‘Pippin’ Breaks the Magic Spell

photo credit: Craig Schwartz

Other than a vague impression that it was a musical, I knew little about Pippin as I took my seat at the Mark Taper Forum in downtown Los Angeles Tuesday night. A season ticket holder to the theater, I don’t so much select productions to see as show up at the appointed date and time. That was the case this week as well, although a gentleman near me filled in his companion and everyone else within earshot the details about the 1972 Stephen Schwartz musical.

He probably had never seen a production like this joint venture between the Center Theatre Group and Deaf West Theatre, which integrates a cast of deaf and hearing actors. The approach may seem counterintuitive at first—tasking actors who can’t hear to sing and dance—but ultimately proves a natural fit. Musicals are, after all, largely about movement, and done right, as it is here, signing compliments choreography.

Some characters, like the Leading Man (a fantastic Ty Taylor) both sing and sign. Pippin is actually played by two actors (Michael Arden and Tyrone Giordano), one who speaks and one who signs. This works particularly well when the two selves argue, illustrating visually Pippin’s inner conflict. Other roles, like King Charles, are portrayed by one actor who signs (Troy Kostur) but are voiced by another actor offstage (Dan Callaway). Overall the incorporation of all of these players is seamless.

The play itself, though, I found uneven and kind of strange.

Set in Medieval France during the reign of Charlemagne, the eponymous prince has just completed his education with the ambition to live an extraordinary, completely fulfilled life. He’s not quite sure how to do this, though, so he convinces his father, King Charles, to let him go to the war against the Visigoths. Battle is not as glorious as he imagined, however, and he returns home disillusioned by the experience.

Next, taking the advice of his saucy grandmother, Pippin decides to live it up, and embarks on a series of sexual encounters that culminate in an onstage orgy. When he has enough of that, he vows to fight tyranny, assassinating his father and taking the throne only to realize the challenges of governing a nation and turning into a tyrant himself.

Finally, Pippin finds himself on the rural estate of the widow Catherine and her adolescent son Theo—the details of this journey remain sketchy—and, through hard farm work and a dead duck, falls in love with her. After a year, though, he asks himself whether this, too, is enough and leaves.

Now, there’s a meta level at work here that I’ve yet to discuss, a Leading Player who orchestrates these goings-on against a magic-show theme. Characters go off-script, as when Catherine actually falls in love with Pippin, rather than just playing her part in the play, and inserts her own ballad.

The finale, too, has been written for Pippin—the Leading Player has arranged for him to finally be extraordinary by going out in a blaze of glory. Literally—Pippin is to be burned alive in a glass box. When Catherine and Theo arrive, the star of the show changes his mind, however, and the Leading Player takes offense, stripping him of the lights, costumes, makeup, even his voice, directing the speaking half of the role to be carried kicking and screaming off the stage.

What strikes me as so odd about this ending—even odder than Pippin’s steroidal half-brother Lewis, who appears in a ’70s-era blond mullet and shiny leotard—is that it seems to be advocating for settling. The message I took away isn’t that Pippin finally found the complete fulfillment he sought in domestic bliss with Catherine and Leo—which may, indeed, have been the intended point—but that he gave up his dream for an extraordinary life and settled for less. Indeed, his choice isn’t celebrated by the players but punished.

As an artist, I find it hard to accept that rather than continuing to strive for the extraordinary and for fulfillment, I should scale back my ambition and resign myself to ordinariness.

Fans of the show surely will protest this reading. I’d love to hear your take.

Caught in the ’Net

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Wednesday Writing Exercise: Group Highlights

I recently joined a new writing group that’s different from any other in which I’ve participated. Rather than sharing their work for critique, these writers gather once a week to, well, write.

This is how it works: each member—as few as three, as many as twelve—comes prepared with a prompt. After some warm-up meditation/relaxation, someone offers a prompt, and we write for ten minutes or so. Then we go around the table and share what we’ve written. You may pass if you want, and there’s no critique. We write on three or four prompts, one of which might be a list.

I discovered this group at just the right time. I had just finished my thesis and was unsure as to what to do next—dive right into revision, or start something new? In the meantime, this model was perfect for generating material.

Mots Justes is planning a series of posts on writers groups—the benefits, the different types, the rules—but for now I thought I’d share highlights from last week’s meeting:

• Think about one of your characters. Now, title your piece using his or her name and the word interrupted—i.e., “[Character Name], Interrupted”
• “My soul routinely leaves my body.”
• “I would strike the sun if it insulted me.” –Ahab, Moby-Dick
• Imagine a coat. Imagine the coat’s pocket. Imagine what is inside the coat’s pocket. (We did this one as a list.)

Share your writing prompts here, and MJ will assemble them into a future post.

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Monday Morning Grammar: Nouns Part II—Plurals

This week, Monday Morning Grammar continues our discussion on that most basic part of speech, the noun. Last week, we established what a noun is, common versus proper nouns, and count versus noncount nouns. Today, let’s look at plural nouns.

In most cases, plural nouns are formed by adding s or es to the end of the word. If a noun ends with a letter that lends itself to the s sound, use s to make it plural:

book→books
stapler→staplers
bottle→bottles

If a noun ends with a letter that would make it awkward to end with s, such as s, sh, x, z, or a soft ch, then use es.

bus→buses
box→boxes
church→churches

Nouns That End in o

Some nouns that end with the letter o use s to make it plural; others use es. There is no firm rules on when to use s or es with words that end in o, so your best bet is always to consult a dictionary. However, there are some guidelines that can help:

1) Nouns that are used in plural form as often as they are in singular form often use es to form the plural:

hero→heroes

An exception to this rule is the word zero:

zero→zeros

2) Nouns that end in o usually use s to for the plural if

a) the word has been borrowed from another language:

bravo→bravos

b) the word is a proper noun:

Del Toro→Del Toros

c) the word is rarely used as a plural:

bravado→bravados

d) the o is preceded by a vowel:

folio→folios

e) the word is a shortened version of another:

photo→photos

Nouns That End in y

If a noun ends with the letter y, which is preceded by qu or by a consonant, change the y to i and add es to make it plural:

jelly→jellies
query→queries
soliloquy→soliloquies

If a noun ends with the letter y and is proper, or the y is preceded by a vowel, use s to make it plural:

boy→boys
play→plays
Freddy→Freddys

Nouns That End in f or fe

Some nouns that end in f or fe use s to become plural:

cuff→cuffs
roof→roofs

Others change the f to v and add es:

thief→thieves
self→selves

When in doubt, consult a dictionary.

Compound Nouns

For nouns made up of separate words, with or without a hyphen, form the plural by adding the appropriate ending to the noun, or, if there is more than one noun, to the main noun:

brother-in-law→brothers-in-law
passer-by→passers-by
driver license→driver licenses

Irregular Plurals

Unfortunately, some nouns don’t follow any of these rules:

man→men
mouse→mice

And some nouns, especially those referring to game, fish, or livestock, are spelled the same in both the singular and the plural:

elk→elk
fish→fish
sheep→sheep

Again, when in doubt, consult a dictionary.

Plurals with a Singular Sense

Finally, some nouns are plural in form but are used in sentences as if they are singular:

The economic news hasn’t been good lately.
Politics is taking much of the blame.

Next week on Monday Morning Grammar, we’ll talk about the cases and properties of nouns.

Resources

Chicago Manual of Style, The. 15th ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Hacker, Diana, The Bedford Handbook for Writers, 3rd ed. Boston: St. Martin’s Press: 1991.

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AWP Dispatch: NEA Grant Apps

At nine a.m. on the first day of AWP, informational sessions already provided the practical advice sought by conference attendees. Much of what was reviewed during this morning’s panel on “Applying to the National Endowment for the Arts: Helpful Hints for Arts Organizations” is readily available at www.nea.gov and www.grants.gov, but John Parrish Peede, Director of Literature: Grants Programs for the NEA, did provide these helpful hints:

• Read the grant guidelines.
• Flesh out your project.
• Review grants that have been previously granted by the NEA.
• Decide the appropriate category and guideline for your project.
• Contact discipline specialist and director for support.
• Double-check your math.
• Enclose an appropriate work sample.
• Include the earliest start date.
• Fill out the application checklist.
• Apply online and apply early. Peede recommends applying ten days before the deadline. The only exceptions to online applications are extreme—for those who are disabled or who aren’t within thirty miles of an Internet connection—so make sure to get a head start in chase you hit any cyber snags.

In addition, during the post-presentation Q&A, Peede addressed some issues not expressly covered in his PowerPoint or online:

• The grant narrative: “Apply as if you are a panelist,” Peede said. Think about the thousand pages of application materials they have to read. Make a “succinct, cogent argument,” no more than three pages, and break it down into subheads.
• Prior grants: Previous support is not grounds for receiving or not receiving funding. However, “one of the most important thing is the ability to pull off a project,” Peede said. The NEA doesn’t reward—or punish, for that matter—based on the past. It’s always about the project, but history does matter, so demonstrate the means to complete the project.
• Panel notes: Ask for notes from the panel’s discussion, even if you receive the grant, as these can be helpful in identifying where your application was strong and weak.
• Matching funds: The NEA requires that any grants it awards be matched one-to-one by the recipient organization. In order to achieve this, get creative and apply for consortium grants with organizations who already do this well.
• The fifty-percent question: “Do no harm,” Peede said, so when the grant application asks you what your organization would do if awarded less than fifty percent of the requested funding, say you’ll find the funding somewhere else, or you’ll scale back the project. Don’t say you’ll cut back on marketing costs, and, whatever you do, don’t say you’ll walk away from the project—the money you’d be giving up goes back to the Treasury, not the NEA, effectively cheating fellow applicants of funds.
• Theme: Although it isn’t necessary for your project to have a theme, it does provide an easy shorthand for panelists. “Theme is a useful organization principle,” Peede said. “You can build a better case” for your project.
• “Give us your best.” If Peede had one piece of advice to offer, this would be it.

Caught in the ’Net

The 25 Random Things meme on Facebook inspired this “25 Non-Random Things About Writing Short.”

Writing and Editing News Roundup

Yes, 2009 is off to a rocky start for Mots Justes. Returning to a regular posting schedule post-thesis has proven just as challenging as returning to a regular writing schedule post-thesis. (More on that later.)

This will change, however, this week as the Association of Writers and Writing Programs kicks off in Chicago. MJ will be there, reporting from the conference and Bookfair floor.

In the meantime, let’s catch up on what’s been going on in the realms of writing and editing:

R.I.P. John Updike, whose literary merit remains up for debate.

“The horror!”: Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book wins the Newbery following a debate on the Medal’s relevance.

A rural California school board bans Bless Me, Ultima.

San Pedro, Calif.’s Williams Book Store celebrates its centennial while the fate of West Hollywood’s Book Soup remains in doubt.

As the English language approaches one million words, Dr. Goodword names the hundred-plus most beautiful.

The British put the grammar and punctuation police on the defensive.

“Writing in the Age of Distraction”: Cory Doctorow strikes a balance between work and the Internet’s too-easy access to entertainment and information.

Best Books Read in 2008

For years I’ve been putting together year-end top-ten lists of movies. One can do this as a film critic because one has presumably seen a prodigious number of current titles in order to make a qualified assessment of the cinematic offerings from the past twelve months. (Reading these rankings, however, can become eye-blurringly repetitive, with little variation aside from the occasional left-field acclamation, so I’ve put my own twist on this industry tradition, as you’ll see later in the week.)

I’ve never done a best-of list for books, however, because of the thirty-plus titles I read last year, few of them were published in 2008. Instead, here’s a list of not the best books of 2008, but the best books I read in 2008:

1. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley and All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren—These are my all-time favorite books and the reason I am a writer. I reread them back-to-back this summer, and I was reminded how A Thousand Acres was a revelation to me: you can write a novel about a farmer? Smiley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book was not only an homage to King Lear but to the reserved, stalwart men and women around whom I grew up in the Midwest. After reading it for the first time, I became determined to bring more of their stories to the page. Meanwhile, Warren’s veiled account of Louisiana Governor Huey Long’s rise and fall is as humid as a Southern swamp with rich language, lyrical detours, and compelling themes about the corruptive influence of power.
2. Judith Freeman‘s oeuvre: The Chinchilla Farm, Set for Life, A Desert of Pure Feeling, Red Water, and The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved—Freeman’s biography (of sorts) of Raymond Chandler, which was released in 2008, is a fascinating meld of geographic history, speculation, and writer’s notebook. In it, she visits each of the Los Angeles-area homes occupied by the Chandlers, an itinerant couple who rarely lived in one place for more than a few months. At each location, Freeman imagines the relationship between Chandler and his wife Cissy, about whom little is known and who was much older than her husband. Meanwhile, Freeman writes about the process of writing the book. The Long Embrace marks a departure from her previous books—all novels that at least originate in the rural West and, often, among Mormons. It was this milieu that we shared as thesis advisor and advisee.
3. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan—In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, food activist Pollan follows four meals from the ground to the plate, from driving through McDonald’s for a burger and fries, to organic shopping at Whole Foods, to eating locally raised meat and vegetables, to hunting and gathering for an entire dinner party. In his follow-up, In Defense of Food, he prescribes a new approach to what and how we eat based on his findings.
4. Consider the Lobster and Other Essays by David Foster Wallace—I have to confess I’d never read anything by Wallace before his unfortunate passing, although I have had Infinite Jest on my bookshelf since it first came out in paperback. His forte, however, may have been nonfiction. In this collection of journalism, which includes the oft-mentioned profile of John McCain from his 2000 presidential bid, he takes, say, a straightforward assignment from Gourmet magazine to profile the Maine Lobster Festival and turns it into a manifesto decrying the barbaric way in which the crustacean is prepared for our consumption. Or a simple book review assignment from Harper’s becomes a history of Standard Written English. The man dug and dug and dug until no corner of a story was left unilluminated.
5. Blindness by Jose Saramago—Saramago’s portrayal of a community suddenly universally struck blind and the resulting disintegration of society is the most awful thing I have ever read.

Now it’s your turn: what are the best books you read in 2008?

Caught in the ’Net

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Glen Goldman, owner of Los Angeles’s Book Soup, dies.

“Review” Revue

Mots Justes hopes you’ll indulge a little self-promotion today, as the second edition of Southern California Review is now available! The literary journal, published by the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California, celebrated with a joint reading with MPW at the Spot in Culver City, a wonderful, lit-friendly café/lounge—as long as they know you are coming. The hard-working young woman behind the counter Friday night didn’t—and quickly became overwhelmed by the thirty or forty people who attended.

Eventually, reading host Stephen Silke and I started rooting around ourselves for the lights in the lounge in the back, where a stage and a mic made for a perfect venue. It soon became apparent, however, that the singing Australian drama/theater club that plopped down on the couches was not there for our literature reading but for an open mic.

The young lady by herself behind the counter knew nothing about either event, and the manager was out shopping, but Stephen handled the situation lightly and deftly. Ultimately the other group ceded their spot, unfortunately not sticking around but departing for another venue—or sushi.

The rest of the evening went swimmingly-the place was packed. (I heard attendees—including our faculty adviser—were crowding the entrance and spilling out of the lounge into the café. Here are some highlights:

Host Stephen Silke invited SCR to participate in the evening’s MPW reading.

Stephen also read from his new collection, Furniture.

MPW student Natash Burton read from her fictionalized memoir.

Stacia Saint Owens, whose short story “Once Removed” appears in SCR, read from a new piece that will appear in Massachusetts Review.

Richard Lange, author of short-story collection Dead Boys, read from “Sweeth Nothing,” which appears in SCR. His first novel, This Wicked World, will be published in June.

David Francis, whose novel Stray Dog Winter was released last month, entertained with an excerpt from “How’s It Going, Peter Pan?” and “Daisy on the Bridge,” both of which appear in SCR.

The Spot’s lounge was packed.

Stephen reads along.

Caught in the ’Net

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“Every Life Is Worthy of a Novel”

At a special event curated by novelist Mona Simpson at the Hammer Museum in Westwood last week, Michael Cunningham (Specimen Days, The Hours, A Home at the End of the World) gave the audience an early holiday present: a reading from his as-yet unpublished, untitled next novel. The passage was enthralling, and he cut it off expertly right before a revelation that “changes everything.”

Cunningham has been away from novel writing for the past couple of years, co-scripting the adaptation of Evening with the book’s author Susan Minot, developing a television series, and writing a biopic of Dusty Springfield to star Nicole Kidman, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf in the big-screen version of The Hours.

Cunningham doesn’t see his work in showbiz as slumming, however.

“I love the movies. And TV,” he said, citing especially HBO’s critically lauded The Wire. “I never for a second thought of writing for the movies or television as a lesser form. Would I rather watch a great movie than read a perfectly adequate first novel? Yes. One of the big things that’s happening in aesthetics is in the blurring of boundaries,” with poets or novelists working in other forms.

This malleability has marked Cunningham’s fiction writing as well, as Simpson noted each of his novels is different from his others.

“As a writer, I want to feel a little bit incompetent, a little bit out of my depth,” he said. Putative work resides in the gap between what an artist wants to do and what he or she is able to do. The minute I start to feel competent, the minute I start to feel that I know what I’m doing, I know I’m in trouble.”

Where Cunningham is consistently competent, however (to understate it hugely), is, as one audience member noted, in finding beauty in the everyday.

“Any writer learns over time what his or her natural scope and scale is, where your eye goes in a scene,” he said. “And I do look for something largish in something that appears ordinary.”

He borrowed this technique from the authors who have inspired his own writing: Woolf (The Hours), Walt Whitman (Specimen Days), and James Joyce, whose work makes an appearance in the passage he read that night. Before Woolf and Joyce especially, he said, “Literature had been mostly about heroics and large events. Okay, most of us aren’t involved in events so obviously cataclysmic. Most of us spend a lot of time driving down roads.”

The modernists asked themselves, “What if we as writers were to insist that every life is an epic-sized life? What if we as writers were to stop looking around for lives worthy as a novel but argue that every life is worthy of a novel?” The result of this line of thought, Cunningham said, was “two of the greatest book of the last hundred years”—Mrs. Dalloway, epitomized in The Hours, and Ulysses.

“It’s great and hugely important to look out at the universe and see so far that we can see billions of years into the past. It’s equally important and not all that different to split the atom and look into the subatomic world. Ultimately it’s the same thing.”

Fiction’s dramatization of everyday lives, Cunningham ultimately argued, is its greatest strength.

“Maybe the way in which fiction is most indispensable, the reason we still need it, is it’s the best medium to communicate what it’s like to be someone other than yourself. There is nothing to take the place of fiction’s ability to put you in the mind and body of another person. It’s a subtle and hugely political act because the more we understand what it’s like to be someone else, the harder it is to amend the Constitution [to ban same-sex marriage] or bomb the fuck out of a country. This is fiction’s most essential contribution. Without fiction, I don’t know where we’d go for that.”

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Deadlines Are Our Friends—Part II: How to Function Without One

As discussed at length in yesterday’s post, I handed in my thesis last week. As the deadline approached, I was writing furiously, madly. Now that the deadline has passed, however, I fear I may stop. (I prefer to think of my current lapse as a “break” or a “pause” as I consider my next step.) How will I function without a deadline?

1. Set new deadlines. For example, I might say to myself that I am going to complete the second draft by the time I walk for my diploma in May. Of course, deadlines are hard to enforce if there are no consequences for missing them—like, say, having to extend (and pay for) your studies for yet another semester.
2. Join or form a writers group. If the group meets regularly, you’ll have regular deadlines, and you will be held accountable.
3. Get and enforcer. I learned this trick of the trade from Mark Sarvas over at the Elegant Variation. When he was writing his first novel, Harry, Revised, his goal was to write two pages a day. Upon completion of this goal, he sent an email to a friend with a simple “done” in the subject line. If he didn’t check in, his friend got after him.
4. Schedule writing into your daily routine. Set aside time. This should be as important as grocery shopping, or showering. More important.
5. Set goals—a number of words or pages or hours to be met every day or every week. Think of it like a job—if you miss your quota, you have to make it up the next day. Monthly goals are less effective, as it’s hard to make up three-and-half weeks’ worth of missed work over the last couple of days.
6. Join a support network. I caught on to Facebook rather late, but many of my “friends” are fellow writers. I see through their status updates, and they see through mine, whether they are writing. Mutual encouragement and support ensue.
7. Don’t make writing so precious. If getting to work on that second draft of your novel is too intimidating, spend some time with your writers notebook instead.
8. Shift gears. Do some research. Or switch to short stories.
9. Attend readings. There’s nothing more inspirational than being in the presence of other writers.

Caught in the ’Net

The newspaper industry is feeling the effects of the economic crisis: Tribune Co., parent company of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, has filed for bankruptcy, and ad sales at newspapers will likely be even worse next year. One pundit makes the case for the resurrection of the New Deal’s Federal Writers Project.

Deadlines Are Our Friends

Hello again! Yes, Mots Justes is back online, having survived the thesis throes. And yes, as a commenter on the post below notes, unfortunately it is well past November 4. Here’s what happened:

As noted in my last post, I decided that during the last month before my thesis was due, I could ill afford any distractions. I had to cut out anything unnecessary-i.e., anything that didn’t pay the rent. Unfortunately, that meant the blog had to go on hiatus.

MJ wasn’t the only sacrifice, however: I stopped freelancing, too (which arguably does help pay the rent, but not much). I stopped cooking, which resulted in a late-night run to Ralph’s by my desperate significant other, who never goes grocery stopping, and a fridge full of frozen pizzas, pot pies, and Lloyd’s Barbeque Pork. I stopped cleaning my house. That has yet to be remedied.

What I did do is write, as many as 1,000 words a day, which is epic for me. It was frantic. It was stressful. It was really kind of great.

At no other point in my career had my creative writing taken center stage. At no other time was it the most important thing that simply had to get done. There were no other articles to write, no other assignments to turn in, no blogs to post that took precedence over my novel. It was wonderful.

And then, with just two-and-a-half weeks to go, I got a month extension. I didn’t even ask for it; it just arrived, uninvited, in my inbox. My thesis was now due on December 3.

I expressed joy and relief at the time, of course—deadlines are the bane of any writer’s existence, and extensions are always welcome. Inside, however, all I could think was “Oh, no …”

You see, for the past year or so I had been building toward this November 3 deadline. I had put MJ on hiatus for it. I had pushed back the ship date of Southern California Review, of which I am editor-in-chief, so I wouldn’t have to turn it and my thesis in at around the same time. And truthfully, I liked the idea of handing in this major project on my birthday. Now, my blog would be offline for two months, I still had to turn in SCR and my thesis at the same time (literally on the same day), and the new due date was, well, insignificant.

Then I did what I feared I would do, what I knew I would: I stopped writing. Less than two months before my thesis was due, I didn’t write. For two whole weeks.

Yes, I could have stuck to the original deadline. I could have finished the draft by November 3 and given myself a whole extra month to revise and edit. But I don’t work that way. I don’t do anything until I absolutely have to.

Eventually, I found myself in the same position as the day the deadline was extended—running out of time and writing like mad. And again, it was great.

Today, now that my thesis is turned in, SCR is at the printer, and my gig at the Writing Center has come to an end (alas, you have to be a graduate enrolled in classes to stay on the payroll), my life looks completely differently from just five days ago, and my goal is to hang on to some of that momentum, to not stop writing again now that there’s no deadline.

I’ll explore ways to do that in tomorrow’s post. In the meantime, how have deadlines been your friend?

Caught in the ’Net

How to

• “… Write a Christmas Letter” with a dose of humor
• “… Become a Successful Copywriter With ‘Bad’ Writing”
• “… Write Sex Scenes” by Steve Almond, an interview with whom appears in the Fall 2008 edition of—here comes the shameless plug—Southern California Review.