Chris Howard's Writing & Art

Tales of the Otori

I just started Lian Hearn's, Grass for His Pillow, the second book in the Tales of the Otori, set in a mythical medieval Japan.  I loved Across the Nightingale Floor, the social constraints, the intrigue, wars, revenge, authenticity.

I lived in Japan for three years, 8th, 9th and 10th grades of middle and high school  (1976-1979).  Took two years of Japanese language.  TV pretty much consisted of cool samurai shows on the Japanese networks and Monty Python on FEN.   I've lived all over the place, but those three years were some of the most fun and interesting.

I've always wanted to write a fantasy set in the Japanese feudal period.  I can think of a couple other works in this subgenre, but nothing as popular as Across the Nightingale Floor and the other Otoris.

tweak, hack & bend

Subscribed to Make magazine today, a new quarterly from O'Reilly.   Subscription was $30.

"Make is loaded with exciting projects that help you make the most of your technology at home and away from home. This is a magazine that celebrates your right to tweak, hack, and bend any technology to your own will."

Looks really cool.  Check it out.

http://make.oreilly.com/

No I will not give it a rest

It is likely that Plato's pejorative use of mimesis was influenced by the works of the Sophist, Gorgias, who used the word, apate (deception) to describe the artist's effect on the audience. (Hutton, James, Aristotle's Poetics, 1982, p 8.)   However, Gorgias' use of deception did not include an ethical aspect.  Deception was simply the method that must be employed by the artist if he is to create a successful work.  To Gorgias, artistic deception was the creation of a "dramatic illusion" for the audience.  The spectators' pleasure is directly related to the artist's deceptive skill.

Plato held up mimesis as the focus of art, but its meaning took on the full moral connotation of copying to deceive.  Mimesis became an affront to truth. The artist was a deceiver, a cheat, a poisoner of minds.  To understand Plato’s hatred of art you must understand something about the foundation of his philosophy, the so-called theory of Forms (Blogged about this last week or so).  For Plato, the world in which we live and act, the world of particulars, is sort of a shadowy copy or reflection of the world that really exists.  Only the Forms truly exist.  The Forms are the archetypes—singularly existing things—that are to be found off in their own world.  Plato’s dualistic metaphysics redounded throughout his philosophy, splitting everything in two, the physical and the spiritual, the world of Forms and this unreal world, good and evil.  Anything remotely physical or dependent on the physical was a deception that had to be purged from the mind, destroyed.

Since art is a copy of a particular thing in this world, mimesis is one step away from the world of particulars and two steps away from the Forms.  Something like this:

Real        The world in which we live        Art

Form --> Shadowy copy of Form  -->  Copy of a copy

A particular is an imperfect copy of the Form, but an artwork is even more degrading, depicting imperfect copies of particulars.  Plato twisted the mimetic effect of pleasure, the Greek cultural view, into mental poison. To Plato, the artist was moving even further away from the truth.  This is his primary reason for despising artists and their products. 

Leonardo's Workshop

From Reuters: "A forgotten workshop of Leonardo da Vinci, complete with 500-year-old frescos and a secret room to dissect human cadavers, has been discovered in Florence, Italy..."

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=scienceNews&storyID=7427028

A Couple Chapters in the Mail

Put together a good cover letter, SASE and the first two chapters of TWP for an agent.  Almost forgot to put "REQUESTED MATERIALS" on the envelope.  It's all ready to go out tomorrow.

Revision

Holly Lisle has put together one of the best sites on writing.   I re-read her How to Revise A Novel essay this morning, which contains the following,

"You can't do a decent, deep revision of your book without a printed manuscript copy of it.  Don't try revising on the computer screen.  Words look and feel different on the printed page than they do on a monitor, and you'll find mistakes in hard copy that your eye would slide right over on the screen."

I would add that revision requires a paper copy because I'm afraid to make "deep" edits or cuts on-screen.  I need to be able to scratch out an entire paragraph or page and then come back an hour or a day later and write OK next to it, putting the whole thing back in.  Ctrl-Z (undo) won't help you--or it'll only get you so far.  There's a limit to the undo stack, the clipboard, or any of the application features that assist with document editing.   For me, I like to see what I've cut out as I re-read the book.  It gives me the opportunity to see a sentence or an idea that I may want to fit back in somewhere else.  I suppose that this can be handled by highlighting and changing the type color to red or blue, but then you still have Holly's point about how your eyes work on paper and screen, which I agree with, and have experienced myself, editing something for a week, but not finding some glaring mistake until I printed it out.

Don't get me started on Plato...

Oh, all right.

But before I start, let me say that I like Plato for a lot of reasons.  Maybe this is bordering on blasphemy for an Aristotelian, but I think Plato established the most extraordinary organization in history: the Academy.  The Academy under Plato was a playground for thinkers.  Under Plato, his organization tolerated opposing views--as long as they stood up to scrutiny.  The Academy drew the world's greatest thinkers, some of them escaping tyranny to live in Athens.  In the Academy, Eudoxus was allowed to teach what he thought was right.  In the Academy, Aristotle was allowed to openly criticize Plato and others.  Looking at the progression of ideas from the Republic to the Laws, the Academy was a place where even the teachers could learn from their students.  (After Plato died, Speusippus dorked the whole thing up--that's my view anyway).

In Plato's philosophy, what we roughly call the real world isn't real at all, but just a shadowy copy of the world of the Forms.  The particulars, the things of this world, can only be real to the extent that they "participate in the Forms."  Something that's considered beautiful merely participates in the Form of Beauty to some extent.  There aren't just Forms for complex concepts like beauty and justice, but for man as well. 

Somewhere, according to Plato, is a perfect Man of which we are all just imperfect reflections.  The world of the Forms is a supernatural realm populated with the ideal structures of particular things: universals.  These two separate worlds come together in the mind of a man only to the extent that he can remember the Forms from some inter-life stage in his development.  (Plato believed in an eternal transmigratory soul that moves from body to body through birth, death and rebirth--an eastern import.  The ancient Greek man on the street would have laughed at this--I'll see you in Hades' Halls!).  Plato's version of rationality consists of being able to "see" the participation of the universal in the particulars that "exist" in this shadowy world in which we (allegedly) live.  If you're rational in the Platonic sense then you can look at a beautiful human, Achilles, and "see" that his body participates more in the Form of beauty (is closer to perfect beauty) than the body of an ugly man, Thersites, who, according to Homer, was "the ugliest man who came beneath Ilion." 

Epistemology is the study of knowledge, how we know things, how knowledge gets into our heads.

Epistemology for Plato required the innate ability to "see" the supernatural world of Forms.  Those few with the clearest sight of the Forms would, with extensive training, become the absolute dictators--the philosopher kings--in Plato's utopian state.  A few more of the population, those with some, but not the complete ability, would hold somewhat lower positions.  Everyone else is relegated to total slavery, dominated completely, treated like mindless animals, which they are according to Plato's epistemology--these people had no access to the Forms, and therefore had to be told what to do by those who did.   Keep in mind that the majority, the masses, the "herd" were not born with the ability to grasp the Forms at all. 

Incidentally, for Plato there's a group even lower than the herd: those damn artists.  (Worthless, soul-destroying lying bastards, the lot of them).  At least the mindless animals with human shapes could be directed to perform manual labor--you know, rake the leaves, take out the trash, etc.--and labor of this kind wasn't harmful to the Republic and its "citizens." Plato denounced the effect of art as "a crippling of the mind." (Rep. 595b5).  Artists would be banished from Plato's utopia.  (He'll keep a couple guys around to write military marches and funeral dirges.  The rest of you--OUT!).

A thought on selectivity in art

Plato swept art from the realm of human activity.  Aristotle made a clean start in the field of esthetics with little Platonic baggage.  Aristotle's distinction is that mimesis is much more than mere copying.  Aristotle is not advocating naturalism. Nowhere does he say that the detail of the mimesis is supremely important. Mimesis as applied to art is a process of filtering out the non-essential and showing only what is necessary to tell the story.  He praises Homer for the pinpoint focus of the Iliad.  The genius of the artist is not in the details but in the selectivity.

Status

Writing a next steps cover letter.  I looked at the first thirty pages of TWP.  They look good, ready to go out next week. 

Something good in the mail

Good news in the mail today.  Two agent returns.  One's only looking for...illustrators?--I think I'm deciphering the handwriting correctly.  The second wants a partial submission with a 90-day exclusive.