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Shakespeare prompt – Titus Andronicus

March 22, 2022 //
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Aaron: Let him that think of me so abjectly know that this gold must coin a strategem

Those who see me on the street think little or nothing of my appearance. I don’t look poor or rich. I’m clean when I go out of the house and my clothing is such that I’m neither ragged nor ripe for mugging. Not that the muggers these days are picky, but I prefer not to look as though I’m asking to be held up.

But seeing me on the street and knowing me from meetings, or water cooler discussions, the to and fro of office chit-chat, that’s a different story. In the office, you see, I open my mouth. People know how I sound, know my opinions, know the way I manoeuvre. And many of them look at me with a sort of abject pity, as though my inability to navigate office politics is something I should regret, or work to change.  

But the fact is, and you of all people will understand this, there’s no reason to fall into that game, to play as though there’s a real way of winning. There’s no real way of winning and so the way I play is not to play. The way I win in general is not to engage. ‘But you want to rise in the company, don’t you?’ Is rising in the company the goal? ‘But you won’t get a raise.’ Is there a need for more money? Only insofar as I could share it with others. I suppose that’s a reason to play. The company isn’t feeding the community now, is it?

But those aren’t the questions you ask, my friend. You ask how I can retain myself at the end of the day. And I’m not sure I know either. I go home at the end of the day and I can sleep with myself. I can write to you knowing that I was honest and worked to the best of my know how and did the best I could by the people around me. Is it a philosophical victory, to be seen by those near me as something of a failure? 

I ask myself that question with the additional question: Is there such a thing as a philosophical victory?

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Andrew (Sonnet 50, line 11)

March 21, 2022 //
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For three weeks, I used a random number generator to select one of Shakespeare’s sonnets (1-154) and a line number (1-14) and I used that line as a prompt for some writing. This is the first one.

Andrew awoke with the sound of the wind whipping through the tarp he wrapped himself and his belongings in each night. There had been no wind when he’d gone to sleep. Everything was wrapped up so that he’d be awakened should anyone disturb his stuff. 

He didn’t consider himself wretched by any means – he had clothes for the weather and books and a few regulars who tossed him coins and sometimes a sandwich.

His hard bed of a sidewalk kept his back aligned if he didn’t move too much in the night and he could sometimes even wash his clothes.

But today his carefully wrapped set-up was fluttering in a storm. The detritus of the street whipped about him and the storm whipped his skin, his hair and pieces of his life away. The book, wrapped in a zipped plastic bag that had been his pillow, was whisked down the street as soon as Andrew lifted his head. Now on its way down the street, he’d only had about twenty pages left of it to read. He knew of course that Miss Marple would solve the case of X and Y, but he was sad not to be able to finish it. It might have been the least of his possessions, but as his life flew away in the storm it was the most important. He also didn’t have another book to read. 

What made him most wretched is that he’d have to pack up all his stuff in this wretched weather and find a shelter. Somewhere.All the other homeless on his block of downtown street were doing the same. 

He started to hear the grumbling of the hard sleepers around him, but the wind tore their words away as soon as they were spoken. No one on the street said anything new anymore and even if this storm was real, it wasn’t making anything better and whatever the rest of the folks on the street had to say would differ in degree, not in actual content. 

He went to work wrapping his possessions again, more meager now. He reined in the blowing tarp. And rolled a blanket and a metal plate and bowl and thought about the dog – Billiard, she’d been called – weird to name a girl dog after a game played with a stick and balls. But someone had lured Billiard away. Andrew knew about the dog fights that people gambled on, but pushed the thought of his gentle dog being used that way from his head and concentrated again on getting his gear into a form he could carry. Somewhere. 
Source

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Molly (Sonnet 120, line 13)

March 11, 2022 //
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To kickstart my writing recently, I created a random prompt. I took two random numbers, one between 1 and 154 for one of Shakespeare’s sonnets and one between 1-14 for a line number. I’ve been doing this for almost three weeks, writing a page or a page and half in my journal based on the prompt. Sometimes the rest of the sonnet informs what I write, sometimes not. I have no idea if any of these will make it into larger pieces I write, but I’m amused by what has come up.

But that, your trespass, Molly, becomes a fee owed the corporation – you must ransom yourself to be again in our good graces. We must both consider what that ransom entails.

Molly sat back on the folding metal chair in HR’s austere office. The room had one big window with pulled metal blinds to let in the open plan’s lights, but also to let everyone on the floor know she’d been called on the carpet.

What an odd phrase – there was no carpet anywhere on the floor she worked on. Molly was torn between looking at the HR lady (who was probably a robot – who could tell these days?) and looking at her hands in shame. But what had she to be ashamed of? A minute’s distraction from the day’s work, a daydreaming look, a clattering of her pens, or paperclips on the floor? She was human (not ‘only human’ for as a human she was supposed to have more rights than this walking vacuum cleaner who represented corporate interests).

You are the face of the company, Molly, both on the line (They didn’t say phone anymore. When did that happen?) and to your fellows here on the floor. Surely you know that?

I know that because you tell me often enough that it’s true, but – and here was the sin in her heart – the only true compensation for that kind of representation was cold hard cash and they weren’t parting with that. Quite the opposite – they wanted to dock her, would dock her – for being human. Someone must be made the example. For a while Corporate made their weekly or biweekly examples in alphabetical order. All the Ms knew to be on their guard if an L was made an example the previous week. Corporate took an entire year to realize their employees had caught on to that plan. So now it was truly random. Last week had been a William and the relationship between William, his phone number, his badge number and his birthdate had been sanitized against all available information on the previous example. There was truly no winning or predicting anymore and Molly knew that her crimes were no different than the behavior of anyone else on the floor and she’d be docked more than she could afford no matter what. What with company stores and so on.

Molly suggested four hours and two meals. The HR lady replied ‘eight and four’ and stamped her file with a loud thud.

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Books read in February 2022

March 3, 2022 //
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My colleague Stas posts a monthly entry of books he’s read with a bit of commentary. Deciding to do the same.

  1. (Audio) Mel Brooks – All About Me. A lot of fun, great stories about making the classic movies. Hadn’t known that his company produced The Elephant Man and My Favorite Year. (The latter didn’t surprise me, the former did.)
  2. Ken Krimstein – When I Grow Up. Graphic novel of several autobiographical stories submitted to contest for Jewish youth in the 1930s. The results were supposed to be announced on the day the Nazi’s rolled in to Poland. Long thought lost, they were rediscovered in 2017. Krimstein chose six for this volume. Very moving.
  3. Genevieve Cogman – The Invisible Library. Cool fantasy/detective/bibliophile novel. Quite enjoyed it. A friend recommended the second in the series when Amazon had it for 99p. Turns out I had already bought this one (the first in the series) a couple of years ago. There are now eight in the series. Fun.
  4. Agatha Christie – Curtain. The last Hercule Poirot. Good stuff. But most of AC’s books are.
  5. Madeleine L’Engle – A Wrinkle In Time. Great YA fantasy. Christian/Western underpinnings are sometimes obvious, mostly not. Enjoyed the reread.
  6. Madeline Lo – Last Night at the Telegraph Club. Oh man. This was *so* good. YA romance set in 1954 San Francisco. The daughter of Chinese immigrants falls in love with another girl at her high school. Beautifully done.
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The Sandman Audio Drama

December 8, 2021 //
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Last year I signed up for Audible for the sole purpose of listening to the new audio version of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. And I enjoyed it greatly, even though it comprised only a small portion of the 75-issue comic that ran between 1989 and 1996. I think there must have been a selection process to determine whether there was sufficient interest to cover the whole thing. The first release included Morpheus’ first trip into hell, the brutal Collectors episode, Calliope, Facade, The Dream of a Thousand Cats, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But wait! What about Orpheus, Augustus, and The World’s End? Well, fast forward to a few months ago when Audible released Sandman Act II.

Ah, there we find some more of my beloved favourite stories. It seems like they’re working around to doing the whole thing. Eventually. In Act II, we meet Orpheus (in the French Revolution-set Thermidor – Where do you hide a severed head?) and having met his mother in Act I.

In general, they’re doing a good job of telling the essential stories – there are so many characters and there’s so much rich storytelling in Gaiman’s original material (not to mention in Gaiman’s own source material, which includes Shakespeare, Greek mythology, science, fiction, and the mythologies that make up a lot of history) that planning this out required a lot of choices regarding order and the transition from illustrated storytelling to audio. When the original run of Gaiman’s Sandman concluded in 1996, it was obvious that its conclusions had been in mind from very nearly the beginning (this remains a spoiler-free zone, note). Almost everyone we meet has a role.

My main issue, has to do with that very transition. When you read a graphic novel, there’s no reason to describe all the characters – we can see them. What we get in the audio drama is a lot more exposition than perhaps the story needs. We know what Dream and Death, Desire and Despair look like from their first descriptions. There’s no need, usually, to repeat. And it’s okay for the listener to fill things in that are left out of the text. These stories are especially strong and, mellifluous as Gaiman’s voice is, this kind of exposition could have been trimmed in favour of more showing. (I’ll note that being familiar with the source material, I can picture a lot of the story based in the original illustrations. I do wonder what listeners coming to this without the prior experience think.)

Having finished the last couple chapters (The Hunt, Soft Places, The Parliament of Rooks, and Ramadan), I’m overall very pleased with the production values, the acting, and the script. My gripes regarding exposition are minor. I think a lot depends on the story. I didn’t feel the descriptions were problematic or overtaking the stories as the audiobook progressed.

It’s interesting how the people working on this have balanced the overarching story with pieces that are one-offs in context. The framing of Three Septembers, for example, provide some background on the conflict between Dream and Desire. The last four stories are all self-contained, but provide more context about who Dream is. Weirdly, Act II’s centerpiece, A Game of You, only has a couple of scenes with Dream at the very end. And it can be hard to see how it fits into the greater narrative. (In this moment it comes to me that it bears a structural affinity to The Hound of the Baskervilles in which Sherlock Holmes only shows up at the very end.)

In considering the stories not yet shared in audiobook form, I wonder if a forthcoming Act III or Act IV will cover The World’s End which had some insanely good artwork and at least two wordless two-page spreads that will be hard to describe. As the series progressed, the art got more and more interesting (and even the earliest issues weren’t slouching in this department). This might also be why the audio exposition is so detailed sometimes.

In any event, I definitely recommend it, whether you’ve read the graphic novels or not.

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Categories audiobooks, Fiction, Writing
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