Michael Janairo

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Category: Writing

  • Plårk, plårk, plårk

    Plårk, plårk, plårk

    My wife has created a new word: plårk.

    It could rhyme with “park” or “pork” — either way seems to be fine.

    She has the word printed on T-shirts that she gives to her first-year drawing students. The idea she is trying to impress upon them is that making art is a combination of “play” and “work.” Thus, “plårk.”

    I imagine the word being used as follows:

    • “This assignment is plårk.”
    • “Did you plårk yet today?”
    • “Yeah, man, I plårked earlier today, and I’m going to be plårking later with some friends.”

    I suppose a sample declension would look something like this:

    • I plårk. I plårked. I am plårking. I have plårked.
    • You plårk. You plårked. You are plårking. You have plårked.
    • They plårk. They plårked. They are plårking. They have plårked.

    She says that in every class period at least one or two (sometimes more) students are wearing their “plårk” T-shirts.

    With about 50 students a semester, maybe in a few years the word will be in common usage by scores of young artists, plårking their way through the world.

    What do you think: Will plårk catch on?

     

  • Where I’ve Been: Part 2 — In Class with Lydia Davis

    Where I’ve Been: Part 2 — In Class with Lydia Davis

    For five weeks, on Tuesday nights in October and the beginning of November, I’ve spent a few hours in a room at the University of Albany with a few fellow writers and the multiple-award winning writer Lydia Davis.

    My classmates — all published writers — were talented and well-spoken, even if a few weren’t as gregarious as others.

    Speaking of gregarious, Lydia encouraged all of us to track metaphors in are daily lives — to include them in the things we overhear and read as part of our writer’s diaries — and that common abstract words like “gregarious” were derived from metaphors, because the word stems from a Greek word for “herd.”

    As for what to include in our writer’s diaries, Lydia suggested that she writes “whatever goes into my mind that interests me.”

    Most of the class was a writers workshop, reading fellow writers’ stories-in-progress and talking about them, which is always interesting to me. And we got to know each other by sharing what we’ve read in the past year — and that “reading diary” moment generated a long reading list for me.

    In terms of talking about the craft of writing, Lydia shared what she called five different kinds of narration, which she wasn’t sure if she had ever seen before but thinks she may have made up as a way of taking a writerly approach to reading to discover what a writer was doing in certain passages (and how a reader may want to make use of those moments in his or her own writing).
    These five categories aren’t anything new, but they offered a practical way of reading:

    1. Action: characters do things
    2. Comment: a reflection on something from a point of view
    3. Description: things shown through sensory detail
    4. Dialogue: characters talk
    5. Exposition/back story: things get explained, or histories get filled in

    It was all good stuff, and I enjoyed my fellow students’ writings immensely.

    So even though this all came right in the crush of the new website I have been working on, I’m glad I was able to take part. And it was free, courtesy of the New York State Writers Institute.

  • Haiku movie reviews, May 2015

    Haiku movie reviews, May 2015

    Ex Machina (2015)
    A hot bot twists minds
    As it takes the Turing test
    High-tech interlude

  • NaNoWriMo and Me

    I’ve never officially signed up for NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Month — though I know many people who have, and today my social media feeds are filled with folks sharing their words counts.

    I’d love to do it. And I agree with this great advice from John Scalzi that it can be done — you can crank out enough words for a novel-length manuscript in a month. And I also agree with these words of wisdom from Larry Brooks in a 2010 GalleyCat article: “Don’t finish. Make this the start of something.”

    But I want to use this time to try something I haven’t done before: Outline a novel first.

    I’ll let you know how it goes.

  • On writers and (not) reading

    I’m sure I read a quote somewhere recently that said something along the lines that eventually a writer must decide to be either a reader or a writer.

    Has anyone seen this quote? Do you know what I’m talking about?

    The idea behind the quote struck me as intriguing (and maybe a little self-serving). After all, the common wisdom is that all writers must be readers. You have to read the language to know how to use the language, to know the history into which your words are joined. The thing is in my daily life I face a constant dilemma: when I’m not working at my day job, I can read OR write (or watch TV, sleep, do household chores, pay bills, cook, do laundry, buy groceries, socialize, etc.). Most often, though, it is choice between reading and writing. Writing usually wins out, and the guilt-inducing pile of books (in print and ebooks) grows larger and larger.

    If I didn’t read, though, and if that quote that I think I saw recently that I can’t place now has any merit, then maybe I don’t have to feel guilty about not reading all the books that I haven’t been reading. (Though it isn’t clear to me if that quote means I can excuse my guilt when I’m not writing because I’m watching TV, sleeping, socializing, etc.)

    The thing is, though, I’ve always been a big reader. A slower, reader, sure, but I have a large appetite for books. One of the best things anyone has ever said about me is that for me reading is like plugging me in.

    There was a time when I only read big, old books: Les Miserable, Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Crime and Punishment. There was a time when I plowed through novels and short stories, consuming the published works of single authors such as Raymond Carver, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Chabon, Jayne Anne Phillips, Tolkien, and people whose new books I often consume right away, like Margaret Atwood. Lately, it’s taking me longer and longer to read anything.

    My most recent purchase, the 1998 comic book series called Stone, which incorporates Philippine folklore in its story, has taken me more than two weeks just to read the first issue, and its not long at all — and its mostly pictures, too.

    In some ways, with all the reading I do on the web — news, social media, work-related articles — I might be doing just as much reading, if not more, as I was doing when I was in graduate school, when the web was but a wee thing.

    So instead of me thinking that my reading has slowed way down because of my age and my new need for reading glasses, I like to think it is because I’m a writer first and need my free brain time for not only the act of writing but also the thinking and processing and nurturing of the ideas, characters, actions and sensations that go into my writing.

  • On Broadway

    This is cool. My words have made it to the bright shining lights of Broadway.

    My former Times Union colleague Steve Barnes (thanks, Steve!) sent me a photo from outside the Lyric Theater, where a revival of the classic show “On the Town” has just opened in previews.

    The photo shows a poster that quotes the Times Union (alas not my name, but those are my words) from a review of the musical that I wrote when the same production was presented last year at Barrington Stage Theater in the Berkshires.

    Pretty cool, to be blurbed on Broadway.

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  • Fact-checking family stories

    I’m not in the habit of fact-checking family stories, despite the countless times (as a journalism student and journalist) I’ve heard: “If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.”

    So it was more of a fluke than a deliberate act when I came across a document linked to what I’ve come to think of as the precipitating moment of my family’s coming to America.

    A google search led me to the digitized book “Official Register of Officers and Cadets: United States Military Academy,” which included not only my grandfather (a cadet from 1926 to 1930), but also the conditions upon which he became a cadet.

    Screen Shot 2014-09-21 at 5.13.02 PM

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  • On West Point and my father’s 60th reunion

    My father, Max, and my brother Anthony at West Point.
    My father, Max, and my brother Anthony at West Point.

    This past weekend, my father celebrated his 60th college reunion at the US Military Academy at West Point.

    He attended the long weekend of activities with my older brother who, unlike me, had vivid memories of when we lived on post (I was but a wee toddler, and yet I remain a proud Army brat and always feel an upsurge of emotion when I’m at West Point).

    I met up with them on a Sunday morning, after all the official reunion events were over. I met some of my father’s classmates in the lobby of the hotel as they were getting ready to head back to their respective homes. We went into town for a brunch at Andy’s Diner (a place that has been around since 1903 and which many Plebes went to, though my father had never been there. I gave them copies of a short fiction anthology of military sci-fi that includes one of my stories. We toured the West Point Museum.
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  • Moss Hart, Act One and the persistence of You Can’t Take It With You

    Tony Shalhoub as George S. Kaufman and Santino Fontana as Moss Hart in "Act One" at Lincoln Center (Photo by Joan Marcus)
    Tony Shalhoub as George S. Kaufman and Santino Fontana as Moss Hart in “Act One” at Lincoln Center (Photo by Joan Marcus)

    “Act One” officially opens at Lincoln Center later this week, but this weekend I saw a preview showing of it. It’s good. Not great — the story of the life of Moss Hart, the playwright who grew up poor in the Bronx and had only a eighth-grade education (he had to go to work) but who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize.

    The production is magnificent — a rotating set, great period costumes, top-notch acting from Tony Shalhoub (as an older Moss Hart, narrating Our Town-style; as the father of the 11-year-old Moss Hart; and as George S. Kaufman, who works with the young adult Moss Hart); the young adult Hart is strongly played by Santino Fontana, who may be best known as the voice of the evil prince Hans in the movie musical “Frozen”; and Andrea Martin, nailing multiple roles.

    The play (written and directed by James Lapine), though, moves a bit slowly in, yes, Act 1, and feels very much like a less madcap Moss Hart play — a little dated in trying to stay true to the source material, Hart’s 1959 autobiography about his Dickensian early 20th-century life. What also seems dated is the ease of access Hart had to some of the brightest minds of his day, despite his lack of education. Perhaps a 21st century analogy would be talented computer coders and programmers who drop out of college and gain access to the best and brightest in that field.

    What was most interesting to me though was what happened before I saw the show. I wanted to see the play in no small part because I had acted in Hart and Kaufman’s “You Can’t Take it With You” in high school, back in the 1980s.

    At work, one of my coworkers, when I told her I was going to see the play, said, “I performed in ‘You Can’t Take it With You’ in high school.” She’s in her 60s, which means her high school days were in the 1960s. And also at work, another colleague said, “I was in ‘You Can’t Take it With You’ in high school!” That colleague, however, is an intern, a college senior, and her high school days were in the 2000s.

    There it was, three generations of people all working at the same place all having been in the same play, which was first performed 1936 and won the Pulitzer in 1937.

    So if you love the theater, and if you’ve been in any of Hart’s plays (such as “The Man Who Came to Dinner”), then this play is highly recommended.