Last weekend my First Reader and I went into D.C. to see “Arcadia,” Tom Stoppard’s early-90s masterpiece, at the Folger. The play itself is utterly brilliant, seamlessly weaving literature and science and their history over nuanced characters and vivid settings both past and modern.

The Folger’s production of it we thought was pretty good but not equally brilliant. I saw a lady on local PBS saying it was the best “Arcadia” she’d ever seen, but we saw a fantastic one at UVa about ten years ago, which included several very good theater department grad students in the adult roles and undergrad future actress Sarah Drew as Thomasina. It’s hard to remember exactly, and at the time I may partly have been blown away by the play itself, but I still think that production was better.

Either way, it’s a shame that there isn’t a film version of this play, or of more of Stoppard’s work (the Tim Roth/Gary Oldman Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is the only one I know of, and I agree with Roger Ebert that the movie falls flat). Especially with the Hollywood screenplays he’s written, you’d think some indie director would be interested in filming one of his plays. Maybe they’re just far too cereberal for a film audience–which might be one reason I love them.

Titus Petronius Niger, the man scholarly consensus seems to agree is the author of the scandalous, fragmentary narrative of debaucherous and decadent abandon known as the Satyricon, was a consul in Nero’s senate in AD 62; subsequently, he became something akin to Nero’s personal social director, granted the unofficial title “Arbiter of Elegance”. Tacitus, in his Annals, describes Petronius as a man who treated idleness as his profession, “one who made luxury a fine art”. “In the end,” says Tacitus, “Nero’s jaded appetite regarded nothing as enjoyable or refined unless Petronius had given sanction to it.”

In AD 66, after a rival poisoned Nero’s affections against him, Petronius made effort to flee Rome, was thwarted, and so decided to preempt his likely torture and execution with suicide. He threw an extravagant dinner party, during which he opened his veins and bled himself slowly to death to the accompaniment of feasting, wine, music, satiric poetry, and pithy conversation.

There’s a dude who stuck to his principles.

I think I’ve been aware of Petronius as a historical figure for a while, but had until not so very long ago considered him among the ranks of Machiavelli, the Marquis de Sade, and Nero himself: egomaniacal pretend intellectuals championing amorality for no other purpose than to further their own fame—the people who brought us Charles Manson.

I have to admit, though, that hedonism, at least in a watered-down form, has gained a certain abstract appeal for me. Pseudopagan pantheism does seem to lend itself to a philosophy of pleasure. And the ideas involved do have a great deal of practical relevance for me, if not necessarily as a human being, then as a writer. What with the centaurs and all.

So I’ve been reading the Satyricon—in a used Penguin Classics edition, translated by J.P. Sullivan, which is a lot of fun in that it couches all the homoerotic innuendo and hypermasculine grandstanding in the terms of stiff-upper-lip 20th century British slang. And it really is a pleasure. The characters are actually quite reasonable people, even wise, in their approach to their debaucheries. As a window on the culture and period, it’s utterly fascinating, an unplumbable resource. And the parallels with modern culture—and by extension, with human culture across geography and era, whenever a society has passed its peak—are just astounding. For example, certain passages—street chases and a vicious love triangle between two men and a boy—remind me very much of the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. The wealth of pithy witticisms evoke Oscar Wilde, the party scenes Rabelais. Even the scene structure and pacing seem to prophesy a good few thousand years into the future.

All these parallels with later stuff are so numerous and engrossing, it took me awhile to realize that the Satyricon also looks a lot like a prose reinterpretation of the epic poetry form. There are nested stories, comparisons to the exploits of gods and legendary heroes, and points at which the narrative is temporarily arrested for a long soliloquy on aesthetics or philosophy—though, in the case of the Satyricon, such soliloquies are as likely to be about the etiquette of sharing a nubile youth among a roomful of older men as about the death of art.

In short, I highly recommend it to anybody with the capacity for patience and detachment necessary to look past all the gorging and fondling and see the Satyricon for the solid gold it is. If you appreciate the centaurs, I think you’ll be as fascinated by it as I am.

To close, a piece of ageless wisdom on the plight of the struggling writer from Eumolpus, the Satyricon’s sexpot poet:

‘No doubt about it. If a man sets his face against every temptation and starts off on the straight and narrow, he’s immediately hated because of his different ways. No one can approve of conduct different from his own. And secondly, those who are interested in piling up money don’t want anything else in life regarded as better than what they have themselves. So lovers of literature are sneered at by whatever means possible to show that they too are inferior to wealth.’

I'm pretty sure several things I was going to post about have since fallen out of my head, but I thought I'd grab a couple of these because they are cool.

As you may have seen if you were watching time_shark's journal during April, the 10th anniversary issue of Mythic Delirium is out, with a quite wonderful poem by Neil Gaiman as well as terrific work from people like sovay, tithenai+mer_moon, dkolodji, ericmarin, and others (sorry if I missed others with LJ accounts!). And "Beauty Sleep", probably the darkest thing I've written. It's quite a terrific issue, and if you enjoy speculative things or poetry or (gasp) both, take a look.

There have also been several reviews. charlesatan reviews the whole issue here, saying "While there's a certain similarity to each of the poems (i.e. the aforementioned inclusion of an easily-identifiable narrative), they're diverse enough that they elicit a different form of satisfaction depending on the poet and the piece. 'Beauty Sleep' by Erin Hoffman for example tangentially refers to a popular fairy tale and subverting its common interpretation, combining bluntness with beautiful images.". erzebet in the recently redesigned Cabinet des Fees reviews the full issue also, with the kind (I think :) ) "Erin Hoffman works a fairy tale into a brutal collection of stanzas", saying as well for the entire issue "Issue 20 is, without a doubt, Mike’s mythic masterwork.". hooks_and_books devotes a full paragraph to each poem over in his review, separated by parts:

I like the twist of the tale that Hoffman presents, combining aspects of the princess and the evil fairy into one deep persona. The voice in this piece is deservedly bitter, but works will carrying that bitterness or anger all the way through. Also, Hoffman takes the tale back to it's Italian origins, which is nice to see. Some of the line breaks seem off to me--"A king, it happens; and when I" or "his queen is cold and empty as"--which creates a choppy rhythm to the piece for me. There is still a lot that is working in this piece, certainly enough to make it successful.

The sheer volume of reviews focused on poetry is unusual for the space, and likely largely thanks to one Mr. Gaiman, but it's neat to see nonetheless.

In the short story world, Lois Tilton does not eviscerate me for "Stormchaser, Stormshaper":

There is a lot of fresh and original stuff here, the gryphons and the sea magic, and the descriptions are well-crafted. At the heart of the story is Ruby's inner conflict between piracy—making her mother proud—and her inner magic, which involves a strong empathy for her victims. The author loads the moral balance by justifying the pirates' activities as self-defense, about which I have my doubts. Making your mother proud is not a good reason for murder.

The catching up continues...

My latest column is up at Fearzone, my second review of Flesk Publication's artists. This time, we have illustrator, comic artists, and writer Mark Schultz, best known for what became the cartoon Cadillacs and Dinosaurs. I really dig his art, so please do check it out and comment.

http://www.fearzone.com/blog/mark-schultz

I also really like this picture, from Bad Planet, courtesy of Raw Studios, copyright 2009.



Cheers!

JSR

Like most people I first started eating donuts when I was very young. As a kid, I loved jelly filled ones, but my parents were open-minded and made sure I was exposed to a wide variety of donuts. Sometimes they even let me have a cruller.




As time passed I started to experiment with other donuts. Every chance I could, I sought out different varieties. I preferred donuts that were more than simply mass-market donuts. I liked the ones where the artistry of donut making could really shine through.



I always made it a point to choose other donuts beside my favorite chocolate glazed with coconut. Instead, I experimented with all the possibilities of donuts like self-referential interstitial donuts that are actually works of art and not in fact donuts.



But I have to admit it’s a struggle sometimes. It’s hard to know when a donut is really working. Sometimes you bite into a donut and it’s not what you expected. Its outside is too crispy or its inside too spongy. In these situations eating a donut can really be hard work.



But I make sure to finish every donut I start. It’s good knowing that I kept going and saw each donut to the end. It takes discipline really, and it’s quite simple: we eat donuts, because donuts taste good. That’s all that matters.

Don’t you think so?

My interview with Steve and Melanie Tem is up at IROSF

http://www.irosf.com/q/zine/article/10540

The focus is their acclaimed novel, The Man on the Ceiling, which I reviewed here some months back. Steve and Melanie were the writers in rez for my Odyssey year and that week will always be a highpoint in my young career. Thanks to both of them for taking the time to answer my questions and unveil some of the process that went into writing such a stunning piece of fiction.

Cheers,

JSR

I was delighted last week to read a glowing review of my short story “Ebb,” which is in the current issue of Space and Time. It’s by Rob Santa, a writer and indie publisher of swords and sorcery, in the Firebrand Fiction column at SFReader.com. Of all the stories in that issue, he said “‘Ebb’ is my favorite piece, a true standout.” Among other strong praise, he noted “Andrews gives each piece of this world a rich description, with enough emotion and character to chew on for days.” Pretty cool!

“Ebb” had a long and arduous path to publication, including several editors who did not understand the ending, so I was quite pleased to finally find one who did.  But it’s even more rewarding to know that my vision connected with at least one reader, and just as powerfully as I intended it. Thanks very much, Mr. Santa, for the kind words!

Nancy Kress had an interesting blog post the other day about her actual moment-by-moment process of constructing a paragraph: hashing out a couple of sentences, then shoving off the ones that come out of chronological order, cutting the excess words, fixing the sentence structure so it feels natural/fresh, fixing the language so it feels appropriate to the character and setting. A lot of what she says is pretty universal—which I think is one of the things that makes her such a great teacher of writing. She can point out the nose on your face, and somehow it comes across as a revelation, because you’ve never looked at it in quite that way.

Another of Nancy Kress’s great strengths is her economy of language, how she can build a subtle, complex story out of so little.

Thinking about this as I go along with my own writing, it occurs to me there’s one element of this sort of in-the-trenches prose styling that she hasn’t touched upon—possibly because there just is no way to codify it. It can be a painful thing to think about for those of us aspiring writers reading every how-to book we can get our hands on, hoping to someday write as well as Nancy Kress, but there’s always going to be a part of the writing process that’s ineffable, that can’t be fully grasped by rational means. There are too many words and too many subjects, too many unplumbable depths for the mere mind to fathom. Call it the unconscious, the minor deity of inspiration, or pure, dumb randomization, but at some point, you’re going to be hammering away at a sentence, and out will come something astonishing. Call that thing “turn of phrase”.

It’s hard to identify that thing in other people’s work, just because no matter how effortless and flawless a phrase or sentence seems, there’s no way to know the author didn’t agonize over it for hours, going through dozens of word choice options until they found the perfect one. The feeling I get when I come across such a phrasing, however, is unmistakable. And at that point, it doesn’t matter to me whether it came to the author in a flash of divine comprehension or not. Because even if I can’t pinpoint and identify the processes by which such a flash can occur (and if I could, I contend that the writing of fiction would cease to be art and become something soulless and mechanical), I can still train myself, by identifying that flash in the work of others, to recognize it when it comes forth from my own hands. And then, through everything I have managed to learn about the craft of fiction by studying the work and the teachings of masters, I can nudge and tweak and twist the rest of the sentence and paragraph and page to fit around it, carve away and slough off surplus until it stands out like it should.

This is why I keep seeking out great prose stylists in spite of the frustrating fact that whatever powers they possess may never be mine.

“A good strategist concentrates on what he can change,” says the divinely-touched sculptress to the brooding, crippled, chess-playing boy in Vandana Singh’s “The Room on the Roof”, which I happened to be reading over breakfast when this notion came upon me. That’s a wonderful line, and one of those truths of the human condition that are, for me, what writing is all about. But it’s not the line that stopped me in my tracks.

But sometimes a hopeless melancholy possessed her, and she thought the rain would never end, and that she and her brother and parents would never be happy or free, that beyond one wall there were others, an infinite concentricity of walls. Up in Aparna’s room every evening, she felt joy and yearning like a fever. and underneath it the fear that all she had gained was temporary, that one day the sculptress would leave them and the magic would go out of their lives. Sometimes she caught herself holding her breath, waiting for the change.

Let the games begin.