This clock is broken. 
But is it?
Tag Archives: writing process
“Swiss Family Robinson” Stripped from “Paint”
Just finishing the third draft of Paint, the second part of a trilogy of coming-of-age screenplays, and this scene had to be switched out: DAVIS, coming down off a bad mushroom trip, is sitting with his crush, ELLEN.
DAVIS: Let’s watch Swiss Family Robinson.
ELLEN: Really? It’s the Disney film, right?
DAVIS: I love that film.
ELLEN: You watch it with your father?
DAVIS: No. (Pause) I don’t know. He read us the book. I remember that. He sat in his old rocking chair. It creaked as he stretched back, the light over his shoulder.
ELLEN inserts the tape and sits on the other side of the couch.
DAVIS: He had a deep voice. It was good for the book.
Dramatic orchestral music plays on the television. A ship drifts across the screen in a hurricane winds and high seas.
DAVIS: (Watching the film intently) I had my first existential moment watching this film.
ELLEN: (Sleepy) Yeah?
DAVIS: When they finish the tree house and they take the mother upstairs. (Pause) It was so amazing, so perfect. It looked like a perfect place. 
DAVIS: (Looking at ELLEN, who sleepily looks back) And then it wasn’t. It was the opposite. It was fake or something. I don’t know. I had to the leave the room. My step-mother made me go to bed because she thought I was sick.
The Swiss Family Robinson is revealed trapped below decks, yelling for help but still looking orderly and respectable. The ship grounds out on a rock.
DAVIS: (Pause, sighing deeply) You don’t remember doing something amazing as a kid – your absolute favorite thing in the world – and then feeling like it was pointless? You thought it was this thing. And then it isn’t.
DAVIS continues to watch the film.
MR. ROBINSON (On Television): Hans, help your mother!
HANS: If I had been captain, I would have fought the pirates instead of running into storm. 
The Swiss Family Robinson climbs to the top of the ship’s decks and sees that the ship is grounded near an island.
Close up on DAVIS as he watches intently.
MR. ROBINSON (On Television): At least we’re not too far from land.
MRS. ROBINSON: Then there’s hope.
FRITZ: Maybe we could build a raft. There’s enough wood.
DAVIS: Of course they can build a raft! Of course they can.
Smiling, DAVIS looks over at ELLEN and sees that she is asleep. He stares at her naked shoulder, moves forward and looks as if he is about to kiss it when she opens her eyes.
ELLEN: Just watch your movie.
DAVIS awkwardly looks back at the television screen.
KEVIN ROBINSON: Look what I found! The captain’s dogs! Are they glad to see me!
The Robinson Family begins to cut barrels and wood and construct a raft to go to shore.
DAVIS looks around at ELLEN again, who looks angelic in her sleep, and considers touching her shoulder again, but pulls the blanket over her instead. He turns back to the film and watches as a raft is built and lowered into the ocean from the ship. DAVIS falls asleep.
Ice Friday: Vladimir Nabokov’s Essential Truth
Wait! There, I feel once again that I shall really express myself, shall bring the words to bay. 
I myself picture all of this so clearly, but you are not I, and therein lies the calamity.
(From Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading)
Ice Friday: Cormac McCarthy’s World
What is wrong with this story is that it is not a true story. Men have in their minds a picture of how the world will be. How they will be in that world. 
The world may be many different ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the world they dream of. Do you believe that? (From Cormac McCarthy’s Cities of the Plains)
Anori Outtake: Pop-Up Babar
Dee sat on the floor and went through the books on the bottom shelves, and opened an old Pop-Up book, Babar’s Moon Trip. 
She opened and closed the center of the book, the space station rising up, falling down again. 
She played with the bent point of the space tower, toying with the tip of it until it broke and rolled the dirty piece of cardboard between her thumb and forefinger.
Anori Outtake: In Custody
“Miss Sinclair.” Officer Duncan sat pert behind his desk and held out a blue index card. “You fill in one of these?”
“No.”
“I need you to fill it in.”
“I’ll wait for my lawyer.”
He hunched over the desk, his black pointy hair sticking out from his small features and hands, and turned away from her to Officer Manzoni at the desk beside him. “Processing the 10-64?”
Officer Manzoni, intent on his screen, his goateed chin pushed forward, wire-frame glasses tight against the bridge of his nose, took a moment to respond. “Series two.”
“It’s not Series two.”
Officer Manzoni shrugged.
Officer Duncan glanced down at Dee again, almost surprised she was still there, waiting like a child. “1151, you can have a seat.”
Dee waited, looking through the newspapers again and considered the picture of her jumping again, peering at her half exposed breast again and then her arms awkwardly out, her right leg almost straight out, like she had been pushed. It made her stomach turn, looking at herself, thinking how she could have broken her ankle and then remembering the tunnel and the dark and thinking she might actually still be in there, comatose, leaking toward her last breath. She looked around and saw Officer Duncan over her, Officer Manzoni just behind.
“This way.”
Anori Outtake: Taking Pictures
She opened her eyes to see the intern with his phone up, flat, facing her; he was taking a picture.
“What are you doing?”
He lowered it as she stared back and looked down, opening a file. Dee waited for him to look back, but he wouldn’t, keeping his face stupidly low.
“Hello?” Dee knocked on the table; everyone looked up at that.
He hunched forward. “I’m sorry?”
“Fucking admit it.”
He made a ridiculous quizzical face and looked around at the others.
Dee stood and reached across the table.
“What is this?” The judge returned from the hall.
“This guy just took my picture.”
“Miss Sinclair, you will have to sit down.”
“He just took my fucking picture!”
“Your language!”
“Is it allowed, judge? Yes or no?”
“No.”
“Look at it then.” Dee waved at the lawyer to surrender his phone.
She glanced back at the lawyers. “Mr. Cates, did you take her picture?”
“I was scrolling through my messages, looking for a file-”
“Did you take her picture, Mr. Cates?”
“I was…It was a mistake.”
Ice Friday: Vladimir Nabokov on the Novel
One of the functions of all my novels is to prove that the novel in general does not exist. The book I make is a subjective and specific affair. I have no purpose at all when composing my stuff except to compose it. 
I work hard, I work long, on a body of words until it grants me complete possession and pleasure. If the reader has to work in his turn – so much the better. Art is difficult. (Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions)
Anori Outtake: In Love With Shirley Partridge
“You know The Partridge Family? Or you’re too young?”
“David Cassidy.”
“I wanted Shirley Partridge to be my mother.” 
He moved his arms like a broken fan, spinning without effect. “I wanted that woman to come into my bedroom at night and tell me what was right in life.”
“You wanted to have suckle with her.”
“I wanted her listen to my regret. She knew what was right. She understood the secret of innocence.”
“Suckle.”
“That beautiful Hammond organ, the harmonies. Do you remember? It was a real world, real, an alternate space that had real possibility, following interior childlike rhythms, saying those things out loud.” 
He breathed in and took Dee’s hands like they were precious things, like she had brought them from somewhere distant. “I would sit and stare at the TV after it was over, just sit there through whatever was next. I hoped it would come back. It was real to me. Can you believe that? It was as real as anything I will ever know.” He scraped his sandal back and forth. “I met the guy who wrote the music. I met him in California.”
Ice Friday: Henry Miller on Writing Sex
Sometimes in the recording of a bald sexual incident great significance adheres. Sometimes the sexual becomes a writing, pulsating facade such as we see in Indian temples. Sometimes it’s a fresco hidden in a sacred cave where one may sit and contemplate on things of the spirit. 
There is nothing I can possibly prohibit myself from doing in this realm of sex. It is a world unto itself and a morsel of it may be just as destructive or beneficent as a ton of it. The gods came down from above to fornicate with human kind and with animals and trees, with the earth itself. Why are we so particular? Why can we not love – and do all the other things which give us pleasure too? 
We fear to lose ourselves. And yet, until we lose ourselves there can be no hope of finding ourselves.