An Introductory Note, Sometime in Early 2019
For the reader who wants to delve into this Appendix to see what it purports to be, I felt it would be appropriate to make a few brief introductory comments here that would help set the course.
This Appendix is a significantly abridged Man on Earth, Kyiv Unedited’s third main, albeit slow-moving, section that attempted to provide critical commentary regarding the other two main, fast-moving, fictional, sections – Kyiv Commix and The Checkout.
This section tried to explain what the other two sections were about, or what they were doing, or what they were trying to achieve – not so much in terms of plot, or anything based on the content, but mostly in terms of the pursued form.
In other words, the stories of The Commix and Checkout, called frames, were not just a few hundred highly caffeinated outbursts of short fiction, but have a theoretical foundation and underpinning as the reason for their being, all of which I tried to explain and elaborate in the Man on Earth section.
2019
NOTE SET 1
Trying to Answer: What are Narrative, Storytelling, Writing?
Yeah, as if this guy really knows what he’s talking about
Plot and resolution may be ultimately, but are not immediately, important. You cannot hang immediacy, which is at the core of good entertainment in writing, on considerations of plot. A plot is far too weighty of a thing that, if agonized over, will destroy the raison d’etre of a work. A plot, therefore, shouldn’t be immediately discernible. Obvious exertions by a writer to accommodate a plot are contrived and destructive of the ultimate work, which can, and should, then be considered a failure.
What should be almost immediately discernible in prose narrative is an intense engagement, indeed obsession, with revealing, over time, character motives, and through a variety of characters with their particular motives, human nature. It is thus that we begin approaching the greatest questions of existence, like where does evil come from. No one will ever have an answer, but anyone who cares to write with this, and similar, questions in mind will find them endless inquiries whose exploration is endlessly fascinating.
That fascination will come out in the writing with time, and its clear presence is a significant marker of good, and improving, writing. It marks the writer of passion, one who is relentlessly after truth. Good writing is not just one’s ability to write well, but also to maintain a cognizance of the purpose of writing before one when one writes. A writer’s empathy with the goal of his writing, detached from his self-empathy, his ego, is the mark of a strong writer. This kind of understanding of writing is an a priori indicator of a writing talent, which only needs to be developed. If this principle is applied in the writing process, consistently, stubbornly, dedicatedly, then good writing is certain to follow.
Revelation of character, motive, and human nature – a writer achieves such revelation through his obligation to this subject.
There will be no good writing if the writer is writing with himself foremost in his mind rather than the purpose and the goal of the writing and what he is struggling to say. Such people are not writers – they are hacks.
Writing is never just one thing, or one set of things. It is a journey – to an end, and to the end – as far as the writer can go. The journey itself is endless, and is only circumscribed by the life and the efforts of an individual writer who has decided to embark on that journey – blindly, hanging on to a sort of faith; a faith, I think, in a slowly revealed and acquired grace.
“Incompetence will show in the use of too many words. The reader’s first and simplest test of an author will be to look for words that do not function; that contribute nothing to the meaning or that distract from the most important factor of the meaning to factors of minor importance” (from “ABC of Reading,” by Ezra Pound).
This thought conveniently extrapolates to things like penchants for imbecilic irrelevant tangents, wildly inappropriate metaphors and the aggressive and panicked additions of materials that add nothing to the point being made except to show the writer’s self-proclaimed knowledge, profound connection-making capacity, and erudition. This is particularly pathetic and laughable when such an individual’s writing exposes him to be an ignorant pedant who actually knows nothing at all. And such writing will always expose such an individual. Better to simply admit ignorance from the start and let the process of truthful writing open knowledge, and impart wisdom, on its own.
For revealing motives and human nature, Shakespeare’s dramatic form has advantages absent in third-person prose narrative and often in poetry. He is all first person, present tense, dialogue-based, character-driven, and immediate, constantly revealing motive and nature largely by showing (through monologue, dialogue) rather than telling (through description, explanation, justification, connection, place and time details – things that characters themselves reveal, but in ways that are specific to them alone, thereby revealing more about themselves).
Rather than trying to answer questions in a work, which is pathetic contrivance, it’s better to write knowing such questions will be answered without the writer – by the reader’s imagination.
It’s amazing how a few subtle strokes can raise such questions. People like when things are absurd and unclear, because of an absurdity’s ability to raise just such questions, which they, like children (a writer is also like a child) , want to explore and get answers to. You get the reader on a hook. The reader wants to be told a story and then naturally reaches out in his mind for things and connections the author never consciously intended. I am convinced that it is the feeling of the imagination being taken somewhere, which feels good – like a sort of euphoria – and which people enjoy so much.
This is incredibly important. It’s like the first primal things we like – stories, poetry and music, singing then dancing. Sounds to our ears and moves that we see through our mind’s eye, into ourselves, rather than through our physical eyes, out of ourselves. We are internal-focused animals, not external, which is what makes us human, and it is that ability, to reflect, to ponder, to meditate, and as a result to develop our thoughts, that distinguishes us from the animals. To them, a song or dance is natural, coded into their genes; to us, it’s also natural, but we can develop and embellish these infinitely, while they can’t. Against these, our logic and rational thinking are artificial constructs.
We are so made, that we recognize a reality without ever being able to figure anything out, or know it, to the end. We actually prefer to keep things erratic and absurd, and we apply the arts, which come natural to us, to enhance that absurdity. Rather than getting us closer to a truth, they help show us how truth is unknowable.
I am trying to get to deeper recognitions, to apply them to writing, to become a better storyteller.
I think about some of the writers I’m reading, and what some of them have done, and what some of them haven’t done, and this results in assumptions that they are either working through similar realizations, or through their egos, which is the difference that ultimately marks off a talent from a hack.
16.8.13
NOTE SET 2
In the Mix – Form, Method, Style
Creating the short episodic epic picaresque, abandoning much akin to the novel
Revealing Human Nature rather than Plot, and some Conclusions
Pulling back from The Checkout and Kyiv Commix after a little over a year and a half, I look back at my notes that largely preceded the materials on this website, wherein I underscored the importance of revealing human nature through the writing. I saw this as the intended goal and expected result of the writing.
I now wonder if this is something we actually achieved in any measure.
I mean, in The Commix, what is it we did?
We kept driving at what we thought made characters tick through their speech and actions.
The frames in Kyiv Unedited are mostly character, rather than plot, driven. Characters say a great deal to, and about, each other, and themselves. I think much of the time we are kept guessing at their motives, nor, for the most part, do I think the characters understand their motives themselves. In any case, I do not think we spend too much time mulling what happens or not in the overall story, if there truly is one.
Thus, the overarching intent had been that plot – whatever it eventually became – would be secondary, while the human nature behind the characters’ motives would be the focus.
What we got was a cross-section of evil in some of its essential human varieties permuted and combined in diverse degrees.
The rare forces of good and justice that from time to time appear on the scene are almost completely incapable of timely and effective intervention. It’s as if they are forced to stand aside and allow all the varieties of bad to take their course. Any characters who would don costumes to be superheroes, ostensibly for the good, invariably fail in their pursuits, because those pursuits are ultimately inextricable from the delusions and desires of their own egos. They are not selfless, which is what superheroes need to be if they are to properly work.
In any case, most costume-donning superheroes here are assholes. Any superpowers acquired by mortals, whether they don special costumes or not, are used by them toward selfish ends only.
True good, and innocence, are mostly hampered in their attempts to foil evil, because they themselves are almost never pure, but at least partly tainted by the foibles of ego, which partake, and are emanations of, that in our natures which is evil. Sometimes, it is as if evil ends up using good toward its own ends, and not the other way around.
And sometimes, evil can be seen partly destroying itself, but never toward a diminishing of its presence, but rather as part of its constant re-formation. In the world of The Commix, it is very difficult to be good, or to remain good if you more or less start out that way, or not to lapse back into evil, having done so once or twice before. Often, the lapse is permanent.
Truth, and sometimes those who stand for it, is like Proteus, evasive, reluctant to reveal itself, almost a deception, and therefore a lie of sorts itself.
Flash Fiction and Form
The idea of flash fiction, the telling of a fast story, or a story quickly told, the leaving of things unsaid to help fit a fixed brevity, and showing through character dialogue and action, rather than telling through description, helped determine the form – something fast, versatile, and volatile that readers today with mobile web could read in a few minutes between train stops.
While this is not completely true across the board, most frames are self-contained and can be read as such with no further reference to other frames in the entire work thus far, and I believe this holds true even for most of the frames that by their headings indicate they are continuations of preceding storylines.
Thus, coming onto the website, one can enter at any point and read any frame, or any combination of frames, in any order, until one has read all of them, if one so chooses, or one can read them in the more traditional manner from beginning to end, treating the entirety as a long novel-sized linear tale. The thing works either way.
Method
To maximize the impact of a good story told in compressed form and condensed time, we came up with seven rules:
1. Reveal human nature in medias res. Jump into the middle of things as they are unfolding without worrying too much about beginning and end. This requires a sense for the rhythms in language and of timing, of sensing where to start and knowing when to stop. Things are always happening in the middle – in the midst of themselves. Tell a specific, open-ended story for that particular moment in time, with no plot, no resolution, and no motives revealed. The principle of exploiting in medias res takes precedence over these.
2. If things are absurd, keep them absurd. Do not try to reconstruct reality.
3. Keep the frame to 1,000 words. This is an ideal length without becoming exasperating for readers who intend on spending only a short amount of time on what you want to give them. With 1,000 words, you think of what to leave out, while doing your best to really pack it in.
[In hindsight (while editing this manuscript in early 2019), 500 words may be even better, but I think doing it well is probably much harder than it sounds, and in no wise easier than 1,000 words]
Of all the rules, this one – keeping a text to around 1,000 words – was the most vigorously abused, with some frames going well over the limit and approaching 1,500, and even 2,000 words. Nevertheless, many made the 1,000-word cut, with some even coming in under the bar.
4. Keep the frames largely dialogue-based – inasmuch as they are also character-driven. In this way, the words that characters speak also become their actions.
5. Keep descriptions sparse and seamless, particularly in connection with the dialogue. This rule was also at times to some extent broken.
6. Keep things in the present tense to get across the immediacy of the action. The ideal is telling a present-tense story from a first-person perspective – hard to do if you’re describing other characters and reporting what they say.
7. Keep the story character-driven – already mentioned a couple of times above.
Style
Like the truth, styles here are also protean. I won’t spend a lot of time or space explaining or making excuses up for them. After all, the thing is called Kyiv Unedited.
What I do find interesting is the strong pull, particularly initially, to cast the frames into the dialogue forms of movie scripts and plays. Indeed, this proved hard to resist.
The advantage that Shakespeare had – aside from being Shakespeare – with the dramatic script is the form is necessarily in medias res cast in first person present tense. It’s dialogue-based and character-driven. Descriptions are sparse and seamless, things are absurd, and there is brevity to words even in the longest speeches. The plays are eminently consumable.
27.10.14
NOTE SET 6
The Half Guinea’s Checkout Piece, “A Night Unfeared”, Considered
Art as Prophetic Capability
This artistically complex frame alternates two scenes that, to my mind, balance perfectly.
It is a dreamlike autumn night, evocative, and the air is filled with stirred memories, melancholy, contemplation, and unspecified longing for things lost – perhaps love, happiness, the past, or history itself – set against portents of Halloween and expectations of mysterious things still unknown and yet to come.
The first scene opens on Andrew’s Pub, in the bohemian Podil district of Kyiv, with The Hunched Cornish and The Half Guinea sitting at table having a conversation. The precise contents of that conversation remain a mystery to us, except that Winter will bring some kind of end, as a pensive Cornish sadly concludes.
When “the fall” is mentioned in the opening lines, it can either be understood as a reference to the season, or some more ominous event, which The Half Guinea simply refers to as “The Fall”.
Given the date this piece was filed with The Checkout – late October 2013 – these words turned out to be as prophetic as they sounded, and, as is generally the case with prophecies, we never really know what a prophecy means until after the prophesied events are fulfilled.
The Euromaidan mass protests and revolution in Kyiv began precisely one month later, which soon escalated into mass riots and saw the first civilian casualties in January 2014.
The Ukrainian government would be eventually toppled as casualties rose to more than 100 in Kyiv and the country’s president fled in February. This was followed by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and then a spring invasion by Russia into southeastern Ukraine and a war, which as of this writing is still ongoing and has claimed thousands of lives on both sides.
The Guinea even says to The Cornish that nothing beats Moscow, much the way we might say that nothing beats New York in summer or Paris in the spring, yet today, that line takes on far greater meaning in light of the events that have since transpired.
When The Cornish hears this, he at first grows silent and drops his hands on the table in a state of dejection.
When The Cornish finally answers, surmising everything will therefore be over by Winter, and The Guinea lightheartedly affirms this, The Cornish angrily responds that he understands the situation far more than The Guinea, causing The Guinea to grow silent in his turn.
Given the benefit of hindsight following the real events that have taken place since this piece was written, this exchange suggests The Cornish’s heartfelt sympathies lie with Ukraine, while The Guinea, who praises Moscow while enjoying Kyiv, appears to be in the other camp.
On another level, The Guinea has set off emotional, and probably painful, associations within The Cornish, flooding his mind with memories of the bullfighting days and colors of Madrid, particularly the fair, passionate, unapproachable women in all their dark hair.
We can only guess why The Guinea sought to bring The Cornish to this state of recollection and reflection: to encourage him?; to offer him moral support in his romantic endeavors?; to entertain himself at The Cornish’s expense?; to enjoy his pain?
Because it is precisely women that are a particularly painful subject for The Cornish, who has very little luck with them, given his appearance, and also because he seems to be infertile, though not impotent. His inability to attract women, express his feelings toward them, fulfill his desires with them – unless he outright savages and rapes them – and sexually reproduce, partly drive his fiery rage and evil.
Meanwhile, The Guinea is very much The Cornish’s opposite in this, and in almost every other regard. If The Cornish is filled to the brim with hang-ups, The Guinea appears to have none at all.
With regard to women, The Guinea consistently reveals a predilection for dark skin, going after African women wherever and whenever they appear. He seems to always be successful, though his desperation is heightened, since black women are scarce in Kyiv.
Generally speaking, there is a sort of parity between The Guinea and The Cornish because both are deities and both write reviews for The Checkout, and there’s really nothing The Cornish can do to or about The Guinea if The Guinea is abusive of him.
But as gods, the two are not equal.
As a deity, The Half Guinea is perhaps best described as a sort of disfavored and possibly rejected lower god dating back to Roman times – a somewhat abrasive, obnoxious, and pugnacious character with sex forever on his mind.
But The Cornish is a far older god, going back to before Classical Greece, to Mycenaean times leading to the collapse of Bronze Age civilization and the Fall of Troy. His lineage traces back to Minoan Crete, although it is unclear whether he is associated with Crete’s Mycenaean conquerors or its Minoan conquered.
Compared with The Half Guinea, and for that matter with any being in The Checkout (and The Commix), including Manny Face, who is also a deity, The Hunched Cornish is immeasurably more powerful, inscrutable, profound, and awesome, massive in form, and physically, almost unspeakably, gruesome. He is capable of igniting himself and any of his surroundings on fire.
On the Andrew’s Pub stage, a dark-complexioned woman croons a song in Ukrainian, deepening the mood – and perhaps piquing The tragically sensitive, sexually frustrated, and hapless Cornish’s rarely fulfilled desire and passion.
***
We are then taken to a bench in a park on a hill overlooking Podil, which itself is a low-lying flat district lapped by the Dnipro River. Ancient Kyiv is built on hills, which are palpable under one’s feet as one walks the right bank of the city, and there truly are parks on hills with benches overlooking the river, and therefore overlooking the Podil district below. Bulgakov describes this view in “The White Guard”.
On the bench, under a cover of trees, sits John Smith, with “Pilgrim’s Progress” opened in his lap. He’s wearing a light-gray suit and a detective fedora. But Smith’s busy in his mind trying to piece together the plot and make sense of developments, to date, in Kyiv Commix.
As Smith sits, a breeze stirs the trees, which drop leaves all around. The electric lights from the city’s largely residential left bank glow in the distance across the river.
From time to time a wolf call, produced by a human, can be heard in the distance, though each time we hear the howl, it has drawn closer – to Smith and to us.
Smith is thinking out loud about how all the characters in The Commix fit together, what they have done and what each is guilty of and what each one’s significance is to the plot. It’s as if he needs to be in the alternate (or alternative) world of The Checkout to calmly and quietly contemplate the sheer vastness and variety of the insanity taking place in The Commix, of which he has been a part. But the more he turns the characters of the chaotic Commix over in his head and what he knows of their actions, the less sense the whole thing makes.
Whereas we are given very little of the conversation between The Hunched Cornish and The Half Guinea back at Andrew’s Pub, we are meant to feel that conversation’s depth.
But while we are given a slice of Smith’s thoughts in great detail, we see that depth of understanding is unattainable with the subject of his contemplations.
As Smith thinks, the leaves stop falling and the park grows still, like in winter.
The leaves falling and stopping is like a portent of things to come, like the calm before a storm. They mirror the fall-winter exchange between The Cornish and The Guinea back in the pub.
From this point, the tension created in both scenes is released through comic relief.
You may ask, if The Half Guinea wrote the piece, which is the subject of this review, how could he know what John Smith was doing at the very same moment that he, The Half Guinea, was with The Hunched Cornish at Andrew’s Pub?
Believe me – he knew… All writers in The Checkout and Kyiv Commix, be they deity or mortal, who pen disparate scenes into the same frame, always know – otherwise, they wouldn’t be Checkout or Commix writers working for Kyiv Unedited. See? They have the ability.
***
We are brought back to Andrew’s Pub where there has been some kind of commotion involving the Ladies’ Room.
Waiting for The Hunched Cornish to return from his long trip to the toilet, The Half Guinea has sidled up to an African woman sitting at the bar.
With respect to the Ladies’ Room incident, it turns out that the flustered, but now calm, Andrew’s Pub singer, who was taking a break, was startled by a flower dropped over her toilet stall. The perpetrator would appear to have been The Hunched Cornish, who, having first been dressed in a trench coat at the start of the frame was now dressed as a matador and, having dropped the flower, ran away. It’s possible that he was wearing the matador outfit under the trench coat, as at the start of the frame The Guinea calls him “El Huncho”. Also, as a deity, he probably has no problem changing his guise at will.
Meanwhile, back in the park, Smith is joined by Steve Kowalsky (the way the name is spelled in the frame, as opposed to with an ‘i’), a Polish-American natural-born poet, who is crouching on all fours at Smith’s feet reciting doggerel – about a missing dog – after which he cranes his neck back and emits a long and lonely wolf howl.
Sitting next to Smith is Milk Bone, described here as the talking dog detective, wearing sunglasses and reading a newspaper under the moonlight.
With regard to Milk Bone, his being dressed in undercover detective clothes and forever reading a newspaper is a recurring motif met in a number of earlier Commix pieces.
21.12.14
NOTE SET 7
The Half Guinea’s Checkout “Podil Circus” Considered
The Art of Narrative Balance, Rhythm, and Control – Like Music
I found this frame to be just about the apex of great narrative art – a true miniature masterpiece.
“Podil Circus”, filed with The Checkout in early August 2014, was written against the backdrop of Kyiv’s Maidan revolution earlier that winter and the war Russia launched in response in Ukraine’s southeast.
The scene opens in Puzata Khata, a spacious, even grand, three-story Ukrainian-food cafeteria that overlooks a prominent corner and park square of Kyiv’s bohemian Podil district.
Outside, it’s the end of a sweltering day changing into a hot summer evening under a rising moon. Evenings in this latitude come late in summer, much as they come early in winter, and in popular spots, as in this heart of Podil, people like to gather outside for drinking and entertainment, as in any other big city.
Rich descriptive passages of The Half Guinea eating, and of the scene of the gathering crowd outside, surround sparser passages of natural-born Polish-American poet Steve Kowalski asking The Guinea questions and voicing his concerns regarding the war’s dead. Kowalski’s speech is troubled and philosophically uncertain [Contrast this with Kowalski’s similar but far more naïve speech in an earlier Checkout piece by The Guinea called “Killing Time – at Piano Café” – Ed.]
With the scene outside, writing as a detached observer as he listens to Kowalski’s questions and concerns, The Half Guinea describes the denizens gathering around a musician in the park square.
The piece is remarkable for the breadth of its description of the variety of persons The Guinea observes milling and gathering – from hardboiled alcoholics to social drinkers, from hippy chicks to ageing whores, running across the panoply of their looks, fashions, body art, dancing, gesturing, laughing, and exclaiming.
The piece is also remarkable for how it combines these observations with The Guinea’s eating a variety of foods in three-dimensional descriptions that come right out at you, like in a movie.
And the piece is additionally remarkable for how all of this is seamlessly woven together, through great narrative control and timing, with a great ear for the sound and rhythm and pacing of language and the perfect telling of a perfect story. There are no superfluous flourishes, crutch words or phrases; there are no verbal excesses. Kowalski’s poetic meditation on death, though emotionally perturbed, is serious and deep.
Under the table, The Guinea feeds a mangy dog, recently harassed by the oppressive heat outside. We are not told if this is the dog-man Milk Bone, although we know from other Checkout pieces that the two are often found together in a variety of settings throughout the city, and it is probably Milk Bone being more of a dog here than a man.
To help Kowalski better understand the death of the war, The Guinea analogizes the war to a circus, a grotesque abomination that we are supposed to take for fun, with the clowns creepily being closest to our lived reality. Kowalski concludes from this that the clowns are our dead, but this is not what The Guinea meant at all, and he tells Kowalski that the reverse of that notion is closer to the truth.
Repeating another common motif with The Guinea, as an African girl passes by, The Guinea excuses himself to go after her. He then returns from a trip to the toilet, apparently having failed in his wooing.* We then see a young man with a ponytail, who leaves with the girl, who is blushing with embarrassment as she exits the ladies’ room.
As the frame closes, Kowalski asks The Guinea, ‘Who will take care of the dead?’, to which The Guinea replies that the dead will take care of the dead, invoking a passage from the New Testament.
***
The frame is written like a musical composition, and here is what the music looks like:
First passage or movement:
Kowalski talks, Guinea eats, description of outside and evening (short)
Kowalski talks, Guinea eats, description of inside and setting (a little longer)
Kowalski talks, Guinea eats; Guinea looks out window and describes scene of crowd outside (longest), and then he speaks (very short)
Pattern begins again, repeats:
Kowalski talks, Guinea eats, crowd outside described further (but description shorter)
Theme varied: Kowalski talks, Guinea comments (very short), then he eats
Major pattern shift; Guinea now takes initiative and command:
Guinea talks, Kowalski responds (short)
Guinea talks, Kowalski responds (short)
Guinea responds (short), and first passage or movement ends.
New, second, passage or movement begins, reversing pattern of the first:
Scene inside described (long – starting with African girl and ending with Guinea’s return to the table)
Kowalski talks (short), Guinea responds (short)
Frame ends.
28.12.14
*I ran into The Guinea the day after the New Year (the same day I am appending this note to this little essay, January 2, 2015).
Well, nothing happened, nothing out of the ordinary, that is, except that The Guinea, surprisingly having read this review (which, as you can see, was filed very close to the end of last year), took issue with my assessment of his encounter with the black girl at the Puzata Khata in Podil.
The Guinea said that he “fucked her,” and not only that, but repeated the point many times as if maniacally possessed, though not necessarily angry, adding that he has “never struck out during all my time in Kyiv,” and that it is highly unlikely he ever will.
He said that was the reason for her blushing with embarrassment when she came out of the toilet to reconnect with her white ponytailed boyfriend, who obviously didn’t know what had happened.
I don’t exactly remember how my encounter with The Half Guinea ended, but I do vaguely recall my asking him how he might manage to achieve all that in the time that it takes the average man to go take a leak.
On this point I found The Guinea exceptionally accommodating, although he left his explanation unclear, limiting it to assurances that while the action he imposes on an extempore love interest takes place in real time, he manages to have a “long, full-value and completely satisfying” sexual coupling with her in another place he takes her to while he has her in his power.
I asked him if that included the encounter at the (Roman Catholic) church last night when he was out with Kowalski (see The Checkout, “Annus Novus”, Author Unknown), to which The Guinea replied, “What do you think?”
From NOTE SET 12
The Lesson Learned: One Must Keep Writing
… [I]t’s how it’s done that separates the stories that tell from the stories that show, with showing being superior to telling.
A writer who explains too much ruins the story. They either lack sufficient talent or they sacrifice what they do have in potential and ability to the egotistical urge to prove themselves.
An honest writer will admit that’s the case, and this only helps his writing. Rereading, revising, cutting back and editing are acquired skills that help a writer take the ego out of his writing and put in the narrative, which is the most important thing. Doing these things is a way of seeing a work with the eye of a reader, and results in a better story – better-listened-to and better-told.
It would be disingenuous for a writer to claim he doesn’t care about leaving his imprint on his art, yet ultimately, the art is greater than the artist. It’s all about the art, and the artist is merely its vessel. Genuine humility is very hard to come by, but in the end, it’s the greatest state in which an artist can create. Humility, not ego, feeds the imagination.
Having talent helps – an ear for how words fit together and the rhythms of the phrases they form and their flow, fueled by the irresponsible childishness of imagination – something one not only has to have, but be willing to open up to.
Becoming the vessel of something outside yourself is not easy to do, as is clearly proven by the lists of broken artists.
One has to repeatedly read what one has written to understand how one is giving the story one is crafting an existence, a life, in the eye of the reader, in the ear of the listener, in another’s mind.
These things are never a given – I mean as a natural skill, although having a sort of capacity for this or affinity with it does help, much as having good pitch, an ear for the right key, and a singing voice help one become a good musician, play instruments, or compose. But these things – in writing, I mean – are worked at and an understanding regarding their mechanics and effects emerges over time.
In effect, what we are talking about is almost exclusively form.
That’s why no literary critic is worth their weight in salt if they don’t talk about form.
All these literary theories, whatever they may be, are nice to apply, but they are ultimately only effects, they are not the cause.
Form is the cause.
The critics one wants to read for literature are the ones that want nothing more than to talk about the work itself, rather than theories, whether their own, or having their provenance in some fast-rising and fading pseudo movement or counter pseudo movement. We may be talking about something as simple as a book review. And this is not sad to say, but this is good, for this is the most basic and best foundation for furthering readers’ engagement, dialogue, enjoyment, and understanding.
This mostly means talking about how a work works, about its language and how it says what it says, about how the language affects us and why – what is it that the author did with the language to bring this about. Which largely means talking about form, since content can be anything, but it is never worth anything unless it is given artistic value, and therefore weight and meaning and significance by the form.
21.8.15
From NOTE SET 13
The Framescape vs. The Novel
In terms of their length, framescapes, created from individual frames, would probably be comparable to novellas and novels of the shorter to midsized varieties – the ones we know as being, say, not much more than 300 pages at their maximum, this being because they will generally not seek ultimate plot resolution and strict closure, but will remain…
1. more open-ended and suggestive of possibilities compared with the novel, thereby leaving them with nothing else to prove once the main story has been told, and hopefully, told well. While a story arc for the entire framescape inevitably takes form, the writer’s efforts are instead concentrated on the story arc for each unit frame.
2. With framescapes, there is no room for showcasing the writer’s prowess beyond that of the basic story. If he doesn’t prove his mettle within the scope of the core story, and within the bounds of each frame that makes up that core story, then, as with the modern novel, more virtuoso descriptive passages, stream of consciousness demos, and pages and pages of additional text – to impress you and me – won’t win him his case.
Thus, with framescapes, what is most important is that the main story is told, with the greatest concern being that it is told well, that it engages the reader’s imagination, and upon its ending, provokes a lingering reflection and speculation as to how the story might have continued.
3. The frame-by-frame structure of a framescape, being flexible, makes it easier to change mood, atmosphere, and even style, as well as focus on different characters, compared with the typical novel’s chapters.
4. For the same reason, framescapes are better equipped than the novel itself is to engage the traditional novel’s historically component parts and bring long storytelling back to its more fragmented, episodic and serial roots.
Below, at the risk of oversimplifying this argument and exposing what may be highly subjective prejudices on my part, as quickly as possible, I attempt to explain why.
The Novel
According to Wikipedia (as of this essay’s date), the modern Western novel boasts its start in 1605 with the publication of the first part of the masterpiece, Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” – a highly episodic picaresque also widely considered the greatest work of prose fiction in the world.
In Great Britain the novel rises, self-conscious of its differences with its more fantastical and digressive cousin, the romance. There are Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” and “Moll Flanders” in 1719 and 1722, Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” in 1726, and a little later, the works of Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding in the 1740s.
The novel has its roots in the newly rising journalism of the time, the closely related essay, the satire, polemical religious and political dialogues, and the theater’s drama.
Where there was once more class-exclusive high court entertainment, there was now a growing literary market thanks to life’s ever-broadening democratizations.
The novel gained popular appeal for an increasingly industrialized and growing literate public, which appreciated the form’s emphasis on real life problems, practical issues, and current sensibilities, as well as its linear storytelling and unitary action, compared with, say, the romance and more esoteric story collections.
Due to its roots, the novel initially yielded fictional histories, stories in letters (epistolary), and fictional diaries, making the form fragmentary and highly episodic, and thereby true to its original nature.
Fictional prose works had been fragmentary and episodic prior to the novel, but scholars are reluctant to call most of those works novels because the episodes are either unrelated, or, if related, they are not linked into a narrative order.
The original episodic nature of the novel meant its emphasis was on action, not description.
The Novel Today
Today, the opposite appears to be the case and novels appear to be set to formula and therefore safe in their mediocrity and ever spiraling downward. The acceptable norm is ever-sinking, to the point that it no longer makes sense to even say there is a norm at all. The degradation is so pervasive, that these things no longer work at the greater lengths of, say, 500 pages, or 800 pages, which, I take it, is supposed to be somehow impressive.
Today the industry is clearly a raging and blind monster gone out of control and, in trying to remain viable, is actually devouring itself out of existence.
This is but one theory with regard to the demise of the novel.
Another is that, after 400 years, we have simply come to the close of an era and moved into the beginning of a new one – something, I think, that needs to be more widely realized and accepted.
In this theory, the novel is only a phase, a transition. It started, rose to a height, and has seen its decline – and the way I argue it, irreversible.
Today, the novel has become a convict to psychological realism, weighted with characterization, explanations and descriptions of motives, circumstances, and internal action, which is all meant to develop external action.
The writing doesn’t spring from a conflict with a competing ideology, as, for example, a hostile or favorable discourse with other authors, or with the spirit of the times, but has become, rather, settled into a fixed set of thematic and generic conventions.
I think novels today force us into descriptions, force descriptions on us – of characters, of the places where they live, of the ways they act and interact, and of the contrived backgrounds and incidents in their pasts that are meant to show us, indeed convince us, why that is.
The Framescape
Here, description takes a backseat while the focus is on characters’ words and actions, which show or reveal, rather than tell, us what they’re like and what their possible motives may be for their existence, for their actions. The frame’s short form forces the writer to be mostly brief and to concentrate on telling the good story. Formulaic novelistic description is not forced and rammed down readers’ throats.
As the story grows and becomes more complex, description is added to reflect that and facilitate development. Otherwise, as a rule, descriptions of place and time are mostly sketched in and typically brief, thereby leaving a good deal to the reader’s imagination.
Because I’m speaking in evolutionary terms, very important for the framescape is the original novel’s highly episodic nature.
To structure and tell a story similar to how a novel once did, the idea or MO of a frame takes the components from which the original novel had been made – journalism, the essay, the satire, the polemical dialogue, the theater and its drama, but mostly its principal fragmentary and episodic nature – and builds stories into frames and, if deemed necessary, linking or interlocking those frames into greater wholes using those parts.
4.11.15
In hindsight, sometime in early 2019
Over the four-year period during which the works of these volumes were written (coinciding almost precisely with the start of 2013 and the end of 2016), I did a lot of fretting that, while a number of frameworks (a linkage of, say, from two to five (or six) related frames) were being written, framescapes weren’t being written at all.
In hindsight, however, I see that is not true. While the five-six-frame cutoff point for what constitutes a framework may be somewhat arbitrary, it is also, I think, appropriate, if only because it feels just about right. I guess that would mean a linkage of seven related frames would already make it a small framescape, or perhaps a framescape miniature.
In The Commix, there is the “Nocturne” series of 10 related frames, which is a framescape, and then there is, for example, the unavoidable linkage of the two back-to-back frameworks of “Losser Drives Olifko” and “The Transmigration of Bad Souls”; making their whole a framescape as well. In The Checkout, there is what I refer to as “The Saga of Manny Face”, which is also a framescape of almost 30 frames.
But finally, and most importantly, the entire integrated work of The Kyiv Commix and The Checkout, as contained in these volumes, is precisely the vast, grand, jubilant and sad framescape of the kind I had had in mind all along. Funny I didn’t see that, but there it is.
For the record, the term frame is filmic in origin, and fits precisely the storytelling intent of The Commix and Checkout, as in ‘frame-by-frame’.
2019
From NOTE SET 14
Sections reintegrated back into The Checkout and Kyiv Commix: A Simple Restatement of Literary Intent
Up until a few days ago (as of this writing), Kyiv Unedited had had 10 sections (categories).
All of these sections were reintegrated back into the sections Kyiv Commix and The Checkout, bringing the site back to its original, simple, and classic design of three main sections – the two creative, literary sections Kyiv Commix and The Checkout, and this section, Man on Earth, which is the slow-moving critical commentary on the other two sections.
Now, the reader’s experience is bound to be superior.
The format is back in line again with the site’s original intent – that a reader move up and down either the Kyiv Commix page or The Checkout page and read any frame or any number of frames in any order the reader wants.
Reading freedom and the utmost in simplicity is of essence for Kyiv Unedited, the idea of it, and its design. Crowding this very simple website with tags and links within frames to other frames would not enhance a reader’s experience and help maximize that freedom, but limit it. It’s all about choice and exercising it on your own, and of your own free will.
The text is the most important thing. What you choose to read and how you read it – it’s your choice, and your experience will be based on the text and on the choices you make, and not on links or tags suggesting you continue on here, or there, or elsewhere.
Plus, we don’t want to do all that extra work. It’s simply not worth it.
There is, perhaps, one not insignificant challenge for those who would like to read the frames in both sections on the site in the order they were written, in that this would mean a lot of time-consuming, and therefore, time-wasting alternating between The Commix and Checkout and noting the filing date at the bottom of each frame – obviously inefficient, frustrating and annoying.
The best solution to this problem would be publishing the entire work in the order it was written in physical book form. This would still allow readers to read the frames out of sequence, if they prefer, flipping this way and that through the book, thereby detracting nothing from the original intended website experience.
And dare I say, proving the irrefutable and timeless superiority of the book in every way over anything anyone can do with, and inside, a screen.
17.5.16