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Dithering: Discovering New Colors, New Measures

I spent much of the day Sunday working on a new version of this blog–with more focused content and a new look (trust me, it's jazzy)–and I learned two things which do not appear to be in the Typepad Knowledge Base. First, there is a distinct set of computer-compatible, "non-dithering" colors and if you have a typepad account, you can simply enter the appropriate value to use them on your site. Second, an inch is 71 pixels. 

Does everyone else in the world know these things? Do I uniquely straddle the line between amateurs who wouldn't care and specialists who already know? If not, I offer this tentative gripe. The Knowledge Base isn't really a knowledge base. It's a tepidly comprehensive guide to what you probably already knew. I wanted to find this information there, couldn't, and found it myself via web search and an old fashioned phone call to an art director friend. And there doesn't seem to be a ready way to update the Knowledge Base.  I'm going to start a help ticket, but there should be a more readily apparent way to actually share evolving knowledge. 

Curtain Call

It’s surprising how hard it is to find the trace of Shakespeare’s influence in 20th century writers, at least if you're half-literate blogger. But I’ve found it in an unlikely place–criticism, specifically the theater criticism of Kenneth Tynan, in his collection of 1950s reviews, Curtains.

Tynan simply couldn’t avoid Shakespeare, whom he called British theater’s “luminous accident.” And you can feel the bard’s rhythms in Tynan’s prose, in the bracelets of prepositional phrases (“fascinating in performance, puzzling in retrospection”) and the swashbuckling modifiers (“a knightly piece, glib and well-nourished, star bright and silk-swathed”).

Tynan shares Shakespeare's comfort with the dazzling.  Of Waiting for Godot, of all things: "A play, it asserts and proves, is basically a means of spending two hours in the dark without getting bored."

And maybe Tynan can pull this off proto-bombast because he shares with Shakespeare a mind both saucy and smart. About some Richard play: “Which prompts a footnote on one of Shakespeare’s recurrent messages: never trust uncles.” Of the Queen and the Rebels: “I do not see what else [the actors] could have done with dialog so incompatible with the known facts of human behavior.” Earlier he had written, “To object that people do not talk like that would be naïve; the real objection is that conventional symbols do.”

Such aphorisms are balanced by precise observations on the craft of acting and a keen sense for the temperature and trajectory of characters. Paul Scofield “plays Hamlet as a man whose skill in smelling falseness extends to himself.”  As Bolingbroke in Richard II, Eric Porter “brings a proper queasiness to the job of usurpation.” Of Michael Redgrave’s Shylock, “He simply could not fuse the villiany of the part with its sardonic comedy.”

Curtains is out of print; Journals, in which Tynan details his sexual perversions and socialist politics and whines about Olivier (his boss at the National Theater), is not. That’s, well, a tragedy. 

Happy 25th Fallon

Fallon Worldwide celebrates its 25th anniversary this year and to mark the occasion the agency has published–via Harvard Business School Press–Juicing The Orange, a wonderful book of case histories (really) and will be publishing a compendium of its work called The Work.  It's hard to describe the effect the agency had on those of us who started our careers in Minneapolis. But a story that has nothing to do with the work may help illustrate it. The agency was originally Fallon McElligott Rice and when founding creative director Tom McElligott resigned and went into treatment in the late 80s, it discolored the week in the same that a family member's misfortune might. But I had never met McElligott. The closest I got is when another Fallon creative was looking at my portfolio and said, Tom should see this but realized that the founder was out the door on the way to judge an award show. A few weeks ago, I was talking with a co-worker from that time and he said he had the exact same reaction.  Whatever the details  and politics of McElligott 's departure, the agency has continued to create great work. You can see it by going  to Fallon, clicking on the  work and then on the 25 Years of Fallon link.

Twelfth Night Is Really About Me, After All

Watching Twelfth Night, I thought digressions indulged, darlings pardoned, fourth wall shattered, this breaks a whole bunch of rules. But that’s self-interested and more than a little logically questionable because it assumes that everything a great writer writes is uniformly great.

Bad workshop advice–of which I got relatively little at Minnesota and plenty of elsewhere–is like bad parenting. A year after your last workshop, you have to shut and write what you think you need to write and if the rules of the workshop still trump the demands of the page and the character, that’s your problem for being a wimp. And here’s a thought: all the fine writing can make Shakespeare a little airy and brittle.

There’s a reason why so many of us recent MFAs are slow to share our work, especially in its early stages. You really need some time without the training wheels and spotters (and mixed sports metaphors).

For Winona Guys and For of You Who, By Virtue of being subjected to my short stories, are honorary Winona guys:

Heard in the Acoustic Cafe (from a young man starting his shift):  "So, has it been a total dubefest this morning?

How exactly the slang word "dube," a strange noun form of "dubious,"  managed to survive thirty years after being coined by my friends in the 70s is any linguist's guess. 

Night Vision: More Thoughts on Great River Festival’s Twelfth Night

The one thing I would add to E’s remarks about the performance would be to note the set design, which is as agile as a mobile and as efficient as a ship. Twelfth Night, if I have any business bloviating about Shakespeare, is more dance than drama, and the set is perfect for it. 

What 'e Said

Link: Cool on the Hill: Where there's a Will.

Flinty Hero

Link: Mike's Classic Cartoon Themes & Images - Flintstones . A friend of ours sent a link to classic cartoon stills and theme songs. My personal favorite is the theme from Dastardly and Muttley and Their Flying Machines. ("Mutley, you snickering floppy-eared hound, when courage is needed, you're never around.") But I also realized that I somehow missed, "A Man Called Flintstone." The parody of a 60s spy movie theme–Brubeckish urgency; jaunty splashes of horns; skatty, talky verse;  operatic chorus–is great. 

Handler, With A Little More Care

I’m afraid that by dismissing Daniel Handler’s Adverbs, I’m imposing on fiction the hegemony of feeling that prevails in 12-step groups as shown in TV commercials. So I thought I’d examine one of the stories in Adverbs in more detail.

Like all of the stories I’ve read so far, “Immediately” starts quotably, “Love was in the air so both of us walked through love on the way to the corner.” It proceeds through a prankish realism. A couple is on their way to a reading of a will. The woman can’t believe that the man’s father died two weeks ago and he has just now told her about the reading of the will. He says that the man who died wasn’t his father, which is as baffling in the story as it is in this precis.  The couple hail a cab. As they are getting in the cab, the man realizes that the woman will never marry him and breaks up with her so obliquely I didn’t know it was happening.

He then falls in love with the cab driver, a man named Pete and there is the requisite joke about the cab driver’s exotic last name. He asks Pete to take him to Penn Station. (The will reading was a lie or delusion.) The cabbie also gets out to have a cup of coffee and our protagonist, assuming he’s invited, follows Pete. He worries about whether he should sit next to him or across from him. He worries about real estate and rent control and it’s effect on relationships. He worries about Pete’s lack of commitment. When he brings these things up, Pete is flummoxed, asks him if he’s a faggot and gets back into his cab. Our hero stands at the curb, waving his arms and proclaiming his love.    

The fact that none of this feels gay might be underlining the story’s apparent point, which is that love has nothing to do with the beloved. This is a cynical and, I think, false point. (Actually isn’t the reality of the other what distinguishes crushes from love?)  Or maybe the story is more about its premise than its point: what if love actually were in the air and you fell in love with whatever human you stumbled across? The problem is that the weirdness is imposed on the reader and on Pete without ever being imposed on the protagonist or the writer. Thus, the prankishness. It’s as if Gregor Samsa woke up as a cockroach and then walked to the corner and got a latte and had a fine day.

Consequence never saturates character, and it is this, not any lack of “feeling,” that I think enfeebles the story.   

What many--well, I--have thought and few have so well expressed

Link: The Believer - Protesting All Fiction Writers!. "Most writers are not garrulous people; those few who are can . . . behave in the uniquely alienating way of people who think they are celebrities but are not, actually, celebrated."