channeling a master

Posted on 13 May 2012 by Paul Vitols

Today something a bit different.

Recently, while studying Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student by Edward P. J. Corbett, I’ve been doing exercises in copying and imitation. The copying has been straight-up literal copying, in longhand, of paragraphs written by excellent writers of the past, while the imitation has been imitation of the form and style of individual sentences. Corbett offers both these techniques as ways of expanding and improving one’s own stylistic toolkit, and while it may be too soon to tell whether these exercises are having any discernible effect on my own prose, I feel that they are most beneficial. My latest idea is to try to carry this method one step further.

As you know, I have a prose sketchbook in which I occasionally “sketch” my surroundings. Yesterday I had it with me when I accompanied Kimmie to the Park Royal mall, and I sketched the mall around me while Kimmie shopped at Fabricland. My idea, based on the Corbett approach, was to try to channel the point of view and style of an exemplary writer and sketch my surroundings using his method, as much as I could in a spontaneous exercise. I thought I would try to imitate Thomas Pynchon, whose descriptive writing I have always found to be very powerful, even as it is also idiosyncratic, lurid, and funny.

I found that the writing flowed less than when I just sketch in my “own” style; I had to give it repeated pushes and make repeated efforts to try to borrow Pynchon’s way of seeing things. This was the result:

Sat 12 May 2012 ca. 12:45 pm Park Royal South

A gabble of voices with reverb in this wide commercial grotto, a mosque to the invisible but omnipotent god Mammon, a sense of semi-subterranean complexity, with galleries running off to unseen epiphanies with gods not yet named. A sense of neon and incandescent tubularity: the glow of cylinders suspended in shade where no photon arrives from the sun without reflecting from at least two surfaces first. The mall food-court sprawls as purely artificial as a spaceport, populated by unconnected denizens who behave with the simple decorum of the figures in the architectural drawings used to raise the original capital to build the place. A sense of commercial purpose, of continuous machinelike operation in which the actual staffing is only implicit, as with the monolith in “2001: A Space Odyssey”: the intelligences behind all this remain largely unseen except for the odd security guard, leaving it all to run itself like a well-designed farm where the livestock, after such long conditioning, all know what to do.

This paragraph of course could never be confused with one by Pynchon, but to me it does bear traces of my effort to observe and write like him. In this paragraph he was my master and I was his apprentice. The exercise pulled me out of my habits and got me trying to do things in a different way, to me a new way.

And how would I characterize my effort to “Pynchonize” my writing? In no special order:

  • don’t be afraid to run on
  • reach farther for a more outlandish but maybe more telling simile or metaphor
  • fearlessly fold in references to religion, science, and technology
  • convey a dreamlike sense of the intimacy of one’s barely conscious experience
  • prefer taking risks to playing it safe in order to be understood

The best writers are bold, and Pynchon is that in spades. My current thought is that I will copy more of his paragraphs, and also imitate some of his individual sentences, and see whether these efforts make it easier for me to channel this master in my own writing efforts.

My intent is to post all my sketches, so if I do more, you’ll know about it.

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Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student by Edward P. J. Corbett

Posted on 8 May 2012 by Paul Vitols

Classical Rhetoric for the Modern StudentClassical Rhetoric for the Modern Student by Edward P. J. Corbett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This college textbook, first published in 1965, is much more than a mere aid for students trying to learn how to come up with essay topics and then how to write the essay; it is a labor of love, even a cri de coeur, by a man who wants to revive the ancient and much-examined art of rhetoric. This book can be studied with great profit by anyone who wants to write effectively.

The author breaks his text into five parts:

  1. an Introduction in which he defines rhetoric and presents examples of effective discourse, ancient and modern
  2. the Discovery of Arguments, or formulating your thesis and finding persuasive points for supporting it
  3. the Arrangement of Material, or how to present your points in an effective way
  4. Style, and examination of sentences, diction, usage, and figures of speech
  5. and a concluding Survey of Rhetoric, in which the author gives a brief history of rhetoric as it has affected English prose

Each of these sections is filled with interesting and useful material. As might be expected, the core classical text for this book is Aristotle’s Rhetoric, but Corbett draws freely on other sources as well, including Quintilian, Cicero, Longinus, and many others. The ability to speak persuasively in public was a key skill for the citizen of an ancient city-state, and over the centuries this skill became thoroughly examined and analyzed by the best minds of the period.

Speaking for myself, as someone who was born with significant writing talent, who has written professionally since 1978, and who has written millions of words in a variety of formats and genres, I learned a lot from each section of this book. When I was in school, writing was not taught with anything like this level of depth, rigor, or precision.

Corbett’s text treats rhetoric as an art—but an art in the Aristotelian sense. From this point of view, it is a knowledge of principles that elevates a knack into an art. This book is concerned with the principles of effective writing: the skeleton, flesh, and skin of a persuasive or moving discourse.

Following Aristotle, Corbett presents the “three modes of persuasion”—the so-called rational, emotional, and moral arguments. The rational argument makes its appeal to our reason by the use of logic; the emotional argument makes its appeal to our feelings; and the moral argument makes its appeal based on our perception of the speaker or writer as a person. Interestingly, Aristotle felt that this last was the most persuasive appeal of the three; we are most inclined to accept the argument of someone that we like and admire. These three modes of persuasion permeate all the specific strategies and techniques presented in the rest of the book.

Corbett gives the reader lots of work to do along the way. I did most of it, and still felt I was only making the very first beginnings. He has you analyzing Aristotelian syllogisms; breaking down sample discourses into their component topics or specific argumentative strategies; breaking down more discourses into their structural components; even copying individual paragraphs written by excellent writers of the past—that’s right, copying them out longhand, as you might have done early in grade-school, to absorb some of the stylistic prowess of the author.

Along the way you’ll read a lot of excellent writing by authors such as Pericles, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Jefferson, Matthew Arnold, and many others. Furthermore, you’ll read them in an alert, critical way that you might not in any other context. The individual paragraphs he gets you to copy will take you all the way from the King James Bible to Edmund Wilson, by way of Thomas Hobbes, Daniel Defoe, Edward Gibbon, Washington Irving, Walter Bagehot, and Mark Twain—again, among many others.

As long as there are human beings and speech, there will be rhetoric. Perhaps my greatest takeaway from this book is the realization of how poorly and sloppily I use language for the most part, and how poorly and sloppily others do as well, even when they really don’t want to. Now I can glance at a letter to the editor, see the topics and appeals used, and note how successful, or rather how unsuccessful, they are.

Friends, we’re all rhetorical flops. Are you satisfied with that condition? If not, there’s a remedy. It’s this book. Get it, read it, work it. Let’s become citizens in the full sense.

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The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Posted on 16 April 2012 by Paul Vitols

An Inquiry into the Nature & Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Great Books of the Western World, #39)An Inquiry into the Nature & Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I forget when I first became aware of the existence of Adam Smith and his famous work on economics, but I certainly knew about him by 1981, when Deng Xiaoping had started to nudge China away from its hardcore Maoist past, and I saw a cartoon in The New Yorker that showed two Chinese workers. One was saying to the other: “Adam Smith say: Buy cheap, sell dear.”

I regret that I don’t remember which cartoonist it was. But the caption highlighted the fact that Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was, in the popular imagination, the capitalist equivalent and counterweight to Karl Marx’s Capital. And indeed, what led me to The Wealth of Nations now was the fact that I was planning to tackle Marx’s book, and I thought I should probably read Smith’s earlier work first.

I’m glad that now I have, for one thing because, even though The Wealth of Nations is no cakewalk, and indeed was more difficult to read than I was expecting, it is a model of clarity and common sense compared with Capital, which I have now started reading. If I had to summarize my impression of Adam Smith based on reading his book, I would say that he comes across as an intelligent, perceptive, educated, and unassuming writer, even as he has strong viewpoints on things which he does not hesitate to voice. There is none of Marx’s arrogance, condescension, or defensiveness. My only criticism of the content is that as a 21st-century reader I sometimes felt I was getting too much detail about nuances of 18th-century British taxation and market prices; but quite possibly Smith never dreamed he would have readers in the 21st century.

He deserves them. It still makes an excellent introduction to economics and to “political economy” generally. In five “books” Smith sets out to explain:

how wealth is created
how stock or capital is accumulated
how and why different countries do or do not become wealthier
how governments try to influence economies
how governments finance their operations

Marx starts his work with a convoluted proof that the value of commodities is directly proportionate to the quantity of human labor that goes into their production. Smith starts his with a much more direct account of how wealth, or opulence, his preferred term, derives not so much from labor directly, but rather from the division of labor. As any task is broken down into its component steps and actions, and these are taken up by different people who specialize in those steps, productivity increases. If this productivity outstrips the growth of population, then there is an increase in wealth per person. Since people naturally incline toward the division of labor and its efficiencies, any society or government that wants to promote the increase of wealth simply needs to get out of people’s way. In a liberal society, anyway, it will happen by itself if people are left to their own devices.

Generally in world history, societies have not been liberal and people have not been left to themselves. But even when severely hampered by uncongenial governments and adverse circumstances, people have often managed to expand wealth. In Smith’s view, the natural survival instinct of the human being, coupled with a capacity for reason, make this inevitable. The number of improvident wastrels who cannot look after themselves and go to ruin is always relatively small.

In Smith’s view there are three types of revenue: the wages of labor, profit or the return on stock, and rent on land. In the world of economics these three classes play off against each other, in an environment created by governments, to produce the multifarious phenomena of the commercial world.

Along the way, Smith makes many interesting and trenchant observations, and sprinkles his text with stimulating and intriguing facts and surmises. For example, he notes that one of the effects of the prolonged expansion of wealth in a society over time is that its poorest members come to enjoy much better possessions than the poorest members of other societies, by virtue of the fact that the possessions of rich people tend over time to filter downward after their first owners are finished with them. Thus, in England, he says, many lower-income people live in quite nice buildings that once belonged to much more affluent people, and with nice, if old, furniture. He notes that one bed at a nearby inn was a wedding present to a former king of England! And one of my favorite of his surmises is on the superior nutritional value of potatoes over cereals. His evidence? That both the strong laborers at the bottom of English society, and the unfortunate but very attractive women who were driven to a life of prostitution there, tended to be Irish—and their superior physical attributes presumably had much to do with their nutrition back home!

He has much else to say about things as diverse as education, warfare, social morality, and nomadic societies. Whether you accept it all or not, it is all shrewdly observed and well thought out.

In addition, he is passionate about justice and about liberty. He is a true liberal in the best sense, and a sharp critic of clumsy, ham-fisted governments; of slack, ignorant landlords; and of rapacious, scheming businessmen.

All in all, not bad for a “bagman of free trade” (Marxist invective did indeed, it turns out, begin with Marx himself). Smith’s book has amply earned its place as volume 39 in the Britannica Great Books series, and is well worth the while of anyone seeking a liberal education.

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and for my next trick: poetry

Posted on 3 April 2012 by Paul Vitols

In the library of my late friend Harvey Burt was a volume called The Poet’s Handbook by Clement Wood. I borrowed the book for a while to read and take notes, for it seemed to answer, in a clear, direct way, a question that had long nagged at me: what is poetry exactly, and how does it work?

According to Wood, himself a poet, poetry is language that tends toward rhythm, while prose is language that does not tend toward rhythm. He went on to give pithy accounts of the rhythmical devices of meter and rhyme, along with many examples of their use. I learned the names of the metrical feet and many of the forms of verse, from sonnets to villanelles. In Wood’s view, this is all important knowledge to have, for, again according to Wood, almost everyone has the desire at one point or another to compose verse.

This is certainly true for me: I have had the desire to compose verse, and a few times—very few—I have actually tried it. But I did not know what I was doing. Also, not being much of a reader of poetry, I had very little to guide me.

I had to return that book, which is now in my mother’s library, but at Christmas 2004 Santa saw fit to help me out by bringing a mass-market paperback called The Complete Rhyming Dictionary, also by Clement Wood. Fantastic! For before the actual rhyming dictionary he provides 7 chapters on verse in general, essentially recapping the core material from his earlier Handbook. Somewhere in my readings in November last year I came across a reference by Aristotle to different metrical feet, and I got out Wood’s dictionary to help me out. I was again intrigued and attracted by the idea of being able to express myself in verse.

On Saturday 10 December 2011, this desire finally resulted in action. After my meditation session I felt a desire to write something, and so grabbed a clipboard with blank pages attached and just started writing. later I came back to what I wrote and revised and tweaked, eventually giving it the title “Postmeditation”. Before saying anything more about it, I’ll show you my latest draft (numbered 10):

Postmeditation

I catch the rhododendron watching,
a tree of hands reaching for me,
motionless as the asphalt stripe
of the neighbors’ roof under the marble bowl
of the sky, inverted to dry;
and, I note, with an entourage:
the slim maple behind the pillar,
the yew peeking round the corner,
the crewcut hedge,
the holly cowering against its wall—
a group of strangers grown familiar.
And they leave the talking to you.

Well? What is it? What?

You are still.

I gulp the juice of stillness,
milky-cold anaesthetic,
and it quickens a sprout,
a question too germinal to know,
a green finger poking and crooking
from the invisible coffee humus of my bowel
to the noncommittal light
pouring from the clouds, enshawling us all.

You’ll notice that there is very little rhyme and seemingly not much in the way of metrical regularity to it. I suppose it might come under the category of free verse.

But the rhythmic inspiration was actually one that I learned from Wood, namely so-called accent verse, apparently a versifying device used in English before the language was infiltrated by French and Latin, when poets began to resort to the more Romantic technique of rhyme. English, like its Germanic ancestors, is a language that makes strong use of syllabic stress, and in this way is different from the Romance languages such as French. Therefore rhythm can be generated by regulating the quantity of accent stresses in each line of a poem. In my poem there are, for the most part, four accents per line.

How much poetry have I written since then? None. But you never know where or when the Muse may decide to make me speak. I know that, as and when she does, I would like to have my kit stocked with good tools. Right now I still just have a club, a rock, and a piece of antler—but it’s more than I had before.

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monkey read, monkey write

Posted on 1 April 2012 by Paul Vitols

In my last post I talked about my self-designed study program to learn the classical liberal arts of logic, grammar, and rhetoric, and mentioned my work with the text Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student by Edward P. J. Corbett. Now I want to give more of an idea of what that study entails.

Corbett arranges the material in four sections:

  • Introduction, with a brief description of what classical rhetoric is and some examples of ancient and modern rhetoric
  • Discovery of Arguments, or how to find what you want to say
  • Arrangement of Material, or how to organize what you want to say
  • Style, or how to choose your words

He also has a concluding section called Survey of Rhetoric in which he looks at the development of the art of rhetoric over time. I haven’t got that far yet so I can’t comment on it. I’m still in the Style section, doing exercises in imitation.

That’s right: imitation. In this, you read a piece of good writing and then imitate it, either by trying to mimic the writer’s style in the writing of an individual sentence, or by out-and-out copying of one of his paragraphs in longhand. Apart from the early grades in elementary school, I had first come across the pedagogical technique of copying in an art book given to me by my artist brother-in-law Fred Douglas back in 1988. The book was devoted to expanding your drawing technique, and the author advocated that the student simply copy excellent drawings in order to discover the master’s way of seeing and rendering. I remember the first one I tried: a Rembrandt self-portrait in black conté crayon. I did a pretty good job, and it was indeed illuminating. The author said that only by copying Rembrandt’s own drawing would you learn such things as just how big his nose was, and sure enough, I would never have been so bold as to allocate that much real estate on the paper to the subject’s nose!

Fast-forward to 2012: I’m back at it, but this time with prose. For the past 10 or 12 days I’ve been copying out, longhand, a specimen paragraph or two by exemplary writers. Corbett has arranged the extracts chronologically, starting with two from the Bible (one from Ecclesiastes, one from the Gospel of Luke). Last night I copied a paragraph by William Hazlitt from “On Familiar Style” (1821), in which he criticizes Samuel Johnson’s elevated writing style and praises the use of plain English. My favorites so far have been extracts from John Bunyan (1688), John Dryden (1693), and Edward Gibbon (1796), most famous for his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which now occupies two of the 54 volumes of the Britannica Great Books series. To give a sense of these exercises, here is the extract from Gibbon’s Memoirs of My Life and Writings:

The renewal, or perhaps the improvement, of my English life was embittered by the alteration of my own feelings. At the age of twenty-one I was, in my proper station of a youth, delivered from the yoke of education, and delighted with the comparative state of liberty and affluence. My filial obedience was natural and easy; and in the gay prospect of futurity, my ambition did not extend beyond the enjoyment of my books, my leisure, and my patrimonial estate, undisturbed by the cares of a family and the duties of a profession. But in the militia I was armed with power; in my travels, I was exempt from control; and as I approached, as I gradually passed, by thirtieth year, I began to feel the desire of being master in my own house. The most gentle authority will sometimes frown without reason, the most cheerful submission will sometimes murmur without cause; and such is the law of our imperfect nature that we must either command or obey; that our personal liberty is supported by the obsequiousness of our own dependents. While so many of my acquaintances were married or in parliament, or advancing with a rapid step in the various roads of honor and fortune, I stood alone, immovable and insignificant; for after the monthly meeting of 1770, I had even withdrawn myself from the militia, by the resignation of an empty and barren commission. My temper is not susceptible of envy, and the view of successful merit has always excited my warmest applause. The miseries of a vacant life were never known to a man whose hours were insufficient for the inexhaustible pleasures of study. But I lamented that at the proper age I had not embraced the lucrative pursuits of the law or of trade, the chances of civil office or India adventure, or even the fat slumbers of the church; and my repentance became more lively as the loss of time was more irretrievable.

Corbett advises the student not to write too quickly, rather to write in a legible hand as though one is going to send the document to someone. My hand is not what could fairly be called legible, but I do take more time with these samples than I do when jotting notes to myself. As for whether it’s improving or expanding my own writing style, so far I will have to trust to Corbett’s assurance that sustained effort at this will pay dividends.

The second imitation task, that of mimicking individual sentences, is much more challenging. For this is an effort at copying, not someone’s actual words, but his writing style as manifested in one sentence. For one thing, it requires an accurate breakdown of the structure of the sentence, which in turn requires grammatical knowledge. As mentioned in my previous post, my knowledge here was lacking, so I got out an old university textbook to refresh my memory or, let’s face it, to encode for the first time in some cases, the necessary knowledge of sentence structure.

My first attempt was to analyze this sentence by John Dryden:

No Government has ever been, or ever can be, wherein time-servers and blockheads will not be uppermost.

Great sentence, huh? I cannot falsify his statement from my own observations of contemporary politics. But that by the way. I attempted a grammatical breakdown of the sentence, and then struggled to come up with an imitation of my own. But I found myself unable, and in the end I put it down to a lack of certainty about my parsing of the sentence. Solution: try an easier sentence.

I picked another one from the same Dryden extract:

Blood and money will be lavished in all ages, only for the preferment of new faces, with old consciences.

Using my newly refurbished grammatical nous, I parsed the sentence: a compound subject, intransitive verb phrase, prepositional adverb phrase modifying the verb lavished, and so on. It took me a while, with quite a bit of rechecking. But when I was done I felt confident that I had parsed it accurately, and so could essay my own effort.

I jumped in and just let some image come to mind, some experience. I didn’t want to think about it too much, or I would be paralyzed. Here’s what I came up with:

Camels and horses rested among the rubble, hard by the blocks of the pyramid, under ageless skies.

Not bad. As I worked on this and a couple of other efforts at imitation of the same sentence, I came to recognize what, for me, made it stylistically significant; what made it something out of the routine or anyway unfamiliar to my own style. The biggest single element was Dryden’s use and placement of the adverb only. As far as I can tell, it modifies the following prepositional phrase for the preferment, and to me its placement here is unusual. In my imitation I came up with the adverbial use of hard before the prepositional phrase by the blocks—a use that I think is quite clever and fitting.

Imitation at the sentence level is demanding work. I’ve only drafted a few sentences, so I can’t speak of progress in enriching my own style. But I am learning a lot about grammar, and since that is another of the arts of the trivium, I’m well pleased.

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learning rhetoric the old-fashioned way

Posted on 26 March 2012 by Paul Vitols

My daily reading period starts at about 4 p.m. and runs to dinnertime at 7 p.m. (gosh, I just checked the spelling of dinnertime as a closed-up word and found that it dates back to the 14th century), with a break of about 45 minutes halfway through. Each day I start with fiction or “imaginative” writing, and right now I’m most of the way through the Britannica Great Books translation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Next I read 4 or 5 pages of the Great Books edition of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Then I take a break to come down to my office and check e-mail and such. Then it’s back upstairs for a glass of wine and the remainder of my reading.

For the past weeks this has been taken up mainly with Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student by Edward P. J. Corbett. My old gray hardcover from the Oxford University Press is the original 1965 edition (first owned by a certain John Malcolm, who inscribed his name in blue ink on the flyleaf), a rugged, well-made textbook in great shape. I got the book in September 2009 and have been working through it, off and on, ever since.

My aim is to advance my knowledge of rhetoric, the third of the three liberal arts that made up the so-called trivium or higher triad within the full set of seven liberal arts, the first two of which are logic and grammar. When I was growing up I had only ever heard the word rhetoric used in a pejorative sense, meaning, roughly, “an argument made up of emotional, specious, and misleading statements in order to persuade a credulous audience”. The first time I encountered the word used in a different sense was in (I think) 1978, when I read Robert Pirsig’s bestseller Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, in which he, as the narrator, describes himself as a teacher of rhetoric. It seemed to be the term he used to name the subject I knew as English composition.

I became aware that the word has more than one meaning. Since I have started to pursue my own liberal education, I have come to appreciate the original idea of rhetoric as the art of persuasion. With the growing size and success of the advertising industry after World War II, I think persuasion came to mean, for many, inducing people to buy consumer products they didn’t really need or want and to vote for politicians who didn’t really deserve to be elected. Rhetoric was a way of getting people who are dumber and more naive than you to do what you want.

Sister Miriam Joseph, author of The Trivium, gives an excellent overview of what the three arts actually are: Logic is the art of thinking accurately about reality; grammar is the art of expressing one’s thoughts accurately in symbolic form, such as in writing; and rhetoric is the art of persuading others of the validity of one’s thoughts. These are in no way “ancient” or outmoded arts; they are the vital skills of any citizen who wants to be a full, equal, functioning member of his society. They are called liberal arts, I believe, not only because they were once the sole concern of free, that is enfranchised and fully participating, citizens, but because they are the skills most essential to freedom. They are themselves how to be politically free.

So I’ve been studying all three. I’ve studied logic by reading the Organon of Aristotle—his six books on the art of reasoning and deduction—and I’m studying rhetoric with Corbett’s book. I thought that my lifelong pursuit of writing and reading had probably given me an adequate background in “grammar,” but now I’m finding, to my embarrassment, that that is not so. I’ve run into an exercise in the text that requires me to analyze sentences into their component parts, and I’ve discovered that I’m not really able to do this. Writer or no writer, when the rubber hits the road I struggle to distinguish a prepositional adverb phrase from a participial adjective phrase and an adverb clause from a noun clause.

So I whipped out my copy of the Prentice-Hall Handbook for Writers, 7th edition, which I got in September 1979 as a textbook for English at UBC and started studying up. It’s all there in compact form in the very first section, “Sentence Sense”. There are exercises there, too, and I’ve struggled through those.

All in all, its been a chastening experience, but, I have no doubt, a valuable one. I was going to talk about what my current rhetorical exercises are, but that will have to wait.

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sketchbook: Saturday 24 March 2012

Posted on 24 March 2012 by Paul Vitols

Sat 24 Mar 2012 ca. 12:45 pm Lonsdale & Esplanade

An urgent thrum of traffic barreling along Esplanade in front of me. But now, with a green light for Lonsdale, there is the electronic cuckoo of the pedestrian signal. And before I could finish that sentence, the light has changed again and the determined roar of hurrying vehicles streams through the intersection. A busy thoroughfare, stressful to be near.

The sky is clear but for a few smudgy wisps of cloud hanging over Vancouver. The sun is bright and a cool fresh breeze whips past, gusting up and down. I’m on a bench of steel coated with black plastic. The sidewalk here is a wide generous curve offering plenty of space between the curb and the recessed doorway of Tradwinds Real Estate, current occupants of the maybe 110-year-old 2-story building, now set with large shop-windows in its pale-green walls.

Pedestrians move in small knots, mainly downhill across Esplanade, as though en route to Lonsdale Quay or the SeaBus. Now Asian girls are crossing to the cuckoo sound. A few cars shoot across the level intersection to the final short block of Lonsdale down to the waterfront. The cuckoo is brief: Esplanade is the artery here. But now it beeps again, sending 6 more people across, while 3 more, again Asian, all in black jackets and blue jeans, await the next crossing.

The sun glares above the new Pinnacle Hotel diagonally opposite me, the glass-paneled 12-story building casting a shadow over 2/3 of the intersection. A skateboarder rolls swiftly past; a woman pushing a stroller follows slowly. A #239 Park Royal bus lumbers by on my left, growling a puff of diesel into the air.

Cuckoo, cuckoo . . .

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It’s a Wonderful Life—what it means

Posted on 23 March 2012 by Paul Vitols

Remember Christmas? As part of our Christmas viewing Kimmie and I watched the 1946 classic It’s a Wonderful Life, and in a first post and a second post I offered up my earlier search for the controlling idea or theme of the story. To tie up that loose end, I’ll finish the train of thought and reveal my final version of the controlling idea.

I’ll continue by inserting edited extracts of my document from 2010.

TUE 23 MARCH 2010

He wants to see the world—he wants adventure, not to be stuck in Bedford Falls, even with a girl who loves him.

George learns that love and helping are a two-way street. He’s not just a martyr to responsibility. He is also a recipient of love and kindness. In becoming this, he gains perfect emotional fulfillment—more than any he could have hoped for in adventuring alone. (For it was alone that he was to go adventuring—key point.)

He thought the world and its marvels would provide the thrills of his life, but it is not exotic marvels that will do this—it is local people. The humdrum neighbors he takes for granted and who are such a burden to him.

Clarence shows George that, far from being worth more dead than alive, as Mr. Potter put it, he has been indispensable to everyone around him all his life. All their enjoyments and achievements have been due to him. He has been a happiness-creator. This is fulfilling enough on its own, but the kicker is that when he returns he discovers it’s a two-way street. All those people—every one of them—help him too in his turn, completing the circuit. This is what turns it into an ecstatic moment for George—of total realization, total fulfillment. He has been a linchpin of everyone else’s success and happiness—but they are linchpins of his happiness too, when the time comes.

It’s a paradox: by becoming nonspecial, a member of the group who needs help in his turn, George discovers the intensity of being truly, totally, cosmically special. It’s as though as part of the community, you lie low and do your bit for others, then, when your turn comes, you enjoy the sum of everyone’s specialness and fulfillment—more than any individual could accrue on his own. And knowing that you’re providing this experience for others is a joy to sustain you in the meantime, when you’re not receiving the bounty personally.

For George, only his moment of crisis, of weakness, of failure, was the opportunity for his friends to show him how much he meant to them. Before that he had been the strong one—the responsible one, there to help others get what they wanted in life. In this way his crisis and catastrophe are the best things that ever happen to him. He has love, friends, and a good life, but he doesn’t appreciate them. He never got to do what he wanted. Instead, he got something vastly better than what he wanted.

He hankered after excitement, exoticism, adventure. His belief was that these things could be found only in unfamiliar places. He wanted novelty. It’s the old Zen story: he’s searching for the lost cow—by riding on it.

Bedford Falls provides him with plenty of excitement and adventure: love, sex, death, enmity, heroics, sacrifice, temptation, fury. George’s mettle is tested plenty—probably more than by any adventure in the wide world. But he doesn’t see it as exotic, and so he doesn’t value it. He feels cheated.

WED 24 MARCH 2010

George’s situation has roots: he has history with these people, and this history is what gives their relationships depth. The wanderer lacks such history, and will move on from one fleeting relationship to another in his quest for novelty. The Eiffel Tower and Samarkand might be exciting, but experienced alone, these things will pall. It’s sharing that gives experience its preciousness.

This is a story about sharing. Potter does not share. (A potter’s field is a burial place for unknown and indigent people.)

Final draft controlling idea of It’s a Wonderful Life:

True fulfillment is born when you give up the search for your own private joy and recognize that the greatest joy lies in sharing life with the people around you.

So there it is. That, in one sentence, is what I believe this excellent story is saying.

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sketchbook: Thursday 1 March 2012

Posted on 1 March 2012 by Paul Vitols

THU 1 MAR 2012 1:00 pm ETERNAL SALON

Not a busy place. Japanese being spoken by the bearded young guy at the reception desk. The woman customer is gone, and now he clinks pens in a glass jar, seeking the right one to write with.

Some hip-hop number throbs tinnily and faintly on the sound system: robotic synthesized vocals. Outside on 3rd St. are gruff traffic noises. A car door slams.

Now the Japanese guy sweeps the floor with a push-broom, picking up the hair with a long-handled dustpan so he does not need to stoop.

I hear the soft cheerful voice of Kathy, my hair cutter, breathily greeting the other people as she comes in. Time to get cut.

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sketchbook: Sunday 26 February 2012

Posted on 26 February 2012 by Paul Vitols

SUN 26 FEB 2012 ca. 2:00 pm SEAWALL FALSE CREEK

The cold rolled steel of the bench on my backside. Wan sun falls on the brick pavers set in a herringbone pattern; shadows are long; the bricks are outlined trimly in moss. Behind us: Yaletown: where eagles float over high-rises. Before us: a marina, where white-hulled launches ride at their concrete floats.

“There’s a seal!” says Kimmie, sitting beside me.

People troop by, walking tiny dogs and absorbedly fiddling one-handed with mobile phones. A young guy runs past, panting so hard that he vocalizes, uttering cries of exertion, his long hair flying behind him.

An old man goes the other way, blowing his nose wetly into a handkerchief.

Off to our left: residential high-rises, snap-together grids of greenish windows. And beyond the boats: the long low concrete arc of the Cambie Bridge. And above all: great amorphous masses of cloud, shaded like gulls’ plumage.

Kimmie is chuckling at the dogs going by: they are all dressed in fitted sweaters of different colors and styles, and the dogs are all of expensive breeds. This is Yaletown.

Off to our right the cloud is darker and hangs like smoke over the stepped low-rises on the south shore. The water between is green, and rippled like old-style frosted glass.

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