stringbook

By Lauren Zima
June 16, 2011 

“I work from a place of embarrassment and fear,” Scott jokes.

“Parks and Rec” is a cast full of improvisers. Scott tries, and is sometimes successful.

“There’s a moment when Aziz (Ansari) asks me about ‘Lord of the Rings,’ and I said I wasn’t a fan of Peter Jackson’s interpretation,” he says. “When we did it, I thought, ‘That wasn’t particularly funny.’ But it made it on the show … The people I work with are way better than I am,” Scott says. “I finagle my way through a scene and they make me look good.”

By Emily Nussbaum
January 23, 2012 

The first season began with the Titanic disaster; the second plunges us into the trenches of the First World War, emphasizing the ways in which battle causes class distinctions to at once dissolve and become more starkly apparent. As veterans return from the front, Downton becomes an auxiliary hospital, an event that confronts its wealthier inhabitants with the uselessness of their lives. (Well, most of them; Maggie Smith’s fabulously haughty dowager isn’t having any mournful breakthroughs.) The season begins slowly, but with each episode the pace intensifies; and just when you feel that you can’t take another dignified refusal there’s a resonant insight. “‘Flattered’ is a word posh people use when they’re getting ready to say ‘no,’” one suitor in a cross-class flirtation says.

By Josef Adalian
November 27, 2011 

[Sound engineer John Bickelhaupt], whose formal title is “re-recording mixer,” is one of just four or five craftsmen hired by showrunners to perfect the sounds of laughter. He spends his days traveling from mixing stage to mixing stage, carrying a custom-built computer that can quickly adjust the tone, volume, and even gender of an audience … [His] craft has its roots in the early days of TV, when a sound engineer named Charley Douglass realized a technical need to re-create laughter. When I Love Lucy and other series were filmed, the responses were inconsistent, particularly if, say, scenes had to be shot repeatedly, with audiences laughing less heartily on each take, or when an edit snapped off the laughs in midstream. Douglass’s solution was called the “laff box,” a device that allowed him to substitute giggles and guffaws, along with applause, in place of the show’s original audio track … While Douglass intended his device to solve tech problems, the networks soon got hooked on the notion of cheap, easy-to-produce laughs … That’s when the laugh track earned its bad reputation. Because the tape loops were used for decades, “the joke is that all the people laughing are dead,” Bickelhaupt says. “It was true to a degree.”

By Jonah Lehrer
August 10, 2011

[A] new study suggests that spoilers can actually increase our enjoyment of literature. Although we’ve long assumed that the suspense makes the story—we keep on reading because we don’t know what happens next—this new research suggests that the tension actually detracts from our enjoyment.

Full disclosure: I’ve only read one of the twelve stories included in this study, as far as I can tell (which I can’t, for sure, because why didn’t they include the authors’ names or initials along with their stories’ titles on that little bar graph? I have no idea, unless it was to keep me up all night researching them. And in that case, nice try, but I Googled myself to sleep around midnight). What I really want to know is what did they give away about the end of Raymond Carver’s The Calm?

Anyway, my thoughts:

a) I’d argue that the age of information has lead to more obsession with seeking spoilers than avoiding them. Just ask Michael Ausiello—no, literally; Ask him. Though the term has been in print since as early as 1971, only the internet has made book, television and movie spoilers accessible enough to warrant spoiler alerts. You don’t need a media connection or a magazine subscription to get a hint or a scoop about what happens. If you know where to look, you can download chunks of script months before a TV episode airs. Not a teaser, not a rumor, but the actual content, in writing.

b) While the results may indicate that factors like language, characters, and themes contribute to a pleasurable literary experience, the premise of the study emphasizes plot.  It seems to take for granted that plot is linear, and even when it isn’t, we can treat it as though it is. If there’s a straight shot from Point A to Point E, it doesn’t matter where Points B, C, and D fall; if they stray from the map, the reader can, with or without realizing it, shift their interpretations to realign the points with the known conclusion, or even dismiss them altogether. 

c) The study also sort of backhandedly glorifies the plotted conclusion, though Lehrer writes that spoiled readers can still enjoy surprises “along the way.”  As they’re quoted, the researchers seem to imply that a writer’s primary intent is to “get” the reader at the end, while the reader’s primary intent is to get to the end. Though I’m the sort of reader who sometimes needs the prospect of a reveal dangling before me like a carrot (or a cupcake), that incentive is most effective when it develops naturally, expanding little by little. I don’t want to wonder, “What happens?” I want to wonder “What happens next?” That’s called anticipation. Isn’t anticipation kind of a good feeling?

d) And on the flip side, I think a certain amount of cognitive discomfort is healthy, especially in a fictional context where there’s no concrete or lasting impact on real life. Not only does suspense physiologically engage the brain, but processing cognitive failure, embarrassment, or dismay, consciously or subconsciously, trains our minds to handle, you know, actual failure, embarrassment, and disappointments.