We do have a movie tonight, "Girl on the Run"(1953), but before we get to it we're gonna try something a little different. Let's do a brief writing exercise in which we start with one sentence, analyse it, then move on to a second sentence and see how it builds on the information from the first, and so on. I'm inspired to do this by the Hemingway App (www.hemingwayapp.com), and while the writing style of Ernest Hemingway is not something I'd aspire to, because I tend toward long sentences haha, I've been interested in the art of sentence construction since I began blogging back in 1998, and even moreso when I started my first book in 2006. Book writing is much more strict than blog writing, but anyway let's try it. You can file it under "Weird Stuff".
Here's our first sentence :
"Matthew was hydrocephalic".
It consists of only three words, but it gives you a person (Matthew), a past tense (standard for most stories) and either a noun or adjective describing Matthew's condition. I'm not well versed in the technicalities of written grammar, so I don't know the grammatical difference between hydrocephalic and hydrocephalus, other than that the first word describes a person's affliction (i.e. possessive) and the second word names the affliction itself, which, I'm guessing, makes it a noun. So I'll take another guess and say "hydrocephalic" is a verb, and if I'm wrong it's because I didn't pay attention in 8th grade English. Thanks for bearing with me on these points by the way.
Our second sentence is :
"In layman's terms, that meant he had "water on the brain", a buildup of fluid that caused his cranium to enlarge".
Now we will switch from our technical breakdown to examine the content. The second sentence builds on the first by expanding upon the definition of hydrocephalus to include a wider audience, i.e "in layman's terms". Now, the writer has ensured that we - the laypersons - know what hydrocephaly entails, i.e. having an oversized skull resulting from excess fluid in one's cranium. The reader has also been given a colloquialism, "water on the brain", allowing him to relate, perhaps, to a phrase he may already know. So, in our first two sentences, we've used just 24 words, but we have described the abnormal medical condition of a person in terms that can be understood by most readers. They also know the person's name (Matthew), which will form the beginning of an image in each reader's mind, despite the lack, thus far, of a personal description. In other words, different names will unconsciously provoke different mental images. A "Robert" will be pictured in one way, "Clifford" in another, and "Matthew" in still another. The mind does this on it's own whether the reader realises it or not.
On to our third and fourth sentences : "The kids in Room A just called him a waterhead, which was cruel to be sure, but you know how children are. They call 'em as they see 'em". I'll note that the Hemmingway App won't let me use words like "just". It flags me for that, calling it an adverb, the #1 "no-no" at Hemingway. But in this case I feel it's needed, because it adds a dismissiveness to the children's action. There's a difference between saying : "Matthew was hydrocephalic (etc.) The kids in Room A called him a waterhead", and "Matthew was hydrocephalic (etc). The kids in Room A just called him a waterhead". The addition of "just" implies a dismissal of the technical term for Matthew's condition, in preference of something the children can not only easily understand, but that can also be used as a put-down, or something to distance themselves from Matthew, to make him into an "other". Hence, they "just" called him a waterhead; i.e. they reduced him.
Anyway, to our emerging description we've now we've added context. "The kids in Room A" tells us that Matthew is among children who are grouped in a facility of some kind. I'll go ahead and tell you that "Room A" refers to a kindergarten classroom. We see that the classmates have a mean-spirited nickname for Matthew, but then the author breaks the proverbial fourth wall to speak directly to the reader : "but you know how children are. They call 'em as they see 'em". Kids are indeed cruel, in other words. "You know it and I know it" says the author, but he adds that they don't necessarily understand why they're being cruel, i.e. "they call 'em as they see 'em", meaning that when they see someone who looks different, whether they are frightened or simply feel superior, they do what comes naturally to children, which is to name-call : "they call 'em as they see 'em", each from his or her own childish point of view.
Here's what we have so far : "Matthew was hydrocephalic. In layman's terms, that meant he had 'water on the brain', a buildup of fluid that caused his cranium to enlarge. The kids in Room A just called him a waterhead, which was cruel to be sure, but you know how children are. They call 'em as they see 'em".
Let us proceed again with further information :
"The epithet didn't bother Matthew in any event. In addition to enlarging his skull, the fluid shrank his brain. He was barely cognizant of those around him. Miss Rosenstein, our pretty young teacher, used to sit Matthew on the playground, where he could be alone to absorb the sounds of the world and feel the sunshine on his skin. There was no reason for him to be in the classroom anyway. Looking back, I have no idea why a boy like Matthew would've been placed in a regular kindergarten class like ours. Perhaps at the time there were not the special education facilities we have now".
In this paragraph we learn more about Matthew's disability. We also learn that he's a member of a kindergarten class, which gives us his age without enumerating it (he is 5, just like the other children). We now know the teacher's name and that she is young herself (Miss Rosenstein was a real person who would have been around 21 or 22 in 1965). Lastly, we now know that the author was himself a member of this class, a "regular kindergarten class" as he calls it. Now we'll continue with another paragraph.
"Monday September 27 dawned hot. By noon the air in Room A was sweltering. Miss Rosenstein turned on the fan, and gave us all wet paper towels to hold to our foreheads. At nap time she turned out the lights, and this is when the trouble began. Robert, whom the children called "Barney Google" for his goo-goo-googley eyes, burped and vomited. It was only an accident but it caused him to scream, and as he continued screaming, utter chaos broke out. The kids began throwing things at one another. First little things like pencils and crayons. Then larger things like pads of paper. Chalk flew, and erasers. Kids took off their shoes and threw those, too. Finally, they threw their nap mats, which didn't fly as far because they were unwieldy. That the attempt was made, however, demonstrated just how unglued these five year olds had become, within a matter of seconds".
"One child was not in the room when all of this happened. That was Matthew, who Miss Rosenstein had placed in his usual spot on the school playground, sometime during recess. She'd taken to sitting him there in the middle of the tarmac, in his diaper all alone, because this was the one spot in the schoolyard where he seemed comfortable, away from the other kids at their kickball games and chatter. But on that day, Miss Rosenstein had forgotten all about Matthew. She'd neglected to bring him back inside when recess ended, and now, as the temperature passed 100 degrees, he was still sitting where she'd left him, alone in the broiling sun".
"His skin turned red but didn't burn, and he never cried out for help. This might've been because he sensed the Harrier hovering above the school, directly over our classroom. The jet was silent but Matthew knew it's music. Music was what he loved most in the whole world, and Matthew knew things about music that even the greatest scholars weren't aware of, that it existed out of time, for instance. Now, as he heard the opening bell from "High Hopes", he knew intuitively that it signaled the coming of the jet, the beginning of the end, and the start of things to come".
The addition of these paragraphs gives us the beginning of a story, and indeed they comprise the opening to my next book, "The Lorne Street School Story", which I hope to complete in the next five to ten years (and hopefully much sooner, my work prevents me from concentrating on it right now). I actually began working on "TLLSS" back in 2009. I have 120 pages of separate stories that will eventually be pasted together to make an overall tale. Each one is made up of equal parts memory and what you might call "science fictionfact", where it's difficult to tell what's real and what isn't. BTW, regarding the Hemingway App - which we started to use as a "measuring stick" to corral our sentences - I neglected to run the final paragraphs through the app because it would flag me left and right for some of the syntax, but in editing them down myself, I find the paragraphs acceptable (maybe in need of a word replacement or some polishing here and there, but overall not too shabby). The Hemingway App won't let you use phrases like "had been", as in "Matthew had been sitting on the playground", because it calls that "passive voice", and for Hemingway, passive voice is to be avoided at all costs. But right now I'm reading Neil Peart's "Far and Away", his excellent and final book, and Neil uses passive voice all the time. He's a fine writer, so if it's good enough for Neil, then it's good enough for me, at least some of the time. I just like using the Hemingway App because it helps with discipline, but I don't need to adhere to it's every command, lol.
Okay, so that was a fun little exercise and a nice diversion. We'll try it again real soon. /////
As for our movie, "Girl On The Run" was a low-budget noir with a good story though fairly static filmmaking techniques. I'm just gonna give you a synopsis. A reporter is framed for murder while working undercover at a carnival. He's trying to expose the owner as a crime boss. The owner kills his publisher and blames it on him. All the evidence is against him, so he hides out in the sideshow tents, among the burlesque dancers and the freaks. His girlfriend wants to help him, so she gets a job as a dancer and pumps the other girls for information about the owner.
It's turns out he's a big time hoodlum, but he's working for someone even bigger. Who that will turn out to be is the crux of the story. It's not a bad little thriller. The acting is b-movie good, and the pace moves along at a steady clip. The plot is paint-by-numbers, but the atmosphere makes up for it. The main reason to see this film is that it appears to have been shot inside a real carnival with an actual burlesque show, circa 1953. This takes you inside a world you haven't seen and gives the proceedings a gritty authenticity. I give it Two Solid Thumbs Up and a definite recommendation. At 64 minutes, you can't go wrong. /////
That's all for the moment. Thanks for reading. I'll see you later tonight at the Usual Time.
Tons of love. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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