Join us March 13 as the writing group Word Pirates puts a new twist on the old art of telling a good story over a round of beers. Accompanied by thirty craft beers on tap (plus cider!), the five Bay Area writers will read works of short fiction at TAPS Restaurant & Tasting Room in Petaluma. The event is free and open to the public.

When: Tuesday, March 13, 7 p.m.- 8:30 p.m.

Where: TAPS Restaurant & Tasting Room
205 Kentucky St.
Petaluma, CA 94952

For more information:
wordpirates@gmail.com
(707) 364-3746

About Word Pirates:

Word Pirates is a professional writing group in Petaluma founded by Joy Lanzendorfer and Marcia Simmons. The group meets twice a month to practice the art of creative writing, and members have published short stories, nonfiction, illustrated stories, poetry, and books.

Because he didn’t travel well, Alexander Gödel packed his bags (an upright suitcase, an Italian calf-skin attaché, and a sparkling-new bowling ball tote to house his goldfish) and headed to his local airport. In purchasing tickets to a foreign country—“somewhere with tall women and almond trees,” he requested—he was kindly informed that a passport would be necessary, as well as an airport offering international flights.

Read the rest here.

Marcia wrote this book as part of the Drink of the Week blog. According to the site:

“We’ve concocted the only guide that teaches you to create your own infallible drinks. Using a simple system of basic ratios, you will learn to:

* Mix new flavor combinations for the perfect new blend using the Flavor Profile Chart as a guide
* Master advanced mixology techniques from infusing liquors at home to creating custom-flavored syrups
* Serve the perfect drink every time, whether it kicks off a rowdy party or winds down a romantic evening!”

Buy Marcia’s book here.

Jacinto’s decision to switch from ethanol to methanol was purely economic. Backing heavy sacks of sugar and maize all the way from Punta to home, Punta to home, Punta to home, often stole the greater part of his day: leveraging prices, choosing durable sacks, sidestepping the unlabeled plastic bottles that seemed to pursue him like mice. Plus, Marietta’s calling of him. “¡Jacintito!” she would tease him each time he passed. “¡Tus chinelas – tan celosa!” And it was true: the streets had never been kind to his shoes. Her voice would linger as he lugged each fragile sack along the streets of Bluefields, the dirt-path wheel ruts where the sidewalk ended, the steep hillside home… But beyond this. Beyond the barbed wire and rusted panels marking the boundaries of his small property, there were almendros, pinos, ceibas. Trees for a hundred kilometers inland, uncut and unguarded. Free. The decision had been easy.

Read the rest of Ken’s story here.

Judith’s parents’ barn is full of wooden spools. There are dozens of them wound with rope as thick as tree branches. Being in the barn is like being inside a giant sewing kit.

Our moms told us to play out here because it is Judith’s birthday and they’re setting up for the party. I know Judith from Sunday school. Every week after church, our parents take us to brunch at Adele’s diner, where they put paper umbrellas in our Cokes. Judith and Julie, our parents always say. Judith and Julie.

“My boyfriend is this one,” Judith says.

Read the rest here.

All right, this kid is a spoiled brat. I never once had a reaction like this at Christmas–my parents would never have allowed me to spit in the faces of their presents. But also, this kid’s attitude toward books makes me sad.

Besides, I keep begging everyone to give me books for Christmas, and no one listens!

Merry Christmas, Word Pirates.

Did you know that Jane Austen pretty much lived out Pride and Prejudice in real life, only she didn’t get married at the end? Neither did I, but that is what Hollywood wants you to believe in its biopic “Becoming Jane.” Anne Hathaway plays Jane Austen in a film where she undergoes the events that would later become her memoir–oops, I mean novel–Pride and Prejudice.

Jane Austen, in the film, is very smart. You can tell she is smart because she does not smile as much as the other characters. In Hollywood shorthand, one of the ways you can tell that a character is a genius is by how few smiles that person gives. To illustrate, behold this graph I made:

As you can see, few-to-no smiles correlates with a higher level of intelligence, as perfectly performed by Jesse Eisenberg, who does not smile even once while playing Mark Zuckerberg the boy-genius of Facebook in “The Social Network.” (To be clear, I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg is a genius, but that’s the popular view of him because he is rich.) On the other end of the scale is Ashton Kutcher’s character in “Dude, Where’s My Car?” where he smiles constantly to indicate his character’s stoned-out state. Anne Hathaway’s Jane Austen is on the Mark Zuckerberg end of the scale, but is not quite as extreme because she is a girl.

Although she does not smile, Jane Austen does mumble what are supposed to be wry English witticisms. At least, I assume so. I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying because of the loud musical score that overwhelms the movie. To be fair, Anne Hathaway is charming and lovely to look at, which is accurate casting because everyone knows Jane Austen was a beauty.

When the movie opens, we get one of my favorite cliché images of writing: the writer scratching with a quill on a piece of paper while muttering to herself. (Incidentally, this is my third favorite kind of cliché writing scene, the second being woman writer in a nightgown typing on a typewriter and the first being the writer scribbling something down and then crumpling the paper up and throwing it in a trashcan.) Then we are introduced to characters whom we are supposed to believe Jane Austen based Pride and Prejudice on. There is a Mister Collins. There is a Lady Catherine de Bourgh. There is Elizabeth Bennett’s mother and father and sister. And of course there is a Mr. Darcy as well as a George Wickham. People say lines from Pride and Prejudice to Jane. They insult her like they do in scenes of the novel. Really, you could just see one of the many movie adaptations of “Pride and Prejudice” and skip this film altogether.

Eventually one of several love interests enter the scene, including the leading man, Tom Lefroy. He and Jane instantly hate each other. They bicker in a forest. She snubs him at a ball. Then at another ball, they say English witticisms to each other while dancing, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying because of the loud score problem.

Tom Lefroy challenges Jane. He gives her Tom Jones by Henry Fielding to read, which I don’t remember being racy but Jane Austen finds it so. He rocks her world by doing things people in the 19th Century would never do, such as run from a mixed-gender cricket match while stripping off his clothes so he can jump naked into a lake. Also, he takes her to a boxing match and gets beat up. Jane Austen falls in love with him.

But: conflict: there is another man who wants to marry Jane and he is rich. Jane loves Tom Lefroy, but he is poor. Jane is torn. Should she marry this rich guy and secure her financial position? Should she make-out with Tom Lefroy by a lake? Should she just try to be a writer, even though that is not sexy and she is a woman? At yet another ball, she finds herself dancing with both of her suitors at the same time, and at each turn, she thinks, Money? Love? Money? Love? What will she do??

Sometimes I wonder if Jane Austen’s sister did her a favor by burning all Jane’s letters after she died. This act made the real Jane Austen a permanent mystery, forcing us to always return to her work for clues into who she was and what she thought. On the other hand, that mystery seems to make people want to fictionalize her. Thus Jane Austen is forced to solve mysteries and to act out the plot of her own novels on the big screen. This never happens to Shakespeare. Well, not usually.

In real life, Jane Austen did have two suitors, one based on affection and the other based on position, but they certainly didn’t happen at the same time and they certainly weren’t as fabulous as the movie suggests. When those relationships didn’t work out, she didn’t “live by her pen,” as the movie says. Because women didn’t write books in those days, she was turned down by publishers and was dependent on her brother’s financial mercy until finally, at the end of her life, she started publishing her books. She gained a modicum of fame and then died at age 41 from an unknown disease, probably cancer.

This movie strays so completely from Jane Austen’s life story that it seems indifferent to who she was as a person and as a writer. Instead of allowing the audience to hear Austen’s brilliant prose—which after 200 years surely must be out of copyright—we get montages and overlaid images of Hathaway mumbling under violin music. Fictionalizing happens in every biopic, but this movie seems so uninterested in its subject that it just comes off as a cynical attempt to cash in on the Jane Austen craze.

As such, it widdles her life down to this: Jane Austen didn’t get married, so she lived out the circumstances of her courtship over and over again in her novels. And even assuming that’s so (it’s not), then surely there’s no point in watching this movie when her books are readily available.

If you haven’t read Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, you can read it or listen to him read it here.

I wouldn’t call the movie Howl a biopic. For one thing, I always want to pronounce biopic “bi-opp-ick” but that doesn’t seem to make as much sense as “bio-pick.” After all, I think it’s short for biography picture. I’m not entirely sure which one is correct. However, the better reason not to call it a biopic is that it isn’t one. The film weaves three very different parts together to tell the story of Ginsberg’s most famous poem: James Franco portraying Ginsberg, mostly in an interview or public-reading format; dramatized courtroom scenes from the Howl obscenity trial; and an animated interpretation of the poem with Franco’s voice over. It’s only about Ginsberg in so much as he wrote Howl and the film is mostly an adaptation of the poem.

Since it’s a movie about a writer, there are scenes of him at a typewriter. With little narrative outside the poem, there wasn’t room for scenes of him drinking or a montage of him being rejected. The trial is slotted in out of context, and the interviews are interspersed with one-dimensional interpretations of important moments and people in Ginsberg’s life. It’s kind of like they couldn’t make a documentary because everyone was dead, so they hired actors instead. The trial is fascinating (in fact, it could have been expanded upon for its own movie) and Franco really captured Ginsberg emotionally, even if at times he seemed to be doing an impersonation of him. I liked what they did, and I wanted them to do it more. More trial. More of Ginsberg’s relationships. Heck, even more groovy readings. There was only one thing I wanted less of, and it dominated the film: the animation.

I loved that we got to hear the whole poem. But usually the poem was accompanied by animation that just didn’t serve the film. It was distracting and embarrassing, turning a good idea into something I tried not to laugh at. Structurally, it’s innovative. And it almost works.  There are glimpses of the gritty, graphic novel style that could make for an edgy interpretation of Howl. The animator worked with Ginsberg on illustrated poetry books, so I can see the reasoning. But most of the animation kind of looked like a Hallmark card with the occasional wiener drawn on it.

Here is a sparkly saxophone man:

And here are zooming spirits:

And here is the wiener I promised you, but just the tip:

I couldn’t get a screen shot of it, but there is a part where someone comes down to ride one of the cocks in the flower-field of growing genitalia. For reals. Most of the computer animation looks outdated. I get the feeling that there was such loyalty to Ginsberg’s wishes and vision that it didn’t occur to anyone that they didn’t have to use 1990s animation.

The film lacked the obnoxious deference to the Beat Generation that seems to plague every discussion and dramatization of their lives and work. Instead of repeatedly telling you this was an IMPORTANT POEM, the film showed you. The appearances by Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, and the gang were light to the point that I wanted more of them (and less of the damn animation). Did I mention I didn’t like the animation?

OVERALL RATING: C+

RATING IF YOU DON’T INCLUDE THE ANIMATION: B+

INSIGHT INTO WRITER: B

ACTING: A-

CLICHE SCENES OF WRITER BEING WRITERLY: C- (Meaning there weren’t a lot of them! More typing montages, people!)