Writing that Moves: Amontillado Wrap-up

Posted on November 24, 2014 by robertpkruger

In the last half of “The Cask of Amontillado,” Montresor leads Fortunato down through several more levels of catacombs, and the bones become more numerous and the air more stale, so that the torch glows rather than flames. Beforehand, though, they kill another bottle of wine and Fortunato makes a gesture that he explains identifies one as a mason. Montresor says they he is a mason himself and produces a trowel from his roquelaire. It’s not a knife, so there is something both funny — beyond the evident pun — and sinister here.

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Climate Change: Framing a Scientific Issue

Posted on November 21, 2014 by robertpkruger

This is not a political entry, but it is about politicization, to elaborate on my post about a liberal credo. I was debating climate change with someone today who, I thought, was not confronting the real questions and stubbornly making this a political debate. This is how I attempted to help us make traction.

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The primordial earth had no free oxygen, but plenty of CO2, N2, and water. Life systems regulated the atmosphere as they evolved. We can approach the issue of atmosphere and climate change by considering the atmosphere at a more primitive state.

There is no doubt that humans have increased the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Life systems will certainly be able to correct what we’ve done so far — on a scale of hundreds of years. The more CO2 we put in, the longer it will take. So how much human-contributed CO2 would be intolerable, assuming that might be possible? How long will it take biological feedback mechanisms to make it tolerable?

These are the critical questions.

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Anyone who takes a firm stand on a scientific issue but refuses to engage the essential questions, whether the issue is the influence of biology on human behavior, or vaccination, GMO, or climate change, is wrong, prima facie. They are engaged in demagoguery, not debate.

The following is political, and I don’t want to conflate it too strongly with my main point, above, but I do think climate change is an issue:

If we acknowledge a problem, how do we fix it? We don’t want to regulate industrial emissions in a way that undermines the very infrastructure that will create the technology we need to solve this problem. That needs to be acknowledged. However, a lot of the carbon dioxide that we emit is not being emitted efficiently toward building up technology and a better brain trust. It is squandered in planned obsolescence for short-term profit and in the manufacturing of useless crap.

Letting those who profit from old technology run the debate just won’t work. The invisible hand of capitalism does not always push us toward more efficiency, toward solving long-term problems. It’s great for addressing short-term problems, but this will require government help. We didn’t get to the moon without government help, and we won’t solve this without it either.

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A Suggested Credo for Liberals

Posted on November 20, 2014 by robertpkruger

There’s really not much point being a liberal if you don’t acknowledge…

  • that science trumps politics,
  • that being an individual and striving to treat others as individuals trump group identity,
  • that being a victim is a situation to get out of as soon as possible and to help others get out of,
  • that cultivating self-awareness and owning your own crap trumps projection,
  • that feeling righteous is far from being right,
  • and that answering shitty behavior with shitty behavior is at best counterproductive.

If I were put in charge of the Great Liberal Manifesto, this would be in it — as a reminder to myself first and foremost.

I’ve been keeping politics to a minimum on this blog. I’m a liberal, lowercase, because I think that’s the correct name for a democratic, science-based, freedom-loving ethos. I am not a conservative, except in that I lean a bit toward conservative philosophy: Plato, Taoism, and that sort of thing. While existentialism is good, conserving the hard-won gains of civilization is only prudent, and one should always recheck Plutarch’s Lives to see if the newest fad in social engineering wasn’t actually tried a dozen times before the end of the first century A.D.

Liberalism is a state of mind, and it’s not for wimps.

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Writing that Moves: Amontillado, Part 5

Posted on November 18, 2014 by robertpkruger

Note that we’ve only gone a few hundred words into the story, but I’ve written a few thousand looking at its technique. You may quibble here and there, but I hope I’ve impressed you with how much is going on here.

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General: Confident of his game with Fortunato, Montresor puts on an act, toying with the reader by proxy. The devices introduced early on in the story are re-employed, with a few special flourishes.

The alliteration of “white web-work which gleams from these cavern walls” makes that line a declamation, hammy and theatrical. This is no accident. Nor is the “web” imagery. The spider plays with the fly.

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Writing that Moves: #1 Reason Your Story Fails

Posted on November 17, 2014 by robertpkruger

Simple: you don’t really know your characters.

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Writing that Moves: Choosing Detail

Posted on November 14, 2014 by robertpkruger

Contrary to what you may have read, the author mentioned the curtains for a reason and made them blue for a reason! Either that, or he was a crappy writer.

I’m interrupting my look at “The Cask of Amontillado” to make a digression. In the story, Fortunato wears a jester’s outfit with a cap and bells. The jingling of the bells asserts itself in the story with grim irony.

If your viewpoint character notices a detail, there must be a reason. The more the viewpoint character is focused on something else, like luring an enemy to his doom in some catacombs, the stronger the detail must be to impinge on his awareness. Also, details exist in an emotional context. A set of details in an effective passage may appear unrelated, but they probably aren’t.

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Writing that Moves: Amontillado, Part 4

Posted on November 12, 2014 by robertpkruger

For those who are coming to this late, I’m critiquing Poe’s story on the level of craft, to demonstrate things to look for in writing when you are reading stories you’d like to emulate.

There were no attendants at home; they had absconded to make merry in honour of the time. I had told them that I should not return until the morning, and had given them explicit orders not to stir from the house. These orders were sufficient, I well knew, to insure their immediate disappearance, one and all, as soon as my back was turned.

I took from their sconces two flambeaux, and giving one to Fortunato, bowed him through several suites of rooms to the archway that led into the vaults. I passed down a long and winding staircase, requesting him to be cautious as he followed. We came at length to the foot of the descent, and stood together on the damp ground of the catacombs of the Montresors.

The gait of my friend was unsteady, and the bells upon his cap jingled as he strode.

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Depression and Evo Psych: Fighting Yourself, So the Group Can Win

Posted on November 12, 2014 by robertpkruger

There are several models of depression that psychologists have arrived at from consideration of its potentially adaptive function. Some are weaker than others; some are mutually compatible. When I posted a Facebook link to the Wikipedia article giving an overview of a few of them, my friend Jonathan Tweet edited the sketchy intro. Here’s that article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_approaches_to_depression

A brief comment thread followed my Facebook post, in which a couple of my friends were put off by this line of inquiry. They seemed to think that it was dismissive of the idiopathic complexity of the disease; they cited their own battle with depression, seemingly out of concern that their own experience might be overshadowed or discounted by a general theory. I respectfully think they missed the point. Here is my answer defending one model to a friend who read the article and wasn’t impressed; he argued that chronic depression didn’t seem to confer any survival benefit and therefore couldn’t be an adaptation.

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Writing that Moves: Amontillado, Part 3

Posted on November 10, 2014 by robertpkruger

This continues my look at the technique used in Poe’s story. Since this is a longer excerpt, I’m placing it below.

General Notes:

The narrator recounts how he found and began to deceive Fortunato during a carnival. The narrator does not say, “I pretended to be pleased to see him”; no, he simply states, “I was pleased to see him.” The effect is a little unnerving. Are we to take this figuratively, with the “pretended” implied; or is the narrator happy to see him because he’s happy to get on with his revenge?

Or, more chillingly, does he simply mean what he says, that he was pleased to see him, that he doesn’t have to feign excitement and affection? Perhaps it’s simply that his hate coexists with those feelings, and is the stronger.

Whatever the case, we’re engaged and want to find out more.

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Writing that Moves: Amontillado, Part 2

Posted on November 7, 2014 by robertpkruger

This continues my look at the technique used in Poe’s story. I’m doing these not so much to critique the story but to test and build up a vocabulary to help myself and others read with attention at the level of craft, so that we can recognize these tricks to steal for our own writing.

He had a weak point—this Fortunato—although in other regards he was a man to be respected and even feared. He prided himself on his connoisseurship in wine. Few Italians have the true virtuoso spirit. For the most part their enthusiasm is adopted to suit the time and opportunity—to practise imposture upon the British and Austrian millionaires. In painting and gemmary, Fortunato, like his countrymen, was a quack—but in the matter of old wines he was sincere. In this respect I did not differ from him materially: I was skillful in the Italian vintages myself, and bought largely whenever I could.

General Notes:

Here the narrator sets up the game. First, we have the pronoun with the subject in apposition, emphasized with dashes. Poe is leaning on the name here. We can’t miss how appropriate it is. Next, the narrator’s generalization about the Italians reveals that he’s arrogant, but one thing he doesn’t underestimate is Fortunato’s knowledge of wine. This is a very subtle version of the trick Lucius taught, about trying to get your reader to subconsciously contradict the narrator, which raises our critical awareness of the narrator as a person while it lowers our critical attitude toward the larger story. The narrator speaks with authority about the Italians, but in a fatuous way so that we question his judgment, but then he is generous and claims that Fortunato knows his stuff about wine, giving the impression of a narrator who has overcome his prejudice to make a concession. Fighting prejudice is hard, especially toward someone we hate, like the narrator clearly hates Fortunato, so we’re inclined to think that what he says about Fortunato is true. Meanwhile, the narrator has further revealed himself to be a petty, scheming man. The last sentence is important to building up the narrator’s claim to know that Fortunato is a wine expert, but it’s also a boast. The phrase “in this I did not differ from him materially” is figurative, but it implies that in a more literal way, he otherwise did differ from him, that the narrator is not as wealthy as Fortunato, and in context, this clearly galls him.

The narrator has said a lot more about himself here than he has about his subject! It’s an expert use of the mirror trick.

Technique notes:

Getting us to engage the narrator by contradicting him
Describing a viewpoint character by his attitude toward another character

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