Names of characters for books not yet written

Shady Fishbane - a hard-bitten New York detective, who is in with the criminals as well as the goodies, and has to tackle his own dodgy past to solve the crime

Parvin Zolf - a friendly, colourful, space-travelling alien for a kids book

Toon Wilderbeek - probably a cartoon cowboy, but may be I just think that because of the "toon" and "wild" bits

Halgabron - probably the oldest of these names floating around my head. Halgabron is a beefy, Barbarian-type, man of the woods. I think Halgabron is the ideal man for a choose-your-own-adventure triology. He doesn’t need a surname or a first name, he’s heroic enough already. Although perhaps in the final chapter when his true identity as a lost prince or heir to the wealthy laird comes out, his proper name can be revealed (and go on for two pages).

Or perhaps Halgabron is a place where people live, a dark hamlet. It’s a wooded place on a nastily steep slope. Everything seems normal at first…

Halgabron comes from the name of a house near my parents. But I think “Halgabron” has a life of its own and it’s a shame to leave it in metal letters painted white on the gate of a surburban house with shingle drive. Appears to be the name of somewhere in Cornwall near Tintagel, but I think its bigger than that too.

Shifting picture

I keep thinking of the future, but the future is shifting.

In Back to the Future, Michael J Fox’s character has a picture which alters as he tinkers with the past, making the future less and less certain. His brother and sister disappear from the photo because it looks increasingly likely that their parents will never meet, fall in love and have children.

I have my own version of the photo in my head, but it shifts constantly. Sometimes I see a family photo with curly haired children and a doting, slap-stick father. Other times it’s me alone, probably fairly happy with lots of friends and interests, but with a job not a family. In the first I’m fat and baking cakes. Surely my cheeks will never look that ruddy? In the second I’m thin, surrounded by books, and, although you can’t tell from the photo, probably listening to opera. My greying hair is swept back into a severe bun, but is set off nicely by my black dress. Like Marty’s photo, as things shift – lonely spinster to family matriarch – things fade in and out of the scene. Possibilities and impossibilities swill around like clothes in a washing machine.

Usually the future is a half-done sketch. Places, circumstances are still to be sketched in, but the bare bones are there. It’s not even a work in progress, but a doodle on the back of a gas bill tucked in between the books on the shelves. In time I’ll find it and think it was strange I ever thought the future would turn out that way, but I don’t spend much time thinking about it in the present.

But now I am like an irritable painter with the easel set up, the light in the attic room just right, my pens and pencils set out before me, the floor is neat and tidy and there’s no more procrastinating to do… but the inspiration is nowhere. I keep starting something and tearing it up again. I need to get it get it right. I can’t just put it away and forget about it.

In Back to the Future, of course, Marty gets his parents to fall in love, saves the day, and his siblings reappear in the photo. I’m not sure what’s going to set in mine yet.

metamorphosis

The Tadpole by E E Gould

Underneath the water weeds
Small and black, I wiggle,
And life is most suprising!
Wiggle! waggle! wiggle!

There's every now and then a most
Exciting change in me,
I wonder, wiggle! waggle!
What I shall turn out to be!

Heavyweight postmodernists face off

I don't know very much about either Italo Calvino or Paul Auster, and although I (so far) like Calvino - I think his dissection of the process of writing and reading insightful yet funny - and I (so far) don't like Paul Auster - he is cruel, in New York Triology the readers and characters are pawns in an apparently meaningless game for Auster's pleasure alone, I think they have quite a lot of similarities.

In If on a Winter's Night a Traveler Calvino imagines two writers obsessively watching the other while they write; and a third author frozen in writer's block because he can only think of a reader reading the perfect book he hasn't written. In Auster's Ghost Story in the triology, an author can only write when being watched by a character whose only purpose is to watch him.

So I was surprised to read Auster dismissing Calvino out of hand in this interview

(http://www.bluecricket.com/auster/links/secret.html).

Interviewer: Have you read Italo Calvino
Auster: A couple of books. I'm not a big fan ... I get bored with it.

Beware the adaptationist paradigm

The theory of evolution is one of my favourite things in the world. When scientists talk of an “elegant” theory, this is what they mean. People who deny evolution on religious ground without understanding it make me cross.

Evolution is not a belief, evolution is.

Part of the problem is that too many people don’t understand evolution – it doesn’t happen by chance, although variation, which itself is partly random, is a central part of how evolution works.

However, it is too easy to view everything as an evolved adaptation as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin wrote in their seminal 1979 paper “The Spandrels of San Marco” (http://ethomas.web.wesleyan.edu/wescourses/2004s/ees227/01/spandrels.html).

They called for a pluralistic view of evolutionary biology rather than for organisms to be broken down in constituents parts, like a box full of lego that was once a pirate ship. Although they were writing 27 years ago, I think their comments still have relevance. It may be easy to come up with an adaptive hypothesis without fully considering the alternatives.

They wrote that not every body part, for instance, has arisen for an adaptive reason, partly because the body evolved not discretely but as a whole, but this doesn’t mean that the particular body part has no role. In the sphere of architecture they point out that in St Mark’s cathedral in Venice one might assume that the richly decorated “spandrels” below the dome were designed as upside-down triangles on purpose. The fact is, they are actually holding up the dome! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel)

“One must not confuse the fact that a structure is used in some way … with the primary evolutionary reason for its existence and conformation.”

Further, using adaptations as an explanation appeals to the human mind, because we like stories. But telling stories is not scientific and a new explanation can always be invented if an old one turns out to be unsatisifcatory. “Since the range of adaptive stories is as wide as our minds are fertile, new stories can always be postulated.”

“Often, evolutionists use consistency with natural selection as the sole criterion and consider their work done when they concoct a plausible story... The key to historical research lies in devising criteria to identify proper explanations among the substantial set of plausible pathways to any modern result.” They called for a more holistic approach which “could put organisms, with all their recalcitrant yet intelligible complexity, back into evolutionary theory”.

Living language

“Do you want to demonstrate that the living also have a wordless language, with which books cannot be written but which can only be lived, second by second, which cannot be recorded or remembered? First comes this wordless language of living bodies … then the words books are written with, and attempts to translate that first language are vain…”

From “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler” by Italo Calvino