How unreliable are we?

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn writing

You’ve probably heard the reason why eyewitness accounts of accidents are often wrong. Eyewitnesses may not see 100% of the accident: their view is obscured by other cars/objects, they glance away, etc. But when asked about the accident, they believe they saw the whole thing since the mind tends to fill in the gaps with what probably happened even though they don’t realize there are gaps to be filled in. So, what they saw was a mix of reality and possibility.

Many of us face the same patchy viewpoint of things that happened in our own pasts. Sure, sometimes we exaggerate and know that’s what we’re doing–perhaps for so many years we forget we ramped up the action and our role in it. Or, we flat don’t remember the whole thing and have pasted in what probably happened in the way an eyewitness unknowingly fills in what s/he thinks s/he saw.

According to the Innocence Project, “Eyewitness misidentification contributes to an overwhelming majority of wrongful convictions that have been overturned by post-conviction DNA testing.” With that in mind, can we even believe our own stories and memories?

While I believe we know when we’re exaggerating a personal yarn, I don’t think we know how often we do this when we’re telling others about college experiences, military events, or other things that happened long ago. We’re making a lot of it up. And yet, if we read a novel or short story with an unreliable narrator, we’re likely to get angry when we discover we’ve been lied to–unless there’s something in the story that tips us off.

According to MasterClass, “An unreliable narrator is an untrustworthy storyteller, most often used in narratives with a first-person point of view. The unreliable narrator is either deliberately deceptive or unintentionally misguided, forcing the reader to question their credibility as a storyteller.” This site suggests four types of unreliable narrators:  (1) Picaro – the one who exaggerates, (2) Madman – the one who is detached from reality, (3) Naif – youthful ignorance, among other things, obscures his/her view of reality, (4) Liar – this person knows s/he is lying for one motivation or another.

The Catcher in the Rye:  Does Holden Caulfield, a troubled teen, see and understand what’s happening around him? Probably not. So we cannot trust him as as a wholly reliable narrator. According to Kylie Brant, “Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye is the ultimate unreliable narrator. Reeling from a personal trauma, his narrations provide a caustic take on the world around him. His observations of people and events are veiled in pessimism. He tells the reader he lies all the time, but the reader doesn’t necessarily believe that initially because he’s sympathetic and relatable. ”

Gone Girl: According to Self-Publishing School, “Gone Girl” by Gillian Flynn presents an enthralling example of an unreliable narrator.  As you follow Amy Dunne’s narration, you’ll find yourself constantly questioning her motives and intentions. Amy’s manipulative nature and hidden agenda create shocking plot twists, challenging your understanding of the characters and the events unfolding in the story. The strategic use of unreliable perspectives adds layers of complexity to the narrative, making “Gone Girl” a gripping and unforgettable psychological thriller.”

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier:  CBR notes that “Mrs. de Winter, the narrator in the new adaptation of Rebecca from Ben Wheatly, is a voice of confusion who can’t keep the facts straight.” The new Mrs. deWinter cannot compete with the original, so readers/viewers cannot totally accept her perspective. A close look at the original film will show the same lacks of certainty.

Truth, it seems, in our lives and in our feature films and novels is always relative.  We are the storytellers of our lives as authors are the storytellers of their novels and screenplays. At some point, most of us accept the fact that all of it is unreliable, intentionally or otherwise.

–Malclm

‘The Milagro Beanfield War’ by John Nichols, a film by Robert Redford

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn Film, writing

I’m thinking of this film today because I just learned that John Nichols died at 83  in November, and I’m rather embarrassed that I missed it at the time especially when such publications as The New York Times and The Guardian carried the news. (I can find no public-domain photographs of Nichols.)

The Guardian writes, “Nichols won early recognition with the 1965 publication of his offbeat love story The Sterile Cuckoo, later made into a movie starring Liza Minnelli. The coming-of-age book and subsequent movie were set amid private northeastern colleges that were a familiar milieu to Nichols, who attended boarding school in Connecticut and private college in upstate New York.

First Printing

“He moved in 1969 with his first wife from New York City to northern New Mexico, where he found inspiration for a trilogy of novels anchored in the success of The Milagro Beanfield War.”

Wikipedia writes, “Critic Richard Scheib liked the film’s direction and the characters portrayed. He wrote, “Redford arrays a colorfully earthy ensemble of characters. The plot falls into place with lazy, deceptive ease. Redford places it up against a gently barbed level of social commentary, although this is something that comes surprisingly light-heartedly. There’s an enchantment to the film – at times it is a more successful version of the folklore fable that Francis Ford Coppola’s Finian’s Rainbow (1968) tried to be but failed.”

I liked the movie although the reviews were mixed.

From The Publisher

“Joe Mondragon, a feisty hustler with a talent for trouble, slammed his battered pickup to a stop, tugged on his gumboots, and marched into the arid patch of ground. Carefully (and also illegally), he tapped into the main irrigation channel. And so began-though few knew it at the time of Milagro beanfield war. But like everything else in the dirt-poor town of Milagro, it would be a patchwork war, fought more by tactical retreats than by battlefield victories. Gradually, the small farmers and sheepmen begin to rally to Joe’s beanfield as the symbol of their lost rights and their lost lands. And downstate in the capital, the Anglo water barons and power brokers huddle in urgent conference, intent on destroying that symbol before it destroys their multimillion-dollar land-development schemes.

“The tale of Milagro’s rising is wildly comic and lovingly tender, a vivid portrayal of a town that, half-stumbling and partly prodded, gropes its way toward its own stubborn salvation.”

–Malcolm

‘Special Topics in Calamity Physics’ by Marisha Pessl

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn Uncategorized

I read this novel when it came out in 2006 and became so out of touch with reality that I found it necessary to spend several years in a psychiatric institution named “Cuckoo’s Nest” where my only friend was Nurse Ratched because we had an on-again/off-again fling during the shock treatments. This is the kind of thing that happens to a reader after reading a book with an unreliable narrator. I promised Mildred on the day I was discharged that I would one day re-read Marisha Pessl’s (Neverworld Wake, Night Film) novel Calamity Physics which I’m doing now even though Mildred Rached died in a state of shock on her wedding night and will never know.

From the Publisher

Website Photo

“Marisha Pessl’s dazzling debut sparked raves from critics and heralded the arrival of a vibrant new voice in American fiction. At the center of Special Topics in Calamity Physics is clever, deadpan Blue van Meer, who has a head full of literary, philosophical, scientific, and cinematic knowledge. But she could use some friends. Upon entering the elite St. Gallway School, she finds some—a clique of eccentrics known as the Bluebloods. One drowning and one hanging later, Blue finds herself puzzling out a byzantine murder mystery. Nabokov meets Donna Tartt (then invites the rest of the Western Canon to the party) in this novel—with visual aids drawn by the author—that has won over readers of all ages.”

from Kirkus Reviews

“The writing is clever, the text rich with subtle literary allusion. But while even the gimmicks work well (chapters are structured like a literature syllabus; hand-drawn visual aids appear throughout), they don’t compensate for the fact that The Secret History came first.

“Sharp, snappy fun for the literary-minded.”

—Malcolm

The very reliable narrator of my magical realism books set in Florida is a cat.

The new year never seems to live up to the Times Square excitement

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn magic, writing

People are still shooting each other, having sex, drinking too much wine, getting married, watching bad TV, dying of old age (so long  Glynis Johns at 100), and eating too much fast food. When will it end?

I’m more concerned about the mass shootings than the wine and the sex and the marriage–like the senseless attack at Iowa’s Perry High School. Shooters kill a bunch of people and then kill themselves. Why don’t they kill themselves first? That would reduce the amount of grief and paperwork.

We expect too much magic, it seems, with the changing of the year.  Or maybe we don’t expect enough. Or, worse yet, we expect the same old, same old. Speeding tickets, DUIs, getting fired, getting hired, texting too much, running into a tree while texting, being shot by the cops while breaking into a store, finding the Oak Island Treasure. Yes, when will it end?

I have high hopes for the human race, but low expectations. Perhaps you feel that way, too.

I don’t think “it” will end because it’s easier for all of us to sit back and watch “it” happen on TV without worrying about “it” (all the bad stuff) than figuring out how to fix “it.” Okay, most of us don’t know how to fix it, though one would think that by working on the problem as a group we could make progress with the changing of the years.

Then, New Year’s Eve would mean something.

–Malcolm

‘The Waters’ by Bonnie Jo Campbell

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn books, writing

Bonnie Jo Campbell (American Salvage, Q Road, Once Upon a River, Love Letters to Sons of Bitches) will release a new novel The Waters on January 9. Entertainment Weekly calls Campbell “a bard, a full-throated singer whose melodies are odes to farms and water and livestock and fishing rods and rifles, and to hardworking folks who know the value of life as well as the randomness of life’s troubles.”  Her fans will welcome this new story that as author Daniel Woodrell (Winter’s Bone) said, “tells a story so deeply rooted in a specific place that the accumulation of details approaches the magical.”

From the Publisher

“A master of rural noir returns with a fierce, mesmerizing novel about exceptional women and the soul of a small town.

“On an island in the Great Massasauga Swamp―an area known as “The Waters” to the residents of nearby Whiteheart, Michigan―herbalist and eccentric Hermine “Herself” Zook has healed the local women of their ailments for generations. As stubborn as her tonics are powerful, Herself inspires reverence and fear in the people of Whiteheart, and even in her own three estranged daughters. The youngest―the beautiful, inscrutable, and lazy Rose Thorn―has left her own daughter, eleven-year-old Dorothy “Donkey” Zook, to grow up wild.

Campbell

“Donkey spends her days searching for truths in the lush landscape and in her math books, waiting for her wayward mother and longing for a father, unaware that family secrets, passionate love, and violent men will flood through the swamp and upend her idyllic childhood. Rage simmers below the surface of this divided community, and those on both sides of the divide have closed their doors against the enemy. The only bridge across the waters is Rose Thorn.

“With a ‘ruthless and precise eye for the details of the physical world’ (Jane Smiley, New York Times Book Review), Bonnie Jo Campbell presents an elegant antidote to the dark side of masculinity, celebrating the resilience of nature and the brutality and sweetness of rural life.”

Kirkus Reviews

“The wise woman privy to nature’s secrets has become an overused fictional trope, but it’s mitigated here by Campbell’s sharply drawn characters and her refusal to make easy judgments about them. A birth rather predictably reconciles the town’s men with the Zook women, but the new arrival does not solve everyone’s problems. Campbell’s thoughtfully rendered characters find life rewarding and bewildering in equal measure. Atmospheric, well-written, and generally satisfying despite some overly familiar elements.”

–Malcolm

‘A Naturalist and Other Beasts: Tales from a Life in the Field’ by George B. Schaller

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn books
Schaller in 2005

George Beals Schaller (born 26 May 1933) is an American mammalogist, biologist, conservationist and author. Schaller is recognized by many as the world’s preeminent field biologist, studying wildlife throughout Africa, Asia and South America. Born in Berlin, Schaller grew up in Germany, but moved to Missouri as a teen. He is vice president of Panthera Corporation and serves as chairman of their Cat Advisory Council. Schaller is also a senior conservationist at the Bronx Zoo-based Wildlife Conservation Society.” -Wikipedia

I became aware of George Schaller in 1978 when Peter Matthiessen accompanied him on a two-month trek of the Tiberian Plateau that resulted in the book The Snow Leopard. (1978). Subsequently, I read Schaller’s Stones of Silence (1980) about the same region from a naturalist’s point of view. I’ve been a fan ever since.

From the Publisher

“Since the 1950s, eminent field biologist George Schaller has roamed through many lands observing wild animals and conducting landmark long-term studies that have deepened our understanding of these creatures. He has reported and reflected on his work in classic, much-acclaimed books, including The Last Panda and National Book Award winner The Serengeti Lion, but much of his best writing has been ephemeral, published in magazines, only to drop out of sight.

“This collection features 19 short pieces brought together in book form to offer a unique overview of his life in the field.

“Chapters describe stalking tigers in India and jaguars in Brazil’s Pantanal swamps, studying mountain gorillas in Central Africa and predator-prey relations in the Serengeti, tracking newfound species on the wild border of Vietnam and Laos, searching for snow leopards in the Hindu Kush, and Schaller’s groundbreaking work with giant pandas in Sichuan. Later accounts broaden the focus from individual creatures to whole ecosystems. 

“‘The careless rapture of my early studies has been replaced more and more by efforts to protect animals and their habitats,’ he writes.

“New to this book are Schaller’s introductions for each chapter, which add and update information, and an overall introduction that looks back on his remarkable career.”

From Orion Magazine’s Review

“’At least once in a lifetime,’ Schaller admonishes us, ‘everyone should make a pilgrimage into the wilderness to dwell on its wonders and discover the idyll of a past now largely gone.’ This book is a medley of such soul-nourishing forays, nineteen short essays previously published in various periodicals and books over the past half-century, each updated with a fact-filled introduction.

“The charm of this book is Schaller’s unabashed love of his subjects and his lyrical way of describing them; ‘knowing such animals individually,’ he writes, ‘one begins to view an area with a new intimacy and with a caring that turns into a special enchantment.’ Schaller seeks ‘a deeper understanding, one beyond soulless statistics.’ In the hands of anybody else, declarations like these might be taken as anthropomorphic. But Schaller’s credentials as a tough-as-nails scientist are impeccable, and his enthusiasm for getting down and dirty with his subjects, combined with his literary skill, forge some of the best nature writing of our time.”

—Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of magical realism novels set in the Florida Panhandle of the 1950s.

Atomic Clock ‘Glitch’ Sends Earth Back to January 1, 2023

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn news

Washington, D.C., January 1, 2023, Star-Gazer News Service

While TV viewers watching last night’s New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square weren’t allowed to see it, at the stroke of midnight, the world cycled back to January 1, 2023. Officials urged people to stay calm while the software of the Atomic Clock was checked for evidence of hackers.

According to Time Tsar James Maxwell, “Clock time is independent of historical events. It would be premature at this point to speculate on whether or not we will relive the events of 2023 or if we will experience something new.”

Atomic Clock HQJames Clerk Maxwell, “Clock time is independent of historical events. It would be premature at this point to speculate on whether or not we will relive the events of 2023 or if we will experience new events with year-old dates.”

According to informed sources, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) that mandates when “leap seconds” are added to the official time to synchronize the earth’s rotation with with the official time, 20234 is a leap year. However, that does not mean IERS is considering adding an entire year to the clock to bring time up to what everyday people think the world’s date and time should be.

“That would be unprecedented,” said Maxwell.

Observers at IERS and the Atomic Clock HQ are closely monitoring events and are “happy to report that so far the world is not seeing a replay of the opening days of 2023.”

Joe Smith, the janitor at HQ said, that Wikipedia is correct when it reports that, “In 1968, the duration of the second was defined to be 9192631770 vibrations of the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium-133 atom. Prior to that, it was defined by there being 31556925.9747 seconds in the tropical year 1900. The 1968 definition was updated in 2019 to reflect the new definitions of the ampere, kelvin, kilogram, and mole decided upon at the 2019 redefinition of the International System of Units. Timekeeping researchers are currently working on developing an even more stable atomic reference for the second, with a plan to find a more precise definition of the second as atomic clocks improve based on optical clocks or the Rydberg constant around 2030.”

“Most kids learn this math in grade school,” said Smith, “so they can keep track of time on their cell phones all of which stubbornly maintain this is 2023 all over again.”

According to Sue Campbell, head of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, people are encouraged to report deja view experiences that suggest events from 2023 are repeating themselves. “Until we sort this out, many of us will be experiencing the movie ‘Groundhog Day.'”

“Audiences enjoyed watching the movie,” said Maxwell, “so we believe folks will have fun with the strange things happening in the world of time while officials work to discover just when this moment is.”

At the crack of dawn, Congress passed legislation that mandates that all states and U.S. territories will consider the year to be 2024, prohibiting jurisdictions from “rolling their own” about the current date and time.

“Thank goodness there’s no precedent for this,” said Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, “for that would mean time has been off track for years.”

“No worries,” said President Biden, “since quantum scientists say that time is not real.”

Story Filed by Jock Stewart, Special Investigative Reporter

What’s a little E. coli among friends?

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn Life in general2 Comments

Escherichia coli

Strange to say, I’m almost relieved that after six months of tests and failures to listen to the patient, my doctors think I have Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), a special feature of E. coli.  The relief comes from thinking it was something worse. The failure to listen to the patient comes from not hearing me say, “This is an infection, so stop testing for other stuff while the months go by without any treatment.” (It’s not like pushing for an antibiotic is like pushing for fentanyl.)

E. coli is often called the traveler’s disease since people often pick it up by eating or making market purchases at unsanitary places. So, did I get it traveling between the front door and the mailbox or from infected grocery store produce bought here in town? Nobody knows. Maybe the cat brought it into the house. (Bad kitty!)

A bottle of Xifaxan costs $270. That means insurance doesn’t cover it. Well, if it works, it’s worth it. The only problem is that IBS really has no cure so I’ll probably need to manage it with meds until the cows come home.

I wash everything from the produce department from salad greens to baking potatoes. My mother did it, so I do it.

I don’t eat at disreputable restaurants or drink bad whisky at biker bars.

Bottom line, I’ll probably never know where the E. coli came from. I envy the people who can eat weird food from off-grid places and never get sick.

So, if the diagnosis turns out to be correct and the meds work then 2024 will begin as a happy New Year.  I hope your New Year begins on a happy note as well. Maybe a new job, a new novel, an escape from prison, finding stolen money in the basement. It’s all good.

—Malcolm

What kind of 2024 do we want?

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn New Year

In my version of reality, what happens in the world is the total of what everyone in the population desires with enough fervor to be able to see it and taste it and experience it in their dreams and in their mind’s eyes.  We can say, then, that each of us is responsible for what we get and all of us are responsible for what our city, our state, our country, and our world experience.

The problem doesn’t just come from what the looters, shooters, and terrorists want to do, but from those who assume that the looters, shooters, and terrorists cannot be controlled. Those who think the bad guys will rule enable the bad guys to rule. This is not fate. It’s our permission.

Each of us needs to put hope and energy into what we want. That’s how what happens, happens. In our personal lives, we must be positive and expect the outcomes we desire. And yet, many people begin each week with a pessimistic, Murphy’s law expectation about what will happen. They get what they focus their energy on, so if they think things will go wrong, then things will go wrong, confirming their beliefs about how the world works.

Pessimism always seems to be in vogue, so we swear by Murphy’s Law as though it’s handed down by the Fates. In fact, by swearing by it, we create it again and again. And we smile and say, “That’s life.” Or so we presume.

If we can one day grasp what James Allen wrote years ago, “As a man thinketh in his heart so is he…A man is literally what he thinks,” we will understand that the “bad” and the “good” of life do not come from fate or Murphy’s laws but from ourselves and how we see ourselves and the world. Understanding this is the true power we have over bad things that seem to come out of nowhere.

You can, if you take the time, reduce your brain waves to the Alpha or Theta level, and meditate on the world you want in 2024.   This is more powerful than casually thinking about the best of all possible worlds because it places your consciousness at the level where it can impact reality.

I’ve written about all this before in earlier posts. We’re not corks being tossed and turned by an angry sea, but the sea itself. Seeing that is the beginning of wisdom.

–Malcolm

What’s a dead rat on a Leprchaun’s dinner table?

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn writing

It’s a writing prompt. Writing prompts, which feature a potential plot scerario, are used to inspire writers to try out their skills and create a sense of adventure by writing a scene or a story based on the prompt. His works fine in a creative writing class where all the students work on the same project. The results are critiqued and/or discussed after the work is turned in.

I used a variation of the wrting prompt when teaching journalism classes. The students would be presented with a list of facts and asked to write a news story, feature story, editorial, or obituary. This allowed the class to practice the techiques and/or be tested on them.

What I don’t like are writing prompts that take over the content of a writing website or blog because they’re cheap excuses for providing meaninful content. Staff can think of dozens of these prompts with lot less effort than covering writing news, how-to discussions, book reviews, and other valuable content.

current P&W home page

Two sites that do this are the “Poets & Writers” organization’s website and the Indies Unlimited blog. The “Poet’s & Writers” site does present other valuable home page content, so the page isn’t a total loss.  I would prefer discussions there about the magazine itself or books and authors news instead of his cheap alterantive. I used to be a member of Poets and Writers membership program, so I’ve seen the website a lot.

Indies Unlimited is an authors’ blog that displays e-book deals submitted by involved small-press authors, a resource page, a knowledge base, and a flash fiction challenge based on a writing prompt. The website’s FAQ still says that it presents articles and editorials but as far as I can tell, the blog has had few, if any, of these in a long time. I believe IU is all-volunteer and that in recent years it’s gone through some staff changes and a declining number of available writers for other submitting content. However, I miss the other content and find no excitement in reading writing-prompt-based flash fiction. The site is still fun but would be more usefu without the heavy reliance and the flash fiction.

Margarita

Many other writing sites offer writing prompts, including “Writer’s Digest,” purportedly as inspiration and/or a way to combat writer’s block. Do they work? Possibly so. Personally, I’m not going to spend my time away from the work in progress writing about some BS that some staff member thought up while having a large margarita at the local watering hole.

–Malcolm