Archives for March 2006

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 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.

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.

In case anyone was wondering, I made it back to L.A.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction now has a presence on Myspace. Won’t you be its friend?

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.