Honestly if someone told me that mainly I'd be writing on a smart phone when I was in my forties. That I'd be using my thumbs and that liquid paper would be a thing of the past...I'd have said, yeah but what about the jet packs and flying cars?
Saturday 21 May 2016
Errors and flying cars
It's crazy what gets past you. In these letter and follow up blog entries, I seem to be repeating words. It's almost like a stutter. Conjunctions, articles and other connective words are the worst. 'With', 'in', 'there'....there was one in the 'Carol' letter in the first bloody sentence. The word 'in' repeated twice. And the number of times I went though that letter....it is embarrassing for sure. I tell myself not to worry about it. Accidents happen. I tell myself it's all part of the refining process. That these mistakes are part of each letters texture because the characters are making the mistakes. But still...it just doesn't feel good to see silly error on the page. Recently I talked to my wife about getting a vintage IBM typewriter. An electric model. I had one of these in California. You would flip the power switch and bam! The machine would come to life. It put a very fine vibration through the desk and up into your fingertips. The carriage return action was decisive as if the machine were jumping to attention at the end of each sentence. The cover had this beautiful 1970's design aesthetic. Contours and lines hinting at a future that never quite arrived. Those keys hit the page like a gunshot. Bang! Bang! Bang! Despite all that solid engineering it still made mistakes. Sometimes the letters in words were not perfectly aligned. Sometimes the imprint was too faint or too heavy. And I do want mistakes through mechanical means. In these letters I want to include crossed out words, margin notes, smudges, misspellings, etc. but they need to be intensional, not the result of a careless oversight.
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Hello Tobias,
ReplyDeleteA friend placed a copy of 'getting to know you' in my hands over lunch at an Inner West pub on Sunday. That day, you might recall, the weather was all kinds of inclement - cold, grey, gusty, trees and rain aslant - when the letter was put in my hand we were three drinks deep, happily lunched and, to round out the scenario, the pub, in which we were encamped, referred to itself as an inn. That is, the conditions for encountering your epistle were perfect, almost. The want of perfection lay in that my interlocutor soon informed me it was a piece of fiction or, rather, a true letter by fictional people (or a fictional person) - a wonderful description whose success requires it be left uninterrogated: so, the letter is real but the person who wrote it is a character?
If only I hadn't known it wasn't real I'd have consumed it ravenously. Anyway, I thought it was worthy of a response (and I hope, in your opinion, the following is worthy of your epistle).
So, with the preamble done and brevity an aim of the following:
The gender politics is horribly regressive: Ryan, it turns out, is a cry-baby, a natural disappointment to 'Mel', the female heroine, who wants and needs a real man - one who can take control. The word 'Mel' is given for this manliest of qualities is "initiative". And in an adjacent sentence, near the start of the letter, Mel discloses Ryan also has "a good job". Ryan is the full package: he thinks and throbs. What more could Mel want? Nothing. Simple.
Alas, Mel soon finds her man is indeed real and her subsequent disappointment is torrential, a big bleeding whinge. The low-point in the gender regressiveness, however, must be when Mel considers what her father would've made of yellow belly Ryan: the old man having been a real man. Just like Mel. Not like Ryan.
It's shame Mel was given so little complexity. In the end she has the chauvinism of an uninteresting bloke. She is all judgment and no depth. The old gender paradigm remains intact, just inverted.
So, enough of that.
The 'coda', formed by the aeroplane anecdote, was a nice touch. What was especially enjoyable, apart from it's entertainment value, was that neither party (the man or the woman) are given a value. We're not told who was wrong or who was right. We have room to stretch or legs in aisles and think about it. There are no such freedoms with Mel and Ryan, and yet there was a wilderness in which to do so.
I'd be keen to read Ryan's account of this experience. And I wonder how different would be his account if the recipient were his mother, or his father, or his sponsor at NA (or whichever twelve step programme he attends - or if he hasn't an addiction, some other interlocutor with whom failure does not automatically and irreversibly result in damning judgement).
Regards,
Paul.
Hi and thanks Paul.
DeleteIt was good to hear from you and I appreciate your feedback. I'm not sure I agree entirely with what you're saying here. I don’t think the gender politics is that relevant to the letter. Maybe the female character might come off as a bit masculine because she has taken the most active role in the narrative. I was a bit surprised you picked up on the name Mel as being too masculine. As far as I'm concerned, Mel is a familiar and endearing shortening of Melissa. I honestly wasn't going for anything macho.
Mel is based on a friend of mine whose had a fair bit of bad luck in the dating scene here in Sydney. This friend does have a tendency to streamline the process and itemise her men for easy sorting. She is super confident and knows what she wants. She thinks and expresses herself differently than a woman in her twenties or thirties would.
One question I would ask you is have you listened to women talk? The way they take pleasure in discussing how their romantic interactions have gone? From my experience they tend to enjoy going into quite a bit of detail talking about good and bad male behaviour and what it all might signify. When they are talking about men, my wife's single friends will seek solace, advice and find humour in situations involving men as they weigh up the pros and cons. So I don't think this character is overly masculine or unrealistic. In this letter she is unloading after a terrible last date.
You are complete correct in saying she is rather light on character depth and development. The reason for this is that she is writing a letter. I don't really think people write extensive letters about themselves, rather they skim over events and trivialities in their lives. You might think she is a superficial character and therefore a weak, unrealistic representation of her gender for slating Ryan in the way she does but then again, she is under a great deal of duress. And she finds herself to be the most emotionally well-equipped person to deal with their predicament.
In terms of a limited character, this is perhaps part of the limitations of the genre I am working with. Unless your letter was written in the 1800s, chances are there won't be much in the way of descriptive language and in-depth character development. Meaning is gleaned through inference and perhaps even through the well trodden conceit of the unreliable narrator. Sure. I'll admit that. I'll also admit that I'm a sucker for the Hemingway iceberg approach to writing. Let the reader do some work!
Another way of looking at this is - maybe Mel is just a completely superficial and unlikable person? Maybe her perspective is far too harsh and not to be trusted because she has become embittered by some disappointment in her own life? I don't know for sure. This is what I like about letters. They are incomplete stories. With a letter not only are you locked into a person (character's) narrow channel of experience, you're also dealing with a form of writing that is imperfect because it isn't intended for mass consumption. There is one intended reader on the other end. In this case Jo. And god knows what her part in all this is? I certainly wouldn't say that these characters are emblematic of all women and men. Nor would I describe Ryan and Mel's dynamic as some bungled attempt to invert gender roles. It is simply a completely fucked up last date. I promise you.
In any case, I do thank you for your response and for your well thought out comments. And thanks especially for your compliment concerning the aeroplane coda at the end of the letter. I appreciate it. I am definitely going to start writing a few letters from other characters' perspectives in the future.
Anyway, thanks again for responding mate.
Regards,
Tobias