I shouldn’t be enjoying Damages as much as I am—the often exposition and recap-heavy dialogue, the characters’ willingness to resort to murder, the quick payoffs from readily-comprehensible schemes that are supposed to be fiendishly clever.  Shot on video and edited with less elan, the show would be little better than a soap opera.  (Although: Wallace Shawn!  As a paraphilic jailed financier!)

What makes it work, I think, are the faces.  The soapy dialogue propels the show from one concerned face to another.   The close-ups are terrific, long enough for intentions to register in the silences.  Rose Byrne looking concerned, feigning innocence; Campbell Scott looking pursued; and above all Glenn Close.  Age, makeup or lighting have made her eyes stand out more than in her bunny boiling days, like turquoise.  And Martin Short’s mobile face makes him a supple villain.

Yes, I am entertained.  But does it satisfy?  I think I’d feel more filled by a show about nothing.

Soviet artifacts have the strangest quality of seeming to be ancient relics from a distant future.  To me the jaw-dropping thing here (in Google’s occasionally off Russian translation) isn’t even the gargantuanism (James Cameron with an unlimited budget and actual military?) but how different the Lun battlestar ekranoplan—and the thinking and design sensibility behind it—is from anything in the West outside of science fiction.

Lest one think only in Soviet Russia, according to the photographer the U.S. Air Force and NASA recently toured it.  Because pirates and the terrorists would never see this coming.

via xplanes: BoingBoing: Philip J. Hollenback

Reading Grace Paley’s Enormous Changes At The Last Minute this weekend, I was amused in light of recent discussions by her willingness to use exclamation points.  Some of them seem ironic and Internet-y (which I think she would appreciate—a medium military in origin, propagating OMGs and long cats), others as exuberant as Whitman.  She’s as exuberant about sentences as about people; she knows how to twist context and jumble us up along with her.  What is one to do, at last, with sentences packed this tightly semi non-sequiturs but marvel:

I wanted to stop and admire the long beach.  I wanted to stop in order to think admiringly about New York.  There aren’t many rotting cities so tan and sandy and speckled with citizens at their salty edges.  But I had already spent a lot of life lying down or standing and staring.  I had decided to run.

Which she does, until she gets to her childhood neighborhood, where people trump her plan and she stays for a couple of weeks. 

continue reading Enormous Exuberance At The Last Minute

This week in my independent study we started Paley’s Collected Stories, and alongside my reactions I wanted to post the cover of the edition I am using, which though it doesn’t seem to me that I bought it so many years ago is already browning inwards from the corners.

Why scan a book cover when you can Google it, right?  My laziness yielded a Google bonus: a copy with a Philip Roth endorsement that my copy lacks (did the publishers add it in a later edition, or decide it was better to do without it?). “Splendidly comic and unladylike,” Philip says.  Which would never have occurred to me!  In fact with most people I would wonder why anyone after 1903 or so would use “unladylike” as praise or at all, but this is Philip Roth so we know what he’s referring to.

But: let’s get crafty, shall we?

continue reading Thoughts On Grace Paley

What’s better than lists of “if you want to write” tips?  Well, this from Laura Ellen Scott:

3. If your plot is too exciting or moving too fast, enhance realism by making your characters stop for a meal at an ethnic restaurant. Describe each course and allow your characters to re-cap the plot so far.
5. Do not write a single word unless you know how your story will end. You are the dungeon master.
7. Trust your workshop peers. They aren’t in competition with you or anything, nor are they attempting to hijack your story to make it their own. Use all of their advice. Also, keep work-shopping a recalcitrant story for years.

via HTML Giant

…Or, Hitler finds out that The Wall Street Journal misses why his meme is funny…

I love the Downfall meme (as does the director of Downfall).  I’ve been surprised by how much I like it.  Describe it literally—Hitler rants anachronistically about some contemporary, usually minor, pop-cultural event—and doesn’t it sound, at best, quease-inducingly disrespectful?

continue reading Downfall: WSJ Edition

We finished reading Flannery O’Connor’s Complete Stories this week in my independent study.  I think I’m becoming addicted to reading entire oeuvres of short stories, or as close to entire oeuvres as possible.  So different from reading a comparable page-count of novel(s).  More intense, the accumulated weight of choices in subject matter, ways of entering stories, developing plots, the kinds of endings an author tends towards…

Often, discussing the craft of fiction, our goal is abstraction; to separate authors’ use of language and structuring of events or types of narration so that we can identify techniques to apply to our own stories: shifts between present and past or in point of view; dips into scene or narration; whether we begin with setting or action, scene or narration, idea or character; how much is told and how much shown; etc.

Flannery O’Connor’s late stories seem to me to make such separation of content and form unusually difficult, because certain themes so drive her plots, and the scenes and shifts in points of view are structured to repeatedly expose the same ideas. There’s conflict aplenty in these stories, but even that seems to be only the means of breathing life—or fire—into her symbolic structures.

Chief among O’Connor’s propelling elements is the Scourge of God—the unstoppable figure bent on or disregarding its own destruction, rending society, showing up characters’ hypocrisy and delusion.  (The original Scourge is Attila the Hun, sent to bring God’s wrath on the Roman Empire, though it consume him as well.  My source?  Kate Seredy’s 1937 children’s book, The White Stag.  I must have been eleven or twelve when I read it…).

continue reading Thoughts On Flannery O’Connor’s Late Stories

- Harry (the one who Met Sally)

While I don’t unreservedly love this film as I once did, this is such a well-written line of dialogue, and it does so much work.

At the end of an afternoon outing to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harry and Sally are in the Temple of Dendur.  He’s enticed her into speaking in a silly voice, and, still in accent, asked if she would like to see a movie with him that night.  She asks the question back and he shakes his head.  “Not to repeat, to answer,” he says, still in the silly voice.  Turns out, she already has a date for that night.  “I was going to tell you about it,” she says, “but I don’t know I just… I felt strange…[] because we’ve been spending so much time together.”

Without missing a beat, Harry asks what she’s going to wear—brilliant (from his point of view).  It directs the subject away from his feelings—which we may be starting to suspect—and puts him back in charge of the conversation.  It’s a power move, a way of possessing Sally and getting in a compliment before the guy she’s going on the date with has a chance to, but it’s also still praise.  To us, it’s sexual enough to confirm, yep, he’s interested, but it’s such tempered admiration—she’s not wearing a skirt when he says it—that it’s almost brotherly.  Sally has just shown their friendship’s limits.  In his way, Harry is responding by inviting her to further intimacy, and accepting that he’s not eligible for a romantic relationship with her.  Sally is hesitatingly pleased, with that inimitable Meg Ryan expression.

In the next scene, she’s wearing a skirt, helping him redecorate his (ridiculously large) apartment, and the pattern for many a hopeful, enabling friendship has been laid out.

Once not so very long ago, in a place much like this, lived a family who looked forward every week to dining at a fine restaurant.  Such care over the menu!  Such surprising ingredients and combinations, fruits and vegetables from many countries, and main dishes—fish from far oceans, and meats from farms that the family hadn’t known were right in their neighborhood.

“Not only is every meal here tasty and nutritious,” the husband said.  “But we always learn something.”

“It’s well worth the money,” his wife agreed.

“So much effort,” the little boy said, and pulled at his little tie.  Because, since it wasn’t every day that the family went out to the fine restaurant, and because the restaurant cost money, it was important to dress up.

“I like it,” the little girl said.  She wasn’t sure if what she liked was dressing up, or that they only went out once a week, or what she ate.  When she thought about them, she couldn’t tell these things apart.

continue reading The Parable Of The Fine Restaurant And Magic Cookie Jar

What/How-not-to-write lists usually seem to me to be singularly unhelpful: checking one’s work against them while writing makes for cramped prose and stunted concepts.  But longer works, novella-length short stories and novels, take long enough to write—at least for me—that in slack moments sizing up a work in progress can save a lot of time and heartbreak.

Mark Sarvas’s list, made after judging last year’s Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, seems to me unusually good—generous-spirited, and general enough to transcend genre and topic.

I’ve been a reader for two novel prizes.  What I noticed above all was a direct correspondence between the line-by-line interest of the prose and the fullness of the book’s conception—and my interest in sticking with it.  With only one exception—a fantastic satire about crystal meth addiction that I really, really want to see on the shelves—my judgment on page one was the same as when I finished.  For me, so much of developing my own style and what I find rewarding in other writers comes down to voice: a complex cocktail of subject matter and prose style that really can’t be evaluated except on its own terms; a unique way of structuring thought and experience.  Which brings to mind Mark’s last points: warning against works that seem familiar, and that don’t justify their existence:

To be sure, there are no new stories or new truths, but if we are going to revisit certain ones time and time again, it seems absolutely necessary – at least to this writer and reader – that it’s a story that needs to see the light of day, a story without which we’d be somehow poorer.