Miscellany from New Orleans
A note from the road.
Hi all,
So, yesterday (Wednesday) I flew down to New Orleans for a week-long visit with my parents, and I’m writing you from their house in Slidell.
One of the many things I love about being down here (where my two sisters also live) is the access to old photos I’d either never seen or had forgotten about, that have the effect of pulling back the curtains and revealing that 1) we forget most of the things we’ve ever done and the various people we’ve been over the years and 2) nothing is permanent, at all, au contraire.
For example, here’s a Forgotten Me, from 1974, standing in front of a groovy poster and a stack of speakers that I’d also forgotten about, playing a guitar that had all but slipped out of my mind even though, at the time (I now recall), it was very precious to me:
On Sunday, behind the paywall, we’ll get started on a new story – one of my all-time favorites, about that diciest of topics: class.
Well, maybe it’s about that. It’s about….a lot of things.
As you’ll see. 😊
I want to thank Maria Popova over at The Marginalian for this generous mention of a (speaking of the passage of time) old (2007) essay of mine, “The Braindead Megaphone,” and for the abundant wit, intelligence, and compassion she manifests in all of her writings. We’ve never met in person, I don’t think, but I sense a kindred spirit. What an abundant place The Marginalian is – always something amazing in there.
And now for our main business:
A few weeks back I was sent a John Barth essay I’d never seen before, called, “Incremental Perturbation: How to Know Whether You’ve Got a Plot or Not.” It’s a really original, relaxed, frank discussion of all of the things we obsess about here in Story Club. (I was especially taken with what he has to say about story shapes and the middles of stories.)
I thought I’d share it here, so we could discuss. Reading it, I had a couple of real “aha!” moments. There are many paths to the mansion/ways of conceptualizing the ineffable, and this essay just sings with the authority of mastery.
I tracked the essay back to a book called Creating Fiction: Instructions and Insights from Teachers of the Associated Writing Programs, which (it turned out) was edited by an old pal of mine, Julie Checkoway, who kindly granted me permission to pass the essay along to all of you.
Julie, who is also the author of The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of the Sugar Ditch Kids and Their Quest for Olympic Glory, and the director of the documentary Waiting for Hockney, provided a little background on the essay:
“I solicited that from (Barth)” she wrote, “because he taught that concept in our workshop at Hopkins. The whole idea of the ‘incremental perturbation of an unstable homeostatic system and its catastrophic restoration to a more complexified equilibrium’ has always stayed with me with regard to short stories (at least most western ones?) and even with regard to crafting narrative nonfiction books for general audiences. I absolutely used it while making my documentary and also writing The Three-Year Swim Club. One of the ways I broke it down for students, after introducing the verbose Barthian version, was that “stories catch characters at the point at which their habitual way(s) of being in the world are about to meet their greatest challenge and (perhaps) give way.” I also used the notion of the three-legged table. A three-legged table is an unstable homeostatic system, just waiting to fall. Almost anything will tip it, and when it falls to the floor, it always comes to a more complexified and stable equilibrium. It just has to. That image—of a character with three legs instead of four, has always worked for me.”
So, thanks, Julie.
Join us behind the paywall on Sunday, for that new story….I think it’s a good one and will do something amazing to your mind.
Thank you as always George. I loved the quote by Julie Checkoway about Barth: "stories catch characters at the point at which their habitual way(s) of being in the world are about to meet their greatest challenge and (perhaps) give way.” It was a translation that reached me. We have spoken many times about the power of translations here in SC. This one, from English to English was very helpful!
There is almost always a gem, or many gems, in your posts and I learn something every time - about writing, life, myself, your old guitars, whatever. And I carry these gems with me as I go forward. And they help me decode the world, and other people's stories. You give me 'Writer's Eyes' to view the world. Thank you so much!
I love this essay and thank you, George for posting, and Julie for giving George permission to share it with all of us. I own this book and have many times referred people to the chapter by Jane Smiley on Revision: "What Stories Teach Their Writers: The Purpose and Practice of Revision." It's an excellent book overall, one "writing craft" book that remains on my shelf while many others have found their way to a Goodwill box.
This essay by Barth always cracks me up because his touch is so light and heavy at the same time. What he's saying is not new, but he's found his own way to say it. "Incremental perturbation" is hilarious to me, but maybe I'm just a nerd. There is one line he writes that describes a tendency within me entirely, a tendency that I feel has often ruined me for any sort of narrative-based entertainment. That is when he asks how we can tell if something is the "real thing" in terms of truly being a story. He says we should always watch/read with a third eye, always on the lookout for the increments that perturb the situation, for that climax and the ending that satisfies, bringing all to a new grounded level. Always by thinking about how it was done. Yes, I do this...always. It makes it very difficult for me to enjoy movies, books, stories, etc, the way i feel many others do. I go crazy is there is not a story! Just last night, my husband and I were watching some animated shorts that have been nominated for the Oscars. He fell in love with one of them, that I also loved. But that one bothered me--it had no story. All the others perturbed incrementally, but not this one. This was more like watching a prose poem. He is a voter in the academy and he chose that one--while I objected! I wanted a story! He was happy with the beauty and mastery. Finally, he pointed out that the category was simply for a "short." A "story" wasn't necessary. Okay, he wins because every once in awhile that's what you have to do to make a marriage work.
What else? I read the most interesting chapter on storytelling in the book People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn. What a surprise to find a chapter in that book on telling stories. It spoke to last week's conversation about stories bringing solace or pleasure. Horn pointed out that many stories historically written by Jews do neither. They do not provide redemptive endings nor anything uplifting. For anyone interested, it's truly fascinating.
I look forward to today's comments section as this is one of my favorite topics: What makes a story a story? Thank you, George!