Zeitgeist's Observer

by Gigi

There's a bar near where I used to work in San Francisco called Zeitgeist. It's the kind of place that I liked to go to after work, with its large backyard full of sprawling tables and trees. The kind of place where you can chill with your friends while people-watching -- and there are always interesting people in this neighborhood at the edge of the Mission District.

I love observing people to understand the times. (Yes, I'm the child of cultural anthropologists; but no, my skill in people-watching does not transfer to eavesdropping, which I'm terrible at.)

I've always been the observer.

It was my role in back at school, when I read The Great Gatsby and immediately identified with the narrator, Nick. One friend called me Nick for a while after we read that book, while I called her Jay. And when I saw the musical Rent, oh how I was at one with Mark, the geeky documentary filmmaker.

I'm most at home behind the camera, capturing the essence of what's around me. I find I get the most authentic shots when I wait a while after taking out my camera. That way people forget about the camera and stop posing, allowing me to capture their natural spirit -- like in this photo of my friends in a bar in Bath, England.


Since I seem to be continuing with the bar theme, here's a photo I took at a San Francisco bar (though it's not Zeitgeist):


Writing fiction is similar to these moments observed through the lens of a camera. You put the essence of life into a story, not every mundane detail.

Have you ever read a book with dialogue like:
"Hi, how are you?"
"Good, you?"
"I'm good. How was your weekend?"
"Nice. Yours?"
"Pretty good. The neighbors came over for a barbeque."
"Cool."

If a writer left that in, you'd either fall asleep or throw the book across the room. Yet you probably had that exact conversation at work on Monday morning. But to capture the spirit of reality, you start writing where the conversation gets interesting. What little gems of details say more about the world than the sum of their parts? Therein lies the fun in capturing the spirit of the times.

Martha's Food Zeitgeist

What other animal needs professional help in deciding what it should eat?
- Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food

Oprah. Infomercials. Suzanne Sommers for crying out loud. What's the deal with people forgetting how to eat so they need these sources to step in?

I'm as guilty as anyone. I can't remember the last time I listened to my body instead of a barrage of medical advice.

I'll start my day with oatmeal or yogurt. Do I like these things? No. But somewhere along the line, someone convinced me I wouldn't die if I ate them. I'm gonna nosh on some fish. Something about omegas. Maybe get in a few veggies. Because of an "oid" of some kind...flavenoid? Rabenoid? I don't know.

How have we as a culture become so disconnected by something as simple as our survival instinct?

Even water has a guideline. WATER!!!! The simplest, most basic need for survival and I need a doctor to tell me what to intake? Or the trainer at the gym?

To me, this food dynamic represents just one iota of the self-help culture zeitgeist. Of this idea that we don't know enough about ourselves or that we can't trust ourselves to be healthy, happy, fulfilled, satisfied, rich without the input of "experts."

I know there's nothing wrong with looking for advice but I'm waiting for the next zeitgeist. The one where we listen to ourselves first, and strangers next.

The Zeitgeist of Parenthood

by Lisa Hughey


The meaning of Zeitgeist is in the spirit of time. And okay, I admit, I had to look it up. Generally I believe the spirit of the time is more broad, such as the Gay 90's (1890's) or the post 9/11 the patriotism that ran heavily through our hearts and country. But the term can be applied to any place (the artiste community in Paris during the 1920's)...




...or even be whittled down to a specific family or person and a specific moment in time.


My oldest son is preparing to leave for college soon. Actually I’m preparing for him to be gone. He can’t wait. I understand and I’m honestly thrilled that he is excited to embrace the change and a new place and a new state of being. So for the summer we exist in this awkward state of limbo. Not parent, child anymore but not yet adult, adult. He hasn’t left yet but he’s already gone. And I live each day knowing soon, life will be different. Soon. But not yet.

In reality, we’ve been preparing for this day since we brought him home from the hospital. Helping him walk, catching him when he fell, kissing his boo-boo’s better and then teaching him to get back up again. Teaching please, thank you, good words, bad words, punctuation, math, dinosaurs and chemistry experiments. Life lessons: don’t touch the hot stove, consequences of missing deadlines and forgetting your homework. Heart lessons: that first rejection and living through the ache, with him and for him.


The pride of his accomplishments, overcoming dyslexia, discovering a passion for rugby,


This is his favorite picture from last season, a conquering bloody warrior :)

graduating from high school. Perseverance. Endurance. Every single moment has been building toward his leaving our nest to become an adult. The Zeitgeist of Parenthood narrows down to one small click of the dorm door lock after he says goodbye, eager to begin his new life, standing alone, standing proud. I know it's time, I know he's ready, but when I think of him leaving...my heart is so full of love the pressure is a physical ache in my chest.

It’s been an amazing journey, funny, frustrating, rewarding, exhilarating and heartbreaking, sometimes all at once. And I know it’s never over. The Zeitgeist of Parenthood can be summed up with three simple words: hope, pride, love.

We love you, buddy. And we'll miss you.
xoxo
Mommy

Missing Zeitgeist

L.G.C. Smith

The Grousing Reader is in the house this week, and it's all about zeitgeist. In my over-educated, persnickety and old- fashioned opinion novels need a strong zeitgeist to be truly satisfying. This is zeitgeist as Juliet defined it for us last week, The Ghost of the Times -- where setting, culture and moment breath in and around character and conflict as an independent presence without which the story would be utterly different.

It's impossible to imagine Juliet's Lily Ivory without her transplanted-Texan-witch-in-San-Francisco vibe in the Witchcraft Mystery Series. Or Rachael's Abigail and Cade without Eliza Carpenter -- who is, literally, the zeitgeist in the Cypress Hollow Yarns. Or Sophie's Stella without rural Missouri and the ghosts of violence and expedient self-interest that haunt it.

We can imagine Jane Austen's novels without Regency England thanks to Hollywood and various enterprising storytellers, but the originals are better. Change the setting and the spirit of the times and you may reveal the universality of emotion, but it's not the same. Good writers will replace the original zeitgeist with something dynamic, which can be provocative. At the least, it can be fun and refreshing. A great deal of creative storytelling is about manipulating the stock of standard human stories into a distinctive zeitgeist.

It occurs to me that one of the elusive differences between literary and popular fiction may lie in the handling of zeitgeist. Literary fiction can float on a sea of it without bothering much about plot. I don't get that. On the other hand, popular fiction can view zeitgeist development as more of an optional sort of thing. And this is my grouse. Why? I'm sick of it. I can't be the only one.

I lay the lion's share of blame for this at the feet of publishers. This means you, marketing folks. You are entitled to pursue the book-as-commodity model. It's a free market. Fine. Go for it When I look at my royalty statements, I have very much appreciated this. I'm sure many authors do. We may also appreciate that publishers can get out three, four, five, or even more books a year if we can write them that fast.

But as a reader, I'm weary of generic settings, books that would be vastly better had they had another month or six of work, and the lack of any geist in the zeit. Because I read more romance than anything else, I'll take my examples from that genre. First up: category publishers. There are many, many fine category novels. There are more bland ones that look like the writers have opted for a corporate zeitgeist that's about as interesting as library paste. I can't remember the last time I bought a category novel. I know there are excellent books there, but I've been disappointed too many times.

Lest anyone think I'm picking on category publishers, the publishers of historical romances are a bigger disappointment. A proper historical romance should ooze zeitgeist. I want to feel as though I'm in the world at a different place and time from now. Different. Not like now. Not like here, wherever here is. I want a total immersion experience in something else AND I want a well-crafted story. Madeline Hunter offers this, particularly in her medievals. LaVyrle Spencer's historicals give it up in bushels. Laura Kinsale can be the best. "For My Lady's Heart" does this spectacularly well.

I don't want to read about contemporary people dressed in costumes zipping through places with values and mores just like the ones I see everyday even though it's supposed to be two hundred years ago in England. That's not what I mean when I look for "identifiable characters." If that means an author has to work a little harder, and possibly use a few more words to tell the story better, fine. I would be thrilled to read more 150K historical romances redolent of the zeitgeist of another time and place.

In the past month, I've read perhaps a dozen genre novels. Maybe more, but I'm reading less fiction than I used to partly because none of those novels were all that great. They weren't necessarily bad. But they were lackluster. Then I picked up Suzanne Brockmann's "Infamous."
At first, I was that unimaginative reader the marketing departments claim we all are: I sneered. "What, no Navy SEALS? No terrorists? No Troubleshooters? Bah." I was looking for the usual Brockmann zeitgeist and I didn't see it. "Infamous" is a contemporary ghost story in a western setting. I resisted. But then I reminded myself that Brockmann knows how to tell a story, and she knows how to develop a world. So I started reading, and for the first time in a long time, I couldn't put a book down.

It's more than the characters, and more than the setting that make "Infamous" a wonderful read. Zeitgeist is more than the sum of the parts of a novel. Yes, there's a ghost, so maybe I'm way too literal, but Brockmann pulled me in, and I didn't want to leave. That indefinable something, the spirit of the times, the zeitgeist -- it made all the difference.

Staying Connected -- A.J. Larrieu

Talking to a three-year-old on Skype is a good way to understand the limitations of the medium. Since I live in California and most of my family doesn’t, I end up having a lot of conversations over the internet, and it works much better with the adults in my life. “Talking” to my nephew usually involves him running by in a blur, waving a toy truck. I’m glad I get to see how much he grows every year, but it’s not the same as taking him to the park in person.

If there’s a spirit of our times, I think it must be this: the paradox of families being hyper-connected but spread thin across the world. There are so many ways for us to get in touch with people we love, but none of them ever feel complete compared to being in the same room. I’m not saying all the social networking we do is bad: I love it! But it’s no substitute for the real thing, and I think the popularity of facebook, twitter, facetime, etc. etc. etc .is linked to the fact that none of these things is quite enough.

It’s a disturbing talent of mine to link everything back to writing—sort of a self-centered six-degrees-of-separation—but this one’s easy. What are stories, if not ways for us to connect with each other? My nephew tells me complicated, made-up stories about the adventures of his tiny toy cars. Having dinner with a couple of new friends, my husband and I told old stories we’ve heard a hundred times, taking a different kind of comfortable pleasure in hearing them again. (Like the one about him almost getting hit by a train: funny now, not funny at the time.) Stories aren’t just a nice way to connect, they’re the only way to connect. Publishing a book, well, that’s a way to tell a story to thousands of people, whether it’s a true story or one that only feels true.

Every so often, an agent or publishing professional will post a blog entry about the explosion of unsolicited submissions, wondering aloud why they keep increasing. (Here’s an example from literary agent and writer Nathan Bransford.) Is it the economy? The fact that anybody with a computer can write a book? I think those things are probably part of it, but I also think there’s something more societal and systemic at work. Now more than ever, people are moving away from their families and trying to forge new lives in strange cities, strange countries. It’s what I’ve done. My husband and I have become part of a community of other “orphans” out here in San Francisco, but sometimes it can feel sad, being cut off from your roots and trying to grow news ones. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way, and I’m betting I’m not the only one writing stories as a way of understanding it, as a way of connecting with the huge, scary rest-of-the-world. Anybody else want to confess?


A. J. Larrieu writes urban fantasy set in southern Louisiana and the San Francisco Bay Area. She is represented by Sarah LaPolla at Curtis Brown, Ltd., and her first novel is on submission. Visit her at www.ajlarrieu.com.

1994

--Adrienne Miller

I’ve heard it said that the music that you loved when you graduated High School is music that you’ll love all your life. I don’t remember who said it, so I’m going to attribute it to Them. You know Them. They are always saying stuff like, “Don’t count your chickens before they’re in the bush,” or “Haste makes a stitch in time.” I don’t know. They’re crazy, those guys.

This is what I imagine They look like. Definitely not crazy, or, most likely, real.

But whatever the true or existent nature of this Them, I’m thinking they got this one right. My iPod is filled with the songs I used to love when I was eighteen. And it’s not just the music. The movies, the tv shows, I still love them. Well, some of them. I don’t deny I’m cherry picking here.

So, let’s all get in this little time machine of mine and meet this girl I used to be. Buckle up and prepare for he far away land of 1994.

And it’s not my 1994 with out Toad the Wet Sprocket. My most enduring 90’s love. If I got a vote on those Best Albums of the 90’s lists, my #1 would be Dulcinea. Hands down. None of this Nevermind for me.

A close second—and I do mean very close—is James. Ring the Bells off the Seven album. Yeah, so it came out in 1992, but trust me that cassette was still in heavy rotation in my Walkman. That’s right, my Walkman.

There are others, Counting Crows, Green Day, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Though I must admit that last one has fallen out of favor lately. It seems I don’t much of a stomach for songs about killing women anymore.

As far as I was concerned there was only one movie put out in 1994. And that was The Crow. Eric Draven, I still love you.

The Crow Trailer

Alex Proyas | MySpace Video

And when I curled up on the couch every Sunday night with my Ham and Cheese Hot Pockets and Mountain Dew who was keeping me company. Why, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, of course.

The Ghost of the Times

There may be a few of you out there still blissfully unaware that I was the Monta Vista High School Bank of America German Award recipient of 1980.

I like to point this out since it's the only award I've ever won. (I don't take this particularly personally, as I never win anything. No theater door prizes, no free lunch when I deposit my business card in a box at the counter, not even a freaking Sisters in Crime raffle...I mean, come on, everyone wins Sisters in Crime raffles eventually, right?)

Anyway, back to the topic at hand: Zeitgeist. Since I can claim the very slight, very dubious, very out of date honor of the aforementioned German award, I know what Zeitgeist means. Literally. Zeit means time, and Geist means ghost. The term has come to refer to certain prevailing thoughts and ideas of an era. But in literature, the German Romanticists utilized Zeitgeist not only as an ephemeral spirit of the times, but as an actual character in their novels.

This got me thinking. What form would Zeitgeist take, as a character in the story of our times? A character can impose its will, interact with other characters, experience moments of heroism and/or meanness, share its gifts...and fail from its faults. A literary character has an arc -- it changes over the course of the tale.

If I was casting the role of today's Zeitgeist...I would jump on the paranormal bandwagon. Way more fun than reality, and as far as supplying characters, the supernatural world offers all kinds of timeless, yet time-specific, tropes. After all, if it was good enough for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, isn't it good enough for us today?

But should I choose an immortal, bloodsucking, soulless creature...or a shambling, brain-jonesing, mess? Which would you choose? In other words, are you team vampire, or team zombie?

One blogger presents the idea that in the current political landscape, vampires are red, zombies are blue. Apparently democrats fear the idea of vampires (the aristocracy sucking the people dry); whereas republicans are scared of zombies (shuffling, poorly-dressed folk--apparently without health care-- looking to eat brains.) Hence when republicans are in office, the vampiric specter is raised, while democratic control of the white house leads to widespread zombie outbreaks.

Or maybe this overcomplicates matters. Maybe our interest in zombies is simply a natural reaction to the reality of economic recession and shrinking resources. They're a symbol of apocalyptic, diseased immortality, after all; a real downer of a Zeitgeist. On the other hand, could our current literary treatment of vampires --casting them as misunderstood love interests rather than deadly snakes-- be a thinly veiled plea for gay rights? For comprehensive immigration policy reform? For acceptance of the classic Other?

What do you think? Would our current Zeitgeist be better represented by a zombie, or vampire? Or a werewolf, for that matter, or another kind of monster...how would you envision the Ghost of our Times?

And, perhaps most importantly: who the heck would play him -- or her-- in the movie?

***Oh...in case you don't believe me about that German award, here's proof --it's tucked under my arm at my high school graduation:

The Twitter Zeitgeist

I'm a Twitter junkie. There's something about 140 characters that I find so wonderful -- I sometimes find myself in entirely innapropriate situations composing those perfect few words which will convey what I mean in the best way possible. While stuck in traffic (no texting while driving, I swear), I think (often) of the best, wittiest thing you've EVER heard. You will DIE when you read this one. But by the time I pull over, it's no longer funny or even relevant.

Isn't that just the way with Twitter?

I don't use Twitter for big announcements. (Okay, sometimes I do.) I don't use it to complain (very much). I don't use it to be passive-aggessive (well, I did the other night during a domestic argument, but I swear to God it was the first time).

I use it to sound off. I use it to catch up. And more than that, I use it to remain connected to people I really care about. It's a warm, fuzzy feeling -- standing in line at the post office with a few minutes to kill, I can eavesdrop on friends' lives. I can catch up, commiserate, and congratulate with just a few strokes of the phone's keyboard.

And it's that eavesdropping that brings me to this week's word: Zeitgeist. Twitter, for as long as it lasts (LOVE MAY IT LIVE), is a window onto the spirit of today's culture. The trending topics alone show us what the majority of people are thinking about on Twitter. Last week, when the Mehserle trial's verdict was returned, I sat glued to Twitter, feeling comforted as other people were scared, upset, and nervous. I searched #riot to see if anyone was planning anything in my neighborhood (so I could avoid it, not join it). I was with people then, even though I was alone in my house.

And now, I have such a treat for you today. I mean, really. If I'd made you my special seven-layer cookies (which actually only have six layers, because I leave the nuts out, leaving more room for chocolate chips), you would not thank me more for what I'm going to give you right now.

GO HERE.

Twistori only takes a moment to glance at. But watch out: It's compulsively addictive. You will want to sit and watch. I think I could sit in front of it with my knitting and watch for hours. I know I'd learn a lot if I did. Do yourself a favor and click. For just a moment, be immersed in the Twitter Zeitgeist. It's pretty awesome. (Gleaned just a second ago: RAWR means I love you in dinosaur. If you see one that knocks you out, copy and paste it and bring it for us in the comments, mmm?)