Scheduled Thursday afternoon thunderstorm (every Thursday!) occurred as usual, followed by a state of weather where it is raining only in some places–where you can walk ten feet and go from rain to not-rain, like in a video game, or like the guy who brings his own cloud with him.
Author Archives: weinberg
reading
Lynda Barry: CRUDDY and THE GOOD TIMES ARE KILLING ME
Julianna Baggott: GIRL TALK and POEMS IN WOMEN’S VOICES
this is just to say
that the Maryland Poison Control Center, which I had to look up online for work purposes, has such a great website (http://www.mdpoison.com/) that it makes me feel like poisoning someone just so I can use their resources. Note especially the little icon of the guy sticking out his tongue.
enforced focus
“[…] These are all theater pieces meant to be experienced by an audience of one. High-concept and immersive, intimate theater has been cropping up for years, but now in Europe it has reached such a critical mass that the Battersea Arts Center in London, known for innovation, hosted the largest one-person-audience festival this month. […]
“We had a couple of hundred people in the building every night, and there was an incredible buzz about what people saw and experienced,” he [festival artistic director Mark Ball] said. A festival setting is a good way to work out the logistical and economic challenges of one-audience theater, he added, since the paying audience for any one show is limited.
By the end of the Battersea festival there had been 10,000
performances in the center’s big building in southwest London. With dozens of choices each day, one could be bathed in the nude by a performer, “kidnapped,” slid out of a window and much more, all for the price of admission.
For the creators of these works, part of the appeal is the enforced focus they bring…”
– NYT, “Up Close and Personal: Theater for Audiences of One.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/theater/28one.html?hp)
its innate tendencies to overreach
“…while our senses can only ever bring us verifiable knowledge about how the world appears in time and space, our reason always strives to know more than appearances can show it. This tendency of reason to always know more is and was a good thing. It is why human kind is always curious, always progressing to greater and greater knowledge and accomplishments. But if not tempered by a respect for its limits and an understanding of its innate tendencies to overreach, reason can lead us into error and fanaticism.”
– JHU professor William Egginton, “The Limits of the Coded World,” in the NYT, on free will and other things
(http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/the-end-of-knowing/?hp)
the integrity of a poem
“Poetry, the most precise and precious of literary forms, is also so far the least adaptable to the growing e-book market. A three-line stanza might be expanded to four if a line is too long or a four-line stanza compressed into three if the second and fourth lines have sharp indentations, as with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Hymn to the Night.”
Royalty disputes, philosophical objections and suspicions of technology are keeping countless books from appearing in electronic form, from “The Catcher in the Rye” to “Gravity’s Rainbow.” But for poetry, the gap is especially large because publishers and e-book makers have not figured out how the integrity of a poem can be guaranteed. And a displaced word, even a comma, can alter a poem’s meaning as surely as skipping a note changes a song.
“The critical difference between prose and poetry is that prose is kind of like water and will become the shape of any vessel you pour it into to. Poetry is like a piece of sculpture and can easily break,” Collins says.”
– Yahoo! article on poems in electronic form, esp. in e-books (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100714/ap_en_ot/us_books_e_poetry_blues)
more on that “writing schedule” business
“…two years later, promoted to the position of chief clerk at the Insurance Institute, he [Kafka] was now on the one-shift system, 8:30 A.M. until 2:30 P.M. And then what? Lunch until 3:30, then a sleep until 7:30, then exercises, then a family dinner. After which he started work around 11:00 P.M. (as Begley points out, the letter and diary writing took up at least an hour a day, and more usually two), and then “depending on my strength, inclination, and luck, until one, two, or, three o’clock, once even until six in the morning.” Then, finding it an “unimaginable effort to go to sleep,” he fitfully rested before leaving to go to the office once more. This routine left him permanently on the verge of collapse.”
– Zadie Smith, “F. Kafka, Everyman,” Changing My Mind.
She goes on to quote the biographer, Begley, assaying that “As he [Kafka] recognized, the truth was that he wasted time.” Yep. Appropriate, on what has turned into another w[or]kend.
on being afraid
(This is a post I wrote in April, when ||8ve started out, and then never put online. I think now that the group feels more secure as an entity, it’s safe to share it. )
I recently (in April) edited an essay for a friend at Hopkins, on the subject of pilgrimage literature. One of the books he referred to was Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan; A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, which is a fictional narrative, disguised as an anthropological report, about experimentation with hallucinogenic substances. (I know, I know, but hear me out.) I did not try any of the substances (which would have been pretty difficult to obtain in the state of Maryland, anyway) — I only read the book. Out of curiosity.
It’s a flawed book, and reading it made me feel like I was watching a form of spiritual pornography. You don’t want to look, but you don’t want to not have seen it if everyone else has. (It’s funny how being in a writing program makes me feel that I have to have officially condemned the text.)
But one thing that was resonant to me in it was the idea that someone seeking knowledge has to overcome fear before he or she can progress further. I do not think I have overcome fear — in fact, I think I have to deal with it on a daily basis. But apparently the way to overcome fear is to do just that, to go on acting despite it. Eventually this will either neutralize the fear or, if not that, lead you to a state where the fear is no longer a problem.
This relates to all sorts of endeavors, artistic and personal (no difference, really…) where you, that is to say I, that is to say the endeavorer, do[es] not and cannot have control over the endeavor. Writing is a pleasant exception to this — no one has control over writing but the writer.
So what are you to do about that? About not having control? Keep going, or else lock yourself in a room. And try to fear less.
As many times as I have now seen living, breathing choruses on stage, whether put there by me or by other people, I am still afraid, each time I enter into a chorus exercise, that this time it somehow won’t work — that our work will not suffice. That, somehow, this time, the chorus which I have seen come from individual voices so many times will not emerge.
Fear is a feature of risky endeavors, just like some of us have better eyes than others. We all go on trying to see with whatever lenses we possess. I don’t know how to not be afraid. There was a time in my life when I did not work with actors and musicians. There have been times in my life, some of them long, in between productions or projects, when I feared that I would never have the opportunity again. I do not know how to not think of those things.
I think this is one reason why many directors I know go straight from one project to another.
And as for that state of mind where fear is no longer a problem, I am nowhere near it. The most I can do is say to myself, “I acknowledge that I am afraid.” And then move forward.
I write about this, though, because having this chorus working group is something I have wanted for a long time, and have known was the next logical step in the work I do. And yet I have avoided it, reasoning, I think, against reason, that if I didn’t do it, I couldn’t be disappointed by it. Well, I am doing it. I am not disappointed. It is incredible. It — I — yes. Many things. Many, many, many things. But first things first. We have some recordings and we’re going to make more.
I hope that whatever fears you have do not keep you from your work.
the reservoir of talent
“Across Europe the age of austerity is beginning to drain the reservoir of talent. Cecilie, half-German, half-French, was in the dance chorus at one of the big Berlin opera houses. “It was not enough to live on but we all supplemented our fees by giving dance or piano lessons,” she says of 2007. “Then came the first stage of the financial meltdown and I got maybe two or three performances a month. We all took on more and more private lessons. So the rates went down — and I ended up teaching yoga.”
Now there are no more stage performances, yoga is done on the cheap and Cecilie works as an evening shelf-stacker for a supermarket.”
– On the funding cuts to European arts, in the Australian. Via.
Dara Weinberg 