KILLING YOU SOFTLY WITH QUESTIONS

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Vivian Hightower wiggled without moving as she sat across the table from me. She was sure of her sex appeal. She shouldn't have been.

I was married to an Empress, of whose beauty sonnets had been written by Shakespeare and Keats.

 

I have called Meilori beautiful, and those of you who have read that word think you know what it means. 

 

“Beautiful” evokes paintings of the masters in your mind and perhaps some face of an attractive woman from your past. 

Meilori was of another time, another realm. 

 

To see her was to believe in the stuff of magic, perhaps even to catch glimpses of unicorns in the distance, to hear lost faes’ sad laments in the twilight. 

 

To see her face would break your heart with longing and yet heal that heart at the self-same time.  And from that moment on, your heart would beat twice as strong as before.

"Captain McCord, I'm surprised you are agreeing to this taped interview. My last one destroyed the career of your policewoman friend."

She cleared her throat at my silence, turning on her tape recorder. "They say your jazz club, Meilori's, is haunted."

Vivian narrowed her diamond eyes. "You aren't speaking."

I looked at her from under the wide brim of my Stetson. That I had not taken it off when she sat down should have been a warning.

"You haven't asked any questions, Miss Hightower."

"Oh, in that case: What is your biggest vulnerability? Do others know this, or is it a secret?"

I smiled like the last wolf I was often called.

"Now, my hunch on that might be dead-on, Miss, or it might be full of worms. But Mama McCord didn't raise any sons dippy enough to tell it to a vicious reporter ... on tape."

"Be that way. What do people believe about you that is false?"

"That I am a hero. In all the ways that count, I am a monster."

She wet her lips. "Wh-What would your best friend say is your f-fatal flaw?"

"Father Renfield believes me not believing in God anymore is that. Coming from a vampire priest that is saying something."

Vivian snoted at the word "vampire." "What would Father Renfield say is your one redeeming quality?"

I smiled sad. "That while I say I'm agnostic, I act as if I still believed ... which means to him that deep down I still do, for what we do, we believe."

She outright sneered at that. "What do you want most? And what will you do to get it?"

I bled a sigh. "Not a what but a who, Miss Hightower. My wife. And I will do nothing to get her back. Love forced is no love at all. On either side."

She turned off the tape recorder, and I asked her a question.

"When I said that you could come to my table, did I ever say anything about you leaving it alive?"

I tore off my right glove that kept my cursed palm from touching innocent flesh. I reached out and grabbed her satin throat tight.

 

Shock filled her eyes.  Her petty, shallow memories slithered across my consciousness.  I felt dirtied by their touch, endured them as the price of ridding the world of her.  She withered before my eyes.

"I am a monster, Miss Hightower, in all the ways that count. But I only kill other monsters."

Piece-Full, my Grim, flowed from the shadows to tear and rip at her jerking body.  The other customers averted their eyes from mine.  After all, Piece-Full had brothers.

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***

If you want to see what McCord looks like :

WRITE AS IF PEOPLE WERE LISTENING

It is a magical world like Calvin says.

But often our prose is not magical ... it's murderous.

We have so much we want to say that sometimes it just tumbles forth onto the page

in great chunks of blocky sentences becoming an avalanche of numbing paragraphs.

1.) Write like someone is listening ... not reading.

a.) You wouldn't go up to a person and say:

"Although the complexities of stintilating prose can be easily comprehended, they are often misunderstood by today's beginning writers."

b.) Why not?

1.) People would stop listening almost at once, their eyes glazing over.

2.) We would bewilder them with blunt instruments of prose.

3.) We would bore them ... and we never want to bore an agent or potential buyer of our prose!

SOLUTION: Write short, easily understood sentences with equally short words. As in a more digestible sentence : "Writing riveting prose is easily understood if taught correctly."

SOLUTION:

Read your work aloud, page by page. You will hear flaws you never thought you'd written.

Print out your work. Look at the page. Is it filled with two huge, impossibly long paragraphs? Break them up into easier to digest paragraphs and sentences.

SOLUTION:

Never play "Hide and Seek" with the subject of your sentence.

1.) Be upfront with your subject, not putting rows of rail cars in front of your locomotive.

2.) No corollary things about your subject first.

3.) Get to your subject as quickly as you can in your sentence.

NOT: Heavily burdened by accepting the huge debts of Fannie Mae, the U.S. Treasury is reaching critical financial mass.

BUT: The U.S. Treasury faces bankruptcy due to its accepting trillions of dollars of debt from Fannie Mae.

EXCEPTION:

When you want to build tension or expectation:

"Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings with a single bound --

 Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird; it's a plane.

No, it's Superman!"
The writer had a reason to withhold the subject. The subject is the punchline.

THAT is my short lesson in writing better. Now, go out and play in the snow.
***

IS SOCIAL MEDIA MAKING AMERICANS EMOTIONALLY ILL?

If a society’s mode of communication is a metaphor for that society, as Marshal McLuhan suggested, then what does our obsession with social media say about us?

 Our social preoccupation with Twitter seems to suggest we’re a bunch of self-obsessed schizophrenics.

 We’re so into ourselves that we think the world cares to know what we’re doing at any given point of the day. 

What’s more, if tweeting is our method of speaking with one another,

 it seems our social conversations have given up narrative and structure and our discourses have abandoned any points of reference.

Even when people are physically in the same room as one another, 

they are updating their status, following someone on twitter, texting, sexting, checking their email, googling something someone just said, 

 looking up a video on YouTube, posting a picture they just took – all in between sentences. 

There is never a moment we are not entertained. 

We are texting when we should be having one-on-one conversations. 

Relationships are formed in the social media world without ever physically meeting. 

This constant multitasking and informational overload may also have serious implications on 

education, including verbal and writing skills in the coming generations.

 According to the Pew Internet Project 18-24 year olds are exchanging an average of 55 texts per day and over half of them say they prefer to communicate via text than by voice call. 

Now considering body language and “nonverbal cues” make up about two-thirds of communication between two speakers, what are the implications here? 

So much is being lost by this increasing communication through a phone. So much authenticity and emotion is completely removed from these “text” interactions. 

The ability to perceive, understand and empathize with one another is quickly being phased out 

and replaced by these cold and impersonal, albeit immediate and dynamic technological messages.

A. EMAIL HAS BECOME THE NEW SLOT MACHINE:

 It follows something called the “variable interval reinforcement schedule,” which is the same process that drives gambling addiction. 

In both cases, you perform an action (check your email or put a coin in the machine) in the hopes of receiving a reward (an interesting email or a nice sum of money).

 But that reward only comes at unpredictable times—

causing you to perform the first action more and more frequently. 

It’s one of the strongest habit-training methods known to man, and nearly everyone who owns a computer has been subjected to it for years.

B. FACEBOOK IS A DEPRESSANT:

A joint American/Belgian study monitored participants’ Facebook usage for two weeks 

while simultaneously keeping tabs on their moods. 

 They found that frequent users reported lower life-satisfaction both at the end of the fortnight and after individual visits to the site.

C. SOCIAL MEDIA IS POWERED BY RAGE:

Think back to the last Tweet you saw that really caused a reaction in you. Chances are it was something that angered you,

 Chinese researchers studied over 70 million posts on Sina Weibo (China’s version of Twitter) to see how different emotions spread across the network. 

They found that anger utterly trounces every other emotion for getting retweeted—leaving joy, disgust, and sadness trailing in its wake. 

D. DUMB AND DUMBER:

 In 2009, the journal Science published an overview of studies about the effect of new media on our cognitive abilities. 

They found that while the Internet can increase “visual literacy skills,” that increase appears to be offset with decreases in other areas, such as

 critical thinking, inductive problem solving, imagination, and “abstract vocabulary.” 

 If we end up trading critical thinking and imagination in for super-duper “visual literacy skills,” it won’t exactly be the trade of a lifetime.

 E. SOCIAL MEDIA MAY BE AN EMPATHY VAMPIRE:

Students today are less likely to feel for others, to show concern for others, and are 40% worse at prescriptive talking—

he ability to perceive other people’s thoughts, feelings, and motivations. 

 Scientists are suggesting that that may be down to social media forcibly slowing our compassion responses. 

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF SOCIAL MEDIA'S IMPACT UPON US?

ARE YOU A COWARD IN YOUR WRITING?

Ghost of John Steinbeck here.

Who am I you ask.  Fair enough.  Despite my novels, I live in a house of shyness.  If you wish to know, there are alway those funny sounding things called "Search Engines."

But who are you?  Where are you in your writing?  Where are you going with it?  To know where you are going, you must first know where you are.

To help you with that last, I ask you:

Are you a coward in your writing?

Do you even know what it means to be brave in your writing?

I have noted that contemporary fiction is not interested in culture, history, ideas or real human psychology.

Not really.

To be interested in such things requires engagement not only with the world but also with entire bodies of knowledge generated by hundreds of fevered human minds.

That requires you to read, to think in areas most shy away from.

Incapable of taking anything seriously and unwilling to risk disapproval by writing anything that might be deemed in any way political, 

today's writers spend their days like performing toy poodles in a circus:

pushing a load of battered toys called words around in a baby carriage while undemanding audiences roar their approval.

Hemingway wrote that bullfighters taught us how to be brave. 

Really?

I hung around the rings in Spain. I even saw Manolete fight a number of times, which is more than Ernest Hemingway did.

I know about the underweight bulls, the sandbags on the kidneys, the shaved horns and sometimes the needle of barbiturate in the shoulder as the gate swung open.

I have yet to hear of a bull-fighter who has taken a dangerous political stand, who has fought a moral battle unless its horns were shaved.

Are you like that bullfighter?  Only willing to face issues that have had their horns shaved, only willing to write fiction that will not raise eyebrows, will not offend any one of a dozen special interest groups.

In the end it is not the bulls of critics or agents that will defeat today's writers I am afraid, but their own shrinking, cowardly approach to what they write.

"Oh, there are things we must never say out loud, groups we must never risk offending" I read on your electronic journals.

  Really?

But aren’t writers meant to write down the thoughts that others won’t speak?

After I wrote THE GRAPES OF WRATH, the banks that owned the groves whose workers starved howled at me.  The critics expected me to write societal commentary from then on. 

Subsequently I saw a piece of war as a correspondent, and following that I wrote CANNERY ROW.

That was a kind of nostalgic thing, written for a group of soldiers who had said to me,

“Write something funny that isn’t about the war. Write something for us to read— we’re sick of war.”

When CANNERY ROW came out, it got the usual critical treatment.

I was wasting my time in flippancy when I should be writing about the war.

But half a million copies were distributed to troops, and they didn’t complain. We had some very warlike critics then, much more bellicose than the soldiers.

It is strange to me that I have lived so many lives. Thinking back, it seems an endless time and yet only a moment.

Tell me:

if a thought came to you of a tale that included Moslems acting as humans customarily do: both heroically and cruelly -- would you write the tale?

Or would you shy away from it?

What do you think about honesty in writing? Do you tackle taboo subjects in your writing?  Do you play it safe? 

 

WHEN A HERO DIES

 

I just finished watching the latest episode of PERSON OF INTEREST. 

A major character was gunned down mercilessly.  It hit me.  I had grown to like that person ... yes, person.

Should we feel guilty for feeling bad at the death of a fictional character?

If you’re like me, you know they really haven’t died.

No, they’ve been Loved Into Being, just like that velveteen rabbit in the children’s story, gaining So Not Dead status and going on to further adventures and greater glories.

Living on in our hearts.

When an actor puts his/her heart and soul, along with keen intelligence, into creating a character, flawed and very much human, yet still someone we can love and admire and respect --

how can we not feel moved at the very thought of losing them, never mind watching it unfold onscreen before us ? 

Yes, our hearts break a bit. We are sad. It is what makes us human.

What fictional character's death upset you the most?

Lennie from OF MICE AND MEN or was it George who would have to live with what he had done?

Or was it Lil Ann and Ole' Dan from WHERE THE RED FERN GROWS?

Sirius Black?

Myself?  I don't cry when Spock dies in WRATH OF KHAN. 

 I tear up at the funeral scene, right around when Kirk's voice cracks when he says "of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most... human." 

(I read in the "trades" that Leonard Nimoy would only make KHAN if Spock died, so I "knew" this was the end for that character --

as it turned out, Nimoy had so much fun making KHAN that he wanted to do another.  Go figure, right?)

Speaking of HARRY POTTER: Every mirror is the Mirror of Erised for George.

Our own memories are actually fictions: we filter what we recall consciously and unconsciously.

Yet we feel true emotions mulling over our memories, so why should we not feel emotion over fictions that seem real?

Again what fictional deaths got to you?

WHO WE ARE IS WHAT WE READ

Abraham Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address on this day in 1863.

As he was following a two-hour oration by Edward Everett, Lincoln kept it short.

Afterwards, even Everett acknowledged that he could not "come as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes,"

but the newspapers of the day still managed to play politics.

Republican papers reported hearing a speech that had "the charm and power of the very highest eloquence" (Providence Journal),

that "will live among the annals of man" (Chicago Tribune).

 Democratic papers wished to "pass over the silly remarks of the President" (Harrisburg Patriot and Union),

for "the cheeks of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat, and dishwatery utterances" (Chicago Times).

Then, there is the LOST SPEECH OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN:

On May 29, 1856 in Bloomington, Illinois, Lincoln so mesmerized reporters that all of them failed to write down the words that so moved them. 

It is thought that newspapers with opposing ideals refused to print it due to its anti-slavery sentiments.

With just a few sentences, Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address summed up American history and democratic ideals as well as giving a new motive for keeping up the fight,

so that those who fell at Gettysburg “will not have died in vain."

Lincoln’s speech was years ahead of its time, which is why it still resonates today, when audiences quickly tire or overlong oratories.

Today’s speeches are more likely to resemble Lincoln’s. The rise of social media has changed the way they are written and digested.

What we think will sometimes, if not all the time, influence how we view new information.

That is why we sometimes are skeptical when foreign ideas invade our minds.

Our thinking or current perception of things or an idea filters the new perception or information so that it fits the perception that our mind is willing to retain.

What do you think?

Do people truly read
what you write
or
who they are?

LAUGHING WITH THE DEAD and other thoughts

Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950’s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.

So you've been laughing with the dead.  Strange, huh?

“Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death

The sum of all the numbers in Roulette is 666.

The average wind speed of a fart is 7 miles per hour.

Stressed is Deserts spelled backwards. 

Most lipstick contains fish scales.  Taylor are you reading this?

The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows. It was the fashion in Renaissance Florence to shave them off.

And speaking of the Mona Lisa ...

Leonardo da Vinci invented scissors. Also, it took him 10 years to paint Mona Lisa's lips.

315 entries in Webster's 1996 Dictionary were misspelled.

A female ferret will die if it goes into heat and cannot find a mate. Maybe we better warn Taylor.

Money isn't made out of paper; it's made out of cotton.

The 57 on Heinz ketchup bottle represents the number of varieties of pickles the company once had.

The phrase "rule of thumb" is derived from an old English law, which stated that you couldn't beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb.

Urea, found in urine, is added to cigarettes to enhance flavor.

After 6 years, 10% of your pillow's weight consists of dead skin, mites, and mite dung.

The house fly hums in the middle octave, key of F.