Going to China!

Tomorrow morning I head to China for the ASIFA General Assembly. While there, we'll have the assembly and an in-person board meeting, and most of us will also give presentations to the Jilin Animation Institute. Mine will be on stop motion technologies here in Portland, with a focus on Laika's use of rapid prototyping technology in Coraline and Paranorman.
To be honest, I'm not sure what to expect, but it will be interesting, that's for sure. I'm looking forward to the trip.

I've been corresponding a bit with Malcolm Turner, of the Melbourne International Animation Festival. Apparently we've both been been asking for a while why there is so much great animation here in Portland, and the perennial answer ("because it rains so much") is highly unsatisfying. As Malcolm says, "it rains in lotsa places that produce truly dire animation".
I shared with him my pet theory, which goes a bit like this:
Basically I think that Portland has long been home to people who don't care much about conventional measures of success or status; people who are seeking wealth and fame tend to go somewhere else. Portlanders talk a lot about "quality of life", and "quality of life" seems to be code for "I don't want to work too much" - it goes with low cost of living, ease of access of public transportation, and a diversity of non-work activities. Because people don't work too much, they cultivate weird hobbies; unicycling and juggling and knitting and animation. Portlanders are expected to have side-projects; we welcome strange habits and (and this is important) are very tolerant of failure
So I think that atmosphere cultivates the culture that has become peculiarly "Portland" - we not only have an abundance of animation and film and music, but craft shows and pedicabs and artisinal beers and specialty foods and so forth. We aren't so supportive of the Arts-with-a-capital-A, but celebrate and support Crafts of all kinds, and our animators present themselves as craftspeople, as experimenters and tinkerers, as people in pursuit of the interesting.
He likes my theory, and maybe it will be more fleshed out and substantial in time for his Portland-specific feature in next years' festival.

Next week is the Best of the Northwest Animation Festival, but I won't be in town to catch it. If you are, it looks like a strong program.

And I'm working on bringing a program of the Polish School of Animation to Portland next year, partnering with the Northwest Film Center. It may be the US premiere of the program, which would be exciting.

I'm rereading if on a winter's night a traveler, by Calvino, and some Robert Frost poetry. Life is good.

Mahabharata

I meant to close the previous post with this quote from the Mahabharata, translated by William Buck:

Then the Universe is water; water
without end or beginning; without
Earth or sky; without space or light;
without sound or movement. Then
the dark waters lie still and silent
and waiting, touching nothing.
What shape shall I take to rescue
the Earth from this flood?

Mythical Man-Month

I just finished reading The Mythical Man-Month. It's interesting, because it was written in the late 60s, and is an analysis of managing large software projects at that time. The title intends to debunk the idea that if it takes one programmer 12 months to do something, it will take two programmers 6 months, and three programmers four months, etc. The man-month, Brooks admits, is still a convenient shorthand for estimating projects, but adding more staff to a project does not mathematically expedite production, and, Brooks argues, adding staff after the schedule has begun to slip will never bring it back the original schedule. The reason, as he demonstrates thoroughly, is that adding manpower adds additional avenues of communication, takes trained people off-task in order to bring new people up to speed, and, most damaging, often calls for re-allocating tasks within the team, which means everyone (new and existing staff) has to reorient themselves. The more often this happens, the greater the amount of work time is spent on non-productive internal communication, and no meaningful advances are made on the original project.

Some of my favorite quotes are:

First, our techniques of estimating are poorly developed. More seriously, they reflect an unvoiced assumption which is quite untrue, i.e., that all will go well. (Later, he defines "going well" as "each task will take only as long as it 'ought' to take.")
Second, our estimating techniques fallaciously confuse effort with progress, hiding our assumption that men and months are interchangeable.
...
Fifth, when schedule slippage is recognized, the natural (and traditional) response is to add manpower. Like dousing a fire with gasoline, this makes matters worse, much worse.

Observe that for the programmer, as for the chef, the urgency of the patron my govern the scheduled completion of the task, but it cannot govern the actual completion.

In most projects, the first system built is barely usable. It may be too slow, too big, awkward to use, or all three. There is no alternative but to start again, smarting but smarter, and build a redesigned version in which these problems are solved. The discard and redesign may be done in one lump, or it may be done piece-by-piece. But all large-system experience shows that it will be done. Where a new system concept or new technology is used, one has to build a system to throw away, for even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time.
The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. The only question is whether to plan in advance to build a throwaway, or to promise to deliver the throwaway to customers. Seen this way, the answer is much clearer. Delivering the throwaway to customers buys time, but it does so at the cost of agony for the user, distraction for the builders while they do the redesign, and a bad reputation for the product that the best redesign will find hard to live down.
Hence, plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.

I appreciate that so much of what he wrote about is still applicable today, for all kinds of project management, and his insights are valuable. He has some great thoughts about keeping teams productive and management style, and some recent analysis at the end revisiting (and confirming) the original premise of the book.

BeTween!

So, I've been meaning to blog about this for weeks, but I've been putting my efforts on the project into realizing it, rather than blogging about it. You may remember me making noise for months about an unconference for freelance animators, and finally, with the support of David Billings and Sam Niemann, it is actually going to happen.

Our website is coming together, and the event will be on May 1 at the Art Institute open space. I'm so so excited.

Even though it's an unconference, we'll have some "experts", who can speak to IP and copyright/fair use, taxes, health insurance, software... my hope is that people can get real information out of these sessions, rather than just trading stories and frustrations (although that's incredibly important too).

It's been such a pleasure working with David and Sam, and I've been thinking a bit about that. It was so discouraging all those months when I would talk about it and people would just give me a vague look and nod. And I was so convinced it was a good idea, but so few people seemed to share that conviction that I got discouraged (as I often do). So the process of just continuing to talk about it until I found the people who got it and shared my enthusiasm has been enlightening. I can think of other projects that would have benefited from that kind of persistence and faith, so I need to keep that in mind.

They also really want these to be ongoing events, which is an interesting idea.

So let's close with a quote from TH White in The Goshawk:

To write something which was of enduring beauty, this was the ambition of every writer: as it was the ambition of the joiner and architect and the constructor of any kind. It was not the beauty but the endurance, for endurance was beautiful. It was also all that we could do. It was a consolation, even a high and positive joy, to make something true: some table, which, sat on, when it was meant only to be eaten off, would not splinter or shatter. It was not for the constructor that the beauty was made, but for the thing itself. He would triumph to know that some contribution had been made: some sort of consoling contribution quite timeless and without relation to his own profit. Sometimes we knew, half tipsy or listening to music, that at the heart of some world there lay a chord to which vibrating gave reality. With its reality there was music and truth and the permanence of good workmanship. To give birth to this, with whatever male travail, was not only all that man could do: it was the human contribution to the universe. Absolutely bludgeoned by jazz and mechanical achievement, the artist yearned to discover permanence, some life of happy permanence which he by fixing could create to the satisfaction of after-people who also looked. This was it, as the poets realized, to be a mother of immortal song: to say Yes when it was, and No when it was: to make enduringly true that perhaps quite small occasional table off which subsequent generations could eat, without breaking it down: to help the timeless benevolence which should be that of this lonely and little race: to join the affection which had lasted between William the Conqueror and George VI. Wheelwrights, smiths, farmers, carpenters, and mothers of large families knew this.

Upcoming and outgoing

Women in Animation had their first public meeting last week. I think it went really well- good attendance and great people. They sought input on what people want from the chapter, which was welcome- it's good to be able to give input. I expect great things from them, and am so happy I played my small role in getting it going.

ASIFA meeting last night discussed upcoming events: Animation Show of Shows on Saturday, a drawing trip on November, a Show and Tell in December, Drinking and Drawing in January, and we're thinking about putting on a freelancer resource fair/panel discussion/something in February. Let me know if you have any insights on content for the freelancer event- I'm sort of spearheading that one, so I'm looking for input and suggestions as I try to see who would be interested in participating.

Work is busy and just doesn't seem to slow down. Which is good, I know- good for the company, good for the economy, good all around, but personally, selfishly, I wish I had a little more down time in a given day. I'm out of touch with all the blogs I used to read at work. We've had a really great group of clients lately, though, which helps immensely.

Last week (was it only last week? It seems forever ago), my mom and I took a trip down the coast to visit the aquarium and see Newport. I don't think I had ever been to Newport, and it's silly to miss things that are so close. I need to get to Crater Lake someday. I took a couple pictures that I'll put on Facebook eventually.

I've been reading a bit, but mostly fiction, re-read Neuromancer and some Gaiman. Here are some gems from Dune:

Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of mankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him.

I am like a person whose hands were kept numb, without sensation from the first moment of awareness--until one day the ability to feel is forced into them. And I say "Look! I have no hands!" But the people all around me say, "What are hands?"

Finally, it looks like I've been keeping this blog (more or less) for a year now. It went so fast.

Bric a brac

Well, it looks like I'm a board member of ASIFA Portland. I have to admit, it seems like it will be fun- I don't have, you know, a Real Job like an elected member, and they are a pretty laid-back bunch. So we'll definitely be putting together another Drinking and Drawing- I may not be hosting this one, but I'll show 'em how it's done. :-)

Personally, I'm going through a few transitions- I can't tell if this is baby steps toward major progress, or just sidesteps as I work out a few things. One thing I've been really focusing on (and it was going well until tonight) is delineating my time- I need my work day to end, period, at some specific time, and the rest of my life to commence. I tend to drag work stuff around with me all the time, and it's poor stress management and doesn't let me focus on other areas of my life that need attention. So even if it's just for an hour or two at night, I need it to officially stop. I've been hitting a gong in my apartment, and it's funny but it helps.

I'm reading Locke's Essay on Understanding. Delightful writing style- he starts out so self-deprecating, with just a few of his humble observations, and then commences to thoroughly, systematically, demolish any competing opinions. Funny how we take the whole tabula rasa argument for granted now, and wrap it into nature vs nurture- when he wrote this stuff, it was really groundbreaking.

What's coming up? Cre8Con, for one. I'm not sure I can afford to go- it's so much more expensive than it was last year, and my job just spent a fortune to send me to Siggraph. Too bad, too- I got a lot out of it last year. Also Art Spark, BackFence PDX, OMPA Industry Night, and Dr. Sketchy. So if you're a creative type, September has a lot to offer.

from The Once and Future King

A truly amazing book, by the way.

There is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people do not have until they are middle-aged. It is something which cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey rules which are constant. It has no rules. Only, in the long years which bring women to the middle of life, a sense of balance develops. You can't teach a baby to walk by explaining the matter to her logically--she has to learn the strange poise of walking by experience. In some way like that, you cannot teach a young woman to have knowledge of the world. She has to be left to the experience of the years. And then, when she is beginning to hate her used body, she suddenly finds that she can do it. She can go on living--not by principle, not by deduction, not by knowledge of good and evil, but simply by a peculiar and shifting sense of balance which defies each of these things often. She no longer hopes to live by seeking the truth--if women ever do hope this--but continues henceforth under the guidance of a seventh sense. Balance was the sixth sense, which she won when she first learned to walk, and now she has the seventh one--knowledge of the world.
The slow discovery of the seventh sense, by which both men and women contrive to ride the waves of a world in which there is war, adultery, compromise, fear, stultification and hypocrisy--this discovery is not a matter for triumph. The baby, perhaps, cries out triumphantly: I have balance! But the seventh sense is recognized without a cry. We only carry on with our famous knowledge of the world, riding the queer waves in a habitual, petrifying way, because we have reached a state of deadlock in which we can think of nothing else to do.
And at this stage we begin to forget that there ever was a time when we lacked the seventh sense. We begin to forget, as we go stolidly balancing along, that there could have been a time when we were young bodies flaming with all the impetus of life. It is hardly consoling to remember such a feeling, and so it deadens in our minds.
But there was a time when each of us stood naked before the world, confronting life as a serious problem with which we were intimately and passionately concerned. There was a time when it was of vital interest to us to find out whether there was a God or not. Obviously the existence or otherwise of a future life must be of the very first importance to somebody who is going to live her present one, because her manner of living it must hinge on the problem. There was a time when Free Love versus Catholic Morality was a question of as much importance to our hot bodies as if a pistol had been clapped to our heads.
Further back, there were times when we wondered with all our souls what the world was, what love was, what we were ourselves.
All these problems and feelings fade away when we get the seventh sense. Middle-aged people can balance between believing in God and breaking all the commandments, without difficulty. The seventh sense, indeed, slowly kills all the other ones, so that at last there is no trouble about the commandments. We cannot see any more, or feel, or hear about them. The bodies which we loved, the truths which we sought, the Gods whom we questioned: we are deaf and blind to them now, safely and automatically balancing along toward the inevitable grave, under the protection of our last sense.

He had worn a place for himself in some corner of her heart, as a sea shell, always boring against the rock, might do. The making of the place had been her pain. But now the shell was safely in the rock. It was lodged, and ground no longer.

Also, the last several pages have some really fascinating thoughts about war and human nature, but I can't type them all out here and the fragments won't be very insightful.

James P Carse- The Religious Case Against Belief

If God held all truth in his right hand and in his left hand the everlasting striving after truth, so that I could always and everlastingly be mistaken, and said to me, "Choose," with humility I would pick the left hand and say, "Father, grant me that. Absolute truth is for thee alone." - Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

[Galileo] knew, as any critical thinker would, that knowledge is corrigible, and that belief is rarely so. Open to correction himself, he had no inclination and no reason to take an immovable stand. He could not perform a heroic act like Luther's not because of cowardice but because there was nothing to stand on ... Galileo knew as well as anyone that there is no protecting ourselves from what discoveries the future brings.

We might say that we join the communitas when the questions being asked there becomes our questions.

In fact, never can we make a judgment of another with clean motives--even when such a judgment is appropriate. Evil is real. It is unmistakeably there in the world, and just as unmistakeably in ourselves.

miscellany

A crucible is a heat-resistant container in which materials can be heated to very high temperatures.

Cre8 Camp on Saturday. To be perfectly honest, I'm feeling a little apprehensive that the event will be something of a forum for the OCI peeps. That makes it feel less organic and participant-driven than the Legion of Tech events, which is precisely what I value about them. However, I am looking forward to it.

Women in Animation stuff is happening- I've been really busy at work so haven't followed up on it as much as I keep intending to.

Still reading James P Carse and listened to his Long Now lecture last night. Really interesting, and surprisingly consistent with some stuff I was thinking way back when I studied philosophy, although, of course, much more cogent. His thinking is an interesting mix of rationality and mysticism that appeals to me.

James P Carse- Breakfast at the Victory

The ego wants nothing less than to see God. The soul knows, however, that if the Divine were to appear, the ego would not recognize it. The heavens cannot open for the soul; they are already open.

That is all.

The Alchemist- Paulo Coelho

So, this is another one of those books that everyone on the planet has read and raves about, and I wasn't particularly impressed by. Perhaps people are just so desperate for a sense of personal significance and meaning in their lives that this little allegory really speaks to that need... I'm not sure.

There was, however, one little passage I liked:

"This is why alchemy exists," the boy said. "So that everyone will search for his treasure, find it, and then want to be better than he was in his former life. Lead will play its role until the world has no further need for lead; and then lead will have to turn itself into gold."

Francis Bacon 1605

For myself, I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as for the study of Truth; as having a mind nimble and versatile enough to catch the resemblances of things … and at the same time steady enough to fix and distinguish their subtler differences; as being gifted by nature with desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to consider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and as being a man that neither affects what is new nor admires what is old, and that hates every kind of imposture.

Miscellany

The exploratory "who wants to do this" Women In Animation meeting is on the 29th. Kate's gotten a huge response- she's starting to worry if there's going to be enough room at the table for all of us. Wonderful!

I just got a notice from the library that Altered Carbon is due sooner than I thought it was, and I haven't made much progress on it due to being sidetracked by Don Quixote. I'm going to try to finish it this weekend- I don't have a lot on my plate, so I should be able to jam on it.

Interesting Portland is moving forward, and I'm bummed that I missed all the meetings- they've been in the morning, before/into my work hours, and I just can't hang with those times. However, the event itself should be pretty cool, and the tickets are already on sale at a steep discount for the adventurous who are willing to buy tickets before the agenda is announced. For more info, go here.

Derrida- Rogues

At the moment of confiding it to you, I am myself torn or split in two.
On the one hand, this double question would require us to inflect otherwise the very word question. It would impose itself at the very beginning of the game, and that is why I spoke without delay of an injunction and of the greatest force, of a force that will have won out over everything, and first of all over me, in the figure of a violent question, the question in the sense of an inquisitional torture where one is not only put in question but put to the question.
On the other hand, this double question has returned to torment me. It has made a return, turning around me, turning and returning, turning around me and turning me upside down, upsetting me, as if I were locked up in a tower unable to get around, unable to perceive or conceive the workings or turnings of a circular machine that does not work or turn just right.

In the end, if we try to return to the origin, we do not yet know what democracy will have meant nor what democracy is. For democracy does not present itself; it has not yet presented itself, but that will come. In the meantime, let's not stop using a word whose heritage is undeniable even if its meaning is still obscured, obfuscated, reserved. Neither the word nor the thing 'democracy' is yet presentable. We do not yet know what we have inherited; we are the legatees of this Greek word and what it assigns to us, enjoins us, bequeaths or leaves us, indeed delegates or leaves over to us. We are undeniably the heirs or legatees, the delegates, of this word, and we are saying 'we' here as the very legatees or delegates of this word that has been sent to us, addressed to us for centuries, and that we are always sending or putting off until later. There are, to be sure, claims or allegations of democracy everywhere 'we' are; but we ourselves do not know the meaning of this legacy, the mission, emission, or commission of this word or the legitimacy of this claim or allegation.

In its constitutive autoimmunity, in its vocation for hospitality, democracy has always wanted by turns and at the same time two incompatible things: it has wanted, on the one hand, to welcome only men, and on the condition that they be citizens, brothers, and compeers, excluding all the others, in particular bad citizens, rogues, noncitizens, and all sorts of unlike and unrecognizable others, and, on the other hand, at the same time or by turns, it has wanted to open itself up, to offer hospitality, to all those excluded. ... Rogues or degenerates are sometimes brothers, citizens, compeers.

Drinking and Drawing

Turnout wasn't as high as I had hoped, but everyone had a really good time. It's funny, because the group of people who ended up doing the bulk of the drawing really took ownership of the final product. I hadn't seen that happen before, but I think it's because at prior events there were so many people drawing that they only got to go once or twice.
I had a really good time and saw a lot of people I wanted to see, and finally met some people I had only met on Twitter.

My use of Twitter on this event was really interesting to me. I created a Twitter account for DrinknDrawPDX, and specifically sought out people on Twitter that I thought would be interested. Over time, DrinknDraw developed a social network that only slightly overlaps my own, and introduced me to people I wouldn't have met otherwise. And I'm still not sure that all those people know that I'm DrinknDraw and DrinknDraw is me. Funny.
So DrinknDraw developed a small social network on Twitter, and I spammed the hell out of everyone from my own Twitter account, and Facebook, and the Oregon Media Network, each of which had a slightly different result from a different but overlapping group of people.
The DrinknDraw account ended up being followed by some local art and media outlets, and had people volunteer to post press releases, as well as volunteer for the event itself.
That was pretty cool, actually- normally the process of getting volunteers for chapter events involves sending an email to a massive distribution list and then having interested people contact a coordinator who tries to coordinate them- in this instance, I called for volunteers from both Twitter accounts and within minutes I had one confirmed volunteer for each account. I love the speed and ease of tweeting those kinds of requests, and how quickly the community passed on the info. It's really cool.

At the event, someone I had never met before showed up and took the lovely photos posted here. Her name is Heather Zinger, and I think there's a wonderful artistic sensibility in her photography. And lo, she's interested in animation, so will show up to our WIA meeting.

On a different note, I think I need to set aside Don Quixote for now- it's a huge time sink, and I have some library books I'm dying to get to. It's a strange book- I spent a long time expecting a Decameron/Canterbury Tales kind of thing, and then just when I had accepted that it was going to take on the novel form, it switched over and seems to have become that. Which makes it easier to set down, actually.

Comfortable with Uncertainty

A really good book, actually. I wish I had more time with it.

Everything in our lives has the power to wake us up or put us to sleep. Allowing it to awaken is up to us.

Marten is really serious about putting together an animation festival. I'm on board, but frankly intimidated by the idea. Help!

His Monkey Wife

This is Jonathan Collier's first book, and it's not as good as his short stories. But he does have a way with words.

For the heart is, in a sense, like the Prince of Wales; we would not have it cut in stone, yet how pathetic it is when, as at Wembley, we see it modeled in butter.

For the rest, though the reflections of the untutored chimp are scarcely worth the setting down, she was mostly struck by the appearance of abject misery which was apparent in all the passersby, especially in their sickly complexions, their peevish or anxious looks, their slave's gait, and, most of all, in their rare and rickety smiles.
Do not think, however, that she jumped at once to the conclusion, as some more superficially observant stranger might have done, that the great city is on the whole a nasty mistake, and that it would have been better, all things considered, if Highgate Hill were to turn Vesuvius, so to speak, and obliterate, to put it bluntly, all the ugly antheap at its feet. No: she had experiences of her own enough to know that happiness is like some of the lower forms of life, of which, if one of them is cut into pieces, some inconsiderable fragment or other is sure to survive. Thus she had little doubt that, among these hurrying millions, most of whom looked to her (though she knew little of homes and offices) as if they had been both crossed in love and condemned to penal servitude for life, many had compensations, which, however small they might seem to the indifferent spectator, must in logic be so great to each individual concerned that they compensated for the toil, the illness, the worry, and the emotional starvation marked clearly on his face, for they demonstrably withheld him from cutting his throat. "What a wonderful thing a stamp collection must be," thought Emily, "or the construction with one's own hands of a home radio set!"

When a young man, almost alone in London, and, possessed of a modicum of intelligence and a small deposit account, is afflicted with pain greater than he can bear, he is likely to find himself, in obedience to an inexplicable law, in the company of artists.

What's with all the reading, Rebekah?

It occurs to me that someone might wonder why I devote so much space to books when that's not, ostensibly, the subject matter of this blog. For all five of you who read it (love you! and sorry to clog your feeds with my multiple posts), I'll explain.

I think that writing is almost unique in the art forms in that it can be done in complete isolation, with no investment. An actor, an animator, a dancer, need to be hired by someone in order to practice their art (that seems like such a vulnerable position, to me). A musician, a painter, a sculptor, need place and materials in order to practice their art. A writer can use a napkin and a pen, they can write in a bar, at work, at home, they can write in the morning or the evening, they can write whenever and wherever, the only tool a writer needs in order to practice their art is discipline.

It seems to me that is why I meet more aspiring writers than any other kind of artist, and more failed writers, writers who don't write, writers who say they write and then produce a battered sketchbook they've been carrying around for years, writers who tell you the idea they had years ago and are going to "do something with someday."

Writing has also the greatest potential as an art form. Because it's made of nothing, it can be anything. It is in books and literature that we see the most extraordinary ideas, it is in great writing that we see the truly original. And every great movie, every great play, we can look through it to the great writer who conceived it and bore it into the world. It's through literature that we see the greatest, most creative, most lasting explorations of our world, our human consciousness.

I'm terribly interested in artforms that are fundamentally collaborative, in tapping the creativity of disparate individuals and wrestling forth something greater than the sum of it's parts, and yet it is in the mind of the writer, that strange, private, unknowable place, that so many amazing ideas are born and made concrete. So I read to know the writer, and I read to conceive the world.

Aspects of the Novel

(you see how fast the reading goes when I'm into the book?) This was recommended by Jelly at the cre8 conference, and I've just now gotten to it.

Neither memory or anticipation is much interested in Father Time, and all dreamers, artists and lovers are partially delivered from his tyranny; he can kill them, but he cannot secure their attention, and at the very moment of doom, when the clock collected in the tower its strength and struck, they may be looking the other way.

If we were to press [Moll Flanders] or her creator Defoe and say, "Come, be serious. Do you believe in Infinity?" they would say (in the parlance of their modern descendants), "Of course I believe in Infinity -- what do you take me for?" -- a confession of faith that slams the door on Infinity more completely than could any denial.

The plot-maker expects us to remember, we expect him to leave no loose ends. Every action or word ought to count; it ought to be economical and spare; even when complicated it should be organic and free from dead matter. It may be difficult or easy, it may and should contain mysteries, but it ought not to mislead. And over it, as it unfolds, will hover the memory of the reader (that dull glow of the mind of which intelligence is the bright advancing edge) and will constantly rearrange and reconsider, seeing new clues, new chains of cause and effect, and the final sense (if the plot has been a fine one) will not be of clues or chains, but of something aesthetically compact, something which might have been shown by the novelist straight away, only if he had shown it straight away it would never have become beautiful. We have come up against beauty here--for the first time in our inquiry: beauty at which a novelist should never aim, though he fails if he does not achieve it.

Most of us will be eclectics to this side or that according to our temperament. The human mind is not a dignified organ, and I do not see how we can exercise it sincerely except through eclecticism. And the only advice I would offer my fellow eclectics is: "Do not be proud of your inconsistency. It is a pity, it is a pity that we should be equipped like this. It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive and truthful."

Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off but opening out. When the symphony is over we feel that the notes and tunes composing it have been liberated, they have found in the rhythm of the whole their individual freedom. Cannot the novel be like that? Is not their something of it in War and Peace? -- the book with which we began and in which we must end. Such an untidy book. Yet, as we read it, do not great chords begin to sound behind us, and when we have finished, does not every item--even the catalogue of strategies--lead a larger existence than was possible at the time?

He also has a long but absolutely brilliant explanation for why I've never been able to enjoy Henry James, but I won't type it up here and bore you with it.

Pasquale's Angel

I'm giving up on this book- it just doesn't seem to be able to hold my attention, and I can't bring myself to care about what happens next. However, here's one quick passage that I liked:

But this was only a temporary disturbance. All disturbances in the calm unfolding of the city's routines were temporary, no more than an incalculably minute faltering, as of a speck of grit caught and crushed in a gear-train, in its remorseless mechanisms.