I read an obituary today in the NY Times for one of my NYU film school professors, Robert Sklar.
The course I took from him was called, I think, Hollywood and Its Alternatives. The idea was we saw Hollywood films side by side with some classics of foreign cinema. I remember Anna Magnani running after the truck after the Nazis have taken away her lover in Rome, Open City. And Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped -- an almost entirely dark movie, filmed in a prison, and yet it made you hold your breath with suspense. On the Hollywood side I remember The Asphalt Jungle and The Big Heat, where Gloria Grahame has hot coffee thrown in her face by Lee Marvin. (I remember The Public Enemy, too -- Professor Sklar really had a thing for gangster films.) Above all I remember how stirred the class was by these films as we discussed them. They might be 50 years old but they were brand new to us. Each film was like a continent, rediscovered after being long-lost, and all our own. And there were those films that were hardly ever shown -- cult movies and potential cult movies -- over which we asserted bragging rights, like birdwatchers listing rare species.
Today you can get Rome, Open City on Netflix or watch the coffee scene from The Big Heat on Youtube. I think that's great, honestly. I count the hours I spent sitting in the Kentucky Theatre watching Ingmar Bergman and Alfred Hitchcock as part of my education. But it was a hard-won education, full of gaps, and anything that makes great movies more easily available is a win for our civilization. But kids today will never know the thrill of making an effort to see a classic movie -- earning it, in a way -- and they will also never see the movies as I saw them -- on an enormous silver screen in black and white that could be satiny smooth or gritty as reality itself.
In tribute, here is Anna's famous run, yes, from Youtube. (I can't seem to get it to embed, so I'm just going to link it.) It's in Italian, but you won't need subtitles.
Friday, July 8, 2011
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Rain
We had a beautiful rain on Sunday. The day was smudgy and hazy, with the white sky we sometimes get when there are nearby wildfires. (There weren't any - none closer than New Mexico.) At 5 o'clock, when I drove out to pick up a pizza for dinner, the cars had their headlights on. After dinner the lamp made a pool of yellow light and we sat reading by it. For half an hour or more we heard long rolls of thunder. The air remained humid, the breeze began to stir, we took the garbage back in. I went outside once or twice and could smell the rain up in the clouds. Finally I looked up from A School for Scandal to see the first big drops falling on the porch. Then it rained and rained and rained. We paid for it the next day, the 4th, when it was humid and sticky, but it was fun while it lasted.
If you ever want to know exactly how dry it is in Las Vegas, I can tell you. When it rains here, they put it on the news. And the news goes crazy. Flooding! Don't go in the washes! Don't drive through running water! Stay indoors because lightning can get you 10 miles away! Look, a palm tree got blown over! The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
I didn't listen to the news. My son and I went out on the porch (some people have sun porches -- we have a rain porch) and watched the drops dance in the street.
I am still on my Free Stuff on Kindle binge. I have overdosed on Victorian fiction, which means I am taking every act and thought very seriously and worthy of a thousand other acts and thoughts. By the way, A School for Scandal would make an excellent YA novel. So would William Makepeace Thackery's fairy-tale The Rose and the Ring. I can't believe no one's ripped it off yet.
If you ever want to know exactly how dry it is in Las Vegas, I can tell you. When it rains here, they put it on the news. And the news goes crazy. Flooding! Don't go in the washes! Don't drive through running water! Stay indoors because lightning can get you 10 miles away! Look, a palm tree got blown over! The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
I didn't listen to the news. My son and I went out on the porch (some people have sun porches -- we have a rain porch) and watched the drops dance in the street.
I am still on my Free Stuff on Kindle binge. I have overdosed on Victorian fiction, which means I am taking every act and thought very seriously and worthy of a thousand other acts and thoughts. By the way, A School for Scandal would make an excellent YA novel. So would William Makepeace Thackery's fairy-tale The Rose and the Ring. I can't believe no one's ripped it off yet.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
The Longest Day of the Year
"Don't you always look for the longest day of the year, and then miss it?" Daisy Buchanan asks in The Great Gatsby.
Daisy never had CNN to remind her.
The garden was gorgeous this morning and we have hummingbirds the way some people have mice.
Monday, June 13, 2011
3rd Person vs. 1st Person
With 3rd person, you're the movie director. You're a master of sleight-of-hand, showing the reader this scene, withholding that bit of information, moving from person to person, building tension, jumping across continents, moving through space and time. You are the Author. You can do anything you like.
1st person, on the other hand -- and I know 9/10ths of YA is written in 1st person -- is messy. You're in the middle of everything, plopped down in your character's mind, wading through the long grass of distraction. You don't know the half of what's going on. Forget the well-tempered sentence: you drown in a sea of "anyway," "sort of," "kind of," and "I mean." You're not sure when to stop and so you keep going on and on, until you're sick of your character and just want out of his/her head.
OK, maybe you can tell I'm just a little bit prejudiced in favor of 3rd person. Frankly, I think that 1st person is (sometimes) a writer's crutch. It lets you do more with less. But before anyone who loves 1st person gets upset, let me just say that I'm willing to look at both sides of the subject:
3rd person is cold. It's remote. You're up in the sky, looking down on the characters. Good luck getting close to them as they wander through their lives while Mr./Ms. Author , who seems to be on a serious ego trip, tells you all about the history of some other place or person.
1st person is focused. It's you, telling your story. It's you living your story. You're witty, intelligent, sarcastic and flirty all at once. Everyone loves you. You have VOICE.
My challenge this time around, since I'm writing first person from two different characters: make them sound different.
1st person, on the other hand -- and I know 9/10ths of YA is written in 1st person -- is messy. You're in the middle of everything, plopped down in your character's mind, wading through the long grass of distraction. You don't know the half of what's going on. Forget the well-tempered sentence: you drown in a sea of "anyway," "sort of," "kind of," and "I mean." You're not sure when to stop and so you keep going on and on, until you're sick of your character and just want out of his/her head.
OK, maybe you can tell I'm just a little bit prejudiced in favor of 3rd person. Frankly, I think that 1st person is (sometimes) a writer's crutch. It lets you do more with less. But before anyone who loves 1st person gets upset, let me just say that I'm willing to look at both sides of the subject:
3rd person is cold. It's remote. You're up in the sky, looking down on the characters. Good luck getting close to them as they wander through their lives while Mr./Ms. Author , who seems to be on a serious ego trip, tells you all about the history of some other place or person.
1st person is focused. It's you, telling your story. It's you living your story. You're witty, intelligent, sarcastic and flirty all at once. Everyone loves you. You have VOICE.
My challenge this time around, since I'm writing first person from two different characters: make them sound different.
Monday, June 6, 2011
That feeling
Forgive this post for self-indulgence. Yesterday, in the middle of the hot-water-heater crisis, I had a semi-mystical experience while watching an earwig. Actually, I don't think the earwig had much to do with it; it was just there on the floor of the garage while I stared, thinking deep thoughts, and somehow got mixed up with them. Although if things work out maybe I'll mention him in the acknowledgements.
The deep thoughts were about my WIP and what came out is that story is going to be in first person instead of third, and told in alternating chapters by two characters. I got "that feeling." You know: the road is open, I can see this, I know exactly how this is going to work. And I could hear Janette's voice for the first time, though I created her as a character months ago.
The book is set in Las Vegas in 1964 and Janette, one of the narrators, is a 16 year old art student:
"John would have been an artist, if it wasn’t that he became a Beatle first. In pictures he always looks slightly apart, slightly more serious – not sad, like Ringo – but as if he sees through the press and the cameras and the screaming girls, as if he keeps something in reserve, apart from them. As if he’s waiting for something, almost.
I zipped up my art bag and slung it around my shoulder and then I remembered I’d bought a new tube of cadmium orange and it was…somewhere in my room. I finally found it in my school jacket. It’s a bad habit, leaving paint everywhere. One day last fall I threw my jacket on the floor and later I walked across it and there was a paint tube in my pocket and it burst open. I didn’t even notice until the next day when I put my hand in the pocket at school. Mom wasn’t happy, about the jacket or the carpet.
I threw the cadmium orange in the bag and zipped it up again. Then I opened the window, pushed the screen out, and slipped out it feet first, landing among the weeds and the bleached, warped boards my father still intends to build a shed with. It’s juvenile, I know, but it avoids Janette can you go to Safeway for me, oh, and take your little sister too. If Mom had her way I’d spend my entire Sunday pushing Betsy on the swings at the park.
Rachel’s mother is not like anyone else I ever met, never mind anyone else’s mother. She’s a good model, generally; she sits still without complaining and questioning me. She’s never asked to see the picture, either, which is good because the picture is pretty much a disaster.
But her house is so…not dark, exactly, but dim. And silent. There are never any women sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee and goading each other into eating the last piece of cake. And there are too many things in the house. The first time I saw the living room I recognized, somehow, that every statue and picture had a particular reason for being there, that Mrs. Rosenkrantz wasn’t just hoarding stuff like a madwoman. But there’s just so much of it. It’s like a house under occupation by an army. I can hardly stand to sit there, scraping Mrs. Rosenkrantz’s head off the canvas for the hundredth time or re-working those damn glasses (I don’t know why I ever thought to put them in, and yet every time I paint them out the picture just seems nothing.) I feel like they’re all watching me – the stuffed trout, John F. Kennedy, St. Bernadette – and they know I’m going to fail."
This is just the middle of a passage so I'm sure a lot of it will go away or change. But one of the great things about writing for me is that feeling that something's there, something I can use and make something of. I feel like a cat, watching the mouse play and thinking, you're mine, baby.
The deep thoughts were about my WIP and what came out is that story is going to be in first person instead of third, and told in alternating chapters by two characters. I got "that feeling." You know: the road is open, I can see this, I know exactly how this is going to work. And I could hear Janette's voice for the first time, though I created her as a character months ago.
The book is set in Las Vegas in 1964 and Janette, one of the narrators, is a 16 year old art student:
"John would have been an artist, if it wasn’t that he became a Beatle first. In pictures he always looks slightly apart, slightly more serious – not sad, like Ringo – but as if he sees through the press and the cameras and the screaming girls, as if he keeps something in reserve, apart from them. As if he’s waiting for something, almost.
I zipped up my art bag and slung it around my shoulder and then I remembered I’d bought a new tube of cadmium orange and it was…somewhere in my room. I finally found it in my school jacket. It’s a bad habit, leaving paint everywhere. One day last fall I threw my jacket on the floor and later I walked across it and there was a paint tube in my pocket and it burst open. I didn’t even notice until the next day when I put my hand in the pocket at school. Mom wasn’t happy, about the jacket or the carpet.
I threw the cadmium orange in the bag and zipped it up again. Then I opened the window, pushed the screen out, and slipped out it feet first, landing among the weeds and the bleached, warped boards my father still intends to build a shed with. It’s juvenile, I know, but it avoids Janette can you go to Safeway for me, oh, and take your little sister too. If Mom had her way I’d spend my entire Sunday pushing Betsy on the swings at the park.
Rachel’s mother is not like anyone else I ever met, never mind anyone else’s mother. She’s a good model, generally; she sits still without complaining and questioning me. She’s never asked to see the picture, either, which is good because the picture is pretty much a disaster.
But her house is so…not dark, exactly, but dim. And silent. There are never any women sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee and goading each other into eating the last piece of cake. And there are too many things in the house. The first time I saw the living room I recognized, somehow, that every statue and picture had a particular reason for being there, that Mrs. Rosenkrantz wasn’t just hoarding stuff like a madwoman. But there’s just so much of it. It’s like a house under occupation by an army. I can hardly stand to sit there, scraping Mrs. Rosenkrantz’s head off the canvas for the hundredth time or re-working those damn glasses (I don’t know why I ever thought to put them in, and yet every time I paint them out the picture just seems nothing.) I feel like they’re all watching me – the stuffed trout, John F. Kennedy, St. Bernadette – and they know I’m going to fail."
This is just the middle of a passage so I'm sure a lot of it will go away or change. But one of the great things about writing for me is that feeling that something's there, something I can use and make something of. I feel like a cat, watching the mouse play and thinking, you're mine, baby.
Kindle, take me away
One of the secret pleasures of Kindle for me is that you can get for free almost any book published in English before 1923. Since the copyright has expired, these books are in the public domain. Yesterday I woke up early and instead of thinking about 1) work, 2) various medical crises in my extended family or 3) our broken hot water heater and the mildew smell downstairs from the resulting flood, I thought, my God, think of all those old books you've always wanted and never could get...now's your chance, girl...be glad you've lived long enough to see this day...19th century literature FOR FREE!
A long-supressed wishlist tumbled out. Lord Dunsany, the Irish fantasy writer (he actually died in 1957, but his early weird stuff is available.) The Country of the Pointed Firs, by Sarah Orne Jewett. Mr. Britling Sees It Through, a WWI-era novel by H.G. Wells. The Golden Age, Kenneth Grahame's other children's book. A couple of Victorian classics: Three Men in a Boat and Diary of a Nobody. Oh, and I threw Moby Dick in as well. I've read it, but I figured it was worth a second look.
A long-supressed wishlist tumbled out. Lord Dunsany, the Irish fantasy writer (he actually died in 1957, but his early weird stuff is available.) The Country of the Pointed Firs, by Sarah Orne Jewett. Mr. Britling Sees It Through, a WWI-era novel by H.G. Wells. The Golden Age, Kenneth Grahame's other children's book. A couple of Victorian classics: Three Men in a Boat and Diary of a Nobody. Oh, and I threw Moby Dick in as well. I've read it, but I figured it was worth a second look.
Monday, May 9, 2011
Two New Books
I don't do book reviews a lot, but I've just finished two books that definitely go on the changed-my-life list.
The first is Among Others, by Jo Walton. Walton is mainly known as a adult writer of fantasy/alternate history, but I think Among Others could be considered crossover/YA. It has a little bit of magic in it, but mostly its about being a reader, about loving books, consuming books, talking with people about books, and not being able to understand people who don't like books. It's a very close portrait of growing up in Wales/England in the late 1970s, dealing with family, school, boy-girl stuff...and the whole time living another life through reading, and recognizing that this second life is the one you really want to lead when you grow up. If you were one of those teenagers that just read and read and read, this book is about you, and you need to read it.
The second book is called The Anti-Romantic Child by Priscilla Gilman. As soon as I saw the title on the New Book shelf in the library, I thought, "I know what that book is about. It's about my son." And it is.
Gilman, who comes from a literary family and was at that time teaching at Yale, wanted a child who would love books and poetry, someone for whom she could re-create the cosy world of her own childhood. But she had the sense that her son Benjamin, in spite of his precocious reading, was somehow "off." In fact, he turned out to have a host of disabilities (hyperlexia, sensory integration) related to autism. Gilman subtitles the book "A Story of Unexpected Joy" and in fact there is great joy, both in the progress Benjamin makes and the things Gilman learns from her son. As I read this book I found myself putting it down from time to time and pacing around, remembering things from my son's childhood. The motor difficulties ("Don't worry -- not all children crawl.") The blank staring at other children ("He's just shy.") The day what you thought was your child's personality is just a list of symptoms on a website.
Even if you don't have a child with a developmental disorder, you're bound to be touched by The Anti-Romantic Child and to see such children in a new light (I did, and I thought I knew everything I was supposed to about the way my son's mind works.) It also struck me, as I was reading it, that Gilman's book is kind of the story of a generation. Women my age grew up with three factors affecting child-rearing: 1) less experience with babies because of smaller families, 2) less availability of parents and grandparents, and therefore dependence on books for child-rearing 3) a kind of "free to be you and me" attitude that encouraged us to see children as individuals in which there was no such thing as "wrong" development or behavior. We are also the generation that seems, based on statistical evidence, to face the highest rate of autism in our children. I don't know why this is and I don't really want to go into those muddy waters. But I appreciate Gilman for writing the story of what she and I and a lot of other mothers have gone through.
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