For me, one of the great pleasures in reading an approachable classic like War and Peace is the chance to meet Tolstoy face to face as it were, take his story one word at a time and derive a self-made opinion of everything he sets in front of me. The greatest novel ever written is not some monolith for Kubrick’s 2001 apes to caper around, grunting and throwing bones, cow-towing to the critics; it’s a living narrative that sets out, whatever its other ambitions, to entertain its audience. I love that about Tolstoy. Though he dwarfs me as a writer, as a reader he approaches me as an equal, as a respectful but exigent friend who needs to be amused, beguiled, thrilled.
Everyone starts with the same materials, the blank screen or sheet of paper, the keyboard or the pen, the same twenty six letters. There’s a kind of fierce democracy to that, a level playing field; or is a mine field? You feel it at my MFA residency sitting in Noble Hall at Vermont College, listening to a student reading one night and a faculty reading the next afternoon. The wild-eyed kid’s garbled ungrammatical account of catching his parent’s making love and – for example – Larry Sutin’s latest admixture of Kafka and Dinesen, precipitated with the mysterious reagent of his own lucid vision and wry humor into a compelling and mysterious potion, both start the same way, with a nervous man standing in front of an audience; with scratches on paper. In that context the difference is particularly stunning. Clearly words can be used to sharpen thought or to dull it. As Orwell points out in Politics and the English Language, many writers just piece trite phrases together as if they were “assembling the pieces of a prefabricated henhouse”.
I remember the exact moment when I turned away from the consumption of this kind of writing forever. It was about three quarters of the way through Leon Uris’ Trinity. The effortless sentence – you just know it flowed out of him with the giddy sluice of inspiration – was this: “His role was to ferret out brewing insurrection and nip it in the bud.” Not just four clichés, but four clashing and incongruous clichés jammed blithely together in the clattering rush of another day’s work. Many years ago, before computers, when an IBM Selectric was state of the art, Leon Uris gave my father some deeply considered writing advice. “You have to go faster. Get an electric typewriter.”
Over the years, I have come to believe that there’s some middle ground, some leafy suburb between the woods and canyons of literature and the grid-lock city streets of genre fiction (not to mention the graffiti-smeared urban blight of the sub-genre world).
That middle ground is my favorite landscape, and I would define it upward as a type of literature, rather than downward as a classier version of trash … in human terms: a young heir in jeans and a t-shirt, rather than a bum in a tuxedo. And of course it’s a sliding scale, with almost infinite gradations. The work I prefer, the work which has no official title, perches right on the border of literature, the rough undeveloped sections of that suburb, perhaps: the last house on the dead-end street whose back yard merges with a tangle of bushes that becomes the forest; the ranch style teetering on the border of the wetlands with the perpetually flooded basement; the canyon house stalked by coyotes.
Despite carrying the ‘genre’ stigma, these authors, these suburban pioneers if you like, combine the most enjoyable aspects of high literature and low. They don’t dig as deep into their characters’ psyches as the masters who dwell in the deep woods; but they reject the trite puppet shows of their inner-city brethren. They create the vivid dream that John Gardner talks about, they allow you to live in the particular world of a unique human sensibility and let your own perspective be colored and enlarged by the exposure.
I realize now that almost all the writers I love at least own property in this fringe area: genre writers like Len Deighton, John LeCarre, P.D. James, Dennis Lehane and Philip K. Dick; and masters who understand the power of plot, from to Faulkner to Graham Greene and John Fowles, to contemporary writers like Vikram Chandra and Michael Chabon.
And of course, standing genially above all the others, Tolstoy himself.
Tolstoy shares a craven common urge with the genre writers who followed him: he wants you to turn the page. It democratizes his greatness, somehow. It’s endearing. And it makes a book written 150 years ago about events transpiring 50 years before that absolutely present, an urgent transaction between two minds, an intimate seduction and a great mutual project.
I’ve always wanted to read War and Peace, but found the length daunting and the translations stilted. When I heard that Pevear and Volokonsky, who did the sharp and engrossing translation of Anna Karenina a few years ago, were working on Tolstoy’s masterpiece, I was thrilled. Perhaps I would finally be able to read this intimidating tome, this Everest of literature. Then it occurred to me that it might be interesting to chronicle the climb; if others chose to take it with me, we could share our thoughts and de-mystify the experience of reading a classic.
That’s the plan.
I’m standing at the base camp, among the litter of other people’s oxygen bottles, hoping you’ll join me, hoping we won’t be turned back by bad weather or the cold. If your lungs are strong enough for the thin air, and you’re not scared of heights, organize your equipment and get a good nights’ sleep.
We start our ascent tomorrow, at first light.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
The Thing With Feathers
Hope is a strange emotion. It’s addicting but dangerous, like some kind of new street drug, except that we manufacture it ourselves, like endorphins or adrenaline. And we stand in a somewhat different relation to those other chemicals: the body releases them involuntarily, at moments of physical exertion or stress. Hope is active, intentional, a gesture of the imagination, an attempt to conjure the future. To actually allow yourself to hope for something you care about deeply requires a peculiar unacknowledged bravery that not everyone can muster; it opens a troubling chasm of vulnerability at your feet, and looking down into that gulf of disappointment creates a dizzying vertigo.
Much better to play it cool, pretend it doesn’t matter. We have invented a whole patois of self deception on this point: ‘Easy come easy go” “That’s the way the cookie crumbles” “Que sera sera” ‘So it goes” “Who cares?” “Roll with the punches” “Lighten up” “Big deal” and the ever popular “Whatever”. But things don’t go easily, we all care and we take most of those punches right on the point of the jaw. Still, indifference remains the perfect combination of pose and protection. We act blasé while we prepare for disappointment in advance. We tell ourselves not to “get our hopes up” though we know the secret shameful truth that actually having your hopes up is one of the few clean cheap thrills you can get in life and flinching in advance doesn’t make it sting any less when the rejection finally comes.
Sustained hope in the face of relentless setbacks and failures can be toxic, though it feels nourishing – sort of like trying to live on Chai tea and muffins. My friend used to say of my Hollywood ambitions, “Until it happens, it didn’t.” And I would answer, “And when it happens it was always going to.” But releasing those hopes has been liberating, Hope requires the stamina of youth, when the seemingly limitless procession of days ahead lend any prediction a diaphanous plausibility. A five year old toddler dreams of becoming an astronaut; a twenty year old boy writes his Oscar acceptance speech on the bus to work. A fifty-year old man is happy just to make it through another week. There’s no more time for dramatic re-inventions and astonishing second acts. I won’t be going to law school or clown college any time soon. Win or lose, I am what I am: accepting that mortal tautology sounds despairing. But it contains an element of bliss, a caress of relief, like a vein of warm water in a frigid lake. I can happily call myself a ‘hobbyist’ and get on with my work. Emily Dickinson put it best: “Publication is not the business of poets.” She knew what she was talking about on that score; she made obscurity into another art form. But she understood hope well enough. She called it ‘the thing with feathers that perches in the soul/ and singe the tune –without the words/ and never stops at all.” I always wondered whether that line was a tribute or a admonition.
Away from that relentless bird-song I’ve found my own refuge, pecking away at the keyboard in privacy and silence. But hope is a tough old pigeon and not so easy to escape. It feeds on litter and perches on the fire escape, strutting snd fluttering over it three inches of hard-won territory. And so I find myself doing hopeful things like contributing to Open Salon and even –on a cockeyed impulse – contacting an editor who expressed interest in seeing more of my work. She’s reading my new novel now, as I comb the Open Salon website for comments and wonder feverishly if the last post will be an Editor’s Pick. So I guess I haven’t shaken the addiction after all and I probably never will.
I never could stay on a diet.
So please, O! charming editor who actually returned my phone call on a dreary Tuesday afternoon and chatted for half an hour about Hillary Clinton and Alice Munro, please read my book and like it and publish it, and send it off into the world with a full page ad in the New York Times. And while I’m waiting, I’ll have a Chai latte.
Make it a double, with a pistachio muffin on the side.
Much better to play it cool, pretend it doesn’t matter. We have invented a whole patois of self deception on this point: ‘Easy come easy go” “That’s the way the cookie crumbles” “Que sera sera” ‘So it goes” “Who cares?” “Roll with the punches” “Lighten up” “Big deal” and the ever popular “Whatever”. But things don’t go easily, we all care and we take most of those punches right on the point of the jaw. Still, indifference remains the perfect combination of pose and protection. We act blasé while we prepare for disappointment in advance. We tell ourselves not to “get our hopes up” though we know the secret shameful truth that actually having your hopes up is one of the few clean cheap thrills you can get in life and flinching in advance doesn’t make it sting any less when the rejection finally comes.
Sustained hope in the face of relentless setbacks and failures can be toxic, though it feels nourishing – sort of like trying to live on Chai tea and muffins. My friend used to say of my Hollywood ambitions, “Until it happens, it didn’t.” And I would answer, “And when it happens it was always going to.” But releasing those hopes has been liberating, Hope requires the stamina of youth, when the seemingly limitless procession of days ahead lend any prediction a diaphanous plausibility. A five year old toddler dreams of becoming an astronaut; a twenty year old boy writes his Oscar acceptance speech on the bus to work. A fifty-year old man is happy just to make it through another week. There’s no more time for dramatic re-inventions and astonishing second acts. I won’t be going to law school or clown college any time soon. Win or lose, I am what I am: accepting that mortal tautology sounds despairing. But it contains an element of bliss, a caress of relief, like a vein of warm water in a frigid lake. I can happily call myself a ‘hobbyist’ and get on with my work. Emily Dickinson put it best: “Publication is not the business of poets.” She knew what she was talking about on that score; she made obscurity into another art form. But she understood hope well enough. She called it ‘the thing with feathers that perches in the soul/ and singe the tune –without the words/ and never stops at all.” I always wondered whether that line was a tribute or a admonition.
Away from that relentless bird-song I’ve found my own refuge, pecking away at the keyboard in privacy and silence. But hope is a tough old pigeon and not so easy to escape. It feeds on litter and perches on the fire escape, strutting snd fluttering over it three inches of hard-won territory. And so I find myself doing hopeful things like contributing to Open Salon and even –on a cockeyed impulse – contacting an editor who expressed interest in seeing more of my work. She’s reading my new novel now, as I comb the Open Salon website for comments and wonder feverishly if the last post will be an Editor’s Pick. So I guess I haven’t shaken the addiction after all and I probably never will.
I never could stay on a diet.
So please, O! charming editor who actually returned my phone call on a dreary Tuesday afternoon and chatted for half an hour about Hillary Clinton and Alice Munro, please read my book and like it and publish it, and send it off into the world with a full page ad in the New York Times. And while I’m waiting, I’ll have a Chai latte.
Make it a double, with a pistachio muffin on the side.
Monday, August 11, 2008
PLugged Nicholl
Mac Dixon, the first Artistic Director of the Theatre Workshop once remarked to my fiancée, “Only mediocrity succeeds on Nantucket.” It was a harsh comment, but even three decades later it continues to resonate because with every passing year the idea becomes more and more of a universal axiom. In politics, in corporate America, even in the building trades, the inept and the mendacious succeed while the gifted and hard-working fall by the wayside. From Jimmy Carter’s defeat at the hands of the charming but catastrophically foolish and ideologically blinkered Ronald Reagan to the more recent electoral nightmares, to the sub-prime lending scandal that may yet bring down the entire American economy (Someone decided it was a good idea to give mortgages to guys living in refrigerator boxes), the plague of dull-witted, pedestrian greed rages on. For the most part I’ve become numb to it, but occasionally the phenomenon hits close to home and I have to face it.
In the community of aspiring screenwriters the Nicholl Fellowship – a screenwriting contest sponsored by no less an organization than The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, stands as an almost unattainable measure of achievement. Blogging screenwriters compare notes on the harrowing triage of talent … who made it to the quarter-finals and the semi-finals. More to the point, they discuss the mysteries of the judging: why their script never placed at all, how to improve, where to find the secret code that unlocks this exalted prize. There are websites devoted to coaching neophytes in the arcana of this contest. I should mention I never entered the race because as a member of the WGAw, I’m automatically disqualified. This quest is for amateurs only.
I had never seen a winning screenplay until today. This one is being shot on Nantucket and a friend of mind is helping to hire the extras and scout locations. I read the script and I confess to being stunned by it, stunned the way you feel when you crack your shin on a coffee table in the dark or miss a step going down a ladder: a physical jolt of outraged surprise. Because this script is bad. The dialogue is stilted and laden with exposition. The characters are barely sketched in, rounded off to the nearest cliché. A local sailor was asked to check the sailboat details; every single one was wrong. So are the points of local color. A shrill local rants against tourists, referring to them as wash-ashores; whereas anyone who lives here knows that a washashore is a resident who came from somewhere else. My son was amused by the local girl telling the off-island boy that “We always go to Jetties for The Fourth Of July – it’s crowded but it’s a tradition.” He said, “Right, because I’ve lived here all my life and don’t know anyone with a boat or a house with a view of the harbor.” The script is a symphony of wrong notes, a trite family drama complete with the callow grandson who learns important life lessons and the curmondgeonly old grandpa who teaches them. None of this would be of even passing interest (I read dozens of scripts just this bad and bad in just this way when I was reading for production companies in L.A.) except for the astounding, jaw dropping fact that this commonplace bundle of lazy plot points and sticky sentiment won the Nicholl. It beat out literally thousands of other screenplays, at some of which were probably pretty good. The scripts that won Project Greenlight on HBO – and the films made from them – were just as awful … as are so many more traditionally produced movies and TV shows. So something is going on here. But what?
Perhaps it’s true: mobs and morons rule the world. Certainly the wrong people seem to run everything. The notion may be economically disheartening and politically frightening, but it’s kind of liberating artistically. The opinions that make one cringe and cower (people have seriously considered giving up writing after not placing in the Nicholl three years in a row) are in fact nothing more than the senseless noise Truman Capote was talking about when he dismissed critics with the phrase, “The dogs bark and the caravan moves on.” So not winning the Nicholl isn’t a defeat and humiliation, after all: it’s a badge of honor. It’s a credential. It proves you’re not mediocre. Unfortunately, Mac Dixon was right: much of the time, in every profession, in every art and craft, mediocrity succeeds.
And not just on Nantucket.
In the community of aspiring screenwriters the Nicholl Fellowship – a screenwriting contest sponsored by no less an organization than The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, stands as an almost unattainable measure of achievement. Blogging screenwriters compare notes on the harrowing triage of talent … who made it to the quarter-finals and the semi-finals. More to the point, they discuss the mysteries of the judging: why their script never placed at all, how to improve, where to find the secret code that unlocks this exalted prize. There are websites devoted to coaching neophytes in the arcana of this contest. I should mention I never entered the race because as a member of the WGAw, I’m automatically disqualified. This quest is for amateurs only.
I had never seen a winning screenplay until today. This one is being shot on Nantucket and a friend of mind is helping to hire the extras and scout locations. I read the script and I confess to being stunned by it, stunned the way you feel when you crack your shin on a coffee table in the dark or miss a step going down a ladder: a physical jolt of outraged surprise. Because this script is bad. The dialogue is stilted and laden with exposition. The characters are barely sketched in, rounded off to the nearest cliché. A local sailor was asked to check the sailboat details; every single one was wrong. So are the points of local color. A shrill local rants against tourists, referring to them as wash-ashores; whereas anyone who lives here knows that a washashore is a resident who came from somewhere else. My son was amused by the local girl telling the off-island boy that “We always go to Jetties for The Fourth Of July – it’s crowded but it’s a tradition.” He said, “Right, because I’ve lived here all my life and don’t know anyone with a boat or a house with a view of the harbor.” The script is a symphony of wrong notes, a trite family drama complete with the callow grandson who learns important life lessons and the curmondgeonly old grandpa who teaches them. None of this would be of even passing interest (I read dozens of scripts just this bad and bad in just this way when I was reading for production companies in L.A.) except for the astounding, jaw dropping fact that this commonplace bundle of lazy plot points and sticky sentiment won the Nicholl. It beat out literally thousands of other screenplays, at some of which were probably pretty good. The scripts that won Project Greenlight on HBO – and the films made from them – were just as awful … as are so many more traditionally produced movies and TV shows. So something is going on here. But what?
Perhaps it’s true: mobs and morons rule the world. Certainly the wrong people seem to run everything. The notion may be economically disheartening and politically frightening, but it’s kind of liberating artistically. The opinions that make one cringe and cower (people have seriously considered giving up writing after not placing in the Nicholl three years in a row) are in fact nothing more than the senseless noise Truman Capote was talking about when he dismissed critics with the phrase, “The dogs bark and the caravan moves on.” So not winning the Nicholl isn’t a defeat and humiliation, after all: it’s a badge of honor. It’s a credential. It proves you’re not mediocre. Unfortunately, Mac Dixon was right: much of the time, in every profession, in every art and craft, mediocrity succeeds.
And not just on Nantucket.
Monday, August 04, 2008
Genre Fiction smackdown: Aristotle Vs. Chandra
In Greek tragedy plot was primary. Not much has changed in the realm of genre fiction. A publishable mystery can lack interesting characters every bit as much a Greek heroic poem; it can lack insight and metaphor, aphorism and a sense of place, as long as the simple two stroke engine of what-happens-next is turning over. This is not to say that most published mysteries are so thinly-written and debased. Many detective novels have fascinating characters and settings, sharp writing, vivid imagery. But they could have been published and read without those things.
Only one element stands as essential.
Take the analogy of music. If you’re writing ‘house music’ for a German disco club, nothing really matters but the beat: bang-bang-digga-digga, bang-bang, digga-digga on an endless loop. A simple 8 bar blues melody can be floated on this current, like a canoe. You can add key changes and witty lyrics as Jimmy Tamborello and Ben Gibbard of the rock band Postal Service do. That might be analogous to teak brightwork on the little boat; or titanium paddles from Hammacher Schlemmer. But no one dancing at the 90 degrees club on Dennewitzstrasse would care … even if the words were in German. Only the current matters: diving into that swift water and being pulled downstream.
They’re dancing to the beat, not the lyrics.
But Aristotle is discussing the writing of plays; that’s why his work applies so well to screenwriting, and has been so extensively ‘anthologized’ by Syd Field, Robert McKee and others.
"Plots are either simple or complex, since the actions they representare naturally of this twofold description. The action, proceeding in the way defined, as one continuous whole, I call simple, when thechange in the hero's fortunes takes place without Peripety or Discovery; and complex, when it involves one or the other, or both.These should each of them arise out of the structure of the Plot itself, so as to be the consequence, necessary or probable, of the antecedents. There is a great difference between a thing happening propter hoc and post hoc. "
Of course by Peripety he is referring to the reversal of fortune, usually in the second act (and some would insist, on page 78) that is the core of both screenwriting advice, and most modern screenplays. Along with unity of action, the idea that nothing extraneous can be permitted in the story, that the gun over the mantel in Act One has to go off by Act Three, as Chekhov instructed, we can see the basic parameters of the modern screenplay emerging. Authors like the ones mentioned above, the first to realize the relevance of Aristotle, have made a fortune from his work without fear of copyright infringement.
Whether these strict rules – and the reductive way they are applied -- are healthy for the cinema is a subject for a different essay. The question here is: can these principles be applied to the novel, a much longer and naturally more discursive medium. The answer is clear, at least in terms of genre fiction: yes, of course. But in the realm where genre fiction approaches literature, where the conventions of the mystery novel, for instance, are played with, investigated, even subverted, can these rules still hold true?
There’s an instructive example on Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games. This is a sprawling 900-page book that encompasses much of Indian history in the twentieth century. It’s a portrait of modern Bombay, and study of Hindu-Muslim politics and simultaneously a compelling procedural police novel. Simply put, Chandra is doing everything I’d like to do. Though I am to some extent in retreat from those ambitions, it’s still inspiring to see them accomplished with such breath-taking skill and audacity.
In the first third of the book, Sartaj Singh and his partner Katekar investigate a murder. Three successful young thieves have had a falling out; one of them winds up dead. Sartaj’s work on this case runs parallel with the larger story, in which he seeks to understand why Bombay’s most powerful gangster chose to kill himself and his mistress in the basement of a newly built fallout shelter. Several other cases also intertwine throughout the story, but by the middle of the book the murder sub-plot has been resolved. Sartaj and his partner discover who the boys are, and plot to catch them in the act of fencing their loot. The ambush goes awry and Katekar is killed; Sartaj shoots the murderer as he flees down an alley. So a faceless killer is lying in the dirt, and the case is closed, but Sartaj derives no satisfaction from the senseless slaughter. It feels both pointless and grotesque.
Throughout the book, Chandra introduces chapters he calls ‘insets’, which present stories of marginal significance to the main plot. Anjali Mathur, the chief government agent working with Sartaj, was mentored in the service by her father’s best friend; one inset shows his early days, fighting the Chinese in the Hindu Kush. Another reveals the fate of Sartaj’s Aunt Navneet, who perished during the Partition.
These are sidelights, apparent violations of the Unities, but Chandra gets away with them because they deepen our knowledge of the book’s characters and their world. Plus they are compellingly written. Aristotle didn’t have much to say about the benefits of a muscular prose style, though you could cobble together a sense of it from his descriptions of Thought, Melody and Spectacle.
Near the end of Sacred Games, Chandra seems to push his fascination with the peripheral too far. In a final inset, he describes the life of a small town boy from Rajpur named Aadil Ansari. Aadil loves reading and becomes the first boy in his village to finish high school; he even goes on to college, working for two years in between, driving trucks and maintaining them, to pay for his schooling. He studies Zoology and in a just world, he would have become a university professor. But college is a torment because of money. Often he can’t afford to both eat and buy books. Meanwhile his rich friends laugh at his complaints and call him a typical weak-willed bumpkin when penury, stress and exhaustion force him to quit school. Of course, no one offers to help. These friends of his are a familiar type: born on third base, certain they hit a triple.
So Aadil goes home, to work his family plot of land. Requests for help from the local Raja get nowhere; and on top of that, the Raja is actually stealing Aadil’s family land, one thin strip at a time. There is no law court to dispute this encroachment: the government is corrupt from top to bottom. Aadil becomes bitter and winds up joining the Communist party. He’s the perfect candidate for a Marxist revelation. Eventually he becomes a full-fledged revolutionary, blowing up buildings and committing assassinations. It’s only when he witnesses a horrific episode of mutilation and torture that he becomes disillusioned with the cause.
He flees to Bombay, moving frequently to avoid being recognized. He goes back to his books, reading botany and biology texts for the sheer pleasure of it. He hires some boys to do his marketing and other errands, but his funds are running low. He is an expert at military operations, and he trains the three boys in the skills of commando-style larceny: careful planning and artful use of the threat of violence.
This is the first moment when you get a narrative twinge at the back of your neck. Three boys?
That sounds familiar.
The boys become successful and eventually have a falling out. Two suspect the third is talking more than his share of the proceeds. They confront him; it turns into a fight and then into a murder. Aadil tells the boys to leave their lodgings and meet him two days later at a certain hotel. But the police are onto them and the rendezvous becomes a catastrophe. The boys are arrested. As Aadil flees in panic, he kills a policeman. He is shot himself, and dies in the street.
Then you realize: this is the faceless thug who killed Katekar.
The revelation opens under you like a trap door and you plunge into the troubled understanding that there are no faceless thugs, that every incident has layers of irony and tragedy that make you cry for the whole human race.
So in one devastating coup de theatre, the Unities are preserved: nothing is irrelevant and everything is connected.
And Vikram Chandra wins the prize – the summerslam championship belt goes to Sacred Games: the Great American Literary Genre Novel.
Take the month of August and read it.
Sorry about the spoiler.
Only one element stands as essential.
Take the analogy of music. If you’re writing ‘house music’ for a German disco club, nothing really matters but the beat: bang-bang-digga-digga, bang-bang, digga-digga on an endless loop. A simple 8 bar blues melody can be floated on this current, like a canoe. You can add key changes and witty lyrics as Jimmy Tamborello and Ben Gibbard of the rock band Postal Service do. That might be analogous to teak brightwork on the little boat; or titanium paddles from Hammacher Schlemmer. But no one dancing at the 90 degrees club on Dennewitzstrasse would care … even if the words were in German. Only the current matters: diving into that swift water and being pulled downstream.
They’re dancing to the beat, not the lyrics.
But Aristotle is discussing the writing of plays; that’s why his work applies so well to screenwriting, and has been so extensively ‘anthologized’ by Syd Field, Robert McKee and others.
"Plots are either simple or complex, since the actions they representare naturally of this twofold description. The action, proceeding in the way defined, as one continuous whole, I call simple, when thechange in the hero's fortunes takes place without Peripety or Discovery; and complex, when it involves one or the other, or both.These should each of them arise out of the structure of the Plot itself, so as to be the consequence, necessary or probable, of the antecedents. There is a great difference between a thing happening propter hoc and post hoc. "
Of course by Peripety he is referring to the reversal of fortune, usually in the second act (and some would insist, on page 78) that is the core of both screenwriting advice, and most modern screenplays. Along with unity of action, the idea that nothing extraneous can be permitted in the story, that the gun over the mantel in Act One has to go off by Act Three, as Chekhov instructed, we can see the basic parameters of the modern screenplay emerging. Authors like the ones mentioned above, the first to realize the relevance of Aristotle, have made a fortune from his work without fear of copyright infringement.
Whether these strict rules – and the reductive way they are applied -- are healthy for the cinema is a subject for a different essay. The question here is: can these principles be applied to the novel, a much longer and naturally more discursive medium. The answer is clear, at least in terms of genre fiction: yes, of course. But in the realm where genre fiction approaches literature, where the conventions of the mystery novel, for instance, are played with, investigated, even subverted, can these rules still hold true?
There’s an instructive example on Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games. This is a sprawling 900-page book that encompasses much of Indian history in the twentieth century. It’s a portrait of modern Bombay, and study of Hindu-Muslim politics and simultaneously a compelling procedural police novel. Simply put, Chandra is doing everything I’d like to do. Though I am to some extent in retreat from those ambitions, it’s still inspiring to see them accomplished with such breath-taking skill and audacity.
In the first third of the book, Sartaj Singh and his partner Katekar investigate a murder. Three successful young thieves have had a falling out; one of them winds up dead. Sartaj’s work on this case runs parallel with the larger story, in which he seeks to understand why Bombay’s most powerful gangster chose to kill himself and his mistress in the basement of a newly built fallout shelter. Several other cases also intertwine throughout the story, but by the middle of the book the murder sub-plot has been resolved. Sartaj and his partner discover who the boys are, and plot to catch them in the act of fencing their loot. The ambush goes awry and Katekar is killed; Sartaj shoots the murderer as he flees down an alley. So a faceless killer is lying in the dirt, and the case is closed, but Sartaj derives no satisfaction from the senseless slaughter. It feels both pointless and grotesque.
Throughout the book, Chandra introduces chapters he calls ‘insets’, which present stories of marginal significance to the main plot. Anjali Mathur, the chief government agent working with Sartaj, was mentored in the service by her father’s best friend; one inset shows his early days, fighting the Chinese in the Hindu Kush. Another reveals the fate of Sartaj’s Aunt Navneet, who perished during the Partition.
These are sidelights, apparent violations of the Unities, but Chandra gets away with them because they deepen our knowledge of the book’s characters and their world. Plus they are compellingly written. Aristotle didn’t have much to say about the benefits of a muscular prose style, though you could cobble together a sense of it from his descriptions of Thought, Melody and Spectacle.
Near the end of Sacred Games, Chandra seems to push his fascination with the peripheral too far. In a final inset, he describes the life of a small town boy from Rajpur named Aadil Ansari. Aadil loves reading and becomes the first boy in his village to finish high school; he even goes on to college, working for two years in between, driving trucks and maintaining them, to pay for his schooling. He studies Zoology and in a just world, he would have become a university professor. But college is a torment because of money. Often he can’t afford to both eat and buy books. Meanwhile his rich friends laugh at his complaints and call him a typical weak-willed bumpkin when penury, stress and exhaustion force him to quit school. Of course, no one offers to help. These friends of his are a familiar type: born on third base, certain they hit a triple.
So Aadil goes home, to work his family plot of land. Requests for help from the local Raja get nowhere; and on top of that, the Raja is actually stealing Aadil’s family land, one thin strip at a time. There is no law court to dispute this encroachment: the government is corrupt from top to bottom. Aadil becomes bitter and winds up joining the Communist party. He’s the perfect candidate for a Marxist revelation. Eventually he becomes a full-fledged revolutionary, blowing up buildings and committing assassinations. It’s only when he witnesses a horrific episode of mutilation and torture that he becomes disillusioned with the cause.
He flees to Bombay, moving frequently to avoid being recognized. He goes back to his books, reading botany and biology texts for the sheer pleasure of it. He hires some boys to do his marketing and other errands, but his funds are running low. He is an expert at military operations, and he trains the three boys in the skills of commando-style larceny: careful planning and artful use of the threat of violence.
This is the first moment when you get a narrative twinge at the back of your neck. Three boys?
That sounds familiar.
The boys become successful and eventually have a falling out. Two suspect the third is talking more than his share of the proceeds. They confront him; it turns into a fight and then into a murder. Aadil tells the boys to leave their lodgings and meet him two days later at a certain hotel. But the police are onto them and the rendezvous becomes a catastrophe. The boys are arrested. As Aadil flees in panic, he kills a policeman. He is shot himself, and dies in the street.
Then you realize: this is the faceless thug who killed Katekar.
The revelation opens under you like a trap door and you plunge into the troubled understanding that there are no faceless thugs, that every incident has layers of irony and tragedy that make you cry for the whole human race.
So in one devastating coup de theatre, the Unities are preserved: nothing is irrelevant and everything is connected.
And Vikram Chandra wins the prize – the summerslam championship belt goes to Sacred Games: the Great American Literary Genre Novel.
Take the month of August and read it.
Sorry about the spoiler.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
American Idol Wrap-up
Well, American Idol is over for the season, and the right person won, much to everyone's amazement. By the time they got to the announcement, at the end of a lavish two-hour variety show spotlighting over-the-hill singers as diverse as Bryan Adams, Graham Nash, George Michael and Donna Summer, I had almost forgotten the point of the evening. I never vote myself. That's a line I can't being myself to cross. Voting would somehow be going over to the Dark Side.
I remain a neutral observer. Still, it came down this year to a choice between David Cook, a genuinely talented, bright, amusing guy who never even intended to enter the competition (he just showed up at the initial audition to support his brother) -- an actual musician with some measure of charm and charisma ... and David Archuleta, a creepy 17-year old choirboy homunculus with a demented stage Dad and a tendency to squeeze his eyes shut and clutch his stomach while he sings. This kid has basically wanted nothing else but TO BE THE NEXT AMERICAN IDOL since his days as the first karaoke fetus. (He may still be the first karaoke fetus). Preteen girls -- who must make up a majority of the voting audience -- find his neutered threatless self-effacing persona attractive. And of course, he can sing. Technically, he's one of the best singers they've ever had on the show. But there's an unformed, sort of ... larval quality about him that most adults found vaguely repellent. Anyway, he's been the preumptive winner since the creepy afternoon seven years ago when he trapped some of the kids from the first season and serenaded them with his inhuman prodigy version of I am Telling you I'm Not Going from Dreamgirls. It's on youtube. You see the wormy little boy bellowing out the melodramatic finale that's meant to be sung by a huge black woman and you can see Kelly Clarkson thinking "Whoa, thank god I'm not going have to compete with this freak! I'm smiling, I'm clapping okay? Now get him the hell away from me."
Archulleta has been twirling through his performances in a kind of smug I've-already-won-it fugue state, lapping up the robotic, predictable condensed milk praise of the judges (Randy: "You could sing the phone book, Dawg" Yes, but could he sing the yellow pages? Paula: "You're just so beautiful and wonderful and I could hang you on my rear view mirror to make my car smell all musical and I'm so high I can't even see straight right now." Simon: "That was brilliant."). Cook meanwhile, just performs his ass off and has a good time.
So we were all gritting our teeth, waiting for the inevitable, consoling ourselves that even second place finalists do very well (sometimes better than the winners) in the real world of record sales. And then, in a startlingly appropriate reversal that seemed to set the Universe right for a second or two, Cook won it. He was as stunned as everyone else. I hate to think what Archuleta's father said to his son after the show: "You didn't sing it the way I told you! You didn't smile enough!Your phrasing was off! You've ruined my life! Can you dance? I'll teach you to dance! There's a dance contest starting next week! Toe heel, toe heel, back forward -- come on DO IT!"
Cook had to sing the usual treacly winners' song, supposedly written by Idol viewers and chosen in a contest, but in fact manufactured on some Orwellian 'versificator' machine that assembles standarized chord changes, familiar melody lines and trite sentiments for the consumption of the proletariat masses (The usual sludge about dreams coming true and this is the best moment of my life and whatever), but he was too dazed to really care. I felt the same way. When they announced the winner I yelled "YES!" so loud I scared my normally unflappable pug, who must now be convinced that humans really are insane. Well, I have seven months to redeem myself, reading books and watching the Weather Channel, until Idol starts all over again in January.
I hope it's enough time.
I remain a neutral observer. Still, it came down this year to a choice between David Cook, a genuinely talented, bright, amusing guy who never even intended to enter the competition (he just showed up at the initial audition to support his brother) -- an actual musician with some measure of charm and charisma ... and David Archuleta, a creepy 17-year old choirboy homunculus with a demented stage Dad and a tendency to squeeze his eyes shut and clutch his stomach while he sings. This kid has basically wanted nothing else but TO BE THE NEXT AMERICAN IDOL since his days as the first karaoke fetus. (He may still be the first karaoke fetus). Preteen girls -- who must make up a majority of the voting audience -- find his neutered threatless self-effacing persona attractive. And of course, he can sing. Technically, he's one of the best singers they've ever had on the show. But there's an unformed, sort of ... larval quality about him that most adults found vaguely repellent. Anyway, he's been the preumptive winner since the creepy afternoon seven years ago when he trapped some of the kids from the first season and serenaded them with his inhuman prodigy version of I am Telling you I'm Not Going from Dreamgirls. It's on youtube. You see the wormy little boy bellowing out the melodramatic finale that's meant to be sung by a huge black woman and you can see Kelly Clarkson thinking "Whoa, thank god I'm not going have to compete with this freak! I'm smiling, I'm clapping okay? Now get him the hell away from me."
Archulleta has been twirling through his performances in a kind of smug I've-already-won-it fugue state, lapping up the robotic, predictable condensed milk praise of the judges (Randy: "You could sing the phone book, Dawg" Yes, but could he sing the yellow pages? Paula: "You're just so beautiful and wonderful and I could hang you on my rear view mirror to make my car smell all musical and I'm so high I can't even see straight right now." Simon: "That was brilliant."). Cook meanwhile, just performs his ass off and has a good time.
So we were all gritting our teeth, waiting for the inevitable, consoling ourselves that even second place finalists do very well (sometimes better than the winners) in the real world of record sales. And then, in a startlingly appropriate reversal that seemed to set the Universe right for a second or two, Cook won it. He was as stunned as everyone else. I hate to think what Archuleta's father said to his son after the show: "You didn't sing it the way I told you! You didn't smile enough!Your phrasing was off! You've ruined my life! Can you dance? I'll teach you to dance! There's a dance contest starting next week! Toe heel, toe heel, back forward -- come on DO IT!"
Cook had to sing the usual treacly winners' song, supposedly written by Idol viewers and chosen in a contest, but in fact manufactured on some Orwellian 'versificator' machine that assembles standarized chord changes, familiar melody lines and trite sentiments for the consumption of the proletariat masses (The usual sludge about dreams coming true and this is the best moment of my life and whatever), but he was too dazed to really care. I felt the same way. When they announced the winner I yelled "YES!" so loud I scared my normally unflappable pug, who must now be convinced that humans really are insane. Well, I have seven months to redeem myself, reading books and watching the Weather Channel, until Idol starts all over again in January.
I hope it's enough time.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Making the Cut
I have this weakness for entering stupid on-line contests run by agents on their websites. Most famously, an agent who called herself Miss Snark ran a 'crapometer' where she judged your log line; if it was good enough you got to submit the firt 750 words. I passed the first round but then butted up against the fact that I couldn't make the proper impact with my actual first section. So I figured out where I wanted to end up, and started cutting. Here's the original:
For Tom Jaglom, it began on the November afternoon when the Mafia killed Alfredo Blasi. He didn’t know it, of course -- we often don’t know when things begin until after they’ve ended. The moment when forces that are going to change the world assemble and begin moving together is a question for hindsight and historians and college kids playing the if game in late-night dormitories -- if the Arch Duke Ferdinand hadn’t been assassinated in Sarajevo, if Hitler had attacked the British Army before they fled at Dunkirk ... or, in this case, if a reporter named Jim Gramble hadn’t been on the steps of the Criminal Courts Building that day, standing in the raw wind, asking questions -- what might have happened?
The question would have bored Tom Jaglom. He was a practical person. He had no interest in speculation; besides, on the day in question he had something much more important on his mind.
He was falling in love.
He was walking in Central Park with Amy Elwell, holding her hand inside his coat pocket, watching the wind scatter her long red hair, feeling truly happy for the first time in years. He felt too large for his skin. It was almost painful. The park was deserted in the bitter cold and it felt like their private estate.
They had been together all morning. Tom was supposed to have picked her up at ten, but he’d arrived at her apartment two hours early. He had been up since five. By seven he was on the street, buttoning his coat against the cold. The wind running between the grimy buildings felt as clear as stream water. He gulped it as he walked. MacDougal Street was peaceful in the sharp morning light, the shops and cafes closed, litter blowing across the pavement. He saw no one but bums and joggers, a kid on a skateboard, a little man walking five big dogs. The city was at rest, unclenched. It absorbed his energy.
He had started walking without conscious direction; nevertheless, within an hour he was at the front door of Amy’s apartment house. She lived on the fourteenth floor. The elevator was slow, the hallway was silent. He stood in front of her door for a moment, bracing himself. Then he knocked. He heard footsteps, then the cover of the peep-hole sliding. Locks clicked and then the door was open and she was standing in front of him in a bathrobe, her hair wrapped in a towel. She smelled of soap and steam.
“Come in.” she said, smiling, startled but happy to see him. “I just got out of the shower. I didn’t expect you for hours.”
“Sorry -- I couldn’t wait.”
He stepped inside and she hugged him. He could feel the firm length of her naked body loose under the terry cloth. She pulled away an inch or two, kissed him lightly. “Let me just get dressed,” she said. “There’s coffee in the kitchen.”
Tom walked into the cramped, sunny room, and poured two cups of coffee. He sat down at the little table Amy had jammed into a corner by the window. He pulled off his coat and sweater; like most New York apartments, Amy’s was brutally overheated all through the winter.
He sipped his coffee. Intruding on this ordinary part of her day gave him a sudden vision of what life might be like if he lived with her, if he were really at home in this little kitchen, as if he had awakened beside her in the pale sunshine, made coffee while she showered.
These were not fantasies he could have imagined himself inventing even two months ago. But everything was different now. He saw beautiful women and he didn’t care. He saw children and he wanted his own. He hadn’t said all this to Amy yet. He wasn’t sure how to do it. He didn’t want to scare her; and he was a little scared himself.
She came in wearing jeans and a t-shirt, toweling her hair. They chatted while she ironed a shirt. They went downstairs after awhile. The city was waking up. They had a quick breakfast at a Bagel Nosh and then walked -- uptown through the garment district and then across town at forty-second Street, past Grand Central and then north on Lexington, looking in shop windows, talking about mid-terms and parents, politics, poetry and pizza, long easy threads of conversation unspooling block after block as the city unpacked itself around them.
Eventually they wound up in Central Park, walking in lazy circles towards the West Side and lunch. Amy’s hand was warm inside his pocket, her fingers laced tight with his as she talked.
“I’m just not sure why I even bother at this point,” she was saying. “They like the idea of me being home for Christmas, but it always turns into a nightmare.”
“Why? I mean -- what happens?”
“I don’t know ... everything I do is just a little bit wrong. It’s like there’s some abstract version of me in their heads and I don’t measure up.”
Tom smiled. “What’s she like?”
“Well -- for one thing, she accepted that Juilliard scholarship. Music is the whole world to her. She’s not recklessly throwing away her God-given talents.”
“Oh boy.”
“All she wants to do is practice. It’s great -- she makes them so proud. She’s going to be the first woman Concert Master of the New York Philharmonic some day.”
“She sounds like a bore.”
Amy laughed, and at that precise moment, Tom realized they were being followed. Under normal conditions he would have figured it out much more quickly. But he was distracted. Amy kept talking, but he was counting pairs of footsteps now, estimating weight from foot falls -- three, four, five altogether. Jumbos. And they were speeding up. Amy finally sensed that something was wrong and started moving faster herself. This was the worst possible response. Tom tugged on her arm, pulled her back into a casual stroll.
“Don’t hurry,” he whispered. “Don’t turn around. Just keep talking.” There was still a chance that this whole absurd circus could be avoided. But Tom had been trained well, by his father and others, and he knew it wasn’t likely. The group was dividing behind them. At the moment he knew the gang was going to attack, all he felt was embarrassment —— this kind of situation made him feel like a freak.
Two gang members trotted ahead of them, blocking the path while the others caught up.
This was it. Tom sighed.
“What’s your hurry. pal?” the leader asked conversationally. Tom had made a point of not hurrying, but he decided against pointing this out. The gang ranged in age from about fifteen to twenty, big heavy white guys wearing bulky coats and packing guns under them.
“He don’t wanta get robbed,” one of the others suggested.
“Yeah,” a third one agreed. “You gotta be careful around here. This is a high crime area.”
“Let’s kill ‘em both!” the youngest one burst out suddenly, unable to control his enthusiasm.
“No,” said the leader. “That would be a waste. We’ll kill him -- the girl we take with us. We can have some fun with her. He pulled out a switch knife and let the eight-inch blade snap out dramatically.
Tom cleared his throat.
“Hold on a second,’ he said. “You’re making a big mistake here. No -- really. Look, this may seem a little bit hard to believe, but … I’m the son of the President of the United States. It’s true. And wherever I go, these Secret Service guys follow me. Big guys. With guns. They shoot first and ask questions later.”
The leader thought this was hilarious. He barked out a short laugh. “Oh yeah?” he said.
Tom shrugged. “Well -- no, actually. They don’t really ask questions later. Except for stuff like, ‘Where are the body bags?’ and ‘Who’s going to get the brains off this wallpaper?’”
“Cut the crap, buddy -- “
He never finished the sentence; Ira Heller’s Secret Service crew finally made their appearance. Three men in gray trench coats carrying AK-47 attack rifles. The gang burrowed into its jackets, and in a moment they were armed the same way. Heller, a jowly, graying man in his fifties who looked like the ex-cop he was, spoke in a tired voice with a faint Brooklyn accent.
“Okay,” he said. “Put the guns down.”
That's 1,414 words. For the crapometer finals I cut it down to 750:
For Tom Jaglom, it began on the November afternoon when the Mafia killed Alfredo Blasi. He didn’t know it, of course -- we often don’t know when things begin until after they’ve ended. Besides, the question would have bored Tom Jaglom. He was a practical person. He had no interest in speculation; besides, on the day in question he had something much more important on his mind.
He was falling in love.
He was walking in Central Park with Amy Elwell, holding her hand inside his coat pocket, watching the wind scatter her long red hair, feeling truly happy for the first time in years. He felt too large for his skin. It was almost painful. The park was deserted in the bitter cold and it felt like their private estate.
He had gotten to her apartment early, and sat in the kitchen sipping coffee while she changed. Intruding on this ordinary part of her day gave him a sudden vision of what life might be like if he lived with her, if he were really at home in this little kitchen, as if he had awakened beside her in the pale sunshine, made coffee while she showered.
“I’m just not sure why I even bother at this point,” she was saying now, as they strolled through the Ramble, under the bare branches of the sycamore trees, between miniature cliffs of jagged granite. “My parents like the idea of me being home for Christmas, but it always turns into a nightmare.”
At that moment, Tom realized they were being followed. Under normal conditions he would have figured it out much more quickly. But he was distracted.
He half-listened as Amy chatted away about her music and her parents. He was counting pairs of footsteps now, estimating weight from foot falls -- five altogether, jumbos. She hadn't sensed anything yet. That was good. If she panicked there might be real trouble. The steps behind them were speeding up. Tom sighed. These situations always made him feel like a freak.
Amy kept chatting away, but she finally sensed that something was wrong and started moving faster herself. This was the worst possible response. Tom tugged on her arm, pulled her back into a casual stroll.
“Don’t hurry,” he whispered. “Don’t turn around. Just keep talking.” There was still a chance that this whole absurd circus could be avoided. But Tom had been trained well, by his father and others, and he knew it wasn’t likely. The group was dividing behind them. Two of the gang members trotted ahead, blocking the path while the others caught up. This was it. Tom sighed.
“What’s your hurry. pal?” the leader asked conversationally. Tom had made a point of not hurrying, but he decided against pointing this out. The gang ranged in age from about fifteen to twenty, big heavy white guys wearing bulky coats and packing guns under them.
“He don’t wanta get robbed,” one of the others suggested.
“Yeah,” a third one agreed. “You gotta be careful around here. This is a high crime area.”
“Let’s kill ‘em both!” the youngest one burst out suddenly, unable to control his enthusiasm.
“No,” said the leader. “That would be a waste. We’ll kill him -- the girl we take with us. We can have some fun with her. He pulled out a switch knife and let the eight-inch blade snap out dramatically.
Tom cleared his throat.
“Hold on a second,’ he said. “You’re making a big mistake here. No -- really. Look, this may seem a little bit hard to believe, but … I’m the son of the President of the United States. It’s true. And wherever I go, these Secret Service guys follow me. Big guys. With guns. They shoot first and ask questions later.”
The leader thought this was hilarious. He barked out a short laugh. “Oh yeah?” he said.
Tom shrugged. “Well -- no, actually. They don’t really ask questions later. Except for stuff like, ‘Where are the body bags?’ and ‘Who’s going to get the brains off this wallpaper?’”
And at that moment Ira Heller’s Secret Service crew finally made their appearance. Three men in gray trench coats carrying compact tech nine assault rifles. The gang burrowed into its jackets, and in a moment they were armed the same way.
Heller, a jowly, graying man in his fifties who looked like the ex-cop he was, spoke in a tired voice with a faint Brooklyn accent.
“Okay,” he said. “Put the guns down.”
Here's the question -- do I lreally lose that much in this edit? I mean, I cut the thing almost in half. And I don't feel the absent material nagging at me. Anyway ... I just entered a new contest, at Bookends LLC. They want just the first 100 words, so I had to cut even more out of the opening. Now it looks like this:
For Tom Jaglom, it began on the November afternoon when the Mafia killed Alfredo Blasi. He didn’t know it, of course -- we often don’t know when things begin until after they’ve ended. Besides, on the day in question he had something much more important on his mind.
He was falling in love.
He was walking in Central Park with Amy Elwell, feeling truly happy for the first time in years. He felt too large for his skin. It was almost painful. The park was deserted in the bitter cold and it felt like their private estate.
For Tom Jaglom, it began on the November afternoon when the Mafia killed Alfredo Blasi. He didn’t know it, of course -- we often don’t know when things begin until after they’ve ended. The moment when forces that are going to change the world assemble and begin moving together is a question for hindsight and historians and college kids playing the if game in late-night dormitories -- if the Arch Duke Ferdinand hadn’t been assassinated in Sarajevo, if Hitler had attacked the British Army before they fled at Dunkirk ... or, in this case, if a reporter named Jim Gramble hadn’t been on the steps of the Criminal Courts Building that day, standing in the raw wind, asking questions -- what might have happened?
The question would have bored Tom Jaglom. He was a practical person. He had no interest in speculation; besides, on the day in question he had something much more important on his mind.
He was falling in love.
He was walking in Central Park with Amy Elwell, holding her hand inside his coat pocket, watching the wind scatter her long red hair, feeling truly happy for the first time in years. He felt too large for his skin. It was almost painful. The park was deserted in the bitter cold and it felt like their private estate.
They had been together all morning. Tom was supposed to have picked her up at ten, but he’d arrived at her apartment two hours early. He had been up since five. By seven he was on the street, buttoning his coat against the cold. The wind running between the grimy buildings felt as clear as stream water. He gulped it as he walked. MacDougal Street was peaceful in the sharp morning light, the shops and cafes closed, litter blowing across the pavement. He saw no one but bums and joggers, a kid on a skateboard, a little man walking five big dogs. The city was at rest, unclenched. It absorbed his energy.
He had started walking without conscious direction; nevertheless, within an hour he was at the front door of Amy’s apartment house. She lived on the fourteenth floor. The elevator was slow, the hallway was silent. He stood in front of her door for a moment, bracing himself. Then he knocked. He heard footsteps, then the cover of the peep-hole sliding. Locks clicked and then the door was open and she was standing in front of him in a bathrobe, her hair wrapped in a towel. She smelled of soap and steam.
“Come in.” she said, smiling, startled but happy to see him. “I just got out of the shower. I didn’t expect you for hours.”
“Sorry -- I couldn’t wait.”
He stepped inside and she hugged him. He could feel the firm length of her naked body loose under the terry cloth. She pulled away an inch or two, kissed him lightly. “Let me just get dressed,” she said. “There’s coffee in the kitchen.”
Tom walked into the cramped, sunny room, and poured two cups of coffee. He sat down at the little table Amy had jammed into a corner by the window. He pulled off his coat and sweater; like most New York apartments, Amy’s was brutally overheated all through the winter.
He sipped his coffee. Intruding on this ordinary part of her day gave him a sudden vision of what life might be like if he lived with her, if he were really at home in this little kitchen, as if he had awakened beside her in the pale sunshine, made coffee while she showered.
These were not fantasies he could have imagined himself inventing even two months ago. But everything was different now. He saw beautiful women and he didn’t care. He saw children and he wanted his own. He hadn’t said all this to Amy yet. He wasn’t sure how to do it. He didn’t want to scare her; and he was a little scared himself.
She came in wearing jeans and a t-shirt, toweling her hair. They chatted while she ironed a shirt. They went downstairs after awhile. The city was waking up. They had a quick breakfast at a Bagel Nosh and then walked -- uptown through the garment district and then across town at forty-second Street, past Grand Central and then north on Lexington, looking in shop windows, talking about mid-terms and parents, politics, poetry and pizza, long easy threads of conversation unspooling block after block as the city unpacked itself around them.
Eventually they wound up in Central Park, walking in lazy circles towards the West Side and lunch. Amy’s hand was warm inside his pocket, her fingers laced tight with his as she talked.
“I’m just not sure why I even bother at this point,” she was saying. “They like the idea of me being home for Christmas, but it always turns into a nightmare.”
“Why? I mean -- what happens?”
“I don’t know ... everything I do is just a little bit wrong. It’s like there’s some abstract version of me in their heads and I don’t measure up.”
Tom smiled. “What’s she like?”
“Well -- for one thing, she accepted that Juilliard scholarship. Music is the whole world to her. She’s not recklessly throwing away her God-given talents.”
“Oh boy.”
“All she wants to do is practice. It’s great -- she makes them so proud. She’s going to be the first woman Concert Master of the New York Philharmonic some day.”
“She sounds like a bore.”
Amy laughed, and at that precise moment, Tom realized they were being followed. Under normal conditions he would have figured it out much more quickly. But he was distracted. Amy kept talking, but he was counting pairs of footsteps now, estimating weight from foot falls -- three, four, five altogether. Jumbos. And they were speeding up. Amy finally sensed that something was wrong and started moving faster herself. This was the worst possible response. Tom tugged on her arm, pulled her back into a casual stroll.
“Don’t hurry,” he whispered. “Don’t turn around. Just keep talking.” There was still a chance that this whole absurd circus could be avoided. But Tom had been trained well, by his father and others, and he knew it wasn’t likely. The group was dividing behind them. At the moment he knew the gang was going to attack, all he felt was embarrassment —— this kind of situation made him feel like a freak.
Two gang members trotted ahead of them, blocking the path while the others caught up.
This was it. Tom sighed.
“What’s your hurry. pal?” the leader asked conversationally. Tom had made a point of not hurrying, but he decided against pointing this out. The gang ranged in age from about fifteen to twenty, big heavy white guys wearing bulky coats and packing guns under them.
“He don’t wanta get robbed,” one of the others suggested.
“Yeah,” a third one agreed. “You gotta be careful around here. This is a high crime area.”
“Let’s kill ‘em both!” the youngest one burst out suddenly, unable to control his enthusiasm.
“No,” said the leader. “That would be a waste. We’ll kill him -- the girl we take with us. We can have some fun with her. He pulled out a switch knife and let the eight-inch blade snap out dramatically.
Tom cleared his throat.
“Hold on a second,’ he said. “You’re making a big mistake here. No -- really. Look, this may seem a little bit hard to believe, but … I’m the son of the President of the United States. It’s true. And wherever I go, these Secret Service guys follow me. Big guys. With guns. They shoot first and ask questions later.”
The leader thought this was hilarious. He barked out a short laugh. “Oh yeah?” he said.
Tom shrugged. “Well -- no, actually. They don’t really ask questions later. Except for stuff like, ‘Where are the body bags?’ and ‘Who’s going to get the brains off this wallpaper?’”
“Cut the crap, buddy -- “
He never finished the sentence; Ira Heller’s Secret Service crew finally made their appearance. Three men in gray trench coats carrying AK-47 attack rifles. The gang burrowed into its jackets, and in a moment they were armed the same way. Heller, a jowly, graying man in his fifties who looked like the ex-cop he was, spoke in a tired voice with a faint Brooklyn accent.
“Okay,” he said. “Put the guns down.”
That's 1,414 words. For the crapometer finals I cut it down to 750:
For Tom Jaglom, it began on the November afternoon when the Mafia killed Alfredo Blasi. He didn’t know it, of course -- we often don’t know when things begin until after they’ve ended. Besides, the question would have bored Tom Jaglom. He was a practical person. He had no interest in speculation; besides, on the day in question he had something much more important on his mind.
He was falling in love.
He was walking in Central Park with Amy Elwell, holding her hand inside his coat pocket, watching the wind scatter her long red hair, feeling truly happy for the first time in years. He felt too large for his skin. It was almost painful. The park was deserted in the bitter cold and it felt like their private estate.
He had gotten to her apartment early, and sat in the kitchen sipping coffee while she changed. Intruding on this ordinary part of her day gave him a sudden vision of what life might be like if he lived with her, if he were really at home in this little kitchen, as if he had awakened beside her in the pale sunshine, made coffee while she showered.
“I’m just not sure why I even bother at this point,” she was saying now, as they strolled through the Ramble, under the bare branches of the sycamore trees, between miniature cliffs of jagged granite. “My parents like the idea of me being home for Christmas, but it always turns into a nightmare.”
At that moment, Tom realized they were being followed. Under normal conditions he would have figured it out much more quickly. But he was distracted.
He half-listened as Amy chatted away about her music and her parents. He was counting pairs of footsteps now, estimating weight from foot falls -- five altogether, jumbos. She hadn't sensed anything yet. That was good. If she panicked there might be real trouble. The steps behind them were speeding up. Tom sighed. These situations always made him feel like a freak.
Amy kept chatting away, but she finally sensed that something was wrong and started moving faster herself. This was the worst possible response. Tom tugged on her arm, pulled her back into a casual stroll.
“Don’t hurry,” he whispered. “Don’t turn around. Just keep talking.” There was still a chance that this whole absurd circus could be avoided. But Tom had been trained well, by his father and others, and he knew it wasn’t likely. The group was dividing behind them. Two of the gang members trotted ahead, blocking the path while the others caught up. This was it. Tom sighed.
“What’s your hurry. pal?” the leader asked conversationally. Tom had made a point of not hurrying, but he decided against pointing this out. The gang ranged in age from about fifteen to twenty, big heavy white guys wearing bulky coats and packing guns under them.
“He don’t wanta get robbed,” one of the others suggested.
“Yeah,” a third one agreed. “You gotta be careful around here. This is a high crime area.”
“Let’s kill ‘em both!” the youngest one burst out suddenly, unable to control his enthusiasm.
“No,” said the leader. “That would be a waste. We’ll kill him -- the girl we take with us. We can have some fun with her. He pulled out a switch knife and let the eight-inch blade snap out dramatically.
Tom cleared his throat.
“Hold on a second,’ he said. “You’re making a big mistake here. No -- really. Look, this may seem a little bit hard to believe, but … I’m the son of the President of the United States. It’s true. And wherever I go, these Secret Service guys follow me. Big guys. With guns. They shoot first and ask questions later.”
The leader thought this was hilarious. He barked out a short laugh. “Oh yeah?” he said.
Tom shrugged. “Well -- no, actually. They don’t really ask questions later. Except for stuff like, ‘Where are the body bags?’ and ‘Who’s going to get the brains off this wallpaper?’”
And at that moment Ira Heller’s Secret Service crew finally made their appearance. Three men in gray trench coats carrying compact tech nine assault rifles. The gang burrowed into its jackets, and in a moment they were armed the same way.
Heller, a jowly, graying man in his fifties who looked like the ex-cop he was, spoke in a tired voice with a faint Brooklyn accent.
“Okay,” he said. “Put the guns down.”
Here's the question -- do I lreally lose that much in this edit? I mean, I cut the thing almost in half. And I don't feel the absent material nagging at me. Anyway ... I just entered a new contest, at Bookends LLC. They want just the first 100 words, so I had to cut even more out of the opening. Now it looks like this:
For Tom Jaglom, it began on the November afternoon when the Mafia killed Alfredo Blasi. He didn’t know it, of course -- we often don’t know when things begin until after they’ve ended. Besides, on the day in question he had something much more important on his mind.
He was falling in love.
He was walking in Central Park with Amy Elwell, feeling truly happy for the first time in years. He felt too large for his skin. It was almost painful. The park was deserted in the bitter cold and it felt like their private estate.
It's bizarre ... how much further could I go with this? Reduce a whole book to a haiku? Or just a very dense short story -- that's the technique Borges preferred. Could I make these same relatively painless editorial corrections on everything I've ever written? It's a daunting thought. I'm sure some of my friends would be cheering, though, especially the one who said that reading my 900-page manuscript felt like being pelted by rhinestones -- she knew some of them had to be diamonds, but the barage was too painful for her to pick and choose.
My Dad made even more extensive cuts at the behest of my (then) agent -- this was in the late nineties -- and it seemed to me that his edits rendered the whole thing generic. My cuts keep the feeling of the original (I think) ... but story moves much faster to that confrontation in the park. And agents seem so impatient these days. One of them suggested an opening like the one below -- right into the inciting incident. It seems rather abrupt, but this is supposedly what people want now: plunge them into the action and don't give them time to breathe:
The gang had been following them for five minutes. It wouldn't be long now. Tom Jaglom half-listened as Amy chatted away about her music and her parents. She hadn't sensed anything yet. That was good. If she panicked there might be real trouble. The steps behind them were speeding up. Tom sighed. These situations always made him feel like a freak.
Amy kept talking, but he was counting pairs of footsteps now, estimating weight from foot falls -- three, four, five altogether. Jumbos. And they were speeding up. Amy finally sensed that something was wrong and started moving faster herself. This was the worst possible response. Tom tugged on her arm, pulled her back into a casual stroll.
I guess this is okay, but personally, I like breathing from time to time.
Anyway,I doubt I'll win this new contest, but it doesn't matter. The cutting is what counts. It's an interesting experiment; and a humbling one.
Friday, March 14, 2008
Twilight Zone -- the Movie
I recently purchased the complete Twilight Zone on DVD and discovered that one season featured hour-long episodes. They were uniformly bad, and I began to feel that Rod Serling’s story-telling style required a half-hour format. I didn’t see those sixty minute stories as a kid, because they went on too long and aired too late at night. I could barely keep my eyes open for the half hour episodes, with my mother’s bland but merciless “Of course you can watch it, if you can stay up that late” ringing in my ears like a call to battle. Far too often I didn’t make it, so it felt good to catch up on the shows I missed.
But I’ve come to realize that there are a number of superb Twilight Zone episodes in the form of full length films. Foreign movies like The Seventh Seal, old Hollywood science fiction like The Time Machine, The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Incredible Shrinking Man; recent films like Gattaca, The Sixth Sense and The Truman Show also fit the mold. Time shifters like Sliding Doors and Peggy Sue Got Married would make good episodes. But I have a private list of the top five potential two-hour Twilight Zones. They have to be a little corny, they have to have some kind of twist or trick; there has to be a moral or some heartwarming lesson at the heart of the story.
Most of all, you have to be able to imagine Rod Serling doing the intro.
In reverse order:
#5: Big
The best of all the little kid in a grownup body movies, complete with creepy amusement park vending machine genie and the realization that childhood is too precious to waste on being a successful 30-year old ad man. Who can forget Elizabeth Perkins’ classic “He’s a grown up!”
#4: Terminator
The first one, not any of the others, which were either too slick, too complex or too stupid to make the grade. The first movie has everything a good Twilight Zone needs: scary stuff – being chased by a machine from the future with nuclear apocalypse looming (There was lots of nuclear apocalypse in the Twilight Zone); and a time bending love story where the soldier sent back in time to save the mother of humanity’s last hope in the war with the machines winds up making love with her and becoming the father himself. You can almost hear Rod doing the intro: “Scientists tell us that time travel is impossible. The events you go back in time to stop happen anyway. In fact, it’s your actions that set everything in motion. Case in point: one Sarah Connor, an ordinary waitress in the city of Los Angeles, about to receive some unexpected visitors … from the Twilight Zone.”
#3: It’s a Wonderful Life
A classic Serling fantasy, the perfect Christmas episode, especially the dark section where George Bailey gets to see how badly the world would have turned out if he had never been born. Serling always had a soft spot for this kind of sentimental fantasy. “To my brother George – the richest man in town!”
#2: Planet of the Apes
The cheesy twist ending for the ages: the planet of the apes is really Earth! We destroyed our civilization and now apes rule the world. You can hear the eerie dee-de, dee-de music swelling as Charlton Heston pounds the sand in front of the ruined Statue of Liberty at the low-tide line. How the Statue of Liberty survived a nuclear holocaust, or wound up on what looks suspiciously like Zuma beach, are questions for a more mature audience. Those discerning souls might also wonder how the apes speak perfect English. But none of that matters. The final jolting image, with its freight of moral censure, is all a classic Twilight Zone ever needed.
#1: Field of Dreams
This may be the greatest Twilight Zone episode ever filmed. It’s got everything – the supernatural element of ghostly baseball players emerging from the green stalks, the reunion with the estranged dead father, (“If you build it, he will come") the American iconography (A baseball diamond in a corn field), family values, cynics converted to belief and innocence, and most of all, Moonlight Graham, played by Burt Lancaster, getting his dream to pitch in the big leagues and giving it up to do his duty as a doctor. Who can forget Graham’s lovely speech about playing a single inning as the whole of his career. “It was like coming this close to your dreams, and having them brush past you, like a stranger in a crowd.”
And I hear Rod’s voice, resonant and wise: “Submitted for your approval: one Ray Kinsella, Kansas farmer and family man, about to risk everything for a few innings of baseball …in the Twilight Zone.”
That one would have been worth staying up for.
UPDATED
Fittingly enough, I come back to the blog again, it's still the same day and I have to revise it over and over, until I get it right.
I'll let Mr. Serling do the talking for me, standing in his dark suit and thin black tie, heavy eyebrows bunched together, hands clasped in front of his crotch, as always:
"It's February 2nd in Puxatawney, Pennsylvania, and weatherman Phil Connors is walking through another soft news feed, waiting for a groundhog to predict the end of winter and hoping to beat the next blizzard home. He's bored and he's cranky and he's going through the motions one more time. Or so he thinks. In fact, Phil Connors strayed off course today, far off course. He doesn't know it yet, but Phil is going to be broadacsting this particular Groundhog Day report ... from the Twilight Zone."
Groundhog Day -- that was an inexcusable omission. It bumps Big off the top five (to fill out the top ten with The Dead Zone, Miracle on 34th Street, E.T. and The Birds) and jumps to the #2 spot. It's a great movie, actually it's a better movie than Field of Dreams, but as an episode it loses by a nose.
You just can't beat Burt Lancaster saying --"You know, we just don't recognize the most significant moments of our lives while they're happening. Back then I thought, 'well, there'll be other days. I didn't realize, that was the only day."
--no matter how many times you repeat it.
But I’ve come to realize that there are a number of superb Twilight Zone episodes in the form of full length films. Foreign movies like The Seventh Seal, old Hollywood science fiction like The Time Machine, The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Incredible Shrinking Man; recent films like Gattaca, The Sixth Sense and The Truman Show also fit the mold. Time shifters like Sliding Doors and Peggy Sue Got Married would make good episodes. But I have a private list of the top five potential two-hour Twilight Zones. They have to be a little corny, they have to have some kind of twist or trick; there has to be a moral or some heartwarming lesson at the heart of the story.
Most of all, you have to be able to imagine Rod Serling doing the intro.
In reverse order:
#5: Big
The best of all the little kid in a grownup body movies, complete with creepy amusement park vending machine genie and the realization that childhood is too precious to waste on being a successful 30-year old ad man. Who can forget Elizabeth Perkins’ classic “He’s a grown up!”
#4: Terminator
The first one, not any of the others, which were either too slick, too complex or too stupid to make the grade. The first movie has everything a good Twilight Zone needs: scary stuff – being chased by a machine from the future with nuclear apocalypse looming (There was lots of nuclear apocalypse in the Twilight Zone); and a time bending love story where the soldier sent back in time to save the mother of humanity’s last hope in the war with the machines winds up making love with her and becoming the father himself. You can almost hear Rod doing the intro: “Scientists tell us that time travel is impossible. The events you go back in time to stop happen anyway. In fact, it’s your actions that set everything in motion. Case in point: one Sarah Connor, an ordinary waitress in the city of Los Angeles, about to receive some unexpected visitors … from the Twilight Zone.”
#3: It’s a Wonderful Life
A classic Serling fantasy, the perfect Christmas episode, especially the dark section where George Bailey gets to see how badly the world would have turned out if he had never been born. Serling always had a soft spot for this kind of sentimental fantasy. “To my brother George – the richest man in town!”
#2: Planet of the Apes
The cheesy twist ending for the ages: the planet of the apes is really Earth! We destroyed our civilization and now apes rule the world. You can hear the eerie dee-de, dee-de music swelling as Charlton Heston pounds the sand in front of the ruined Statue of Liberty at the low-tide line. How the Statue of Liberty survived a nuclear holocaust, or wound up on what looks suspiciously like Zuma beach, are questions for a more mature audience. Those discerning souls might also wonder how the apes speak perfect English. But none of that matters. The final jolting image, with its freight of moral censure, is all a classic Twilight Zone ever needed.
#1: Field of Dreams
This may be the greatest Twilight Zone episode ever filmed. It’s got everything – the supernatural element of ghostly baseball players emerging from the green stalks, the reunion with the estranged dead father, (“If you build it, he will come") the American iconography (A baseball diamond in a corn field), family values, cynics converted to belief and innocence, and most of all, Moonlight Graham, played by Burt Lancaster, getting his dream to pitch in the big leagues and giving it up to do his duty as a doctor. Who can forget Graham’s lovely speech about playing a single inning as the whole of his career. “It was like coming this close to your dreams, and having them brush past you, like a stranger in a crowd.”
And I hear Rod’s voice, resonant and wise: “Submitted for your approval: one Ray Kinsella, Kansas farmer and family man, about to risk everything for a few innings of baseball …in the Twilight Zone.”
That one would have been worth staying up for.
UPDATED
Fittingly enough, I come back to the blog again, it's still the same day and I have to revise it over and over, until I get it right.
I'll let Mr. Serling do the talking for me, standing in his dark suit and thin black tie, heavy eyebrows bunched together, hands clasped in front of his crotch, as always:
"It's February 2nd in Puxatawney, Pennsylvania, and weatherman Phil Connors is walking through another soft news feed, waiting for a groundhog to predict the end of winter and hoping to beat the next blizzard home. He's bored and he's cranky and he's going through the motions one more time. Or so he thinks. In fact, Phil Connors strayed off course today, far off course. He doesn't know it yet, but Phil is going to be broadacsting this particular Groundhog Day report ... from the Twilight Zone."
Groundhog Day -- that was an inexcusable omission. It bumps Big off the top five (to fill out the top ten with The Dead Zone, Miracle on 34th Street, E.T. and The Birds) and jumps to the #2 spot. It's a great movie, actually it's a better movie than Field of Dreams, but as an episode it loses by a nose.
You just can't beat Burt Lancaster saying --"You know, we just don't recognize the most significant moments of our lives while they're happening. Back then I thought, 'well, there'll be other days. I didn't realize, that was the only day."
--no matter how many times you repeat it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
