Angry

It's been eleven years since I was this angry, sad, and generally rendered incapable of much useful work. It's shocked me how hard the last two days have been: I mean, yes, it's awful—twenty first graders shot dead in their classroom, and the teachers and principal and so on. Of course it's awful. But there have been lots of awful things over the last ten years.

I'm not alone in this. Something about the events in Newtown have made us as a nation viscerally, boiling-over angry in a way that we haven't seen since 9/11/01. We are grief-stricken in a way we don't know what to do with.

I realized tonight that underneath the weeping for those 20 six- and seven-year-olds is something bigger. I am weeping for my country. I am weeping for the sense that this is becoming a place that isn't mine anymore. But I'm not from anywhere else. This is my home. I'm an American.

It isn't cheap political rhetoric. I spent a few days in Toronto on September, and it was such a startling weight off of me, walking through the streets of a very urban, gritty, full-of-urban-problems city, and not feeling the sense of anxiety that hangs even over my nice hometown of Minneapolis. It was like losing a headache I'd forgotten was there.

Toronto's no paradise. Canada's no paradise. I'm probably never moving to Canada. But I just don't get how so many people, including some of my friends, look at Canada and Western and Nothern Europe, and sneer at universal health care and pooh-pooh the lack of gun violence. I could quote figures at you, but I don't want to here. That's not the point. The point is, I felt more at home and at peace in a strange city than I do in my own front yard. I found that profoundly unsettling.

I am angry, angrier than I've been willing to admit to myself. I cover it up pretty well most of the time, I think—both from others and myself—but what I've seen in some of my liberal friends—the bitterness and fatalism—well, I worry I'm coming down with it too. I love my country, and I want it to be a place of love and peace. That's the picture I grew up with, and as I get older, I realize most of my fellow Americans have either given up on that vision as childish, or never had it in the first place. Instead it's a nation filled with demons needing to be stomped out with vigor. No dream of a better place in the here and now, just a resigned sigh that the battle is never won, and hope for peace in the next world.

But we're the nation that made a great industry out of dreams and fantasies. You'd think we'd know better, that we could learn to harness this great national talent for self-invention, and become a nation of Ray Bradburys. But we're not. We produce Ray Bradburys in a way no other country could, but the fantasies we adopt as our national scripts are full not of magic and hope, but of moralizing and fear and brimstone.

We are not the Greatest Nation on Earth. Whoever said that anyway? It sounds like a P. T. Barnum line. It's cheap boasting, and we've always been good at that. But we've also been good at self-deprecation, and we've been sorely lacking that in our national debate lately, outside of Comedy Central. Maybe we were the greatest nation on earth for a while after World War II, but we didn't even get to enjoy it, because we were so consumed with hate for dissent and fear within ourselves.

I love my country, but my country lies to itself. It hates itself. It's like loving someone with anorexia: their body image doesn't match their body, and becomes an ugly tool of self-mutilation, instead of a guide to positive change.

I am angry that we need revisionists like Howard Zinn (We who live in a nation that prides itself on a clarity and practical know-how. No fancy theories with abstact thises and thats—we leave that to the old world. No outdated, ossified social hierarchies). But we need the Howard Zinns to to show us how we have lied and lied again to ourselves. Lies upon lies. No fancy theories, just plain bald-faced ignorance of evidence and stubbornness. We let people say science is just someone's opinion, and all opinions are equal, and so it doesn't matter a whit how much research and effort you've done.

Jonathan Haidt thinks liberals don't care about sanctity and loyalty and respect. We do. I do anyway. And it hurts to think that what was sacred, what I want to be loyal to, and respect, has been dragged through the filth, betrayed my loyalty, and unearned my respect.

I want to live in a country where ideology is not king, especially ideology that masks rapaciousness and greed. I know we're never going to be rid of ideologues, and that's OK. But the floor of our national sense of self is rotting from underneath, and all we seem to be able to summon the collective will to do is tap on the floor with our foot and complain about the funny smell, and argue about whose job it is to hire the contractor and whether we really ought to pay for new sills.

And weep when twenty children fall through the hole and into the basement, gone forever.

Saving the Universe, one novel at a time

Late last year I read my son most of Diane Duane’s So You Want to be a Wizard. I was reminded again of what struck me the first time I read the book (and its sequels): for a young-adult fantasy novel, it brings into unusually clear focus how doing good means setting aside your own needs (and maybe your life) in service of something bigger. Self-sacrifice is one of the central common themes in hero-stories, which make up a lot of fantasy fiction (self-discovery being the other big theme). But there's usually a narrative-distance gap that dulls its emotional impact: either the novel is set far enough away in time and/or space that the behavior seems exceptional to our life and times, or else it's not the character that you as reader really identify with that does the self-sacrificing; your stand-in character is witness, not willing victim.

Meanwhile, I am getting tired of the idea of actually saving the Universe, or the Earth, or Life. I am getting tired of people who overstep their truth. I just get tired of feeling like I need to clean up after radical theoreticians when I read them, like I have to measure every sentence to see if they are still speaking from experience or generalizing out into an barely-tenable conclusion. And I think it's like the idea of our "saving the Earth" or "saving life on Earth": Folks, we'd have to work pretty damned hard to actually wipe out microbial life, or even vertebrate life, or even mammalia, let alone primates, let alone Homo Sapiens. "Western civilization" I can see getting wiped out over some lengthy period of time, though it will take some doing to wipe away so much printed and absorbed knowledge. And what hubris to think we can "save the Earth." It is large, and contains unbelievable multitudes. (see this post by Keith Humphreys that pretty much sums it up for me)

I've noticed for a long time in movies and comic books and fantasy novels, that when there's a battle for the Universe, it usually takes place in the author's backyard. Wherever the author lives, that's where the Ultimate Conflict will be. So Tom Clancy has a showdown in Washington, Harry Potter and Doctor Who in England, Godzilla in Tokyo... somewhere there's a Malaysian hero-movie with the Ultimate Battle in Kuala Lumpur, and a telenovela with the world-saving hero's sword is locked in combat somewhere near Buenos Aires. Probably the dolphins have a long-running series on the Ultimate Battle With the Orcas of Puget Sound.

There is something wonderful about your own backyard becoming the center of the universe. English fantasies do this well: old battles that were, for their participants, the center of creation—the invasions of Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans; the endless wars since—are placed against the determinedly bucolic and ordinary lives of our lead characters, living in undramatic late-twentieth-century England.

American fantasy writers struggle to do this as effectively. I have often wondered why this is. For a long time I wondered if it's because, with the exception of Native American religions and the Mormons, we do not have the Center of the Universe posited here by our religions. But I'm coming to wonder if it has more to do with the fact of fighting over land. The English are just as uncentered religiously: yes there's Canterbury, but the Holy Land is as religio-centric as it is here in North America.

No, I think the depth of people physically battling over land may be the key. There are few battlefields here in North America, and what there are are mostly framed as battles over principle rather than invasions. Really only Euro vs Native wars qualify in the same way as those repeated invasions of England, and those are a still a little crisply engraved in our cultural memory to work as the resonant underpinning to fiction, and the descendants of Europeans remain on the side of the Normans and the Vikings... the bad guy invader side. I wonder what it will take, in terms of action and the erosive quality of time, for us to get past the American equivalent of Ivanhoe-ish divisions.

Daddy Played the Banjo

The more I listen to the first song on Steve Martin's album The Crow, the more impressed I get. Concealed in an utterly banal little song about tradition and learning the banjo from elders is an almost koan-like reflection on how we invent ourselves, and even such eternals as hope and love, out of whole cloth.

The first three verses are sung straight, an idyllic recollection of a youth surrounded by the sounds of the narrator's father's music:

Daddy played the banjo, ‘neath the yellow tree.
It rang across the backyard, an old time melody.
I loved to hear the music; I was only five.
I listened as his fingers made the banjo come alive.

Sometimes I’d wake up at night, and hear a distant tune.
The banjo would echo, ‘round my childhood room.
I’d sneak down the back stairs—Daddy never knew.
I’d grab a broom and make believe, I was pickin’, too.

One day Daddy put my fingers down upon his fist.
He picked it with his other hand, we made the banjo ring;
Now the music takes me back, cross the yellow day.
To the summers with my Dad, and the tunes he made.

It's absolutely standard this-music-came-down-to-me-from-my-ancestors, justify-traditional-styles lyrics. You'll hear it in any modern musical style that somehow pays homage to pre-electronic styles... heck, you'll hear it in homages to "old-time rock and roll." The lyric that came to mind for me was John Denver's "Thank God I'm a Country Boy."

Then comes a bridge and the fourth verse:

But I’m just tellin’ lies ‘bout the things I did—
See I’m that banjo player who never had a kid.
Now I sit beneath that yellow tree.
Hopin’ that a kid somewhere, is listening to me.

Now, if you'll notice, verses 1-3 didn't say anything about the adult narrator and his kids. So his saying he never had kids doesn't show the first three verses as lies. So what's the lie? If he was sweepingly lying about his childhood—and if we take this to be Mr Martin's personal narration, which is of course a risk, then yes, it is made up; he first taught himself the banjo as a teenager and has learned it from friends and collagues since then—if he is lying, then this is supposed to be the "real truth" behind his banjo playing, that it's not about the past and where he learned it, it's about the audience. He hopes a kid will be listening to him.

Daddy played the banjo, ‘neath the yellow tree.
It rang across the backyard and wove a spell on me.
Now the banjo takes me back, through the foggy haze,
With memories of what never was, become the good old days.

The narrator repeats that initial idyllic vision and then closes with a variant on how music takes us back...it takes us back into an invented good old days. It creates nostalgia.

The whole song is performed with comforting old-time instrumentation, and a buttery, comforting vocal (not Martin's own kind of frenetic and always kind of snide vocal style). It's possible to glide right over the words. And in fact, while the words deconstruct the comforting past of folky musics, they also point to its appeal, and slide right into that appeal. The line about the performer sitting under the tree hoping a kid is listening to him, really get to the heart of this constructed fiction.

The point is, we who work in folk idioms (and as a morris dancer and sometimes singer I think of myself that way some of the time) are indeed constructing a fiction. But that fiction isn't about hagiography of country life for its own sake. It's to use comfort and selected older values as the basis for constructing our own lives and offering that to our audience. By calling up aspects of the "good old days" and bringing them into the present, we offer a gentle sort of critique. Why not dance and sing? Why not celebrate the seasons? Why not get closer to the food you eat? Why not listen to friends and family making music, and make some yourself? Here, it can be fun.

I'm reminded of Ray Bradbury's short story "The Toynbee Convector," in which a man invents a time machine, goes forward in time and comes back with a dazzling vision of the future, which the world starts getting behind, and eventually builds. As he nears the end of his life, the inventor reveals the whole thing was a fiction: no time machine, just a detailed model in his basement. But the earth bought it, and now has moved into that dazzling future anyway.

We receive some of our hope and love and Light from outside of ourselves, but we get to make some of it ourselves too. And we can do it out of whole cloth, like the kid from the suburbs who learned to play the banjo from a book and some records, and can construct a whole fictional past which we, too, buy. Mostly. The important bits, anyway.

Familiarity

Kate Stanley pointed to this lovely piece from the NY Times by Verlyn Klinkenborg. An excerpt:

The surprise wasn’t just being reoriented so abruptly. It was also discovering that an unfamiliar world lay a few dozen yards off a road I drive all the time. In a way, the unfamiliarity of that world has been eroded now by driving through it once.

The more I think about that seam between the familiar and the unfamiliar — and how it feels to pass from one to the other — the clearer it becomes that humans instinctively generate a sense of familiarity. You can sense it for yourself the next time you drive someplace you’ve never been before. Somehow, it always feels as though it takes longer to get there than it does to get back home again. It’s as if there’s a principle of relativity, a bending of time, in the very concept of familiarity. The road we know is always shorter than the road we don’t know — even if the distances are the same.

The Power of Place

Harm de Blij’s new book The Power of Place is one half of an argument that I already agreed with at the first paragraph. As such, it didn’t do much for me in terms of changing my view of the world. It is essentially a challenge to the view that globalization has made the world “flat.” (as in Thomas Friedman’s best-selling The World is Flat, a title Friedman acknowledges as hyperboly).

De Blij is a professor at Michigan State and a public advocate for geography—his previous book was Why Geography Matters... Not someting I like I needed to be persuaded of, but I gather there are a fair number of people who really do think geography really doesn’t matter, so good for him.

I was attracted, honestly, by the title, and I was disappointed to find that place itself and its power was not really described. There is no topography (in the old sense) here, no “sense of place.”

What this book is about is the importance of location. De Blij’s point is that regional variations in health, religion, language, exposure to natural hazards, etc. are huge determinants in your economic and physical well-being—quality of life. Well, to coin a phrase, duhhhh.

The piece that stuck out for me the most was his approach to religion. De Blij is not a religionist, and he picks out religious conservatism, especially conservative Islam, for particular critique. Now, I’m no fan of Wahhabi ideology (or of the fiery fundamentalism of any faith), but that this sticks so especially in his craw I think relates to of the weakness of the whole book: a limit in scale to his view. In cartographic terms, he never gets closer in than 1:100,000, and mostly he’s hovering above 1:1,000,000 (the scale of a US state road map). When he does zoom in, it’s for a few peculiarly impersonal snapshots, in particular a view of his native Netherlands from below sea level.

De Blij sees local conditions as trapping people, keeping them out of the benefits of a global marketplace. He fails to address seriously the appeal of localism: the way a close relationship with a place can yield an understanding and an attachment whose richness can more then counterbalance the economic benefits of mobility.

The appeal of religion is in the experience, the day-to-day living it. Same thing with place: the appeal is getting to know the place, learning to see it not as a ground to put your feet on, but as ground that supports you, as a thing itself. “Religion” itself is an “outside” word, as I think I’ve noted before.In the sense we and de Blij use it, it is a name for a system, like a state. When you live within it, it usually is not the state you are paying most attention to, it’s the places within that state. And it’s the visceral love for those places that politicians use to translate into love of country.

Religion has much the same dynamic as place: when it develops deep roots (and de Blij advocates keeping children from being “indoctrinated” until they are old enough to develop judgment), it ties people to itself with roots of habit, knowledge, and comfort. This becomes a “trap” only if the basis of the person’s attachment is a lie (e.g. a prophet who it turns out is a shyster who runs off to the Bahamas with all your money). The same imbalance holds when a person’s attachment to place is physically unsustainable—the heartbreak of resource-extraction economies forcing families to move once the resource is tapped out.

Where people are seemingly traped by their geography or religion, it is not the place or the spiritual life itself that is the problem usually, it is the socal construct built up around it. And unless we learn to respect the deep connections at the core of that construct, we will be approaching issues of global culture and its effect in as dark an ignorance as a madrassa student approaching a Western university or a hick visiting New York.

No Man's Land

We've tossed around word like "neutrality" and "arbitrariness" and "objectivity" on this blog a fair amount. I've been arguing that the value of "the Grid," the "neutral" framework on which we compile common knowledge of the world, is that it provides a pidgin, a non-native language of commerce. It provides common ground, so to speak.

The phrase "no man's land" popped into my head this morning, and I find it resonating.

What the phrase evokes most of all to me is the dreadful no-man's-lands of World War I, the muddy, bloody plains of death. No man's land is not a place to live in, it's a place to separate peoples who cannot live together. Instead of creating a shared space, it creates an unclaimed space. To be blunt, there is no love there.

I was trying to conjure up an alternative to the scientific, objectivist way of finding common ground, asking "what other common grounds are there?" The obvious one is personal contact. The way you make the stranger into a non-stranger is to spend time with him/her. Host and guest. Or neighbor and neighbor. Not that I really know my neighbors all that well, but communion can be achieved through common work, even among strangers.

The opposite of no man's land then is "the commons" where we all graze our livestock— "we" in this case meaning the shareholders of the commons. Not everyone everywhere, but everyone in the village, everyone working on the same project.

How does a no man's land become a commons? I think of this literally happening in the story of Christmas 1914 in the trenches of World War I, where the guns stopped and soldiers from opposite trenches met, traded songs and cigarettes and played soccer. The story brings tears to my eyes still, like the hopeful/exhausted refrain of the Decemberists' "Sons and Daughters": "here all the bombs fade away..." [actually the lyrics sheet says "Hear all the bombs, they fade away," but I hear otherwise] but that's another blog entry.

But to think of it, Christmas 1914 depended on the majority of soldiers sharing a common religion. They both celebrated Christmas, neither side wanted to be shooting when they would rather have been home with family. I'm guessing things would have been different if the Gallipoli campaign had happened in 1914. But no, a truce to allow clearing of bodies did happen. So sometimes you can appeal to commonality as a species.

No-man's-land implies the opposite of itself—territory. I need to do some studying about the evolution of modern ideas of property and territory, because they clearly aren't universal. Nomadic tribal societies, while they wanted to keep their own hunting grounds for themselves, did not allocate land to individual "owners." And many settled societies have had owners as equivalent to rulers (see lords and serfs). As small freeholdings became more common in Europe, how did the idea of territory change, and when did "commons" arise as an alternative to private property (or is that how it worked at all)? Like I said, I need to learn more. (I note with interest a reference in the wikipedia discussion page on the article Property to "Richard Schlatter's by now classic Private Property: The History of an Idea. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1951, or for a more current perspective Laura Brace's The Politics of Property. Edinburgh University Press, 2004")

So how do you get from no man's land to commons? And (to get back to the general theme of things here), where does the cool light of "objectivity" fit in? The question, I think is to what end neutrality is invoked. By itself, "neutral territory" can mean the no-man's land of World War I; or its cold modern alternative, the DMZ; or Switzerland, or the town common. Is the difference a matter of scale and dispute, or is there something else going on in the range of possibilities?

identity grid

I was walking around our building's First Thursday open studio, and in the back of my mind, as I chatted with artists of all stripes, was the question, "How and why do they call themselves artists?" Not in an insulting way, but honestly what makes them different? And the best answer I could come up with, is marketing. People generally buy art from artists, so if you want to make your living drrawing, painting, sculpting, ceramicizing, etc., then you need to call yourself an artist.

I think it's interesting how in the world of people who make things for money, you can divide their self-definitions two ways: definition by what sort of subject-matter they choose, and definition by what sort of medium they work in. In the arts, this means you're a portraitist or a painter; in graphic design it means you're a cartographer or a book designer; in writing it means you're a financial writer or a journalist.

In any of these examples, there are conventions, there is a sense of commonality of language and understanding when two or more people of like self-identity meet. The narrower the common self-definition (financial ceramicisists working in terracotta mergers and acquisitions), the more they will share a network of shared experience and understanding. And the closer they get to having the same experiences in their work, the better the chance that their conversation will move from "isn't that interesting what you're doing over there" to "don't poach my turf." When two people interested in the same things realize they're fighting for work the same clients. Or the same tenure committee. When one or both of them decide the town ain't big enough for both of them.

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I'm trying out the thesis developed in the discussion over the Grid (in cartographic terms), that the problem isn't in the gridding per se, its in the reimposition of that grid back on the subject. Does that apply to identity? I'm thinking of ongoing discussions in meeting about Quaker identity, but I think it applies to all identity groups: Is the problem less with the identity group and more with when the code which binds us is then reimposed back on us?

We human beings come up with structures, codes, grids, networks, any numbers of systems we lay our understandings of the world over the top of. Saying we shouldn't do that because systems end up dividing us is like saying we should stop using language because we'll be misunderstood.

We also like to form community (or better yet find community, because its easier) around identity, to be able to say "these are my people." And it seems sensible then to put these two together, and to codify what it is that brings us together. Maybe it's a hierarchy (I'm with you because of a feudal system, or because we're part of this family tree). Maybe it's a creed (I agree with enough of the planks in your platform, I'm in). Maybe it's just cultural clues (You like chicken? I like chicken!). Maybe it's a bunch of people who all know the same songs (I know I'm not the only one who had a near-religious experience at a Pete Seeger concert).

But...

The problem arises (I would submit) when we then look at the "official" set of common-identity markers, and judge ourselves (or worse, allow others in the group to judge us) based on our adherence to those markers. To make the Grid the marker of value, not the thing itself.

Home and Away

One of the defining moments in my pre-cartographic life was my first time in London (England) in 1983. I did a lot of wandering about, and had an old-fashioned Bartholomew’s map of the city (hand lettering and cross-hatching, spot colors, etc.). I took some longish walks exploring the city, and then would get out the map to see where I’d been. Because London is such an un-gridded city, I’d find myself approaching places I’d been before from new directions, and later, tracing my route on the map, I’d realize I’d sometimes been only a block or two from a previous day’s walk.

In this case, the map provided an obvious framework on which I “draped” my own experiences. I’ve found that for large-scale maps in general, this process of using the map as a common base for explorations makes places make sense—especially urban spaces (I’m not much of a wilderness walker).

To me this is central to what a map is good for, but it is of course only a small part of what maps do in the world: it only really happens using large-scale maps: maps of states and countries don’t have the sort of visual information that ties direct experiences together.

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Every so often these days, I’ll find myself approaching a familiar place from an unfamiliar direction, and I find the jump from one to the other to be a sudden change in attitude. When i drive through unfamiliar places, I pay attention to the generic: interstate highway signage, billboards, franchise stores. It makes me a little sad to see this generic quality, when I am interested in seeing something new and different; it makes me think a little of John Steinbeck’s rants against growing uniformity and generic-ness 50 years ago in Travels With Charley.

On the other hand, I see the same signage, billboards and franchise stores in my own back yard, and they seem simultaneously normal (they’re always there) and locally rooted (they’re landmarks, and they employ or otherwise have to do with my neighbors). A Burger King on the corner near my office closed earlier this year, and while I won’t miss it as a place to get food or as a neighborhood social hub, it was a little disturbing to see the marker of the corner of 18th and Central change.

My point is, depending on whether I’m home or away, my responses to these generic landmarks change. When I’m in unfamiliar territory, they are the only things familiar to me. And in fact when I’m on the road, I tend to seek out specific generic national brands for the sake of being reasonably sure of what I’m getting. When I’m on familiar turf, these generic brands are just part of a familiar landscape more shaped by my past experience and those of friends.

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Where am I going with this?

When I cross under an anonymous freeway bridge (and is there any other kind, really?), it makes a huge difference in my attitude if I can see in my mind’s eye that it’s a bridge I’ve crossed myself. It becomes a “home” experience. When it’s an unfamiliar road, all I see is the bridge; when it’s a familiar road, it becomes part of a mental map of the familiar.

I think of the experience of driving a new bypass on a formerly familiar route. The landmarks all look right, and then suddenly I’m seeing familiar places from the wrong angle, and then familiar places from elsewhere on my map, or features I’d never seen before.

This to me is where large-scale maps can be very useful. They let me make sense of new experiences like this, and ground them amongst my existing experience. I find it a kind of exciting thing to edit a map to show a new road alignment (call me weird) in part because it’s about a new experience of a familiar space.

But interestingly, those maps are themselves built of entirely generic graphic materials. So they can’t and don’t actually transmit local sense of place. They are all grammar and syntax, all the graphic equivalent of journalistic speech, without any sense of direct experience or personal lives lived. When I project my experience on them (as JB Harley did in his famous essay on an Ordnance Survey map of his former home town), I am essentially draping experience over a framework. This process is similar to the way I approach a new place via landmark, directional orientation, and street grid, and then build experience on top of that.

So what I think I am approaching here is a way of looking at maps that needs to incorporate more than the map itself. Studying cartography separate from experience, especially studying meaning and implicit content of maps, is like studying syntax and grammar and sentence structure without ever acknowledging one can be moved by literature.

Through the Looking Glass

When I was in college, I had some peculiar ideas. OK, to be honest I was a little nuts...too much time rattling around inside my own head. The summer between sophomore and junior year I spent working in England, and reading some wonderful but pretty intense books: Diana Wynne Jones’ The Homeward Bounders and Keri Hulmes’s The Bone People are the two that come to mind. The former is about Real Places and how they become and stay Real, the latter about center and periphery, home and away, saved self and lost self. I recommend them both (I should re-read Hulme; I don’t think I have in the intervening 20+ years).

At the end of the trip, I spent a memorable week out on Scarp, an island off the northwest end of the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides in Scotland. It’s a truly magical landscape, and I was particularly open to that magic. I wasn’t doing any formal meditation or anything, but there I was in a tent with the sheep and a few folks who had holiday houses out there. I mulled over questions of how I could find and be part of a Real Place; one of Jones’s points is that Real Places are made so through people being truly in them and loving them and caring for them; a viewpoint not dissimilar from The Velveteen Rabbit with all the treacly bits excised. An answer came to me there on Scarp: “I am real, I am here, I am myself.” Pretty basic stuff, but it was a good little mantra. Still is sometimes.

I wrote what was almost certainly a mad-sounding letter to Jones about all this, and received (after my return to the States) a kindly “calm down, it is just a novel” reply from her. And that exchange is really the point of this posting.

To approach it another way, I remember a session at the unfortunately now-defunct Fourth Street Fantasy Convention, a gathering of readers and writers in the fantasy genre. This would be in the early 1990’s. There was a session about “fantasy and religion,” and it became clear over the course of the session that there was a major divide in the group. People were being careful enough and polite enough that it never really became a full argument, but came close when one of the audience rose to ask about the relationship between the explicit cosmological content of the authors work, and the author’s personal religious beliefs. Diane Duane gave what I recall as a very well put response, noting that she was a pretty serious practicing Catholic. She does not believe in wizards or magic as practiced by the characters in her books. To paraphrase William Shatner in his famous Saturday Night Live skit, “It’s a show, guys. Get over it!”

To me this was kind of a revelation, because as a reader who did not interact with writers, I was working in a vacuum. Especially in literary genres where characters are looking at magic, hidden meanings, lost knowledge, etc., the line between fiction and non-fiction may be deliberately blurred for effect (see The Da Vinci Code, et al for similar effects in another genre). I was half-expecting that the writers of this stuff were themselves secretly, I don’t know, witches or something.

They aren’t. At least not as directly as I hoped or expected.

Writers and other creators of narrative forms have this problem all the time. Call it the Don Quixote effect: the writer urges readers through the narrative to open up their hearts to some transcendent quality: romance, wonder, courage, grace, etc. Readers do open themselves up, and are inspired. Readers then ascribe this opening to the work, and therefore to the authors, who must therefore be very wise indeed. But of course they are well-versed craftspeople, not warlocks/sages/prophets.

What the readers don’t realize is how everyday the process of creating the work feels to the creator. It’s a lot of fun and satisfying, sure, but the transcendent experience of reading the book is seldom reflected by a transcendent experience making it. Writers and other creators do talk about “characters writing themselves,” or about how “I am just a conduit for this stuff.” The religious ones praise their deity for the grace to turn this stuff out, the non-religious ones shrug and smile. But the creators also talk about the Butt-In-the-Chair principle, a corollary to Edison’s prescription that genius is 99% perspiration.

Which brings us back to the idea of frames. The construction of frames, whether literally in the visual arts or metaphorically in narrative arts, is a Butt-in-the-Chair craft and technique sort of process. Some of it is what fantasy writers call “world building,” and historical writers call “research,” learning/developing enough sense of the world within which the story will develop, that the writer feels comfortable having the characters hop around in it. This is important to remember; sometimes it feels to readers like the point of world-building/research is to create that world for their entertainment, but the point is usually to make a workspace for the writer to be able to comfortably work within.

This is why sitcoms are usually framed in such a limited number of spaces: the writers and actors can behave with much less inhibition-from-lack-of-knowledge when they know exactly where Archie Bunker keeps his keys and what time Meathead gets off work. And with this strong sense of “home,” they can feel free to introduce new characters and settings one at a time.
Next up: inspiration.