Drydocking Sloop

English 363
January 29, 2010

Drydocking Sloop

I entered the little cafe, which was built flat-roofed and crisp of line in the '50s, and now had hardwood counters and tables, shade-grown coffees (promoting triple-canopy ecosystems, birdlife, and general ecological health), and whole-grain pastries.  It is, of course, a vital part of the process of "boatbuilding" to visit such places often, and sitting there at a varnished hrdwood table was Ben Travis, local hydrology engineer—a wiry, grey-haired forty-five-year-old who seemed always to have a glint in his eye, and (more to the point) was building a thirty-six-foot schooner in his backyard, which he intended to sail around the world with his family.

I asked him the green white oak question, and suddenly the glint vanished, replaced by the blank look of one who knows he has valuable and arcane knowledge. (Robb 93)

    This passage reveals to me another example of the narrator's sense of subtle smug condescension, not towards the reader or audience per se, but a general voice of superiority.  It also has an example of what could be termed hollow description—that is, a descriptive passage that reads well, but shows very little concrete evidence without having to dissect the sentence to infer its meaning.

    Let us begin with this latter point, concerning the hollow descriptions.  When Robb-as-narrator tells us that this "little cafe" was "crisp of line in the '50s, and now had hardwood counters and tables" it calls to mind far more about what is not being described as much as what is being described.  What exactly is 1950s "crisp of line" design, and how does that differ from the apparently more recent style of "hardwood counters and tables"?  In my own experience, hardwood style isn't necessarily "crisp" but it is usually straight of line (hence a specific varietal of tree is known as lodgepole pine because of its even grain and pole-line straightness).  The following description of Ben Travis does indeed show us-as-readers something about the fellow, but it relies on worn-out clichés to do so: "wiry, grey-haired forty-five-year-old who seemed always to have a glint in his eye" is a generic description of an archetype who is wise and happy and, according to cliché tradition, is about to become serious and impart Very Important Wisdom.  Obliging, this happens in the following paragraph when "suddenly the glint vanished, replaced by the blank look of one who knows he has valuable and arcane knowledge."  The knowledge in this instance is valuable within context and arcane only so far as people have been using white oak to build boats in New England, so the use of "arcane" seems a bit brash and overblown.  Or, one could argue with a Hemingway attitude, that "arcane" is a ten dollar word used when a fifty cent one might have sufficed.  But fifty cents doesn't get one very far in this little cafe with its shade-grown coffee.

    Which brings up the former point concerning the narrator's smug voice.  To what purpose does it serve to offer a comment (complete with Very Important Sounding parenthetical) about "shade-grown coffees (promoting triple-canopy ecosystems, birdlife, and general ecological health), and whole-grain pastries"?  Personally, having been a professional coffee-roaster, I am familiar with the extent of coffee practices around the world and the value of fair-trade organic (why were these two features not mentioned?) shade-grown coffee (coffee being the second largest commodity traded in world markets and ethical business models within the industry can set standards for thousands of others), but in unpacking the meaning of Robb's passage here, I call into question the term "triple-canopy," never having heard it before, nor able to find any reference to such a thing outside of Robb's own narrative.  This description sounds more at home in a sales pamphlet than a narrative memoir, unless the point is to ensure us-as-readers that the narrator is a socially conscious supporter of environmental causes and is hoping for a big thumbs up and us-as-readers to collectively say, "Good for you."

    The point of this passage from Robb is, I think, to show us the sort of everyday places in his small town where old knowledge and wise still reside, and it waits, available for the asking, to seekers such as the narrator to come along and pluck it from today's vine.  This wisdom and knowledge is, of course, represented by Ben Travis, while the cafe in which he waits for the seekers of his arcane wisdom is a place that was built some fifty years ago (showing it has some sense of tradition in a region with only a few hundred years of Western Civilization under its metaphoric belt) but now has a much simpler air about it, embedded, perhaps, in the grain of the varnished hardwood counters and tables.

    I understand that the author (via his narrative persona) seems to attempt to show us-as-readers—the sense that some wisdom, the important knowledge, is something that comes from age and place and word-of-mouth handed down from adept to apprentice.  I just don't think he does so without being smug and disingenuous towards the audience and the world that resides outside his small sphere of influence.  It feels to me more like reading a political propaganda piece or moralistic tract than the tale of someone looking to folk wisdom and tradition in order to fulfill their own spiritual path.


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But What Does It Mean?

(second draft)
This paper was rewritten twice for the same class, expanding its scope each time.

English 205
January 14, 2010

But What Does It Mean?

Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?
―Hobbes

    When looking for meaning in a particular text, what exactly is the process used to discover what meaning might be there?  Like situational ethics, the very method itself varies, not so much in accordance with the text itself, but certainly with the context in which it is encountered.  The reason is as simple as the above quote from the sarcastic philosophy espouted by the fictional feline: ignorance becomes boring to me, and so I spend my commodity of time in order to gain the return on my investment in the form of further thought and—at times—some sort of understanding of a subject or idea.

    To illustrate, let us walk through some of this process while examining two separate texts.  The first will be an incident that had its source in “real life” and was repeatedly examined in fiction by author Philip K. Dick.  The other will be a more straight-forward text, that of an online comic strip called XKCD.

   Jumping into the Phildickian example is going to be necessarily as brief and cursory as possible.  This is a singular subject which produced at least three full-length novels and more than eight thousand pages of type-written notes (which Dick called his “Exegesis”).  In February and March of 1974 Phil Dick had his impacted wisdom teeth removed and, on a particular afternoon, the pharmacy delivered his pain medication.  The delivery girl who came to his house wore an ichthys necklace.  Dick asked her what it meant and when she told him is was a symbol used by early Christians Dick saw sunlight glint off the pendant and, “In that instant … I suddenly experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis—a Greek word meaning, literally, ‘loss of forgetfulness.’ I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me.”  More than that, “as hard as this is to believe or explain, I saw fading into view the black, prisonlike contours of hateful Rome” (Dick).  In the following weeks, Dick experienced further visions, none of which he ever claimed to completely understand nor objectively define.  He did, however, spend the last eight years of his life writing about those experiences, examining what could possibly produce such events, and, in context to my own personal examination of deciphering what I encounter, what does it all mean?

    On one hand, Dick had been a heavy user of amphetamines in the years previous to his “mystical experience” and that fact alone was not lost upon him when he sought to attribute source and cause to his visions.  Likewise, he often considered the possibilities of a stroke or mental aberration as the cause.  But he never amassed the dogma in his own mental quest for meaning to categorically dismiss any possibility he could coherently structure, including some more outlandish theories such as a Teslaesque Soviet mind control beam or influence from an extraterrestrial satellite.

    Given Phil Dick’s wide range of meanings he deciphered from a singular event—from the mundane to the phantastic—who am I to say that the event was merely a side effect of pain and prescription medication, or that Dick is a liar, or that it never happened at all.  My mind is open to the possibility that something can occur for which I have no framework to define it.

    Contrasting this delightful somewhat existential quagmire, is the January 13, 2010 edition of the comic strip XKCD by Randall Munroe titled “Self Description.”  From its title, wearing my English Major Academic Thinking Cap®, I can deduce a self-awareness of post-modernism which demonstrates a certain incredulity to its own meta-narrative.  Which might mean that it knows it is going to be playing with the conventions of self-awareness and the regressive inversion of its audience knowing that is aware of itself, or so on down the infinite hall of mirrors casting reflections upon themselves:

    One of the traits this web-comic has, is a meta-text (also called an alt-text or, ironically, a hyper-text) that is displayed when the mouse cursor is placed over the illustration.  This text usually takes the form of a sarcastic comment about the subtext of the strip, or otherwise givens meaning or complication to what is shown.  In this particular strip, the alt-text tells us, “the contents of any one panel are dependent on the contents of every panel including itself. The graph of panel dependencies is complete and bidirectional, and each node has a loop. The mouseover text has two hundred and forty-two characters” (Monroe).  Here then we have a comic strip that seems to be doing nothing more than making a rather facile comment upon its own contents, and offers little to suggestion anything other than that.  Being an ideological omnivore, I can place attributions on it much like a Rorschach ink blot.  These attributions are highly dependent on if I have donned my English Major Academic Thinking Cap®, or I have just awakened and taken to the internet before my second cup of coffee in the morning, or how much cognitive dissidence I wish to express.  This is a strip which seems to provide no deeper meaning, but that could be precisely why it may offer some because, in life, literature, art, politics, what-have-you, initial appearances are rarely what they seem, and my brain is wired to instinctively wonder what else might be lurking there just below the surface.

    Not to meander off-topic—nor add filler to this self-aware personal narrative—but like the meaning sought for in any given text, the meaning of “meaning” is not as simple as one might think.  In looking up the word in the OED, the first definition encountered is: “The action of MEAN v.2; moaning, lamentation,” which refers to “a. To complain of or lament (something); to lament for (a dead person).  b. To pity or comfort.”  So the seemingly most obvious meaning of “meaning” is not the initial meaning at all.

   This alliterative conundrum may seem to be a farcical endeavor, but it is purposefully used here to illustrate the point being made.  That is, the meaning is pretty much anything is rarely, if ever, what is encountered on its surface, its face-shown-to-the-world level of intention.  And whatever it was that the author (that is, the creator or creators) of a particular text intending its meaning to be, there are certainly many other—and equally valid—meaning which can be deciphered from that text.  What meaning the (reader/viewer/listener) audience of a work thinks and takes from it is just as valid as what the creator of the work intended, just as the meaning of the same text for the same individual may be different in accordance to when and how they re-encounter or re-examine it at another time.

Works Cited

Philip K. Dick. "How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later (1978)." In The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, ed. Lawrence Sutin. New York: Vintage/Random House, 1995, Print.

─. In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis. Nevada City, CA: Underwood Books, 1991. Print.
Munroe, Randall. "Self-Description." XKCD 13 Jan. 2010. Web. 13 Jan. 2010.

Watterson, Bill. Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Monster Snow Goons. Kansas City. Andrews McMeel Publishing, 1992. Print.


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Writing Rules To Be Learned & Only Then Broken At Will, part 5

Mark Twain:


1. A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.

2. The episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help develop it.

3. The personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.

4. The personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.

5. When the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.

6. When the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.

7. When a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a Negro minstrel at the end of it.

8. Crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader by either the author or the people in the tale.

9. The personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausably set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.

10. The author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones.

11. The characters in tale be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.

An author should—

12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.

13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.

14. Eschew surplusage.

15. Not omit necessary details.

16. Avoid slovenliness of form.

17. Use good grammar.

18. Employ a simple, straightforward style.




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Writing Rules To Be Learned & Only Then Broken At Will, part 4

Ernest Hemingway:


1. Use short sentences.
2. Use short first paragraphs.
3. Use vigorous English.
4. Be positive, not negative.
5. Put the shit in the wastebasket.
6. Don’t drink until after you have finished the day’s writing.




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Writing Rules To Be Learned & Only Then Broken At Will, part 3

George Orwell:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.




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Writing Rules To Be Learned & Only Then Broken At Will, part 2

Kurt Vonnegut:

1.     Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2.     Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3.     Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4.     Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5.     Start as close to the end as possible.
6.     Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7.     Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8.     Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.




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Writing Rules To Be Learned & Only Then Broken At Will, part 1

Elmore Leonard:


1. Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle.*
2. Never open a book with weather.
3. Avoid prologues.
4. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
5. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” . . .
6. Keep your exclamation points under control.
7. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
8. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
9. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
10. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
11. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
12. If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.




* = "Hooptedoodle" — From John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday:  "Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”



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