Have to see the movie to find out

Around the Willow Springs office, author Robert Lopez is often incorrectly referred to as Rob, an error we inherited from our boss, Sam Ligon, who knew him before he was Robert. The name is going to appear on the cover of Willow Springs 69, which is set to include an interview with Lopez, and, during a recent edit of the front cover, Sam caught the name listed as Rob, which we hastily corrected. The difference is simple, but distinct. Rob is Sam’s friend and colleague. Robert Lopez isn’t a person.

As soon as a text is written, its author becomes a brand—a way of describing a style, worldview, or type of prose. This is the moment where writer becomes author, transferring power from himself to the consumer. For instance, while Rob is a private name, for friends and family, Robert Lopez yields control to public interpretation. When this interpretation becomes collective, authors’ names morph into adjectives like Homeric, Dickensian, and Kafkaesque, all of which can be used to describe more than just books. These authors become part of the lexicon, shifting from the signified to the signifier.

Shakespearian is an adjective that has come to mean many things to many different people. In fact, most people recognize Shakespeare as an adjective or signifier before they ever pick up one of his plays. Some might say that this is what constitutes a classic—a book that is a signifier prior to being read. If so, Shakespeare is the ultimate example—becoming so much of an abstract noun that even his contemporaries forgot to gather evidence of his existence.

People often attempt to reconstruct a writer after he or she has already transformed into an author. This is called biographical criticism or, as it’s known around my apartment, a way for people who don’t like studying literature to pursue an English degree. These are the people who worry about the authorship of Shakespeare’s work—who have been arguing since the 18^th century as to the true identity of the playwright. Let me take this opportunity to concede that they are right. William Shakespeare did not write those plays. Considering he is a brand—an adjective—he couldn’t have. In the same sense, whoever did write them—be it William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, or all the king’s men—none of them could ever have been Shakespeare. He was just a person—a person who couldn’t possibly been the signifier that his audience continues to ingratiate into their lexicon over 400 years after The Bard is said to have died.

Anonymous, a new movie on the subject that comes out tomorrow, dramatizes the theory that the Earl of Oxford was the actual writer of the plays. It seems like a good enough premise for a movie—someone pours his life into writing, only to have the credit stripped away. Though is that not, in essence, what happens to any writer? Are they not all dehumanized—morphed into adjectives to be thrown around in MFA workshops? That’s so Carveresque. What a Munroic conceit. Your prose is truly Dybekian.

My classmates and I often joke about whether or not we could write each other’s stories. Could I write a Krow story? An Evans? A Moore? What do those names mean in terms of style? What do they look like independent of Leyna, Tyler, or Elizabeth? Even in our group of eight students we formed our own accidental language.

In our form and theory classes we are assigned to write imitation pieces, which attempt this exercise with books from the syllabus. Last quarter I found myself grappling with what exactly a Robert Lopez story was supposed to be. It’s just an exercise to push us outside of our comfort zone, to get us thinking differently, and is intended for us to fail. And I did. I could never write someone else’s story. I couldn’t help but make it my own. It would be the same if I imitated my classmates. But it’s still terrifying to think of my classmates writing a Michael Bell story—terrifying to think that I have no control over myself as an adjective.

Well, now you (and I and everybody with internet access) can experiment with how often a word occurred in literature through history thanks to Google’s new Ngram site.  (Yes, you get TWO Google posts for the price of one today! )

I’ve spent lots of time playing around with…erh, researching interesting things such as how often the phrase “little did I know” occurs in books. I’m not quite sure how it will fit into any academic research (or how I would fund that research), but it’s still fascinating to note that the phrase was used very frequently in the early 1800s, hit an all time low around 1830, only to peak again around 1850, then decline for a while before holding steady until 2000, after which it took off at an alarming rate.

 I’m not the only one who’s spending way too much time on this site. The blog Jezebel tried it out on different sexual terminology. They noted that there was a decline in writing about “penis” and “vagina” around the Great Depression but then a huge peak in the usage of “vagina” around 1883.

This tool is supposedly developed for academics and Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist and adjunct full professor in the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley, reviewed it for that purpose for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Linguistic research is of course very important, but isn’t it much more fun to find out how much more often “tits” are used than “boobs?”

Try out the site and let us know what astonishing facts (academic or titillating or other) you found in your quest for word and phrase usage through the ages.

Find exemplars wherever you can.

Last week while talking to my creative writing class about various structures they might try fitting their fiction into I found myself suddenly using the movie The Hangover as an example of a classic story form. My students, all of whom save two had seen the movie, were excited to talk about something they actually liked and engaged in willingly outside of class. “Oh yeah, that movie was so funny!” they exclaimed while I tried to backtrack a little in order to make sure they understood that we were still having a constructive, academic conversation. We’d talked a bit about journey stories already, and several students had attempted writing road trip stories, knowing from reading our textbook that it’s usually a bad idea to write a scene that places one character alone in a car unless they are thinking about something active outside of the car, a flashback maybe, since a one-person scene tends to lack energy or conflict, two things that stories thrive on. So I ask them, “Why do you think the writers chose to place four men together in this car? Why not two?” One student said that if there were only two guys the story couldn’t have existed because one of the guys has to go missing for the plot to go on. “Okay, good point, but why four? What is each character doing in this movie? How does each one play an important role in propelling the plot?” That’s when the conversation improved. We talked about how each character has a vastly different personality from the others and how they are really archetypes. The ringleader, Phil, is the reckless antihero. Zach Galifianakis’ character plays the fool, the trouble maker and comic relief. Ed Helms, or Stu, is the straight man, the conscience of the group, albeit a somewhat warped one since he’s lying to his overbearing girlfriend to go on this trip. And, finally, there’s the main character, Doug, absent for most of the film, who is the catalyst for most of the events we watch. He’s missing. His friends can’t remember why and have to find him and get him back to his bride who is waiting anxiously back home.

Maybe this wasn’t “literature” so to speak, but I could totally imagine Shakespeare writing a similar plot-driven comedy that concluded, of course, with a wedding, all of the characters safe and happy in the end (besides maybe Stu’s witch of a girlfriend who didn’t deserve to be). There wasn’t a big, deep message in this movie, right? I mean, what would we take away from this? Don’t drink whatever the weird brother-in-law-to-be is serving. Try counting cards at a Vegas casino; it’s worth it. Lie to your partner as long as you can so s/he doesn’t know you’ve totally screwed up. Vacations full of debauchery are are good idea as long as you make it home in one piece. These aren’t lessons. They’re jokes.

We aren’t supposed to learn anything from this movie. We’re supposed to be entertained. This, in my opinion, is an important lesson for young writers to learn. First, young grasshoppers, you must entertain your readers. Then, once you’ve got them within your grasp, you can do other cool stuff: teach them, make them uncomfortable, inspire them, break their hearts, etc.

I encourage my students to watch movies and good television all the time. (We’ve also talked about shows like the brand new, hour-long drama, Parenthood, as well as Big Love, Weeds, and True Blood.) Maybe this is bad. Maybe I should feel guilty about it. Molly Giles, in her visit here last week, mentioned that it seems like many of the writers she sees in her MFA program at the University of Arkansas are really good at showing what’s happening in a story but are terrible at getting inside the characters’ heads, and she blames moving pictures: TV, movies, etc. Someone else in the workshop suggested that it might be our over-reliance on the “Show, don’t tell.” mantra we’ve been worshipping since the imagists, in which case, it’s William Carlos Williams’ fault.

I’m not sure who’s to blame for students’ inability to write a contemplative scene, but it may be my fault, too. I’ve seen too many stories from beginning writers that start with a paragraph or two of exposition that spells out what we’re supposed to take from the story before it’s even started. Another common story start that I want to strangle out of my students is the one where the first two or three scenes are setting up the real story: We had been best friends for ten years…. I was driving with my friends cross country…. I loved that girl more than anything…. Ughh. Often, I want to tell them to just stop writing about love or friendship or whatever it is that seems so comfortable to them that they tell it like they’re writing instructions for how to [fill in the blank]. But I’m a firm believer that no subject is unworthy of being written about. It’s not the subject that matters, it’s the way the subject is handled, and that’s where television and movies come in. If they can’t pull us in, we won’t watch and they’re doomed. Same with short stories.

Am I a bad teacher? Am I ruining my students’ ability to write “real literature”? I don’t know, but in my defense, we read lots of literary stuff too (Raymond Carver, Charles Baxter, Wells Tower…), but even when they say that they really enjoyed one of these stories, they never get as excited as they do when I say, “Hey, have you guys seen Californication?”