Bad Dream <=> News Story

Man faints at sight of blood, dies

A federal agency is investigating the death of a worker at a Savannah recycling plant, who died after a chain of events that begin with a cut to his hand.

Authorities say the worker died Tuesday after a Sunday accident at Southern Metals Recycling's plant on Tremont Road. Michael Day, owner of the temporary staffing firm StaffCo, tells The Savannah Morning News that 26-year-old Fernando Aburto cut his hand while stripping insulation from wire at the plant. Day said the worker then fainted at the sight of the blood, hit his head on concrete and was taken to a hospital.

Day said StaffCo provides workers for Southern Metals Recycling. The recycling company referred questions about the matter to StaffCo.

-The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, February 24

Literary criticism in translation

["The Story of Ying Ying"] is about the deep and melancholic personal bonds between a man and a woman. Their sublime passion, though deep, has no beginning and no end, as a single burst of love and affection creates endless despair and infinite sorrow. The romance emphasizes Scholar Zhang’s faithful character and irregular constancy; underscoring in every part how his captivation with Ying Ying is different from the ordinary philandering of a lecher. Ying Ying is able to turn Zhang upside down, which highlights how Ying Ying is different from other beauties. Ying Ying is an intelligent unflappable young lady. She loves Zhang’s talent and is moved by Zhang’s foolish passion (chiqing). That she arranged the private rendezvous with Zhang in the western chamber, yet scolded him once there, is perhaps a matter of changing her mind at the last minute, or perhaps she really only wanted to see him and speak with him. In any case her “speaking of principle sharply and defensively” (yan ze min bian) is believable.…If Yuan Zhen’s “The Story of Yingying” was really about Yuan’s own feelings, then Scholar Zhang’s restraint answers not only to the personality (gexing) of the character (renwu), but also the needs of the story. The old matron, knowing the boat has sailed, is not obstructing the marriage, so Zhang and Ying Ying can enjoy what they desire and don’t need to remain mired in melancholy. It is Zhang who restrains himself before the marriage can be completed. Zhang’s restraint is not what Yuan Zhen wants, but only a rule of the story, an internal requirement of it.…Neither Ying Ying’s meandering soliloquy, her sorrowful qin playing, nor her plaintive-without-complaining (yuan er bu nu) love letters can make Zhang bring his passion to a head. And even though she breaks up with Zhang in a poetic letter, still there is a lingering passion left unsevered (yu qing wei duan), a cavity of the heart filled with a deep depression that manages to win the reader’s empathy. Yuan Zhen’s “love ’em and leave ‘em” （shiluan zhongqi) story is clearly not meant to promote some grand moral involving “restraint,” but rather to write out a kind of infinite melancholia. This is not just a matter of failure between Zhang and Yingying, but also a statement about how common failure is in this world; moreover, it makes manifest the conflict between intellect (lizhi) and passion (qinggan). Knowledge from the intellect is a defect that can’t be patched; passion, though, is unwilling to submit, can never rest, and yet is also no guarantee of success. These feelings (qinggan) are the universal human experience (rensheng pubian de jingyan). It really proves a statement from western literary theory: “A particular fiction can lead towards a general truth.” That’s why this little story is so moving, and later generations never stopped praising it, and in Record of the Western Chamber, even gave it a happy ending.

--Yang Jiang, "Shishi, gushi, zhenshi" 实事、故事、真是 (Fact, Story, Reality)

Islam, 0.5

Notes on a guest speaker from Twin Ports Islamic Center in my class

The root s-l-m, from which the word Islam is derived, means "safe and unharmed, unimpaired." Its derivatives include words meaning both "peace" and "surrender."...It is the latter meaning that is uppermust in the use of the term Islam, meaning "to surrender oneself, to commit or resign oneself to the will of God." Islam is the state or act of submission; Muslim is the one who submits. It is in this sense, of total surrender to the will of God, that the terms Islam and Muslim have always been understood in the Islamic lands and communities.

--Barnard Lewis and Buntzie Ellis Churchill, Islam: the Religion and the People (Pearson, 2009)

Struggles of the Writer, 1

"I never mean to be slow," Joseph Conrad wrote to David Meldurm of the Blackwood publishing house in 1899, but "The stuff comes out at its own rate [and] too often -- alas! -- I've to wait for the sentence -- for the word." The process of writing involved long hours of incapacitating doubt that left him caught like a ship in a calm, an unrestful paralysis in which his mind remained "extremely active," producing "descriptions, dialogue, reflexion -- everything -- everything but the belief, the conviction, the only thing neeeded to make me put pen to paper." Days would pass without his writing a line, and Conrad would take to his bed, sick of a labor so great that it should have given "birth to masterpieces" instead of what he termed the "ridiculous mouse" his struggles would sometimes produce. ...Conrad also had a history of nervous collapse at the end of most of his major books. Under Western Eyes (1911) in particular, a novel that involved a prolonged psychic immersion in the Russia he both hated and feared. Few of his letters are without some plaintive or even desperate note. "My brain reduced to the size of a pea seems to rattle about in my head," he wrote to R. B. Cunninghame Graham in 1900, and if it wasn't the fight with words then it was his worries about money or housing, the illnesses of his wife and children, or the crippling attacks of gout with which his working life was spiked.

--The Portable Conrad, introduction by Michael Gorra

Implied Author, I

As [the author] writes, he creates not simply an ideal, impersonal "man in general" but an implied version of "himself" that is different from the implied authors we meet in other men's works. To some novelists it has seemed, indeed, that they were discovering or creating themselves as they wrote. As Jessamyn West says, it is sometimes "only by writing the story that the novelist can discover -- not his story -- but its writer, the official scribe, so to speak, for that narrative."

***

When Fielding comments, he gives us explicit evidence of a modifying process from work to work; no single version of Fielding emerges from reading the satirical Jonathan Wild, the two great "comic epics in prose," Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, and that troublesome hybrid, Amelia. There are many similarities among them, of course; all of the implied authors value benevolence and generosity; all of them deplore self-seeking brutality. In these and many other respects they are indistinguishable from most implied authors of most significant works until our own century. But when we descend from this level of generality to look at the particular ordering of values in each novel, we find great variety.

***

Our sense of the implied author includes not only the extractable meanings but also the moral and emotional content of each bit of action and suffering of all the characters. It includes, in short, the intuitive apprehension of a completed artistic whole; the chief value to which this implied author is committed, regardless of what party his creator belongs to in real life, is that which is expressed by the total form.

***

A great work establishes the "sincerity" of its implied author, regardless of how grossly the man who created that author may belie in his other forms of conduct the values embodied in his work. For all we know, the only sincere moments of his life may have been lived as he wrote his novel.

***

We too easily fall into the habit of talking as if the narrator who says, "O my good readers!" were Fielding, forgetting that for all we know he may have worked as deliberately and with as much detachment in creating the wise, urbane narrator of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones as he did in creating the cynical narrator of Jonathan Wild. What was said above about the relation between the author's own values and the values supported by his second self applies here in precisely the same sense. A great artists can create an implied author who is either detached or involved, depending on the needs of the work in hand.

--Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction

True Character

TRUE CHARACTER can only be expressed through choice in a dilemma. How the person chooses to act under pressure is who he is -- the greater the pressure, the truer and deeper the choice to character.

The key to True Character is desire. In life, if we feel stifled, the fastest way to get unstuck is to ask, "What do I want?," listen to the honest answer, then find the will to pursue that desire. Problems still remain, but now we're in motion with the chance of solving them. What's true of life is true of fiction. A character comes to life the moment we glimpse a clear understanding of his desire -- not only the conscious, but in a complex role, the unconscious desire as well.

Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting

Embourgeoisement

As I am a wretched bad writer, many of my friends have advised me to practise more, to do which I have made many attempts but allways forgot or got tired so that it was never atended to. I am now about to write a sort of journal, to note down some of the chief things that come under my observation each day. This, I hope, will induce me to make use of my pen every day a little. My account of each subject will be very short - a sort of multo in parvo - as my book is very small and my time not very large.

Diary of William Tayler, Footman, 1837 (Thanks to The Diary Junction)