don juan found dead in miami. yeah he's alright but he died

Hi! Not sure how often you’re on AO3 these days or whether you’ve seen the comment I left, so I guess I’ll ask you here instead… I really love The PlayWright, would it be OK with you if I translate it into Chinese?

Hello there!! I check my inbox about once a week; I'm so sorry if I missed your comment. I'm so behind on responding to them!!

Anyway, I would be honored to have you translate The PlayWright to Chinese, so long as the original work/author (me lol) is credited!! Thank you so much for your interest. I can't wait to see it, so please link me when it's done!! 😊💞

Who is Martyna Majok?

Martyna Majok is a Polish-American playwright. Born in Bytom, Upper Silesia. She emigrated to New Jersey as a child and grew up in Kearny. Majok studied playwriting at Yale School of Drama and Juilliard School.

FACTS:

Her breakthrough play was Ironbound in 2014 (interesting in reading up on what it is about? Here's a link to review and summary -> Review: ‘Ironbound’ Stars Marin Ireland as a Struggling Immigrant - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

She won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Cost of Living

She taught playwriting at SUNY Purchase

Here's a video of an interview with Martyna Majok to check out

Andrew Minyard, Literature Major ("Hell hath no fury" , "Jean Valjean") getting a PhD just to piss off Aaron so they're both Dr. Minyard is just--

just saw asteroid city last night, pls explain the proposed significance of the kiss!!

answering this publicly hope thats ok! cant do a readmore im on mobile *****asteroid city spoilers below beware*****

i dont remember anyones names so this is gonna sound partly unhinged. okay so the edward norton playwright and jason schwartzman actor (not character, in the black and white parts) are lovers right. tbh i thought this was kind of a gag and forgot about it. but later we find out that the playwright died 6 months into the production. i didnt make the connection that THAT’s why the actor-jason has to suddenly leave the stage and freaks out backstage about how he’s not sure he’s Doing it right. hes not talking about acting!! because he himself is literally grieving his lover while he’s playing a character who’s grieving his wife written by his lover so obviously it’s too much!!! actor-jason is trying to find meaning in his death through his writing but there isnt any meaning in death [gerris drinkwater voice] which is what the play is trying to say anyway. he doesnt think he’s performing grief right even in his own life!!! (and tbh it’s the 50s so he wouldnt be able to perform grief publicly anyway!!!!) the play starts with a car accident… anyone would search for some hidden meaning there, some sign…. so when he talks to margot robbie outside it’s not really about finding the CHARACTER’s motivations it’s about the actor himself being able to process the playwright’s death! and adrien brody director was probably also dealing with that too (him and norton seemed to be good buddies) so the whole “sleeping backstage” thing gets a bit sadder maybe? maybe everyone else got this in the theatre and im just stupid lol but crazy making stuff to me!!! the whole story is about sublimated gay grief that cannot be expressed?!?!

the tweet that caught me onto this was here which posits that the playwright’s death was a suicide but i think that’s pretty stupid and unnecessary because the whole thing about the play asteroid city is that death is random and meaningless. im pretty sure that’s what the alien represents— a shocking and absurd event that isnt outright evil or menacing, not something anyone can predict or make sense of, it’s just a thing that happens to you out of nowhere, it doesnt mean anything. he’s a little black figure, he’s death! giving and taking! aagh

bookworms.

i'll let you in on a little secret.

acting isn't acting at all.

if it feels real, it is real.

trust me.

Mary P. Burrill (deceased)

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Lesbian

DOB: August 1881 

RIP: 13 March 1946

Ethnicity: African American

Occupation: Writer, playwright, professor, director, activist

The first child of the Empress being from Furina fells like a whole comedy in the whole harem 😂 The other courtesan would look at Furina and having mixed feeling with some kind of respect and shock like "Wait, so she was such a threat all this time ?"

But Furina being a mom is 🥰 She doesn't feel like the kind of parent that would bother her child with sucession. She would be more like "Find something you really like and give it your whole. But before everything, be happy. You will always be my pride and joy" and being a silly loving and supportive parent 🥹

YEAH EXACTLY. In the courtesans’ eyes, Furina is just a cute woman who is fun to mess around with in the harem and in the bedroom. But to find out that Furina was the first to produce an heir with the Empress? Well, let’s just say that the courtesans now hold a new vision of respect for her now <3

Also Furina would be such a good mom for the first heir! Though the first heir is expected to become the next emperor/empress since they are the first and therefore the oldest, they have the right to pass down the throne to the next heir and pursue other careers if they wish. If Furina’s child wants to follow in her footsteps and become involved in theatre, whether it’s becoming an actor or a director, Furina would 100% support her child’s wishes, even if they won’t become emperor/empress or they don’t even do theatre in the first place.

I can also see Furina being a nervous wreck of a parent at first, but she has the support of the Empress, the courtesans, and Neuvilette whenever he visits to help out with the baby. When she gets used to it, she’s coddling the first heir with such love and adoration in her eyes 🥺 the Empress just melts at the sight of Furina cradling their heir and reciting lines from playwrights to help the baby fall asleep…

i love Interview with the Vampire for 500 million reasons but one of them is how playwright-centric it is. showrunner? pulitzer prize for drama nominee rolin jones. one of the stars? pulitzer prize for drama nominee eric bogosian. half the writing staff? playwrights (eleanor burgess && hannah moscovitch && jonathan ceniceroz for sure, probs others). it's playwrights all the way down motherfuckers, and that pleases me greatly.

Okay, breaking my principles hiatus again for another fanfic rant despite my profound frustration w/ Tumblr currently:

I have another post and conversation on DW about this, but while pretty much my entire dash has zero patience with the overtly contemptuous Hot Fanfic Takes, I do pretty often see takes on Fanfiction's Limitations As A Form that are phrased more gently and/or academically but which rely on the same assumptions and make the same mistakes.

IMO even the gentlest, and/or most earnest, and/or most eruditely theorized takes on fanfiction as a form still suffer from one basic problem: the formal argument does not work.

I have never once seen a take on fanfiction as a form that could provide a coherent formal definition of what fanfiction is and what it is not (formal as in "related to its form" not as in "proper" or "stuffy"). Every argument I have ever seen on the strengths/weaknesses of fanfiction as a form vs original fiction relies to some extent on this lack of clarity.

Hence the inevitable "what about Shakespeare/Ovid/Wide Sargasso Sea/modern takes on ancient religious narratives/retold fairy tales/adaptation/expanded universes/etc" responses. The assumptions and assertions about fanfiction as a form in these arguments pretty much always should apply to other things based on the defining formal qualities of fanfic in these arguments ("fanfiction is fundamentally X because it re-purposes pre-existing characters and stories rather than inventing new ones" "fanfiction is fundamentally Y because it's often serialized" etc).

Yet the framing of the argument virtually always makes it clear that the generalizations about fanfic are not being applied to Real Literature. Nor can this argument account for original fics produced within a fandom context such as AO3 that are basically indistinguishable from fanfic in every way apart from lacking a canon source.

At the end of the day, I do not think fanfic is "the way it is" because of any fundamental formal qualities—after all, it shares these qualities with vast swaths of other human literature and art over thousands of years that most people would never consider fanfic. My view is that an argument about fanfic based purely on form must also apply to "non-fanfic" works that share the formal qualities brought up in the argument (these arguments never actually apply their theories to anything other than fanfic, though).

Alternately, the formal argument could provide a definition of fanfic (a formal one, not one based on judgment of merit or morality) that excludes these other kinds of works and genres. In that case, the argument would actually apply only to fanfic (as defined). But I have never seen this happen, either.

So ultimately, I think the whole formal argument about fanfic is unsalvageably flawed in practice.

Realistically, fanfiction is not the way it is because of something fundamentally derived from writing characters/settings etc you didn't originate (or serialization as some new-fangled form, lmao). Fanfiction as a category is an intrinsically modern concept resulting largely from similarly modern concepts of intellectual property and auteurship (legally and culturally) that have been so extremely normalized in many English-language media spaces (at the least) that many people do not realize these concepts are context-dependent and not universal truths.

Fanfic does not look like it does (or exist as a discrete category at all) without specifically modern legal practices (and assumptions about law that may or may not be true, like with many authorial & corporate attempts to use the possibility of legal threats to dictate terms of engagement w/ media to fandom, the Marion Zimmer Bradley myth, etc).

Fanfic does not look like it does without the broader fandom cultures and trends around it. It does not look like it does without the massive popularity of various romance genres and some very popular SF/F. It does not look like it does without any number of other social and cultural forces that are also extremely modern in the grand scheme of things.

The formal argument is just so completely ahistorical and obliviously presentist in its assumptions about art and generally incoherent that, sure, it's nicer when people present it politely, but it's still wrong.

Oscar Wilde was full of witticisms until the very end..

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arthur "art" shepherd & noah quigley