The Fredösphere

Well, bless my little heart: I'm on sale at Amazon. For only $0.89 you can own your very own Fredösphere! And I am coming soon to an iTunes near you, as well as Rhapsody and Napster.

(I'm amused and more than a little saddened to see I'm the #2 result when you search Amazon for They're Made Out of Meat, because that's a higher ranking than the Terry Bisson book that the original story comes in. Yow.)

And now, more about the making of They're Made Out of Meat:

For any work of art too large to fit in the creator's mind as a single flash of intuition, it's creation is really the discovery or invention of the appropriate creative process. After fumbling around for a bit, I found a time and place I could make headway.

Serendipitously, my son's basketball practices during the winter of 2008-2009 gave me an environment where I could work one hour a week utterly free of distraction. I sat on the stage of the gym at York Baptist Church with no one to talk to and nothing to do (because I deliberately left books and iPod at home). I found I could concentrate on the vocal lines and compose them in that noisy, but music-free, room, surrounded by other parents and motivated by the strange, vain frisson that came from knowing I was the only person in the place writing an opera about two alien beings trying to wrap their heads around the concept of a meat-based life form.

With the vocal lines in place, I could begin to see the general shape of the whole piece. That moment of intuiting the shape is an important one; once it occurs, one can confidently create various small sections of the work knowing how those sections relate to the whole.

Next time, I'll talk about musical motifs. Meanwhile, git yer li'l clicky finger busy and buy the dag-nabbed song!

Labels: They're Made Out Of Meat

In my previous post I asked you to go read Terry Bisson's marvelous story They're Made Out of Meat.  Today I'll tell you about my new relationship to the world of Meat.  Having noticed the story's unusual structure, that of pure dialog without a single word of narration, I realized the story worked as the script to a play, and needed absolutely no modification for dramatic adaptation.  From there, the next step should have been easy to see, but as is often the case, it took me a long time to understand:  namely that I could turn Meat into an opera.

A few things made me hesitate.  The size of the project was intimidating, as I estimated the resulting piece would be 10 minutes long.  (As it turned out, 15 minutes would have been closer to the truth:  more than twice the length of any piece previously written by me.)  The story was under copyright, and the thought of contacting/negotiating/wheedling/wrangling the author for permission was dismaying.  (Few things are better at sucking my will to live than asking a stranger for cooperation.)  Finally, I had recently decided upon another artistic project that seemed to me to be the thing I should be devoting the next several years of my life to and I didn't want a large distraction to delay it.

In the end, I couldn't say no to Meat although it did make chopped liver of an entire year of my life.  I contacted Terry Bisson by way of my good friend Tony C. Smith, he of the StarShipSofa podcast.  Terry turned out to be wonderfully, even miraculously, cooperative.  My first email to him was long and lawyerly, and was ignored.  My follow-up email was a couple of sentences, and Terry responded with a reasonableness and trust which still awes me whenever I think of it.  It's a model for how I should treat others when I become rich-slash-famous.

Tomorrow:  an opera is born.  Meanwhile, let me tease you with one minute of Meat:

Labels: Composition, They're Made Out Of Meat

My favorite SF short story is a very short story indeed by Terry Bisson entitled They're Made Out of Meat. The two minutes it takes you to read the whole thing will be the best possible use of your time. Do it. Now. I'll wait here 'til you're done.

Wasn't that fabulous? I've been re-reading that story for years and re-urging all my friends to read it, yet only recently (about a year ago) did I notice the secret of its brevity: it contains not one word of narration. The entire story is pure dialog. Not even a "he said" anywhere.

I meditated on that profundity for a while and finally noticed the story in its original form reads like a play, or a script for a movie. (Or—he said, trembling with excitement—the book for an opera.) Clearly I'm not the first person to have noticed this; someone has made a movie directly from the story:


They're Made Out Of Meat - The funniest movie is here. Find it

So now you ask, why is the Fredösphere talking about a short story that reads like a script, and could easily be made into a work of drama? Why, in short, is he talking about a science-fiction story that is practically begging for operatic treatment?

Keep asking yourself that question. Perhaps one day soon I will answer it.

Labels: Composition, Opera, They're Made Out Of Meat, VideoClip

Those of you who devote your lives to memorizing the content of this blog will remember I am a fan of the book The Seven Basic Plots.  Author Christopher Booker drew much information from the anthropologist Joseph Campbell, one of the world's top authorities on myths and a man who famously influenced George Lucas' development of the Star Wars story line.

Long have I intended to watch Joseph Campbell's PBS specials, hoping an answer to the following questions would I find:

What is the purpose of myth-making in a culture?  What is its job?
What lessons can modern fiction writers learn from the ancient myths?

Finally, I've done it.  My local library has several Campbell videos to choose from.  I began with Mythos.  It's a 3-disc series but my library owns only numbers 1 and 3.  The first disc examined the psychological foundation of myth.  Campbell is an engaging speaker, with deep knowledge and a rare knack for teaching.  I found this part of the series very stimulating, even though much of it I didn't buy, as it relied heavily on Jungian and Freudian concepts which have lost much of their scientific cachet.  (Thad, my friend the psychology professor, tells me that the use of drugs in psychiatry has not so much refuted those two giants as rendered them irrelevant.)  The third disc was less interesting to me as it simply described certain myths without the  kind of analysis I was hoping for.  Here, Campbell's bias became more obvious, which is:  all traditions are equal and equally glorious, except the European/Christian tradition which is uniquely bad.  At the point Campbell mentioned "Jesus Christ" and "the speed of light" in the same sentence (by way of refuting the Ascension as a historical fact), thereby dropping a notch in my estimation.  That's one of my rules:  never fully respect anyone who uses the words "Jesus Christ" and "the speed of light" in the same sentence.

Were my questions answered?  No, not completely.

I moved on to another, more famous PBS video:  Bill Moyers' interview of Campbell at George Lucas' Skywalker Ranch, titled Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth.  This was even less interesting.  It quickly devolved into Hindu apologetics.  That's fine if that's what you want, but maybe they could have given the video a more honest title, like maybe Joseph Campbell and the Power of Hinduism and Buddhism Which Are Religions Far Superior to Christianity With All It's Annoying Dogmas and Neurotic Fixation On Sin.

Were my questions answered?  No, not at all.

My search for enlightenment continues.  I'll give one of Campbell's books a try.  I think I'll start with The Hero With a Thousand Faces, which I believe was the starting point for George Lucas.  In the meantime, I'll have to rely on this brief summary of "the hero's journey," complete with disco cheezeball Star Wars soundtrack:



So now I'm thinking about writing a story about some warrior dude who rips the arm off a monster.  A monster who wears black and breathes noisily, and uses an ill-defined, magical "force."  And whose name is Grendel.  Or Darth Grendel.  Or. . .well, obviously this is just a work in progress.

Labels: Culture, Fiction, Religion

More crazy awe: the announced Death of Cursive Handwriting has the curmudgeon (what a wonderful word, curmudgeon!  Makes me want to write it down 500 times.  In cursive) in me denouncing our feckless afterbearers who no longer learn that discipline.  Here's one link, but google the topic if you doubt there has been much hand wringing over the state of handwriting.

Mind you, I completely get the temptation never to learn the not terribly easy craft.  What I don't understand is the poor confused, lying zitbrains you find here and there who claim that block letters are faster. Obviously they haven't practiced their cursive enough to discover what a beautiful, efficient, and downright elegant (in the engineering sense, especially) technique cursive writing is.  Avoiding the tedious act of lifting the pen or pencil off the page once or more per letter is a wonderful thing.

And I would personally like to take this opportunity to denounce whatever pathetic (no doubt self-appointed) panel of so-called experts who were in charge of deciding what the official style for cursive letters would be taught to schoolchildren of my generation. In particular, I'd like to complain that the look of many of the capital letters are goofy, ugly, unwritable, tasteless, and/or generally exactly what you would expect coming from a bunch of education bureaucrats (the kind of people who spend their Friday nights memorizing tables of statistics published by the Soviet Union).  What's with that letter Q, looking like the number 2?  Why can't the capital F look like, you know, an F?  And, speaking as someone with the middle name Gero (a committee of one, no doubt) who therefore occasionally needs to write a capital G and make it look decent, I ask:  who's the genius who came up with that hopeless tangle of worms?  To write a decent G one must loop counter-clockwise, come to a full halt, then loop clockwise.  I've never seen any other person pull it off, and of course, most people don't even try:  most people have brains enough to abandon the system and write their capitals as ordinary block letters.  The capital requires an extra lift of the pen or pencil, so block letters cost almost nothing in time or effort, and look much more tasteful.

(The Time article linked above says a new system, the Zanerian alphabet, is much cleaner.  Sadly, not even that system is being forced upon our lazy spawn.)

I remember the shock I had recently of reading the handwriting of a college student who's penmanship seemed to be lifted right off a poster on the wall of a 2nd grade classroom.  To be blunt, it was the penmanship of a dork.  The kid should have figured it out by that late stage to break the rules, but still, can we agree?­­­­ He was the victim of educational malpractice.

Labels: Culture, Design