Vol. I, No. 30, October 4, 2010

“Wings Over Arda” Film Diary 2 – Liberties/First Day of Shooting

Oct 102010

As evidenced by my last post, my free time and brain-space has been heavily occupied by a writing/film project based on a few early works/drafts of J.R.R. Tolkien, including material from Unfinished Tales and The Shaping of Middle-Earth. The project is a collaboration between myself, my brother (visual artist, filmmaker, action choreographer and athlete), and two close friends: Jennifer Wicks (costume designer and actress), and Jack Durnin (local filmmaker/cameraman). While adapting the script, storyboarding, and visualizing the process as a whole (including the inevitable “liberties” I would have to take), I tried to keep this quote from Tolkien himself in mind:

[T]he cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.

In short, Tolkien wanted people to adapt his work into other media, including films. Consider the following quote, also from Tolkien, after viewing the original animated films based upon The Lord of the Rings.

I would ask them to make an effort of imagination sufficient to understand the irritation (and on occasion the resentment) of an author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his work treated as it would seem carelessly in general, in places recklessly, and with no evident signs of any appreciation of what it is all about.

What stuck with me while working on my adaptation was the last part: “appreciation of what it is all about.” As a longtime reader, I think I’ve got a good idea, but as previously mentioned, liberties must be taken. Where, then, do I take them? I am working on merging two stories, which take place around the same time period in the fictional mythology, into a single film. The myths, which in The Silmarillion read similarly to the Greek Mythos or the Norse Myths, continue onward when the specific sections end. Certain characters were around thousands of years earlier; some live all the way into the latest histories of the mythology. As a rule with a film, however, the story must be self-contained. This film’s budget is out-of-pocket; I’m not planning a Trilogy. I took into consideration which parts of the mythology are important to these specific stories and this particular point in the fiction’s history, as well as, perhaps more importantly, what would be coherent to a film audience who has never touched these books. Simple example: three precious stones. Only one of them matters to this story, and only to half the characters, but the entire story is happening because these stones exist. How much attention should be given to the stone, and how do I tersely explain where the other two are without going into a campfire storytelling session?

I figured it out through rigorous script revision, but listening to the dialogue being spoken on set also helped. I am usually a person who needs to have every nook of a creative project in order before proceeding, especially when it involves people other than myself, but this time I had to let that go (appropriate for a story that is, if we must tack a theme to it, about letting go) and resolve to revise it as I go along. That process is working out well. We’ve had two days of shooting over two weekends, and I’m revising the script after each shoot, on some occasions even editing dialogue while on set – this is different from allowing “improv;” the dialogue is still written, agreed upon and followed. The only way I can describe it is “adventures in dialogue.”

Linked below is a little 10-minute feature we put together after our first day of shooting. Within are interviews with me, Phil and Jen; comments from other cast members in the film; some of our ideas about the project at the onset; and of course, some general silliness. Take note that this footage was shot with a “B” camera in Hi-8; none of the shots, audio or HD footage from the final product is in the video, but you’ll get to see some of the costumes in low quality.

See also Richard Hartshorn acting in his brother’s Trojan War film.

Return to the table of contents

“Four Approximations of Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65 BCE-8 BCE), from the Odes,” by Steven Heighton

Oct 062010

Herewith a sequence of poems from Steven Heighton‘s book Patient Frame, published earlier this year. Numéro Cinq readers will (or may not) recall Steven from two earlier appearances on these pages (here and here). He is an old friend of mine, a hurting hockey player, father of a daughter, and he published a book of poems and a novel this year, which is more than I have (probably you, too). He sent me “A Strange Fashion of Forsaking…” months ago for fun and it’s been biting at the back of my brain ever since, not the least because he refashions Horace after Thomas Wyatt, one of my favourite poets (I use the poem “They Flee from Me” in my essay “The Drama of Grammar”). I leave it to Steven to introduce Horace and these translations—which he prefers to call “approximations”—in his own words.

Horace, or Quintus Horatius Flaccus, was a Roman poet. During his lifetime (65 BCE – 8 BCE) he served briefly as a military officer, as a functionary in the Roman treasury, and as a writer, producing satires, epodes, epistles, literary criticism, and poems. He was a highly versatile poet, both formally and thematically; his Odes comprise work ranging from personal lyrics to moralistic verse, and from private, occasional poems to public, ceremonial verse. Horace’s words survive not only in Classics departments and in translation (David Ferry’s The Odes of Horace is deservedly respected and widely read), but in common parlance: the phrase carpe diem comes from one of his poems.

In approaching these four odes of Horace I’ve stuck with my usual practice as an amateur translator, giving myself the freedom to make each approximation as “free” or as “faithful” as the original inspires me to be. So “Pyrrha” sticks close to the untitled original in its structure, imagery and level of diction, while “Chloe” has morphed from an unrhymed twelve line poem into a short-lined sonnet. “A Strange Fashion of Forsaking” is inflected and re-gendered by way of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s famous poem “They Flee from Me”, while “Noon on Earth!” has gone from a linguistically formal eight lines to a highly colloquial seventeen.

Robert Kroetsch once observed that every poem is a failed translation. What a translation can’t afford to be is a failed poem—or at least an uninteresting one. My aim in approximating a poem that I love is, of course, to make a compelling counterpart in English—something to entertain you, startle you, pry you open—while in the process entertaining myself: sitting up, by candlelight, with dictionaries and a glass of Douro red, the house silent, even the bats in our walls asleep; reciting the original lines aloud, in some cases two thousand years after their conception; weighing how best to re-conceive those cadences in English; serving as a kind of stenographer to the dead, a medium at a prosodic séance, an avid collaborator, an apprentice always learning from the work. And for me, the most mysterious, engrossing work lies in finding a way into old or ancient poems and making them young again. Hence Horace.

Continue reading »

The Use of Moralized Cityscape in Los Angeles Literature: Jill Glass

Oct 062010

It’s a pleasure to introduce my former student (and Vermont College of Fine Arts graduate) Jill Glass to Numéro Cinq. Jill lives in Los Angeles, writes about Los Angeles, thinks about Los Angeles and even seems to like it there. “The Use of Moralized Cityscape in Los Angeles Literature” is a marvelously intelligent essay on the use of place in fiction, the moralizing of place for fictional purposes (a literary effect called paysage moralisé) and, in particular, the way authors like Joan Didion, Gavin Lambert and Nathanael West re-imagine Los Angeles as a literary universe unto itself. Make sure to look at the notes and bibliography which extend the reach of the essay far beyond its topical orbit. This was Jill’s critical thesis at Vermont College, one of the best I’ve seen.

THE USE OF MORALIZED CITYSCAPE IN LOS ANGELES LITERATURE

By Jill Glass

“I look at the writers who came, when they came, why they came, what they found and how they responded to the city. I am interested in the way the place—in all its apparent oddity—shaped the writer’s imaginations and how their imaginative renderings shaped the city, structured it in image and myth as the city of dream, desire and deception.” ⁱ

–David Fine, Imagining Los Angeles.

It was failure that brought Nathanael West to Los Angeles in the mid-1930’s, after his first novel, The Dream of the Balso Snell, was little read and poorly reviewed and his second, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), was not the breakthrough many anticipated. Critically praised, the novel seemed poised for success when West received news on the eve of release that his publishing house, hit hard by the economic depression, had declared bankruptcy. Months later, when the book came to market, it had lost all momentum. In an unexpected development, Twentieth Century Fox bought the film rights, and West followed his novel to Hollywood to oversee its transition from page to screen.

The Depression had been good to the film industry. Americans, desperate for diversion, crowded the theaters where they were fed images of Los Angeles life as one of material comfort, escapism and eternal sunshine, the locus of the American Dream. This was not what West saw when he arrived. His Los Angeles was “a grotesque half-world of outcasts and hangers-on, misfits and freaks, exotic cultists and disillusioned Midwesterners,” a jumble of incongruous architectural styles—pagodas and chalets–stacked side by side in rugged canyons, a fantasyland gone awry, the lines between movies and reality badly blurred, a city devoid of cultural or literary definition.

Heightened and distorted, this became the central imagery for his seminal work, The Day of the Locust. The book was published in 1939, a defining year for Los Angeles literature. Raymond Chandler released his novella Red Wind, elevating pulp crime fiction to an art form. His Los Angeles was “a big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup…no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.”ⁱⁱ John Fante published his second novel, Ask the Dust, the first book to focus a tender eye on the down-and-outers, the immigrant denizens of the city’s downtown flophouses and cafeterias. “Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.”ⁱⁱⁱ But the Los Angeles of West’s imagination was a bleaker place, a moral black hole–the embodiment of what he saw as the spiritual and material betrayal of the American dream during the years of the Great Depression, a city where people “realize they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment…Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have saved and saved for nothing.”^iv

With The Day of the Locust, a black, surrealistic, social satire, West created his own genre—Hollywood Apocalypse. A short 126-page novel, the chapters range from one to eleven pages in length. Written in third-person omniscient, past tense, the story is told from the point of view of Tod Hackett, part moral-innocent, part artist-prophet, a recent graduate of the Yale School of Fine Arts, who has temporarily set aside his aspirations towards serious art to work as a set designer at a second-rate Hollywood studio. As he takes in Los Angeles, he marvels at the blatant artifice of the architecture and the inhabitants. He dismisses the masqueraders, people who parade the streets in costumes that belie and disguise their social standing, but is fixated on the migrant middle-class Midwesterners who “have come to California to die.” He plans to use them as the subjects of the masterpiece he will someday paint in the style of Daumier or Goya, a fantasized catastrophe he has titled “the Burning of Los Angeles.”

He falls in with an assortment of oddballs–a veritable laundry list of Hollywood clichés—an over-the-hill Vaudeville clown, a child actor, a cowboy, a dwarf, and Faye Greener, a scheming, untalented extra with delusions of stardom.

Tod becomes obsessed with Faye, joining her circle of suitors, a group of misfits and has-beens, including Homer Simpson, a sickly Iowan newly arrived in Los Angeles in search of a health cure. It is a losing proposition. Faye makes it clear that Tod has nothing to offer her since he is neither wealthy or good-looking or connected. Her rejection fuels his depraved and lustful fantasies, and after an evening of group flirtation at a Hollywood Hills campsite escalates into violence, Tod chases Faye into the woods with the fantasy of raping her.

Faye’s father dies and she moves in with Homer Simpson in an arranged relationship–food, lodging and expensive clothes in exchange for her companionship. She takes advantage of Homer’s vulnerability and manipulates him into letting two of her other suitors move into his garage.

Tod determines to break off with Faye. His desire for her makes him feel as desperate as the people he is trying to paint. He turns his attention back to “The Burning of Los Angeles,” searching the churches of Hollywood for new subjects. He is disturbed by what he sees—fanatical congregations worshipping false-prophets.

“The Tangerine Quandary,” a story by Diane Lefer

Oct 062010

Diane Lefer and Duc Ta (for photo details see introduction below)

Diane Lefer is an old friend and former colleague at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Many of you know her. She is what you want a friend and a colleague to be: forthright, hugely funny, smart and a passionate moral being. The last time we ran a workshop together in College Hall, one student called it (in her evaluation) “the Doug and Diane Show.” I do believe we had a lot of fun, and the students had fun, too (and incidentally learned something, a couple anyway). She’s a fierce and kindly person. “The Tangerine Quandary” originally appeared in the Santa Monica Review, Spring, 2010. Here is Diane’s gloss on the photo above. “In 1999, Duc Ta was arrested at age 16 when he drove the wrong kids home from school. One of them fired two shots out the window. No one was hit or injured. Duc was tried as an adult and sentenced 35-years-to-life. I’ve been advocating on his behalf ever since. We did get his sentence reduced to 11-years-to-life making him eligible for parole but he is still locked up. This picture was taken in front of the backdrop in the visiting room where you have to stand if you want a photo taken while visiting. We call it Jail Break.”

The Tangerine Quandary

By Diane Lefer

Theo watched the Orthodox schoolgirls at the corner, long-sleeved shirts, skirts below the knee, high socks in the 80-degree heat, and hoped they were there for him. One reached with both hands to do something with her hair, her water bottle tucked between her thighs so it stuck out like an erection with a blue head. Then the light changed and they crossed and caught up to the girl who stood absolutely straight as she dribbled a basketball. What are they doing on a basketball court, he thought, but there they were, going to the park, and he to the bookstore, and damn but they would have made an interesting audience.

What was wrong with him that he was still too shy to approach a gaggle of teenage girls and say, “Come here. I’ve got what you’re waiting for.”

He’d come by bus and wandered a while, trying to figure out how to enter the mall itself rather than the car-park structure, then found himself on fake cobblestones, rolling his carry-on bag amid the crowds and the burbling of recycled water in the fake stone fountains, then past the multiplex theatre and the clothing stores. Pigeons huddled beside the decoy owl on the bookstore roof, unafraid, and taking advantage of its shadow.

He studied the posters in the window. So many photos, so many names, so many famous people he’d never heard of. His own claim to the Walk of Fame: a $15 bunk in the hostel on Hollywood Boulevard. Inside the store, the air conditioning hit him, less a greeting than an assault. Not as bad as the BBC interview of course, being called a bottom feeder, a canker worm and parasite. The Brits do have an abundant command of entomological and ichthyological invective. The presenter never even worked his way up to anything warmblooded. Here he finds piles of books on display, not his, more posters and book covers and faces, not his. People should have heard of—he wouldn’t presume to name himself—but they should have heard of, cared about, come out to honor her. Anne.

If people would only ask the right questions, such as: Why here, why now?

He’d answer, The Savior would have to appear among the most despised people on earth.

But she’s an American.

Precisely!

What It’s Like Living Here — from Natalia Sarkissian in Milan

Oct 052010

This is a gorgeous, heartbreaking nonfiction piece by my former student and Vermont College of Fine Arts graduate Natalia Sarkissian. Read it, admire it, and send her your thoughts and best wishes.

——

October, 2010

Dear DG,

Thanks for your email. You ask about Milan. What it’s like living here. You ask for descriptions, for photos…. Enclosed please find my views :

“Duomo” means cathedral.

A Gothic version wrought with grimacing monsters presides in central Milan. Recently renovated, the marble shines a bright white in direct sunlight, blushes at dawn, or grows ruddy in the gloaming of nightfall.

Pickpockets roam the piazza spread out like a large, bumpy placemat beneath the Duomo. Their glittery black eyes home in on the naïve tourist. Hand to your pocket, or arm firmly over purse, please. You have treasures to lose.

Merchandisers sell Inter, Milan, Juve soccer scarves—blue&black, red&black, white&black—from small wooden kiosks; marketers ring the perimeter with fluorescent neon in pink and blue that exhorts purchases of Gucci, Prada, Sony. Close your eyes to (un)subliminal messaging. Times are tough. Save your dough.

Pigeons squat on the equestrian bronze of King Vittorio Emanuele. White streaks drip from his greened shoulders. Hurry past, head hunkered down.

Seven o’clock shadows lengthen and grow violet while the sun sinks. Cut across the cobblestones of the piazza, wind through pickpockets, tourists, merchandisers, marketers, and pigeons. Climb the steps, enter the Duomo through tall bronze doors, choose the side altar where the Renaissance panel of the Virgin and her Son hangs. Light a candle below the image. Kneel. Even if you’re not Catholic, even if you’re not religious.

The smoky sputter of burning wax. The golden light ringing bowed heads like glowing halos. The sting of incense wafting from the main altar—hundreds of yards away—where evening mass reaches a crescendo.  The intonation of millions of prayers, seven hundred years’ worth, reverberates in the cavernous, vibrating enclave.

You listen, knees against the stool, fingers laced together on the rail.

Dive in, again today, as you have every day since disaster struck. Add to the swirling mix.

When you finish, fall back into your wooden pew.

You remember that John Ruskin hated the aesthetics of this place. That Oscar Wilde called it monstrous in taste. But that Mark Twain, like you, scoured the thousands of niches decorated with statues of saints, and bugs and birds, and all of nature, and knew here, in the Duomo, he wasn’t alone.

“Salsamenteria” means Sauce-eria.

A new one, near the recently-opened Abercrombie and Fitch, waylays the hungry in a narrow street not far from the Duomo. Salt-cured pig haunches hang from hooks on the walls and rafters in the ceiling. Brown paper mats plaster square oak tables. Kegs of cheaper wine sprawl on a hutch to the left of the bar, bottles of finer wine march across a shelf.

Study the menu taped to the window.

Coppa, it says. Prosciutto, Culatello di Zibello. Tortellini, Ravioli. Lambrusco. Bardolino. DOP–the best of the best. 5 Euros. 6 Euros. 10 Euros. 3.5 Euros. 2 Euros. 4 Euros. 3.9 Euros. Eat. You need to eat. Mangia. Mangia. Keep your strength up.

Take a break from your vigil. Enter. Choose a table for one near the door.

Black eyes, black hair, brown skin. The waitress from Kenya, poised to serve. Pencil on pad.

Order a sandwich. Select some wine.

Pink slabs fall from thick slices of peasant bread. Green sauce—made from parsley, capers, oil and anchovies—glistens in a finger bowl on the middle of your table. Unkegged Bardolino fizzes in the white ceramic bowl the graceful Kenyan girl serves it in.

Dip your sandwich into the oily green, slurp the slick red.

Forget while you eat and drink. Listen to the clinking in the kitchen, the tap of forks against ceramic plates. Watch the girl glide and whirl.

Chew.

And when wine splats on your blouse like blood (drops of crimson on white gauze) blot and wipe in the room with the skirted stick figure on the door.

Remember.

Hurry out to evening mass at the Duomo.

“Ca’Granda Policlinico” means Hospital.

Designed in the Renaissance by Filarete, the Florentine, with perfect courtyards, graceful loggias and brick fretwork, the first Ca’Granda is where the ill of the city was nursed back to health. Now university students occupy Filarete’s harmonic spaces, while the Ca’Granda has migrated across the street to become the Ca’Granda Policlinico and occupy dozens of buildings of eclectic styles and dubious periods.

Rush your teenage boy here one ill-fated Monday. See how he is classified code red.

Tell the doctors: He’s healthy. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

Tell the doctors: His heart’s fine. But then listen to it beat 200 times a minute.

Wait, sitting on linoleum lit by neon.

An orderly changes rumpled blue sheets on an abandoned gurney. An infant, red with fever, cries in its father’s arms. A small pink girl in a wheelchair, her broken wrist held to her chest, fusses at her gold-jewelry-laden-black-leather-jacketed mother. And a blond boy lies down the hall, behind closed doors, in intensive care, monitors hooked to his chest and fingers.

Wait, sitting on linoleum lit by neon.

Relatives of the injured arrive. One, with stiff gray hair and sturdy brown pumps, holds the infant so his father can go to the men’s room. The pink girl’s burly grandfather bellows into his cellphone. The mother in black and gold lights a cigarette beyond sliding glass. Soon, her exhaust curls up through the night.

Your husband calls. He’s home, caring for your youngest. How is our boy? He asks.

Ask a nurse, How is my boy?

Then wait, sitting on linoleum lit by neon.

“Parco” means park.

A nineteenth-century park—the parco Sempione—sprawls around the Castello Sforzesco, the imposing castle that was built in the early Renaissance where Leonardo da Vinci frescoed rooms for Ludovico il Moro. The parco encompasses the Triennale Art Museum too, and DeChirico’s beach house sculpture.

On sunny autumn afternoons boys bring their dogs to the happy corners of Parco Sempione and run. Disks of red plastic spin through the air, dogs fetch, their pink tongues curling and flapping.

Don’t worry about curbing your dog here—no one does. But check your shoes—wipe them on the graveled walkways—when you quit the grass.

On sunny autumn afternoons boys play soccer on the grassy knolls of Parco Sempione. Under the elm, off to the side. And here, one boy, a teenage boy with blue eyes and a chipped front tooth who plays soccer in autumn crumples one graying afternoon. His chest thumps at two hundred beats a minute—like a golden hummingbird’s—while the parco fades into black.

Call 118 when this happens. Climb into the wailing vehicle. Bump over old, winding streets, ancient alleys, circular passageways, through centuries of urban sprawl and nonexistent urban planning. At rush hour.

Say faster, please faster, as you watch your boy’s lips turn blue.

Hold his hand, whisper a prayer when you see his eyelids twitch.

Plan to light a candle at the Duomo every evening until he wakes.

Best,
Natalia

—By Natalia Sarkissian

“Writing Before God: The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard,” an essay by Andrew Hood

Oct 042010

Herewith an essay on writing, the spirit and Kierkegaard by a former student and Vermont College of Fine Arts graduate (dual major in creative nonfiction and fiction) Andrew Hood. Beside being an author, Drew is a father, a former seminarian and a gifted photographer. This essay was Drew’s critical thesis.

Writing Before God: The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard

By Andrew Hood

Preface

I first encountered Søren Kierkegaard in an undergraduate philosophy class when I was assigned to read what my professor called, “an uplifting exploration of sin and despair,” entitled The Sickness Unto Death. Having grown up attending church regularly in the Bible Belt of north Louisiana, I had a thorough but rudimentary understanding of the concept of sin. Thorough because the pastor talked about it every Sunday. Rudimentary because it was the same formula every Sunday: some form of pride leads to some form of anti-social behavior, which must be judged and forgiven by God at great personal sacrifice on His part.

By the time I got to college, I realized that whatever sin was, it was everywhere and bad, and that I was personally causing God a lot of grief because of it. So I understood how a conversation about sin could lead a philosopher into a conversation about despair. The byproduct of contemplating my own sin – which had become a kind of perpetual act carried out just beyond the horizon of consciousness – was guilt and shame. In my experience, guilt and shame were to despair what hydrogen and oxygen were to water. And I was drowning.

When I went off to college, I tried two different churches for two weeks each. And when, over the course of those four weeks, not a single person spoke to me or acknowledged me, I stopped looking for a church. Louisiana State University had as many students as my hometown had residents. I felt lost and invisible among the swarm, and with no church, and no Christian friends, I began to grieve the slow dissolution of my faith – which was no small matter for a boy whose faith was so intimately bound to his self.

My astronomy, sociology, anthropology, geology and biology classes were forcing me to think in new ways, and convincing me that history and existence could not be reduced to or explained by the cluster of truisms and artless appeals to mystery that had comprised my Christian faith. Eventually, the structure upon which I had made sense of my world and self trembled and collapsed. The sole exception was that sturdy, incorruptible concept of personal sin.

Like a chimney that stands tall over a burnt and crumbled home, that concept of sin and its concomitant sense of shame and guilt stood firm, even as the rest of my faith laid in ruins. A chimney deals only with fire, and so survives a fire; while sin deals only with failure, and so survives all failure.

But beneath the smoldering pile of religious rubble was a remnant of belief. I still believed that God existed, but I had lost the certainty that I knew and understood God. And with that, I lost the sense that God knew and understood me. And I missed that. So I held onto my belief in the existence of God, and I decided that one day I’d try again with Christianity.

Enter Philosophy 1201 and Søren Kierkegaard.