Author Interview: Francis Levy

Recently, I posted a review of a new novel called Erotomania: A Romance. I was so intrigued by the book that I had to interview the author, Francis Levy, to find out how he came up with the idea for the novel.

Erotomania is an absurdist portrait of a modern-day romance. It follows James and Monica from their early days as couple that is forced to move into a nuclear fall-out bunker so their explosive sex life doesn't physically harm their neighbors, down the long journey to marriage counseling.

Q: Tell us a little about yourself, what is your background and how did you come to writing?

I was an English major at Columbia and always wanted to write. Actually trash that, I went to Columbia and felt like shit, just hated myself, felt inferior, undesirable, my long time girlfriend had left me, I then went to Yale Drama School, in a program they had in critical writing and continued to feel like shit. I constantly wanted to be top man on the totem pole. At Yale I began my long career oedipalizing reality. I constantly wanted what everyone else had. There is an expression you've got to want what you have. It took me about thirty years to learn that. I started writing for all the wrong reasons basically as a way of looking for attention. I think all writers do this to some extent and I'n ending my career with the same base motives. You will never hear a heartening word from these lips. I look at writing as an animalistic activity, a delving into an unconscious instinctual world; this is where the addictive power of writing comes from. This is a world that psychotics inhabit unwillingly and that writers are free to come and go from as they please. There is a deceptive veneer of humanism to the enterprise, but essentially it has to do with the will to power. Who used that expression? When I first came to NY after my years in New Haven, I got a job in publishing. I expected the literary world to be kind of cult of sensiblility, EM Forster had talked about "the aristocracy of he heart." It was nothing like that.

Q. How long did it take you to write the book and find a publisher?

It's a short book, but it took a couple of years since it was rewrirtten a lot. I had published a lot of short fiction, essays, humor, criticism in a wide variety of places including The Village Voice, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly and so on, but I had never published a book. I have written other books which I tried to publish unsuccessfully and I was a little wary of the situation. So I actually didn't really do much submitting. I think I queried a few places and maybe sent some sample chapters out, but I didn't seriously set out to get published in the way I had in the past. I work with a very good editor named Maggie Paley and she showed it to her agent at the time Jane Gelfman. Jane liked it, but wasn't going to handle a first novel whose only destination was going to be Morgan Entrekin at Grove. He is the one that everyone thinks off when they have an edgy book. You have to remember that the situation in publishing is particularly bad now. It really sucks. I think one of her authors someone with a big track record had spoken highly of a small publisher in the midwest called Two Dollar Radio. That's how I heard of it. I went on line, looked up their submission guidelines then submitted, sight unseen. I heard back from Eric Obenauf the publisher. He liked what I had shown him and wanted to see more. I sent the rest and he offer me a contract.

Q. Your first release is entitled Erotomania: A Romance. How did you come up with the idea? From your blog, you specifically state that the book is not autobiographical in any way!

The original title of the novel had been Savage Fuck, then Savage Kiss, but the publisher wasn't hot on it. So my wife Hallie said, why don't you call it Erotomania. It's a word I frequently bandy about. The significance of the title for me really is that Erotomania is a pathology and pathology is a form of consciousness. My two characters start as animals. they are really walking ids and they they develop personality and consciousness. It's what allows them to get to know each other and it;s the thing that always draws them apart. The romance part came because from the first my publisher regarded it as a love story. I think his acceptance letter said somethinng like "you have reinvented the love story."

Q. I have to say that even though I’ve read a great deal of erotic romance and erotic, I found myself blushing at the sexual nature of the book. Was that something that you were concerned about all? Did you find yourself ever pulling back during the writing?

Never, not once. I don't regard it as pornographic or sexually stimulating either. I just wrote. You have to understand the language the thinking is all a little like Bunuel and Dali's Chien Andalou, a mixture of humor, sexuality and agrgression. It's not the language of reality, rather that of dreams. if you look at the sexuality in that context you will hopefully see it in another way. By the way I have nothing against pornography or writing that is sexually stimulating. One of my favorite books is DH Lawrences's The Rainbow--which is wonderfully sexy.

Q. The book is not set in a specific place, although the characters travel quite a bit going to various museums, and Jim travels for work. Was there a reason why you didn’t set the book, say in New York, or Chicago?

Again, this isn't reality. It's more of a dreamscape and hence I wasn;t concerned with that kind of verisimilitude.

Q. Although this book is written solely from the male point of view, we get a strong sense of Monica’s character. Did you find it a challenge getting into Monica’s head?

Not really, I have always been fascinated by women. One of my jokes which has some truth in it is that I have a lesbian sensiblity. That is, I have the sensibiity of a woman who loves other women. I don't think sexual consciousness need be defined by sexual orientation or biology. I can be a woman in a man's body for instance while not being a transexual, who desires a sex change operation. I love being a man, but I also love thinking about what it is to be a sexual or even non sexual woman.

Q. Not to spoil it for everyone, but both Monica and Jim have suffered a similar experience with a parent, was this a conscious decision on your part? And I noticed that it wasn’t really addressed during the counseling sessions?

There was nothing consciously addressed with regard to the creation of Monica or Jim's back stories. They just evolved. However, I am a great believer in the significance of manifest content. In other words if you spot a relationship then there is a signifance to it. I am still seeing things in the novel that I hadn't consciously noticed when I wrote it. I'm a very regimented person. I work on a strict schedule the same time everyday etc, but when I actually get into the act of writing I'm in a rather manic state. It's like a good therapy session that is painful at the same time. I delve into area I might not have been aware of ideationally, then I wake up from my dreaming, only to return to the wet dream or nightmare the next day.

Q. The character of the relationship counselor, is almost the anti- Dr. Phil. Is he based on someone you know or a completely fictional creation?

It's a total fictional creation, as is the whole novel. I will say this however. I have had lots of experience with psychoanalysis, and marriage counselling both and let me add I only satirize or caricature that which I love. I actually have an article in the current issue of the psychoanalytic journaol Contemporary Psychoanalysis entitled "Catricide, Matriciide and Magic: the Artist as Chimera."

Q. Food also plays a major part in the book, particularly Chinese food. You live in New York, what are your favorite Chinese food restaurants?

I used to eat in a place called Jade Mountain. It was between 12th and 13th on Second. It was the old combination plate kind of deal with the naugahyde booths and linoleum tables, a staticky oldies station playing in the background. I always ordered the Number #1` chow main, egg roll, fried rice and wanton soup. The Chow Mein sign is still up there on the building if you pass by. Now it's a bar. It was run by a guy named Reggie Chan. He was chief cook and bottle washer. There was a delivery guy, but Reggie made deliveries sometimes too. One day the delivery guy didn't make it to work I guess and Reggie got hit by a flat bed truck while making a delivery. That was the end of Jade Mountain and a whole period of my life. My kids grew up there. When I got my black belt we had my party there.

Q. Monica and Jim spend a great deal of time watching TV. Are there any shows that are must see TV for you?

I watch no TV. I am not against it. I just watch no TV I don't have the time.

Q. What are some novels that you could read again and again?

War and Peace, The Brothers K, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Great Expectations, The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq

Q. Who do you admire and why?

I admire mostly dead people, Chekhov, Freud, I loved Bergman more than my own life. He is the Shakespeare of film. I hate being entertained and I hate beauty which I find alienating, but I love art and artists whose currency is human pain. That is something I identify with. It's not the pain of living that is so difficult. It is being alone in it that has always been the problem for me. I don't find a movie like Through a Glass Darkly disturbing in the least for instance. I find I solace in it. When I first saw the great Bergman films I was overwhelmed with the feeling of consolation.

Q. What is your writing process? Do you plot extensively first or do you tend to “fly in the mist?” Has your process changed over time? Do you write multiple drafts or clean up as you go?

No plotting. I write as I go, I try not to think. Ideation is the enemy of invention for me. I never say I have an idea for something. A line or succession of lines occurs and I'm off to the races.

Q. You work out seven days a week, you manage your family’s real estate holdings as well as a homeless program called Safe Haven, and you’re in analysis, when do you find time to write?

I write at the same time every day for starters. I write and weight lift in the mornings. then I go to karate or spinning or I jump rope, then I go to my analytic appointment, then I write some more. In the afternoons I write again and rewrite. I am usually working on three different things at the same time. For instance I recently completed a long essay on my analysis called "Pscyhoanalysis:The Patient's Cure."

Q. Do you have any advice for aspiring novelists?

As I have said before writing is an irrational activity; that is where the power comes from, but to deal with the huge amount of irrationality unleashed, a firm regimen is necessary. The discipline, the regimen is everything. It's what allows the process to take place. I no more think about feeling like writing than I do feeling like working out. I just do it , the same time everyday. I rarely feel like working out. Who does? Do you know anyone who wants to do something that is difficult and exhausting?I feel the same way about writing.

Q. You are also the co-director of The Philoctetes Center here in New York. Can you talk a little bit about the Center and what it does?

The Philoctetes Center is psychoanalysis, neuroscience and humanitires. We run roundtables and are now running an increasingly ambitious research program. We have a poetry series and a jazz improv series and we have a collaboration with Film Forum where we preview films of theirs that have artistic or psychological resonances. We ran a whole series on creative process showing films about Kiki Smith, Chuck Close, Louise Bourgeois etc. Chuck Close and Kiki Smith came to talk about these film. The center began as a discussion about imagination. Imagination being the palette of psychoanalysis we were interesed in what creative people who have a particular intense connection to unconscious life could tell about analysis and conversely what analysis could tell us about the process of creativity.


Q. What are you planning to work on next?

Two things. I have a collection of interrelated short stories, really fables called The Kafka Studies Department. I term these "emotional mysteries." They are illustrated by my wife Hallie Cohen , who is a painter and chair of the art departmen at Marymount Manhattan College. My next novel is nearing completion. It's called "Seven Days in Rio" and concerns a sex tourist who gets waylaid at a psychoanalytic convention.

Dreams of Harlan Ellison

Last night I went back to The Philoctetes Center to see a new documentary about Harlan Ellison called Dreams with Sharp Teeth. Ellison is a writer whose works are genre bending but one could say that he writes science fiction/fantasy, mainly short fiction. The only thing that I knew about Harlan Ellison was that he had written the only Star Trek episode that I've ever seen City on the Edge of Forever. So I had no expectations about this film or what I might learn which I think might have been a good thing.

I came away fascinated with him as a person and wanting to immediately go out and read some of his work. He's 74 years old now, and he has an energy and a spirit that are palpable. Maybe I found myself liking him because in the clips of himself as a younger man, he looked like an extremely crankly Michael J. Fox. Or maybe I related to his stories about being picked on as a kid and being beaten up repeatedly. Anyone who has experienced abuse at the hands of their peers can understand why he may have grown up to be a slightly bitter old man.

Even though I haven't read any of his work, seeing this film and hearing him talking about writing, it made me realize more than ever how important it is to read outside of the genre that you write in because you can learn from all kinds of writers. After the film, Carol Cooper who is a critic for the Village Voice among other publications, talked about what it was like to work for him for a week at the Clarion Writer's Workshop. His method of teaching is the tear the writer apart and then build them back up approach which I personally don't agree with because I think it is abusive. Which is interesting because in a sense he's treating people the way that he was treated. That's kind of f*&$#d up in a sense. He also apparently tells students to forget writing as a profession which is also what happened to him in college. I guess because he then went out to prove that professor wrong, he wants students to do the same to him, if they are really determined to be a writer.

He can also be belligerant with fans, occasionally. I'm sure there are quite a few romance writers who if they saw this film would cringe at the way that he treats them, with a mixture of contempt and exasperation at times. He seems to see them as a necessary evil because at least they had the good sense to buy his work, but I don't think he particularly likes them as people or most people in general for that matter, and when I say people I mean as a whole.

The best part of the film was when he talked about watching the game The Weakest Link. A young woman was asked the question "Which S who was in Lawrence of Arabia wrote a long running newspaper column about bridge?" The woman's answer? Naomi Campbell! That is so wrong on so many levels, a) She wasn't in Lawrence of Arabia, b) I don't think she knows what bridge is unless it's crossing a river, and c) Her last name doesn't start with S. The only thing I can think of is that because Campbell is considered a supermodel, well that starts with S. Ellison said that he and his wife now use it as a catchphrase whenever anyone asks a question, they answer 'Naomi Campbell.'

I did agree with him that writing is incredibly hard work. Some days it goes extremely well and some days or weeks it sucks totally. I was trying to articulate to cutie pie author why I responded so enthusiastically to this film and the one on Louise Bourgeois than the other two that I had seen on Philip Glass and Robert Wilson. I think because in many ways Glass and Wilson were still as enigmatic to me after the film as they were before the film and I certainly had no desire to run out and buy a CD of Glass's music or to see the next project that Robert Wilson directed. Even at times it seemed that Ellison was doing his cranky man shtick you still sensed that he meant every word that he said. And the scenes of him reading excerpts from his work was particularly good. From the little I've heard, it appears that his writing is very similar to Hemingway's in its spareness.

Anyway I enjoyed this film and it was more fun than sitting at home watching The Bachelorette (more on that show tomorrow.)

Stay warm (the temp has gone down here),

EKM

Weekend Update

So yesterday was Father's Day and since my dad passed away 8 years ago, instead of being sad, I decided to cheer myself up by going to see Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. Granted it was an unusual choice of movie for Father's Day, and not necessarily my father's type of humor but it was mindless, politically incorrect and funny and that's what I was looking for.

I'd already had my intellectual fix for the weekend by going to see a roundtable on pyschology and architecture at The Philoctetes Center. I won't bore you with too many details, just that there was a lot of talk about how architecture can shape one pyschologically in terms of where even the architecture of a room in terms of how the furniture is placed. Sort of like the principles of feng shui, where everything in the room has a place to create balance.

I've also learned that I have a great deal to learn about relationships, and that I have to learn to stop taking things so personally, which is really hard for me to do for many reasons. I've always been thin-skinned, and while it's not as bad as it once was, I still let things bother me that shouldn't. But still, if someone walks away from you while you are talking to them, isn't that rude? Or is it just me?

The weather turned on us this weekend a little with scattered thunderstorms, and now its a lot cooler here in New York. Watched the Tony Awards last night and I have just one question, what is Adam Durwitz of the Counting Crows deal? Is he black is he Jewish? I am confused. Loved Whoopi though.

Stay cool!

EKM

Pyschogeography (Yes, I'm going deep)

So on Saturday, I went to a roundtable at The Philoctetes Center on Pyschogeography which I thought might be dry and over my head but actually turned out to be quite interesting and made me do a lot of thinking afterwards. The definition on the flyer was this 'Psychogeography—the impact of landscape on the senses and on memory—will be considered from literary, child developmental, and neurological perspectives. The discussion will make specific reference to the changes of scene brought on by immigration and urbanization, in addition to addressing nostalgia for simpler modes of existence.'

Sounds incredibly lofty doesn't it? It was moderated by Matthew von Unwerth who started off the discussion by talking about how some of his earliest most pleasant memories had to do with nature. Which was funny for me because one of my earliest memories having to do with nature was traumatic! Its actually one of my earliest memories. I was about 3 or 4 years old, and we were upstate at our house. We had just gotten out of the car, and I went skipping off along the flagstones carrying a bag of Brach candy when a snake came slithering out from under the flagstones and scared the crap out of me. The bag of candy went flying, and I ran right past my mother, do not pass go, do not collect $200, and climbed up my father's leg, crying. My mother later told me that it was nothing more than a garden snake but when you are 3, a snake is a snake.

Of course I do have pleasant memories later of nature. I remember walks in the woods at day camp, passing the skunk cabbage, a smell that will never leave my brain. I remember rowing on the pond, and the skanky smell of the water. I remember going swimming in the pond near our house upstate, the brackish water, the vegetation that used to grab at our legs. My niece and I used to race each other to see who could get to the raft floating in the middle of the pond first.

Andre Aciman and brought up a point about Manhattan that I thought was interesting. Vito Acconci, another panelist, was born in the Bronx bought went to school in Manhattan. For most people who care coming to New York or who live in the outer boroughs, Manhattan is like this beacon, the green light at the end of the dock in The Great Gatsby. No one who comes to NYC comes to live in the Bronx, or State Island or Queens, they want to live in Manhattan. Such a small island to contain so many people's hopes and dreams. A member of our chapter, always had a dream of living in Manhattan which she fulfilled for one year, before she moved back to Queens!

Growing up in Manhattan, I wasn't really conscious of how other people felt about it until I went to college or traveled outside the city and met people from Europe or other states. Then I began to see the city through their eyes, and it gave me a different perspective on my home. New Yorkers, particularly those of us who are natives, love to complain about how the city has changed and how much better it used to be. The biggest example is to talk about how much better 42nd Street was when it was seedy, disgusting and full of porn theaters and prostitutes as opposed to now when it has become Disneyfied. And my parents could talk about what it was like before it became seedy and disgusting!

My father always had a love hate relationship with New York. He couldn't wait to retire so that he could move to our house upstate full-time. My mother on the other hand would have died if she had to live upstate full time. I feel the same way. Even though I may not go to the museums all the time, I need to know that they are there, that Lincoln Center is there, that I have the options.

I was watching this movie called The Clock yesterday. Robert Walker plays a young soldier from Minnesota who comes to New York on leave. He's exiting the old Penn Station (another lament of New Yorkers!) and as he steps outside and sees all the tall buildings and the horde of pedestrians, he quickly scurries back inside the train station to safety. He's just not ready to venture forth until he meets Judy Garland and they go forth and have adventures in New York.

I remember when I spent my semester abroad in London. I was there for four months and when I came back to New York, I felt so discombobulated. I didn't recognize anything anymore! My whole world had been London, I never once thought about New York or going back. I almost felt like an immigrant!

The roundtable made me think of how I need to incorporate more how the landscape affects my characters in my new novel. Particularly since my heroine has never really been out of her city or state before. Not just the landscape but also the weather as well. I'm really good at dialogue and character description but not so good at the other stuff. I need to describe whether or not the walls are cracked in the hallways and other good things like that.

So yesterday, to help me work on pyschogeography, I made my way out to Brooklyn to the Botanical Gardens. June is Rose Month out there. I've been out to Brooklyn to go to the museum but never to the Botanical Gardens although they are right next door. It was a gorgeous day, the sun was out, the sky was blue and the roses were beautiful. I made time to stop and sniff, remember the fragrance in my nostrils. I've never seen so many different kinds of roses in my life. There was one variety that was purple that didn't even look like what we would consider a rose. There were roses named after Princess Michael of Kent, Julie Andrews, Charles Aznavour, a McCartney rose (which was absolutely lovely, probably named for Linda), a Barbra Streisand rose that wasn't open yet so I couldn't see what the color would have been.

The trip reminded me of the rose bushes that my grandmother used to have in her backgarden in her house here in the city. They were beautiful bushes, and my mother used to clip them and take them home so that we had fresh roses, instead of the hot house ones that they sell at most florists. I think that's why I'm not that fond of receiving roses, because I've had the real thing. I was seriously tempted to snip one or two but I was sure that I was going to get caught. When I was little, I loved flowers, and I had no qualms about wandering off at the Hojos in Kingston and trying to pick the flowers until my mother grabbed me.

I wish I still had the picture of me at Kew Gardens in England, sitting in the middle of a bunch of rose bushes. I also had pictures of me hanging off of the Unicorn of Scotland as well.

So I guess the lesson I learned is that I need to remember that there is more than GIC, and dialogue to make a book work. All the senses need to be engaged. Sight, sound, touch, taste and smell.

Thanks for reading,

EKM

Weekend in New York

So this past weekend was really weird in New York. Friday night, it poured down rain, Saturday was beautiful, Sunday it poured down rain. I thought it was supposed to be April showers bring May flowers, not May brings Noah's ark.

On Friday, I went to my dance class because I had skipped last week to go to the Met museum. I managed to survive, even though I had to quickly learn the routine that everyone else had learned last week. I even managed to make it through dancing the routine twice with our instructor who is wicked good. I mean seriously good. All the instructors at Dancesport are professionals and have been dancing since they were in utero, they could all be on Dancing with the Stars, that's how good they are. And we were dancing the cha-cha which is normally a really fast dance, but Werner slowed down the music a tad for us.

Afterwards, I headed up to Lincoln Center to see Duel in the Sun, also known as Lust in the Dust or Hump at the Stump. It's a movie from the late 1940's starring Jennifer Jones, and Gregory Peck. The actors in this movie are so over the top, you can practically see the pieces of scenery in their teeth. I was also fascinated by how much make-up Jennifer Jones was wearing to be playing Pearl Chavez, who is half-Indian (you never do find out what tribe her mother is from, it doesn't really matter). This stuff must have been troweled on, and her red lipstick. Gregory Peck comes off a lot better than she does in the film. He played Lewt McCanles, the bad boy in the family. You can tell he's having a great deal of fun, while JJ is trying gamely to play a sexpot, a role that didn't come naturally to her. Ava Gardner would have been much better in the film, but it was produced by David O. Selznick who was JJ's lover and later husband, who wanted to make a Gone With The Wind type epic for her.

Saturday, I went to see this really groovy group at The Philoctetes Center called the Wingdale Community Singers (that's them in the picture). The guy in the hat is Rick Moody who wrote the novel the Ice Storm which was made into a film about six or seven years ago with Katie Holmes and Toby McGuire. The music is sort of alt-country, folk, with tinges of rock. Very cool. Of course, I had to purchase about 5 CD's to give to friends. I have a habit of buying multiple copies of something if I think my friends will like it.

THE WINGDALES COMMUNITY SINGERS. The Wingdale Community Singers play folk music that could have been written any time in the last sixty years. It's Old Time, it's High Modernist, it's experimental, it's resistant to interpretation, it's funny sometimes, it's full of dread other times. One aspect remains throughout: there's a lot of singing. And a lot of harmony. With Rick Moody (acoustic guitar, vocals) Hannah Marcus (acoustic guitar, piano, fiddle, vocals). David Grubbs (electric guitar, vocals). Nina Katchadourian (acoustic guitar, accordion, recorder, tomato, vocals).

I'm planning a field trip to see them play in Brooklyn in June which sounds strange since Brooklyn is part of New York, but to us Manhattanites, its like traveling to another state. You have to take the F train, which I like to call the Forever train because that is how long it takes for one to arrive. It should be fun. I have about people on the wagon so far.

EKM

Its Not Raining Men

Remember that song from the Weather Girls in the 1980's, the one that Ginger Spice butchered in Bridget Jone's Diary? Well its raining here (again) in New York and there are no men to be seen. Or cats and dogs for that matter. Do you know that I went to buy an umbrella last week in this fancy store and they had brollies for $200? I'm sorry but for $200 that umbrella better make like Mary Poppins and carry me over the rooftops.

See the hottie to the left? That's my new Object of Lust. His name is Nathan Gunn and he's an opera singer. Yes, I said an opera singer, which is funny because I think that most operas sound like cats yowling. But he was so hot as Lancelot in Camelot for Live from Lincoln Center that I would willingly go to the Metropolitan Opera House to hear him sing. And he's wearing leather pants!

Unfortunately (like Clive) he's married and has 5 kids. He also lives in the middle of nowhere Illinois when he's not off making womens knees weak like mine. And he has an amazingly glorious baritone voice. Sigh!

What else did I do this merry May weekend? Well, I braved the monsoon on Friday to go to the MET museum to see the Superhero costume exhibit which was lamer than lame. The exhibition was supposed to be how superheroes have inspired fashion. Guess what? Not so much. I did see an absolutely lovely Dante Gabriel Rossetti of Lilith which I fell in love with. I'm a sucker for the pre-Raphaelites.

Saturday, I went to see a documentary on Philip Glass at The Philoctetes Center because I'm all about the culture. I admit that I'm not a huge fan of his music, its a little too atonal for me for the most part, but I enjoyed the documentary and I came away with a new appreciation for at least his newer music. Nothing could make me go see Einstein on the Beach, his opera however.

What really got to me was the aspects of his personal life that we got to see. Glass has been married four times, and his current wife, Holly had had enough of his constant work schedule. For all intents and purposes, she was a single mother raising two kids, while he flitted hither, thither, and yon with his music.

There were lots of scenes of him at his place in Nova Scotia and in New York but what struck me was how often they weren't alone as a family. Even their vacations were about his work. We also got to see a little bit of his spiritual quest, which involves Tao, Buddhism, Shamanism, etc. I found that interesting because again it seemed to be at a remove from personal relationsips.

It brought home the point that there has to be some kind of balance between creativity and ones personal life. One can't be at the expense of the other. Perhaps women are better than this than men, since we are pretty much born multi-tasking. I can remember going from a dance recital to a girl scout jamboree to traveling to our house upstate all in one day. I was the master of changing clothes in 60 seconds. All the female writers that I know, particularly those who have children, have set times for writing, and then its family time. It may mean they produce fewer books a year (although in Wendy Corsi Staub's case, it hasn't harmed her output) or they have the ability to write fast. I also have other friends who have chosen not to have kids because they don't feel they have the time or attention to give to them.

Both films that I've seen recently about male artists, Robert Wilson and Philip Glass, there seems to be no balance really, its all about the work. Robert Wilson didn't seem to have any real personal relationships or we didn't seem them in the film. It made me very sad to see the breakdown of Glass's' marriage in the film. Unfortunately we only got to see his wife's reaction to it and not his which I felt was a weakness in the film.

The rest of my weekend was spent doing research and watching old movies on TCM.

The Fine Art of Improvisation

It's Monday morning, the sun is shining, its warm out and I'm stuck inside at work when I want to be outside playing. So instead, I'm looking at pictures of Richard Armitage instead and typing up the ten handwritten pages of chapter 10 that I wrote last week.

It's also Cinco de Mayo today, which according to Wikipedia, is a regional holiday commemorating the victory of the Mexican forces against the French during the Battle of Puebla in 1852. The Emperor of the French, Napoleon III had put the Archduke Maximillien (brother of Franz Josef) on the throne as Emperor of Mexico (also see the movie Juarez with Paul Muni, Bette Davis as crazy Carlotta and Brian Aherne as Max). Which is another excuse for me to drink margaritas today after work with my friends. Viva La Revolution!

As for improvisation, I've come to think of life as one big improvisation. No matter what you think or plan to have happen, something else comes up, and you have to improvise. Take for instance, our chapter brunch on Saturday. We were supposed to have a private room, but we didn't, so we improvised with our speaker so that we could hear her while the rest of the people were dining at PJ Clarke's.

Which leads me to the great experience I had on Saturday at the Philoctetes Center. I talk about this place so often, people must be getting bored, but its had a major impact on my life since I've been attending roundtables. And not just because of cutie-pie author. This past weekend, the program was Cross-Cultural Improvisation. Three women, three very different backgrounds, and three different instruments came together to create some of the most beautiful music. It just made me want to get up and dance and improvise with them. And as anyone who saw my stellar performance piece to Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart at the New Jersey Conference last October knows it doesn't take much to get me up and dancing!

Geetha Ramanathan Bennett played an instrument called a veena that I confused with a sitar becausae I'm stupid about world music. Jane Ira Bloom played soprano saxophone (I have a thing for the saxophone which explains my crush on Jimmy Sommers) and Min Xiao-Fen plays the Chinese pipa which is also an instrument that kind of looks like a weird guitar. They were accompanied by Frank Bennett on the mrdangham (South Indian drum). Poor guy had to sit on the floor in an uncomfortable position for like 2 hours while they played.

Oh and one of the cooler things was Min Xiao-Fen had created this really groovy wall hanging on black silk with red writing that was the word dragon in Chinese in different ways. Since I was born in the year of the dragon (wood dragon to be precise), I found that most interesting. I've always been drawn to dragons, its why I love Katie Macalister's Dragon Sept books so much when I couldn't tolerate some of her other stories. Also the Dragon is one of the luckiest signs to be born under in the Chinese zodiac.

They all had such interesting stories about their instruments and how they came to play them, and the types of music they learned in their native countries. But somehow it all came together, these three disparate instruments in harmony that was just breath-taking. Geetha Ramanathan Bennett told a wonderful story about being shy when it came to singing until she met her husband and then she practised because she wanted to mesmerize him with her voice so that he would marry her. I wish I could do the same thing with my dancing for cutie-pie author.

Anyway, my point and I do have one, is that you wouldn't think that these three women could improvise together as well as they do. And improvising can be a wonderful thing. Relationships also involve a certain amount of improvisation. Just when you think that you know what is going on, they can take a turn, and you just have to go with it. No matter how hard you map out the scene in your head, the other person will never say the things that you thought that they would in your scenario (plus they may have their own scenario), so you have to improvise. You can't control relationships, except in fiction, and sometimes not even then!

It can take your work to another level. If you don't get stuck into thinking that something has to happen a certain way, if you can let your mind free, you can let your imagination soar in wonderful ways. You just have to let go and that's the thing I think that people get weirded out by. I think we're all control freaks in a strange way.

When I was acting, I used to hate to improv. Give me a script in my hand and I'm fine. No script and I get anxious. But somehow, I would manage, if I just checked my brain at the door and just let whatever came into my head come out of my mouth on stage or in an improv in class.

Sometimes I think you have to do that in writing to. Know where the story is going, but just improv the scene. If necessary, get some friends together, tell them the situation and let them act it out. You'll be amazed and what you might actually get out of it.

Thanks for reading,

EKM

A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words

Last night I went to a roundtable called 'The Psycho-Neurology of the Photographic Arts' at the Philoctetes Center. I've blogged about roundtables that I've been to before, and I still feel like I have the smallest IQ in the room when I go there, but considering how much reality TV I watch and how many brain cells must have died after each episode, is it any wonder? Still I had to look at my blog Scandalous Women just to remind myself that I am indeed intelligent and can put two sentences together.

While some of things that were discussed went way over my head, there were some pertinent subjects that I found particularly interesting. And the panelists were incredibly lively and engaged, which is what you want. I would rather see disagreements and heated discussion than everyone kind of being polite to each other. There was a lot of talk about optical nerves and whether how we look at and interpret an image is cultural or biological. I'll spare you the answer to that since I was totally confused at this point. And the panelists couldn't agree either!

I was particularly struck by Robert Polidori who is a photographer who seems to specialize in photographing rooms instead of people. I found that incredibly interesting. There was much ribbing and questioning when he said that in the act of photographing a subject or a room, he has no emotion at that moment, before and afterwards yes, but not at the time that he clicks the shutter. That right then he has to be objective.

There was also a discussion of black and white photography versus color, which was better or worse. I personally prefer black and white photography unless its fashion photography, although I've seen some stunning images from the 1950's. Robert Polidori made a funny comment about his use of color is related to the acid trips that he took in the 60's. I totally get that even though I have never indulged myself (I'm a child of the 80's although apparently acid made a brief comeback in the 90's at least according to this artist I used to know who dropped it frequently). There's something about color photography that's particularly modern, whereas I feel that black and white photography is timeless, a black and white image from the 19th century can look just as modern as one from the 1960's in many ways.

Images in color can also be more shocking. I went to see this exhibit at the American Museum of Folk Art called Dargerism, which is about artwork influenced by a man named Henry Darger. Wikipedia can explain who Henry Darger is better than I can here. I can tell you that his artwork features little girls with angelic faces who also for some reason have penises. A photographer who was inspired by his artwork had created pictures where young women had been photoshopped onto the bodies of prebubescent girls. The colors in the pictures were incredibly bright and I found the images much more shocking in color than the photos that Lewis Carroll took in the 19th Century. Maybe its because Carroll wasn't trying to shock whereas this photographer clearly did.

It also struck me how in the Darger paintings the girls had an innocence about them which wasn't present in the photographs. Even though in several of them the girls were naked (and had penises). While Darger may have had sinister intentions for the girls, its under the surface, whereas in the photographs it was clearly blatant. I found afterwhile I couldn't look at the photos, I had to move on.

One of the panelists, who I was calling in my head, rather pompous posh dude (his real name is David Freedberg and he teaches Art History at Columbia. He has one of those hybrid accents, in his case South Africa via Yale and Oxford. What my Impossibly Handsome British friend calls a passion killing accent) made a comment about emotion in art and how good art should have been made without emotion or something like that. Which kind of ticked me off. Because how can you say that an artist isn't trying to invoke an emotion with his artwork? Or that he wasn't emotional when he chose the subject or when he was in the act of creation. Van Gogh's artwork is all about passionate emotion.

I'm one of those people who totally responds to a piece of art emotionally. I don't know anything about brushstrokes or chiascuro or anything like that. I can admire a painting but unless it evokes an emotional response in me, I'm not going to love it. Which is why I love the pre-Raphaelites and the Impressionist painters and most modern art leaves me cold. I believe that most artists create out of some sort of emotion or they're trying to invoke something emotional response in the viewer. If you've ever seen any of William Blake's paintings, they are very passionate and totally correspond with his world view and his poetry.

The Sleeping Princess (Frances MacDonald)

Which do you prefer painting or photography? Black & white or color? Do you believe that most artists create out of emotion or is it more calculated than that?

Absolute Wilson - Movie Review

Yesterday I went to the Philoctetes Center to see a film about the director Robert Wilson called of course Absolute Wilson. The film chronicles the life and work of Wilson.

I've not a huge fan of Robert Wilson's work but I thought it would be interesting to see what he was like and what drove him to create the rather bizarre performances he's created over the years, including one play that took place over 24/7 in Iran.

I'm one of those people who actually like plays that have a plot. I'm not really fond of plays being desconstructed, and moved around with giant televisions etc. Most of the time, I figure that the director hasn't a clue, so he's just throwing everything but the kitchen sink up on the stage.

Wilson was born in Waco, Texas in 1941 when the South was still incredibly segregated. He stuttered as a child and was seen at least from what I got from the film as somewhat stunted intellectually. They mentioned in the film the fact that he's left-handed and I wondered if they had tried to force him to write with his right hand. Queen Elizabeth II's father, George V, was left-handed and was forced to learn to write with the other hand, and he had a horrible stutter. Plus he was also abused by one of his nannies which might also have something to do with it.

Anyway, Robert grew up thinking he was stupid, until a dance teacher helped him by telling him to slow down when he spoke which helped his stutter. He was also gay, which never goes down well in the South, and he had one very good friend who was black, the son of their housekeeper, another no-no.

So like most misfits, he came to New York to go to Pratt to study I'm assuming design, although his professor stated in the film that he never did any of the assignments, he would just create his own. He got involved with the avant-garde theater Off-Off Broadway which was really taking shape in the sixties. Artists were taking over lofts in SoHo, storefronts, anywhere that they could turn into a theater.

Because he's visual and also had trouble communicating, most of his pieces, from what I could tell in the film, deal with language. It seems mainly how language can be a barrier. From interviews in the film, Wilson's life is all about his work. He seems to travel constantly putting on productions simultaneously, with no time for a private life, and I think it shows in his work. If you're afraid of intimacy, of anyone getting to know you on a deeper level, then its going to color everything you do.

From the snippets that we got to see in the film, his work is interesting, but its certainly not something that I would want to see 40 times the way Susan Sontag mentioned in the film that she had done. If I can't indentify with anyone in the play, I find it hard to watch, although I can admire the performances and all the work that went into it.

I also found it interesting how he would meet people, who were damaged in some way, and then put them into his work. He adopted a young black kid who was deaf and used him in his work for a few years, but then (at least according to the film) he seemed to disappear from Wilson's life. Another guy that he's continued to work with is an artist named Christopher Knowles who is brain-damaged. To me, while it seemed that in one way he was helping these people, in another way he was also exploiting them for his own gain, which I found a little off-putting.

What I missed in the film were more dissenting opinions about his work. There are brief interviews with John Simon, who for many years was the much reviled critic for New York Magazine, who didn't seem too fond of his work, but everyone else seemed to hail him as a genius. While they talked about his failures over the years as an artist, it's always with the idea that people just didn't understand him. That he was too out there for America, which is why most of his work has been done in Europe, where most theaters are subsidized heavily by the government. That attitude, that we in America are just too stupid to appreciate him which always annoys me.

I'm glad that I took the time to go see it, because it's always good as a writer or an artist to be exposed to other points of view, even if you don't agree with them or even like them.

Thanks for reading,

EKM

Movie Review: Protagonist

Yesterday, I got to see a preview of a new documentary film by Jessica Yu called Protagonist at the Philoctetes Center. I knew nothing about this film other than remembering that the director when she won an Academy Award for best Documentary Short Subject for Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien had joked that her dress cost more than her film.

The Philoctetes Center always shows the most interestings films. I saw Crazy Love there this summer before it opened, and the films I saw as part of their summer series still resonate with me so I was eager to see this one.

Protagonist is a term used to refer to the figure or figures in literature whose intentions are the primary focus of a story. Classically protagonists are derived from good will, however, this does not always have to be true. Protagonists cannot exist in a story without opposition from a figure or figures called antagonist(s). Classically in literature, characters with good will are usually the protagonists; however, not all characters who assist the protagonist are required to be simple protagonistic. This is the definition that Wikipedia gives for Protagonist and it's a pretty good definition for the film because each of the subjects had a clear antagonist even if it was within themselves and not an external antagonists.

The film features for men, Hans-Joachim Klein, a German terrorist, Mark Salzman (a martial arts expert and Ms. Yu's husband), Joe Loya, a former bank robber and Mark Pierpont, a gay former missionary. The one thing all four men have in common is extremism and a certainty. They each in their way took extreme measures reacting to circumstances in their lives, in most cases it was physical or emotional abuse by either their parents or their peers. All four of them believed that this extreme behavior would save them. Loya frequently mentions thinking that he was turning himself into Nietzsche's ubermensch by robbing banks as if each bank he robbed made him stronger when it reality it just increased his chances of getting caught (It's funny how people have distorted Nietzsche's theories over the years. Leopold and Loeb were also caught up in Nietzsche which led them to try and commit the perfect crime, since they both had genius I.Q.'s and all). Ultimately of course the behavior turned out to be destructive for all of them. The certainty they had in their lives, turned out to be not so certain after all and they all had to regroup.

In Klein's case, his mother committed suicide shortly after his birth, and he later discovered that not only was she Jewish but that she'd been interred in a concentration camp. His father and step-mother were abusive, and he got caught up in the fervor of the 60's radicalism in Germany. Only in his case, it wasn't enough to just protest. He felt that only by violence could a point be made. So he got involved with a wing of the Bader-Meinhof gang (a group of extremists) and ended up involved in the kidnapping of a group of Opec executives, in which 3 people were killed and he was wounded. While recovering he saw the Raid on Entebbe and something about the plight of the Jews on the flight spoke to him and it changed his life. He realized that they weren't really changing anything.

For Mark Pierpont, he grew up in a religious household and tried through prayer and missionary work to change his nature, which was being gay. Joe Loya tried to escape the brutality of his father by becoming a bank robber. He was taking control of his life in a very bizarre way. Mark Salzman was tormented as a child by bullies, and he had a father who wasn't very masculine (at one point he mentions his father coming to one of his martial arts matches and doing needlepoint), so he found the most extreme sensei possible to teach him martial arts.

The stories on their own would have held my attention but Jessica Yu frames it using Euripidies Ancient Greek tragedy the Bacchae to illuminate the subject. In the play Dionysus is angry at his human family for rejecting him and not believing that he is the son of Zeus. His mother Semele died looking upon the face of Zeus which was verboten, him being a god and all. Dionysus disguises himself as a blond youth, who has a group of female worshippers including his aunts and cousins, who he's driven into an ecstatic frenzy. His cousin Pentheus has banned the cult of Dionysus from the kingdom. Since it's a Greek tragedy you know it doesn't end well.

The director uses puppets to illustrate not only sections of the play (which are performed in ancient greek with subtitles) but also to illustrate the more graphic violence such as when Joe Loya describes stabbing his father. While I found the use of the puppets in this case to be illuminating, I found the Greek tragedy sections not to be that interesting. Partly because unless you know from the get-go that the play is the Bacchae, you're not really going to get the nuances that the director is going for. Now that I know the scenes were from the Baachae, they make more sense, and I would like to see the movie again with that knowledge.

Not only does the movie illustrate extremism, but there are also elements of the hero's journey in the film, Joseph Campbell's landmark work which I know solely from Christopher Vogler's the Writer's Journey. The director frames each segment of the film using terms like catharsis with lovely ancient Greek illustrations, but I found that I would have liked to have come to my own conclusions without being led so much by the director.

I read a review that said the film had more in common with Sophocles than with the plays of Euripides, in particular Oedipus who famously killed his father and married his mother. Clearly all four men had serious father issues and issues with their masculinity or society's version of what constituted a man.

All four men were incredibly articulate about their journeys, all most too much so. You almost wish that at least one of them had been struggling to communicate. In her production notes, she states that she searched for months for the other three protagonists (since one of them lived in her house). I would have liked to have known more about her process of finding and interviewing people. Apart from her husband, and why she chose to include his story. Mark Salzman had written a book about his experiences teaching in China which was very well received and made into a movie in which he starred.

Unfortunately the director was not able to be at the screening to answer these questions, so I'll have to wait until she's interviewed or for the DVD extras to get my questions answered. But I would definitely go see this film, if you like documentaries or even if you just like human stories.

Thanks for reading,

EKM

Distortions of Memory

So today, I went to a roundtable at the Philoctetes Center on Distortions of Memory. And the picture on the left is apropos because I wore absolutely no make-up (okay I did throw on a little lipstick). I wore a short skirt, however, despite the fact that it is freezing cold outside. Why you might ask did I risk my health? Like Jennifer Lopez has her booty, I have a kick ass pair of legs and while they are still holding up, I like to show them off (yes, I am that vain). Hence why I now have a incipient head cold. Oh, I also had the embarassing moment of cutie pie author pointing out someone to me who came to the roundtable, as if I should know who they were. Which I didn't. I felt like a complete moron, but then I remembered that if Suzanne Brockmann or Meg Cabot had been in the vicinity, he wouldn't have known who they were either. So it all balanced out.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, Distortions of Memory. Very interesting topic and we could have talked for hours about it. The panel went through the various kinds of memory, declarative, semantic, episodic, visual, procedural, and others and some of what they were talking about went completely over my head, but I'm used to that by now, whenever I go to these roundtables. But the panel was incredibly interesting. Deirdre Blair has written biographies of Anais Nin and Simone de Beauvoir (both potential Scandalous Women along with Ayn Rand), and it was interesting to hear her talk about going through Samuel Beckett's letters and having to deconstruct what was actually the truth about his feelings about Ireland before he left it for Paris. It reminded me of this author Cupcake Brown, who not only interviewed her friends, family and colleagues to their side of the story for her memoir, but hired a private detective to coorborate her memories for the book.

Since so much was going on, I'm just going to kind of filter what they were talking about through my own take on the subject, and what I was thinking about as they talked. The first thing that came to my mind when one of the audience members was talking about how memories aren't tangible, you can't hold them in your hand, or touch them. They just exist inside your head. It made me think of the scenes in the Harry Potter books when Dumbledore would use the pensieve to show Harry his memories. I remember reading those things and thinking how great it would be to be able to just pull your memories out of your head and put them in a bowl so that others could also experience them first hand. Of course, as Harry later figured out, how much of those memories would be the actual truth? This is kind of a spoiler alert but later on Harry gets to see Snape's memories and he gets a different truth, which made him look at his parents in a different
way.









Maryse Conde talked about the different images of Guadaloupe that existed in people's memories. The memories that the tourists who come to the Island have, and then the memories and experiences of the people who live there. I was reminded of the first time I went to New Orleans. Ex-sweetie pie and I had newly declared our love, and it was our first vacation together. So my view and experience and memories of New Orleans were seen through the prism of that emotion, even after we went our seperate ways. Even having one of the worst dinners of my life at Antoine's, so that ex-sweetie pie could fulfill his wish of eating in the same room that Jack Lemmon and Kevin Costner did in JFK didn't diminish my joy. Although I was kind of a bitch at the time about it (the food was seriously awful), he really wanted to have that memory. It was important to him.








My second trip was for the RWA National Conference. This time, without the haze of new love blinding me, I was able to clearly see the poverty and the shabbiness of the city clearly. Walking through the French Quarter early in the morning before it got unbearably hot to go to Cafe Dumonde, and seeing the dirty cups and vomit lining the streets from the debauchery of the night before, gave me whole new memories, that were no less valid than my earlier ones. They were just different but I remember thinking at the time, how could I have been so wrong? How could I have missed all this? It all of a sudden occurred to me, that if you travel somewhere and you have a bad experience, like finding out that a relative has died back home, that memory can completely color your feelings toward that place, to the point that the idea of ever going back there, is painful.







When I was in college studying acting, we learned about sense memory which is a technique that Konstantin Stanislavsky came up with (although later on he had different thoughts about it) and that Lee Strasberg and the Actor's Studio honed. The head of the drama department had been a member of the Studio. In sense memory, you use your own memories to when playing a character, sort of as another layer. My freshman year, we spent at least a month taking turns sitting in chairs in front of our classmates, reliving memories. Some people were really self-indulgent and started reliving car accidents, surgeries and other traumatic experiences. It was uncomfortable as hell to watch.









At the time, I really hated sense memory, to be blunt I thought it was bullshit. I felt that it placed a barrier between the actor and the character. Instead of dealing with the emotions of what they were dealing with, I thought that it was treating acting like therapy. Plus it's really hard to sustain through a long theatrical run. For film, it can work like gang-busters. But when you're performing night after night, after awhile the memories fade, they're not that strong anymore. So you're forced to dig into your bag of tricks for other memories. Or, you can take it too far and you can end up like Daniel Day Lewis did while performing Hamlet in London, where he ended up thinking that the ghost of Hamlet's father was his own father Cecil Day Lewis. It was so traumatic for him, that he couldn't finish the rest of the performance and Jeremy Northam, his understudy had to go on. I only used sense memory once, when I was playing Perdita in The Winter's Tale. In the final act, a statue of Perdita's mother Hermione is unveiled, so I used the memories of when my mother had passed on for Perdita, which was a mistake because I was still too close to it. I never used a personal memory again while I was acting.









When they were talking about distorted memory, it reminded me of all the times my mother would share her memories of when from when I was a toddler. She told them so often, that I could actually see the memory in my mind to the point that I actually believed that I remembered. One of her stories was about how I hated wearing pants (still do) and I would take them off in the elevator when we got home. I can just see myself doing that. And she told another story of how once when they took me to a restaurant, the maitre d' picked me up and carried me around because he thought I was so cute (yes, even as a toddler I was an attention seeking egomaniac!). These stories have so become a part of my history, that sometimes I find myself relating them as if I actually remembered it happening.









And then there are the distorted memories in relationships. Just think of the times, you've been infatuated with someone, and every little thing that they do, whether it's opening the door for you, or brushing against you, become part of your memory as signs that this person has feelings for you. And if you're lucky and the person gets hit with a clue bat and you end up together and they become part of your collective memories as a couple, "Hey honey remember how you used to blow me off constantly, and the time you never even bothered to ask me how my birthday went?"















They briefly touched on repressed memory and recovered memory, but it would take a whole session to discuss that alone. About a decade ago there was a story in the news of a woman who during therapy remembered that her father had killed her best friend. She apparently had surpressed the memory. What was interesting was that her father was convicted because of her testimony, even though there was no real physical evidence to tie him to the crime.










As a writer, I've often used my memories in my fiction. Bad dates, bad auditions, and other memories have been given to my characters. Sometimes even other people's memories have ended up in the mix. We're often told to write what we know, and that is our memories and experiences. Of course, there are some writers who shall remain nameless because we all know who he is, who use other people's memories in non-fiction and then claim them as their own.












Or in the case of Lillian Helman, the story of Julia in Pentimento, which was later proved not to be true, but I think in her mind, she'd told the story so many times after the book was published and the movie came out, that she believed that it actually happened. Or Lola Montez, who created a life out of whole cloth, and refused to the end to admit that it was fiction. That she was not Lola Montez, but Eliza Gilbert from Ireland.











All memory, when you come right down to it, is emotion really, happy, sad, angry, indifferent. Memories can comfort you, or they can be so painful that you have to keep them hidden away in a safe place. Like the song says, "Memories like the corners of my mind, misty water colored memories, of the way we were."







Thanks for reading!








EKM

Mama, don't let your baby grow up to be drama critics!

Yesterday, I went to a roundtable at the Philoctetes Center featuring three important drama critics of the 20th Century, Robert Brustein, Eric Bentley, and Stanley Kauffmann on the state of dramatic criticism in the United States. For anyone who doesn't know these 3 gentleman, Eric Bentley is the author of Playwright as Thinker which was published in 1946, Robert Brustein as well as being a critic was also the head of the Yale School of Drama and the artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theater, before moving on to Harvard to found the American Repertory Theater and the MFA program. Stanley Kauffmann was the drama critic at the New York Times in the 1960's as well as for The New Republic. Combined these men have about 200 years of dramatic criticism behind them.

It was interesting to hear these men speak because they were around with Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams were premiering their first plays, back in the days when Broadway was mainly filled with either drawing room comedies like Philip Barry's or the melodrama's of Eugene O'Neill. The general consensus of the panel was that dramatic criticism is on the wane at the moment. Oh people still write reviews either for web-sites like theatermania or for the newspapers but the kind of critical thinking that these men brought to their reviews no longer exists, at least in this country, where most cities have one major newspaper.

New York still has 5 if you count The New York Sun and Newsday, but what the newspapers and most magazines do now are just simple reviews, so historical context for the most part. Entertainment Weekly, when they do review theater, operate on the A through F critique. I can't imagine a critic like Kenneth Tynan or Robert Brustein ever resorting to a letter grade in a review. Brustein mentioned that when they initiated the dramatic criticism major at Yale, there were no jobs for the graduates once they were done, so the program shifted to dramaturgy.

There was a time when everyone knew the name of the big drama critics in New York, even if you didn't live in New York. People like Brooks Atkinson or Walter Kerr. The last person to have that kind of name recognition was Frank Rich aka The Butcher of Broadway. Or maybe Clive Barnes, who I once saw sleep (not just sleep, snore) through a production of Joe Orton's Loot, which he then gave a rave review to.

I was fortunate enough to have Michael Billington, the chief drama critic of the Guardian, as my dramatic criticism instructor when I studied at The British American Drama Academy twenty years ago in London. Each week we would go to see a show, and then we would get to dicuss it with him in class. We were encouraged to keep a theater journal of the other plays and musicals that we saw, and later on we had a tutorial with him, where we went to his house in Chiswick to drink tea and read aloud from our journals.

He was the first critic that I ever read where I had to keep the dictionary handy to read his reviews. What was fantastic about the class was that we were allowed to argue our views with him. My friend Joanna actually managed to convince him to reconsider his review of Sam Shepherd's play A Lie of the Mind by arguing that the play had been damaged by an inferior staging and bad casting.

Keeping that journal allowed me to see theater in a new way. When I did my semester abroad in college, we also had to keep a theater journal which I still have. I actually took it down when I got home last night to read over what I had wrote. Most of it was of the variety that "Ian McKellan is a god and I worship him,' and 'Antony Sher is the most exciting actor ever to appear on the English stage, and I want to have his baby.'

Of course little did I know at the time that I wasn't going to be having either of their babies since they don't play for my team! But there were reviews where I ripped apart a production that the RSC did of Romeo & Juliet for using excess props on stage (Tybalt drove on in a red Porsche, Mercutio did a frantic disco dance, played the electric guitar and jumped into a swimming pool during the ball scene, and Juliet was listening to her walkman and reading Vogue before launching into her speech about wanting night to come so that Romeo would arrive), and not paying enough attention to the text.

The point was made that besides most newspapers shrinking their theater coverage or dropping it all together, there is a distinct lack of critical thinking about much of anything in this country, which I tend to agree with. When I was in high school, we were forced constantly to think critically in history and in English class, but I think that most public schools gloss over it, or the kids just don't get it. Their thinking is reserved for getting to the next level in whatever X-Box game they are playing.

Which is a shame. One of the reasons that I love Vanity Fair magazine is that you get such a great mix of fluff and serious pieces (Oh and James Wolcott who writes a monthly column for the magazine spilled his wine on me yesterday).

The best dramatic criticism (and I've read most of Robert Brustein's work) opens up your mind and makes you really think about your response to a play or to a movie. It involves all of your senses. I've learned about plays and playwrights that I never would have known existed if it hadn't been for reading men like Brustein and Kenneth Tynan.

It's funny because on the other hand, literary criticism just ruins reading for me. I don't want to read about F.Scott Fitzgerald's use of imagery, or what the green light means at the end of The Great Gatsby. I don't really care.

Thanks for reading,

EKM

Writer's Block, Oh My!

So last night I went to the Philoctetes Center here in New York for a roundtable on Hypergraphia and Hypographia, two terms that I had never before heard in my entire life.

Hypergraphia is the unstoppable drive to put words on paper or any other available surface. Basically, the people who have this write non-stop. They'll write on anything, napkins, match book covers, menus. We have a writer in our chapter who has something similar. She even brought in poems that she's written on napkins. People with this affliction, if you can call it that, will write even around the edges of what they've written to get it all down. It's almost like a verbal diarrhea. It's associated with temporal lobe changes like epilepsy and mania. Apparently Vincent van Gogh and Doestoevsky suffered from it, which makes sense when you consider that van Gogh didn't pick up a paint brush until he was 30 and then painted like a fiend until he committed suicide.

It sounds like a great disorder to have doesn't it? Unfortunately, it can be almost painful. I know that I have a hard time writing as fast as my mind is racing, so I can't imagine what it must be like for them.

Hypographia is basically writer's block, which most of us have experienced at one time or another. Of course, no one knows why some people suffer writer's block and some people don't. It can come from experiencing a trauma in your life, that prevents you from sitting down and writing, or it can come from not being able to turn off that internal editor in your head, that constantly tells you that what you are writing is crap.

I personally have suffered from intense writer's block, particularly when my father died. I couldn't write for almost seven months because the grief was just so intense. There was just no way to write my way out of it. I just had to feel it and hope that I would come out the other end in one piece. I was literally hanging onto my sanity by my nails. There were days that I could barely make it out of bed to go to work, all I wanted to do was just crawl into a hole and pull it in after me. Seriously, I thought I was going to lose my mind.

I had lost my mother when I was 24, and I guess I didn't allow myself to really grieve then. I just threw myself into acting and stage managing. So in a sense, I was allowing myself to feel the grief that I had bottled up for 11 years and that combined with my grief over my father just pulled me into the muck.

The internal infernal editor is my other problem. I've managed to turn that off to a certain extent but only by allowing myself to get the first draft out on paper before I edit. If I write a chapter and then edit, I get bogged down in thinking that it's the most horrible thing I've ever written. I really admire writers who can take a month just to write a chapter or a sentence. I was talking to cutie pie author after the roundtable and he was telling me that he's lucky if he writes a chapter in a month, and I'm thinking wow, I once wrote a book in a month. I'm not saying it was a good book, but I wrote it. Jonathan Lethem was talking last night about how he loves going over the sentence structure and playing with the words. The Queen Bee, who's workshop I was in for two years, took five years to write her third novel.

My concern has always been about the story, and the emotions. I probably spend more time trying to get the reader into my character's heads and what they're feeling. I suppose if I wrote literary fiction, I would probably write slower, but I don't. I write genre fiction and I write pretty fast. Not Meg Cabot/Nora Roberts fast, but I could easily write two books a year. As it is, I try to write everyday, even if it's just this blog.

And I never have a problem with finding ideas. My brain teems with plots and characters, some of which will probably never see the light of day unless I'm planning on living to be 150!

The discussion at times got a bit estoteric and eggheady but most of it was informative. This graphic artist gave his solution for writer's block. He told an audience member who stated that her problem was her internal critic, that she should just write the worst film ever, direct it badly, cast really bad actors, edit it badly and then show it to her friends, and then her worst fears would be realized and then she could move on!

Sounds a bit extreme but I see where he was going with the idea.

Anyone suffer from writer's block? And what did you do to get past it?

EKM