Theater and the Interrupted Ritual: Readercon Thursday 10 July 2014

Starting from premise that theatre/drama stems from an "interrupted ritual", specifically:

9:00 PM    F    Theater and the Interrupted Ritual . C.S.E. Cooney, Greer Gilman, Andrea Hairston (moderator), Kenneth Schneyer. Theater theorists have put forth the idea that most theater begins with an interrupted ritual. This goes back to ancient Greek theater, which generally literally began this way, but in modern theater we see this in more subtle ways, with characters making a cup of tea or sorting the mail when someone else comes in. At Arisia 2012, Andrea Hairston talked about theater and performance being tied to spiritual practice, which resonates with the idea of the interrupted ritual. How does this idea relate to storytelling in general, and what can writers do with it?

Panelists agreed most drama portrays interrupted routine, but routine not the same as ritual.

A story is usually not about an ordinary day in someone's life, but about the worst day in their life or the most extraordinary day in their life.

(I thought of A day in the life of Ivan Denisovitch as counterexample, but the point of the book was to show how extraordinary/bad the ordinary day of a Gulag prisoner was.

In Thornton Wilder's Our Town, the recently-deceased Emily wants to "visit" her old life. She is warned to return to the most ordinary day possible--but even that turns out to be too precious for her to be able to bear its loss. Still, visiting the living is not routine for a dead person.)

They said going to a theatre was a type of ritual in itself.

Andrea Hairston talked about the magic of theatre:

• How rehearsals without an audience was difficult
• How audience contributed to the transcendent experience of a performance
• How non-actors are transformed by theatre exercises, e.g. putting on a mask will free them to do things they didn't do without the mask.
• How children on Halloween have similar experiences
• That children play in order to learn how to be human. Adults feel too old for child's play, but they do theatre, or they go to sf Cons where they can play like children again.

Then she said when she wrote a novel she thought about how to translate the theatre experience into the novel writing.

C.S.E. Cooney said that it was still theatre, with an audience of one reader at a time.

They quoted some theatre theorist a lot, whose name I did not catch.

Hatching a plot to take over the world?

Why take over the world? It would be an administrative nightmare.

Dream diary entry

A a highly-evolved future cat and I were about to slingshot into an even more distant future when we became suspicious of the claw beckoning us. It was revealed to belong to a bear who admitted: All the cats are in zoos. And the humans? There is no evidence of their existence.

Not a diet

I've never managed to sustain a diet, but until I can fit into the jeans that fit me last summer, I hereby will do my best not to rebel against the behavior that would characterize a diet.

Cheerios

It may have been second grade teacher Mrs Dukakis who taught us to write cinquains.

Cheerios
Baby valium
Are best fresh
Goes great with milk
Yum

My sister Melinda coined the 'baby valium' term. She was so right.

The first paragraph of a story requires

The first paragraph of a story requires a reason to read the second paragraph of the story.

Such as:

1. A charming character. By "charming", I mean anything that would cause the reader to want to spend more time with the character. e.g.
1. Likeable
2. One with which reader can identify
3. One who is intriguing by being very different from reader or anyone reader is likely to know well
2. An interesting world. e.g.
1. Life of Crime or others on Edge of Society
2. Life of Privilege from which most of us excluded
3. New sort of fantasy or science fiction setting
4. Old sort of setting made appealing by writer's descriptive powers
3. A charming, amusing, or unusual Point of View:
• Jane Austen — "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
4. Impressive prose. That killer first sentence, e.g.
• William Gibson — 'The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.'

That killer first sentence is great if you've got one in you, but not necessary. To quote a Tweet that I can't find at the moment: The way to begin a story is to start telling the story.

And while I'm at it:

• Don't subject your character to a long series of perils without giving the reader a reason to care enough to want to follow the character through the adventure. Adventure or peril by themselves are insufficient.

Mid-snowstorm need to shovel

Husband: It's snowing so heavily. You really want me go out in that?

Me: It won't hurt you. It's not hail. It's better to go out before it gets dark.

Him: What if it's the dust of radioactive fallout?

Me: I think I'd have heard of it on Twitter by now.

Margie slams fiction

Rob came to a few of our NHWorD writers group meetings, so I followed him on Twitter. Last week he tweeted about a 3-minute Fiction Slam going on in Manchester Monday night. I didn't think I had any 3-minute fiction--I've been writing a saga-length story for most of my adult life--but I thought it might be of interest to the other members of my writing group. I forwarded the tweet to the NHWord email list.

Rob Greene (@rwwgreene) tweeted at 11:06 AM on Tue, Feb 04, 2014:
It's a fiction slam in the #MHT http://t.co/0by1WbhpQN #writing
(https://twitter.com/rwwgreene/status/430734027260035072)

For the rest of the week there were some replies and discussions. I didn't open the emails, but Gmail gave me a preview of the first lines of each email. Sunday, while waiting for my writing group meeting to begin, I read the emails. So and so didn't think they could handle being 'slammed', Rob assured them that it was a 'gentle slam', but even so, it was just a bad week for that, with Boskone starting this Friday. No takers.

Our meeting ended around 8. I remembered that I was out of deodorant and didn't think I should start a work week without it. Wal-Mart closes horribly late on Sunday night, so I headed over there. I bought deodorant, motor oil, bubble bath, tried to remember what kind of toothpaste my daughter wanted... So I was driving home at 9:37 when it occurred to me that I did have a short story that could probably be read in three minutes. I got home, found the story on Google Docs. Its word-count was 630. I tried reading my story with the kitchen timer and found it was too long. I did more editing. I sent an email to Rob, saying I might be able to slam, but didn't know if I could get there on time. He replied:

I can put you at the top of the waiting list, which is pretty much a guaranteed slot. I hope you can make it. -rob

The next day I googled "Word Count Three Minute Fiction" and found that the limit was 600 words. I snatched time to work on the story. By nightfall it was down to 548 words. I finished the work I promised to have ready by the next morning and left after 7. The Fiction Slam had already begun. I was 50 miles south.

I arrived at 8 pm, snuck in, sat down. There was a  piece of paper with a list of names on the table in front of me. There were ten names under "Guaranteed to Read" and three names under "The Wait List". Mine was at the top of the "Wait List". All of the names had checkmarks next to them except mine.

I listened to 8, 9, and 10. In between, I reread my story. I cut out 8 more words. I didn't know if my reading would really be within the three minutes. I figured that my turn would come at the bottom of the wait list, since I got there late, so while Number 10 was receiving judge's feedback I looked at my cellphone's clock feature. I chose the mode that counted down from three minutes and started to time my mouthing the words to the story. Two minutes in, only a few paragraphs left, they called my name.

I wasn't at the end of the wait list--they were using the original order. I shoved the phone into my pocket and walked up to the microphone.

Halfway through, I started to hear beeping. First I thought it was a cafe noise--a coffee maker or something. Then I thought maybe it means I've gone past my time. Was it really a 2-minute fiction slam? They didn't tell me to stop, so I figured I should read to the end. It was distracting with the beeper going off. When I finished, I turned to Rob and asked, "Was this a 2-minute or a 3-minute story?"

"Three minutes," he said.

"Oh. I thought the beeper was because I'd gone past my time."

"I don't know what that beeper is."

Then I realized what, and pulled my cellphone out of my pocket. Even though I had set the sound to zero, that only turned off the ringer. The three minute timer had been going off.

"I sabotaged my own performance," I said to the judges.

One of them said, "I thought it was a special effect."

Grasshoppers

When I was in 7th grade we had to bring in grasshoppers to dissect. Until that time, I'd never seen one, except in books. The kids who weren't as good in school brought in the grasshoppers.

Now I live in a house where there are lots of grasshoppers in the backyard. They hop out of the way when I mow the lawn.

StorifyHelp replies, I click "Publish" again, and it works

@pargery It looks like your story isn't actually published — did you press the "Publish" button in the editor?
— Storify Help (@Storifyhelp) December 22, 2013

So I returned to my Storify account, found the story at the bottom of the Profile window (Zoe had to show me yesterday that it was down there.) and didn't see a "Publish" button. But I found an Edit button and reasoned that I could Edit and then try Publish again. That worked, though before clicking "Publish" I checked, just in case there were more Jeffrey tweets. I was glad I checked, because there were two more, which leaves the story with two more interesting tweets than had ended it last night.

@Storifyhelp Thanks for your reply. I just tried again & now have working & shortened URL: http://t.co/VS02xf6QYE
— Margery Harrison (@pargery) December 22, 2013

I had added " - 1" after the title, just in case Storify does not permit additions after "Publish", but now it looks like it wasn't needed.
I spent time yesterday trying to find the answer to whether I could edit after Publish. This resulted in Storify tweeting that question to my regular Twitter stream. I had thought I was was just adding the question to the comments section of their support blog, which was the only way I had found to ask a question. I deleted the tweet when I saw it in my regular stream because it looked stupid out of context: "Can I edit a story after I Publish it?"
So, bad automated interface, but how nice that they have Storifyhelp humans working on the weekend to answer questions.

Collecting Philip Pullman's Tweets on Jeffrey the House Fly using Storify

Jeffrey our resident fly is the most polite insect I've ever met. He leaves our food alone but sits on my shoulder to read the Oxford Times.
— Philip Pullman (@PhilipPullman) November 14, 2013

Phillip Pullman was tweeting about a fly in his house. It reminded me of when I was blogging about a spider web I was seeing in the ladies room at work, only I look back at those blog entries as possibly a sick manifestation of the creative desperation of my life at that time, whereas Pullman's tweets about Jeffrey the housefly and all that follows are charming, intriguing, and delightfully written. I set up an account on Storify to collect the Jeffrey Tweets, because it's more pleasant to read the story in chronological order. When you read Tweets directly from Twitter, they are all reverse chronological because it's more natural to read from the top down.

I'm hoping my daughter or husband might draw some pictures to illustrate it.

http://storify.com/pargery/pullman-jeffrey

I had some difficulty with the Storify User Interface, and ended up having to re-insert half the Tweets after they were lost. I finally finished a 2nd time late tonight. I had thought I'd finished it around noon today and had to make pancakes in penance for ignoring children while I was trying to put it together..

And the link is still not working. Not a good GUI for Storify.

Yankee Candle Fundraiser Magazine Subscription Wastes Trees and Time

My daughter's school was having a Yankee Candle Fundraiser. I didn't want any of the Yankee Candles, but the fundraising catalog also included magazine subscriptions. So I ordered a magazine subscription. Weeks later, the order arrives in a box. My daughter is excited: What's in the box?

Inside the box is a piece of paper with a postcard and a website address and an activation code. I need to either send in the postcard or go to the website in order to get the magazine subscription.

Could they have saved 2 or 3 bucks off the subscription price by not sending this information in a box? How about an envelope? Or an email? Or just signing me up for the subscription, as I expected would happen?

Maybe they save enough money from people losing the coupons to make it worth it.

Not wanting to waste my $15, I log onto the website and fill in the information and the name of what magazine I want, again.

They send me a confirmation email:

Dear Margery,

Thank you for ordering from TheMagazineStoreOnline.com and supporting our fundraiser!
Please review the details for order #12345 below. ...
Please remember it takes between 8 and 10 weeks for your magazine subscription(s) to begin.

8 to 10 weeks. The irony is, my order is for a subscription to Fast Company.

Complaint about a 1953 Philip K Dick story - Imposter

With spoilers, of course:

OK, so it's in this robot anthology: Souls in Metal, published in 1978. It was in the bookcase at home. It reprinted robot stories written between 1938 to 1974.

Imposter, by Philip K Dick, is a very dramatic story. The narrative is in the third person, but the point of view is limited to one character--a man, or so we think, who's working on an important military project. His name in Olham. He seems like just a normal guy, with a wife, a love of the outdoors, and a longing to take a break, a camping trip, in the woods outside of town.

But, no, we find out he's suspected of being a robot--a spy robot--sent by the alien enemy. The robot has landed in a spaceship in the woods outside of town, and murdered the main character after first copying out the man's memories and impersonating him. The robot contains a bomb, that will be set off the moment the man utters a triggering phrase. The danger is that the robot will carry the bomb into the heart of the Secret Military Project and set it off.

The main character knows they must be wrong, and does his best to prove who he really is. After clever plot twists, he escapes and makes his way to the spaceship where the robot landed. He wants to prove the robot failed his mission. Instead, he finds his own dead body. In despair, he says, "But if that's Olham, then I must be---"

Oh no! That was the triggering phase. The story ends with:

The blast was visible all the way to Alpha Centauri.

And I thought, "Wow," and then, "Huh?"

Because the triggering phrase was obviously the result of seeing his own dead body, that is, he was set up to explode exactly where the robot found him in the first place.

Which made me wonder, why would the aliens bother with the whole robot thing, if the blast from exactly where their spaceship landed would be seen all the way to Alpha Centauri? All they needed was to set off the bomb immediately. What happened to the purpose of the robot to take the bomb into the heart of the Project? Did the aliens then fail? That wasn't the implication. The implication was that blast blew up all of Earth, kabloom. So, anyway, it doesn't make sense. Did I miss something? If not, then,

How did Dick get away with it?

Playing with clay at Castle Hill

So, looking back at my wish list from earlier this year, one of the items was "I want to play with clay." I had a week's vacation to take this summer. I did web-searches for short writing and art classes that would meet the week I had off. I found the Castle Hill Art Center in Truro MA, Cape Cod. 

We rented a cottage. The weather was beautiful. We even managed to avoid the bad traffic, somehow, renting Sunday to Sunday. If only Zubie hadn't had a major bad-back episode for the entire time, culminating in a Wednesday afternoon (perfect beach weather) ambulance ride to Cape Cod hospital in Hyannis (thank you Kennedys), it would have been a glorious vacation. 

The sculpture class reminded me how much I like sculpture. I've been working on wire mermaids since then. I've been neglecting story-writing, and that feels bad. The mermaid-sculpting is fun. Maybe I'll have stuff ready for Arisia this year.

Tonight's quick miso soup

Filled & started electric tea kettle.
In the meantime diced up some onions and carrot, about :

• diced quarter of a large red onion
• diced small carrot

Saute'ed in a few tablespoons oil.
Added a chunk of miso. About

• 3 tablespoons? miso

Stirred in the hot water, with about 2 tablespoons of leftover tomato-basil sauce to use it up from the jar.
Added about

• 3/4 cup frozen spinach

Sprinkled in the following spices:

• ginger (very little)
• sage (tiny bit)
• cumin
• coriander 
• garlic powder
• a bit of black pepper

It's not great, but not as terrible as experimentation might warrant. Rather warm and soothing.
Just recording the ingredients for improvement later.
I think the ginger is important, even though in a small quantity.

Last Sunday's Fish Chowder

Ingredients

• About 5 or 6 large red potatoes, peeled and sliced thin (leave some slivers of red peel).
• less than a pound or so of fish chunks (I used the Trader Joe's frozen cod pieces, inexpensive fish)
• 3 large carrots, peeled and sliced into disks
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 tablespoon butter
• red onion diced
• 3 tablespoons flour
• 2 cups milk

• spice to taste:
• dill (optional)
• tarragon (optional)
• basil (optional)
• ground bay leaf (or add a whole bay leaf before adding the carrots)
• parsley
• paprika
• fresh ground pepper
• salt

Directions

Peel and slice potatoes, add to soup pot until they fill about 1/2 way up.
Rinse, discard rinse water, and then fill with enough water to cook the potatoes.
When they are close to cooked, add the carrots.

In a saucepan, saute the diced red onion in olive oil and butter. Add flour, stir it around and let it brown. Gradually add in about 3/4 cup milk until you have a cream sauce.

Add the fish pieces to the potatoes in the soup pot, then stir in the cream sauce. Thin the chowder out with more milk.

Spice to taste.

ALZA ARRIBA!

I don't know Spanish, but my husband is from Chile. From his dad, we learned a great thing to yell at kids when you want to get them out of bed in the morning:

Alza arriba!
Trinca el coy!
Coy a la batayola!

Here's his translation/pronunciation guide:

Alza arriba! - AL-sa  a-RRI-bha (literally loft upwards)
[RR meaning hard R like Rabbit]

Trinca el coy! - TRIN-ca El COy (tie up your hammock, which is otherwise known as "hamaca". "Trincar" in general parlance means to bind up or corner in)
[R meaning soft R like train]

Coy a la batayola! - COy  A LAH   BAH-tah-yoeh-lah (Put the hammock away on the batayola which I think means bulkhead stringer, some sort of shelf structure along the hull or bulkhead)

Ready for a Red Wedding?

I watched the first season of Game of Thrones this weekend. Unlike those who watched it before June 7 of this year, I think I may have benefited from the protection of all of those Red Wedding Tweets and news stories. As I watched the story unfold, I thought:

"What a nice family. They're all going to DIE." 

I didn't fall in love, though I have to admit I particularly like the younger daughter. She's fun.

I was even annoyed at the dad's honorable stubbornness. Didn't he know what story he's in?

Of course, do any of us?

What kind of story are you in?

Yes, I did finish

Not to leave my non-existent readers hanging, I thought I should post that I did indeed finish The Casual Vacancy. I also finished building the garden and moving in the tomatoes and cucumber plants. I'll post a photo of the garden if I'm ever home when the sun is out.

I did like the book. It did make me wonder if J. K. Rowling will always be bursting full of characters. I liked that all the characters were understandable--none were entirely good or bad. Unlike in the Potter volumes, there was no obvious main character. At the end of the book, I realized there probably had been a main character, and it wasn't whom I would have expected it to be from the beginning. That was fitting, because the novel illustrated the error in judging and dismissing a person. 

You could derive this moral from the novel:  

Pay attention to your kids, and pay attention to other people's kids too. 

 Spoiler alert: Very sad things happen.

four tomato plants, forty dollars and four hours later

    You see, the best luck I ever had growing tomatoes was when I was living in the middle floor of a triple-decker in Medford MA. I bought some cherry tomato plants on impulse outside at the local Rite Aid, (the one we could walk to, on the corner of Rt 60 & Rt 28, on the border with Malden).
    I put the tomato plants in giant plastic flower pots on the back porch and they produced wonderful tomatoes. The only plant that didn't produce tomatoes was in the smallest of the big pots, so I reasoned that you need big pots to produce tomatoes.
    Fast forward thirteen years and on impulse I buy a 4-pack of cherry tomato plants from the Farm and Flower Market in Manchester NH. I planted them in the only surviving pot on the back porch but I knew it was just a temporary tomato home. Weeks have gone by. The tomatoes are too big and one is toppling over. My husband has suggested the idea that he might build a "raised bed" garden for them at the end of the driveway, but that has not happened.
    Today I take one of the kids and we go to Devrient Farm to get a bag of potting soil. They're out, but I leave with a flower pot containing a 'pickling' cucumber plant, and some fresh off-the-truck strawberries to just eat. They suggest Goffstown Hardware for the potting soil.
    I look in Big Lots for big pots but don't want to pay $14 for an ugly one. I try Goffstown Hardware store and the hardware guy sells me a 'kit' for building a raised garden bed ("These were on sale last week, but today I'll still give you the sale rate of $29.99." "Will it fit all four tomato plants?" "Oh, yes.") and a bag of garden soil that the guy says will be big enough but I don't think so. It remains to be seen.
    I spend an hour searching the house for a screwdriver with the right bit and my electric drill ("Before I married, I had an electric drill with all the bits in the package. Where is it? And where's the case for my profile sander? Why is it out of its case? And how do I know the missing drill bits aren't buried in this sawdust? Can't you clean the sawdust.." most of which was said downstairs while my husband the target of all this was upstairs. Probably a good thing.) and then trying to figure out the relatively simple directions for putting together the 4x4 raised bed kit: four posts, eight boards, 20 screws, and 4 square caps for the posts.
    I dig out the section near the front door where we've decided to put it. Not as sunny as it ought to be, but the underlying soil is good there, unlike near the driveway where it's not. It's also a pretty spot to add a 4x4 mini-corral, so we could always plant shade-loving flowers if the tomatoes don't work out. For this season, it's also a good spot because we'll see the tomatoes as we walk in and out and remember to take care of them.
    I cut up the grass by stepping on the shovel. I find lots of small rocks and four very large flat-ish rocks, three of which I pull out of the square. With all those rocks out, it is now a sunken garden bed. After pulling out the third rock and standing it up against the 'raised bed' fence I was just too tired to do any more.
    Shower and supper. To be continued tomorrow.
    Tomatoes and their new cuke pal are still on the back porch.