When Gary Kornblau was putting Mythomania together for publication, he caught me unawares with a request for an author photo. I wasn't crazy about the idea, and we had kind of a fight about it before I consented to use a photo Colby'd taken from the Jeopardy broadcast. I'd always resisted the notion of having whatever it was I was doing in my writing tied to an image the reader would have of me. For a long time, I sincerely hoped to publish in different genres under a variety of names and avoid developing a persona as a writer at all; instead, I have managed to remain obscure through the more straightforward strategy of simply writing and publishing very little. Now I feel more like, hmmm, pictures of me just don't matter; they're beside the point, that's all. I wish I were better-looking; I wish I were slimmer; I wish I had even the slightest talent for turning wishes into reality---but lately, even though it may sound like an excuse and probably is, I'm a lot more suspicious of the role of this "I" that wants all this control over my looks, my habits, and my destiny. I like this picture because of the relation of the subject in the distance to the lotuses in the foreground. If I start wondering whether I look hot in that red shirt, it becomes an invitation to a really distracting bout of self-reproach.
Movies and Dreams
Yesterday showed The Wizard of Oz to my Dream Screen class at the Corcoran. (The title of the course is a phrase I probably would have chosen spontaneously, but it does happen to be the title of one of the better of the few existing books on dream and cinema--though one I don't agree with about much.) I wrote about Oz in Mythomania; in that essay, I followed the trail of Dorothy into Victor Fleming's version of Joan of Arc, suggesting that he carried the traces of the plot of his earlier film into the later one, and using the parallel to sort of question Joseph Campbell's universal myth stuff. (Do girls get to be heroes? Aren't hero myths just as much about the heroes' counter-social elements as all that following of their bliss? And so on.) My favorite thing about that essay was the opportunity to print the image of Dorothy with the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion next to one of Ingrid Bergman as Joan of Arc with her three generals, one of whom looks an awful lot like the tin man in his 15th-century armor.
I'm asking the students to write about the use of the dream in Oz, Sherlock, Jr., or Living in Oblivion. My own take on the movie has always centered on the paradox of Dorothy's rather grimly determined insistence that "There's no place like home"; that's always seemed to me a good example of how the transparently ideological purposes of cinema (and art in general) aren't nearly as neat as critics like to make them out to be. In movies, mixed messages expose their own contradictions to create the flavor and excitement of the medium; their messiness isn't just an opportunity to point out how terribly, terribly wrong these ideas are--that they're biased and inconsistent and serve commercial purposes isn't exactly news--but the very most appropriate form that art can take in order to create a dynamic relation among the art producers, the world, and the audience.
The particular issue I usually focus on is Dorothy's relation to the men (or males; they aren't exactly human) in the film, who are defined by their deficiencies. But every time I see the movie, I think about something else. This time it was the issue of influence. It looked to me like the Wizard's chamber had interesting echoes of Rottwang's workshop in Metropolis and the city in The Shape of Things to Come; the Wicked Witch started to look to me a lot like Nosferatu. The Wizard's scenes seemed derived from both Prospero's and Ariel's speeches to the Neapolitans in The Tempest, so I started to think about whether Oz isn't really very much the same in its use of magic (and stage magic) as a way of thinking about the experiences that are supposed to transform lives and lead characters to discover their essential selves. Is this just a convention I'm too undereducated to recognize? Something about the nature of masques as a way, kind of separate from traditional plots in drama, of representing ideas? And would that be just as important in thinking about fantasy in film as any dream stuff I'm pursuing?
And how about those flying monkeys? They seem like an eruption of the genuinely, horrifically scary into the merely bizarre and fantastic. Does everyone who sees the film find them as incredibly disturbing as I do? (That's an idea: things that actually scared the shit out of me so much I don't like to think about it--Ice-Nine in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, which I probably read at 15, pops into my head.)
I think I can promise not to be quite as pretentious as this most of the time in my online journal. (Though I may often be this long-winded.) The biggest project I'm thinking about these days is a book on dreams and cinema, projected title Over the Rainbow. I had been thinking about soliciting for a collection of essays, bringing film critics and dream theorists together. But the first few people I ran it by suggested I just write it myself. I realized I had the outline for the whole thing, and the substance of a lot of the essays from my notes for the Dream and Cinema classes and the presentations I've been doing at conferences of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. I realized I actually like writing about the topic. I also realized, quite frankly, that getting a book together was pretty much a necessity if I'm going to have any flexibility about my job as a teacher, any prospects of moving on if I decide I want to.
The issue's always been that I see myself as a creative writer, and now a writer of fiction and drama more than poetry, with essays as a sideline. But my publications have been almost all in essays (or fictions taken as essays as they appear in art catalogues). With notes for four novels going, and seven stories, and three plays--those are the things with substantial notes, not concepts--all saved up over twenty years (twenty years!!), I have to decide what I really mean to be giving my time to. The same theme brought up by my picture is pursuing me here: There isn't much point in worrying about who or what I am. (Am I a fiction writer if I'm often working on fiction but never finish or publish any? It ends up being a silly question. I may or may not be. What I certainly am is a fuck-up, but you know, it would be incredibly wrong-headed--in a way so very, very typical of what's wrong with ideas about art these days--to imagine that has anything to do with a person's qualifications as an artist.)
I know I need to set aside some projects I've wanted to get to in order to work on the book. I'm just hoping that, as with this blog, getting more done will help me to get more done.
Movies and Dreams
Yesterday showed The Wizard of Oz to my Dream Screen class at the Corcoran. (The title of the course is a phrase I probably would have chosen spontaneously, but it does happen to be the title of one of the better of the few existing books on dream and cinema--though one I don't agree with about much.) I wrote about Oz in Mythomania; in that essay, I followed the trail of Dorothy into Victor Fleming's version of Joan of Arc, suggesting that he carried the traces of the plot of his earlier film into the later one, and using the parallel to sort of question Joseph Campbell's universal myth stuff. (Do girls get to be heroes? Aren't hero myths just as much about the heroes' counter-social elements as all that following of their bliss? And so on.) My favorite thing about that essay was the opportunity to print the image of Dorothy with the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion next to one of Ingrid Bergman as Joan of Arc with her three generals, one of whom looks an awful lot like the tin man in his 15th-century armor.
I'm asking the students to write about the use of the dream in Oz, Sherlock, Jr., or Living in Oblivion. My own take on the movie has always centered on the paradox of Dorothy's rather grimly determined insistence that "There's no place like home"; that's always seemed to me a good example of how the transparently ideological purposes of cinema (and art in general) aren't nearly as neat as critics like to make them out to be. In movies, mixed messages expose their own contradictions to create the flavor and excitement of the medium; their messiness isn't just an opportunity to point out how terribly, terribly wrong these ideas are--that they're biased and inconsistent and serve commercial purposes isn't exactly news--but the very most appropriate form that art can take in order to create a dynamic relation among the art producers, the world, and the audience.
The particular issue I usually focus on is Dorothy's relation to the men (or males; they aren't exactly human) in the film, who are defined by their deficiencies. But every time I see the movie, I think about something else. This time it was the issue of influence. It looked to me like the Wizard's chamber had interesting echoes of Rottwang's workshop in Metropolis and the city in The Shape of Things to Come; the Wicked Witch started to look to me a lot like Nosferatu. The Wizard's scenes seemed derived from both Prospero's and Ariel's speeches to the Neapolitans in The Tempest, so I started to think about whether Oz isn't really very much the same in its use of magic (and stage magic) as a way of thinking about the experiences that are supposed to transform lives and lead characters to discover their essential selves. Is this just a convention I'm too undereducated to recognize? Something about the nature of masques as a way, kind of separate from traditional plots in drama, of representing ideas? And would that be just as important in thinking about fantasy in film as any dream stuff I'm pursuing?
And how about those flying monkeys? They seem like an eruption of the genuinely, horrifically scary into the merely bizarre and fantastic. Does everyone who sees the film find them as incredibly disturbing as I do? (That's an idea: things that actually scared the shit out of me so much I don't like to think about it--Ice-Nine in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, which I probably read at 15, pops into my head.)
I think I can promise not to be quite as pretentious as this most of the time in my online journal. (Though I may often be this long-winded.) The biggest project I'm thinking about these days is a book on dreams and cinema, projected title Over the Rainbow. I had been thinking about soliciting for a collection of essays, bringing film critics and dream theorists together. But the first few people I ran it by suggested I just write it myself. I realized I had the outline for the whole thing, and the substance of a lot of the essays from my notes for the Dream and Cinema classes and the presentations I've been doing at conferences of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. I realized I actually like writing about the topic. I also realized, quite frankly, that getting a book together was pretty much a necessity if I'm going to have any flexibility about my job as a teacher, any prospects of moving on if I decide I want to.
The issue's always been that I see myself as a creative writer, and now a writer of fiction and drama more than poetry, with essays as a sideline. But my publications have been almost all in essays (or fictions taken as essays as they appear in art catalogues). With notes for four novels going, and seven stories, and three plays--those are the things with substantial notes, not concepts--all saved up over twenty years (twenty years!!), I have to decide what I really mean to be giving my time to. The same theme brought up by my picture is pursuing me here: There isn't much point in worrying about who or what I am. (Am I a fiction writer if I'm often working on fiction but never finish or publish any? It ends up being a silly question. I may or may not be. What I certainly am is a fuck-up, but you know, it would be incredibly wrong-headed--in a way so very, very typical of what's wrong with ideas about art these days--to imagine that has anything to do with a person's qualifications as an artist.)
I know I need to set aside some projects I've wanted to get to in order to work on the book. I'm just hoping that, as with this blog, getting more done will help me to get more done.
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