Writing | John Clarke Online

A Novel – A Song Just Waiting to Bust Out

One of the most memorable quotes I’ve heard from a child came from his experience listening to classical music. I don’t remember who said it (Google comes up empty-handed), but I’ve never forgotten it.

“A symphony is music with a song waiting to bust out any minute.”

Those words were the child’s response to listening to a symphonic piece. The little listener kept expecting to hear a song, but no sooner did the musicians seem to be closing in on a melody, than the music changed and darted off down another musical path. I suspect that was a little frustrating to the kid; but at least it kept him listening, expectantly.

Being a musician, I can fully appreciate the correctness of his innocent comment.

Classical music is technical; in fact, highly so. Orchestration is a wonderment to those of us who aren’t both talented and trained in the art. The printed lines for a solo instrument, like the clarinet I play, are defined by strict mathematical relationships between frequencies of sound. If the math is not precise, then the sound will not be precise and melodic. That is to say, the sound will not be music, but rather noise.

I consider myself a technical person. As a scientist, I understand the technical rigor and precision which is required for composing and orchestration, but also for scientific and engineering calculations and publications. Indeed, I’ve spent decades writing technical papers, many with a fair amount of mathematical basis. I kept the creative, the musical side, bottled up, because it’s not publishable. Technical publications are, well, technical. They are neither pretty nor tuneful.

But as I mingle vicariously with other technical writers, I find that some of them also have a pent-up desire for creative writing. With a somewhat guilty feeling, they have actually penned very good, non-technical prose. And even a few poems.

Now that I, a scientist, have released my first novel, Middle Waters, hugely imaginative compared to my day-to-day paid technical writing, I feel I have birthed a bastard child.

Oh, but how I love that child.

Now let the song begin…

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Blood, as a Delicacy, Is Underrated

Those words earned me a first place prize of $20 in a contest for the best first line in a comic vampire novel. The contest was held during the 2010 Ozark Creative Writers’ Conference in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

Not that I would ever write a vampire novel, comic or otherwise, but I guess it proved I can be succinct – from time to time. I admit that comes as a shock to those who know me best.

What amazed me about that line, and winning, was that it was my first submission for a writing competition. Now, if I can just keep it up. Let’s see, that was $3.33 per word, so a 100,000 word novel would earn me …

Holy Mackerel! What am I doing wasting time blogging?

OK, seriously, what is it about the European cultures and blood? Have you ever had blood pudding?

I once stood in a working man’s cafeteria line in Geesthacht, Germany, on the Elbe River, paralyzed before a large stainless steel pan filled with — blood, or at least something really, really bloody. It wasn’t like rare steak. It was more like a pan from an autopsy table.

My German friends told me the “pudding” was really fresh. Did that mean there was a meat packing plant close by? Maybe it’s just me, but any recipe that starts off with one quart of pig’s blood is just not that appetizing. I know, it’s a cultural thing.

I didn’t gag, but I also didn’t eat much of anything for lunch that day. Maybe some very white bread, and milk — nothing with shades of pink — that’s for sure.

Which brings me to the observation that perhaps I could write the first line of a comic vampire novel, but I would probably throw up before finishing the first chapter.

Guess I’m just squeamish.

The Return of Souls – A Science Fiction Theme

“I believe we don’t stay dead long”, said Robert Frobisher, a talented composer created by David Mitchell for his epic novel, “Cloud Atlas”.

I recently watched for the second time the complex and potentially disturbing movie adaptation of “Cloud Atlas.” The first time I watched it I simply held on for the ride, trying to make sense of the action and changing plots and characters. On second viewing, it was still a page-turner, so to speak.

During my second viewing, I noticed, apparently for the first time, that short sentence uttered by Robert Frobisher; “We don’t stay dead long.” It was an introspective comment in a letter directed to his lover, and pretty much summed up the entire movie.

In spite of the perplexing current interest in a zombie apocalypse, the “Cloud Atlas” book and film are not about the undead. It’s about reincarnation.

In my opinion, there are two themes in science fiction that make for almost limitless possibilities — time travel and reincarnation. “Cloud Atlas” uses the latter theme as a platform for topics far more meaningful than the tired theme of man meets giant worm, worm eats man, man’s friend kills worm, and so on. Regardless of what I or anyone else thinks about souls or reincarnation, they do make for interesting theater.

Another bit of narration from the movie, this time from Zachry Bailey (played by Tom Hanks) struck a chord with me for it accurately reflected a seriocomic theme in one of my previous posts, Conversation with a Cloud.

In Bailey’s words, “Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same, it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be ‘morrow?”

In my own less artful words, quoting a sentient and telepathic cloud that knows it will die at the end of the day, “I am not a cloud. I am moisture. A cloud is my physical appearance, but that changes throughout my life. And regardless of how I look, what I am, vapor, still exists.”

If we accept that almost all religions propose the survival of a soul after death, then the essential question raised by David Mitchell’s story is whether or not an eternal soul is granted only one chance to incarnate.

If you accept the concept of a soul, then you may accept the concept of a God who created souls. And I would be a very presumptuous man to decide what God would or would not do with one of his creations throughout an eternity of time, an eternity that I cannot even imagine.

Unfortunately, there is no data with which to debate the return of souls. That is, there isn’t if you ignore what seems to be documented anecdotal accounts such as a recent one involving a three-year-old Druze boy who seemingly identified his murderer, with supposedly witnessed proof of the crime.

That story, and others like it, make for interesting and mind challenging reading for those steeped in western religion, like me. As I understand it, in Eastern and Middle Eastern regions such stories are rather commonplace.

Of course, the story of the Druze three-year-old could be fictitious, an elaborate deception. Regardless of the truth of the existence of souls, and soul mates (a currently popular meme with a subtle assumption of reincarnation), there is a literary aspect to consider. To state the obvious, fiction does not have to be true to be entertaining.

If I were capable of writing a sequel to “Cloud Atlas”, (which I am not), I would be unable to resist adding Karma to the mix. The notion that you get what you deserve, in this life or the next, is simply too enticing to ignore, whether it be truth or fantasy.

For instance, suppose a chapter in a sequel covered the life of Jack the Ripper, of both historical infamies, and future infamy; except in the future, his would-be victims are packing heat (carrying a gun). Jack’s story of infamy would end abruptly.

Based on such a karmic premise, the literary possibilities are endless. With the proper writer in control, they could also prove endlessly entertaining.

How to Create a Motorcycle Salesman in Five Easy Minutes?

I used to own a Honda 350 motorcycle and drove it about 35,000 miles before I sold it. But that was long ago.

But still, there was a history. Such a good history, in fact, that of late I’ve been admiring a fellow’s 175 cc Honda of the same style and vintage as mine. But I’m not at all in the market for a motorcycle — not in the least.

Nevertheless, I was not too surprised last night when I found myself in a dream, in a motorcycle store, looking at motorcycles. I hadn’t been there long before a salesman asked me, “What range are you looking for?” My answer: “I used to have a 350, so a 350 to 500 would be about right. I’m not interested in a big Harley.”

The last bit of conversation from that clerk I remember before I awoke, was “Well, we have an old black and blue junker we could get for you.”

It didn’t occur to me until I was awake that the store clerk thought I was talking price range, in dollars, not engine displacement. He was really confused. And then I thought, “This is my dream, I created that store clerk, so how could he and I not be communicating? How could he be confused?”

And I still wonder that.

The ancients used to think that characters in dreams were embodiments of spirits or actual characters from life, and through dreams we communicate with them. And on the surface, that would seem to fit the data from this dream. But being a modern, educated man I don’t at all believe that. Still, why the confusion within a dream?

Could it be that life itself is so confusing that we simply expect it to be that way, and therefore inject confusion into the characters we create in our dreams? I suppose a dream without confusion would not be a dream.

As a writer of sorts I am tempted to think that in dreaming I’m creating something—an experience. And as I wake and lay down words, I am truly creating. But as a rule my characters and I always understand each other. I know their needs, desires, and weaknesses. They don’t surprise me — because after all, I created them.

So maybe that is what I should heed from this dream. Perhaps our best creations should surprise us. Perhaps, when we allow ourselves to loosen control of our characters just a bit, they are free to do the unexpected.

Sounds nice, like something a creative writing instructor would say, but predictably, the letting go is the hard part for a technical writer, one who writes as a career scientist, with precision and concision. You can not let go: You have to throttle your writing to best explain sometimes difficult ideas in as simple a way as you can.

Your characters are equations: they have no freedom, they are defined, immutable. Nothing is left to providence. Even chance must be carefully defined, with probability ranges that are known, and in conventional terms agreed upon by the scientific audience at large. Writing like that is a conversation I suppose, between the writer and the audience, but it is never surprising, not if it is to be believable.

Creative thinking, on the other hand, like dreaming, can be surprising. It can lead you were you least expect it. For instance, I thought this little blog post would be about dreaming, but it turned itself into a post about writing. Funny how the mind works some times.

And now that I’ve expanded my mind a bit, I think the dream was right. A buyer thinks of what he wants, a salesman thinks of what commission he can get from the transaction, based on the buyer’s pocket book.

Hmm … guess I created a pretty good motorcycle salesman character last night after all.

Disclaimer: the motorcycle salesman created in this dream does not reflect in any way upon any other salesman, real or imagined. It was just a dream.

Where Have All the Letters Gone?

SONY DSC — By Petar Milošević (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

When is the last time you wrote a letter to a family member or loved one?

I’m not talking about email or text messages; digital communications do not count. I mean a letter on a piece of paper, placed in an envelope with a stamp, and mailed at a mailbox or post office; or in a very private way, lovingly slipped underneath someone’s door.

In the hurry-up, speak sparingly Twitter generation, there seems to be little value in penning an honest-to-goodness letter. Compared to instant communication, letter writing with an ink-filled pen seems agonizingly slow, sloppy and so twentieth century.

I recently opened a grey metal box that had lain dormant, ignored, for up to 50 years. It was a time capsule, holding remnants of this young man’s life in 1964 and before. In it were letters, letters my Dad had written to me during my college years.

My parents have been gone for many decades now and reading those letters after such a long time was a joy. Unlike emails and tweets, those letters told a story, a story of how my parents were reacting to and appreciating my newfound freedom and expressions of individuality.

My father, a physician who practiced medicine for 50 years, wrote words that are even deeper in meaning now than they seemed at the time. “We are glad that you seek the places that are apart, such as the mountains and the sea,” he wrote. “It is so easy to rush past the beauty and truth of life, especially in this age. An older and wiser one once said, ‘Let us not hurry, not worry, and let us take a moment now and then to smell the flowers along the way.’ “

And then there were the words I puzzled over briefly before realizing what it meant. “Their being and meaning will never know the obsolescence of most of that which is taught.”

Frankly, that was a lesson that takes a lifetime to understand, for in time we come to know that many things we are taught while young will eventually be found wrong, or at least inaccurate. In other words, so-called truths change.

In 2064, fifty years from now, how will you or your descendants be reminded of things you said or things your parents and other loved ones thought way back in 2014? How will memories of 2014 be renewed?

Even now, the concept of writing love letters seems sweet but archaic to those in their twenties. So I wonder, will there be such a thing as love letters in the future?

Facebook posts certainly won’t be preserved for fifty years. In fact, both Facebook and Twitter will be long forgotten, replaced by more culturally relevant trends. And let’s face it, have you ever said anything on Facebook that deserves to be preserved for fifty years?

I suppose that as my father saw his time on earth becoming increasingly limited, he realized that time, the time to enjoy life, was a precious commodity, yet one not well appreciated until the sand in the clock is half run out. That is an important lesson that I, with my own sand ebbing away, have at last come to appreciate. But if I did not have my Father’s letter to read now, fifty years later, it would be a lesson long forgotten.

In a tweeting, Facebook society, how will we hold pages and memories in our hands when our parents and other loved ones are gone?

Sad to say, I don’t think we will.

Half Magic

Long before J. K. Rowling began writing the wildly popular Harry Potter series of books on children and magic, Edward Eager wrote a similar themed book in the 1950s. In my child’s mind at that time, Eager’s book, Half Magic, was one of the most remarkable and memorable books I’d ever read. In fact, it is currently rated by some as #54 among the top 100 children’s books.

The fact that it was featured in our elementary school’s library did nothing to detract from the read. After all, that was the joy of school libraries — the ability to browse through the rows of books waiting for discovery.

There was another library book I remember, about a barnstorming pilot who for one reason or another kept crashing, and yet somehow surviving. It was exciting reading, and surprisingly did not deter me from my love of flying. But I digress.

Thanks to the magic of the Internet, I was able to identify Half Magic and download it, and read it. Presto, change-o, just like that!

But, it’s not at all what I remembered.

Here’s the thing about memory; it is ever so malleable, especially in children. All I really remembered in my teenage and adult years was that there was something in it about people who were half white and half black. Frankly I’d forgotten the whole magic theme.

What had colored my memory was the power of a vivid image found on the cover of that book, and the fact that it was popular during a time when racial integration was a frequent topic in the news. Somehow, those mental bits merged into what I believed the book to be. Many years after reading it I had the curious impression that it was a morality play of sorts, where people were in fact half black and half white.

Well, if that happened, racial profiling would be nonexistent, wouldn’t it? If you were of mixed race, with your body literally halved by distinct racial characteristics, then you obviously couldn’t be bigoted. And for that reason I held that book in high esteem. But due to my fragmented memory, I despaired of ever finding it again.

And then there was Google. While I may razz Google a bit for their intrusiveness, I do consider it a blessing to be able to Google the words “half black and half white” and see before me a panoply of related images. There, buried in the search results, was the image of a book cover that I instantly recognized from so long ago.

I had no conscious memory of it, but yet I recognized it among all the other less relevant images. (Yes, there really is such a thing as subconsciousness, just in case you wondered.)

Happily, the 50^th anniversary edition of that book was recently published, so the book is available for another generation of young minds looking for magic with a moral. And indeed, it really is a morality play of sorts. But sadly, someone felt the need to modernize the cover, which is now far more visually complex. But I wonder; is it memorable?

If I had a book cover, I’d want that cover to be memorable enough to transcend the decades, and jump out of my seemingly inaccessible memory like a Jack-in-the-Box long after all other memories of the book had faded.

I am patiently waiting for my 6-year old grandchild to be still long enough to let me read her this book. As for the rest of you, real childhood magic as portrayed in Half Magic may not be as fantastical as Harry Potter, Hogwarts School, and the dark Lord Voldemort, but it seems a lot more believable.

For more information on this memorable book:

http://magicvalley.com/lifestyles/relationships-and-special-occasions/summer-book-club-half-magic/article_b1414bf4-d895-5800-8f16-169da042a889.html

The Positive Side of Internet Data Gathering

There is a good reason why God and aliens (of the extraterrestrial variety) use telepathy to communicate. It is the only secure form of information transmission. Everything else is subject to capture, storage, and retrieval.

There is currently a frantic paranoia spawned by national and international agency’s collection of virtually everything we say and do. The only thing not open for capture are our thoughts and dreams, at least for now. (Yes, the Army’s working on that).

But governments aren’t alone in information spying — commercial industry is perhaps outpacing governments in their data collection efforts. Their motivations may be different, but the frenetic pace and implications are every bit as invasive. Privacy, as we’ve known it, is dead.

I’ve previously written about Google Noodling , which is a way of catching Google in their data-mining efforts. And like the tone of that article, you have to take a lighthearted view of such efforts. It is not going away. And if we don’t “get over it”, we may, in my estimation, go a little crazy.

But there is a positive side to all this, and a large and growing number of people are finding this side to be personally satisfying. That has to do with family connections, or genealogy. I’ve written about that topic as well.

Scan20080_1 crop — My brother and I. He was five years older.

Last night I solved a very personal family puzzle through the help of Ancestry.com. Both my parents had brown hair and brown eyes. Both their younger children, sons, had blond hair and blue or green eyes.

I’ve spent a lot of time of late with my brother before he passed from a prolonged illness, and I was struck as never before with the purity of the blue color in his almost iridescent eyes. (I’m the one with the green eyes.) When young, both of us had blond hair, which eventually darkened with age. My brother was tall and thin. I was thin, but vertically challenged.

In the next generation, both my children have green eyes, perhaps because I married a green-eyed girl. Our daughter has blonde hair, and even a granddaughter has greenish-brown eyes. And a new grandson baby seems to have blue eyes and blond hair.

I have never ceased wondering, as did my parents no doubt, where those light colors came from. Having believed strongly in my mother’s fidelity, I kept assuming that someday I would discover the source of the blue/green eyes and blond hair.

That happened last night, thanks to the technology of digitization and data mining. I discovered a World War I selective registration document from my Grandfather who died in a hotel fire many years before my birth. At the age of 34 he had blue eyes and “light” hair. He was both tall and “slender”, pretty much a perfect description of my brother.

The next morning I was able to go through unidentified family photos, and there he was, identified at last, the Grandfather I never knew. So apparently it wasn’t the mailman after all!

Obviously this discovery is of interest to no one except my cousins and other relatives. However, it does point out the value of computers, computer databases, and the sharing of information that large databases make possible. There is a tangible reward, for both the company providing the product (the database) and the customers who benefit from the data shared.

I’m sure that when my Grandfather filled out his draft card in 1918, he had no idea that the digital image of that card would end up in the hands of his unborn grandchildren and great grandchildren 95 years later.

Which makes me wonder, what will the world know about each of us 100 years from now? We’ll be long gone, but the record of our existence will survive somewhere in the depths of a digital storage facility. Without a doubt our descendants will enjoy reading about the inane things which pleased or troubled us in 2013, and which we so freely posted thinking that no one was listening, and no one really cared.

Believe me, some people will care. And apparently, everybody’s listening.

The Day the Gorillas Were Stopped at our Door

I think one of the reasons I enjoy my grandchildren so much, and vice versa, is because they know they won’t always get a serious answer from me. They sometimes call me “silly”, but they do so with a smile. Silly is fun.

Children will assuredly get an answer to any question they ask me (within reason). However, that answer may be weighted more on the side of creativity and fantasy than on reality. They understand that, and delight in it. My instincts tell me that there cannot be too much fantasy during the playtime of young children.

As for my choice of an answer, it’s not at all a conscious decision to alter reality. I simply abhor an uninteresting answer, to anything.

Case in point: My five-year-old granddaughter found two bottles of the popular foaming adhesive, Gorilla Glue, next to our back door. “What are these for Granddaddy?”

Well, the stock answer would have been that I was gluing adapter ends to some polypropylene drainage gratings, and the Gorilla Glue would hold nicely until I could embed the gratings in concrete.

But I sincerely believe that if a writer can build on a play of words, he should. In fact, it’s almost an obligation of adults to pass on an appreciation of the joy of words.

So my answer to her was as follows: “I use Gorilla Glue in case gorillas come into our backyard to scare us. I’ll run out into the yard and glue their feet down.”

That answer was very well received.

“Why is one bottle white and one bottle brown?”

“Well of course the white gorilla glue is for white gorillas, and the brown is for brown gorillas.”

Silverback Gorilla at London Zoo, Wikimedia Commons

“Let’s go try it!” she yelled almost ecstatically.

Looking out the window I saw no gorillas, or any other animal wild or tame. “Well, I think the gorillas are hiding from us now.” Thinking like an adult, I didn’t want her to be disappointed.

“No, they’re not. We’ll just pretend,” she said with a sly wink that seemed to say, You do remember how to play, don’t you?

And with that, the five-year-old sprinted outside, paused at a spot where the threatening gorilla hoard was standing, and squirted pretend glue on pretend feet. She was fearlessly immobilizing at least six gorillas, and by my reckoning, three were white, and three were brown because she selected just the right bottle for the proper gorilla.

As proof of the effectiveness of her defensive strategy, no gorillas entered our house that day.

snowwhite — Snowflake the Gorilla, Wikimedia Commons

Now, to be fair to all gorillas, I do plan to take my granddaughter to the zoo one day and explain to her what an intelligent and peaceful, and threatened species gorillas are.

And then I’ll probably explain the real reason Gorilla Glue is named as it is. Gorillas undoubtedly use it to glue their nests together so gorilla babies won’t fall out of the trees at night.

Gorilla_nest (1) — Gorilla night nest. Photo courtesy of Jefe Le Gran, Wikimedia Commons.

Makes perfect sense to me.

The gorilla face featured photo is by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash.

What Are Spammers Thinking?

I’ve noticed that from time to time normal, rational people comment on my blog posts. Unfortunately, their comments are usually lost in the noise. Where is the noise coming from?

Well, spammers.

Spam on blog posts is one of the most bizarre human or computer behaviors I have ever seen. And frankly, it makes no sense at all.

When some computer fills up one or two paragraphs with wildly random characters or words, I think it’s a good bet that no intelligent life form is behind the keyboard. If I had a monkey, it could probably do a better job.

And though I appreciate it when some comments praise my work, when they quickly lead to an ad for Viagra I become suspicious that they aren’t actually insinuating that my posts are leaving the readers flat. I suspect they haven’t read a word, and some computer is inserting an ad which the programmer hopes will automatically get posted. I hate to disappoint, but my posts have nothing to do with the pharmacology of impotence, and therefore such obviously slanted ads will get no traction with me.

As a matter of fact, any reader with more than a microwatt brain will notice two things. 1) there are no ads on my site, and I strongly resist any outside efforts to get me to “monetize” my website. I figure if I can’t afford to keep the website up without selling ads, then I’ll shut it down. 2) The name of the blog strongly implies I am a man, and upon reading a few posts you see that I have an attraction to men’s toys. So why do I see a preponderance of spam trying to get me to push handbags and women’s boots?

If I was going to push ads, they would be for man-toys like motorcycles, airplanes, high definition video cameras, arctic survival gear, wingsuits, and diving gear. You know, guy stuff. But the purveyors of those specialty items have the good sense and integrity not to spam me. Fur-lined boots and handbags do not occupy even a cubic nanometer’s worth of space in my brain. So why would I link to spam sites selling those things?

You would think that the fact that I have dumped thousands of spam attempts for completely unnecessary fashion accessories would catch someone’s attention in the respective marketing departments. Their money is being wasted. But that fact is seemingly never appreciated by the spammers.

Also not appreciated is that I never publish anything in Japanese. I have been to Japan, but I can’t read or write kanji or hiragana. In fact, one of the most disorienting experiences of my life occurred in a Japanese bus station where there was not a single character from the Latin alphabet. So why would spammers send me lengthy spam in Japanese writing? Are they completely clueless? Or do they think I’m a renaissance man who acquires languages like some people acquire DVDs? I’ll confess, I’m not that man. I have a hard enough time with American English.

The irony of it is that before long I’ll likely receive one or more spam comments based on this posting. It will probably read something like this:

“You hit the actual fingernail in the head regarding this gleam… This information is so hard to find I will link to your feed and tell my friends who have been searching. Buy Viagra cheap online.”

How about that for a non sequitur!

If you have an interest in the psychology of spammers and spamming, there are a couple of articles, one scientific and one lay press that I can recommend. Another article, classified by Google as being scholarly, reportedly has a bad habit of infecting computers with viruses and other malware. According to the recommendations of my security software, I will not be recommending that site.

Spammer Image Photo by Clint Patterson on Unsplash