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.)

New Links and Mentions for the New Year

Out with the old, in with the new! A fine motto, but I still have a lot of end-of-2013 business to catch up on. (In general, I want to be better about blogging relevant links, rather than just posting them on Twitter or Facebook, since a blog is a less ephemeral, more easily searchable medium... Ten years ago, who ever thought there'd come a day when blogs would seem like islands of permanence and stability in a sea of online ephemera?)

Anyway, here are a few links to some recent posts from friends and acquaintances in the San Francisco theater community that I wanted to preserve:

• At the end of his massive end-of-2013 post, my friend Charles Lewis III published his list of favorite quotes of the year – I'm proud to say that I'm the only person who had two of her quotes make Charles' list!
• For the Theater Pub blog, Charles also wrote up a piece about the Pub's spinoff endeavor "Saturday Write Fever," a celebration of writing, acting, and randomly sparked creativity. I get a brief name-check in this article.
• After the 19 ATLAS participants completed Theater Bay Area's series of professional-development workshops for playwrights, Ignacio Zulueta interviewed me and several other participants about our experience. His article is now up on the TBA site.
• Again from the Theater Pub blog: Allison Page writes up a great piece encouraging playwrights to "produce it yo own self." I swear, it's like she's reading my mind (or maybe it's just that she and I had a conversation about this very issue in December). It's also worth reading the Storify of HowlRound's recent Twitter conversation on self-producing, if Allison's piece has inspired you to try it out.

How to Be a Minor Jane Austen Heroine

"All were contented to pass quietly and carefully down the steep flight, excepting Louisa; she must be jumped down them by Captain Wentworth. In all their walks, he had had to jump her from the stiles; the sensation was delightful to her. The hardness of the pavement for her feet, made him less willing upon the present occasion; he did it, however. She was safely down, and instantly, to show her enjoyment, ran up the steps to be jumped down again. He advised her against it, thought the jar too great; but no, he reasoned and talked in vain, she smiled and said, "I am determined I will": he put out his hands; she was too precipitate by half a second, she fell on the pavement on the Lower Cobb."

—Jane Austen, Persuasion, ch. 12

This is by way of saying that yesterday, as I was jumping around on a concrete barrier at the beach at Pacifica, I slipped and fell and banged up my leg pretty bad. As I lay on the sofa with an ice pack on my swelling leg, I tried to make the best of it by thinking of myself as a 21st-century Austen character — because it was all very much like the scene where Louisa Musgrove slips and falls while jumping around on the seawall at Lyme Regis.

If only I'd had some Jane Austen bandages at my disposal, huh? (I saw these in a gift shop when I was in Oregon over Christmas.)

So, this clearly shows that I'm someone who thinks too much about literary heroines and how I may or may not resemble them. That's why I'm eager to read the new book by my friend Samantha Ellis, How to Be a Heroine, which was published in the U.K. today! (Will it find a U.S. publisher or should I just order it from Amazon.uk, I wonder?) It's billed as "a funny, touching, inspiring exploration of the role of heroines, and our favourite books, in all our lives – and how they change over time, for better or worse, just as we do." In other words, it sounds like the kind of friendly, feminist, literary-nerd book that I've always wanted to read. Congratulations, Sam!

Sam's publisher has also put out a "which literary heroine are you?" quiz to promote the book; according to it, I'm Anne of Green Gables.

Bonus link to one of my blog posts from 2007: Am I a Jane Austen Heroine? 

"Shake 'Em Up": High-Spirited Civil Disobedience

I decided recently (prompted by a viewing of The Palm Beach Story on TCM) that my goal in life is to be one-half of the madcap couple in a screwball comedy. For Christmas, my parents gave me a book that might help me achieve that: a genuine Prohibition-era cocktail-party guide.

(And of course, it was the perfect book to read on New Year's Eve. Happy New Year to all!)

Shake 'Em Up!: A Practical Handbook of Polite Drinking by Virginia Elliott

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


"Shake 'Em Up" is a book of cocktail recipes, party-giving tips, and hangover remedies, first published in the United States in 1930 -- when Prohibition was still the law of the land. Authors Virginia Elliott and Phil Stong even advise on what mixture of herbal extracts will give your bathtub gin the most authentic flavor, which got them in trouble with the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Truth be told, a lot of this book consists of recipes for cocktails and canapes that probably won't appeal to a modern palate, which is why I'm only giving it 3 stars. The recipe for a "dry" martini would be considered outrageously "wet" these days (two parts gin to one part vermouth), and the appetizers are mostly variations on "slice white bread, butter it, and put something salty-fatty-savory on top."

Still, there's enough historical interest and insouciant 1930s wit to make this slim book worthwhile. For instance, to introduce their section on drinks for cocktail novices, the authors write "Tender young things, who have just been taken off stick candy, prefer complicated pink and creamy drinks which satisfy their beastly appetite for sweets and at the same time offer an agreeable sense of sinfulness. If you have any creme de menthe or creme de cocoa about the house, make them up some kind of a mess of it and push them under the piano to suck on it."

Civil disobedience has rarely been so cheerful or such good fun.

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Macbeth is a Middle-Aged White Guy @ SF Theater Pub Blog

Over at the San Francisco Theater Pub blog I lay out my theory of why Macbeth gets produced so much more frequently than the other "great" Shakespearean tragedies: because Macbeth is a middle-aged white guy. It's a simple explanation, but not necessarily an obvious one. (I haven't heard anyone make this argument before, and was pretty pleased when I came up with it.) Agree? Disagree? Go over to the Theater Pub blog and tell me about it in the comments.

Bonus links:
My 2008 review of Patrick Stewart's Macbeth
A post from 2007 in which I discuss the three productions of Macbeth I had seen up to that date (Oregon Shakespeare Festival, high school, and college)

"The Last Days of Disco, With Cocktails at Petrossian Afterward" - The Only Movie-Novelization That Matters

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you know that I'm a major Whit Stillman fan. As such, I was thrilled when my friend Stuart (at his own birthday party!) gave me a copy of Stillman's out-of-print novel The Last Days of Disco, with Cocktails at Petrossian Afterward. It was all I could do not to stay up all night reading it. My review:

 The Last Days of Disco, with Cocktails at Petrossian Afterward by Whit Stillman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Whit Stillman is one of America’s great cult filmmakers. In the last 24 years, he has written and directed four indie movies, and published this novel, based on his 1998 film The Last Days of Disco. He’s met with critical acclaim (one Oscar nomination, two films in the Criterion Collection) but has never become widely popular. Several of his films were financial flops*, and the novel is out of print.

Which is really a shame, because it’s a lovely entry in the kinda-pretentious-young-people-coming-of-age-in-the-big-city genre. The setting is Manhattan, circa 1980. The characters work in crappy jobs and live in crappier apartments, but as long as they can dance till dawn at the hottest nightclub in town, everything seems beautiful. They fall in love and break up and overanalyze one another’s motivations and try to figure out the proper way to live in the world as an adult.

Of course one of the major charms of Stillman’s films is his dialogue, and the novel faithfully reproduces classic scenes like the one in which a character argues that Lady and the Tramp “programs women to adore jerks.” But Stillman’s voice shows through even in the more narrative sections. E.g., describing the aftermath of a fight outside the Club: “The cops jumped out, but it was almost all over except for the mercurochrome.” There are also plenty of good moments in the novel that don’t appear in the film – I couldn’t stop laughing when I read the scene where Alice, our modest and virtuous heroine, kicks a dog** while jogging in Central Park.

So you can think of this book as something like the DVD extras or “deleted scenes” from The Last Days of Disco, but I even think it’s good enough to stand on its own. If you didn’t know better, you could almost think that it’s a minor-classic novel that got turned into an indie film, rather than the other way around. I know I said it's a shame this book is out of print, but I also feel like that somehow adds to its mystique. After all, it’s a story about the rare, precious, fleeting moments of one’s young adulthood – so it’s oddly appropriate that this book should be a rare and precious object itself.

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*CORRECTION 12/9/13 (morning): Via Twitter, Whit Stillman (!) writes to say that of his four films, "only Disco was unprofitable."

**CORRECTION 12/9/13 (afternoon): Via Twitter, Palacio Rojo Blog points out that the dog-kicking scene did appear in the movie. Oops! It's been a few years since I saw the film and I didn't recall that moment; perhaps the scene makes a bigger, funnier impact in the novel than in the film. (Stillman tweeted in reply that the dog was "a bad actor.") Oh well, another excuse to rewatch the film.

Turkey Day, Quirky Friends

Mead Hunter posted this whimsical image on my Facebook wall yesterday. Ever since I wore a mini-dress and colorful tights to visit him one day in the mid-2000s, he's been convinced that I am the 21st-century embodiment of Marlo Thomas in That Girl! Hence, this photo of Thomas with a turkey.

"Quirky" is an overused word, but I am thankful to have friends who are both so thoughtful and so quirky.

Brussels sprouts with bacon are currently roasting in my oven, and then I'll be off to an "orphan's Thanksgiving" with some other delightfully offbeat folks.

(Finally having a smartphone means that I am now more likely to document my life in Pinterest-y images such as the above. Credit my roommate for buying the sunflowers, though.)