See the Movie or Read the Book First?

The holiday season is coming up fast with its compliment of "prestige" films, those high-budget, critic-favored movies all aimed to become Oscar bait.  That's fine, but since a lot of prestige pictures are based on written works, some readers face an unusual quandary.  When a book-based picture comes out, which should you do first: read the book or see the movie?  Or, if you love one of these, should you even look at the other?

I found out how hard that question was long before I grew up.  Somewhere around age 9, I discovered Dodie Smith's book, The Hundred and One Dalmatians.  To say I fell in love with the tale is a gross understatement: I re-read it so often, I could recite whole pages of it from memory.  So I should have loved the Disney adaptation, right?  Wrong!  I couldn't stand the picture because it altered key parts of the original story and removed the comfortably British narrative voice.  I went home swearing at the film industry in general and Disney in particular for trashing a classic.  I believed no movie would ever respect a book.

Flash forward 25 years or so.  I'm still a fan of British lit. but, there some books I won't touch, like Howards End.  I heard the book was difficult and dull so I avoided it on principle. It took the beautiful 1992 film adaptation to open my eyes. Even after falling in love with the picture, I was a bit unsure about the book.  Given the usual film-adaptations, would I like the original story?  Little did I know that Merchant-Ivory, that film's production company, was known for their sensitive treatment of original material.  Howard's End remains one of my all-time faves on the screen and the page.

The truth is, some movie adaptations of stories work while others don't .  Film is a visual medium that makes some story-telling easier but it requires light and movement to keep the audience interested. Watching somebody think is dull.  And while words only require a reader's imagination, every reader's vision can't be incorporated into a film adaptation.  So it's your choice to read the book or see the movie first/  Just be prepared to accept the two versions may have nothing in common beyond the title.

Please, I need a Favor from You

Two years ago I started writing "The Stories that Follow You Home" also known as "The Istoriaphile's Corner."  It's been fun to write about stories so full of thought and meaning that they 've found a home in my soul.  Still, I have to admit that's not the reason I started this blog.  I began this because (deep breath) I wrote a book.

A bit more than two years ago, I decided to write a story about a pair of constantly squabbling sisters. This was something I knew about because my sis and I fought all the way through childhood and I wanted to see what it takes for a pair of warring siblings to cooperate and appreciate each other. I called my book The Plucky Orflings and it's taken me almost as long to finish as it took me and my sis to stop fighting but now it's ready for an agent to look at it. The problem is, I learned, that having a manuscript isn't enough for an aspiring writer now.  To get published, you need a built-in audience.

Publishers and agents don't take many chances on the books that they send to market these days. Between e-books and e-booksellers, many of their traditional customers have disappeared and business is very tight. So, most of them aren't interested in publishing a book until a prospective author can show them there's already a bunch of interested customers, or followers.  And if I self-publish, I still need to know who might want to buy it.  All of which brings me to today's request.

If you look to the right-hand side of this post, you'll see something that says, "Subscribe if you want a spot in the Istoriaphile's Corner."  If you fill this out and submit it, you'll become a follower and I'll be a step closer to getting my book published.  Being a follower doesn't obligate you to buy anything (including my book) and no one will see your name there except me.  And I promise I will only write to you when I have information or news relating to my work. But wait, as the commercial says, there is more.

If you've read my blog, you know I think about nature almost as much as I think about books.  To me, some books even go with the seasons.  So I've created a pretty register of the books I love that match or adapt to each season and I've illustrated it with some of my best photos.  If you become a follower of mine, you'll get a copy of my register in return.  

So, what do you say?  Help an aspiring author out and get something in return?  I sure would appreciate it.  And it might help The Plucky Orflings get into print.

When a Play Turns the World Upside Down

For most people believe plays are just another form of entertainment. An audience goes to a theatre and pays for the actors to entertain them. If the performance is acceptable, the company is praised with applause.  That's a fairly simple transaction but it's also a limiting one.  Theatre, great theatre does more than make people happy, it makes them think.  This would upset the audiences who only want to be entertained, if many of them hadn't learned to watch a play while ignoring what it has to say.  Then, a play like Ibsen's "A Doll's House" appears with meaning that can't be ignored and the world turns upside down.

The world of Europe in the 1800's could safely be described as belonging to men.  Males held most of the money and power and almost all of the "good" jobs. (Even a monarch like Queen Victoria had substantially limited power.) Women were expected to be decorative, passive guests in mens' lives. Enter Nora Helmer, a little woman with a big, serious secret.  Years ago when her father was ill and her husband close to death, she took matters in her own hands. She illegally borrowed the money needed to heal her husband and she's been scrimping and scrounging to pay off the balance ever since. Unfortunately, a man who knows about her crime was just fired by her husband and he's blackmailing Nora to get him his job back.

If this story happened these days, how would it play out?  Nora might get a slap on the wrist from a judge but since she's kept up the payments, the penalty probably would be light.  Her husband might be grateful to wife who found a way to save his life. He might even admire how she repaid much of loan without while caring for him and the children.  Well, that might be the situation today but it wasn't in the 1870's.  Ibsen based his play on a friend of his who fell into the same situation.  When that lady's husband found out what happened, he filed for divorce and had her committed to the insane asylum.

Claire Bloom as Nora in
this 1973 Production

A Doll's House turns out both better and worse than real life. Nora's husband, Torvald, finds out about the deception and declares their marriage is over. When the blackmailer has a change of heart, Torvald changes his mind, still insisting Nora's actions weren't desperate or heroic but just one of those things dumb women do.  Nora realizes their life has been based on assumptions: Torvald's belief that his wife is a child and her hope that if he saw her as the adult that she is, he'd love what he saw. Reality kills both the assumptions and the marriage and she leaves him at the end of the play, slamming, as one critic said, "a door that reverberated across Europe."

To say A Dolls House became a pop culture phenomenon is like saying Noah got a bit wet.  It was the scandal of the age with actresses refusing to play the part as written and people fighting about the play over dinner. Nora was praised or condemned in the papers and from the pulpit and, for all the fuss she caused, you would think she had killed a real man instead of leaving a fictional one.  In a way, her character killed something worse; she murdered people's assumptions about their own lives.

So "A Doll's House" became a classic and part of feminist literature but that understanding of the play is too narrow. Ibsen's play resounds in any time and place where one part of humanity fails to recognize the human dignity of another. In the end, it doesn't matter if we are male or female, gay or straight, and any shade of the rainbow; we are all human with the same capacities to love, need and strive. To discount those capacities or assume they don't exist because of what makes us different, creates a wall of dangerous assumptions between each of us.  Until, of course, another play comes around that shoots down those assumptions. Then the world turns upside down.

Do You Write in Your Books?

I still remember the first time I saw it.  I was browsing through a used book store and re-reading The Great Gatsby for pleasure, (hey, you have your pleasures, I have mine) when I saw it at the end of Chapter three.  

Someone had underlined the last sentence in the paragraph and drawn a star beside it at the end. They wrote in a book.  A book full of someone else's words.  I wasn't aware people did that.

Not that my family tried to safeguard our books; you can't safeguard possessions you love and use daily. Our books were tattooed with coffee-cup stains, dog-eared and limp with wear.  A few loved storybooks suffered with fractured spines and key pages had to be turned carefully.  We were hard on the books we loved, but we never wrote on their pages.

I bought the used book, partly because I love the story  and partly because I was curious about the previous owner's additions.  The check marks and dashes seemed like someone else's coded commentary that expanded my vision of the story.  I wanted to decipher the code.

I never quite succeeded in that but I learned why some folk annotate text: they tell you to do this in school.  In high school, teachers encouraged us to highlight or underline key points and by college, the rumor was used text books were better because the previous owner had already done the highlighting.  By the way, this only works if the original owner marks the correct passages.  

And that's the issue of annotated text: if the extra comment makes a reasonable point. I hated seeing a beautiful descriptive passage marked with a vertical line and then dismissed with the written comment "B.S."  That has no place in Madame Bovary.  

But text annotation continues, even into electronic texts.  Kindle has an option of seeing where other readers annotated their copies of your book and lets you read their commentary.  Sometimes the comments are thoughtful and succinct; sometimes they're verbal graffiti.  Like reading the comments on an internet article, at best it's a mixed bag

So no, I don't usually write in my books, and I don't like most of what other folks add. But I make one big exception to that rule.  It's not hard to  guess what that is.

Unpredictable Mary Chase

Once upon a time a woman named Mary decided to write a play.  A war was going on at that time and many people were sad so Mary wanted to make them laugh.  Now Mary knew something about writing and she'd written plays before but she had a hard time writing this comedy. Not only is it hard to make people laugh when they're sad, it's hard to find time to write when you're raising three boys and freelancing to bring in a paycheck. (Mary's other plays had not been successful.) So in the evenings, when her boys were asleep, Mary scribbled away at her story.  It was an unusual tale about a gentle man named Elwood who turns his conventional town upside down when he insists his best friend is a Celtic spirit, or pooka.  A pooka that looks like a rabbit.  A six-foot-three, tie-wearing rabbit. 

Mary spent the next two years perfecting her play.  She read it aloud to anyone who would listen and rewrote it at least 50 times.  (Plays are as tricky as chemistry experiments; one mistake can make the whole thing explode.)  Eventually, a producer read her play, and liked it enough to have it performed on Broadway.  Then, fate intervened: people loved Mary's play and turned it into a hit.  It ran for years, became a movie and got Mary the Pulitzer Prize. Now she had people who believed in her and enough money to write full-time. The only problem was everyone wanted more funny stories about gentle people, must like her hit play, Harvey.  Mary wanted to write something else.

Ten years later, (though still decades ago) Mary began to write a children's book.  This tale also had a Celtic spirit but the gentle, kind hero was gone.  In his place stood Maureen Swanson, a grade-school bully that nobody likes.  Maureen is a disrespectful liar and thief but she's not really brave. Nevertheless, Maureen  usually gets her way until she crosses the Messerman sisters, women who are cold-hearted, powerful and evil. Our bully is completely outclassed.

Fifteen years passed before Mary published the story of Maureen and the wicked Messerman sisters and when it came out it was not a hit.  It was not surprising since this story had no laughs and  people want to cheer the hero and boo the villain, where they're not laughing.  No one could believe this scary storywas written by the woman who created Harvey.

But Mary's two stories have one other thing in common; they look at what makes people change. Elwood's conventional family finally become more tolerant when they realize Elwood's eccentricities are part of what make him so kind.  Decent treatment won't persuade the rotten Maureen so she has to learn the hard way that there is always someone stronger and meaner.  Is there a bigger meaning? I'm not sure except never to try to predict or control what a good writer will come up with next.  Just hang on and enjoy the ride.

When your Book Pusher Blocks Your Review

Now I have no use for trolls, whether they live under the bridge or on-line.  My darling passive-aggressive mom taught me to be polite or silent, even if that meant biting my tongue.  So, I never thought I'd be blocked as a troll for telling the truth.  But then I reckoned without the World's Largest Book Pusher.

WLBP started mainlining me books back when the dot-com revolution was in force.  First I was a regular patron, then a "1-click" shopper and an early participant in their on-line review program. WLBP and I both were happy.  I got a lifeline of books and WLBP got my money.  Then Sandra Worth's Love & War had to appear.

Love and War is another historical novel based on the War of the Roses.  Now, I became a fan of the losing side of that war before I learned to drive so I tend to scoop up any book on the subject, non-fiction or otherwise.  This one promised to focus on John Neville, one of the supporting players.  Off I go through the pages, happy as a lark until I hit a passage where Neville is writing home to his wife.

"Tomorrow we give battle.  Lest I be unable to write you again, I send you this missive so you may know my thoughts when I am no more."

Wait a minute.  I knew those lines.  I had heard those rhythmic sentiments  before.  I glanced back at the text.  It was a moving testament of love; a soldier's realization of all that he would lose if he died in an upcoming battle.  Then Neville wished that he and his wife would both live to see their son grown "to honorable knighthood" and I recognized the real source of those words.

That moving passage actually was written by a soldier, but not one in the War of the Roses.  It was written by Major Sullivan Ballou of Rhode Island a week before he died at Bull Run. Ken Burns featured the letter in his Civil War series and I wept the first time I heard it. Now, here were his phrases, word for word, in some misbegotten, romance set in the Middle Ages!

I spent the next hour creating a reader's review on the book saying what I thought of Ms. Worth's plagiarism.  I cited sources and dates and prepared a comparison of the two letters with highlighted copied phrases. I admitted Ms. Worth hadn't broken the law; Major Ballou's letter was in the public domain and she could copy it whenever she liked. Still, it's lazy writing and dishonest to claim another's work as your own and it's despicable to steal the eloquent last words of a soldier. I thought potential customers should be aware of these flaws before they bought the book.  The computer servers in World's Largest Book Pusher disagreed.

I submitted my review but it failed to appear, the only time that has happened. After five minutes of waiting, I assumed the computer hit a glitch and started rewriting my essay, furious but sure I was right.  I submitted again, after saving the text of my essay. Again, my commentary disappeared. I rebooted, and checked everything worked before submitting the essay a third time. My other reviews were uploaded immediately but my Love and War review was apparently blocked. I started to get the message.

Now, if I submit a review to the World's Largest Book Pusher, I remember to be direct and bland. I don't want to be voted off the island.  If that happens, I'll have to move to the underside of some bridge and hang out with the other trolls. 

Finding A Room with a View

The idea of travel always seems attractive, doesn't it?  To leave behind our humdrum, everyday world and enjoy life as a tourist.  To picture ourselves in an exotic environment and perhaps, be transformed by our time in that place?  Fortunes have been made over the years in books on this subject: A Year in Provence; Eat, Pray, Love and Under the Tuscan Sun are just three examples. But the fact is, wherever we go, we take ourselves with us and most travelers come back home.  Lucy Honeychurch would be the first person to tell you that.

Lucy is one of those Edwardian, English girls who will tell you real travel isn't the flight of fancy you'd imagine.  She's supposedly on this trip to Italy, to pick up some of the culture and sophistication of the continent but she hardly allowed within speaking distance of anyone truly Italian.  Her irritating, old-maid cousin is always at her side, the hotel's land-lady has a cockney accent and all the other guests there are English as well.  To make things worse, the reservations got mixed up and she didn't get A Room With a View.

That's the opening situation in E. M Forster's story of what travel can and can't do.  Lucy is a young woman at the edge of adulthood, about to make life-changing choices.  Her cousin and other guests sense it, potential reveals itself when she plays the piano.  And all of these good people want her to make the right choices so they try and limit her exposure to the bits of Italy they approve of.  But, fate and travel sometimes circumvent the very best-intentioned limits.

Despite her guided tours and chaperone, Lucy witnesses chaos and romance while she's in Florence and she retreats to England, ready to marry the deeply pretentious Cecil Vyse.  (Great name for a silly man, right?) Fate and nature still have a few tricks up their sleeve and Lucy eventually will choose whether she wants the kind of life she's seen others live or a future that feels right for her.

This sweet tale has been adapted to film a few times, most memorably in 1986 (Have 30 years gone by that fast?) by the Merchant-Ivory company.  While I never recommend a film adaptation over a book, this is a beautiful accessory if you want a video version of the story.

Maybe we don't always have an opportunity to travel.  And travel may not always change our lives. But a good travel story can still open our eyes and give us a break from everyday life.  And in fiction, we always get A Room With A View.

An Intimidating English Teacher

He was in my very first high school class, a wiry, little guy behind a lectern, with gravity-defying hair and feverish-looking eyes. He wasn't much taller than the lectern and it probably weighed more than he did.  The stranger stared at us briefly before introducing himself as Mr. S___, taking the roll and passing out Literature text books.  "Another first-year teacher," I thought with dismay,"this class will eat him alive."  Then the little man barked out an order and half the class jumped. For a small man, this guy's voice was loud. "Mr. So-and-So" he boomed at one of the better-behaved boys in class, "What have you got there?  Bring it to me."  The poor kid named slunk his way toward the front of the class while I cowered in my seat and revised my opinion of the instructor. This guy would control the class but I didn't like him and doubted if I'd learn much from him either. Little did I know I was facing the greatest teacher I've ever meet.

Mr. S. taught my favorite subject, English, but I never would have told him something that personal. The man was far too intimidating.  We were in an era when teachers were supposed to relax a little and relate to the kids but Mr. S. didn't get the memo.  Instead he barked out remarks and questions in class and when he grinned at us from behind his lectern, he looked like a wolf eyeing his prey.  He admitted to having daily debates with the "fun" English instructor in school about which was the better teaching tool, trust or fear. Mr. S. held out for fear and it worked; he scared the spit out of me.

Sophomore collection of short stories.
Does my high school still want it back?

Funny thing was, this strange little guy taught an interesting class.  For one thing, he got us to think about what we read. Instead of focusing on terms like "protagonist" and "plot", Mr. S. forced us to identify the ideas in stories and then debate those with him in class. Some of those ideas had obvious answers, like, "What would you rather have, security or freedom?" Mr. S. always took the contrary side of an issue like this and, as I recall, he always won the debates. When we insisted Americans preferred freedom, he'd point out the ways our society had opted for security instead. Keeping up in his class meant using your wits and even the most disinterested students started getting involved.  Then, he taught us how to listen.

Sometime in my sophomore year, I began to get irritated over the "less-than-excellent" grades I earned in his class.  I wasn't interested in keeping a high GPA but it irked me to get "Bs" in one of the few subjects I usually aced. So, when written tests were given, I tried to write great essays, scouring meaning out of the text and paragraphs out of my soul.  Then I'd get another B and someone else's answer would be read out in class. I sweated blood over the next essay test... and my friend Mindy's answer was read aloud instead.  On the way home, I showed her my paper and asked her why he picked her essay answer over mine. "Mine answered his question." she said.

In my junior year but I started paying attention to Mr. S.'s lectures and I realized something; we might debate profound ideas in the text but the subject we studied was literature and he tested us on specific literary techniques and criteria we discussed during class. I started paying attention to what the man said he wanted in an answer. I  wrote responses to his questions.  I started getting As.

One of the last books in the lit. syllabus
I never forgot it or the teacher.

By my senior year, I had relaxed enough to appreciate Mr. S.'s teaching methods and he seemed to unbend just a bit. His grins weren't just a demanding instructor's delight in catching students unprepared, he loved seeing us use our brains. Although some of his formality remained, we began to glimpse his sense of humor and we learned he loved when we'd "forget" to return our text books at the end of term.  He said he measured a book's popularity by how few copies came back to the school.  (Mr. S., if you see this, I still have two of my short-story collections as well as my copy of Candide.  I still love them and read them; I just have to be careful because the pages are brittle and some of the covers are gone.)  Then, Mr. S. left our school system the same spring that our class graduated. I never found the chance or nerve to thank him for the impact he had on me.  But I've felt his influence ever since.

Over the years, I've attended more than a dozen schools and probably studied under a hundred different teachers.  Most were bright, some were kind and I even made friends with a few.  But the greatest teacher I ever met taught me to fall in love with a subject.  He changed me from someone who enjoyed reading as entertainment to one who reveres prose as an art.

Who is your Greatest Teacher Ever???

Families are such funny things

Families are such funny things.  Find a man in his late thirties or early forties surrounded by his kids. Around them, he is the paterfamilias.  The Father.  The Ultimate Authority (besides Mom).  Now transfer him to his family of origin and watch him interact with them.  There he's not recognized as a dad but as a brother or child and the definition has an effect on his personality.  His air of authority is gone.  Maybe an old squabble is raked up with a sibling.  If his children are watching, they have a rare glimpse of their Dad as a boy, momentarily spinning like an electron from their immediate family into the family of their grandparents. Around the molecules of generations, Dad becomes a covelant bond.

As a writer, Anne Tyler knows this better than most and the idea stands out in her novel, A Spool of Blue Thread.  This is the story of the Whitshanks, another eccentric Baltimore family (Anne is the literary patron saint of both the city and eccentric families) with an recurring, dynamic.  Each generation has one member with the drive to attain a goal above their expectations even though success will not make them happy.  Every generation also has at least one "sympathizer" member who negotiates their way through family frictions and the rest have their own coping skills.  Whenever holidays or family emergencies pull the grown siblings back together we see how much or little they've learned about being adults while they were apart.

This story also throws in something extra.  After chapters of seeing Red and Abby function as the heads of the Whitshank clan, coping with their children and grandchildren, a flashback takes us to their adolescence and we see the young people they once were dominated by their patriarch, Junior.  We even see the events that influence Junior.

In many ways, A Spool of Blue Thread is also the story of the family home, a house in an affluent neighborhood that Junior Whitshank built and coveted.  The house goes from Junior's talisman of success to the legacy Red and Abby will care for and the symbol of favoritism their sons will crave. As the house witnesses each successive generation's secrets, resentments and hopes, we learn what drives this family and what they need to let go of in the end.

Since the prospect of Thanksgiving is looming, with the chance we'll spend time with extended family, take a second for the Whitshanks clan.  Remember we are all covelant bonds in the family of Mankind and we all have a role to play.  May your next family gathering be like the beautiful spool of blue thread, that appears just when it's needed.

Making Sense of the Universe: the Writer-Reader contract

The relationship between writers and readers is an odd one. The writer sits in a garret (or on the top of Mount Parnassus, depending on your point of view) and labors to create a work of lasting value.  If it's good enough and all the stars align, the readers let the work of an author's imagination into their own and reward the author with praise, treasure and enough allegiance to read writer's next story, as long as the author keeps the the writer-reader contract.

What, you thought what I just described was the writer-reader contract?  Au contrair, mes amis! That is merely the description.  The writer-reader contract is an old and long one that is modified only as literature evolves.  One of the basic tenets of this implied agreement is that, however complex the plot or intricate the fictional universe in the story is, the author knows everything that is going on in the story and can explain how this imaginary world makes sense.  For example:

Like most of the reading planet, I adored J. K. Rowling's fantastic Harry Potter series.  It's a mammoth accomplishment and a brilliantly planned series. Elements of the entire saga start appearing immediately although their importance is played down. (Spoilers abound here so if you spent the last quarter century living under a rock to avoiding the Potter phenomenon, read a different one of my posts). In the first chapter, we get the primary premise that magic-is-real set out and we learn a baby Harry somehow defeated an evil, magically powerful being named Voldemort. The soul souvenir of Voldemort's attack, a scar on Harry's forehead, is mentioned in passing on the first chapter but Potter fans don't learn the full significance of scar until the end of the series, seven years and a million words later. Still, virtually every bit of information JKR drops in the early part of the series forms part of the bigger picture later on, from Hagrid's motorbike to Dumbledore's evasive answers to personal questions. ("What do you see in the mirror, Professor?")  JKR doesn't tell the audience everything immediately, she can't, but she tells us what we need to know when we need to know it.  She honors the contract.

Another splendid example of an author knowing everything is Louis Sachar's Holes.  This is a case of non-linear storytelling at its best since most of the narrative is about perpetually unlucky Stanley Yelnats IV, a good kid in a bad situation.  Stanley can't know that his fate was tied to Camp Green Lake and a kid named Hector Zeroni generations before he was born but that's because there are "holes" in his family history.  The reader's fun comes from finding the information filling those holes at different parts of the story.  It's a masterful fulfillment of the Writer-Reader Contract.

Now compare these to Lemony Snicket's books, A Series of Unfortunate Events.  As usual we have an unfortunate child (well, 3 of them: Violet, Klaus and Sunny); a wicked, overarching villain who pursues them through the series (Count Olaf) and a bunch of mysterious clues and circumstances the kids encounter along the way. But, contrary to the implied contract, many of the mysteries in the story are never solved!  Readers never find out what was in that blasted sugar bowl or details about the schism that split the V. F. D. into fire-starters and fire-fighters! (Speaking of which, there are so many entities in the series with the initials V. F. D. it's hard to keep them straight.) Instead of resolving key mysteries that have been building through the series, the author states in the last book that not every question can or will be answered.  That is true of real life, but it's a weak excuse to readers who waded through 170 chapters of alliterative names and silly puns to find out what really happened to all of the Baudelaire family. It is a break in the writer-reader contract.

So, if you know someone struggling to write a novel this month, be kind to them.  Bring them encouragement and hot drinks as needed and assure them that they can always get through one more revision.  But remind them of the writer-reader contract and how they need to know everything in their fictional universe.  It's a part of the contract.