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Storyglossia Interview with Scott LambridisSynopsis
: In October 2009, Scott Lambridis talked with Anne Valente, Assistant Editor of Storyglossia about what went into the creation of "The Hum of Broken Things," which appearedin Storyglossia #36: Musical Obsession. Contact Scott Lambridis atscott@omnibucket.comwithany further questions.
1. Where did the premise of this story come from?
I doubt you’d ever guess it, but the original premise of Hum was “What if someone discoveredtime was no longer infinite?” Everyone, including Morris, was given hourglasses that measuredtheir lifetimes, and Morris had just inherited his wife’s time. Yup, a whole strange speculativeslant. I loved the idea, but as the story became what it is, those elements just got in the way.Many thanks to Molly Giles and the other participants of the Squaw Valley Writer’s Workshopthis year for helping me wizen up and simplify these last few drafts.That said, the underlying idea remains: how do we understand and cope with the differences between mental and physical time? My academic background is in neurobiology and I’m stillobsessed with it, particularly how our self-awareness, consciousness, “I” – whatever you want tocall it – is generated as a consequence of our brain’s sense of time. I mean, recording patterns isreally all that wet bag of jelly does: “this followed this followed this, so this probably followstoo”. You could make a strong case that memory is just a survival technique for predicting whatwill happen next.
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And that’s basically where this story began. Could a physical thing like music affect Morris’s perception of mental time, and could those mental experiences affect his understanding andexperience of physical time? I had this gruff character and wondered what would rattle him;what would piss him off while simultaneously obsessing his inner scientist. I love the ironicturnaround of having someone with such strong associations towards something like music facestressors that flip those beliefs upside-down. In this case, making him obsess over music evenmore than the person who turned him away from it in the first place.
2. Music is so often tied to memories or certain spaces in our lives. Did this humantendency inform the shape of this story?
Yeah, music tends to find its way into anything I do. Listening has always been a part of my life,and I’ve been playing music in some form since I was ten and forced to take trumpet lessons. (Icannot to this day play a single note of the trumpet). After college, I was in a band for eight yearscalled Wigglepussy, Indiana. We toured the Midwest playing weird, dark, theatrical rock withlyrics that asked a lot of the same questions about what the hell a human being is in this weirduniverse. We were – how shall I say this – we were a bit odd for the Midwest.From the brain science side though, music is unique among sensory experiences. We know itaffects a lot of brain regions, but have no real comprehensive idea of what it’s doing in there. It’salso unique in that you experience it across time, or not at all. Very different from a painting or asmell, or a touch sensation, all of which can be enhanced by time, but can exist just fine as amoment. This can make your mental time seem very different than the passage of actual physicaltime, and thus an interesting way to explore memory, and memory’s affect on the present. I bet if
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you plotted our brains’ encoding of information on staff paper it would even look like music,with each note able to trigger the beginning of billions of other pieces of music.
3. There's a pervading loneliness to "Hum" that music seems to fill, becoming an actualperson of sorts by the end. Was this always a central theme of the story for you, for Morristo create beauty from what has been broken? Or did it evolve as you wrote?
Stories begin very patchworky for me. I don’t know what they are, I just observe and make notesand throw it all on a page, and then pick out chunks that seem to go together. Once I’ve got these puzzle pieces, I can start to see what story they might form. I encourage this process – which Iknow is not the same for everyone – and have taught it in some children’s workshops at 826Valencia in San Francisco. It should encourage people who think they’re not creative that all ittakes is curiosity, tenacity, and patience that the process will yield what it yields.“Hum” started with two scenes that seemed to fit together: Morris knocking over and replacinghis wife’s horn (though originally it was a bassoon because, well, I love the bassoon), and thetechnology swamp at the fleamarket. There was a strange sort of sadness to Morris’s action, likean awkward lament. I wondered how to push it out of him more, so I took away his livelihood,leaving him with idle hands that would inevitably start tinkering, and then threw more unwantedinstruments at him. This seemed to fit great with the fleamarket, so you can see how theconnection between the two started forming, and how the brokenness of things grew out of that.The plot details and the interconnectivity changed with every draft, as did his relationship withthe old woman, but the emotional undercurrent of loss and fear stuck around. All the writinghappens in these dissociated parallels until they finally click and I sit back and say “oh, that’s
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