“Untold Backstory” — Cast of Characters

The story in my post of last September contains a large number of characters. Recently, the entire cast, with a few adjustments, reappeared in an expanded, more dramatic version that appears in my forthcoming collection, Brain Frieze. In September I also posted some notes concerning a “secretly non-sequitur” story like this one, and promised a cast list. Here’s that list.

Note how weirdly plausible these people all seem to be. Note also that the original story arc provides no real or logical connection between most of them. The apparent overall sequence of the narrative relies almost entirely on the tone of the writing and the tendency of readers (all of us) to accept inferred connections without minding how impossible or illogical they are. In fact, even the author as omniscient narrator can’t really justify the cavalier connections in this piece.

“Untold Backstory” — Cast of Characters

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Samuel Beckett vs. The Audience

I just considered (after decades of reading and thinking about Godot) that Vladimir’s nickname could be read “Did I?” – this seems sufficiently appropriate for the “mental” one of the pair that I wonder if Beckett might have intended that play on words. “Gogo” is pretty obvious, I would think; hence his foot problems.

I also love the way Beckett critiques the audience – rarely in other works, but several times in Godot. Breaking the fourth wall is one of my favorite conceits, although it has to be done very carefully or it’s just a gimmick (I always felt there was too much Godot in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead).

Right at the beginning, about 8 pages in, Estragon turns his back on the audience, “Charming spot,” and then faces the audience with, “Inspiring prospects.” Then he turns to Didi and says, “Let’s go.”

In Act II, when blind Pozzo asks, “Is this by any chance the place known as ‘the Board’?”, Didi never heard of it, and Gogo says, “It’s indescribable. It’s like nothing. There’s nothing. There’s a tree,” to which Pozzo replies, “Then it’s not the Board.” In the UK, of course, everyone knows that the Elizabethan actors all “trod the board.”

But at the beginning of Act II Gogo and Didi really attack the audience:

Vladimir: Where are all these corpses from?
Estragon: These skeletons.

Vladimir: A charnel house! A charnel house!
Estragon: You don’t have to look.
Vladimir: You can’t help looking.
Estragon: True.
Vladimir: Try as one may.

A charnel house is, appropriately, a place where disinterred bones are stored, when they are exhumed to make room for the more recent dead. Not unlike a theatre with an unresponsive audience.

I should also provide a link to a brief photographic homage to Godot that I created a few years back: https://vimeo.com/16134190.

 

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The Sound of Silence

There have been many periods of isolated total silence here in Fairfield since I moved here a dozen years ago. These are of course always at night, but they remind me of my childhood in both Manhattan and the Hudson highlands — in Manhattan I was fascinated by the endless inarticulate roar of the city, faint at times, but never absent. And I was equally captivated by the night-sounds of the country above the Hudson, where on an occasional summer night there would be a lull of real silence. Or in a snow blanketed winter, when all the nights, and most days, were truly silent and one could only listen to the blood flowing.

It’s those microvilli (“stereocilia”) (c. 1 um cylinders) atop the primary cilia within the cochlea, which amplify the tiniest sounds, approaching the soft rattle of Brownian motion itself.

stereocilia

 

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Is it time to end human life on the planet?

I just received a long, unsettling email from an old friend who wonders if there is any way out of the horrendous mess so many politicians and billionaires have been pushing us into for their own selfish gains. It seems they have stacked the deck more egregiously than ever before, and it’s hard even to visualize a way out.

I empathize with my friend’s concerns, very much. What follows is my reply.

My dear friend,

The first thing that came to mind was your notion that “everything we do is destructive.” It’s true, but it’s not hard to see that Nature works in a frighteningly comparable fashion. Even at the level of the most profound natural laws—the second law of thermodynamics, the basis of entropy—there are balancing forces of creation and destruction. Ilya Prigogine, the great Russian expat (to Belgium & the USA) Nobel-winning physicist, said, in effect, “living systems drink orderliness from their environment.” He was describing how all living systems work, in contradistinction from entropy, which appears to be purely destructive and utterly irreversible. A car (high level of organization and orderliness) will always, eventually, turn into a pile of rust (no orderliness), but a pile of rust will never turn into a car. And yet, in the face of this, living systems take in structured forms as nutrients, and emit less organized forms as waste. And the product of that process is evolution itself. It’s no surprise that this occurs at the social level as well. Continue reading

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Untold Backstory — some notes

The evolution of this piece surprised me (link). It started just as an experiment to see how difficult it might be to write a few paragraphs making connections that were actually idiotic and not connected at all, but in a tone that seemed realistic and authoritative.

This interests me because I admire the way Frank Herbert was able to evoke spectacularly elaborate but solidly plausible motivations, backstory, cultural history, international intrigue, etc., without ever quite defining these past events his characters were reacting to. In a vaguely similar way, John Fowles creates connections and implications in The Magus without ever quite specifying anything. One believes that sufficient information is available, even if it doesn’t happen to appear in the novel. This is a wonderful subterfuge…

At first, writing the Backstory piece seemed quite easy, and the first few coincidences were obviously arbitrary and irrelevant. But then the tone of the piece began to win me over, even as the writer, and it got increasingly difficult not to tie things back in realistic ways. I had to force myself to break the logical thread over and over — the thing kept trying to make sense! Continue reading

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Short Story: “Untold Backstory”

The following story might be a lost voice-over for a History Channel program. Or (more likely) a demonstration of how we manage to make literally everything relate to everything else. We find connections between absolutely anything and anything else, no matter how disconnected and arbitrary these things might actually be. I’ll post my thoughts on this story, but first, you should read the thing without expectations. (Needless to say, all posts on this blog are copyrighted, and all rights are reserved.)

 

Untold Backstory

Last night, a good friend of mine, David Vivian, sent me an email asking after my sister, Joan Boyce, who lives in Eugene Oregon. Joan is the daughter in-law of Burke Boyce, a popular historical novelist of the 1950’s who specialized in the young George Washington.

Burke often complained to my sister of a review of his successful Man from Mount Vernon, in which Clive Etheridge, the reviewer, had claimed the curator of the Mount Vernon estate disputed some of the facts in Burke’s novel. This curator, a Mr. Frank Fellows, cited several historians, notably Delmar Weingarten, whose scholarly reputation is rarely in dispute.

According to Weingarten, the original groundskeeper at Mount Vernon was one Anthony Blaine (not to be confused with Anthony Wayne), and was the son-in-law of a well-known pre-revolutionary doctor named Phillip Dannerston. Dannerston was well liked, and widely known in the region for having saved the lives of the entire K. P. Bellows family, whose estate was frequented in the early 20th century by T. S. Elliot. Continue reading

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Writing Tools – Adobe InDesign

Adobe InDesign probably shouldn’t be thought of as a writing tool, but for some of us it’s very much a tool for writers. InDesign provides facilities for very powerful and flexible publication development in many areas, certainly far beyond books and stories. But in the context of writing per se, it’s a tool that I find indispensable when a manuscript is 90% edited and ready to start looking like a book.

Even if I’m not planning on providing the final design & typesetting of a publication, it’s still very useful to view the document as if it were finished and published. There’s nothing quite like reading your carefully crafted opus in a polished PDF that looks like it was printed. Suddenly all manner of gaffs and misteaks come to light. (My god! Did I actually say that?)  Continue reading

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Operation Redundancy (Amazon Author Page)

This blog is now being mirrored (with short teasers) on the Allen Cobb Author Page at amazon.com.

Just in case some of you prefer to find me there (unlikely) or happen to stumble across the Author Page (plausible).

Posts prior to today’s date won’t show up on Amazon.

 

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Anti-Telemarketer Script

Sometimes the best strategy is to fight fire with fire. Since there are still too many telemarketers (n > 0) calling us at dinner time to sell home security or raise money for charities that spend 5% on charity, we all occasionally seek appropriate ways to fight back.

Unfortunately, there are risks. If we annoy the telemarketer too badly (always the most tempting approach), he may just flag our phone number as “very interested.” But if we simply hang up on him, we may find ourselves feeling empty, frustrated, and unfulfilled.

The most interesting strategy I’ve come up with is to respond to the telemarketer’s intrusion with my own telemarketer-like intrusion. Before providing any information at all, start politely asking for his information. The questions below are designed to create a sense of friendly beaurocracy, almost as if you might be an official of some kind, or at least someone well above his pay-grade who should be taken seriously.

The Anti-Telemarketer Script

Note: Don’t bother to write down any of his responses. In general, ignore whatever he says. Just stick to the script. Continue reading

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Telephodot — Threnody, an impression of Godot

A few years ago I shot Threnodya ten-minute personal impression of my favorite modern play, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

Threnody is not a film of Godot. I don’t believe that Godot should be made into a movie (apart from simply filming a stage production), because the idiom of film is so different from the living performance of the stage. Beckett went to some lengths to create the play without undue artifice, in part by first writing it in French (to limit any likely linguistic excess), and then translating it into English. He also paid close attention to professional productions of the play (its premiere was in 1953, I believe), and commented on every detail while generally disapproving of innovations (such as producing it in the round, or with an all-woman cast).

The Vimeo version (in 720 HD) can be found here: Threnody.

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