Mapping the Intimate Contours

Memoir is usually seen as an internal psychological exploration. But I felt that I wasn’t just writing about the personal loss of my mother; I was also mapping the intimate contours of this mysterious transformation we all experience, because that’s what I’d wanted when my mother died: a more resonant description than 'the stages of grief' could offer.- Meghan O’Rourke

The words Meghan O'Rourke used in a New York Times interview to describe writing about her mother's death have stuck with me: "mapping the intimate contours."

It's a phrase that describes one of the important things artists try to achieve.

Thanksgiving symbolizes harmony in a melting pot

Maybe this is a stretch. It's certainly a bit outdated with the approach of Christmas - the holiday for which Thanksgiving serves as an healing balm.

Thanksgiving is celebrated as a time to count our blessings, a harvest festival with ancient roots tied to the natural high-latitude season for chowing down.

But in a world of mechanized agriculture, in a colonized land filled with immigrants of various races, ethnicities and religions, I'm thinking the cultural significance of Thanksgiving stems from its symbolism of community harmony. Thanks for not killing me. I have no plans to kill you.

Think of the iconic image of Thanksgiving: pilgrims and Native American's dining together. An armistice before the grueling winter. We're all in this together. Pass the turkey, please.

At Thanksgiving, Jews, Muslims and Christians can - and do - dine together without the theological ackwardness that accompanies religious holidays like Christmas, Hannukah or Ramadan. (Saying grace aside, of course.)

Next time someone asks me what holiday is the most important in America, I'm going to tell them it's Thanksgiving.

It's all fugue, contrast and tension to me

After spending the past 6 months launching a new website - STRAY: The Adventure Journal - I've returned to my interest in literature by picking up "It's all Greek to me" by Charlotte Higgins. A survey of Greek influence on the modern world, the book rightfully starts out with a discussion of Homer, that well-spring of Greek culture - and thus Western culture.

From the first chapter, it's got me thinking about literary theory. The author had me when she started talking about the "architecture" of the Iliad. Specifically, I was struck by a discussion of how Homer, in The Odyssey, slips in mention Agamemnon's less than happy homecoming to Argos after the Trojan war. "He returned home only to be slaughtered unceremoniously by his wife's lover Aegisthus - who in turn, was murdered by Orestes, Agamemnon's son," she writes.

Higgins points out the architectural function of including this story in Odysseus' epic is to provide an alternative story against which the main story unfolds. If Odysseus doesn't play his return right, he might meet the same fate as Agamemnon. Will Odysseus' son Telemachus turn out to be as brave a boy as Aegisthus? Will Odysseus wife Penelope, who house is lousy with suitors, betray her husband the way Agamemnon was betrayed?

The story of Agamemnon's return seems superfluous, but is in fact central to establishing the drama of the Odyssey.

It got me thinking of several techniques and elements of storytelling. The first is the concept of literary fugue, which I've discussed before. That is, a pattern that serves as a benchmark for the main action of the story. Here, the story of Agamemnon's tragic homecoming serves as a pattern against which the story of Odysseus is compared.

The second technique, then, is contrast or juxtaposition. When Odysseus accomplishes his homecoming, it is more meaningful because the readers understands the alternative. There is a tension between the possible and the actual.

And speaking of tension, prior to known how the story unfolds, the introduction of the story of Agamemnon's return serves to heighten the reader's anticipation through foreshadowing possible outcomes. We want to know if the same pattern will be repeated. We fear for Odysseus, Telemachus and Penelope, while rooting for them to come out on top. We want Odysseus to root the greedy suitors, for Telemachus to become a man and for Penelope to stick by her man.

Cutting it Short

It is generally true that algebra in its development in individual countries passed successively through three stages: the rhetorical, the syncopated, and the symbolic. - Tobias Dantzig

The first time I remember hearing the word "syncopated" was in Ken Burn's documentary on Jazz. It seems to have a specialized meaning in music, which is to modify rhythm by stressing or accenting a weak beat. In Burn's movie, Wynton Marsalis uses it in his running commentary to describe the musical flights of various great jazz artist.

So when I came across the word in Tobias Dantzig's book Number, I was intrigued that the word seemed to have a more fundamental meaning with broader implications for abstraction and meaning -- and therefore possibly for writing and art.

In his book, which traces the origins and evolution of numbers and mathematics, Dantzig demonstrates a progression from oral mathematics that uses only words (such as "the sum is independent of the order of the terms") to symbolic algebra in which graphical symbols represent concepts previously conveyed by the words (a + b = b + a).

Syncopation is the process of abbreviation by which the words become symbols. Certain words that are used regularly are gradually shortened until they have no obvious connection with the original word.

Webster's tells us that the word syncope dates to 1550, and comes from the Greek synkopē, which literally means cutting short from synkoptein to cut short. It is the loss of one or more sounds or letters in the interior of a word.

Dantzig offers the history of the symbols + and - as examples of words become algebraic signs.

In medieval Europe the latter was long denoted by the full word minus, then by the first letter m duly superscribed. Eventually the letter itself was dropped, leaving the superscript only. The sign plus passed through a similar metamorphosis.

Here seems to be the key trait of syncope: abbreviation. It is the process by which a sign for something becomes abbreviated.

In this way, it seems to be subclass of metonymy, which Webster's tells us "is a figure of speech consisting of the use of the name of one thing for that of another of which it is an attribute or with which it is associated."

This certainly seems to hold in the broadest sense that metonymy consists of using a derivative sign to represent an original object or concept. The "sails crossed the ocean," being a classic example of this kind of derivation (i.e., the sails are derived from the ship.)

When we see a sign on the side of the road with a simple graphic of ship on it and find a marina at the next exit, its the end result of the process of syncopation.

Punny brainteaser #2

The latest offering, of modest difficulty, from Luis, the cafe clerk:

Pablo has two coins that add up to 15 cents. But one of them is not a nickle.

How is that possible?



One dime, one nickle.

Aristotle's Poetics and plot

I've started Aristotle's Poetics, the Penguin Classics version. I'm only into the intro by Malcolm Heath, but it's already fascinating. The first thing that caught my attention in a big way was Heath's discussion of the primacy that Aristotle assigns to plot -- as contrasted with character. The argument at its most basic goes something like this: even if we know nothing about the character, we can imagine what a normal person would do in a given situation; thus a story, at it's simplest, can do without a complex character, but not without a series of connected actions (i.e., plot). "Do" here is key, as Aristotle sees action as the core of a story.

The most interesting part is Heath's caution that Aristotle's discussions of plot focus on the underlying sequence of events in a story. "The reader," he writes, "should be careful not to forget the level of abstraction at which Aristotle is working throughout the chapters on plot: he is not concerned here with the construction of the verbal artefacts (his spelling) which are tragedies, but with the design of the patterns of events which underlie them."

He makes the distinction again here: "Aristotle is often quoted as if he had said that a play has a beginning, a middle and an end. This is wrong. It is the plot, the underlying sequence of actions, that has this structure."

I've come across this distinction before -- most recently reading Gerrard Genette -- is important, because the "artefact" often mixes up the time, beginning at the end of a story then flashing back to the beginning then coming back to the end again. In some cases, the story focuses only on the moment of crisis in a story.

I'm thinking of Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants. The couple has spent quite a while together and Hemingway's account could have begun before they met, showed them meeting, the discovery that the woman is pregnant, and the scene on the train platform where they heatedly discuss her getting an abortion. But Hemingway only shows the scene on the platform -- though he very cleverly alludes to the larger story with these two lines: "He did not say anything but looked at the bags against the wall of the station. There were labels on them from all the hotels where they had spent nights."

You are what you analogize

A stanza from Wallace Stevens poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird was display on the home page of Poet.org this morning.

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

The poem reminds me of William Carlos Williams' Red Wheel Barrow and Archibald MacLeish's Ars Poetica, in that it seems to be a meta-poem, a poem about writing poems, about the nature of art.

The entry for Stevens on the site placed him between the English Romantics and the French Symbolists -- between, and I'm interpolating here, "inflection" and "innuendo." Which got me onto Symbolism (so attracted to abstraction, the French). The Poetry Portal says the Symbolists "rejected the pastoral tradition, and took their themes and images from city life, emphasizing its bleak, hallucinatory and/or illicit aspects."

This is, of course, only one characteristic of the Symbolist movement. But it got me thinking about the imagery and analogies (not to mention forms and techniques) writers use change over time.

Homer derived most of his imagery from nature. The exception to Homers nature-based imagery may be the scene in the Iliad in which Hephaestus makes armor for Achilles; his animated forges and girls made of metal are VERY unnatural, the stuff of science fiction. These rare technology-based images aside, Homer was grounded in nature. How many Homeric similes in the Iliad depict a lion ravaging a sheep while quaking shepherds watch? His audience were farmers themselves and intimately acquainted with nature, so those analogies were accessible to them.

It makes sense then that people living in cities would write for other people living in cities by using urban imagery. Suburbanite that I am, I'm wondering how to work Starbucks and rush-hour traffic into my writing.

Punny brainteaser of the day

This from Luis, the cashier at the cafe down the hall from my office:

A terrible plane crash occurred over the Atlantic one morning in January. Every single person on board dies.

Two survived. Why?


They were married.

Bows and slippers

A parallel between the Odyssey and Cinderella: Odysseus' bow and the glass slipper. Both are symbols that appear at the story's climax, the point where the characters triumph, finally abandoning disguises and fulfilling their destiny. Cinderella changes from scullery maid to princess; Odysseus changes from haggard beggar to king.

In both stories, the item in question is a personal belonging of the protagonist, something from the past, from a period when they were their true selves, that has since been lost to them. Cinderella's slipper comes from her night as a princess at the ball. Odysseus' bow was one he used for hunting before he sailed off to fight the Trojans.

These archetypal symbols play a number of important roles. They build anticipation -- the reader waits for the moment when the totem of the character's true self is returned. They serve as an corporeal signs of inner truths.

They play on irony: the people who claim to be the real princesses (the stepsisters) and kings (the suiters), who chide the true hero and heroine for being impostors and lowlifes, are themselves the true impostors and lowlifes. The reader disdains the impostors for their hypocrisy and their lack of a sense of propriety. Injustices are set right when Odysseus strings the bow, when Cinderella fits the slipper.

These items represent the core imbalance of the situation -- which a broad way of thinking of complications in narrative. At the climax, we discover that balance will be restored, the complication resolved.

Try to ignore this billboard

When I was in journalism school at the University of Maryland, I took a feature writing class from Gene Roberts, the legendary editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and recent Pulitzer Prize winner. A piece of advice he offered that I always remember: Hook readers by introducing mystery in the first sentence.

I've come to interpret that as meaning: Raise a question in the reader's mind in the first sentence.

Driving along Route 95 through Philadelphia yesterday I passed the billboard picture above. I'm guessing Gene would approve.

Desire, drama and decisions

A character must have a desire that drives him or her to care about what's happening. If the character shrugs off being hit in the face, and that's that, that's not a story. He's too passive. Now if the character is proud, if he desires to maintain his self esteem - perhaps because his father taught him to protect his self esteem above all things - then we have a story.

When he gets hit in the face, it's on.

The character will not just shrug it off. Or if he does, it will ruin him, because he has abandoned what's most important to him.

That's not to say he has to hit back. He might not strike back, but that's not the same as not caring. Maybe he controls himself to maintain his self esteem, because he's decided to take a more Gandhi-like approach or to preserve his dignity by not lowering himself to violence.

Either way, this is an intense inner struggle - if he cares deeply about it. If he doesn't care, no story.

In the case I proposed above, and in most cases, the character's history plays an important role in establishing the character's desire. I'm thinking of the movie Casablanca and the flashback to Paris that explains the passion and hurt between the Rick and Ilsa. That episode is necessary to explain their conflicted feelings desire for one another and desire to avoid the heartache that each represents for the other.

(One pitfall is writing overlong accounts of the past to explain the events lead to the character's desire.)

So how does this relate to the cycle of discovery and decision? In one sense it drives the character's decisions. Conflicting desires make the decisions more interesting.

If the character has a choice between love or money and she desires both, there's a story -- a common story. If man fears public ridicule more than anything, but wants to show his son it's alright to risk embarrassment, his decision of whether to sing at the town fair becomes dramatic. If he's a ham with no qualms about singing in public, no story.

Back to Casablanca, Rick wants the girl but he also wants to do what's right. He does what's right. (I'd have given a spoiler alert if I thought anyone hasn't' seen Casablanca. If you haven't, do.)


We could state an axiom here: Desire dramatizes decisions.

Conversely, decisions reveal desire in that decisions are actualized as actions or behaviors. If a woman goes to great lengths to avoid intimacy, we might guess she has a fear of intimacy. Fear generates a desire to avoid the thing we are afraid of. Some stories focus on the unpeeling of that onion that is behavior. I'm thinking of Robin Williams character telling Matt Damon's character in Good Will Hunting that "It's not your fault."

Williams' character has observed the behavior (decision making) of Damon's character and determined Damon's character was molested as a child. This moment is the climax of this portion of the movie -- and the whole movie, if I remember correctly -- because it forces Damon's character to face the deeply buried demons that drive self-destructive desires. The young man can stop being angry at himself once he realizes it's not his fault. He can then make choices that fulfill other, healthier desires.

Another axiom: Decisions (behaviors, actions) reveal desire.

In a story, the decisions that reveal desire are through action. The decision comes first, then the action. The director doesn't say "Matt Damon's character forgave himself and decided to seek happiness." The director shows him actively seeking happiness. This is the showing not telling part.

Desire and related words

Abstraction redux

Christoph Niemann's Lego art in the New York Times, which I posted about before, has proven a rich vein.

The title of his blog, Abstract City, got me thinking about abstraction as an aspect of art, writing and expression in general. It's like reading about a cool new car and suddenly noticing them everywhere.

I've happened upon all sorts of discussion of abstraction. (In other news, I had a discussion about unicycles with a friend recently, then saw a woman practicing unicycling on a winter day in front of her house here in Princeton.)

The thing I found most striking in Niemann's Lego art, as I mentioned before, was the size of the pepper grinder toted by the Lego waiter. To rehash: "The size of the grinder makes the art sublime by raising it from simple imitation of reality to the level of satire -- how pretentious are those huge restaurant salt shakers anyway!?"

Then there's this quote by the Latvian-born American abstract painter Mark Rothko: "I’m not an abstractionist. I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on."

(I was reading about Rothko because Niemann included an homage to him in a proposed tile mosaic in his remodeled bathroom.)

The common thread here, at least the one I've noticed, is that abstraction not only serves as a way to represent objects, feeling or ideas, but also, at its best, communicates some essential truth about the human experience.

Rothko put it this way: "It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing."

One can imagine a painter sitting at her easel next to a canal, capturing the fall foliage reflected in the water's surface. How is this any different than filling in a color-by-numbers depiction of the same scene? Is there any difference, other than resale value, if both are simply imitative?

If she's there on doctor's orders to lower her blood pressure, she may shrug off the question. If she's there to learn to communicate some deeper truth about nature and her relationship to it, the question is crucial and potentially devastating if she can't find a way to answer it.

Of course, one difference between painting "freehand" and coloring by numbers are the constraints placed on the artist's craft. With no lines to guide her the artist must rely more on her own judgment and skill to convey what she sees to the canvas. That also allows her more freedom to develop a system for communicating visually.

For Rothko, as with other artists, this freedom allowed his craft to evolve over time to express the emotions and concepts the artist thought important. Throughout his career, Rothko's work became increasingly abstract and easily identifiable objects disappeared from his canvases.

From an exhibit website:

During the 1940s Rothko's imagery became increasingly symbolic. In the social climate of anxiety that dominated the late 1930s and the years of World War II, images from everyday life -- however unnaturalistic -- began to appear somewhat outmoded. If art were to express the tragedy of the human condition, Rothko felt, new subjects and a new idiom had to be found. He said, "It was with the utmost reluctance that I found the figure could not serve my purposes....But a time came when none of us could use the figure without mutilating it."

The idiom for which Rothko is best know are paintings characterized by simple asymmetric shapes and layers of liquid color.

For him, eschewing representation permitted greater clarity, "the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea and between the idea and the observer." As examples of such obstacles, Rothko gave "memory, history, or geometry, which are swamps of generalization from which one might pull out parodies of ideas (which are ghosts) but never an idea in itself. To achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood."

As I interpret it, Rothko was avoiding recognizable objects in an effort to capture some visceral impression that correlated with the archetypal emotions captured in myth: terror, hate, bliss and other feelings for which their are no names. (Jungian psychology was a key influence on the abstract expressionists - Rothko's pedigree as taught in art history classes.)

His paintings were abstract (thought he didn't like that word) in that they were about, intending to capture and in capturing to evoke, deep-seated human emotions. The emotions were the objects of the abstraction.

Over time Rothko experimented with new mechanisms for communicating those emotional truths -- an evolution seen in over the course of many artists' careers.

My guess is that what Rothko disliked about the word "abstract" is that in connotes simple "imitation." He wanted people to understand that his Lego men were all bent under the weight of an absurdly large pepper mill.

Narrative cycle

Abstraction and medium

The New York Times posted photographs of terrific Lego art from artist Christoph Niemann, depicting slices of life and iconic aspects of New York.

What's striking and inspiring is how he uses the simple shapes and colors of Legos to evoke city life. It reminds us that art is the abstraction of ideas, emotions and sensory experience using mediums that are lower fidelity than sensory reality. Writers used words. Painters paint. Children -- and in this case an artist father -- Legos.

My favorite of Niemann's Lego art is the Lego man carrying the giant pepper grinder. Neimann could have made the grinder smaller - using single bump Legos for the body for instance - but he chose a grinder that's in ridiculous proportion to the man. The size of the grinder makes the art sublime by raising it from simple imitation of reality to the level of satire -- how pretentious are those huge restaurant salt shakers anyway!?

This quote from Picasso, an artist who took abstraction to a new level, seems appropriate here: "Art is a lie that helps us to realize the truth."

Big Brother

my big brother
throws
olive army men
on searing rods

he calls it
torture

we play good guys
bad guys
in the yard

forts of sand
machine gun mouths
olive army men
toppled, scattered

Americans
the good guys

no, my big brother said
no good guys or bad guys
just situations

decades later
another word
interests

olive army men
faces, arms, legs
melting, dripping
plastic sizzling
on red coals

torture, he said
we needed information
no good guys or bad guys
just situations
interests

decades later
waterboarding
sleep deprivation
Abu Ghraib
Guantanamo Bay

mouths gasping
naked humiliation
bodies melting

sizzling
on the coals
of America

no good guys
no bad guys
situations, interests
security, security, security
security, security, security
no good guys

years later
new year
crisp breeze blows
across the sand

on capitol steps
new president
"Our security emanates
from the justness of our cause"

sizzle and stench
fades...fades...fades
crisp breeze blows
across the sand

Digitizing Metaphor

The Chronicle of Higher Education offers a fascinating article about the use of computers to recognize and catalog metaphors. It leads with the story of Brad Pasanek, an assistant professor of English at the University of Virginia, who created a website called The Mind is a Metaphor, which is a database of literary metaphors that writers used for the mind.

The Chronicle reporter writes:

Mr. Pasanek hopes it will help literary and intellectual historians gain insights into how people's language reflects their understanding of the world around them.

The article also notes a database of contemporary metaphors of the mind created by a British artificial intelligence researcher.

I'm intrigued people are collecting these metaphors and that they have developed computer algorithms that can recognize them.

Most intriguing though is the articles discussion of how the metaphors we used to characterize the mind have changed. In the 18th Century writers often compared the mind to a book or a page, whereas nowadays the mind is more often compared to a computer.

The most interesting question for me is how does the shift in the metaphors we use change how we think and act. If I think of my mind as a computer as opposed to a book, how am I different.

Someone asked me recently if I had the bandwidth to handle another task in my workload. I thought it was a great turn of phrase and I've been using myself. But I've also been wondering if it changes somehow the way I perceive myself as a human, professional, worker, cog in the machine.

Internal conflict and the essence of character

This is an addendum to my last post on discovery and decision. As I read on in Janet Burroway's book Writing Fiction - yes, I personally drive the consumer market for books on writing - I came to a passage where she crystallized the idea of character (or dramatic character anyhow). She refers to "conflict that is the essence of character".

I was once warned away from thinking of stories in terms of the classic term conflict, because the word suggested something negative. But within the context of viewing stories as a cycles of discovery and decision, conflict seems apt because every decision involves conflicting choices. Otherwise, we are left with a bland tale indeed.

At the macro level, the antipodal positions of conflict have been used to categorize fiction: man vs. man; man vs. nature; man vs. self. (The best stories, of course, resolve back to the latter of the three, even it outwardly they present some version of the first two.)

At an even more abstract level the complication-resolution model also implies conflict. A complication introduces an imbalance in a character's life that can only be resolved - barring an act of God - by action on the part of the character, even if this action is completely internal, such as coming to peace with a situation.

The pitfall with using "conflict" in conceptualizing stories, as my teachers warned, is that the word connotes "aggression." Would could take this to mean "angry" or "violent," adjectives that apply to a limited number of characters.

In short, internal conflict seems like a good way to describe a state of mind of a post-discovery character who must make a decision - be it a decision that resolves a story's main complication or a decision that solves some minor disturbance. How the character acts at the moment of conflict tells us about her soul.

Discovery and decision

An editor once told me narrative is about something happening and something else happening and so on. At the time, this diagnosed a problem with a story I'd written. The story had stalled in description and exposition that attempted, in vain, to provide a glimpse into a character's motivations. And I'm still grateful for the insight.

But the first stories I tried to write suffered from the opposite problem. All that happened was one thing after another, but with no meaningful change taking place. They were like stenographer's account of courtroom events, but less interesting.

Janet Burroway diagnoses this earlier problem with writing by making the distinction between movement and action. Of course, this is to an certain extent an arbitrary choice of words -- I actual reversed their meaning when I first encountered her usage in this context -- but the distinction is important.

Basically, the problem with my earlier stories was a lack of action. There was movement, but not action. The characters were doing things, but their was no drama or significance to the things they were doing. Burroway writes:

The significant characters of a story must be both capable of causing an action and capable of being changed by it...Some force outside the the character presents itself in the form of information or accident or the behavior of others or the elements. The unknown becomes known, and then the discoverer must either take action or deliberately not take action, involving the reader in the tension of the narrative query: and then what happens?

Every story is a pattern of change (events connected, as the author E.M. Forster observed, primarily by cause and effect) in which small and large changes are made through decision and discovery.

One important difference then between movement and significant action is that action creates tension -- the reader anticipates action, understands or feels its necessity (remember that inaction is a form of action once a decision must be made.) Burroway abstracts to call this a process of discovery and decision.

She analyzes passages in which movement is used to characterize and set the scene, and then either a discovery or a decision or both are interjected to create anticipation.

For instance:

Bob boarded the train to Newark, putting his rolling suitcase on a storage rack near the door.

So far we've got movement that establishes character and scene (albeit briefly). Then we get a significant discovery:

Bob walked along the car looking for his seat number. When he came to his seat, an elderly woman was sitting in it. He double checked his ticket. It was the right seat.

This generates anticipation. What will Bob do? Will he confront this fragile woman? Will he move on and find an empty seat?

Bob takes makes a decision and takes action:

Bob looked around the train. Numerous seats remained empty. The train was scheduled to leave in 30 seconds. "Excuse me, ma'am, I believe you're in my seat."

Bob's decision to confront the woman both resolves a previous tension (What will he do?) and generates a new tension (Why did he do it, and what will happen next?). It also tells us something about Bob: that sitting in the correct seat for him is important enough that he would consider making a little-old lady move. Also, he did it in a brusque manner -- another choice -- that helps to characterize him (we don't think his manner is very polite, do we?).

Larry David comes to mind. In Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, David's characters make a series of decisions the dig them further and further into a comic hole so that seemingly small decisions have dramatic import - think George on Seinfeld and David's eponymous character on CYE. Which brings us to the related concept, which Burroway discusses, of how tension in a story builds.

The cycle of discovery and decision, decision and discovery, ratchets up the level of tension, which could be defined as the reader's desire to know what happens next. The actions, Burroway tells us, are a window into the soul.

...it turns out that the internal or mental moment of change is where the action lies. Much movement in a story is mere event, and this is why descriptions of actions, like stage directions in a dull play, sometimes add little or nothing. When the wife picks up a cup of coffee, that is mere event. If she finds that the lipstick on the cup is not her shade, that is a dramatic event, a discovery; it makes a difference. She makes a decision to fling it at the woman with the Cherry Ice mouth. Flinging it is a action, but the dramatic change occurs with the second character's realization (discovery) that she has been hit -- and so on.

Synecdoche: Measuring the drapes

I came across this example of metonymy in an blog post by the New York Times, Stanley Fish (bold is mine):

Weeks later, the pattern continues, but in an even more intense form. The McCain campaign huffs and puffs and jumps from charge to charge: Obama consorts with terrorists; he’s a socialist; he’s a communist; he is un-American; he’s not one of us; he’s a celebrity; he’s going to take your money and give it to people who never did a day’s work; he’s going to sell out Israel; he’ll cozy up to foreign dictators; he’s measuring the drapes.

Measuring the drapes. This is an example of synecdoche: the kind of metonymy where the part is used to refer to the whole. Measuring the drapes is part of the process of taking over the White House which is an important - and symbolic - part of becoming president.

Measuring evokes anticipation. It is metonymy that suggests something that will happen in the future.