came early today! Thunderous outside.
Thursday’s been my favorite day of the week for a long time (it is, after all, Thorsday / Fourth-Grade Art Class Day) and I like that the storm couldn’t wait to get it started. It is always an auspicious thing to wake up and find it raining, especially now that I no longer have to drive to work.
Who wants to walk down St. Paul in the rain?
“Now taking place at the Baltimore Free School, Parallel Octave is poised to bring all sorts of Baltimore artists together—and perhaps create a new kind of art in the process.”
– from Rachel Monroe’s wonderful CityPaper article on the ||8ve chorus, “All Together Now,” just posted today. It’ll be in tomorrow’s issue.
If you’re interested in our project, please check out our website or course page on the Free School site, or email paralleloctaveATgmail.com.
The extraordinary playwright and poet Ron Allen, from Detroit, author of the plays EYE MOUTH GRAFFITI BODYSHOP and x restrung cortex, among many other texts, died last night at a hospital in Los Angeles.
He left me a phone message on July 16, and in the extreme bustle that’s been happening, I didn’t call him back. The message is still on my phone.
“Dara Weinberg: Ron Allen calling. Wanted to (…) see how you’re doing, tell you how I’m doing, so give me a call when you get a chance.”
I had a chance–you always have a chance–but I didn’t call.
He had a stroke, was in a coma, and his family decided to let him go rather than to let him linger–which I’m sure was what he would have wanted.
Ron was a teacher as well as a writer. He taught young people, old people, people at rehab centers, monasteries, and prisons, in Detroit and here. He was someone whose life touched many, many, many people, through his Buddhist practice, his writing, his classes, and his love. I will be thinking of him today. I hope you will all take a moment to think of him, as well.
“For whatever reason–success, removal from Ireland, the realities of the war years, a comparatively settled and domestic routine–the number and variety of Beckett’s complaints had diminished. He would still get cysts from time to time, his teeth would give him trouble and so would his eyes, but the panic attacks which had impelled him into psychoanalysis were now a thing of the past.”
-Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, (27.439)
you can edit for hours, with multiple windows in multiple programs, Tracked Changes and Notes and all that, with clipboards of both the paper and electronic variety; you can do all that till the cows come home; but no one will walk by your cubicle until the exact moment when you’re staring at your fingernails like there’s a little green alien dancing on them.
there is a truck with a handpainted sign reading "FLAMABLE" (sp) hanging from the railings above the bed.
“11:30 A.M., Groningen, The Netherlands
Wow! Cloud outside looks just like Henry Moore’s “Reclining Figure” (1939).
11:35 A.M.
So does the croissant.”
– Christopher Niemann’s graphic diary of a NY-Berlin flight, Red Eye, Abstract City blog
till TA Training boot camp and the start of the academic year.
As I wind down two large editing projects for work, I have more respect than ever for people who work as editors, day in, day out, throughout their lives. It requires so much care and patience and generosity. I have a tendency to compare everything I like or honor to directing, but it really *is* a lot like directing, to edit something–the best people, I think, manage to do the least of it, or do the most by doing the least. I am not the best people, but I am better for a summer of it.
One project went “to the printers” yesterday–that was very exciting. The other is more of an ongoing deadline. I’ll keep working on it during the semester.
“In June [of 1958], however, he [Beckett] was still resolutely struggling with the new prose work and finding it horribly difficult. Even though he could see clearly what he wanted to do, and that it should be only about 100 pages, he felt he was making very little progress, or only just enough to keep him from giving it up in disgust. ‘I rely a lot on the demolishing process to come later and content myself more or less with getting down elements and rhythm to be knocked hell out of when I am ready…It all takes place in the pitch dark and the mud, first part man alone, second with another, third alone again. All a problem of rhythm and syntax and weakening of form, nothing more difficult,’ he told Barney Rosset. Yet, comically perhaps, he was once again hankering after other forms of composition–theatre or radio. ‘I hear their siren voice and tell them to stick it up.’ “
– Anthony Cronin, Beckett: The Last Modernist (30.489)
“Remember when you could tell a lot about a guy by what cassette tapes—Journey or the Smiths?—littered the floor of his used station wagon? No more, because now the music of our lives is stored on MP3 players and iPhones. Our important papers live on hard drives or in the computing cloud, and DVDs are becoming obsolete, as we stream movies on demand. One by one, the meaningful artifacts that we used to scatter about our apartments and cars, disclosing our habits to any visitor, are vanishing from sight.”
–Mark Oppenheimer, “Judging A Girl By Her Cover,” Slate
(http://www.slate.com/id/2261955/?from=rss)
Dara Weinberg 