Top 10 Cultural Experiences - July 2012

Trying something a little different here with my blog (After 5 years, can't I mix it up a bit?). I want to keep writing about the things I am seeing and doing that inspire, entertain and stimulate me, but I don't feel up to the challenge of cranking out thousand-word essays multiple times a week, the way I used to do. So I'm thinking that each month, I'll post a round-up of my top 10 cultural experiences, with a short explanation of why I enjoyed each one.

The list will be eclectic and draw from a variety of genres. A brilliant episode of a new TV show could be sandwiched between an old movie I just saw for the first time and a particularly thought-provoking Internet essay.  The only rule is that I have to have read/seen/experienced this thing during the designated month, and I have to have enjoyed it.

So here goes: Top 10 Cultural Experiences - July 2012

1. "Black Box" by Jennifer Egan (short fiction). When is the last time I got so excited about a New Yorker short story? Oh yeah -- "Escape from Spiderhead," by George Saunders, December 2010. Clearly I have a thing for futuristic sci-fi stories about people with things implanted in their brains -- not what most people think of when they hear the phrase "New Yorker story."

Indeed, in its structure and its voice, "Black Box" is like no story I've ever read before. It is masterfully controlled, a distanced and elliptical way of narrating a thrilling spy-adventure plot. Somehow, this only serves to ratchet up the tension even more. I started reading it on my lunch hour and didn't have time to finish -- I was in agony for the rest of the afternoon!

Though the story was published in June and I didn't read it until July, I'd somehow managed to avoid hearing that the unnamed narrator is a grown-up version of Lulu from A Visit from the Goon Squad. Reading the story, I was very proud of myself for figuring out that connection on my own. And the themes of "Black Box" dovetail with those of Lulu's Goon Squad chapter in interesting ways -- I wonder if Egan would ever consider adding this story as an addendum to Goon Squad, that novel's praise and Pulitzer notwithstanding? Because this story deserves to be read by as many people as possible.

2. Pint-Sized Plays at San Francisco Theater Pub (theater). Is it OK to put your own show on a list like this? Oh well, I'm doing it anyway, because the Pint-Sized Plays were a big part of my month. They represented the longest run ever of one of my plays: 7 performances, including a special presentation last Saturday at the Red Poppy Art House. And, because I didn't attend every performance, it's also the first time my work has been performed without me present. The five performances I did attend, however, caused a surprising range of reactions in the audience, which taught me a lot (I hope to do a longer post on this later).

Moreover, I was honored to be included among so many other funny, idiosyncratic plays. Highlights included Megan Cohen's BEEEEAR, starring Allison Page as a dancing bear who gets "growling-tipsy after the day's grueling toil," and Tim Bauer's Play It Again, Friend, a character study of a douchebaggy businessman (played by Cooper Carlson) who nonetheless claims "I see the good and then reflect it back -- I'm a mirror with eyes!" Special mentions also to Neil Higgins' hard work directing one play (Bill Bivins' Celia Shits) and acting in three others; and Matt Gunnison and Kirsten Broadbear's performances as the title characters in Sunil Patel's witty Man vs. Beer.

3. Olympics Opening Ceremony (TV/theater). I had a ridiculous amount of fun watching the Olympics ceremony while lying on my couch, drinking Cabernet, and live-tweeting it with some friends. Danny Boyle certainly knows how to put on a show! (I wasn't too fond of the screenplay or acting in Slumdog Millionaire, but thought that that movie gained whatever merit it had from Boyle's kinetic direction.) And I do consider this a piece of theater that just happened to be televised, with many astounding moments of stagecraft. Although it paid tribute to the expected, beloved icons of British culture, it managed to seem offbeat and loopy and idiosyncratic rather than corporate. I especially loved how uncontroversial its liberal political slant (with tributes to suffragettes and the NHS) turned out to be. And the Parade of Nations moved quickly while allowing me to indulge my Geography Nerd, French Nerd, and Fashion Nerd tendencies all at once.

4. The Scottsboro Boys, at ACT (musical). It's difficult to say that you "enjoyed" this show without sounding like you are making light of a very dark moment in our nation's history, so maybe "admired" is a better word. Kander and Ebb can still deliver biting but catchy songs, although as a whole the musical does feel like a bit of a throwback to their '70s "concept musical" heyday. Susan Stroman's minimalist staging was lively and brilliant, and Clifton Duncan gave a powerful performance in the leading role. Due to the subject matter and the casting and staging demands, I doubt that this musical will get many future productions after this tour is over, and I feel grateful to have seen it.

5. The Song is You, by Arthur Phillips (novel). I really love Arthur Phillips' writing: above all, when you read his novels, you can tell that he had fun writing them, devising plots and characters and set-pieces and opportunities to deploy puns and other curlicues of language. Yet his worldview also contains a sense of melancholy and loss. I am a total sucker for playful-but-melancholy art, because it chimes with my own worldview, so Phillips' novels really speak to me. And as it happens, the theme of The Song is You is about how it feels to find art (music) that speaks to you and changes your life. The main character is an emotionally numb middle-aged man who becomes obsessed with an up-and-coming rock singer and turns into a kind of anonymous Svengali for her. While the plot is a bit preposterous, Phillips gets a lot of other things right about our contemporary culture. I liked how he portrays the singer, Cait, as a hardworking young artist rather than just an object of desire; and how what she wants (or thinks she wants) more than anything is someone to mentor her and call her on her bullshit. And the novel wraps up in the way that I was rooting for, too.

6. The Canadian, at the SF Silent Film Festival (movie). On my birthday, I won a pair of free tickets to the screening of this obscure silent movie. I invited a Canadian-born friend of mine along to the screening, which packed the Castro Theater on a Saturday afternoon. We enjoyed it, with no need for any caveats like "it was really good for a silent movie." (Although the live musical accompaniment on piano and accordion was terrific!) The leading actress had a neat trick of looking out from under half-closed eyelids, which she used to great effect to look haughty and supercilious (in the first part of the movie); and stricken and pained (in the second part of the movie). Also, the weekend we saw this, that whole controversy about Daniel Tosh telling a rape joke had just blown up, and in the movie, the main character rapes his wife. (They've entered into a marriage of convenience where she locks herself in the bedroom and makes him sleep on a bench -- but it's the kind of movie where once you see that bedroom door close, you know it's going to get broken down.) After this startling scene, there's an intertitle: "The next morning wasn't just any day." And because of the hilarious understatement of this -- of course the day after you get raped is not going to be just any day -- everyone in the theater laughed. "Now that is how you make a rape joke," I said afterwards.

7. Nights at the Circus, by Angela Carter (novel). Angela Carter is another author I really like. I began reading Nights at the Circus in London -- appropriate, as its larger-than-life heroine is a proud Cockney -- but finished it back in the U.S. This book has all the magical realism, stories-within-stories, theatricality, glorious excess, and love of life that you expect from Carter -- just a terrifically good yarn, full of vivid detail. The opulence, intricacy and fantasy of a Faberge egg -- an object which actually ends up playing a role in the story. Oh, I just know that I'm reiterating everything that has ever been written about Carter, but it's all true, even if her books are fantastical.

8. Cling to Me Like Ivy, by Samantha Ellis (play script). A few days after I met my blog-friend Samantha in person for the first time, I bought a copy of her play Cling to Me Like Ivy at the National Theatre bookshop. It's the story of a young Orthodox Jewish woman in crisis just before her wedding day -- a fairly intimate tale of family and friendships, though there's a stunningly theatrical climax at the end of Act Two. The heroine is believably caught between her respect for her cultural traditions and the temptations of modern-day London culture (represented by her best friend, who was born in India but is now thoroughly assimilated). Also, you know the old adage "To write a play, put a man up a tree at the end of Act One, throw stones at him in Act Two, and get him down in Act Three"? Well, Ellis does exactly that in this play, only with a woman instead of a man -- can't help but think this is a clever playwriting in-joke.

9. Brave (Pixar film). I saw Brave toward the end of July, so was not able to read or participate in all of the discussion earlier in the month about The Feminist Implications of Pixar's First Female-Driven Story. Which might be just as well, because that seems almost like too much freight for one movie to bear. (Pun on "bear" not intended.) Brave is not my favorite Pixar, I think because its script and story are more predictable, less dazzlingly constructed, than their best films. As someone who read a lot of fantasy stories about Rebellious Tomboy Princesses when I was a girl, I felt like Merida's struggle was somewhat familiar, even if I found her sympathetic and wanted to cheer when she stepped up at the archery contest to defend her right to remain unmarried. But the movie was gorgeous to look at and I liked the complexity that they gave to the character of the mother, positing that "feminine" skills like diplomacy are as valuable as "masculine" skills like fighting. More than anything, I hope the movie's box-office success will allow more female-driven movies to be made, till we get to the point where they are no longer remarkable or anomalous.

10. Salomania, at the Aurora Theater (play). Mark Jackson's latest play takes the #10 slot on my list, partly due to residual affection from how much I loved his play God's Plot earlier this year. Also because it allows me to note that I am having a surprisingly Salome-ish 2012: the "Cult of Beauty" exhibition at the Palace of the Legion of Honor featured Aubrey Beardsley's original illustrations for Salome, and I attended the premiere of Al Pacino's Wilde Salome at the Castro Theater in March. (Both the exhibition and the film would have appeared on earlier editions of my "Top 10 Cultural Experiences" list had I been doing it back then.) I found Salomania a weaker play than God's Plot -- it didn't hang together as well -- but I like Jackson's approach to complex historical dramas that show how life and art influence one another.

Feliz Cumpleaños Borges

Today's Google Doodle doesn't look the way I think a "Borges" illustration ought to look -- somehow it's too sci-fi. Yes, Borges wrote speculative fiction, but he was steeped in erudition, enthralled by the thinkers who had come before him, and fascinated by dreams and mysticism and conspiracies... The image above is too bright, too orderly, too futuristic.

Nonetheless I am happy that Google chose to honor him on this day. "The Aleph" might just be my favorite short story of all time -- I think it is absolutely perfect. And, as a playwright, I find myself thinking about "The Secret Miracle" an awful lot, sometimes praying for a secret miracle of my own!

I read the complete short stories of Borges the summer I was 17 and keep meaning to do a lengthier post on him. But I can't afford to do so at the moment: there are no secret miracles, and time marches on apace. And besides, you'd be better served by reading the actual JLB than by reading my opinions of his work. I encourage you to check out the above two stories -- and feel free to come back and tell me your thoughts on him. Or let me know your personal favorite Borges story.

Other great writers born on August 24: Jean Rhys (someday, too, I'll write about why I think Wide Sargasso Sea is overrated and Voyage in the Dark is underrated) and A.S. Byatt (a favorite of mine; see all my Byatt posts here).

One Constant, If I May

A few New Yorker-ish things:

* The short story "Homage to Hemingway" by Julian Barnes from the July 4 issue was very thought-provoking. A combination of fiction, literary criticism, playful meta-textuality... good stuff, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Hemingway's death. And I loved this little passage:

He told them his theory of writers and cooking. Novelists, who were in it for the long haul, were temperamentally equipped for stewing and braising, for the slow mixing together of many ingredients, whereas poets ought to be good at stir-fry. And short story writers? someone asked. Steak and chips. Dramatists? Ah, dramatists – they, the lucky sods, were basically mere orchestrators of the talents of others, and would be satisfied to shake a leisurely cocktail while the kitchen staff rustled up the grub.

Bonus link: Julian Barnes reads Hemingway's "Homage to Switzerland," which inspired "Homage to Hemingway."

* Paul Muldoon, the magazine's Poetry Editor, gave the commencement speech for the Bennington College writers' program -- in terza rima. Actually, this poem is a meta-textual homage too, to W. H. Auden's poem for the 1946 Harvard commencement, "Under Which Lyre". I'm not sure Muldoon's poem will endure as long as Auden's (there might be too many snarky pop-culture references in it), but I enjoyed several passages from it, especially this one:

The challenge is how to kick-start
ourselves and name some grand ambition shining there
at which we may, albeit briefly, set our caps
before throwing those same caps in the capricious air.

and the concluding advice:

think outside the frame
unless you’re a photographer; be frugal
in everything but praise; never jump a small claim;
always write “some pig” of the least porker
in the barnyard; remember those who fly far look like fair game;
refuse to pay corkage; make every line a corker;
let your main tactic be tact
and—one constant, if I may—read The New Yorker.

Two From The Millions

The Millions is one of my favorite websites. (Can't believe it wasn't on my blogroll, an egregious omission that I have now rectified.) Here are two recent posts of theirs that I found particularly worthwhile:

• The Story Problem: 10 Thoughts on Academia's Novel Crisis by Cathy Day. This article is about how America's MFA writing programs focus on crafting short stories and offer no guidance on crafting novels, and the problems that this causes both for aspiring writers and for the reading public. As I read it, I couldn't help thinking of the blog post I recently wrote about playwriting books, and the conversation that Tim struck up with me at Theater Pub after seeing my post. There is something similar in the deficiencies that exist in the teaching (in MFA programs) of fiction writing and the teaching (in how-to books) of playwriting. These methods do not necessarily produce the kind of writing that audiences/readers most want. They define things too narrowly (you must write a minimalist, realistic story of 8 to 16 pages! you must write a realistic play about a single protagonist struggling to achieve a single goal!) and force some writers into a box where they don't belong.
  

• Beverly Cleary's Dispatches from the Golden West, by Lydia Kiesling. Kiesling's experience of reading Beverly Cleary's two memoirs--A Girl from Yamhill and My Own Two Feet--basically mirrors my own. These are great books to give a girl who has outgrown "Ramona Quimby" and wonders what life was like for an American girl/young woman in the 1920s and 1930s (these are real-life "American Girl" books, yo). I wrote about them briefly here. Like Cleary, I am a proud Oregon girl who moved to California as a young woman, and this article has me thinking that I should reread My Own Two Feet now that I am living in the Bay Area.
  

"The New Yorker" and I Have the Same Ideas

In the skit/performance-art piece/year-end Theater Pub silliness that I performed on Monday night, I wrote a joke involving Santa Claus and Wikileaks. The premise of my skit was that I had only recently learned that Santa wasn't real, and the proof came from checking out Wikileaks:

I thought, there must be some diplomatic cables leaked from the North Pole, from Santa’s workshop! I thought he must have a highly trained staff of diplomatic elves, in little business suits—he is on friendly terms with just about every government in the world, and that is not easy to do! I was sure I’d find some communiqué where he pleaded with Kim Jong Il to be allowed to visit North Korea this year… or maybe once some of Rudolph’s reindeer shit accidentally got into Vladimir Putin’s stocking and nearly provoked an international incident! But there weren’t any cables. Just a message from that Julian Assange saying “Seriously, it doesn’t even count as a leak to tell you that Santa isn’t real.” So that’s it! There’s no Santa! No reindeer! No cute little diplomatic elves! None of it is real…

And then, two days before the performance, I received my holiday issue of The New Yorker in the mail, and discovered a humor column about Santa and Wikileaks--this time purporting to publish cables leaked by "a disgruntled elf" that revealed the inner workings of Santa's regime. Subsequently, I have also seen "Santa and Wikileaks" jokes pop up in a viral video and on Huffington Post, which means that this trope is officially played out.

But anyway, I was not happy when I saw the New Yorker humor piece. I thought I would either have to cut one of my best jokes, or have everyone think that I stole it from The New Yorker. In the end, the joke stayed, and nobody accused me of plagiarism. (After all, I had given the joke the twist of "I thought there'd be Santa documents on Wikileaks, but there weren't," whereas most iterations of this joke are the straightforward "Santa's Naughty List gets published on Wikileaks! Oh noes!") But for a few days there, it felt like a playwright's worst nightmare: someone "scoops" you on an idea, or a premise, or a joke, that you'd worked hard on!

Meanwhile, I've been working through the New Yorker holiday double issue, and on my commute home today I read the short story, "Escape from Spiderhead," by George Saunders. It is a terrific story -- one of my favorites of the year. It concerns a facility where imprisoned criminals are used as guinea pigs to test powerful, mind-altering pharmaceuticals -- including a drug that can alter your brain chemistry to make you fall madly in love with whoever you're sitting next to. So it's sci-fi, but the kind that uses sci-fi tropes to explore what it means to be human. It is very powerful.

Now, without revealing too much of what I'm working on, I recently began writing a play based on the idea that, in the near future, scientists will develop a "love potion" drug that will alter your brain chemistry to make you fall in love with a specific person. It will use a vaguely sci-fi premise to explore what it means to be human, what it means to love, et cetera.

So, naturally, I was a bit annoyed that Saunders had written such a great story, using a similar premise! (And twice in one issue, the New Yorker publishes something similar to something I'm working on... what are the odds of that?) However, I don't see it as a reason to give up on my own play. For one thing, Saunders' story goes in a very different direction than I intend my play to go. I've gained a reputation this year for being cruel to my characters, but the ending of "Escape from Spiderhead" is far darker and crueler and more brilliantly twisted than my own play will be.

For another, I think the Santa/Wikileaks thing annoyed me because I didn't find the humor column in The New Yorker particularly funny. So, I thought, not only would people assume that I had stolen a joke from The New Yorker, they would assume I had stolen a lame joke from The New Yorker. Whereas, because George Saunders is so awesome, I wouldn't mind it if people thought I stole my premise from him, as long as I developed it differently. I could call it a homage, and people would respect that!

There's an excellent interview with George Saunders on the New Yorker Book Bench blog. I really liked what he had to say about the ending of his story, in response to a question about whether his protagonist makes the "right" decision:

I don’t know that it was the right one. But I think it was the most interesting one. That’s a funny thing about writing stories. We have that illusion that we are “deciding” what to make a character do, in order to “convey our message” or something like that. But, at least in my experience, you are often more like a river-rafting guide who’s been paid a bonus to purposely steer your clients into the roughest possible water. It’s as if the writer has to keep asking, What choice is going to give off the maximum bumpage? And if you go that way—in the direction of the biggest bump—then the thematics of the story will change; but it’s not really your decision to make. The energy of the story dictates it.

That's how I often feel as a writer -- it's why I have this tendency to be cruel to my characters, to put them in agonizing situations and keep raising the stakes. Cruelty causes maximum bumpage.

"Kissing in Manhattan": Anti-Feminist Fables

I thought that David Schickler's collection of linked short stories Kissing in Manhattan, a hit when it was published back in 2001, would be the ideal thing to read on my first trip to New York City in 2.5 years. It was supposed to be charming, capturing the romance and magic of New York. While I knew not to expect miracles from it (I picked up the paperback from a friend who was downsizing his book collection; he warned me "it's the kind of short-story collection that makes the bestseller list," by which he meant "it's relentlessly middlebrow") I at least expected to find it agreeable. Instead, it just made me angry. Despite being set in New York City at the turn of the millennium, it propounds the most antiquated ideas about gender roles.

In David Schickler's Manhattan, men are either aggressive and horny alpha males or shy nice-guy beta males. The female characters are even less varied and more stereotypical: nearly every woman in the book is a gorgeous, willowy thing in a satin cocktail dress. They do one of two things, depending on the man they're dealing with: they ache to be dominated by the alpha males, or they play perverse sexual games to humiliate the beta males.

Kissing in Manhattan is a collection of male sexual fantasies disguised as middlebrow literary fiction. And that's not what I bargained for.

The book begins with the story "Checkers and Donna," about a woman who has rape fantasies and secretly wishes to "belong to a man."  Donna finally meets her match in Checkers, a crude and loud man who drives a muscle car and is a big fan of cat-calling. I thought this story was pretty weak, but hoped it was an anomaly.

No such luck. In the second story, "Jacob's Bath,"the heroine, Rachel Wolf, is praised for being a loving and loyal wife and mother, who gives her husband Jacob a bath every night:

The woman was there to strengthen the man, to quench his thirst, and the man loved the woman and he was grateful. It wasn't about equity: Jacob never bathed Rachel. He was ready to perform a lifetime of chores for her, but this isn't about that [...]

[Rachel] told how Jacob's bath wasn't about sex, but about devotion, and love. She even admitted, because she thought her friend needed her to, that Jacob had once had an affair, an affair she'd known about the entire time it went on. [...]

"The bastard," whispered Susan.

Rachel stiffened. "He was home every night for his bath."

"But he lied to you! He was cheating!"

Rachel stared at her friend, who didn't understand men.

"I was devoted to him," she said evenly. "I was his wife, and I loved him. The affair stopped."

This angel of wifely devotion and forbearance is contrasted with Susan, a New York Times journalist, whom the narrator denigrates for having pursued professional success instead of marriage and family:

She was well into her sixties, and she'd never married, or been to Disneyland, or learned to sing. Instead, she'd drawn a bead on the large, savage habits of the globe: murder, extortion, hatred, crimes against women and the earth. She'd stared long at these awful truths. The problem was, as Nietzsche said, when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. That New Year's morning Susan March made a terrible realization: she craved baseness. Some fiber of her soul longed to kill, as Mr. Bruce did, or to cleanse countries with napalm, or to be taken viciously by a man on the steps of a church. Not only did Susan want these atrocities, she wanted them so badly that she'd never erected the means to fight them off. She had no husband, no children, no balm to ease her days. And her arrogance, her pride in her lifelong, clear-eyed independence, died hard that New Year's morning.

And it goes on from there. A story about a gorgeous paralegal who gives her employer a bad case of blue balls. Several stories about Patrick Rigg, who ties a different naked, beautiful woman to his bed every night.

Schickler got his book deal for Kissing in Manhattan after his story "The Smoker" was published in The New Yorker. Taken on its own, "The Smoker" is indeed a pretty great story: funny, absurd, good dialogue. But in the context of Kissing in Manhattan, it comes off as just one more sexual fantasy. In it, a nebbishy 31-year-old English teacher at a private girls' school gets invited to dinner at the home of Nicole, his brightest student. Then Nicole's parents announce that they want to arrange a marriage between their daughter and her teacher. Nicole is not as powerless nor as submissive as some of Schickler's other female characters, but she's still too good to be true: a beautiful, brilliant 19-year-old who just wants to make her lonely English teacher happy.

Of course authors should be allowed to let their sexual fantasies inspire their writing. But I want them to be honest that that is what they are doing. Ideally, they'd even be smart enough to interrogate their fantasies and assumptions, to ask why men and women are drawn to dominance and submission and erotic games.

The magical-realist tone of the book somehow makes its retrograde ideas about gender even less palatable, because the author seems to think he's being charming rather than gross. Misogyny is bad enough, but whimsical misogyny is the worst.

"Marvelling At Its Relevance To Her Life"

The cool people these days are pontificating about The New Yorker's list of "20 Under 40" fiction writers, but I'm a little behind on my New Yorker reading and haven't gotten around to cracking the Summer Fiction issue yet. So, I just wanted to say that I hope the story in the previous week's issue, "Extreme Solitude" by Jeffrey Eugenides, doesn't get lost in all the 20 Under 40 hoopla!

I really enjoyed this one--perhaps for the selfish reason of being able to relate to the main character, Madeleine, a student at Brown University who is trying to figure out love, sex, intimacy, and postmodern literary theory. But I do love it when male writers are able to create female characters that I can wholeheartedly relate to. And I laughed out loud at the following passage:

[Madeleine's] freshman roommate, Jennifer Boomgaard, had rushed off to Health Services the first week of school to be fitted for a diaphragm. Unaccustomed to sharing a room with anybody, much less a stranger, Madeleine felt that Jennifer was a little too quick with her intimacies. She didn't want to be shown Jennifer's diaphragm, which reminded her of an uncooked ravioli, and she certainly didn't want to feel the spermicidal jelly that Jennifer offered to squirt into her palm. Madeleine was frankly shocked when Jennifer started going to parties with the diaphragm already in place, when she wore it to the Harvard-Brown game, and when she left it one morning on top of their miniature fridge. That winter, when the Reverend Desmond Tutu came to campus for an anti-apartheid rally, Madeleine asked Jennifer on their way to see the great cleric, "Did you put your diaphragm in?" They lived the next four months in a twenty-by-fifteen room without speaking to each other.

Also, did the character of Leonard in this story (Madeleine's love interest) make anyone else think of David Foster Wallace? I mean, he's an overachieving, somewhat obsessive, double-majoring, tall guy who chews tobacco--sound familiar? And according to this interview, Eugenides is a Wallace fan...

The Elitist Issue

Did anyone else think that the January 4 issue of The New Yorker could have been subtitled "The Elitist Issue," the Stuff White People Like issue? OK, the general POV of The New Yorker shouldn't be news to me, or to anyone, but reading this issue, it was like I suddenly understood why the Bill O'Reillys of this world deride "liberal coastal elitists" in the way that they do.

Here are the contents of the January 4 issue:

• an article about the broken California university system, something that affects Californians of all income levels, but the article focuses on the protests and strikes at Berkeley--the system's most elite university. It shows that even though the situation is urgent, Berkeley easily gets bogged down in political-correctness-run-amok stuff: I laughed aloud when I read that the student activists had spent hours debating whether a strike is "a European tactic unsuited to students of color, who challenge the status quo simply by going to class."
  
• an article about Vampire Weekend, the indie rock band that has, as the magazine puts it, polarized and offended people with their "effete, collegiate image," "the incongruity of four upper-middle-class boys channeling Third World musical traditions."
  
• an article about Whole Foods, the pricey organic grocery chain that looks at "the number of college graduates in the area" to decide where to open new stores. Many paragraphs are devoted to the anguish that some liberals feel when they discover that the Whole Foods CEO is a libertarian who doesn't believe in universal health care.
  
• some pieces about Dead European Males: an article about Van Gogh, Gauguin, and the modernist mindset, which comes to a rather airily philosophic conclusion; and a review of a recent theater/music piece that juxtaposes Schubert and Beckett
  
• an article about Grace Kelly, the beautiful and patrician movie star who actually became a princess
  

True pop culture finally makes its way into the magazine only on the last two pages, with reviews of blockbuster movies Avatar and Sherlock Holmes. And even though David Denby genuinely enjoys Avatar's beauty and exhilaration, there's still a hint of elitism in his review. He writes, "Actually, life among the Na'vi, for all its physical glories, looks a little dull. True, there's no reality TV or fast food, but there's no tennis or Raymond Chandler or Ella Fitzgerald, either." Um, Mr. Denby, if you want to list good things about American culture... could you maybe try to include some things that became popular after 1950?

The short story in this issue, "Baptizing the Gun" by Nigerian writer Uwem Akpan, would seem to disprove my thesis--it adds racial diversity and focuses on a gritty subject, the corruption and danger and poverty in Lagos. But because the story is not really distinguished in an artistic sense (there's a cheap twist ending that would have been hokey in a magazine story 100 years ago), there is something unsavory about publishing it... as though The New Yorker feels we should overlook the flaws in Akpan's writing because he is saying something "important" about Africa, even though, in that case, a news article or autobiographical essay would be much more satisfactory than fiction. So it seems to have been published because it adds diversity to the issue, which is certainly a "liberal elitist" thing to do.

Still, far more unsavory is one of the poems in this issue, "The Things" by Donald Hall, which I am tempted to call the worst poem I have ever read.

When I walk in my house I see pictures,
bought long ago, framed and hanging
--de Kooning, Arp, Laurencin, Henry Moore--
that I've cherished and stared at for years,
yet my eyes keep returning to the masters
of the trivial: a white stone perfectly round,
tiny lead models of baseball players, a cowbell,
a broken great-grandmother's rocker,
a dead dog's toy--valueless, unforgettable
detritus that my children will throw away
as I did my mother's souvenirs of trips
with my dead father, Kodaks of kittens,
and bundles of cards from her mother Kate.

I just can't shake the feeling that the only reason Hall wrote this poem is because he wanted to brag about his art collection. And then he tries to convince us that he's not bragging, that he's really a sentimental guy who takes pleasure from the little things in life, and tries to make us feel upset that his children will throw these things away. But really, how upset can one get? These kids are lucky, they're inheriting De Koonings! It all leaves an extremely bad taste in my mouth.

I rather liked the other poem in the issue, though, "Only So Much" by Rachel Hadas, so go read it if you want a palate-cleanser.

Now, though the Jan. 4 issue made me more conscious of why some people in this country despise the "liberal coastal elite," that doesn't mean I agree with that. (To quote Metropolitan, my favorite self-consciously elitist movie: "I could hardly despise them, could I? That would be self-hatred.") I like Vampire Weekend, I enjoyed the Grace Kelly and Whole Foods articles, and am now convinced I should listen to Schubert's "Winterreise." But I think The New Yorker is stronger when it provides a more wide-ranging view of the world, with an article on something like politics or science thrown into the mix. It's funny: I don't always find the articles about international crises enjoyable to read, but I miss them when they're gone.

Elementary, my dear Borges

Over the holidays, my dad and I went to see Sherlock Holmes--we have kind of a tradition of going to blockbuster movies together, generally because I am more persuadable/tractable than my mother is. Sometimes these movies are lots of fun (Iron Man); sometimes they're dreadful (Star Wars: Phantom Menace).

Sherlock Holmes falls somewhere in the middle. Robert Downey Jr. is always fun to watch, and none of it is on a Phantom Menace level of awfulness, but I still wouldn't really call it a good movie. For one thing, the plot is needlessly convoluted, and seems even more hokum-y than the typical Hollywood action film. The story has Holmes trying to prevent the evil Lord Blackwood and his mystical secret society from taking over the world--so basically, it's a Dan Brown ripoff.

But it also seems to have ripped off Jorge Luis Borges...

Spoilers ahead for Sherlock Holmes and Borges' story "Death and the Compass."

Sherlock Holmes has a Connect the Deaths plot: Holmes cracks the case when he realizes that three crimes committed by Blackwood follow a pattern, related to the occult symbols of the secret society. And because this society reveres the number 4, Holmes realizes that a fourth crime must take place and complete the pattern. He plots the locations of the three crimes on a map of London and sees that they form a nicely shaped triangle, which enables him to deduce the location of the fourth crime--English Parliament! Armed with this knowledge, Holmes races over to Parliament and save the day.

But as soon as I saw Holmes and his marked-up map, I couldn't help but think of Borges' short story "Death and the Compass," which revolves around the same kind of map. A famous detective named Lonnröt investigates a series of murders that seem to follow a mystical/occult pattern: in this case, they revolve around the four letters of the Jewish name of God, YHWH. When three murders have taken place, Lonnröt plots their locations on a map and deduces where the fourth murder is due to occur.

There's an extra twist to "Death and the Compass," though, which Sherlock Holmes lacks. At the end of the story, we learn that the villain had staged these murders specifically in order to trap Lonnröt, and that he will be the fourth victim. It's a cautionary tale, in other words: Lonnröt thinks he has it all figured out, but really he's been set up. His intelligence, his arrogance, will be what kills him.

Sherlock Holmes lacks this twist, and because of that, the story makes no sense when you stop to think about it. We learn at the end of the movie that Blackwood didn't even believe in the occult at all--he just knew that he could exploit people's fear of it in order to seem more powerful and terrifying. So, if he knew that his crimes had nothing to do with supernatural forces, why did he feel compelled to commit them according to an occult pattern? After all, because he followed a pattern, Holmes was able to figure him out and foil his plans! But if he had just committed crimes randomly, Holmes would have been stymied and Blackwood would have easily triumphed!

Furthermore, Holmes appears to be the only person in the entire movie who figures out that the crimes were based on occult symbols. So if Blackwood was trying to terrorize the citizens of London by making them think that supernatural forces were at work, he's failed at that, too... And, while Blackwood wants to get rid of Holmes, he doesn't seem to have figured out that he can use Borges' method and trap the detective in his own logic.

This made me realize that Borges' twist isn't a cheap trick: it's really the only logical way to resolve the plot. But as it stands, Blackwood is just a sorry excuse for a villain!

On Trying to Do Too Much

If you know me in person, you're probably aware that I am a perfectionist--and even if we've never met, you might get that impression of me just from reading this blog. Lately I've been contemplating my perfectionistic tendencies--my habit of trying to do too much, of thinking that everything I create needs to be stunningly original and word-perfect and complex and insightful. And I'm realizing just how detrimental that is. My perfectionism, that is, my fear, is slowing me down.

These reflections were prompted by going to see a new play called Zombie Town, by my blogfriend Tim Bauer. Zombie Town has a fun structural conceit: it asks us to believe that about a year ago, a zombie uprising actually took place in a small town in Texas, and that afterwards, a troupe of actors from San Francisco traveled to the town, interviewed the survivors, and made a documentary theater piece. And that is ostensibly the play that we are seeing performed. This amusing idea allows Tim to make fun of both the small-town Texans and the pretentious San Franciscans, and also offers a way around the difficulty of showing a zombie apocalypse onstage. It's The Laramie Project, but with zombies! Take a hook like that, develop it well, and you've got a good play on your hands.

But, I realized, the thing is that if I had come up with this idea, I wouldn't have developed it well. I'd have tried to do too much. At first, I would've dismissed out of hand the idea of writing a zombie play: "You're the wrong person to write it, Marissa," I'd tell myself. "You're not a horror fan and your audience is sure to have seen way more zombie movies than you have!" But then, if the idea kept niggling at my mind, insisting that I had to write this play, I would go too far in the opposite direction. I'd convince myself that I couldn't write it until I had learned everything there was to know about the history of zombies in popular culture--watching the most notable zombie films so that I could then either pay homage to them, or avoid plagiarizing them. I would get so enthralled with the metatheatrical conceit that I would give all of the characters an elaborate backstory that slowly got revealed over the course of the evening. I would probably burden the play with some kind of overarching metaphorical structure about the Significance and Meaning of Zombies in the 21st Century.

In short, I would be a Pretentious San Francisco Playwright.

But Tim is not pretentious, which allows him to skewer his characters' pretensions all the more effectively, and to write a fast-moving, entertaining zombie comedy without looking over his shoulder the whole time and wondering if he's doing it right. His play gave us what we wanted and was never lumbering or ponderous; but I have this feeling that if I had started with the same conceit, I would have overworked it and come up with a play that was much baggier and more complex, less sheerly fun. And the writing process would have been agony the whole way through.

Similar thoughts occurred to me after reading the short story in last week's New Yorker, called "While the Women are Sleeping," by Javier Marías. Have you read it? Es bueno. In it, a first-person narrator describes meeting some strange people while on vacation with his wife. And I really enjoyed the story while I was reading it, but then I started to second-guess myself. "We don't learn anything about what kind of a person the narrator is," I thought. "He's obviously meant to be normal, an Everyman, a stand-in for the reader, in contrast to the weird guy he meets at the beach--but isn't it lazy, to write a narrator who has no personality?" But then I realized, maybe I wouldn't want to read a whole novel narrated by this guy, but it's just fine for a short story. I didn't notice the narrator's lack of personality when I was reading and liking the story--only afterward, when I started to nitpick it to death. (And upon further reflection--the narrator's passivity might make the end of the story more effective.) And so, again: if I had written this short story, I'd have expended way too much effort in trying to give the narrator a unique personality, and the result would be overdetermined.

So yeah, in my writing, I have a bad habit of wanting to do too much. Which means it's ironic, isn't it, that I've set myself the task of writing a blog post every day this month--isn't that a symptom of doing too much? Well, no, actually. Instead, I'm hoping that NaBloPoMo will have the opposite effect on me. If I write only a few blog posts a week, I can convince myself that everything I post has to be lengthy, brilliant, word-perfect, etc. But if I blog every day, I will have no choice but to post some things that aren't perfect. To post a video with limited commentary as opposed to a beautifully argued essay that over-explains everything. To write shorter posts or more humorous ones. Or, if I write a longer post, to have it ramble and be self-critical and perhaps "not of general interest." Like the post you have just read.

Dorothy Parker, Playwright in Disguise

Of the books I've read lately, the one that I can sense will most influence my playwriting, and has inspired me to sit down and write a few scenes, isn't a playscript or a book on theater history. It's Dorothy Parker's Complete Stories.

These days, Parker seems best known for her persona: the iconic Algonquin Round Table wit, one of the world's first snarky women, author of mordant little poems. But that leaves a lot out. For one, we forget her deep troubles, that she was "one of the saddest rapid-burnout cases in American letters," as Joan Acocella once described her. (My father once accused me of "wanting to be Dorothy Parker"--Heaven forbid, I say!) But we also forget that, out of all her writing, she was evidently proudest of her short stories, not her poetry or epigrams.

I picked up the Penguin Classics edition of Parker's Complete Stories (I have a Penguin Classics fetish and a "complete works" fetish, so this was a must-buy), and, after I got past the irritating introduction by scholar Regina Barreca, discovered some wonderful writing. (This review at the site Words on Us perfectly expresses my grievances with the introduction. Basically, Barreca noisily defends Parker against every criticism that has ever been leveled at her--even though some of those criticisms are valid, and not just malicious invective cooked up by the patriarchal establishment.)

I'll begin with a criticism of my own: yes, Parker was funny and cynical, but she could rely too much on cheap ironies. Reading this collection, it gets to the point where you can anticipate the plot of the story from seeing its title: if a story is called "Oh! He's Charming!" or "The Wonderful Old Gentleman," you can predict that the man in question is going to be horrible.

But not all of the stories are this simplistic--and, as I said, I was surprised and thrilled to discover that most of them function like one-act plays. A man and a woman, or sometimes two female friends, have a conversation in a taxicab or on a banquette at a cocktail party--and that's the story, the effects all achieved with dialogue. Some of my favorites: "A Terrible Day Tomorrow" (guy tries to get a girl drunk--his speech getting more and more rambling as he drinks), "Arrangement in Black and White" (which indicts racist attitudes by letting us overhear the patronizing things said by a woman at a party), and "Dusk Before Fireworks" (a painfully observed account of a clever young woman in love with a man who keeps stringing her along). Interspersed with these stories-in-dialogue are some other stories, told in the first person--that is, "dramatic monologues." The narrator of the monologue is often Dorothy Parker herself, complaining humorously about her broken garter or her awful dance partner or her insomnia. But sometimes she writes in a different voice--check out "Lady With a Lamp," the monologue of a rather unlikable woman visiting her friend, who is indisposed after having an abortion. It captures the personality of this "frenemy," and I am sure it was quite daring for 1931!

Has anyone ever acquired the rights to some of Parker's stories and adapted them into a theater piece? I can picture it now--"A Dorothy Parker Evening." It would alternate her dialogue sketches with her dramatic monologues, and then finish up with a dramatization of one of her longer stories... might I suggest "The Game" (a collaboration with Ross Evans, from 1948), which is a fantastic, tense story about a game of charades that reveals a sordid secret. It would be a fun evening in the theater--and because of Parker's name recognition, I think it would also have commercial appeal!

And in the meantime, I know I'll be returning to Parker's stories, examining how they work and how much her dialogue conveys. I love discovering "playwrights-in-disguise"--authors of prose fiction whose greatest asset is their dialogue. There's Parker, Hemingway, Armistead Maupin... who else?

"A Diamond Guitar" and "The Gold Violin"

My copy of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's contains three short stories in addition to the novella: the classic and beautiful "A Christmas Memory," the adapted-into-an-obscure-Broadway-musical "House of Flowers," and the wholly forgotten "A Diamond Guitar." When I read the title of that story, though, it immediately made me think of a Mad Men episode from Season 2 called "The Gold Violin." Stringed instrument + precious metal or gemstone... they're the only works I can think of whose titles follow this pattern. (Perhaps they're even the only works in existence with this kind of title. I doubt that anyone has written "The Platinum Cello" or "The Sapphire Ukulele.")

"The Gold Violin" is the Mad Men episode where Salvatore, the closeted gay art director (who never fails to engage my sympathy), invites his colleague Ken to dinner at his apartment, and we realize that Sal has an unrequited crush on Ken. The episode's title comes from the fact that Ken, an aspiring author, has just completed a short story called "The Gold Violin" and asks Sal to read it.

So is there any connection between this episode and "A Diamond Guitar," apart from their similar titles? Well, "A Diamond Guitar" is an extremely homoerotic story by 1950s standards. The plot: in a prison farm in the South, an intense friendship springs up between Mr. Schaeffer, a middle-aged inmate, and Tico Feo, a handsome young Cuban boy who has just arrived, a rhinestone-studded guitar in tow. "Except that they did not combine their bodies or think to do so, though such things were not unknown at the farm, they were as lovers," Capote writes. How appropriate, then, that the Mad Men episode whose title recalls this story should also be an episode that focuses on Salvatore! Like Mr. Schaeffer, Sal is defeated and imprisoned (at least metaphorically); like Tico Feo, Ken is a cheerful golden boy with an artistic talent.

The Mad Men writers definitely make a habit of paying homage to (or, if you are feeling less charitable, stealing ideas from) the American literature of the period. For instance, Don Draper lives on Bullet Park Road, and John Cheever wrote a novel called Bullet Park. In another episode, someone reminisces about the sweltering weather they had "the summer they executed the Rosenbergs," which is an obvious lift from the first line of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar: "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs." And speaking of Capote, it just occurred to me that the Mad Men scene where Duck Phillips abandons his dog on the streets of New York might be inspired by the scene where Holly Golightly abandons her cat there. So it's not hard to imagine that the Mad Men writers read "A Diamond Guitar" in the course of researching the early '60s, and, realizing that its themes related to the story they were trying to tell about Salvatore, paid homage to Capote by titling their own episode (and Ken's story-within-the-story) something similar!

Image: From "The Gold Violin": Sal, his wife Kitty, and Ken.

There Are Faeries In My Neighborhood

No, this is not the set-up for a tired joke revolving around the "there sure are a lot of gay people in San Francisco" thing. It's a reference to a short story by Chris Adrian, called "A Tiny Feast," which is, to crib a line from Shakespeare, "something rich and strange." (And which was published in The New Yorker in April, but I only now got around to reading.)

The quote from The Tempest is especially appropriate because "A Tiny Feast" is a twist on another Shakespearean fantasy, A Midsummer Night's Dream. The premise of the story is that Oberon and Titania and their band of faeries are living beneath Buena Vista Park in San Francisco (about a mile from my house), and have stolen a human child and left a changeling in his place. When the human boy gets leukemia and cannot be cured by faerie magic, they must disguise themselves as a mortal family and get him treated at UCSF Children's Hospital. This information comes out much more gradually in the story than I have written it here, of course. And what follows is brilliantly odd and imaginative and well-written and meaningful, too. As immortal faeries, Oberon and Titania have great difficulty processing their child's illness and the doctors' diagnoses. But how different is this from the disorientation that any parent feels when his or her child gets cancer?

Chris Adrian, aka Mr. Overachiever, is a critically acclaimed fiction writer, the possessor of a divinity degree from Harvard, and a pediatric oncologist at UCSF--so he knows whereof he speaks. And according to this interview, "A Tiny Feast" is not just a standalone story: Adrian is working on a novel that retells the story of A Midsummer Night's Dream in modern San Francisco. Anticipation! Because, just reading "A Tiny Feast" has got me to see my city as a new place--a magical place. When the N-Judah train tunnels through Buena Vista Park I now think to myself "There are faeries here, living right on the other side of these tunnel walls." I can only imagine what effect a whole novel of this will have on me.

Incidentally, what is it with UCSF physicians having amazing second careers as artists? Aside from Chris Adrian, there is a great band called Rupa and the April Fishes whose frontwoman, Rupa, also works as a doctor at UCSF. My god, they put the rest of us San Franciscans to shame.

Image: "A Fairy Flew Off with the Changeling" by Arthur Rackham.

The Remarkable Rocket

Have you bought your Fourth of July fireworks yet? Whether you have or not, might I suggest reading, in honor of the holiday, Oscar Wilde's short story "The Remarkable Rocket"?

I am thoroughly in love with this story. It features a frog, a duck, and a whole lot of fireworks (including the titular rocket) who all talk with Wildean wit, and I hope I don't have to explain why that's so awesome. It must have the highest number of aphorisms per page of any short story in the English language. It is completely charming, and deserves to be better known.

Tom Stoppard's play The Invention of Love contrasts Wilde with A.E. Housman, who exemplified opposite ways of living as gay men in late-Victorian England. Which is worse: to lead a long life of inhibition and suppressed sexuality (Housman) or to live flamboyantly only to be punished for it (Wilde)? "Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light," Stoppard has Wilde say.

Could this image be inspired by Wilde's short story? I wonder. And I also think that The Remarkable Rocket: The Life of Oscar Wilde would be a great title. If the world needed another Wilde biography, that is.

But don't just take my word for it. Try it!