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The Master Butcher's Singing Club

I’m working on a novel right now dealing heavily with music, and was originally attracted to Louise Erdrich’s The Master Butcher’s Singing Club based on its content—I wanted to see how another writer handled music, in both its description and technical aspects. I quickly discovered, however, that MBSC was only about music on the surface; it is actually a multi-generational family saga. The novel takes place in a developing North Dakota town between the two world wars, following Fidelis Waldvogel and his four sons as they move through their lives with Delphine Watzka, the strong, progressive heroine who befriends the boys’ mother. I also discovered, quickly, that MBSC was fantastic, a fact that many other people already seemed to know. For example, while I was carrying MBSC around the AP English reading, matronly high school teachers kept grabbing me enthusiastically, even violently, by the arm and exclaiming, “Isn’t it incredible?!? I thought it was INCREDIBLE!!!” I nodded in agreement and self-preservation, but now my accolades are more sincere.

The story in MBSC is both grand and intimate, creating moments as periodically pulse-pounding as they are emotionally dense. The characters—Delphine especially—are complicated and rich, their beauty conveyed by lush, supple prose. Furthermore, the book is remarkably deft in its handling of time; Erdrich can devote pages to an instant in the character’s mind, and then propel time forward for years in the very next chapter—and if that sounds disorienting, I assure you it’s not. I’ve read some books recently that had very little effect on me, and so it was fantastic to be moved, multiple times, to chills or tears. So while the book is not perfect (a great deal of early attention is devoted to episodes with only scant influence on the overall plot, and Delphine enters a kind of emotional stasis towards the beginning of the third act, which makes the narrative sag) there is much more to applaud here than to nitpick. I liked the book so much, in fact, that I’ll put it in a course someday.

In the meantime, the book fulfilled its purpose of teaching me something about writing music, in that it mostly doesn’t write about music. The singing club (which was founded by Fidelis, a butcher, and attracts many of the men in town) is predominantly an artistic motif and occasional plot device, providing unity between the three decades and bringing together otherwise separate characters. It never takes center stage until the end, however, when it becomes an almost —almost— heavy-handed metaphor. Otherwise, the singing is in the background, which lets Erdrich put appropriate attention on other elements of the story. Songs are named, but described only when scene or characterization merits the attention—and even then such description wears thin surprisingly quickly. Also, nowhere were there any theoretical or technical discussions of music, which makes sense, based both on the character’s level of actual knowledge and on the fact that many readers find that kind of thing tiresome. Erdrich’s restraint in this respect was a useful reminder. So the book, without question, provides some helpful bits of instruction—although that isn’t why I recommend it. I recommend it because, for the first time in a while, a book reminded me why I wanted to be a writer. That’s some of the highest praise I can offer.

Posted by Alan Ackmann - Monday July 21, 2008.
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It Smells Like Noise in Here . . .

Fasten your seatbelts, folks: it’s science time. As a writer, I’ve long been familiar with synesthesia as a literary device, but not so much a literal phenomenon. That was before I saw a Discovery Channel documentary on literal synesthesia a few days ago. Simply put, literal synesthesia occurs when the experience of one kind of sensory perception (such as sound) triggers the simultaneous experience of another kind of sensory perception (such as taste). In a way, two senses become inextricably linked to one another, and EKGs have actually mapped the different areas of the brain firing despite the lack of any direct stimulation—the experience of a smell triggers the node for a color, for example. Over the course of the program, they presented people who could taste different flavors on hearing certain words, or who saw different colors for different letters, or who saw—actually saw—grids of numbers arranged in three dimensional space when doing math. It’s not a new thing evidently (as many as 1 in 23 people have some form of the condition) but as I was watching the program I was hit with an overwhelming sense of: “how have I never heard of this before?”

It was, of course, fascinating. My wife, as I describe in my smell dictionary, was born without a sense of smell, and I’ve always found that literary synesthesia was one of the most effective ways of communicating what things smell like, however clumsily. It was therefore fun to watch her watch the program, especially the part about the blind man—that’s blind man—who sees flashes of color when he hears numbers or words that fit into a sequence (days of the week, for example). At that point in the program, my wife got this adorable glimmer of hope that one day a random synaptic misfire triggered by, say, a bagel might allow her to really know what something smells like. Alas, we did not pick up any tips on how to make that happen.

Another interesting part of the program talked about the possible connection between synesthesia and creativity. Since the root of the condition involves an unusual connection between portions of the brain usually kept separate, some scientists believe that synesthetes are inherently more creative. Creativity, as these scientists present it, is all about unanticipated connections—whether on global levels, like the intersection of plot points in storytelling, or on local levels, such as in metaphors. It’s possible, these scientists claim, that the unusually dense neural pathways of a synesthete’s brain make them more prone to such connections, and thus more creative. I looked into it, and several famous artists are indeed reported to have been synesthetes, including jazz legend Duke Ellington and composer Franz Liszt, who (thrillingly, I think) is reported to have seen music as color, saying enigmatic things to orchestras like “A little more blue, please!”. My favorite example of a synesthete is Vladimir Nabokov, who has this to say about the condition in his autobiography Speak, Memory:

[it is] a fine case of colored hearing. Perhaps ‘hearing’ is not quite accurate, since the color sensation seems to be produced by the very act of my orally forming a given letter while I imagine its outline. The long a of the English alphabet (and it is this alphabet I have in mind farther on unless otherwise stated) has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g (vulcanized rubber) and r (a sooty rag bag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l, and the ivory-backed hand mirror of o take care of the whites. I am puzzled by my French on which I see as the brimming tension-surface of alcohol in a small glass. Passing on to the blue group, there is steely x, thundercloud z, and huckleberry k. Since a subtle interaction exists between sound and shape, I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl. Adjacent tints do not merge, and diphthongs do not have special colors of their own, unless represented by a single character in some other language (thus the fluffy-gray, three-stemmed Russian letter that stands for sh, a letter as old as the rushes of the Nile, influences its English representation)...In the green group, there are alder-leaf f, the unripe apple of p, and pistachio t. Dull green, combined somehow with violet, is the best I can do for w. The yellows comprise various e’s and i’s, creamy d, bright-golden y, and u, whose alphabetical value I can express only by ‘brassy with an olive sheen.’ In the brown group, there are the rich rubbery tone of soft g, paler j, and the drab shoelace of h. Finally, among the reds, b has the tone called burnt sienna by painters, m is a fold of pink flannel, and today I have at last perfectly matched v with ‘Rose Quartz’ in Maerz and Paul’s Dictionary of Color.

That’s right everyone: just when you’ve reconciled yourself to the idea that you’ll never be able to do the things with words that Vladmir Nabokov can do, he lets it slip that his library comes in living color while yours is still stuck in the fifties. Jerk.

If you want to find out more, here’s a link to the American Synesthesia Association. Happy browsing!

Posted by Alan Ackmann - Thursday June 26, 2008.
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