Anecdotal evidence

I come from a family that love anecdotes. They're our social lubricant, and usually very amusing. I've lost track of the times I've been embarrassed by my auntie telling people how I once was found as a toddler swearing at an injured pigeon which was hiding under the bed from me for being naughty, and how I tried to turn its legs round because they were "the wrong way round". Poor pigeon. Having grown up around it I find myself loving other people's stories, and it often made me wonder why we enjoy this so much, both the telling of them and the listening. I'm fascinated by folk stories and fables.

Whilst studying on my MA we were visited by a remarkable storyteller Taffy Thomas MBE (http://www.taffythomas.co.uk/). He's the UK's first storytelling Laureate. He suffered from a severe stroke and taught himself to speak again using the art of storytelling. He came in and put on his storytelling coat which was a handmade coat made up of various images, each representing a folk story. He asked us to pick a picture and he would tell from memory the story. He was captivating, in presence and skill. We hung on his every word, amazed that he could remember each of these stories so perfectly and tell them so beautifully. He spoke about how important stories are, particularly to children and how they could develop emotional literacy, empathy and communication skills. The morality in some of the stories also acts as a guide for children to develop within the community. Taffy was keen for us to remember the stories, and taught us a few handy ways to recall them using anchor points within the story. He said as long as we could remember these it didn't much matter how we told it, so long as it was told with conviction and respect for the story.

The art of verbal storytelling has been around far longer than the written word, but is just as important. We've evolved to tell stories to pass on information, alert to dangers experienced in the past, teach empathy and morality and of course help us to communicate with each other better. Both in speaking and listening. In his book Telling Tales Taffy quotes a 12 year old he met at one of his workshops;

A story's like a game of tig that's passed on
And around. A story is like a gift that's
Given by sound. A story is like a Mexican wave
Whirling above the ground. Around and
Around it goes, by word of mouth it flows
Hold the gist as it goes by. Pass it on or it will
Die. A story's a game of tig.

I like this quote, a story is a game of tig. A verbal tale or anecdote is passed on much like any other type of story, and whether it gets twisted a little on the way it doesn't matter. We're wired to tell stories, whether in verbal or written form, so pass em on.

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Green Orchid

Anecdotes have triggers.

Often I'll hold onto my stories, sharing them with select individuals at a time that suits me, but some stories must be told straight away, to anyone who will listen.  If all else fails and there is nobody to communicate with, individuals will begin muttering to themselves, "I can't believe that just happened...she swallowed the whole thing!" 

Then there are the anecdotes that are flourished, as if from a hat, at parties and during the 'getting to know you' stage of a friendship.  These stories come with embellishments and have likely been told many times before.  They involve flamboyant gestures and, occasionally, song. 

Parents and teachers will be familiar with the forced stories.  These are the anecdotes we tell when we are made aware that a sparse description of events is not sufficient and we dredge through the details in the hope of offering a tidbit that will impress the other just enough so that they will leave us alone.  These stories can also contain 'not-quite-truths'.  You'll hear these falling from the lips of children when they haven't completed a task, from spouses when they haven't completed a task, and criminals when they have completed a task which wasn't theirs to complete. 

The definition of anecdote is a fraught one.  Many would contend that anecdotes should be interesting or amusing however there are many who use the cover of 'anecdote' to smuggle Trojan Horses filled with dull particulars of their sleeping habits or the particular manner in which a counter assistant filled their grocery bag.  Doubtless for every hundred thousand listeners who would write this off as unanecdotal, there will always be one who wishes to pursue the story further, hanging on the details and asking whether the counter assistant had a lazy eye and a creased shirt because they might have met this shop assistant and how very interesting because their bags had been filled with great care, in particular the delicate items such as the Danish loaf which everyone knows is prone to crushing and he actually gave it a bag of its own and if that doesn't show customer service, they don't know what we're expecting and perhaps the shirt was creased because they don't believe in wasting energy on ironing when the earth is in the grip of a fuel crisis and really, when there is the capacity to produce iron-free shirts, why aren't we all wearing them...

Anecdotes, in poetry, tend to live in the narrative form.  I've mentioned before that this is the superior form and will brook no argument on this point.  As evidence, here is a portion of Two Deaths in the Bronx by Donald Evans.

TWO DEATHS IN THE BRONX 

The sodden stretches of the months of pregnancy 
Had had but one green orchid; 
That was their sole pauseful 
And suspended moment of beauty. 
He had brought it home to her at dawn 
On the day before Christmas, 

And he was a little drunken as he dropped it on her bed. 
But it was a green orchid, 
And pleased she took it unquestioningly. 
He had bought it with many more 
Hours and hours earlier for the girl, 
Who was then amusing him. 
In some way it had got into his pocket — 
Or, perhaps, it was his buttonhole. 
He had noticed it as he entered the abode of maternity, 
And with his quick sense of values 
He offered it in a tenderness. 
He would have sent her orchids every day, 
But he had no money to spare. He must live. 

He was spending the nine months with her — 
He had promised to do that — to take care of her 
Until their child was born — 
Then she would go away with the child. 

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Bumbling by day...

...leaping by night.

Hello language lovers.  It's been a while since I wrote for the blog and I am, as usual, writing under the influence of too little sleep.  I think my subconscious prefers it that way.  I suspect that when I'm tired and closer to sleep it finds it easier to whisper to my bumbling consicous mind, making the obscure connections which some call creativity.

The theme this week is Mad Hatter.  It's a leap, appropriately, from the 'mad as a March hare' phrase to the Mad Hatter from Lewis Carroll's Alice stories.  It's that leap from one element of language to another that I think ties poetry to its original culture and means that poems in translation must be reinterpreted rather than simply translated word for word. 

These leaps are also the foundations of figurative language.  If we're thinking in colour we might leap from the word hatter to the bright orange hair of Tim Burton's Hatter in his film adaptation.  If we're thinking in sound we could leap from hatter to tatters, smatters and batter.  If I think personally, hatter makes me think of tea cups and songs, a large nose and a bit of paper with a price in old money.  It also makes me think of tailors/Taylors and coopers/Coopers and dyers/Dyer whose names recall old and current trades. 

In Carroll's fantastical linguistic, mathamatical novels, his Hatter is an enigmatic, eccentric fellow who sits alongside similary incomprehensible friends.  These characters seem as confused as our dreams, speaking in rhyme and riddle:

`If you knew Time as well as I do,' said the Hatter, `you wouldn't talk about wasting IT. It's HIM.'
`I don't know what you mean,' said Alice.
`Of course you don't!' the Hatter said, tossing his head contemptuously. `I dare say you never even spoke to Time!'
`Perhaps not,' Alice cautiously replied: `but I know I have to beat time when I learn music.'
`Ah! that accounts for it,' said the Hatter. `He won't stand beating. Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he'd do almost anything you liked with the clock. For instance, suppose it were nine o'clock in the morning, just time to begin lessons: you'd only have to whisper a hint to Time, and round goes the clock in a twinkling! Half-past one, time for dinner!' 

I think that when we make creative leaps in our poetry, we are not only trying to communicate as fresh an image as possible, we also emulating the strange associations that our dreams and subconscious mind throw at us when our conscious mind isn't looking.  The conscious mind can only understand the huge web of experience in terms and images that it can recall.  When a poet creates a series of images strung together that ring true to us, and the degree of recognition surely must differ for each one of us,they seem to be speaking to us in the language of the subconsious, that larger, smarter part of ourselves which controls much of our actions but which we do not control.

With that thought looming in the in your ridiculously facile conscious mind, here is a snippet of a poem which speaks to my own creative leaps.  It's an excerpt from Poor Fish by V A Sola Smith which can be found in the Sculpted: Poetry of the North West anthology, edited by Lindsey Holland and Angela Topping:

...a whisper

between the isles of bargain basement food stuff stores,
stealing from the ginnells and cobbled snickets, the not-yet
ghouls, tripping unseen about their fate like the helter
                                                                            skelter
fun house stairs, we rode along the promenade as kids,

waiting for the night to tear across the shore line, faceless
and fearless and one against the jetstream of the whole
                                                                               North
Atlantic...


If you want to buy Sculpted, it's available direct from the website.

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My magic

My magic (a moment in my life) Colin Daives

I love magic, have done since my very earliest memory. I actually wanted to be a magician, even tried practising for our in front of a mirror. Desperately trying to palm a card, holding the nine of diamonds in my fingers while concealing it from the audience and keeping my hand looking natural.

I would watch Paul Daniels with wonder. He maybe a bit of a Barclay, but his close order magic is something to behold. The same can be said of Jerry Sadowitz. Not only did he have to ‘offend everyone’ Scotsman years before Frankie Boyle said “Oscar Pistorius sounds like a Harry Potter sell to grow someone’s legs back,” but he was, and still is, one of the finest close quarter slight of hand trickers I have ever seen.

I never got close to these giant of the UK magic industry. I thought my love for the craft and my desire to conjure would never join. That my shot of creating wonder in the hearts and minds of an audience would never happen. And I was only twelve years old.

Then something happened, I wrote a story. This was not that unusual for me at the time, amongst my peers I was know doing such thing on a regular basis however, this story was different in three ways.

Firstly it was part of a challenge. This was the early 1983, we had all watched the Horizon programme about effects of nuclear strike; we had all read Raymond Briggs ‘When the Wind blows’; we all heard the speeches from Thatcher and Regan; we were all scared.

My friend, Anthony Hamlin, suggested we write stories about nuclear war. This seemed like a great idea, and during the next free writing session we both put pen to paper and scribbled out a tale of destruction. So this was the first time I wrote based on a theme someone other than the school had suggested.

Secondly was the teacher reactions. Pete Cartlidge was our form teacher and for some reason he loved my story, so much so that he put it forward to be read out at assembly. This was high accolade indeed. Then something strange happened, the headmaster My Nunn called for the story so he could have a read. This was unusual, but off it went. The following day the news came back that he thought it was ‘too strong’ for assembly and it was withdraw, banned.

I found this utterly strange, Anthony on the other hand found it utterly hilarious. Weeks past and the story drifted from our thoughts until Mr Nunn had to go away on school business and Mr Cartlidge, being the deputy head, put the my story back on the table. I questioned this decision which got the response “when the cat’s away...” So his was the first thing I wrote that caused controversy.

Thirdly was the performance. I stood on the stage in front of the entire junior school, some three hundred and sixty children aged eight to twelve and twelve teachers. I read the piece which included the lines “I remember the cloud, looking like a mushroom. So beautiful yet so destructive.” and as the protagonist contemplated taking his own life (which was one of the rules of the story challenge) “no one to live for, but so many people to die for”

As I finished reading I was met but a stunned silence, you feel the emotions in the room. I could see one of the teachers crying. Another teacher began to clap which started a chain reaction across the room with some of the children cheering. Mr Cartlidge smiled at me as I left the stage. It was the first time I had written something that had proved an emotion response. It was the day I realised I could effect people with my writing, the day I learned to true meaning of magic, the magic of words.

This was quite a profound thing. It would be years before I realised the true deeper meaning of this event. But now I’m here, writing children’s books, poems and blogs. Conjuring up entire worlds of fanciful images. All to try and create a wonder in the eyes, hearts and minds of an audience.

I still love magic, and even though I can figure out how a lot of tricks are done, I don’t care. The skill is in the mechanics, the entertainment is in the performance, the presentation. The rules of a good magic trick are the same as a good story. To quote the film ‘The Prestige’

“Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called ‘The Pledge’. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn't. The second act is called ‘The Turn’. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call ‘The Prestige’.”

Not all stories need a twist, they just need to leave the audience with an open mouth full of wonder and overflowing ideas on how you just got there. That could just be a description. I may not work for everybody, but for those you managed to connect with, well that’s magic.

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Patches, Parrots and 'Arrrs'

On Sunday, as I was drawing with my three-year-old nephew, he asked if I could draw him a boat. As I was colouring in the hull, he instructed that I needed to add a sail and a scary flag.

He then put my drawing skills to the test by asking for the inclusion of a pirate, which according to Joshy had to have a hat, a patch and a parrot. As I attempted to draw out his requests in thick Crayola felt tip pens, I asked if he could make up a story about pirates (sneakily thinking I could get Josh to unwittingly write this blog post). I started him off with the classic and culturally ingrained ‘Once upon a time...’

Once upon a time, there were dinosaurs that roared loudly. Scary, roaring dinosaurs. They chased the pirates away. The pirates ran back to their boat and sailed away from the dinosaurs. They went to an island to find treasure, gold treasure. They had a key. When they used the key – ‘POP!’ – because there was a Jack-in-the-box hidden inside. Then the cavemen came and took the pirates underpants and then took them to the dinosaurs. And the dinosaurs wore them and roared because they were happy. The end.

Anyone who regularly reads books to children will be able to see that Josh’s story has been greatly influenced by a specific children’s book, Dinosaurs Love Underpants. This book, along with others, have formed part of Josh’s current knowledge of a world he’s still learning and trying to understand. At the minute, for him, his favourite books (full of imagination) are just as real and valid as concrete objects or authenticated facts.

From both what Josh asked me to draw and from the story he told, it is clear that Josh has managed to acquire the same stereotypical depiction of a pirate as would be held by most adults. However, where we perhaps just accept this stereotyped view of a pirate, Josh is presently in a ‘why?’ phase – questioning everything and looking for answers. And it got me thinking: is this view of pirates derived from reality or has it been constructed overtime by fictional works (such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan) and subsequently reinforced via the medium of film?

So what was based on reality and what has been made up?

Did pirates really have pet parrots?

Exotic pets were certainly popular amongst sailors, if for no other reason than the high price they could command in the European markets, and parrots were especially popular, perhaps because they could be taught to talk. Several probate inventories of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries list parrots or parrot cages amongst the possessions of seamen, but most importantly perhaps is the description of parrots to be found in William Dampier's journal of his circumnavigation in which he describes the parrots of Campeachy Bay as "yellow and red, very coarsely mixed; and they would prate [talk] very prettily…"

(from www.piratesinfo.com)

Did pirates really wear eye patches ?

There is one theory that the eye patch was worn over one eye so the pirate could move between the darkness of below-deck to the brightness of topside without waiting for the eyes to adjust.

Another theory: the eye patch stereotype predates the "Golden Age of Piracy" by some 200 years. Up until the 1500s one of the key tools of maritime navigation was the cross staff, which required the navigator to look directly into the sun at high noon. This led to a lot of sailor/navigators who were partially blind in one eye. After significant sight loss, many would likely have taken to wearing an eyepatch over the afflicted eye. By the 1500s other tools like the back staff had been invented which eliminated the need to look directly into the sun, but by then the sailor/eyepatch image had made its way into public consciousness.

(from Pirate Master)

Did pirates really say ‘Arrr’?

Most scholars think English-speaking Golden Age pirates spoke exactly the same as English-speaking merchant sailors of the time, since large numbers in both groups tended to be from riverfront neighborhoods around London, he said.

Many of the phrases that most people think of as pirate speech today can actually be traced back to the 1950s Disney movie Treasure Island, starring Robert Newton as fictional pirate Long John Silver (hear Newton as Silver).

(from National Geographic)

Thank you for reading,

Lara

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