Boy Meets Girl

Back in college I saw a 1935 stage place called Boy Meets Girl. 

 

(Picture from here.)

 

It was what we would call these days a rom-com. It takes place in 1930s Hollywood with a failing leading man, a film producer, an unmarried, pregnant waitress, two script-writers, and the illegitimate baby the writers turn into a star.

 

It’s fun. I have not seen the Cagney film but the Wikipedia synopsis is pretty much what I remember. I’ll look for it.

 

Under the plot is the idea of a style of story: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. 

 

This has intrigued me ever since. I rewrote it as protagonist discovers target of desire, protagonist loses target of desire, protagonist attains target of desire.

 

Reframed in this way, it is a common story structure as either the main structure or as a thread within the main structure. For example, in the Netflix Wednesday show, a strong theme is Wednesday discovers friends, Wednesday loses friends, Wednesday gets friends. (For those familiar with the show, “friends” can be replaced with “Enid.”) This is the emotional arc of the show. 

 

In my own work, Jackie’s Boy is the story of Michael finding Jackie, Michael losing Jackie, and Michael getting Jackie. The rest of the book is wrapped around this armature. 

 

I think this is different from the Aristotelean Plot. According to Big A, there are two kinds of good plots: simple and complex. Simple plots involve a change in fortune and the characters response to this. There is usually an incentive moment—what we called at Clarion, an event— that triggers the cause-and-effect sequence of the plot. Complex plots involve a reversal of fortune and insight into one’s fate. The protagonist has more agency to change the plot.

 

As I understand it, in both of these plot types the change of fortune is outside of the protagonist’s control. In the boy-meets-girl paradigm, the chance element is only represented by the encounter to the target of desire. From then on, all agency relies on the protagonist, be they one or many. 

 

Hitchcock referred to a macguffin, an object of desire that has no intrinsic importance but is the attractant to the characters. The Holy Grail, Golden Fleece, and Maltese Falcon, all demonstrate a macguffin: the mystery and importance of these things reside only in the mind of the characters. Others believe that the macguffin must have importance to the audience (or reader) as well: the One Ring of LOTR, or the Lost Ark in the Spielberg film. In both of these cases, the macguffin has intrinsic importance especially when in the wrong hands.

 

LOTR and Raiders of the Lost Ark are both example of what I call big stories. Big stories involve the end of the world, good versus evil, light against dark. Small stories, on the other hands, are stories where the stakes are limited to the characters involved. I’ve written very few big stories—the closest I’ve come have been stories where the big events happen but as an afterthought consequence of the small stories. For good or ill, small stories are where I tend to live.

 

Boy-meets-girl is essentially a small story paradigm. It can reside within a big story—see Wednesday, above—but the stakes are local. Wednesday’s acquiring of friends has little bearing on the larger issues. The fact of her having friends by the end has an effect on the larger arc but the big story could have been told without it. 

 

These days, big stories are written with little stories embedded within them. That’s the current style—in Raiders the story of Indiana and Marian is important to Indiana and Marian but not to the Lost Ark itself. The best big stories are built that way. Heist films—Avengers’ Endgame and Ocean’s Eleven have big stories flowing right along without much in the way of small story support. (In the case of Endgame, the small story of loss motivates the big story but is ultimately left to one side when the heist gets going. It then returns at the end.)

 

Boy-meets-girl (so much less wieldy than protagonist-encounters-target-of-desire) is really built for the small story. It can be contorted to fit over a big story but it’s not often a comfortable fit. It’s not a coincidence that the small stories inside Raiders and LOTR are not boy-meets-girl but of a different style. In Wednesday, the BMG story is pushed to the background and emerges as needed to re-energize the characters and to introduce teenage angst as needed. (It is a story of high school, after all. What’s high school without teen drama?) The writers were careful to keep a little distance between the BMG elements and the big story of monsters, mayhem, and death.

 

I keep discovering the BMG paradigm in my own work and in the wild all the time. When you look at LOTR from the point of view of the One Ring, it’s BMG all the time. It’s either done straight—Gollum meets ring. Gollum loses ring. Gollum gets ring—or it’s inverted. As in Frodo gets ring, Frodo rejects ring, Frodo embraces ring. BMG is the small wheel that drives the ponderous architecture of both the novels and the film. 

 

Of course, it’s possible I’m projecting my own touchstone imagination onto works that don’t actually have it. Many times, we have phrases or magic words that mean worlds to us but have no real meaning to anyone else. 

 

That’s okay. Inspiration is not transferable. What inspires me might leave you cold. Your most important life affirming moment might be something I find trivial. 

 

It’s like the elephant dancing. The magic is not how clumsy or inept the inspiration is, but that it occurs at all.

 

 

Vicious Psychopath vs Senile Grandpa

(Picture from Dall-E.)

 

This is not the best presidential lineup. 

 

On the one hand, we have Trump who promises revenge for insults and slights he invented and can only stop lying when he stops breathing. On the other, we have Biden who has trouble putting together a coherent sentence.

 

As I said before, vicious psychopath vs. senile grandpa.

 

A friend of mine texted me when the debate was over: Biden told the truth and looked weak. Trump lied and looked strong.

 

It’s at times like this I really don’t like the winner take all process we have in this country. Ranked voting might well still get the same result but at least there would be a slim possibility of actual choice.

 

I can’t vote for someone who has tried to overthrow the government, condoned violence, and lied about everything from COVID to global warming. At least with Senile Grandpa, I can rely on people he has picked. It’s picking a lesser mistake to avoid a catastrophe. 

 

Make no mistake: Trump is a catastrophe.

 

This is not the of times and the best of a presidential lineup. But I’ll put my country’s fate into the hands of dementia rather than rest it with psychosis.

 

Convention News: Readercon 2024

 I will be at readercon this year. Readercon runs 7/11-7/14 at the Boston Quincy Marriott in Quincy, MA.

I’ll be on two panels:

• Mosaic Novels: Sunday, 7/14, 10:00 AM, Salon B: Mosaic novels (or sometimes called braided novels) are collections of associated stories that together have a continuing narrative. My contribution was to the Future Boston series where I contributed several stories and a novel. We were telling the future history of the city of Boston.
• Defining and Appreciating Cozy SFF, Sunday 7/14, 11:00 AM, Salon 4. Cozy SFF involves usually has small stakes rather than shaking the world. This describes most of my work.

Come one. Come all. Come often.

 

Consideration of Works Past: Dangerous Visions

I was never the audience for Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

DV came out in 1967. I was fifteen. I read it but DV was intended for adults. While I was advanced for my age, I was still a fairly repressed teen in Alabama at the time. I was obsessed with science fiction but I was not part of the SF fan community. I didn’t really know about such a thing until much, much later. Thus, I did not grow up with the concept of readers contacting readers and discussing what they read.

 

When I was growing up the rule was, I could read anything I could reach on a bookshelf. My mother didn’t take into account my ability to climb so I read everything in the house. This included such things as For Whom the Bell Tolls, From Here to Eternity, The Arrangement, and As I Lay Dying. I read most of the library before I was twelve. 

 

I discovered science fiction as a branch from comics—of which I remain an avid reader to this day. I started at one end of the SF section in my local library and worked my way left to right. There weren’t SF novels in the house until I became a member of the SF book club. 

 

SF entered my life just before Junior High and has remained with me ever since.

 

I think I encountered DV late in high school. It was a good collection of stories. It wasn’t my favorite. My favorite collection remains the Robert P Mills Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction (1960) with Anthony Boucher’s A Treasury of Great Science Fiction (1959) a close second. The Mills collection had such stories as Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon,  Bester’s The Pi Man, Heinlein’s All You Zombies, and McKenna’s Casey Agonistes. Treasury has Budrys’ Rogue Moon and Bester’s The Stars My Destination.

 

DV was fun but it didn’t strike me as all that interesting in comparison. Also, close to a quarter of the book was commentary. Ellison had a long introduction to the book and introduced every story. After each story, the author had an afterward. As far as I was concerned, this material was to be skipped. I’d rather the work speak for itself. It’s been nearly sixty years and I still can’t bring myself to read it. I’ve never much cared for literary commentary. 

 

(As a side note, since Ellison wrote all of the introductions and had a story in the collection, he ended up being the largest contributor. This may have influenced my opinion.)

 

I read DV and went on relatively unscathed. DV spawned Again, Dangerous Visions (1972), which I found somewhat impressive. Meanwhile, the long moldering Last Dangerous Visions will soon be published. I’ll probably make myself read it. 

 

Meanwhile, while DV didn’t have a strong effect on me, it did seem to have a strong effect on the field. In college, I met other SF readers and many of them thought this collection was world-shaking. It was amazing. It was dangerous.

 

Really? I thought. More dangerous than Rogue Moon, which examined an alien artifact in a work that seemed to channel Norman Mailer? More dangerous than The Stars My Destination, which as a main character who starts out a rapist and murderer and ends up a tortured saint? More dangerous than From Here to Eternity, which seems to me at this point in my life a deconstruction of the American idea? More dangerous than John Dos Passos? (whom I’d just discovered and thought was world-shaking, amazing, and dangerous. Also since he wrote his best work in the first half of the 20^th century, what does that say about me?)

 

I mean it was a good collection. Several stories won awards. Not all of the stories have aged well—Gonna Roll the Bones could use some really strong editing, is essentially a glorification of a philandering, gambling, wife-beater. I liked it when I was seventeen. Not so much now. A Toy for Juliette, The Doll House, and The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World are essentially hubris stories: where something is given to the main character which ends up destroying the person due to the person’s unthinking arrogance. The ideas surrounding them are interesting but not so the stories themselves. I didn’t like hubris stories in The Twilight Zone. I don’t like them in DV.

 

Other stories have been overtaken by time. For example, Anderson’s Eutopia, is a somewhat tired story about an alternate world traveler trying to get home. He’s persecuted for mysterious reasons throughout the story until finding his way back to his lover, a boy. (I’m not being facetious. The lover is directly referred to as a “boy” in the story.) This is presented as a surprise but it’s pretty obvious half way through the story. 

 

On the other hand, Spinrad’s Carcinoma’s Angels is pure genius. In this story, the main character is an unrepentant, successful, ambitious businessman struck with cancer. All cures fail and he resolves to tackle his cancer himself, by going inside with a cocktail of hallucinogens. From there on, every battle, encounter, and victory is metaphorical. 

 

I thing the “dangerousness” of DV reflected a lack of understanding of where SF sensibilities resided within the context of the literary world. DV has been described as launching the New Wave approach to characterization in SF. New Wavers considered themselves breaking from the whole pulp, American ideal, SF. 

 

I don’t agree with that self-assessment. The characterizations they discuss were already there in Bester, Budrys, and others in the field, and across the world outside of it.

 

But my agreement is not important. While I don’t think DV stories are as good as people think, the writers that came after it— Le Guin, Ballard, Delany, and Zelazny as a few examples—are as brilliant as any writers anywhere. I wasn’t much influenced by Ellison or the DV books, but I was inspired by those who were appeared subsequently. If DV enabled their publication, it deserves every honor given it.

 

State of the Farm: June, 2024

We managed to get pretty much everything planted by the end of Memorial Day weekend. This is, more or less, the traditional planting time up here in New England. Of course, global warming has brought spring in two weeks early and pushed summer out two weeks later. In addition, it has changed our location in the USDA plant hardiness map. 

 

This has some pros and cons. On the pro side, we get to start planting two weeks early and can harvest into early October. That is, if we pick the right seeds. It gets hotter now in the summer—we’re looking at a record heat wave in the coming days—which might be good or bad. The beans last year didn’t set fruit above 95F. But the melons like the heat. 

 

On the con side, the heat is a problem for many of the plants. The extended growing season also extends the opportunity for pests and diseases. We’re having record slug and rodent problems. Slugs (“They can’t hear. They can’t speak. They can’t operate machinery.”) have never been that much of a problem. But with the warmth and the wet, they are starting to be a real issue. We’re investigating a number of solutions but haven’t implemented any as of yet.

 

The rodent problem comes from multiple sources. For one thing, we’ve not had an outdoor cat for a few years now. Cats don’t just kill everything that moves, rodents and similar animals are scared away by their urine. Cats are happy to oblige. For another, we lost a large hickory last year. That served as a food source for squirrels. I think the squirrels competed with the chipmunks and helped keep the population at least a little bit down. Finally, the longer season and the mild winter no longer keeps the smaller rodents in check. 

 

We had redone the garden fence, putting in chicken wire and lining the ground with hardware cloth. This held back the mice and most of the voles. However, it didn’t stop the chipmunks one little bit. 

 

We’ve been trapping them regularly and that makes a dent but only a dent. It’s another problem we’re working on.

 

So.

 

We have three main garden areas—the turtle garden, the main garden, and the raised beds—and several fruit trees and arbors. 

 

There are three sections of the turtle garden: north, central, and south. We planted potatoes and sorghum in the north area. The potatoes are doing okay but the sorghum is a little stressed. If we continue with sorghum, we will likely move it. In the central section: more potatoes, pinto beans, and sugar beets. The beets and sorghum are part of my continuing experiments to be able to generate sugar. So far: failure. But I’m still trying.

 

The south section is fava beans and asparagus. Fava beans are another experiment. They are supposed to be a perennial up here but we will see. The asparagus bed is now close to three years old and supplies us with spears.

 

I overplanted the main garden last year and had too much competition. I reduced what I was planting this year and every plant has a clear area to grow. The list this year is:

• Basil
• Daikon radishes
• Carrots
• Sunflowers
• Goldberry
• Brussel sprouts
• White beans
• Brown beans
• Bush beans
• Cucumbers
• Melons
• Rutabagas
• Kohlrabi
• Celery
• Squash

Aaaand we’re already having issues. I planted eight lovely basil sets in the southwest corner of the garden and came in two days later and they were gone. Eaten to the root. Then, we found a hole under the fence. Too big for a mouse. Too small for a squirrel. I’m betting on chipmunks. But what rodent preferentially eats basil? We’ve never had that. Planted eight more purchased sets and they’ve been picked off, one by one. We are down to four. The brown beans came up and about a quarter of them had their tops bit off. Clearly, we have to handle this.

 

Of the four squash beds we planted, two didn’t come up at all. The peas I planted back in April had the same issue. We did notice that during COVID there seemed to be a seed germination issue. It might still be percolating through the system.

 

The raised beds have now been planted:

• Strawberries
• Potatoes
• Peanuts
• Peppers
• Basil

We’re getting strawberries. The early radishes (not listed above) didn’t really produce. The potatoes are being ravaged by potato beetles so I sprayed them with Dead Bug. For the record, we like to garden because we like to know where our food is coming from. That doesn’t mean we’re “organic” in the traditional use of the word. We’re not above using fertilizer, insecticides, or fungicides. It does mean that we’re judicious in their use and selective as to what we apply.

 

In the fruit department, the pears, apples, peaches, blueberries, and grapes look great. We lost all of the Manchurian pears—they either didn’t pollinate or the chipmunks got them. I think the former. A number of fruit trees produced huge amounts of blossoms but did not yield fruit at all or a lesser amount. This was the first time in several years where we didn’t put out orchard bees. That may be the problem.

 

The paw paws were like this. We have four trees. Three of them had blossoms. The fourth is too young. Across the three trees we only have about a dozen fruit growing. Paw paws are notoriously difficult to get pollinated. First, they cannot self-pollinate. Pollination must come from a genetically different plant. This means you can’t take a cutting and grow it next to the parent plant to get pollination. In addition, they are generally beetle pollinated and small beetles at that. Bees don’t help. There’s some evidence that a few paw paw species are pollinated by flies since the odor of the flowers resembles carrion or dung. 

 

All of this means that if you take a paw paw out of its range, you may or may not get fruit. In Europe, for example, they all hand pollinate. We might try that next year.

 

Finally, we’re attempting a grand experiment.

 

In the picture above, in the background, two items are circled. The left circle shows the use of bird tape on the strawberries and a blueberry bush. The right circle, in the background, is what looks like a tunnel. This is the blueberry house. 

 

We’re using bird tape on the lesser blueberry bushes. The blueberry house is covered with netting. 

 

We don’t like to use netting. It’s a complete PITA to deploy. It catches everything—leaves, branches, dirt. It supposed to be pulled after the harvest so leaves and snow can come in. And, sometimes, it catches birds. Some birds can be released. Others are not so lucky.

 

We saw the bird tape being used in Vermont. We’re hoping it works here. It doesn’t seem to work so well with strawberries. It’s possible the red color is so inviting that it overcomes whatever the bird tape does. Or, it’s possible we’re not using the bird tape correctly. We will see.

 

This is a good time in the garden—minus the pests. Just a little weeding is sufficient to keep control. Watering isn’t much of a problem because we’re having good rain. Not a lot of work. As the summer progresses, the work load gradually increases. Weeds get more persistent. Harvests have to be managed. Right now is good.

 

Finally, an apology. I didn’t get this out at the right time. So, in effect, it’s a day late. I’m sorry about that.