Northern Word

Back from the Caribbean, Blogging after long hiatus

2010-02-06T21:54:18Z

It's been a long time since I posted here, as is usually the case during academic semesters for me. But this spring I'm on my own so I'll be posting again. I have two photo/travelogues to post - a trip last year to the Grand Canyon, and a very recent trip to the Caribbean. Look for those over the next few months. Here's a taste: the island of Dominica, wild and relatively undeveloped, quintessential British West Indies, a chunk of wilderness and local culture that survives while other islands are strangled by cheap jewelry stores. Below, the capitol city of Roseau.

Deep in the interior of this large island are waterfalls aplenty. With over 300 rivers and steep terrain, this is waterfall paradise. I saw a relatively small one, Jaco Falls, not far from the last surviving tribe of Carib Indians.

The Time Traveler's Wife: a film without a central conflict

2009-09-07T04:32:42Z

I really didn't think I'd ever find it. An entire film without a central conflict. Films are all about conflict - even the toy store-on-screen Transformers II had a central conflict (save the world from the aliens). But The Time Traveler's Wife (adapted from the bestselling book) has actually avoided any real point at all.

Watching this film was like watching luggage being sorted at an airport. A suitcase has no control over its fate, no ability to change its destination, and isn't great at conversation. A suitcase isn't "fighting" to get to San Francisco Oakland International. It doesn't charge forth to find JFK. It is a passive participant in the luggage sorting process and it goes where its tag specifies that it will go.

Eric Bana and Jennifer Connolly are very pretty designer luggage.

The wife is the most passive of the two - she is manipulated from an early age, her entire life defined by a man who himself has no ability to give her a long term relationship and who knows this as he manipulates her. She is also, curiously, not the lead character in the film. The director has aimed his lens at Bana, the husband, and kept it clearly focused in his direction. Bana's character is constantly confronted with hints of predetermination - he must do this or that because it is foreordained.

The device of time travel itself is almost a disaster due to logic failures, but really, this is a minor problem in a film that treats its characters as incapable of changing their own circumstance. By the end, we understand that neither character has really changed at all - they have just followed a script, been good little pawns, and have completed their rounds. And that's a real snooze. Neither of these characters is aspiring to anything specific - they are just reacting to input.

This film drove home for me the importance of clearly understanding your central conflict before considering a story to be "done". What on earth do these people want? How do they change? Where do we end up in comparison to where we started? This film provided no answers - just helpless pawns moved around against their will.

North Woods

2009-09-05T17:17:54Z

Lake Vermillion, a major lake in Northern Minnesota. Soon to be home to Minnesota's newest state park, Lake Vermillion State Park. Also hosts an Ojibwe casino which has one of the best tribal museums I've found. This view is from an island resort on the lake.

A Walk in the Big Woods to Hidden Falls

2009-09-02T03:05:59Z

Spent some time recharging my creative juices in one of Minnesota's many state parks last weekend. Big Woods State Park is a fragment of the original Eastern Broadleaf Forest that once covered over 3,000 square miles in the southern third of the state. The arrival of white settlers brought maps and grids which parceled out this forest to all comers, and with the help of lumberjacks, beasts of burden and the revolutionary John Deere plow, the forest was chopped down, stumps removed and the ground broken into the gentle farmland that is much of MInnesota today.

This Big Woods fragment was just too inconvenient to destroy, and survived. In the middle of it is a rectangular waterfall that evokes Frank Lloyd Wright . While I was there, two small boys stood by the side of the creek and attempted to bring the waterfall into submission by throwing rocks at it. Their father stood nearby, disinterested, checking his cell phone. The waterfall persisted. The boys grew bored. After a time they moved on and I was able to snap some pictures.

Trying to break into the Red Room

2009-08-11T15:36:01Z

Last year I signed up for Red Room, an online community for writers launched in January of 2008 from the San Francisco Bay Area. That's about the time I signed up, hoping for a fun, writerly community online to augment my writing habit. Unfortunately, January 2008 turned out to be a bit soon for the Red Room folks on the technical side, and after much frustration and inability to post even the simplest items to my member profile, I gave up.

Well, it's been a year and a half, so I thought I'd try again. Red Room is a great idea, after all, and they've had some time to work these things out. Still called a "beta" effort (a cheat in my view - a site that is open to the public for over a year should never be called beta) My hope was that beta or not, the site had become more functional.

The basic organization of Red Room is two-tiered. "Authors" are defined as people who have published via traditional means, which is still a very difficult and selective process (unless you're a right-wing pundit). "Members" are people who haven't yet published a traditional book. At first I forgave this obvious caste system as a necessary filter mechanism, but after some consideration, I've changed my mind. It's insulting, and because self-published authors and established bloggers and performance poets who have no chapbook are not considered "authors", it perpetuates some of the walls of the print publishing world that may not be truly useful for an online audience. It all smells a bit dusty for an online community.

Red Room looked at first like a place where writers could gather and form community, sharing literary interests, and providing as a secondary feature a directory of writers and their works. Instead I found a very fragmented online community which reminded me of early blog groups in which you'd have a simple directory and then hop from isolated blog to isolated blog. There are a few index pages where you can find author's works listed under specific genres, the pages are oddly laid out (if you don't scroll down, you don't know you've found your list of results) and as far as I can tell these pages do not include "member" works.

My own attempt to set up a member page has been an exercise in futility. Though I have been able to put up a blog post, the rest has been a struggle. Menu items are not intuitive, the purpose of some pages isn't clear, and Red Room requires a human to approve all content - something that I never received any notification about. This caused me to think my work had gone into a black hole. With some help from one of their staff (or volunteer? Hard to know) some of it got published, but after several tries I was unable to post photographs in a gallery, one of the features of the site. Despite relatively responsive technical support, I eventually had to give up.

Another problem is that the approval stage is not properly disclosed to content submitters. I never received a message informing me of this step, though I was told I should have, and it is not part of the faq. The support staff member explained it in very general terms in an email, which is not sufficient. The lack of transparency for this step was odd, and combined with the very traditional publishing bent of the entire site left a bad feeling about the place. It's fine to edit - but in a community site, it's important that some guidelines be made known, and that the activity of editing is disclosed clearly. Is it just pornography they object to? Or criticisms of authors the staff likes? We don't know.

The best way to use Red Room at this time is to simply use the blog feature, which is the most technically competent at this time. If you do this regularly, you may be able to slowly join the community and attract some readers, and it does appear that some folks are having a good time in there. It's also the only place I found that one can actually upload a picture. Ignore most of the rest of the advanced features of the site until they are improved. "Conversations" looks promising, but does not function for me. Creating prominent, front-page linked discussion areas seems like the most important piece of community that is missing. If you are a traditionally published author, apply for the author status. But if you're not - frankly, you're better off doing what I have, and creating and hosting your own blog.

I hope Red Room improves, and I'll check back in another year and see what's happened - that is, if I don't find that someone else has done this better by then.

Fiction: The Red Hand

2009-08-11T00:47:15Z

This short short is inspired by one of the originating myths of Northern Irish culture, the boat race and the red hand. My grandmother came from Belfast, as did most of the rest of my family at some point in the last hundred and fifty years, so I find the history of the place fascinating.

But retelling a Northern Irish myth has a bit more baggage than many European cultural tales. My goal was to retell it in a form that feels less distant than a standard "myth", and to put the reader right in the moment. And to do so without straying into political territory. There is no reference to right or left hand, for instance, as one or the other indicates a different "side" in the modern Irish conflict. There is no use of the color orange. Even so, I may have inadvertently stepped on a cultural toe, and that is always the risk when writing of Ulster.

The tale of the Red Hand and the various uses of the Red Hand symbol are sometimes associated with Unionists, but the tale long predates the modern Troubles. In fact, some Irish Catholic societies use the symbol too, though some also complain the Unionists have taken it over for themselves. It is in fact one of the few universal Northern Irish symbols. In addition, this story has competition from biblical myths and tales of giants as the origin of the Red Hand, depending on the source.

Enjoy this brief story about the founding moment of Ulster (cross posted at Red Room.) I find it works well when read loudly to a crowd with a pint of beer.

The Red Hand

One captain, the dark-haired captain with blue eyes, wants to win this race more than the other. The prize is this low, treeless land before them, dominion over it, the right to populate it with their children and grandchildren and to leave their mark upon it forever. Their boats will anchor here. Their men will hunt the giant elk. They will build castles and hold feasts and found clans and defend their claims with daggers and swords.

The boats are close together, so close their wakes intermingle and the oarsman can shout to each other across a narrow strip of water. The prows of the boats are almost even. On the shore, the elders who will judge the contest stand waiting, and the stakes are high for them, too. The winner will be their Chief and he will rule them all.

The dark-haired captain sees his oarsmen begin to fade. He sees the prow of his boat fall behind. His future life as a powerful man wavers as the other captain's boat pulls ahead and the carved yellow serpent which marks its prow reaches its ribbon tongue toward the shore. The dark-haired captain grips the rail of the boat and watches the land rush toward him, and he watches the other boat creep ahead, and with the soft summer wind in his face he makes his choice. He will win.

He removes his sword from its sheath. The scalloped blade catches the shifting sunlight. He kneels and braces his arm against the deck of the boat and raises the sword. Behind him, his young son stands by, watching his father, the future chief. The dark-haired captain, the future chief, the father of this boy lowers the sword with such force as to sever his own hand from its wrist, and the bloody hand falls to the deck, palm up, fingers open. The boy shudders. The father, the captain, the future chief, turns the stump of his arm into his stomach and holds it there to slow the bleeding. He uses his good hand to pick up the severed flesh, which is now red with blood, a bloody hand, a red hand. He rises to his feet and holds the red hand high in the air, and then he reaches back, and just as the boat reaches the sandy beach - just as the other captain begins to climb down from his own boat to reach the sand - the dark-haired captain, the father, the chief throws the red hand to the sand below and claims his chiefdom.

The five elders stare at the bloodied hand in shock, and look up to see the dark-haired captain raise his arm, blood trailing down his cloak, and they know that he is the new chief. This land is his. This land is real. The son watches his father, his chief, in awe. This is the first day of history in this place.

Thoughts on Julia/Julie

2009-08-08T23:37:41Z

Went to see Julia/Julie, the film about Julia Child and former Salon blogger Julie Powell. I take the time to point out she was a Salon Blogger (a blogger using the small community created by Salon.com in the early 2000's) as I was as well, blogging about the same time my crazy zoo over at Pesky the Rat, a political satire blog (rats! snakes in miniskirts! Talking anerobic bacteria!). I remember seeing Julia/Julie in our community rankings, and thinking it was a nice idea. Cooking good food every single day for a year is really a no-lose proposition. She didn't really participate in the community much that I could see, but then again, an obsession such as hers left little time for socializing.

I came out of the film a bit disappointed, however. This was not due to the Meryl Streep-as-Julia-Child sequences, which are brilliant, with a stellar supporting cast including a wonderful turn by Stanley Tucci as Julia's husband (it's very hard to portray an entirely loving and decent character well enough to maintain the audience's interest, but the screen lights up every time he's there).

No, my disappointment came from the strange treatment of the Julie Powell segments of the film. Early on, for example, we start easing into Julie's life as a bureaucrat in the agency responsible for dealing with the rebuilding of the twin towers site (keep in mind everything in the Powell sequences of the film takes place less than 2 years past 9/11). Powell's job appears to be to help people apply for victim funds, register opinions on the new buildings and the memorial, etc. Not exactly a trivial position, but one she clearly finds a bit soul-crushing. Fair enough. Yet the tone of the film seems almost mocking of the entire job - mocking to the point of making fun of 9/11 victims. Just strange.

There's an awkward scene in which Powell is lunching with some wealthy college classmates, all of whom seem truly odious and with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Perhaps this is an east coast thing - where you continue to hang out with people like that? Or perhaps it's lazy filmmaking. I vote the latter.

But throughout, the Powell character comes off as self-absorbed and shallow, to the point of being truly trivial. Her life is so carelessly portrayed we are confused when her husband takes a short leave of absence - is he validating that she is shallow and trivial? If so, why isn't the audience allowed a fast forward button? If not, what on earth does his absence mean?

Powell's work in the blog was that of personal memoir. Personal memoir doesn't require a life like that of Julia Child to be successful. I recently read Patricia Hample's "The Florist's Daughter", in which nobody is a secret spy taking down Nazis (that would be Julie Child - no, really) nobody discovers penicillin, nobody invents the atom bomb. But that book still works on an artistic level that is quite rewarding.

Perhaps the director wanted to make Powell's life into more than it is, misunderstanding the nature of personal memoir. By attempting to make normal thirty-something anxieties seem comparable to Julie Child's extraordinary life and presence, they put Powell in competition with Child, and that is a competition she loses definitively. I would have liked to have seen the Powell sequences condensed and handled with more subtlety. And unfortunately, the use of Amy Adams - an actress who here speaks with a near monotone chipper princess voice (sorry, but there's a reason she got the lead in that Disney movie...) trivializes the blogger, the memoirist, even more, and pushes her over the edge into needy, self indulgent, and shallow. And Adams vs Streep? That dynamic is set up here as well - with the results predictable.

Powell's blog certainly accomplished more than she, or any of us watching her early on, ever anticipated. And one of the fun things about the film is that you can go read the blog yourself - frozen in time, it's all still there. By the rankings on Salon I can tell people are finding it as a result of the film. So this is an unusual circumstance in that the real-time spontaneous memoir upon which a film is based is actually still there for you to see (see link at beginning of this article). That alone makes this an interesting study of how things go from real life, to print, to screen. You can go back to the original source and see for yourself.

Above: My humble stove, with my favorite brand of fancy Italian olive oil.

A view of the theater

2009-07-18T02:45:49Z

Recently passed by Minneapolis' shining star of the arts, the Guthrie. A very recent facility, it hosts tony-quality performances that frequently include major national stars, such as Tony Kushner and the various graduates of the Royal Shakespeare. But on a sunny day, it's the big blue shiny thing next to the farmer's market.

Morbid Amusements

2009-07-11T03:06:37Z

I think I've seen this before, but this time I got a picture, and I am still not really sure that such a thing can exist. But there it is, at a local carnival (the Taste of Minnesota fair in St. Paul, which was surprisingly light on food): an inflatable Titanic that kids can enjoy by climbing to the top and sliding down, presumably to their early demise. In this case, the children can throw themselves into the sea and then allow themselves to be eaten by a large reptile.

I've finally finished my summer course and am coming up for air. Still have some pics to post next week, and a little break before heading to a writer's retreat. Should be nice and relaxing - the visiting writer is proposing no hard-core workshopping in the class, which is often a feature of these retreats. That means not putting a random piece of my writing on the chopping block in front of strangers who barely have time to read it. A few nice summer days in the shady hills of Southern Minnesota...heaven.

The Very Bad Hotel

2009-06-13T14:50:54Z

I'm researching hotels for a January trip to San Juan, Puerto Rico, and in doing so I've discovered a new place to mine for creative writing ideas. That's right, online hotel reviews. Ever have trouble coming up with original detail in your work? Need a jump start on ideas for setting? Hit Tripadvisor, Expedia, Travelocity, and you'll find they've got all that and more.

But of course it's the BAD hotels that provide the most delicious details. And my new personal favorite hotel in the universe is a resort property "on the beach" in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

This hotel may or may not provide you with a clean room. This hotel may or may not provide you with a room at all, even after you are confirmed. This hotel may, according to those who have stayed there, best be described as a scientific retreat for the Pasteur set, with ample mold to keep you company during your stay. But the reviews themselves are the prize here, not the hotel:

From Expedia.com: "The hotal room was dripping with water as if the walls were sweating..."

Sweating walls! Excellent original detail!

"...the walls dripped so much water it made the beds wet..."

Now there's a waterfront property for you. Let's think about this for a minute. If the walls dripped so much the bed got wet, does that mean that water was literally leaping off the walls onto the bed? How does that work? And keep in mind this is not the only traveler to report this phenomenon. I say it's time to call NASA and get some top brains on this.

"...on my fourth day of the trip and there was no water at all i had to wait until the afternoon to go out because i could not take a cold shower..."

Now I'm not sure what the complain is here. Obviously there was plenty of water coming out of the walls, so one would be expected to take one's shower in bed.

Let's see what other travelers have to say about this same hotel. From our friends at Tripadvisor (good site, by the way):

"it was a hoodlumm spot for the locals!!!!!"

Ah -ha! Now we have some characters to add to our story. As the walls sweat in the Puerto Rican heat, the hoodlums - presumably out of West Side Story - have taken over the reception desk (multiple reviews report that the staff are entirely teenagers. How odd is that? Staffing an entire major resort hotel with teenagers? Is this perhaps the set of some new Disney Channel Spanish language series? "The Suite Life" with Maria y Carlos?).

"When we first arrived, we entered our rooms, to find the overwhelming stench of mold and mildew slap us in the face."

Smell is always a fantastic original detail, isn't it? Excellent.

To this an employee of the hotel (one of the teenagers perhaps?) responds with the following: "we are currently undergoing renovations." Well, that's a shame then. Would hate to lose all this original detail. But at least in the short term, The Very Bad Hotel amuses its guests by using the construction to shut down all the facilities at the resort and shutting off all the hot water to the guest rooms.

In addition, The Very Bad Hotel apparently lost its beach - the beach washed away. This intrigues me, this idea of the "Lost Beach." Where did it go? Is it in Jamaica, sipping on a nice rum? Was this hotel SO BAD that the beach itself became dissatisfied and had to leave? Questions I will never answer, as I will be avoiding The Very Bad Hotel.

PS - Just noticed that Trip Advisor has a "Best and Worst" feature on its front page. Every time you open it you get a best and worst review snippet. The one up right now includes the phrase, "There were dead bugs all over our wall." Splendid!

Letter to the Woman in the McDonald's Drive Thru Line

2009-06-12T03:35:59Z

Dear Blonde Lady,

I realize this is Minnesota. I realize it is the right that Thor and Odin gave you to drive an enormous black SUV in a passive-aggressive fashion. I understand this. I am at peace with this.

But I must ask. I must ask what it is that compelled you to rocket around my little car with the rumble of the God of Thunder and cut me off in the drive thru line? What treasure did these Golden Arches possess that must be pursued with such vigor? Are the chicken nuggets in the Falcon Heights McDonalds made of gold? If you are 45 seconds later to the drive-thru window, will your QVC polyester relaxation pants no longer fit snugly to your bottom?

I don't mean to make an issue of this. As I said, I am at peace. This is Minnesota. You will drive with hellacious fire, and then you will smile and say, "You betcha!" with the glow of a thousand winter suns. When Minnesotans are birthed from their lakeshore muskrat holes each spring, they are endowed with certain inalienable rights. I know this. As a simple Irish girl from California, your ways are mysterious to me. I seek only to broaden my understanding.

Love and Kisses,

Susan

Writing Prompt: Snack Food

2009-05-31T00:31:51Z

There are two ways you can use this writing prompt. One, actually do some writing, and two, head straight for the fridge and procrastinate. Your choice.

Fiction: your character has a sudden need for a snack. Take this as far as it will go. If in nature, small rodents are acceptable. If in the city, larger rodents may be more commonly available. Or choose your own snack.

Nonfiction: If looking for a topic, find a snack food in the supermarket, and research its history. If possible, connect this snack food to your own life. Then eat several portions of the snack food and see if anything comes to you. If nothing does, go to the gym and work out until the snack food is no longer attached to your hips.

Below: giraffe snacking at the Minnesota Zoo last week. Giraffe in question was brought here via specialized Giraffe Truck, which apparently is an actual thing. Giraffe enjoys eating giraffe biscuits fed to him by tourists for $2.50 each. Giraffe goes back to warmer climes during the winter due to Minnesota's general incompatibility with Giraffes.

Floral displays

2009-05-26T04:40:07Z

with spring still blooming here in Minnesota, I caught some pics of local flowers at Coon Rapids Regional Park in Anoka County, North of the Twin Cities. The park has miles of bike trails through mature oak woodlands as well as along the Mississippi river.

Character study

2009-05-24T01:30:50Z

Today the family and I took a nice walk through a local park, and it was a lovely sunny day. The river flowed smooth and dark between edges of green spring trees. In the forest itself, the leaves are still a lighter, fresher green, as here in Minnesota spring is still underway and summer has not quite arrived.

At the riverside visitor's center I paused with my mother's corgi while mother took a quick bathroom break. Nearby, a clean-cut man in his thirties sat with an unusually large brown pit bull. He started chatting with me. "People think these dogs are vicious," he said in a pronounced southern drawl, patting his enormous pit bull on its flat head. "But it's just the training. It's like with guns. Guns don't kill people, people kill people." Well all right, I thought, people kill people with guns. But that's neither here nor there. "She's a sweetheart," he said. "Never had any problems." I made some sort of comment about how even corgis can get a little grumpy sometimes (anyone who has tried to separate a corgi from a pork chop can attest to that) but their smaller jaws made them a bit less lethal.

And then the fellow opened up. "Oh yeah," he said, "Those jaws, they lock on and they just don't let go. She's two for two. Took apart a rottweiler."

"A rottweiler?"

"Yeah, guy brought over a rottweiler, and she ripped her up, they took the dog to the university and they worked on her all day but there wasn't anything they could do."

It was then I understood that I was being visited by a stranger from an alternate universe, one free of irony or logical malfunctions. I scooted the corgi a couple of feet to the left. "Wow," I said, and as Mom emerged from the bathrooms off we went.

Aaaah, sweet relief...and then comes the wind

2009-05-22T01:05:02Z

I've been sweating through a semester-long class and now that it's over, I feel like I've been let out of the fields and allowed a glass of lemonade. The blog has taken a backseat to the work, unfortunately. But here I am, ready for summer.

Yesterday here in the Twin Cities we had an unusual weather day: hours and hours and hours of 40 mph winds in 95 degree heat. It was as if Minneapolis had been put under a hair dryer, and all the trees and blades of grass began to wither as the wind went on and on and on. The flags at my office, all relatively new, shredded at the ends by afternoon.

When I moved to Minnesota from Northern California four years ago, Dad and I drove the 2,000 miles across the great American West and encountered our share of wind. By far the windiest place was wyoming, where it seemed everywhere we stopped had a steady 30-50mph wind, everpresent, unrelenting. The grass seemed short and the ladscape relatively treeless. Beautiful and stark and dotted with antelope who didn't seem to mind the wind. Perhaps Antelope are just too fast to be bothered by it.

Before our hot wind arrived this week, I had a lovely day at Snail Lake Regional Park in Shoreview, Minnesota. The park contains several reservoirs for the City of St. Paul and families hugged the shoreline, fishing in the clear lakes.

The parks along the lakeshores were green on blue. This is Sucker Lake...which oddly, does not suck.