Beyond the Elements of Style

Everyone is Acting Like Everything is Okay

The power of words and the power of art are fused in the work of Camille Rose Garcia, a Los Angeles-based artist whose “narrative art” captivated me last week when I was in San Jose speaking at the Search Engine Strategies conference. I took a couple of hours off from the conference to visit the San Jose Museum of Art and was, as the expression would have it, blown away by Garcia’s work.

Each painting or series of paintings is preceded by Garcia’s own take on it, whether she was inspired by her own thoughts, as in Plan B (“I was already deep into thinking about the collapse of society, the degradation of the environment, and military catastrophe”), or what she observes, as in Operation Opticon (“I wanted to do a group of works that specifically addressed the war machine and all of its evil agendas”).

Garcia creates dreamlike landscapes through which charming beings sleepwalk, relying on antidepressants and the joys of 500-thread sheets to keep them from seeing where they are and what they are doing. Her colors are vivid and supplemented with bits of mica and glitter to make the destruction in them seem even more removed, magical, inevitable. Garcia grew up near Disneyland and contrasts that so-called perfect world in denial with the real world that surrounds it in ways that simply jump off the wall at the onlooker. I fervently hope that The Tragic Kingdom will be exhibited elsewhere, so that others can get a glimpse of Garcia’s genius, which unfortunately is not well captured on paper or on the web.

So what does this have to do with words? Plenty. There’s the narrative art dimension to her work that appeals to me, as a writer and someone who generally absorbs meaning through words; but there’s something deeper here, too, a fusion of the different arts to communicate a vision to the world.

And that puts her way … beyond the elements of style!

Check Your Assumptions at the Door, Please

The story is told by Norman MacLean in his posthumously published book Young Men and Fire. On the fifth of August in 1949, fifteen young Forest Service smokejumpers landed at a fire in remote Mann Gulch, Montana. It was supposed to be a “ten o’clock fire” — a fire that would be out by ten o’clock on the morning after the élite squad arrived. It wasn’t. Within an hour, thirteen of them were dead or fatally burned.

They didn’t die because the fire was too hot or too difficult to contain. They didn’t die because of a lack of leadership or a lack of courage. They didn’t die because they were lazy or stupid or unwilling to help each other. They died because they had been trained to deal with fires in one way and one way only, and couldn’t stop thinking of firefighting that way — not even to save their own lives.

This was a grass fire, a fire that burns hotter and faster than the forest fires to which the smokejumpers were accustomed. Suddenly cut off from their escape route, the men had only one option: to outrun a fire moving at seven miles an hour up a 76 percent incline, carrying gear they had been trained never to drop, in heat they had never before experienced.

One person didn’t die and wasn’t burned. His name was Wag Dodge, and he was the crew foreman.

He didn’t die for one reason: he discarded what he thought he “knew” about fighting fires, and he thought of something new. He dropped his heavy gear and set fire to the grass directly in front of him. The new fire spread rapidly uphill and he stepped into the burned area — now a safe zone. He called to the others to join him. They didn’t — and most of them died because of it. (Building an “escape fire” such as the one Wag Dodge improvised at Mann Gulch has now become part of the repertoire of all smokejumpers.)

One of the pieces of equipment keeping the men from running fast enough, the piece they had been trained never to drop, was a combination axe and pick called a Pulaski.

A Pulaski is very useful in a forest fire and completely useless in a grass fire; but it didn’t occur to anyone to drop their Pulaskis in their race against death.

For those of you who thought I’d never get around to writing, breathe a sigh of relief: there is a point to all of this. All of us carry our own Pulaskis; all of us “know” the right way to write, to market our work. But most of us learned to write in a world that doesn’t exist anymore: we had to have, because the world is changing so rapidly. We were trained on forest fires and we’re dealing with grass fires here.

Is it really a good idea to keep carrying a Pulaski?

We “know” certain things about writing just as the smokejumpers “knew” how to deal with fire. We have training. We have experience. Some of us even consider ourselves among the élite in our own niches. But new technology is changing the Internet and the world so rapidly that sometimes it only takes a few months for what we “know” to become obsolete. And then what do we do? What will it take for us to drop our Pulaskis?

History is filled with examples of a better technology vanquishing a less-evolved one. But part of using any new technology is realizing that the old values don’t hold: that assumptions we made based on our experience with one technology do not necessarily translate into the new one. Along with Wag Dodge, we have to think of something new.

Do you have any Pulaskis you can drop… now? You’ll be beyond the elements of style!

Poetry in Motion

Like every published writer, I torture myself. I check my books’ online ranking chez Amazon and B&N. I anxiously scan the shelves of bookshops to see whether or not they’re stocking me, in any of my incarnations.

It’s an occupational hazard, but one that takes us further from the center: from the real reason why we write.

And then in the midst of my fretting, I received the foreword to my upcoming book. The book is about reading, about books, and about stories, and I had asked (with some trepidation) a brilliant poet with whom I had once shared a reading whether he’d be willing to write it. To my delight (and astonishment), he said yes.

He did not disappoint: “Reading is more than fundamental—it is elemental,” he writes. “Books are essential to our self-perception, and not to have them limits our access to beauty and dream (imagine the world of Fahrenheit 451!). Conversely, when we have unfettered passage to the worlds great books contain, that is, the stories of our species, we begin to ’shuffle off th[e] mortal coil’ and are renewed.”

His name is Regie Gibson, and the late Kurt Vonnegut thought rather a lot about him: “When you perform, you are supersonic and in the stratosphere … you sign and chant for all of us. Nobody gets left out.” He is a National Poetry Slam Individual Champion and has been featured numerous times on National Public Radio, on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, and on the WGBH-2 program, “Art Close-Up.” His first collection of poems, Storms Beneath the Skin, received the Golden Pen Award. He is currently working on two manuscripts and recently completed a MFA in poetry from New England College.

My husband–who for reasons beyond my understanding abhors poetry–was captivated by Regie. He performed a poem about Jimi Hendrix, and afterward, all that Paul could say was, “He sounded like him! He sounded like his guitar! How does a person do that?”

You can find Regie on the web in any number of places, but you would do best to listen to his words in his own voice. Please do. and if you’re ever in the Boston area, come and hear him in person at one of the many performance venues in the area. I’m honored that he’s a part of my project and look forward to what he’ll be doing next.

Regie Gibson is way … beyond the elements of style!

The Origins of Spam

We all know about spam – that ubiquitous, annoying, unsolicited email that clutters up our inboxes. I could go on at length about how frustrating it is, but … well, you know that already.

So I thought today I’d take a somewhat lighter approach to the issue, and being a wordsmith I couldn’t help but be interested in the origins of the term. After all, the comparison of unwanted communications to a luncheon paté-like substance didn’t just come out of the blue – it’s just too strange for that!

Have you ever wondered how it got that name? I caught up with Paul Czarnecki, the originator of the expression, to find out.

CEZANNE: So I understand that you were the first person to use the term “spam” on the Internet, is that right?

CZARNECKI: I’ll correct you. It wasn’t the Internet at the time. It was on a Usenet. Al Gore hadn’t invented the Internet yet! I was on Usenet back then.

CEZANNE: What were you doing at the time?

CZARNECKI: I was working for Kodak, doing color science work. One of my duties was to maintain our connection to the network. So I used to read the Usenet newsgroup for network administrators. There was this long discussion of what constituted inappropriate behavior and how to deal with it. I was involved with that discussion. And I closed one of my messages with this phrase in my signature line: “Spam, spam, spam, Usenet and spam.”

CEZANNE: Where did that phrase come from?

CZARNECKI: It was from a Monty Python skit. There were people trying to have a meal in this diner that specialized in Spam – the pseudo-meat, you know – and there were these Vikings singing a Spam song – “Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, wonderful Spam, glorious Spam!” and that song was drowning out all other conversation. I thought that the situations were similar.

CEZANNE: Did you think that people would understand – that they would be familiar with the Monty Python skit and make the connection?

CZARNECKI: I hoped that a small percentage might. To tell you the truth, I really just thought that I was being awfully clever for a little geek…!

CEZANNE: Did you realize that you were adding to the language?

CZARNECKI: Not at all! I never thought twice about it at the time. Later on, the folks in the first online role-playing games, the MUDers, they picked it up and used it. But I found out that my use came first. Do you think I can get rich and famous and live off it now?

CEZANNE: Probably not. They say that virtue is its own reward.

CZARNECKI: I’ll try to think of a snappy Pythonesque retort to that.

***

If you’re not well versed in the humor of British comedy group Monty Python, the transcript of this skit is posted on a number of Web sites, includingthis one.
http://www.detritus.org/spam/skit.html

Czarnecki’s original message can be seen here:

http://groups.google.com/group/news.admin/msg/483c12f48d13225e?output=gplain

At the end of the day, I still come back to the fact that the great wonders and convenience of the Internet make spam a relatively minor inconvenience. Think that way, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!