writer. screenwriter. learning person. loves being human.
It’s Sunday. I have the world’s longest list of stuff to do, mostly things I am pleased to be doing. There will be music, sausage for breakfast and vegetable beef marrow soup for lunch, lots and lots of lovely tea all day, screenwriting and a little fiction and some work on a New Project Coming Soon that Nicola and I are very excited about; and then off to dinner with a friend.
I want you to have a nice day too. So please, go here and follow the instructions.
And enjoy your day.
Love movies. Love epic stories. Love ancient history (I was amazingly fortunate in my education — I got ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman history in junior high school, along with Latin, Shakespeare and the kind of geography where the test is “draw a map of Africa on a blank piece of paper and then fill in all the countries”… but I digress. Ah well, why should today be any different?)
And here is the trailer for the ancient-history-epic-movie Agora, directed by Alejandro Amenábar (whose work has always struck me as marvelously attuned to both the “big picture” of a film and the internal landscapes of the characters in it), and starring the brilliant Rachel Weisz as — wait for it — Hypatia of Alexandria.
And it’s Saturday! How much better does it get?
Enjoy your day.
This past week, writer Alain de Botton has served as writer-in-residence for Heathrow Airport.
The notion is to capture the airport in real time: describe the intensely private moments between travelers played out on a stage so public that there is no audience, only all the rest of us passing through, focused on our own destinations and our own dramas — people in the bubble-space that airports make. People saying hello, goodbye, why do you have to go, why won’t you come with me? And de Botton is also exploring the private areas of the airport, the guts of the place and the people who keep it going, all the complex machinery and process and systems and training which most of us only experience as a step to wherever we’re going: Please place all metal objects in the tray. The doors are about to close: please step away from the doors. Collect your baggage at Claim Area 16.
Here’s an excerpt of de Botton’s real-time writing during his week in residence:
Some lovers were parting. She must have been twenty, he a few years older. Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood was in her bag. They had oversize sunglasses and had come of age in the period between SARS and swine flu. They were dressed casually in combat trousers and T-shirts. It was the intensity of their kiss that first attracted my attention, but what had seemed like passion from afrar was revealed at closer range to be unusual devastation. — Alain de Botton, in Heathrow Airport
We’re different writers; already my writer-self has been itching to get in there next to him and write it my way. And that tells me more than anything that I want a gig like this. It goes right to the center of my love of story, my fascination with what human beings do and say and feel and want, and my intense interest in how things work (on mechanical, structural, process and human levels). I’d love to have this kind of access and freedom and space to weave together the story of a place by telling stories of its systems and its people.
Airport; large hotel, or an island resort; train station, or a passenger train on a long journey; bus station; stadium; theatre; border crossing; an enormous outdoor concert space; a state fair… and that’s just off the top of my head.
Someone please give me a week of this, she said to the universe.
And where would you like to be writer-in-residence for a week, or where would you enjoy reading about if they had one?
Writer, artist, fire lookout and friend of this blog Jean Rukkila wrote this lovely piece about books we can’t find online — the books that we make ourselves.
The first blank book I filled for public consumption began at the locals’ end of the bar in Crown King, Ariz. When I lived up that dirt road I’d noticed how the fellows kept their personal cue sticks in the care of the bartender. ‘Hey Bob,’ I asked the owner, ‘Can I keep a blank book and watercolors with you?’
— Jean Rukkila, from “Not available online: a place for books that breathe”
Jean and I have never met, but as I type this, I’m enjoying imagining her at a lunch counter or a corner table in a bar, or high above the forest watching for the smoke to rise… with a book that she is making of the life that she’s part of, that is part of her. It’s especially the notion of sketches and words together that I love so much. I’m no artist (I have negative drawing talent, seriously, ask Nicola…) and it can be so frustrating, because images can say things that I cannot say with words. I think this is why I’m so drawn to screenwriting — because the end result is words and pictures of people doing, being, living.
As I said, reading Jean’s article makes me see her: or maybe it’s myself I’m imagining, magically gifted with hands that can draw the important things around me — my versions of men playing pool, gurgling ducks, a full glass of beer on a hot afternoon.
Jean, I hope I’ll see one of your books one day. And as much as I am a willing traveler in this land of pixels, I’m glad, like you, that some things aren’t available online.
About a month ago, I posted this:
Here’s the bigger picture, in all kinds of ways:
Time out of life. Time out of the everyday world. Time out.
Time in the bigger world, the realer one, water and sky, sun and stars. Time in myself without the daily stress, without the constant doing of things that somehow seem so important when I’m looking at my calendar, and somehow so unimportant when I look at this picture.
Ah, it really would take a thousand words to say it all. I’ll stop here.
Enjoy your day. Wishing you a measure of space, of time out, of time in.
From USA TODAY‘s The Oval:
The five — count ’em, five — books that the president toted along on his vacation amount to a whopping 2,352 pages of reading. Obama packed two novels, two non-fiction tomes and one thriller, all of them hits with the reviewers. In case you’d like to read along with the commander-in-chief, here’s the list:
The Way Home, a crime thriller set in Washington, D.C., by George Pelecanos. USA TODAY reviewer Carol Memmott called it “well-written and touching.”
Lush Life, a novel set in New York City, by Richard Price. Memmott said it “shows all the shades of grey in our urban landscapes.”
Hot, Flat and Crowded, an examination of today’s green revolution, by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that made the USA TODAY best-seller list.
John Adams, David McCullough’s 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the second president.
Plainsong, a best-selling novel by Kent Haruf. Reviewing the television show that the novel inspired, USA TODAY’s Robert Bianco described it as a story in which families are tested by difficult circumstances but prevail out of “sheer decency.”
I gotta say, someday I would love to find out that a President had read my book! Must be a pretty cool feeling.
And I’m biased, of course, but I worry a lot about people in power who never read; who don’t see the use in story. How do they learn about other experiences, other perspectives, other possible lives? And if they don’t learn that, how can they lead well?
Roaming around the internets recently, I came across this article on bullying by Alan E. Kazdin and Carlo Rotella.
In one large-scale national study of elementary and middle school students, 17 percent reported having been bullied, 19 percent said they bullied others, and 6 percent reported bullying and being bullied.
…
Because a bully’s success depends heavily on context, attempts to prevent bullying should concentrate primarily on changing the context rather than directly addressing the victim’s or the bully’s behavior. — from “Bullies can be stopped, but it takes a village” by Kazdin and Rotella
I wasn’t very popular in grade school, and I came in for my share of mean teasing and playground bullshit, but I was only ever bullied by a teacher. In high school, the mean people were more articulate and inventive, but I wasn’t a particular target.
But a lot of kids were, and are. I am so glad I’m not growing up now: at least in my day we didn’t have email and Facebook and cell phone cameras, we didn’t start expecting sex from each other at age 12… we didn’t have instant access to each other and the wider world. We were (mostly) still kids and that was okay.
I think it’s harder now, and I think bullying is more of a social sport than it used to be, and I worry about that. Kid bullies grow up to be adult bullies. People who have been allowed to intimidate others at age 17 often become 18-year-olds who feel entitled to take up as much of other people’s space, resources, and energy as they please, and who think that getting what they want when they want it is the Meaning of Life. Apart from the damage it does to bullied kids physically, psychically, and emotionally, bullying separates us from one another. It hurts community.
And that’s why I like the emphasis in this article on both individual responsibility (problem-solving for ourselves, and helping others to solve their own problems) and community solutions. I think perhaps the days when we can simply be our own best lone gunslinger are passing away: we are now making trouble for each other on such a broad school/city/national/global level that we can’t just fix each other anymore. We can find solutions, but more and more it seems that those answers involve and depend upon other people.
I believe in individual choices, individual courage. Individual responsibility. I’ve been a gunslinger all my life. But I’m also very glad that I’m learning to be a part of the posse.
Enjoy your day.
…the creative among us rise to meet the challenge. You don’t necessarily need to speak Spanish to get the jokes, but you do need to speak math.
Muchas gracias a E por los enviarme.
Here’s an examination of bad Star Wars science by John Scalzi that made me howl.
And cringe, as well. I’ve said before that my fiction tends to wave at science on the way past, and that’s because I’m not Science Gal… but there’s currently one Big Science Clunker in my screenplay that I have gone down on my virtual knees to try to fix; the powers that be, however, are so in love with it as a metaphor that they think no one will notice the bad science. I’ll keep trying: but Scalzi, when the time comes, if you cannot be kind, then at least please be this funny…
Please join me once again over at the Science Fiction Message Board’s Author August, where it’s all about Nicola today. Any comments you have are most welcome — just be sure to sign up/login first or you may find your thoughtful post has been eaten by worms.
Thanks once again to the good folks at SFMB for hosting this event and inviting us to be part of it.