The new TV season:  this is the first time in many decades I didn't manage to get my paws on the Season Preview edition of TV Guide so I was pretty clueless, for once.  Had no idea Sorkin et al had anything to do with Studio 60, which sounded like a drag.  It's a major stitch, and I wouldn't miss a show!  Brilliant.  Brothers and Sisters sounded soapy; it's very funny in fact.  Kidnaped held no interest for me; I actually felt sorry for myself that it wasn't on this week (and why wasn't it on, anyway?)  I want that kid to get away!

Ugly Betty, on the other hand, isn't as good as I thought it'd be; it's a little morality tale.  I think I'll still be giving it a chance to find its legs, simply because it's SO cool to have someone who looks like Betty on TV, but I think I was expecting her to be a little more like Daria and a little less like... I don't know, mooney-eyed child or something.  And you have to admit there isn't a subtle moment anywhere in the show.  STILL.  Give it time....

The Tina Fay thing, the little half-hour thang, whatever that was, it had its moments but LORDY, they've got one of the Baldwin boys playing a kind of second-rate John Larroquette; they couldn't get the real thing?  Also not subtle.  Okay, it's a sitcom.  I'll probably watch a little and see if it improves.  Likewise 20 Good Years.  Of COURSE they have to spend lots of time introducing everyone to us.  Now that they're mostly done with that, maybe they can get down to funny business.  I'll give them a chance, yes.

Do you think they could make a few more changes to Law and Order CI?  They haven't quite dumped EVERYONE!  What are they playing, Musical Actors?  I like everyone so far... freckles and all.  I do miss Sheridan (have liked him since he had his OWN series, and feel free to remind me what it was called because I'm blanking) and Vance (they never explained HIS disappearance!)  In regular Law and Order Govich is okay so far, not really standing out, but the new lawyer, I can't read her; she just looks a bit like Ross, only more on the anorexic side.  Couldn't they get someone who looks like Ugly Betty in there, or are we to believe McCoy won't work with anyone who doesn't look like a model?  If she's got a personality, she's hiding it.  Let's see if one pops up (not abandoning the show for such details, just miffed).  SVU, of course, is showing episodes in which a pregnant Hargitay makes for an absent Benson, and we understand that; for the nonce, the new partner is, to my mind, doing well.  She has issues; she has history; she looks and acts like a person.  She might be pretty but it's not what she's about.  Nice.  I hope they found something for her to do upon Hargitay's return (which I eagerly await).

I have no idea whether The New Adventures of Old Christine is an old show I never heard of or a new show I won't be watching again unless Bakula returns... do I sound as if I care?

I don't think I've checked out anything else; there's plenty to do without taking on more.  Sleep, for example.  Well, that's a tough one, so I may end up stumbling upon more new drivel or a new gem.  Who knows?

"What do you say about a girl who died?"

As little about your own feelings (and as much about her) as possible.

You know that old adage (okay, so if it wasn't old it wouldn't be an adage yet!) "Show, don't tell"? It's amazing how many folks get that backwards. Consider these two paragraphs (and be gentle; I'm just whipping them off now as random examples from my own warped and somewhat sleepy brain):

"The evil man whipped the cute little puppy mercilessly. The poor adorable thing suffered immensely. Had there been any witnesses, their hearts would have gone out to the persecuted creature. It was terrible what that beast of a man did!"

and:

"Jack hitched up his right sleeve so it wouldn't get caught on the whip handle. He stared at the young dog sitting two feet away, wagging its tail. The first blow was so swift it didn't stop wagging immediately; then it whimpered. Jack smiled and struck the second blow. The puppy fell...."

I can't go on.

Now maybe both were a little cruel but which one made you wince more (and not from the bad writing)? If you said the first one, please move on to another blog. Those of you still with me, why did the second work better than the first? It's partly a matter of temperature: cold writing usually (there are exceptions) works better than hot writing.

Why should this be? You'd think hot writing would stir more emotions than cold, but the opposite is true, simply because emotions are something that come from within, not from without. Have you ever gone to a movie and seen something moving and felt that little lump rising in your throat, only to be quashed by the music's jumping in to instruct you how to feel? A scene that would've just killedyou in silence moved you moderately because one corner of your brain was saying "yes sir, yes ma'am" to the music, which was yelling "OKAY YOU IDIOTS, now it's time to feel something!"

If you don't leave your reader (or audience or listener or whoever it is you're trying to move) some room to feel something, you're defeating your own evil purpose. Er, what I mean to say is, give your dear reader, to whom you would do no harm, a little space.

You'll notice too, in my examples above, that there were more specific details, even in the few sentences of number two. Instead of an anonymous man, we got Jack (an otherwise perfectly fine name, my father's name, even, but at any rate a name); instead of a cute or adorable puppy we got one who wags its tail at the villain (show, don't tell! we can see it's adorable!) Jack's actions bespeak his evilness; we don't need to be told when we're shown.

If you keep the heat down and the details up, when you do indulge in some warmer writing, it'll stand out -- especially if you don't skimp on details even when the flames are licking at the readers' collars.

Charles Dickens, a hero of mine, frequently (not consistently, even within the same work) produced ice-cold writing that made people cry. You will notice that in Oliver Twist, for example, he is, between bouts of melodrama, as sarcastic as can be. How dare little Oliver demand more food! The worse the situation, the funnier Dickens makes it, and that pushes home the pain and injustice all the more; we feel for Oliver more keenly for even the author's seeming not to take his side.

Oliver Twist's ninth birth-day found him a pale thin child, somewhat diminutive in stature, and decidedly small in circumference. But nature or inheritance had implanted a good sturdy spirit in Oliver's breast. It had had plenty of room to expand, thanks to the spare diet of the establishment; and perhaps to this circumstance may be attributed his having any ninth birth-day at all. Be this as it may, however, it was his ninth birth-day; and he was keeping it in the coal-cellar with a select party of two other young gentlemen, who, after participating with him in a sound thrashing, had been locked up for atrociously presuming to be hungry....

But he can throw in some justifiably (and effectively) hot writing too. In Our Mutual Friend, Eugene is deciding not to marry Lizzie, when:

He had sauntered far enough. Before turning to retrace his steps, he stopped upon the margin, to look down at the reflected night. In an instant, with a dreadful crash, the reflected night turned crooked, flames shot jaggedly across the air, and the moon and stars came bursting from the sky.

Was he struck by lightning? With some incoherent half-formed thought to that effect, he turned under the blows that were blinding him and mashing his life, and closed with a murderer, whom he caught by a red neckerchief--unless the raining down of his own blood gave it that hue.

Hmm, actually, that's not such warm writing after all. What is warm is the imagery. If your blood rises upon reading of this violent attack, you may forget to notice that only literally does Eugene's blood rise; his emotions are not mentioned once; nor is his murderer's action criticized except by virtue of his being called one. (I was also, upon first reading this, impressed to note that this was the earliest use of pure metaphor in prose I had ever seen. Dickens doesn't say it was as if the night had turned crooked; he tells it entirely from Eugene's point of view, and the night turns crooked!)

Dickens was often criticized for including too much detail in his works. The most oft-cited example is this, from Great Expectations:

`Is it Pumblechook's house that has been broken into, then?'

`That's it, Pip,' said Joe; `and they took his till, and they took his cash-box, and they drinked his wine, and they partook of his wittles, and they slapped his face, and they pulled his nose, and they tied him up to his bedpust, and they giv' him a dozen, and they stuffed his mouth full of flowering annuals to prewent his crying out. But he knowed Orlick, and Orlick's in the county jail.'

Which part of this quite specific litany of crimes against poor Pumblechook was so offensive to the critics? The flowering annuals. We didn't need to know which kind of flowers were used to gag the victim. I wholly disagree; it is to our absolute delight that we know he was gagged with flowering annuals; details, detail, detail makes it real!

So while you're leaving the reader some space to feel something, don't forget to give said reader lots of detail to stimulate that feeling. Whoa, that sounds hard.  Yep.  It is.  But you can do it. I have faith in you.

In 1976 and 1977 I was employed by the United States Department of Justice, which is housed in the building you see in the title shots of the old TV series The FBI Yes, that big building. Inside, it's a total maze.

I worked on the sixth floor, in the Accounting Department, which was like a very bare maze, with temporary walls, cubicles, everything unfinished. Every couple months they'd want to redecorate something (doesn't something have to be decorated to be redecorated?) They were always redecorating -- I honestly don’t know if they’ve finished yet, since as I write this it’s only been 30 years -- so we'd move to another set of cubicles and mazelike hallways.

Parts of the Smithsonian Institution are across the street from the DOJ and a block or two down is the Nation al Gallery of Art. During one of our moves, I spent my lunch break at the Gallery gift shop, picking up small prints for all my coworkers. (I believe they cost 50 cents each; I doubt they still do.) I chose two prints per person, and two for myself, and at the last minute decided not to give anyone what I had chosen. Instead, I presented them all and asked everyone to choose for themselves.

Each and every one of my coworkers selected the two pictures I had chosen for them. I ended up with the two I wanted.

Of COURSE I wanted to be asked to dance -- are you crazy? Why did I go to the few dances I attended to begin with? Well, no one asked. I knew they wouldn't, and I knew I'd probably step on their feet if they had. I wasn't putting out the right signals. I didn't know the right signals, and I was afraid of putting them out, much as I wanted to be the belle of the given ball.

Thing is, I was SHY. Not a little bit shy, a LOT shy. I stayed shy until well into adulthood. Then I went to Japan and found myself standing in front of some 60 overgrown college boys, engineering majors who didn't see WHY it was more valuable to their lives to sit in my classroom and learn English than to lounge around in the hallways smoking cancer sticks and trying to impress each other with fictional sexual adventures.

I stopped being shy. I still couldn't dance, though. I grew less and less afraid to get up and make a fool of myself trying, but my skill did not increase in proportion to my decrease in timidity.

However, my real problem was, I have always been, in my soul, a singer -- a secret singer. Now that I am no longer shy, I sometimes inflict that on folks.

Some of you are secret singers. You know what I mean. You sing in the shower. You sing with the radio. You sing just for the hell of it, but you probably don't get up in front of people, the way I have done, at open mics around town, and sing, the way I usually don't.

I spent 10 years in Japan, where they don't sing without permission, or a permission-like context. I don't know if they sing in the shower but they sure don't sing walking down the street. They sing in karaoke bars, when they're EXPECTED to sing, and they usually have to get good and drunk to get up the nerve to do it, too. Since I don't drink, if I were Japanese, I'd never be able to sing, and that would just about kill me. I sing all the time. I sing in the shower, with the radio, when I used to drive I sang driving, and I still sing walking down the street. I always did, but I sort of doubled my dedication to it once I arrived in Japan and saw and heard that no one else was doing that. I'm just ornery that way. I find out it's not done, and I've got to do it.

One of the placed I lived in Japan was by a little river, barely a creek really, that had some noisy little waterfalls in it, and fireflies in the summer, and bats at dusk, giving airshows for an hour or two. I like bats, and I like their airshows. In decent weather I went out just about every night and walked by the little river, and when I got to a particular noisy little waterfall, I sang against it. Ever sing against a waterfall? No one can hear you. You can barely hear yourself. It's very safe if you're a shy, secret kind of singer. It's also just plain safe, any hour of the night or day. In japan, or at least in Nagoya, which is a pretty large city after all, you can walk around outside at three in the morning and the worst thing that can happen to you, apart from getting hit by a car, because they are the worst drivers over there, is some drunken guy might come up and either practice his English on you or flash you, or both. "Harro. Nice to see you. How is your health condition?" So I got a lot of singing done for a couple years, and then the powers that be, or the powers that then were, decided to "improve" the river by paving it.

They paved that riverbed, and left only one little manmade waterfall, that made barely a whisper. Not enough to sing against anyway. It put a crimp into my nightly songtreks. Oh, I still went out and sang, but more softly, and that's just not as much fun. The fireflies never came back but at least the bats continued to perform every evening.

Well, now that I'm back in the States, I find that only people who've gotten drunk enough to go to a karaoke bar sing walking down the streets anymore. So I still do it... but softly. Maybe I'm shy about singing in a language most everyone actually understands. I don't know. I don't always sing in English anyway. I have two Japanese songs I favor, and one in French, and one in German that I don't know the words to, so I mostly just hum. I also sometimes forget what to sing.

I know a lot of songs, and I have a special selection to sing while walking, but sometimes I just forget what they are and I walk along saying to myself, also out loud, like a lunatic, what should I sing? What do I want to sing? The jingle from some stupid commercial might be stuck in my head instead of a real song, or I might just blank totally. It's scary. but I can usually remember SOMETHING, at least one little tune, and then I sing it more than once, until I remember my playlist, as it were.

Anyway I'm a really EXCELLENT singer, honest I am. Just, my voice won't cooperate. What comes out is NOT what's going on inside. I have perfect relative pitch too, so listening to myself can be awfully painful. But I am no longer a shrinking violet. No wallflower, I! So go ahead and ask me to dance. Not only will I step on your feet without compunction, I'll sing right in your ear.

PART ONE

Define love.

I'd be willing to bet each of you can come up with a dandy definition and not only not agree with one another but not be able to stick to your own definition for long. There are too many kinds of love.

1 Is the love a mother has for a child the same as the love between best friends? Is it even the same as the love a child has for its mother? Does the love it has for its teddy bear count too? Does an historian's love for history, or a miser's love of money? How about my love for my cats, or my [late] best friend's love for his dogs? Is the love that dazzles young lovers the same as what sustains them when they are in their seventies? If they are all different, are they still all love?

Let's eliminate "being in love" for the moment, which implies a kind of exclusivity of emotion and even commitment, and only consider love itself. There is no love itself; we cannot consider it independently of its subject and its object. Without someone to do the loving and someone or something to receive the love, love has no definition at all. It's not a thing; you can't pick it up and throw it, or drive home in it.

We use the word a lot in hyperbole. "Oh, I love pizza! I love to swim!" That's okay; everyone understands hyperbole; no one misunderstands you to mean that you want to marry, suckle or even devote a fair portion of your life to pizza. (Mind, there are those who do, and those people are considered to be ill.) We say it about performers too, and not only regarding love: "I hate him!" can simply mean you don't care to watch his films. "I love her!" could mean you find yourself whistling along with all of her tunes; you might even have her picture taped to your closet door. In neither case does the subject have any personal relationship with the object; the child sleeps with its bear but most of us have never met our favorite performers, or if we have, it was a brief, impersonal encounter. Sometimes, though, we manage to confuse ourselves with words. We begin to believe our own hyperbole. Thus begins obsession.

I have met men who say they love women. This, to me, is as dubious as a claim to be in love with pizza. Of course, these men could be speaking of their sexual preference for women, usually as opposed to men, and/or their fondness for the company of women , sometimes in addition to the company of men, children and members of other species. However, it generally turns out that men who claim to love women -- and the fact that they claim to love them as a group is telling -- have no individual woman in mind. They quite often have various parts of an individual woman in mind, but no whole individual woman.

These men do not speak in hyperbole. Although the similarity of this sort of love to a love for, say, pizza is chillingly close, they have no awareness or intention of hyperbolizing.

Why should I pick on men? After all, I have spoken to too many women who have expressed an eagerness to be married. "To whom?" I always ask, and they look at me as if I have asked them to multiply 3,492,234 by the square root of 45,730,221 off the top of their heads. To whom doesn't matter. Well, it matters -- he has to be "nice," or "rich," or "handsome," or "tall" -- but it doesn't matter that they have no one specific in mind; what matters is that they crave the married condition; with whom to share it is a variable to be filled in later. That marriage is considered to be a condition rather than a relationship is what I find problematic. Anyway, I'll tell you why I am, at least for a short while more, picking on men: it's because men are traditionally in charge of keeping both attitudes alive.

Let's go back, then, to the men who love women. You'll find breast men and leg men, butt men and even the romantic eye men. A good whole-woman man is hard to find, and when you find him I have no doubt you'll also find that his idea of loving a whole woman is loving the sum of her parts. There is no individual, integrated woman in his fantasy. She is a combination of qualities.

Of course we all tend to idealize: children dream of the ideal parent long before they begin to seek partners, and a mother wonders what the little mite in her womb will grow up to be. Alas, the little mite, once born, might remain an idealized object of its parents' plans for it. They might or might not ever love it for itself. First comes recognition of the individual; without that, there is only objectification. (Ever ask your teddy bear who it really is?)

Marriages can fall out that way too. One spouse discovers that s/he has no idea who the other spouse is. The whole deal was concluded, from daydreaming to first meeting to courtship to the birth of the first couple dozen kids, without any attempt to recognize the individual hidden within the illusion of the ideal. "I don't know who you are anymore!" cries the frustrated partner. "You never did," comes the sad, accurate reply.