Anthony Lee Collins

So, I’m still working on my next mystery story (“The Trinity Mystery”), and I’ve written quite a bit, but right now I’m kind of stuck, so I’ve been thinking about my third novel, which I never finished.

I got to the end of a first draft (so, it did have an ending, and a pretty good one), but it had some significant problems (internal and external), and I got distracted by writing mystery stories.

So, I decided to go back and give the third novel another look. And I couldn’t remember where it was. I knew it had been online, but I couldn’t find it, and clearly I removed links to it on this blog (or at least most of them).

Well, that was embarrassing. One advantage of having your writing online is that you always know where it is, and if you back up the website(s) then you also have backups of the writing.

I searched, and I couldn’t find anything on this blog. Or the other blog.

I finally found it, or fragments of it, and I’m starting to collect all the pieces and sort them back into their proper order. It needs some streamlining (it emerged from chaos even more than some of my other work), plus some punctuation improvements, and it has way too many characters (fifty? sixty? — but I’m probably stuck with that). So, I’m going to assemble the pieces and then bring it to the point of being a second draft.

It will be fun to put all the pieces back together, and when I’m done I’ll link to it from here, probably with some caveats. (You know when you have a DVD of a movie, and there’s a menu item called “Deleted Scenes” and one of those deleted scenes is actually an entirely separate movie? Okay, I’ve never seen that either, but this is like that.)

And (to mix metaphors) when I’m done, this time I’ll remember where I parked the car.

Oh, and I just remembered that the third novel had a title also. It was “Throwing Stones.”

It’s been a while since I posted. I’ve been accumulating little notes here and there about things I could write about, but none of them were really strong enough for a whole blog post.

So, here is a selection:

1) “No Comfort” by Fintan O’Toole

I read O’Toole quite often, mostly about politics, but this (even though it starts about Elon Musk) is not about politics. It’s about the inescapable cliche that Shakespeare wrote about “heroes” who were brought down by “tragic flaws.”

To offer a brief quote:

The most obvious problem with all that is, even if it were true, it would be crushingly dull. Moral tales in which people do bad things because they have wicked instincts and then get their comeuppance are ten a penny. The clichés shrink Shakespeare to the level of Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest, the author of a three-volume novel of “more than usually revolting sentimentality” who explains that in her book “the good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”

Well worth reading.

 
2) Shelley Duvall (1949 – 2024)

Here are two good obituaries of Shelley Duvall:

• The Guardian
• The New York Times

This article is good, too: “The slim but powerful movie career of Shelley Duvall emerged from a Robert Altman crowd“

It’s really too bad that so many people these days know her, if they know her at all, from her (excellent) work in The Shining. She was consistently good, in a variety of roles, in all the movies she made with Robert Altman.

Speaking of Altman, this was interesting: “The 10 Best Robert Altman Movies, Ranked.” I don’t entirely agree with the ranking (if I made a Altman Top Ten list today, I would undoubtedly disagree with it by tomorrow), but it enough in sync with my own preferences that I’m tempted to re-watch 3 Women, which I haven’t seen in ages and which I’ve never reviewed (and which stars Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek).

 
Also:

I’ve still been dipping in and out of Across the River and into the Trees, from time to time, but my opinions haven’t changed. And now there are no more Hemingway novels for me to read for the first time (I have no interest in the posthumous ones). Oh, well, the short stories are generally better anyway.

I’ve also been re-reading parts of A. E. Hotchner’s book Papa Hemingway, which is about the years they were friends (and collaborators, since Hotchner adapted quite a few Hemingway stories for the screen). And during that time, they (and several other people) traveled around Spain following a season of bullfighting, partly because of a very intense rivalry between two great matadors, both of whom Hemingway was friends with.

Hemingway wrote a book about that summer, called The Dangerous Season. I’ve never read any of his non-fiction writing, but I decided to try this one.

(Weirdly, I do have to report that I felt a wisp of an obligation to insert a caveat explaining that I don’t approve of bullfighting. Looking at this objectively, this is odd, since I frequently read — and write — murder mysteries and I have never felt that I should clarify that I’m not in favor of murder.)

It is difficult to describe how much I enjoyed The Dangerous Season. Unlike Across the River, this is not Hemingway attempting “calculus” in prose (and did Hemingway even know what calculus was? — I doubt it) — this is Hemingway writing simply and well about people he knew and a sport he had studied for a lot of his life. It has humor, too, which the novel mostly doesn’t. (Orson Welles said that Hemingway could be really funny in life, but he obviously thought that humor had no place in serious fiction.) His humor can be rather dry and subtle, but it’s there.

In fiction, there are fairly predictable ways that this story could have ended (see the Lady Bracknell quote above), but these are real events and so they end as they ended.

One thing particularly amused me after reading this book and the Hotchner book referred to above. The two matadors whose rivalry is at the center of the book were Antonio Ordóñez and Luis Miguel Dominguín. Dominguin’s sister Carmen was married to Ordóñez. Hemingway clearly liked Carmen, and writes about her with admiration, but what he never mentions (and Hotchner does) is that she had been a matador herself, and a very good one. Hotchner makes it clear that no woman could succeed in the macho world of bullfighting unless she had undeniable skills.

Why is this book so much better than Across the River (apart from the “calculus” question referred to above)? Frankly, one reason is that it was edited, and heavily (I think partly by Hotchner). As far as I can tell, Across the River was never even proofread, let alone edited.

“Tonight’s program takes us backstage to witness first hand the creation, start to finish, of a new play mounted on the American stage.

“Asteroid City does not exist. It is an imaginary drama created expressly for this broadcast. The characters are fictional, the text hypothetical, the events an apocryphal fabrication. But together they present an authentic account of the inner workings of a modern theatrical production.”

— the first words of the movie Asteroid City

A couple of articles I read recently in the New York Review of Books clarified some things about my reaction to the movie Asteroid City which I discussed recently.

Here’s a quote from “Bodies That Flow,” which is about Peter Paul Rubens, the Flemish painter:

“If it is possible to sum up, in one work, the way that Rubens respected the beauty of women, then this is it,” writes Jennifer Scott, the gallery’s director—one might add that it is equally a hymn to the beauty of oil paint. We can forever learn from Rubens about the latter. I am less sure whether he tells us how women and men should relate.

And this is from “Cartoon Rules,” which is about Ernie Bushmiller, who created the comic strip Nancy:

Nancy’s main characters included the titular mischievous girl, her aunt Fritzi, and her pal Sluggo; its perfectly generic fences and houses seemed to resemble the view outside Griffith’s window. The strip was Bushmiller’s decades-long exercise in joke construction, accomplished with a rigorous set of rules and an absurd imagination. As Griffith writes in Three Rocks, his graphic biography of Bushmiller, “Nancy doesn’t tell you what it’s like to be a child. Nancy tells you what it’s like to be a comic strip.”

The more I think about Asteroid City, and re-watch it, the more I think that it’s about movies themselves and how they work (and how they are similar to, and different from, theater). It’s a movie about a television program which is presenting a play, and the play is shown to us in the form of a movie. At one point, an actor steps “on stage” at the wrong time, and later another actor “leaves the stage” in the middle of his performance because he’s stuck on one action which his character takes which makes no sense to him. (That’s Jones Hall, who’s playing Augie Steenbeck, who deliberately burns his hand on the Quickie Griddle, for some reason. Jones Hall is played by Jason Schwartzman.)

Also, in one of my favorite bits, other than the laugh-out-loud moments I mentioned in my earlier post, a car drives at high speed through the tiny town of Asteroid City, being pursued by a police car and a motorcycle, and various guns are fired. The main characters watch this, and then, when the speeding vehicles are gone, resume whatever they were doing before. This happens three times, and it seems to be saying, “Yes, you could be watching a movie with gunfire and fast cars and violence, or you could be watching this.” And, in blatant (and, I’m sure, deliberate) violation of Chekhov’s Law, two civilian characters go armed throughout the story and neither of those guns is ever fired, or used or referred to in any way.

Asteroid City is a movie about how movies work. As I said before, characters look directly at the camera a lot, and sometimes address the audience, but it’s not really a “fourth wall break,” since there is no fourth wall. There is never a moment when we’re supposed to forget that “the characters are fictional, the text hypothetical, the events an apocryphal fabrication.”

Pirandello, or Beckett, or Stoppard would understand.

Why does Augie burn his hand on the Quickie Griddle? To paraphrase that kid in The Matrix, there is no Quickie Griddle.

1) “Denis Villeneuve: ‘Frankly, I Hate Dialogue. Dialogue Is For Theatre And Television’“

“Frankly, I hate dialogue,” the filmmaker told The Times of London in a recent interview. “Dialogue is for theatre and television. I don’t remember movies because of a good line, I remember movies because of a strong image. I’m not interested in dialogue at all. Pure image and sound, that is the power of cinema, but it is something not obvious when you watch movies today.”

First off, no. If I bothered to have an all-time list of my Top Ten or Top Twenty movies, Robert Altman, Howard Hawks, and Orson Welles would be heavily represented, and they were all very focused on dialogue.

However, what caught my eye about this quote is that this is exactly how I feel about Villeneuve’s movie Blade Runner 2049. I have long wanted to watch a version with the visuals, the music, and the sound design, all of which are amazing, with the dialogue buried way down in the mix somewhere. Once you know the plot of the movie, the words aren’t important, and none of them are memorable, but the rest is a constant pleasure.

 
2) There are rumors that Paul Thomas Anderson is going to make a movie based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland.

There are a few reasons that I should not be excited by this news.

One: It may not be true. (Anderson is apparently directing a movie right now, but it’s not confirmed what movie.)

Two: He directed Inherent Vice, also based on a Pynchon novel. I enjoyed that movie, or at least parts of it, but it is not, I would say, actually good.

Three: Vineland may be my least favorite Pynchon novel (with the necessary caveat that I still haven’t read Against the Day).

Nevertheless, I am curious, and if the movie actually exists at some point (see point one above), I imagine I will go see it.

Update: Yeah, Vineland is my least favorite Pynchon novel. By a wide margin. I just checked Wikipedia to make sure I wasn’t forgetting a novel, and, no, I remembered them all.

I have mixed feelings about the Wes Anderson movies I’ve seen.

(This is not a question of “love/hate,” by the way. People use “love/hate” quite often for things which — as far as I can tell — never rise to the level of “love” or “hate.” This is just mixed feelings.)

Some people say all of Anderson’s movies are basically the same, and either you like them or you don’t. There are reasons this theory comes up, but it doesn’t apply to me.

I saw The Royal Tenenbaums years ago and I couldn’t stand it. Too many people who were all miserable for no apparent reason. I don’t remember if any of them changed in the course of the movie, but if they did it was, for me, too little and/or too late.

Quite a bit later, I have no idea why, I watched Moonrise Kingdom, and I immediately watched it every night for a week. I’ve talked about that before.

Then, when The Grand Budapest Hotel came out, I saw that. At first I found it to be so-so, but I’ve grown to like it much more over time. I believe I’ve been won over by how funny it is (it has a lot more laughs than either of the other two I’ve mentioned, or both combined).

I skipped The French Dispatch. It sounds like it was based on how much Anderson likes The New Yorker, and I grew up reading the magazine myself, but a movie? Really?

But now I’ve seen Asteroid City, and it’s a hoot.

First of all, there were two moments which made me laugh immoderately and repeatedly. I think the last time I laughed like that at a movie was American Hustle.

Asteroid City has a nested structure, a story within a story within a story, like The Grand Budapest Hotel. A moment when that structure breaks is one of the two laugh-out-loud moments I mentioned above.

Here, that means that you never forget you’re looking at the actors playing actors playing characters (one of whom is a famous actor). The whole thing is all really just the writer/director talking to us (which is further emphasized by how often the characters address the camera directly).

Will Augie end up seeing Midge again? The question is moot, since, as we are reminded on a regular basis, neither is a real person, even within the movie.

So, the fact that the characters are, in some cases, wounded can be examined while maintaining a certain distance. With Anderson’s movies (as opposed to Robert Altman’s movies, or Les Miserables, for example) that’s what works best for me.

Also, enjoyably, it’s a movie of a play where both the actors in the play and the playwright himself are confused about what the play actually means. YouTube has tried to get me to watch various videos about “The Real Meaning” of this movie, but I haven’t watched them, just like I ignore all the videos which want to “explain” Mulholland Drive to me.

Explanations aren’t always necessary. When I was younger, I had a beloved cat for over twenty years. I never once had the urge to dissect him.

First: I was very sorry to read about the death of Joan Acocella.

As I’ve said before, I always enjoyed reading her writing, particularly about dance (although I have no real interest in dance).

And now, on to the regularly scheduled blog post.

 
I am not, so far, excited by, or even interested in, artificial intelligence (except in a very general way). By the way, I do not think that artificial intelligence will end the human race. If that happens, at least in my lifetime, it will be accomplished by human beings.

Would I use artificial intelligence to help me write my stories? To paraphrase Orson Welles, the stories might end up being better, but they wouldn’t be mine.

Also, even if my writing could be improved by artificial intelligence, where would be the fun in that?

If writing was my business, of course, that might make a difference, but obviously it isn’t. I do want my writing to be read by an audience of more than one — that’s why I make it publicly available for free — but I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t fun.

But there is another, and more decisive, reason I won’t use artificial intelligence to write stories. The question that really hangs me up is not the question of fun — important as that is — it’s the question of ownership.

If I went to ChatGPT, or whatever, and developed a prompt to get it to write a story in my style and with my characters, who would own that story? Maybe there’s some fine print somewhere which says that I would own it, but what if tomorrow that fine print was changed to say the opposite?

Not worth the risk.

[Later: For an interesting article on the current legal situation with ownership, go here: “Is A.I. the Death of I.P.?“]

Now, it has been a while since I’ve started a new story, but that’s up to me to do. I’ve written some scenes, but until now they haven’t started to fit together.

But now, I think something is starting to come together. The turning point for me is usually a title. As I’ve talked about before, if you write a story in the conventional way, you can write it first and then title it later. When you write and publish serially, you need the title before you start posting, and now I think I may have a title…