As mentioned before, Clarion West is stationed in geosynchronous orbit above Seattle, but at the same time it replicates the Earthly city below. I think this Miévillean metaphysic serves in part to shield Clarionites’ dubious deeds from those who might not understand what happens when writing workshops (rightfully) push people to revise their stories: their fictional stories and moreso their personal identity ones. In the space station, as narratology becomes conscious craft, students confront fictional characters who battle through fictional plots, and confront seventeen other writers, plus a vaunted instructor, each of whom are battling through their personal plots — and everyone winds up using the manuscripts as materiel.
Mortal Kombat II: SNES
With their laptops students type out art, trails to their selves; the art becomes in the classroom terrain for proxy wars over personal identities — and over the group’s identity, too. Everyone in the building is at once enemy and comrade. Reality shows would pay to sell some of the behavior that bubbles up. Caught in it, students lean on each other for support. That requires privacy; thus the mystery of the workshop’s location. Again: the experience requires privacy. To have four laptops — writers’ trusted weapons — stolen by aliens breaking in … an invasion!
I’m not clear on the actual details of the heist, none of us were, though we scried far and wide for the aliens, and sent many spaceships chasing after. We were all as one laptop-less ragtags, but within forty-eight hours we were high-fiving each other — because to our quick rescue came an advocate of privacy shielded with a sheen of transparency, in other words, that frenetic pirate known as Cory Doctorow.
Info he finds useful he boomerangs, and so when he learned aliens invaded just prior to his arrival, he donated his instructor’s pay toward laptop replacements and posted the following on Boing Boing:
Clarion West, the famed Seattle science fiction workshop, has suffered a terrible theft: four student laptops were stolen yesterday. Clarion West (like Clarion in San Diego) is a grueling, six-week intensive boot-camp for science fiction writers. Students often quit their jobs and save for years to attend and it goes without saying that they can hardly absorb the cost of a new laptop in the middle of the workshop.
I’m flying to Seattle tomorrow to teach the third week of the workshop and I’m keenly aware of the chaos this will have wrought on the students. The workshop’s organizers are soliciting donations — either hardware or cash — to get the students up and running. The workshop is incorporated as a 501(c)3 charity, so any donations are tax deductible.
I am donating all of my teaching fee to the fund. I hope that some of you will be moved to chip in whatever you can afford, to help fund the instruction of the next generation of great science fiction writers.
Clarion West received enough donations to replace all stolen laptops. I wonder which literary fiction communities could boast the same (I’m actually asking!).
That week, in addition to the invasion, I was shaken “as if with ague,” which is the writerly cliche for describing someone tremoring.
Except there was no as-if subjunctive for me: all week I had a constant fever registering over a hundred, and I had a cough, too. I think the illness was brought on by too much exercise (I ran in the mornings). Thankfully the administrators (Neile Graham and Les Howle) gave me nothing but the kindest help. My memories of Cory’s week, though, remain hazy.
All the same he had a sensitivity about him that I don’t see many mention. For example, he was the only instructor who in the one-on-one sessions made a point of asking how we were doing emotionally, aside from the writing portion of the workshop; that thoughtfulness probably was in part due to his having attended Clarion East as a student in 1992. He definitely understood how stressful and transforming the entire experience is, how it requires the privacy and the care that can come with a good group’s special, monastic space (station).
In one lecture Cory gave us a seven-point formula for plotting: create 1) a character 2) in a place 3) with a problem 4) who intelligently overcomes obstacles, 5) and as things get worse, 6) conflict by necessity comes to a climax, 7) after which there’s a denoument.
If I’m not mistaken, Cory portrayed this formula as universal, which with if so I take issue. The formula doesn’t account for certain types of good stories that go under-represented in science fiction & fantasy: stories with unreliable narrators, trapped protagonists who don’t escape into heroic stature — they’re the kind of characters who remind us, as we watch their ironies, of just how much sway our environment has over our lives, and how unreliable information is, no matter how much we try to route around those bugs/features of reality.
As I mentioned in Part 4, most (all?) my classmates in the space station, along with our Week 2 instructor (Mary Rosenblum), totally loved my Week 2 story (“Glenn of Green Gables“); Cory was among the readers who didn’t. Years later I can count the non-fans on one baffled hand. Cory argued Glenn isn’t like-able since he doesn’t solve his problems intelligently. My rejoinder, however unnecessary it is now (people are entitled to their opinions!), is the one a fellow Clarionite suggested: Glenn is an emotionally intelligent problem-solver because he bravely sticks to his lonely love for ol’ Anne Shirley despite increasingly sinking circumstances…
I've never actually read any Green Gables books -- just Googled 'em for allusions
Maybe I seem bitter, and for a time I did feel a bit (byte?) uselessly resentful. But that’s not the point, not me; the point is to tell you (especially future Clarion students) what I experienced. So: there were three male instructors my year, three female. My father is and has been, uh, conspiciously absent from my life, and so the less mature 2008 version of me unconsciously scrutinized Paul Park, Cory, and Chuck Palahniuk in a way he didn’t the three other instructors (Mary, Connie Willis, Sheree R. Thomas). I regarded the men’s instruction as having a sort of paternal absolutism to it.
And so I’m like…
Now that I’m more of an “active protagonist” in my “real” life (thanks in no small part to Clarion West and Seattle), I’ve intentionally challenged myself to write short stories in different and also more traditional ways, and for that, Cory’s obstacle-tackling pointers have proven handy.
…where am I?
One application: while plotting with point 5 — “as things get worse” — I can ask myself, not “what happens next?” but rather “what would raise the stakes?”
But mostly I just keep piracy and capering as tesserae in my own aesthetic.
You want more? Here’s a list of Cory’s excellent fiction-writing advice:
If you don’t like your story, you get stuck more frequently. If you’re stuck, ask yourself what you need in the story to make yourself like it.
Use a feed reader and consider staying on top of interesting things (including current events) part of your writing job. But be willing to “mark all as read” when you get behind; don’t be perfectionistic about it, or you’ll never keep up with anything.
If you’re really stuck, changing projects can be a good strategy.
Write down little bits of things that interest you, and have a good storage system.
Get away from any ceremonial ritual for writing. You will become dependent on the ritual.
Freewriting about whatever is blocking you works well. The shortest path between thought A and thought B, according to some science article or other, is writing it down.
Subjunctive sentence constructions, dreams sequences, telephone conversations, &tc. generally don’t have as much power as showing situations actually happening to characters face-to-face.
When you’re stuck, look back at what you wrote earlier. You’ll often discover or remember stuff you were thinking earlier that you can use to go forward.
Use descriptive filenames if guidelines for electronic submissions ask for attachments.
The central conceit of a story sometimes doesn’t even show up until a story has gone through multiple drafts. Be willing to revise extensively.
You stop having writer’s block when writing becomes your job.
This post is the fourth in a series of ten about my experiences at Clarion West Writers Workshop (Wikipedia entry) as a 2008 class member. I’ll talk about the workshop’s second week, when Mary Rosenblum instructed. Here’s Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of the series. I ended Part 3 with a picture of Clarionites sailing away from the workshop’s secret space station (in geosynchronous orbit above Seattle) to acquire beer.
Sailing pretty much dominated my mind that week, though it was sailing of the oceanic variety. I was writing my first story for class critique, “Glenn of Green Gables,” which in 2009 I released under a Creative Commons License, so go read it! (A bit of DFW.com publicity about me as a group of four local artists inspired the CC licensing.) The story’s about a crossdresser on a cruise ship who navigates through a love triangle.
Writing “Glenn” made me incredibly nervous. You normally don’t hand a bunch of roommates who are semi-friends, semi-strangers 20-odd copies of 6200 first-person words concerning sex. I’ll confess that my worries notwithstanding, I felt quite haughty those first two weeks, confident that “Glenn” was quite good and confident that some stories turned in by others weren’t. (Little did I know I too would turn in poor stories later.) However, I had no idea what people would assume about my own underpants. Frequently I scuttled into the neighboring dorm room where my friend Pritpaul stresslessly studied Canadian hockey scores, and he reassured me all would be well: no one would pull down my pants without asking first.[/caption]
While writing, I periodically updated the dry-erase markerboard hanging outside my dorm room with enigmatic phrases from the story, phrases completely devoid of context. (Future Clarionites: my year, each dorm room had a markerboard outside the door, but they didn’t come with any markers.) So classmates saw such phrases as: “a dolphin perhaps”; “spread gossip about me on the Internet”; “Stallone. Van Damme.”; “Lights brighter than Christmas”; “headed toward Quebec.” People tried to guess what my story was about, and that was pretty amusing in and of itself. Classmate Christopher said my markerboard was giving him story ideas.
About that confidence — one classmate, Caren, said “Glenn” completely thwarted her expectation that I’d turn in something broody. She also pointed out, correctly, that “the Douglas show” was going on constantly in my gear-turning head. I’ll just say that these days I no longer tune in only to myself, and that my Clarion West experience had a lot to do with that. The workshop made me scrutinize other’s narratives and interact with them in person daily; that in part was what raised my general self- and other-awareness.
Looking back at the emails I routinely sent home from the space station, I see that by the start of the second week I already wrote Life here is starting to blur into one endless day, so it’s hard to remember what happened when. That’s ever more true now; writing this is agonizing: everything I post about Clarion West seems utterly banal compared to that summer. A few months back a dental hygienist was scraping her sickle scythe across my gums, and it hurt so bad — as it went, the thing made crunch noises. The hygienist told me to think of my happy place. Well, that was Clarion West.
Pretty much the entire class loved “Glenn,” as did our instructor that week, Mary Rosenblum. Mary attended Clarion West herself in 1988; here’s her site, her blog, her Wikipedia entry, an excerpt from the interview Locus Magazine conducted with her, and the opening of her awesome story “Lion Walk,” published in January 2009 by Asimov’s. You might know Mary by her sometimes (open) pen name, Mary Freeman, which she used to write the Gardening Mysteries series.
Here’s some of Mary’s wisdom, according to the paraphrases in my notes. Hopefully I won’t misrepresent anything she said.
The stuff you write when you feel you’re writing poorly is basically as good as the stuff you write when you feel you’re writing well. Keep writing even when you feel you’re writing poorly.
The fiction market is undergoing radical changes. Stay on top of electronic publishing.
Show characters’ opinions on settings. This is one way to sneak in backstory.
Watch people’s body language in real life. A lot.
WHY WHY WHY. You need to figure out your characters’ motivations, the worldbuilding details, everything. You might not end up explaining them in the story, but never be vague on them yourself.
Sometimes showing very (physically) small details evokes a lot of emotion.
Mary’s Rule of Three: each scene should deepen character, enrich setting, thicken plot.
Exercise: Walk into an unfamiliar space, look around for no more than 30 seconds, walk out, and write what you remember–and write an additional take from your character’s POV. Such a description will often give you more emotion than if you’d meticulously observed the setting. Worst are “catalogue” settings (“there were 3 chairs, 4 light bulbs…”)
In the one-on-one conference, Mary was very complimentary, and her words inspire me to this day. The one-on-one conferences, oddly perhaps, were one of my favorite aspects of the workshop, and I feel I learned quite a lot in them.
Now, the workshopping vibe. Probably Clarion West should take thickness measurements of people’s skin before and after the summer. I toughened up a lot. Also I learned a lot about tact. There are people who busily pat themselves on the back about how they give such ‘brutally honest’ opinions, but that usually makes the critiqued person shut out the critiquer. You can dish it out effectively and respectfully without being a brute. Takes practice, though. The flip side of this: by Week 6 I for one — and maybe only for one — felt that our class had descended too much into lovey-dovey softness. That might have been something idiosyncratic to our class, though, because even the administrators pointed out that our class all got along startlingly well. Most of the time. Sociologists would love Clarion West: a little bit of Zimbardo, a lot of Elysium. Like a reality TV show — only it’s actually real.
Here are some quotes classmates uttered in the course of Week 2’s critiquing.
“I hated the main character. I wouldn’t let this guy clean the city’s latrines.”
“Should you build in redundant systems in case of reader failure?”
“Heal myself or heal this guy? F*** him!”
“Women are all the time going home with men they shouldn’t be going home with.”
“So, why does he give her life? Is he just a warlock d***ing around with nothing else to do on a Sunday night?”
“I was waiting for the speculum to be busted out — I don’t necessarily know what a speculum is.”
At the end of the week, we all attended our second party; everybody attends a party each workshop weekend, even Week 6. The parties were fun; some socialized more skillfully than others. All was lovely. But the next week,
aliens broke into our space station’s hull …
Depression and a dislike of rules led Fernando Ochoa of Uruapan, Michoacan, México to drop out of school at age 16, but now at 22, photography lets him share his thoughts and perceptions with the world. “Although situations can leave scars,” he says in his self-taught English, “no matter what passes, the world is still beautiful.”
"Mix"
“In ‘Mix’ I did a zoom in-out. I guess it’s more like a gaze to things. Actual living goes too fast, I think we should pace out sometimes, look around nature and focus our minds. Sometimes it gets like a mass of thoughts, that most of the time are useless, and you just have to let them go.”
At age 18 Ochoa “was playing the photographer” and told his father “I want to take pictures.” His father, a hobbyist photographer himself, approved. He encouraged his son to join an online photo forum and upload the photographs he’d started taking. “None of them were good,” Ochoa recalls, “but everyone who commented said I had good aesthetics. That became a challenge for me to take better ones.”
"2 of October"
“When I was younger, I thought what’s the actual hype with this date, the Tlatelolco Massacre … ignorant me, it was about freedom, that government turned out extremely bad, people died. In English the wall says ‘Because the color of blood can’t be ever forgotten, 2 of October, never forgotten.’ We tend to think those days are gone, but they are not.”
From his father, Ochoa learned “the basics: aperture, speed, rule of thirds” so well he has become “kind of a purist.” (Of course, like any good artist, he makes sure to “break all rules.”)
It was due to his own intellectual curiosity, however, that Ochoa learned enough English for his current job as a programmer and sysadmin — and for promoting his photography online. After installing a hotkey program, he was able to translate the English he saw on Internet Relay Chat channels. That helped him learn the language by immersion, “without much knowledge of it,” night after night. “I’m an auto-didact,” he says. “Knowledge is always a good thing.”
"Ricardo"
“Ricardo’s a cousin, I enjoy hanging out with him, everytime he comes to this city I invite him over my house, or we go to different places. He lives far from this city, in Monterrey.”
In cyberspace he’s traveled the world, but Ochoa hopes to someday see more than México in meatspace, too. Life is “about seeking more and more,” he explains; it’s “about pushing the ‘you’ to accomplish things.” He already understands art and humanity are about “empathy, mainly,” whereas as individuals we sometimes become “immersed too much in ourselves.”
"Fernanda"
“Oh, she’s my sister, my name is Fernando, her name is Maria Fernanda, I enjoy talking to her a lot, she was always constant company to me during childhood and still.”
México doesn’t bore him, however. Ochoa says he also has “to learn more about roots.” Some give the credit for Uruapan’s founding to Franciscan friar Fray Juan de San Miguel; others point out that the P’urhépecha Indians predated him. Ochoa does not hesitate: “the P’urhépechas. The whole language is there, the traditions, the native people.”
"Cross"
“That’s a sign with power, I had to represent it with a good blue sky. I took it from a different angle, so it looked wide-angle.”
Asked about his photography equipment, Ochoa responds, “It’s in the eye most of the time, sometimes it’s not dependent on equipment — you can make good photos with a 3MP camera. I use mostly DSLR’s, like a Nikon D70 or Nikon D300, since I can manipulate all settings, and they’re digital. I rarely use tripod, just for landscapes. So it’s me with the camera mainly. I shoot all in color, then I convert them to black and white if needed, then I use mostly curves for how the black and white will be shown. Sometimes real manipulation is needed, but I’m a purist in the sense of leaving all in its place.”
"Cat"
“I took this photo around two years ago. I had to represent my feeling I guess, I get somewhat fed up at times.”
Ochoa gives photography “as much effort” as he can. While many “don’t tend to explore further what can they do, what they cannot,” he does, and he will. He says he’d “love to go to an art school or by some other way learn more and more about photography.”
"Self Portrait"
“We are constantly struggling with feelings that aren’t supposed to be there, we feel rather overwhelmed if we say we have a mental illness, but people stare and respond, ‘Are you serious?'”
For Ochoa, observation is a way to “immerse himself” in the world instead of losing himself in mental rumination. With his photography he hopes to “open broad” the constant question — Who am I? — and evoke actual emotion and community.
I hereby announce my campaign to snailmail all 535 United States Congresspeople personalized letters before the year is out, in favor of a genuine, government-run public option. So far I’ve snailmailed 4; 531 to go.
In 2009 The Washington Post persuasively reported a professional lobbyist firm snailmailed astroturfed (fake grassroots) letters to US Representative Tom Perriello. So if they expect fake letters to work, you should expect real letters to work. I can’t resist mentioning Shakespeare: as the New York Timesput it, “Generated mail is a pretty old idea. In Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar,’ Brutus is persuaded to assassinate Caesar in part by letters of support from the public — letters that were actually faked by Cassius ‘in several hands … as if they came from several citizens.'”
On 10 Sept 2006, The Pottsville Republican & Evening Herald published a story about a 10-year-old girl, Taryn Kitchenman, who wrote US Representative T. Timothy Holden a letter. She wrote him: “I was wondering instead of putting [the new playground] downtown right by the old one, could you put it in Arnots [her neighborhood]. I was wondering because we only have one playground and it is not that good. We don’t have swings, we don’t have a good basketball court. I am only 10, I am not allowed downtown. Try and help me.” She received a reply the same week. Presumably this was a snailmail letter (and not fax or email “letter”).
To prove that I’m serious about my campaign, below I’ll post the letter I sent US Representative Nancy Pelosi yesterday. In an attempt to protect myself against discrimination and stigmatization, I censored out a very small portion of the letter, though presumably the letter is now public record somewhere. I’ve also PDF’ed the letter so you can see the formatting in case you want a guide for your own snailmail. Because you’re going to write your own personalized letter(s) — or do something equivalent or better — right?
Douglas Lucas
[street address]
Fort Worth, TX 76109
[email address]
The Honorable Nancy Pelosi
Office of the Speaker
H-232, US Capitol
Washington, DC 20515
16 September 2009
Dear Representative:
I’m writing to support your insistence that a healthcare reform “bill without a strong public option will not pass the House” (your Press Release, 3 Sept. 2009), to agree with your statement that if “a vigorous public option is not included, it would be a major victory for the health insurance industry” (your Press Release, 3 Sept. 2009), to ask you to continue to insist on a strong, government-run public option — which, as you know, does not mean a co-op plan such as that of Senator Max Baucus — and to ask you to fight any spin attempting to pass off a co-op plan as a “public option.” I’m a self-employed writer and tutor in Fort Worth, Texas, and, just out of college, I’m working toward a public-school teaching certification. Like many Americans, I have a pre-existing condition — in my case, [type of pre-existing condition]. I lose my BC/BS disability coverage in February.
My medicine for this one illness alone costs nearly $1000 per month. Without reliable health insurance, I cannot responsibly teach public school. Sure, a school would provide me with group coverage, but what if I were laid off? COBRA only goes so far; high-risk pools only go so far. Just as you chose a career in civil service to help others, so I want to help others, and a government-run public option would give me a strong safety net so I could focus on teaching. A co-op plan wouldn’t have the membership clout needed to compete with private insurance. The Iowa state government tried a nonprofit co-op — and it died in two years (New York Times, 17 Aug 2009). Just like a trigger plan, a co-op plan would take longer to start than a government-run plan, and we don’t have any more time. According to a 2007 American Journal of Medicine study, an American family files for bankruptcy in the aftermath of an illness every 30 seconds. In 2009 the Center for American Progress explained that every day, 14,000 Americans lose their health insurance: 2,190 in your state, 470 in mine. Every day. It is a moral issue.
Thank you for fighting in favor of a strong, government-run public option. Please keep fighting.
The interview and photo-shoot experiences were really fun. I’m glad people are paying attention to local artists during a time when not many are. DFW.com is a fun site — you should check it out anyway; my girlfriend Kate and I found a really cool hangout, Gallery Art Cafe, through DFW.com’s highly searchable directory of local restaurants.
The public option, says the Chicago Tribune in 2009, is a “government-sponsored insurance policy [that] would be offered alongside private plans.” It’s a Medicare-like option American citizens could select voluntarily if they so desired, and that taxed American citizens would pay for, as they already pay for other public goods/services ranging from air traffic control to zoos.
In an effort to take some of the right-wing food coloring out of the swimming pool, here’s some information, as opposed to dis-information. By itself, the information below doesn’t prove the public option a good thing (though the public option is a good thing). But it does make you sigh and wonder where the hell the (representational, constitutional) United States democracy has gone off to. Here’s a hint about some of the above-the-table answers.
If you hate the public option but still want a lesson out of this, it’s that you should look at primary sources as much as possible when learning stuff. Preliminary research seems to indicate teens today, for example, have practically no media literacy training and typically don’t think about sources’ credibility. Finally, you should watch President Obama’s speech about healthcare reform tomorrow (Wednesday September 9th), which might change the ballgame quite a bit.
N.B. The information below is subject to irrelevancy as time marches on.
This post is the third in a series of ten about my experiences at Clarion West Writers Workshop in 2008. I’ll talk about the first week of the workshop, when Paul Park instructed. Here’s Part 1 and Part 2 of the series. I ended Part 2 by saying that at the mysterious space station in geosynchronous orbit above Seattle, where the workshop is held, I started the first week proper by thinking about characterization.
Seattle, far below the space station
Because characterization is what Paul Park began by talking about.
Paul, a tall, fit guy, struck me and others as confident and intense. Among other books, he’s written the Roumania Quartet novels and the short story collection If Lions Could Speak. He seemed very much a ‘thinker’, and that partly explains why I could easily relate to him and what he had to say. Since it was only the first week of the workshop, no one had turned any stories in; so, instead of the Milford story-critiquing method that drove the workshop through weeks 2 to 6, Paul lectured — mostly in a Socratic way. Sometimes he used exercises he asked us to hand in as the basis for his lectures.
Paul Park, standing left, Clarionites in the foreground
Paul said that on the whole, our Clarion submission stories, while packed with whizbang ideas, didn’t make him invest in the characters strongly enough. So throughout the week he gave us a bunch of tips about characterization and other aspects of fiction-writing. I can tell you without looking at my notes what tips Paul gave that stuck with me the most. Bear in mind I’m paraphrasing.
Story events happen because of the way people (the characters) are; writers shouldn’t just construct plots and then shoehorn characters in.
Compressing the timespan of a short story can often give it more ‘kinetic energy.’ Classical unities and whatnot.
Too frequently, writers use point-of-view characters’ physiological reactions as a shortcut attempt to convey emotion. For example — and this my example, not Paul’s — all too often writers trying to evoke, say, fear, strew sentences such as “Her scalp tingled” and “Her scalp prickled” and “Her scalp tightened” across even just a single short story. The physiological reactions become unintentionally comical (or annoying) tics. You start to wonder if the scalp-y character simply needs a different type of shampoo. The best book I ever read about representing emotion in fiction without resorting to cliches, by the way, was Ann Hood‘s Creating Character Emotions. I have no idea why that book doesn’t get more attention. Most fiction-writing books are nearly useless; Ann Hood’s isn’t.
Many writers, trying to convey what secondary characters feel, rely far too much on simply reporting the characters’ facial expressions. Sometimes that’s necessary, but conveying what secondary characters feel is (often) a lot more effective when the characters simply do things. Example — and again this is my example, not Paul’s — instead of “her eyes were ablaze with anger” why not “she picked up the baseball bat and pointed its business end at me as though the bat were a sword”? To me, fictional facial expressions are the most obnoxious when writers use eyes to relay to readers what secondary characters feel. How many times have you read “Her eyes were ablaze with anger” in your favorite airport novel?
Sometimes in real life people do communicate startling things exclusively with their eyes, and it’s such an intense experience that cliche sentences don’t do it justice. Oh, and check this out, the study of eye contact is called oculesics. I gotta learn more about them thar oculesics, but I can’t find much written on the subject, can’t find any sort of expert oculesics-ist (or whatever). So for now I simply stare at people and ask them what we’re feeling. People don’t take it too kindly.
The collection of fiction-writing tips I come home from the space station with wasn’t at all the point. The entire workshop process improved my writing and me in ways a list of tips can’t convey. The whole process seemed a sort of artsy group therapy, centered around words and storytelling, both of which have a great deal to do with how people mature and generate meaning. Somewhere therein lies the key to what Clarion West meant. At the time, though, I was far too busy to ask myself what the heck Clarion West was adding up to — the Apollo astronauts generally say the same thing about when they went to outer space: ‘We were too busy picking up rocks and setting down experiment packages to write poems about our feelings.’
Clarionites, taking a break from critiquing stories, go out for beer
A Visionary from the early 20th century — none other than the forgotten strongman and “Respiratory Specialist” Paul von Boeckmann — wishes to save you from “the terrible effects of oxygen starvation” with his “Pneumauxetor”: “a Gymnasium for the Internal Body” used by “Over 23,000” and “Guaranteed to Develop Strong, Healthy Lungs.” Lest you worry about the durability of the Pneumauxetor, please be advised, it’s “Mechanically Perfect.”
The Pneumauxetor
I’m not quite sure how one uses a — excuse me, the — Pneumauxetor, because in order to find out, one has to enroll in von Boeckmann’s “system of correspondence instruction,” which, he assures us, is “perfect.” No wonder: he has taught, he says, “over 23,000 persons by correspondence and [he has] long ago overcome all obstacles that might make [his] instructions less comprehensive, and less effective.” By his method, “you obtain permanent strength, permanent wind, permanent endurance.” He guarantees “a gain of not less than 30 cubic inches [in lung capacity for] anyone, young or old, in three months, or [he will give a] refund.” What a bargain!
Paul von Boeckmann, dressed snappily
I purchased von Boeckmann’s pamphlet for but $1.00 at an antique shop in Glen Rose, Texas. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to telephone 532 Bryant in New York, or how to otherwise contact Paul von Boeckmann, who, the pamphlet says, resides at 500 Fifth Avenue in New York.
There are many things one can learn for von Boeckmann’s pamphlet. To list but a few direct quotes:
We all know air is life.
Exercise does not develop lung power.
Such knowledge [of breathing gymnastics] can be gained only through experience, and not through theory.
Always breathe through the nose […] In nose breathing, the air is purified before it reaches the lungs. In mouth breathing, dust and poisonous germs are breathed directly into the delicate lung tissue.
A woman is as old as she looks, and if she feels old, then she is twice as old as she really is.
"A piece torn out of a full package of playing cards by Paul von Boeckmann, a performance that eclipses all other card tearing feats."
Von Boeckmann was a confident man:
It is needless to say that the medical profession as a whole, fully endorses my system. […] Failure is due principally to lack of stick-to-it-iveness. […] As references I might give two banks with which I transact business, and scores of business houses, and well-known physicians. Testimonials I have by the thousands, many of which I have the permission to publish. But I never present testimonials. I am the only one in my profession who has adopted this rule. I object to advertising my business at the expense of my pupils. I object to prospective pupils annoying a grateful patient by a visit, or perhaps a request to permit him to “try the Pneumauxetor.” Furthermore, I cannot believe that at the present day, an intelligent man or woman can be influenced by testimonials.
Lest you infer von Boeckmann was an arrogant man, take into consideration his confession of nervous problems:
My system is especially adapted to persons of a mental or nervous temperament, or, in other words, to those whose brain and nervous system is very large as compared to the capacity of the vital organs. A starved nervous system and a starved body go hand in hand. By strengthening the digestive and assimilative powers, through proper breathing, this abnormal condition can be remedied easily. I stand as an example of what my system can do for one of a nervous temperament. By nature I am as restless as a wolf. My greatest enemy is Hurry. To develop muscle and to retain normal weight under such conditions is usually impossible. Nevertheless, I have succeeded. I am to-day the strongest man of a nervous temperament, all other strong men being either of the motive or the vital temperament. In special feats of strength requiring a powerful grip I am the strongest person, regardless of temperament. I have not learned to control the Nervous System, but I have learned to feed it.
Paul von Boeckmann, dressed for a night out, perhaps?
Elsewhere and at another elsewhere I have learned this Visionary has penned other pamphlets, such as Nerve Force. And he isn’t remiss in giving us his physical measurements:
You can witness all the pages of the pamphlet at my flickr site. As best as I can make out, the pamphlet — which is undated — was printed in the late 1910’s. Does anyone have further information on this mysterious Visionary, his mysterious pamphlet and mysterious correspondence course, and above all, does anyone have access to a — excuse me, the — Pneumauxetor?
July 20th, 2009 marks the 40th anniversary of the day when the only life we so far know to exist, having left its home planet and having focused for a moment into the form of a human being named Neil Armstrong, first strode across the soil of another celestial body. When life stepped off the ladder of the frail little Apollo 11 spacecraft called the Eagle and onto the surface of the Earth’s Moon. The 55-second video clip embedded below replays Armstrong’s first step and first lunar words as at least 600 million people on Earth experienced them televised live in 1969.
If you’ve been frantically calculating the angular momentum and the who’s torquing whom of current-events soundbyte spin — take a break. You can return to the various expectorations about the empathy of a “wise Latina” later, you can compare her empathy to the peculiar sentiments of Joe the Plumber later. But right now — do yourself a favor. Quest for no-spun reality by decoding a message which instead points toward the widest horizon, where empathy springs not just from considering gender and race, but from reverencing all life, reverencing all the universe.
Hubble Deep Field: Wherein magnification of just 0000000.7th of the sky above you reveals 10,000 galaxies, 123 quintillion stars
[W]hat can you say when you step off of something? Well, something about a step. [The line] just sort of evolved during the [roughly six-hour] period [after landing on the Moon] that I was doing the procedures of the practice takeoff [as if to return to the command module orbiting above] and the [Extra-vehicular Activity] prep and all the other activities that were on our flight schedule at that time. [… It] wasn’t much of a jump to say what you could compare [a step] with.
Wherein the 2009 Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has photographed the base of the Eagle spacecraft still sitting on the Moon (center of photograph, with horizontal shadow)
The morning after the moon landing, The New York Times reported Armstrong’s famous line as “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” According to the Times, then, and also according to many other ears, Armstrong left out the ‘a’ in ‘for a man.’ Which would render his line equivalent to “That’s one small step for mankind, one giant leap for mankind.” A frustrating contradiction. Armstrong might have thrown up his hands a few years ago when he told biographer Hansen:
For people who have listened to me for hours on the radio communication tapes, they know I left a lot of syllables out. It was not unusual for me to do that. I’m not particularly articulate. Perhaps [the ‘a’ in ‘for a man’] was a suppressed sound that didn’t get picked up by the voice mike. As I have listened to it, it doesn’t sound like there was time for the word to be there. On the other hand, I think that reasonable people will realize that I didn’t intentionally make an inane statement, and that certainly the ‘a’ was intended, because that’s the only way the statement makes any sense. So I would hope that history would grant me leeway for dropping the syllable and understand that it was certainly intended, even if it wasn’t said — although it actually might have been. [… Historians] can put it in parentheses.
Today you get all kinds nudging you with their elbows and half-whispering, “Do you know what Neil Armstrong really said?” A setup for their gloating found-feet-of-clay punch: “He flubbed his line!!! He really said — ” and on and on.
Pale Blue Dot: Wherein from a distance of 3.7 billion miles, sunlight scattered off the Voyager 1 probe puts the Earth and you into the universe
But in 2006, after his decoding of the Apollo 11 recording with GoldWave software, a computer programmer named Peter Shann Ford reignited the discussion over what Armstrong said. The Houston Chronicle reported that “According to Ford, Armstrong spoke, ‘One small step for a man …’ with the ‘a’ lasting a total of 35 milliseconds, 10 times too quickly to be heard.” One person who stepped into the debate was Wina Sturgeon, who in 1969 was married to Theodore Sturgeon, author of the glorious 1953 novel More Than Human, the underlooked 1986 novel Godbody, the 1953 short story collection E Pluribus Unicorn, and many other works. In 2007 Wina Sturgeon discussed her memory of Armstrong’s words for ABC 4:
Neil Armstrong’s alleged first words on the moon are now deciphered by modern technology as grammatically correct […] My husband was a science fiction writer. The moon landing was as important to him as [our unborn] child […] was to me; but then, in some mysterious way, the two became connected in my mind; the child that would come out of me and the astronauts that would come out of the ship and walk on the moon.
In 2006, with a great deal of attendant media attention, journalist/entrepreneur Peter Shann Ford claimed to have located the ‘a’ in the waveform of Neil’s transmission. Subsequently, more rigorous analyses of the transmission were undertaken by a number of people, including some with professional experience with audio waveforms and, most importantly, audio spectrograms. As of October 2006, none of these analyses support Ford’s conclusion.
My take? The embedded 7-second audio clip below plays my 88% slow-down of Neil Armstrong’s “for a man” phrase as well as the phrase spoken at regular speed. If you listen very closely — and listen to it loud — and listen again, maybe believing a little, you can hear Armstrong automatically transform, with his northwestern Ohio boy accent, “for a man” to “furuh man.”
If you must pat yourself on the back and straitjacket Apollo 11 into the context of jingoism and the Cold War and the military machine, go ahead; if you must quarrel about Armstrong saying ‘mankind’ and not ‘humankind’ or ‘life,’ go ahead; however accurate you might be, you are right now spinning away, too accelerated to pause for the perspective of the universe as braved in 1969. As you exit, let me send you with a note explaining that in less than a billion years, as the sun burns more and more fiercely, the Earth (unless we move it!) will be hotter than boiling water and will have no atmosphere; in 7.6 billion, the sun, by then a red giant, will swallow the Earth. Those of us who have taken the perspective of the universe care not just about the present but also about the farthest future. Where will life go?
Asking such a question, listening closely, we have herein slowed spin sufficiently to decode Armstrong’s message. We know Armstrong’s intention, at the very least. “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
What might it mean?
It’s not symptomatic of some ultimate white flight. I say Armstrong’s combination of the provincial and the cosmopolitan, the timely and the universal, points us toward the deepest empathy. Wherein we know ourselves, and without losing our individual identity — a northwestern Ohio accent or another accent adding to the great universal jam session — we blesh with the identities of others, especially those we dislike, working to understand, to reverence all things.
Just like these folk in Holland 1979, jamming out to the universe:
Blesh? The neologism comes from Theodore Sturgeon’s novel More Than Human. If you, like The New York Times, still need to ask if someone can “write about spaceships and monsters and alien civilizations and still be a great American writer?”, then pay especial attention.
Wherein you benefit immensely
To “blesh,” Sturgeon writes, means “everyone all together being something, even if they all did different things. […] Lone said maybe it was a mixture of ‘blending’ and ‘meshing,’ but I don’t think he believed that himself. It was a lot more than that.” As Crawdaddy! creator, rock journalist, science-fiction chronicler Paul Williams writes in his online essay Theodore Sturgeon, Storyteller:
Crosby, like most mid-Sixties’ rock musicians (and underground press editors, political activists, dope impresarios, etc.), was an avid reader of science fiction in general and Sturgeon in particular; and he realized early that the Byrds and other rock groups were living examples of Sturgeon’s idea that a group of humans could function as more than the sum of the individuals involved … not just more, but mystically more, so that the group took on its own personality and created things that none of its individual members could even have imagined. Chester Anderson wrote in the San Francisco Oracle in 1966, in a widely reprinted analysis of the new rock or “head” music, “Rock is evolving Sturgeonesque homo gestalt configurations…..” The Merry Pranksters were another example of the same phenomenon, as were all the nameless groups that came together to organize political or cultural events and then disbanded and vanished when the work was done.
[…] Sturgeon, in More than Human and throughout his work, is a moralist as well as a visionary. Not the kind of moralist who knows what’s right and what’s wrong and tells you in so many words, but the kind who is searching for the answers and shares his search with his readers. […] Sturgeon’s answer is awkward and incomplete, but, for our generation, much more appropriate than Nietzsche’s.
(Paul Williams now requires full-time medical care; his website asks for donations.)
And as to the “wise Latina”? For all the Congressional insistence that a judge not be “activist,” for all the expectorations asserting that “the” law must be mechanistically applied by “impartial” judges, Edward H. Levi makes clear in An Introduction to Legal Reasoning that legal reasoning is necessarily activist, and imperfect, which is why it works so well. What we want on the Supreme Court bench and elsewhere in the universe is the broadest, deepest empathy. Even the George W. Bush-appointed Justice Sam Alito said “in immigration and naturalization cases” he “can’t help but think” of his “own immigrant ancestors,” and he said “When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account.”
Good science fiction — or, given Apollo, science fact — sends out a message calling for empathy. Life moves forward toward the perspective of the universe. Signing off this message with a description of that perspective from More Than Human:
[This] ethos will give you a code for survival too. But it is a greater survival than your own, or my species, or yours. What it is really is a reverence for your sources and your posterity. It is a study of the main current which created you, and in which you will create still a greater thing when the time comes. […]
And when their morals no longer suit their species, you or another ethical being will create new ones that vault still farther up the main stream, reverencing you, reverencing those who bore you and the ones who bore them, back and back to the first wild creature who was different because his heart leapt when he saw a star.
The most impressive Southern Magnolia (Magnolia Grandiflora) in Dallas-Fort Worth lives at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden. The picture above shows a view of it from near one of the Garden roads (along with a few tiny, other trees). Many magnolias in Fort Worth are impressively tall — for example, the one pictured below, which grows next to the library of my alma mater, TCU — but the one at the Botanic Gardens is the best!
A TCU Library Magnolia
From some angles, the Garden’s huge magnolia can at first look like many trees, not one. That’s why I never(!) truly noticed it; I mistakenly saw a big stand of multiple trees, not a single special individual. This past May, however, Kate — a special individual herself — showed me one of the “secret entrances” to the “cave” made by the magnolia’s drooping branches.
A Secret Entrance to the Big Magnolia Cave
Once you go through the secret entrance (no password necessary), you’ll see a scene like something out of Lord of the Rings or a King Arthur tale. This cave hides in plain sight near University Drive, one of the busiest streets in the city! Here’s a shot of it. The branches go all the way around, 360 degrees.
Fruit: Cylindrical aggregate of follicles (“seed pod”). Green changing to red. Matures Oct-Nov.
Twig: Stout. It gives off a citrus scent if broken.
Bark: Brown to gray, thin, smooth when young, but plating or scaling later in life.
The Southern Magnolia is sometimes called an Evergreen Magnolia, or a Bull-bay.
I took four pictures of the tree’s flowers, each illustrating a different stage of the flower life cycle. You can learn much more about the magnolia flower life cycle, and see pictures of it, at this website.
The Flower Before Blooming
The Flower Begins to Bloom
The Flower Has Bloomed
Once the petals fall off, the center of the flower remains — the fruit or seed pod:
The Fruit; Flower Petals Have Fallen
In the last year I’ve taken to learning about trees via field-guiding. While field-guiding is certainly enjoyable in itself, I started mostly because I wanted to improve my ability to see, both during observation and with my mind’s inner eye. Routine close observation of details — samaras, leafstalks, whatever — definitely has lead to improvement in both areas. For example, a mechanic showed me some small parts of a Civic brake system a few months back. My eyes would have simply glazed over a year ago. But as a result of field-guiding, I could see just what he was talking about. As to the inner eye: I’ve always had difficulty visualizing in my mind. Many people are startled when I confess that while I can close my eyes and picture a stop sign, I can’t mentally change its color. Still can’t. But the more I scrutinize small visual details, the better my mind’s eye becomes. A specific instance of this is what I think of as “stabilizing” my mental imagery. Before field-guiding, if I closed my eyes and visualized the sycamore fruit I have sitting on my shelf, the image would sort of wobble and vanish after only a second or two. Now I can more or less keep it in my inner eye for as long as I can concentrate.
I'm a Seattle-based freelance writer/journalist originally from Texas. I'm also a substitute teacher in public education. I write about anything and everything, but usually philosophy tied to current events, liberatory mental health, science fiction and fantasy, investigative journalism, technology, justice, and more.
Email: DAL@RISEUP.NET (ask for pgp key or check keyservers if you want encryption)
Snailmail: Douglas Lucas / PO Box 75656 / Seattle WA 98175 / United States
This post is the fifth in a series of ten about my experiences at Clarion West Writers Workshop (Wikipedia) as a member of the 2008 class. I’ll talk about my third week at the workshop, when Cory Doctorow (Wikipedia, Twitter; freely downloadable recent novels Little Brother and Makers) instructed. Here’re Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 of the series. In Part 4 I discussed writing my story “Glenn of Green Gables” and ended with a cliffhanger: aliens had just broken into our space station hull.
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