Sotto Voce.

At last month’s Baltimore Book Festival, Gregg Wilhelm asked me to do a stint providing fiction pitch critiques at the CityLit Stage on Saturday afternoon. Well, for the inventor of bludos, anything. And I’m really glad I did, because it turned out to be one of those prime serendipity moments that I’ll remember forever.

The critiquers — a poet, an agent, the managing editor of a local magazine, and myself — sat around chatting as we waited for passersby clutching their manuscripts to poke their heads in the tent with that Daniel-in-the-lion’s-den look that we all know so well. A poet was first, and off went our poet to review his work. Then came Polly Bart, a Baltimore-based green builder, rider of horses and motorcycles, and all-around Renaissance woman. She started out by talking to the nonfiction critiquer (the magazine editor), but quickly the agent and then I got called in too.

She was pitching an idea for a book on green building techniques, which is hot right now, and we all put our heads together trying to suss out an angle that might help her book stand out. But it’s a crowded market, and we were struggling until she paused and said, “well, you know, I do have this other idea…”

And for the next fifteen minutes Polly just burned with a story of how she was preparing to embark on an eighty-day trip around the world — Japan, Thailand, Bhutan, India, Kenya, India, France, and Scotland — to learn about local sustainable building techniques and their intimate connection with the rights of women in those cultures. She talked about how she would be staying in a Buddhist monastery in Kyoto, riding a motorcycle in the mountains near Chiang Mai, and working on a kibbutz in the Arava Valley. The more she talked, the more we boggled.

When she was done, she asked, almost sheepishly, what we thought. She had held an agent, a magazine editor, a poet (who joined us halfway through), and a freelance writer absolutely spellbound for the whole time; then we all started speaking at once — about book deals, magazine interviews, and people she absolutely had to talk to at the Festival. As she tried to write everything down, Polly probably thought we were all crazy. We were — about her.

Well, Polly’s on her way and blogging about her journey. She’s traveling solo, but she’s not traveling alone. She didn’t have time to score a book deal before she left, or get a full-page spread in the Sun, but in her own quiet, deeply personal way she’s making her own splash.

Polly is one of the many people writing for, and sharing with, friends in what I call the “smallweb,” the thriving sub-subculture that exists like a quiet country road running parallel to the noisy freeway of the “bigweb,” where people race by in their insatiable jostling for attention and stats. The smallweb is made up of chance encounters, found moments, and surprises that lie at the end of roads less traveled. It has room for discovery and serendipity. It happens offline as much as on.

The rest of the world may not be following her trip — yet — but that’s OK by her. She knows who we are. And thanks to the smallweb, I can say that I know who she is too. Thanks to Polly, several corners of the world are about to become personal.

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When I go to sleep with a fever, my dreams tend to be vivid and complex. (When I get sick while asleep, which has happened a few times, my dreams are the opposite — stick figures against white or gray backgrounds. Absolutely true.) Yesterday an incipient cold that I caught while walking in the rain in Lancaster, PA, on Saturday turned into a full-blown Force 10 fever — the kind where there’s a white-hot bar of pressure across the bridge of your nose turning your eyeballs into puddles of lava, and even the air hurts your skin.

You know how with a fever you feel best around noon and then as the day wears on you get steadily worse? Well, by 8 p.m. I was pretty much dead. I crawled into bed but I couldn’t fall asleep. So I killed time by listening to some of my favorite Comfort Music, particularly Maurice Ravel. His music doesn’t play in my ears; it plucks the strands of my DNA. Just the kind of trip I needed at that moment.

While listening to his Pavane, and delirious, I wandered over to his bio on Wikipedia. Ah, such names! Such times! Satie, Faure, and Debussy! Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov! Bakst, Fokine, Diaghilev, Nijinsky! 1899! 1905! I just let myself drift away into a sepia-toned Lartigue panorama of La belle epoque.

As I slept, I had a most wonderful dream. All those men had gathered together in my sunny, arboreal drawing room for a salon. In intimate clusters of two and three they were having heated debates, telling stories and laughing at jokes, picking out tunes on the piano, debating philosophy, and critiquing, critiquing, critiquing. It was raucous, invigorating, a spectacle.

Around 11:30 my fever broke, and so did the salon as the guests began to take their leave — handshakes of farewell and gratitude, calls across the room to departing friends, the shuffle of donning coats and hats. After the last guest had left, I noticed a handwritten manuscript lying on one of the tables. As I looked at it, I realized that it hadn’t been forgotten; the guests had been collaboratively writing it throughout the salon, and had left it as a gift of thanks to their host.

I looked at the title: Ravel l’Aviateur — The Aviator Ravel. I started reading; it’s an amazing story they created.

I’m looking forward to translating the rest of it.

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The golden anniversary of The Twilight Zone has just come to pass. And two generations later, we writers who set out to follow Rod Serling still haven’t caught up with him. He will forever be five minutes and one hundred steps ahead of us, tantalizing us to try ever harder.

Conventional wisdom holds that a genre anthology show could never gain traction in this age of season-length story arcs and continuity-obsessed fandom. If so, it is a loss, because there is a lot that writers can learn from developing the skill to create a consistent world, populate it with compelling characters, establish a dilemma, and resolve it in 25 minutes — and then do it again. Each episode of The Twilight Zone, even the ones that reached for the easy tropes (“You can’t go home again after all.” “They’re not who/what they think they are.” “They’re dead but they don’t know it.” “They’ve time-traveled into the future/past.”) still had to grab people’s attention and keep them from changing the channel. They are all compact, portable writing lessons.

The allegories were my favorites. Chief among them is certainly The Obsolete Man:

I came of age when the new series debuted. I loved it, and still do. It’s not as well regarded by fans as the original, but it should be; most of the stories were as good as any from the original series. My favorite? Unquestionably To See the Invisible Man:

So thanks, Mr. Serling. Qui audet adipiscitur.

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Dear Mr. President:

In Washington, the bullies set the terms of the debate. There are only two ways to deal with bullies: kick their asses in public, or humiliate them in public.

Please pick one and do it, so that you can get back to doing what the people sent you to Washington to do.

This compromise schtick is getting really old.

Sincerely,
Paul Lagasse

PS — While you’re at it, please replace Rep. Pelosi and Sen. Reid with people who have backbones.

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Music has always been an important creative tool for my writing. I am a film score buff; I love to annoy Mrs. Sotto Voce, when we’re watching movies on TV, by playing “Name That Composer” — how quickly into the opening credits can I identify who wrote the score? (I don’t play for movies for which I already know the answer; that would be cheating).

I co-opt film scores as background music for scenes and sometimes whole stories of my own. And in turn, listening to those scores helps me to slide quickly into the mental mindset to write. The “score” for my novel Seeing Through Clouds was that of the movie Country; James Horner’s playful Sneakers score captured the feel of my novella Invasion of the Orb Men; and I’ve lost count of how many epic space operas I plotted, as a teenager, to Horner’s verdant Star Trek scores.

I rely on music (not always film scores) for my nonfiction work too: my MA thesis was done to the music of Steve Roach and Dead Can Dance; my perpetual work-in-progress memoir of Lord Thomson is fueled by the many (non-Bond) scores of His Magisterial Awesomeness, John Barry; and my freelance writing requires me to cocoon myself in the insulating warmth of the streaming audio of RadioIO, SomaFM, and Coolstreams.

But I am working on a new SF short story/novellette, and I have been hampered by the lack of a soundtrack for it. After flailing around for a while auditioning various scores and composers, I discussed it with Mrs. Sotto Voce. She knows the short story’s themes and suggested Michael Nyman’s perfection for Andrew Niccol’s SF masterpiece, Gattaca.

Yep, that’s it. The themes of the movie are similar enough to the themes of my story — an individual out of place; a society in which a smooth, stylish coating of order and rationality deflects people’s gaze from its underlying violence. And Nyman’s score has phrases of such poignancy and passion that there’s no way that you can — well, that I can — ever get through the end of the movie with dry eyes.

That last bit is a vital necessity for my short story. My crit group has pointed out, and rightly so, that the writer’s voice (both mine and the narrator’s) is too cold and emotionally distant for the overt and covert tensions that drive the story. Listening to Nyman would melt that frigidity like turning a blowtorch on a popsicle. And that’s so what this story needs. It needs to boil.

Thanks, Mrs. Sotto Voce. And thanks in advance, Mr. Nyman. The score hasn’t been released (legally) for download, but I have a CD on the way. And my writing will be all the better for it. In the meantime, I should go watch the movie again. Any excuse.

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Yesterday was a stunningly beautiful day, cool and crisp, the kind you get when a distantly passing hurricane blows away the late summer heaviness and reveals nature’s underlying moderation. Windows open, fresh air, optimism. I’ve always loved the Fall, and never blamed it for school starting during it.

Last night the moon was bright and clear, and not too far away Jupiter was radiant. I pulled out my telescope and gear, opened up the back window, and gazed at it for a long time. The sounds, the smells of night haven’t changed in 20+ years; I still belong there. It was wonderful to see the Big Planet again, stripes and four moons and all. The sky was boiling with heat waves, but there were a few seconds of relative peace every now and then as a breeze would smooth it out. And then, suddenly just above (in reality, of course, “below” since it’s a Newtonian reflector) Jupiter and off to the side with the three moons, what appeared to be another moon, moving outward. It got a little brighter and lasted long enough for me to think, “satellite? Right position, but way too slow for a low-earth orbit. Distant plane? Maybe, but it doesn’t move like one, and where’s the blinking lights?” and then it went dark. I caught one last glow a little further on and then it was gone. A meteor, coming in almost head-on. If I hadn’t been looking at that very narrow arc of sky at that very moment, I wouldn’t have seen it — and it’s quite likely that no one else did either.

The night sky still has the power to amaze me, to awe me. Every moment is unique, and yet I’m looking at the same things that Galileo saw and Kepler (one of my heroes) imagined. Watching Jupiter slowly track across the scope’s field, revealing the tremendous yet stately rotation of this planet under my feet — carrying me along with it carefully, tenderly, swaddling me in a thin-yet-robust blanket of air — created anew the old shifts in perspective, the different pace and wider view that observational astronomy always offers. No wonder I love it.

I packed up the telescope and went to bed determined to keep doing The Big Thing — with my latest SF novella, with my writing in general, and with my life. I owe that little meteor nothing less.

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I love serendipity. The more a system or technique accommodates serendipity, the more value I tend to place on it. Conversely, I tend to abandon systems and techniques that have lost their ability to generate it.

So this morning I am reading Seth Godin’s blog post in which he arranges forms of communication along a two-axis chart: one axis represents distance in time and space between what he terms the “creator” and the “responder,” and the density (or “quality”) of information exchanged.

(Love him or hate him, at least Godin is honest and straightforward about what he is — a salesman, a marketer, a classic old-school huckster. He’s all about the deal, and never pretends to be about anything else. But he’s also a better-than-average observer and analyst of the power of words, which is why he’s part of my daily reading.)

Anyway, his chart is sure to provoke — Is art really a low-bandwidth form of communication? Surely “quality” is more than just density? — but it’s designed for a simple purpose: to map out the fertile spots in the land-rush for profitable communications technologies. While you can extrapolate some interesting implications from his chart — you could argue that plotting from the asynchronous to the synchronous appears to correlate with a transition in the nature of the medium from the permanent to the ephemeral, for example — it’s probably best not do too much of that.

Anyway, he ends with this question: “If you had seen this chart three years ago, you obviously would have invented Twitter. Now that you see it today, what will you create?” While I was contemplating an answer to that question, I received an e-mail from a friend with a quote from Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941):

By riding words that are bridled and reined
Man has quickened
The pace of time’s slow clock.

Yep, I think I’ll stick to creating most of my things in the high-bandwidth half of the chart — lots of asynchronous stuff like writing, of course, but mostly in the upper-right quadrant, where the most valuable, meaningful, and timeless stuff can be found. That’s where relationships live.

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Probably typecasts, too:

www.toothpastefordinner.com

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