Stairway to Heaven vs Taurus - a roundup of soundalikes for the undecided "is it plagiarism" voter

I've written before on the Stairway to Heaven/Taurus plagiarism court case. One of the best posts has disappeared into the back catalogue and suffered the link rot that plagues blogs. 

Here are some of the comparisons, updated as of this week. 

I won't rehash the legal case. It turns on various technicalities in the law (like the fact that at the time, sheet music was copyright but musical performances on vinyl were not copyright) and technicalities in case law, like the "inverse ratio rule" that basically said if someone could have heard a song a lot, then you can claim he copied it by showing that only a tiny amount of his song resembled the original. Which doesn't make any sense, and it's gone now, thanks to the Stairway win. 

Instead I want to rehash the emotional case. Lots of people think Jimmy Page stole the opening bars of Stairway because a) he was a bit of a naughty boy when it came to taking credit for other people's work and b) the opening bars of Stairway do sound a lot like the post-introduction opening bars of Spirit's Taurus. 

I can't do anything about a), except to point out that wherever Led Zeppelin have been caught, they've eventually paid up, even, at last, to Jake Holmes for Dazed and Confused. 

But I can do something about b) which is to say, I can point out that the opening bars of Stairway sound like lots of things, because it's a very ordinary chord progression picked in an ordinary way (sorry Jimmy). If you normally listen to say, Death Metal or Doo-Wop, you may not have heard much of it and be susceptible, if you hear Taurus and Stairway played side-by-side, to saying a few seconds in the introduction are "the same". (Stairway is eight minutes long, and the rest of both songs are clearly different. The balance of Stairway is not 'picked in an ordinary way'.) If you've listened to other forms of music, you'll be more open to hearing they are two variations on a common theme.  Baroque music has similar progressions as does the Renaissance thingy passamezzo antico. Antico, meaning old! Another name for it is a cliché line, cliché meaning old hat!

Patrick Ball's Carolan's Dream (found via Celtic Baroque Roots of Stairway)

Or here, after the introduction. (Found via a comment in the blog above.)

Sonata di Chittarra, e Violino, con il suo Basso Continuo (at 35 seconds in)

But enough of those. What about pop music? Well, what about pop music! Here we go!

Cartoone, Ice Cream Dreams (1968) – Introduction

(Jimmy Page played on this album)

Davey Graham, Cry Me a River (1963) – introductory few seconds 

The Beatles, A Taste of Honey (1963) – arrangement and melody under "I dream of your first kiss and then I feel upon my lips again."

Johnny Rivers, Summer Rain (1968) – descending figure the orchestra plays, e.g. in the intro 

Crow,  Thoughts (1968) – introduction and guitar figure under verse 

Damnation of Adam Blessing (1969), Strings and things – all of it really

Nick Drake, Day Is Done(1969) – all of it really (he's doing his Davey Graham bit here)

(That is some great guitar playing, isn't it!)

Scott Walker, Hills of Yesterday (1969) – guitar figure

The Kinks – Shangri La (1969) – guitar figure

Jim Croce, Time in a Bottle (1970) – introduction and guitar figure under verse 

Andy Williams, Music to Watch Girls By (1967) – introduction (after first five seconds)

Led Zeppelin, Stairway to Heaven (1971) – introduction and guitar figure under first verses

(Recorded December 1970)

Spirit, Taurus (1968), 44 seconds in

Eric Clapton, Let It Grow (1974) – guitar figure under verse

Dolly Parton, We Used To (1975) – introduction, arrangement

U2, Sunday Bloody Sunday – introduction after the drums

Pink Floyd, Is There Anybody Out There? (1979) – at 1:25

Foo Fighters, The Pretender (2007) – introduction

I'm sure there's more, but you get the picture. 

A lot of these song names were transcribed from a video by ThatsSoInane, but they don't seem to exist on YouTube anymore to thank them. The video itself was taken down years ago. I bet these links rot soon too!

My neighbor has a dog called Spirit who is very yappy. I just heard him start barking and my neighbor's really loud yell, "SPIRIT!"

So maybe that's some sort of omen. 

Show, don't tell in Science Fiction

 In his letter to Joan Lancaster in June 1956, C. S. Lewis wrote: 'In writing. Don't use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was "terrible," describe it so that we'll be terrified. Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, "Please will you do my job for me."'

'On the dam of the mill a fragment of broken bottle flashed like a small bright star, and there rolled by, like a ball, the black shadow of a dog' – Anton 'is that a gun on your mantelpiece or are you just pleased to see me?' Chekhov

'Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.' – Mark Twain

This is the goal of 'good writing'. It is claimed to make the reader do the work of feeling instead of being told how to feel, as a mechanism to engage the reader. Instead of asserting that something happened, it gives the reader evidence that it happened.

"Show, don't tell" is one of the iron laws of literary fiction, along with "murder your darlings" and "remove all the words ending in 'ly'."  It's a hallmark of western literature, and it's firmly based in the conviction that writing can and should express "universal themes".

Alexis Enrico Santi, editor of Our Stories, wrote: Literary fiction is writing that concentrates not on the climax but all the foreplay before and after […] What bridges the gap between the reader and writer is the essential senses of human emotion: smell, sight, hearing, touch -- these are universal. Everyone who reads is looking to access their own emotions to 'live' inside your fiction. Whenever you are communing with these senses, you will be connecting with your reader."

From Wikipedia: "Literary fiction is a term principally used for certain fictional works that are claimed to hold literary merit…To be considered literary, a work usually must be "critically acclaimed" and "serious". In practice, works of literary fiction often are "complex, literate, multilayered novels that wrestle with universal dilemmas".

But there will always be a major role for simply telling. Importantly, it is not possible to describe motivation by "showing".

"[M]otivation is unshowable. It must be told. […] Motivation is precisely the one thing that cannot be shown. […] When you are using a POV character, the single most important thing that you must tell the reader is the full purpose of what the character is doing, as soon as the character knows it himself. If you do not, you are cheating, and the audience gets less and less patient with you, until they lose interest because you are not telling them the most important information that people come to stories -- especially fiction -- to receive! -- Orson Scott Card. (Links to an external site.)

If you try to describe a person's inner state only by showing what he does, one problem you will run into is what psychologists call the Fundamental Attributive Error. This is the tendency to believe a person's actions are the result of their personality rather than outside forces. For example, you're likely to believe the speeding car that cuts you off must be driven by a selfish jerk, when in fact it could be driven by a soon-to-be father who is trying to get his wife to the maternity hospital and was temporarily distracted.

Even if you excel at "showing", you will be, as the reading for this class described in "constant dissociation", forever describing a cloud around a person without ever acknowledging there's a person at the center of the cloud, an "I". 

Since good writing is said to come to grips with "universal" themes, to "show" them, a writer must assume that it there is a universal way to 'be in love,' 'to be terrified,' 'watch a beautiful sunset' and so on. But is that a good assumption? Leaving aside the whole branch of anthropology dedicated to the study of "literary universals" (the upshot being that not as many things as we think are universal in discourse) literary fiction is western, largely white, and 'the canon' is still mostly male. Styles, themes and techniques fall into and out of fashion.  It is not universal.

The "universality" of literary fiction has been challenged by on multiple grounds. For example by Namratta Podar on the grounds of Colonialism, because it ignores the orality (story telling) tradition in societies around the world. It has also been challenged for containing implicit Colonialism by Cecilia Tan because the literary form, particularly when "showing", often requires the story to be about the impact a newcomer has on a world that is new to them, and vice versa. 

It has also been challenged on the grounds that no experience can be universal. Empathy is a myth. In "Consider The Lobster," David Foster Wallace expounded on the life of the lobster. It does not have a nervous system that resembles that of a human, so can we truly say a lobster 'was in agony' when it was boiled in a pot?

"Since pain is a totally subjective mental experience, we do not have direct access to anyone or anything's pain but our own; and even just the principles by which we can infer that other human beings experience pain and have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain involve hard-core philosophy – metaphysics, epistemology, value theory and ethics."   In this case, 'the lobster was dropped in boiling water' – telling, not showing – is a true account. -- David Foster Wallace, in Ethical Challenge of Posthumanism. 

More narrowly, we are all, like Wallace's fish in This is Water, unaware of our environment.  We are embedded within a medium – our Umwelt, as von Uexküll named it – and do not realize that our own senses, effectors and environment are not contiguous with the Umwelten of our so-called peers.

 (Links to an external site.)named it – and do not realize that our own senses, effectors and environment are not contiguous with the Umwelten of our so-called peers.

This issue is exacerbated in speculative vis à vis literary fiction. In the latter, the Umwelt of the colonizers and the colonized may not overlap to a significant degree, but in the former one set of characters might literally be lobsters. A long time in literary fiction may be a hundred years (of solitude), in speculative fiction it may be a billion years – or a millisecond. A long way in literary fiction may be Eastern Europe to New York, in speculative fiction from Schenectady to the Andromeda Galaxy.

It is informative to see how television approaches this.  In "The Expanse" (2016–), a portal opens between distant systems. The portal – the "Ring" – is not said to be Cyclopean, Brobdingnagian, immense, planet-sized. It’s barely described by the characters.  This is a TV "show" and of course it makes sense that they will "show" the size of the Ring. But in contrast, the interpersonal relationships between the characters are talked through exhaustively in dialog. If a character betrays another character, it is explained – told – in minute detail. The precise relationship between the characters, at this current juncture of the plot, like motivation, may need to be spelled out.

In written SF, we often need to "tell" both exposition and motivation. We must find a way to describe a situation no one has ever come across before – a portal between star systems – and we have to explain how the characters are interacting.

For the former, we have two main choices: infodump, what Damon Knight called the expository lump, and incluing, named by Jo Walton, where the situation is described in small pieces as the character encounters each part of their environment.

The most famous incluing phrase in SF is Robert Heinlein's "the door dilated". This advances the action while showing that we are not in 21st Century in three short words. It's not a trick that's easily replicated, however, or it wouldn't be the go-to example.

Infodumping includes the classic, much maligned technique of people explaining things to each other. "As you know, Bob, we settled this planet almost a hundred years ago but still on occasion a wild invisible creature from the mountains attacks the settlement and steals our children."

(Perhaps "incluing" would be something like, "I walked on the outside of the trail, carrying a big stick. I didn't believe there were any invisible monsters in the mountains, but my little sis did. Four generations of settlers had metaled and graded what was once just a rocky path, but to her it was still the edge of civilization and monster lurked in the bushes.")

In summary, it's called telling a story, not showing a story. Showing has its place, but plot will always require telling. A dedication to showing will produce a work where nothing happens except for the experience of the main character, and if you don't feel like him, then for you nothing has happened at all.

SF Critic Damien G Walter wrote on the Asimov's forum: "I've noticed a lot of writers, particularly those who write novels over short stories, refer to 'show don't tell' as using scene and dialogue instead of narrative voice. IMHO that advice is not very helpful. Narrative voice is pretty essential in a good story, and trying to stick to this idea of 'show don't tell' is a mistake."

Fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson (as Mistborn) wrote: " Show don't tell is pithy, and it is good advice. But it's not the whole story. What it really should say is this: learn when to show and when to tell." 

(Written because we had to "do" show don't tell for our writing class.)

Led Zeppelin win Stairway case.

 The Supreme Court have declined to hear the Stairway to Heaven plagiarism case, and so the lower court ruling, exonerating Led Zeppelin, stands. 

The judgment also means that a long-standing (and much debated) copyright case rule in the ninth circuit called "the inverse ratio rule" has been overturned. This said in effect, that if you had a chance to hear the song that is claimed to be the basis of your song, then you *could have* stolen the sound, and if you had a lot of chances to hear the song, then you could have stolen the song even if your song doesn't much sound like the original. No, that doesn't make any sense, but copyright rarely does. It's gone now, we don't have to worry about it. 

I wrote about the case in 2016 and appended a number of YouTube videos of "things that sound like Stairway". It's a fairly common sound in music, both before and after Stairway (and before and after Spirit's Taurus).  And even if it wasn't, it's a bit much to suggest that the first 30 seconds or so of Stairway is the part that made it so iconic. But I won't rehash all of that. There's plenty of takes out there on the interwebs, most of which are "Page nicked things so this case is his just desserts", which I don't agree with either. 

There's a write-up of the case from Variety here, and one from Rolling Stone here.  The Rolling Stone piece has a good write up on the inverse ratio rule. 

Online all the time

Social Media looms large in our lives these days. Almost everyone has a Facebook account or a twitter account, and we all are tempted to share the posts that engage us the most.

Some of the posts are from, or about Qanon orphans. These people, we're told, are younger people who have "lost" their older relatives to a rapidly-spreading conspiracy theory called Qanon, after its supposed founder, who hold a "Q" (top secret classification) in the government administration.

This phenomenon follows on from similar social scares ranging from the Satanic Panic of the Eighties to the Fox Widows of the Oughties – people who have been radicalized by the media and then isolated from their "normie" – non-radicalized – relatives.

My own experience with online communities is very different. I emigrated to the US in 1989, just as the wired community was ramping up. I was online immediately, using the ability to talk to my friends in the UK and make hundreds of friends all around the world. Friends who have lizard pets. Friends who watched (and obsessively detailed) the X-Files. Led Zeppelin fans. Jack White fans. Star Wars fans. All of these had messageboards – or ‘communities’ as people now call them – dedicated to the topic, and quite often had messageboards limited to a few friends, dedicated to talking about the people on the main messageboard. There was LiveJournal, Archive of Our Own, Fanfiction.net, the comments sections of popular blogs. Many people have had a similar journey, from listservers to Compuserve, Deja News, AOL, to Facebook and Instagram in the twenty-twenties. From modems in the early nineties to cable or free wifi in cafes, the experience has been positive and encouraging.

What, then has gone wrong in the relatives of the orphans and widows mentioned above?

In my opinion, two things. First, personally, I wanted to make friends and involve them positively in my life and thoughts. I looked for similarity in hobbies and outlook and sought to think of mutually interesting topics to write about. I did not wait for people to find me and attempt to influence me. Secondly and more importantly, old fashioned message boards did not have "algorithms". These computer programs are written by such as FB and Twitter to work behind the scenes and bring you, the reader, content you will engage with (click on or linger on). They know you will engage with it because you have done so with similar items before. This is a positive feedback loop – if you click on something, you will see more of it. You will click on it again, and so the algorithms are trained to show you EVEN MORE.

Unfortunately, it's a feature of the human psyche that we click on (and linger over) items that make us angry. Get us up in arms, as the cliché goes (alas, literally these days). The algorithms have taken us away from our friends, who post pictures of their cats and lasagnes, and into the arms of Q, who gets us mad about crazy happenings elsewhere that we can't take care of ourselves, and so we go back, over and over again, to make sure that SOMEBODY is doing something.

We can't do much about FB's algorithms and their tendency to show us a world where things are out of control. We can, however, trim our own behavior and look for – and click on – posts from those we trust, and join in the celebration of togetherness.

--

We were asked to write an opinion piece in our non-fiction writing class, and this was mine. 

Bones on the Couch (short story, complete)

Bones on the Couch 

The first skeleton turned up in May on, I think, a Friday. I remember we were preparing to go out. Yvonne knew a place had great social distancing, so we could sit outside without a mask and look at the ocean while drinking cocktails.

We finished getting ready and came out of the bedroom and the skeleton was sitting there on the sofa.

"Who's that?" Yvonne said.

"I think it's my boss's father," I said. I knew he'd been sick.

"It can't stay on the couch."

It wasn't putrid or anything. No smell or scraps of flesh. Just clean bones, still attached together somehow, without any wires or ligaments. Maybe some sort of magnetism? When I gripped it, it just pulled apart, and I stacked it in the cupboard under the sink. The ribcage was the largest and most unwieldy segment, so I put the little bones inside it, the long bones around it to make a sort of flattish platform and placed the skull on top.

We had a nice time at the bar on the pier that evening, and I don't remember any skeletons for a while.

One turned up about a week later, on a stool in the kitchen. It was my brother's friend, an ER nurse, or at least that's what we decided after a brief debate. That skeleton fitted under the sink as well, but when two turned up the next day, I started having to stack them in the bathroom cabinet. One was my brother's garage mechanic – I don't know why I was getting my brother's – and one we weren't sure about.

By then, we were hearing about other people getting them. Most did as I did – I learned it was called 'disarticulation' – but a few people just left them where they were. "They get less noticeable after a while, " a work colleague said.

"It's a nine-day wonder," another said, "I bet they disappear after the election."

In August, our son Ian came to stay with us. He said his apartment was full of skeletons and he had to move out for a while.

"You'd think a young guy like Ian would have fewer skeletons," I said to Yvonne.

"I think he has a lot of heart, and that makes them stick around," she said. She was disarticulating our mortgage loan manager so she didn't look up. He fitted under the sink. They did tend to pack down after a while, and you could get more in each space.

She was right about Ian. A skeleton turned up the next day and after a lot of inquiry, we realized it was a Black Lives Matter protester who'd been run over in the streets in Portland, so clearly it belonged to him. Ian wouldn't disarticulate it, so it stayed in the bathroom, sitting on the floor and grinning up at the shower rail.

"It wasn't a nine-day wonder after all," I said to my co-worker, who had to move the bones of one of the secretarial staff out of his cubicle to sit down that morning. "It's still only August," he said. "Anyway, you're outliers here – both you and Yvonne. Born worriers. Most of us just get on with life. It's not like you can put a stop to it."

"Ian gets them as well," I corrected.

"He'll grow out of it," the co-worker said. "It's you I'm most worried about. You should take a vacation."

I didn't – it never seems to be the right time to take a vacation. There's always a crisis. Riots, police-involved shootings, COVID-19 travel restrictions. Middle East in an uproar, again. Climate refugees on boats in the Mediterranean. It's hard to keep up with the news sometimes.

We had a few more. Mostly Ian's, I think. He was no help and his tended to hang around the longest. Yvonne wouldn't acknowledge any of hers and I would put them in the cupboard under the sink for her. One day in late October, as I was leaving work, I got one in the passenger seat of the car.

I sighed and drove off, and by the time I reached home it had gone.

End

 

 

Sam Redlark, star commenter, aces the wand debate

I haven't been around much, have I?

Well, here's some light reading suggestions for you.

A chance remark by a friend on twitter has led to me learning of the existence of a true heir to the surreal wordsmithing of the Bonzos' Vivian Stanshall. The wonder-writer's name is Sam Redlark.

The friend tweeted about a comment on a Guardian article which was wonderful, loopy and inventive, and really nothing at all to do with the article. She said "he has form" and pointed to the commenters' page. (For the Guardian, realizing that we may not want to slog through its wet and weedy articles, provides a link to a particular commenter's replies.)

Sam Redlark's comment page, worthy of a novel, is available here. A tiny sliver of his oeuvre is inserted as a picture. (On the Grauniad site, the headline for the article appears on the left, and is a link. The comment appears on the right. There is no requirement to read the article in order to enjoy the replies.)

I've found a couple of hints that Sam may have had the urge to spin webs of fancy before this year, when he discovered the Guardian's comment page. There's a long-abandoned blog by a Sam Redlark that has much of the same character, here. 

There is also a reply to a Warren Ellis blogpost  by a Sam Redlark that leads to an (also long-abandoned) LiveJournal by one "backwards7" here. 

Put together it does seem to me that the author of Sir Henry at Rawlinson End has come to life again. (Though it would be too much to hope that Sam could have Vivian's mellifluous voice tones.)

Interzone science fiction magazines available free online

In 1989, I had my first story published in a glossy magazine - semi-professional magazine, as the terminology goes, the wonderful and long-lived Interzone, edited at that time by multi-talented and Ballardian extraordinaire, David Pringle.

Issue #1

A string of other semi-professional and zine sales followed. Most of them are lost in the mists of time (though Mike Ashley has the story of them and the zeitgeist of those days in his book Science Rebels, available here).

A dozen dozen of the first couple of hundred Interzone issues are digitized and online at the estimable Internet Archive. I do not know if the estimable Internet Archive actually has permission to do so or if this is one of its regular excursions around copyright in these Plague Years.

And one of those issues is the one my short story is in.  I called it The Continuous Council Workman, but editor Pringle persuaded me to dial that title down to The Outside Door.

You can browse the Interzone archive at this link


You can find the link for the issue featuring The Outside Door here.

Really takes me back!

Counterfeit bills

A long time ago - maybe 1986 or so - I tried to pass a counterfeit £20 bill.

I didn't know it was counterfeit. At the time, I wasn't exactly Peter Thiel and such huge bills (to me) only came my way when I got my weekly wage out of the bank.

The store didn't believe a bank (it was a Giro bank, British folks) would hand out fake notes, and the police, when they arrived, didn't believe me either. I was marched out of the store and deposited on a hard bench in a East London police station. The copper said that Special Branch or whomever would be along to question me, but nobody bothered. About an hour later, the original copper came by with his cup of tea in his hand, and said, "Are you still here?" I allowed as I was, in fact, still here, and he indicated I should get lost.

I did. I got back to work, they accepted my excuse for having taken such a prolonged lunch break, and that was that. 

None of the police involved handcuffed my hands behind my back and knelt on my neck for more than eight minutes, killing me.

So I guess I got off lightly compared with George Floyd, God rest his soul. The East London police were pretty hard - the Giro bank post office where I deposited my paycheck was just opposite the Blind Beggar where Ronnie Kray murdered George Cornell, for example, so they had to be - but they weren't psychopaths.

Alice Cooper - Don't Give Up (Official Video)

That nice Alice Cooper has some encouraging words for us.

Creative Writing in the time of Covid

The Creative Writing class continues apace, if by "apace" we can include facing each other in the little screen boxes of a Zoom meeting. It's beginning to feel natural to avoid seeing others face to face and instead to gaze stonily at a tiny dot on the top of your screen and see yourself in one of the little boxes.

“O, wad some Power the giftie gie us. To see oursels as others see us! It wad frae monie a blunder free us, An' foolish notion.” - Robert Burns.

Done. I even turned off mirroring. Not yet freed of foolish notions, but I've discovered I'm asymmetric.

The team continues to write and we continue to critique. I learn a lot but write very little. Fifteen or so people turn up to the Zoom meetings, three send pieces for critique, and we have one or two 5 or 10 minute periods of 'freewriting', an exercise that makes my mind go completely blank.

The teacher gives us two words and asks us to write a piece about them. If meditation teachers knew about it, they'd adopt the technique. They'd pull two pieces of paper out of a tin of stamp-sized sheets with words written on them and tell us to think about what the words bring up in our imagination.

Teacher: "Umbilical. Ma Po Tofu."

My Brain: ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Uhhh.

There are some very good amateurs in the class. One is a phenomenal writer in the word/sentence/paragraph sense but rambles like Trump in speech, which I find interesting. One loves European writers, which shows in terms of his subject matter and attention to detail. Many are concentrating on memoir and have interesting stories to tell, although it's hard to know if they have a book-full each. I'm not interested in it myself, and balk at questions about what I've done or what I feel, almost as hard as I stall at the freewriting exercises.

One thing I don't bring up in critiques and probably should is the treatment that the Serious Men of the class bring to female characters. I spend a lot of time on the internet reading people who are so woke that you couldn't scare up a cis het white male character in there if you waved an AR 15 and a jar of mayonnaise and shouted, "Hey soy boy!" In contrast, the Serious Men of the class write about exciting, deep, dark, disturbed white men. Women are presented as objects, which the protagonist acts upon.

We had a short story where a man goes to visit a woman for no reason as far as I could tell, then beats her up. She does not fight back. For more information reread the last sentence. She has so little agency she doesn't even try to run.

Another of the Serious Men wrote a long and very well-written piece about a man who is obsessed with another man. The object of his obsession is described in great, loving detail, from his college days (which the protagonist had researched - it was before they met) to his shirt and to his car. The story is named after him, and he is nicknamed after his car. The car, like the man, is described in detail, and the car has agency - its temperamental ways are a plot point. The reason the protagonist is obsessed with him is that he knows a woman the protagonist had interacted with before the story began. The previous interaction is never described. And the woman, when we eventually meet her, is barely described. The protagonist is driven to her house by the car-man in his erratic car, where the protagonist kills the woman and the man as well.

To be fair, some of the Serious Men write about themselves and don't really mention women, or about a character's childhood, much of which seems to be spent in reform schools or orphanages and not have any women in it. They don't all write about psychopaths.

The women are a more varied lot - from the spiritual seeker to the memoirists to the one with the fabulous voice - and tend to have both men and women in their stories. I think because of our mutual age, there is a tendency for the men characters to be doers and the women to be opinion-havers, but for most of us, that's what growing up was like. Stories set in the present day, written by the women, generally treat men and women as two types of human beings.

Going to video conferencing has reduced the tendency of readings and critiques to become therapy sessions. When someone writes about a father being distant, or a  father womanizing, or someone being sexually assaulted, there's a minefield where criticizing the writing may be criticizing the writer. Safely behind our screens, sending marked up Word documents back and forth, this is minimized.

It's certainly an interesting class, and a first for me. I've been to workshops like "How to write the perfect query letter!" (A: Enclose a $50 bill.*) Or, "What is tight third person omniscient pluperfect?" (A: "He hadn't worked out by then that he had written in the tight third person omniscient pluperfect.") I hadn't been to a long course where I was expected to write things.

OK, now write for ten minutes on these two words: Error. Nature.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Uhhh.


*This is not the actual way to write the perfect query letter.

Merope (fiction, 500 words)

My creative writing class prompt was to write about the rituals that evolve when you are trying to survive in isolation. Here's my 500 words.

***

I got wearily out of the bunk, folded it into the wall and stuffed the bag into the sanitizer. My daily checklist was on a clipboard because there was something tactile about pencils that I didn’t get from a tablet. They say that knowing what you like and sticking with it is the key to these long periods on the watchtowers.

Khaliunaa was already at the watch station, as usual smelling of flowers, a remarkable feat since we were three and a half million miles from earth. Whatever perfume she’d smuggled on board had lasted – what? I was losing track of time. More than eleven months. At first I’d considered objecting. Some people are allergic to fragrances, I considered saying. It’s antisocial, I imagined myself arguing. But getting on with your team-mate is the key to these long periods on the watchtowers. And anyway, it covered up the smell from the food preparation area. (The food itself was perfectly seasoned, designed to keep us lonely crew members relatively satisfied on these long, tedious tours. The lingering smell was not lovely.)

The watch station was in the center of the cupola, where you could observe the stars slowly rotate around you. Occasionally, dim pepperoni-red Mars or bright coral Jupiter would appear for a stately procession outside the glass. The instruments, of course, did all the watching, but Mission Command had psychologists by the truckload, and they had advocated for a big, wide, panoramic window to keep the inhabitants sane. The instruments could detect the signature of a rocket engine tens of astronomical units away. Millions of miles before a person could see a flare.

Khaliunaa, too, had a checklist – hers was on a tablet – because a checklist to keep you mentally moving forward is the key to these long periods on the watchtowers. I swear the first item on hers, because she says something like it every morning, is her little joke. She spotted me and prepared to say it.

“Hey, Kareem, can you see something moving – there – across the Pleiades?”

“Ha ha, very funny,” I said, fumbling with the squishy plastic packaging of a breakfast. I’d gotten bored with the formerly astonishing sight of the constellations months ago and didn’t look up.

“I mean it this time.”

“Sure you do.” I munched the vanilla granola, trying to keep the noise down because getting on with your team-mate is the key to these long periods on the watchtowers.

“Kareem? We have to alert Mission Command.”

Unnerved, I looked at my instrument display. There was nothing hot out there. Maybe she’d spotted a comet? Not unheard of. I grabbed a bar and pulled myself up into the cupola. My eyes tracked across the constellations to the bright blue throng of the Pleiades. The beautiful Seven Sisters of legend shone brightly. Then there were six. Then seven. Something had briefly eclipsed Merope.

Something coasting in.

Then the unknown body flared red. A rocket engine had fired.

Klaxons blared across the watchtower. 

Battle stations.

***

Clints

I was singing a Yorkshire folk song, On Ilkley Moor Baht ‘At, and thought of this piece. (Though technically, Ilkley Moor is mainly sandstone and gritstone.)
***

I am indigenous to Yorkshire, England. A hilly, wild place where the limestone bones of the earth form ridges on the land, the ribs of the world. You can see these ribs and feel the earth below them breathing; they’re placed at the surface so you can wonder at the immensity of it all. How similar the limestone peaks and stony cracked clints are to our own bones and how full they are of the bonified remains of alien creatures a billion years before our time – the crinoids and the seashells and crushed sea floors raised up to hikers’ heights.

The earth bones reflect our bones. Our bones are who we are, how we are created from the ground, the dust of the earth. Archaeologists can divine the native land of buried autochthons by grinding their skeletons and dissolving them, running them through their machines. If a man was born in Anatolia and walked the earth to dwell in Germany, the trace elements in his teeth and bones, the trace radioactivity of his bony remains, each give out a clear signal of his origin and travels. We are made from the land. We carry our bones within us (as the shelled creatures carry their bones without) and yet we are made of the bones in the ground where we were born, glossed with where we grew our wheat and corn. In turn, our bones ultimately return to the ground to create the possibilities of new bones, of new life. New corn springs from the ribs of the world, and we consume it, making it part of us, unknowingly or knowingly, with prayer.

We invite the earth’s bones inside us with rhythm Music comes from our bones and our bones come from the ground. We make drumsticks with our bones, and our flutes are made of bones. The bone bridges of guitars a link to the bone age origin of our music. Every beat and tone is created from the native bones, the outer sound resonating the bones within us. Our tiny earbones ring with beats that swell below and among us. The rhythm translated into our hasty mortal speed, the rugose and crenellated stones of Yorkshire limestone, its peaks and lakes the creations of deep time, millions of years in the making, the rising and the sinking of the earth’s very bones, speak to us and call for our attention. Many times I’ve looked for music that speaks to these bones, and found Neo Folk, the songs of the land.

The limestone scars around me are called Feizor, and Moughton, Pen-y-ghent and Ingleborough. Crummackdale, Askrigg, Clapdale and Malham. The Ribble runs between them, trout-frequented and glacially cold even in the Anthropocene. In the center, like a lesion of the skin eating down to the bone, Arcow Quarry has blasted an impressive abyss into the world, carting off the tortured crushed stones to make road surfaces. In the depths of the quarry a cerulean blue lake has formed, gorgeous and poisonous. A thousand feet above the dynamite holes where the rock is forced down into the grinders, curlews sing and rabbits run in the heather between the limestone clints.

(Originally written for my writing group, March 2020)

Deefferented

There is a medical condition called the Locked-In Syndrome. The patient is conscious but is unable to move any muscle of his body, excepting sometimes an eye. He is unable to make his wishes known; he is unable to make a mark on the world. If he is fortunate, a doctor, or more likely a family member, will catch a glimpse of an eye movement, and then will begin the dance to interpret the movements of his eyes, the windows to his soul (as the proverb has it), to determine the depth of his understanding of how his condition overcame him, and hear his desires of how to be treated, and taught, and interacted with in future.  

We are all Locked-In today. We have no physical presence in the outside world – the world we assumed was THE world only three weeks ago.  If we are to have an effect, we must find the window and make our tiny, weak eyeball efforts to shift the course of the larger universe from the inside.  

From my lock-in, I’m looking at a window. A Window. A Word Window in Windows. At the top, a Title Bar (26March.docx), and below it a Menu Bar (File, Home, Menu, Insert, Design – you know the drill). Vertically at the side, there’s the Scroll Bar. No-one can see my eyes; this is the only Microsoft Window to my soul.  It’s up to me to make that work and persuade the others on the outside of my Lock-In to understand my needs and to hear what I have to offer.

Behind me, facing my screen, is a window. A glass pane, the word ‘window’ coming from the Old Norse Vindr, meaning wind and Auga, meaning eye. (It’s not known why it is not called a fenester, which most other European languages use.) Behind it, the wind still moves. The wind eye behind me reflects on the glass of the screen so that as I write, I see the outside world behind me as if it were in front of me. There are broadleafed trees, now bare but in bud, an avenue of asymmetrical Queen Palms, a car dusted with yellow spring pollen and a series of purple sprinkler valve covers. There is no-one there, in the window reflected in my window. The people are all indoors, locked inside.

(Written for my creative writing group)

Colci Rebellion (fiction)

This is the final piece I wrote for my creative writing class - there are some 8 weeks more to go, but it looks like coronavirus has scuttled the entire college, not just the emeritus program and our class meetings. Our teacher has created a blog for us to post pieces and keep in contact with each other but I'm not convinced it will hold together. Currently, most of us are out in the trenches, fighting for toilet paper. It is literally incredible how much things have changed since the day I signed up for that class and today, three months later.

Anyway.
It's more of a rewrite than a new piece, and yes, I do know how the story continues after this first chapter. It's designed to be about novella length (say 40,000 words), but it is not written, not even outlined, except inasmuch as it was outlined by Tacitus, from whom I have ripped it off.  The working title is Colci or Colci Rebellion, but as you can see, it from the point of view of the Imperial Admiral, so that has to change. This first chapter is about 1700 words, and features more of a space navy than the soldiers Tacitus was more familiar with.

***

Admiral Zander left White Stadium as soon as it was decorous to do so. He walked rapidly into the cold night, hands behind his back, wishing that he could swing the vast bronze doors shut behind him to lock away the peculiar electric smell of spectacle.

A few others were leaving early with him, mostly naval veterans like himself. Perhaps, he thought, there's something about living a lifetime on a spaceship which vaccinates against the excitement that air shows and weapons displays invariably brought out in others. Certainly the mob seemed to like them well enough. They were in there still cheering the post flash-bang climax dregs – the parade of the Queen's Own 37th Auxiliary Crack Astrobicycle Blowpipe Team, or whatever it was. He found it remarkable that the Emperor had the spare capacity to fly these people in to show them off. Wasn’t there a war on? The settlers, the old soldiers, were in there cheering too. That thought precipitated a change of mood. They were presumably remembering old battle brothers. It reminded them of their service. It just looked like they were cheering a living river of killers.

The tall, dark-haired man in front of him slowed his steps to drop back and walk beside him. With some annoyance Zander realized that this was Athernati, a Magisterial General who had retired on this outpost planet. That wasn't unusual – there were more than three thousand veterans living on Occupied Colci. But Athernati was indigenous, a Colci native. It was unheard of for a high-ranking officer to accept land from the Emperor on his own, native planet. Something not quite honorable about that.

Zander stifled his annoyance and rearranged his features in their natural earnest, rather put-upon, configuration. The general slapped him heartily on the back, boosting Zander's displeasure level to maximum. When he looked up at the general's face, though, the irritation ebbed. It was difficult to be angry with a Colcian. Tall and well-featured as only those growing up on a lower-gee world could be, the men were lean, runner-muscled, ageless knights, and their women hour-glass damsels with haunting eyes. Even the taller Magisterials from one-gee core worlds looked like trolls beside them. Trolls with dwarf wives – except for Zander, who had (rather cleverly, now he came to think of it this way) never married during his service and so had married his own doe-eyed damsel when he settled on Colci. If the girls here liked anything better than tall, muscular, dark-haired knights, it was a Magisterial uniform. Which unpleasantly jerked him back to the here and now; Athernati combined both.



Athernati was speaking to him. " . . . everything the Emperor gave us to start out our lives here," he was saying. "Where the White Stadium now stands, there was a just grove of sugar trees on a plain near a muddy river. Now we have the stadium, and the city, the dam, and land under cultivation for hundreds of miles in either direction."

Zander's well-trained mind dug up a few hail-emperor platitudes. He reeled them off, but underneath, he was thinking, the grove of sugar trees was a holy place; the Empire always builds something showy on the local holy place. I know that, Athernati knows that. His father probably worshiped there. Either he's trying to clumsily affirm his loyalty to the Empire, having mistaken me for someone who cares–or he's as dumb as a post.

Athernati was not telepathic. He continued, "The courtiers have started a death vigil for King Tigus, I hear."

Zander was vaguely aware that the local civilian client society had ranks, but he had never troubled himself to learn them. "King . . . of Colci?"

Athernati shot him a grey-eyed glance that had more than a hint of the steel for which the general was celebrated. "King of the local cluster. Half of Consul Veran's sector."

"If this Tigus dies, will Veran bring us under direct rule of the Emperor?"

"Hardly. King Tigus has willed half his wealth to the Emperor. Tigus has two daughters who will succeed as client Queenlings. Why would the Emperor disturb a sector where he gets half of the output for nothing?"

Zander vaguely remembered that the local king had daughters. So, twelve-year old twin girls were to inherit half his wealth? He wondered why Athernati thought Veran would be satisfied with a mere half. Then again, Consul Veran was a sluggish individual who never moved until you poked him. Hopefully it would be enough to fund his continued inaction. He said nothing.

It was getting cold out here, away from the crowd. The stars were out, but they were partly obscured by the smoke from the thunder-flashes inside the stadium. The thin smell of burned fuses mingled with the almost-animal smell of jet fuel. He shivered.

Where the hell's my car?

One of those local tree-dwelling spirits must have been the patron of minor social miracles. Though the sacred grove was buried under six meters of landfill and topped with thick laser-cut marble, Zander's car arrived as soon as the thought was out. He heard it smoothly decelerate beside him. His lieutenant, Garvey, leaned over and pushed up the gull-wing passenger door. Zander was so relieved to see the car that he invited Athernati in for a ride, but the old general refused. Shame, really. Garvey could have told him a few jokes and lightened the atmosphere a little. Lieutenant Garvey was on active duty, his tour of Colci just a brief respite from a career of policing trouble spots. He seemed to know a story about every whorehouse in the galaxy, and if that wasn't to someone's taste, he had a thousand tales of places he'd lived that were so odd the people called their washing powder BURP, or their candy bars Spongy Joy.

The car sped silently down the jade-stone streets of the town, towards Zander's estate. Garvey recounted a long, filthy and anatomically improbable story about a borrowed orbital lifter and two girlfriends of his who'd always wanted to try zero-gee. It made Zander realize, for the first time, that youth really was wasted on the young. In the dark of the car he secretly pinched the skin on the back of his left hand and was astounded at the lack of elasticity. I'm only fifty-seven! he thought. Then he remembered he was wearing gloves.



He reached Villa Zander just before midnight. He swung his legs out. “Join us for cocktails?” he said, his words punctuated by the crunch of his boots on gravel.

The lieutenant nodded and drove away. Zander's walk to the entrance was overwhelmed by the shriek of cicadas. The lights blazing across the lawn kept them awake every summer night. The rose-red sandstone of the first pylon glowed as if lit from within. He looked up, instinctively, to see what traffic there might be above Colci and its valuable planetary neighbors, but he saw little; the beauty of his house was displayed at the cost of a riot of light pollution. He could make out a few ragged stars and the rapidly setting disc of Pasor, the distant gas giant. The haze didn't, strictly speaking, matter. One could get a thousand times more information from the informationweb. But something in the admiral's mind preferred the direct assessment of spatial distances. It had saved his life before, on the battleship Prometheus. It was easier, instinctual.

Tirisa had waited up for him. He found her in the reflecting room, sitting with a piece of needlework on her lap, watching the aurora play over the distant mountains. The villa was ray-shielded, so the stern vista of ice and glaciers gave only a brief mental feeling of chill.

Tirisa put the embroidery to one side and got up to greet him. She gave him a soft hug and a kiss full of promise, and then ruined his mood with her first sentence. "What was the rally like?"

He sighed, clicked his fingers and sat down. A small bot, cued by the signal, arrived with his cocktail and a matching one for Tirisa. "Tanks, technicals, lots of men looking determined and proud. Thunder-flashes." He took a drink of the sweet, woody liquor. "Dreadful stuff, but you should have gone, really. It looks bad when I'm unaccompanied. This 'I can't go because I have a women's impurity' excuse won't last forever. And anyway, the Magisterium doesn't care. It's a local custom, shutting up women on their impure days." He took another drink, and remembered something else, something altogether more pleasant. "Oh - There was a choir. A choir of little angels. Boys with the purest voices. We should have a son."

She came to sit beside him. "So that he can sing for the Glory of the Empire?"

"No, we should just have a son."

He was about to kiss her again when Lieutenant Garvey walked in and saluted.

"General Ragni's coming over," he said as he sat down. "He said he needed to talk."

Zander couldn't imagine the taciturn old soldier needing to talk. "It's midnight," he pointed out.

"It's always midnight somewhere, sir," said Garvey, and clicked for a drink.

Zander hoped the general hadn't discovered some sort of night-dwelling fish. When Zander had first arrived, as a gesture of friendship Ara Ragni had taken him out fishing on one of Colci's liquid oceans in some small local craft that seemed about as safe, and as maneuverable, as a rawhide coracle. The trip combined the nauseating pressure of planetary gravity hauling on every tissue of his body with the unpredictable rise and fall of the boat on the choppy swell. It had not been a happy combination for Zander. He had spent the day pale and silent, his eyes fixed on the chaotically bobbing horizon, while Ragni stalked around the deck, drank a lot, cursed continually, and eventually caught a fish. This was apparently the signal to go home, and Zander still remembered The Catch as one of the most cheering moments of his entire life.

General Ragni arrived momentarily, causing Garvey to jump to attention.

"I’m here about Consul Veran," Ragni began as he sat down and accepted a glass of wine from the bot.

"He's coming here?" Zander asked in alarm. Damn, that would mean shoring up the collection of hail-emperor junk. Impressing the Emperor’s personal envoy was no simple matter. He'd have to buy statues, maybe even tapestries. At current Colci prices that could empty the entire bank balance.

"No!" Ragni said. "Veran's dead. Happened yesterday."

***

The Convalescent Home song

My mother used to sing me a song she'd learned as an in-patient in what was called a Convalescent Home - a residential children's home for youngsters recovering from the more debilitating diseases of childhood abroad in those days. In my mother's case, 'those days' were the 1920s and early 30s.  As far as I can recall, my mother was recovering from Scarlet Fever, a type of Strep that does not stop at the throat and causes the skin to break out in bright red sandpapery spots. Although it can come with a high fever, it's not considered particularly dangerous in the 21st century, with our rapidly-waning antibiotics, but at the time it was a serious childhood disease that could take weeks of recovery with attention from trained nurses.
Many children in Convalescent Homes were recovering from other diseases of the age, including the dreaded Diphtheria, Corynebacterium diphtheriae, which coats the lungs with a thick, grey biofilm and attacks other organs, and polio, a childhood viral paralysis which in the worst cases could prevent the child being able to breathe on their own, and for which they would sleep in 'iron lungs', a metal tube which enclosed the whole body, leaving the head outside, so that the inside could be used as a pump to operate the lungs. There were the other childhood diseases as well, measles, mumps, rubella, chicken pox and some others.
Convalescent Homes were for children who were past the acute phase of the disease and had to be classified as non-contagious before they were admitted. Some would be there for months.
For some reason, all the Convalescent Homes had a version of the same song my mother sang. Sometimes the disease changed (rheumatic fever, scarlet fever, diphtheria) and sometimes the names of the nurses or doctors changes (Dr Annister, Dr Aniston, Dr Canister) but all had the same plaintive chorus -
Mummy, Daddy, take me home
From this Convalescent Home

I've looked for it on Youtube, to no avail, although there are people all over the interwebs recalling the song from their childhood, from the 20s to the 60s, with many saying they sang it or know someone who sang it to them.  One said it was to the tune of The Laughing Policeman, which the verse is, but my mother sang the chorus differently (obviously as it would just be screams of laughter).
The song came into my head the other day - before the Coronavirus hit, in case you're wondering - and I looked up the song and wrote a story based on it for my writing class. I'll put the story in a separate post. Here's the version my mother sang, with a couple of bits filled in by me. (For example, I can't for the life of me remember the name of the home.) If you ask Google (tm) you can find other versions.


I had that scarlet fever, 

I had it very bad
They wrapped me up in blankets 

And put me in the van
The van was very bumpy, 

 nearly tumbled out, 

And when I got to Tadworth Court 

I heard a patient shout,

Mummy, Daddy, take me home, 

From this convalescent home.
I’ve been here a year or two, 

Now I want to be with you.

In comes Dr. Annister, 

Sliding down the banister.
"Are you better, are you worse? 

Oh my goodness, where’s that nurse?"
In comes nurse with a red hot poultice, 

Slaps it on and takes no notice. 

"Oh, said the patient, that’s too hot.
“Oh, says the nurse. I’m sure it’s not."

Goodbye all the patients, goodbye all the nurses,
Goodbye all the doctors, and jolly old matron too.

I don't know of anyone who thought of the matron as "jolly" - most recall a certain amount of lack of patience on the part of the nurses, if not outright physical punishment. Everyone, including my mother, was very glad to get home.