CHANGING FOCUS, A DEMONSTRATION

One aspect of literary creation is the use of something originally given a vocabulary by image work like photography or painting.  It is the idea of close-ups, medium distance, and long-range shots, depending on the closeness of the camera and the strength of the lens.  More recently we've seen extreme closeups of eyes and bees and even micro-closeups inside the body, looking down circulatory channels and watching cells operate.  The artful choices of the alternatives can be emotionally powerful.  If the imagery is moving, like video, it's possible to go from one focus to another while not leaving the frame.

I watch these strategies in good films.  In "Mystery Road" with Judy Davis and Aaron Perderson, the Australian Outback is the stage and camerawork searches the fabulously strange terrain.  In one scene of violence it is somehow managed so that the people struggling and their vehicles are seen from considerable distance on a kind of horizon across the bottom of the screen in a striking miniaturization of the action.  Some years ago the Western called "The Big Country" (I think) did something similar with two men in conflict pounding away at each other while the camera pulled far enough away that it must have been on a helicopter.  Tiny struggling ants on a vast horizon were a strong comment on what seemed so vital to the men.

At the other "near" extreme, especially in scenes of love-making, we often see closeups of eyes as though looking through the close but other eyes of the face-to-face lover and the moving flesh is shown in sectional closeups that sometimes make it difficult to tell which part of the anatomy we're looking at -- folds, bulges, overlaps, curves.  (The actors report that it is disconcerting to imitate intimacy with the cold eye of the camera about five inches from one's face.)

But when writing, one doesn't need a camera nor is the writer confined only to sight and sound.  For instance:  "The tiny pulse of her carotid artery, just below her ear, just below the delicate line of her jaw, began to speed up silently.  He put his lips gently against it and tasted the salt of her moistening skin."

Then the writer can pull back a little.  "She lay extended on the crisp olive of her sheets, her hair thrown back across the pillow and her arms out to the sides.  She was almost purring like a cat."  Then a little more.  "The candles that have been obligatory since Hollywood began to use them were flickering on the bureau and the dressing table.  Their scent mingled and moved in the breeze from the window."

And more, since the window makes a good transition clue to moving outdoors.  "Across the yard another window was dark but a figure stood there, barely perceptible between the curtains, staring at the candle-lit square with its moving curtains."  The writer is omniscient.  "His heart beat so loudly that he wondered if the lovers could hear it across the yard."

Pull away more.  "The houses stood side-by-side, only separated by a stretch of lawn, on a quiet street where very little ever happened.  Or maybe it just didn't happen in plain sight."

Pretend  you're a drone.  "A few miles away the lights of the city brightened under a lifting sky.  Still more miles away the molten sea under a silver moon was gleaming but the water was about to darken into the roughness of an oncoming storm."

Now that it feels as though something is bound to happen, you can see it from far away.  "The weather satellite was showing the giant whorl of a storm forming, though it was too new to have a name yet."  

It's easy to foreshadow that there is about to be a major catastrophe and that the plot might involve trying to save a woman, two men striving for a common goal in spite of jealousy because of both loving the woman.  Does she live?  Does she turn to one more than the other?  Do THEY die?  Or one of them?  Off you go.

You could take a swerve.  "The increasing wind made the curtains fly out from their windowsills farther and with more force.  One gust pushes the hem of the filmy material into the flame of a candle.  As the man and woman neared the semi-conscious bliss of sexual climax, a flickering light traveled up and up.  The watcher across the yard saw it."

So did he do anything?  Now you can go to the psychological.  "The man was not a rival lover but rather the woman's father.  He both loved and hated her.  He didn't like the real flesh and blood person who defied him, even after he had built her a house of her own to escape her mother.  But he loved the idea of her, the potential, the myth he had built around her in which she brought him honor because of her achievements.  She was a dancer."

Now you can run with your metaphor, the destroying storm.  "Smoke began to suffocate the love-drugged couple on the bed until it was too late for them to understand what was happening.  The man in the other window saw the billowing, the snuffing of the candles in the oxygen shortage and then the replacement of candle light with fire light as the room itself was consumed.  But superimposed he also saw his dancing daughter in her swirling robes, barefoot like Isadora Duncan with her scarves and shawls, laughing as she leapt and crept across the stage, while the audience sat still in their seats, afraid to miss any part of this performance."

And you can say something pretentious:  "Rain began too late to save the house.  The man turned away, just as his wife came into the dark room, horrified but somehow satisfied that the house across the way and its inhabitant were now gone, out of their lives, in a storm of fire as potent and destructive as the woman had been."

That began as a little thread but by fooling around with the near/far dimension, grew into a bit of drama.  I didn't know this was going to "happen."

SELF-PUBLISHING: ANOTHER CONTINUUM

Self-publishing is only a small part of how we understand "books" now.  Books are only ways of making print into objects that have the advantages and drawbacks of all objects. Books are pretty much the result of the invention of the printing press and therefore stand for a kind of cross between the industrial revolution and the continuity of meaningful marks on paper, some of them print and some of them objects.  But more than anything else, modern books are the result of the mercantile basis of democracy and the rule of law, both of which are fraying badly.  Books can be decorated to be attractive, even if no one reads them.

In between the handwritten book on whatever paper was available (What was the name of that way-out old man in Oregon who wrote his book on the wrappers from nitroglycerin blocks?  Clyde something.) and the books on demand that are "Espresso" printed as you watch and emerge warm from the process, is a wide range of phenomena from graffiti on sidewalks to typed and xeroxed books kept in backpacks until the first and last pages wear off because there are no covers.

I've had only one "properly published" book.  "Bronze Inside and Out."  The press was academic and fraught with scandal.  I don't know of any formal press that isn't much like that, academic or not.  But a whole class of business is based on the idea of "published" as an imprimatur by a respectable publisher.  Originally, in the 1600's, the word was an authorization by a religious authority to print the book.  

So I'm classic if I say my lesser book, "Sweetgrass and Cottonwood Smoke" was edited and distributed by the Moosemilk Press, a committee authorized by the Edmonton Unitarian Church.  It was sermons, the beginning of a theology of landscape, and the committee said it was not easy. The majority of my books are on Amazon and printed by Lulu.com by using a URL that I sent them.  Also, without permission, some of the books are available through search engines or used book sources.  And on that peculiar Google thing about pieces of books.

All I care about, really, is the day-by-day production of a few blogs.  My friend says, "There are demented people who do it [writing] because they have to do it, which is why addiction and compulsion are neurological in nature, affecting the left part of the brain frequently called the dominate hemisphere."  He's right.  It's how I spend my mornings at the expense of housekeeping and the comfort of my butt.  This is not the mental image responded to by many clever young women who feel they are at the center of the most crucial maelstroms of love and thought.  (All maelstroms are eerily alike.)

Now that I begin to have little twinges and pinches of something in my life/left hemisphere (literal dementia -- I meant to type "left" but typed "life") that I blame for having to proof read so closely, I think about the dependence of thought on blood flow.  I consistently conflate Alvina Krause, acting professor, with Malvina Hoffman, sculptor.  The two women valued each other highly but they were not the same.  I don't think that Hoffman knew about Krause though Krause used the sculpture of Hoffman in her acting classes.  In my head now they come out as a mix: maybe "Alvina Hoffman."

I've always written, even published what I whacked out on my father's massive typewriter and printed with deep blue waxy stencils on a hand-turned stereotype machine.  When the computer age dawned, I began to write a lot of short stories, experimenting.  

Finally I grouped two sets into anthologies called "Willow Sticks" and "Out There," and ran them through Lulu.com to become "books."  The covers are photos I took locally.  They weren't meant to evoke praise or even much readership, but I thought they might be examples.  (I'll give copies to the Valier library so you can use Interlibrary Loan to read them with no cost.  Or ask and I'll send a URL.  Or go to prairiemary.blogspot.com and look around.)

When I taught on the rez, the students were always asking for examples:  "Show us what you want us to do."  This was a remnant of a missionary and bureaucrat dominated world where it was only safe to do what the authority requested -- if you could figure out what books were, when you only really knew oral literature because no one could afford books.  What they seemed to want was "Napi stories" because the first publishing was anthropological until Adrian Jawort and Sterling Holy White Mountain began to self-publish, disguised as conventional publishers when they weren't even in Manhattan.  

Adrian calls his stories "Gothic."  The rez IS Gothic.  Montana Gothic is an established category that also appears in Canada.  (For instance, "The Studhorse Man" by Robert Kroetsch.  Amazon doesn't have it -- Barnes and Noble does.  Horses in houses, those shrieking eagles.)  Since several tribes ignore the 49th parallel, they dissolve the boundary with magical realism.

In the back of "Willow Sticks" I added notes to point out how different "types" were.  "Conan the Siksika" is just for fun.  "Napi's New House" is an attempt at a myth.  "La Femme Rouge" was written for an editor who objected to mild sex but didn't mind bloody violence.  Two stories are fictionalized history, one about Heavyrunner's daughter being shot through the heart while he held her during massacre ("Now That I'm Dead") and one about Helen Clarke ("Brilliant Mix of Red and White").  Two are fiction-polemics:  "Blood Quantum" and "FBI Long-Game" -- they are more timely now than ever.  

"The Bracelet Boy" came out of a novel I work on sometimes  and "Do What You Have To" was to counter some romantic person who said a Native American would never eat a horse.  Yellow Slicker starts with an object, this time merely imagined.  Every story in "12 Blackfeet Stories", a separate self-published book, is prompted by a Blackfeet artifact I knew when I was married to Bob Scriver and which he pictured in "The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains" which he rather covertly self-published through the printing company.

The step that's missing is publicity and distribution.  I don't have the capital to place copies in bookstores or in the libraries.  Neither do I have the time or skills.  At first the Native Americans couldn't read books -- now they read just fine, but many can't afford books, so there's no motive to sell those objects for profit.  One must sell to educated white ladies. There are no rez bookstores.  My non-Indian friend copes with this problem by writing material so shocking and forbidden that the underground craves and publicizes them.  You have to know somebody, like buying illegal drugs. But the missionaries forbade Indians to admit to such things.

This post will bring criticism, though few will tell it to me.  That's okay.  It's not as though I might lose sales.  Most people around here will just look at me funny, never admitting that they read such stuff.  The books are not as fancy as my blogs can become, especially when I get into the medical or philosophical stuff.  I'd hoped that at least some of the stories would escape the page, becoming oral literature.  I think some have.