Playwrights

A New Chaucerian Age?

 

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I met Yvonne Durant at Brasserie Cognac, my favourite neighbourhood restaurant, the night before last Thanksgiving. I had finally made the move, the day before, to an apartment I purchased on the east side last summer.

We had (and have) yet to file the paperwork to the building for the proposed renovations.

By October it became clear the renovations were unlikely to begin before this summer, if then. So I gave the landlords of the west side apartment I’d occupied for ten years my required 60 days’ notice and relocated the other side of Central Park. Knowing I will have to move again once the renovations commence, it was quite a procedure to decide which items to unpack, and which ones to put into storage until the renovations are complete.

Yvonne was seated at an adjacent table. She struck up a conversation and I was charmed by her quiet elegance, easy demeanour and conviviality towards someone she had never seen before.

I have come to the conclusion that I am not a social animal, at all. I can be sociable–especially with friends and family members I  love–but I really prefer solitude to crowds. I would never start up a conversation with someone I don’t know, even if the person looked intriguing. Never is an exaggeration of course, but it’s rare for me to initiate a conversation with someone I haven’t met before.

Since that night at Cognac, I’ve had the pleasure of running into Yvonne at another local restaurant about a week before Christmas and  then, a couple of weeks ago, she came to my apartment for dinner.

This morning, she sent me a link to her latest blog post Yesterday Were National Grammar Day. (Somewhere among my numerous books in storage I have a copy of Woe is I, mentioned in the post.)

Grammar, syntax and spelling are strange beasts, and often disagreeable bedfellows. They evolve as culture does; and, as we all know from first-hand experience, very few of us like change, least of all the evolving kind.

However, I have a feeling that in ten years—maybe even five—we will start to see “u” as an acceptable alternative to “you” in formal writing, along with other texting abbreviations. Many new words and expressions that technology continues to inspire–and to direct–the current generation to invent have already begun making inroads into every day usage. The Oxford English Dictionary and other notable lexicons have begun to include them as acceptable forms of the written or spoken word.

New spelling, as an outgrowth of texting, is something I’ve been reflecting on for a while. I have a feeling we are on the cusp of a Neo-Chaucerian Age–where language is about to make a paradigm shift, the likes of which we have not seen since the 16th Century. I think about how technology is driving us to change the way we spell–and perhaps even change the meaning of–words Shakespeare invented. Words that since their invention have been the cornerstone of the modern English language.

 

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My friend Seth Michael Donsky’s work in progress is called Irregardless, because one of his characters–not quite Mrs. Malaprop but, like her forerunner, a graduate of the almost-but-not-actually-real school of words–uses “irregardless” practically as her trademark. Each time she’s corrected by another character she retorts, “You know what I mean!” And, in fact, we do. (Yesterday, Seth told me that in some online dictionaries, irregardless is rapidly becoming an acceptable alternative to regardless; so that, very soon he fears, it will no longer be a valid joke in his play.)

I don’t spend a lot of time parsing grammar when I write even though, among a variety of jobs I’ve held, I have been a copy editor and own a much tagged edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. For me the most important thing about the function of grammar is that it frames my internal and external perceptions and precepts in a way that makes them accessible to other people.

 

chicago manual of style

This image of the latest–and last–printed edition of the Chicago Manual of Style is here because I adore azure blue. All the editions of the Chicago that I’ve owned and own have covers of fire engine orange–not my favourite colour by a long shot.

If Lesley Gore can cry at her party I can post a pretty cover of a pretty useful book. It’s my website and I’ll post if I want to, post if I want, post if I want to…. (It’s the ultimate postmodern reprise.)

 

I love Yvonne’s blog post title Yesterday Were National even though it’s apparently incorrect grammar. It has for me a musical ring to it.

I’m terrible at haikus but anyone who loves to write them, feel free to share your best riff on Yesterday Were National Grammar Day.

The measurement of Light

I realized I was overwhelmed by the number of ideas I have for writing about different things and consequently wasn’t writing at all. So I got out my trusty notebook and began writing the list. Lo and behold an epiphany (I was going to say great revelation but I realized you can’t measure infinity, and likewise can’t measure the light in an epiphany) about my fantasy story. I love it so much I think I’m going to use it! Then I came to a kind of full stop. I didn’t know what happened next–the juice, so to speak, stopped, as if the power had suddenly been turned off. So I went away and ate my baked pear and when I came back I thought, “It’s all right that I don’t know what happens next. This is that moment Meg Rosoff talked about in Salem, where you can put your character into the car and have them drive the road home. But when they get there, whoever’s waiting at the door should surprise you as well as your character. So I am going to leave my moment at the point at which it has arrived for now and see what happens when I come to write it up as an actual scene.

One of the other pieces of writing that’s been on my mind since talking with my friend Seth’s friend, Jeremy, at the surprise birthday party is my roman a clef. And whether I want it still to be a roman a clef or a memoir. I was so surprised at how fascinated Jeremy was to hear about my parents, and that I want to set it in London, during the swinging sixties because that’s my strongest memory of everything to do with my parents, I came away from the conversation with a very different sense of how I might want to write it. What I was most struck by after that conversation was the “voice” in which I recounted various stories about my parents, and his partner’s reactions to  some of my mother’s dresses and designs that I have in my Facebook photograph albums. (Jeremy’s partner, Tim, has just finished learning how to make patterns because he wants to be a couture designer.) I realized that in many ways the voice in which I recounted these stories to a relative stranger was the same voice that appeared naturally in the tribute to my parents…a more objective voice when I’m talking about my parents as artists, than when I’m talking about them as my parents.

The third thing I’ve been thinking about are my blog posts. I began writing them again at the beginning of the year because I needed to become agile again after almost a year away from writing, in how I think about and produce it. What I have observed is that I begin with one point and then somehow other things intersect as I’m writing, and I see them merge with the original idea in ways that are interesting to me. They become non-conventional mini-essays on things that intersect in my mind. Meaning, I don’t have a thesis that I then proceed to expand or defend. So I want to keep developing this place of where things intersect, as I was never particularly good at writing conventional essays; and perhaps as I go along with this project I may become better at both. Also Where Things Intersect will become the new subtitle for my personal writing space because I’m going to take my real writer made up worlds and use it for my work site.

The fourth thing is my work website that’s being designed and that I am now very excited about. I am finally certain about how I want it to look and why. I was deeply inspired by Patrick Corbin’s website which I came across when I was searching for information about him to add to a post I began last week, and which I will get back to, hopefully, this week. What I absolutely loved about Patrick’s website was the space and power of the image within this space, which drew me in and voluntarily forced my thoughts to recede into the background, and allow the stark simplicity of his page and portrait to flood my mind. It creates in me a kind of wonder of how something so simple can simultaneously be so powerful.

My web designer Lori Whiston has already built a prototype of the home page, which riffs off of Patrick’s website aesthetic. The first layer looks promising. I’ve been running everything by my coterie of secret writing friends–not that they’re actually secret: they are known to many on Facebook and in real life.

Now that I’ve written it all out in my notebook I feel the way Dumbledore must have felt whenever he poured his thoughts into the pensieve–more room in the brain to think about the present moment and what to wear to BAM tonight (that’s me, not Dumbledore. I’m certain his only dilemma would have been, which pair of socks).

 

 

True Fiction

A few weeks ago a friend posted this picture true fictionon Facebook and asked whether it bothered anyone else? My friend is humorous, she writes humour, but it’s not always obvious to me when she’s being ironic. I asked, “Does it bother you?” I didn’t get a reply. Then other Facebook friends piled on with comments that, although funny at times, were written to ridicule whoever had come up with such an ignorant sign. Guffaw, guffaw. (In their defense, not that they need any from me, I  am certain their conscious intentions were not meant to ridicule the person who had written the sign, but the sign itself. But, I ask: in this instance, can we actually separate the two? If it were any group of FB people other than writers commenting, perhaps I would have had an entirely different emotional response to the whole thing.)

I have to admit it bothered me. I felt like an outsider on this thread, and although I am certain my friend, and even the Facebook friends who posted their comments, plus other friends in real life would say, “You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.”; and Mark Manson would say, “Your giving away one of your fucks when, really, who gives a fuck what all those other people were doing?”; the truth is, I did give a fuck. And I was right to–but it was for the wrong reason.

I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time, but today it came to me: There is such a thing as True Fiction–it’s called a Roman à clef.

A roman à clef is “a novel about real life overlaid with a façade of fiction.” [Wikipedia entry on roman à clef.] Now, maybe, the sign in this bookshop or thrift shop or wherever this bookcase of books for sale resides was wrong in its naming of these particular books. But no one, and certainly not I, on that thread of writers mentioned the possibility of true fiction being a legitimate category.

By definition a novel is a fictitious prose narrative of considerable length and complexity, portraying characters and usually presenting a sequential organization of action and scenes. I’m pretty certain this assumed definition of a novel is what raised everyone’s guffaws to a raucous decibel of ridicule for this poor sign.

Now, it is very likely that ridiculing the notion anyone could think “true fiction” is a real category pricked my personal sensibility. Because I am attempting to write, among many other writing projects, exactly that: True Fiction, a roman à clef, using my parents’ extraordinary talents and lives, together and apart, as a jumping off point to write about my time as a teenager in London during the “Swinging Sixties.” (Which, along with fashion and music, also generated the term “Swingers”.)

So what did I see again for myself today when I remembered roman à clef ? I saw the importance of trusting one’s instincts and not becoming intimidated by the crowd.

“What?! You?! Intimidated by the crowd”? I can hear the incredulity of people who know me on Facebook, and in real life.

“Yes, I.” I am intimidated by a great many things. Feeling like an outsider, even though I hate to run with the crowd merely for the sake of company, triggers this most strongly. Because I grew up an outsider in my home country–being a brown-skinned girl in a then predominantly white, largely xenophobic, country, whose monarchs had colonized the greater part of the world before the sun finally began to set on the Empire.

 

When I watch something like this glorious performance by Sarah Connolly it awakens mixed feelings inside my body and heart. On the one hand, I remember standing in the gods at the Royal Albert Hall for the last night of many a Prom, singing, with all my heart, Rule Britannia. On the other, I was always an outsider in England, because of the colour of my skin. Always. I can’t count the number of times people asked, “Where are you from?” And when I said, “London,” the questions would escalate from, “No, where were you born?” [“London.”] to “No, where were your parents born?”

I have this sense that if we were able to see our internal culture through a specimen of our bone marrow under a microscope, mine would be British through and through, in spite of my parents’ ancestry. I don’t know if this is because all outsiders attempt, on an unconscious level, to assimilate themselves so fully that they will “pass”; or if it’s because, by and large, in my family home the most important thing was talent and the future it could create; rather than the past and what tradition naturally carries within it: something unchanged and passed down from generation to generation, with the goal of preserving it forever.

My parents were all about breaking with the moulds of the past and creating their own. They were often outsiders–foreigners–to the majority of English people who didn’t know them. But, in the wisdom of Mark Manson, they didn’t give a fuck. And, so, the only real culture I know is that of my birth country and not the one of my ancestors.

Things have changed in England, a bit, it’s true: there are now too many people “of colour” for things not to have shifted a little. But the underlying belief that the Empire still exists, and that people of colour (a strange turn of phrase) are somehow intellectually inferior, still pervades my home country. But, I digress.

Trust in oneself. That’s what I felt strongly to write about today.

Perhaps the realization “True Fiction,” under the banner of roman à clef, was triggered by an email I received this morning from my playwright friend, Seth Michael Donsky. [Take note, Marta Pelrine-Bacon, this post could well be about hidden motives, although I have an actual post to write about that particular topic. It’s certainly a post about Meg Rosoff’s colander.]

To help my friend understand that he knows exactly what he needs to know in order to write the play he wants to write, I suggested an old writing exercise to him before Christmas: In his case, take any play he admires, and type or write out the whole thing, including the stage directions. For a while he argued he didn’t want to waste his writing time to do this. I understood, because he has a crazily busy schedule. But I really believe in this particular exercise. And so, eventually, after a certain amount of persuasion on my part that the benefits would outweigh the loss of personal writing time and, in the long run, return rewards to him in spades, he chose Noel Coward‘s Hay Fever.

 

Sometime last week, as he was transcribing Hay Fever, he had a major breakthrough with his own play. Then, this morning, he wrote that although he wasn’t yet convinced he could write this or any other kind of script, he no longer believed that he couldn’t.

That was the whole point of doing the exercise: To understand and experience for oneself, how powerful the subconscious is–that it will give us everything we need, in order to express the creativity that we, uniquely, have appeared in the stream of Life to realize and share with Life itself. That everything we need is already inside us. Not the thing itself; that has yet to be born and fully realized. But the wherewithal to make it happen is inherent in every human being. I am so proud of my friend for having the trust in himself to do this exercise, even if it began as blind faith and trust in another.

Trust is the bridge that leads us across the uncharted waters of our own creativity, to the possibility of producing something that is uniquely us.

 

Theory is all well and good

Frank Porcu
 

I was going to write about the colander effect–a term coined by Meg Rosoff, which I heard her speak about in Salem last November. In fact, I began a post with that title and how the effect manifested in my January 1 post with the unexpected appearance of Miss Barbara Wace, a renowned journalist and travel writer who was one of my mother’s clients. But then the phone rang and it was my friend Seth Michael Donsky with whom I became acquainted during my graduate years at U.C. Irvine in the MFA directing programme for theatre, under the mentorship of Keith Fowler. Seth was an undergraduate at the time. I admired him for his perseverance, his tenacity, his will power, and his desire to do something different, to experiment with creativity. We lost touch after I left New York in 1994 and did not reconnect until he found me again through my website, in 2013.

He called this morning to talk about a play he saw last night, largely, because it wrestles with many of the themes he is exploring in his own play in progress, Irregardless. We covered a lot of ground in our short conversation, most of which is hard to replicate in a post, but three things stay with me.

The first is the death of our own creativity every time we compare ourselves to other people’s successes. So much of what makes creativity successful is having confidence in the truth of our own instincts and work.

Zuli Souza sleeping-at-lamp
Zuli Souza

Last night I went to drawing class with Frank Porcu for the first time in two months. First, I missed class in October because I was ill with bronchitis. Then I was away in Salem, the first week of November. As soon as I returned I had to pack up my apartment on the west side and move myself into the apartment I bought last summer on the east side. After which I had to unpack everything and get Zuli Souza settled. As a result of so much extra activity, so soon after my illness, I didn’t regain enough strength to do more than sit on my sofa and catch up with myself. I decided to wait until the New Year before returning to class. As always, being in class with Frank was inspiring and gave me much to think about, including some of what I’m writing about today.

As Frank went around the class, he told a student who had over-corrected her first instinct–what she had actually seen on the model–that she must trust herself, even if the initial line she had put down looked wrong to her brain. Her instinct, he told her, had shown her the truth.

He spoke of how hard it was for him as a teacher when he started out to have that kind of confidence when he was trying to show students how to see the truth that was in front of them. Because the brain, through the eye, was telling him–and them–something else. “Of course,” he said, “after you’ve gone home and drawn it four hundred times you feel confident in telling students, ‘this is how to see the truth of the model.’ But for a long time I couldn’t call what I was teaching a method, because I couldn’t prove it.”

There will always be people infinitely more talented than we are who go unrecognized. (I feel that way about Frank Porcu’s genius at the Art Students League. So few recognize him as a direct succesor of Bridgeman. Or, to take it farther back, as Frank himself has, to Michelangelo, DaVinci, Raphael.) There will equally be many people who are not as talented as we are and who will garner successes beyond measure.

The most important thing is to trust the truth we instinctively see.

And to let go of everything else.

The goal of all theories is to prove their veracity. But the theory itself can only go so far. This was the starting point of this post. It was inspired by something Frank said to an advanced student in yesterday’s class. But I think it must wait until another day, in order to be explored in more depth, and in a way that captures the essence of what Frank was trying to convey.

Of the third thing I wanted to write about today–hidden motive–it too must wait.