Beautiful: new Nabokov book covers like specimen boxes for butterflies. Reminds me of “Joseph Cornell: inside your boxes” and so on. Via. Makes me want to cut out pieces of paper and start taking pictures.
Author Archives: weinberg
Single Carrot Presents: Blue Water, Black Sails
A free semi-staged reading of a new play, written by Matthew Smith (MFA – Poetry, Johns Hopkins)
This new drama imagines the last days of life on a ship of condemned Athenian youths sailing to Crete to be eaten by the Minotaur. Blue Water, Black Sails asks us to consider under what conditions we remain human and whether fidelity, sexual or scriptural, can retain meaning in the absence of hope.
Directed by Dara Weinberg
with Nathan Cooper, Genevieve de Mahy, Nathan Fulton, and Kaveh Haerian
and featuring musical guests Anne-Marie Thompson and Patrick Franklin
Saturday, March 27, at 2:30 PM and Wednesday, March 31, at 7:30 PM
Performances at Single Carrot Theatre. Both readings are free and expected to be full, please arrive 15 minutes prior to performance time. No reservations. Free parking in rear lot on Howard Street.
Call 443-844-9253 with any questions.
We hope that you’ll join us for this FREE reading of a new work!
www.singlecarrot.com
twitter.com/singlecarrot
polyurethane
Once he sealed a roast turkey with polyurethane, hoping it would last through a play’s entire run.
– wonderful LAT article on East West’s prop master Ken Takemoto. Via ArtsJournal.
if you think you know what you’re doing
Just because you figure out how to do something once – discover a way to shape a poem around this image or that experience – doesn’t mean you ever get to do it that way again. The writer is always starting over, and if you think you know what you’re doing, you’re probably damned. This is the source of a wellspring of youth, of artistic energy, of the will to keep going. And it’s also damnably hard, and daunting.
– Mark Doty, interviewed in Seattlest. Part
I. Part II. Via Bookslut.
Words requiring new synonyms
So, in my occasional editing work, I find that I am getting really bored with the following words: improve, educate, strategy, method, solution, result.* All from Planet Grantspeak. I suggest that we make something up, pretending to be half a German speaker and half Shakespeare. If anyone can think of a good new coinage for any of those words, we can all start using it, and then it will be in common usage, and available to the grantspeakers. Thank you for your help.
The suggestion of already existing synonyms is, of course, also appreciated, but I’d much rather that we make up new words.
*I try, whenever possible, to avoid “outcome.”
Fill it full with Wills
This is Sonnet 136. I’m sure I’ve SOSed it before, but it is time to bring it out again. I have always treasured this snicker-inducing sonnet as proof of Shakespeare’s susceptibility to the same stuff to which the rest of us are susceptible. May you have an absurd Monday.
If thy soul check thee that I come so near,
Swear to thy blind soul that I was thy Will,
And will, thy soul knows, is admitted there;
Thus far for love, my love-suit, sweet, fulfil.
Will, will fulfil the treasure of thy love,
Ay, fill it full with wills, and my will one.
In things of great receipt with ease we prove
Among a number one is reckoned none:
Then in the number let me pass untold,
Though in thy store’s account I one must be;
For nothing hold me, so it please thee hold
That nothing me, a something sweet to thee:
Make but my name thy love, and love that still,
And then thou lovest me for my name is ‘Will.’
– W.S.
There is nothing to do with a day except live it
…
Shall a plate be broken? A new thing understood?
Shall we be lonely, and by love consoled?
What shall I whistle, splitting the kindling-wood?
Shall the night-wind be cold?
How should I know? And even if we were fated
Hugely to suffer, grandly to endure,
It would not help at all to hear it all fore-stated
In an overture.
There is nothing to do with a day except live it.
Let us have music again when the light dies
(Sullenly, or in glory) and we can give it
Something to organize.
– Richard Wilbur, from his poem “C Minor,” in The Mind-Reader
rehearsal report
This afternoon, we held the first meeting of the lyricist/composer collaboration group, which is what I’m calling it now instead of “musical theater collaboration group.”
We heard both recorded and live music, and had actors present to read aloud the lyrics. Spontaneously, some lyrics were read to some improvised music on the piano. This was more than I had hoped for, and exactly the kind of thing I wanted to make happen with this.
Apart from the usual obstacles, which serve to remind us that it’s still theater – bagel logistics*, enormous reception in lobby of Mattin confusing people, unopenable CD drive on monolithic scary Mac, one participant being down for the count with a kitchen injury – today’s meeting was very successful.
It remains to see what will come from this, but the mere fact of having put words together with music, in the presence of other people, is more than enough. I am becoming more a follower of late-period Grotowski, I think, in that the participants compose an audience. Not the only audience: but, still, an audience.
We’ll meet again in April.
*Economics of cream cheese: complicated.
A: How much cream cheese do you need for twenty people?
B: It depends how much they put on the bagels.
& one more
The Cold Hill Side
As months and years accumulate,
I miss you more and more.
Forgetting where I put the key,
I sometimes find a door
and other times feel stunned and lost,
though living in my own
body and life, presumably,
bewildered and alone
as the knight, kidnapped and released
to a dim world, who said
And I awoke and found me here
on the cold hill side.
Again, Rachel Hadas, from the New Yorker. She is, by the way, a Hopkins alum from when the MFA was an MA.
Dara Weinberg 