Iambs and Anagrams and Anapests, Oh My

Some sentences from my reading that have jumped out at me lately.

[Leon had said] "I can't help but picture an armada of floating parties." But the men were serious and reserved and afraid of pirates.

—From Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel

This stopped me in my tracks, and not in a good way. In my copy of Station Eleven, the word "pirates" is printed almost directly below the word "parties," and I got weirdly distracted when I realized they were anagrams. Was it intentional wordplay? Inadvertent? What did it mean? I'm inclined to think it was unintentional (I'm enjoying Station Eleven, but its prose is not flashy or full of wordplay) and that an editor should have noticed how distracting it is. Then again, it can take a few editing passes to spot something like this. I like to think I have a good ear, yet I nonetheless wrote a line of dialogue containing the words "tectonics" and "ironic" (yeowch! inadvertent rhyme!) in my latest script, and didn't notice it till an actor read it aloud.

There's some pocket of rot in the oak of their soul that can only be patched up by watches.

—From the March 20 New Yorker article on watch collecting, by Gary Shteyngart.

No, wait, forget what I said above about wordplay being distracting and worthy of removal by an editor. This sentence, this I love. The metaphor! The assonance and slant rhymes! The anapests! All in a sentence that purportedly was not even composed by Shteyngart, but is a quote from a watch-collecting acquaintance of his! I read it while on MUNI and then wanted to run around the city chanting it. It reminded me of another New Yorker sentence that had a similar effect on me, from an April 2014 article on caving, by Burkhard Bilger: "Their digestif has come to grief against a fissure wall." Perfect iambic rhythm and a jaunty internal rhyme on "digestif" and "grief"!

John Hodgman on Only Children

I am an only child. And when you are an only child you have an unusual relationship with your parents. There are only the three of you, and you come to rely on one another for company as much as for anything else. You spend a lot of time traveling together, going to movies together, and watching public television together, with your dinner in your lap. Your mother and father are not so much your parents as they are your weird, older roommates. Or better, a pair of older cats who wander in and out of the rooms of your house. They silently judge you, but they can't stop you from whatever it is you're going to do.

—John Hodgman, from "Downton Abbey with Cats," The New Yorker, 1/13/14

 The New Yorker characterized this as a "Shouts and Murmurs" humor piece, but it was far wiser and deeper than those pieces tend to be. (It begins, "Look, I never want to tell stories about my children, because it always seems a little lazy. Children tend to be sort of dumb, and, in the end, the stories are always the same: children say hilarious things, and I am old and dying." That's funny, sure, but it also cuts close to the bone.)

And the paragraph I've quoted above made me realize how little writing I've read about the experience of being an only child -- despite the Internet-enabled proliferation of first-person essays about coming-of-age and parenting and all that stuff. And, even though only children make up an increasing share of the population (about 20% of American kids these days will be only children) there still seems to be a sense that it's "better" for children to have siblings, or that being an only child is not "ideal." Think of how newlywed couples get asked "Are you planning to have kids?" not "Are you planning to have a kid?" (Which is pretty presumptuous on the part of the asker – there's no guarantee that any couple will be able to have one healthy child, much less multiple children.) I'm trying to think of ways I can personally help dismantle the stigma around having only one child, without coming across as an agenda-driven douchebag.

But I know I am agenda-driven, because I'm an only child who never wished for siblings, and I feel like many of my better qualities (my creativity and ability to spend time by myself) are attributable to my being an only child. Some people may read the Hodgman quote above and discount it because it's part of a "humor" piece; others may read it and say "Look, it says that only children have an 'unusual' relationship with their parents; I don't want that for my child." But I feel that my life was enriched by being around adults so much at a young age, and if my parents were "a pair of older cats" -- well, I've always been a cat person.

The Starry Messenger takes just two months to arrive

I very much enjoyed Nicholas Schmidle's recent New Yorker article about a forged copy of Sidereus Nuncius ("Starry Messenger"), the groundbreaking treatise in which Galileo described the craters of the Moon, the moons of Jupiter, and the new stars that he had discovered with his telescope.

(And not only because my post about Galileo's discovery of the moons of Jupiter, as portrayed in Brecht's Life of Galileo, is in my top 5 most-read posts of all time. Or because Galileo was the first person to look at the Pleiades through a telescope.)

Mainly, I enjoyed the article for its account of shady dealings in the rare-book world, complete with a talented but completely unscrupulous con man with a terrific Italian name (Marino Massimo De Caro).

But also, I was intrigued to learn the publication history of Sidereus Nuncius. Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter in early January 1610, and two months later, he had written up his observations in Latin, found a publisher, had the book typeset, commissioned copperplate etchings as illustrations, reviewed the proof copies, and published the book. Two months to publish a book that would change the course of science! Granted, Sidereus Nuncius is only 60 pages long... but still.

People say that culture moves much faster in the digital age than it ever did before; we have this idea that, in the olden days, writers were more careful and thoughtful than they are now. And, sure, in the 21st century you can publish something instantaneously on a blog and have it available to the entire world, rather than dealing with the slower processes (production and distribution) of print media.

However, for anything to get published in a scientific journal these days, it must go through a lengthy peer-review process. And even if you're self-publishing, two months is an awfully quick turn-around time to write, illustrate, proofread, and publish a book. In some ways, then, the culture seems slower than it was in Galileo's time. It's the same thing I was writing about in my Theater Pub column earlier this month: we think it was fine for Shakespeare to write and produce two plays a year, but there's an expectation that modern playwrights will spend years workshopping a single play. And, we think it was fine for Galileo to publish his scientific observations two months after he made them (without any peer review), but modern scientists would never get away with having so little data.

Image: the pages of Sidereus Nuncius that depict Galileo's drawings of Orion and the Pleiades, cropped from the original image at the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering & Technology. So cool! I've just adapted it as my Facebook and Twitter cover photo.

Prose Is Not Verse (Even If It's Shakespeare)

I've written before that when The New Yorker prints "vocal chords" instead of "vocal cords" (something I have witnessed twice), it makes me think that the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

And now I have witnessed an even more shocking error in this publication, which caused me to throw down the magazine and storm off to blog about my fury.

From Hilton Als' review of Twelfth Night (in the Nov. 25, 2013 issue): "Olivia dodges the entreaties of her visitor, a youth whom her steward, Malvolio (Stephen Fry), drolly describes as 'not yet old enough for a man, nor young / enough for a boy, as a squash is before 'tis a peas- / Cod, or a codling when 'tis almost an apple.'"

Do you see what happened there? The magazine printed Shakespearean prose as though it were verse! Dividing the word "peascod" with a slash and a hyphen, even, for no apparent reason! (Shakespeare will enjamb lines of verse, but he never splits a word down the middle between lines of verse.) But there's no verse structure, no rhythm or meter, underlying these words! It's prose, dammit!

Who's to blame, I wonder? This suggests that the magazine's head theater critic, or possibly his editor, doesn't know the difference between prose and blank verse (or perhaps they mistakenly think that all of Shakespeare is written in verse). Which is a disturbing thought, to say the least.

Especially because when I heard Hilton Als speak in 2009, he suggested that "plays should be treated as literature" and that it's therefore OK to read them instead of seeing them. (A very strange attitude for a theater critic to take, I thought.) And if you are reading a Shakespeare play, rather than seeing it, you should definitely be able to tell the difference between verse and prose!

So I hope that this error is just the work of some entry-level bozo at the copy-editing desk, so I can go on with my faith in The New Yorker undimmed. (And there are some nice insights and turns of phrase, as well as an appreciation for the "poetic reality" of live theater and the craft of acting, in the rest of Als' review.)

Greek mythology isn't brain surgery... or is it?

From Rivka Galchen's article on Elmhurst Hospital, The New Yorker, May 13, 2013:

A young, very dark-skinned patient was jogging lightly up and down the hall. His brain appeared to be herniating out of his skull and, indeed, it was, because he had had a portion of his skull removed, with the goal of safely accommodating brain swelling. [...] The swelling goes down; the piece of skull bone, having been stored in the patient's thigh, is eventually returned to its proper location.

So wait. If you have brain swelling, first they cut your skull open, then they store a piece of it in your thigh? OH MY GOD, THIS IS LIKE ATHENA AND DIONYSUS IN ONE.

It's enough to make me want to get a swelled head.

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.

Hitting the Sweet Spot of the Nostalgia Cycle

It seems time to pronounce a rule about American popular culture: the Golden Forty-Year Rule. The prime site of nostalgia is always whatever happened, or is thought to have happened, in the decade between forty and fifty years past. [...] Forty years past is the potently fascinating time just as we arrived, when our parents were youthful and in love, the Edenic period preceding the fallen state recorded in our actual memories.

--Adam Gopnik, "The Forty-Year Itch," The New Yorker, April 23, 2012

My play Pleiades is set in 1971. I didn't know about the forty-year nostalgia cycle when I was writing it, but I definitely felt that there was... something extra-resonant about writing about that era. It was a conscious effort to write a play about my mother's generation of women when they were my age: early twenties, not quite fully formed, finding their way. While I don't think that Pleiades betrays much genuine nostalgia for the early '70s (Gopnik's definition: the belief that an era "is not simply a good setting for a story but that it is a good setting for you") it does feel like we're coming to a time in our culture when we can reevaluate the '70s. When I was growing up in the '90s, my mother would dismiss the '70s as a decade of bad fashion, bad music, and bad faith. But I have to believe there's more to it than that.

Pleiades was my effort to write about my mother's generation as young women; The Rose of Youth, my '30s play, was about my grandmothers' generation. (Here's a post I wrote in 2007 discussing the parallels between Grandma's generation and my own.) Forty years in the past, and eighty years in the past. Yes, there's something to Gopnik's theory.

The new season of Mad Men prompted this New Yorker piece on nostalgia. Can I just say that the use of music in Mad Men is making me feel better about the way I used music in Pleiades? The play is bookended with two songs from a Judy Collins album, which set the mood and make thematic points, but I wondered if I was being too obvious and predictable. (Seven young women in 1971 -- of course they listen to Judy Collins!) But then I realized that Mad Men isn't always subtle in its musical cues either -- and it's not a problem. "Satisfaction" in Season 4, or "Tomorrow Never Knows" last Sunday, are iconic songs that suit the show, the themes, the characters. And I'm glad that they form part of the Mad Men sonic landscape -- that they've been deemed necessary and appropriate, rather than predictable and obvious.

Though I also appreciate how they mix iconic songs with more obscure ones -- I know a thing or two about yé-yé music, but I'd never heard "Zou Bisou Bisou" before it appeared in the Mad Men season premiere!

I do need to do a new draft of Pleiades, but Judy Collins won't get edited out.

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.

Playwriting, Failure, and the Fear of Failure

I've been:

• following the discussion taking place on blogs and among my Facebook friends in response to "The Real Reasons Playwrights Fail" by Mat Smart
• thinking about a conversation I had with a Female Playwriting Friend (FPF) Monday night about writing and the fear of writing and the perils of making excuses or comparing yourself to other people
• reading a New Yorker article on a Hollywood therapist who specializes in treating creatively blocked screenwriters and other artistic types

A lot of the commentary on Smart's post focus on how he is an inherently privileged dude -- straight, white, male, writing linear plays -- and therefore his experience cannot mirror that of other writers, who belong to minority groups or write less marketable plays. There might be something to this, but I think it's more complicated than just "shut up, straight white dude, you can never understand me."

FPF and I both reject the idea that there is something inherently different about men and women. And yet, there's an attitude that we see more often in men than in women -- the "If you just did what I do, you'd be successful too" attitude, which can morph into "I know the right way to go about things and you're doing it wrong."

FPF and I have been on the receiving end of this attitude before. A few weeks ago, a male playwriting friend (MPF) said to us, "What I don't get is writers who don't like to write, to sit down and put pen to paper." And we both felt personally indicted by this, even though it's not clear whether it was meant as an indictment of our work habits. This is, of course, very similar to Mat Smart's stuff about "you have to love" working on your play for six hours every day after working your 9 to 5 temp job, or else you're not serious about playwriting and are obviously a worthless weakling.

And unfortunately, I am easily persuaded by this. I see my friends working hard, working damn hard, sacrificing other aspects of their lives in pursuit of artistic success, and being rewarded for it. I do feel guilty about how little I write. Because I am prone to melodrama and overstatement, I am perversely drawn to pronouncements like "you must have an inner fire that compels you to write six hours a day, no matter what, or you will NEVER be a playwright!" Every year, I tell myself that this is the year I am really going to be a playwright, the year I hunker down and churn out the sentences, the year I read more than I ever have read before and write more than I read. And every year, I falter.

I'm afraid of failure, is what it comes down to. Afraid of spending all that time cooped up at my desk only to produce a mediocre product. But someone who says "If you just worked as hard as me, you'd be as successful as me" is also the kind of person who tends to be unafraid -- the kind of writer who is extremely prolific and will fail often and learn from those failures.

Neither males nor females have a monopoly on failing and learning from failure. But, I think, because males often start out from a privileged/advantaged position, they get the sense that they have more chances in life and it's OK to fail. Coming from a more precarious or disadvantaged group, you don't have that same comfort with error and uncertainty. I have never felt that it would be OK for me to fail; failure would shame me. To make a totally reductive generalization, male artists tend to be Bad Boys and female artists tend to be Dutiful Daughters.

So I'm trying to take some lessons from the New Yorker article, use some of therapist Barry Michels' tricks without having to pay $300 an hour to hear them from him. Some insights:

• " '[Writers] procrastinate because they have no external authority figure demanding that they write... Often I explain to the patient that there is an authority figure he's answerable to, but it's not human. It's Time itself that's passing inexorably. That's why they call it Father Time. Every time you procrastinate or waste time, you're defying this authority figure.' Procrastination, he says, is a 'spurious form of immortality,' the ego's way of claiming that it has all the time in the world; writing, by extension, is a kind of death. He gives procrastinators a tool he calls the Arbitrary Use of Time Moment, which asks them to sit in front of their computers for a fixed amount of time each day. 'You say, "I'm surrendering myself to the archetypal Father, Chronos," ' he says. ' "I'm surrendering to him because he has hegemony over me."'"

• Michels' patients often "[vacillate] between thinking [they] are God's gift to mankind and thinking [they] are garbage." This is activated by a mixture of "petulance, rage, arrogance, hypersensitivity, a sense of victimization, and, above all, a resistance to process."

• Another technique is "Reversal of Desire," which "helps a patient face something he's avoiding and involves another silent scream--'Bring it on!'--addressed to an imaginary cloud of pain. while pushing into the center of the cloud, the patient says, 'I love pain,' and then, 'Pain sets me free.'"

I guess it's really all about acceptance and submission to a larger discipline -- accepting that time is passing, accepting the process, accepting the pain. And I love the idea that "procrastination is a spurious form of immortality" -- it makes you feel immortal while you're doing it, but when you die and leave no work behind, you're dead. Whereas writing may be a "form of death," but if you do it well, and leave a legacy of the written word behind, it actually can make you immortal.

And some of this is similar to the advice offered in this classic column about writing and womanhood and the fear of writing, which I think I basically ought to memorize: Write Like A Motherfucker

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have a play to write. About sisterhood.

"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.

Billy Collins, Plagiarist?

Billy Collins has a poem in The New Yorker musing on Zeno's paradox:

Not long after we had sat down to dinner
at a long table in a restaurant in Chicago
and were deeply engrossed in the heavy menus
one of us--a bearded man with a colorful tie--
asked if any one of us had ever considered
applying the paradoxes of Zeno to the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian.

[...]
If, the man with the tie continued,
an object moving through space
will never reach its destination because it is always
limited to cutting the distance to its goal in half,

then it turns out that St. Sebastian did not die
from the wounds inflicted by the arrows.
No, the cause of death was fright at the spectacle of their endless approach.
St. Sebastian, according to Zeno, would have died of a heart attack.

Well, this is suspiciously similar to Tom Stoppard's explanation of Zeno's paradox, in his play Jumpers:

It was precisely this notion of infinite series which in the sixth century BC led the Greek philosopher Zeno to conclude that since an arrow shot towards a target first had to cover half the distance, and then half the remainder, and then half the remainder after that, and so on ad infinitum, the result was, as I will now demonstrate, that though an arrow is always approaching its target, it never quite gets there, and Saint Sebastian died of fright.

This is too strange to be a coincidence, right? Collins has to have somehow gotten the seed for his poem from Stoppard, doesn't he?

Maybe the dinner party actually happened as described in the poem, and Collins overheard "a bearded man in a tie" trying to pass Stoppard's idea off as his own original thought, but Collins wasn't aware of this, and wrote the poem in perfect innocence. Maybe the bearded man acknowledged that his Zeno-Sebastian speech was inspired by a line of Stoppard's, but Collins decided to leave that out of the poem. Or maybe there wasn't any dinner party, and the bearded man is fictitious-- a framework invented by Collins to hide the fact that he had really gotten the idea for his poem by reading or seeing Jumpers (or just by reading Stoppard's wikiquote page). What I like about this is that, even though Collins doesn't credit Stoppard, his poem still acknowledges the deeper truth: the Zeno-Sebastian idea is not original to Collins, he got it from someone else.

Some among us might simply call Collins' poem an "allusion" to Stoppard, or a work "inspired by" a line of his. And I might buy that reasoning if the Stoppard quotation were more well-known, or recognizable. (I mean, if Collins had written a poem playing off the idea of "beauty is truth, truth beauty," I wouldn't write a blog post excoriating him for plagiarizing Keats!) But, in my opinion, there is something not quite right about building an entire poem around an idea that another writer had, and then not crediting that writer.

Also, am I wrong in thinking that Stoppard's way of phrasing this idea is more snappy, more economical, more memorable, more, dare I say, poetic than Collins'? "Saint Sebastian died of fright" is much better than "No, the cause of death was fright at the spectacle of their endless approach. / St. Sebastian, according to Zeno, would have died of a heart attack." That's why I remembered the Stoppard quote, after all these years...

"Anguish Is the Universal Language"

What's this? I actually liked a poem published by The New Yorker? And, furthermore, it's a love poem, that most clichéd of genres?

Yep. "Claustrophilia" by Alice Fulton, in the July 2 issue. Not only is there a lot of truth to it, it is memorable, quotable... and taught me some new words, too ("moxibustion").

See also the New Yorker blog's interview with Fulton about her work.

"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...

"Angels & Insects," Victorians and Us

Over the weekend I finished reading A.S. Byatt's novella-collection Angels & Insects and then finished reading the January 25 issue of The New Yorker. What's weird is that a couple of articles in the magazine strongly reminded me of the book I'd just finished.

First, there was the short story, which is one of the more bizarre pieces of fiction that the magazine has published recently. It's called "Trailhead," it's by distinguished entomologist E.O. Wilson, and is more like a creative-nonfiction article about an ant colony, than like a literary short story. You can learn an awful lot about ants from it: their mating habits, the social structure of their colonies, how different colonies fight each other...

But I had just learned many of these same facts from Angels & Insects! One of Byatt's protagonists is William Adamson, a naturalist who is writing a popular-science book based on his observations of a local ant colony. As is her habit, Byatt embeds excerpts of Adamson's writing into the text of the novella... and it's very similar to "Trailhead." Adamson is like a fictional, Victorian-era E.O. Wilson!

Then, at the back of the magazine, Anthony Lane reviews the new movie Creation, the Charles Darwin biopic. Evidently, the movie shows Darwin struggling to write The Origin of Species while anguished by the death of his daughter Annie and holding imagined conversations with her. Lane writes, "The movie, with its complicated time jumps, does give fresh energy to another Victorian obsession—namely, the ghost story. The epoch that, with Darwin’s assistance, came to nourish profound doubts about the hereafter was also, by a pleasing paradox, the heyday of interest in the spirit world."

Well, it wasn't intended as such, but that just happens to be a precise description of what Angels & Insects is all about. It's made up of two novellas: "Morpho Eugenia," about William Adamson, who is an early follower of Darwin, and clashes with his religious father-in-law because of it; and "The Conjugial Angel," about a group of Victorian spiritualists, holding seances to try to contact dead loved ones. So, the spiritual and the earthly, angels and insects. What I got from it is that we think of the Victorian era as being cozy and repressed, but it was during this time that ideas like "God is dead" first came into the culture, and people were really frightened and confused, and sought solace. But did solace lie in Darwin's scientific rationalism, or in the metaphysical spirit world? Which system should one follow?

"The Conjugial Angel" is not entirely successful, at times reading more like Byatt's meditation on Alfred Tennyson and his poem "In Memoriam" than like a piece of fiction with a strong plot and characters... in contrast to "Morpho Eugenia," which, for all its digressions on ant life, has an interesting story to tell. It's extremely "Byatt-y" (it might make a good introduction to her work for someone who's unwilling to tackle Possession), and because you know that I have a bias for Byatt, that's just fine with me.

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.

Sixty-Nine Essays and Two Authors

By now it should be obvious that I am completely obsessed with The New Yorker. Earlier in the year I suffered a form of New Yorker-related madness, where I thought that if I could just read every article that has been published in the magazine, I would possess "all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." (Oh, to become a cyborg and download the complete New Yorker archives into my brain!) So I began buying and reading collections of essays by New Yorker writers. Yes, despite the fact that the infamous Half-Read Pile of back issues is building up on my bedroom floor... and despite knowing that, as a subscriber, I can access the complete archives of The New Yorker for free on my computer.

(All the same, even though I could have read these essays for free rather than paying $15 or so for a paperback, I do think that books are more convenient... and also, to plunge too deeply into the New Yorker Digital Archive is dangerous...)

Anyway, I started off by reading essay collections by two female writers currently on staff at the magazine: Cleopatra's Nose by Judith Thurman and Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints by Joan Acocella. Thurman's favorite topics include fashion designers, femininity and power, and anything French. (She reminds me a lot of a French teacher I had in college, whose area of study involved "reclaiming" for serious inquiry topics that men have historically dismissed as too frivolous and girly.) Acocella, the New Yorker dance critic, writes about choreographers and dancers, but also about books and authors, many of them European. In the introduction to her book, she notes that the essays are tied together by the theme of how her favorite artists overcame challenges and managed to keep going.

The heart of Thurman's book are her essays on the great fashion designers of the 20th century--Balenciaga, Schiaparelli, etc. These make wonderful introductions to some very important figures; it is otherwise difficult to find good information on fashion history without shelling out $60 for some coffee-table book from Rizzoli. (Magazines like Vogue aren't educational because they assume that their readers all grew up in Park Avenue apartments and learned about fashion design from playing dress-up in Mommy's Chanel suits.) I returned to Thurman's Yves Saint Laurent essay after seeing the YSL exhibit at the De Young and her Chanel essay after seeing Coco Before Chanel. Not only does she recount each designer's history in the impeccably fact-checked New Yorker way, she also makes some interesting observations: for instance, that because Elsa Schiaparelli grew up an Italian aristocrat, she had the freedom to make kooky and surreal clothes, but because Coco Chanel grew up poor in the French provinces, she knew that her designs had to be impeccably tasteful.

Other good things in Thurman's book include the opening essay, a jaw-dropping profile of the artist Vanessa Beecroft; her essay on Leni Riefenstahl, which provides a fascinating new perspective on the issue of whether Riefenstahl can be considered a great filmmaker; and her reviews of the now-classic novels Possession and Beloved. Still, there is a good deal of filler in Thurman's book too, with several essays that are reviews of Fashion Week collections, which are of limited interest several years after the fact.

Acocella's book is more of a piece--it's not padded with short, ephemeral dance-review pieces the way that Thurman's is padded with fashion reviews. Her thoughtful essays on dancers and choreographers seem to cover most major 20th-century dance-world personalities except for Balanchine (though Balanchine gets touched on in several essays, such as the one about Suzanne Farrell). Acocella's account of Martha Graham's long career and the fight over the intellectual property rights to her dances is absolutely riveting. Just as I didn't know much about fashion history before reading Cleopatra's Nose, I didn't know much about dance history before reading Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, and again appreciated the education. I also really enjoyed Acocella's essays on literature and authors; for example, her Dorothy Parker piece was one of the things that inspired me to pick up Parker's Complete Stories last month.

Sometimes The New Yorker gets accused of having a single "house style" for its authors, but Acocella's and Thurman's voices are different and distinctive. Thurman strikes me as more self-conscious than Acocella, more in love with hearing herself talk. Her style is dense and aphoristic; Acocella's is lucid and expository. Thurman has more individual sentences that you want to quote, but with Acocella you are more likely to remember the thrust of the argument.

I should also note that Acocella's book is more handsomely produced, with a black-and-white photo decorating every chapter and a thorough index in the back. Because Thurman's style is so dense with references to other artists, it is frustrating that her book lacks an index. (I even took a pen and annotated the table of contents so I'd remember what the subject of each essay was--and I hardly ever write in my books.)

So I guess that Acocella's book wins over Thurman, if you had to pick just one; but I have returned frequently to both of these essay collections since I read them circa last February/March, and know that I'll continue to do so in future. Both have introduced me to some wonderful artistic personalities and offered fresh insights on artists that I was already familiar with. I love these kinds of books! I love The New Yorker! Come on and fill up my brain!

The Man Behind the King Tut Exhibit

The King Tut exhibit arrived at the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park last summer, which means that for months I have been living a ten-minute walk away from one of the world's most priceless collections of Egyptian antiquities. But I still haven't been to see it. First, I didn't feel like dealing with the crowds; then, some of my friends said it wasn't very good. And now, after reading the New Yorker article on Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt's Council of Antiquities (subscribers only, sorry) I am not sure I want to support this exhibit with $32.50 of my money!

The article portrays Hawass as a megalomaniac, a relentless self-promoter who recklessly seeks blockbuster archaeological finds--digging the Valley of the Kings down to the bedrock in the hopes of unearthing a tomb. Ian Parker, the article's author, does try to give Hawass a fair shake--acknowledging that his egotism is rooted in a patriotic desire to promote Egyptian history and restore Egyptology to the Egyptians. But the rest of the article is written in such a snarky tone that the impression of Hawass as reckless blowhard is what predominates. I'm not used to seeing New Yorker profiles that so gleefully make fun of their subject--well, the critics will tear movies and plays apart, but the writers of feature articles don't tend to be so harsh on living people. Which implies that Hawass must have really pissed Parker off.

Choice quotes:

• "[Hawass] often asks rhetorical questions along the lines of 'God gave me this talent for public speaking--what can I do?'" (N.B. this is the third sentence of the article. The snark starts early.)

• "Hawass is so often found in the middle of an argument that one can usually assume the fuss is strategic. [...] He has no doubt that his fame is a vital national asset."

• "His dominant conversational tone was rebuttal laced with invective and self-regard [...] Hawass speaks English fast, with a strong accent, and in a tone that, after a while, you come to realize doesn't denote outright fury."

• "Hawass's tendency toward self-flattery obscures his past; when, reluctantly, he talks of his upbringing, his words have the texture of a Soviet-era account of Stalin's boyhood."

• "He mentioned an excavation in 1990, when he opened the tomb of a dwarf named Perniankhu and found a basalt statue that he regards as a masterwork of the period. [...] When Hawass took the statue in his hands, he told me, 'it was one of the most beautiful moments in my life, as if I were holding my first son.' This moment occurred during a press conference."

• "He told me that when he showed Obama around the Pyramids he grew to have a better understanding of him than all but the President's closest confidants. 'We became friends from the first minute,' he said. 'I told him George Lucas came here to find out how my hat became more famous than Harrison Ford's.'"

• And, most damning, considering the exhibition that is in town and the money they're charging for it: "Hawass accepted a proposal from A.E.G., the sports-arena owner and events organizer, to take Tutankhamun back on the road, with an explicit ambition of making money. [...] Any museum that took the show would be given a share of the ticket proceeds, but it would have to stomach the loss of almost all curatorial control. In San Francisco, for example, the de Young museum was able to veto items in the exhibition's accompanying gift store, and it ruled out a tissue box whose papers exit through the nose in a Pharaoh's mask. Beyond that, the museum was the provider of floor space."
  

"So-Called Post-Racial"

"It's fairly easy to get beyond [Thomas] Bradshaw's purposefully thin surfaces--unless, of course, you're unwilling to look at what contorts all America: racism, and the bullshit notion that it doesn't affect our view of sex and love in a so-called post-racial country."

--Hilton Als, "Critic's Notebook," The New Yorker, Sept. 28 2009

Given this vehemently expressed attitude, I am surprised that Hilton Als was as polite to me as he was last summer, when I met him and asked him my confused question about what playwrights should do if they wanted to write a post-racial play!

But at the same time, I can't help but wonder if my use of the term with Mr. Als – and my kinda-naive, bourgeois-white-girl-from-San-Francisco-by-way-of-Vassar attitude--is one of the things that provoked him to write this in the first place? The New Yorker isn't often this profane nor this angry, you know.

Previously: Theater à la Als
The "Post-Racial" World and Contemporary Playwriting

P.S. Sometime I must write about the playwriting workshop I had with Thomas Bradshaw as one of the perks for winning the Young Playwright's Contest (and if you know Bradshaw's work you know that he is a rather dubious choice to give a writing workshop to 15-to-19-year-olds)... but later, later.

Theater à la Als

On Thursday night, I attended a discussion between Hilton Als, theater critic at The New Yorker, and Michael Paller, dramaturg at ACT. The topic was "Outsider Artists Inside the Theater" – a subject that could seemingly be interpreted in several different ways, but which the two men mainly used to talk about diversity (race, gender, sexuality) and the American theater. These are complicated issues, and the discussion tended to leave me of two minds, rather than making my thoughts clearer. Maybe it was supposed to. That's why it was a conversation instead of a lecture, right? That's why the basis of theater is dialogue and not monologue, yes? So here are some of the questions I'm asking myself, and the things I'm conflicted about.

One subject that got mentioned was the necessity of producing plays written by "outsiders" (that is, members of historically disenfranchised groups). Paller pointed to ACT's production of a play that dealt with Japanese-Americans returning to San Francisco after having been in the internment camps – he said that it got a great response from the Asian community and brought many people to ACT who had never been there before. And that's all well and good, but wouldn't the real measure of success be how many of these new audience members came back to see another play at ACT the next year – a play that did not have a specifically Asian theme? If the effect of producing plays by gays/minorities/women is an increasing polarization of the audience (blacks go to see black plays, women go to see stories about women), is that really progress? Maybe it's naive of me, but I still dare to believe that good art is universal, and that nothing is gained from going to see plays or movies only about people who are "like you."

(Hilton Als saw this from a different perspective. Speaking of plays like The Color Purple and the all-black Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, he said, "I'm happy that they're bringing in new audiences, but do they have to be such crap?" He wants to see more plays like for colored girls... that speak genuinely to the black experience, and fewer crassly commercial appeals for black people's money.)

In talking about the difficulties faced by minority actors, Als brought up the story of a talented black actress, Susan Batson. (Als claims that black women and Asian men are the two groups most often misrepresented or underrepresented in the American theater.) Batson grew so dissatisfied with the typecasting and racism that were pervasive in the New York theater of the '60s and '70s that she stopped performing and became a highly regarded acting coach. Her clients now include such movie stars as Nicole Kidman and Brad Pitt. "It's wonderful that she found something that she's really talented at, and can be happy doing," said Als. And part of me wants to agree with this. But another part of me wonders, "Isn't this just another example of a black woman disappearing behind the scenes, devoting her life to helping porcelain-skinned Kidman and blue-eyed Pitt – white people who grab the fame and the glory? Is this progress? Is this the best we can hope for?"

One final thing that has me conflicted is Hilton Als' attitude toward theater and theater criticism. Als says that in his reviews, he tries to treat theater like literature; when he sees a new play, he tries to fit it into the context of the writing that has come before it. Paller read aloud from Als' recent review of the David Adjmi play Stunning, and asked Als to discuss it. Stunning is about some Syrian-American Jews and their black housekeeper, and Als' review compared it to the works of other authors, such as Bernard Malamud, who have written about the relationship between blacks and Jews. On the one hand, Als' approach argues for the inherent dignity of theater and of the playwright – treating theater as an important component in the narrative of American culture. Too often, Als said, we think of the playwright as someone who merely creates a blueprint for the actors and director to fill in, rather than as the instigator and the driving creative force. And he says that anyone who is serious about culture must try to read or see the important plays of the year, the way that they would go see the award-winning movies.

But then, Als followed that up with a comment along the lines of "So playwrights should try to get people to read their work, that's the important thing, and they shouldn't care if it doesn't get produced." Which, excuse me, sounds like a very strange thing for a theater critic to say. It singlehandedly discounts the contributions of the actors, director, and designers in creating the theatrical experience. It insults the playwright by suggesting that she should limit her aspirations and be content to write "closet dramas," rather than works that will be brought to life on the stage. And also, it's counterintuitive: I think that in this country, even fewer people read plays as literature than attend the theater, so if Als got his way, theater would be even further marginalized. Trying to get people to see live theater is hard, but there are ways to promote it and make it sound fun: it's a night out on the town, you might get to see great acting or singing or dancing, it's amazing to laugh or cry along with your fellow audience members. Whereas trying to convince people to read plays because it's the "important" thing to do makes play-reading sound like a boring old slog.

Furthermore, sometimes Als' insistence on treating theater as literature makes it seem like he's just using the play he's reviewing as an excuse to talk about something else that he thinks is more important. That's kind of how I felt about the Bernard Malamud references in the Stunning review (which I also think have the effect of making the reader feel stupid for not having read, or even really heard much about, Malamud). It also seems that Als is somewhat notorious for writing irrelevant intro paragraphs, which further reinforce the impression that he'd rather be discussing something other than the play he's ostensibly reviewing. I don't always love the theater criticism of Als' colleague John Lahr either, but I much prefer his idea of the theatrical experience. "The John Lahr recipe for telling whether a play is good or bad is if you can shut your eyes when you're in the theater and get all the meaning – it's a bad play. You didn't have to be there," he has said. As opposed to suggesting that the best way to experience a play is to read it.

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.