Category Archives: writing

books, writing

“lily bart is dead!” – anguished early Wharton reader

I went to the library a few days ago for John Updike, but he was all checked out. Instead, in the last 72 hours, I have read, for the first time, PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT, SISTER CARRIE, and THE HOUSE OF MIRTH. Thematically, it made a nice seminar on the futility of mating.

Roth, Dreiser, and Wharton are novelists who I’m not sure would often be compared to each other in terms of style, but they have made a nice picture of contemporary confusion for me. Topic: a bunch of young people trying to live, trying to fall in love, and all ending up either alone or dead.

This subject matter is one which has consumed my writing lately. The only thing I have to write about, other than young humanoids trying – and failing – to mate with each other, is theater.

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books, writing

the future of fiction

“And what will that fiction look like? Like fan fiction, it will be ravenously referential and intertextual in ways that will strain copyright law to the breaking point. Novels will get longer–electronic books aren’t bound by physical constraints–and they’ll be patchable and updatable, like software. We’ll see more novels doled out episodically, on the model of TV series or, for that matter, the serial novels of the 19th century. We can expect a literary culture of pleasure and immediate gratification. Reading on a screen speeds you up: you don’t linger on the language; you just click through. We’ll see less modernist-style difficulty and more romance-novel-style sentiment and high-speed-narrative throughput. Novels will compete to hook you in the first paragraph and then hang on for dear life.”

– Lev Grossman, “Books Gone Wild: The Digital Age Reshapes Literature,” TIME

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wordage, writing

untitled folder

Ah, January – when the desktop is studded with identical bright-blue icon-droids all bearing the name of “untitled folder,” full of important documents that you haven’t named, mostly titled “Document1” and “Copy of Document1,” and when the words of Polonius’s Guide to Portfolios become, with repetition, increasingly meaningless. This above all:

“A poem may be more than one page, however, please do not put more than one poem on each page.”

I used to be good at titles – these days I want to call everything “Baby Girl Poem (DOB 1-12-09), 3 stanzas, 11 lines.”

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LA theater, writing

insofar

as Theatre of NOTE, my beloved Los Angeles theatrical home base, has sent out a call for ten-minute plays on the most preposterous theme imaginable: “Someone else’s loss is my chocolatey goodness” – I have shelved my objections and am passing along this fact to the blog at large. I hate to be disparaging about any opportunities for playwrights, but this one has to be viewed in the light of an opportunity best missed. Although, as a friend and I were saying, if you recast it as “One man’s meat is another man’s poison,” you might survive.

Regardless, if you have a ten-minute play on hand about, I don’t know, something, you might send it to NOTE. Their actors are the best in the city, and consequently, the best in the country. I’m not biased, I’m just right.

One man’s really bad theme could be another man’s short play.

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writing

hyper text markup deficit disorder

Ever since I started messing around with HTML, when I was twelve, I have found that it fulfills exactly the same needs as writing. They are both such good ways to waste time.

You can achieve something spectacular pretty quickly, but you can also tinker with something infinitely without ever being completely satisfied – and it expands to fill any amount of time. You’re never done with HTML, any more than you’re done revising a poem.

I wonder if it’s the same way for other programming languages. I don’t know, but I think what makes HTML seem like writing to me is the way that you sit there putting funny little symbols around everything, like a beehive, and then you step back, click a button, and it makes a visual picture. It’s a literal dramatization of the stages of writing – work work work RESULT – work work work RESULT. Something so laborious creating something so useful and cool.

I would like to write a poem that began with something like
A HREF=the first time we met
something like that,
using the HTML code as part of the language,
or something like the word “boyfriend” in close-tags at the end of it.
(WordPress won’t let me show what I mean by close-tags because,
like a good text editor,
it keeps absorbing them into the background of the post.)
Is HTML to web pages as meter is to poetry?
Invisible but essential? (Trying…)
I think this is one of those ideas that’s better in the idea
than in the execution.

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writing

There is underneath the sun

nothing in true earnest done, right? But what if you’re supposed to be writing something that’s supposed to be true?

I am trying to start a new series of articles about some personal experiences, which are, most unfortunately, as real as…what do people compare reality to? Second base? Seventy-Second Street? Apparently something with seconds in it. Anyway, they’re real, and I’ve come up – not for the first time – against this stupid pseudonym problem. I think that if your writing is as good as it’s supposed to be, you shouldn’t need one. The only really good excuse I’ve ever seen for a pseudonym was Neil Gaiman’s for publishing too much, or similar concerns – like wanting to switch genres. I read an article online once, which I thought was on SFWA but couldn’t find it this time, about someone who had to change her name to get out from the authorial reputation.

But inevitably, the pseudonym becomes more successful than your name (Oronte Churm) because of the freedom of writing under it. I don’t know what I’m trying to say. This isn’t a very coherent way to begin a new blog theme.

I guess I just haven’t made up my mind whether I feel publish-and-be-damned about it or whether I feel private about it. This wouldn’t matter to me at all if it weren’t so clear that I’m writing these for the purpose of publication. Now that’s interesting.

The last time I used a pseudonym was in college and that was from just being shy. If I determine it’s just the same thing, I’m going to use my own name.

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science, writing

continually conditioning society

So, some scientists have found, based on a questionnaire about whether or not Darcy and Elizabeth and Heathcliff are nice or nasty, that novels are “not just by-products of evolutionary adaptation,” but actually “continually condition society so that we fight against base impulses and work in a cooperative way,” especially Victorian novels, which “have a function that continues to contribute to the quality and structure of group life.”

This makes me sick. If I believed that, I would stop writing immediately.

It’s amazing how this particular Platonic error of interpretation about literature persists, century after century – how we keep trying to find justifications for literature which somehow make it contribute to the social good. Literature is good for religion, good for politics, good for philosophy, good for science – now it has to be good for evolution?

Literature is not “good” for anything except being itself. Poetry makes nothing happen. The Victorian novelists were writing against the social order as much as within it, and the fact that their characters reflect facets of that social order does not mean that the novels helped bolster it.

No one can predict who will be inspired to do what by a work of art. The same books and the same music have been inspiring to both pacifists and murderers. The other side of this argument about Victorian novels leading to a better society is that old familiar one about Marilyn Manson being responsible for Columbine. We have to take responsibility for our own actions and stop blaming (or crediting) the books, the music, the art.

This is the first time in my life that I have found myself arguing on the opposite side of the fence as an evolutionary scientist.

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wordage, writing

It’s all pun and games till somebody loses an eye…

The cover of this month’s CONSCIOUS CHOICE, a magazine I pick up at the yoga studio, has this headline:

WE PITY THE FUEL

I’ve probably told this story on this blog before, but the great thing about blogs is that, unlike people, they can’t stop you when you say “Stop me if you’ve heard this before.” Besides, no one ever does. Stop anyone. So, when I was at Stanford, I thought it was a very important thing for me to be proficient in all forms of writing, including comedy writing, at which I have never had any particular skill.

I decided to audition to be a comedy writer for the Stanford Band’s halftime shows. I wrote a script which was mostly composed of rhyming and punning jokes, and won one of the three slots. I got into the writers’ room only to discover that my two co-writers actually knew about the other elements of comedy…timing, plot, delivery…and all I could do was puns.

I didn’t write a word of the remaining scripts in the season. I participated in the process, and helped be that person you bounce ideas off of, but except for a few occasions when a pun was needed, I was S.O.L.

Still one of the best times I’ve ever had, and made me appreciate the work of comedy writing so much more.

Once again (oh come on, you know you like it):

WE PITY THE FUEL

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