklebur. You can’t shake it no matter what you do.”
He smiled wearily. “I must have missed that verse in the Bible.”
“Gotta read the small print, Padre. Gotta read the small print.”
***
He gave his word to have an entry on whatever they call it …
oh, yes a weather blogfest of all things :
http://littlesliceofnothing.blogspot.com/2010/06/hey-look-its-one-of-them-things.html
The poetry of the earth is never dead, yet Nature is red in tooth and claw. Those two facts clash over and over again inside the human soul.
And to spotlight that fact I have chosen this snippet from Roland’s FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE. (It's worth the ride if you choose to take it.)
It the first evening following Katrina’s destruction of New Orleans.
Samuel McCord and his best friend, the vampire priest, Renfield, are stepping out from McCord’s supernatural jazz club, Meilori’s, to view the carnage Nature has left in their beloved city :
Renfield stiffened as we walked out onto the submerged sidewalk. “Dear God, Sam, did you ever think we’d see our city like this?”
I looked at the battered club fronts, the boarded windows, the two-by-four’s driven like crude knives into the very mortar of the buildings, and the crumpled remains of people’s lives floating down the flooded streets.
It was eerie. The utter blackness of a once bright street. The deep quiet of a mortally wounded city.
I looked about at the shattered world around and within me. Withered leaves of my soul seemed to fall away from me in the dark breeze of this night.
Shadows flowed through my veins. The night and eternity mocked me. They seemed to whisper : “This is all your struggling achieves -- Life runs, falls, and spindles slowly into the abyss.”
Renfield and I were standing on the threshold of something that befell every person, every civilization, but with each at a different cost.
I moved through the moments but was far them. And as the night descended, it felt as if I were leaving home. I was swept up in a sense of the missed opportunity, the lost chance, the closed door.
In my mind, I heard Bette Midler singing “I Think It’s Going To Rain Today.”
“Broken windows and empty hallways,
A pale dead moon in a sky streaked with grey.
Human kindness is overflowing,
And I think it’s going to rain today.”
I sighed, “It’s like looking at the hell in the streets of London after the first Nazi bombing in ‘40. The sheer quiet that follows a whole city being gutted, that stillness that comes right before it screams.”
He bent down and picked up a floating child’s doll, its false hair soaked and hanging. Its glassy eyes reminded me of too many human corpses I had seen floating down this same street.
Renfield stroked the plastic cheek softly as if it had been the flesh of the girl who had lost her doll. Closing his eyes, he dropped the doll with a splash that sounded much too loud.
That splash said it all.
The world had always been dangerous and full of fear. It had only been the lights and the illusion of civilization that had kept it at bay. But the world was patient. It knew its time would come sooner or later.
And in the gamble called life, the House always wins. Renfield looked my way with eyes that clawed at me.
“But the Blitz came from Man. This .... This is from God.”
I just looked at him. From God? I bit back the words that first came to my lips. It was plain he was hurting inside. And I put up with such talk from Renfield. He was my friend. And he was a priest.
Priests were supposed to see life through the filter of faith. Still, I had lost faith in the unseen long ago. It had slowly faded like mist on a summer sea.
But there is a toll to such a thing. I looked around about us, trying to see it through my friend’s eyes of faith. I failed. Not a first for me.
Renfield’s head was down, though his eyes followed the floating body of the plastic doll as the currents pulled it under the black waters. “Do you think He finally has had enough of us, Sam? Enough of our cruelty, our madness?”
I rubbed gloved fingers across my face. Like I said, I was at a loss at whether the Great Mystery even existed or not, much less be able to give a true answer to that question.
But Renfield had his own doubts about God. He was my friend, and I wouldn't push him over that dark edge.
“Hell, Padre, I don’t know. Could be.”
I smiled bitterly. “You know the Lakota Sioux call God The Great Mystery.”
“You call Him that, too, as I recall.”
“Yeah, ‘cause what He’s up to most of the times is surely a great mystery to me.”
He studied me. “You’re not ---”
He waved a hand around us. “ --- mad at Him for all of this?”
Mad at someone who might only exist in empty prayers to equally empty darkness? I saw the anguish in my friend’s eyes. I chose my words carefully.
“Hell, Padre, we all chose to live in a city seven feet below sea level right by the coast, protected by levees built and maintained by a corrupt government. What did we think would happen?”
Renfield shook his head. “We all denied. It’s what humans do.”
His lips twisted. “Even those of us whose humanity is only a memory.”
I clamped a hand on his left shoulder. “You’re human where it counts.”
His face twitched as if his tongue tasted bad. “And where’s that?”
“Your soul, Renfield, your soul.”
“I lost that a long time ago, Sam.”
I might be at a loss about God, mind you. But I was sure about the soul, for I had seen its lack often enough in too many eyes. Just like I saw its solid presence within Renfield's.
“No, you didn’t. Like mine, your soul is a cocklebur. You can’t shake it no matter what you do.”
He smiled wearily. “I must have missed that verse in the Bible.”
“Gotta read the small print, Padre. Gotta read the small print.”
***
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE
As you went about your life, you may have heard it in the shadows. You heard it just at the edge of consciousness like a fear rising from the fog of a waking dream. It was loudest when you witnessed people caught in the crosshairs of life. Sometimes it was as soft as a child's whimper. Other times it was as loud as a gun fired in anger.
Mankind shares a soundtrack. It is the music of the collective unconscious. Anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, neurosurgeons, and psychologists attest to it. Music is the breath of humanity as a species.
In Sanskrit breath is called prana, the very breath of life. And that breath is filled with vibrations : the cry of a lost child, the wail of a bereaved mother, the shattering of a store window. So many sounds in a single night of terror, creating a haunting melody ... a French Quarter nocturne for a mortally wounded city. Its name?
Katrina.
I was one of its notes.
Though I have a Master's degree in Psychology and a Bachelor's degree in English education, I, like so many others, survived as best I could. And so I found myself working as a blood courier to New Orleans in order to support myself. I used that experience to aid me in writing the speculative Noir thriller, FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE.
Against the backdrop of Katrina's aftermath, an agnostic jazz club owner and his best friend, a haunted priest, engage enemies in the shadows that challenge both their belief systems. But there are two things not in doubt : their deep friendship for one another and the dark threat given license to kill by the absence of the police.
Mankind shares a soundtrack. It is the music of the collective unconscious. Anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, neurosurgeons, and psychologists attest to it. Music is the breath of humanity as a species.
In Sanskrit breath is called prana, the very breath of life. And that breath is filled with vibrations : the cry of a lost child, the wail of a bereaved mother, the shattering of a store window. So many sounds in a single night of terror, creating a haunting melody ... a French Quarter nocturne for a mortally wounded city. Its name?
Katrina.
I was one of its notes.
Though I have a Master's degree in Psychology and a Bachelor's degree in English education, I, like so many others, survived as best I could. And so I found myself working as a blood courier to New Orleans in order to support myself. I used that experience to aid me in writing the speculative Noir thriller, FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE.
Against the backdrop of Katrina's aftermath, an agnostic jazz club owner and his best friend, a haunted priest, engage enemies in the shadows that challenge both their belief systems. But there are two things not in doubt : their deep friendship for one another and the dark threat given license to kill by the absence of the police.
Samuel McCord is the owner of the jazz club Meilori's, a place in which almost anything is likely to happen and in which almost everything has. He tries to live with the loss of his beloved wife while struggling against political incompetence and intrusions by the Russian Mob, European revenants, and an old enemy seeking final revenge. Father Renfield tries to maintain his doubt-ridden faith under the twin barrage of his friend's questions and the overwhelming needs of Katrina's survivors.
McCord's world is internally consistent, his problems are diverse, and his obstacles offer opportunities not only to ride along on a great adventure but to watch from the inside as he confronts internal battles that resonate with real life. FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE offers a three-dimensional world, augmented as it is by various paranormal elements. Since the paranormal facets are subject to limits and rules, the existence of "revenants" and "linked dimensions" doesn't so much produce a deus ex machina as produce a new class of problems by which Sam can be outclassed -- and more rules against which poor Renfield can run afoul.
I believe that the audience base for such a series of adventures is large as attested to by the sales of the works of Jim Butcher, Neil Gaiman {American Gods}, Patricia Briggs, and Charlaine Harris. And like those authors, I toss jokes and inferences that resonate against what the readers know from the rest of their cultural lives.
Also on June 18, 2010, a supernatural western set in New Orleans is scheduled to be released. Jonah Hex stars Josh Brolin and Megan Fox. Its release will spark renewed interest in the legends surrounding New Orleans.
When my Noir thriller is published {I am the original little train that could,} you may find the glimpses of the architecture of New Orleans, along with the little-known facts of its archeological history, interesting. {There was an actual Baroness Pontalba, and the tragic story of her missing fingers is a true one.} The true glimpses of political incompetence and callousness are absorbing in a "train wreck" sort of way.
I have finished FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE as well as the first three chapters of its sequel, NEW ORLEANS ARABESQUE. All that is missing is the agent who loves a shivering supernatural tale of love, death, and what, if anything, lies beyond.
Wish me luck. I'd knock on wood, but my head is sore from me constantly doing it.
Currently, I'm listening to "Icarus Wind" by Thea Gilmore, a British singer/songwriter born to Irish parents in Oxford. Her duet with Joan Baez, "The Lower Road," is haunting. Her website is http://theagilmore.net/ Check it out. You might like some of her music.
Here's a musical view of the heartbreak I saw with my own eyes and felt within my own soul :
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