All right! As an offshoot of my work at Freehold Theater trying to learn to act Shakespeare, I wrote a one-act play and submitted it to Freehold's Incubator Studio Series, a sort of competition for performance projects that will be presented at the end of March. I just learned my play was accepted. I'm now using whatever persuasive powers I have to convince four actors and a director to do the play.
It's called OFFRAMP. It's about a vet panhandling at a freeway offramp. He is approached by a representative of an organization that wants a cut of his daily take in exchange for marketing support and not beating him up. He declines. He is then approached by his ex-wife, irate and ashamed that her former husband is out there with a cardboard sign; then by a dead army buddy; and finally be an enforcer for the organization, who finds he has much in common with the panhandler. Their conversation moves inexorably to the subject of suicide.
Unfortunately Freehold doesn't have a list of aspiring actors looking for performance opportunities. Too bad, there certainly are actors who would like to be on such a list, me included. I'm reaching out to the better actors in the classes I took. So far I have a director and one actor. Wish me luck
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Did People Always Talk as Dirty as They Do Now?
Okay, I know, Abby is short for Abigail, not a former monastery or convent, which is abbey. Sorry.
If you based your judgment just on novels, you would think there has been an explosion in the use of dirty language since 1900. But is that a matter of novel conventions and requirements for getting published, or are obscenities more commonly used in conversation today than they used to be?
Within my reading I see Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948) as a transition novel. That novel is filled with "fugs," as in "fug it" and "that fuggin' lieutenant." It took, what, a couple of decades for writers to include the whole inventory of undisguised obscene terms in their fiction without thinking twice.
Here's my sloppy sociological speculation: in some groups there has probably always been about the same level of coarse language. Soldiers in wartime, for one. That's the life Mailer was describing. The lower classes and the criminal class, for another. The thieves' argot of Dickens was probably in actual life shot through with profanity. The American detective-noir novelists of mid-century hadn't come to Mailer's threshold. The crooks in Cain and Goodis talk like prudes. In actuality the bad guys of that era probably sounded about the same as contemporary goodfellas.
Shakespeare's world? Probably the same. The plays include bawdy, but not obscenity. Those plays had to pass the scrutiny of a censor, who was mostly interested in political issues, but who worked for a queen who was both pragmatically open-minded and prudish. But the soldiers shipping off to Ireland probably had a larger catalog of obscenities than the guys in Afghanistan.
What I think has happened is that the use of dirty language has moved up-class.
So what do I do with adolescent city boys in 1908? I guess you think about the intended readership for your book. The boys would probably be like I was at that age, reveling in a new-found freedom to talk like foul-mouthed adults. My choice was to clean up their speech. If you asked me to describe the tone I tried to create in the novel, I'd struggle to be very articulate. But that's where the answer would be.
If you based your judgment just on novels, you would think there has been an explosion in the use of dirty language since 1900. But is that a matter of novel conventions and requirements for getting published, or are obscenities more commonly used in conversation today than they used to be?
Within my reading I see Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948) as a transition novel. That novel is filled with "fugs," as in "fug it" and "that fuggin' lieutenant." It took, what, a couple of decades for writers to include the whole inventory of undisguised obscene terms in their fiction without thinking twice.
Here's my sloppy sociological speculation: in some groups there has probably always been about the same level of coarse language. Soldiers in wartime, for one. That's the life Mailer was describing. The lower classes and the criminal class, for another. The thieves' argot of Dickens was probably in actual life shot through with profanity. The American detective-noir novelists of mid-century hadn't come to Mailer's threshold. The crooks in Cain and Goodis talk like prudes. In actuality the bad guys of that era probably sounded about the same as contemporary goodfellas.
Shakespeare's world? Probably the same. The plays include bawdy, but not obscenity. Those plays had to pass the scrutiny of a censor, who was mostly interested in political issues, but who worked for a queen who was both pragmatically open-minded and prudish. But the soldiers shipping off to Ireland probably had a larger catalog of obscenities than the guys in Afghanistan.
What I think has happened is that the use of dirty language has moved up-class.
So what do I do with adolescent city boys in 1908? I guess you think about the intended readership for your book. The boys would probably be like I was at that age, reveling in a new-found freedom to talk like foul-mouthed adults. My choice was to clean up their speech. If you asked me to describe the tone I tried to create in the novel, I'd struggle to be very articulate. But that's where the answer would be.
Friday, January 11, 2013
Bad Language, Downton Abbey, and the Historical Novel
I enjoy watching Downton Abbey. I was hooked from the first show, before anyone could have predicted its success. I wasn't quite as engaged by the opening show of the third season, but that's the nature of a multi-season series. We know each character's crisis-situation, and watch them being resolved. In the first season we were engrossed trying to discover just what Mr. Bates' crisis-situation actually was.
I've read comments trying to explain the series' success, and in particular why it's been more successful in the States than in England. I have a theory, not the whole explanation, but more of it than has been recognized.
I spent ten days in December in London. Though we were out on the streets and in crowds most of the time, I did not overhear a single obscenity. True, we were in places like Bloomsbury, not the east end. But the visit made me aware that in the US I'm lucky to get through a day without hearing someone say "Fuck you, asshole," to someone else.
And I realize that is what Downton Abbey offers me: a world where people behave with grace under pressure. "Grace under pressure" is a virtue that has always been valued. In the mid-twentieth century it was exemplified by Hemingway, later by Clint Eastwood. Today, with the model of the European lady and gentleman being altered by hip-hop and immigrant cultures, I'm not sure what it looks like. In Downton Abbey aristos and servants alike may be prigs and snobs, but they never break into a string of contemporary American obscenities. I'm more than willing to spend an hour a week in a world like that. Escapism indeed.
I began this post thinking about whether bad language was as common a hundred and two hundred years ago as it is today. Because of its shifting conventions the novel is not a very good way to measure that. Let me follow up with the thought next post.
I've read comments trying to explain the series' success, and in particular why it's been more successful in the States than in England. I have a theory, not the whole explanation, but more of it than has been recognized.
I spent ten days in December in London. Though we were out on the streets and in crowds most of the time, I did not overhear a single obscenity. True, we were in places like Bloomsbury, not the east end. But the visit made me aware that in the US I'm lucky to get through a day without hearing someone say "Fuck you, asshole," to someone else.
And I realize that is what Downton Abbey offers me: a world where people behave with grace under pressure. "Grace under pressure" is a virtue that has always been valued. In the mid-twentieth century it was exemplified by Hemingway, later by Clint Eastwood. Today, with the model of the European lady and gentleman being altered by hip-hop and immigrant cultures, I'm not sure what it looks like. In Downton Abbey aristos and servants alike may be prigs and snobs, but they never break into a string of contemporary American obscenities. I'm more than willing to spend an hour a week in a world like that. Escapism indeed.
I began this post thinking about whether bad language was as common a hundred and two hundred years ago as it is today. Because of its shifting conventions the novel is not a very good way to measure that. Let me follow up with the thought next post.
Friday, January 4, 2013
The Historical Novel and Old Newspapers
Until I do a book tour I won't know if it's true that the question readers most commonly ask a novelist is "Where do you get your ideas?"
In the case of LIFTERS, the answer is from the Seattle newspapers from the period 1905 to 1909.
History is seductive. The further you get into the details, the further the details get into you. You crouch over the microfiche reader and pursue the events that interest you as they unfold from one issue to the next. But you also become aware of assumptions that the newswriters don't know they were revealing. A blend of admiration and racial contempt for the Japanese, for instance. A belief that insanity can strike anyone at any time, sometimes the result of a shocking event, sometimes not the result of any obvious cause. Insanity explains otherwise inexplicable behavior. A vague fear, in the background but never too far away, that hypnotism can induce anyone to do things they don't want to do.
I would become so engrossed in the University of Washington newspaper files I would lose all sense of time, and would end the session because of eyestrain or the first hints of migraine. It was all fascinating, the shipping news, the theater events, the local crimes. Dr. Benjamin Franklin Roller rose out of the sports pages as a figure larger than life and I had no choice but to make him a major character in the novel. The challenge
is that this kind of research has a kind of centrifugal force and can lead to a multitude of story lines. I could have found myself like George R. R. Martin, with too many story lines ever to bring back to the leash of a narrative line. In LIFTERS I set a lot of things in motion, but (I believe) they all fit together at the end.
In the case of LIFTERS, the answer is from the Seattle newspapers from the period 1905 to 1909.
History is seductive. The further you get into the details, the further the details get into you. You crouch over the microfiche reader and pursue the events that interest you as they unfold from one issue to the next. But you also become aware of assumptions that the newswriters don't know they were revealing. A blend of admiration and racial contempt for the Japanese, for instance. A belief that insanity can strike anyone at any time, sometimes the result of a shocking event, sometimes not the result of any obvious cause. Insanity explains otherwise inexplicable behavior. A vague fear, in the background but never too far away, that hypnotism can induce anyone to do things they don't want to do.
I would become so engrossed in the University of Washington newspaper files I would lose all sense of time, and would end the session because of eyestrain or the first hints of migraine. It was all fascinating, the shipping news, the theater events, the local crimes. Dr. Benjamin Franklin Roller rose out of the sports pages as a figure larger than life and I had no choice but to make him a major character in the novel. The challenge
is that this kind of research has a kind of centrifugal force and can lead to a multitude of story lines. I could have found myself like George R. R. Martin, with too many story lines ever to bring back to the leash of a narrative line. In LIFTERS I set a lot of things in motion, but (I believe) they all fit together at the end.
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