Sunday, November 28, 2010
Story Euphoria 7: Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen
It’s Thanksgiving weekend, and O. Henry lampoons Tradition and treats us to no less than two feasts, both of which must be, heroically, eaten by one man. Download and listen!
In case you are wondering about the Turkey Trust mentioned in the first paragraph, you can check out this New York Times article for a point of reference.
To read from The Trimmed Lamp, and other Stories of the Four Million for free, visit Project Gutenberg, or else borrow an O. Henry collection from your local library. Of course, you can always dress out your home library with a copy of your own:
Production Notes:
Creator: Amanda Haldy
Theme Music: Nye Nate by Roger Leighton
Incidental Music: Rag by David Alberto
The Perils of a Twist Ending
To be honest, I’m not a fan of twist endings. There are just too many things that can go wrong, like maybe it will be obvious from a mile away, or it’s the same cliché twist found in a hundred other stories, or it just doesn’t add anything to the story and is therefore anti-climactic. Those problems can potentially be avoided if the twist is inspired and clever, but even then there is a big risk: the story itself relies upon the sudden revelation at the end to inform all of the events that have come before, so the only pay off of reading the story is the twist and re-readability is zilch. In short, a good twist ending is hard to pull off and probably not worth it, so I doubt I would ever attempt one myself.
Twist endings and related varieties of dramatic ends were quite a bit more popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries. For example, it was more common to have your protagonist suddenly die or kill themselves in the last few paragraphs, perhaps because of a greater sense that ends really had to be final, whereas contemporary tastes not only find such conclusions melodramatic but are more apt to find satisfaction in stories that continue past the last pages of the manuscript, inviting our imaginations to linger upon them. Twist endings tend to feel as worn-out as last-page-protagonist-suicides, and I am hard-pressed to think of any authors who use them today—though there are probably a few out there.
However, there is a distinguished modern literary award that bears the name of perhaps the greatest twist-ending writer of them all: O. Henry. Because O. Henry incorporated a twist in the ending of basically every story he wrote, one almost wonders if some of the supposed unpredictability of the twist is compromised. Yet, while many people love O. Henry for just this very reason, I think what really makes him worth reading is his use of humor. Fortunately, there is more to his writing than the twist endings, which tend to work rather like the punch lines of jokes, and the characters he brings to life have an unpolished honesty and intimacy evocative of another American Everyman, Mark Twain.
What a fitting choice for America’s Thanksgiving weekend podcast story, when something as down-home and friendly O. Henry makes a proper addition to the comfort food on our tables. Of course, this story also comes with a patented twist ending. Do you think the ending works and adds to the story? Do you love twist endings and think I got it all wrong, or do you agree that such flourishes of the pen are all too fraught with peril?
Twist endings and related varieties of dramatic ends were quite a bit more popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries. For example, it was more common to have your protagonist suddenly die or kill themselves in the last few paragraphs, perhaps because of a greater sense that ends really had to be final, whereas contemporary tastes not only find such conclusions melodramatic but are more apt to find satisfaction in stories that continue past the last pages of the manuscript, inviting our imaginations to linger upon them. Twist endings tend to feel as worn-out as last-page-protagonist-suicides, and I am hard-pressed to think of any authors who use them today—though there are probably a few out there.
However, there is a distinguished modern literary award that bears the name of perhaps the greatest twist-ending writer of them all: O. Henry. Because O. Henry incorporated a twist in the ending of basically every story he wrote, one almost wonders if some of the supposed unpredictability of the twist is compromised. Yet, while many people love O. Henry for just this very reason, I think what really makes him worth reading is his use of humor. Fortunately, there is more to his writing than the twist endings, which tend to work rather like the punch lines of jokes, and the characters he brings to life have an unpolished honesty and intimacy evocative of another American Everyman, Mark Twain.
What a fitting choice for America’s Thanksgiving weekend podcast story, when something as down-home and friendly O. Henry makes a proper addition to the comfort food on our tables. Of course, this story also comes with a patented twist ending. Do you think the ending works and adds to the story? Do you love twist endings and think I got it all wrong, or do you agree that such flourishes of the pen are all too fraught with peril?
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Story Euphoria 6: Longhouse Stories
It’s American Indian Heritage Month, and seeing as how these nations have a rich oral tradition, Story Euphoria brings traditional storytelling to the forefront. Learn how Chipmunk got his stripes, why Rabbit has long ears and how Owl got such big eyes. Download and listen!
If you want more, check out this free online library of American Indian stories and legends.
Production Notes:
Creator: Amanda Haldy
Theme Music: Nye Nate by Roger Leighton
Incidental Music: Flight of the Arrows by Kathy Reynolds
Oral Origins
The Odyssey, as (presumably) created by Homer was composed primarily in dactyllic hexameter, which was very much the thing at the time. This means the lines of poetry had six beats each, with each measure being a triplet, so the rhythm would have been: BUM-da-da BUM-da-da, BUM-da-da, etc., wash and repeat. This might very well be musical in Greek, but in English the result tends to be awkward at best, or, as one anonymous translation reviewer put it, akin to “pumpkins rolling on a barn floor.”
So, over the years, translations of The Odyssey have taken strange forms, such as putting the tale in rhymed iambic pentameter, as George Chapman did in 1616 (which was very much the thing in his time), and though quite entertaining, it’s not considered very accurate to the original. In 1961, Robert Fitzgerald received wide acclaim for a translation that did away with attempts at rhythmic symmetry, casting Homer’s words into unrhymed poetry with lines of unequal length. Then there are plenty of translations that throw out poetry altogether, weaving the tale as a piece of prose. In fact, more than 24 translations of The Odyssey into English are available on the market. Would Homer recognize any of them as his own work?
This question is not just about what gets lost in translation. The epic ballad had to get written down in Greek before it could even be translated hundreds of years later into a tongue that didn’t even exist in Homer’s time. And in fact, the idea of fixing in print a story intended for oral performance, the presentation of which probably would have been tailored to the audience and the taste of the performer, would very likely seem alien or even ghastly to Homer and his contemporary bards. When the notion of putting information in writing first took root in Greece, with the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet, Socrates argued against it as a meaningless crutch that would seem to give students information without actually giving them knowledge. He believed discourse to be a far superior tool, describing it in dialog with Phaedrus as the “...living word of knowledge which has a soul and of which the written word is properly no more than an image...”
Nowadays we take writing for granted. Our society is surrounded and shaped by text, which is our primary means of storing information. Yet, for the bulk of human history, knowledge and culture were passed on orally through story and song, from teacher to student.
Few societies survive today that maintain an operating oral tradition, but interest in the oral packaging of information is more than a historical or anthropological side-track. A great deal of excitement has appeared over the past couple of decades as social scientists, communications experts and philosophers contemplate the future of the written word, some of whom predict that writing is on the way out to be replaced by oral tradition 2.0—a heady cocktail of sound and image-based hyper-media accessible through the internet, wireless devices and even chips implanted in our brains that allow us to communicate telepathically (yes, this has been done).
At first glance, the way we store and transmit information may not seem to matter, so long as the information is transmitted. However, since Marshall McLuhan first argued that “the medium is the message,” an increasing number of communications theorists and historians, such as Elizabeth Eisenstein and Dene Grigar, have suggested that the way we handle information has more impact on our society and culture than the information itself. This can be explored by studying the impact of writing on society, which Leonard Shlain argues in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess gave rise to patriarchy over mother-goddess traditions by favoring word-signs over image-signs. Another example is the fascinating transformative power of the printing press on everything from national economies to religious reform. If this train of thought interests you, I highly recommend William Sonn’s book on the subject, Paradigms Lost: The Life and Deaths of the Printed Word
.
If we truly are headed to a revival of oral and audio-based information fluency, what might our society be like in the future? Will the written word become an obsolete technology, or will it continue to coexist with the new, being incorporated in unforeseen ways, as most old technologies do? As we contemplate these questions, let’s take another look at the oral tradition of storytelling. This week’s podcast features two American Indian stories told the traditional way—completely from memory. Because human memory is imperfect and limited, there has been a tendency in modern Western culture to look at oral information as inferior to text, which maintains fixity. Yet because of this same quality, I suspect orally-oriented cultures are more comfortable with change and improvisation.
So, if contemplating the death of the written word pierces you with the cold dagger of dread and dystopia, it may be a result of text-based socialization. We are a product of our time and place, and perhaps the stories of the future would seem as bizarre to us as Fitzgerald’s translation of The Odyssey would seem to Homer. Change is inevitable; the real question is whether the change will maximize benefit to civilization, and how much we can do to insure it does. On that note, I also recommend taking a look at the work of Marshall McLuhan:
So, over the years, translations of The Odyssey have taken strange forms, such as putting the tale in rhymed iambic pentameter, as George Chapman did in 1616 (which was very much the thing in his time), and though quite entertaining, it’s not considered very accurate to the original. In 1961, Robert Fitzgerald received wide acclaim for a translation that did away with attempts at rhythmic symmetry, casting Homer’s words into unrhymed poetry with lines of unequal length. Then there are plenty of translations that throw out poetry altogether, weaving the tale as a piece of prose. In fact, more than 24 translations of The Odyssey into English are available on the market. Would Homer recognize any of them as his own work?
This question is not just about what gets lost in translation. The epic ballad had to get written down in Greek before it could even be translated hundreds of years later into a tongue that didn’t even exist in Homer’s time. And in fact, the idea of fixing in print a story intended for oral performance, the presentation of which probably would have been tailored to the audience and the taste of the performer, would very likely seem alien or even ghastly to Homer and his contemporary bards. When the notion of putting information in writing first took root in Greece, with the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet, Socrates argued against it as a meaningless crutch that would seem to give students information without actually giving them knowledge. He believed discourse to be a far superior tool, describing it in dialog with Phaedrus as the “...living word of knowledge which has a soul and of which the written word is properly no more than an image...”
Nowadays we take writing for granted. Our society is surrounded and shaped by text, which is our primary means of storing information. Yet, for the bulk of human history, knowledge and culture were passed on orally through story and song, from teacher to student.
Few societies survive today that maintain an operating oral tradition, but interest in the oral packaging of information is more than a historical or anthropological side-track. A great deal of excitement has appeared over the past couple of decades as social scientists, communications experts and philosophers contemplate the future of the written word, some of whom predict that writing is on the way out to be replaced by oral tradition 2.0—a heady cocktail of sound and image-based hyper-media accessible through the internet, wireless devices and even chips implanted in our brains that allow us to communicate telepathically (yes, this has been done).
At first glance, the way we store and transmit information may not seem to matter, so long as the information is transmitted. However, since Marshall McLuhan first argued that “the medium is the message,” an increasing number of communications theorists and historians, such as Elizabeth Eisenstein and Dene Grigar, have suggested that the way we handle information has more impact on our society and culture than the information itself. This can be explored by studying the impact of writing on society, which Leonard Shlain argues in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess gave rise to patriarchy over mother-goddess traditions by favoring word-signs over image-signs. Another example is the fascinating transformative power of the printing press on everything from national economies to religious reform. If this train of thought interests you, I highly recommend William Sonn’s book on the subject, Paradigms Lost: The Life and Deaths of the Printed Word
. If we truly are headed to a revival of oral and audio-based information fluency, what might our society be like in the future? Will the written word become an obsolete technology, or will it continue to coexist with the new, being incorporated in unforeseen ways, as most old technologies do? As we contemplate these questions, let’s take another look at the oral tradition of storytelling. This week’s podcast features two American Indian stories told the traditional way—completely from memory. Because human memory is imperfect and limited, there has been a tendency in modern Western culture to look at oral information as inferior to text, which maintains fixity. Yet because of this same quality, I suspect orally-oriented cultures are more comfortable with change and improvisation.
So, if contemplating the death of the written word pierces you with the cold dagger of dread and dystopia, it may be a result of text-based socialization. We are a product of our time and place, and perhaps the stories of the future would seem as bizarre to us as Fitzgerald’s translation of The Odyssey would seem to Homer. Change is inevitable; the real question is whether the change will maximize benefit to civilization, and how much we can do to insure it does. On that note, I also recommend taking a look at the work of Marshall McLuhan:
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Story Euphoria 5: Rothschild's Fiddle
This week’s podcast features a man who is hardly the sort you’re likely to invite over for tea. Yakov is a coffin maker whose existence is perpetuated—as well as tortured—by the losses he sees all around him. Anton Chekhov was a master at capturing the harsh and ironic voices of the Russian peasantry, and this is certainly the case in Rothschild’s Fiddle. Download and listen!
If you would like to read the same text I used, check it out at Project Gutenberg. Otherwise consider your local library, or snag a collection of Chekhov’s tales for yourself:
Production Notes:
Creator: Amanda Haldy
Theme Music: Nye Nate by Roger Leighton
Incidental Music: Gotta Go by Wicker Basket
We Wouldn't Be Friends
The first week of Story Euphoria looked at how stories slip us into the skins of others, including people we might not like very much. There’s a certain breed of character with whom, realistically, it’s hard to identify, and yet writers get us to sympathize with them anyway, sometimes against our will. In fact, writing from the point of view of an unlikeable character has been a popular ruse since the birth of modern literature and one does not need to cast far to find examples.
Even in the pre-dawn of modern literature we can find examples, with characters like the overly-ambitious Faust, willing to sell his soul for knowledge and power, or Shakespeare’s complex and tragic Othello who, when tricked into believing his wife adulterous, murders her. As the novel matured as a literary form, more contemporary types emerged, like Dostoyevsky’s young and impoverished protagonist, Raskolnikov, who early in the novel, Crime and Punishment, murders an old woman, which deed becomes the catalyst for the rest of the book. A more lighthearted example could be Emma, from Jane Austen’s novel of the same name, who is about as self-satisfied and self-interested as young ladies come, and hardly a good friend—until she matures. Notably, Emma is a character who, as Austen herself put it, "no-one but myself will much like,” and a great deal of our entertainment comes from watching Emma get her comeuppance.
But not all authors are so obliging. While many unlikeable characters do transform during the course of the story in some way that makes us more inclined to sympathize, there are plenty of others who remain ambiguous, or whose crimes are so distasteful that little could ever be done to exonerate them. An excellent example might be Humbert Humbert, the pedophiliac and murderous narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. For some readers, this is enough to make them give up on a book, but others are more easily swayed by the author’s plot devices or pretty narrative, and indeed, in Nabokov’s hands, Humbert’s tale is full of hypnotic poetry—as he jokingly admits in the first page, “you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”
Indeed, what makes us put up with these despicable people with whom, if they weren’t confined to fiction, we probably wouldn’t be friends? Is beautiful execution and brilliant authorship alone to blame? One theory is that such characters make us feel superior, and an opposite theory is that we feel secretly relieved that we are not alone with the darkness inside us. But I’m not sure I buy those explanations. When I find myself in the shoes of an unlikeable character I am most captured by the sheer variety of the human spectrum. It is a psychological fascination. Watching such characters may be akin to watching a dissection—gruesome, fascinating and revealing.
Even in the pre-dawn of modern literature we can find examples, with characters like the overly-ambitious Faust, willing to sell his soul for knowledge and power, or Shakespeare’s complex and tragic Othello who, when tricked into believing his wife adulterous, murders her. As the novel matured as a literary form, more contemporary types emerged, like Dostoyevsky’s young and impoverished protagonist, Raskolnikov, who early in the novel, Crime and Punishment, murders an old woman, which deed becomes the catalyst for the rest of the book. A more lighthearted example could be Emma, from Jane Austen’s novel of the same name, who is about as self-satisfied and self-interested as young ladies come, and hardly a good friend—until she matures. Notably, Emma is a character who, as Austen herself put it, "no-one but myself will much like,” and a great deal of our entertainment comes from watching Emma get her comeuppance.
But not all authors are so obliging. While many unlikeable characters do transform during the course of the story in some way that makes us more inclined to sympathize, there are plenty of others who remain ambiguous, or whose crimes are so distasteful that little could ever be done to exonerate them. An excellent example might be Humbert Humbert, the pedophiliac and murderous narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. For some readers, this is enough to make them give up on a book, but others are more easily swayed by the author’s plot devices or pretty narrative, and indeed, in Nabokov’s hands, Humbert’s tale is full of hypnotic poetry—as he jokingly admits in the first page, “you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”
Indeed, what makes us put up with these despicable people with whom, if they weren’t confined to fiction, we probably wouldn’t be friends? Is beautiful execution and brilliant authorship alone to blame? One theory is that such characters make us feel superior, and an opposite theory is that we feel secretly relieved that we are not alone with the darkness inside us. But I’m not sure I buy those explanations. When I find myself in the shoes of an unlikeable character I am most captured by the sheer variety of the human spectrum. It is a psychological fascination. Watching such characters may be akin to watching a dissection—gruesome, fascinating and revealing.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Story Euphoria 4: Daughters of the Late Colonel
After the death of their father, Josephine and Constantia must contend with a household haunted by the decades of their lives spent devoted to his care. Even more perplexing than this untrustworthy world, in which they are confined and embattled in the viewpoint of the colonel's children, the two women are confronted with the impossible question of what comes next. Download and listen to The Daughters of the Late Colonel, by Katherine Mansfield!
Production Notes:
Creator: Amanda Haldy
Theme Music: Nye Nate by Roger Leighton
Incidental Music: Emil Waldteufel’s The Skater’s Waltz by Trick T Olly
More Than Words Can Say
It’s been said that writing a story is the art of trying to put into words that which cannot be put into words. This thing which cannot be put into words is often summed up with the pat phrase, “the human condition,” and capturing this condition is the artist’s constant labor. The big, foggy idea of the experience of humanness, in turn, comprises a number of slippery notions such as mortality, love, confusion, joy and, well, a lot of things that are hard to put into words. In fact, the words I just listed don’t mean a whole lot. Words like “love” and “mortality” feel especially worn thin: flimsy. They don’t hold.
So what is it that takes hold of us when we read a compelling story? What makes a story live? Is it the theme of the story? One way of identifying a story's theme is to look for a pattern of bright images throughout the story, pictures that keep cropping up or changing as the climax mounts. These images work their way into our subconscious and we translate the story using the lexicon of our own life experiences to give meaning to the imagery.
Of course, the theme of a story would not impact us as soundly if we did not get wrapped up in the events of the story itself, and the characters that populate it, so these elements must excite our imagination and sympathy. Also, the way a writer chooses to tell a story may be more effective in some cases than in others, either engaging our senses in the story’s world…or not. Ideally: The poetry of the story’s language plays like sunlight over the waters of our senses, illuminating surprising depths.
Honestly, it’s hard to isolate the various aspects of craft that turn a story from a mere collection of words into a work of art. The easy answer would be to say that all of those things I mentioned above (and more) are necessary if a story is to bash us over the head and grab us by the heart—in a good way, of course. Yet, there is no denying that some stories have a more lasting impression than others, and some stories speak to us more loudly than others. If you are following Story Euphoria, chances are, right now you are carrying around inside you precious stories that have shaped your life and the way you see the world.
We are treading murky waters now. We have entered the realms of dream and myth. There are no concise answers, no literary terminology that explains this mystery. Yet this mystery is perhaps the greatest power that can define a “good story”—that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts—and to impart such a power is no doubt the ultimate ambition of all who create stories.
In one way or another, this mystery is at the heart of all we explore at Story Euphoria. What makes a story come alive for you? What are some of your favorite stories, and how do they express “that which cannot be put into words?” Fortunately, we live in a world brimming with powerful stories, and one such I share with you today. Katherine Mansfield’s The Daughters of the Late Colonel is a tale that sneaks up on you and strikes when you least expect it—delightful, funny, compelling and surprisingly vast for a story told from such limited perspective: Through Josephine and Constantia, Mansfield speaks to us all, placing her finger on that awkward little something inside us so commonly called “the human condition.”
If you want more Mansfield, read from the text I used at Project Gutenberg, or fetch a collection of her stories for yourself from your local library. You can also buy a copy you’ll be sure to return to time and again over the years:
So what is it that takes hold of us when we read a compelling story? What makes a story live? Is it the theme of the story? One way of identifying a story's theme is to look for a pattern of bright images throughout the story, pictures that keep cropping up or changing as the climax mounts. These images work their way into our subconscious and we translate the story using the lexicon of our own life experiences to give meaning to the imagery.
Of course, the theme of a story would not impact us as soundly if we did not get wrapped up in the events of the story itself, and the characters that populate it, so these elements must excite our imagination and sympathy. Also, the way a writer chooses to tell a story may be more effective in some cases than in others, either engaging our senses in the story’s world…or not. Ideally: The poetry of the story’s language plays like sunlight over the waters of our senses, illuminating surprising depths.
Honestly, it’s hard to isolate the various aspects of craft that turn a story from a mere collection of words into a work of art. The easy answer would be to say that all of those things I mentioned above (and more) are necessary if a story is to bash us over the head and grab us by the heart—in a good way, of course. Yet, there is no denying that some stories have a more lasting impression than others, and some stories speak to us more loudly than others. If you are following Story Euphoria, chances are, right now you are carrying around inside you precious stories that have shaped your life and the way you see the world.
We are treading murky waters now. We have entered the realms of dream and myth. There are no concise answers, no literary terminology that explains this mystery. Yet this mystery is perhaps the greatest power that can define a “good story”—that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts—and to impart such a power is no doubt the ultimate ambition of all who create stories.
In one way or another, this mystery is at the heart of all we explore at Story Euphoria. What makes a story come alive for you? What are some of your favorite stories, and how do they express “that which cannot be put into words?” Fortunately, we live in a world brimming with powerful stories, and one such I share with you today. Katherine Mansfield’s The Daughters of the Late Colonel is a tale that sneaks up on you and strikes when you least expect it—delightful, funny, compelling and surprisingly vast for a story told from such limited perspective: Through Josephine and Constantia, Mansfield speaks to us all, placing her finger on that awkward little something inside us so commonly called “the human condition.”
If you want more Mansfield, read from the text I used at Project Gutenberg, or fetch a collection of her stories for yourself from your local library. You can also buy a copy you’ll be sure to return to time and again over the years:
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