tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32328738515264462372024-03-13T05:06:45.508+04:00Beginner's MindMusings on writing, teaching, and thinking (or: Random stuff I can't help but write about).Sam Snoek-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12072291977553439029noreply@blogger.comBlogger82125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3232873851526446237.post-73581077432576356422010-01-26T10:17:00.002+04:002010-01-26T10:41:07.977+04:00And ... we're live!This is just a quick note to officially switch from Blogger and begin posting over in Wordpress. If you haven't already, nose around the rest of the site (<a href="http://snoekbrown.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">start at the Home page</a>, which I'm kind of proud of), and then stay tuned as I begin posting here from now on. Also, if you used to follow me in here Blogger, update your RSS feeds to this: http://snoekbrown.wordpress.com/feed/<br />
<br />
As I mentioned in earlier posts, I'll leave this blog open through the end of January, maybe a bit longer, but all my new posts will appear at the Wordpress site, so please visit me over there.<br />
<br />
And now--back to the fiction!Sam Snoek-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12072291977553439029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3232873851526446237.post-44941742739198007462010-01-25T13:36:00.003+04:002010-01-25T15:11:37.153+04:00New blog site nearly ready<span style="font-size: large;"></span><span style="font-size: small;">The big move is just around the corner: Look for a link to the new home of <i>Beginner's Mind</i> in the next day or two.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: small;">Also, I have a new addition to the <a href="http://samsbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2010/01/more-help-for-haiti.html">list of resources for helping Haiti</a>. And if you haven't already, check out <a href="http://firstlinefiction.blogspot.com/2010/01/musings-from-desk.html">Lori Ann Bloomfield's post</a> on compassionate writing.</span><qtlend></qtlend><br />
</span>Sam Snoek-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12072291977553439029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3232873851526446237.post-65443266781613464492010-01-24T15:34:00.000+04:002010-01-24T15:34:47.596+04:00Compassion in actionMy friend <a href="http://www.secondstorypress.ca/books/195-last-river-child">Lori Ann Bloomfield</a>, over on her blog <a href="http://firstlinefiction.blogspot.com/">First Line</a>, has posted an excellent comment on how writers can help not only Haitians but all human beings, simply through the act of writing. By writing more human characters, she says, we come to understand our fellow human beings better, and it's a very small step from there to full compassion for all humanity. Better still, when we compassionately write fully realized, human characters, we invite our readers to a broader, more compassionate view of the world. It's a beautiful post, and I encourage everyone to <a href="http://firstlinefiction.blogspot.com/2010/01/musings-from-desk.html">check it out</a>.Sam Snoek-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12072291977553439029noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3232873851526446237.post-89225675310842652012010-01-22T14:16:00.000+04:002010-01-22T14:16:01.641+04:00I'm moving the blogJust a heads-up: I plan to migrate this blog over to Wordpress next week. I like Blogger a lot and I've enjoyed posting here, but I'm moving for the website-like functionality of Wordpress. I'll keep this blog up through the rest of the month, and I'll keep posting here for a while even after I've moved to Wordpress, but early next week, look for a link to my new home on the Web.Sam Snoek-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12072291977553439029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3232873851526446237.post-91753435075275115782010-01-21T15:53:00.003+04:002010-01-21T15:56:29.188+04:00Research wrap-up: More resources than you ever wanted (but not nearly as many as you'll need)As I said in <a href="http://samsbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2010/01/re-researching-fiction-new-expanded.html">the first post of this series</a>, there’s a lot of advice out there. I’ve just hit some highlights that have intrigued me over the years, but if you want to push further and see what other ideas exist, here are some articles and resources I've found online. I’ve also included a short bibliography of some books that at least mention researching for fiction. And in case anyone was curious, yes, I did mention <a href="http://www.barclayagency.com/lamott.html">Anne Lamott</a> and <a href="https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/jlkerche/web/">Jesse Lee Kercheval</a> a lot, as well as a few references to Paul Lucey. That’s because when my wife and I first moved overseas, I only had room in my luggage for a handful of books, and at the time I was wholly enthralled with <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bird-Some-Instructions-Writing-Life/dp/0385480016"><i>Bird by Bird</i></a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Building-Fiction-Develop-Plot-Structure/dp/0299187241"><i>Building Fiction</i></a>, and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Story-Sense-Screenwriters-Guide-Television/dp/0070389969"><i>Story Sense</i></a> is just a terrific reference guide for plotting, so they got to tag along for the ride. The other books on the list below are equally fantastic, though (I own them all), and I would have quoted them as well if I’d been able to bring them with me.<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Web articles about research:<br />
</b></span><br />
<ul><li><a href="http://writing-genre-fiction.suite101.com/article.cfm/historical_fiction_writing_and_research">Historical Fiction Writing and Research: How and Where to Research a Historical Novel</a>, by Delphine Cull</li>
<li><a href="http://www.barbarafister.com/BloodattheSource.html#epilogue">Blood at the Source: Research Tips for Mystery Writers</a>, by Barbara Fister</li>
<li><a href="http://www.barbarafister.com/TrueLies.html">True Lies: Libraries, Research, and the Facts of Fiction</a>, Barbara Fister</li>
<li><a href="http://www.writetoinspire.com/article1211.html">How to Research Historical Fiction</a>, by Rita Gerlach</li>
<li><a href="http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1393872/how_to_write_a_traditional_western.html?cat=4">How to Write a Traditional Western Adventure Novel</a>, by Laura Griffin </li>
<li><a href="http://menwithpens.ca/fiction-writing-research-is-just-a-road-trip">Fiction Writing: Research is Just a Road Trip</a>, by “Harry” (at <a href="http://menwithpens.ca/">Men with Pens</a>)</li>
<li><a href="http://www.writing-world.com/fiction/lundoff.shtml">Historical Research for Fiction Writers</a>, by Catherine Lundoff</li>
<li><a href="http://writingfiction.suite101.com/article.cfm/research_for_fiction_writers">Research for Fiction Writers: Ensuring Accurate Details for Authenticity When Writing a Book, by Suzanne Pitner</a> </li>
<ul><li>(actually, the Cull article above and this Pitner article both come from <a href="http://www.suite101.com/">Suite101.com</a>, where you can find a slew of other articles on writing and research, including a few written by my friend <a href="http://www.suite101.com/profile.cfm/ryanwerner">Ryan Werner</a>)</li>
</ul>
</ul><br />
<b><br />
</b><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Bibliographies and databases:</b></span><br />
<br />
Here are a couple of links to bibliographies on research resources, both of them special collections related to science fiction and fantasy research:<br />
<ul><li><a href="http://www.wsu.edu/%7Ebrians/science_fiction/sfresearch.html">Science Fiction Research Bibliography: A Bibliography of Science Fiction Secondary Materials</a> (at Holland Library, Washington State University)</li>
<li><a href="http://cushing.library.tamu.edu/collections/browse-major-collections/the-science-fiction-collection">The Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Collection</a> (at Cushing Library, Texas A&M University; also check out their <a href="http://sffrd.library.tamu.edu/">searchable online database</a>) </li>
<li><a href="http://www.sfra.org/">Science Fiction Research Association</a> (not really a database or collection so much as a vast resource) <br />
</li>
</ul><br />
<br />
And, because <a href="http://samsbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2009/11/researching-fiction-nanowrimo-update-3.html">my own research</a> that started all this was on the American Civil War, I thought I’d toss in a few of the sites I found invaluable during my own writing (there are thousands of Civil War sites online—these are just the few I stopped at, and they were plenty):<br />
<ul><li><a href="http://www.civilwar.com/">American Civil War</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://www.sonofthesouth.net/">The Civil War</a><br />
</li>
<li><i><a href="http://www.pbs.org/civilwar/">The Civil War</a></i> (supplement to the excellent PBS film by Ken Burns)</li>
</ul><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><b>Bibliography:</b><br />
</span><br />
<br />
<br />
These are books I own. They discuss, at least in brief, some aspect of researching for fiction:<br />
<ul><li>Janet Burroway, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Fiction-Guide-Narrative-Craft/dp/0205750346/ref=tmm_pap_title_1"><i>Writing Fiction</i></a> (I actually don’t remember any specific advice on research in this, but I’d be surprised if she didn’t touch on it at least a couple of times—this is an excellent and wide-reaching book)</li>
<li>Jesse Lee Kercheval, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Building-Fiction-Develop-Plot-Structure/dp/0299187241"><i>Building Fiction</i></a></li>
<li>Anne Lamott, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bird-Some-Instructions-Writing-Life/dp/0385480016">Bird by Bird</a></i></li>
<li>Paul Lucey, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Story-Sense-Screenwriters-Guide-Television/dp/0070389969"><i>Story Sense</i></a> </li>
<li>Francine Prose, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Like-Writer-Guide-People/dp/0060777052/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264073303&sr=1-1"><i>Reading Like a Writer</i></a></li>
</ul>Also, check out some of the standard magazines and journals about writing. You might try <a href="http://www.writersdigest.com/GeneralMenu/"><i>Writer’s Digest</i></a> or <a href="http://www.writermag.com/wrt/"><i>The Writer</i></a>, but I do remember reading some terrific articles on research in <a href="http://www.awpwriter.org/magazine/"><i>The Writer’s Chronicle</i></a> and <a href="http://www.pw.org/magazine"><i>Poets & Writers</i></a>, and I strongly recommend both those publications.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<hr /><br />
Just when we thought we had things under control, that maybe since the aid was arriving we could let up on our contributions, <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2010/01/21/MNVV1BL246.DTL">a vicious 5.9 aftershock rocked Haiti again today</a>. Which means we aren't finished helping yet—not even close. So, once again, please visit <a href="http://samsbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2010/01/more-help-for-haiti.html">my links page</a> to find out how you can help.Sam Snoek-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12072291977553439029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3232873851526446237.post-7480415729590226742010-01-20T12:33:00.003+04:002010-01-20T15:49:24.202+04:00Research tip #6: MarblingSo now you have all your research done and you’re ready to get back to the writing. But you’re writing fiction here, not a research paper—so how do you use this research you’ve done? Sometimes the answer is easy: You were looking for a particular detail, and you found it, and you just plug it in and keep on working. But other times your research will be background—you’d written a quick rough draft but needed to learn a <i>lot</i> more about the time period, or the industry, or the culture, or whatever it is you’re writing about, so you’ve spent days or weeks or even months plowing through piles of research, and now you need to return to that draft of yours and work in what you learned. And this is where things get tricky.<br />
<br />
The simple answer is to <a href="http://samsbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2010/01/re-researching-fiction-new-expanded.html">always focus on the writing</a>. If you learned what you studied, if you absorbed all that research you did, then you should be able to just start revising the text and the details will fall in on their own. But let’s be honest, writing is almost never as easy as shaking our heads and letting the genius sift down. You’re going to have to work at this, and it’s going to have to be precise and intentional.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://media.readersdigest.com.au/dynamic/41/40/12/Marble-Cake.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="http://media.readersdigest.com.au/dynamic/41/40/12/Marble-Cake.jpg" width="200" /></a><br />
</div>So let’s set aside the writing for a minute and go bake a cake.<br />
<br />
In his screenwriting book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Story-Sense-Screenwriters-Guide-Television/dp/0070389969"><i>Story Sense</i></a>, Paul Lucey discusses working research into a story:<br />
<blockquote>A certain amount of your research may be cited in the script, but it should not be dumped on audiences to impress them. Instead, research should be worked into the story in the same way that the history of the characters and the locations is worked in through a process called <i>marbling</i>. This term refers to information that reveals the characters and the plot indirectly, through dialogue and images. When marbling is done skillfully, audiences are hardly aware that they are receiving exposition.<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
Because we’re writers and therefore probably also book nerds, we might be tempted to think of marbling in terms of <a href="http://content.lib.washington.edu/dpweb/essay1.html">paper-dying</a>, the art form in which you swirl inks and dyes on paper to produce wild, psychedelic patterns. But I think this is a poor metaphor, because the result is a disorienting churn of color that does not help anyone perceive either the larger picture or the individual hues. Instead, I think the term “marbling” as used for fiction is best related to <a href="http://www.joyofbaking.com/MarbleCake.html">marbling in baking</a>. For those of you who’ve never been up to your elbows in flour, marbling in baking refers to swirling two contrasting batters—one light, one dark, usually vanilla and chocolate—into a single cake, so the baked cake comes out looking like marble (or like marbled paper). But bakers know that the secret to a good marbled cake is neither the separation of the flavors nor the blend of flavors, but the <i>complement </i>of flavors: we don’t want to taste chocolate and then vanilla, and we don’t want to taste chocolate-vanilla; we want to taste how chocolate and vanilla play off each other in a single bite. <br />
<br />
In fiction, we “marble” our details in such a way that they neither stand out as a distinct list of details (“Look what I learned!”) nor blend in as indistinct jumbles of words. Instead, marbled details should work their way into a story so they complement the story—they show us details not to inform the reader but to inform the story, to provide depth to character, to drive the plot, to set the mood.<br />
<br />
And we should never forget that this is the function of our research—to serve as details in a story. This can feel frustrating sometimes in the same way that cooking frustrates some people. You spend hours and hours in the kitchen, tossing up a huge mess and stacking dirty dishes you’ll just have to spend hours cleaning later, but the final result is a single plate of food that someone wolfs down in maybe 20 minutes, and then it’s over. Similarly, when you spend hours or days rubbing your weary eyeballs and your hands have gone dry from flipping pages and you’ve learned an entire history inside and out, it can be terribly frustrating to find that all that work boils down to a single detail, a phrase in a sentence. You are tempted, I bet, to pour on the details, to load in everything you learned just to prove that you did the work. But this is not why we did the research; we’re not out to prove anything, we’re out to tell a story.<br />
<br />
Francine Prose, in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Like-Writer-Guide-People/dp/0060777052/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263975180&sr=1-1"><i>Reading Like a Writer</i></a>, puts it this way:<br />
<blockquote>Details are what persuade us that someone is telling the truth—a fact that every liar knows instinctively and too well. Bad liars pile on the facts and figures, the corroborating evidence, the improbable digressions ending in blinds alleys, while good (or at least better) liars know that it’s the single priceless detail that jumps out of the story and tells us to take it easy, we can quit our dreary adult jobs of playing judge and jury and again become as trusting children, hearing the gospel of grown-up knowledge without a single care or doubt.<br />
</blockquote><br />
Yes, your research lends your fiction a certain authority, a sense that you know what you’re talking about, or at least your narrator does. A lot of great authors made sure they did know what they were talking about—when you read Hemingway’s vivid descriptions of lion-hunting in Africa, you know that old Papa Hemingway actually hefted a rifle and trekked out on safari, actually shot at the king of cats himself. But in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bird-Some-Instructions-Writing-Life/dp/0385480016/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263975270&sr=1-1"><i>Bird by Bird</i></a>, Anne Lamott tells of writing a story about gardening based solely on research and on <a href="http://samsbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2010/01/research-tip-3-go-to-source.html">going to the source</a> (in this case, a horticulturalist as well as dozens of happy home gardeners) and then catching people off guard when they assumed she herself was a gardener. “I’d let them know that I had only been winging it, with a lot of help from people around me. [. . .] ‘You don’t love to garden?’ they’d ask me incredulously, and I’d shake my head and not mention that what I love are cut flowers, because this sounds so violent and decadent [. . .].”<br />
<br />
So you find only those details that are necessary, only the research that serves the story, and then you work it in where it’s necessary and only there. In her book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Building-Fiction-Develop-Plot-Structure/dp/0299187241/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263975472&sr=1-1"><i>Building Fiction</i></a>, Jesse Lee Kercheval explains how Tim O’Brien (who, to be fair, was indeed a Vietnam veteran, so his details came first-hand) worked in whole lists of specific facts to lend realism to his short story “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Things-They-Carried-Tim-OBrien/dp/0618706410/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263975401&sr=1-1">The Things They Carried</a>.” <br />
<blockquote>As a first lieutenant and platoon leader, Jimmy Cross carried a compass, maps, code books, binoculars, and a .45-caliber pistol that weighed 2.9 pounds fully loaded. He carried a strobe light and the responsibility for the lives of his men. . . .<br />
<br />
As a medic, Rat Kiley carried a canvas satchel filled with morphine and plasma and malaria tablets and surgical tape and comic books and all the things a medic must carry, including M&Ms for especially bad wounds, for a total weight of nearly 20 pounds.<br />
</blockquote><br />
The information here accomplishes several things at once: They give the narrator (and O’Brien himself) authority through the specificity of the details—the weight of packs, the caliber of firearm, the curious detail about the “M&Ms for especially bad wounds.” Only someone who’d been there, we would reason, could know details like that. The lists also inform us about the characters, “the cumulative impression they leave of a character’s rank and specialty,” as Kercheval puts it. (Notice that the medic carries comic books, too, which, combined with the M&M detail, tells us something about Rat Kiley the human being as well as Rat Kiley the medic.) And they move the story itself forward—the description of the platoon leader, with his weapons of war and his “responsibility for the lives of his men,” precedes the description of the medic, whose gear helps him heal the wounds of war, and this pairing creates a tension that propels the story forward.<br />
<br />
But for the best example of how to use your research in your fiction—how to marble in the details so that they complement the story you’re telling—I will turn to the master, <a href="http://www.cormacmccarthy.com/">Cormac McCarthy</a>, and his greatest novel so far, the brilliant historical novel <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Meridian-Evening-Redness-Library/dp/0679641041/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263963238&sr=8-1">Blood Meridian</a></i>. (For a fascinating discussion of McCarthy’s own research and writing process, check out <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704576204574529703577274572.html">this rare interview</a>, with John Jurgensen.)<br />
<br />
In <i>Blood Meridian</i>, a group of men led by the violently mythic <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judge_Holden">Judge Holden</a> are running from a band of vengeful Native Americans; as one might expect in a Western, they are shooting at each other as they gallop across the West Texas desert, firing so much that the judge’s men run out of ammunition. Actually, they have plenty of bullets and plenty of empty casings and are used to recycling their rounds by recasing their own ammo, but they have run out of gunpowder. So they run to the volcanic mountains to escape, and there on the burning peaks the judge sets about making gunpowder by hand.<br />
<br />
The process of making gunpowder involves chemically mixing potassium nitrate (saltpeter), sulfur powder, and charcoal. But these men are on the run, trapped at the top of a volcano—they’re not leisurely tinkering around with a chemistry set. McCarthy did his research, though, and he learned that human urine contains nitrogen and that saltpeter can be made from urine by mixing it with potash (wood ashes). He also must have discovered that sulfur naturally occurs in volcanic regions. And it wouldn’t be hard to come across charcoal at a volcano, either.<br />
<br />
I did a little looking myself (okay, a very little—I just hit <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder#Manufacturing_technology">Wikipedia</a>), and learned that just before the Renaissance, Europeans discovered a way to add liquid to the ingredients and create a kind of gunpowder paste, which they then dried and crushed to form gunpowder. And, according to the Wikipedia article, “gunners also found that it was more powerful and easier to load into guns.” <br />
<br />
Perfect! But these men in <i>Blood Meridian</i> are on the run, in the middle of a shootout, fighting for their lives. We don’t have time to pause the action and explain all these technical, alchemical processes. We need gunpowder and we need it now! So McCarthy marbles—he keeps the action moving fiery and relentless even as he describes the powder-making process in grossly vivid detail and reveals volumes of insight into Judge Holden’s feral genius and his devlish nature:<br />
<blockquote>We hauled forth our members and at it we went and the judge on his knees kneadin the mass with his naked arms and the piss was splashin about and he was cryin out for us to piss, man, piss for your very souls for cant you see the redskins yonder, and laughing the while and workin up this great mass in a foul black dough, a devil's batter by the stink of it and him not a bloody dark pastryman himself I dont suppose and he pulls out his knife and he commences to trowel it across the southfacin rocks, spreadin it out thin with the knifeblade and watchin the sun with one eye and him smeared with blacking and reekin of piss and sulphur and grinnin and wieldin the knife with a dexterity that was wondrous like he did it every day of his life.<br />
</blockquote><br />
<br />
(For any chemistry nerds reading, I should point out that most information online explains that making gunpowder takes an incredibly long time, upwards of two days or more, so I know there’s absolutely no way that the judge’s men could concoct makeshift gunpowder on a mountaintop and reload and carry on their fight with the Native Americans in the span of time McCarthy describes in his novel. But we don’t care—the story has us, we are committed, and now we just want these guys to <a href="http://samsbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2010/01/research-tip-4-shoot-bullet.html">shoot the bullet</a>.)<br />
<br />
Tomorrow, a short summation and a list of links to other articles and books you might find useful.<br />
<br />
<br />
<hr /><br />
If you haven't already, please <a href="http://samsbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2010/01/more-help-for-haiti.html">visit my links for charity and aid organizations</a> that are helping Haiti. Also, today I discovered the website for the <a href="http://www.clintonbushhaitifund.org/">Clinton Bush Haiti Fund</a>, which is another place you can donate (I've added it to the existing list as well). And as always, if you know of any news or any other organizations I can add here, let me know.Sam Snoek-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12072291977553439029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3232873851526446237.post-70620602651450626232010-01-19T15:15:00.004+04:002010-01-19T16:48:48.455+04:00Research tip #5: Shop the catalogue<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.chesterbookco.com/sears_roebuck_catalogue_1897.htm" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_LHY6ITGJH2k/S1WQDAt8NVI/AAAAAAAAE3M/cwxARI06w0Y/s320/sears%26roebuck.jpg" /></a><br />
</div><a href="http://samsbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2009/11/researching-fiction-nanowrimo-update-3.html">I’ve written about this before</a>, but just to recap: <a href="http://www.harpercollins.com/authors/19243/Tom_Franklin/index.aspx">Tom Franklin</a> hates doing research. Yet his first two novels were historical fiction, which stuck Franklin doing the very thing he hates. Still, Franklin prefers to focus on the writing, to let the fiction drive his work (which is probably the way we all should work), so he developed a way to conduct the research he needed to do without letting it get in the way of his writing. The idea wasn’t his—he credits Steven Scarborough for the suggestion—but he made it his own.<br />
<br />
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Franklin has a thing for details. The way he sees it, a story might be entertaining if you focus on character and plot, but the characters aren't real and the plot won’t ring true without the help of minute details. “You can't write convincingly unless you know the tiny details of a place, of people, buttons on their britches or zippers, how much their snuff costs, the caliber of their sidearm,” <a href="http://www.allanguthrie.co.uk/pages/noir_zine/profiles/tom_franklin.php">he once told interviewer</a> <a href="http://www.knox.edu/Academics/Faculty/Smith-Robert.html">Rob McClure Smith</a>. But in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hell-at-Breech-Tom-Franklin/dp/0060566760"><i>Hell at the Breech</i></a>, Franklin was writing about the late 1890s, a period he had little access to. So, how to get the details right?<br />
<br />
Scarborough suggested he find an old Sears & Roebuck catalogue. “Everything in the world you could get you got through Sears & Roebuck,” Franklin told Smith. “I got one from 1897 and it's filled with pictures of everything from Adzes to zebra lined boots. [. . .] This Sears catalogue’s got it all.”<br />
<br />
The catalogue became his springboard into the fiction. He’d write and write (and revise as he went), and just keep plowing away at the story until he couldn’t write any more. He was dry; he needed a dip at the well. So he’d pull out his facsimile copy of the 1897 Sears & Roebuck catalogue and flip through it. Eventually, he’d find something—sometimes an item he was looking for, like, say, a pocket watch, but often he’d stumble across something he hadn’t expected, like a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereoscopy">stereoscope</a> for viewing photographs, a kind of Victorian-era version of our old 3-D <a href="http://www.fisher-price.com/fp.aspx?t=page&a=go&s=viewmaster&p=landing_flash&site=us">View-Masters</a>—and he’d start describing whatever he found. The catalogue, after all, contained drawings or diagrams of the items for sale, descriptions of what they were and how they functioned, ads explaining who might find them useful, and so on. And absolute wealth of information—practically a time machine. So Franklin would describe the item, would perhaps assign it to a character and let him or her use it, and just keep working over the bit until it developed into a scene. The next thing Franklin knew, the fiction was rolling along again and the story progressed.<br />
<br />
Franklin got lucky, of course, that anyone was bothering to print facsimiles of the old Sears catalogue at all, let alone that it was from the same time period he was writing about. But it's not hard to find similar items for yourself, and the more we writers come to need these books, the more our demand will create a market for them. That same <a href="http://www.amazon.com/1897-Sears-Roebuck-Catalogue-Israel/dp/0791046265">1897 Sears catalogue</a> is actually available now through Amazon, as is an <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Montgomery-Ward-Catalogue-Buyers-Guide/dp/1602392382/ref=pd_sim_b_1">1895 Montgomery Ward catalogue</a> and an <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bloomingdales-Illustrated-Catalog-Bloomingdale-Brothers/dp/0486257800/ref=pd_sim_b_2">1886 Bloomingdale's illustrated catalogue</a>. A quick search through your local library might also turn up books on the history of advertising, in which you can find ads and illustrations from years past. You can also find useful information in histories of clothing and costumes, antique furniture guides, even old cookbooks. <br />
<br />
And while you’re there, look into the library’s newspaper archives. Most public libraries—even the small town libraries—will keep archives of the local papers, and many larger libraries will keep archives of major national papers as well. If your library is well funded, you might even be able to search through the microfilm or microfiche collections for newspapers that are decades, even centuries old. (If your library is not well funded, lobby your local government to increase library funding, and join your area Friends of the Library group to help raise money.)<br />
<br />
I mention the newspapers because they’ll also have print advertising and can help add a little local color to your details, and while you’re there, you can also browse some of the community articles to see what people were writing their editors to complain about, what people were gossiping about, what the local community was interested in. Check out the photos, too--you can see what people were wearing, which, as Sherlock Holmes would tell you, can provide excellent character details. You can do the same with magazines, sometimes with surprising results (the library at one of the colleges I attended has the entire run of <i>Playboy</i>—in full color—on microfiche, though you have to know who to ask to get access to it and sorry, I’m not going to help you with that one). <br />
<br />
When I was working on my Civil War novel, I found myself slowing down about halfway through and I started wondering how I was going to push on through. I thought about Franklin, in the same predicament while working on <i>Hell at the Breech</i>, and I decided to follow his advice: I shopped the catalogue. Of course, I don’t have a copy of that or any other historical catalogue, and living overseas as I do, it was going to be difficult to get one on short notice. But with some search <a href="http://samsbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2010/01/research-tip-1-marry-librarian.html">guidance from a librarian</a> (actually, my wife), I started poking around online and I stumbled across the excellent web site titled simply <a href="http://www.sonofthesouth.net/">The Civil War</a>. The site is good for all its history and essays and trivia, sure, but the pot of gold is their collection of Civil War-era <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper%27s_Weekly"><i>Harper's Weekly</i></a> magazines, which they’ve scanned in and posted online. (The coolest thing about their project is that they preserved the text as text, so the magazines are fully searchable!) Now, not only did I have access to contemporary news about the war, but I also had letters, political cartoons, sketches of battles, and, best of all, advertising. Thanks to these magazines, I was able to add vivid realism to my battle descriptions, give depth to characters’ personal sentiments about the war, and include rich details about daily life. In one scene, my characters come across a few worn old books in a dead soldier’s rucksack, and I listed the titles, which I’d found on a bestseller list from 1863. In another scene, some characters are haggling over the price of a few blackmarket firearms, and I was able to describe some of them based on advertising in the magazine, which sold pistols alongside ladies’ stockings. <br />
<br />
The <i>Harper’s Weeklys </i>weren’t as easily perused as a Sears catalogue, maybe, and they were comparatively limited in scope, but they got the writing going every time, and that’s the only point anyway—<a href="http://samsbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2010/01/re-researching-fiction-new-expanded.html">it is always the point</a>—to get back to the writing.<br />
<br />
Of course, once you shop the catalogue, you have to unpack all that stuff and arrange it, which is for some people the biggest trick of all. So, tomorrow, I’ll write about marbling….<br />
<br />
<b>Bonus link: </b>For more recent cultural and material research, check out the delightful <a href="http://www.retroland.com/">Retroland</a> website. Remember <a href="http://www.retroland.com/">Trapper Keepers</a>? Yeah, <a href="http://www.retroland.com/pages/retropedia/schooldaze/item/6410/">so do they</a>. Loads of nostalgic fun.<br />
<br />
<br />
<hr /><br />
<a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5h35Oe4QKyZypfOdTA3eN83gxpiBQ">Obama has tweeted</a> about Haiti—his first post on Twitter—and asked Americans to continue supporting Haitian relief efforts. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has called for troops and aid organizations to <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/18/AR2010011803513.html?hpid=opinionsbox1">unclog the bottleneck</a> of supplies, and indeed the US military (according to some, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/17/us-accused-aid-effort-haiti">a source of the bottlenecking</a> once we took control of the main airport in Port-au-Prince) has agreed to <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60H00020100118">help speed the distribution of supplies</a>. Yet as the death toll mounts, with some estimates now reaching more than 200,000 dead, <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34928950/ns/world_news-haiti_earthquake">survivors continue to be miraculously pulled from the rubble</a>, alive and in dire need of food and medicine. That means it remains important—is perhaps more important now—to continue giving to relief efforts. There are reports now of <a href="http://redtape.msnbc.com/2010/01/fake-fundraising-efforts-for-the-haiti-disaster-are-spreading-like-wildfire-on-facebook-dozens-of-fan-pages-have-been-set-up.html#posts">fake support groups popping up on Facebook</a>, which is unfortunate, but the list I put together a few days ago remains a good starting point for finding legitimate, carefully vetted aid organizations. Please <a href="http://samsbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2010/01/more-help-for-haiti.html">check out that list</a> and consider giving.Sam Snoek-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12072291977553439029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3232873851526446237.post-87890575962470232602010-01-18T12:30:00.006+04:002010-01-19T16:22:19.248+04:00Research tip #4: Shoot the bulletA few years ago, I was at the big national conference of the <a href="http://www.awpwriter.org/">Association of Writers and Writing Programs</a>, and a friend of mine, <a href="http://www.harpercollins.com/authors/19243/Tom_Franklin/index.aspx">Tom Franklin</a>, was on a <a href="http://www.awpwriter.org/conference/2007ConfArchive/2007schedFri.php">panel discussing research in fiction</a>. Franklin joined the panel by virtue of his historical novels <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hell-at-Breech-Tom-Franklin/dp/0060566760"><i>Hell at the Breech</i></a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Smonk-Novel-Tom-Franklin/dp/B002BWQ5YK/ref=pd_sim_b_2"><i>Smonk</i></a> (particularly <i>Hell</i>, which is based on a true story), but Franklin freely admits he dislikes research, so I knew the panel discussion would be fun. The panel did turn out to be a pretty lively one, frequently digressing into friendly banter and swapped anecdotes between Franklin and his friends and fellow panelists <a href="http://www.juliannabaggott.com/">Julianna Baggott</a>, <a href="http://www.randomhouse.com/author/results.pperl?authorid=6053">Justin Cronin</a>, <a href="http://www.jennifervanderbes.net/">Jennifer Vanderbes</a>, and <a href="http://www.markwinegardner.com/">Mark Winegardner</a>. In fact, the stories the panelists started telling sometimes had little to do with research—the group quickly became just a bunch of practiced storytellers trying to outdo each other—but they all did a terrific job of bringing their rambling stories back to the point at hand: research.<br />
<br />
Among the planned topics for that panel, some (“what really happened!”) seemed fairly gratuitous, and others (“what to look for and how to look for it”) fairly dry and mechanical. But there was one point that people keep debating, and after the comments from this panel, I’m not sure why, because the answer seems pretty simple. The conference program lists this point three different ways: “negotiating between historic fact and story-truth,” “approximating what can't be looked up,” and “what's better made-up,” but they all boil down to one axiom: Sometimes it’s better to shoot the bullet.<br />
<br />
I should confess here that I don’t recall who told this story. I know it was a guy, and I know it wasn’t Franklin. That leaves Justin Cronin and Mark Winegardner, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Winegardner. That should make it Cronin’s story, but my memory keeps adding a fourth guy, tacked on the end of the panel as a late addition, and I don’t want to put words in Cronin’s mouth that weren’t his. But until someone corrects me on this (I e-mailed Franklin, but he doesn’t remember, either), we’ll say it was “Cronin” who told this story.<br />
<br />
And the story goes like this: “Cronin” was working on an action sequence in which a character has been shot in the leg but must run to escape his enemies. He has no surgical experience and no time to stop and dig out the bullet even if he knew how, but he also cannot run effectively with that <a href="http://cal.vet.upenn.edu/projects/saortho/chapter_36/36F10.jpg">bullet still lodged in his thigh</a>. What he does have is an almost superhuman expertise in firearms, and he has a pistol. So he does what any desperate action hero would do in this situation: He aims his pistol at his own thigh, muzzle pressed into the open wound and angled along the same trajectory as the original bullet. He grits his teeth. Then he pulls the trigger and fires a second bullet into his leg. The result is something like projectile-billiards—his bullet strikes the first bullet and knocks it out the far side of his thigh, and his bullet then continues on the same path and exits the same wound. No more bullets, and now he can run. And off he goes.<br />
<br />
We in the audience all laughed at this story, as did the guy who told it. It is a ridiculous scene, he admitted. (In my head, I recalled the scene in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095956/"><i>Rambo III</i></a> when Rambo, out in the deserts of Afghanistan and wounded in the stomach, uncases two rifle bullets, pours the gunpowder into his wound, and <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsjLpR3PTShPP3kansW-uT0WHPEbOOChBYuzEli6-mPyzgJqzHYUMz7ci2N2tB_VjQWJnG3kADGCnJf7i9WQD1JNj_lFlaDtIoWB9mQtQWMw7HrLkjKMbOSwGjXprIu_djCmzTzfi8bRpH/s1600-h/Rambo+III.png">ignites it</a>—fire bursting from his muscled torso into the desert night—<a href="http://www.dailyfilmdose.com/2009/04/cauterizing-wound-and-other-scenes-of.html">to cauterize the wound</a>). Still, “Cronin” said, shooting the bullet was just too cool to pass over, and it sounded vaguely plausible to him. He wanted it to work. <br />
<br />
He’d already been poring over medical references and firearms manuals in the course of writing this book of his, but he’d never come across anything that would either confirm or contradict his idea to shoot the bullet. This sounded like specialist information, the kind of thing you could probably only deduce from experience. So “Cronin” <a href="http://samsbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2010/01/research-tip-3-go-to-source.html">went to the source</a> and called a doctor friend of his. He explained the situation, described how his hero would shoot the bullet, and then asked his doctor friend if such a thing would work.<br />
<br />
His friend laughed in his face.<br />
<br />
“Of course that wouldn’t work!” the doctor said. “Medically speaking, it’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard—and the odds against it are astronomical!”<br />
<br />
Disheartened, “Cronin” began thinking then and there of alternative possibilities, but he didn’t get far in his silent, dejected reverie, because the doctor leaned in close and said, “But the way you describe it, shooting the bullet sounds cool as hell. You should let him do it anyway!”<br />
<br />
And that was the lesson for the day: Sometimes the research can get in the way of good writing. Sometimes you have to say to hell with realism, to hell with the facts, and just write a cool story. Sometimes you have to shoot the bullet.<br />
<br />
This doesn’t mean you can get away with shoddy writing. You don’t always have to operate within the rules of the real world, but you do have to operate within the rules of your established world—you have to remain true to your story. Take my novella, for example, which involves a couple of teenage boys running around causing trouble just outside <a href="http://www.ci.boerne.tx.us/">Boerne, Texas</a>, in the woodsy little <a href="http://www.rangercreek.org/">subdivision where I grew up</a>. I have spent a lot of time constructing complicated calendars and character note cards, and I’ve gone through every line of the story checking that the timeline adds up. I can’t say my character is 14 in the winter and 15 the summer, for instance, without knowing that he has a birthday sometime in the spring (it's March 14, if anyone cares). I don’t have to mention the birthday at all, but I do have to know that I can’t mention his birthday in the fall is it had already happened in the spring. The rules of my story won't allow it.<br />
<br />
But I’m not tied to the physical details of my old neighborhood. This is fiction, after all. So I have my characters tearing loose in a version of my own back yard even though the reference sites for each boy's house are nowhere near my parents’ actual home. I can manipulate geography because I’m not drawing a map—I’m writing fiction. The point is not that people reading my story can go out to my old subdivision and find the secret hiding place where these boys spend their time—they can’t, because the geography is imprecise. The point is that someone can read the descriptions and, if they know Boerne or my old subdivision, they can recognize the general landscape (which I hope people can).<br />
<br />
When I was an undergrad student, <a href="http://www.madeleinelengle.com/">Madeleine L'Engle</a> once <a href="http://samsbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2007/09/madeleine-lengle.html">visited my college</a> as a visiting speaker. Among the many insights she touched on during her audience Q&A session, she explained what she saw as the difference between fact and truth. Facts, she said, are details, data, pieces of information that we can record and prove and quantify . . . and manipulate. They are not inherently true. On the other hand, truth is not always dependent on facts—truth is just as much something we can feel or something we believe as it is something we can point to or measure. And fiction, according to L’Engle, is often more truthful than factual.<br />
<br />
Fiction writer and memoirist <a href="http://billroorbach.com/">Bill Roorbach</a> has alluded to a similar phenomenon in his own work. He likes to joke that his greatest frustration is when he reads from his nonfiction and people challenge him, shouting out from the audience, “That didn’t happen! You’re making that up!” but when he reads a piece of fiction, people creep up to him and lean in conspiratorially, wink at him, and whisper, “I know that’s based on a true story—I know all that really happened to you.” The point, Roorbach says, is that people often confuse fact for truth, so when he writes a story full of truth, people mistake it for fact, and when he writes an essay full of truth, people want <i>only </i>the facts.<br />
<br />
We are not in the fact business. We are in the truth business. It doesn’t matter what form our work takes—fiction, essays, poetry, scripts, aphorisms, whatever—so long as we strive to tell the truth. And sometimes, telling the truth, or even just telling a damn good story, requires us to bend or even ignore the facts.<br />
<br />
When Tom Franklin was writing <i>Hell at the Breech</i>, his first novel, he spent a lot of time interviewing people who knew the true story, whose relatives had lived through it and passed down their version through the generations. He wrestled and agonized for a long time over how to reconcile all the variations of the local legend, how to write the most factually accurate story possible and please all the folks he’d talked to. But eventually he realized he couldn’t, and in his author’s note in the book, he explains that his is a work of fiction, not fact. Once he let go of trying to get in all the factual details, he discovered he could tell the truest story possible.<br />
<br />
Which isn’t to say Franklin gave up doing research. What he did, though, was a specific kind of research best suited to his writing style, something I like to call “<a href="http://samsbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2010/01/research-tip-5-shop-catalogue.html">shopping the catalogue</a>,” but that’s for tomorrow’s post . . . .<br />
<br />
<br />
<hr /><br />
The situation in Haiti is getting better, but it's also getting more desperate. <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34915151/ns/world_news-haiti_earthquake">Supplies are bottlenecked</a>, relief organizations are tripping over each other, and what little order people managed to cobble together in the immediate aftermath is deteriorating. Let's not make this sound prettier than it is. But let's also focus on what is getting accomplished: Supplies <i>are </i>arriving and <i>are </i>getting distributed. In fact, despite the bottleneck, supplies are running out as fast as they're arriving, which means relief organizations still need your help. When you return from the public celebrations of the Reverend Dr. King's life, and before you switch on the Golden Globes, take a moment to give a donation. See <a href="http://samsbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2010/01/more-help-for-haiti.html">this list of organizations</a> for more information.<br />
<br />
<b>UPDATE: </b>United Arab Emirates, where we live, is joining other Arab nations in <a href="http://www.arabianbusiness.com/579120-arab-aid-speeds-to-quake-hit-haiti">sending aid to Haiti</a>, both through Khalifa Bin Zayed Charity Foundation and through the UAE branch of the <a href="http://www.uaerc.ae/">Red Crescent Society</a>, the organization we're donating to.Sam Snoek-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12072291977553439029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3232873851526446237.post-86996805729397142992010-01-17T14:22:00.005+04:002010-01-19T16:15:55.971+04:00Research tip #3: Go to the source<a href="http://www.ijpc.org/" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://www.ijpc.org/Journalist%20A.jpg" width="263" /></a>A lot of great writers started out as journalists, and critics have offered a lot of reasons for that shared background. Journalists know how to work under deadline, they have an instinct for finding a story, they’ve learned how to find an angle or a hook to draw a reader in, they have developed a sense of concision and compression in language. But I think there is at least one reason that critics tend to overlook: Journalists know how to interview people.<br />
<br />
I’ve been writing so far about how to conduct research for fiction, but up till now that research has been primarily textual—books, articles, websites. However, sometimes research in books or online isn’t enough. There are some things you can’t learn by reading, but <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/christopher-ondaatje--bewitched-by-africas-strange-beauty-633122.html">Hemingway</a>’s or <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/factfict/eapint.htm">Annie Proulx</a>’s examples aside, there are also a lot of things you can’t learn by living through or traveling to, either. For some things, you have to go to the source, you have to talk to other people who have lived through it, who did travel there—you have to talk to people who know. <br />
<br />
This is a hard thing for many introverted writers to do. We’re much happier holed up at our desks with our desk lamp, our music, and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cat-Shoulder-Lisa-Angowski-Rogak/dp/0681414588/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0">our cat</a> for company. We’re writers, we tell ourselves, because <a href="http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1954/hemingway-speech.html">we don’t like to talk</a>. So actually tracking down people and meeting them is at best a chore—at worst, terrifying. But hey, you've managed to get out and <a href="http://samsbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2010/01/research-tip-1-marry-librarian.html">meet a librarian</a> by now, right? (<i>Right?</i>) So you can do this too. Talking to people isn’t really much different from the kind of research you’ve probably been doing, except instead of asking questions in a search engine or a database or a catalogue, you’re asking a human being. And sometimes, this is the only way it can work.<br />
<br />
The simplest thing to do is start with people you already know. For example: I’m currently working on a story in which one of the characters is a Mexican-American who understands English fine but does not speak English. I can write the character without any problems, because I grew up in the Texas Hill Country, in <a href="http://www.ci.boerne.tx.us/">a small town</a> with a significant, proud Hispanic population. My perspective remains irrefutably white, of course, but this isn’t really a problem in the story—most of what we see of this guy is through a white perspective. But he needs to speak, and I need his speech to be authentic. Yet no matter how many Hispanic friends I hung out with at lunch or on weekends, and no matter how many Hispanic coworkers I worked with (this character is in fact based loosely on a guy I used to mow lawns with), my Spanish is limited, academic, and frankly, terrible. I’ve used the language in stories before, but it’s an issue I always wrestle with. I can (and have) used dictionaries and online translators to temporarily write the dialogue I’ve used, but we all know this is inauthentic—no one speaks their own language the way it’s written in textbooks or constructed by translators. So, for my Mexican-American character’s voice to ring true, I turned to some of my Spanish-speaking friends from back in high school, because they can help me with the spoken rhythms of the language, the idioms and the slang. (This is an on-going project, by the way, so if any of my friends want to volunteer as translators, I’d love to hear from you!)<br />
<br />
More recently, I learned a wealth of invaluable information while working on that Civil War novel I keep mentioning. One of the characters in that book has the bizarre habit of skinning wolves and wearing their pelts as clothes—he even wears a real wolf’s face as a mask. But I’ve never been a hunter and I’m now a vegetarian, not to mention that <a href="http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Are_any_wolf_species_endangered">many wolf populations are protected</a> today, so this not only was something I was unfamiliar with, it is something I’ll never have a chance to try for myself. I tried reading some guides online but the specific information I was looking for was difficult to find, and besides, the skinning and preparation of these pelts is, for my character, an intensely personal process, so I needed some kind of inside information. I put out the call online, and several friends came through for me immediately, including my friend Amy Smith Hicks, who is a self-described “country girl” and regularly helps dress and butcher deer during the annual hunting seasons; better still, members of her family are in the taxidermy business, so she had some insights there as well. Amy not only was able to explain the mechanics of the process better than the manuals I was reading, but she also described the sounds and smells of the skinning process, how the skin feels as you strip it from the carcass, and some personal tips for an easier job. These are details I would never have gotten from reading a book or even watching a video.<br />
<br />
If you’re lucky, you can do the same with other complicated professional information as well. Despite the stereotypes, most writers are not insular homebodies who hang out only with other writers, if with anyone. You probably have friends or acquaintances in a wide breadth of fields, from grocery store clerks to construction workers to computer support technicians to police officers to accountants to college professors. You also conduct a lot of business with people in various professions. When you get your cable installed, talk to the person hooking up your tv. When you go to the doctor for a check-up, ask questions about your characters' fictional conditions. <br />
<br />
Sometimes, though, you’ll simply need to dive in and play reporter, to call up a professional or an organization and start asking questions. Say you’re writing a crime thriller but you’ve never lived in a dangerous neighborhood, you don’t know any cops, you’ve never even seen a firearm up close. Call up your police department and request a ride-along. (You can usually do the same for your local fire department and sometimes the paramedics as well.) Or let’s say you’re writing about an employee at an animal shelter. Call up your local humane society and ask about volunteering; while you’re there, talk to other volunteers, talk to the vets. <br />
<br />
Some professions or people are going to be trickier than others, of course. I don’t recommend diving into dangerous situations without a LOT of preparation and help from other professionals, and even then, I would never condone any writer participating in dangerous or illegal activities just to write a story. When in doubt, go back to the old rule of writing what you know. But you should embrace a certain sense of adventure and talk to interesting people; your readers want to read about those people. Talk to professionals in the fields your characters work in; your readers they want to know that you know what you’re talking about, or at least that Val, your lawn-mowing main character, knows his way around a commercial-grade Walker mower. <br />
<br />
When I was hospitalized in 1999 with a bleeding ulcer, the doctors explained to me how they would insert a gastrointestinal scope down my throat and take a look around inside me to find the ulcer, and then they’d use the laser attached to the scope to suture the ulcer shut. I was going to be unconscious for all this, they assured me, and then I asked what struck them as a strange question: Would they be recording the scope? Sure, they explained, they would keep a video record of the procedure for reference later. I said, “Will I be able to see this video?” They reminded me I would be under anesthesia, but I clarified that I wanted access to the video after the procedure. “I just want to see what it looks like,” I said. I had no plans for the information—at the time, I’d lost a couple pints of blood and was lying weak and woozy on a gurney, already in the surgery room where they were preparing the scope, so I wasn’t thinking about fiction at all. But I knew I needed to see that video, and indeed, a few weeks afterward, I returned to the hospital and asked to see my file. I watched the video and asked a lot of questions about what some of the images meant, what they’d done during the procedure, what the instruments did and how they worked. And then I forgot it. It became just another piece of information I knew, trivial and quirky but not of much immediate use. But sure enough, more than four years later I had an idea for a story that involved a scope down the esophagus, and I remembered that video; my story “Horror Vacuui,” about a sword-swallower with a dangerous case of intestinal blockage, would not be the same if I hadn’t seen first-hand what the inside of my own bloody intestines looked like. These details matter, and sometimes the best way to get them is from the source itself.<br />
<br />
That's why, tomorrow, I'm going to offer some specific advice based on a story about a doctor and how you, too, can "<a href="http://samsbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2010/01/research-tip-4-shoot-bullet.html">shoot the bullet</a>."<br />
<br />
<br />
<hr /><br />
Relief efforts in Haiti are <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/01/17/world/international-uk-quake-haiti.html">going slowly</a> and the situation is dangerously precarious, but a lot of supplies have already arrived on the island and volunteers are working hard to <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34902547/ns/world_news-washington_post">help the Haitian people</a>. The harder they work and the more they give, the more they're going to <a href="http://www.suntimes.com/news/nation/1995403,CST-NWS-usresponse17.article">need your donations</a>! Please see <a href="http://samsbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2010/01/more-help-for-haiti.html">my list of charity and action organizations</a>, and as usual, if you know of more I need to list, please let me know.Sam Snoek-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12072291977553439029noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3232873851526446237.post-87367870832394864332010-01-16T00:30:00.001+04:002010-01-19T16:15:55.971+04:00Weekend repreiveThe research series is on hold for the weekend (I live in a Muslim country, where our weekend is Friday and Saturday), so look for <a href="http://samsbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2010/01/research-tip-3-go-to-source.html">Tip #3</a> on Sunday.<br />
<br />
In the meantime, if you're on Facebook: Today a friend of mine who is a Unitarian minister alerted me to a "<a href="http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=296218974324&ref=mf">Prayers & Thoughts for the people of Haiti</a>" event on Facebook, hosted by the group "<a href="http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/group.php?gid=48264465816">Long Live His Holiness the Dalai Lama</a>." I'm certain there are many other groups associated with other faiths or with secular organizations who are hosting similar pages/events, so look them up.<br />
<br />
And <a href="http://samsbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2010/01/more-help-for-haiti.html">keep those donations going</a>!Sam Snoek-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12072291977553439029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3232873851526446237.post-47403040815370283852010-01-15T09:55:00.003+04:002010-01-25T15:11:05.505+04:00More help for HaitiThe links just keep coming, thanks especially to my friends Rima Abunasser, Beth Davidson, and Diana Pearson. I'm re-posting the list from yesterday, but some links are to organizations and some to lists of organizations, so I'm listing the lists first:<br />
<ul><li><b>NEW: </b><a href="http://www.microsoft.com/about/corporatecitizenship/en-us/our-actions/in-the-community/disaster-and-humanitarian-response/community-involvement.aspx">Microsoft Community Involvement</a> site (Microsoft has put together a list of resources, not all of them merely financial. I can't vouch for the reliability of all those resources, but it's worth a look, especially for the non-monetary ways you help)<br />
</li>
<li><a href="http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&cpid=1004">Charity Navigator</a> (this is a kind of clearing house for reliable, reputable charities; it weeds out the scams and helps you find the right charity for your giving preferences) </li>
<li><a href="http://www.interaction.org/crisis-list/earthquake-haiti%20">InterAction</a> (from my friend Rima: "a list of legitimate organizations who are participating in the relief effort")</li>
<li><a href="http://www.google.com/relief/haitiearthquake/" onmousedown="UntrustedLink.bootstrap($(this), "1cda80dc15c52041336c4217dcd9a19a", event)" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Google</a> (my friend Beth pointed out that Google is listing charities; you can search yourself or just follow the link she sent me)</li>
<li><a href="http://www.bbb.org/us/charity/">BBB Wise Giving Alliance</a> (Beth also pointed out this clearing house, "for 'vetting' charities") <a href="http://www.bbb.org/us/charity/" onmousedown="UntrustedLink.bootstrap($(this), "1cda80dc15c52041336c4217dcd9a19a", event)" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><br />
</a><a href="http://www.bbb.org/us/charity/" onmousedown="UntrustedLink.bootstrap($(this), "1cda80dc15c52041336c4217dcd9a19a", event)" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> </a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/haitiearthquake">The White House</a> (this comes directly from President Obama, via an mass e-mail he sent out; it lists all the efforts our government is taking and how you can help, and it's where I got this web badge for today's post)<br />
</li>
</ul><a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/haitiearthquake_embed"><img alt="Help for Haiti: Learn What You Can Do" border="0" height="100" src="http://www.whitehouse.gov/files/images/haiti/help_for_haiti_272x100.jpg" width="272" /></a><br />
<br />
<br />
Here are some individual charities and organizations:<br />
<ul><li><a href="http://www.ifrc.org/">International Red Cross Red Crescent</a> (this is the main site for the joint operations of Red Cross and Red Crescent; you can donate directly here, or you can use their search tool to find a Red Cross or Red Crescent office in your home country)</li>
<li><a href="http://www.doctorswithoutborders.com/">Doctors Without Borders</a> (they were already operating three hospitals in Haiti before the earthquake, but all three hospitals are destroyed and the medical staff are now operating out of tents and temporary shelters--they desperately need your help, and every dollar counts)</li>
<li><a href="http://www.oxfam.org/">Oxfam</a> (another hugely important coallition of international aid organizations)</li>
<li><a href="http://www.heifer.org/site/c.edJRKQNiFiG/b.5720609/?msorce=EEA1C0000B3">Heifer International</a> (Heifer seeks to fight hunger and poverty, and has decided to step in as a first responder in the Haiti crisis. Thanks to my friend Beth Davidson for pointing this one out.) </li>
<li><a href="http://www.er-d.org/HaitiEarthquakeResponse">Episcopal Relief and Development</a> (my friend Diana says this organization "is already on the ground there and puts 92 cents on the dollar into relief work.")</li>
<li><a href="http://www.worldvision.org/">World Vision</a> (my friend Rima says, "according to ABC, they're already distributing first aid kits and and other staples in Haiti.")</li>
<li><a href="http://www.savethechildren.org/">Save the Children</a> (also from Rima: "using grassroots methods like sending motorcycle teams to help people in Port au Prince")<a href="http://www.savethechildren.org/" onmousedown="UntrustedLink.bootstrap($(this), "1cda80dc15c52041336c4217dcd9a19a", event)" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> </li>
<li><a href="http://www.care.org/">Care</a> (Rima: "distributing high protein biscuits they already had in warehouses in Haiti"; Beth highlighted this one, too)</li>
<li><a href="http://www.unicef.org/">UNICEF</a> (a time-honored and reliable group--I used to "trick or treat" for donations when I was a kid; thanks to Beth for pointing this one out!)</li>
<li><a href="http://www.clintonbushhaitifund.org/">Clinton Bush Haiti Fund</a> (<b>a new addition to this list</b>; this is the organization set up by former Presidents Clinton and G.W. Bush, as the request of President Obama)<br />
</li>
</ul><br />
Thanks everyone for your links and support! Keep those ideas coming, and keep the words, the money, and the helping hands going!Sam Snoek-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12072291977553439029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3232873851526446237.post-41115205363398504282010-01-14T09:31:00.002+04:002010-01-19T16:23:03.938+04:00HaitiI want to pause in the series on researching to focus on more important matters: Haiti. As I write this, the death toll is not yet known, and like the horrible tsunami catastrophe of 2005, we may never truly know. What we do know is that millions--that's <i>millions</i>--of Haitians are injured or dying, and all Haitians, both in their homeland and living abroad, are suffering terrible, unspeakable grief.<br />
<br />
There have been a lot of calls for prayer in the past day or so, and I'm among those people who believe that prayer, or meditation, or any other form of mental or spiritual offering can be hugely beneficial in tragedy, not only to those on whose behalf we pray but also for ourselves as well. It's why I'm here now: I view writing as a kind of prayer, like a message in the Wailing Wall or a sutra on a prayer flag or calligraphy from the Qur'an, and I write this because I want to send my hope and compassion out into the world, on the off chance that it can help someone who is suffering, if only to know there's someone like me who cares.<br />
<br />
But I also believe that words alone are not going to help the people of Haiti, and I agree with all those people who suggest that action is as important as prayers--maybe, for the time being, action is more important.<br />
<br />
I know things are hard for a lot of people the world over. Just today, as I browsed messages and status reports from friends and family, I found as many people despairing over their own hardships as I found despairing for Haiti. I have friends who have lost their jobs, or who have been seeking jobs for months to no avail; I have friends who wake each morning wondering how they're going to feed their children. I have friends who are suffering from terrible illness, or whose family members or spouses are dying of cancer. I have friends who are fighting day after day just to retain (or in some cases earn for the first time) their basic human rights.<br />
<br />
But I also know that there are also plenty of us who can afford to help. It doesn't take much. When Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit several years ago, I had students approach me asking to be excused from class for a week. They wanted to head south, down to the Gulf Coast. I said, "You have family down there?" They said, "No, I'm joining a group of volunteers helping to clean up." I excused them from class. A couple of years later, up in Wisconsin, another group of students asked the same thing--they were driving down to build houses with Habitat for Humanity. These actions cost time, but they rarely cost money, and they have enormous impact.<br />
<br />
I don't yet know what sorts of actions are available to help Haitians; the Haitians themselves do not yet fully understand the terrible scope of this tragedy or what their needs will be, and the governments of the world, including my own, are scrambling to help but don't yet know how. I hope by the end of today we can know, at least to some degree, and the help can begin. But in the meantime, I do know that one thing needed desperately is money to fund the efforts of those brave volunteers waiting to rush to Haiti's aid. So if you can afford to, please consider donating. Some places are willing to accept anything you can spare, even if it's only a dollar.<br />
<br />
To that end, here is a short list of charities to consider, compiled by myself, some friends on Facebook, and one of my favorite blogs, <a href="http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/2010/01/help-for-haiti.html">Cake Wrecks</a>:<br />
<ul><li><a href="http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&cpid=1004">Charity Navigator</a> (this is a kind of clearing house for reliable, reputable charities; it weeds out the scams and helps you find the right charity for your giving preferences) <br />
</li>
<li><a href="http://www.ifrc.org/">International Red Cross Red Crescent</a> (this is the main site for the joint operations of Red Cross and Red Crescent; you can donate directly here, or you can use their search tool to find a Red Cross or Red Crescent office in your home country)</li>
<li><a href="http://www.doctorswithoutborders.com/">Doctors Without Borders</a> (they were already operating three hospitals in Haiti before the earthquake, but all three hospitals are destroyed and the medical staff are now operating out of tents and temporary shelters--they desperately need your help, and every dollar counts)</li>
<li><a href="http://www.oxfam.org/">Oxfam</a> (another hugely important coallition of international aid organizations)</li>
<li><a href="http://www.heifer.org/site/c.edJRKQNiFiG/b.5720609/?msorce=EEA1C0000B3">Heifer International</a> (already an addition! Heifer seeks to fight hunger and poverty, and has decided to step in as a first responder in the Haiti crisis. Thanks to my friend Beth Davidson for pointing this one out.) </li>
<li><a href="http://www.er-d.org/HaitiEarthquakeResponse">Episcopal Relief and Development</a> (and another addition, this one from my friend Diana Pearson, who says this organization "is already on the ground there and puts 92 cents on the dollar into relief work.") </li>
</ul><br />
If you know of any more than I can add to this list, or of any non-monetary ways in which we can help, please tell me--I will [continue to] update and repost the list as long as it's necessary.Sam Snoek-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12072291977553439029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3232873851526446237.post-6270168375824485562010-01-13T16:05:00.006+04:002010-01-19T16:24:46.032+04:00Research tip #2: Know your limits<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Turn-Byrds/dp/B000002ACP">Sing it with me now</a>: “To everything there is a season . . . A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to research, and a time to stop researching and get back to the writing . . .”<br />
<br />
Every good academic knows there comes a point in the research process at which you have to quit looking at other people’s ideas and start working with your own. Failing to do so, you risk letting other people’s ideas take over, and what you wind up writing is not original argument but regurgitative reporting. Fiction writers, though, seem to know less about this magical balancing act and aren’t always aware when that moment comes. <br />
<br />
The first thing you need to bear in mind as a researcher is what your skill set is, what things you know about researching and what things you’ll need help with. (If you read <a href="http://samsbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2010/01/research-tip-1-marry-librarian.html">yesterday’s post</a>, you know at least one thing: Ask a librarian!) Many fiction writers come from academic backgrounds and know a great deal about researching, but many fiction writers don't. And it's not a problem, not in terms of researching for fiction. The point is not to become expert researchers but to become excellent writers, which means we must always stay focused on the writing and not worry so much about the research. You’re not out to learn new processes (though it’s always helpful if you do learn some things along the way—see yesterday’s post), so what you want to do is work within the skills you have, find what you can as fast as you can, and then—say it with me—<i>get back to the writing</i>.<br />
<br />
Maybe the only thing you know to do is jump onto <a href="http://www.google.com/">Google</a> or <a href="http://www.wikipedia.org/">Wikipedia</a> and look stuff up. That’s fine, though the Internet is notoriously time-consuming and conducive to procrastination (or, as my friend Tanya’s son Aaron brilliantly calls it, “procrasturbation”). If that’s what works for you, use it: follow a few links in, see what you can see. But if you linger too long or start clicking on too many links, shut it down and get back to the writing.<br />
<br />
Maybe you have a small collection of standard references in your home, and you like to dive into those now and then, hit the encyclopedias or the indexes or <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dangerous-Book-Boys-Conn-Iggulden/dp/0061243582"><i>The Dangerous Book for Boys</i></a>, and read till you find what you’re after. That’s excellent. I can’t tell you how many trivia books and instruction manuals and dictionaries I’ve read over the years, and boring as it might sound, I’ve enjoyed them all. There’s some fascinating stuff out there in the world, and I love to learn. But there’s a difference between reading to write and just plain reading. Put the book down. You have a book of your own to write.<br />
<br />
Maybe you’re well versed in complicated research methods, you know your library’s article databases inside and out, and you have personal access to the archives or the rare books room, and you head down to the library to put in some good hard research. Great. But take your writing with you—your laptop, your yellow legal pad, your lovingly worn, floppy old journal and fancy pen—and be prepared at any moment (the right moment) to drop everything and get back to the writing.<br />
<br />
So what is the right moment? How do you know when you’ve done enough research and are ready to write again? Well, that’s a tricky question, and the simultaneously fortunate and unfortunate truth is that only you can know. It reminds me of the very short chapter on knowing when a story is finished, from Anne Lamott’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bird-Some-Instructions-Writing-Life/dp/0385480016/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263382357&sr=1-1"><i>Bird by Bird</i></a>: “This is a question my students always ask. I don’t quite know how to answer it. You just do.” But I call it fortunate because you get to determine this—the “right” moment depends on you.<br />
<br />
In his book on screenwriting, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Story-Sense-Screenwriters-Guide-Television/dp/0070389969/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263382476&sr=1-1"><i>Story Sense</i></a>, Paul Lucey suggests that “the amount of time spent on research depends on the topic, how quickly you work, and how much background you need to feel comfortable” with writing the story. “Some writers spend months research and mulling the story, which is also an aspect of writing. The research and story pondering continues until the writer feels charged with energy and begins working out the plot.” But I think Lucey’s description is a bit disingenuous, or else he drinks better coffee than I do—I’ve never felt “charged with energy” after a long research session. I feel swollen, full of new information and unsure what to do with it all. But sometimes I also feel driven, sometimes frantically, to get down an idea or a scene, in much the same way I’d feel driven by any flash of inspiration or sudden insight I knew belonged in fiction. It is a gratifying moment, to flash on the one piece of information you were looking for (or better yet, a piece of information you didn’t know you were looking for) and suddenly know you need to get it into writing. But I worry that Lucey’s initial image of writers sitting around poring through tomes of research and pondering and mulling <i>ad libitum</i> gives us exactly the excuse we need to avoid writing. Fan as I am of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Moveable-Feast-Ernest-Hemingway/dp/0684833638/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263382790&sr=1-1">Hemingway’s pinching orange peels</a> and staring at the fire routine, we don’t really need any more excuses to avoid writing, and sometimes you have to recognize that, right information or not, you’ve put off the writing long enough and it’s time to go back and just write the thing. There will be time enough for follow-up research later. Right now you need to write.<br />
<br />
When I was working on the Civil War novel that spawned these posts, I was under the daily pressure of <a href="http://www.nanowrimo.org/">NaNoWriMo</a> to pound out a few pages every day, so even though I wound up doing a little research every day, I also had to force myself toget back to the writing. In some cases this was easy: One time, I needed to find out how to defeat the Cajun folklore creature known as a rougarou (a bit like a werewolf), so I looked up the answer, found it, and moved on. Other times, I risked letting the research run away with me, like the day I looked up Civil war battles in southwestern Louisiana. I wanted to reference a particular battle in dialogue in order to set a character's background and establish some of the real history behind my story, so I started looking up historical accounts of battles. At first I was just looking for date and place, but once I'd found several, I needed to pick one, and to pick one—I told myself—I needed to know a little about each battle. So I started reading. After a while I'd narrowed my battles down to two or three I could use, but then I decided that the only way for my character to talk about the battle effectively was if I knew that battle from the inside, so I tore off searching for first-hand accounts, letters and diaries from Civil War veterans, and newspaper reports contemporary to the battles. Before I knew it, I'd spent hours and hours reading, and I was started to feel overwhelmed. Worse, I hadn't written more than a few dozen words for the day. There was no magic trigger, no <i>a ha</i> flash of inspiration. There was only the weary realization that enough was enough, and it was time to get back to the writing. So I dropped everything, picked a battle at random, and dropped a single reference to it in a line of dialogue, and I moved on. I'm glad I did the research I did because it'll be easier to find again when I go back and fill in the details. But the point that day was to write, and my mind told me when I'd finished with the research.<br />
<br />
Determining the moment you’re ready to get back to the writing will take a certain degree of self-awareness, which means that you’re going to have to practice this a lot. Research and write, write and research, back and forth, until you can figure out that delicate balance. It’s a lot like meditation, what Buddhists and psychologists call “mindfulness” training: you need to learn what your mind is doing, learn to notice when you’re getting distracted from your goal, which in this case is always the writing.<br />
<br />
In one version of mindfulness meditation, the meditator is supposed to focus on his breath. He notices when he breathes in; he notices when he breathes out. That’s it. Sometimes, he counts the breaths in order to remain focused on the breathing, but this becomes tricky, because it’s very easy to use that as a crutch, to stop focusing on the breathing and start focusing on the counting. And the counting is not the goal—the goal is breathing, and the counting is just a tool to facilitate the breathing.<br />
<br />
The same is true with writing and research. We must begin with writing and we must end with writing. Sometimes we need the tool of research to help facilitate the writing, but the research is not our goal, not our purpose—we are doing the research only so we can continue writing. <br />
<br />
This is easier said than done, of course, because for some people, research is a fantastic crutch. In <a href="http://wordplay-kmweiland.blogspot.com/2009/11/4-reasons-i-quit-writing-exercises.html">a blog post on WordPlay</a>, author <a href="http://www.kmweiland.com/">K.M. Weiland</a> explains one reason she quit writing exercises is because they became a good excuse to not write: “It’s much easier to scribble away on exercises that don’t matter, rather than buckle down and work on that tough scene opener.” I’m a fan of exercises myself, just as I’m a fan of research, but Weiland has a point—we can sometimes allow what started out as work to become a distraction from work, and research is especially nasty about this. Paul Lucey himself admits this, following up his idyllic image of pondering, intense writers hunched over their research with the warning that “in some cases the research can go on for so long that it becomes an excuse for avoiding writing.” Try reading anything interesting on Wikipedia and you’ll quickly see what I mean. You reading something interesting and it points you to something else, some other related tidbit, so you go read about that, which links you to a different article, and soon your “research” has snowballed into “not writing” and you’re spending all day browsing useless information that won’t wind up helping anything. So you have to force yourself back to the writing.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.jackkornfield.org/">Jack Kornfield</a>, Buddhist and psychologist, in his chapter “<a href="http://www.alexox.com/sangha/trainingthepuppy.pdf">Training the Puppy</a>” from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Path-Heart-Through-Promises-Spiritual/dp/0553372114"><i>A Path with Heart</i></a>, puts it like this:<br />
<blockquote>In this way, meditation is very much like training a puppy. You put the puppy down and say, “Stay.” Does the puppy listen? It gets up and it runs away. You sit the puppy back down again. “Stay.” And the puppy runs away over and over again. Sometimes the puppy jumps up, runs over, and pees in the corner or makes some other mess. Our minds are much the same as the puppy, only they create even bigger messes. In training the mind, or the puppy, we have to start over and over again.<br />
</blockquote><br />
This is true for everyone’s mind, not just meditators. Your mind is a puppy, and it’s squirmy and restless and playful as hell. That’s fine. Let it play—we are creative writers, after all. But don’t let it make a mess. In researching for fiction, we have to learn what our own limitations are, we have to discover—through practice—that in the end we can only research so much, and we have to remind ourselves to return to the fiction over and over again, because that is what we’re really doing: We are writers, and we need to write. Listen to your mind, and when it says “A ha!” or “Enough,” let go of the research, and get back to the writing. <br />
<br />
Of course, one way to cut down on your research time is to skip the books and <a href="http://samsbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2010/01/research-tip-3-go-to-source.html">go straight to the sources</a>—to cultivate connections with experts and to learn from people on the street—but that’s for <strike>tomorrow’s post. . . .</strike><br />
<br />
[<b>EDIT:</b> I've postponed the entry on sources to focus on <a href="http://samsbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2010/01/haiti.html">the dire need in Haiti</a>--please read tomorrow's post for more information.]<br />
<br />
<br />
<object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/aNopQq5lWqQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/aNopQq5lWqQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>Sam Snoek-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12072291977553439029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3232873851526446237.post-12210708780634811582010-01-12T15:27:00.008+04:002010-01-19T16:20:28.912+04:00Research tip #1: Marry a librarian<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.jephdraw.com/random/libraryscience.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="309" src="http://www.jephdraw.com/random/libraryscience.png" width="320" /></a><br />
</div><br />
I’ve been hanging out in libraries since I was a kid, and I was a regular at <a href="http://www.boerne.lib.tx.us/">my town’s public library</a> during high school. My first year of <a href="http://www.schreiner.edu/">college</a>, I was commuting 40 minutes to school and had a huge gap between classes my first semester; with no dorm room or home to return to between classes, I did the only thing that felt natural to me and I hung out in <a href="http://library.schreiner.edu/">the library</a>. A lot. Sometimes six hours a day. And I wasn’t sleeping in there—I was reading books, not just fiction but nonfiction too, usually researching arcane and ridiculous subjects in addition to my serious scholarly pursuits. My habits didn’t change when I met the woman I would later marry, because she took a work study job in the library, which just meant I hung out in there more.<br />
<br />
So I got to know a lot about libraries and librarians. I knew the card catalog inside and out (that’s right—we still had one when I was in college, though they transitioned to an online system before I graduated). I knew the vertical files and the atlas room. I’d been inside the archives and even the dim basement storage affectionately nicknamed “the catacombs.” The librarians and library staff all knew me by sight; most knew me by name. And I knew where to look for most kinds of information (or thought I did at the time), and I had already learned the most valuable lesson of research: when in doubt, ask a librarian!<br />
<br />
(That bears repeating: <b><a href="http://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/">ASK A LIBRARIAN</a>!</b>)<br />
<br />
I didn’t set out to marry a librarian, really. But it makes a lot of sense that I did marry one, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. Better still—and I say this objectively, based on a lifetime of hanging out in libraries and chatting with librarians, as well as on a professional career understanding my own research needs—I was lucky enough to marry one of the best librarians I’ve ever worked with. I know that if I have a pressing research need, I can call or text or e-mail my wife, and she can find the answer. Most of the time, she’ll find more information than I was even looking for, or better information than I was looking for, and more often than not, she’ll have pointed me toward that information by the end of the day. More than once she’s tracked down truly arcane information I’d spent two whole days looking for, and I swear (I’m not making this up), she’s found it inside of five minutes.<br />
<br />
Librarians are like that, or the good ones are, anyway. It’s what they’re trained for; it’s why they have advanced degrees (technically speaking, you cannot claim to be a librarian without at least a masters in library science). And it’s why, if you plan to focus on your own writing without getting too bogged down in research, it’s going to be a good idea to marry a librarian.<br />
<br />
Okay, I know. There are only so many librarians in the world, so maybe you’re not going to be fortunate enough to marry one. But you can still make friends. I was friendly with all the librarians I worked with long before I fell in love with one, and they were always helpful, because any good librarian will view his or her job as a service profession. Sure, all librarians collect information, and it’s a small step from collecting to hoarding, and yes, most librarians have some professional obligation to preserve and protect the information they collect. But for most librarians, the main reason they’re collecting and preserving that information in the first place is so we, the public, can use it. That means their primary concern on any given day is to help you find the best information in the fastest, most painless way possible. So if you can’t marry a librarian, make friends with one. <br />
<br />
And don’t say you don’t know any librarians! Head to your nearest library and meet one. Walk up to the reference desk. Say, “Hi, are you a librarian?” (The person on the desk might be a staff member or a student worker, so it’s helpful to ask.) If they say yes, tell them, “I’m a writer, and I’m going to need a lot of help doing research. I don’t need any help right this second, but I wanted to meet you so I’d know where to come in the future.” Smile when you say this. Offer to shake hands. Bring the librarian chocolate. And thank the librarian, frequently and sincerely.<br />
<br />
But meeting a librarian isn’t enough. To get the most out of the relationship—and out of your fiction—you also have to . . . say it with me now . . . <i>ask a librarian</i>. Which means you need to know what to ask.<br />
<br />
I said in <a href="http://samsbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2010/01/re-researching-fiction-new-expanded.html">the previous post</a> that the first step to writing historical fiction is to write the fiction. Get a story down, or at least an outline. Have some sense of where you’re going with this piece. Put in your share of “butt in the chair” time. Because the best way to get the most help out of a librarian is to know what you’re looking for in the first place, and to know what you’re looking for, you need to start the writing.<br />
<br />
But let’s say you’ve got a draft started—or even just an outline. Let’s say you’re writing about the 19th-century grave robbers known as “resurrectionists” (as did the delightful <a href="http://hannahtinti.com/">Hannah Tinti</a>, in her novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Good-Thief-Hannah-Tinti/dp/0385337450"><i>The Good Thief</i></a>), and you find yourself stuck in a passage about the process of robbing graves. So, first things first: Do the research yourself. Librarians love it when you’ve made a little effort on your own, because any good librarian, like any good detective, is going to start with the simplest solutions, which means that if you’ve eliminated some of the basic steps of research before approaching a librarian, the librarian will be able to move that much more quickly to the really juicy stuff you couldn’t find on your own. These basic steps will depend on your own skills as a researcher (see tomorrow’s entry for more details), so I won’t go into those here. Your process is your own.<br />
<br />
But let’s say you’ve now done a little of the preliminary work yourself, you've looked where you can think to look and found some good stuff but you want more. So you get in touch with the librarian. Personally, I love libraries—I view them as sanctuaries, academic temples worthy of the highest reverence—and I prefer to physically visit the actual buildings when I can. But this is the digital age and librarians—who are by definition as up to date as anyone can be in the Information Age—are happy to work with you over the phone, via e-mail, or even in a chat session. (While working on my Civil War novel, I started looking for information on the bayou in the mid-1800s, and I e-mailed the community library in <a href="http://www.cameron.lib.la.us/">Cameron Parish, Louisiana</a>—which was all but wiped out by <a href="http://www.cameron.lib.la.us/Hurricane/MainLib/pages/Cameron%20Main%20Branch2.html">Hurricane Rita</a> back in 2005—and the librarian there was not only quick to respond but provided me with some extremely helpful information. Shout out to the wonderful Dede Sanders!) The capabilities will vary by library, but the process is the same regardless of the medium you choose. <br />
<br />
What will happen is what my wife (and any other librarian) calls the “reference interview.” And, like any interview, you should come to it at least a little prepared, which means whatever work you’ve done until now you should be prepared to describe to the librarian. Gather those materials, or at least remember what you have managed so far on your own, and then contact your librarian. (My wife recommends calling or e-mailing and making an appointment. “We love people who make appointments!” she tells me. “Also, you might find out there’s a subject specialist—especially at big public libraries or academic libraries—if you inquire about appointments.”)<br />
<br />
First, tell the librarian, as specifically as you can, what you’re looking for. As my wife says, “We would want the same thing from a fiction writer as a person who is without a job and needs to look for job resources: a clear understanding of what they need to find out. That's really what it boils down to.” In our example, you could tell the librarian that you’re looking for information on resurrectionists, but that’s an awfully broad term, and unless the librarian asks you to be more specific, you could wind up with information on early Christianity, modern religious cults, body snatchers, zombies, even a Massachusetts <a href="http://www.myspace.com/resurrectionists">rock band</a> or a German <a href="http://www.myspace.com/resurrectionists666">metal band</a>. So it’s best to be specific: “I’m writing a book on grave robbers in the 19th century, who were sometimes called ‘resurrectionists,’ and I’m trying to find out what processes they used to steal body parts.” <br />
<br />
Then you explain what you’ve done so far. “I’ve looked on Wikipedia using these search terms . . . .” “I checked the card catalog and used these search terms . . . .” “I tried searching article databases in journals of medical history, using these terms . . . .” (It’s always good to explain what terms you’ve used, because in my experience, the librarian will almost always come up with one or two terms you hadn’t thought of, and they’re usually better terms.)<br />
<br />
From here, the librarian will probably ask you a series of questions to help narrow down the search (Are you looking for general info or for specific info? Are you writing about a particular country or geographic region? Are you interested in the legal aspects at all, or the medical aspects, or just the digging up of bodies? And so on . . .). My wife puts it like this: “Lots of times, patrons [that’s us] don't know what they want to know, so we have to ask a series of questions to get them—and us—to a point where we both know what we're looking for.” <br />
<br />
Also, my wife says, it’s helpful for patrons to know what format of info they're wanting—books, articles, web sites, etc. If we’re writing an historical account of grave robbing in the 19th century, for example, we would probably want some contemporary accounts, so we could tell the librarian that we’re interested in memoirs about grave robbing, if any exist, and probably some 19th-century newspaper articles that report on grave robbing. <br />
<br />
You should expect to work with the librarian as much as possible—it isn’t exactly fair to just dump a load of research in a librarian’s lap and then sit back and twiddle your thumbs—but like any good professional, sometimes the librarian will want to dive into the research themselves or confer with other librarians, and you should also give these professionals the space they need to work. Besides, that will give you some time to get back to the writing (always go back to the writing!) while you’re waiting on your information. (Research should never be an excuse to stop writing, but more on that tomorrow.) Most importantly, never approach a librarian and expect an answer then and there. (This bears repeating, too: <b>Never approach a librarian and expect an answer then and there!</b>) I mentioned earlier that my wife, brilliant professional that she is, is sometimes amazingly fast at finding information. But only sometimes—there are limits to how fast some information can be found, and good research is like good cooking: it takes time, and it’s always best to be patient. No matter how long a librarian takes to track down the information, just remember that it’s faster than you were finding it on your own.<br />
<br />
Finally, expect to learn something. A librarian’s first goal is to help you find information—not to simply <i>give</i> you information. That means that at the end of a search, the librarian will probably explain how she or he found the information. (If she doesn’t, ask her.) Pay attention to this, and take notes if you need to. What she’s doing is teaching you how to find similar information on your own the next time, so as you progress in your novel, you will be able to do more and more of the research for yourself. We researchers, my wife says, should learn to “feel more confident about starting out next time.” The librarians, she adds, are “here as guides, not crutches.”<br />
<br />
Now that you’re learning to feel more confident as a researcher, check out <a href="http://samsbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2010/01/tip-2-know-your-limits.html">tomorrow’s post</a> about knowing your limits!Sam Snoek-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12072291977553439029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3232873851526446237.post-60182347538911616142010-01-11T11:33:00.003+04:002010-01-19T16:15:31.774+04:00Re-researching fiction: The new, expanded edition!A while ago I wrote <a href="http://samsbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2009/11/researching-fiction-nanowrimo-update-3.html">a blog entry on the research</a> I was doing for my <a href="http://www.nanowrimo.org/">NaNoWriMo</a> novel, a twisted little Civil War novel set in southwestern Louisiana during the last of the war years. At the time I was just counting some of the cool things I’d learned while writing the first draft of that book, like how to build an Acadian shack or what sort of bait to use when catching crawfish, but I also made a few comments on the apparently contradictory act of researching for fiction. Then a friend of mine, Midwestern <a href="http://www.facebook.com/bulldykerodeo">rock star</a> and fellow writer <a href="http://www.flashquake.org/fiction/sketches.html">Ryan Werner</a>, started a conversation about writing with a friend of his (we writers are a molecular bunch, clustering together in little clumps of “I know someone who knows someone” and hoping something alchemical results). This friend of Ryan’s is thinking about writing an historical novel and wondered if Ryan had any thoughts; what Ryan thought is that he despises research (I’m euphemizing—Ryan was a bit more emphatic than “despises”), but then he remembered my blog post, and he sent me an e-mail asking if I might elaborate. So here we are. Now you know who to blame.<br />
<br />
There's a lot of good advice out there. There's a lot of bad advice, too, and half the time the good advice sounds almost identical to the bad. What works and what doesn't depends on what sort of writer you are and on what sort of researcher you are, so like anything in fiction writing, no one tip or exercise is going to solve your writing problems for you. You live and you learn--or, more accurately, you learn through living, through the practice itself. <br />
<br />
That said, it often does help to get a few pointers at the outset, a kind of nudge in one direction or another, and who cares if it's the right direction, because at least you're moving. So over the next several posts I'm going to start discussing a variety of tips, some of which work for me, some of which don't--but they worked for someone, so maybe they'll help you, too.<br />
<br />
But first, some general advice:<br />
<br />
The first thing any writer of historical fiction needs to do is sort out his or her priorities, and I promise you, no matter what sort of writer you are, your first priority is to write. That means now. Start a draft, even if it’s terrible, even if you’ll wind up chucking 99% of it. There is an old and oft-quoted (and oft-disputed) axiom in the writing world, that we should write what we know. On the surface that sounds antithetical to researching for historical fiction—if you don’t know it in the first place, some purists would have it, you shouldn’t bother looking it up. But what that axiom really means is that you should stay true to your own vision, and whatever time period you’re writing about, it will inevitably conform to your world view now.<br />
<br />
Or, I'll put it another way. There's a long-standing critical truism that all science fiction, however distantly futuristic it pretends to be, is a commentary on contemporary times (Philip K Dick's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Scanner-Darkly-S-F-Masterworks-Philip-Dick/dp/1857988477/ref=tmm_pap_title_1"><i>A Scanner Darkly</i></a>, which I'm reading now, is not so much a novel about the drug culture of a near future but a commentary on the drug culture of the times Dick wrote it, just for example). But there’s an adverse example, too: In Jorge Luis Borges’s excellent short story "<a href="http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/borges-quixote.html">Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote</a>," we read about a contemporary author who, having never read Cervantes’s <i><a href="http://www.online-literature.com/cervantes/don_quixote/">Don Quixote</a></i>, sets out to write a modern version of it. Instead he winds up recreating the text verbatim, so that Pierre Menard’s Quixote is utterly indistinguishable from the original. Yet—the story tells us—critics rave about the genius of Menard’s version because it has become a reflection on all that has changed in the centuries since the original Quixote was written. In some respects Borges is poking fun at the pomposity of academia, but there is a more serious point underlying this, that any historical fiction we might write today must become relevant to contemporary readers and therefore must reflect a contemporary perspective, however accurate or inaccurate the resulting historicity might be.<br />
<br />
So it is always a good idea to begin by writing cold, without research. Get the story down, however sloppy or short or inaccurate, and then go back and correct the historical details through research. If you begin with the research, you will wind up writing a report, which no one—not even college professors—really wants to read. But if you begin with the story, you will have something engaging and exciting to build the historical details into, and that’s what will make for good fiction.<br />
<br />
Tomorrow: <a href="http://samsbeginnersmind.blogspot.com/2010/01/research-tip-1-marry-librarian.html">Tip #1--Marry a librarian!</a>Sam Snoek-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12072291977553439029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3232873851526446237.post-42066545923638699212009-12-30T12:24:00.004+04:002010-01-19T16:16:43.373+04:00Counting beans (now with more numbers!) I'm not one for math--anything more complicated than my checkbook and I break into a sweat, and even the checkbook is a chore I'd much prefer to avoid--but I have always been fascinated by numbers. Ask me to prove anything with them and I'll freak out and slip into a coma, but ask me to play with them? I'm on board. I love <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerology">numerology</a>, I love our planet-wide obsession with the number <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_%28number%29">12</a> and all its variables, I love counting the years I've been married (a little more than 8) and the years I've known my wife (almost 13), the number of chapters in, say, <i>For Whom the Bell Tolls</i> (43; the events in the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTz0xQomNFg">Metallica song</a> based on the novel take place in Chapter 25). Before there were the loads of obsessive explanations and musings that exist online today, I once wrote a lengthy and absurdly complicated essay unpacking the mathematical gymnastics of <a href="http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/The_Numbers">the numbers in <i>LOST</i></a> (<a href="http://thelostnumbers.blogspot.com/">4 8 15 16 23 42</a>), not for an assignment or even a public blog but just because I was fascinated by them.<br />
<br />
Right now I'm knee-deep in revising a novel that has long frustrated me, including numerically. For complicated symbolic reasons I won't go into right now, I have divided my novel into 3 "Books" and a total of 12 chapters. But as soon as I'd got through a 1st draft of this thing, I noticed how lopsided it was--the 1st 4 chapters, making up Book 1, took up nearly 1/2 the novel, relegating Books 2 and 3 each to just over a 1/4 of the text. Consequently, what should be the last 2/3 of the book move along far faster than the 1st 1/3 and feel rushed, sloppy, and amatuerish, while the 1st "Book" is sluggish, equally sloppy, and amatuerish in an entirely different way. <br />
<br />
One of my goals in revising this novel was to tighten up the 1st 1/2 and expand the 2nd (by which I mean tighten up the 1st 1/3 and expand the other 2/3--such is the confusing nature of math and/or my novel). Today I checked my page count: In the 1st 2 chapters I have managed to add--not delete--a full 20 pages to my novel. Right now the total count sits at 293, yet, just a few pages into chapter 3, I am currently working on page 92. By page count, I am 1/3 of the way through my novel, but by chapter count, I am just over 1/6 through. I'm not saying all the chapters or all the "Books" have to be of equal length, but I'm a fan of balance if not symmetry, and I'd like each section of the book to carry similar weight. Which means, if I'm going to pull that off in this revision, this novel is going to have to wind up a little over 500 pages by the time I'm done, with the bulk of the extra 210+ extra pages showing up in chapters 5 through 12. Or I'm looking at yet another revision to follow this 1, in which I strip out all the fat from Book 1 and clean it up like I'd originally intended. Which might be what I have to do. Not just for the sake of the numbers, but for the sake of the prose as well.<br />
<br />
<hr /><b><br />
</b><br />
<b>UPDATE: </b>I've finished revising (for now) all of Book 1. As it stands right now, Book 1--the 1st 4 chapters--total 141 pages, out of 298 (that's up from an original page total of 271). The word count for Book 1 is around 43,000; the word count for the whole novel, so far, is 91,300. So, by chapter count I'm exactly 1/3 through the book. But by page count and word count, I'm almost 1/2 (47% by either page or word count). <br />
<br />
The good news: if 141 pages is what roughly 1/3 of the book is supposed to look like, I'll only have to add 125 pages to round out the last 2/3, which is considerably less than I was first counting on, and 400+ pages actually doesn't sound too unreasonable for a novel of this sort, though if a final revision can squeeze that down to, say, 350, I'd be happier.Sam Snoek-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12072291977553439029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3232873851526446237.post-24158896337229748802009-12-21T16:06:00.006+04:002010-01-19T16:43:26.141+04:00Is there anybody out there? Sensory deprivation and creative writing<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.impawards.com/1980/posters/altered_states.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" ps="true" src="http://www.impawards.com/1980/posters/altered_states.jpg" width="209" /></a><br />
</div><br />
I'm currently (and rapidly) revising my second novel, which also served at my dissertation and which is set in an afterlife, with a dead narrator and a whole mess of dead characters. The harderst part, I think, is the opening, the first third of the book, because at heart the novel is a roadtrip adventure story and I've always struggled with getting my narrator out on her journey in a way that doesn't feel hackneyed or forced. In my revisions, her impetus for setting out is still a bit hackneyed and forced but it's starting to make more sense. <br />
<br />
One of the things I'm trying to do with this novel is adhere (very loosely) to Buddhist concepts of the dying process as laid out in the scriptural text <em>Enlightenment on Hearing in the Intermediate States </em>(mostly known by its shorter title <em>Bardo Thodol </em>and, to Western audiences, as "The Tibetan Book of the Dead"). I've already walked my narrator through the first three cycles of death described in Yangchen Gawai Lodro's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Death-Intermediate-Rebirth-Tibetan-Buddhism/dp/0937938009">The Lamp Thoroughly Illuminating the Presentation of the Three Basic Bodies--Death, Intermediate State, and Rebirth</a> (as translated by Lati Rinpoche and Jeffery Hopkins), but in my dissertation drafts I let my narrator effectively skip the fourth cycle, in which she loses all sensory perception and effectively dissolves into her after-life existence. This is a profoundly difficult thing for me to describe, of course, since I'm still alive and still tied to my sensory perceptions. The closest thing I could imagine to such an experience is a float tank or sensory deprivation chamber, but I don't have access to such a device. So, how to describe what my narrator experiences?<br />
<br />
Winter here in the Middle East is impossibly mild, temperatures lullingly comfortable during the day, and I've been leaving the air conditioning off most days. So I decided to take advantage of the weather and I created a kind of sensory-deprivation experience for myself. Using the audio-editing software Audacity, I created a 20-minute track of white noise. Then I took my laptop into our guest room (also known as my meditation room, where my Buddhist altar shares space with a fantastic little futon from IKEA), and I lay back on the futon. I'd shut the windows to block any distracting breezes. I donned an airline eyemask and a pair of light headphones plugged into my laptop, I covered myself in a thin blanket, and I started a recording program to document anything I might say out loud. I put myself in the mindset of my narrator, then I started the white noise, and I simply lay flat for 20 minutes.<br />
<br />
The result is not earth-shatteringly profound, but I did have some fairly vivid visions of things my narrator might experience, and as they occured I described them aloud. On the recording, I sound bizarre--sometimes simply bored, sometimes stoned, and toward the end flat-out asleep, which I might have actually been--I catch myself snoring on the recording--but I remain in character throughout, and the text I dictated, though brief and strange, has resulted in some interesting and usable prose for the novel.<br />
<br />
I've been intrigued by sensory deprivation since watching the 1980 movie <em>Altered States</em>, but now I'm wildly curious. Word online is that float tanks are common features at spas these days, and though I've yet to come across one, I'm going to start asking around. Who knows what else I might wind up writing?Sam Snoek-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12072291977553439029noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3232873851526446237.post-61280491568674486072009-12-14T22:24:00.001+04:002010-01-19T16:27:33.834+04:00And now, a word from our sponsor: Some of Jennifer's thoughts on ViennaThe list from the listmaker. I love making lists, yes, but I don’t feel the pressure Sam feels of having “the” list. Maybe that’s why I like Family Feud so much – it’s all about the list that’s true in the moment. So looking back on our Vienna trip, what are the things/events/activities that stand out in my mind right now?<br><br />
<ul><li>Coming across the painter painting a copy of a painting of a painter painting in the Kunsthistoriches. We had been dutifully looking at the history of European art and winding our way to the center (in my mind at least) of the collection, the lone Vermeer. Vermeer has been my favorite artist for as long as I can remember, and I love, absolutely love, that I got to see that particular painting, Allegory on the Art of Painting, as the center of a kind of real-world, ironic tableau. </li>
<li>The pastries. Sam loves his coffee – and I did like the Viennese specialty, the mélange – but for me, it’s all about the pastries. The apfelstrudel (with real cream!), the sachertorte, the doughy, chocolate-filled dumplings covered in powdered sugar and strawberry sauce. And best of all, the total unapologetic, unabashed attitude toward pastry – why would you deny yourself something sweet?</li>
<li>Our spur-of-the-moment decision to have dinner one night by picking out some delectable goodies in the Christmas Market in the Maria-Theresia square. Spicy and seasoned potato wedges, complete with its own tiny fork; the above-mentioned chocolate-filled dumplings; a cup of glühwein. Bliss.</li>
<li>The transportation. Absolutely the best transportation system in the world. And it all has to do with the attitude of Austrians, I think. Why wouldn’t you have a reliable, cost-efficient, and on-time system of buses, trams, trains, subways, and airplanes? It just makes sense. And it does, and it works, beautifully.</li>
<li>The library at the Benedictine monastery and abbey in Melk. I try to make it to at least one library in the different places we visit – so I was really thrilled to visit one of the most beautiful libraries in the world. It was odd, though, to see all these incredibly old volumes all encased in matching 18th century gold-leather bindings, and all stacked up by height on these carefully managed shelves. A part of me loves that – order reigning supreme – but another part chafes at the thought of destroying all those individual covers and bindings and mashing them into this homogenous, monochromatic front. And most librarians usually dislike being asked questions like, “Where’s that blue book?” so organizing by something so arbitrary as height – rather than by author or by subject – just doesn’t feel natural to me at all now. But then, I’m probably overthinking it. It’s a beautiful library – and it feels like a library in a monastery should, with hidden hinges (bookcases that hide windows behind, so from the outside, the library matches the grand ballroom design!) and row upon row of books and a spiral staircase leading to unseen extra rooms (12 in total).</li>
<li>Being mistaken for natives – by natives AND by tourists! </li>
<li>The gorgeous coats and boots. The first day, I didn’t see any other footwear other than flat-heeled boots. And the women – from teens to elderly ladies – are so chic. I remember on one subway ride, I couldn’t take my eyes off this older woman, with her white hair artfully arranged – she had on knit gloves that had stripes of different shades of purple; a purple knit hat, kind of like a loose beret; a dark purple wool coat; grey slacks and suede boots; and a lavender scarf. Fabulous! </li>
<li>Discovering Schiele and his version of Cubism. I’ve never really gotten into the Cubism art movement, but I love how Schiele kept on experimenting and made a kind of internal cubism – his shapes of humans and buildings and trees were recognizable as what they were, but they were made up of different shades and colors that echoes the Cubism movement. Fascinating. And he painted some memorable trees. I love trees and almost always tend to include them whenever I get hold of the camera (whenever Sam relinquishes the camera strap!). </li>
<li>Watching Sam light up with joy when he discovers something he likes – which are almost never the things that I expect or particularly like myself sometimes. This is an everyday occurrence, really, but it’s especially fun while travelling. Example: Sam taking tons of pictures of the black bears (!) while on the trail bridge at the Schönbrunn Zoo. </li>
<li>The total ease of an old European city. Go down a side street, filled with charming cobblestones, and you come across a lovely, tiny park in the middle. You spy a lovely, centuries-old building, with a modern glass bit perching on top. You visit a tiny sliver of a museum – in this case, the Römaner Roman ruins museum – that has done the best it can with a very limited space (really, about 12 feet wide, 3 stories tall) and presented artifacts in a modern, engaging way with kids’ activities and a walk-through basement of Roman ruins. Really fascinating to see how modern Viennese lifestyle fits so snugly around its history. It’s quite inspiring to see and feel the atmosphere and energy of a city that’s proud of its heritage, and proud of where it’s going. Viva Vienna!</li>
</ul>Sam Snoek-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12072291977553439029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3232873851526446237.post-72457401385426131112009-12-13T22:55:00.003+04:002010-01-19T16:27:33.835+04:00Vienna: final thoughts (almost)<strong>Day 7 and final thoughts:</strong><br />
<br />
We woke early our last day in order to enjoy a full breakfast and take our leisurely time getting out to the airport. On our way into the city, aboard Vienna’s CAT train, we’d flopped wearily into the nearest seat and leaned against the windows to watch the countryside flash by, and so we missed out on the views from the upper deck of the train. Heading out to the airport on our last day, we made sure to climb the narrow stairs to the upper floor, where we enjoyed fleeting streaks of little Viennese suburbs, the pitched roofs and yellow-painted walls flying by but somehow noticeably serene. <br />
<br />
The flights home were trying, especially for Jennifer, who has a knack for accidentally winding up in conversations with the people next to her. It helped that both ladies Jennifer talked with on our two flights back were terrifically pleasant, and Jennifer had good conversations the whole way back, but it also meant she never got to sleep on the planes. Consequently, we both were tired—and Jennifer doubly so—when we finally waddled through our front door at 12:30 in the morning, and we didn’t bother unpacking at all. Instead, we grabbed the cats for some fur therapy and then promptly fell asleep.<br />
<br />
Jennifer is a dedicated list-maker. It’s part of her job, of course, to be organized, but she’s so good at her job because she’s naturally organized anyway. So it’s never any surprise to me when at the end of a day on vacation she’ll ask, “What were your top five favorite things about today?” Our first full day back, as we unpacked and sorted through our souvenirs, she upped the ante: “What were your top ten favorite things about our trip?” I’ve enjoyed these sorts of lists myself ever since reading Nick Hornby’s <i>High Fidelity</i>, which is chock full of Top Fives, though I admit I often hesitate to call my lists “top” anything, lest I inadvertently leave something out or shunt something into a lower order of memory where it doesn’t necessarily belong. (Unlike Jennifer, I’m a chronically disorganized person and fear lists because I’m certain to leave something out or put something in the wrong order or include something absurd, and I’m constantly second-guessing myself.) Still, it’s a fun game to play, and it frequently serves us well as a way to concretely root certain parts of our trips to memory. Favorite moment during our two trips out to Dyersville to the <em>Field of Dreams</em> farm: Literally disappearing within three steps of entering the corn field (that’s no movie magic—you really do just vanish). Favorite historical site in Scotland: The hill fortress atop Dunnydeer where Jennifer and I ate a secluded picnic lunch amid the brisk winds and the tumbling castle walls.<br />
<br />
Favorite moments in Vienna?<br />
<br />
Walking pretty much anywhere. It’s a beautiful city, and the tightly compact Innere Stadt is perfect for leisurely strolls day or night. Popping down a narrow cobblestone street and emerging into a hillside clad in stone stairs leading to a looming Renaissance church is a treat on any occasion, but it was the normal state of affairs pretty much anywhere we walked in Vienna as well as the few old towns and villages we visited along the Danube valley, which meant nearly every walk was beautiful.<br />
<br />
The Friedhof der Namenlosen. Actually, bizarre and morbid though it sometimes was, I enjoyed the Viennese fascination with death and their elaborate efforts to celebrate it in their cemeteries and churches, but the Friedhof der Namenlosen was a deeply reverential experience for us both. Here were the graves of people no one knew, people who’d washed up anonymously on the industrial shores of the Danube Canal with no one to vouch for them or pay for their burial, yet the Viennese saw fit to cultivate a beautiful and solemn little cemetery to allow these poor lost souls some rest, and even today, some seventy years after the most recent burial there, people continue caring for the cemetery. Every year a group even comes out to hold a candlelight vigil and float a huge raft of flowers out into the Danube as a memorial to the nameless folk buried there. It’s a beautiful thing.<br />
<br />
The coffee. To be honest, I think the coffee here in the Middle East is better—stronger and more flavorful—but what I loved about Viennese coffee was its abundance. I’ve been a fan of coffeehouse culture ever since discovering it in college—I love the intellectualism, the artistic and cultural vibrancy, and the democratic blending of social strata that have long been the hallmark of the traditional coffeehouse experience—and Vienna literally invented the coffeehouse. When we sat down in the Café Benno on our last evening in Vienna, after spending several minutes browsing the Kaffeemuseum inside, it felt almost like a homecoming or a kind of pilgrimage.<br />
<br />
The museums—all of them. At the end of our trip Jennifer and I agreed that the Belvedere was probably the best museum we’d visited, and indeed it was the brightest, best designed, and most visitor-friendly museum (in one room they invited visitors to scream as loudly as they could just to hear the echoes off the high vaulted ceiling), and it contained some of the most impressive and unique art we’d seen. But then I remember that we’d said the same thing about the Leopold when we first emerged from it, and though the Kunsthistoriches Museum was dark and oddly arranged and I’d been disappointed in the coin collection there, it held some phenomenal pieces of art, including the most singularly thrilling art experience of the whole trip: seeing Vermeer’s “Allegory on the Art of Painting” and watching a painter practice a copy of it, as though the allegory had come to life. Every museum we entered was more impressive than the last, it seemed—and even if I only count the major museums, we still barely managed a quarter of what Vienna has to offer, and that's not even accounting for the dozens upon dozens of smaller, specialized museums in the city.<br />
<br />
Talking with Jennifer. This doesn’t seem fair, really, to include in a list of favorite memories on vacation, since we talk to each other all the time anyway, but travelling does something for Jennifer and me. We’ve always been able to talk about anything at any time and still, after almost thirteen years together, we find ourselves amusing and intellectually stimulating. But on vacation we <em>really</em> get rolling, having long intellectual conversations over breakfast or cracking each other up on subway trains. Talking to my wife is one of my favorite things about being married to her, but it’s also always one of the highlights of our vacations.<br />
<br />
And so it seems only appropriate that tomorrow, my wife will join the conversation and offer her own final thoughts (in list form, of course!).<br />
<br />
Until then....Sam Snoek-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12072291977553439029noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3232873851526446237.post-76076023181038742292009-12-12T22:54:00.000+04:002010-01-19T16:27:33.836+04:00Vienna: Day 6<b>Day 6<br />
<br />
Thursday, December 3, 2009</b><br />
<br />
We have had as solid a last day as I could have hoped for, made all the better for its spontaneity—while we knew the handful of things we wanted to fit in today, we weren’t sure we’d get around to them all or in what order we’d do them, but in the end we managed everything we’d planned as well as an impromptu trip, and we picked up a few last-minute souvenirs. Then, to crown our day and our vacation, we went to a recommended vegetarian restaurant down near the Schönbrunn and not only had a good meal in a delightfully atmospheric restaurant but also got to experience Viennese long-form dining at its fullest, spending (not entirely willingly) a full three and a half hours at dinner.<br />
<br />
Which put us back at our hotel late, meaning we started packing late, meaning I have precious little time left for this entry and will have to revisit the last few days in a final mammoth entry later. But such is the nature of vacation—sometimes this sort of leisure writing makes way for other forms of leisure, and especially in my case I usually wind up tidying up the recounting in the days following vacation, which has actually served me well over the years, because it gives me a chance to relive our adventures and solidify my memories.<br />
<br />
But the memories would be far less worth having if they didn’t include Jennifer, so I think I’ll set this aside for now and join my wife for our last hours in Vienna, because that’s really the point in all these travels anyway—to have our adventures together.<br />
<br />
<br />
2:40 am<br />
<br />
<hr /><br />
<br />
<b>Day 6 follow-up:</b><br />
<br />
Jennifer and I had been wanting to drop by the Hundertwasserhaus since our friend Steve Bowman recommended everything Hundertwasser-related, but I’d been waiting for a bright sunny morning to see the multicolored building at its best. On the other hand, we’d come to Vienna for some much-needed cold fall weather, and while the first few days were cool but sunny, the latter half of our vacation was exactly what we’d hoped for: overcast, windy, and quite chilly. Which meant that when our final day in Vienna dawned gray and cold, we shrugged and decided to head out to the Hundertwasserhaus anyway, because it was now or never, and we definitely didn’t want to miss this childish delight.<br />
<br />
From what I’d read of Hundertwasser, the guy seems rebelliously whimsical, bored as he was with the austere blocks of concrete that seemed to dominate Austrian architecture during the first half of the 20th century. His reaction is almost excessively in the other direction—he refused to draw straight lines, splashed every surface he could find with all manner of incongruous colors, and seemed to revel in mixing artistic style almost at random. He’s like a child who all his life have been using eight crayons to bubble in the little black outlines of a coloring book and suddenly, for Christmas, receives a pad of blank white paper and the big box of 128 Crayolas and a pack of glue sticks and glitter and told, “Have fun, kid!” The result is a delight, as much fun to behold as it must have been to create, and Jennifer and I had a lot of fun just walking around the building. But our favorite find—Jennifer’s discovery, actually—was not officially connected to the building at all. Across the street, as a diversion for overly curious tourists (the Hundertwasserhaus is still a private apartment complex, and the residents get a little weary of people like us poking around their homes), Hundertwasser’s admirers have set up a kitschy little souvenir boutique, and outside, on an arrow pointing into the shop, Jennifer found a sign reading “Toilet of Modern Art.” It seemed somehow simultaneously a legitimate directional sign and a comment on the effusive art-related souvenirs found within (or even on the art itself).<br />
<br />
Our last day seemed a day for catching up on things we didn’t want to miss, because after Hundertwasserhaus, we hopped on a series of trams and worked our way over to the Upper Belvedere. We weren’t sure we’d get over to it this trip. But on our tour of the Danube valley our fellow travelers raved about the art collection there so enthusiastically that we decided we had to fit it in. Besides, as impressed as we were with the Klimts on display at the Leopold, we knew the grand prizes were at the Belvedere: Klimt’s “The Kiss” and “Judith I.” Plus, Jennifer had fallen in love with Schiele’s art, and the Belvedere boasted a healthy collection of some of Schiele’s best as well.<br />
<br />
Klimt’s work was indeed phenomenal to behold in person. I have always loved “The Kiss,” though of course I’d only ever seen it in art books and poster shops and on postcards. Seeing it in person illuminates the true depth of the painting, the most intriguing aspect of which is the way it plays with light. I had always assumed that Klimt’s highly detailed figures wrapped in very flat, stylized cloaks and clothing was a means both of trapping the figures in two-dimensional space and of showing off the human form, alive against that flat, dead surrounding. And indeed from one angle this is precisely how it looks, and the effect in person is even more striking, because you can see the fine brushstrokes and textures in the figures. (The Belvedere also displays some of Klimt’s unfinished works, which reveal that he liked to paint his human being fully and in great detail before swathing them in flat clothes, as though in process he wanted to acknowledge the living person underneath the painted clothes.) But then you move to the other side and catch the painting in the light, and something interesting happens: The muted gray and pink fleshtones of the human form recede to the background as the gold and silver paints of the clothing catch the light and flare up in almost religious illumination. The paintings wind up looking like the negatives of themselves, the colors and their effects transverse to produce an opposite painting every bit as powerful as the original. For an artist who was so fond of playing with dimension and perspective, and who was so technically proficient, this cannot be just an accidental trick of the light, and it was wonderful to discover.<br />
<br />
After a light (and somewhat disappointing) snack at the Belvedere’s café, we headed back into the Innere Stadt to try for the Stephansdom catacombs we’d missed a few days earlier. I was a bit disappointed that I wasn’t allowed to take photos in the catacombs, and our guide seemed almost bored with his own tour, but the catacombs were precisely what I’d hoped to see. They aren’t as extensive or, indeed, as grisly as the vast catacombs under other European cities, but they were somber and cold and rife (literally) with the history they represented, particularly in the mass plague graves where the stale odor of rot lingers like wet leaves in the shallow-roofed corridors, the blackened shreds of ancient clothing like burned paper still visible among the disheveled piles of ribs, thigh bones and skulls. When we emerged out a back stairs into the gray daylit square of the Stephansplatz, we all were a bit relieved to be among the living (and, smartly, the tour waits to charge your fee at the back door, jokingly threatening not to let you out until you pay!). <br />
<br />
To celebrate and, as I’d wanted to do our first trip to the Stephansdom, to complement our subterranean tour with an elevated view of the city, we headed north across the Danube canal to the Prater, the giant park filled half with deep wild forest and half with a glittering old amusement park. It was once the private hunting grounds for the Imperial family, but in the 18th century the Emperor gifted it to the city as public grounds and it quickly became the most popular spot in Vienna, great for family picnics, casual hikes, and—very soon after it become public—a fun fair full of old-fashioned games and rides. It remains so today, and while it was sparsely populated on the chilly autumn afternoon when we went, it was still a fun place to be. We’d come, of course, to ride the giant Reisenrad, the Ferris wheel made famous in movies like <i>The Third Man</i> and our beloved <i>Before Sunrise</i>. We hopped aboard and road our circuit more or less quietly, observing the city as though in farewell, and when we descended from our red railroad-like boxcar, we were ready for a quiet coffee in a traditional Viennese coffeehouse to wrap up our afternoon. <br />
<br />
Jennifer had the terrific idea to head out to the Café Benno, where there is a small but recommended Kaffeemuseum. I’d read about it in one of our tour guides but wasn’t sure we’d be able to fit it in, but now, in search of coffee and wanted to get in the best of Vienna before we left, Jennifer insisted it’d be worth the trip out of the city center to find it, and indeed she was right. The now-traditional Viennese coffeehouse is a modern but charming hybrid of traditional coffee shop and hip bohemian pub, and the Café Benno seems the perfect embodiment of that ideal. The wood-paneled walls are covered in quirky, coffee-related décor like antique signage and various coffee-making apparatus as well as loads of pop art and posters. Best of all, they serve a special version of the Viennese café mélange (a small coffee something like a mix between a cappuccino and a latte, but in a double-espresso-sized cup); the Benno mélange comes topped with cinnamon smiley face!<br />
<br />
The big treat for me, of course, was the Kaffeemuseum, really just a broom closet stuffed with display cases, but the displays were excellent and included coffee urns and pots from all over the world (including Persia, Turkey, and Morocco), every variety of bean grinder ever invented, and several bizarre and ingenious brewers, some with multiple hoses and gears that looked something like alien torture devices or machines for milking cows. There were also displays of coffee bean varieties, coffee containers, and coffee cups, and a few very cool displays on early coffeehouse culture and the near-vitriolic outcry against the evils of coffee (and the equally vehement supporting ads and editorials promoting coffee and coffee culture!). I loved every inch of that tiny “museum”!<br />
<br />
After coffee we headed back to the hotel to change for dinner, which we’d arranged to eat at the hip and highly recommended Hollerei Vegetarian Restaurant (where we also had a discount thanks to our Wienkart, a special promotional card for visitors to Vienna). We’d been hearing, too, about the leisurely dining in Vienna, how you can—and should—spend hours in any Viennese café or restaurant and shouldn’t expect anything approaching “fast” service from a Viennese server. So far we’d avoided that cliché, partly by asking for our bill early in the meal, but on this night we wound up in a restaurant slammed with two large parties and only two servers on staff, one who was learning the ropes her first day on the job and the other who was training her. So we spent a full three and a half leisurely hours nibbling, chatting, and waiting around, and it was very, very late by the time we got back to the hotel.<br />
<br />
We packed, we searched the room for any sundries we might have left lying in the closet or behind the desk, we set our alarms, and we collapsed. We’d done our share of walking through Vienna and beyond, and the day ahead was all sitting—on a subway, on a train, in an airport, on a plane….. Still, reluctant though we were to leave this beautiful city, we knew we’d nearly exhausted it and ourselves, and would leave the next morning satisfied that we’d done all the Vienna a person can manage in a week. It was a stupendous little holiday and we can already add Vienna to our list of favorite cities in the world.<br />
<br />
Saturday, December 12, 2009<br />
<br />
<br />
10:47 p.m.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
(Tomorrow: Final thoughts and things I missed!)Sam Snoek-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12072291977553439029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3232873851526446237.post-40032008207825690252009-12-12T00:01:00.000+04:002010-01-19T16:27:33.837+04:00Vienna: Day 5<b>Day 5<br />
<br />
Wednesday, December 2, 2009</b><br />
<br />
<br />
I’m not sure how to briefly write about today, and it will have to be brief because it’s very late and tomorrow is our last day. In some respects, today actually felt like two days, one a trip down the Danube to tiny medieval villages and a vast Baroque abbey, and the other a long evening stroll through the Christmas market and a delightful carriage ride through the city center. In one of the todays, we endured a trio of obnoxious tourists, and in the other today we endured a viciously unpleasant film; but in one of our todays we followed a goofy and pleasant tour guide through quaint little hillside villages and another mousy but delightful guide through a sprawling monastic complex, and in the other we savored an impromptu treat of hot potato wedges, fresh donut-like desserts and hot glühwien before riding through ancient narrow streets on a horse-drawn carriage piloted by the most charming and adorably stereotypical little mustachioed Austrian driver.<br />
<br />
But sleep and who knows how many tomorrows are calling to me now, and this, my shortest entry, will have to wait till another day for the fuller details.<br />
<br />
1:14 am<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<hr /><br />
<b>Day 5 follow-up:</b><br />
<br />
As our trip has sifted through the mental filters, I’d have expected the details to intermingle, like two colors of sand sieved into the same bowl, but indeed the separate days I first described have stayed that way, and the largest part of our Wednesday—our tour of the Wachau region in the Danube valley—has far outweighed the brief evening that followed it.<br />
<br />
We woke that morning supremely sore first from our long hike out to the Friedhof der Namenlosen then our drizzly tour through the Schönbrunn zoo, and we were glad this day to be spending most of our tour on a bus. After meeting our guide (a chipper, funny man with limp disheveled curls who, Jennifer said, looked like an Austrian Michael Palin), we settled into our bus seats and gazed out the huge windows as the city slipped past and we ascended into the foothills. As we crossed the Danube for the first time, the tour guide began humming the Blue Danube Waltz into the buzzing microphone and then explained how lucky we were to see the Danube blue, as it reportedly only appears to people in love. Jennifer and I wanted to take credit for the color of the river, but in fact there was also a delightful older Scottish couple who seemed very much in love and, just across from us for most of the bus ride, a young honeymooning couple, so Jennifer and I had some help turning the Danube blue.<br />
<br />
Along the way we marveled at little villages tucked away in the hillsides and towering church steeples reflected in the waters, and all Jennifer and I gasped when we came into sight of the Dürnstein Castle, a ruined medieval fortress where Leopold V, Duke of Austria, briefly held captive Richard the Lionheart, King of England. In the late winter of 1192, Richard was on his way home from the Crusades, where he’d offended the Duke by denying him credit in sacking a city, and as he passed through the Austrian Empire the Duke saw an opportunity and had the King kidnapped and held for ransom. Of course, kidnapping a crusader was against Church law at the time, and it got Leopold V excommunicated. Our tour guide apologized on behalf of the Austrians and claimed they were still ashamed of the episode, but then he delightedly explained that Leopold used his share of the English ransom money to build a new city, Wiener Neustadt, which—our guide declared—was intended to benefit future tourists to Austria.<br />
<br />
About halfway through our drive we stopped in a little town called Krems, or, more fully, Krems an der Donau. The town today is actually a melding of three medieval villages, Krems, Und, and Stein, and for some reason the old gates leading into the once-separate walled cities are named backward: when we alit from the bus for a short walking tour and shopping trip (on which I bought a fantastic tweed hat), we walked into the dolled-up downtown Krems through the Steiner Tor, while the matching gate leading into Stein is called Kremsor Tor. Whatever the reasons behind the gate names, the towns are today, as far as I could tell, indistinguishable, and the little cobblestone shopping lane through downtown Krems was window-dressed and sugarcoated but charming nonetheless, mostly because no matter what they did to try and evoke a romanticized Renaissance atmosphere, the streets were undeniably medieval in their narrowness and the winding, organic way they lay against the hillside.<br />
<br />
The same was true of Emmersdorf an der Donau, where we had lunch at a little hotel restaurant called Zum schwarzen Bären (The Black Bear), as well as the tiny village of Melk, our final destination for the day. Melk, actually, was a kind of detour: our true destination was the Melk Stift, a huge Benedictine abbey settled inside a medieval fortress that in early 18th century had been renovated with much elaborate glitz and pomp in the Baroque style, but we’d arrived early for our scheduled tour and our guide led us down steep stone stairs into the narrow Melk.<br />
<br />
But charming as these little towns and villages were, the crowning jewel was definitely the abbey, a huge complex that despite its Baroque extravagance retains its monastic solemnity. Sure, the ceilings were richly painted in wild and sometimes surprising frescos, and yes, the columns and friezes and altars were literally dripping in gold, and okay, the museum section of the abbey was jarringly modern. But the atmosphere was restrained, and frankly, the ceilings were beautiful, the gold-drenched the architecture and furniture were so dimly lit that they offered a kind of quiet warmth, and the museum was so intriguingly designed along a kind of metaphorical narrative that I felt pulled through it. The Stiftkirche, the huge cathedral at the rear of the complex, was especially beautiful, particularly seen from the long curving terrace across the back edge of the complex, which also overlooked Melk and the Danube valley in a stunning panorama.<br />
<br />
But for Jennifer and me both, the highlight was the library, a tall multiroom wing of the abbey stacked with stuffed bookcases rising at least fourteen feet and displaying only a fraction of the library’s thousands and thousands of volumes. For Jennifer, the library held the same personal attraction of all libraries, since she is herself a librarian. I confess that I, too, was thrilled at the library, partly because I’ve always viewed libraries as sanctuaries of learning, and being in an ecclesiastical library that was literary in a sanctuary was a secret treat for me. But more importantly, I was surprised to learn that the abbey’s library had long been devoted to combining religion and science, first as a repository for astronomical tomes (the main reading room included a large telescope) and most recently as host to a series of conferences on religion and science. Each of the delegates attending the annual conference contributed an essay recording their musings and conclusions, which was then sealed in a metal scroll-tube and installed in a large figure-eight sculpture representing eternity; among the scrolls in the library was a contribution by former conference attendee the Dalai Lama (whose scroll is labeled simply “Tenzin Gyatso,” omitting his title).<br />
<br />
Descending from the library, we made our way into the Stiftkirche and marveled at the huge, gilded interior and bizarre side altars. The latter held particular interest for me, especially the twin altars dedicated to St. John the Baptist and St. Michael, each of which included a full—and very real—human skeleton of some anonymous martyr dressed in Baroque-era finery and reclining inside a glass display case. But the personal thrill was learning that the first side altar on the left, as you enter the church, was dedicated to St. Nicolas, a personal favorite of mine since I first saw his holy relics (a jaw bone, some fingers and a rib, as I recall) in a museum near his home city of Mira, Turkey. And, of course, we’d come to Vienna in part looking for a little Christmas spirit, as we were at the time only a few days away from St. Nicolas’s saint day of December 6, so it was a fortuitous find.<br />
<br />
We napped in the early dark on the bus ride back to Vienna, but back in the city center, we decided we were in the Christmas spirit and headed out for a stroll through some of the Innere Stadt’s several Christmas markets, including the small affairs at Freyung and Am Hof, and then headed to the Stephansplatz to pick up a fiaker, one of the city’s traditional horse-drawn carriages. These rides exist in every major city in the world, I think—I remember seeing them running the circuit through downtown San Antonio, and we even have a few trotting around the Marina Mall here in Abu Dhabi—so we knew they might seem an absurdly touristy thing to do. But the fiakers in Vienna were in fact once the city’s official taxi service, and touristy though they might have become, they do have a legitimate history and purpose in the city, and when we met our fiaker driver, we knew we had to hop aboard. Our driver was a short, round gentleman with superbly practiced manners—when Jennifer approached him and said good evening in German (<i>guten abend</i>), he actually gave a small bow. We discussed prices and then he helped us both into the half-covered carriage, handed Jennifer a faux-fur blanket, and we were off. Mostly it was just a clopping trot through the same narrow old streets Jennifer and I had walked already, but it was nice to ride in style, and our driver had excellent and easy control over the horses. When we rounded our last slow corner and rolled in to the Stephansplatz again, I helped Jennifer down and then took out the camera, and before I could even ask, our driver gestured toward his horses and said in his thick accent, “Picture?” I nodded and said “<i>Ja</i>,” and he proudly posed with his horses—then waved Jennifer over to join him! She leaned over him (Jennifer was at least a head taller) and took his politely offered elbow, and then he stepped forward and motioned that I should join Jennifer with the horses so he could take our picture! A truly delightful man and a wonderful way to end our evening.<br />
<br />
Friday, December 11, 2009<br />
<br />
11:47 p.m.Sam Snoek-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12072291977553439029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3232873851526446237.post-39787102429753795882009-12-10T12:57:00.000+04:002010-01-19T16:27:33.837+04:00Vienna: Day 4<b>Day 4<br />
<br />
Tuesday, December 1, 2009</b><br />
<br />
<br />
Tonight might be short because it’s nearly midnight already and we’ve had another exhaustive day of heavy walking and are looking forward to an early morning. Fortunately(?), full as our day was it contained relatively few individual activities—we stayed focused today.<br />
<br />
When we woke up we found it raining, and the temperature had descended with the rain, so we scrapped plans for an early-morning jaunt up to the Hundtertwasserhaus (we might try again another day) and headed straight for the subway. Our destination: Schloss Shönbrunn, the former summer palace of the Habsburgs. Today it’s a vast museum of the Empire, but Jennifer and I had elected to forego the palace itself and focus instead on the grounds, which include a large maze and a labyrinth, several flower gardens, a wooded area, walking paths, dozens and dozens of statues and several impressive fountains, and even fake Roman ruins added by one of the emperors to give the illusion of some connection between the Habsburgs and the Roman Empire. There’s also a sprawling and highly embellished triumphal arch call the Gloriette, but it closes for the winter. But our real destination was the Tiergarten, the zoo housed on the grounds of the Schönbrunn. It’s described as the oldest zoo in the world, having evolved from the private royal menagerie kept by Franz Stephan in the mid-18th century, and because of this description I’d half expected it to be a simple affair of a few dozen wild animals—a zebra, a few moneys, maybe a big cat—but when we arrived we found a vast and extremely well-designed zoo spread across a huge area, including a wooded hillside with a treetop catwalk overlooking timberwolves and owls. Among the pleasanter discoveries were a small red panda, a pair of snoozing koalas, a European lynx, and a small but well-executed rain forest. We missed the lions because their habitat was being cleaned (we think), and the tigers were restive and barely visible, but the elephants were active, we got very close to the giraffes, and we spent several minutes petting a housecat named Sergei, who lurked in the doorway of the monkey house and invited us inside (we think he belongs to one of the employees, which is how we learned his name).<br />
<br />
The monkey house, too, is worth mentioning, because despite the updates required of a modern zoo, the architecture remains the Baroque original and retains much of its old charm, as does the octagonal pavilion in which Franz Stephan and the royal family once ate their breakfasts among the animals—the enchanting building operates now as an excellent little café, but it has retained the ornamented wooden walls and the painted dome ceiling depicting Ovid’s <i>Metamorphoses</i>, all original to the pavilion.<br />
<br />
We had a delightful time, but the zoo required a LOT of walking—again—and so after a long, cold, wet adventure, we decided to pack it in and head back into the city, where we hoped to put in a little shopping before finding dinner and heading back to the hotel. However, on the way into the city, I talked Jennifer into visiting the genuine Roman ruins in the heart of the Innere Stadt, just north of the Stephansdom on Hoher Markt. There, excavations have uncovered the foundations of the ancient Roman fort of Vindobona, an important military outpost during the wars with the Germanic tribes and a common stop for Marcus Aurelius—according to some sources, he might even have died here. As a fan of Stoicism and a reader of Marcus Aurelius’s <i>Meditations</i>, I was thrilled to learn of the connection and was anxious to find the ruins. Today, not much exists in public view, but what archaeologists have unearthed is very well presented in a small but excellent museum built over the foundations of two soldiers’ homes. The basement level is particularly fascinating, as here they have not only preserved the foundations in such a way that you can walk through them, but they also display some of the inner workings of the home, including the ingenious underfloor heating system. Upstairs are displays and videos on everything from fortress construction and religious beliefs to funeral rites and Roman toilets, and there are several great interactive exhibits for kids (which I’m unashamed to count myself among, because I played with the toys, too!).<br />
<br />
Still, it had been a long day already and by the time we slipped south again to put in some shopping, we both were feeling more in the legs than we’d thought we would, so instead of an extensive shopping tour we decided to head back to the Spittelberg Christmas markets, where we sipped glühwien (mulled wine) as we browsed for Christmas gifts, and for our “dinner” we simply grabbed a handful of specialty cakes and pastries and ate a dinner of desert back in our hotel room.<br />
<br />
Jennifer and I enjoyed a healthy trip to the hotel’s sauna, watched a sad but terrific movie on BBC, and then Jennifer called her mother to wish her a happy birthday, and now we both are collapsing, so that’s it for tonight. Tomorrow, more adventure awaits.<br />
<br />
11:56 pmSam Snoek-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12072291977553439029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3232873851526446237.post-19270217100304537572009-12-10T00:09:00.002+04:002010-01-19T16:27:33.838+04:00Vienna: Day 3<strong>Day 3</strong><br />
<br />
<strong>Monday, November 30, 2009</strong><br />
<br />
<br />
Today has felt longer than it has been, partly because despite all our hopping on and off trains and buses today, Jennifer and I have put in more than our share of kilometers on foot and partly because it has been a day of adventurous misdirection. <br />
<br />
We started off with a simple errand to the main post office to mail some letters, but when we exited the U-bahn, we accidentally headed the opposite direction we meant to and wound up circumnavigating several blocks, working our way around the commanding, militaristic Kriegsministerium, a government building guarded by a pair of grim soldiers and a huge mounted counter-revolutionary, with a gigantic double-headed eagle swooping over the rooftop. We ducked down several side streets and past the prettyish Dominikanerkirche before finally discovering the backside of the post office, a block-wide building we then had to find the front of. When we finally left the post office we slipped into a covered corridor looking for an alternative route back and discovered—to our bemusement—the very subway station we’d first exited.<br />
<br />
<div>Our errand finished, we headed along the U3 east toward the edge of the city, where we hoped to catch a bus out to the terminus of the Danube Canal and the little industrial inlet called the Alberner Hafen. We knew from write-ups and from <em>Before Sunrise </em>that at the edge of the Alberner Hafen, at the end of a lane and down into a small copse of trees, we would find the melancholy but beautiful <a href="http://www.friedhof-der-namenlosen.at/">Friedhof der Namenlosen</a>—the Cemetery of the Nameless. (I’ve come to prefer the German name for the little cemetery because it’s so much more descriptive: literally translated, it comes out as something like “Peace-yard of the Ones Who’ve Lost Their Names.”)<br />
</div><br />
Along our route, we learned several things: <br />
<ol><li>We did not need to go to the end of the U3 line and walk up to the bus stop—the next-to-last stop was directly opposite the bus route we needed. </li><br>
<li>Though the bus route we took did indeed go all the way to the Alberner Hafen, it did not go there consistently, nor did it travel its route all at once. Instead, it stopped halfway, where we alit and waited ten minutes for a change of drivers and a new destination printed on the bus’s sign, then went most of the way toward Alberner Hafen; however, we were riding the wrong bus, or on the wrong day, or in the wrong direction…. Whatever the reason, our bus only took us within “walking distance” of the Alberner Hafen. We discovered this, thankfully, with the help of an extremely kind Austrian woman riding the bus with us and who lived in the neighborhood where we got off. Which reminds me: </li><br>
<li>We didn’t need to be fluent in German to understand the language—this woman rattled off extremely complex directions as though we were native speakers, yet through her generosity of spirit and a little sheer determination she miraculously helped us understand that our intended route would mean extra walking, that the neighborhood had a secret short-cut through a field and up to a road-side bicycle path which should only take ten minutes to walk, and that our destination was in the vicinity of a group of tall industrial buildings which we could use as landmarks along the way. All of this was exclusively in German, with only a bit of pantomime to help us along, but we managed to understand it all. The only thing we knew to say in reply was “Dankeshün,” but she seemed to understand that she’d helped us—and indeed she had, tremendously!</li>
</ol><br />
And so we hiked out, along a paved path raised up from the roadside for several minutes, across a road, and down an interminable grassy lane between a woodchip mill and what looked like some kind of refinery, wondering if our friendly Austrian woman had led us astray, when finally, peaking through the trees and well off the beaten path (literally), we spied the small chapel that accompanies the little Friedhof.<br />
<br />
Which is how we learned #4:<br />
<ol start="4"><li><em>Before Sunrise </em>is tricky and ingeniously misleading in its choice of camera angles, because in the film we get the impression that in just a half hour or so Jesse and Celine drift over to the cemetery from town, approaching it from the road and descending the little stairs hugging the chapel. In reality, it takes something in the area of ninety minutes to get out there (if you know where you’re going), and there is no approach from beyond the stairs—the only way there, from the direction Jesse and Celine would have traveled, was along a rutted country lane between two factories, through a gated ditch, and across the delivery drive of a working refinery. Such is the nature of film, I suppose.</li>
</ol><br />
<div>Once inside, though, the cemetery does become eerily quiet. It sits in a shallow depression surrounded by trees, so it seems to block out all the racket of industry and rests in a timeless solitude, the chalk-drawn plaques of the “nameless” beneath the crucifix gravemarkers solemn but somehow inviting. We spent a good half hour in the cemetery, walking among the graves and noting the few names discovered, straightening fallen flower pots, and saying silent prayers. On one grave I found a decapitated teddy bear, the head rolled face-down nearby, and I replaced the head on its lonely body atop a grave. It was a deeply meditative moment for Jennifer and me both, and very much worth the long, confusing trek it took to find the place.<br />
</div><br />
<div>Almost two hours later we made it back into town and stopped in the heart of the Innere Stadt, at Stephansplatz. We grabbed a quick bite of cake and coffee at the Café Diglas then braced ourselves for the mammoth cathedral that is Stephansdom. I had two missions in mind for the day, the pair of them somehow symbolic: I wanted to climb the 343 steps of the south tower to view the city from above, and then descend into the cathedral’s catacombs to explore the subterranean tombs. Peak and nadir, bustling city and slumbering dead… The dichotomy appealed to me. But by the time we’d clambered nearly dizzy up the narrow spiral staircase and then down again—the whole way down dodging gangs of wild teenagers recently released from school—we were both so exhausted that the idea of the catacombs seemed overwhelming. Besides, when we’d first arrived I narrowly missed the scheduled tour (despite Jennifer’s reverently hushed calls that it was leaving without us) because I was busy setting up a photo of a floating crucified Christ, and when we finally got back down from the tower we narrowly missed the next tour. We decided we’d had our share of cemeteries for the day and opted out of waiting around for an hour to catch the next tour.<br />
</div><br />
<div>Instead, we hit the atmospheric but miniscule (there were only two and a half tables and three stools!) American Bar just off the Stephansplatz for a quick cocktail and an inside peek at a building by Adolf Loos, one of Vienna’s most important architects. The room was almost smokily dim, with ochre-painted glass blocks covering all the lights and the few small chandeliers fitted with what looked like 10-watt bulbs, but instead of feeling claustrophobic, it felt cozy, like the downstairs den of someone’s home. <br />
</div><br />
<div>After the American Bar, we drifted down the Kärtnerstrasse to the Franziskanerplatz, where in <i>Before Sunrise</i> Celine and Jesse enjoy a coffee from the tiny Kleines Café and get their fortunes told by a gypsy. No gypsy for us, and with the cool evening of autumn, the café was a strictly indoors affair, and it was barely larger than the American Bar and twice as crowded, so we contented ourselves with the ambiance and with studying the looming statue of Moses.<br />
</div><br />
<div>Tired as we were, we decided to ride the U-bahn across the Innere Stadt to check out the Sigmund Freud Park and the beautiful twin-spired Votivkirche, which we’d been seeing and photographing from almost everywhere in town since we got here and which Jennifer has been especially keen to see. It’s under restoration and is closed on Mondays, so we didn’t get to go in, but we enjoyed the evening in the park and the beautiful lights on the façade. Still, by now our feet were aching and we needed to grab a dinner before we headed to a concert, so we trekked back to the hotel.<br />
</div><br />
<div>Our evening was unexpectedly capped by the invitation of a costumed music student hocking tickets outside the Stephansdom. As part of a practicum for his studies and as a fund-raiser for a local repertory of classical musicians, he was selling seats at an intimate “parlor concert” by the Vienna Residence Orchestra, a tiny troupe of classical musicians, opera singers and ballet dancers that perform in the historic Palais Auersperg, where the boy Mozart gave early performances for royalty. It was a short, simple affair clearly marketed toward tourists (the bulk of the audience arrived on two huge tour buses), but we enjoyed getting dressed up for an evening out, we knew we’d need to get to some music-related event sooner or later, and the setting was rather appealing—just a small gathering to hear a small group perform some simple, classic pieces by Mozart and Strauss. For the most part the performances were quite good—nothing stellar, but solid and proficient, with a rather dedicated solo violinist and a delightful soprano. The ballet dancers seemed superfluous, though, not because they lacked talent or technical merit but because their stage was so tiny they had little room to do anything but showy vertical jumps and poses. Jennifer did enjoy watching them attempt their maneuvers on the small stage, though, since with every jump or twirl the young man nearly slapped, kicked, or toppled into the solo violinist—she was delighted by the facial expressions of the violinist as he ducked or reeled away from the ballet while trying to maintain composure and his music; she affectionately called the whole scenario “cartoonish,” which is as apt as it gets, really. Still, the fact that the ballet dancers never did hit the musician seems a great compliment to their prowess in their art! So, in all it was an excellent evening out and precisely the thing we needed to unwind after a very, very long day.<br />
</div><br />
<div>12:12 am<br />
</div>Sam Snoek-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12072291977553439029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3232873851526446237.post-17581726461366744512009-12-09T00:23:00.003+04:002010-01-19T16:27:33.838+04:00Vienna: Day 2<strong>Day 2</strong><br />
<strong></strong><br />
<strong><br />
</strong><br />
<strong>Sunday, November 29, 2009</strong><br />
<br />
<br />
Jennifer figured out this evening that she’s been to the cinema in six different countries. She saw a film in San Miguel de Allende, in Mexico, while I was in Turkey, and I didn’t go to any theaters in Istanbul or Ankara or Izmir, so she’s one up on me. But her sixth and my fifth was <em>500 Days of Summer </em>at the Haydn Kino English Cinema here in Vienna. It was cleverly written and cleverly directed—I told Jennifer it flirted with the line into too clever, but I thought it maintained its integrity well. And it was an excellent cap to a surprisingly full day.<br />
<br />
We started with a filling and extensive buffet breakfast (at which they offer free champagne, though we skipped that indulgence this morning), then walked across the street to the MuseumsQuartier. We weren’t sure what we planned to see, though we knew we were interested in the Leopold Museum with its impressive collection of Klimt; the Leopold is also currently showing a loaner exhibit of Munch, which was an added and unexpected thrill. We both also discovered some new interests in art: Jennifer fell in love with the Secessionist painter and Klimt protégé Egon Scheile, including his quirky self-portraits and his moody, meandering autumn trees, while I found myself utterly sucked into the unnerving world of Alfred Kubin, whose nightmarish, fantastical drawings and sketches are like the inner ravings of some brilliant but tormented child. (We each bought a book of their work.) Seeing the Klimt, too, was an education, because while we both were familiar with his more inventive and more popular works (“The Kiss” is among our favorites, though it’s housed at the Belvedere in another part of the city), we discovered he was a brilliant technical painter in any form, and we saw some impressive landscapes and portraits, including a dark, emotional portrait of a blind man that actually moved me to tears. Another prize of the day was the Munch; the collection is thin, Munch being hard to come by, but we did see an extremely rare lithograph of “The Scream” as well as both the lithograph and the painted versions of “The Vampire,” a favorite of mine for almost twenty years now. To see it in person was perhaps the highlight of the visit, though I am still reeling over the discovery of Kubin—his artwork is fascinating enough, but he was also a writer; his novel <em>The Other Side </em>was a major influence on Kafka! <br />
<br />
After a light lunch in the pretty Café Milo outside the Architekturzentrum (The Architectural Center), we crossed the Ringstrasse to the Maria-Theresien-Platz. We spent a few minutes browsing the Christmas market there and gazing in awe at the huge Maria Theresia statue-complex (it is one monument, but it contains so many full-sized sculptures of ministers, musicians, and mounted equestrians, that it can really only be described as a conglomeration, with the regal Maria Theresia enthroned high above all her statuary-subjects). But our true purpose was to cross the platz there on our way to the Kunsthistoriches Museum, one of the world’s largest and finest classical art collections. So it is billed in all our guidebooks, and they don’t oversell it—the building itself is a work of art, and the collection is so vast and so exhaustive that we barely managed a third of it in our hours-long visit. <br />
<br />
On the ground floor we browsed a small but impressive Egyptian collection, including an array of splendid sarcophagi, and upstairs we drifted past the coin cabinets (for which I’d had high hopes, being an amateur numismatist myself, but most of the “coins” were more accurately commemorative medallions and cast portraits, though the handful of true coins I saw were extremely cool). On the main stairway we saw two terrific Klimt frescoes commissioned for the museum when it was built, as well as a massive marble statue of Theseus slaying a centaur. And in the main painting gallery, we saw an amazing array of Brueghels and Rembrants, some fantastic Van Eycks and a handful of truly awesome Rubens paintings, and some fascinating Velazquez portraits of Habsburg family members, including a series of one young princess painted at various ages, showing her maturity, and a hilariously unflattering portrait of a Habsburg Spanish cousin. But the genuine highlight of the museum—and, for Jennifer especially, of the whole day—was the one Vermeer in the collection. Vermeer has long been a favorite of ours, and he holds a special place in Jennifer’s heart particularly, so she was looking forward to seeing his “Allegory on the Art of Painting,” but when we entered its room, we found a painter set up with his easel and palette, practicing technique by copying the Vermeer! It became a living allegory, and I was quick to set up and snap several photographs. We now have photos of a painter painting a copy of a painting of a painter painting; the original is a whimsical and ironic study of the art of painting, the student-painter we saw became a literal study in the art of painting, and my photograph juxtaposed the two to further irony—it was all any of us could do (for by now a small crowd had gathered to watch) to keep from laughing out loud. And the painter, consummate artist that he was, painted on the while as though he were alone in the room with Vermeer himself, learning from the master.<br />
<br />
By the time we left (after a terrific coffee and sachertorte in the museum’s café), it was 4:40 and already deep into evening—the sun sets distressingly early here and continues to catch us off guard. We headed back to the hotel to unwind, and then out to our movie. We arrived at the theater a full forty-five minutes early, so we amused ourselves by wandering the shopping district in which the theater lies, including a pleasant jaunt down an interior lane of connected courtyards full of shops, cafes, pubs, and even a psychiatrist (the sign read “Psychoanalytische Praxis”). The streets were packed with pedestrians wrapping up their Sunday, and we enjoyed the life of a modern city, feeling very much at ease here. After the movie, though, we discovered something strange: The streets were almost entirely empty. The sidewalks were all but vacant and only a handful of cars drifted down the streets. I worried that the movie had gone on far longer than I’d thought and we’d wandered outside after midnight, but when I checked the time it was only 10:30. It was another reminder of how unique this city feels to us—we expected a large European city with bustling activity and rich arts and shopping districts, and so far we are supremely satisfied, but Vienna maintains its conservative roots and behaves very much like a small town, shutting down especially early on Sunday night. It’s an unexpected difference, but I think I’m liking it because in many ways it offers the best of everything I’d want in a city—huge civic resources for social and artistic services and a wide variety of shopping and culinary options, but without the crush and frenzy of a metropolis.<br />
<br />
Of course, it is still Sunday (or was—it’s now after midnight here), so I’m looking forward to seeing what a weekday brings to our Vienna experience….<br />
<br />
12:34 amSam Snoek-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12072291977553439029noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3232873851526446237.post-32534262390235624892009-12-07T14:25:00.006+04:002010-01-19T16:27:33.839+04:00Vienna: Intro and Day 1I like to keep a travel journal whenever I go anywhere far from home--it's a habit I was assigned on a college winter-term trip to Turkey eleven years ago, but one I've enjoyed keeping since then--and so I kept one last week while Jennifer and I jaunted around Vienna. But I've always viewed my travel journals as something of a hybrid between true, in-the-moment journaling and quieter, more reflective personal essays, so I decided not to post my entries during vacation. Besides, we were supposed to be getting away for some time together, just the two of us, and if I'd started posting daily updates then, I'd have felt beholden to a larger world, which sort of defeated the point of the vacation. So, here I am now, retroactively posting the entries I made each night. <br />
<br />
<br />
For fun, I've decided to post one entry each day, as though I were on vacation this week instead of last. Makes for easier and slightly more authentic reading, and gives me a chance to polish the entries as I go. I do believe in the honesty of a journal, though, so I promise not to revise my entries--I'm just editing them for typos and for clarity, so what you're about to read it true to the day I wrote it.<br />
<br />
I realize, by the way, that many of these comments have little to do with writing or teaching, so they seem out of place in a blog like this. But they're also a record of what a writer and a teacher does on vacation--I am obsessively academic about my vacations, meaning I spend most of my time before, during, and after my holiday reading, researching and writing about the place and the people and the experiences--so we'll call that my excuse to post these here. Just go with it, okay?<br />
<br />
________________________________________<br />
<br />
<strong>Day 1</strong><br />
<strong><br />
</strong><br />
<strong>Saturday, November 28, 2009</strong><br />
<br />
Jennifer and I are getting used to travelling, yet somehow we never seem to <em>feel</em> used to it. This is a mixed blessing, I think—we are generally familiar with airports regulations and know our way through security screenings and long lines and foul-smelling fellow passengers, but for some reason we’re still aghast when a passenger makes an ass of himself or an airline employee chooses to assert her bullyish authority simply for the sake of doing so; we know each other’s habits and routines yet can’t help but let our travel fatigue occasionally turn us into taciturn ogres (yep, that’s me); and for all our careful planning we wind up winging half our trip, yet for all our joy at exploring a city ad hoc, we usually wish we’d planned better. We’re full of contradictions, which is part of the fun, I think.<br />
<br />
Today we flew to Vienna, using the opportunity of a week-long holiday back home in the UAE to travel north and revisit some cool fall weather. We picked Vienna because…. Well, I’m not entirely sure why, and that’s part of what makes this trip unique. In the past we’ve always had specific reasons for visiting a place—Prince Edward Island for the LM Montgomery/<em>Anne of Green Gables</em> history, Scotland for my family, Chicago because it’s Chicago. We even drove from our previous home in southwest Wisconsin out to Dyersville, Iowa, just to visit the filming location of the farm in <em>Field of Dreams</em>—in fact, we went twice, and we loved it. But this time, we knew only that we wanted to head north, that we wanted fall and old-world European charm, and that we wanted a city for its size but not all the hassle and crowding of a major metropolis. We thought about a number of places we’ve casually mentioned over the years, including various parts of Italy as well as Amsterdam and Prague. And then there was Vienna which, I admit, we’d first added to the list primarily (and for us, not surprisingly) because we love the film <em>Before Sunrise</em>. But the more we looked at Vienna outside the context of the movie, the more we fell in love with its bizarre history, its compact pedestrian-friendly size, its culture and charm, and, most thrillingly, its joyous obsession with Christmas, which is manifest in the dozens of outdoor Christmas markets dotting the city. So Vienna it was, and here we are.<br />
<br />
Before we left Abu Dhabi, we rewatched <em>Before Sunrise </em>and Jennifer--the consummate librarian--found online a fun though abbreviated guide to some of the film’s featured locations. We bought a few guidebooks, started practicing a bit of German, and became enchanted by the strange and sometimes hilarious history of the Viennese, who seem somehow simultaneously extraordinarily blessed and doomed with bad luck, and whose morbid fascination with death has become so intertwined with the culture that one can hardly mention a major historical figure without also describing his untimely and sometimes bizarre demise or her lavishly elaborate funeral. Still, it was the film that first drew us to Vienna, so it seemed fitting when we arrived that we should visit one of the first featured locations, the Zollamtssteg Bridge over the River Wien, a walled channel containing the former tributary to the Danube. We’d spent an hour wandering the alley-sized streets of our little Renaissance neighborhood, which includes a charming if disorganized Christmas market scattered over several streets in the Spittelberg area, before settling into a terrific lunch of veggie pizza at a pleasant little Italian restaurant with a sweet and (for a Viennese) attentive waiter. Then, once we’d checked into our hotel, we set out for the bridge. The early sunset here surprised us (it was nearly dark at only 4:30 pm), so by the time we found our way to the bridge it was already twilight, and there was some repair construction going on on one side of the bridge, but the sight was still fantastic, perhaps more so under the amethyst dusk with the first of the city’s multitudinous Christmas lights winking on to reflect in the shallow runnel of the Wien’s canal.<br />
<br />
Afterward we rode the tram around the Ringstrasse to the Neues Rathaus, the towering Neo-Gothic city hall lit up against the night sky and overseeing a vast Christmas market that from the outside seemed magical, with its huge central Christmas tree and the platz’s many other trees bedecked in inventive light displays (including a tree full of illuminated Santa-angel-bears); we ventured into the market, however, to discover it a madhouse of swarming tourists and shoppers, people sipping hot cocoa or mulled wine literally shoulder-to-shoulder and rocking in a mass undulation, like an ocean, complete with a riptide of scurrying children tearing underfoot. We drifted out and walked back toward our hotel near the MuseumsQuartier, marveling at the looming statuary of the Parliament building and the squat façade of the Volkstheater. We were looking for a quiet café to enjoy a cup of famous Viennese coffee and a bit of torte or strudel, but strangely, we managed to wander down all the wrong streets and could find only hip, modernist bars or expensive restaurants. We finally ducked into what looked like a cozy corner spot with cakes in the window, but when we entered, the place hushed in surprise, and though we stuck it out through a cup of coffee, we quickly realized we’d wandered into a local café so quiet and so comfortable it was meant only for the neighborhood regulars, and we interlopers had just interrupted their routine evening. <br />
<br />
We finished what was actually good coffee and then, content to leave them their café, we headed back to the hotel and here I sit. It’s only 9:30 here, but my body tells me it’s after midnight and I, like Jennifer, am tired, so I’m off to join my wife and rest up for a new adventure tomorrow.<br />
<br />
9:39 pm Austrian timeSam Snoek-Brownhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12072291977553439029noreply@blogger.com0