Reading list for those attending the filmmaker’s Rogue Film School:

Required reading: Virgil’s “Georgics” and Ernest Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”. Suggested reading: The Warren Commission Report, Rabelais’ “Gargantua and Pantagruel”, “The Poetic Edda”, translated by Lee M. Hollander (in particular The Prophecy of the Seeress), Bernal Diaz del Castillo “True History of the Conquest of New Spain”.

Re-watching a couple of his documentaries over the weekend began thinking how it was too bad Herzog wasn’t tapped to create the Voyager’s message to aliens. One imagines a future army of extraterrestrials arriving on Earth speaking in Herzog: “What is this planet we find ourselves upon? Everything is pointing to a new world but we need to articulate what that might be…”

A couple enjoyable things:
• Tom & Lorenzo’s series on the fashion of “Mad Men”, a detailed look at the costumes of the different characters. If I were costume designer Janie Bryant I’d be over the moon about it — they are picking up everything she is laying down.
• Another bookmark: Schott’s Vocab blog, which is doling out a “lexicographical trifle” a day with an assist from the OED. Elsewhere on the word geekery front, I love this Language Log theory that pegs basketball player Manute Bol as the originator of the phrase “my bad.” Also: Team Snuck. (More here.)

I’m amused by this pen and ink sketch of Lord and Lady Byron shortly after their marriage. It was drawn by Lady Caroline Lamb, who had carried on an affair with the poet before being thrown over a few years before (it was Lamb who called Bryon “mad, bad and dangerous to know”). As with the couple’s correspondence about religion, it’s an early signal that the marriage was headed for a spectacular flame-out. Lamb was hardly objective of course, but look at that body language!
The sketches Lamb kept in her journals have real wit and charm. But the novel she later wrote about Byron, Glenarvon, is wonderfully terrible. I’m reading it right now and it’s like slogging through a juvenile Bronte effort with all the trotting around moonlit ruins and character names like Calantha, the Duchess of Altamonte and Sir Everard St. Clare. Sample:

At this very period of time, in the prosecution of her sudden and accursed designs, having bade adieu to brighter climes and more polished manners, with all the gaiety of apparent innocence, and all the brilliancy of wit which belongs to spirits light as air and a refined and highly cultivated genius, she was sailing, accompanied by a train of admirers, selected from the flower of Italy, once again to visit her native country.

That does sound fancy, doesn’t it? And evil. I wish Lamb had done the book as a graphic novel instead.
(Sketch scanned from Fiona MacCarthy’s very good Bryon: Life and Legend.)

From a letter to Annabella Milbanke, the to-be Lady Byron, written in 1815:

I thank you very much for your suggestions on Religion – but I must tell you at the hazard of losing whatever good opinion your gentleness may have bestowed upon me – that it is a source from which I never did – & I believe never can derive comfort… why I came here – I know not – where I shall go it is useless to enquire – in the midst of myriads of the living & the dead worlds – stars – systems – infinity – why should I be anxious about an atom?

It is muggy in Asheville. Thunderstorms daily. This weekend we bought a bag of birdseed for the birdfeeder in the backyard. The birdfeeder’s been there since we moved in; a super-ugly structure, like a miniature, maroonish Brady Bunch house stuck on a high narrow pole, cemented into place. We scraped off seven years of cobwebs and filled it. About two hours later, a squirrel climbed up it, the pole broke, and the birdfeeder, seed and squirrel came tumbling down. Squirrel last seen riding off into the sunset, belching Eastern songbird mix.
My other weekend purchase was two books, Louise Glück’s Wild Iris and David Lipsky’s book about David Foster Wallace, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. Here’s a bit of Glück for you, from one of her “Matins” poems, middle removed:

I see it is with you as with the birches:
I am not to speak to you
in the personal way. Much
has passed between us. Or
was it always only
on the one side?
…
… I might as well go on
addressing the birches,
as in my former life: let them
do their worst, let them
bury me with the Romantics,
their pointed yellow leaves
falling and covering me.

A collection of first sentences from Nabokov’s short stories. Selection cribbed from Anthony Lane’s terrific New Yorker essay about the collected stories, with a couple additions:

“The Wood-Sprite” (Nabokov’s first published story, written while he was a student at Cambridge): “I was pensively penning the outline of the inkstand’s circular, quivering shadow.”
“Wingstroke”: “When the curved tip of one ski crosses the other, you tumble forward.”
“Gods”: “Here is what I see in your eyes right now: rainy night, narrow street, streetlamps gliding away into the distance.”
“Details of a Sunset”: “The last streetcar was disappearing in the mirrorlike murk of the street and, along the wire above it, a spark of Bengal light, crackling and quivering, sped into the distance like a blue star.”
“La Veneziana”: “In front of the red-hued castle, amid luxuriant elms, there was a vividly green grass court.”
“A Letter That Never Reached Russia”: “My charming, dear distant one, I presume you cannot have forgotten anything in the more than eight years of our separation, if you manage to remember even the gray-haired, azure liveried watchman who did not bother us in the least when we would meet, skipping school, on a frosty Petersburg morning, in the Suvurov museum, so dusty, so small, so similar to a glorified snuffbox.
“The Potato Elf”: “Actually his name was Frederick Dobson.”
“The Circle”: “In the second place, because he was possessed by a sudden mad hankering after Russia.”
“Tyrants Destroyed”: “The growth of his power and fame was matched, in my imagination, by the degree of the punishment I would have liked to inflict on him.”
“Ultima Thule”: “Do you remember the day you and I were lunching (partaking of nourishment) a couple of years before your death?”
“That In Aleppo Once”: “Dear V.–Among other things, this is to tell you that at last I am here, in the country whither so many sunsets have led.”
“Signs and Symbols”: “For the fourth time in as many years they were confronted with the problem of what birthday present to bring a young man who was incurably deranged in his mind.”

Through this “scattering of nutshells” (Lane’s phrase) you get a portrait of Nabokov as a writer. I was reminded of it by Maud’s similar collage of first sentences from nine Muriel Spark novels. Interesting to compare the two. For example, Nabokov’s color field: azure shading into quivering blue, vivid greens and a spot of red. The only colors in the Spark selection: “almost white” and the “clear crystal” you come to after the “murk & smog” — a fittingly chilly palette for a writer who writes as cleanly and sparely as Spark does.
Lane notes another quality of the Nabokov first sentences is their lack of preamble or introduction. The reader is almost always set down at some mid point of the narrative. Writes Lane: “Again and again, with polite indifference, the stories drop us in media res, and leave us to work out what on earth the res might be.”
Lane’s Nabokov essay can be read online (sub. required) or in his essay collection, Nobody’s Perfect.

One of the sharpest parts of last night’s Oscars was a nice bit by Tina Fey and Robert Downey Jr. about writers versus actors. The transcript, courtesy of Salon:

Fey: Great movies begin with great writing.
Downey:What does an actor look for in a script? Specificity. Emotional honesty. Catharsis.
Fey: And what does a writer look for in an actor? Memorizing. Not paraphrasing. Fear of ad-libbing.
Downey: Actors want scripts with social relevance, warm weather locations, phone call scenes that can be shot separately from that insane actress that I hate, and long dense columns of uninterrupted monologue, turning the page, and for instance seeing the phrase, “Tony Stark, continued.”
Fey: And we writers dream of a future where actors are mostly computer-generated and their performances can be adjusted by us, on a laptop, alone.
Downey: It’s a collaboration, a collaboration between handsome, gifted people and sickly little mole people.

The two were presenting the award for best original screenplay, which went to Mark Boal for The Hurt Locker. Watch the exchange here.

The Guardian’s round-up of authors’ rules for writing fiction has been making the rounds for a couple weeks now. If you haven’t checked it out yet, it’s well worth it. Contributors include Geoff Dyer, Margaret Atwood, Sarah Waters, Neil Gaiman among others.
Zadie Smith shares ten rules too but leaves out a piece of advice I’ve seen her mention before and found useful. It’s from a 2008 talk on novel-writing she gave at Columbia, later published in The Believer:

My writing desk is covered in open novels. I read lines to swim in a certain sensibility, to strike a particular note, to encourage rigor when I’m too sentimental, to bring verbal ease when I’m syntactically uptight. I think of reading like a balanced diet; if my sentences are too baggy, too baroque, I cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka, as roughage. If I’m disappearing up my own aesthete’s arse, I stop worrying so much about what Nabokov would say and pick up Dostoyevsky, the patron saint of substance over style, a reminder to us all that good writing is more than elegant sentences.

I’ve started using this open-books-on-the-desk method too. Partly as inspiration and encouragement when I’m dragging, but also as a practical aid; a way to remind myself about the basics of construction and how writers accomplish simple things like getting a character to walk across a room (“he walked across the room”) or go outside (“she went outside”), which it’s easy to over-think (“he lumbered across the oak-floored palladium” “she hastened down the hallway, through the doorway, and out to the great outdoors”).
This reminds me of a time we were reading Evan Connell’s Mrs. Bridge in a writing class. There was a place in the book where the narrative skipped forward a year or so. O’Connell handled the jump this way: “Time passed.” No “the leaves fell, snow came and melted, and spring tripped in like a million ballerinas in a million long pink tutus.” Just “Time passed.” It blew our minds. That’s the sort of help the open books can offer. When I’ve gotten myself in a snarl it’s good to peek in one and be reminded that it can be that easy. Time passed. He walked across the room. She went outside. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.