Pietie November - The MOOC had it coming! #StoryMOOC

#StoryMOOC

This is the official creative task of week 3 of The Future of Storytelling MOOC, run by the University of Potsdam. You can find the course at  https://iversity.org/courses/the-future-of-storytelling

I am to create an on-line presence for a fictional character of my own, with a connection to "Aunt Renie".

He is Pietie November - an amiable character for the most part - and you can visit him also on facebook:

www.facebook.com/PietieNovemberDetective

Pietie November is a character that I introduced into my spoof Cape Town detective story that I wrote for last year's NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), held on-line in November each year: hence his surname “November” – which is an actual surname in South Africa, dating from the days when slave owners often gave their slaves as a surname, the month in which they were purchased.

Pietie himself is a modern day vagrant – or as they would call him in the Cape Coloured community – a “Stroller” or a “Bergie” (a name dating from the old days when vagrants used to retire up the “berg” – the slopes of Table Mountain – to sleep).

Pietie is small in stature, his face is grizzled. For all we know, Pietie may simply be prematurely aged by constant 24 hour exposure to Cape Town’s capricious weather. He himself is unsure of his age. He speaks both Afrikaans and English – often mixing the two.

Like most strollers, Pietie has a marked sense of humour and is very talkative - and can tell a good story! He is mostly easy-going and is generous with what he finds or is given as a hand-out. That said, he is not above a fight with his fellow bergies when he considers it necessary! Not much damage is done, as everyone mostly only fights if they get too drunk to do much more than scream obscenities and land ineffectual swipes.

Pietie is usually employed these days in “working the traffic” (begging at the traffic lights), a job which he takes quite seriously, though he preferred being a car guard, which he used to work at in town until the “blerry foreigners” (usually refugees from further afield in Africa) took over!

Pietie has been around - well, certainly around Cape Town at least. He currently lives under an overpass near Oranjezicht, near the City centre. He has occasional thoughts of strolling off and visiting the fabled Stellenbosch wine lands – perhaps there he might also find again his “no good blixem” of a girlfriend, Teena, who was last seen walking off in that direction (“going home” to the farm she had run away from) after the Varkies dropped off on the side of the road well out of town an entire group of vagrants (including Pietie and Teena) who had been disturbing the peace in a drunken fight (started, it must be added, by Teena).

Apart from mourning the loss of Teena, Pietie finds Cape Town highly entertaining – and it is his keen observation that has led him to become the first ever Bergie Detective (in Cape Town at any rate). He can come up with clues that others have thoughtlessly discarded and is expert in listening in unobtrusively to other people’s conversations as they walk along the streets. In Cape Town, we call this “picking up stompies” – as in picking up discarded cigarette ends – which Pietie also likes doing so that he can roll his own “smokes” (another use for newspaper). However, a number of forces act against Pietie actually solving his cases – not enough stompies, falling asleep, arguing the case with fellow bergies who confuse the issue for him (blerry rubbishes!), and entirely missing the point – and most of the time, there was no case – but what can you expect? A man is only human after all, and it helps to pass the time!

Until recently, Pietie November had no website at all, being indigent. In fact, until a day or so ago, he had no access to any of the modern media other than watching a bit of the TV in a shop window before the “Varkies” (police) move him along. The nearest he gets to reading is in holding old newspaper scraps that might have held some fish and chips - he calls them "vis 'n skyfies" in Afrikaans - or a “Gatsby”, which is a french style loaf with fillings. Yirra! The smells on those bits of papers tell him a blerry good story of their own!

Anyway – there’s this ou vrou (old lady) who was a tourist. At first Pietie thought that she said she was from Postberg up the West Coast, but it turns out she is from a plek called “Potsdam” in Germany – which is somewhere else. She is a nice ou tannie (old auntie) and she got talking to Pietie after he managed to guard her car by the shops (tourists is mostly always nice, hey!) and it turns out she is looking for all the ouens called November because some of her old folks from way back lived in die Kaap (the Cape) and was owning a farm and all they workers was called November. Now she is looking for them all though they don’t even have the farm any more, and she is putting up something on the computers called Facebook and all of the Novembers will be there – even Pietie! She even said he can call her Aunt Renie because it seems that the old farmer got up to some nonsense back in the day and they might even be family and all!

So now she is putting up a page for Pietie November even though he doesn’t read and hasn’t got any computer to look at it – but it’s nice to think about. Not every stroller has his own page on a computer!

Komachi Monogatari - or - Tales of Komachi.

I have had both enjoyment and employment in writing my book (still unnamed in English) on the 9th century Heian period Japanese poetess, Ono no Komachi.

Originally, I wrote the first story simply as a one-off that juxtaposed and obliquely contrasted the 1001 nights of Sheherazade with the apocryphal 99 nights that a would-be lover sat outside Komachi's window in order to gain her favour. The numerical part of the two stories appealed to me. Interestingly, once I had written the story and was checking details, I discovered the fascinating coincidence that the 1001 Nights was originally written down in the Arabic world at the same time that Komachi was at court in far-off Japan!

I had thought of other stories that bore similarities to one another yet with contrasting outcomes, and decided on writing a series of linked stories with Komachi's frame story to contain them. This then evolved (in the style of Japanese poetry) into four episodes in the life of Komachi, each being narrated in a different season of the year. Later I added an epilogue episode and a prologue that introduced the premise of the book.

The frame story is based on three episodes from the famous (in Japan) "Seven Komachi", a series of seven apocryphal events in the life of Komachi, each with a poem attributed to her that illustrates the episode. I also include one invented episode, in which nothing much happens per se, but which is important to the overall narrative. I have alluded to other episodes of the Seven Komachi at various points in the book.

The fun part was in weaving a number of disparate stories from different eras and countries into the life of Komachi as foci for a fictitious "background' to the writing of her actual poems - a storytelling device that I only discovered later was popular in the Heian Court as a way of illustrating and re-interpreting existing poems!

I did a fair amount of research on each story I told, whether it was one about Komachi herself or one of the "tales within a tale", because I wanted to retell stories that were both accurate and narrated from an original perspective. And so I looked at the earliest historical variants in each story and all sorts of detail surrounding the story at its earliest telling - related stories, religious beliefs, historical and social detail and so on (as any writer will do). Of course, the detail was not to be obtrusively written: a week's worth of research might contribute to a single phrase!

And so - the book contains stories retold or alluded to from as far afield from medieval Japan as Arabia, Britain, continental Europe, Mexico and Alaska. On the Japanese side, I retell the Japanese creation story and retell one of the most famous Noh dramas about Komachi - but giving back to this Buddhist play its original Shinto leaning. I also realised how profoundly Komachi has been misinterpreted in the West (and often by the average modern Japanese person also). Only by thoroughly understanding the old Shinto beliefs and practice can one truly understand and make sense of the Seven Komachi, the Noh dramas that feature Ono no Komachi, and a number of her poems.

Well - not all was hard work..... I tend to go into distraction mode quite frequently. I tell myself that I am allowing my brain time to digest things and come up with a novel story synthesis. But this is what can happen along the way.....

This, good people, takes practice and sustained dedication!!!!

Loving the MOOC

Much as I love taking part in NaNoWriMo, I sadly decided not to take part this year, what with up-coming radiosurgery, a possible trip away, and completing the final edits of a book and searching for a loving agent (and still no title other than my favoured one: but would "Komachi Monogatari" sell in the English-speaking world??).

So I was interested when a friend suggested that I sign up for the free 8 week online Iversity course titled "The Future of Storytelling", offered by the University of Potsdam in Germany. the course is a MOOC - a Massive Open Online Course - now about 70 000 participants strong and in its second week. (Should you wish to join, the posted modules remain up for the entire period and anyone can join at any time - there are brief quizzes and assignments, but your level of participation is up to you - so rush on in and sign up).

I am loving it!! I tend to get so involved in the discussion boards and in following links provided by course conveners and participants alike that it takes me much longer to do the modules than it might otherwise do (the bare minimum could be as little as 10 min, by my reckoning). Today, I have sat about 6 hours - and enjoying every minute of it.

Yes, you could read it in a book (once you find the book). Yes you could find tons on the internet. but it is a guided and enthusiastic process and that is its strength. So far we have looked at storytelling basics and are now into television serial structures.

I'm taking a break for some food, exercise and sleep - then it's back I go!

News of a Tumour (with apologies to Marquez)

After a brief squabble with the postings function - neatly resolved when I discovered that everything works better using Google Chrome (now that sounds like a washing powder advert) - herewith an update on brain surgery and how it fuels the creative process - or how I survived and thrived with brain surgery.

I was probably one of the merry few who looked forward with pleasurable anticipation to brain surgery. To be absolutely truthful, I did have a couple of 5am attacks of "What if....." (what if I bleed to death...?) but I was able to reassure myself very quickly that Allan Taylor is not only the best skull-base neurosurgeon around in SA and one of the best in the world - but he is a neurovascular surgeon and simply will not let me bleed to death!

So I was in for a nearly 8-hour op, during which time the anaesthetist found that I was allergic to opiates, and the surgeons discovered that the tumour was a meningioma (rather than an accoustic neuroma as first suspected) only once they had opened the skull, which meant that they were now not entirely sure of its point of attachment as they began surgery so that Allan as lead surgeon did the entire 7 hours - an epic in itself. Then there was some recovery time in hospital (to still the whirling world and re-focus the double vision), some more recovery time at home (appetite! No pain!) - and I was set to go.

The anaesthetist's remark that I was allergic to opiates triggered in me my version of how young Samuel Taylor Coleridge lost most of his nascent poem, Kubla Khan, including just who the Person from Porlock actually was and what was the manner of his business. In writing the story, I was led into completing Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan" (and - as far as I am aware - the first ever historical attempt to do this, I might add, unless one were to count Coleridge's own abortive efforts over the rest of his life) so that it became a nearly 400 line poem in the early Coleridge gothic style. It was a highly enjoyable undertaking that took me three months (given that I had composed almost no poetry before and certainly no poem of this length before). The e-book of the short story and long poem can be found on the internet as "Col's Phantasm Speaks".

Awkward tumour!!! Because it had insisted on obstructing some of the lower cranial nerves and making a nuisance of itself by sitting in the jugular bulb where it could not be safely winkled out, besides trying to make a getaway from the skull through the jugular foramen using the jugular vein as a fireman's pole, it needed to be zapped another way.

This happened in late 2011 when I was given stereotactic radiosurgery. In this process, high energy radiation is delivered to the fragment in such a way that the beams are shaped to the exact volume and shape of the tumour remnant. Interestingly, I was far more concerned beforehand about the prospect of radiation than I had been about the prospect of surgery - but all was well. I got to feel what it was like for good folk such as The Man in The Iron Mask and Hannibal Lector - though my thermoplastically shaped head mask was rather more elegantly shaped and they would have done a better job of keeping Lector from being a nuisance if he had a mask like mine - especially once it was being worn and was bolted to the treatment table! One cannot move a millimetre. But then again, one would not want to. I wanted that beam to go exactly to where it was targeted and not a millimetre on either side! (Actually, the machine is programmed to shut down entirely if the beam wavers off target by a millimetre).

Snazzy, custom-made mask!

Red outlines the bit that will be zapped. 

Yellow and Green are bits that must be avoided at all costs if I still want to see afterwards!

Me and the team and a couple of visiting doctors afterwards. 

The massive headache kicked in a few hours later!

Then a long two year wait......... (during which time, among other things, I wrote two short stories involving a whole load of sheep and quantum physics jokes)

Late 2013 - nasty jugular tumour fragment seems convincingly to have died off! Hooray!!!

But....

Did I mention the tiny and insignificant tumour fragment that had to be left in the inner ear canal after surgery? No? Well it seems it did not like being ignored. It correctly figured that it had been considered as being of no account merely because of its size, awkward position and probable lack (at the time) of adequate nourishment. Determined to make the team sit up and take notice, it has managed to treble in size in the last 3 years and, even as I write, is doing a slow motion meningioma crawl out of the inner ear canal, heading off to push the brain stem around, as fast as it can grow. Since it crawls along at a leisurely 3mm per year, we are even now preparing to head it off at the pass. Yup - you guessed it! The little crittur has earned a stereotactic radiosurgery operation all of its own. The experts are even now preparing for it ("Bring on the sharks with lasers on their heads!").

Then it will be another two year wait .....

Can't wait to see what I might write!

What is it to be then? A bit of writing? Or would you prefer brain surgery?

My writing career has had a bit of a rocky start over the last couple of years. Notice the juxtaposition? "Start" and "Years"?

I decided to leave off molecular genetics research to start writing fiction full time in early 2009. But first I needed a bit of recuperation from what I had deduced to be accumulated stress and a dropped shoulder from labwork-induced shoulder strain (all that micro-pipetting!). The shoulder, neck and back pain and stiffness, by now near constant headache and about 3 hours sleep per night over the last couple of years were getting to me. Not to mention the occasional dizzy attacks.

So off I went for some physiotherapy. When the physio gave up in puzzlement after several months of little improvement, off I went to a Body Stress Release practitioner. A few months of a very little more improvement and I gave up BSR as well. In retrospect, the BSR practitioner DID locate the area where the problem originated, but it just made no sense at the time given the presenting aches and pains. And of course there was no way the technique could have helped with the root cause anyway.

The months dripped by. Sitting and typing at a computer for longer than 20 minutes was impossible. I decided to use a dictation programme (Dah Daaah! - Dragon Naturally Speaking - nice programme to use) - but began going deaf in one ear which rather messed things up because the tinnitus and hearing loss in the one ear interfered with my ability to hear clearly with the other and made using headphones uncomfortable. And I still couldn't sit for long enough at the computer to do anything worthwhile! (Even driving for more than a few minutes brought on deep aches in the head, neck, shoulder, arm and back)

In 2010, things went from bad to worse.

The intermittent ear pain I had suffered for many years (variously and imaginatively misdiagnosed over the years by several GPs and Ear, Nose & Throat specialists, given that there was no visible evidence of infection) now became near constant and excruciating.

"Referred pain from the neck and shoulder." said one ENT specialist knowledgeably, "You'll just have to live with it."

"You probably have a narrow eustachian tube." said another ENT, "Hold your nose and blow into your ears to equalise the pressure." (Sounded like a surefire recipe for introducing bacteria).

"Stress-induced temporomandibular (lower jaw) joint wear." decided a third ENT in 2010 even as I walked into his consulting room, "Not much you can do - TMJ wear is a degenerative condition, but you need to sleep with a mouth guard." (Sleep? That would be nice!). I got the mouth guard and all was well - for a week or two. Then I had more excruciating pain than ever and a precipitate loss of most of the rest of the hearing in the one ear. (I still own the mouth guard. It lies in a drawer somewhere).

The hearing loss was also not a problem for the TMJ ENT. "Your hearing range is normal" pronounced He Of The Mouth Guard complacently, after conducting the briefest of hearing tests as a diagnostic formality, during which time he politely ignored the look of pained concentration on my face and the wearying length of time it took for me to decide whether I should perhaps press the hand held buzzer after all to show that I might have heard something tinny and far far away when the near-deaf ear was tested. And of course there was no need for an MRI scan, he said.

In 2010, the headaches of many years had become so bad that I often slept propped up or else woke up in tears during the night. Three hours sleep was a good night! My sense of taste went all awry (alas! Even chocolate tasted absolutely wierd!). I had bouts of extreme exhaustion (recurrent flu, I said to myself) and nausea (recurrent tummy bug, I said to myself) and in between times I had no appetite signals coming in (I often had to be reminded to eat or else I would go all day without food or hunger pangs. Only the actual sight of a meal would remind me that I was starving). Needless to say, I became very thin! (Some people get thinner as they get older, I said to myself). One side of my face and head went "fuzzy" and was sometimes nearly insensate.

Most scientists would have worked out by now that something was severely amiss. (Dear me! Could the fact that everything always went wrong on the right side have been a clue???) - but there always seemed to be a rationale given for the various symptoms - hypochondria, low pain threshold, peri-menopause, stress, neurosis..... I even wondered whether the various physical therapies might not themselves have caused further damage. I wavered between thinking that I must be a real weakling compared to other people and wondering seriously how I could manage to survive the rest of my life in such dire and constant pain!

It was only when half of my tongue went numb and partly paralysed for a week of two in late October 2010 that I realised that something was seriously wrong.

In mid-November, we met the life-saving Professor of ENT at Tygerberg Hospital, Rory Attwood (on whom be heaped much praise!) After a lengthy and meticulously thorough examination, he went the extra mile to arrange a confirmatory MRI scan, an appointment with a neurologist and an appointment with two of the best skull-base specialist neurovascular surgeons in the world, let alone in South Africa. Thus, in the space of less than a week I discovered that I was no longer a whimpering neurotic hypochondriac, but the cultivator (over an estimated period of about 29 years or so) of a respectable golf ball sized tumour in the skull base - the cerebellopontine angle to be precise. Not that I had long to dwell on the diagnosis. In only 10 days I would be having skull-base brain surgery.

What is going on?

Blogger is not working. I can see nothing either when I try to view my blog or when I am trying to see my posts on my dashboard. Rats!

Wherefore art thou, Blogger?

I have recently been having problems trying to publish posts to my blogsite? I have an entertaining little pink message as follows - "An error occurred while trying to save or publish your post. Please try again." Immediately followed by the cheery blue message - "Ignore warning."

Now I still remember the pre-personal-computer days of my undergrad years in Pietermaritzburg, when computer programming meant an elaborate and clumsily inefficient method of using hundreds of punched cards to convey a few instructions which were read by a card reader which functioned a bit like the modern paper money counter in your local bank. Most of my efforts in card punching were pronounced wanting by the reading machine (linked as it was to the Durban campus "server" about an hour's drive away) in robust computer language - "Error! Abort!" it would cry. It was an impatient machine and on the back of more than one or two errors it spat out a final humiliating "Error! Abort! Fin!"

The most pleasure I received from computer programming in those days was marvelling at the wasteful abundance of coloured card papers littering the floor (having experienced war torn and paper destitute Rhodesia) and saving stacks of cards to write notes on (which I must confess also gave me a perverse sense of joy).

Having received such an early insight into the basics of a computer's mind - do I look like the kind of person who is likely to ignore the pink writing in favour of the blue?

Rambly thoughts from 2008 on Books

Tollyported (above) is not an unhappy pair of stories - just a gentle poking of fun at the scientific fraternity from whose ranks I lately emerged, and a gentle spoofing of science fiction and quantum physics. The sheep are serious.

I came across some old thoughts of mine today while sorting out my "Story Ideas" folder -

"I want also to write stories that reflect the gentler part of human experience. My perspective is that it is easier to write stories of negativity and trauma, because the subject matter itself holds a fascination in part for its shock value and in part has the same pull as in motorists slowing down to view an accident scene. The story allows the reader to vicariously experience another’s suffering while actually feeling comfortable that the reader’s own life is different, better organised and that one would not fall prey to the same kinds of blindness, idiocy or bad luck that has led the story’s protagonist into such trouble.

"And yet there is also a kind of subliminal nausea after finishing such a book. There is something pornographic in observing or reading about horror or trauma. In a way, the reader is deriving pleasure out of witnessing another’s pain, even when that other is a fictional character. Thus, “Midnight’s Children”, “Disgraced”, or “Blindness”, for example, are not only profoundly depressing, but leave me with a more sickened view of both humanity in general and the authors in particular. I must add though that "Blindness" does contain a particularly lyrical description of women washing themselves that encapsulates a humane beauty.

"Our current era is absorbed with pain and disappointment, and more so with disillusionment. This is justified as being “gritty”, “revealing the truth of the human condition”, “exposing the mean underbelly”, “telling it like it is” and a host of other stock phrases. The fact is that a large number of modern novels are clichéd. The clichés vary with the specific society that the novels come from. And in the end, the story-lines are banal.

"Thus, the stock modern female English novel generally concerns the boredom of urban or well-off country life, leading the protagonist to attempt a search for “meaning” – which predictably devolves into the standard substitute for “finding oneself”- the affaire with a least-expected someone, and by a string of tawdry revelations concerning the lives of all those in one’s family, set of friends / village or suburb – and no transcendent resolution.

"Much of the magical reality of South America, when one has read enough of it, is poetic but seamy and is ultimately depressing.

"Indian novelists write agonised and confused renditions of family histories. As the story progresses, the trials of the increasingly despairing and unfortunate protagonist, hopelessly and inappropriately in love, are interspersed with miraculous occurrences, mothers and masala.

"South African novels are so often stark and depressing in their jaundiced view of humanity that they are best read to the swishing accompaniment of the flail across one’s shoulders.

"Russian and east European novels still express grimly despairing fatalism in the tradition of the major eighteenth and nineteenth century Russian novelists – a long litany of suicide, murder, madness, betrayal and tuberculosis, where Chekov’s plays were considered the ultimate in frivolity. Must be something about the weather.

"This is not to say that the novels themselves are not beautifully and memorably written. But there comes a point when I think – is this all there is? Why is it so difficult to write strong and beautiful stories for adults that reflect and explore the kinder, altruistic, humane part of human nature without burlesquing them (as in “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency”) or appearing “Pollyanna-ish”?

"Of course, as I write this, there immediately spring to mind a large number of stories that do celebrate goodness – Mitch Albom’s “The five people you meet in heaven”, Ray Bradbury’s books, particularly his highly poetically written “The illustrated man” (the ending is utterly transcendent), “A good man in Africa”, Marquez’ “News of a kidnapping” and Vonnegut’s “Bluebeard” – but the stories still are achieved through relating disturbing or traumatic events. Is it at all possible to write a fascinating story (a very short story??) that concerns the illustration of simple goodness, or love in quiet circumstances?

"Actually – I can answer that – the traditional adventure story allowed the characters to be display all that was considered rational and civilised - their resourcefulness, nobility, and determination - as they wrestled externally with new environments or rescued people from suitably faceless massed hordes – another version of the hero’s journey. Rider-Haggard’s and Jules Verne’s stories, “The Coral Island” and “The Swiss family Robinson” spring to mind. Yet these have predominantly come to be considered out-dated children’s stories. And the traditional adventure story has been re-written introspectively by the likes of Conrad (“Heart of Darkness” being the all-time classic here), “Lord of the Flies”, some of D H Lawrence’s tales based in South American settings, and slightly satirically in H G Wells’ “The History of Mr Polly”.

  

 "This has become a long ramble that reduces into my loving many books for many reasons, but not wanting to write on the current stock grim socio-politically correct, socially relevant themes."