My first week of teaching is over! Or sort of over — my students just turned in their first assignments, so I’ll be reading those this weekend. We spent most of this week reading and discussing published short fiction and we begin workshopping their own work on Monday.

I am very sleepy this morning, not least because T. talked me into attending the midnight showing of Inception with him on Thursday night. Vaguely spoilery reaction below — skip if you’re not into that kind of thing. Non-spoilery reaction: it’s fun and you should see it.

Beyond that, I think A. O. Scott’s review is right on:

… though there is a lot to see in “Inception,” there is nothing that counts as genuine vision. Mr. Nolan’s idea of the mind is too literal, too logical, too rule-bound to allow the full measure of madness — the risk of real confusion, of delirium, of ineffable ambiguity — that this subject requires. The unconscious, as Freud (and Hitchcock, and a lot of other great filmmakers) knew, is a supremely unruly place, a maze of inadmissible desires, scrambled secrets, jokes and fears. If Mr. Nolan can’t quite reach this place, that may be because his access is blocked by the very medium he deploys with such skill.

I had the same reaction to the movie that Scott did — I really enjoyed it and admired the caper-plot machinery, but I felt slightly unsatisfied at the end. I think the problem is that the plot is designed, like just about all of Nolan’s plots, to turn on a series of reveals. Except that these reveals aren’t really surprising. You can see them coming from at least a few minutes away, if not more. T. and I were both perplexed at the critical habit of describing the movie as confusing or hard to follow — it’s complex but incredibly regular, and I don’t think I ever got confused about what was happening or where/when the action was occurring. (Roger Ebert’s review, which is very positive and definitely worth reading, does this a bit; he also points out, interestingly, that Nolan was working on this script while he filmed Memento. [Obligatory mention here of how much I enjoy Ebert's Twitter feed, if you aren't familiar with it!])  I found The Prestige’s reveals more satisfying, and its moral sense more resonant, too. You would think that a movie that is explicitly about the very foundations of reality would have higher stakes than a movie about magicians, but it seems to me that Nolan might be better at approaching ethical questions sideways rather than head-on. (Do not get me started about the question of ethics in relation to the dreadful The Dark Knight.)

The other weakness of the movie, for me, was the lack of development of the relationships among the characters, especially in comparison to the character-driven drama of The Prestige. This is maybe a flaw inherent in the caper plot, though I think even Ocean’s 11 did a better job of creating real people to fill out its team (and there were, as you’ll note, eleven of them). I liked all the team members just fine — I think I will always adore Joseph Gordon-Levitt, even though I couldn’t get through (500) Days of Summer — but their interactions are shallow. The movie also wastes a chance to do something really interesting, which I won’t discuss much here because it would be super-spoilery, by eliding one large chunk of time that would have allowed it to investigate the relationship between DiCaprio’s character and Watanabe’s character, and to be weirder. I liked Marion Cotillard a lot, which was a nice change from Public Enemies in which she just seemed like a pretty but bizarre casting choice and reminded me that I really do want to see her Piaf movie. (Okay, one spoilery side note regarding her character: Nolan is really obsessed with giving his main male characters idealized wives who died in ways they may be culpable for.) And the movie also made me want to look up a few of the other actors, especially Tom Hardy, who is delightfully smirky.

In sum: not perfect, but it is a gorgeous movie. It will make you clutch the arm of the person sitting next to you, and it may make you think about it after it’s over. And if you have a partner who likes Crystal Castles, you will definitely be unable to get this song out of your head after the movie, as it’s very like the movie score in some ways:

A really amazing, thoughtful, detailed, super-complimentary reader review. The kind that inspires dolphin-sonar noises and flappy hands. (If you’ve never been inspired to make dolphin-sonar noises and flappy hands, I feel bad for you.)

And now, I’m about to go talk  about Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss” with my fiction students. Heh.

In March, I filmed an interview with “Open Books, Open Minds,” a local TV book program based in Ashland, Oregon, and sponsored by the Jackson County library system. Clips from that interview are now up on Youtube — the first features a bit of the interview and me reading the prologue; the second shows me reading a selection from chapter 1 that I haven’t read publicly before. (The bit about the seawater ritual, for those of you who’ve read the book.)

Many thanks to Maureen Battistella of the Ashland Mystery group, who organized and filmed the interview, and Ashland Public Library manager Amy Blossom, who interviewed me!

Back in May — long enough ago that I’d totally forgotten about it — Lambda Literary asked for interview questions for the fabulous Sarah Waters. This was just after I’d read The Little Stranger, so I was bubbling over with them, and I left a few at the Lambda Literary blog. Yesterday I was surprised and delighted to see that Lambda Literary had actually asked Sarah Waters those questions, along with great questions by Shelley Ettinger and Jeri Estes. Here’s a snip from her answer to my question about historical fiction, to entice you to visit the LL site and read the rest:

One thing that’s always intrigued me about our relationship with the past is how we’re always rewriting it. You can date a historical novel just like you can a period drama for TV or film: they always tell us as much about the period in which they were produced, as about the period they’re attempting to describe. I don’t see that as a limitation, though. The past is necessarily elusive; we can never “reproduce” it. But we can have lots of fun trying! That’s a big attraction of the genre, for me — taking on stereotypes about the past, and finding way to revise them, or to overturn them altogether.

And now back to teaching prep — as you could probably tell from my previous post, I’ve begun teaching my summer fiction workshop class at UT. Today was day two. Tomorrow, among other things, we’re going to take up Kelly Link’s suggestion of listing tropes you like and use that as an idea-generating writing exercise. (I will cheerfully admit that I do the writing exercises right along with my students.)

Watching a room full of students busily writing fiction, in response to a writing exercise given on the first day of class.

I’ve been trying all week to write a post about why the film versions of Twilight and Eclipse are kind of avant garde — notice I claim nothing of the sort for New Moon — but I just can’t seem to finish it up and post it. Can it be that I’ve hit my limit for dissecting the cultural phenomenon that is Twilight? Does Edward Cullen like to eat bears? (This is still the funniest thing about the Twilight universe, by FAR.) Actually, I’m almost tempted to read the remaining Twilight books — I’ve only read the first — so that I can see if this theory about the movies holds true for them, too. That just might be a ridiculous amount of preparation for writing a blog entry, though.

There are a few other reasons for my lack of follow-through:

1. Migraine, yargh.
2. Dissertation chapter: the one I am almost done with and really wanted to finish before Monday.
3. Teaching prep for my class that starts Monday (hence the diss chapter deadline).

In fact, I need to be finishing up the section on Martha Fowke Sansom’s Clio right now. Which means it’s time for a few links and a promise to be back soon with more substantive thoughts — possibly even more substantive thoughts on topics not related to vampires or YA! Well, maybe not that last bit.

Links!

• Kate Elliott is smart about genre boundaries.
• N. K. Jemisin is smart about worldbuilding.
• What happened at the Folger Library when the Durham First Folio was recovered. Short answer: wackiness.
• An 80s-style credits sequence for Firefly. Oh dear.
• A deservedly superlative review of Winter’s Bone, which is pretty amazing.

… first of all, you’re silly. But second: read this wonderful letter by Mary A. Dempsey, the Chicago Public Library Commissioner, calling out the many stupidities of a FOX News story asking why we still need those tax-greedy libraries now that we have this handy series of tubes called the internet.

The post also has one of the most heartening and non-keyboard-mash-y comment threads I’ve read in a while. The best one is by a Patrick F.:

The first thing I read this morning, while eating my quinoa flakes, was Kate Elliott’s excellent post about how she knows a scene needs to be rewritten:

The medium answer is:

I feel uncomfortable with it (see: “I just know” above) because:

the rhythm feels wrong when I re-read it. The rhythm of a scene should flow smoothly and inevitably for however you are defining inevitability — you should never catch or stumble over the flow of action and conversation.

Or: the characters aren’t doing what they need to do to move the plot forward because they are doing something else, specifically something that doesn’t actually matter no matter how entertaining I find it, or perhaps because it is something that was generic and easy to write but does not serve a useful purpose in narrative terms.

Or: the characters are not acting as they would be acting if they were being themselves. They’re saying things that come out wrong for them.

Or: Something I wrote later changes the nature of what this scene needs to accomplish.

Or: Ouch.

Or: the conversation wanders through the scene, repeats itself, contradicts itself, and/or isn’t directly to the point.

Or: the conversation isn’t layered right so that it starts from one point and leads to a bigger and more emotional point by the end of the scene.

Or: I wasted a big moment, eliding it or gliding over it, and I need to punch it up and/or expose it properly.

Or: What was I thinking?

The long answer: Give me three hours, a seminar, and a ton of time to prepare (none of which I have), and I might be able to make a stab at opening this out.

It’s interesting to me that Kate talks about rhythm first, because for me, at least, the other concerns she lists often present themselves as problems of rhythm first. That is to say: I’m writing a scene, or reading back over a scene, and I notice that something feels off, like a slub in smooth fabric. Then I start to worry at it, the same way you might pick at that little knot of thread. Sometimes the problem really is a prose-level rhythm issue, but sometimes the prose isn’t working correctly because something underneath the prose, something mechanical or structural, isn’t working either, in one of the ways Kate lists above.

I titled this post “rhythm as alarm system” as a way of describing that process, in which a flaw in the rhythm lets you know that something else may be wrong with your writing. But maybe it’s more like an extra sense or a magical power: imprecise, hard to control, and impossible to turn off. I spent some time re-reading old writing of mine recently, and it’s amazing how the things that feel most familiar about those old pieces of writing are the things I never did quite figure out how to fix: the slubs in the fabric. I remember the occasional awkward word or tinny line of dialogue better than the bits of beauty.

(If you want to develop your own extrasensory rhythmic perception, read your work out loud. All of it. Tayari Jones posted on Twitter recently about doing a complete read-through of her novel in progress while going over copyedits. [She also wrote a great post about fixing a timeline problem in that book.] If I’m struggling with writing anything, fiction or grant proposals or job letters, I read it out loud while I work. Often I get funny looks from the cats.)

Does the knot-in-the-fabric metaphor describe how you feel about weaknesses in your writing, or do you sense things a different way?

I’m bogged down in dissertation-land this month, trying to finish a chapter before I start teaching in mid-July.

Things I have been doing lately, in addition to writing my dissertation:

• Pondering the confluence of events that leads pets to get sick immediately before one’s partner leaves on a scheduled trip.
• Washing a lot of bedding. See previous point.
• Watching season 1 of Leverage and pondering the caper plot. It’s a silly, fun show with a ridiculously sentimental frame story, but it’s also surprisingly ambitious — a caper a week?
• Preparing teaching materials for my fiction workshop, including a basic website. (Not totally complete yet.) Wondering why Drupal is so much more annoying than Wordpress.

Links to recommend:

• Alexander Chee’s great series of posts on MFA programs: when an MFA degree is a good idea, how he chose his own program, etc. Start with this post — the others are linked from it, including this brief FAQ about MFA programs, which is worth a look.
• This NPR story on a neurologist who studies the brains of psychopaths — and who found his own brain scans somewhat unnerving. (Not dissimilar, in a sense, to the book by Jessica Stern that I mentioned last week, in which she connects her own traumatic history to her study of terrorism.)
• The formation of a new continental rift valley in Africa.
• Tuscany via Henry James.
• Ernesto Neto’s installation at the Hayward Gallery at the Saatchi in London. A friend posted photos on Facebook; just beautiful.
• The sweetest story of a marriage I’ve read for a while.

One of the most fascinating first-person narratives I’ve read recently: Jessica Stern’s WaPo op-ed about how trauma shaped her professional career and her personality. Stern asks: “Why does the threat of violent death alter some of us, even if subtly, forever? Why does it make us unusually numb or calm when we ought to feel terrified?” Well worth reading, and I imagine Stern’s forthcoming memoir will be too.