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!