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The basics of picture framing

Posted in art, Bruce Byfield, canvases, Framagraphics, Kent PIcture Framing, matting, Personal, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on September 16, 2012| 2 Comments »

Twice in the last few weeks, I have been asked for advice about picture framing. Each time, the requests surprised me, because matching a frame to a picture is such an exacting exercise that I don’t think of myself as an expert. However, I have framed nearly three dozen prints and canvases in the last four years, so on second thoughts I must have picked up a few basic ideas.

My first advice to anyone framing a picture is: keep it simple. Anything you like well enough to frame is probably going to be around much longer than your current furniture – plenty of time for you to get bored with something elaborate, and for anything trendy to date itself. So, unless you are decorating a room like an 18th century boudoir, forget the gilt frames that are half as thick as the picture. You are far less likely to grow tired of a plain black frame or one of stained wood.

After all, the whole point of a frame is to accent the picture, not to call attention to itself. If you notice the frame as much the picture, you’ve made the wrong choice.

In choosing the frame, try to match a dominant color in the picture. If, for example, the picture has a blue background, consider a blue frame. If there is a hint of metal in the picture, then consider a metal frame rather than a wood one. When the picture is colorful, either go with a plain frame, or, at the most, a frame with a barely noticeable line of color that picks up on a common color in the picture.

In general, the smaller the picture, the thinner the frame should be. A canvas that is “museum-finished” – that is, painted on the sides (a reference to the times when artists were expected to provide their own frames and wanted to save the expense) – need not be framed at all, although it will usually look more finished if you do. Other canvases often have a deep frame, with the canvas resting about halfway from the bottom.

For a print or a painting on paper, you will often want a matting, or even a double matting between the frame and the picture. The matting needs to complement both, and choosing between the dozens of shades of an appropriate color for exactly the right one can be demanding. You need to consider the width of each matting, as well as which is on top of which, and, occasionally, if the matting should be some other shape than square. Usually, part of the picture is concealed by the matting, which is why white space is so important, but a picture with a ragged edge may float on top of the matting instead. Canvases generally do not use matting, although paintings on paper do.

The next consideration is the glass, unless the picture is on canvas. In some cases, you can save money by the glass you choose, but I generally prefer glass with ultra-violet protection. This glass is expensive, and usually mutes the picture’s colors, but if you think that you may ever change its position, you’ll be glad that you took the time to protect your painting from sunlight.

The combination of frames and matting are numerous, so expect to spend some time finding the exact ones. Twenty minutes or half an hour are not unusual for the decision, especially when you are not used to it, so don’t expect framing to be something you rush in and do in a few minutes. Take the time to do it right, and you’ll enjoy your picture more over the years.

Oh, and one final piece of advice: Don’t attempt to frame a picture yourself. For one thing, if you’re like most people, you don’t have the tools to do so. For another, hobby stores and do-it-yourself framing stores (which mercifully are far less common than they used to be) generally don’t have the selection of frames and matting to help you make the most suitable choice. Going to a professional framer won’t cost you that much more, and you’ll likely be more satisfied with the results.

In Vancouver, I use either Framagraphics or Kent Picture Framing. In other cities, ask the gallery or store where you bought who they use for their framing. – if professionals employ a framer, chances are you can safely use them, too.

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Personal Mottoes

Posted in Bruce Byfield, mottoes, Personal, Society for Creative Anachronism, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on September 15, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I never did accept my Award of Arms in the Society for Creative Anachronism. Doing so would have been out of keeping with my persona as an eleventh century Icelandic farmer. In the end, Cathal Sean, the seneschal of Seagirt, had to print it as the back cover of a newsletter so he could report that it had been delivered. My one regret about my sacrifice for dramatic consistency is that I would have liked to see if I could register a personal motto. (I suspect not)

Mottoes seem to have originated as war cries for families. Some sound like declarations of faith or loyalty, but the more interesting ones sound vaguely ominous. For example, the Gaelic motto of Macdonald of Clanranald translates into English as, “Gainsay who dare.” Others are hallowed, but obscure. For example, the MacAlpine’s motto urges its speakers to “Remember the death of Alpine,” although exactly why anyone should became obscure centuries ago – probably it referred to some treachery that was the stuff of blood feuds extending for generations.

Personal mottoes, though, are another matter. My partner Trish, for example, thought long and hard about hers, and came up with “Loyalty to honor.” To her, the meaning was perfectly clear: the loyalty of her persona was honorable people and causes, so long as they stayed that way. Those who didn’t understand it, she used to say, were unlikely to be people to whom she ever gave any loyalty.

My own motto was based on my personal myth of triumphing via persistence, and on the fact that my boyhood martial fantasies were more about heroic defenses than wild charges. Since my character was supposed to be living in the England of Athelraed Unraed, it was in Old English: “Ich dreoge” – “I endure.” It, too, said something about the sort of loyalty I offered.

Unfortunately, I never really got much of a chance to use it. Shortly after the Awards of Arms, we left the Society for Creative Anachronism for the White Tower Medieval Society. The White Tower was far more fun, and I once immortalized its triumph over the SCA in a song called, “The Twenty Second War,” but somehow mottoes were not a large part of its activities.

For a while, I used to sign letters with “Ich dreoge.” However, that stopped when Avram Davidson (whose own letters tended to end with, “Yoursly,”) asked me what I meant by “I drag,” and asked if I was confessing to an urge to transvestism. Utterly outclassed in wit, I quietly dropped the habit.

Still, I can’t help thinking still that a personal motto is more useful than a personal mantra. If nothing else, it gives its owner something dramatic to live up to.

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Jared Kane and making NWC art on the computer

Posted in aboriginal art, art, art appreciation, British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, computer-generated art, First Nations art, indian art, Jared Kane, Northwest Coast Art, Personal, Shawn Aster, Todd Stephens, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 12, 2012| Leave a Comment »

When I was in Terrace last April, I returned with two artist proofs from Jared “Citizen” Kane, a young First Nations artist who affects hip-hop clothes and attitudes. Both these works – one entitled simply “Moon” and the other “Love Birds” – interested me as examples of what computer-assisted art does easily and what it struggles with in Northwest Coast art.

Both these pieces are based on popular images. Neither image is claimed by a particular family, so artists can use them without being accused of appropriating someone else’s property. “Moon” is a successful blending of the traditional crescent of the moon with a more modern sketch of a face, while “Love Birds” combines a traditional split image with lightly concealed heart-shapes of European origin. “Moon” is striking for its simplicity, “Love Bird” for its intricacy, as well as for the placement of a central T-shape with foreshortened arms that could be interpreted as either male or female genitals, but both are identifiable at a glance as being designed on the computer.

I spend far too much time on a computer myself to see anything wrong with making art on the computer. The days are long past when people objected to pole makers rough-shaping the wood with chainsaws, and computers seem to me nothing more than another way that artists can make their work easier.

However, the idea of computer-assisted art remains far from generally accepted in Northwest Coast Art. In the case of several established artists who dislike the very idea, part of the reaction may be due to their own lack of computer literacy. However, they will add that they consider computer-assisted art lacking in warmth and individualism. But artists like Alano Edzerza have shown the possibility of bold, original works designed on the computer. And, really, the idea is no different from the manual templates used by some artists on the coast for over two centuries.

Still, computer-assisted art generally leaves its mark. Like many of the pieces created since Bill Holm in the 1960s codified the conventions of the northern formline tradition, it emphasizes geometry and symmetry in a way that traditional art did only part of the time. It is not so much that a piece like Kane’s “Moon” adds an unnecessary line to create a complete circle instead of a crescent, but that each of the ovoids, U-forms, and other shapes has a single template. Graphics software allows these templates to be scaled and rotated, or even distorted, but they remain obviously based on the same source.

In addition, because the templates are available, computer-generated designs tend to be less varied in general. In formline design, part of the craft is how the thickness of the formlilne changes according to the need of the design. Look, for example, at the work of Todd Stephens, a Terrace-based Nisga’a artist, and you will see that the broadest formline can be up to ten times that of the thinnest, which is often as thin as single brushstroke can make it. By contrast, in Kane’s “Love Bird,” the difference is may be four times.

Another place for variation in formline design is the variety of techniques for avoiding too much thickening of the line where two formlines meet. These techniques can include thinning the tips of one or both lines, or adding a T-shape or some other element in the middle of the two lines to thin out the filled space between them. Kane uses both techniques, but the thinning is minimal in both pieces, and he uses fewer varieties of techniques than many manual artists.

Although I suppose that in theory there is no reason that artists working on a computer could not make asymmetrical designs (which were a much larger part of the local traditions than is sometimes credited in these post-Holm days), or vary technique more, in practice they seldom do. The natural tendency is against both asymmetry and variation and for consistency. There is nothing wrong with this tendency, but it means that computer-assisted design is more likely to be bold rather than nuanced and varied. Even the relative intricacy of “Love Birds” looks far less detailed and more striking than a hand-drawn similar design, like Shawn Aster‘s “Raven Heart,”) another piece on display in my townhouse.

In general, though, Kane makes the computer work for him rather than against him, producing designs that almost insist on being enlarged, and, in “Love Birds,” adding more variation than many artists who have attempted to work on the computer. In the future, I’m going to keep my eye out for what he is designing – manually as well as on the computer.

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Ill and alone

Posted in Bruce Byfield, comedy, humor, illness, Personal, sickness, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on September 11, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Being a compulsive exerciser, I am as familiar with injury as with the feel of my fingers on the keyboard. But a combination of genetics, habits, and luck make illness strange to me. Once every three or four years, a ‘flu might lay me low, but usually my body goes into hyperdrive and after a couple of days of constant naps and eating everything in the kitchen, I’m fully recovered. So, when an illness persists, I’m like a toddler – I feel it all the more because I have so little with which to compare it, and never more than now that I’m living by myself.

On those rare occasions, my ambitions are reduced to sprawling on the bed like a particularly unappetizing piece of jetsam (or is it flotsam? I can never be sure which is which), gently bemoaning my condition and trying not to sound as sorry for myself as I actually am. I pile some light series of books on the bed like the Scholar’s Mistress in Fritz Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness, and alternate between dozing and reading, feeling like I’m imposing on everyone around me because I’m not up and going about my daily routine.

In fact, I can get decidedly tetchy when I’m ill. I’m too solidly middle-class to enjoy being waited on, and I can’t help thinking I have no right to be the focus of so much of anyone’s attention (I have the same problem in restaurants, too, which is why my guilty reflex is always to over tip, no matter how poor the service). What I really want is to be left behind a closed door, and every five hours or so someone’s head on an angle between the door and the frame to check – preferably without speaking – that I don’t need to be rushed to emergency.

Meanwhile, I can lie back and read until my eyeballs ache, until I see the formula in the series and start inventing the last in the seemingly endless series that I happen to be reading, such as Sharpe’s Enema or Continuity Editor of Dune, all of which strike as much funnier at the time than they do now.

With this attitude, I would probably drive anyone with an instinct to nurse into a berserker frenzy. Fortunately, that’s not the type of person who tends to be my life for long.

But a few days ago, when poor air quality threatened to burst my sinuses like over-pressurized inner tubes and I felt about as hearty as Samson after his last haircut, I could have used even a nurse around the house. It was only the second time I had been ill since I was widowed, and I couldn’t just focus on getting better. I had pets to feed. For that matter, I had myself to feed, although I had an only theoretical interest in the subject. Even cutting back on all but the minimum of daily chores, I still had dishes that need washing, and laundry to put away.

I suppose I could have abandoned all these things except feeding the pets, but then the rising piles of dishes and dirty clothes would have accused me of being untrue to some neurosis no doubt carved into my psyche along with toilet training, nagging me until I attended to them anyway. So, I coughed and wheezed, and slithered from beneath the sheet, flopping like a deboned salmon, and did them anyway.

It wasn’t in any way heroic. But it was necessary. And I soon learned two things: First, living alone is not so bad when everything is going well. But in domestic crisis, having nobody except myself to rely on is unsettling (I do have friends and neighbors, but not wanting to be a nuisance, I forget to ask for help until I no longer need any). Second, I now strongly suspect that I was not nearly as easy to have sick around the place as I always imagined, and was, in fact, as self-indulgent, unceremoniously dumping daily chores on whoever was around at the time.

I’m coming slowly out of hyperdrive now, with a renewed interest in food and only the occasional bits of phlegm coughed up to remind me of what I’ve been through. But I think I’ll see what I can do to make my intervals between illnesses even longer than they are. A few days to recover may be efficient, but they are a self-indulgence I can no longer afford.

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7 Specific Skills of English Majors

Posted in Bruce Byfield, English majors, Personal, rhetoric, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , on September 8, 2012| Leave a Comment »

At university, I declared an English major for no other reason except that I needed to specialize for my last two years. Three-quarters of my way through my bachelor’s degree, I panicked, and took a couple of extra semesters to get a double major with Communications. However, looking back, I realize that my time in English was better-spent than I thought at the time. Basically, I learned the skills to prepare, structure, and present an argument – skills that were not only invaluable for me as a journalist, but also for the time I spent in management at IT companies

Or, to break down the skills more exactly, thanks to my English courses, I can now answer all the questions in the following categories:

Preparing an argument: How do you take notes as you research? How do you scan sources accurately? How do you evaluate sources? How many sources do you need? When should sources qualify your original ideas? When do you know that you have done enough research to begin structuring your argument? Why should you acknowledge them in your argument, and how?

Deciding the appeal of your argument: When should you appeal to logic, emotion, or ethics? When can you mix them? When do any of them threaten to become invalid? When is there a sub-text, detectable but not fully adressed in your argument?

Structuring an argument: What do you need to explain before beginning your argument? When do you need declaimers? How many points can you develop fully in the space available? How should the points be arranged? What alternative tactics might also work?

Recognizing invalid arguments: When is the evidence too general to support the conclusion? When are points being left out? Is an issue really a matter of one thing or the other, with no other alternatives? What’s wrong with a personal attack? Does one point follow from the other? Did something that happened first cause things that happened later? What are the limits of an analogy being used? When is an argument depending on popular prejudice or belief? Is an authority being cited to shutdown discussion, rather than as an acknowledgment of sources? Is an argument being associated with desirable qualities, outcomes, or events that have no real connection with it?

Considering other opinions: Why is your argument strengthened by considering other viewpoints and interpretations? How do you show respect for an argument while arguing against it? How do you consider other opinions without weakening yours? When should you grant limited validity to another argument? How do you avoid being so fair that you end up being neutral and saying nothing? Where in your argument should you consider other arguments? How do you present them?

Summarizing and quoting accurately: Why should you summarize or quote accurately? What constitutes “accuracy”? How to you fit a quote into your own sentence, making allowance for differences in person, tense, and subject-verb agreement?

Understanding your audience: Why should a change in audience affect your argument? How does the audience affect your argument? How do you access what is suitable to a particular audience?

If an English major has made a formal study of rhetoric, they could also give you the appropriate jargon as they answer these questions. However, even if they haven’t, they should have enough practical experience to be able to answer most of these questions (as well as any similar ones that I may have left out), and make a reasonable guess about the others. They should also have little trouble applying these questions to any argument that is presented to them.

In particular, they will know that most of these questions are not a matter of memorizing a set of facts, but of of knowing the possibilities and knowing which ones might be useful in a specific context. All these are useful skills in any situation in which you need to communicate with others, or to persuade them – in other words, in just about any circumstances that you can name.

The next time someone tells you that an English major is a waste of time, ask them to answer these questions. If they can’t, you are completely justified in telling them that they have no idea what English majors learn — in fact that, in the most literal sense, they don’t know what they’re talking about.

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My shadowy, non-geeky past

Posted in Bruce Byfield, comedy, high school, humor, nostalgia, Personal, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on September 4, 2012| 1 Comment »

Most of my friends claim to have had a harrowing time at high school. They complain about being picked on by teachers, bullied by older students, hopeless at sports, and stressed by a combination of part-time jobs and homework. They paint such a Dickensian scene of horror that I feel ashamed to admit that my main complaints about high school was that it went on too long and taught me lazy habits.

The truth is, I never had any serious problems at school. I may have been good at academics (in fact, I won one of the two major scholarships the year I graduated), but I was also a minor sports star, scoring regularly in rugby, and winning races and setting records on the track and in cross-country races. If I became increasingly solitary as high school dragged on, it was because of my growing realization that I had little in common with those around me. Nobody was going to bother me, because until I stopped growing at fourteen, I was big for my age, and afterward I carried myself like a big man, and looked fit enough to cause anyone who went after me some grief.

The result of all this was that I was left to do more or less as I pleased. Teachers trusted me, and my running especially gave me respect, and most people left me alone. The only exceptions were the boys who responded sarcastically to everyone, and I had no trouble answering them in kind.

The only trouble was, I was ready to leave about Grade 10. I realized that to do any of the things I wanted to do, I would need to graduate, but all I could really do was endure and try to appreciate the fact that these would be last years free of serious responsibilities. So I kept to my routine of study and training for running, mooned about over one girl after another, and waited for it all to be over. I was bored, and I knew it.

In fact, my boredom was responsible for one of the few times a teacher kept me after class. Warming up for typing class, I had written “B—–O—–R—–E—–D!!!!!” repeatedly across my page, and, the next class, the teacher decided to admonish me. “You’re bored before the class even starts,” she said, in an accusing tone, as though I had been caught stealing the principal’s day book. After enduring a rambling lecture about how I had the wrong attitude, I muttered something about it being a joke and slunk away as soon as I could.

By Grade 12, I would take any excuse possible for getting away from school early. I would use my free period to go for a run, especially if it fell just before lunch or the last period of the day. I didn’t bother to attend graduation – officially because the girl with whom I was currently infatuated had moved back to her small town and I wasn’t interested in anyone else, but truthfully because I didn’t care.

For the last six weeks of the year, I even had permission to skip most of my classes to study for the government scholarships. The suggestion was taken by the councilors as an important step in my maturity, although they insisted that I keep attending French class, where my struggle with boredom was causing my grades to slip. I was disappointed that I couldn’t get out of classes altogether, but decided to be satisfied with what I could get. By the day of the graduation ceremony, I was already mentally far removed, and thinking of my planned trip to visit my far-away infatuation (which, needless to say, ended badly)

So, no, I can’t say I suffered much in high school, inflicting boredom not usually being regarded as cruel. But, years later, I realized that, in another respect, high school had failed me badly.

In those days, no students skipped grades. It was thought better to keep students with their peer groups. And if that meant that I mooched around a year of Community Recreation as the class loner because I had nothing in common with the rest of the class, that was supposed to somehow help me socialize into a normal North American man – something I was already resolved not to become.

Nor were there any enrichment classes to speak of. The closest equivalent was the Humanities program I took for two years, which was delightfully free-form, but meant that I had to fill many of the gaps in my education – Macbeth, for instance– for myself.

But the point was, there was nothing to challenge me, a fact that I always thought said more about the curriculum than about any brilliance in me. For two years, I drifted along bored, not trying nearly as hard as I could have. In the end, I developed a lack of self-discipline in everything except running, and had to scramble during my first semester at university to learn some proper study habits. Far from preparing me for anything, what high school really did was encourage me to take everything far too easy..

Still, after all these years, in all honesty, I can’t blame anyone else for my own shortcomings, not even a conveniently vague system or spirit of the times. So when someone else starts bemoaning the terrors of their high school years, I listen attentively and make suitable noises at suitable intervals until an opportunity to change the subject arises. My fear is that someone will learn that I lack the requisite background of torment, and consequently don’t qualify as any sort of geek at all.

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Beaudin, from wimp to cock of the walk

Posted in birds, birdwatching, Bruce Byfield, conures, nandays, Parrots, Personal, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on September 3, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I’ve lived with Nanday conures – a kind of small, South American parrot – most of my adult life. I knew they were intensely social birds, craving flock and constantly re-negotiating their status. But I never realized just how much the composition of the flock could affect personality until the last few months of watching my bird Beaudin.

Beaudin was a rescued bird we adopted six years ago in a process that could hardly have been more rigorous if we had been adopting a human child. He was about thirteen at the time, and may have lost a mate. When Trish and I brought him home, he had been neglected for several years, kept in a half-dark laundry room and mostly ignored.

We set up Beau’s cage across the room from Ningauble and Sophie‘s. We soon noticed that Ning thoroughly dominated him. Ning’s domination could have been because he was the oldest bird, and had been resident in the living room the longest. Possibly, too, Ning dominated because he was the only cock with a mate. But whatever the reason, Ning had Beau under control from the start.

A large and soon healthy bird, Beau would challenge Ning at every opportunity, answering his calls defiantly with his own. If Ning hopped down on the floor to explore, Beau would dive-bomb him if he crossed the invisible border between their territories. While he wouldn’t come down on the floor himself, he would pace back and forth, squawking furiously if Ning disappeared under the couch or behind it, obviously expecting an ambush at any moment.

Yet, for all Beau’s young machismo, Ning always had the psychological edge. He would sit just centimeters over the border, apparently calmly preening, but actually alert for any attack. When Ning discovered he could use the table to infiltrate to a position directly under Beau’s cage, where the angle was too steep for Beau to dive-bomb, he took full advantage of the fact, lingering there as long as I would let him.

I am ashamed to admit now that I laughed at Beau. He seemed so full of expectations of becoming dominant and so puzzled at the hold Ning had over him that I had to laugh. Partly, my reaction was a pleasure at seeing that age and the death of his mate hadn’t slowed Ning down any, but mostly I laughed because Beau’s reaction seemed so exaggerated.

Then six months ago Ning died, and Beau became the dominant cock at last. Rambunctious, my other surviving parrot, is crippled, so he has never tried to dominate, and suddenly Beau had what he had sought by default.

For several months, he continued to look around cautiously, peering at the places where Ning had liked to hang out as if to be sure he wasn’t about to be attacked. But, almost immediately, Beau became more confident, exploring further from his cage. Now, he spends more time with me at the computer, flying to and from my shoulder as he pleases, hardly ever checking for where Ning might lurk.

A nervous bird, Beau didn’t calm down completely. But he became a quieter bird. His expressions of surprise or peevishness still sound like a cockatiel’s, but they are usually quieter, and last for a shorter time. Where he had once preened with Trish and I only occasionally, and never for long, he now preens me and presents himself for a neck and wing scratch several times a day, and coos contentedly when I talk to him.. Only occasionally, when the shadow of another bird crosses the window or when I move too quickly does he act like he used to. For the most part, he is a much more confident bird, although I suspect he will always be high-strung.

As for relationships with Ram, Beau is benevolent, as dictators go. He will concede my shoulder to Ram for brief periods, and wait if I feed Ram a piece of peach or some fruit juice first. But he expects his share of both attention, and will fly over to claim it, driving Ram away in his eagerness – although, mindful of Ning’s treatment of Beau, I intervene to keep them from fighting, because, after his initial retreat, Ram has a tendency to lunge and bluff, and I am not sure if either will back down.

Beau’s transformation has convinced me that we often under-estimate just how social parrots really are. To an extent, being plunged into a small flock might have been just what Beau needed to help him recover after years of isolation. There is, after all, a theory, that intelligence develops in social species in order to think about relationships. But, because he was the newcomer and therefore low-status, past a certain point, being in a flock seems to have slowed his recovery from neglect beyond a certain point.

Perhaps the effect of having other nandays about might have been different in a larger space, or with different birds. I don’t know. But I do know that, if another parrot ever comes to live in the townhouse, I will think more about how the personalities involved might interact.

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Scene transitions in fiction

Posted in Bruce Byfield, fiction, Personal, transitions, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , on September 1, 2012| 3 Comments »

For years, I’ve maintained that the secret of writing well is understanding structure. Most people can learn to write a pithy statement or paragraph if they are willing to put in the effort, but developing a sense of how ideas fit together is much more difficult. Nor is learning helped by the fact that we have little analysis of structure and consequently can only talk about it with considerable difficulty.

Take scene transition in fiction, I’ve always added. We can sometimes use analogies from movie making, but, being different media, both fiction and film have transitions that the other lacks.

Finally, after years of waiting for someone else to analyze scene transitions, I thought it was time to approach the task myself, studying several dozen of my favorite novelists and short story writers for examples:

1. Continued Narrative: In the most common transition, the story simply continues. The main artistic choice is how much time elapses between scenes: A few minutes, so that what is saved is only a few sentences of narration about something mundane, such as walking from a house to the car? Or a much longer period of hours, days, or years?

2. Flashback: The second scene happens earlier than the first. Sometimes, the first scene introduces the second. Usually, the flashback scene is shorter than the first, because readers are apt to see a flashback as a digression from the main character.

3. Infodump: Giving background information can slow a story down. One way to minimize the slow-down is to take advantage of the boost in interest created by a new start and begin the second scene with a few paragraphs of infodump before returning to the action.

4. Collage: A variation of the infodump first developed in John Dos Passos’ USA trilogy. Short pieces of information, such as newspaper headlines or quotes from imaginary books are placed between scenes. The information informs either the previous scene or the next one, possibly both. Seemingly random, the pieces of the collage need to be carefully chosen and arranged to be effective.

5. Establishing shot: A variety of infodump in which the setting is described before anything else, even the characters. Victorian novelists made heavy use of establishing shots, but modern audiences have less patience with them, especially if they are longer than a few paragraphs.

6. Starting in the Middle (in media res): The second scene starts in the middle of the action, and what is happening is only gradually revealed This transition is handy for restoring readers’ interest – with any luck, they’ll wand to continue reading to know what’s going on.

7. Change of viewpoint: The transition also marks a change in viewpoint character.

8. Parallelism: One scene ends with a thought or image that is mirror, sometimes distorted, in the next scene. For example, one scene might end with knife chopping down at a character, and the next with another character using a knife to chop carrots.

9. Dramatic irony: What one character thinks or states in the first scene is found in the second to be incomplete, inaccurate, or wrong. This transition might be considered a variation on parallelism.

10. Comparison / Contrast: The opposite of parallelism. The second scene is markedly different or similar in setting, time of day, tone, or action. For instance, the first scene may be set at night with a lone character, while the second features multiple characters in the sunlight.

11. Cause and effect: The second scene happens because of the first. For example, because Hamlet doesn’t kill his uncle in Act 3, Scene 3, he is harsher to his mother in Act 3, Scene 4, which follows immediately afterward.

In addition, there are at least two transitions which connect a variety of shots:

12. Tracking shots: A series of scenes in which a character moves through a variety of settings or completes a task. For instance, the start of Fiddler on the Roof shows the milkman on his daily rounds, while he sings about his culture and the inhabitants of the village are introduced.

13. Panorama: A series of scenes in which each on gives a different perspective on the same event. Usually, the event is something complex, like a battle or a disaster. However, it can also be used with more subtlety. For instance, Paul Edwin Zimmer’s The Lost Prince begins with characters within a few miles of each other looking out on various parts of the same city. As the scenes progress, the sun sinks lower in the sky and finally sets.

Almost certainly, there are more possible transitions, although the majority fall into one of the categories given here. In fact, the first three listed probably account for the structure of the majority of short stories and fiction. At other times, two or even three transitions can be used at the same time.
Transitions are worth thinking about because they are one of the important aspects in story-telling.

Often, writers use the same types of transitions over and over. American fantasist Avram Davidson, whose later stories were usually intricately crafted, started nearly two-thirds of his scenes with an infodump, while science fiction writer John Brunner would use the collage to suggest the fast pace of the information age. Similarly, Shakespeare, whose plays continue to influence English-language fiction, was fond of contrasts, particularly in the first acts in which characters are being introduced. As these examples show, transitions can form a major part of any writer’s style.

That alone makes them worth a closer look. If we can identify the different types of transitions, we can talk about them with greater ease, and learn more about how to put a story together. If nothing else, on a practical level, when we are unsure how a story should continue, we can scan the possibilities and maybe see the way through – or, at least, some possibilities with which to experiment.

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Graphic novel series

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Cerebus the Aardvark, comics, Fables, graphic novels, Hellblazer, Hitman, Lucifer, Personal, Preacher, Sandman, Strangers in Paradise, The Books of Magic, The Boys, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 27, 2012| Leave a Comment »

As a recovering English major, I was trained to be a snob. Strangely, that training means that I’m only mildly abashed to confess an addiction to graphic novel series. After all, when you read George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, you don’t worry much about what anyone thinks about your choice of reading – although I do have a lingering reluctance to be seen reading comics on the bus.

Still, graphic novels fascinate me. They are their own genre, with their own conventions. As a form of storytelling, they’re somewhere between a short story and a TV script. At their best, they have an elegant economy of expression unlike any other form.

However, very few of the graphic novels I read involve superheroes. When they do, the treatment is decidely wonky, often commenting on the whole superhero tradition. More often, they have fantasy elements woven together with strong sense of realism. All the series, too, have a definite end, which opens up more storytelling possibilities than the regular superhero series that go on forever with an occasional reboot that changes almost nothing.

So what series do I read and re-read? Here are the top ten:

1. The Books / Names / Age/ of Magic: Created by Neil Gaiman, these series tell the story of Tim Hunter, a London teenager destined to become the world’s greatest magician. But magic only complicates all the usual problems of adolescence, not least of which is staying on good terms with his girlfriend Molly. The series carries Tim through the first discovery of his powers, his uneasy denial of his destiny, the loss of his family, his search for his true parents, and his university years, ending with him at the threshold of adulthood. The invention in the series sometimes flags, depending on the writer, but the general quality remain high. My only complaint is more than half of Tim’s story is uncollected.

2, The Boys: What would superheroes really be like? According to Garth Ennis, they’d be corrupted by their power, and some of them would need to assassinated. Hence The Boys, a secret CIA-backed team devoted to seeing that justice is done for the rest of us. Violent, x-rated, hilarious, and ultimately humanistic, the result is a wry debunking of comic conventions, including thinly disguised versions of the X Men and the Justice League of America.

3, Cerebus the Aardvark: This self-published comic began as a sendup of fantasy novels, with characters such as the teenybopper Red Sophia, The Cockroach (a version of Batman) and a version of Elric of Melnibone who talks like Foghorn Leghorn, with a version of Groucho Marx thrown in for good measure. The series reached its heights in the High Society story line, then slowly declined into a combination of self-indulgence and anti-feminist rants that were decidedly unfunny and virtually unreadable (and which I didn’t keep).

4. Fables (and Jack of the Tales): The characters of fairy tales and children’s fantasy are real and living in New York, their homes having been conquered by a mysterious figure known only as the adversary. Characters include Snow White, now a civic executive, Bigby Wolf, the reformed Big Bad Wolf, and Jack of the Tales (the same Jack who was involved with the beanstalk), a trickster who eventually got a meta-series of his own. If the TV series Once Upon a Time and Grimm havent settled with creator Bill Willingham, I suspect it’s only a matter of time before they acknowledge their sources.

5. Hellblazer: Originally introduced in Swamp Thing, John Constantine is a small-time magician who is always getting in over his head in the affairs of heaven and hell, as well as any other supernatural beings that happen by. The series has its ups and downs, and sometimes includes too much of Constantine feeling sorry for himself because most of his friends are dead, but there’s always an anarchist sensibility that makes it unique. Moreover, when writers like Garth Ennis or Warren Ellis are with the series, it reaches some extraordinary heights – in Garth Ennis’ case, sometimes without any fantasy at all.

6. Hitman: Tommy Monaghan is a New York Irish boy who comes across as a nice boy – except those who object to his profession as a hired gun. Although equipped with mildly superheroic powers – telepathy and xray vision – mostly he forgets his abilities and responds by shooting. For instance, how to handle a vampire? Answer: shoot their legs out from under them, then repeat as necessary until sunrise. Like most of Garth Ennis’ works, the series is comic and irreverent, with Monaghan using Batman for a straight man and making a fool of Green Lantern. However, the series becomes increasingly darker as his family and professional friends die violently one at a time, and Monaghan struggles to leave his profession to do something worthwhile.

7. Lucifer: In Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Lucifer walks away from his position in hell to live a private life as a nightclub owner. But in Mike Carey’s continuation, that’s only the beginning, as Lucifer gets involved in celestial politics and a truly creative assortment of characters and situations, and even finds love. Sarcastic and as proud as ever, he learns gradually that autonmy is far more important to him than replacing God.

8. Preacher: A young minister becomes linked to a being half-angelic and half-demonic, then sets out to hold God accountable for abandoning his creation. His sidekicks include his pistol-wielding girlfriend and a vampire with the taste for the low life. Many of Garth Ennis’ favorite preoccupations are visible in the series, including the friendships of men of action, but the series ends with the namesake character realizing that he has to change his macho ways if he wants to settle down with his girlfriend.

9. Sandman: Neil Gaiman’s now-classic series remains an exercise in different forms of storytelling, as well as the new cosmology of The Endless, seven anthropormorphic beings who control the basic powers of the universe. Through stories that range from horror to comedy, and from ancient times to modern, the title character Dream learns the inevitability of change, and how it affects his life. The series also shows Gaiman perfecting his craft as a writer as he mixes history and mythology with his own bits of fantasy.

10. Strangers in Paradise: Few comics could be farther from the superheroes tradition than Strangers in Paradise. The series features two women who are gradually falling in love, complicated by one’s determination to live the hetrosexual dream life in the suburbs and the other’s hidden past and attraction to a doomed young male artist. Sometimes melodramatic, the series is at its best when depicting daily life and the comic interactions between its large cast. A major feature of the series is the numerous fantasy interludes, many of which are pastiche tributes to well known comics artists.

These are not the only graphic novel series that I read. Ask in a couple of months, for instance, I suspect that I will want to add to the list Locke and Key by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez, the story of a family trying to escape the events of the past while confronting the eerie ones in the family home. I am looking forward, too, to Sydney Paduas’ first volume of her online comic, “The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, which I hope will be the first of many. With any luck enough series will continue to be published that I can continue subverting my literary training all the days of my life.

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Receiving compliments

Posted in Bruce Byfield, comedy, humor, journalism, Personal, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , , , on August 23, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I never have learned how to accept compliments gracefully. With insults, I know where I”m at; self-defense kicks in and I turn icily cold and dryly cutting. But one enthusiastic word, even from a lover, and a blush warms my cheeks and I start to stammer.

Part of my difficulty is that compliments are rarely delivered at the time of whatever they are praising. Meanwhile, I’ve moved on to some other project. I’m no longer engaged by whatever is being complimented, so much so that it could almost have been done by someone else.

That is especially true when someone compliments a piece of my writing. The facts that I crammed into my short-term memory and the arguments to structure them are no longer there, having been nudged aside by the facts and arguments for the next piece that I’m doing. I imagine that writers on tour to promote a book they finished a year ago must feel the same way.

Another part of my difficulty is that I am convinced that compliments are not healthy for me. I know that those delivering the compliment are being enthusiastic or polite, but part of me regards their kind words as the equivalent of a plate of cinnamon buns that’s being pushed under my nose – however enticing, the compliments seem unhealthy, like far too much of a good thing.

But the main reason I squirm is because of a bit of my own hypocrisy. From all my childhood heroes from King Arthur to Robin Hood, I’ve learned that modesty about my own accomplishments is a virtue (an attitude that makes my years as a marketing consultant more than a little inexplicable).

Yet, at the same time, I can’t help hoping that someone is noticing those accomplishments. Receiving a compliment forces me to confront this contradiction – and, since I am even poorer at lying to myself than I am at receiving a compliment, the whole experience leaves me in confusion.

While part of me thinks that I shouldn’t enjoy the compliment, another part of me is secretly wallowing in delight. Since the two impulses are completely irreconcilable, what I really want to do is make my escape as quickly as possible.

Tell me that learning to accept compliments is part of being an adult, and I would agree with you. But in practice, I’ve never achieved complacency. The best I can manage is a “Thank you” that would rival the Duke of Wellington for curtness, followed by a quick change of subject.

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