FRACTALS

by Sheila Connolly

A decade or more ago, I read a book from our local public library (which, BTW, had an extensive mystery collection) that I have never forgotten. Oh, I managed to forget both the author's name and the title of the book, but the gist of it struck a chord. I held on to only one word: fractals.

Benoit Mandelbrot 1924-2010

When I mentioned this over dinner one night recently, both my scientist husband and my literature-major daughter immediately said "Mandelbrot." After a little internet digging, it appears likely that the book in question was Benoit B. Mandelbrot's The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1982). Apparently Mandebrot created the term "fractal" in 1975, in an earlier work, and expanded his concept in the 1982 book. According to one source, he meant it to apply to "an object whose Hausdorff-Besicovitch dimension is greater than its topological dimension."

Uh-huh. The last math course I took was a summer school class in calculus, at a moldy high school somewhere in San Francisco around 1984, in preparation for applying to an MBA program. I understand about half the terms in that definition, including "is greater than."

So why did the memory of this book stay with me? I'm not sure why I pulled it off the library shelf, much less finished reading it, but I did. The single concept that struck me was the idea of self-similarity. To put it simply, as you zoom in on an image, from far to near, you will see the same pattern over and over, no matter what the scale. A view of a coastline seen from a satellite will have striking similarities to the distribution of sand grains on a beach in the photo, under a microscope.

This is a phenomenon found in a wide range of natural sources: sounds, blood vessels, trees (where the form of a branch is a replica of the whole).

All right, enough tech-speak. I freely admit I have only a shaky grasp on the concept. But what intrigued me was that there are patterns in the universe, many of which we didn't even know existed before the development of digital imaging, and they are internally consistent.

How does that relate to writing? Because for "pattern" you can substitute "style" or "voice." If you are familiar with a particular writer's style, at what level can you identify the writer? By a word, a sentence, a chapter? The whole book, the genre? That writer is unique, and his or her pattern should be too—and yet it fits into a broader universe of fiction writing. Think of contemporary computer programs that can analyze a document and, looking at the frequency of word use or the structure of sentences, can tell you if a manuscript was written by William Shakespeare. Can that be called a "fractal" application?

Or take it to the next step: if you wanted to forge a Shakespeare play, could you reverse the computer program and alter the structure of a play you had written to match his? With enough time and analysis, will we be able to reduce what we now label as "genius" to an algorithm? And is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Book Movie Book

What do you do when they make a movie of your book...but it's not your book?

Let me explain. Have you seen those movie trailers for the new movie Anonymous, the one where Shakespeare didn't write the plays? Well, I wrote that book way back in 1994. It's called The Playsmen, and it's done in an epistolary style. In other words, the story is told through journal entries, letters, documents, and play fragments. It's about a restless young William Shakespeare who wants to make a name for himself as a poet but who isn't very good at it. Enter the earl of Oxford who wants to write, but that is no profession for a nobleman. They make a deal and to young Will it becomes a deal with the devil.

When I first researched for this book, I wasn't quite sure what I was going to write about Shakespeare, only I was quite the groupie back then. I had been in Shakespeare plays in high school and college and I was rather enamored of the bard. So once I sunk into the research I was convinced that Edward de Vere, the earl of Oxford, really was the author of the plays. But how to make it make sense? Way led on to way and I got my story written. At the time, it was the best thing I had ever done. And my agent thought so, too. In the early ninties, you couldn't get arrested for writing historical fiction let alone publish it. Although, she did manage to sell this--my first sold novel--to a small press for the humungous advance of $3,000. I was happy just to sell something! But I kept my excitement in check, because things seemed somewhat subdued. And then I discovered why. Though I was issued the check for half the advance (and it didn't bounce!) the publisher had to call it quits and went out of business before my opus went to press. It languishes here and there on the internet with its ghostly ISBN but it does little more than that. It hasn't seen the light of day since.

But I had plans. Now that my medieval mysteries were selling, it was the first one I took out of mothballs and was reworking to send along to my agent. And then I'm sitting in a theatre and see this movie trailer. My heart plummeted. Yes, I know, as soon as you breathe "Oxfordian" you have your story, though I think my take probably makes the most sense. Who knows where this current movie plot came from? It is disheartening.

What do you do when you see a movie made from your book but it's not your book? You cry a little, sigh a little, and then, I guess, wait again.

Observing the Ides

The winner of a free signed copy of Erin Hart's new novel is Deb Salisbury. Congratulations!

by Julia Buckley
First of all I'd like to say that I can't believe it's March 15. Every year seems to speed by at an even more accelerated pace. I guess I'll have to stop looking at the calendar, since it intimidates me so.

But there is a different reason that today's date is intimidating: it is the legendary Ides of March! Ever since I first read Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, I find this date more significant, mostly because of Shakespeare's powerful and memorable references.

Shakespeare paints Caesar as a man who refuses to acknowledge the plentiful warnings, a man brought down by his own hubris. According to Caesar, "a coward dies many times before his death," and so he insists upon fearing nothing, clinging to the illusion that his own might can ward off any danger.

Yet there are people in the play who warn him: the soothsayer, for one, who famously says "Beware the Ides of March!" Caesar laughs off the warning, and he dismisses the prophetic dream of his worried wife. At this point in the play I was pretty much rooting for the conspirators, since no man should dismiss his wife, nor should he chuckle at her instincts. :)

It's not only the bloody-minded conspirators Caesar should fear, though, but his own lust for power, which marks him for assassination in the first place.

When Caesar confronts the soothsayer again on March 15, he is triumphant, saying "The Ides of March have come!" The seer is undaunted. He replies, "Aye, they are come, but they have not gone."

It's impossible to read this scene from Julius Caesar and not be affected. Therefore, as a mildly superstitious person, I am always slightly uncomfortable on this day. I am not vain like Caesar, nor do I think I'm indestructible (in fact I am sometimes such a hypochondriac that I fear a slight wind). :)

But this is the power of language and rhetoric: because Caesar died on this day and Shakespeare chose to focus on it as an unlucky date on the calendar, I always remember it when it arrives.

How will you be observing the Ides?

(image: wikipedia, bust of Caesar)

Happy Birthday, Will: A Tribute to the Genius of Shakespeare

by Julia Buckley

What can one say about William Shakespeare? Everyone will be writing tributes to him today, at least those people who love The Bard. He deserves all the accolades, of course, for innumberable reasons; but one of the most important is that the works of Shakespeare have personal resonance with each reader. How else would they have lasted for more than 400 years? That in itself is something to celebrate: literature that has spanned centuries.

I enjoyed the Shakespeare that I read in high school, but I didn’t begin to love his words until I taught them. In trying to make them attainable to my students, I had to take them apart, analyze them, put them in different contexts, examine their impact within the conflict of the given play. In the process I came to feel, most deeply, how perfect those words were, as though the playwright, the poet, had taken 400 years to compose them.

Once his words became a part of me, I found that I thought about them all the time. When I was searching for a title for my first book (my first title, Our Rarer Monsters, a quote from Macbeth, was too difficult to say), I spied it while reading The Tempest. Prospero is speaking to his daughter Miranda, an innocent who doesn’t realize that she ever lived anywhere except on the magical island where she and her father are marooned. Her father decides, when she is fourteen, that it is time to tell her the truth, and asks her what she remembers about her past, prompting, “What seest thou else in the dark backward and absym of time?”

I nearly knocked over my podium. For my students, that phrase could pass unappreciated, but for me, a title jumped out of the text. The Dark Backward! What an amazing way to refer to the past! What a genius Shakespeare was and is! So that became the title of my first book.

In the book, however, it is not The Tempest I reference, but Macbeth. There are endless wonderful lines in this play, and I was inspired by many of them as I wrote a tale about a governor’s corruption and about the young police officer who wants to bring him down. For me, there were obvious parallels here to Macbeth and Macduff, his arch enemy, and Macbeth’s quote:

“Then live, Macduff: what need I fear of thee?
But yet I’ll make assurance double sure,
And take a bond of fate: thou shalt not live;
That I may tell pale-hearted fear it lies,
And sleep in spite of thunder.”

Macbeth feels threatened by the man he left alive, as does my villain by the woman he couldn’t kill, Lily Caldwell.

Now I’m working on the galleys for my new mystery, Madeline Mann. Madeline, too, references Shakespeare (I can’t seem to avoid it), and she does make the occasional reference to Macbeth, but she hearkens back to Hamlet, too, when she notes that “Something is rotten in the State of Webley.”

The tributes I make to Shakespeare are almost inadvertent, because that is the effect his words have on me: they get into my mind and float around there, and because he’s covered almost every possible theme, everything that happens tends to remind me of Shakespeare.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

And for all of you readers of Poe’s Deadly Daughters, I’ll quote the Bard for you, too:

“I count myself in nothing else so lucky as in a soul remembering my good friends.”