Ghost Month

It's been a good month for spookers. Just yesterday, sitting and standing in my morning writing class, I started developing, out of the blue, it seemed, a new one about a mixed-race family stuck in the mountains of central Taiwan with a family of crash victims. It uses the idea of "hungry ghosts", spirits looking for new bodies. I kid you not: some people around here are afraid to go anywhere near a lying in state in case the departed's spirit is on the prowl for new digs. In two or three free moments, I jotted down the first three or four paragraphs. Before bed, though deadly tired, I wrote out the last two paragraphs.

The premise is that the husband/father in the family group, being a Westerner and no believer in ghosts, is entirely unaffected by the activities of the dead in Taiwan, but his wife and children are very directly affected. I don't want to spoil it for you, so I'll say no more, even though I believe a really well conceived and constructed story can easily stand a spoiling.

A Saving Vision of the Night

Praise God, whose is the might. If any should read this, be it known, when I returned from evening prayer, the last of my life, I found a man standing in my room. His skin was blackened and he smelled of smoke, but when I looked closely I could see his face and stature were my own. Upon his chest he wore a flaming sword.

I did not challenge him, for I knew before he spoke that he was a messenger, but whether of God (let him be praised, for he hath made the world and given us to cleanse it) or the Devil (let him be scorned, for he bringeth impurity into the world), I could not tell, for does not the scripture say: For my name’s sake even the angels have their wounds?

I waited and beheld. His appearance was of smoke, but of smoke so tightly bound as to resemble flesh. He regarded me silently, as if he, too, wondered whose servant I might be. Praise God, I am the Lord’s, as you shall know on the morrow, for his in all the universe is the might, to create and to destroy.

At last he spoke.

“Praise God!” he cried. “I am permitted to appear to you, from beyond the borders of the grave, though you shall have none, to warn and to plead, for the thing you design to do is not of God.”

At these words, I began to suspect that here was an angel of lies, for is not it written in the book of prayer: Oh, Lord, deliver me from mouths whose tongues are honeyed, but whose breath is poison to the lungs? But I could not yet be sure, for it is also said: The words of sorrow may be the words of life; words that seem arrows to the ears may be a soothing ointment to the heart.

I did not speak. Again he looked on me as if in doubt.

“Hear me,” he urged. “Hear me and be saved. It is in your heart that God has called you among all men to be the weapon of his ire. Your courage is acceptable to him. Your obedience to that which you suppose to be his will is acceptable to him. But life is not given you to take, for the scripture says: Hurt not the fruit of the woman’s womb. Life is the Lord’s. The Lord is life. By his command the elements combine. Only by his command shall they be sundered.”

He reasoned well, but the scripture also says: When I command it, strike. When I say kill, obey. You are the arrows in his bow. Your arms are the swords in his hand. By you shall he cleanse the earth and write his word in heart, on head and on the tongue. By you shall filth be rooted out, even by death if they will not repent.

Still I did not speak, for as the scriptures say: When angels call, men shall not answer with their tongues. And in another place: Join not the Devil in discourse. He that speaketh with the fiend walks by his own device into the snare. The snares of Satan are an iron band.

“Listen to me!” he railed, so like the noticed and rejected fiend. “It is not too late. Praise God, the merciful, who blesses with his might. I who have walked this path and tasted bile pled for grace and have been saved, but only if I turn you from the path. Praise God, for his might is in the miles and in the hours. He guideth suns and knoweth the secret ways of space, for all they are the craft of his hand, the thought and yearning of his heart. He reacheth all places and seeth all times. Nothing shall hide from him, in time or space. The sands do not stand or flow, but that he guideth them to and fro, but that his fingers feel each one, each in its stillness and its flight.

These were new scriptures. They rang true, but I had not read them in any canon. And I was no prophet that they should be revealed to me.

“No longer doubt!” he screamed. “All time is God’s to give and lend, but I have been given just this once and just this hour. Turn from the darkness and the fire. You have been deceived. It is God you praise, but the Devil you serve.”

I put my hands to my ears.  “Be gone!” I cried.

Panic seized him.

“Proud, blind fool! They said it would be so. You would not believe, though your own dead self returned from the scattered places of the grave. You will damn us both, for we are one. I have seen our error and by the grace of God come to deter you from your course, that the innocent may be spared and that we may yet kneel before God, not in shame, but in honor, for we may yet serve the Maker in life, whereas we only offend him in the death you choose.”

I confess, at these words I wavered. Is not the way of life the better way? Do not the scriptures say: Two paths there are, but one leads to rejoicing and one to endless pining for the first? But they also say: Let not the shadow guide the feet, let not the pressure of the wind lead you to right or left, let no lie tempt your feet backward from the path of right. Do they not say: Lord, I have set my course toward the sun. No wind, no wave shall overcome me now, for I sail to thee. If I fail, it shall be death that breaks me, not despair?

He continued to plead, but I knew him now. I shut my ears, my eyes and my heart. Though he shouted like thunder, I would not hear. Though his words beat like surges at the gate, the gate did not open and did not fall.

Yet I cringed in my anguish. “Be gone! Depart from me! Return to hell and tell your master, if you are not the master himself, no man of my house has changed his course once set. I serve the only God. Be gone!”

Silence surrounded me. I dared a glance. He stood as in defeat, his shoulders slumped, his hands at his sides like torn rags, his face as sagging as a flag, the flag of a defeated army on a carrion field, stirred by no wind and by no survivors.

“My own words,” he groaned. “Will you not listen, you twice-damned fool? But God is just. He knows our hearts.  Too late I see the evil in my heart. We cannot be saved. O God of mercy and of might, I surrender wholly to thy will!”

With that, he drew his sword, the sword of flame strapped like a breastplate to his chest. His fire was glorious, but I was not deceived. Does not the scripture say: Even the Devil flies in light?

Brain Bombs or How to Read My Stories

This afternoon I asked one of my mystery colleagues what he thought of "The Ice Cream Truck's Song" (now "The Ninth, Not Final, Plague"). He said frankly that he frankly didn't get it at all, even after reading it twice. Interesting. Here he was a native speaker and he'd fared worse than my students. They at least knew it was a ghost story. Hmm. We talked about the title, which I admitted was misleading. He said it made you think something nice was going to happen. Well, something nice did happen, from a certain perspective. He said it reminded him of Poe's madmen stories. Lots of detail. I can't remember what triggered it, but he suddenly shouted, "Oh! I know who the ghosts are!" I must have said something about its being a ghost story. I think that's right. The minute he knew it was a spooker, everything clicked. Hmm.

The conversation reminded me that I'd planned to write a brief treatise on how to read certain of my stories which begin "in medias res" and don't supply obvious hints about what's going to come in handy down the road. I'm referring here to things like the James Bond movies, where Bond invariably pays a visit to Q, who invariably hands him a set of disguised weapons and other gear, which Bond invariably calls upon in a tight spot, or the Harry Potter stories, in which one or two magical gadgets introduced casually early in the tale end up being crucial to the plot (think of the time-turner in The Prisoner of Azkaban, the portkey in The Goblet of Fire, the pensieve in The Order of the Phoenix and the vanishing cabinet in The Half-Blood Prince).

While I don't mind, and even enjoy, this obvious style of presentation in other people's work, but I like to do it more subtly myself. I like to show you the world and let you notice what you will, the way it works in the real world. Of course, there are myriad differences between any story and the real world. Any report or representation of reality is going to be restricted in content, our attention is going to be funneled to a few pertinent items, but I so like those moments in M. Knight Shyamalan's movies when a whole mess of seemingly insignificant details or oddities suddenly string together into one tight and intense realization (as when Malcolm Crowe can't open the basement door in The Sixth Sense, David Dunn sees Elijah Price's diagrams in Unbreakable, and Graham Hess confronts the alien in Signs).

And so to "The Ninth, Not Final, Plague". I'm not entirely pleased with that title, which may be the subject of a future entry called "Evolution of a Title". It's a good title, but it's a bit heavy for the story, just as "The Ice Cream Truck's Song" was too light. Anyway, let's talk briefly about how the story works.

It starts with what for some readers would be, and is, an obvious clue: "I myself would not believe it, if not for the bell." This is a pretty plain tip off that something weird is about to be described. If that isn't enough, we have the next sentence: "Every night it rings–and rings and rings until I open the door and find–nothing." What else could we be talking about but ghosts, especially after the next paragraph, which tells us that "there was no one there. The elevator had opened and was closing and stood empty on my floor. There was no one in the stairwell for two floors and not a soul on the roof"?

Next thing you know the narrator is hearing voices. Not much later he is making them out. It could only be ghosts, ba.

The question for most of my students is "Who are the ghosts?" They really puzzle over that one. Yet the clues are so numerous it's almost embarrassing. You could be forgiven for thinking the narrator was freaked out until you read paragraph five: "It seemed like a game. It was a game. I had played it before." If that doesn't help, he tells you "I would have let it ring a decade if I could", not what you'd expect from someone experiencing fear, unless you take it to mean he'd rather hear the bell ring than face the ghosts in the corridor. Ooh! That gave me the cold pricklies! But then he goes on "grasping at shadows", actually trying to touch the ghost that rings the bell, so he's obviously not afraid of the ghosts, and then he claims to know where the ghost's hand, arm, shoulders and head should be–even what the look on its face must be! If that doesn't do it for you, he digresses about shoes and dust and about an apartment that hasn't been looked after for a while. Then there's the perfume, a sly little twist to show he has a grip on reality. He's sure he must be imagining the perfume. It wouldn't be so apparent if its wearer were returning.

Then we have paragraph eleven, which spells out in huge flaming letters the relationship between the ghosts. Taken with paragraph ten's "family grave" simile for the vacant parking spot that neighbours wish to buy or rent but which the narrator refuses to sell or rent in case "they" return and paragraph eight's dust and shoes description, paragraph eleven amounts to a statement of the relationship between the narrator and the ghosts. The second to last paragraph talks about fear, but not of the ghosts: of their eventually not coming anymore, a fate the narrator would rather avoid. Why? Well, you figure it out.

This type of story I call a brain bomb. You go along, wondering or not, and somewhere very close to the end, it all clicks and your brain explodes with it. In the explosion, all the subtle hints come rushing together to be relived, everything takes on new meaning (or just meaning, if you didn't start to get it earlier), and there's this intense, exquisite paroxysm of understanding and awe, awe not for my finesse with the pen or keyboard, but for the splendour and terror of the human soul, the beauty and horror of our state.

Does that help anybody?

The Ninth, Not Final, Plague

I myself would not believe it, if not for the bell. Every night it rings–and rings and rings until I open the door and find–nothing. The tight corridor between the elevator, my neighbour's door and the door to the stairwell crouches before me with an emptiness like famine, with a blackness like a plague of night.

At first I believed it was a joke, that the children downstairs had learned to play tricks on a lonely old foreigner. I said and did nothing the first night, grew incensed the second night and lay in wait the third night, but when I flung open the door, needing time only to throw the bolt and turn the handle, there was no one there. The elevator had opened and was closing and stood empty on my floor. There was no one in the stairwell for two floors and not a soul on the roof.

So I began to listen. We pick up on patterns quickly, we mortals. By the fifth night I knew the time to the second. At nine thirty-five and three seconds, the elevator slid into place, the doors opened and after a pause just long enough for my heart to beat twice like a drum in the clutches of a madman, the bell rang.

I tested that bell. If I opened the door immediately, it cut off immediately. If I waited for ten minutes, it rang and rang until I could stand it no more and opened the door, as I have said, on a black, dry well whose bottom seemed to rise more swiftly with each turn of the game.

It seemed like a game. It was a game. I had played it before.

I began to listen as one listening for thunder in the distant hills or the faint, approaching jangle of the ice cream truck's song. There is that moment when the sound is heard, but so vaguely and mistily that only the time of day, the flash of lightning or its utter approach assures you that it has begun. It was always like that, even when I made out voices and what they said, even when I huddled by the door in tears, listening to that bell as it rang and rang for half an hour.

I would have let it ring a decade if I could, but ever more clearly I could hear, behind the frantic ringing of the bell and the rapid pressures of a ghostly hand, a  panicked voice, high and shrill, calling and crying, impatient, distressed. In tears like Pharaoh at the ninth and final plague, I burst into that space, grasping at shadows where the hand should be, the arm, the shoulders, the small, bright head, the frenzied, pouting face suddenly alight with impish reproach and the glee of relief and victory.

But there was nothing there, only my shadow on the elevator door, the dusty blue mat which I had not washed for weeks, the equally dusty shoe rack with its burden of abandoned shoes, hers and mine. Not theirs. Theirs lay like forgotten toys in careless jumbles on the rack inside the door and on the floor before it in a sward of dust disturbed only by my passing to and from the door to leave for work, to return from work and to answer the ringing of the bell.

One time I caught the elevator door before it closed. I stood there in that hollow light and felt for a moment as if I'd caught a scent, a harsh, sweet, strangling waft of her perfume. Impossible, of course. The scent had always faded by the time she came home, though it filled the house like the cloud the temple when she was ready to leave.

One time I locked the door and rode the elevator to the basement garage. I felt the motor of the scooter. It was warm, but only from my returning from work. I still parked the scooter tight against the rail and the parking space, my heart's delight whenever we returned from church or an excursion to a park or the seaside, yawned like a family grave, a thick, black oil stain and a pile of  planks for flowers and a headstone. A few neighbours had heartlessly offered to buy or rent it, but I had refused. It was my earth and it waited for their return.

One time I stood in the basement by the elevator door. It was nine thirty-three. At nine thirty-four and six seconds, the button lighted and the door opened. I stepped inside. I heard them. Piping, bright voices and hers scolding them for some heedless infringement of the maternal code. A squabble. A shout. All heard as if through glass, thick, black, frosted glass that made shadows of sound.

The door opened. I stepped out. I stood in the corridor. The bell did not ring. Puzzled impatience engulfed me like a wind. I unlocked the door and went in.

Nobody followed.

I have ridden with them since, always with the same result. The squabbles vary and the imprecations are not always severe, but the bell does not ring and I am conscious of confused expectation, as if I, too, were of their company. Sometimes I have made them wait until an unbearable edge of anger pierces my skin and heart like the sure stroke of a well-known knife. It is rare that I provoke them.

Most nights I wait beside the door, no longer doubting, more and more afraid. Will it occur to them that it is in vain, that they cannot enter, that I cannot reach them in that cramped void?

So far the bell still rings. With luck it will ring forever.

© Mark Penny

Where Ideas Come from

I was spooning out the cat food when I started thinking about an HBO feature I'd seen on Mission Impossible 3. I'm going to skip the gimmicky spelling here. Tom Cruise and JJ Abrams had shared how the city of Shanghai had really opened its doors to them. This struck me as interesting, because some bureaucrat probably had to look over the script for the flick before approval could be given and the portrayal of Chinese military intelligence in the script was probably obviously less than flattering. You'd think they'd have run into problems on that count. Perhaps they did and were just keeping the fact under wraps.

In any case, my mind turned to the question of art and what it consists of. Readers of my previous post will remember that I spoke of communities and their aesthetics. What if a human filmmaker submitted a script to an alien bureaucrat and the bureaucrat judged the script on its artistic merits? And what if the alien world's aesthetic was worlds apart from ours?

Sounded like a good premise for a story. Sci-fi, of course. A one off? Hmmm. Maybe I could fit it into a series. How about TEAL (Teaching English as an Alien Language)? Hmmm. How would I fit in an English teacher? Aha! The English teacher is recruited as consultant and translator. He or she observes and participates in the process. Now we're talking!

All this happened before I'd finished spooning out the dog food. That's where ideas come from. From spontaneous associations, not from dog food.

Hmmm. What about dog food? Alien dog food. Alien dogs. Really intelligent alien dogs. Hmmm. Attitudes toward intelligence. Measures of intelligence. Roles of intelligence. Slavery. Cultural prejudice. Hmmm. An English teacher is hired to teach an alien dog English. The dog is as intelligent as any of us. The masters refuse to learn other languages. The dogs handle interracial relations. Hmmm.

Two ideas in one day. Not a record, but not bad.

Art, Meaning and Message

Just yesterday I read Henry James's "The Tree of Knowledge" in Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine's Short Story Masterpieces.

A devastating and exalting little piece.

In the story, a self-styled great and little-understood sculptor, Morgan Mallow, aka the Master, sends his son, Lancelot, aka Lance, to Paris to study painting. The son discovers that he himself has about as much talent as a can of paint and that his father has less talent than a chisel. "I'm a hopeless muff [loser, bungler, incompetent]…, [b]ut I'm not such a muff as the Master!" he exclaims to the Master's long-time friend and his own godfather, Peter Brench, through whose eyes, if not voice, the story is told.

This is just one angle of the story (there are also the friend's heroic success at keeping his contempt for the work of the "artist" a deep and abiding secret without claiming the least respect for it, the son's struggle to keep his new and enlightened opinion of his father's work to himself, the son's apparent unfitness for any calling, the friend's deep and abiding secret love for the artist's wife, and the wife's subjection of her chronic and acute awareness of her husband's failings as an artist to her all-consuming and all-subsuming love for him and the concomitant care of his ego), but it's the one I want to deal with.

I'll bet it's the greatest fear of anyone who thinks they have talent but is aware that they might not that they will turn out to be one of those who has none but is unaware of it. You follow so far?

It is unlikely that either Morgan or Lancelot had no talent at all. The one could probably sculpt recognizable likenesses of people and things, and the other could probably paint recognizable likenesses of people and things. That's better than I can manage without a supreme effort.

The problem lies not in the ability to sculpt or paint, but in the power attributed to the sculptures and paintings. The problem lies in discernment. The Master's sin is not so much a lack of talent as a lack of discernment. He is able to sculpt likenesses, but he is unable to discern their ineffectiveness as works of art, their lack of power. If he claimed only to sculpt likenesses in a certain disproportionate style and made no claim of creating art, he would be neither contemptible nor pitiable. He would be normal. Because he so obstinately, in the face of the public's informed rejection, claims to be creating art but is so decidedly not doing any such thing, he is contemptible–or at least laughable, most likely slightly and harmlessly mad (that is, mentally out of alignment with his culture). Because he so naively persists in the belief that his work is simply not understood and because this naiveté is so essential to his self-esteem, if not his sanity, he is pitiable. There is no hope for the man. He will either dig in against the awareness of his own insignificance on that front, or crumble like Jericho when the reality penetrates his illusion.

The beauty of the story lies in the friend's, the son's and the wife's self-sacrificing subterfuge. They will quietly or vociferously, as they choose, align themselves with the Master's folly and bear the buffetings of a more discerning and less compassionate society rather than shatter the man's self-image or his image of the world. They are voluntary hostages to his benevolent but unsparing pride.

What does this mean for the rest of us, particularly us writers?

Whenever we write a story and friends or family applaud it, we must ask ourselves what motivates the applause. Is it genuine, discerning appreciation of our work, or is it self-sacrificing subterfuge, an inability or an unwillingness to confront us with the failure of our attempt? Conversely, whenever we submit a story for publication and it is rejected, we must ask ourselves why it was rejected. Was it because we failed in our attempt to create something of value, was it because there was no more room at the inn, or was it because a work of art was simply not understood?

A question might be asked about the Master's work. Was it really the pathetic scraping that his intimates and the larger public saw it to be? To him it was not. To him it had power. To him it was art. It had meaning and that meaning was conveyed. From this perspective, the question of whether a work is art depends ultimately on who is looking at it. If somebody thinks it is art, it is art. That is, it is art for them. And that is acceptable.

If you want to write, write. If you and others like what you write, then it's good writing. If what you write powerfully conveys meaning for you and others, then it is art.

The difficulty lies in the composition and conceits of the community within which and for which you attempt to write. In the story, the Master's son only sees his father's folly when he views his father's work from the perspective of an education in art in Paris. In other words, he had been brought up at home to admire his father's work, but when trained in a different aesthetic, the dominant aesthetic, he came to despise his father's work. He suffered a paradigm shift, a dramatic and traumatic one, one his godfather would have spared him. Such shifts occur all the time. What happens to any country boy or girl who moves to the city, any city boy or girl who moves to the country, any boy or girl who goes off to university, anyone who lives abroad? Do not they all come back, or at least look back, with some degree of pity or contempt on the aesthetic and cosmology of their neighbours and kin, their old community? And do they not often resume the old aesthetic and the old cosmology when they return?

So it appears to be a question of community. But then, that is what folk art and world art are for. We are quite capable of discerning power in an alternate aesthetic and the works it generates. Given a basic understanding of the aesthetic, we can say something of the success or failure of a work rendered within that aesthetic. Indeed, we may even be able to recognize art without any other introduction to its inherent aesthetic than the common aesthetic of humanity. Cross-eyed, short-sighted aliens from a planet that only shows blues would probably be unanimous in their judgment that every piece of visual art created on earth looks pretty much like every other, the way all country songs sound nearly identical to the uninitiated and all heavy metal sounds like a car crash to the violently unrefined.

Is this to suggest, then, that there really is such an objective quality as art? I suppose it is. At least, there must be some such objective quality at a certain level. That is to say, there must be degrees of art. This notion is adhered to by Penn Warren and Erskine, who quip in their introduction that "if we had got together within our available number of pages what we considered the best thirty-five short stories there would be fewer authors." They elaborate.

William Faulkner, for example, would have more than one, and, among others, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, and Frank O'Connor. There are few such real masters of the short story…. But there are others who have produced one or two stories so memorable that they must find a place in a book like this, which aims to give some representation to the considerable variety of good stories that have been written in our time.

I admit that when I read Faulkner's "Barn Burning" I was, or at least thought I was, conscious of a certain lushness not common in stories of any kind, let alone short ones, a sort of density of detail not attributable to length of sentence, paragraph or passage. On the other hand, I wasn't much impressed by Hemingway's "Soldier's Home", perhaps because I found no redemption in it (typical of Hemingway), but also because the rhythm seemed clumsily off. I'll have to go into depth about that later.

As I wrote about the subjectivity of art, or of the perception of art, it occurred to me that the aesthetically misguided may be guilty of a baser crime: vagueness. Could the Master have minutely defined in what the power of his sculptures lay? Or did his perception that his work was art spring from his belief that he was an artist and that all that he produced must by the nature of its origin be art? Can we pinpoint in what the art of our work resides? Can our friends and family when they applaud us?

Natural Order Comprehensible Input and Acquired Language Output

Krashen (2006) outlines three important hypotheses in the field of applied linguistics:

1. The Natural Order Hypothesis
2. The Comprehensible Input Hypothesis
3.  The Monitor Hypothesis

The Natural Order Hypothesis posits that we acquire (as opposed to learn) language items in a restricted order, so that items of grammar, say, taught or studied out of order may be learned (i.e., memorized) for probably short-term use in form-focused environments such as tests, but normal language production will not reflect such learning.

The Comprehensible Input Hypothesis posits that we acquire language by observing it, so that speaking and writing practice do not serve acquisition (though they assist learning), but rather serve to demonstrate level of acquisition.

The Monitor Hypothesis posits that items of grammar learned but not acquired will not be tended to unless spontaneous speech is reviewed and revised by an "editor" before being uttered. Where speakers or writers are focused on meaning rather than form, many errors of form will occur. Where speakers or writers are focused on form, meaning may be hindered.

Based on these three hypotheses, I've come up with a couple of guidelines for writing ESL materials (and conducting ESL classes):

1. Natural Order Comprehensible Input
2. Acquired Language Output

The material presented, whether written or spoken, should contain a wealth of items within the learner's current "acquisition range". If the learner is at the stage to acquire the ing form, the material should be saturated with ing-form vocabulary. More advanced forms will by necessity also occur, but they should not be emphasized in either number or prominence.

Language produced by the learner should be assessed based on his or her acquired level. If the learner has recently acquired or is in the process of acquiring the ing form, only errors within range of the ing form should be corrected by the instructor. S form errors should be ignored, since correcting them will not assist acquisition at the ing form stage, and such unhelpful correction may activate the learner's Affective Filter.

Krashen, S.D. 2006. English Fever. The Crane Publishing Co., Ltd. Taipei, Taiwan. 13-18.

Rubber Masks and Twists and Turns

I was watching Alias last night and thinking to myself how silly many of the most recent TV series are. I guess TV series have always been silly, but I've been particularly aware of this phenomenon lately. The same applies to movies.

Last night's silliness resided in two elements: impersonation and misdirection.

I haven't been following the series closely, so I can't be sure what all has happened between the episodes I've watched, but it appears that Lauren, an apparently exposed Covenant mole, has managed to get back onto the "Rotunda" wearing a rubber mask in the likeness of Sydney, the show's heroine. Now, forgive my lack of credulity, but it seems to me that properly trained field agents and desk officers of a crack intelligence agency would see through or around a mask in less time than it takes to bat an eye. Besides the cosmetic anomalies, there would be the little matter of what carries the head around, to wit, the rest of the impersonator's body. Surely physique/figure, posture, gait, tread and a dozen other characteristics would give the impersonation away. As it happens in this episode of Alias, only a change in perfume is apparent.

Masks as paraphernalia of impersonation have been around for a while on the stage and screen. John Woo was into them for a bit (Face Off, Mission Impossible 2). They featured prominently in Darkman. Granted, the Face Off and Darkman masks were somewhat more sophisticated than the MI2 and Alias ones, but there are so many problems with the whole conceit of fooling everybody, including spouses and lovers in bed, with a simple change of face and voice that it's a wonder the idea gets used at all.  I guess it's effective, though. People watch the shows–and sometimes pay money to do so.

Incidentally, the Japanese historical drama Kagemusha explores quite effectively the complexities of impersonation. A thief is very secretly recruited to impersonate an assassinated warlord. He succeeds brilliantly, even managing, though with initial difficulty, to fool, or at least win over, the warlord's grandson, but is ultimately exposed by the warlord's horse, who is not fooled at all and throws him off like a sack of rice. The warlord's favourite concubine, who has been kept away, like all the warlord's wives and concubines, from the impersonator, rushes to her supposed lover's side only to discover that his shoulder lacks an identifying scar.

More annoying than the business with masks is this tendency to stuff a show with misdirection. It's become so common that I've grown to expect it. You'd think the characters in the stories would expect it, too, especially the ones in TV series, who encounter it weekly or daily or whatever. The problem with it as a plot device, from my perspective, is that you stop trusting the characters. For me, at any rate, this creates a hesitation to care, a tiresome uncertainty that what I'm seeing is actually happening (in the context of the story) or that it means what I think it means. It's gotten to the point that I sometimes don't bother forming conclusions about the reality or significance of events in these shows. Well, all right, that's impossible, but I've adopted a sort of limp inquisitiveness, a ginger, half-hearted, detached curiosity focused more on how silly it's going to get than on what's actually apparently happening.

Another example of the device occurred in a recently aired and re-aired episode of 24. I haven't followed that series closely, either, but I get the gist of the events and relationships. In the episode in question, Jack Bauer, exposed as a CTU mole in the Salazar organization, moves to re-infiltrate the Salazar organization. Whatever happened to once bitten, twice shy? Don't the people in these shows have any sense? Why on earth would the supposedly sagacious head of a heavy-handed family criminal organization with terrorist connections allow an exposed anti-terrorist triple agent back into the bosom of his gang, especially when by discrediting himself with the government that agent has undermined his own usefulness to the underworld? Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

The only explanation I can think of is that all this is somehow symptomatic of the currently empowered generation, the late-twenties through mid- to late thirties generation, I guess, that writes, directs and markets these productions. They must feel uncertain of the people and events in their lives, that anyone could be an imposter, that it's impossible to tell who is really behind or with you, what's really going on, or what anything really means. Perhaps it's the lack of a code, of a set of beliefs and morals they would rather die than betray. Perhaps everything has become so relative that people expect and forgive betrayal, trusting when trust has been abused, and overlook patent uselessness, anticipating benefits when no benefit can logically be expected.

Cashing in on Krashen?

Stephen D. Krashen, a bigwig in the study of language acquisition and an ardent proponent of so-called "comprehensible input", maintains that language competence is most efficiently acquired subconsciously through reading in one topic, by one author, or in one series. It stands to reason, I suppose, then, that reading a series of pieces by one author on one topic would really do the job.

I've long considered a foray into ESL/EFL/ELT writing. Some of the graded readers I've used with students have been half decent. I bet I could write better ones, though. Most of the readers I've experienced have a dessicated quality, whether adaptations or originals. They feel like they've been written for a level rather than at a level. I'm going to take a crack at writing, within vocabulary limits, stories that feel alive, that feel as if they were written at the right level.

Progress on “Into the Fire”

Progress on "Into the Fire"

I mentioned this story briefly below. It's one of four (the others are "Sutler's Vale", "Since the Green Folk Came" and "The Flight from Home") currently putting themselves together in my notebook (the old-fashioned spiral-bound paper type). It's one of a set (not a series) of four (the others are  "Moonshadow", "Auld Lang Syne" and "The Craving Vein") that center on events surrounding the disappearance of a supposed lunar observatory.

"Into the Fire" is the story of the wife of a man whose former girlfriend, the love of his life, returns with an offer: to take him back through time and accept rather than reject his offer of marriage.

 My reasons for writing "Into the Fire" are somewhat complicated. Basically, my mother felt that, as intriguing and, as always, well-written, as it was, "Auld Lang Syne" was going to hurt my marriage, because it was so obviously autobiographical in origin, if not plot (for the record, none of my former girlfriends has returned with an offer to accept an offer of marriage, let alone take me through time to do it). Based on reactions from two of my brothers, my father and a friend, this seemed to be a uniquely feminine, if not maternal, perspective. I seriously considered never publishing the story in any form, since, like Sauron's ring to Isildur, Smeagol, Bilbo and Frodo, my marriage is precious to me–though without the dark lord overtones, if not entirely free of orcs; however, the story meant so much to me and resonated so powerfully with most of its male readers that I preferred to find an alternative. The first alternative to come to mind was to make a few small repairs, make the wife, who, as I've said below, was so marginal to the narrative as to be not even minor, more important, back up the denouement with references to the marriage, that sort of thing, but the story had been such an exercise in honesty that I quailed at the thought of twisting it even that far. It needed to stand alone.

At the same time, I recognized that I hadn't told the whole story. The protagonist's marriage deserved some detail and the wife deserved a say. So I decided to write a companion story from the wife's perspective. The prospect was intimidating. For me, a man and an accused sexist, to write a story about a woman from a woman's' perspective seemed pretty audacious. I still think it audacious, but I also think I'm pulling it off. As I've mentioned before, it's been educational and I believe it's even helped my marriage.

Speaking of the marriage, I brought up "Auld Lang Syne" with my wife one morning when she was obviously feeling cheerful and sociable. Timing is everything when it comes to rings. She listened intently and said she could relate. Ow. We had a good talk about our disappointments in our marriage. I also told her about "Into the Fire", of which I'd written several pages (it's a paperback-sized notebook), and about how it was teaching me about her side of the marriage. She didn't disagree with a thing I said–and believe me, if she'd disagreed, she'd have let me know in unmistakable terms.

I think "Auld Lang Syne" will give a lot of male readers a voice when it comes to their marriages and ex-girlfriends. Reading it will be cathartic for them. It will help them exorcise old demons, so to speak. "Into the Fire" will, I dare to hope, give women a voice when it comes to their marriages, families and husbands' ex-girlfriends. It will also teach men a bit about what it's like and what it means to be a woman in a marriage, especially a traditional single-income marriage.

By the way, readers familiar with the work of Dan Fogelberg (not Robert Burns), Shawn Colvin, Cat Stevens (now British Muslim Yusuf Islam: banned from American airspace if not American airwaves) and Bruce Cockburn will have noticed (consciously or subconsciously) that the titles of all four stories come from songs. Dan Fogelberg wrote a song called "Same Old Lang Syne" in which he "met [his] old lover in the grocery store" and "her eyes were just as blue". Shawn Colvin co-wrote a song called "Sunny Came Home" about a woman who gets fed up with her marital life and decides to do something about it with a match (the refrain ends with the prepositional phrase "into the fire"). Cat Stevens wrote a song called "Moonshadow" about being followed by an optical phenomenon and how to cope with possibly losing various parts of one's external anatomy. Bruce Cockburn wrote a song called "Don't Feel Your Touch" about saying goodbye to the "closest thing [you] have to home", one chorus of which is built on the image of "a junkie's craving vein". The significance of that allusion will become apparent when I get to "The Craving Vein".