Arriving at My Perfect Writing Tools

Writing is easy:  All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.
– Gene Fowler

About five years ago, I wrote a post here called The Search For the Perfect Writing Tool.  It’s proven to be one of the most popular posts, attracting more than 9000 visits over the years.  Lots of people are interested in writing.  Most, as I am, are always seeking the right secret sauce, or helpful gimmick, or way to think to overcome all the things that prevent us writing and expressing the magical mystery that lurks within.

I’m about to embark on writing a novel that I’ve been gathering notes on for several years now.  I’ve come to the end of my note gathering just because it may otherwise turn into terminal procrastination.  During the holidays, I’m trying to figure out the best schedule so that I can produce a certain amount of first draft ideally every day, but practically maybe five days a week.

In a subsequent post, I want to consider the several books that I will be leaning on in this journey.  But for this one, I want to revisit some of the tools I looked at five years ago, and tell you about the ones I’ve come to settle on.  This too is a kind of preparation for me.

In tune with that previous post, I remain skeptical of novel writing software which claims to help propel one down the road of success.  In the end, they all provide some kind of generic formulation, or somebody else’s idea of what it takes to give your characters and story life, and it’s not enough.  I tried a few of them a number of years ago, and given my own foibles, they didn’t work for me.

Research

In the 2006 post I mentioned that I found Quintura Search of interest in gathering information.  At the time, it had a fresh graphical cloud way of providing search avenues to pursue.  Looking at it now (it’s still out there), and given that its format has changed somewhat, it seems pretty ho-hum.

Like most everybody else, I’ve come to rely on Google for what I want to find on the web. As I’ve mentioned in several posts over the years, I’ve found the derivative Shmoogle search strategy to be of use when I want to find something more rare or intriguing than might pop up in the first few pages of Google.  Shmoogle randomizes the Google results so you don’t get the benefit of all that search engine optimization people work so hard on.

A related idea is the search engine BananaSlug, where you add to your search term a random word selected from such categories as Emotions, Great Ideas, and Themes from Shakespeare and then it searches on Google.  Good for odd ideas for characters or plots….

When one needs to get more specific than a general search engine, especially as in my case with science fiction as genre of choice, I’ve found Science Daily indispensable in discovering new ideas and investigating old ones.  The short articles are readable, not totally buried in the jargon of abstracts, and the site is well organized to pursue specific interests whether on global warming or dark matter or neuropsychological quirks.

For a search engine tailored for writers specifically, there’s Writer’s Knowledge Base.  It seems to be genuinely useful…. for instance here’s a post found through it about a scene checklist at The Writers Alley site.

And a blog post at Accredited Online Colleges gives 60 writing-related search engines for your consideration….

Organization and note-taking

For collecting and organizing all that great information you might find on the web, a way to archive that material would be useful.

I trust my own hard drive (and backups) more than I trust permanent availability of some site on the web. Accordingly, I used to use the free version of Local Website Archive, as mentioned in the old post, which is still available.  Although somewhat limited in its free form, it stores web pages of interest on your machine, to be reviewed at your leisure later.  I did try Surfulater briefly, a good and more comprehensive program although it costs a few dollars.  I also experimented with Evernote, but the ribbon style and the eventual web-based archiving led me to give it up.  But for effectiveness and sheer convenience, since I use Firefox, ScrapBook Plus is hard to beat.

I’ve struggled with the right software to keep my text notes.  Like a real writer, I do carry around an old-fashioned notebook where I scratch down any observation, reference, or momentarily bright idea I come across.  But I’m going to work at my computer in the end, and I would like to record and create a database out of all that material.  As mentioned in the old post, I did try The Literary Machine — a 2007 version of which is now available — but in the end I found it too inscrutable to use.

I discovered I didn’t really want an outline program to keep track of notes, or even as a planning aid for my novel, although there are good ones out there, including Keynote which I noted in the 2006 post.  Treepad Lite has also received good reviews. An interesting one that I haven’t tried but which may be good just for its exporting function is TextTree 1.3.  TextTree used to cost money but is now free, and claims to be designed for writing purposes using the “snowflake method.”  (For more discussion of that idea, see this post at WritersCafe.)

Now these are all well and good, but for my purposes, as noted in a post here “Take Notes. Watch Them Organize Themselves,” I’ve found a personal wiki-style notebook that suits well my non-logical and disorderly tendencies. The wiki “seed” can be found at NoteStorm.

Just by entering one’s notes in NoteStorm, you create a cross-referenced, searchable database.  You do have to organize your thoughts sufficiently to set-up different categories of information which comes to resemble a kind of outline (and this can only be good). But I just find it the most amenable to the way I work of anything I’ve found.

A note on Papel, the free graphical note-organizing and writing software which I mentioned and liked a lot in the 2006 post….  For me it came to seem limited by the available linkages between items — you would need a 3D graphical space to better trace the links.  I still think it is a great concept, and may be found useful by others.  Although the original site and author has disappeared, it can still be found at a mirror location through the website Romanzo.

Writing!

The basis of the novel is the scene, and those are the building blocks that you can begin to develop in SLang2 available at freefilmsoftware. It is described as story development software.  Scenes can be inserted as if on virtual index cards and rearranged as one goes.  In a subsequent post I will explore this more as guided by several books I set great stock in….

This program is pretty bare bones, and that’s why I like it. Just start whaling away at scenes and sort them out when you feel like it.  Although if you want to eventually export what you’ve written, it seems you must import it into the also free Scriptmaker screenwriting software at the same site, and then export it to a .rtf format file which most word processing programs can use.  (One caution: I haven’t actually tried this yet to make sure it works….)

And then for the actual writing beyond the first chaotic scene stage of the provisional draft (as I find fruitful, and less binding, to think of it), I plan to use yWriter, now in its fifth and still free incarnation.  Designed by an author, this is another software which focuses on the scene.

Of course, I could just start writing in Word or something…. but where’s the fun in that?  I seem to need some kind of chaotic reference system with the possibility of stray creative sparks flashing from it to get me started.

So there you have my current thinking on the subject…. as in 2006, I would like to leave off with an amusing poetry generator offering.  Unfortunately the great generator cited in the old post is no longer available, but as a substitute I’ve gone to the site RoboPoem and submitted part of this post to obtain the following:

Secret sauce or wit mass
Or way to think to price
The things that recant trice
Writing and citadel
pettily clientele
That lurks somewhere in czar
To embark stain jaguar
A novel that I’ve fine
Notes on for lip enshrine

I find “jaguar” ill-fitting there, but still it may be of as much sense as other things I write here….

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Note on the above image:

My study, where I like to write…. No, just kidding, that’s the study of English writer William Morris, from Concert Tee.

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Subversive Fiction

“In a free society, citizens are entitled to know more about the government than it knows about them; in authoritarian regimes the reverse is true.”  — JR Finlay

“Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you’d collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.” — Aldous Huxley, Island

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The Fourth Realm Trilogy by John Twelve Hawks
– The Traveller, 2005
– The Dark River, 2007
– The Golden City, 2009

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, 2008

At the beginning of the new millenium, I used to keep a file of notes and references that I called privately “the coming police state” folder.  In it I kept citations on various police and state abuses, and worrying political and social trends.  I was interested in it both as a citizen and because it might be a source of ideas for a novel along the lines of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or Huxley’s Brave New World.

With the onset of the “War on Terrorism” — a war against an abstract noun — and the use of that justification to erode many privacy, constitutional and natural human rights, I gave up on that file.  Events overtook and overwhelmed it.

But I still believe JR Finlay’s observation above is true.  And that Huxley’s description of the West is true so far as it goes — his character from the novel Island (published in 1962) doesn’t point out that the three pillars have a finite period of strength due to their corrosive internal contradictions. Then there comes the destructive reaction wrought by the state and corporations, including mass surveillance, in aid of desperately propping up those pillars.  While the overconsumers themselves are sinking more deeply into chronic disaster.  (Yes, I am also likely an overconsumer.)

The Traveller

John Twelve Hawks is an enigmatic figure who wrote the Fourth Realm Trilogy in the guise of a modern fantasy about fighting back against a centuries old secret society called the Tabula who believe in the importance of control and stability, and who are advocates of a kind of extreme utilitarianism.  (Oddly enough, a different brand of utilitarianism is part of the vision of Huxley’s utopian Island).

This secret group is intent on creating “a society where all individuals become so accustomed to being watched and monitored that they act at all times as if they were being observed and are as such completely controllable” (Wikipedia).

“John Twelve Hawks” is a pseudonym of a man (we presume), who is said to only communicate remotely with his publisher and who apparently lives “off the grid.”  He is not a native Indian, and says he chose the name due to a real experience with the hunting birds.

In the first book, The Traveller, we are introduced to the themes that play out in the trilogy.  Although the story elements include other dimensions, a warrior elite and the Travellers — men and women of great decency and spirituality who add to the world a creative, uncontrollable spark abhorred by the Tabula — it is the specifics about the modern surveillance state, the “Vast Machine,” that truly intrigue.

The author says that all the sophisticated computer and camera capabilities he describes are either in existence or on the verge of actuality.  These include the proliferating use of closed circuit cameras with sophisticated automatic algorithms that identify faces, Global Positioning Systems (GPS) built into everything from phones to cars, the proposed development of so-called “safe” cities with complete wireless video surveillance, unmanned aerial drones for civilian observation, mobile phone tracking, tracking by radio frequency ID devices, unreviewable no-fly lists, comprehensive DNA records, roadside fingerprinting, automatic licence plate recognition systems, credit card information vulnerability, remote installation of programs on your computer by authorities to monitor activity, surveillance mining of websites, emails, and phone calls and the requisite, often automated, computer systems to keep track of all this information and to flag it for those with access.  If you get caught up in any of these databases or programs, you have no means to check or correct the information.  Even to know of or or question them may become illegal or eventually indicative of your terrorist or criminal tendencies.

In a recent article, Twelve Hawks wrote about video surveillance:

“Some of them are ‘smart’ cameras, linked to computer programs that watch our movements in case we act differently from the rest of the crowd: if we walk too slowly, if we linger outside certain buildings, if we stop to laugh or enjoy the view, our body is highlighted by a red line on a video monitor and a security guard has to decide whether he should call the police.”

More than any specific technological use of cameras and other surveillance technology, it is this mindset writ large that most troubles me.

All of this is open to abuse by the state and other entities.  As the saying goes, just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me….  And that other saying about power corrupts….

Going on with Twelve Hawks’ trilogy, the first volume ends with a cliffhanger, as the dedicated bodyguards who protect the almost extinct Travellers from the overwhelming power of the Tabula attempt to find a place of refuge.

In the second novel, The Dark River, the Tabula (also known as The Brethren) continue to manipulate people and events through the power of their vast computer information system.  A Cain and Abel storyline begun in the first book heightens with two opposed brothers, one on either side of the battle.  There is travel to a parallel world to further the hero’s survival and that of the forces of good.  The book has been described as “part The Matrix and part Kurosawa epic.”

The third and final novel, The Golden City, didn’t receive as much praise as its predecessors, as it leaves some of the action behind and becomes more discursive.  The ending (or lack of it) left many unsatisfied. Yet its description of the ascendancy of what Orwell called Big Brother gives one motivation to examine the fate of what many of us in the western democracies take for granted as our rights.

I’ll leave the trilogy with this quote from the last book:

“…We have no knowledge of how the information is being used or who is using it.  Criminals can duplicate our identities. Corporations can manipulate our spending behavior.  Governments can manufacture opinions and crush dissent. We are seen, but they are faceless.  We are asked to live in a transparent house, while the forces of power are concealed.”

This is probably why I always object to handing over my postal code and even e-mail information for the benefit of some retail outlet.  A small and petty rebellion, true.  I may now be on a list for anti-social tendencies because of it, I suppose.  (I’m only half-joking.)

Little Brother

Cory Doctorow is another author who is as interesting as what he writes.  He has become a well-known science fiction author, blogger and journalist who received his high school diploma from what has been described as an “anarchistic free school” in Toronto and attended four universities without getting a degree.  An opponent of Digital Rights Management (DRM), he has given away his books digitally while still publishing hard-copy versions.

His novel Little Brother is one of these.  The novel tells of several teenagers in San Francisco who after a terrorist attack on the city and its transit system defend themselves against the Department of Homeland Security’s onslaughts against the Bill of Rights. It was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the science-fiction equivalent of an Oscar.

In his Introduction to the novel, Doctorow writes:

“… kids were clearly being used as guinea pigs for a new kind of technological state that all of us were on our way to, a world where taking a picture was either piracy (in a movie theater or museum or even a Starbucks), or terrorism (in a public place), but where we could be photographed, tracked and logged hundreds of times a day by every tin-pot dictator, cop, bureaucrat and shopkeeper.  A world where any measure, including torture, could be justified by just waving your hands and shouting “Terrorism! 9/11! Terrorism!” until all dissent fell silent.

“We don’t have to go down that road.”

He also notes in an addendum, now that he makes his home in England:

“In early 2008, the head of Scotland Yard seriously proposed taking DNA from five-year-olds who display ”offending traits” because they’ll probably grow up to be criminals.  The next week, the London police put up posters asking us all to turn in people who seem to be taking pictures of the ubiquitous CCTV spy-cameras because anyone who pays too much attention to the surveillance machine is probably a terrorist.”

In the novel, four teenagers are truant from school and playing an alternate reality game when the terrorist attack occurs, destroying the San Francisco Bay Bridge.  When the teens didn’t behave exactly as authorities expected, they are held by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as enemy combatants.

Some of the teens are released after being forced to sign a statement that they were held voluntarily.  The main hero discovers that his computer has been bugged by DHS.  He doesn’t dare dismantle the bug for fear of being arrested, so he takes an Xbox and uses a heavily encrypted version of Linux to create an online network undetectable by DHS.

Aftewards he discovers that the DHS is slowly turning the city into a police state, and detaining people arbitrarily.  He gains other young recruits and they set up an underground resistance movement opposing DHS actions.

They develop new uses of existing technology to defeat DHS monitoring and throw the authorities into an uproar.

Our hero is eventually caught after he meets and gives information to an investigative reporter friend, and is imprisoned and tortured by the DHS until he is rescued by the California Highway State Patrol after the governor of California acts on his reporter friend’s news article.

Publishers Weekly in a review said the novel was “filled with sharp dialogue and detailed descriptions of how to counteract gait-recognition cameras, RFID’s (radio frequency ID tags), wireless Internet tracers and other surveillance devices. This work makes its admittedly didactic point within a tautly crafted fictional framework.”

Fellow author Scott Westerfeld put it well:

“A rousing tale of techno-geek rebellion, as necessary and dangerous as file sharing, free speech, and bottled water on a plane.”

The novel has gone on to a stage adaptation.  Fans have translated it into other languages.  Doctorow has just sold the sequel to publishers while at the same time making the audiobook version of Little Brothers freely available.

In the end, this post really hasn’t been a book review of these novels, but more about the recognition that the tradition of Orwell and Huxley lives on, and that current events make that tradition even more important.

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Additional Notes:

Related to John Twelve Hawks –

For an interesting, if unused, forum, check out Resurrection Auto Parts: Serving Travellers Everywhere…. click anywhere on the site.

Twelve Hawks shares a website where he occasionally writes, called We Speak for Freedom.

He also has a site related to the trilogy at Random House Books.

Related to Cory Doctorow –

Doctorow’s site is at Craphound.Com….

If you want to read, for instance, an interesting article on amateur use of “dronecams” to chronicle the Occupy movement better than your typical news organization, see this on Boing Boing where Doctorow is a co-editor.

For more free e-books by Doctorow, go here.

Real world surveillance –

How the surveillance industry markets spyware to governments….

Millions of smartphones’ keypresses monitored….

In the Guardian….

At the Ministry of Tofu….

The RCMP with egg on their face…

On the Voice of America website….

On the Bloomberg website….

For more information –

http://epic.org/

http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/journalv1i3.htm

http://www.lockdown.co.uk/

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The Last Bike Ride

My uncle was an odd man, gently odd in the way that all of us become if we live long enough, after a lifetime of slowly developing idiosyncrasies.

He was my mother’s fraternal twin.

Before his early retirement in his fifties, he worked as a brakeman and engineer for Union Pacific, mostly out of California in the Bakersfield area.  I remember when we visited him when I was a very young kid.  He took me to the rail yard and let me “drive” a big engine.  Driving mainly consisted of moving the throttle backward and forward, but this was still a big thrill for a little boy.

He was a yardman, shunting the engines and cars around, getting the right ones together for the next long train out. In his later years he was forthright about the reason for his early retirement — he caused a bad accident in the yard that cost a lot of money.  He was in danger of being fired, but friends in management and union stuck up for him enough to allow him the more dignified, and more financially viable, option of retirement.  He didn’t sugarcoat the mess he made.  This is one of the things I learned from him… tell it like it is, and was.

After his retirement, he moved to Nevada and ended up residing in the mile-high little metropolis of Carson City, the state’s capitol.  He and his second wife Beth owned and ran a liquor store for a few years.  But when that came to an end, they hit the road with an older RV that somehow he managed to keep running.  They would often come up to Canada and British Columbia to visit his three nephews.

I usually was not there, either at university, traveling, or working elsewhere, but he would frequently visit the farm of the middle brother, Mark, and became quite close with him.  When my wife and I visited Uncle Ed in his later years, he had many of Mark’s early pencil sketches taped up on his walls in his little house in Carson City — Mark being a talented pencil artist who occasionally sells his work despite not pursuing that calling professionally.

The Winter He Gave Us

But what all three brothers remember him most for was the winter after our father died of a stroke.  I was twelve, my brothers 8 and 9, and we lived with Ma in an old log cabin in the Bulkley Valley in the northwest half of British Columbia.  The winters were colder then — there could be periods of -40, and even -50, degrees below zero Fahrenheit — and the long season required a lot of wood to burn.  We had a wood cook stove and heater, and an additional little oil furnace, but stove oil was too expensive for us to use in a big way.

I could operate our small Homelite chain saw, although I didn’t sharpen the chain very well, and us boys struggled to start creating the store of wood that might last us the winter.  As the snow began to deepen on the ground, one day Uncle Ed showed up from California.  He took a few months leave from his railroad job and came to help us.   Probably Ma let him know how we were struggling, trying to get over my father’s death, and how we were falling behind in such things as the winter fuel supply.

He showed up more than a little overweight, unused to the cold and snow, and proceeded to take things in hand. He was always of a cheerful demeanor, prone to lame jokes, and nonsensical sayings.  I don’t think he had ever used a chain saw much before, but he got hold of a good-sized one, and started roaring away with it immediately.

Over that winter he was the wood-cutting boss, orchestrating the falling and cutting and delivery by toboggan down to the cabin area from the hilly slopes above where we lived wherever we found good-sized poplar and pine.  Then Ed, and to an extent us three boys, had to split all that wood with a heavy splitting axe.  Unfortunately, green poplar takes at least a season to dry well.  We didn’t have much in reserve, so we struggled to burn green wood all that first winter while we built up a sizable store for the future.

I’m sure there were many other chores he helped out with, but it was the firewood cutting that I remember best.  He could be annoying, and rather sharp with us while trying to be amusing, I recall as a budding teenager.  But he never tried to pretend to take the place of our father, or to be anyone other than who he was.

By the end of his time with us, he had lost all his extra weight, and looked fit and trim. He was ready to return to his life in California, and apparently a serious girlfriend (who later became his first wife) was waiting for him.

Sadly, in later years, towards the end of my mother’s life, he and my mother became estranged for reasons that had to do with their parents and events from their childhood that I’m not sure about.  At times, my mother found Ed to be maddeningly opaque about what he thought or felt.

For awhile, he took care of his mother, our grandmother, moving her from Seattle to Nevada to stay with them until she died.  After my mother died in her sixties, Uncle Ed continued to travel around with Beth, still often visiting my brother Mark.

Then Beth died, and Ed’s health problems came to the fore.  He had become heavily overweight again, diabetic and suffering from heart problems.  When my wife and I visited him in the in the early 2000s in Carson City, he told us the doctors expected him to die quite soon, but that he was going to thwart them.

HO Scale

He showed us his large model train setup in an otherwise empty extension of his house.  It wasn’t the typical model railroad setup with nice miniature scenery and little stations.  No, it was mainly just a bunch of tracks where he tried to recreate all the problems of scheduling and distribution of cars from his former working life.

I still remember him suddenly diving below the large surface, into the guts of the electrical system which seemed to consist of many haphazard, tangled knots of coloured wire, trying to get the electricity going again on the tracks.  He stood up, pleased and apparently surprised, when the train started clattering around once more.

Fortunately after his health scare, he lost the extra weight, revised his diet, began to exercise including taking long bike rides with a neighbour friend.  Whenever we phoned him, he would report with glee that his doctors just couldn’t understand how he managed to be doing so well with his conditions.

Uncle Ed had his own theories about life and living that he often promoted to us, although we were skeptical.  He had read a lot of Jane Roberts and the Seth material, which derives from channeling.  It’s mainly about how you create your life through what you think.  I accepted there could be a lot of truth to that, but I always balked about people giving themselves cancer, or being responsible for getting themselves gunned down by some ruthless dictator.

He liked to make choices with a pendulum, even travelling decisions.  In the latter case he would dangle the little metal bob over a route, and depending on which way it turned, decide where to go.  He swore it worked wonders.

I think his beliefs did extend his life. They gave him the basis to believe he could take control of his fate.

Turning 84

This year he turned 84, the same age my mother would have been.  Part of my relationship with Uncle Ed was as a connection with my mother.  The small birthday and Christmas presents we sent to him each year were also a misty surrogate way to affirm that connection.

Uncle Ed loved getting on the internet with his computer and sending to a select bunch of people the jokes and rude commentary that he found.  He still tried to keep active. When the weather allowed, he got out on his bike for rides that were shorter now than in the old days, he told us.

A few days ago, he took his bike out again for a ride.  I like to think that he knew that the end was not far, and that on a cool autumn day in October, leaves blowing along the street, with the breeze in his face, for the last time he took in the sight of the world and the wonder of it and his place in it.

When he got back home, he laid down in the same clothes and took his leave of us.  A neighbor, his old bike riding companion, who still lived nearby, found Uncle Ed after not seeing him for awhile.

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Coming of Age with the Folk Music Revival

The music that formed my childhood and pre-teen years during the 1960s in the northern wilds of British Columbia was much the same as for the rest of North America.

Although my parents and their three boys moved to a log cabin within sight of snow-covered mountains in the Bulkley Valley, it didn’t mean we moved off the face of the Earth. Although it must have seemed close enough to my mother.

No, when we moved there from the Bellingham area of Washington State in the early 1960s, my parents took with us our ‘Lower 48′ fears of a nuclear end to the Cold War and a love of music of the era (along with books of all kinds).

On winter nights especially, with snow and cold occasionally snapping poplar trees outside, we could hear powerful AM radio from all up and down the west coast of the continent.  Later in our teens, that was the window to all the rock music of the world from Donovan to the Beatles, Van Morrison and Led Zeppelin.

Splitting wood, carrying water

But when we first moved north, I was eleven years old, my brothers seven and eight.  The first year was hard becoming country folk, learning to carry water in buckets and splitting wood for the cook stove.  But we had the music my mother loved, long-playing 33 rpm records of the musicals My Fair Lady and The Music Man, although we couldn’t play them for awhile.

My father dragged with us north an old-fashioned, even then, wind-up phonograph with an actual trumpet and the blunt needles to play his collection of old foxtrot and Josh White 78 rpm records. He found it in some second hand store in Washington before we left.  It fit so well with his vision of re-inventing a pioneering version of himself and his family.  I think we played it a few times that first winter, in the crowded one-room cabin.  (We were to live off the power grid for many years, and even outside the reach of phone lines, for a shorter time.)

But in another year or so, my father had died of stroke, probably from complications from banging his head so hard on a cabin log he knocked himself out… he lived long enough to build artful extensions to the base log cabin, and to have established us in the life of the valley around us.  There was no going back.

Heating up the batteries

In those days of little money, Ma found enough to buy a compact, battery powered phonograph made by Phillips.  We played that and its successors to death, sometimes resorting on cold winter nights to heating up batteries on the top of the small oil furnace to get just a few more plays.

At first we had only a few records, Ma’s show tunes, mainly.  “You got trouble…. trouble, I say, right here in River City!”  I can still clearly hear that from The Music Man….

On rare occasions Ma went south to Seattle to visit her mother and settle some of my Dad’s affairs…. our sole source of income for awhile became monthly payments from Dad’s GI Bill benefits, since he fought as a Marine in the Pacific during WWII.

When she returned, she always came back with a few LPs.  The first time, there was a Weavers album, I remember so well, and the Swingle Singers singing Bach.  Eventually from the south and then more locally she might find albums by Louis Armstrong, and more obscure, especially to us boys, LPs by other jazz artists like Errol Garner.

This was the time though, in the early 1960s, of the folk music revival.  It was the time of the Weavers, the Kingston Trio, Harry Belafonte, Peter, Paul and Mary, the Chad Mitchell Trio, Odetta, Miriam Makeba, Burl Ives, Joan Baez, the Limeliters, Judy Collins, the New Christy Minstrels. Many were deeply involved with the civil rights struggle in the States.

We listened to them all, as Ma brought them home… some more authentic than others, but all catching a spirit of the time: it was a kind of awakening, or call to awakening that foreshadowed the more turbulent times of rock, the counterculture and the Vietnam War and its protests that lay ahead.

Although we were quite far away geographically from the mainstream, thanks to Ma, my brothers and I were able to participate in the wider spirit of the times by being exposed to the effervescence of this music.

By the time we entered our teens, my brothers and I began bringing our own music home: Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Paul Revere and the Raiders, Neil Young and Gordon Lightfoot.  The earnestness of the early folkies transitioned to something more complex, more electric, even subversive and occasionally confrontational.

But I still have a tremendous feeling for the folk music revival, as it has become known.  I rediscovered this recently when our local PBS station in the Pacific Northwest (I live in the Greater Vancouver area) began showing a number of documentaries and performances from those times.  What a beautiful young woman Mary Travers was! (Of Peter, Paul and Mary.)

These days I take blues and rock guitar lessons from a younger fellow, a rocker whose formative years were shaped more by punk rock than folk rock.  Although he is well-informed about the acts before his time (he loves the Kinks for one), his affinities are understandably different, louder and more cynical than mine.

I come of a softer, more earnest stock, willing to believe in song.

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Sources/links for images, from top down:

The Music Man Poster

The Weavers

Harry Belafonte

The Limeliters

Mary Travers

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Dancing Like A Crazy Man

We’re fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.
–Japanese Proverb

When I first started to dance, it was square-dancing in high school, and I hated it.

Do si do with the old right hand and swing your partner ’round and ’round…. It was part of the P.E. (Physical Education) curriculum at that time in the 1960s. Mr. Goodchild, the P.E. teacher, seemed to smile an evil smile at his cohort of pimply awkward boys and intrigued girls as he tried to get some semblance of order and timing out of us. His expression, I think back now, was probably more of a rueful bemusement at this annual parade of bumbling, recalcitrant teenagers.

Secret wishes

On my part, it was mostly about shyness and embarrassment. I was very shy around the opposite sex all through high school, having grown up with only brothers and neighbourhood male comrades. I had secret wishes for attention from at least certain girls, I recall, but if such ever came my way I tended to run in the opposite direction. It was kind of sad, really….

By Grade 12 and graduation, though, and on into university, I slowly eased into trying to shake it up a bit on the dance floor. Earlier in the decade the Twist had reached the height of popularity. There was “jive dancing”, which in our teenage circles at least meant a kind of swinging couple dance with twirls and turns to an early rock beat.

Do the Mashed Potato

Of course, just as I was struggling to emerge from the bonds of shyness, there were all those wonderfully silly 60s dance crazes like the Frug, the Mashed Potato, the Watusi, the Pony, the Swim, the Loco-Motion and many others.  And then there’s Chubby Checker’s the Fly! How can anyone forget that one….  They make me grin to think of them. And after looking them up on You-Tube, the Pony especially makes me laugh out loud.

(If you would like to dance the Hitchhike, for instance, follow these directions. “The dance is extremely simple and is based on the hitchhiker’s gesture: waving the stuck out thumb. The classical Motown pattern is three times right thumb to the right over the shoulder, clap hands, three times left thumb to the left over the shoulder, clap hands. All this is accompanied by the shimmy body ripples popular at these times.” (Wikipedia))

Most of them, though, were a little before I got to dancing much, but they seemed to accomplish a liberation of people’s movements and ideas about what was acceptable as dancing. For starters, you didn’t have to actually touch your partner — this in itself was rather revolutionary.

Of course many couples danced the Twist or the Hitchhike together; but it became perfectly acceptable to dance any damn way you wanted out there on the floor, and even all by yourself, if you were really that antisocial in a communal sort of way.

Metaphysical dancing

I came to love getting out on the dance floor, with a date and often friends too, admittedly sometimes after taking in a variety of intoxicants, to jump around and entertain each other, and when the rocking beat became really intense, we might travel to another realm entirely, of sweat and movement and rhythm that might never stop. It bordered on the metaphysical, as a friend of mine once claimed.

It felt something like a Zulu warrior stomping up a storm, or a native shaman whirling around greeting the spirits, or a raindancer changing the weather. Dancing felt that strong and essential and mysteriously satisfying.

Of course, I don’t go out much to dance wildly anymore, being a staid married man of 60 and all that. But I’ve been known to turn up the stereo louder than I should with a favorite song and bop around the house. I have no particular interest, to my wife’s chagrin, in ballroom dancing or other formal modes. But I like to think I have a certain animalistic grace in my leaping about, although I may be as deluded as Elaine with her head-popping grotesquerie on Seinfeld.

Top-Secret Dance Off

I got to thinking about all this after running across the Top Secret Dance Off site, a project of Jane McGonigal, a games researcher interested in alternate reality games. It’s well worth taking in what she’s trying to do with it. As the home page says:

“Welcome to the underground world of dance quests and dance-offs. Discover new dance battlegrounds and develop your top secret Choreopowers! “

They have projects like video recording yourself dancing across a crosswalk any place you like. You have to wear a mask of course. That’s the top-secret part of it….

Such things as music and dancing keep us sane by letting out a little of the wildness that we are. Then we can go on with the more mundane.

[Home]

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Sources for images, from top down:

Squaredance from http://www.traditionalmusic.co.uk/american-square-dance/american-square-dance%20-%200257.htm

Teen dance from http://winniecooper.net/2010/02/classic/

Couple dancing from http://eujacksonville.com/story2.php?storyid=589

Zulu dancer from http://www.fotothing.com/clangers/photo/b9ddaff4102ae449f524487e09f45c22/

Secret dancer from http://www.flickr.com/photos/fraying/3317580021/in/photostream/
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