St. Pierre et Miquelon

When I said France you guessed Cannes? No.  A business partner of mine is suffering that indignity and paying 20 euros per G & T for the privilege.  I was, instead, in the French Department of St. Pierre and Miquelon.

pilota court St. Pierre

My long time good friend Gerry Porter (he designed this site) gave me, for my birthday in 1989, a card, that he had illuminated, of Walter Benjamin’s “The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses”.  I keep it in my office. Number XI commands : “Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there”.  Heeding Mr. Benjamin, I sat at a desk in a hotel room in St. Pierre, the scent of Gauloises brunes and French palaver and fog coming in the open window, and finished the play.

Final Problems Never Are

Flurry of gigs and competing deadlines. Stories are bleeding into each other.  Characters in the play are catcalling those in the screenplays.  It’s a narrative fugue state.   I don’t think that’s necessarily bad for the projects, but it’s intellectually exhausting and, as meetings related to the projects have been held across the continent, a physical trial as well.  It’s always thus, periods slow enough that you contemplate actually finishing the novel and starting another then pandemonium.  I’ve never gotten used to it.  Mark Tansey’s brilliant “Derrida Queries de Man” illustrates how I feel.  Things get better next week, after a short trip to France.

The Thing

In Edmonton for table reads of the new play, “Hail” as part of The Working Title Play Reading Series of The Canadian Centre for Theatre Creation. A most valuable exercise.  With actors as talented as those assembled you get to hear which of your words are giving them flight and which are tripping them up.  It is a test to which you cannot put your work back in the cave. Actors, sometimes even more than the author, demand to understand the characters they are playing in profound ways.  Their search for this knowledge forces a writer to put, and eventually answer, tough questions.  Good actors never accept that their character is doing something other than that which the character would do.  If the actions or words are there only for mechanical reasons, to merely advance plot or for authorial wankery, if they don’t come organically from character, those actors who honour/obsess over their craft bristle.  

Kim McCaw, the Dramaturge and Charles Tomlinson, the Director, also indulged my request to see the ending of the play “on its feet”,  so I could better judge the rhythm of the final exits.  This was more than promised and proved invaluable.

The three days concluded with a small public reading which illuminated how the audience might respond, how well the piece was getting through. 

The big changes?  The laughs are too many and too big in the first act,  the piece is, ultimately, a darker one.  And there’s too much of the playwright, in particular his deranged social theories, in the second act.  There was an audible gasp from the house at one moment in the second act that I never would have thought was there.  It was as welcome as it was surprising. 

windowless worlds

This was the second, and I think final, series of table reads of “Hail”.  Each made the play better.  Why we do this so little in the crafting of film and television scripts, where there can be very much more dough at stake, I have never been able to fathom. 

I’ve got another couple of drafts coming out of this. Anything after that will be changes made during the rehearsal process of the first production.

In the photograph, taken at a studio at The University of Alberta’s Drama Department, are, clockwise from my empty chair, David Ley, Steve Pirot, Kim McCaw, Kevin Sutley, Charles Tomlinson and Brian Dooley.  These guys were great.

Epochal

I get the occasional gig re-writing scripts.  Having several writers take a pass at a film or television project is not unusual, especially not in The States.  It would probably happen more often in Canada were the industry adequately financed.

Doll Tearsheet (Jeanne Moreau) & Falstaff (Orson Welles)

Lately I’ve been presented with a couple of projects that were widowed in time, that were, suddenly, of another era; the abbreviated age that began on September 11, 2001 and ended with the Bush administration and the beginning of the “great recession”.   The background noise in these scenarios is an apprehension of terror attack, a boom economy and its consequent profligacy and consumerism.  Things have changed.   A colleague with whom I am currently re-writing a script wondered if there wouldn’t soon be a kind of nostalgia for terrorism, for a time when the enemy was so clearly from without, so clearly an “other”. That particular revision is coming along nicely.  The other awaits difficult decisions by the producer.

If I don’t feel I can advance a project I will turn it down.  I have learned to do this diplomatically, as the proponents seem to take inordinate offense if you decline.   One has to be careful not to suggest that a project is beyond repair, only that you cannot see the remedies.  And that’s the truth.  If you work in the business where,  as William Goldman famously observed , “nobody knows anything”, then you’re one of those showtainment ignoramuses (from my outpost, on the fringes of the entertainment industry, the business seems as lost for paradigms as psychology or economics).

In a bizarre twist of this epochal effect the piece of mine in the recent “Riddle Fence” (see below) is from a novel I was working on that was set in a near future where the economy had gone bust.  Then it happened.  How to deal with that temporal hiccup so far eludes me.

Vivre sa vie

Thought about “Vivre Sa Vie” soon after watching “Synecdoche”.  If the view were widely held it would probably make Charlie Kaufman unemployable but Godard is an obvious antecedent.  Maybe “antecedent” is too strong.  What word am I looking for?  Can words, in the end, ever be expected to convey what we mean?  I should ask the geezer above.

Godard, as much as any filmmaker, opened the medium up to its inherent and distinct possibilities. Godard is political, Kaufman is not.  Why then did I think of “Vivre Sa Vie”?  Because for all of Godard’s formal reinvention and Brechtian distancing in “Vivre Sa Vie” the form of the film ended up serving the story.  The final moments of the picture are heartbreaking.

That’s Anna Karina and Brice Parain above.  Godard doesn’t waste time,  if he wants to get at something he’ll have his protagonist sit down and talk language with one its leading philosophers.

Book Learning

I’ve received a copy of the latest edition of the journal Studies in Canadian Literature.  It contains an interview with me by the canny and affable Herb Wylie and an article about Rare Birds by Paul Chafe.  I’m going see if I can’t embed them here somehow.  Don’t know how at this juncture.

It is interesting and uncomfortable to read about creative intentions you did not necessarily know you had.  I feel Mr. Chafe has it pretty much right.

My daughter did the illustration left when she was eight years old.  It is entitled “Elaments” (sic).

Riddlefence

There is a piece of mine (about which more later) in the latest Riddlefence.  They launch this most handsome edition tonight, April 6, at The Ship.  I will be reading something at the event … not yet sure what.

An Atlas of Anxiety

Finally saw “Synecdoche New York”.   My admiration for Mr. Kaufman’s work is undiminished. He is a leader in writing for the cinema, in the exploration of stories meant to be told with moving pictures.  The formal stuff is in service to the narrative.  For all its artfulness “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” was, finally, a touching and genuine love story.  The “meta” narrative elements and the anxiety and melancholy of “Synecdoche” (it is preoccupied with mortality and the corporeal) kept the piece from enjoying popular success but it excited me again about the potential for wonder in the movies.

Sedentary solitude

Pack Ice Cuckolds Cove April 1, 2009

Twinned curses of the writing life are the sedentary and the solitary nature of the work.  You can wither (or balloon) sitting at a computer all day, every day and you can go perfectly mad doing it alone … for years.  (People who haven’t done so for protracted periods may have difficulty appreciating  what a trial solitary labour can become.  I love working on a team. The Great Eastern could be grueling but because of the cadre it was my most pleasurable professional experience.)

I get out and walk my dog for an hour of so every morning regardless of the conditions.  Most of my thinking gets done then, it’s the air and the rhythm of walking that is the rhythm of speech that is the rhythm of writing.   I am blessed to live in a place that offers so many footpaths, especially along the coastal boundary.  The furthest point of land visible in the photo above is Cape Spear, the most easterly in North America. The exterior locations for the restaurant, “The Auk”, in the film version of Rare Birds were shot there. Prevailing north easterly winds of the last few days have pushed the pack ice into the land. Note the two ships on the horizon.  Awaiting the harbour pilot?

Also as antidote to the chair and the monitor I have lately returned to squash.  I played and lost with some regularity when I was a student at MUN but had only a scattered few games after that.  Myself and my friend Randy (he’s on the right, I am on the left) have been trying to play at least two or three times a week.   It’s terrific fun and gets one well out of one’s head for an hour of so.  Neither of us is nearly as fast as we used to be so we are fairly evenly matched.

I took a ball in the nose yesterday and figured I’d end up with two shiners, but nothing came of it.  Randy hit me, very hard, with a double yellow in the back of my upper arm five days ago and I still have a welt.

Coming in last

Very near midnight March 31 is the 60th anniversary of Newfoundland and Labrador joining the Canadian confederation. This date is always occasion for the witless and assorted local Uncle Toms to rag me about the conspiracy that features in the film Secret Nation, for which I wrote the screenplay.  They demand “proof” for my assertion that the vote to join Canada was rigged.  That I never made it, that it is a plot point in a work of fiction, seems lost on them. (Peter Cashin’s argument back then, that there was “a conspiracy to sell …  this country to the Dominion of Canada” seems probably to have been the case.  There were certainly interests other than those of the people of Newfoundland in the mix. My personal feeling is that we became on that day a de facto colony of Canada. We have many benefits of citizenship but, with a mere seven seats in the Canadian Parliament, no effective say in our governance. Being culturally distinct from Canada this lack of representation is a problem.)

There is a related phenomena, that of people believing characters in my work are based on them.  Not loosely based, but something akin to portraits.  I usually hear this second hand, how so-and-so “read it and saw right away that she …”. There seems no way to disabuse someone of this notion without insulting them. “You see yourself in everything.” “It’s not about you.”  That Newfoundland is such a small community is an aggravating factor.  I know the author Michael Winter deliberately wrote earlier work by basing characters and events on real ones. I understand he finally desisted under threat.  I don’t even know how one would do it.   And it seems to deny the author one of his very few pleasures, to occasionally depart this world for one of his own invention.

As for the notion that lead characters in my books or plays are autobiographical … alas, no. The protagonist in “The Nine Planets” was designed to loathe me.  And still, at the end of the process, having lived with him so long, he was beginning to convince me.

I try to make a cameo appearance in everything I write.  Sometimes I don’t make the cut.  I give myself the same character name in every case.  In the book I am currently working on this character has to surrender a Green Card owing to “some vice matter”. So by now he’s started to take on a life of his own.  He’s become a knowledgeable collector of furniture … something about which I know or care little.