Ken Stange

Your Man Friday's Ideas: The Demonization of Drugs

Sex, drugs, and rock & roll all have an undeserved bad rep. Some people give up sex, and some people hate rock & roll, and they’re apparently doing okay.  But very few people would want to give up drugs, and if they did...

http://kenstange.com/yourmanfriday/?p=1367

Blame The Camels

Good metaphors are about remarking connections between what superficially appear to be unrelated things. Once when I was doing a stint in a grade school class as part of the Writers In The Schools program, I gave the kids this exercise in finding metaphors (similes, actually). I asked for some random child to name anything, and then asked another kid to name something very different. Then I asked for anyone to put up their hand when they could say how the two objects were similar. Someone suggested a motorcycle, and the second child said a camel. I was disappointed in these selections, because the easy answer is obvious and hardly creative. Nevertheless I asked, “How is a motorcycle like a camel?” One boy’s hand shot instantly, so I pointed to him. “They both have gas!” was his answer. Now that’s a creative answer, although how he knew that camels are flatulent, I have no idea!  But, incidentally, it is true.

http://www.geekosystem.com/australia-camels-farting/

The Cretin At The Poetry Reading

Here is a new “Offering”.
http://www.kenstange.com/offering/

Editors! Who Needs Them?

Answer: writers! While I firmly believe writers must have the last word (so to speak) about what they write, they are too close to what they write to see it clearly and critically. I am a terrible proof-reader of my own work, partially because I read too fast and partially because my head knows what I thought I was saying, and what is actually on the page is just scanned with the unconscious assumption it matches this mental manuscript. But even more problematic than missing typos is thinking one is being clear when one is writing in a clumsy, confusing way. A good editor does more than just correct typos,  spelling errors, and misleading punctuation. A good editor points out infelicities of usage and redundancies and all the other writing sins we overlook when reviewing our own work. (And resent having pointed out.)

Such good editors are hard to find, and even the best, most insightful, and tactful ones still tend to be viewed with hostility, for what writer is comfortable with being told some bit of assumed to be immortal prose or poetry is really shitty, careless writing? So the relationship inevitably is to some extent adversarial. A writer may greatly appreciate his or her editor, but conflict is inevitable.

Yes, good editors are hard to find, especially ones that are ‘on call’ 24/7 and have to put up with your fits of pique. I suggest marrying one. It worked for me.

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Fellow Train Travellers' Tales

Have done a lot travelling, and right now am really just glad to be home and working in the comfort of my study. But travelling is a boon to a writer, because the writers’ paradox is that while they are introverts, they need to meet people to gather material and inspiration.

Train travel is especially effective, for you can’t help but meet people. On Amtrak diners, the tables seat four, so they pair up couples. During our various train trips, we have inevitably been paired up with interesting people, and you get to know each other very quickly, for dining together has always been an inherently social activity. Most first dates are for dinner. The family that eats together stays together. (Well, so they say. Admittedly sometimes these dinner tables are battlegrounds, but again you still really get to know each other.)

I have a story forming in my head based on a recent dining car companion’s tale of dealing with airport security. He was an ex-army officer and made the mistake of pointing out the absurdity of everyone dumping his or her allegedly potential explosive liquids into a common container right at airport security! He used the B-word in explaining the danger of this and was promptly taken aside for interrogation. His description of the interrogation could have come from Heller’s Catch-22. And he eventually used the F-word to tell them what to do—and then refused to fly. My kind of guy, albeit with more cojones than I have!

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What Makes Travel Worthwhile Is Its Adversity

“Travel without misadventure is no adventure at all and hardly counts as travel.” –Hippokrites

The Holiday Inn used to have an ad that promised “No surprises!” Well then why travel? We travel to get away from the ordinary. It’s about surprises. If you want to bed down in a place identical to the motel in your hometown and dine on the same food you can get at your local restaurant, do so—but then why spend your hard-earned money to travel?

When we recount our travels, we inevitably talk about the surprises, many of them about  the travails of travels. It might be the wax paper that passes for toilet paper in England, the restrooms for which you had to drink heavily beforehand (or had a really pressing need) before you dared to enter them, the trains in Eastern Europe where announcements of stations were made though a crackling PA system in a language you didn’t understand, the despair of finding yourself without accommodation for the night, the gypsy beggar kids who licked their hands and then rubbed them on you to curse you for your lack of charity, the many eccentrics that try to befriend you and spill their tales of woe, the petty thief who picked your pocket (or broke into your hotel room or rented car) and made off with your passport and money, or any of many other misadventures the traveller really should not consider a surprise. C’mon, isn’t that what we often talk about when we recount our trips?  And isn’t that the sort of material out of which writers craft their travel books? Who would read a book that about canoeing from Canada to the Amazon basin or biking around the world that recounted how uneventful and easy it was?

http://kenstange.com/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=1780&g2_imageViewsIndex=1    

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A Great Poetry Smorgasbord

Here is a great almost daily blog of poetry reviews by another writer friend of mine. He includes several complete poems from each book he reviews, so his blog is effectively a poetry mag containing the crème de crème of new poetry books. Hats off to Michael Dennis for this pro bono work of keeping up with the poetic delights being published by small presses with limited distribution—and sharing them to the benefit of both us and the writers!

http://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.ca

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Your Man Friday’s Ideas: The Good Old Days    

One of the many pleasures of the Internet is how it can lure you down new and interesting paths. A bit of curiosity about a link in some sidebar can send you back through time to, for example, the Middle Ages. How many of us have any idea what life was like back then? Now we can so easily get a glimpse into the past. And not surprisingly they had the same needs as we do now:  food, drink, and entertainment.

Links at: http://kenstange.com/yourmanfriday/?p=1387

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What Time Doesn’t Change

Our memories our youth may be change with time, but the events that forged them remain the permanent underlying structure of our current selves. This excerpt is from the introduction to my current work-in-progress about my youth.

“You can fix up your house, put on new siding, add a sunroom, knock down interior walls to make one big room out of two, even install a security system to protect against intruders, but the foundation and the basic framework remain the same. Old friends visiting from afar will say they don’t even recognize the old homestead, but you live there and you know it is, at heart, the same place. Go to a high school reunion. The kid everybody called Fatso may now be slim and tanned and a senior executive in an Armani suit—ah, but watch his face closely as he approaches the snack table.”

 (From Freezing Fire, a work-in-progress)

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Fanning The Embers

“It is not always true that ‘where there’s smoke, there’s fire’, but where there’s smoke there are embers—and where there are embers, there is at least the potential for fire.” —Hippokrites

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Passion At A Passion Play

Here another bit about early passion and, incidentally, how I was ‘shaped’ into an atheist.  It’s from Freezing Fire, a work-in-progress.

http://www.kenstange.com/offering/

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Polemic Literature

“Strong opinions are more common in weak minds.” –Hippokrites

Hippokrites is right. This is true, but only because there are more weak minds than strong ones. But among the strong ones are some great writers who forged the polemic into a significant and very entertaining literary genre. There is something you have to love about caustic wit in defense of an opinion worth taking seriously—even if you don’t eventually come to agree with it. We have recently lost a great polemicist and contrarian with the passing of Christopher Hitchens. I envy him his style and his thick skin—not to mention his erudition. I can’t imagine his tombstone saying “Rest In Peace” for he could never be at peace with the stupidity and ignorance he lambasted all his life.  

Here just two sample collections of quotations from this great troublemaker and debunker of pretension.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unreasonablefaith/2011/12/the-20-best-christopher-hitchens-quotes/

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2011/12/16/13_unforgettable_christopher_hitchens_quotes.html

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Ouch, That Hurts! Touché!

Thinking about why we so enjoy witty sarcasm and polemic. I’m sure much of the time it is because we happen to agree that the person or idea being satirized deserves mocking. But sometimes it is simply aesthetic pleasure—even if we sympathize with the target of the barb. You may even laugh when someone makes witty fun of your own foibles.

I can easily imagine that being the response of the unfortunate student who read my friend’s comment in the margin of her term paper on one of Shakespeare’s comedies.  My colleague confessed to me, somewhat sheepishly, that he was unable to resist writing a less than formal, professorial remark on her paper.  When this student, in writing about the amount of implied sex in the play, kept referring to “fornification”, he snapped and scribbled in the margin of her paper “The fucking word is fornication!”

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Reviled Reviewers

An easy way to exercise what you consider your wit is to write scathing reviews—be they of films, books, or any other art form. What could be more fun than having an audience for your cleverness at some artist’s expense? And the meanest reviewers have the biggest audience, because the devil always has all the good lines.

What is safer than taking pot shots at someone who can’t fire back? Those artists that are even given a platform to defend their work are reluctant to mount it, for they are bound to sound defensive, and to respond to an unfair attack is to dignify it with a response. So it isn’t surprising most writers and other artists don’t have a good relationship with reviewers.

“Reviewers, with some rare exceptions, are a most stupid and malignant race.” ― Percy Bysshe Shelley

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Your Man Friday’s Ideas: Letting Art Out Of The Ghetto    

Visual art too often is only to be found sequestered in some ghetto: some public or private art gallery. No wonder it doesn’t seem an integral part of our daily existence. We have to seek it out, and few bother, for its pleasures have so infrequently been experienced as to lure us. Wider appreciation is only made possible by accessibility. Here are some examples of attempts to take art out of the ghetto and onto the main streets of our cities.

http://kenstange.com/yourmanfriday/?p=1413

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