Going shopping at the local grocery store here involves running a gauntlet of surly vagrants, so I tend not to turn my back on anyone in the parking lot. But I subconsciously assumed that the black guy in the expensive suit chatting with someone in a convertible was okay. I got in my car, and before I could close the door this guy was leaning in and offering me his hand to shake. He said, “Hey man, you speak English? I’m Robert.” I didn’t really see that I had much choice, so I shook his hand. He seemed way too well-dressed and well-groomed to be a mugger, so I figured he was probably going to try to convert me. He could tell I was apprehensive, and was like, “I’m okay, man. See, that’s my jag right there.” A jaguar was parked facing me. The guy said, “That’s mine. I’m okay. Really. I hang out with the Lakers. I’m on my way to a job fair.” He patted his pockets. “But, man, I forgot my wallet and I’ve looked all over my car and I can’t find any change and I’m almost out of gas. Could you help me out?” I said, “What do you need?” And he said, “A few bucks for gas.” At that moment I was about 50% sure it was a scam, though I wondered why a scammer who’d managed to finagle a suit and possibly a jaguar (I wasn’t totally convinced it was actually his) would bother with me in my gym clothes and 10-year-old car with no hubcaps. But I was so overjoyed at the prospect that I wasn’t getting mugged or proselytized and that I could buy my way out of this for just a few bucks that I was glad to give it to him, especially if maybe he was telling the truth. He was so grateful and effusive that it almost made it worth it even if it was a scam. He got in the jaguar and drove off, so it was really his. Now that I’ve had more time to consider it, I’m more than 50% sure it was a scam. It seems pretty unlikely that someone would just happen to be that low on gas and have no money and be on his way to a job fair. Plus I think the guy’s delivery was just too polished. So what does he do, drive around to parking lots all day doing that? I don’t know.
Invisible Children
Last night I went to see a screening of the documentary Invisible Children, which was filmed by three recent USC grads. These guys traveled to northern Uganda to document a civil war that’s been raging there for over 20 years. A band of religious zealots called the Lord’s Resistance Army is fighting to overthrow the government. These rebels replenish their ranks by kidnapping children mostly ages 6-12 from the surrounding villages. The children are then armed and assigned quotas of people they’re supposed to kill, and are executed if they fail. Children who demonstrate their disloyalty to the rebels by crying are also summarily executed. The rebels teach the children that smearing their bodies with oil will make them impervious to bullets. (If this fails to work, it means that the victim had somehow displeased God.) The situation has gotten so bad that thousands of children now leave their villages every night and commute miles into the cities to hide from the rebels. The children sleep in basements, piled atop one another. It’s one of those situations that feels to me like science fiction, but is unfortunately very real. The film is not for the faint of heart, but it’s definitely worth checking out, and is even quite funny in places, as people’s basic humanity shines through under even the most trying circumstances.
Random Writing-Related Stuff
I got into the classes I wanted, so this fall I’ll be taking a fiction workshop with Janet Fitch, who wrote the novel White Oleander, and a screenwriting workshop with Stephen Mazur, who wrote the Jim Carrey movie Liar, Liar. So I’m happy about that.
USC has a graduate writing contest going on right now. I entered my newest story, “Blood of Virgins.” The judges are two of my favorite contemporary short story writers, T.C. Boyle and Aimee Bender, who are on the faculty here. I hope I win something, but even if I don’t it’s a thrill just to think of those two actually reading something I wrote.
Last night Bobby Moresco, co-writer of Crash, came to speak to the program. He said a lot of great stuff. The thing that really struck me was his quote, “Being a writer is about being able to ask questions and then answer them.” I’ve heard this same idea before, but when he put it that way it just clicked for me in a new way. That’s what the creative process is: you start out with some interesting premise, character, or image and keep asking yourself why, why, why until an entire narrative emerges.
Speaking of questions, I received another piece of good writing advice recently. Erich Van Lowe, former head writer for The Cosby Show, taught my survey class for a few weeks. He said that the opening of a story should raise questions in the minds of the audience, so that they’ll stick with the story because they want to find out the answers to those questions. I asked if he could give an example, so he talked about the opening of the Lost pilot. You see a guy wearing a nice suit lying in the jungle. Instantly you’re intrigued. Who is this guy? Where is he? Why is he just lying there? Why is he wearing a suit in the jungle? Then he gets up and starts running furiously. Where’s he going? What’s the rush? Then he busts out of the trees and onto a tropical beach. He’s on an island. What’s he doing on an island? How’d he get here? Slowly the camera pans and you see crowds of people escaping the flaming fuselage of an airliner. The guy rushes to help, and you wonder, will he be able to save them? What caused the plane crash? What island are they on? By this point you’re totally hooked.
The other day in the bookstore I saw something I’ve never seen before. Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain,” basis for the hit film, has been published as a book. Just that one story. It’s really more of a pamphlet, but it’s got a spine and it’s shelved with all the other books. I’m glad for anything that increases the profile of short fiction. $10 is a lot for one short story, though the publisher must be figuring that the massive popularity of the title will overcome that hurdle, and they’re probably right.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Mid-Afternoon
All right, well while I’m here, here’s a story you may find moderately amusing. Last week I was supposed to go for a walk with my friend Erica, who lives nearby. She didn’t show at the appointed time and place. Perplexed, I went to move my car, which I had to do anyway, and ran into her a few streets over. She said, “Have you seen a little dog?” I said no. She said, “There’s this little dog. He’s been running up and down my street all day. I think he’s lost. I’m afraid he’s going to get himself run over. I want to catch him.” For reasons that are no longer clear to me, this seemed like a good idea. What can I say? I’m highly suggestible, and I like doing people favors.
I spotted a little dog and said, “You mean that little dog?” She looked, nodded, and said, “I’m going to go get some cheese to lure him in.” I said I’d keep an eye on where the little dog went, but I quickly lost track of him. You’d be surprised how many places there are for a little dog to hide in a parking lot. Erica came back, and I had to confess that I didn’t know where the little dog had gone. As I was saying this, I spotted him again, down an alley. Something had occurred to me. I said, “You know, it seems like I just saw a poster at Ralph’s for a lost dog. And the reward was like $500.” I hadn’t really been paying attention, but it seemed like the dog in the poster was a little yellow-brown rat-dog like this one was. Erica said, “It’s $1,000. Those posters are all over campus too. But it’s not the same dog.” I said, “Are you sure?” She said, “Pretty sure.” I said, “For $1,000, maybe we should make sure.” I was suddenly a lot more interested in catching this dog.
Erica had brought back a big hunk of cheese and a belt. She was going to lure the dog in with the cheese, then slip the belt around its neck like a leash. I have never owned a dog and am not really a dog person, and this dog could tell from a hundred yards away that it didn’t like me, so I kept out of sight while Erica tried to lure it in. She sat very still and would toss little pieces of cheese to the dog, gradually trying to lure it closer. It was very skittish, and would bolt whenever she moved a hand anywhere near it or whenever a car passed nearby. I think she almost had it when a girl came up behind her and was like, “HEY, WHAT’S UP, ARE YOU TRYING TO CATCH THAT DOG?” at which point the dog took off.
Erica and I conferred. A big SUV came by and drove over her belt, which she’d left lying next to her cheese. She picked up the belt and groaned. “This belt is ruined.” I was getting impatient and said, “Look, let’s just chase the dog down. I mean, come on, its legs are like two inches long, how fast can it really run?” We fished some cardboard boxes out of a nearby dumpster. I think back on this now and I really don’t know what I was thinking. Like, what was our plan, exactly? I have much more sympathy now for everyone who’s ever pled temporary insanity. Anyway, we tried to be subtle and cornered the dog behind the dumpster. I thought Erica was going to get him, but he suddenly decided to rush me, which surprised me. I probably could’ve gotten him, but all of a sudden he was like, “ROWROWREOEOROW!,” which scared the shit out of me. It was the first noise I’d heard him make. He slipped past me and squeezed through a fence.
By this point, Erica was irritated with the dog for getting her belt run over, and I was irritated with him for scaring the shit out of me, and I found myself feeling more and more apathetic on the issue of whether or not he got himself run over. Erica said, “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think he’s a lost dog. I think he’s just a straight-out stray dog. I don’t think a house dog would be this skittish.” I said, “I think we should check the reward poster and see if it’s the same dog, and if not just say to hell with it.” Erica was like, “It’s not the same dog,” and I said, “Well, let’s just check.” So we walked over and found one of the reward posters. I stared at it, and was like, “Okay, well obviously it’s not exactly the same dog, but it’s pretty close,” and Erica was like, “This dog in the poster is a miniature poodle. The dog we’ve been chasing is some kind of mutt.” And I said, “Come on, they’re both little yellow-brown rat-dogs. That’s pretty close if you ask me.” So then we went for walk.
By a curious coincidence, Erica had recently related an incident that “happened to a friend of her cousin’s.” This individual was walking along the beach one day and saw an animal drifting in the ocean. They thought it was chihuahua and fished it out of the water. They revived the animal and took it home with them. They left it in their apartment with their cat while they went out to the store to get pet supplies. When they came home, they found that the animal had killed and largely consumed their cat. There was blood everywhere. The animal turned out to be not a chihuahua but a large cat-eating rat from China that had fallen off a shipping boat. I thought this was the most horrifying (and amazing) story I’d ever heard, and I quickly related it to my Chinese roommate, who expressed skepticism that such cat-eating Chinese rats exist. I tried googling it, but couldn’t really find anything. On a hunch, I tried Snopes.com, which debunks urban legends, and they had the whole story, which is completely made up, with the cat-eating giant rat in question supposedly originating in a wide variety of countries. Anyway, these two little rat-dog stories have somehow gotten comingled in my brain, and I now occasionally have nightmares that I’m being attacked by a cat-eating Chinese rat who rushes out from behind a dumpster barking loudly.
By the way, if you happen to spot an apricot-colored miniature poodle wandering in the vicinity of Jefferson and Hoover and answering to the name “Coco,” give me a call, I’ll split the take with you 50/50.
No Internet
The internet in my apartment has been down for weeks now, which has made it a serious hassle to update my blog (which is why I haven’t much) and do email, if you haven’t heard back from me. I’ll try to post some more stuff soon.
No Way!
I can’t believe it. James Morrow’s novel The Last Witchfinder is actually out. I’ve been waiting seven years for this. Morrow is one of my favorite writers — a fabulous storyteller and extraordinary stylist who uses the fantastic to grapple with heavy-duty intellectual themes. (I attended the life-altering Clarion workshop in 1999 because he was one of the instructors.) I can’t wait to read his new book. |
More Shakespeare in Love
More Shakespeare in Love stuff: Shakespeare was one of the few Elizabethan playwrights who wasn’t college-educated. Most playwrights had been sent to Oxford or Cambridge by their wealthy families to prepare them to enter the ministry or the military, but had rebelled and decided instead to come to London to work in the theater. At college they had studied Aristotle, and they mostly composed their plays according to Aristotelian principles. Aristotle taught that there were two dramatic genres: tragedy and comedy. Tragedies were about great men who defied the gods and died in a cathartic fashion. Comedies were about ordinary people, were funny, and ended with a wedding. Romeo and Juliet starts out following all the conventions of comedy, with Romeo prattling on about Rosaline, but then shifts genres and ends as a tragedy. The audience of the day would have been startled, and would have felt that this Shakespeare guy really had something interesting going on here. Norman also talked briefly about the character Marlowe. Apparently Marlowe is a much more interesting historical personage than Shakespeare, and Norman was afraid that if Marlowe were included as a character, he’d overshadow Shakespeare, so Norman used Marlowe very sparingly.
Shakespeare in Love was ready to go into production in about 1992, with Julia Roberts playing Viola, but they couldn’t find a satisfactory actor to play Shakespeare. They wanted someone British, and he had to be handsome, be able to do both comedy and drama, and you had to be able to believe that he was an artistic genius. Julia Roberts wanted Daniel Day-Lewis, and when he turned down the project, she walked off, and the picture was shelved for years until they found Joe Fiennes. Most people on the project felt that he was a nice kid but that he lacked the gravitas to play Shakespeare. But the director believed in him, and convinced the studio to go ahead with him.
Shakespeare in Love
Marc Norman, co-writer of Shakespeare in Love, came to speak to my program the other day. He said that as a freelance writer, he had trained his kids from an early age to come up with ideas for him. This paid off big time when his son, who was in college studying theater, called him and said, “All right, here’s an idea. Shakespeare is a young, struggling playwright.” Norman says he knew instantly it was a great idea, but it took three years of hard work to figure out how to make a screenplay out of it. He was often tempted to give up, but couldn’t bear the thought of admitting failure to his son, so he kept at it. Things finally fell into place when he started thinking along these lines: Shakespeare is struggling to be a better writer. Shakespeare’s earliest plays (e.g. Two Gentlemen of Verona) aren’t very good. Out of his early great plays, the only one that’s familiar to most people is Romeo and Juliet, so use that. What inspires Shakespeare to write Romeo and Juliet? He meets a girl. But Shakespeare’s whole life revolves around the theater. He’s not as interesting a character if you take him away from the theater, and women aren’t allowed in the theater, so how can there be a romance? Well, what if the girl pretends to be a boy? Voila.
Very little is known about Shakespeare’s actual life, but there’s a wealth of information about his times, and Norman immersed himself in this. The more he studied, the more confident he became that he could write about the Elizabethan stage because he felt like, “I know this industry. I work in this industry.” Within about a ten year period, the Elizabethan theater developed all the accoutrements of the modern entertainment industry — agents, contracts, etc. The clincher came when Norman stumbled across the records of a court case in which a writer was being sued by a company of players. The writer had signed a contract to work for this company for one year and write three plays. He had only delivered one, and the company was suing him (for breach of contract) and demanding their money back. The writer’s defense was that his work had been interrupted by the outbreak of plague. Included among the records was a copy of the contract the writer had signed. The contract included provisions such as that the writer must not work for anyone else during this year, must be available to do rewrites of other writers’ work, and must be available to write jokes and such. Norman, who was working on a one-year studio contract at the time, said to his wife, “I’ve seen this contract before. I signed this contract last year.”
Then last night I went to an event sponsored by the newly-formed USC chapter of League of Women Voters. They screened Iron Jawed Angels, a quite good and very eye-opening drama about the struggle to pass the women’s suffrage amendment. I had no idea that the fight had been so brutal, and some of the parallels to contemporary politics were striking.
Back in L.A.
In case anyone was wondering, I made it back to L.A.
F&SF on Myspace
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction now has a presence on Myspace. Won’t you be its friend?
RoF Message Board
Realms of Fantasy magazine has a spiffy new website [dead link] and message board. I introduced myself over here, and a number of nice people have already dropped by to tell me how much they liked my story “Seeds-for-Brains.”
loss of a friend
I lost a friend this week. Well okay, it was just a Myspace friend. But it still hurts. I used to have 66 Myspace friends, and now I’m down to 65. And as always, I’m left with so many questions: Was it something I said? Did? Blogged? Or does it have nothing to do with me? Did they just decide to cull their friend list down to less than 1,000? Did they just get sick of getting so many messages from random bands, webcam bots, and/or stalkers that they deleted their whole profile? And of course, the biggest question of all: who on earth is missing from my friends list? I’ll probably never know the answer.
nature physics
My dad‘s work graces the cover of new issue of nature physics. All you hardcore physics fans out there will probably want to run out and pick up a copy, so you can check out his article, “Angle-resolved phase-sensitive determination of the in-plane gap symmetry in yttrium barium copper oxide.” Or you could just check out this larger picture of the cover, which shows a pretty colored ring. |
Spring Break
Next week is spring break. I’ll be escaping the L.A. winter doldrums and jetting off to sunny New York. Expect to see me at KGB, at Lunacon, and generally just out and about town.
Crash
Drove out to Ventura to watch the Oscars with family. My cousin Brian Barr worked in the art department on Crash, so there was much rejoicing when Crash won Best Picture. (If you’ve seen the movie, you probably noticed the awesome screen door that the little girl stares out of. That was all him.) Back before Brian became famous, he directed a short film based on my story “Lest We Forget.”
Question
Just got this: “I am a junior in high school and am looking for a strong undergraduate creative writing program. I am particularly interested in writing fantasy. Any suggestions for strong programs, preferably in the northeast?” Any thoughts? I have no idea.
Wake Up Call
I was awakened at 5:30 a.m. today by the sound of a party still going strong next door. I was torn between irritation and admiration.
Strange World
Sometimes you see something that makes you realize that not only is the world is much stranger place than you ever imagined, it’s a much stranger place than you ever could have imagined. I had one of the moments yesterday while watching Grizzly Man. The part where he’s feeling the bear’s poo. If you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about it. Oh man.
I also went to campus last night to see an appearance by Judy Shepard (mother of Matthew Shepard), which was sad, but inspiring.
“SHUT UP!!!”
I ran into the student in my program who’s working on The Itty Bitty Titty Committee, and she said that the director decided to use a clip of me yelling “SHUT UP!!!” in the movie. How exciting! My first on-screen dialogue. If I do any more movies, maybe “SHUT UP!!!” will become my signature line, like Arnold Swartzenegger’s “I’ll be back” or Keanu Reeves’ “Whoa.” I wish I could say that “SHUT UP!!!” was a brilliant ad lib on my part, something I produced by delving deeply into the motivations of my character, but really the director just told me to yell that.
New York Reading
Brad Listi will be reading in Manhattan on the 27th at 7:00 p.m. at Barnes & Noble at 396 6th Ave. I can’t go because, d’oh, I’m in Los Angeles, but I recommend any New Yorkers out there check it out. His debut book, Attention. Deficit. Disorder, is the most entertaining novel I’ve read in a while. If you go, tell him I said hi.
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