My new address is, fingers crossed, going to be on Saint Paul Street. Writing this on an envelope for the first time, “St Paul St,” I realize it might as well be “Street Paul Saint,” or any variation thereof, and if I were a voice-recognition computer, I wouldn’t know.
hot yoga: check it and see: I’ve got a fever of a hundred and three
Baltimore is so humid that doing yoga, even at night with all the windows open and a fan blowing, is Bikram-style whether or not you want it to be. I have sweated so much every time I get on the mat that I can feel my brain contracting within my skull. I will say, though, that I do feel more limber in this atmosphere than I did when it was five degrees below zero in Chicago. Today, I was trying to do the wheel pose, and I realized I could almost keep bending my neck back to the point where my nose was pointing at the mat.
“What would you have me do?” – C. de Bergerac, to Le Bret
Yesterday, I finished a pass through the script of Burgess’s translation of CYRANO DE BERGERAC. I’m collaborating, for the second year in a row, with my friend J, the drama teacher at Q School, to help prepare her fall production for her high school students. Last year we worked on LYSISTRATA. This year, it’s Rostand’s CYRANO, which is one of my favorite plays.
J had already done one pass of cuts, so I was working on a script that had already been heavily edited and still needed to lose 35 pages. (It’s a very long play.) I challenged myself to find something that could be cut in every single page of the script.
I did it, with two exceptions: the second to last pages of Acts 3 and 4. This makes sense, if you think about it: those are pages on which a lot of plot elements are being tied up into one big laundry bag full of cliffhangers. You need all the information.
Otherwise, Rostand is such a poet that there was lots that could be sliced. Identifying the cuttable portions was not a problem, but reconciling myself to doing it was. The language is so gorgeous. It was particularly heartbreaking to shorten any of the love scenes with Roxane. But what’s done is done. Now J has to retype the entire thing into a new document, since so much has been cut that the script pages are illegible.
I wonder if J’s students, like the actors on every professional production of a translated / edited play I’ve ever worked on, will come in with the original text in hand, arguing for the reinstatement of their lines.
I amused myself at one point by wondering whether Cyrano, if presented with this task, would have been able to bring himself to eviscerate his own poetry.
Happy July 21st, D. H. Lawrence!
TODAY is the 50th anniversary of the court ruling that overturned America’s obscenity laws, setting off an explosion of free speech…
[…]
The historic case began on May 15, 1959, when Barney Rosset, the publisher of Grove Press, sued the Post Office for confiscating copies of the uncensored version of D. H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” which had long been banned for its graphic sex scenes.
– Fred Kaplan, “The Day Obscenity Became Art,” NYT. It’s a great article.
incidentally,
To divert us from all this maudlin poetry/music, today, in the Valley (the valley so low), it is one hundred and five degrees, and one of my family’s cactuses died from the heat. That’s right.
you must count yourself lucky
When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla
you must count yourself lucky.
You must offer her what’s left
of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish
you must put aside,
and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed,
her eyes moving from the clock
to the television and back again.
– Matthew Dickman, from his poem GRIEF. It is worth it to read the whole thing.
I have been thinking about his other famous poem, TROUBLE, too, of course – for obvious reasons – but I can’t bring myself to read it right now. You should read it too – it is an extraordinary poem, I may have even posted it here before – but you’ll have to find it yourself.
…()…
Grief is not something you can look in the face for more than forty-eight hours. Or I can’t. I got out of the house today – I studied, I got my new ID card, I started exploring the luminous resources of the Hopkins library. I filled out the paperwork for my new apartment on St. Paul.
But now here I am, at home again. I took out the trash in the rain, and I came upstairs to the computer, and he is still dead. It really happened.
how many roads?
I got the news of an old friend’s death on Saturday morning, at his own hands, as they say.
I spent this weekend not at Artscape, like all other Baltimoreans, but talking to our mutual friends, stunned and uncomprehending. I haven’t left the house since I found out.
Some of the writers went floating down the river in inner tubes today. I did not go.
I spent today in a frenzy of composition, writing a fifty-page-long story of every incident I remembered from the ten years of our friendship – incorporating emails and all the data I had, to try to make sense of his death. It’s done now.
I thought, initially, that it would be a tribute to him that I would put up here. But it’s far too personal. I may say something about him here, someday. But not now. Forgive me for quoting Orlando Legolas, but, “For me, the grief is still too near.”
No one who reads this blog knows him. But he was twenty-eight, and he was the greatest writer of my generation I have ever known. I know many very good writers. He was the best. And he was also my friend.
I will miss him every day of my life and all the days after that, too.
My father suggested that I go into one of Maryland’s many Catholic churches and light a candle for him – I think I will do that tomorrow. I had to write the story first, but now that it’s done, I could do that.
If you are the praying type, please keep my friend in your prayers. I don’t know why I can’t say his name here, but I can’t. I can’t. But if you pray for the young writer who is dead, I think that will be good enough.
Thank you, whoever you are, you who are reading, for continuing to ride alongside me in this wagon caravan / Big Thunder Mountain / Cadillac Escalade / velocipede / called life.
That’s enough. I’m exhausted – I’ve been writing for ten hours. I hope that now I will be able to sleep. A few minutes ago, Amelia the cat led another, larger, more hostile black cat into my room. I have no idea how they got in, but it was really creepy to see two black cats walk around the door when you only expect one. I shut the door, and I’m going to bed.
Tomorrow I will go to the church and the library. And something else will happen, the day after that.
they traveled a short while towards the sun
…Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.
– Stephen Spender, I think continually of those who were truly great
Dara Weinberg 