David Simon (THE WIRE) gets the award.
Author Archives: weinberg
new emotions appropriate to one’s age
Friday, two parties, one on a rooftop. Yesterday, “Animula” in Parallel Octave, and the Baltimore Book Festival. Today, chakra-balancing yoga and more of Eliot’s prose: which, unlike his poetry, grows more and more congenial to me as he ages. Also, finishing the poem (finishing the hat). The late Eliot is helpful in this regard. Encouraging.
“When a man is engaged in work of abstract thought — if there is such a thing as wholly abstract thought outside the mathematical and the physical sciences — his mind can mature, while his emotions either remain the same or only atrophy, and it will not matter. But maturing as a poet means maturing as the whole man, experiencing new emotions appropriate to one’s age, and with the same intensity of the emotions of youth.”
-T.S. Eliot, from “Yeats,” (Selected Prose: 247-8)
that is why people make poems about the dead
…some things are not possible on the earth.
And that is why people make poems about the dead.
And the dead watch over them, until they are finished:
Until their hands feel like glass on the page,
And snow collects in the blind eyes of statues.
– Larry Levis, “For Zbigniew Herbert, Summer, 1971, Los Angeles” from The Dollmaker’s Ghost, Selected: 60-61.
Today is the last day of a 3-day Larry Levis festival at VCU, featuring readings by Philip Levine, among others. I wish I had been able to go, but I have been AWOL enough from the program.
Yesterday,
I was in the library, scanning my undergraduate transcript, finishing up the last of the grant-related paperwork. It took a long time to scan, and while I waited, I wrote, in my journal, a new opening to a piece I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I had recently stolen a particularly fast-moving pen from workshop, and this pen seemed to open something up for me. The narrative voice moved along very quickly. I had only intended to write one paragraph, but I wrote several pages.
When I stood up, transcript scanned, to leave the library, feeling the speed and anger of this narration, a computer router fell down from the ceiling of A-Level (where it had been attached to an Ethernet cable) and landed at my feet.
“You almost died,” said a girl who was walking by.
“It’s just a modem,” I said. (At the time, I couldn’t remember the word for ‘router.’)
The object probably does not weigh enough to cause death upon impact. However, this whole thing has made me feel like I’m on to something–either something good or something very bad–with this narrative voice. It must be a sign of something, to almost be hit by a router. It’s not a falling bird, or a snake, but those are harder to come by in the library.
his unique and unerring feeling for the sound of words
“I do not think any poet in English has ever had a finer ear for vowel sounds, as well as a subtler feeling for some moods of anguish…”
“The surface of Tennyson stirred about with his time; and he had nothing to which to hold fast except his unique and unerring feeling for the sound of words. But in this he had something which no one else had.”
“And having turned aside from the journey through the dark night, to become the surface flatterer of his own time, he has been rewarded with the despite of an age that succeeds his own in shallowness.”
– T.S. Eliot, “In Memoriam,” (essay on Tennyson) Collected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode, 246-247
(carriage) return
I have returned from a week in Wroclaw, Poland, taking a theater workshop with Piesn Kosla (Song of the Goat) and am getting back into the swing of things here on campus–teaching, seminar, making final revisions to essays for a grant. Today is my third day back and the jet-lag is finally fading a bit.
I owe a great many people a great many phone calls, a situation complicated by falling asleep at 5 pm Eastern.
The theater workshop itself was extraordinary. I have a lot to say about it. I’m working on an account of the trip, which I hope to finish this week, while the memories are still recent.
The travel back from Poland to the US was no less extraordinary, but not in a good way–I managed to miss both a train and my flight, and have to rebook.
But I’m here now. It’s very good to be back. Baltimore has never looked so beautiful, and there’s nothing to make you appreciate Southern politeness, and the “how are you”s and door-holding-opens at every turn, like 24 hours stuck in Warsaw central station.
the spirit of Frank Zappa
“Rocker Frank Zappa was born in Baltimore but gained greater popular acclaim in Europe than in the United States. On Sunday, devout European fans of the late musician brought his mustachioed likeness back home in the form of a bronze bust.
Several hundred fans gathered on a sweltering afternoon as city officials dedicated the bust of the ponytailed rocker outside an east Baltimore library. The bust is a replica of another in a public square in Vilnius, Lithuania, and was donated to the city by Zappa enthusiasts in the small Baltic nation.
“The spirit of Frank Zappa is alive and well in Baltimore,” Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said.”
– Yahoo! article. Via.
just finished
resurrecting all the sound and light cues and all the blocking for A VAST WRECK, which I directed in 2006. This has been, by far, the most difficult part of the grant I’m working on. It was interesting to have the opportunity to look over the show again, but, man…it was like pulling out all the stitches in something you’d already sewn together. Makes you see how it’s constructed, yes. Makes you appreciate how much work it was, yes. But I really didn’t want to take it apart. That’s one piece that, to me, was completed. Really and truly perfectly completed.
There’s nowhere to rest on that stage or in that show, and every time an actor sits down, he or she is usually overturned.
Every time I spend time away from that DVD, I forget how good the actors and the designers were. I think I must have exaggerated it in my memory, because I have that show on such a pedestal. And then I watch it again, and it’s like, “Oh, no, they were even better than how you remembered them.” Every time.
almost ready
to leave, but not quite.
I’m getting on a plane to Berlin tomorrow, and from there, a train to Wroclaw, for a week-long workshop with Song of the Goat. I’ll be back on the 20th. I won’t have phone or reliable Internet until then. I’ll put something up here, however, when I return.
To be continued.
Dara Weinberg 