{"id":4087,"date":"2013-04-22T07:42:11","date_gmt":"2013-04-22T11:42:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/?p=4087"},"modified":"2013-04-22T18:08:13","modified_gmt":"2013-04-22T22:08:13","slug":"superman-a-wedding-and-mystery-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/?p=4087","title":{"rendered":"superman, a wedding, and mystery stories"},"content":{"rendered":"

1. As you may have heard, Superman just turned 75. I was never a huge Superman fan, but he and I do have some history.<\/a> <\/p>\n

2. I’ve just been re-watching the Robert Altman film A Wedding<\/em>, which I hadn’t seen in a decade or two. It’s even better than I thought. I remembered how funny it was (it’s one of Altman’s funniest films), but I didn’t remember the number of different levels it had. <\/p>\n

On the surface, it’s the story of the wedding of Dino Corelli and Muffin Brenner. Their families are large, dysfunctional, well-off, and incompatible.\u00a0 Preparations have been made at the reception for hundreds of guests, only one of whom shows up. There are pratfalls, alcohol, various drugs, attempts at infidelity, bad behavior, a tornado, many, many misunderstandings, and one death. There are 48 characters, all in the same place for the same event, and it can be said that they have 48 different experiences.<\/p>\n

It’s interesting seeing it now, after having seen Gosford Park<\/a><\/em>, because the films are more similar than I would have thought. Both are very concerned about how class distinctions (and many other things) can be revealed when large groups of people come together. <\/p>\n

It is pretty clear that Altman’s rather dim view of weddings had nothing to do with his opinion of romance, by the way. He’s obviously in favor of romance (sex, too) . But, as in Gosford Park<\/em>, marriage is a very complex social phenomenon and romance, if present at all, is only one component. <\/p>\n

It’s also obvious that this is one of the movies I was talking about when I said I’d learned a few things about writing parties<\/a> from Altman’s films. <\/p>\n

3. As I’ve said before, the mystery stories are nearly done, and I have been fairly sure what I was going to do next (more or less), but I’ve been a bit stumped by voice. <\/p>\n

My default is to use first person narration by Marshall (the intrepid assistant of the great detective — her “Watson,” as it were), but, as in Stevie One<\/em>, some stories can’t be told from Marshall’s point of view. <\/p>\n

I think I have the solution. It came to me yesterday. It doesn’t answer all of the questions, but probably enough to start. <\/p>\n

Because going through an entire novel and changing it from first person to third person, or vice versa, is really no fun.<\/p>\n

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1. As you may have heard, Superman just turned 75. I was never a huge Superman fan, but he and I do have some history. 2. I’ve just been re-watching the Robert Altman film A Wedding, which I hadn’t seen in a decade or two. It’s even better than I thought. I remembered how funny […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4087"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4087\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4090,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4087\/revisions\/4090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/u-town.com\/collins\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}