Category: writing

Under the guise of giving advice for our own screenwriting projects, John August makes some good points about coincidences in the Spiderman 3 script.
He divides coincidences into two basic categories: Fundamental and Minor. The latter are often the result of oversight or slack writing:

My point is not to rip on Spider-Man 3, but to urge readers to look at their own scripts with an eye towards coincidence. If you’ve written a treatment, search for the following phrases: “at the same time,” “accidentally,” “luckily,” “unfortunately,” and “meanwhile.” They’re often a tip-off that you have events happening by coincidence. There’s almost always a better alternative.

Multiple Fundamental Coincidences, meanwhile, are characteristic of the superhero/comic-based genre. [August is writing the script for Shazam.]
If we assume that almost every script has its genesis in a Fundamental Coincidence, then using the $258 million Spiderman 3 budget as a gauge, each additional Fundamental Coincidence in your script increases your required budget by $65 million and decreases the likelihood it will be produced.
Perils of Coincidence [johnaugust.com via tmn]

I’ve always known that you never passed anything from one set of chopsticks to another because it was part of the Japanese funeral service, but I never had any idea…

“Letter from a Japanese Crematorium,” Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s incredible essay about her grandmother’s funeral, in AGNI is as Maud said, like “eavesdropping on the deepest and most spellbinding of secrets,” a theme which wafts across Mockett’s experience as well:

And the fact is, because I speak Japanese yet remain something of an outsider, I generally end up hearing the things that are considered taboo. A family friend confided that he might be bisexual; then he broke down and confessed he was actually gay (and could he stay with me in New York for three months to experience liberation?). My mother’s cousin, who I’d always been told was adopted, revealed to me in the five minutes it took to walk to the house from the parking lot where we had bidden goodbye to guests that he was actually the illegitimate son of my grandfather’s brother, and therefore my blood relative. When I was twelve, my grandmother showed me an old photo of a handsome young man and told me that he was her “true love.” It was not a photo of my grandfather. With geographical, not to mention cultural distance, secrets mistakenly appear to lose their power.
Despite all this, Takahagi remains unconvinced. “I am sorry. I just wouldn’t feel comfortable taking you for a visit to the crematorium,” says my cousin, driver of the American hearse.

Funerals and weddings and other large family gatherings are often catalysts for secrets to escape, not only in Japan.
Mockett’s experience makes me recall a story my mother told, of attending her great aunt’s funeral in a rural town in Utah. In one eulogy, a relative revealed that now, in death, the woman would finally be reunited with the true love of her life–her cousin, hello, not her husband.
[Though her husband had, in fact, already died, too; I guess the cousin and the husband were just waiting with their “we need to talk, dear” looks on their ghostly faces when the great aunt crossed to the other side.] Also, the cousin shared a name with the woman’s firstborn son, who was sitting there on the chapel dais.
update: Mockett also posted pictures relating to her essay.

Tom Scocca does a great takedown of The Economist, and by association, the unalloyed Economist worshippers in the magazine industry: “When other magazines say they want to be like The Economist, they do not mean they wish to be serious. They mean they wish, by whatever means, to be taken seriously.”
[He neglects to mention Monocle, though, which launched itself with the suggested tagline, “it’s The Economist-meets-Vice.” [Aside: There’s a conservative power-worshipping sycophant streak that runs through Monocle which will be interesting to watch develop. As if Tyler Brule wants to be the secret, unaccountable ruler of the world–Karl Rove, just with a gym body and hand-stitched shoes.]
Also unmentioned is The Economist‘s one true strength–at least it was, I only read it to get into business school–its wry photo captions.
But Scocca’s bitingly close reading reminds me of another great Observervation of an uncritically praised media organ: the Zagat Guide. Sometime in mid-to-late 1990’s, someone–maybe Michael Thomas?–identified review-submitting diners as suburban boors transfixed by their own imagined superiority, dealing out criticisms like “filled with model wannabes” and “one-car garage decor” and self-inflating praise such as “just like the ratatouille in Marseilles.”
So, can anyone find that article again? Or has it been sent downt he memory hole now that the paper’s owned by a guy from New Jersey with a six-car garage?

Didion has some notes in today’s NYT about adapting her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, into a play. She could write a laundry ticket and I’d be impressed, but it really is fascinating stuff.

I have been asked if I do not find it strange that Vanessa Redgrave is playing me. I explain: Vanessa Redgrave is not playing me, Vanessa Redgrave is playing a character who, for the sake of clarity, is called Joan Didion. At points before this character appears onstage, she loses first her husband and then her daughter. Such experiences of loss may not be universal, but neither are they uncommon. If you take the long view, which this character tries to do, they could even be called general.
This does not close the subject. “But Vanessa Redgrave is nothing like you.”
This is not entirely true. As it happens I knew her before I ever thought of writing a play. Tony Richardson, to whom she was married, was until his death in 1991 one of our closest friends. I had known their daughters since they were children. She and I understand certain kinds of experience in the same way. We share the impulse to make things, the fear of not getting them right. I would even guess, although I have not asked the question, that she has had the nightmare in which you get pushed onstage without a script.
I say some of this.
“But she’s taller than you are.”
This is true. She is taller than I am.
I try to suggest that her task in this play, for better or for worse, offers more elusive challenges than height impersonation.
Then I give up.

The Year of Hoping for Stage Magic [nyt]

She goes to the trouble of using both “quinary” and “kith,” but for some reason, Thomas Pynchon’s new book, Against The Day, does not face the unbridled, in-character wrath of The Full Kakutani.

David Foster Wallace loves himself some footnotes, even when he’s writing for the New York Times. So I allowed myself a flash of curious anticipation, even though I knew that when that linky glow showed up on Ralph Lauren‘s name [1], it was almost certainly not DFW-ian, just the automated product of the nytimes.com’s Times Topics feature.
Someday, maybe someone will write for the website, and trip up our robotic expectations with his own selection of Times archive links and comments thereon.
[1] Of the Times Topicked names in Wallace’s Roger Federer article, the first three–Andre Agassi, John McEnroe, and Roger Federer himself–all preceded the first footnote, and so went by completely unnoticed. After Ralph came Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali, and Lleyton Hewitt.

For the writer for whom a $20 Faber Blackwing pencil is just not stressful enough may I suggest Carbon Copies, “pencils made from the carbon produced during cremation. A lifetime supply of pencils can be made from one body of ash.
“The sharpenings create a secondary ash and displace the pencils as they are used, transforming the pencil case over time, into an urn.”
Of course, having your notebooks bound in your dearly departed’s skin simultaneously decreases the pencil supply by several years and increases the pressure to write Importantly.
Carbon Copies, by Nadine Jarvis, exhibited at the 2006 Goldsmith College BA Design & Eco Design show in London [nadinejarvis.com via treehugger]

“It’s a nice masculine aesthetic,” said Robert Tagliapietra, who with his similarly bearded partner, Jeffrey Costello, designs a collection of pretty silk jersey dresses under the Costello Tagliapietra label.

Also, Ulysses S. Grant does not actually appear in Cold Mountain. So which one did the guy from Vice Magazine not want to admit was his real inspiration: the $50 bill or the bearded Jude Law?
Paul Bunyan, Modern-Day Sex Symbol

Although he IS credited with the screenplay for Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, I confess to not being a fan of JT LeRoy. Not that I’ve ever read the work, mind you. [Hold that thought.]
Recently the authenticity of his identity, his personal story, and the authorship of his works has been called into question, and reporters have started asking if LeRoy is a hoax, a construct, a collaborative, an impostor whose gritty, wrenching, tawdry, and celebrated persona was somehow overshadowing the work itself. Which is funny, because that’s what soured me on his writing right out of the gate–the barrage of hip and celebrity endorsements, most of which came from people who, shall we say, may not be best known for their literary tastes.
Anyway, that doesn’t make Guardian reporter Laura Barton’s deliberately roadtrippy search for the “real” JT LeRoy and her account of her night out with LeRoy’s posse any less interesting. If you like that kind of thing, this is definitely the kind of thing you’ll like.

Who’s that boy/girl? [guardian]
Previously: Van Sant on greg.org
[1/9 update: The jig sounds up to me. In the NYT, Warren St. John identifies the half-sister of one of JT Leroy’s supposed mentor/saviors, Savannah Knoop, [at right] as the real-world stand-in. And then he examines travel expense reports for a JTL story for the Times, which all but confirms that the writing was done by one of these saviors, too: Laura Albert. The Guardian’s Laura Barton thinks that Albert is also Emily, JTL’s friend who took her around LA.]

Paul smashes his guitar of truth into the speaker tower of fiction, finally revealing to the world that he is Gary Benchley, Rock Star with a book deal–and a reading next Thursday in [where else?] Williamsburg:

As the serial progressed I stopped laughing at the people who wrote in to Gary to share a few details from their lives and began to feel a kinship with them. Like them, I had come to believe in Gary Benchley, in his struggle to get a band together and make a life for himself in New York City. I began to see the people who wrote to him as co-conspirators in the prank rather than its victims.

I Am Gary Benchley [themorningnews.org]

I recall being seized by a pressing need not to let anyone at The Los Angeles Times learn what had happened by reading it in The New York Times. I called our closest friend at The Los Angeles Times. I have no memory of what Lynn and I did then. I remember her saying that she would stay the night, but I said no, I would be fine alone.
And I was.
Until the morning. When, only half awake, I tried to think why I was alone in the bed.

After Life, by Joan Didion, excerpted from her upcoming memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking [nytmag]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/10/arts/design/10alle.html“>And Now, a Word From the Streets. Thanks to Noah at Critical Massive and Edmar at Lumpen for their help, and a special thanks to Marc at Wooster Collective, for both his help and his insights; it always amazes me how quickly and thoroughly he and Sara have grown that site into one of the most important crossroads of street art on the planet. Day-um.