I wear black on the outside 'cause I'm in mourning for my life

Okay, am I seriously the first person on the Internet to propose that the Smiths' "Unloveable" is inspired by Chekhov's The Seagull?

Consider: the song does not have a lot of lyrics, yet two, possibly three, of its phrases echo memorable lines in The Seagull.

"I don't have much in my life, but take it, it's yours" = "If you ever need my life, come and take it" (Nina's message for Trigorin)

"I wear black on the outside 'cause black is how I feel on the inside" = "Why do you always wear black? / I'm in mourning for my life." (first lines, Medvedenko & Masha)

"And if I seem a little strange, well, that's because I am" (possibly) = "I really liked your play, Konstantin Gavrilovich. Oh, it's a little strange, and I didn't hear the end, but even so it made a deep impression on me." (Dr. Dorn to Konstantin. This one is more of a stretch than the other two, but credit to my friend Alan C. for suggesting it!)

And it is well-known that Morrissey quotes from plays in some of his other songs -- I don't envy anyone who gets cast in A Taste of Honey these days, now that so many of its lines are more familiar as Smiths lyrics.

C'mon. I googled "the smiths unloveable seagull" and nothing like this post came up, but I can't be the only sensitive soul who appreciates both 1890s Russian drama and 1980s jangle pop and is equipped to notice this lyrical connection...

We'll Serve Anyone (Meaning Anyone) At All

I was rereading Macbeth this weekend and realized that the conceit of the Porter's first speech is basically the same as that of "A Little Priest" from Sweeney Todd -- making grimly satirical jokes about various British professions, that is, though in a context of damnation rather than cannibalism.

The House of Mitford and the House of Black

As I mentioned, when I was up in Oregon last month, I holed up for several days at the Sylvia Beach Hotel. For my first four nights, I stayed in the Virginia Woolf room, which had a kind of French Provincial décor modeled after Woolf's country house, and on my last night I moved to the J. K. Rowling room. I worried that this room might feel too cartoonish and juvenile, but I actually LOVED it: it had a cozy canopy bed with red satin curtains, a beautiful antique drop-front desk, and plenty of memorabilia to make you feel like you're in Gryffindor Tower. I quickly got into the spirit of things, saying "Hello, Hedwig" to the plush snowy owl in its cage, and waving Hermione Granger's wand around while saying "Expecto Patronum!"

I also started re-reading Book 7 of Harry Potter, which I hadn't read since it came out. (Here's my post from August 2007 about my history with the Harry Potter series and my first impressions of Book 7.) At the same time, I was re-reading Hons and Rebels, Jessica Mitford's autobiography. (I first read it in May 2008.) I'd brought it to the coast with me because I sensed that on my Reading/Writing/Thinking retreat, it might be inspiring to read about a courageous, funny, rebellious woman. I also liked the connection that Jessica Mitford is J.K. Rowling's personal heroine (she named her first daughter "Jessica" in her honor).

Indeed, as I simultaneously re-read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and Hons and Rebels, I spotted a detail in Rowling's book that I'm convinced was drawn from Mitford's. In the prologue to Hons and Rebels, Mitford writes, memorably, "In the windows [of my mother's house], still to be seen, are swastikas carved into the glass with a diamond ring, and for every swastika a carefully delineated hammer and sickle. They were put there by my sister Unity and myself when we were children." Later, she describes the room that she and Unity shared -- divided exactly down the middle, one half of it filled with Unity's Fascist memorabilia and literature, and the other half with Jessica's Communist stuff.

I couldn't help thinking of this when I got to Chapter 10 of Deathly Hallows, which describes the teenage bedrooms of Sirius Black and his brother Regulus at Grimmauld Place: "Sirius seemed to have gone out of his way to annoy his parents. There were several large Gryffindor banners, faded scarlet and gold, just to underline his difference from all the rest of the Slytherin family. There were many pictures of Muggle motorcycles, and also (Harry had to admire Sirius's nerve) several posters of bikini-clad Muggle girls." Meanwhile, "[though] Sirius had sought to advertise his difference from the rest of the family, Regulus had striven to emphasize the opposite. The Slytherin colors of emerald and silver were everywhere, draping the bed, the walls, and the windows. The Black family crest was painstakingly painted over the bed, along with its motto, Toujours Pur."

I need hardly point out that there's a connection between the Toujours Pur motto, Voldemort's ideas of magical blood purity, and Nazi racial ideology; nor that Gryffindor's colors, like Soviet Russia's, are scarlet and gold. In the scheme of the novel, Sirius Black basically is Jessica Mitford, and his cousins Bellatrix and Narcissa are basically Unity and Diana Mitford. (Bellatrix and Unity = mentally unstable, with a twisted, unrequited love for the Big Villain; Narcissa and Diana = beautiful cool blondes, married to the Big Villain's loyal lieutenant.)

It seems so obvious now, but I wouldn't have noticed it if I hadn't been re-reading Mitford and Rowling's books simultaneously -- in a canopy bed in a simulacrum of Gryffindor Tower.

Moved to Tears @ San Francisco Theater Pub Blog

My latest Theater Pub column is about the works of art that make me cry -- something I don't think we talk about enough, in an era that is skeptical of raw emotion. Click over there and read my piece to learn why I made sure to bring a hankie to the performance of Candide I saw last week and how seeing The King and I at the age of 5 utterly ruined me.

(My friend/editor Stuart noted "I think you're the only non-Asian person I know who was traumatized by The King and I... and most of them were traumatized for very different reasons.")

I've also convinced myself that Howard Ashman and Alan Menken must've modeled elements of Beauty and the Beast, especially the ballroom dancing scene, after The King and I -- they were no dummies and, as we all know, "good artists borrow, great artists steal."

In my column, I also mention seeing Rabbit Hole at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival when I was in college -- which happened to be the subject of one of my very first blog posts. Crazy to realize that that was almost 8 years ago (also crazy that I haven't been back to Ashland since then, but that's a topic for another day).

Miss Fisher and Miss Crewe

In my most recent Theater Pub column, I wrote about some of the non-theater things that kept me sane/happy/entertained in January: the f.lux app, trying new hairdos, cleaning my room, and watching Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries on Netflix.

I saw some enjoyable theater, too: Indian Ink at ACT is a good play in a lovely production. Though Arcadia will always be my all-time favorite Stoppard, this one is still smart and entertaining and well worth your time.

Brenda Meaney as Flora Crewe, in ACT's production of Indian Ink. Photo by Kevin Berne.

And I got to thinking about how Flora Crewe, the heroine of Indian Ink, and Phryne Fisher, the title character of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, feel like variations on an archetype: confident, independent-minded, adventurous women of the between-the-wars period. They pursue careers that aren't quite "respectable" (Flora is a poet, Phryne a private detective), but which still allow them to dress glamorously and mingle with interesting people. Flora gets denigrated as an empty-headed "flapper poet" and Phryne gets patronized as a meddlesome amateur, but they do their best to shake off such criticisms and go on with being their awesome selves. They are single but have many lovers; they are not ashamed of their sexuality. They are very fond of stylish automobiles.

Their biographical details are similar too. Indian Ink gives Flora's birth year as 1895; she is 35 when the play takes place in 1930. The Miss Fisher show takes place in 1928 Melbourne, at which time Phryne seems to be in her mid-to-late 30s. (Per Wikipedia, Phryne's birth year is 1900, so she's 28 when we meet her, but maybe that's just for the novels the TV show is based on -- actress Essie Davis is great and looks younger than her real age, but I don't think she can pass for 28.) They both have a beloved younger sister, though Phryne's sister was murdered in childhood while Flora's sister is alive and well. After spending childhood and adolescence in an English-speaking country (England/Australia), they run off to France during World War I and join an ambulance unit. They both remain in France for a bit after the war ends, too, living the bohemian life in Paris and working as artists' models.

Essie Davis as Phryne Fisher.

Here's where the parallels get really crazy. In Paris, Flora poses nude for Modigliani and when the painting is later exhibited, it infuriates her fiancé so much that he buys it and burns it in a bathtub at the Ritz. Phryne poses nude for a fictitious artist, Pierre Sarcelle, which infuriates her lover so much that he resorts to murder to get his hands on the painting. Okay, I can understand how this is a trope (jealous sexist man commits violence when he learns his girlfriend has posed nude for someone else), but it was very odd to see Indian Ink and the Miss Fisher episode about the nude painting less than a week apart, and to note all of these similarities in terms of character, era, etc.

Are both Flora Crewe and Phryne Fisher based on a real-life woman that I should know about? Is there some well-known story about a young Anglo woman who drove an ambulance in France during World War I, then posed for a nude painting that was later at the center of some scandal?

And, to compound the hall-of-mirrors effect, I first became aware of the Miss Fisher actress Essie Davis when I saw her star in a different Tom Stoppard play, Jumpers, on Broadway in 2004. (Her character had a nude scene in that one, too. Stoppard has a reputation as a super-cerebral playwright but there's enough female nudity written into his scripts -- Jumpers, Indian Ink, Coast of Utopia -- that it seems he also has quite an eye for the ladies.)

At any rate, I have two new fictional heroines to inspire me with their independence, courage, and flair.

The Obscure Sorrow of Turning 26

"I'm thirty," I said. "I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor."
—Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby

I turned 26 last month. This, I'd thought, was not a particularly remarkable birthday to celebrate—turning 25, a quarter century, is what gets all of the hoopla. Yet in recent weeks, I've seen several references to the idea that one's twenty-sixth birthday marks the end of foolish youthful hedonism.

There's this humor piece on The Hairpin, "Thank You So Much For Being With Me to Celebrate My Twenty-Five-and-Twelve-Month Birthday," by Julia Meltzer:

As a twenty-five-and-twelve-month-old, it is completely appropriate that I spend Saturday nights locked in my apartment with the five of you and two boxes of Franzia playing Settlers of Catan, Drinking Rules Edition. Max and Joe, I still think that longest road trade was sketchy! No but seriously, when I turn twenty-six that will all be over. I will start going to casual dinners at sophisticated restaurants with friends I haven’t seen in soooooo long, having One or Two Cocktails, and heading home to watch an independent film with my serious boyfriend before knocking off a quick journal entry and falling asleep in a haze of contentment. 

(As many 26-year-olds do, I alternate between the "watching indie films with my serious boyfriend" phase of my life and the "drunken Settlers of Catan" phase. Nonetheless, I relate to what Meltzer is saying about the gap between our real lives and our ideal lives. It's one of my favorite subjects.)

Then there's this, from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:

Midsummer, n. A feast celebrated on the day of your 26th birthday, which marks the point at which your youth finally expires as a valid excuse—when you must begin harvesting your crops, even if they’ve barely taken root—and the point at which the days will begin to feel shorter as they pass, until even the pollen in the air reminds you of the coming snow.

(Are you familiar with The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows? I only just discovered it, but it is the best. It puts words to all the secret aches and regrets and doubts that characterize life as a sensitive soul in the 21st century, yet so often go unacknowledged. The kinds of delicate, poignant, but universal emotions that I want to write plays about.)

Maybe this is just confirmation bias, turning 26 and then suddenly becoming more aware of/interested in other writers who talk about this.

Or maybe it's that I was born into a huge cohort of Internet-equipped, navel-gazing youths, all full of So Many Feelings, all convinced that we're the first people ever to feel this way, and compelled to share our uneasy angst with the world. We're attending our five-year college reunions, and listening to the new Vampire Weekend album, and watching things like Frances Ha and Girls that speak to the anxieties of our generation; and we link to Buzzfeed articles about "growing up in the '90s" and wallow in nostalgia for a childhood that suddenly feels so far away; and I'm amazed that we don't all melt into one quivering blob of jelly, overwhelmed by the weight of all these obscure sorrows.

(Nota bene: I originally typed "quivering blog of jelly." A Freudian slip.)

And when the more practical voice in your head speaks up to tell you that nostalgia is a foolish waste of time, that your life is actually going pretty well, that you have no reason to castigate yourself for being an "irresponsible youth" because you're a type-A perfectionist who's had maybe two hours of true irresponsibility in your entire life... well, it can be tempting to wish that that voice would just shut up, even though it speaks the truth. Angst and nostalgia are so seductive, and it seems like it'd be so beautiful to stand with everyone else, in confusion and misery, and feel All the Feelings.

As a matter of fact, today is my five-year anniversary of moving to San Francisco. I love it here, and I also realize that during these five years I have matured, ridding myself of many of the self-delusions and false beliefs that held me back, and generally becoming a much happier, better-adjusted person. I'm more outgoing and confident; I have a better understanding of others' motivations, as well as my own. In many respects, I feel like I lead a charmed life (for which I try to cultivate gratitude). This anniversary should be cause for a (responsible) celebration! Yet my joy is tempered with a sense of "Okay, Marissa, you've had five years as an aimless flâneur; now it's time to get down to business, figure out what you want out of life, purge yourself of everything extraneous, and for God's sake, start saving for retirement! You are going to need to push yourself a lot more in the next five years in order to accomplish everything you want to do in your twenties."

In the first blog post I ever wrote after moving here, I quoted Angels in America: "Heaven is a city Much Like San Francisco."

And now, five years on, I'm saying to myself, "The Great Work begins."

And here's another question: now that I am 26, am I too old to refer to myself as a girl? My blog header calls me "a girl with an answer for some things and a question for most things," and in my Twitter bio I'm a "would-be girl-about-town," but at what point does that word start to become ridiculous when applied to a grown, adult woman?

"The Chapter In Your Life Entitled San Francisco" - there's more to the story!

On Saturday night, I was at a small party hosted by a friend of a friend, in an apartment north of the Panhandle. A framed book cover, hanging on one of the kitchen walls, caught my attention, and I went over to investigate it.

The cover was plain but elegant: light blue, with a cream-colored rectangle containing the book's title, written in a fine italic script: The Chapter In Your Life Entitled San Francisco.

All at once, I started freaking out. The good kind of freaking out, that is. Because, last spring, I fell head-over-heels for a song called "The Chapter In Your Life Entitled San Francisco," by the Lucksmiths, a band from Melbourne. For a long time last year, they were my new favorite band and "The Chapter In Your Life" was my new favorite song. I couldn't believe I'd never heard it before. I wanted to tell everyone I knew (particularly all of my San Francisco friends) to drop everything and listen to it ASAP. In short, I am probably one of the few people in the United States who is an evangelist for this song, so it felt like some kind of gorgeous serendipity to stumble upon that framed book cover in that apartment kitchen.

The owners of the apartment had no idea that there was a song called "The Chapter In Your Life Entitled San Francisco," so I made them find it and watch it on YouTube as I sang the excellent lyrics under my breath. "Are you ever coming clean? / Or will I never know the meaning of the lines you scribbled out / So that I couldn't read between?" Brilliant stuff.

They also took down the picture frame and opened it up, to show me the Chapter In Your Life Entitled San Francisco book. It's a slim guide to the city and its sights, dating from the late 1940s. You can get a copy on Amazon. I didn't get to look at it for very long, but it's probably fascinating — I love vintage travel guides! The woman who lives in the apartment told me that some New York friends had given the book to her when she moved to San Francisco.

Knowing that the Lucksmiths stole the title of their song from an old book doesn't diminish my appreciation of their music. In fact, I enjoy learning where artists get their ideas. And because you really can't ever have too much Lucksmiths, here's the video again:

"Bernadette" and False Endings

Oddly enough, I'm reading two novels in a row that mention/discuss the song "Bernadette," by the Four Tops.

From A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (this is in the infamous PowerPoint chapter, so I can quote the text but not the formatting):

Right now, [Lincoln's] obsessed with rock songs that have pauses in them.
Songs with Lincoln's Comments:
"Bernadette," by the Four Tops: "This is an excellent early pause. The voice tapers off, and then you've still got 1.5 seconds of total silence, from 2:38 to 2:395, before the chorus kicks back in. You think, Hey, the song didn't end after all—but then, 26.5 seconds later, it does end."

From Anthropology of an American Girl by Hilary Thayer Hamann:

The jukebox finished a song, then whirred to a new start. It was the Four Tops.

Bernadette. People are searching for—
the kind of love that we possessed. 
Some go on searchin' their whole life through
And never find the love I've found in you.

"Do you know the lead singer's name?"

"Levi Stubbs," Mark said matter-of-factly.

I reached for his sleeve. "Listen," I said, adding his name, "Mark. I love this part. The false ending. The way he screams her name. Bern—a—dette."

I sighed. "I'll never be loved like that."

He shook his drink, looking into it. "I doubt that."

I couldn't recall ever hearing "Bernadette" and had no idea that it was so widely known for its false ending/mid-song pause.  So I looked it up. Here it is for your listening pleasure:



The trouble with listening to songs on YouTube or an iPod is the little bar that indicates how long the song is and how much more of it remains, meaning that the false ending can't surprise you the way it could on the radio or an LP record. False endings and hidden tracks are becoming a thing of the past. Music is more convenient than ever (I mean, how nice that I could look this up on YouTube instantaneously!) and yet less able to surprise us.

Then again, when you read a book, you always know exactly where you are in it and how many pages remain, and that doesn't ruin your enjoyment of it. Why should it be any different when you know exactly how many seconds remain until the end of a song?

And now this is making me think of the "Aria with Diverse Variations" dialogue in Gödel Escher Bach where the Tortoise and Achilles discuss exactly this problem.

Tortoise: You've undoubtedly noticed how some authors go to so much trouble to build up great tension a few pages before the end of their stories--but a reader who is holding the book physically in his hands can FEEL that the story is about to end. Hence, he has some extra information which acts as an advance warning, in a way. The tension is a bit spoiled by the physicality of the book. It would be so much better if, for instance, there were a lot of padding at the end of novels.

Achilles: Padding?

Tortoise: Yes; what I mean is, a lot of extra printed pages which are not part of the story proper, but which serve to conceal the exact location of the end from a cursory glance, or from the feel of the book.

Achilles: I see. So a story's true ending might occur, say, fifty or a hundred pages before the physical end of the book?

Tortoise: Yes. This would provide an element of surprise, because the reader wouldn't know in advance how many pages are padding, and how many are story.

(And then, because this is Gödel Escher Bach, it all gets very meta.)

I don't have a Kindle, so I'm curious to know: on an e-reader, do you know exactly how much of the text you have remaining, or is it left mysterious? Wouldn't it be funny if the iPod caused this problem for music (of always knowing how long the work of art is) but the Nook or the Kindle eliminated this problem for books?

David Foster Wallace, Romantic Hero

From NYMag.com, 7/20/11:

There's a David Foster Wallace character in Jeffrey Eugenides' new novel. Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot, his long-awaited follow-up to 2002's Middlesex, arrives in bookstores in October [...] The protagonist, Madeleine Hanna, is a graduating senior at Brown who loves nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels and her scientist boyfriend, Leonard Bankhead. She is loved in return by the religiously minded Mitchell Grammaticus. Grammaticus shares some qualities with the author himself. Like Eugenides, Mitchell's a smarty-pants of Greek descent who attended Brown and grew up in Detroit [...] But the Bankhead character is more recognizable still, as David Foster Wallace. Leonard Bankhead is a philosophy double major who chews tobacco, wears a bandanna, disdains ironic detachment, and has a history of mental illness that has led to multiple hospitalizations — just like David Foster Wallace. [...] Certainly, Leonard is distinct from DFW in a number of ways as well — the particularities of his family situation, his being a total stud, that he's a manic-depressive, not just a depressive, that he's not a writer, and all the vagaries of the plot — but the similarities are so iconically David Foster Wallace (a bandanna and chew are not common accoutrements) that Eugenides, who did not have a well-known or documented friendship with Foster Wallace, must intentionally be calling him to mind.

Well, isn't this what I said when an excerpt of The Marriage Plot appeared in The New Yorker a year ago? ("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?") Score one for me!

Eugenides' novel will add to the Wallace mystique, and I'm not sure how I feel about that. Last month I was talking with a friend about David Foster Wallace and his lasting influence on our generation (the Millennials), even intruding into Millennial mating rituals. That is, my friend and I have both had memorable experiences involving cute boys and David Foster Wallace (cute boys telling us to read DFW, us telling other cute boys to read DFW, becoming closer to a romantic partner by reading DFW with him, etc). And we feel that other women like us have had similar experiences, that this is becoming a "thing" or even a cliché. Prediction: Within the next five years, there will be an indie romantic comedy that features a scene of characters reading Wallace.

On the surface of it, there's no reason why David Foster Wallace should become associated with young lovers. (This is not Goethe and The Sorrows of Young Werther.) In his New Yorker essay on Wallace, Jonathan Franzen pointed out "the near-perfect absence, in [Wallace]'s fiction, of ordinary love. Close loving relationships, which for most of us are a foundational source of meaning, have no standing in the Wallace fictional universe. [...] David's fiction is populated with dissemblers and manipulators and emotional isolates." Yet Franzen goes on to say, "The curious thing about David's fiction [...] is how recognized and comforted, how loved, his most devoted readers feel when reading it. [...] This very cataloguing of despair about his own authentic goodness is received by the reader as a gift of authentic goodness: we feel the love in the fact of his art, and we love him for it."

And thus it does make sense that we Millennials, in love or hoping to be, would make Wallace a part of our romances. In sharing our love for Wallace with a potential lover, we signal what kind of person we are: "I love David Foster Wallace" has become shorthand for "I am impressively smart, but also achingly vulnerable, deeply caring, and worth getting to know, despite the difficulty." Plus, reading Wallace and finding an understanding boyfriend or girlfriend have the same end result -- of making us feel less alone in the world. So Wallace and romance and our sense of self all get mixed up together.

And then, maybe the logical next step is for David Foster Wallace himself to be depicted as a young lover and a romantic hero -- as he is, it seems, in Eugenides' novel.

Well, it might have taken Jeffrey Eugenides to make Wallace a small-r romantic hero, but society already treats him like a capital-R Romantic hero. That is, every generation needs someone whose life plays into the Romantic myth of the artist as a tormented individual who sees more clearly than his fellow man, but suffers greatly for it. David Foster Wallace has become that figure for my generation. The myth goes, "Wallace understood and wrote about The Modern Condition better than anyone else, and because he perceived the truth too profoundly, he was doomed to die. He stared into the sun and went blind from what he saw."

Adding to Wallace's mystique and myth are his notable eccentricities -- not just his stylistic quirks as a writer, but external stuff like the bandannas and the chewing tobacco. (After all, it was the mere mention of chewing tobacco in Eugenides' story that got me wondering, "Was this character based on Wallace?") And so I'm beginning to wonder if there will come a time when Wallace's mythos will overshadow his actual work.

Last week I was considering Ernest Hemingway -- another American author with a highly recognizable prose style and several personal eccentricities, who died by his own hand -- and the way that Hemingway's persona now overshadows his work. Hemingway is no longer A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises, he is Bullfights-Mojitos-Safaris-Masculinity-Monosyllables. Will there come a time when David Foster Wallace is no longer Infinite Jest and Consider the Lobster, but merely Bandannas-Tobacco-Tennis-Depression-Footnotes? And does making him into a romantic hero and a Romantic hero just hasten the onset of that?

"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.

Playwriting is Lasagna

"[Tony Kushner] has compared the [playwriting] process to making a proper lasagne: 'All the yummy nutritious ingredients you’ve thrown into it have almost-but-not-quite succeeded in overwhelming the design. A play should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been.'"

--"The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide To Himself," New York magazine

"If I think I'm going to do research for a particular play, my inner child rebels and I won't do it. So I do research by constantly reading things that excite and interest me and I don't know yet if it's going to be a play. [...] I just kept sort of laying in all this reading because of being excited and not knowing for sure a play would come out of it. But then I realized I was getting close ... It's like making lasagna. One book is the noodles and a couple of movies are the sauce... And then one day, suddenly, I know it's the moment to put it in the oven and start writing."

--Liz Duffy Adams, quoted in the Magic Theatre's playbill for Or,

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...

Zeitgeist-y!

My friend M.R. Fall, who directed one of the Pint-Sized Plays at San Francisco Theater Pub, just sent me this link:

Why Can't a Pregnant Woman Have a Drink? by Margaret Hartmann, Jezebel.com

"Many medical experts say it's OK for pregnant woman to have one or two glasses of wine a week, and drinking while pregnant is common in Europe. So why is moderate drinking during pregnancy still taboo in America?"

If the article and the related issues pique your interest, you have one more chance to see my play about a pregnant woman who really wants a beer: next Monday, August 30, at Theater Pub.

I think it's interesting that the article, and many of the commenters, say that drinking during pregnancy might be OK if it is "an occasional glass of wine." Wine is sophisticated; wine is decorous. Beer, on the other hand... Well, that still has the power to shock.

Seneca = The Roman Tarantino

After Medea vs. Medea a few weeks ago, I was chatting with one of the actors. Like me, he definitely preferred Euripides' version to Seneca's.

I said, "I got the feeling that Seneca was less concerned with moving the action forward, and more with writing speeches that made allusions to all of these other myths, so that he could show off how smart he was."

"Yeah, he was basically the Quentin Tarantino of Ancient Rome," said my friend. "Sorry, I don't like Tarantino."

"Oh, I don't know, I really enjoyed Inglourious Basterds," I said. My friend hadn't seen it, but maybe he should check it out. It seems that what he objects to is Tarantino's random riffs about pop-culture oddities, but Tarantino naturally had to tone that down for Basterds, because it takes place in the '40s. (And I thought that the riff on King Kong was brilliant!)

But anyway, my friend's comparison of Seneca and Tarantino was especially apt because not only are they both known for elaborate, rhetorical, allusion-filled dialogue... they are also really fond of outrageous bloody violence. In Euripides' play (as is typical of Greek tragedy) Medea kills her children offstage, but in Seneca's, she does it right in front of the audience. Seneca, not the Greek playwrights, was the inspiration for Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedy. And after Cutting Ball's staged reading of the Jacobean revenge tragedy Women Beware Women, in the finale of which nearly every character dies in a bizarrely violent way, the post-show discussion compared it to...Quentin Tarantino! It's like there's a direct through-line from the ancient Roman dramatist to the Italian-American auteur.

I always used to have trouble remembering why I should care about Seneca or what his stylistic hallmarks were, but now that I know to think of him as "the Roman Tarantino," I won't forget!

"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.

Cinema's New Favorite Plot Twist

SPOILERS ahead for the movie Fish Tank, as well as two other movies that I probably shouldn't even name in this paragraph, because just reading their titles might alert you to the spoiler/plot twist that I am alluding to, and then if you haven't seen Fish Tank, its plot will be ruined for you. Suffice it to say that the other two movies got some of the best reviews of 2009 and will probably both be nominated for Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars...

*****

Are you still with me, after that convoluted spoiler warning?

OK, here's what I want to talk about. In the last three months, I have seen three new movies that all employ the same plot twist: An Education, Up in the Air, and Fish Tank.

To spell it out: the twist is that the protagonist's lover turns out to be leading a double life--he or she is secretly married, and a parent. Furthermore, each of the movies reveals this twist at about the same time (approx. 3/4 of the way through) and includes a powerful scene where the protagonist visits his/her lover's home and meets his/her secret family.

An Education: 17-year-old Jenny is engaged to the much older David, when she discovers some incriminating letters that reveal that he is married. A heartbroken Jenny later visits his house (which is not too far from her own), trying to get a glimpse of his wife and child.

Up in the Air: Frequent-flyers Ryan and Alex have been hooking up whenever they manage to be in the same city. Ryan finally realizes that he loves Alex and pays a surprise visit to her brownstone in Chicago, only to see her children running around and hear her husband's voice.

Fish Tank: 15-year-old Mia has really ill-advised drunken sex with her mom's boyfriend Connor one night; the next morning, he has fled. Mia tracks Connor down at his house in the suburbs, discovers that he has a wife and daughter, and tries to get revenge.

Because of their similar plots and their teenage British heroines, some reviews of Fish Tank have called it the lower-class, social-realist version of An Education. But I'm surprised that nobody is talking about how An Education and Up in the Air share the same plot twist--even though they are both fairly prominent contenders for awards this season! And, though Up in the Air is a polished Hollywood dramedy and Fish Tank is a gritty British indie film, they reveal the plot twist in the same way. Both have a moment where the audience goes "oh no!" as we see Alex's or Connor's dwelling for the first time, and realize it's much bigger/nicer/more expensive than we expected. We know that single businesswomen don't tend to own big townhouses and single blue-collar guys don't tend to live on suburban cul-de-sacs... so this can only mean that these people aren't single!

I'd like to believe that when three movies that share the same plot twist come out within three months of each other, it says something about the culture at large--our collective fears or anxieties. So, does it mean anything special that 2009 brought three movies where the protagonist's lover is secretly married? Are we all suddenly worried that our loved ones are duplicitous?

I'm also trying to recall older movies that employ this same twist, but off the top of my head, I can't think of any.* If you've thought of some, please post them in the comments!

Maybe it's hard to think of similar movies, though, because there is something very "un-Hollywood" about this plot twist. For 100 years, mainstream cinema has beguiled us with stories of ideal romances between lovers who are just too good to be true. But the moral of the "my lover is secretly married" plot is that if someone seems too good to be true, they probably are. Jenny, Ryan, and Mia lose their illusions by the end of their respective movies. And that's more realistic, but also more downbeat, than the message that movies usually deliver.



*Well, there's a secretly married character in Casablanca: when I watched it last month with a friend who had never seen it, she gasped when Ilsa told Rick, "Victor is my husband, and was, even when I knew you in Paris"! Still, Ilsa's marriage is different; unlike David, Alex, or Connor, Ilsa does not come across as scheming and deceitful.

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!

Madness & Absurdity

MARY: Elizabeth and Donald are too over the moon to hear me, so I can let you in on a secret. Elizabeth is not Elizabeth and Donald is not Donald. [...] In spite of the extraordinary coincidences which seem rock solid, Donald and Elizabeth, not being parents of the same child, are not Donald and Elizabeth. He can fancy he's Donald; she can fancy she's Elizabeth. He can fancy she's Elizabeth and she can fancy he's Donald, but both are sadly deluded. Then who is the real Donald, you ask? And who is the real Elizabeth? It beats me. I say we drop this whole affair and leave things as they are.

--Mary's monologue from The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco (trans. Tina Howe)

Photo: Mad Men, season 3. Donald "Don" Draper fancies he's Donald and his wife is Elizabeth; Elizabeth "Betty" Draper fancies she's Elizabeth and her husband is Donald; both are sadly deluded.

"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.

Coco and Catherine

Last week I went to see Coco Before Chanel. It didn't get fantastic reviews, but I was having one of those days where I just needed to hear French spoken and see pretty dresses, and on those counts, it satisfied. While a less ambitious movie than La Vie En Rose (the last biopic I saw about a Great French Woman) it was also less frustrating--I think biographical movies work better when they focus on a short period of the person's life, rather than going birth-to-death.

And there is one moment that is truly great cinema. You almost don't need the rest of the movie; this one shot says it all. Coco goes dancing at a seaside casino, where all of the other women are dressed in Edwardian finery: white and ivory fabrics, S-bend corsets, lots of lace and ruffles and delicate little details. Coco has been complaining about this style of dress for the whole movie, even though, to our modern eyes, it has its charm: the dresses are luxurious and beautifully made, and it pleases the eye to see a whole roomful of women dressed in similar fashions, waltzing with tuxedoed swains. But as the camera zooms in on Coco, the problem with all the other women's clothes suddenly becomes clear. It's not that they are ugly, it's that they are hopelessly old-fashioned. For Coco is wearing the simplest little black evening gown, sleeveless and slender, and she puts the others to shame. And you could wear this dress to a party in 2009 and still be the chicest woman in the room--long after the other women's dresses have been relegated to Halloween and masquerades.

The movie shows that Chanel's main innovation was to take inspiration from men's clothing: tweed trousers and fisherman jerseys and a flat black straw hat (the item that brings her her first success, but I thought it looked shabby and awkward). Thinking about this afterward, I was reminded of another French movie heroine: Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) in Jules and Jim. The two movies take place in the same time period, and they share the theme of a young woman frustrated with the limitations her society places on her, and torn between two men. Coco, of course, manages to become self-actualized; Catherine only self-destructs.

But it was the similar fashions that made me connect these two characters, and wonder if the costume designer of Jules and Jim had taken inspiration from early Chanel designs when creating Catherine's wardrobe.

Both Coco and Catherine favor loose, non-constricting clothing to match their free-spirited personalities (Catherine may be a femme fatale, but she doesn't dress like one). They are both fond of a classic striped jersey...



...or a nice plaid...



...and of course, they both dress up in men's clothes, enjoying the freedom they are otherwise denied.



I wonder how the young Jeanne Moreau would have been in the role of Coco Chanel? My French friend, Sophie, said she's avoiding Coco Before Chanel because she thinks Audrey Tautou is absolutely the wrong actress for the role. She says I should look out for another Chanel movie that is being released soon, called Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, starring Anna Mouglalis. I am not familiar with Mouglalis' work, but Sophie assures me that she's virtually a Chanel look-alike and will do an excellent job.