March Sucks

I only wrote about half a short-short story in March, despite having a week off from class in which to do my own thing. I did manage to plant my garden, and I started a new sewing project, but most of my free time seems to be sucked up by Doctor Who and Torchwood. Oh, and sleep. I think I've fallen in love with sleep.

April is not off to a good start. I'm a story and a half behind my goal, but the fact that my failure it irking me so much has me thinking I may fianlly get pissed at myself enough to get to work. I'm starting to feel the time cruch now that I've registered for a full-time fall semester. What I don't finish before August won't get finished until next spring. Deadlines are, as ever, the ultimate motivator.

I'm sick of the rain. It makes me lazy. So does the heat, so this hot, muggy weather makes it all but impossible to crawl out of bed every day. My bedtime gets earlier every night, too. I feel as if all my energy is being sucked away by the clouds. It's too gross to cook, to write, to do housework, and most of all to move from the bed to the couch. I'm sick of feeling this way. I want my sweater weather back!

Performance Analysis- Hamlet

Hamlet, Scene 2, Act 2. Second soliloquy. “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!”

David Tennant as Hamlet, 2009 RSC made-for-TV production. Director Gregory Doran.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyB4ktn7AIE

Derek Jacobi as Hamlet, 1980 BBC Shakespeare TV series. Director Rodney Bennett.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOsv66930eI

Performance Analysis

Derek Jacobi’s and David Tennant’s respective performances of Hamlet differ in one essential detail. Tennant focuses almost entirely on Hamlet’s madness and is a much more physically active performer than Jacobi. His pacing and raging and thrashing across the stage gives a physical outlet for the emotional turmoil Tennant wants to portray in Hamlet, and his wild movements and increasingly disheveled appearance provide the audience with visual clues as to the character’s disordered state of mind. That said Jacobi’s much quieter performance places the emphasis on Hamlet’s innate cunning and thought processes rather than solely on his gradual emotional disintegration, which serves to make his interpretation of the mad prince more interesting and evocative than Tennant’s admittedly still admirable work. Jacobi is a much more deliberate and conservative performer in this scene than Tennant, and though Tennant’s Hamlet is fun to watch and a strong portrayal of ever-increasing madness, he lacks the steadfast power of Jacobi’s earlier work. Jacobi’s Hamlet is more controlled and meditative, which allows Jacobi to work with Hamlet’s natural melancholy in a more self-aware way as an actor and as the character he is performing.

Jacobi’s Hamlet is more believable as a character who chooses to enact madness in order to pursue his purposes, while Tennant’s version truly appears to be mad or at least crazed enough by circumstances and legitimate emotional disturbances to be on the brink of real madness. There is little room in Tennant’s performance for subtlety and for deliberation about his actions. Once he has decided on staging the play for Claudius, Tennant’s Hamlet bolts from the room to put his ideas into action without further hesitation. Jacobi’s Hamlet is less certain of his course and maintains his doubts, pondering aloud if he can trust what he has seen or heard or if his emotional instability, of which he is aware, has become such a weakness in his character that he can be fooled by what he wants to see. Tennant’s Hamlet speaks the same lines but dismisses the concept of his possible self-delusion as soon as he speaks them while he jumps into action. In Tennant’s performance, Hamlet’s decision comes quickly and without taking seriously the sort of self-doubt and anxiety Jacobi dwells upon. Tennant’s brand of madness, weather real or feigned, permits his Hamlet to make wild actions and to have uncontrolled outbursts of energy and words, but does not allow Tennant to explore Hamlet’s character far beyond his basic desire for revenge. Jacobi’s steadier and more deliberate portrayal gives Jacobi time to take Hamlet up and down the emotional register and really invest every line with motive and thought. This has the effect of not only making his Hamlet easier to follow as his emotions flare and change and as he formulates his plan to reveal Claudius’ treachery, but helps the performance to make more sense of Hamlet’s decision to take revenge.

The actor’s attitudes toward and interactions with the camera, and by extension the audience, also differs quite noticeably. Jacobi maintains much steadier contact with the camera’s gaze which helps to humanize his performance. His Hamlet never strays far from the stationary camera for long before returning to re-establish contact through a close-up shot of his expression. His physical proximity to the camera encourages the viewing audience to pay close attention through his face and words, through which Jacobi does most of his characterization. This is particularly true of his tremendous vocal range which he uses to emphasize Hamlet’s every emotional fluctuation with both nuance and power. Tennant’s interaction with the camera is very different because rather than interacting with the camera, the camera interacts with Tennant. As Tennant moves back and forth and around the rather large, open set, the camera follows close behind him and continually changes angles and speeds to track his erratic movements. This aids in exhibiting Hamlet’s increasing madness and instability, and also makes those moments when Tennant deliberately chooses to turn and interact with the audience all the more shocking with their intensity. It also has the unfortunate side effect of making it difficult to track Tennant’s movements on the expansive, glossy set. This could be at least partially a metaphor for Hamlet’s own confusion and feelings of being alone and unmoored in his own kingdom, but mostly it serves as a distraction as the audience tries to reconcile the limited view on the screen with what glimpses of the set the viewers have been permitted.

Interestingly, both actors use violence toward the camera to break the forth wall at some point in their performances. In fact, Tennant’s performance of the scene opens with a sudden attack on the viewer’s “eye” when he grabs the security camera, through which the audience first views him, and rips it off the wall to throw it across the room. This fit of violent temper isn’t just an attack on the camera; it is an attack on the audience and their intrusion into his private battle with madness and vengeance. At the moment the audience switches from the grayscale vision of the security camera to the full-color gaze of the normal video camera, Tennant’s Hamlet looks the audience in the face and declares “Now I am alone.” The opening line of Hamlet’s soliloquy is made all the more chilling here because Hamlet is indeed not alone on the empty stage. Instead the audience is alone with Hamlet, who Tennant clearly wants to portray as capable of sudden violence toward those he knows are his viewers. Jacobi’s portrayal also features a moment of sudden violence toward his audience, but due to the rest of his performance and his earlier characterization of Hamlet the withheld sword strike halfway through the soliloquy carries a different note. By withholding the strike at the last moment, Jacobi emphasizes that his Hamlet is a man of calculation and thought in addition to being a man of action. While Tennant’s violent temper is chilling and his attack on the camera carries an implicit threat to the audience for the remainder of his time on stage, Jacobi’s calculated control when he pauses in mid-strike serves to remind the audience that this Hamlet is dangerous not only because he is a madman with a weapon, but because he is a madman with enough control to know when and where to deploy the weapon in order to achieve the vengeance he so desperately wants. The line between this Hamlet’s very real madness and his mad play-acting is so blurred that even Jacobi doesn’t seem to know exactly where it lies. If it’s difficult for Jacobi to parse out his character’s growing insanity, then it’s impossible for the viewer to tell if the Hamlet who threatens the audience with the sword or the Hamlet who throws the sword away across the stage is the real prince of Denmark, and that uncertainty is the source of much of the power of Jacobi’s portrayal.

Tennant’s portrayal of Hamlet is by no means a poor one. His capacity to portray mental instability and the breakdown of an intelligent if angry young man is excellent and his interpretation of Hamlet as a violent and unstable person is more than fair. However, it lacks the overall power and appeal that Jacobi manages with his steadier, lower-key performance. Jacobi’s Hamlet displays more self-awareness of his melancholic tendencies and the potential weaknesses they give him, and yet Jacobi manages to turn the self-doubt into a depth of character that still maintains integrity and appeal for the audience. His Hamlet’s sorrow and uncertainty work to enliven the character more than Tennant’s reckless physicality manages. Jacobi offers the audience no frills of rolling on the floor in an emotional outburst or racing back and forth before the camera as he gives voice to his anger and guilt. What Jacobi gives is a deliberately simple though hardly straight-forward portrayal of a depressive prince making a sincere attempt to plan the downfall of his murderous uncle. His stillness and resoluteness in his decision making are laced with sharp-edged bits of melancholy, madness, and self-induced anxiety, and these hard fragments of emotional turmoil make his performance more powerful and memorable than Tennant’s.

Books Read 2011

Sorry I've been posting even less than usual. I only have internet access at work these days! This list is everything I read in the year 2011, not including most short stories, graphic novels, or manga. I only included novels, collections, and anthologies I actually completed. It comes to 41 books, if I can be trusted to count. I didn't have any particular goal last year, but I think I'm going to up the ante just a bit for 2012 and aim to read 50 books. I've already read three or four so far, so I'm pretty sure it's possible even with my schedule.

John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids

James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Colin Tudge's The Day Before Yesterday

James Joyce's Dubliners

George R.R. Martin's A Clash of Kings

Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz (read it twice, actually)

E.M. Forster's Maurice

Robert J. Sawyer's Hominids

James Joyce's Ulysses

Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita

Art Speigelman's Maus 1 & 2

Samuel R. Delany's Einstein Intersection

George R.R. Martin's Storm of Swords

Alfred Bester's The Stars my Destination

Angela Carter's Shadow Dance

Haruki Murakami's Wild Sheep Chase

China Mieville's Embassytown

William Gibson's Neuromancer

Christopher Barzak's One for Sorrow

Jeff Vandermeer's Veniss Underground

Ian Bank's The Wasp Factory

George R.R. Martin's A Feast for Crows

Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone

Ursula K. Le Guin's Cheek by Jowl

Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan

Michael Moorcock's The Final Programme

George R.R. Martin's Dance with Dragons

Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast

Gene Wolfe's Claw of the Conciliator

Lord Dunsany's The Charwoman's Shadow

Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved

Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl

Elie Wiesel's Night, Dawn, & The Accident/Day

Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Paolo Bacigalupi's Pump 6 and Other Stories

China Mieville's Iron Council

Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments

Zoran Zivkovik's The Last Book

Michael Moorcock's Fortress of the Pearl

Nothing new, really, but...

I haven't started any substantial work on "Splash Page", but I think I know where I want to go with it. I'll get my final exam paper out of the way and be in the clear for the rest of the month to do what I want. I wont have school-related responsibilities to deal with for an entire month. It's such a novel feeling!

I've been feeling the urge to sketch and paint, but I think it's just me trying to distract myself from working on a story. I'm very good at finding such distractions. It's been fun to experiment with a new creative media and all, but I know I'll never be anything but an amused amateur smearing charcoal all over my desk.

I'm developing a taste for classical music and poetry. Is this a sign of greater maturity, or am I just getting old? Ovid and Ezra Pound are rocking my world right now, and I've been on the hunt for a cheap (but complete) edition of T.S. Eliot's poetry. Now that I want one my bookstore is out of stock. Grr. I've learned that Aaron Copeland's music doesn't do it for me, but Bruckner is pretty freaking fantastic. And Chopin, combined with the recent rainy weather, makes me want to snuggle on my couch with a cat, a cup of hot chocolate, and a book for the rest of my life. I may be turning into a snob in addition to being a recluse. I will never be seen in public again.

December is the month of madness. I don't know why we do this to ourselves. I'm going to go home, make brownies for the family dinner party tonight, and read until I go to bed. Tomorrow I'll spend getting my Christmas crafting in order, and the next few weeks (once I'm finished with that paper) I'll spend making one project after another, including - hopefully- "Splash Page".

No Excuses.

I've just been slacking off. Well, I was also legitimately sick for a little while, but otherwise I've been slacking off. "Wild" is still in desperate need of revision but the more I look at it the more frustrated I become. I do already have a few ideas for the next story on my list though, so I guess I haven't been totally wasting the last month.

What I have been spending my time on is coming up with ideas for DIY Christmas gifts. I made the mistake of joining Pinterest and I've been totally sucked into the vortex of homemade handicrafts. This is probably going to take up a good deal of my spare time this December, but I'm going to make a point to find some time to write. Working title of the next story? "Splash Page". I'm all about comic book references, after all.

I'll also try not to let so much time pass by between posts here. I want to have something new up every two weeks at least. Between the holidays, finals week, my upcoming legal issues, and getting to work on "Splash Page", I'm looking at a very busy month. Here's to January, when everything slows down!

November already?

Yeah, I've already broken all the promises I made a few posts ago. "In a Land Still Wild" is finished but I haven't done any significant revisions yet, and I haven't touched Fairway. I should have the revised portions of "Wild" by next week though, so keep an eye out for that. Of course, this means I'm already behind schedule for this month's short story. Eh, oh well.

Have you ever tried to write while intoxicated with cold medicine? Everything is so WEIRD.

Oh, speaking of weird, the Vandermeers have a new anthology out of Weird fiction. It looks awesome, as always, but of course it won't be released in the States until next year. Boo.

I'm wanting to go on a massive rave about Steampunk and genre fiction, but I'm still way too out of it. I may scribble a bit tonight and post next week when I put up the revised portions of "Wild". Right now, however, I'm going to go home, read my class assignment, bake Autumn cup squash for dinner, and revise, revise, revise. There may be more cold medicine in my future as well.

Experiment in Revision

This post is going to be an experiment, and any reader who haplessly wanders on to this blog in the near future will be my guinea pig. Muahaha! Now you are mine!

I'm going to post fragments of the story I'm currently working on, and when I finish writing and revising the story I will re-post the edited fragments in another blog post. This way I can see in print (and not on my MS Word document) how much I've changed and how far I've come with the story. Why don't I just use Word's built in features, such as 'Track Changes'? Because I hate these special features, that's why. As much as I love looking over my handwritten notes done in four different inks on crumpled paper, there's something about seeing every little alteration highlighted, boxed, and colored in that frankly freaks me out. It's a little overwhelming for me, so I'm doing this instead.

How did I select what passages to post? It's partly random and partly decided by what I feel may have to change. There are a few passages posted because I want to challenge myself to revise something I initially like. There are a few passages posted because I know I really, really, really need to find a better way.

1

The children have been playing in the woods again.

I can smell the fragrance of pine needles on Katie’s jacket, and Jon has a stash of smoothed river stones in his closet beside his rain boots. I’ve found autumn wildflowers in the fridge twice this week. I may have to teach one or both of them how to press flowers and leaves, or I’ll have a bouquet of the mountain’s finest next to the eggs.

And to think Eugene and I were concerned that the kids wouldn’t like it here. Katie more so than Jon; he’s too young to really remember traffic-jammed city streets and overcrowded classrooms, and anyway he likes being Daddy’s little Indian. Before this summer his favorite weekends were those he spent playing with his cousins on the Reservation, gathering shells and pebbles and an assortment of gross slimy things so easy to come by on a lakeshore. Here he loves the colors of the changing trees and the sound of the slow river tumbling over rocks. He’s probably the culprit behind the flowers in the fridge. Katie, though, is a city girl like me and was something of a socialite in her fourth grade class. By the end of the last school year her grades began to slip and words like “disruptive” and “unfocused” appeared on her report cards. She begged for a cell phone and a computer and her own bedroom, far away from her little brother, and wouldn’t have picked up a frond of algae if her life depended on it.

2

I think they may have found a dog out there.

I noticed a package of corned beef went missing out of the fridge this afternoon, and I found the empty wrapper on the ground behind the tent. I only buy it for Eugene; Katie hates corned beef, and Jon almost never eats foods his sister disapproves of.

I also saw Katie cut another length of twine from the ball she used to string up the tent. She tied one end into a loop and walked into the shade, beyond my line of sight.

If they have found a dog, it’s likely they’re hiding it. I told them when we moved in we weren’t getting a dog, not yet, not until Jon is older. They may be trying to keep it from me so I won’t say they can’t keep it.

I wonder what kind of dog it could be, that it could have survived out here among the bears and the mountain lions and the frost-fanged mountain winters? Maybe it’s a stray, an Indian mongrel wandered up from the Res?

To be honest I’m kind of regretting not having a dog around here. I think I’d feel better, knowing there was an extra set of protective eyes to watch the kids. And this house is really meant for a dog, these woods are meant for long roving walks under the trees and for chasing summer-fat squirrels. Maybe I’ll say something to Eugene when he gets home tonight. A pet wouldn’t be so bad, and the children would love it.

3

“My apologies, ma’am. The roads are a bit sharp and the light’s a bit dim, and my eyes aren’t what they use to be. My name’s Wallace,” he took his hand off his gun, satisfied that the madwoman wasn’t violent. “You’re Eugene Whitefeather’s wife, I take it?”

I nodded and fidgeted with the metal flashlight. On, off, on, off.

“Is he inside, ma’am?”

I nodded again.

He walked past me and I felt my rage focus and sharpen, targeting this old, useless man dressed in a uniform he should have left long ago.

Where was he going? What did he think he was doing? Don’t talk to my husband, raise the hounds, find my daughter!

“I didn’t want to go back out there but Katie made me. I told her you’d be mad, but she wanted to make sure he was still tied. He was ugly and he didn’t have fur, but she wanted him, even though he was mean.”

He started crying again and pushed his face against my chest, soaking my shirt with tears and snot and the grief that is also a kind of fear. I clutched him tighter and bared my teeth at the darkness around us.

It took him a few minutes to calm down again. He shook and choked and sputtered and I held him close to me while he cried, trying to take his fear away.

“He chewed through the leash. Katie got to him first, before she saw he’d eaten the rope, and he got up and bit her. He let go, though, because she was hitting him and he couldn’t stand on two good paws and keep biting her. They fell, and Katie got up first and grabbed me. She dragged me back toward the house, and we could see him trying to follow us. Katie pushed me up a tree and kept running.”

Jon pushed away and looked up at my face. His eyes were wide and owlish and tired and bloodshot like no child’s eyes should be. “She’s faster than me,” he continued. “She was going to lead him away and come back for me. He stopped at the bottom of the tree and looked at me with his big red eyes. Just like the Big Bad Wolf. He just looked at me. Then he kept going, following her. I wouldn’t have come out of the tree, but I could hear you.”

4

Eugene and Dennis were in the trees somewhere behind me calling my name. I wanted to call out for Katie but I didn’t dare raise my voice. Eugene and Dennis might not have been the only things hunting in the woods, and it would have been terrible enough if one of them had caught up with me. For the moment, silence was safety.

Trees come alive in the dark in a way they never do in sunlight. Roots arched out of the ground as the oaks and birches sought to mingle and migrate, to trade places in rhythm to a moonlight score only they could hear. Branches swept low, contributing to the darkness of the multitude of shadows that lay moon-soaked and drunken on the earth.

More than once I saw, or thought I saw, a moving shadow flitting between the clumps of dry brush alongside my path. The closer I came to the river the less frequently I saw it, until my feet splashed into the cold, slow snow-melt in the riverbed and the shadow was gone.

The water soaked into my shoes and socks and chilled me from the toes up. Icy prickles dug into my skin as I splashed through the shallow water to the far shore.

Had there always been so many pine trees on this side of the river? The pines enveloped me, hid me from the overcast sky and my husband’s searching light beam. They welcomed me into the evergreen scent of bitter cold winters and warm, well-tended hearths. A thick blanket of long dead needles softened my footfalls until I could no longer hear them, except for the faint squelch of cold water seeping from my soles. Here and there among the pines a bleached birch tree gleamed like old bone, but otherwise there was no color, no break in the wall of dark green that surrounded me.

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I apologize if there's anything funny with the formatting. Word doesn't like to cooperate with Blogger sometimes. There, four short fragments of a short story. That there are a few flaws should be obvious, and these flaws are why I'm doing this in the first place. Maybe I should put the entire thing up. I may yet, but I'll wait until I've finished the body of the story before I do.