Ntuple Indemnity

Several people have asked me about my novel, the first draft of which was supposed to be completed tonight, as per the regulations of the inaugural U of A Novel Writing Month. It didn’t happen. Congratulations are due to Jake Troughton, Dan Kaszor and Steve Smith, who hit the 50,000-word mark on schedule and matched the expected 14.3% survival rate exactly. Congratulations are not due to yours truly, whose most significant contribution of the month was defeating the three of them in a rousing game of RoboRally.

What have I learned?

I learned that writing fiction is an impossible career because of its persistent nondeterminism, not unlike software development. In both cases, it astounds me that anything ever gets done anywhere.

I learned that although November is a terrible month to commit to this sort of project, May is not a whole lot better, with its new jobs, new commitments, new married couples, and no new ideas. E3 (or was it Wii3?) was terribly interesting this year, and left me wondering not about how to develop the second act of a spurious plot involving space colonization projects and British secret agents, but how the Wii edition of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess will incorporate the free-roaming camera presumably handled by the yellow C-stick in the GameCube version, which was the primary reason I found The Wind Waker more playable than The Ocarina of Time, if not as robust.

I learned that dousing oneself in the pop narratology of Robert McKee is a great way to get started, but not a great way to get going. To finish something of this scale in a month, you need the mindset of a Donald Kaufman, and after the first week and a half I was locked into Charlie mode. (Speaking of which, for all the lampoonery of McKee’s Story in Jonze/Kaufman’s Adaptation, the principles in the book fit the film like a glove.)

I learned that you can write a novel with much greater expediency if you adopt the Kaavya Viswanathan Method, though if you try to make money off it, you will be punished. Synopsis: 19-year-old Harvard sophomore scores a six-figure advance, New York Times story and DreamWorks film deal for her debut novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got A Life – you know, a celebration of the kind of good-girl-goes-bad trope that made Grease such a reprehensible movie. She’s caught for plagiarism so incredibly egregious and professionally suicidal that one can hardly believe a well-to-do undergrad would do it all of her own free will; indeed, theories have sprung up in the poor girl’s defence, implicating a book-packaging company and an Ivy League admissions consultancy firm. (As usual, my favourite blog has the best coverage.)

I learned that between Viswanathan and Dan Brown, whose stock protagonist is a professor in a discipline that is both intellectually bankrupt and wholly nonexistent, Harvard University really knows how to take a hardcover punch square in the reputation.

I learned that the city I work in over a given summer will: a) beat Detroit in six, b) beat San Jose in six, and 3) advance to the Stanley Cup finals. So next summer, I’m going back to Calgary.

I learned that New Super Mario Bros. is an outstanding adventure. I’ve completed every level, but not every exit (and certainly not every set of three collectible coins per level, since the later ones are quite tricky). It’s in many ways comparable to Super Mario World, though the stages feel a lot smaller, perhaps due to the lack of flight. The level design, however, is well up to the gold standard of the series. If I had any complaints, it would be that the new enemies aren’t all that compelling, and they go unnamed in the end credits. And as in the original SMB, the Fire Flower is overpowered. The game also neglects to track your progress by the number of exits opened and total coins collected, and I’m sure not going to count them myself.

I learned that the great Koji Kondo himself played the overworld theme at the Chicago premiere of PLAY!, the touring game music symphony programme. The music is credited to his protégés Asuka Ota and Hajime Wakai. It didn’t take me long to discover what felt so odd about the oh-so-catchy main theme: it’s organized into 20-bar sections in 4/4 time, as opposed to the typical 16. I plan to sketch a leadsheet and record it sometime.

I learned that if I wrote a post of this length two or three times a day, I would produce well over 50,000 words in the span of a month.

Live and learn.

So I’m writing a novel.

Here’s the scoop: National Novel Writing Month is typically in November, savvy? But here at the U of A, where Novembers are populated with studious activities and the systematic avoidance thereof, a gaggle of us have committed to doing it in May. That’s 50,000 words by the 31st: on paper, not a staggering figure, but the first word takes the longest.

I would like to suggest that as a result, this blog is going to shut down for the month, but it probably won’t happen. At a glance, the next four weeks bring us the film adaptation of a hit novel by my favourite literary whipping boy (the one with the bloodthirsty albino monks), the complete revelation of the Nintendo Wii (wii!), a potential Battle of Alberta playoff series, fewer than four weddings and hopefully no funerals.

So in the meantime, I recommend that you direct your summer-employment blog addictions to the eloquent Geoffrey Chaucer.

I’m surprised at the number of former and current journalist types on the list of participants, myself included. Don’t you guys get tired?

I’ve been thinking about words.

I’m unabashedly a word-lover. One of the consequent afflictions of word-loving, though, is a passion for cute little alphabetic clumps that extends so far beyond their utility as meaning-carrying units that this utility becomes fully detachable. And as soon as one accepts that language can be beautiful in and of itself without having to communicate anything, one begins to see all kinds of instances where language in its meaningful state is intrusive and wholly unnecessary.

This is going to turn into a post where I make fun of hip-hop; but first, a few words about Tolkien.

I have, on one occasion or another, heard someone dismiss The Lord of the Rings on the grounds that Tolkien merely intended the mythology of Middle-Earth to serve as a playground for his invented languages. While not strictly untrue, this is an oversimplification and a misunderstanding. The way I read it, what Tolkien had claimed from the beginning is that the sound-patterns of a language – which would naturally include invented ones, since the meanings of individual lexical units are to some extent arbitrary – are able to contain and reflect the cultural history of a people, even a hypothetical people.

And so you have the Elves, whose unvoiced consonants slip and slide off the labiodental oh-so-gently, whereas the Orcs speak in abrasive, glottal coughs and hacks. In both the physical world and the speech-world, the Elves dance lightly, the Dwarves weigh themselves down; and the language and nomenclature of Rohan are lifted straight from Old English, so there’s no question about where that places them in Tolkien’s cosmos. (Allegorical conclusion: the French are beautiful and the Germans are ugly.) But the important thing is this: the mimetic position of each culture is discernible before meaning is introduced in the form of definitions.

This observation, and the illusion of authenticity that it permits when it comes to an invented tongue, separate Tolkien from all the cheap imitators who think dropping unpronounceable apostrophes everywhere is sufficient. For one thing, it makes no sense for an English-language narrator to anglicize everything except for the funny names, especially in a quasi-medieval setting reflecting an order of society organized around appropriation and homogeneity. I like to think of this as a case of contradictory suspensions of disbelief: how is it that English narrators speaking of a world in which English does not exist are somehow incapable of transliteration? Did they never have Peking Duck at the Turin Olympics?

But enough about bad fantasy. After all, this isn’t my area of special expertise. Talk to Wolf Wikeley, or better yet, watch My Fair Lady. Me, I just play keys.

At this juncture, I want to talk about what inspired this post in the first place. About three weeks ago, I comped a chart featuring my old schoolmate Ian Keteku, who now frolics on the Edmonton rap scene and goes by “Emcee E”. It was a surreal experience, and while in rehearsal, the pair of vocalists coordinating the shindig had to remind me on several occasions to keep the harmonies simple and not swing the time. It’s a struggle to let go of the upper structures and blue notes once you’ve internalized them, and I have no idea how Herbie Hancock ever managed to not only do it, but go on to record a hit single with Christina Aguilera. Then again, he’s Herbie Hancock.

Curiously, the last time Ian and I shared a stage was when he passed the microphone to me at my high school graduation banquet – a legendary evening that, roughly an hour later, went down in history (or down in flames). But the really bizarre thing about this whole scenario is somewhat more transparent.

Jazz guy. Rap guy. We’re not supposed to get along. Think of the Capulets and Montagues; now think of one of them as illiterate, and you’ve got it.

Two days earlier, Kenny Drew (not the one who played with Bird, but his son, who is also a pianist) wrote an article on All About Jazz entitled “What the F**k Happened to Black Popular Music?” – which, predictably, led to an explosive messageboard discussion about the decadence of American youth.

The animosity towards rap is uniquely strong in jazz circles for two reasons. First, rap has taken the place of jazz as the inspirational voice of black America, and there’s a certain cultural jealousy at work – jealousy in its second-most justified form (the first being an armed response to the Universal Constant of the Treachery of Women).

For my part, it is my learned opinion that jazz was, and is, a discovery, not an invention; it does not belong to black America, or America on the whole, any more than the moons of Jupiter belong to Italy. At the same time, I am not going to disrespect the forefathers of the great musical artform of the twentieth century by ignoring the hard fact that the syntax of jazz improvisation developed out of a specific ethnic milieu motivated by the desire to express a positive racial identity. The very problem is that once jazz was properly recognized as a universal construct, it lost its importance to African-American youth.

The second peeve, and the more fundamental one, is that jazz is an extension of the accepted musical dimensions of melody, harmony and rhythm, whereas rap thrives on the absence of the first two and the minimalistic reduction of the third.

I’m not going to get into the discussion of whether or not rap is music. Hip-hop production is no small task, even if it constricts itself to a limited subset of possible syncopations in 4/4 time – which, at face value, isn’t too different from the rhythmic complexity of early swing. It’s just that one requires a MIDI keyboard and a handful of plagiarized samples, whereas the other requires an instrument and practice. But as with any artform, the EffortMeter is merely the first line of aesthetic defence, and leans heavily towards exclusion (or, in the case of aurora borealis at 28,000ft, religion).

The repetition of vowel sounds produces a series of resonances that could be characterized as a harmonic system of its own, though it’s no more sophisticated than Eliza Doolittle reciting nursery rhymes about the rain in Spain falling mainly in the plain or Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor tapping to “Moses supposes his toeses are roses” over half a century ago. And melodically speaking, there does exist a “correct” diction that distinguishes “good” rap from cheap imitation President’s Choice rap, though in either case, it still deserves a bad rap.

So the genre passes all three tests. I accept that rap is musical, in the same way that the ziplocked excrement of an underfed chihuahua decorated with parsley (the excrement, not the chihuahua) is edible. Technically, yeah… it’s just that I prefer the filet mignon, especially when it’s offered for the same market price.

And I will state, for clarity, that it’s not like all rap is intolerable simply because its musicality is relegated to technical excuses. I will concede that the most outstanding track on Bound Together, a tribute to the music of the Super Nintendo game Earthbound, is the rap remix “Da Black Market”. I will concede that for some reason, French rap is actually not bad; if it’s as full of crass proletarian gutterspeak as the English variant, I don’t know it. I will even concede that the sight of a shrimpy Japanese-Norwegian rugby player channelling the Wu-Tang Clan is hilarious.

However, I am going to identify a general cause behind all of this semantic infighting.

Contemporary popular music has a problem. It happens to be the same problem as the one in mainstream computer animation: there are too many goddamned words.

Rap is the extreme case: the distillation of music for the consumption of the lowest common denominator of the tone-deaf breakbeat bobblehead. Somehow, it always manages to stumble its way back to the but-it’s-poetry tagline excuse. But in almost every genre, there is this depressing tendency for kids with mad guitar chops to obscure their playing with vapid half-sung lyrics about love or death or whatever else is fashionable this afternoon on the bipolar planetoid of Kazaa, when the music is perfectly comfortable speaking for itself.

The meaning of the words is at most a supplement to the music, or a part of some larger dramatic mixed-media construction. The words do not equal the music in any respect apart from acting as signals in the soundspace. Remove the words, and you still have music. Remove the triumvirate of melody, harmony and rhythm, and the music is gone; lyrics are not information-preserving. There’s a reason we file operas by composer, not librettist.

Louis Armstrong recognized the self-sufficiency of melodic expression and invented scat. Annie Ross turned it into a joke and pioneered vocalese. And when jazz vocalists still anchor onto the old standards, the melodies suggest a template for creative interpretation, a crucible for the formation of a personal musical identity. The notes on the page by your Gershwin or Rodgers or Porter, and the words that fit them, are norms. What you listen for are the erratic deviations.

I don’t say this to exclude. I have a lot of respect for the burgeoning poetic tradition of the singer-songwriter, be it those who can sing (Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell) or those who can’t (Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen). But in most cases, the words do not equal the music. They are separable, as lyricophiles consistently demonstrate; and that also implies, quite correctly, that the musical dimensions can be isolated. Unless, of course, the music is absent. Just as bad music can get in the way of well-meaning lyrics, bad poetry – or poor enunciation thereof – often obscures the music. And there’s way too much of both going around. Curiously, market forces are driven by the verbally empowered and musically illiterate, a subdivision that is disturbingly representative of consumer society at large where everybody hears and nobody listens.

That’s one possibility, anyhow. The other one is the ego of the musician who feels the need to disrespect the audience by spelling out how it should feel and what everything means. That’s not poetry, it’s narcissism. And when the words are superficial blotches of noise designed to obscure an underlying monotony of composition, the practice is especially reprehensible.

I don’t deny that words can serve a very direct musical function, and in fact, that is what works in rap. That is what works in opera when you ignore the supertitles and listen to the enunciation of a foreign language, which is itself emotionally indicative of something. That is what works in John Coltrane when he chants along to Jimmy Garrison’s bass line in his spiritual “Acknowledgment”: a love supreme, a love supreme. Which is the dominant function, and which is the supplementary one? Here’s a clue: most of what you hear today has it the wrong way around.

Allow me to reflect.

I’m not a prolific writer by any means, on the web or in print. Part of it, by my intention or not, is that I’d rather read than write – a preference that I think should be a property of all writers irrespective of their level of seriousness or the prestige of the medium they call home.

Lately, I’ve neither read nor written to any nontrivial degree. I’ve been playing Scrabble. But there’s a common principle at work that applies to both activities: you can’t do something well if you don’t know what it means to do it well.

Writing without reading is bad writing, and to a discerning observer the deficit is as discordant as a karaoke regular who has never heard a real singer in his life. Then again, real singers are hard to come by for the modern layperson when record labels are actively engaged in marketing superstars on the basis of their being tone-deaf. It’s become a house style. And a world where Kenneth Gorelick making like a prehistoric glowworm and flopping his way around an ill-selected blues scale is enough to outsell every real jazz artist on the globe is a mad, mad, mad, mad world indeed.

The funniest thing I’ve read in the last little while comes from a controversy I thankfully slept through a few years ago, and have only discovered now. It seems that Mr. Kenny G decided to overdub a few of his trademark saxopharts over Louis Armstrong’s “What A Wonderful World”. This prompted a reaction, I would call it, from none other than Pat Metheny himself (only the man who defined the sound of contemporary jazz guitar, if you don’t know who he is), who called the endeavour “musical necrophilia” and then some. Metheny’s talent for obloquy is as lyrical as his proficiency for the Ibanez electric. It even spawned a song.

(Permit me to make a brief and self-congratulatory pause as I admire, in the above paragraph, the best word I’ve coined in at least a fortnight. Google returns no hits for the word or a variant of it spelt with an F. This one’s mine, baby.)

Anyway, to return to the topic at hand: every time I think of writers who don’t read nearly enough, the one that comes to mind is Robert Jordan. When I was fetching the new Snicket at Chapters last week, I passed by another freshly-delivered penultimate volume of a more thickset build – Jordan’s Knife of Dreams, the eleventh of a projected twelve books in his popular series of sword-and-sorcery paperweights, The Wheel of Time. I quit the series after seven out of having better things to read, though I no longer sleep as well as I once did; Jordan’s prose was a panacea for all forty-two flavours of insomnia, and I recall missing at least one bus stop on its account.

Now that I’ve discovered a really schlocky bestselling writer, who is as terse as Jordan is grandiloquent, he doesn’t seem so bad. I still can’t justify resuming where I left off, of course, because I simply have better things on my shelf, and his common penchant for pluralizing gerunds could have a detrimental effect on my word study.

But I digress. (Almost as much as he does. Oh, snap!) I meant to bring up Robert Jordan in conjunction with the topic of how reading and writing interact, because I remember one particular interview with him where he comments on the same. I’ve dug up the relevant excerpt:

I had always said, “One day I will write.” Then when I was 30 I was walking back from a dry dock to my office, and I had a fall and tore up my knee very severely. There were complications in the surgery, I nearly died, I spent a month in the hospital, and I spent three and a half months recuperating before I could walk well enough to go back to the office. During that time I reached burnout in reading. I remember picking up a book by an author I knew I liked, reading a few paragraphs and tossing it across the room and saying, “Oh God, I could do better than that.” Then I thought, “All right son, it’s time to put up or shut up.”

And so I wrote my first novel. It has never been published although it’s been bought by two publishers, and a lot of good came out of it, including meeting my wife.

And you know, I respect that. It’s true that the extremity of consuming words in hopes of fueling the production of them is a life of consumption that produces very little. I think a lot of writerus blockitis comes from ambition and perfectionism. Robert Jordan has the good fortune of suffering neither.

He’s an odd example in the sense that he is, in a manner of speaking, a writer who reads. (We’ll ignore for now that according to Amazon’s “Significant Seven” interview, he names as his desert island book his own work-in-progress.) But judging from his own writing, if he thinks he can do better than the authors in which he was once so engrossed, either he’s not there yet, or his influences clearly weren’t very good.

It’s easy to tell when a writer is an overly selective reader – one who only reads in genre, or one who refuses to read in genre; one who only hits the pulps, or never hits the pulps. I find that writers who read develop a writer’s identity, or voice as some would call it, through a balance of controlled mimicry and improvisational distortion; and just as the most revered figures of the great improvisational art form, jazz, draw on influences from gospel to swing to stride to bebop to post-Romantic to chain-gang country blues, writers can only benefit from reading diversely.

Then you have the likes of Umberto Eco, who is so well-read that it makes his fiction impenetrable because of all its a priori dependencies. Predictably, his non-fiction critical discourse fares much better, but even in fiction he conceals a treasure trove of content, not fluff, behind a tattered verbal curtain. In Robert Jordan’s case, after some early books that are pleasurable for their escapist manoeuvres if not their style, the content is wholly subsumed by a textual torrent that begs for a stopper. One wishes the author spent more time reading the works of others instead of treading water in Narcissus’ swimming pool.

I hear that Knife of Dreams cleans up some of the muck, but considering how much of it must have accumulated in the interim (in addition to how much was floating about already), it sounds like a book for fans’ eyes only. I’ll not make judgments by covers, of course.

There is more to say about literacy that needs to be said, but I have midterms to swat.

At this precise moment I don’t have time to expound on why contrary to what you might have gleaned from Jessica Warren’s review in The Gateway, but well in line with the mainstream press, Corpse Bride is certain to be the most lighthearted fun you’ll have at the cinema this year – at least, until we see hide or hare of The Curse of the Wererabbit. Whatever I said a few months ago about “So Long and Thanks For All The Fish” being a shoo-in for the Original Song Oscar is now seriously in doubt in the face of new and viable competition that almost makes the award seem like something other than an antiquated joke.

I will be investing in repeat viewings. You should too. Come for the exorcising voice of Christopher Lee and classic Mexican calavera cabaret in the same tradition as the epitome of interactive literature. Stay for the first and second best scenes involving pianos since that Polanski war film from a few years back, and stop to notice the Harryhausen nameplate.

So UADS alumnus Alim Merali, who has already taken his place in CUSID history by serving up the textbook example of a low-burden case, has self-published the introductory book on competitive debate that he’s bandied about for the past three years or so. Talk the Talk: Speech and Debate Made Easy has a strong pedigree of blurbs behind it already; a free PDF version of the whole text is available for online perusal. I can’t say I’ve dug into it myself, as the 152-page CUSID Central Debating Guide compounds a backlog of incredible girth.

As an aside, I normally entertain mail from my readers, but any and all instances of “So where’s your book, Nicholas Tam?” will be ignored with extreme prejudice.

You really can get anything published nowadays, though. Just ask Stephen Lanzalotta, author of The Da Vinci Diet: Weight-Loss Secrets from Da Vinci and the Golden Ratio. Picture me as suffused with ennui as I am once again forced to point out for those fetuses joining us after the commercial break that first of all, his name was Leonardo, and secondly, Dan Brown wouldn’t know the Golden Ratio if the plus-minus sign ripped the square root off the unsuspecting five and shoved it up his sacred feminine. Never you mind the inherent ridicule of this unwanted circumstance.

All-nighters, asymptotic complexity proofs and three-day Scrabble marathons don’t admix.