His body is smooth, hard wood. He tells me that, at birth, he was bathed in the shade of sunset, then his belly and paws in that of fresh milk by a nameless, faceless Malaysian child. I will call her Idayu, though doing so will not feed her tomorrow. She glued on his grizzly-colored cotton afro, his firm whiskers, the tuft of bleached hair that protrudes from his chest, his fine bamboo tail. These trappings make him more cartoon character than King of the Jungle. In this we are kindred. But do not believe his painted smile; his jaws were fashioned for destruction.
He was to have been a congratulatory gift.
Before Andrie’ was cast as our Cowardly Lion, he was the baritone who kept my warbly soprano in tune. For that feat alone, he deserved thanks.
So when the nutcracker lion took up residence in the win-by-claw-capture toy-bin-slash-rip-off at my place of employment, I had to make him mine. I ignored the Dorothy of the same series despite her freaking adorable but slightly demonic-looking miniature Toto. Resident Diva of the Arts Tessa would inevitably become Dorothy, and though I didn’t want the part (I would never choose home over brains or heart or courage), I couldn’t stand to recognize her theatrical superiority.
Yes, the appearance of the six-inch nutcracker actually predated casting, but Andrie’ was a shoe-in for the Lion. First of all, kid could sing. Second, he looked the part: almost a pair of hands higher than me, liberally and evenly muscled, padded more than lightly with chub. Most importantly, he was the principal’s son and would get whatever he wanted, to which I had no objection because what he currently wanted was nothing he shouldn’t be given otherwise.
I must have sacrificed twenty bucks worth of quarters to The Claw trying to buy its freedom, always to no avail.
I had all but given up hope when Services The Machines Guy came to trade out the inhabitants of the glass case. I pled with him to sell me the lion. Instead, he made it a gift, and at my explanation of the gravity of his present, he produced the Dorothy from his bag and said he hoped I got the lead.
I never gave Andrie’ his present; the Dorothy Casting Scandal of ’05 caused most of us seniors to boycott the production (the lead did not, as expected, go to the Resident Diva, but to a girl whose only qualification was her skin color). Under those circumstances, it seemed gauche to semi-randomly gift a nutcracker, especially to a casual acquaintance. So he sleeps caged beneath a sky of white-and-red-polka-dotted paper, in his original purple packaging, in a box under my bed, right between my botched attempt at a Cameroonian Passport mask and the tiny crystal unicorn wrapped safely in tissue paper with his severed front hoof, across from the Dorothy and her demon-eyed dog.
He will never show his capability, never serve his purpose, never fulfill his promise.
So long as I keep him Cowardly, so long as I keep him caged.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Truthiness!
Truth… it’s certainly elusive. I’ve always had problems with truth, and I refer you to my first blog if you think I’m lying. And that says nothing about my problems with Truth, which (though probably not unrelated to my issues with truth) are relatively far removed from this assignment.
I am aware that I have memories that have never happened to me. I see places and people, I hear voices and background noise, and I know these things never took place outside of my brain. Does that make them less a part of me? Maybe it makes them more a part of me than what really did happen, because they’re my own creations, not dependent on the rest of the world to bring to fruition. If I can convince myself it happened, if I can see it happening in my head just like any other memory, is it less real? Possibly, but does that mean it’s not true? Not necessarily. While I would include them in the same thesaurus entries in the interest of being thorough, I don’t know that I consider reality and truth synonymous. (The situation is complicated by the fact that I have only spatterings of memory before the age of twelve, and no explanation for the Grand Canyons of time between remembrances.)
As I said in class, I think it’s perfectly fine to invent so long as you inform the reader that it’s invention. That said, there are a few additional qualifiers. According to Jennifer, invention is okay iff:
1. You don’t feel like you have a good enough grasp on the truth well enough to successfully pass it to the reader, like you only half-caught it. If you have a clear memory of something, you’re obligated to give that to the reader.
2. The invention contributes to the truth of what happened, as you see it/saw it/remember it (those all have different shades of meaning; pick whichever you like). Substitution of facts because “this just sounds better” or “but it makes a great metaphor” does not fall into this category.
3. Omission is perfectly acceptable, because no writer has the mental faculties to simultaneously observe every aspect of any situation, and no reader has the time or the interest to read about every aspect of any situation. This applies to things you deem “insignificant” to the story you want to tell, not things you would like to forget happened because they are “inconvenient” to the story you want to tell.
I’m sure I have other thoughts on the matter, but that’s a general picture. You can infer the rest, because I’m not up to writing a treatise tonight.
Though this is an issue worthy of one. While I respect the creative freedom of the artist, if someone is going to outright lie to me I want a disclaimer and an explanation, or I want it called fiction. I’m extraordinarily gullible, but I haven’t gotten used to being duped, and I still don’t like it.
In my memoir, I avoided dialogue because I didn’t think I could capture the voice of the semi-antagonist, Josh. It would have been lies, and his was not a voice I wanted to fuck up. His voice is so integral to understanding him that getting it wrong would have been worse than the omission. If it really matters and/or you can’t get it close to right, I say recreating dialogue has to fall on the invention side of the line. But, since I did include a few lines not in my own voice, I guess I invented.
I like to think I got the facts mostly right, as I included only the ones I was reasonably certain were real. In my character descriptions, I used details I had observed myself or that the subject himself had acknowledged, and I admitted when I was making an assumption (I felt I had the most success in mixing the two: “[He] competed in Bible quizzing competitions and I’m sure he won them.” You get an understanding of the subject and an understanding of the speaker in one phrase.)
I like to think that my imagined section took care of the creative bones in my body, but I only felt I could include it because experience tells me that’s the direction the conversation would have taken had other forces not changed the circumstances.
In revision, I’ll have to be more fair to the spatial aspect of the story; I essentially ignored physicality to focus on other issues. I feel like I need to re-establish contact with some of the other players, to make sure I’m not grossly misremembering anything important. What’s I think is most important is that I will have to be much more careful about language control. I ended up conveying undertones that were never there, which I have to find in order to remove. So if anyone wants to help me with that, I’d appreciate it.
I am aware that I have memories that have never happened to me. I see places and people, I hear voices and background noise, and I know these things never took place outside of my brain. Does that make them less a part of me? Maybe it makes them more a part of me than what really did happen, because they’re my own creations, not dependent on the rest of the world to bring to fruition. If I can convince myself it happened, if I can see it happening in my head just like any other memory, is it less real? Possibly, but does that mean it’s not true? Not necessarily. While I would include them in the same thesaurus entries in the interest of being thorough, I don’t know that I consider reality and truth synonymous. (The situation is complicated by the fact that I have only spatterings of memory before the age of twelve, and no explanation for the Grand Canyons of time between remembrances.)
As I said in class, I think it’s perfectly fine to invent so long as you inform the reader that it’s invention. That said, there are a few additional qualifiers. According to Jennifer, invention is okay iff:
1. You don’t feel like you have a good enough grasp on the truth well enough to successfully pass it to the reader, like you only half-caught it. If you have a clear memory of something, you’re obligated to give that to the reader.
2. The invention contributes to the truth of what happened, as you see it/saw it/remember it (those all have different shades of meaning; pick whichever you like). Substitution of facts because “this just sounds better” or “but it makes a great metaphor” does not fall into this category.
3. Omission is perfectly acceptable, because no writer has the mental faculties to simultaneously observe every aspect of any situation, and no reader has the time or the interest to read about every aspect of any situation. This applies to things you deem “insignificant” to the story you want to tell, not things you would like to forget happened because they are “inconvenient” to the story you want to tell.
I’m sure I have other thoughts on the matter, but that’s a general picture. You can infer the rest, because I’m not up to writing a treatise tonight.
Though this is an issue worthy of one. While I respect the creative freedom of the artist, if someone is going to outright lie to me I want a disclaimer and an explanation, or I want it called fiction. I’m extraordinarily gullible, but I haven’t gotten used to being duped, and I still don’t like it.
In my memoir, I avoided dialogue because I didn’t think I could capture the voice of the semi-antagonist, Josh. It would have been lies, and his was not a voice I wanted to fuck up. His voice is so integral to understanding him that getting it wrong would have been worse than the omission. If it really matters and/or you can’t get it close to right, I say recreating dialogue has to fall on the invention side of the line. But, since I did include a few lines not in my own voice, I guess I invented.
I like to think I got the facts mostly right, as I included only the ones I was reasonably certain were real. In my character descriptions, I used details I had observed myself or that the subject himself had acknowledged, and I admitted when I was making an assumption (I felt I had the most success in mixing the two: “[He] competed in Bible quizzing competitions and I’m sure he won them.” You get an understanding of the subject and an understanding of the speaker in one phrase.)
I like to think that my imagined section took care of the creative bones in my body, but I only felt I could include it because experience tells me that’s the direction the conversation would have taken had other forces not changed the circumstances.
In revision, I’ll have to be more fair to the spatial aspect of the story; I essentially ignored physicality to focus on other issues. I feel like I need to re-establish contact with some of the other players, to make sure I’m not grossly misremembering anything important. What’s I think is most important is that I will have to be much more careful about language control. I ended up conveying undertones that were never there, which I have to find in order to remove. So if anyone wants to help me with that, I’d appreciate it.
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