• Author William T. Vollmann talks about his exploration of Noh drama and femininity, Kissing the Mask, at the Northwest African American Museum at 7 p.m. tonight; tomorrow he’s at Third Place Books.

William T. Vollmann, author, gun owner

There are two kinds of readers in this world: those that know of William T. Vollmann, and those that can’t handle the truth. You could argue there’s a third group of people who know of him, but can’t keep up with his output. He’s written 21 books in 23 years, which includes Rising Up and Rising Down, a 7-volume exploration of humanity’s rationales for violence. You can’t find that one anywhere, it’s sold out. Hobos, prostitutes, illegal immigrants, and terrorists have captured his attention. He’s been a war correspondent, and burned off his eyebrows on a trip to the North Pole.

I’m halfway through his latest, with its duffel-bag-sized title of Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater with Some Thoughts on Muses (especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, Kabuki Goddesses, Porn Queens, Poets, Housewives, Makeup Artists, Geishas, Valkyries, and Venus Figurines. At 200 pages in, it’s been mostly Noh, through the recollections, interviews, and research of an enthusiast (not an expert, as Vollmann is careful to emphasize). Though he has just hung out with a 60-something geisha.

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Reading Vollmann may be an uneasy experience–he has a talent for putting himself into comprising situations, and for speaking his mind while in them–but this book is filled with an unusual passion and sincerity. Along with copious footnotes–you could dismiss Vollmann as a “holy fool,” but for the knowledge he possesses, which (let’s face it) few of us would go through such trouble to get firsthand.

The combination of his perverse/idiosyncratic lines of inquiry with the academic rigor of his observation often yields a bittersweet, bite-of-the-apple result: you’re wiser, but the world is weirder than you thought.

If you’ve ever wanted proof that Seattle has a mysterious success-retardant effect in publishing, the case of Invisible Ink should do the trick. Screenwriter and story structure teacher Brian McDonald, a long-time Capitol Hill resident and good friend of mine, wrote his guide to story back in 2003. Then he shopped the book around for seven years. He went to publishers with to-kill-for quotes like these:

If I manage to reach the summit of my next story it will be in no small part due to having read Invisible Ink. (Pixar’s Andrew Stanton)

I recommend this fine handbook on craft to any writer, apprentice or professional, working in any genre or form. (Dr. Charles Johnson, National Book Award-winner)

I’ve sat down with at least a couple of dozen books that swore they could help me with my craft. Invisible Ink is the first one I’ve finished. (Aaron Elkins, Edgar Award-winner)

Not one publisher bit. There’s a scene in The Family Guy, the first episode back from cancellation, where Peter lists all the other failed shows that Family Guy had to “make room for.” It’s hilarious, but also sad. (Have fun! Create your own shortlist of books published since 2003 that didn’t need to be.)

But finally, Invisible Ink is available in paperback (Amazon, Barnes & Noble), and you can check out an online copy at Libertary.

It grew out of McDonald’s classes on screenwriting and story around town, at 911 Media Arts and Richard Hugo House, and his ongoing work with the animation program at the University of Washington. A friend of his, who used to write for Seinfeld, wrote a pilot for a TV show of his own and asked for notes. When he got through with McDonald’s comments, he said, “You should write a book.”

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It also grew out of the hard-knocks life of a Seattle screenwriter, applying to contests and fellowships, waiting to hear back, and unsealing, often, letters of rejection.

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Brian McDonald

“I was trying to get into the Disney Fellowship program, and one of the rejection letters they sent back came with a list of books I should read,” said McDonald. “I thought, I know all these books. I could write one of these books. So I did, partly out of anger. I had never written a book before so I didn’t know how to do it. I just based it on my classes. It’s what I teach at Pixar or Lucasfilm or wherever I happen to be.” Pixar is having him down for a repeat visit this April, and a longer, four-week course.

The key structural concept McDonald tries to get across is what he calls “armature” (not exactly what’s meant by theme) of the story. It’s not the one-line synopsis, but the heart of what you’re trying to say. This, not coincidentally, is what many, many writers struggle with putting into words. It’s hard enough to do it with someone else’s work, and that’s multiplied when you look at your own.

For McDonald, deciphering the structure of story has been a lifelong process. Some kids take apart televisions to see what makes them go. McDonald used to tape (with a cassette recorder) the Bob Newhart Show, Twilight Zone, and Mary Tyler Moore Show to see what made them tick. “It took me a long time to distill that into armature,” McDonald said.

Twilight Zone is remembered for Rod Serling’s ability to recast the morality play (“the good guy gets something good, or bad guy gets his comeuppance”) to include the paranoid tenor of the late ’50s and early ’60s. But “there’s a bigger idea at work” in each episode, noted McDonald, “like we should respect each individual.” That’s the armature, it defines the story, it lets a writer gauge what’s a relevant detail and what’s not.

For McDonald, “it doesn’t matter whether it’s a joke or a newspaper story,” the armature is what hearers, viewers, or readers rely on to make sense of a story. He’s strict about it. Name the last movie you saw with a fully functioning armature, I asked him. There was a long pause. “Last year? Nothing comes to mind.”

In Invisible Ink, he picks out The Wizard of Oz for special mention. He sums up that movie’s armature as, “We all may have what we’re looking for already,” and then details how scene after scene after scene supports that argument. He gets impatient with today’s writers, who “add extraneous things that don’t reinforce their armature. You chip away anything that’s not David. But they fall in love with a character or subplot and their point gets diluted.”

Realism is not the addition of irrelevant details. McDonald recounts what Charles Johnson told him once. “When a child tells you a story, they say we got up and got dressed and went to the movie and got ice cream and went home. But stories are about ‘because.’ That’s much more interesting than the ‘ands’.” He pauses. “There’s a lot of ‘ands’ in the movies right now.”

It’s not that storytellers today fail to entertain at all. McDonald just thinks that “stories with strong armature entertain across cultures and across time. So, the long money is on armature.”

I asked him to list his students’ top three bad habits.

1. They write without having a point, without an armature, in the hope that one emerges. They hide behind their style. It’s such a beautifully written sentence, they think, who cares if it doesn’t say anything? What happens is, limping. People have a strong leg and a weak leg, they don’t put any weight on the bad leg. But their stories limp because they favor their strength.
2. They try to impress other writers. A lot of writers write for critics or other writers rather than for a larger audience, they write to impress rather than to engage. Writers who engage (Michael Crichton, Stephen King) are thought of a cheap writers. But everyone would love to sell books in that volume, everyone wants people lined up around the block to see their movie. And critics tend to dismiss things that people enjoy.
3. They’re too caught up with the goal to be original. That’s really tied up in the first two issues. You just work really hard and learn to tell a story really well, I tell them. The thing that’s original is the person who tells the story. Originality is an outcome of telling a story well and being honest to your experiences and perceptions.

So where do you get your armature ideas? “You can do both, find the idea in the situation, or the situation in the idea. Still, I can’t start writing a story until I know why I’m writing the story. The trick is if you do it right, no one will know which came first. If you don’t do it right [with an armature], your work will look mechanical and clunky. Without one, scenes meander, characters don’t matter, and your story goes nowhere. Many times, the writer discovers the idea at the end and expects the audience to care.”

McDonald keeps a running commentary of this sort on his  Invisible Ink blog. “The rules have gotten a bad rap, but mostly because someone uses the rules but executes them poorly. People say, ‘I saw that ending coming a mile away,’ or ‘I’ve seen this character before.’ But they tend not to point to classics.”

(via TBTL, who are in the midst of their TBTL-athon)

Author Sherman Alexie has parlayed his Colbert Report appearance into real fame, as he’s booked on TBTL today. With Colbert he discussed his opposition to a digital media that doesn’t protect authorial ownership. With Luke Burbank, today at noon, he gets into “the plan he’s hatched for monetizing art in the digital age, and how (on a totally unrelated note) pickup basketball is the only way for grown men to express their love to each other.” [UPDATE: Twitter just sent me this link to three new poems by Alexie.

Kirkus Reviews calls Matthew Flaming’s debut novel, The Kingdom of Ohio, “impossible to resist,” praising its “marrying poetic prose with hints of steampunk aesthetics.” Closer to home, the Stranger‘s Paul Constant labels it “just deadly dull,” adding that “There’s nothing in the central mystery to entice the reader on.”

So clearly it sparks differences of opinion. For me, this Booklicious review nails down the general outlines, and discontinuities, of the work: “Part historical fiction, part alternate reality, and wholly romantic, Flaming’s novel is a conglomerate of popular publishing trends and timeless storytelling elements.”

The daily life of a turn-of-the-century New York subway construction worker is vividly evoked; the Kingdom of Toledo’s founding by French pilgrims is carefully footnoted; the unlikely romance between young engineer Peter Force and math genius Cheri-Anne Toledo springs up amid their opposition to a powerful cabal starring J.P. Morgan and Thomas Edison.

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All is recounted by a peculiar old historian, closing up shop in Los Angeles, who is less convincingly elderly than reminiscent of that stodgy younger man you know who annoyingly litters his speech with literary archaisms. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, young men fond of archaisms, it’s just not as significant of advanced age as it is of advanced bookwormery.)

There’s an ambition to this agglomeration that isn’t actually to write the ultra-selling novel, but to powerfully reimagine a splintering world as worlds of possibility colliding–this, sadly, is a task that exceeds Flaming’s abilities, as yet, as a novelist. Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

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“Clarity in general isn’t one of my strengths,” our narrator admits early on, and you will come to agree with him, especially as regards the powerful cabal’s plot, which I cannot for the life of me summarize. (Neither is characterization, but that hasn’t stopped Dan Brown, has it?) As with many a first novel, the reader is likely to become frustrated by immersion in the story, and being bounced out of it.

It’s too bad that Flaming was allowed to remain so enamored of his disjunctive leaps through time, because he overshoots what the reader needs to know by decades, and provides his research for the novel (real and fictionally constructed research) in place of story. And a better editor would have waved off lines like, “To put it succinctly–have you heard of the Royal House of Toledo?” followed shortly by, “Suffice to say, my family and I were under attack.”

Not to pile on, but the nearby text includes wine described as a “ruby liquid,” a “surly waitress,” and Cheri-Anne leaning forward “conspiratorially.” That lavender prose clangs fiercely with Peter Force’s Tarzan-like laconic speech:

“Maybe.” He considers. “Dangerous, though. Could bring the whole tunnel down on us. Or could be a pocket of gas behind that wall–kill us just as quick.”

The net result is not that there’s one good story buried inside, but a few promising ones, with only the relationship of Peter and Cheri-Anne finding its way to a climactic moment. To use the novel’s mining terminology, the rest of the veins dry up. Still, let’s face it, depending upon your reading interests, you could do plenty worse, and that’s without limiting yourself to first novels.

Atul Gawande speaks Sunday, January 10, at 7:30 p.m. at Town Hall, 8th & Seneca. Advance tickets are $5 [brownpapertickets].

Atul Gawande, the Checklist Manifesto. At Town Hall on Sunday.

One of the most passed-around, must-read articles this summer among those interested in the future of health care was Atul Gawande‘s examination of McAllen, Texas, which has the distinction of being one of the most expensive health-care markets in the country. [New Yorker].

Comparing the town’s health care delivery system to that of its less pricey neighbor El Paso and to the Mayo Clinic, he revealed how entrepaneurial spirit, affinity for procedures, and reimbursement structures contribute to the county’s extreme medical expenditures.

His conclusions were reassuringly frustrating (more doctor-patient time, less testing, and a centralized responsibility for the totality of patient care results in lower costs and better outcomes) and ominous (this model seems to be winning, nationally).

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The article is emblematic of the lucid, evidence-based writing that Gwande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard associate professor, has regularly contributed during his decade-long tenure as a staff writer for The New Yorker. He appears as part of Town Hall’s Future of Health Lecture Series tomorrow in support of his latest book, The Checklist Manifesto [amazon], a simple and effective response to the enormous strains resulting from the demands to make sense of the increasing complexity of scientific discovery.

Opening with surgical anecdotes sure to grab the attention of lovers of grisly medical mysteries and spanning beyond the operating theater to other fields, he aims to show the pivotal role of the checklist. The topic, while perhaps not the most riveting on its surface, has powerful and wide-ranging implications and seems especially timely in this month of resolutions for self-improvement.

Tonight at 7 p.m., Greil Marcus, one of the country’s most astute cultural critics and music journalists, stops by Seattle Central Public Library to speak about his new work: A New Literary History of America (Harvard Univ. Press, $49.95), a doorstop anthology of work by the best and brightest in American letters, edited by Marcus.

The book is somewhere between pop culture compendium and Comp. Lit. wet dream: clocking in at over a thousand pages and featuring essays by everyone from Camille Paglia to Ishmael Reed, it ranges widely over the bric-a-brac of American culture. “Literature” is a bit of a misnomer, as the cultural products explored include everything from jazz to Mickey Mouse to war memorials, stretching from the Founding to Obama’s election.

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Marcus, a long-time music journalist who started his career in the early days of Rolling Stone before moving on to the Village Voice and others, has long since established himself as one of the most insightful writers in the country. He did more than most any other journalist to establish pop music writing as a serious endeavor, and has long since expanded his purview to everything from visual art to political culture. So even if the thought of dropping nearly fifty bucks for his book is a bit of a stretch, the talk along is worth hitting.