Would OSC protest if language he chose not to use were added to his plays (or books, maybe), in order to make them more palatable or "true" for given audiences?
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posted
Actually my question is "Why didn't Card, a much better writer than I am, write such a lousy article?"
Try a different tack. Explain the situation - without the loaded language, as the second Salt Lake Tribune article did - and then ask why Simon and other playwrights don't offer alternative versions of their plays, minus the profanity.
Spend some time talking about language and how cursing is considered "adult," when oftimes it's just a childish way to shock people or an easy way to get a laugh. Talk about Neil Simon and his history of amazing plays, possibly the greatest living playwright, and ask why someone of that skill must go for the easy laugh.
Acknowledge the playwright's control over the work without sounding sarcastic - again, as the second article did - but ask why, if versions of his movies are made for airline and television viewings, why versions of his plays couldn't be made for school and amateur productions where such language is inappropriate. Then there wouldn't be a question of unauthorized changes, and they would be available to a much wider range of productions. Suggest that Simon try it, and then see which version gets licensed more often.
Talk about how pervasive cursing is in entertainment today, and discuss in glowing terms how wonderful it would be to have quality adult entertainment without the obligatory shock words tossed in to make it seem "real."
Such an article, written with the masterful phrasing and pacing that OSC is capable of, would be something that might make Simon and other playwrights think. It offers a suggestion, not a kneejerk condemnation, and a reasonable one at that.
[ August 19, 2003, 07:53 AM: Message edited by: Chris Bridges ]
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quote:Deidre, cuss words are often (usually?) not taken literally. They are usually used for emphasis, humor or to express surprise or anger by people in all the social classes on occasion. When does anybody mean "f___ you!" literally?
Right. Of course.
quote:My objection was to Card's use of the phrase "ludicrously without meaning."
And I still object to your objection because I think he's trying make a point about how expletives lack real meaning so he can make the comparison between the word "f***" used in the play and his hypothetically use of "k***." I really don't think he's saying that "he can't see any reason why a character should cuss."
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posted
I agree with Chris Bridges that OSC could have written a much better, more convincing piece.
I have an alternative hypothesis as to why the article was written the way it was. I will assign as many motives and possibly negative characteristics to OSC as OSC did to Simon.
I think OSC all of a sudden realized that the Rhino Times deadline was approaching and had an "Oh dear, I have to write something for this stupid column again. Why did I get myself into this?" moment.
So, he jotted down, an off the cuff rant that he felt emotionally passionate about, without finding out the facts first, just to have his column filled. OSC admits he procrastinates until his wife tells them they need money (see the sci-fi interview). He probably procrastinates in real life on other stuff too. When he does this, with short articles it is more glaringly obvious because they don't go through the critiquing rigors that he goes through in his novel.
Normally, even when I disagree with OSC, he appears to have put more thought into an opinion than he did into this one. But, OSC is human. Let him be lazy and rant once in a while. We all do. It doesn't really harm us, does it? It just reminds us that we always have to be questioning everything anyone tells us, because they may not have our best interests at heart.
AJ punctuation round up edit (and it is still lousy)
posted
Banna, I'll bet you're right. It isn't flattering to Uncle Orson, though. Whatever the intent, the essay could have been written better.
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Frankly, i'm much more willing to explain this essay over this, since i, at least, have been a chronic procrastinator most of my life, rather than writing OSC off as becoming more and more crotchety.
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posted
I just mean that it isn't flattering to a writer to tell him he published some seriously sloppy writing.
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posted
I'm not fond of OSC's rants againsts elitists and intellectuals.
But...
I think that the idea that theater scripts should be inviolate is laughable.
Plays are not novels -- confined to the page, dependent only on the words to convey meaning.
Directors and actors and the demographics of the audience should be part of the equation when it comes to staging a play.
I'm not saying that I support fully-sanitized versions of plays. And because of the parameters and condtions of the modern marketplace, I am a supporter of copyright law.
But not allowing changes to a script seems to me to run counter to the entire history and goals of dramatic performance.
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posted
Yes, I'm making an unflattering judgment on OSC in this case My other point is though I am making it on about as little evidence as OSC appeared to have about Simon.
In the few personal interactions I've had with OSC I've liked him as a person very much, and he was willing to listen to a passionate rant I had about some of his characters.
Once you get to know a person regardless of their field, and actually know some of their motives, for the most part, you tend to not include them in the broad "elite" brush. A very few people could retain that "elite" title. The person I always picture in my mind as an "elite" is the guy that does the interviews on Inside the Actors Studio. But, when he interviewed himself for one of their anniversary shows, he showed quite a bit of humanity.
I think we've probably established that OSC doesn't know Simon personally. If OSC did, I think he would have written a very different more compassionate article, even while probably disagreeing. The problem is that that is the standard we are used to him writing to, and he didn't do that this time and we are disappointed.
posted
In light of your earlier request for someone to comment, Banna, I'll just say that what you're saying makes all kinds of sense, and that I agree with you completely.
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posted
It's worth pointing out that OSC HAS to maintain pretty strict control of his OWN intellectual property. If he's quoted without permission, or someone makes a tribute website with fan fiction or some such, he'd whack 'em.
Think about the Mona Lisa. She's everywhere. They put funny hats on her. They put someone else's lips on her and make her talk on used car commercials.
You know why? She's in the public domain. Leonardo da Vinci is DEAD, and has no estate or survivors controlling his creations (as , say, Rembrandt does). My husband's old company had a color management product called the da Vinci, because they would have had to pay royalties to use the name Rembrandt.
Then they proceeded to make a very suggestive training video ("That's it, now do it faster") designed by Germans (German company) that many American customers found offensive.
It was a debacle. Simon may be unwilling to give an inch because stuff like that can happen.
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posted
Hmm, all of Rembrandts works are definitely in the public domain throughout Europe and America. He's been dead longer than even the heavily extended copyright terms of recent years.
Perhaps they've managed to get the name protected as a trademark.
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Glad to think people still think I make sense sometimes. I don't know if I will have a shred of dignity left once people read my story in the fur thread. Though, I guess sense and dignity are not necessarily the same thing. And I posted that story voluntarily.
I hope I haven't offended OSC in what I've said about him if he's reading this thread.
quote: Kathy Kidd's letter demonstrates she, at least, got what he was really trying to say--that a real artist seeks to communicate through his art, rather than inflict it upon someone.
What letter are you referring to, CJ?
Before the thread dies, let me point out that I don't disagree with Card's belief that giving your audience what they want is often a good idea and can make your work more accessible. I do disagree with the tone of his piece, his assumptions about Simon specifically, and the motives and rationale he ascribes to people who don't change their work in general.
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quote:I hope I haven't offended OSC in what I've said about him if he's reading this thread.
Banna, are you kidding? It's possible that you're wrong, but you certainly weren't offensive. You put forth a very plausible scenario, based on information OSC has made public about his work habits. Where could the offensive part of that be?
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posted
Welcome to the club. Man, you and Dragon in the same day! You know, this is going to involve extra snacks and everything. Are you trying to ruin everything?
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posted
Hmmm. I think I found that article to be mildly offensive. What does he mean by provincial or elistist? I still don't understand it... To me, speaking as someone who wants to be a writer, a person has every right to object to cuts and changes made in their play or story or whatever. I know I would. After all, good art, interesting art should not have to cater to the taste of the masses otherwise we get things that are so bland. But, on the otherhand, the F word is often overused as if a person is saying, ooo, how edgy, using the f word fifty times in a row. Am I alone in thinking the term "f word" is really funny? Anyway, I can see it from both sides but to me it's unfair to call someone so many names just for not wanting their play cut. If they don't like the language they out to use some other play or write one of their own.
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posted
I shall quote Tristan from page three of Ryan Hart's thread The New Dictators.
quote: Uhm, since we are talking about posting styles, may I lodge a complaint with you, Morbo? Your habit of ending most sentences with a line break makes your posts flow weirdly and is, to me, stylistically difficult to read. If I slow down it doesn't bother me much, but I usually scan the threads very quickly and when, if in a hurry, I get to a post that is formatted out of the norm, I tend to skip it. I don't know if I speak for more people than myself, but if you wish to increase the chances of your posts being fully read and appreciated by people of my sensitivities, you might perhaps consider changing to normal paragraphs.
I'm rather on the random side myself... I still wish people would stop saying stuff like "cultural elite" and "that's too PC" because for some reason I can't figure out it drives me loony.
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posted
Somehow I don't think that Mr. Simon is thinking, "Aha! I've got those backward middle-Americans now!" Give me a break.
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posted
Syn, line break=line feed=hitting return or enter. I tend to hit enter after many sentences, instead of only to start a new paragraph. At least in your 11:25 pm post, you do to. Tristan (and others, I suppose) think it chops up the flow of my posts when read.
I'll try to change, but it's a tough habit to break. I had to delete about 3 <enter>s just in this short post, and I was thinking about it!
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posted
At the risk of reviving the whole culture war debate, I'm tossing this article, Is It Curtains for Theatre?, into the fray. In it, theatre critic Toby Young raises a lot of issues that come up in OSC's invective:
quote:So what kinds of plays are likely to appeal to my peer group? Within the theatrical community, the general consensus is that what’s needed is a John Osborne or an Arnold Wesker, an Angry Young Man who’s going to light a fire under the Establishment. Ask any broadsheet critic and they’ll tell you that the West End has become too ‘safe’ and ‘middle-class’, much like it was in the 1950s…
Much the same thinking led to the Royal Court backing a new, provocative school of writers in the 1990s led by Sarah Kane. Her play Blasted managed to outrage Middle England by including scenes in which a man is raped, has his eyes plucked out and then eats a dead baby. Kane’s succès de scandale gave rise to a new movement called ‘in-yer-face’ theatre, but it quickly became apparent that, stripped of its obscene content, it contained little that was new or exciting. Today, too many young playwrights think that the only criterion of success is whether a leader appears in the Daily Mail condemning their work as an affront to public decency.
Rather than yet another attempt to épater le bourgeois, what’s needed is a counter-revolution, a new respect for the traditional virtues of the well-made play. Admittedly, I’ve been working as a critic for only a year, but the new plays that I’ve enjoyed the most have been the ones that combine a fairly highbrow intellectual content with a lowbrow sense of just how to keep an audience entertained…[Their authors] realise that if you want to take an audience into new territory it’s sensible to re-use some of the old guy-ropes.
(I'm stepping out for a bit, but I'll respond to any thoughts people might have on the article when I get back.)
posted
Wow, I didn't realize there had been more posts.
CJ, I'm not sure what you were talking about when you said Kidd 'got it'? Her letter had virtually nothing to do with Card's letter that I could tell beyond the kind of tangential fact that they were irritated by a performer/artist. What does her letter say about an artist in relation to the standards of the community? Maybe the rest of her audience really got into the Peter, Paul and Mary act....
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posted
Great link, Deirdre. Here is a quote that I think epitomizes the "intellectual elite" OSC so despises:
quote: The rot began with Samuel Beckett. He, more than any other playwright, was responsible for the idea that in order to be considered ‘art’, a play has to be difficult and inaccessible. Never mind that Shakespeare constantly threw in bits of business designed to appeal to the groundlings, or that Ibsen and Chekhov knew everything there is to know about keeping an audience on its toes, Beckett was applauded for refusing to compromise, for being resolutely non-commercial. After Beckett, any concession to the popular audience was regarded as ‘selling out’
posted
While I don't necessarily disagree that we began to see such things most dramatically with Beckett, a few observations.
First, I'd put the beginning of the change more with Camus, who won the Nobel Prize for Lit before Beckett was popular. His writing isn't much closer to traditional writings, but the indicators are pretty clear.
Second, Beckett never intended even his strangest plays to redefine art. Beckett was a writer convinced he would live out his life in obscurity (until proven otherwise) because he didn't think his work would or even could fit in with mainstream art. He wrote what he felt he had to write.
Third, while Beckett's writing appears "difficult and inaccessible", it is not. In fact, one of the remarkable things about it is that while it defies traditional analysis (and is the nightmare of most english lit majors), it is incredibly enjoyable to experience. Audiences can go see Beckett plays and be baffled over what exactly they are about but also be greatly moved. This is not inaccessibility, but direct accessibility, a bypassing of the social filters that are on most other works. This is not to say that bypassing social filters is the right way, and that otherwise is wrong, but that Beckett did things one way, and others do things their ways. It is not at all uncommon for me to read a Beckett short story out loud to someone, and for them to be incredibly moved by it, being made happy and sad, yet having little idea what goes on in the story.
So while Beckett may have been the greatest pioneer of the movement to obfuscate meaning in performances, I would not consider him part of the movement.
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posted
Thanks, Jacare. I’m glad you pulled out that bit about Beckett, since the article’s critique of Beckett’s influence was one of the main things that endeared it to my heart. I would have quoted it myself, only I didn’t want fugu to think I was baiting him again.
I also liked the next paragraph:
quote:Beckett’s pernicious influence on postwar British drama was compounded by the ideas of Bertolt Brecht. Brecht was an unashamed Stalinist who harboured a puritanical contempt for the idea that people might actually enjoy themselves at the theatre. In his communist vision of the future, theatres were to be the indoctrination centres where the workers received instruction on how to become better citizens. To this end, he railed against such ‘capitalist’ conventions as sympathetic characters, colourful sets, incidental music, atmospheric lighting ...anything, in fact, that threatened to keep theatre-goers entertained. The object of a good production, he believed, was to ‘alienate’ the audience, to unsettle them, to shake them out of their complacency.
Never mind that I love Brecht. I still can’t deny that he is largely responsible for the contemporary notion that good theater should be offensive and medicinal.
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posted
You know, I think I've seen a 'Is this the end of theater? piece for about the last million years.
As to the article, you can see just what it's talking about in 'Cats' and 'Starlight Express'. Yep. I mean, what's 'The Producers' about? Who knows? I don't. :/
posted
I'm actually making a serious point. You have all these articles about the obscurity of theater to the common joe, yet there's one vital ingredient missing from both Orson's article and that dude you just posted. What could it be? Perhaps actual theater showings to actually, you know, provide evidence?
So, let's take a look at these awful, elitist plays that OSC is complaining about.
quote: "Polish Joke," a comedy by David Ives, kicks off the third season of the Deep Dish Theater Company of Chapel Hill. The play is the story of Jan Sadlowski, a Polish-American man who has spent his life trying to deny his ethnic background. In a series of comic sketches, he seeks to remake himself, changing everything from his name to his national origin.
Woah! Totally anti-family!
quote: Raleigh Little Theatre's season continues today with the opening of the drama "Children of a Lesser God," the story of the relationship between a young, deaf woman and her idealistic, hearing teacher.
Dear God! That just drips intellectual haughtiness from every pore.! :/
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posted
I was intentionally a bit vague on that topic (first rule of paper writing in the real world: if you can't define something well, don't; invent a nifty sounding term), but I'll try to elaborate a bit.
First, a bit of a structure. Plays in some way involve emotion. I'd even go so far as to say that there is no art that does not at least attempt to involve emotion in its experience in a major way, and no good art that does not.
I am not saying that emotion is the most important thing to the analysis of art, or the only important thing, but it is an important thing, but as is customary I shall choose a mode, or vector, of analysis, and it shall be emotional analysis.
When viewing a play as a carrier/transmitter/creator of emotion (henceforth, an emotive work), it is important to ask what internal structures (to the play) facilitate this action, and what manner they do it in.
Since Shakespears is a ready reference point, consider his plays. In particular, consider how he portrays certain insults. For instance, at the beginning of Romeo and Juliet (and in several other places in various plays) he has one character bite his nails at others. This is an insult in the play, and also in the society of Shakespeare's time.
These are two very different roles. While it may be less clearly understood by the reader/viewer that it is an insult if they lack the societal background, in the play it will nevertheless still be an insult. However, to the modern person it will not be an insult when viewed personally.
This is still not what I would call a societal filter; this is a societal convention, a common reference point borrowed from a common experience (theoretically). Beckett uses such things regularly, as well (though perhaps less often).
A societal filter is the implicit assumption that (some system of) the societal conventions in a piece are meaningfully representative of human emotional experience.
some notes on and ramifications of this concept:
There is nothing wrong with this assumption. In fact, it will generally be a correct assumption, by direct example (notable possible exceptions lie in the area of extreme speculative fiction).
Societal filters may be (and often are) unintentional. Shakespeare loved writing about Italian people, but for some reason they always seem to act like English (and sometimes French) people.
The boundaries of societal filters are not well defined. Many possible rearrangements and combinations may be useful for the analysis of a given piece.
As to why there are no societal filters in Beckett, it is because he never assumes the importance of any societal conventions. If he considers one important, he tries to explain its important. If he includes one but not explain it, it does not hold importance (to his story).
This can be seen reflected in numerous stories of Beckett's. For instance, one story is all about the importance of supporting someone, and of being independent. It tries to expose that importance explicitly, without societal reference (indeed, the world is so deconstructed that there are no other people in it).
Or in Beckett's views on love: he repeatedly uses conventional modes of love, then breaks them down (sometimes by building them up!) to get to the root of the mode's importance (love), rather than relying on assumptions surrounding the mode.
posted
Storm, the article I linked did give examples. One of them, the Sarah Kane play, was even mentioned in the section I quoted.
No one is saying that every play produced is offensive and incomprehensible. But in my experience there is a tendency among theater people (i.e., people who work in, teach, or write about theater) to take a play less seriously if it’s easy to follow or has bourgeois moral assumptions.
And, sure, "The Death of [whatever]" articles are pretty easy to come by, mostly because it's a good way to get people's attention so the author can get into what he really wants to talk about. That doesn't mean they say nothing new or worthwhile.
posted
Except they're only absolutes when viewed incorrectly, without the societal filters . After running through the appropriate hatrack and lit analysis filters we get their true meaning:
"Beckett doesn't do that much".
Actually, I stand by their absolutism, but only with regards to Beckett's later works.
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posted
If I did that, I wouldn't be a lit major, now would I . We'll start with the last five things he published (not sure what those are off the top of my head), and I may name an earlier cutoff later.
*marshals Beckett's works around him to look through*
As a side note, while my cutoff may seem arbitrary (it is, largely), and any adjustment to it will almost certainly be dependent upon an observation of the very phenomenon I allege is characteristic of his later works, this is because my observation is an attempt at a classificatory observation.
So long as my observation is classificatorily useful, that is, delineates a collection of Beckett's works in an analytically useful way in line with the parameters I have asserted for the boundaries (that is, at the end of his career), my observation is successful.
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posted
Arbitrary is fine, though I'll admit I was hoping for a slightly broader range of stuff to work with . For now, any boundaries are useful, so long as they define the limits of the debate.
Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (1983)
Catastrophe (1984) What Where (1984)
Quad (1984)
Stirrings Still (1988)
Since I'm way more familiar with his drama, I'll probably focus on Catastrophe and What Where, his last two plays. They both involve depictions of authority--some sort of political dictator in one and a director of a play in the other.
I did see them on Beckett on Film, which I recommend, btw, but I don't have the scripts on hand. So I guess I've got some marshalling of my own to do...
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Whatever the intent, the essay could have been written better.
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