Week 45 (10)
Not
quite half an alphabet’s worth of thoughts regarding the recent Buffy
musical.
Saturday, 07:42
A) It was Sondheim. Not Webber. Wash your mouth out with soap.
B) The opening piss-take on Disney opening numbers still makes me giggle.
C) I adore Anya—Emma Caulfield? no, Anya—more than ever, now.
D) Nicholas Brendon is quite good at not dancing terribly well; watch the effortless way he seems to stumble into his pas de deux with Caulfield.
E) The best small-screen depiction of the (receptive) joys of cunnilingus since, oh, that spell that Willow and Tara cast in season four.
F) The brilliant running gag of stumbling into other people’s musicals, from time to time.
G) Both Anthony Stewart Head and James Marsters seemed oddly tamed; subdued. Not that I’m familiar with their singing or anything. But.
H) The double- and triple- (and quadruple-) entendres were dizzying, and no, I’m not talking about sex. (Well, yes. That too. “You make me complete” was gaspingly funny; “Spread beneath my willow tree” was titillating. But.) Enjoy the behind-the-scenes metafiction of the existential ennui of the opening number—“Night after night I’ve been putting on a show”—but also marvel at the metaphor of a vampire singing literally about graves and unbeating hearts which are usually just, you know, metaphors—
J) One does appreciate the fact that the one Big Bad who seriously mucked up Sunnydale that they couldn’t manage to kill was, basically, Dionysus.
K) Considering the general weakness of the cast’s voices, and the sheer amount of effort and brute labor that has to go into building something like this from scratch—the damn thing worked far, far better than it had any right to. The elephant not only flew, it did some nifty barrel-rolls and an impressive Immelman through a flaming hoop.
L) But the prog rock JC Superstar finale seemed a little tame. I mean, kudos for ending on a sour note (literally), but, you know, it just didn’t—rock. (And no. It still wasn’t Webber. Oy.)
I
am, apparently, a man.
Saturday, 07:08
They’re 80% certain, at least. And while they claim it has to do with whether or not you like, say, a blue or a white bedroom, I think it has more to do with finding out whether you tend to carry stuff in your pockets, and whether your middle name ends in a vowel.
Go on. Try it yourself.
—Jeeze, of course it’s problematic! I mean, just try fitting a meaningful response to “Most myths are based on fact” into simple true/false radio buttons. (Define “myth”; define “based on”; define “fact”: are you talking about myths reflecting or expressing the “facts” of emotional and psychological truths for that particular culture, or attempting to reduce it to a specific historical incident; and, most importantly, in however you’ve constructed your reading of the statement, which way have you decided men are more likely to answer, and which women?)
But don’t bother with the sex test. You know it’s terribly limited when it asks you if you prefer younger or older, taller or shorter, dominant or submissive, and there’s no radio button for “Depends on context.” Sigh.
Behind
the scenes.
Thursday, 23:02
I feel, of course, like a rank beginner; a pretender to the title of epigone. A magpie haring after bright and shiny words; a parrot with a dictionary shoved up its feathered arse. I feel, in other words, like I don’t know what I’m doing; like I’m self-indulgently playing with thoughts most others have already thought (okay, perhaps not “most”; those shadowy others, there, most of them, standing around that hypothetical water cooler: the ones whose words do what I want mine to do); like I’m exclaiming in delight over ideas that rank undergraduates have toyed with for a season and set aside: oh, that.
(Of course, a journal is a private place where one can play with ideas and exclaim in delight, to get it out of one’s system and burnish some remark or other to, later, utter at the water cooler—but I’m edging dangerously close to specious bullshit. After all, this journal is posted publicly. Why? To get your attention. Um. Hi. —Let’s move on.)
•
I was mistaken recently for a grad student in a Usenet exchange. Lord, I couldn’t clear that up fast enough. For the record, then: Two and a half years of education at a small, private liberal arts college in northern Ohio (and one of those semesters flushed down the toilet due to a bizarre stress-related inner-ear disorder mistaken for a week or so for a possible brain tumor) did nothing—first-hand—for my intellectual development. That I can tell. The classes, that is: the process of sitting in a room with several other seekers after knowledge and listening to someone lecture or guide a discussion on this or that, and poring over badly xeroxed excerpts of that or the other. Don’t be so quick to read a critique of the current state of American higher learning in that (though there is much of which to be frankly critical); it was far more me than them. Like any bad relationship.
No: my brains, my intellect, the way I think, my critical faculties, all have been formed or can be traced to either slavish imitation of or cantankerous tussling with the Classicist—who’s there, standing by that water cooler, though she’d deny it; to take her place there, she’d have to live up to her potential, something that is anathema to her for reasons I’ve come to respect if not understand. —I’m overstating the case to a certain extent. And you mustn’t blame her (at all) for the end result. But.
•
I’ve just read “Shadow and Ash,” by Samuel Delaney. It’s a—no, it isn’t, it’s not a sequel to “Shadows.” It is an essay constructed in a similar fashion to “Shadows”: a chrestomathy; an argosy; an interlocking series of vignettes ranging from anecdotes or essays or sketches of a couple of thousand words to pithy six-word aphorisms which, though numbered in a Wittgensteinian fashion—or, sequentially—aren’t necessarily in a linear sequence (though there is a sequential progress of revelation and reversal; each does build upon the effect of at least one that has gone before, or depends on at least one to come after, or at least gains something ineffable from its particular context, there, in that place), but do build by the end of it to—not an idea, no; there’s no unity of effect here, and certainly I’ve never thought Poe was all that hot, and Aristotle was a misogynist ass, and Plato was a fascist, yes, yes—a perspective? a vantage point? a way of thinking about an idea, or a group of ideas, a way of thinking? a really neat effect? (And, of course, the “a” is already a lie, a misstatement; its very technique militates against a single anything being drawn from it.)
Point(s) being: I’ve dimly noted this technique being used before, in, say, tonier interviews of our more thoughtful celebrities, read in passing in the supermarket, or as more personal, more essay-ish forms of reportage—not gonzo journalism, no; the gonzos had too strong a narrative drive. Post-gonzo? Aheh. More linear, to be sure: usually structured as alternating between specific, anecdotal moments and more general exposition (between the auctorial and the authoritative, say—aha), usually being clever enough to withhold some crucial context for the specific until a later, more general bit, to let the reader have some play in how the story’s built, and usually building to a final specific anecdote, exchange or image that sums up—ironically, usually—all that went before: the literate journalist’s equivalent of “It remains to be seen—” And I’ve used this technique myself, played with it, liked its effect—but dimly, dimly. I hadn’t realized its potential, hadn’t thought of all the other things it could do, hadn’t thought of why it might have come about, what it might be in reaction to, what it might allow us to do differently than other techniques, that had gone before. (Not better; not worse; different—but why?) I had no idea that numbering such entries sequentially might be called Wittgensteinian—I learned that bit of trivia from Ken James’s introduction to Longer Views, the Delaney collection that includes “Shadow and Ash”—the same place I learned of the tension between the auctorial (the personal, the immediate, the specific) and the authoritative (the general, the expository, the didactic) in the history of the essay.
I have, by the way, no idea at all why such a system would be “Wittgensteinian”; about all I know of Wittgenstein is that he was a beery swine, who, I’m told, was twice as sloshed as Schlegel.
•
It’s rather like—hearing John Williams when you’re a kid, and then hearing Stravinsky—?
No. Not really.
•
“Shadow and Ash” was written over the course of March and April of 1992, in Amherst, Massachusetts, where Delaney is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts—or, as that particular location is known, ZooMass.
In March and April of 1992, I was living outside of Amherst, in Sunderland, in an apartment complex at the base of a small cliff. Along with the other shaggy cartoonist, I’d followed the Classicist and the boy who went crazy (then), who were looking for a university that catered to both Classics and botany; ZooMass fit that rather particular bill. I’d left Boston, and the dyke, and my best friend’s sister behind, the summer before; I was no longer working for the PIRG, but was (I’m pretty sure) working for the market research firm, and from time to time rebound and I would park her van at the tiny, disused highway rest area and climb in the back and fuck. I was lettering the other cartoonist’s daily strip, hanging out with people who made swords out of PVC pipe and foam insulation, had gotten over my infatuation with the film student, and was about to write my first column on comics for the ZooMass paper, which would take material written by anyone, not just students.
None of which has anything to do with reading “Shadow and Ash” except, maybe, this: learning that Delaney was writing it while I lived there suddenly brings up an image of him, in my mind: I’d see him, now and again, at a corner, walking through what passed for downtown (picking up a bagel and fruit juice, maybe?), a beatific Buddha, a New Wave Father Christmas on his day off, in lumberjack plaids, his long beard lifting a little, in the breeze.
•
And it’s not until now, as I’m typing this, putting these thoughts together into whatever shape they’re going to end up making, that I suddenly realize: given his interest in the paraliterary, and unless he made a habit of avoiding the Daily Collegian (which is not impossible), the chances are better than average that Delaney has read something that I wrote. On comics, music, student theatre, the local sf convention, where I never saw him, though he did attend. (A friend found his convention badge on the floor and wore it, for a lark. —Me, I heard Hal Clement talk about how to build an alien world.)
•
“You know,” says the director, “what I’d do if I ever had a class with him?” I don’t know if I’d started writing for him yet, but this was before the mad Greek fed me mushrooms, after I’d read Donna Tartt, after (apparently) “Shadow and Ash” had been written. The director attended Hampshire, or had, till he dropped out, but it wasn’t unheard of for students from any of the Five Colleges to take classes at any of the others. Within reason.
“He calls on me, right? And what I’d do, is—” And this is where I regret typing this up, because you really have to see this next bit, see him put on this patently disingenuous gormless, guileless expression, lift one hand to his lips, winsomely nibble at a nail. “’Gee, Professor Delaney—’”
We all giggled. Good-naturedly. But.
•
No, what’s more important in terms of my reading “Shadow and Ash” is the first time I ever encountered Delaney, on the page. Triton I picked up because of something about the cover (Bron looking silly in black leather and a cape on the cover, an excellent poseur, Neptune looming in the background) and I was in high school, in Portugal, and bored. It—
Leave aside the ostensible thrust of the book: the wry, nasty, bitter shaggy-dog joke on gender and ye olde straight white male. Any book is big and generous enough to have and sustain many different thrusts, many (most?) unknown to the author. (Who is, after all, dead.) For me, the world within blew my mind: all of it: so off-handedly odd, weird, wonderful, alien, beautiful, funny, bewildering, different. Along with its peculiar Afterword, I learned more about how to think about sf—about novels—from that book—
(I’ve since been to college, and to many a bohemian dive, I’ve starred in plays and worked in coffee houses, and I’ve seen what was weird and wonderful and alien is more or less here and there and all around us, right now.)
—I learned more from that book than any other except Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand. My mother, noting how much I’d liked Triton, spying a new Delaney novel on the shelf of the library, picked it up for me. Leave aside the heartbreaking opening, which somehow captures what it is about the acting of reading that is—beyond important, beyond necessary, beyond vital—what it is about reading that is unthinkable to be without (and, in 70-some-odd pages, manages to reduce almost every other world ever created for sf to a Hollywood backdrop, cardboard painted and held up by 2x4s); leave off the ending meditation on sunrises, and glimpses of worlds, whole other worlds; leave aside (for the moment) his sentences, his clarity of detail, the simple beauty of the at-once awkward and inevitable us-and-them of Family and Sign— Forget all that for just a minute and just watch me read this book for the first time and come suddenly face to face with the idea that sex between men could be—was—is—erotic. To me. As well. In addition to.
But that’s not that important to my reading “Shadow and Ash,” either. I’ve digressed.
•
It’s like—hearing the Goldberg Variations played not badly on a piano, and thinking, oh, that’s nice, but not really knowing Bach or the piano or music, not thinking twice about it, but then, maybe, having read more about music, or having read Gödel Escher Bach, you then hear it again, played on a harpsichord, perhaps, and—
No. That’s not it, either.
•
Why is it called ZooMass?
One reason: there are a number of tall, high-rise dorms on the I think south end of the campus. These dorms are, naturally enough, served by elevators. On the weekends, cardboard boxes are flattened and laid on the floors of these elevators.
Makes it easier to clean up the puke.
•
Of course, I’d read “Shadow” before. I’ve also read “Some Remarks on Narrative and Technology” (1995; I am, perhaps, in South Dakota, watching lightning strike the ground not 50 yards away) and “The Rhetoric of Sex/The Discourse of Desire,” whose Wittgensteinian chunks are titled as well as numbered. (And was written in 1993—I’m not sure at what point, so I don’t know if it was when I was courting the Spouse at a distance, or living with her and everyone else at the edge of the hill.) It’s not like this was the first time I ever saw Delaney use this technique—or even that I saw this technique used well.
And then there’s “The Politics of Paraliterary Criticism” which is the best critique of Understanding Comics I’ve yet seen (far and away; far and away), as well as an excellent and necessary essay for anyone contemplating writing criticism of anything, well, paraliterary: comics, genre fiction, rpgs, porn. But that isn’t written in this particular style—though it is constructed with a similar, anecdotal structure. Dated 1996, by the way; we’d all moved to Portland at that point.
Of course, there’s also the short pieces (introductions from Miracleman and Sandman collections; a profiley puff-piece written with Robert Morales) on Neil Gaiman, collected as “Neil Gaiman I, II, & III.” 1993, again, when, to be sure, a lot of otherwise sober-minded people who really ought to have known better were claiming that this soft-spoken English poseur (and do keep in mind: I have great respect for poseurs) was creating nothing less than a new literature with what were mostly badly drawn and frequently over-written comics that, nonetheless, managed from time to time to be—good. —Miracle enough, I suppose. But the hyperbole—the puffery—it doesn’t sit well. To have written them is forgivable, yes; it’s easy enough with hindsight to point out that Gaiman was—in a different time, to a different audience—really little more than what Garth Ennis was just yesterday. But to have remembered them, recalled them, included them in a collection of one’s essays and criticism dated 1999 (and I was already writing pieces as Nicholas at this point)—
•
(And it’s criminally unfair, and mean, but still, funny: or it would be if I knew him, and knew how to pitch this sort of teasing joke, and when. Could it have been that Neil Gaiman has work-roughened, nail-bitten hands—?
(I giggle. Good-naturedly. But.)
•
Granted, I’m going to re-read Sandman before I’ll ever re-read Preacher. Different audiences; different times. And there’s a lot more to be said about Sandman, and about Gaiman. (Hyperbole is bad, but so is bending over backwards to avoid it.)
Do you have the 50th issue of Sandman? The “Ramadan” issue? Pull it out. The gallery, in the back. (I don’t know if it’s been reprinted elsewhere. I’ve lost track of the various collections and galleries and other ephemera. I don’t doubt it.) See the piece by Scott McCloud? That was drawn from a Polaroid. In the Polaroid, I’m the man. The Spouse is the woman. The other shaggy cartoonist and the musician are Dream and Death, but damned if I can remember which was which, at this point. 1992, that was.
I never did write about Sandman for the Daily Collegian.
•
That depth charge is still going off, I think. Inside. Outside. It can be all too easy these days not so much to forget as not really take it into account, which, of course, means that by the definition of some (most?), I’m not. I don’t know, you know?
“Hon,” says the Spouse, wryly, “if we really were nestled in the lap of heterosexual privilege, you’d be making a hell of a lot more money, and I’d have time for a hobby.”
She is not without her point.
•
The highest compliment anyone has yet paid me is tell me that my writing reminded them, somewhat, of, among other people, Delaney. I can’t think of the words to describe the physical sensation that swept over me, reading that. I’d like to think it was deserved—
But it’s not. There’s that doubt inside, the Imposter’s Lament. I am a rank beginner, not even an epigone. I couldn’t possibly. I don’t know what I’m doing.
•
What it’s like?
It’s like reading an author you really like—not necessarily your favorite, no—but reading or re-reading an old piece of theirs, and having them show you, suddenly, or as the result of finally locking together a chain that had been building for a while, having them show you something new, about yourself. Or the world, which, really, is much the same thing.
That’s what it’s like.
Do
you like cats?
Thursday, 06:58
Either way, make sure you’re not sipping anything as you click.
A
word for the week.
Wednesday, 20:19
I was liking tmesis (absofuckinlutely, I was), but I’m thinking flagitious just might whip it.
(Yeah, yeah. We had some ftp problems.)
Postscript.
Tuesday, 10:57 [posted Wednesday, 20:16]
The Spouse says it’s good for me not to overthink things, which (drily), “you have a tendancy to do.” And she says the premise of Shakespeare in Love is, “Love doesn’t conquer all, but it can help us endure.”
Women.
(Do note how heroically I’ve resisted the temptation to present it postmodernly, virgulized: “Screen/play,” as in, you know, a play of screens; a play on a screen; a screen for play, play/ing, play(s), wink-wink. Yes: language is flexible and malleable and twists like cotton candy round our nimble, playful fingers; since it forms a screen between us and the world as we know it, it is vital that we resist all attempts by Buckley and Halpern et al. to dictate, authorize, prescribe its meaning, how words, the very stuff of it, are used [to ensure, say, that when “ball,” is said, we all think of the same red-white-and-blue ball]—to screen them, in other words; even as we use the strictures of Buckley and Chomsky et al. to structure our descriptions, to help us decide the rules of whatever game we want to play today, for what use is a screen without points of tension and contention? —But all this should really go without saying. And so.)
I’m taking a screenwriting class. For a variety of reasons: movies are cool, and there’s something about dabbling in the fringes of what passes for Gesamtkunstwerk these days that satisfies a different though no less profound itch than the stark austerity of words alone; it’s been a (long) while since I’ve been involved in a writing class or group of any sort, and while I agree with everyone from Albee to Delaney that the act of teaching creative writing (of any sort) is pretty much impossible (one can teach the prescriptions generally considered necessary for this or that school of writing—the rules behind the villanelle, say—or describe certain insights into the use of that or this technique over time—the tensions between the auctorial and the authoritative in the essay, say—one can, in other words, teach the writing bit [I am, perhaps overcharitably, taking the basic mechanics of grammar, etc. as already read]; it’s the creative bit that’s either there, or not, and isn’t that breathtakingly black and white), there is something profoundly valuable in the act of kicking one’s writing around a table of other writers, in that (among other things) it militates against self-indulgence, and the sort of needlessly recondite exfoliations and excrescences that mark the work of someone who toils in a vacuum, without such feedback—what are you looking at?—; there is a simple but widely adhered-to structure or stricture or standard to the screenplay as it’s currently constituted (some call it a language, but I shan’t go so far; a code, perhaps, to write by), and it’s best to have such rules explained and gone over and to have tried them out oneself in a guided, even structured environment before deciding to adhere to them oneself, or arrogantly kick them to the curb; and, of course, finally, one should never underestimate the potential of networking.
Getting back to fundamentals is, of course, as good for you as Coach always said it would be. Every story has a premise. Identify the premise. Every story has a character. Think about your character, his (or her) goals and aspirations; the obstacles that get in her (or his) way. Stories are driven by conflict. (A pause, as what few Cerebus fans are left chorus: “Frafe fonflift!”) Find those points of conflict. Outline your protagonist/antagonist paradigm. Text and subtext; backstory and “action line” (the term, these days, for plot, or so it seems). —Just like eating your vegetables.
It’s been amusing and illuminating, also, to learn how recombinant my readings have become: take, for instance, Shakespeare in Love, our first outside viewing assignment. Accurately predicting our point of discussion would be finding the premise locked therein, I gave it some thought, trying to sum up pithily what was being stated through the actions and reactions of our two main characters and assorted others, and came up with: “You must be true to yourself (even the bits you don’t like)”; it seemed to cut to the heart of Shakespeare’s dilemma, neatly limn the tragedy of Viola’s lot and station, play off all the various role reversals, drag play and mistaken identities which run throughout the film, and it neatly stands in opposition to the premise of the play within the play, Romeo and Juliet, which is, of course, “Love conquers all.” —Imagine my surprise, then, to find our discussion opened with the statement: “’Love is eternal.’ That’s a premise. What movie, would you say, has the premise, ‘Love is eternal’?”
I was so thrown for a loop I was thinking, what, we’re suddenly talking about Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula? —But no.
Makes sense when you look at it: love, after all—the romantic concept of deep, abiding, trothful, monogamous, heterosexual, true love—is what Shakespeare is lacking at the beginning of the film; at the end—even though he is denied Viola, cut off from her self, her presence, her person—the love they shared, the concept, the memory, the idea of that love (the conceit, the trope), is enough to sustain him through the creation of Twelfth Night and many more plays and sonnets galore, though one supposes that love must also take the fall for Cymbeline, as well. It even plays with the premise of the play within the play, though less oppositionally, less ironically, than mine does. —Not, mind you, that either reading is more correct than the other; no. “You must be true to yourself”; “Love is eternal”: as seen through the movie, either aphorism is cold comfort; a bracingly mature tonic to the adolescent excesses of Juliet, and her Romeo.
But while I’ll allow that “Love is eternal” almost certainly comes closer to the original intent of the writers (though with Tom Stoppard in the mix, all bets are off), such as it might have been, and I’ll even allow as how I felt like a churlish, obscurantist cynic for so disallowing the power of true love—which, though it’s nothing more than a silly, romantic, delimiting narrative trope, is nonetheless powerful in its effects on real, true lives, even today (this is why, say, The Princess Bride simply does not work without the lengthy prologue of the novel); but: we all know that the intent of the author (who’s as dead as God, or so I hear) doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in this world, and love—true love—is a crock. (It’s a beautiful crock, hon, but it’s a crock.) Our instructor’s reading presupposes a movie relentlessly focussed on one character—Will Shakespeare—which, by the way, is good, fundamental screenwriting: focus on one character, his trials, his goals, his tribulations, his antagonist—but it’s a closed text, a fixed text, a text whose answers are already flagged or underlined or highlighted, a text against which it becomes a radical act to attempt to read Viola’s actions, desires, perspectives—except insofar as they impinge on the plot, or comment, sidelong, on it. —A minor radical act, but hey, rebellion’s where you find it.
(I guess it’s pretty clear what I think of my own reading—churlish, obscurantist cynicism aside. Presupposes an open work; could be about or directed towards any of a number of characters at any given point [“What’s it about?” a whore asks the actor playing the Nurse. “Well,” he says, “there’s this nurse...”] And certainly the movie’s most transcendently sublime moment is reserved for Henslowe’s stuttering tailor, thrown onto the stage as the Herald or Chorus or whatever, looking out at the packed house, everyone backstage waiting for the disaster, he takes a deep breath, checks himself, sputters—and, with sudden, surprising [even—especially—to himself] confidence, growing all the while, he booms forth the opening lines of the play; wow. Wow. And for a story to be focussed so relentlessly on Will, it spends a lot of time with Viola, and her nurse; moreso than is necessary to mirror the action of Romeo and Juliet, which, after all, is about both Romeo and Juliet, and this guy named Mercutio, and—)
—Also: I’d had no idea so many people—our instructor not included, thankfully—read the ending literally, or rather, did not allow for a metaphorical reading of the ending, but instead took it as necessarily meaning an actual shipwreck had occurred to Viola and Wessex on their way to Virginia—which, if Argall ’s any truthful account, did not exist at that specific time, or place. (CROATAN.)
I wonder what will be made of Witness? We’ll be discussing it in terms of character, I’m sure, but all I can really think of now is how leaden Harrison Ford’s performance was, how stomp-footedly telegraphed. His acting has not aged well. —Also: Jarre’s electronic Shaker hymn soundtrack was silly at best.
People-watching the class dynamic has been fun; it’s been a while since I’ve been in a class, as I’ve said. It’s something of a grab-bag: mostly younger than even fresh-faced me, students from this local college, or that; a couple of age-peers; at least one, a brittle novelist, who’s assuredly older than me; she takes great pains to remind us all she’s coming at this from a “different tradition” prefatory to questions which aren’t really questions but launchpads for discussions she might well find interesting but that the instructor doesn’t necessarily wish to pursue at the moment with an unruly pack of mostly undergrads. —I’m being unfair; certainly, she’s the person I’d most enjoy hanging out with of the whole bunch. It’s just that the fresh-faced overachiever (majoring in Theatre Arts and Video Production, I seem to recall) announced as how she’d looked up the novelist’s books on Amazon, since it was so cool, having a Real Live Writer in the class and all. (Me and the music critic winced.) —I’d forgotten the degree of performance necessary to be a good instructor, even in front of maybe 16, 17 people; the degree of improvisation required. (I hear someone’s doing a one-man show on Richard Feynman, in which case, yay: from what I’ve read and seen and listened to, I’d pay good money to see a recreation of Feynman’s lectures performed by, say, Alan Alda in front of a chalkboard. Science and showmanship, critical thinking with pizzazz. Yummy.) I adore the look of—infinite patience that washes subtly across the instructor’s face when, say, the accountant asks a question which, though focussed on the creation of a screenplay, and not without some thought, nonetheless boils down to, “Will that be on the midterm?” (The fresh-faced overachiever asks similar questions, but with a different intent: instead of, “Should our screenplays have a conflict in them?” she asks, “Does it have to be a moral conflict? Or an ethical conflict?”) (Me? I just watch. Remember? —Though I have sparred a couple of times with the geek-chic film student who doubles as a TA, most recently over the idea that, while Kubrick’s The Shining was a great movie, it was a lousy adaptation of the book. Which he had a hard time parsing. I didn’t ask him what he thinks of Misery. [The book’s the best thing King’s written; the movie blew chunks. In case you were wondering.])
—I like the basic thrust of the class: to focus on short films, and to, by the end, have written a ten-page script for a ten-minute short. Even as I quail at the idea of trying to write something so short, so concise, so focussed. Focus is good for beginners, which is why most early creative writing classes attack the poem, the sketch, the short story, even though most markets these days call for novels—which are not, mind you, long short stories. Focus, and, of course, the time constraint: while it’s possible to write a feature film script (or a novel) in ten weeks, there’s no guarantee 17 different writers will get anything usable out of that amount of time, and anyway, they (most of them) wouldn’t be good for much else during those ten weeks. But why just ten minutes? Ten pages? Couldn’t we do, like, 30..?
Mostly because the idea I’m working with—not the gunslinger/Green Knight, and not the “Blues in the Night” gentle gender-fuck, but the sketch ripped off from the færie bride/dæmon lover riff I’m sort of supposed to be writing for of all things Ruthie’s which just won’t get past the duel at the dumpster—that piece did this weird alchemical recombination in the back of my brain last night with a terribly old short story from terribly long ago, and I’m liking where it’s going enough to maybe want to blow it out to its potential length when (as I suspect) ten pages proves to be not quite enough. —Thirty. Or thereabouts.
Of course, now that we’ve settled on a basic idea, and contemplated the idea of the premise (to be rethought and refined as we go along), we’re now to be thinking of character. Specifically: contemplating a character with dramatic needs—her goals; the obstacles in the way of her goals; a brief profile and backstory, laying out her Age, Main Trait, Humanizing Trait, Profession, Address, Values, Foil, Obsession, Goal, Idol, Epitaph, Internal Conflicts, Interpersonal Conflicts, Societal and Environmental Conflicts, the Best Thing That Could Happen to This Character (that could turn out to be the worst), the Worst Thing That Could Happen to This Character (that could turn out to be the best), Why the Audience Will Root for This Character, and Voice (a description of the inciting incident that kicks off the drama, from the viewpoint of the character) (all as per Making a Winning Short , Edmond Levy, a nice enough book, though I’m already put in mind of why role playing games tend to fail when modeling people and personalities; I prefer Alternative Screenwriting , Ken Dancyger and Jeff Rush, which takes the basic solid insight of Syd Field into the three-act redemptive structure of modern American filmmaking—short-long-short, turning points, plateaus, rising action—and treats it as a model against which any of a number of other things can be done, if one likes—rather than making Syd’s fatal mistake of loudly proclaiming This. Is. How. It. Must. Be. Done)— More specifically, I have to think of and list out all of this for Wendy (not Betsy, not anymore; it’s now “The Thing About Wendy and Richard”)—not point by point, but using those items as a “guide.” (Thank goodness.) And then re-examine what I’ve thought of as my premise (“Sometimes what we think we want is worse than what we don’t realize we have.” Not quite peppy enough. Needs some punch) in light of what I’ll learn about my character from grilling her so relentlessly.
—And if you think all this needlessly recondite exfoliation and excrescence has been nothing more than an attempt to procrastinate that, well. There’s a cigar somewhere around here with your name on it.
One
of the things we missed while we were away.
Sunday, 18:38
I mean, I feel kinda foolish, now. It completely slipped my mind until ASSTR went dark, ’cause why should it matter if li’l ol’ me links to it, and anyways, everyone else who matters has already linked to it, the meme is no longer fresh, and you know how we hate not being fresh, but still—
Okay. Let’s assume, for the moment, you came here because you’re bouncing off the “Recent Uploads” list at ASSTR and you thought you might be getting a dose of fresh smut from some new source, rather than pontifications about smut. Wait! Don’t run away. Go read this—
—and get a sampling of some of the best journals currently going that write about writing about sex (among other things), and stumble over one of those obvious-in-the-light-of-hindsight insights about why it’s important to write about sex as, and as if, you’re writing about anything, everything else.
A thought for the day for you, anyway. And a good deed for us. And we promise: we’ll stop using the royal “we.” Any moment now—
The
Harry freakin’ Potter bandwagon.
Sunday, 17:38
Oh, you know you want to. Go on, get sorted; I’ll wait.
(If you don’t know what is meant by “sorting,” well. You’ve done an admirable job remaining aloof from the current tidal meme; bravo. Now go read the books. They’re fun enough, and they don’t bite.)
Me, I’m a Ravenclaw. How—flattering.
Is it faster for you? Sure seems faster to me.
(Weird to think of these files tucked deep in the bowels of a couple of servers being trucked across the Southeast to their new home and then jacked back into the net and blammo, here we are. But here we are. And the atom-less economy was about what, again?)
To those who missed me this weekend: check the archive in case you didn’t read Friday’s entry, and do be so good as to clix me. I’ve got a ways to go to catch up with the back of the pack.
nicholas urfé
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