theater, writing

footnotally,

didn’t manage to write the though-of-Hamlet-our-brother’s-death scene for playwriting class, by the way. I thought I knew what it was, so I wasn’t able to do it. I can only write things with uncertainty. This is like the time I spent two years thinking I was going to write a poem that was “like PRUFROCK, except better” and didn’t write a thing.

Instead, I flaked and brought in a scene from a play I’m not even “working on,” something old and messy. Course, everyone liked it better than anything I’ve brought in all quarter – and the reason I’m not “working on” it is because it’s too painful – and that’s why it’s better, even though it’s as raw as (insert appropriate comparison) – it’s realer. Hrmph. I would rather be stabbed in the eyeballs with pencils than write any more of it. At least today.

Is “I would rather be (X) than (Y)” a comparison too? I have to watch it.

I don’t have a “playwriting” category. I just have “writing” and “theater.” Somehow I think this post, which is more about cowardice than courage, is not going to be the post that creates that category.

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poetry

here’s mint,

that’s for forgetting things that shouldn’t be remembered.

It was hard to post after that post because that post was so joyful that I felt like it couldn’t be followed. But here it is: I have thought of a new kind of poetic comparison which is appropriate for the New Poetic Comparisons mandate.

If you were talking about someone in a poem with big teeth (like me) you could say “A person with teeth like carrots.” That way you’re not comparing them to a rabbit, but to something once removed from it. It’s like that kind of slang where the rhyme connects the words. You know what I mean, right? British? There is an intermediary between the one thing and the other.

I saw a thin house today that looked like it had been squeezed by tweezers. That comparison, unlike the carrots, is not okay – it’s too easy. I don’t know how to fix it, which means that I don’t know what to say about the thin house.

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chicago, theater

just putting it out there

Tonight, I am cooking the severed legs of four different chickens, and the potatoes of the Midwest, in the oven of Humboldt Park. Tomorrow, I don’t know.

Today, I overheard nothing. I have no dialogue to share because my ears were closed to the world. I only spoke to computers. I worked a day shift at my job and a volunteer shift at the theater where I take writing classes – thanking donors, paper-cuttering fliers. I watched actors walk into a rehearsal without walking in after them. It was hard, but not as hard as it would have been earlier this winter, because this time, I had a secret of my own. I’m going to be in a rehearsal some day soon. Tomorrow, I don’t know.

Yes, two weekends from now, I have decided I’m going to have a rehearsal, but not for what. I just know that it’s been long enough. It’s time to start a new project. I’m hoping to get together a small group of actors and just do some text experiments. The thought of this makes me feel, at once, like my own legs have been severed and also like I have grown eight new ones. It’s been so long. I miss it so much, and yet I am still wary about returning. Tomorrow, I don’t know.

It is a sign of the generosity of my performer friends that many of them have agreed to come to this “rehearsal” without knowing what it is we intend to “rehearse.”

I wish I could remember exactly what it was that made me feel like I had the courage to begin again. Springtime, maybe – or riding the Green Line with my actress friend – or C moving up here, at last – or hearing my friends sing at a piano bar – or the persistent pain in my shoulder finally simmering down to a manageable level – or discovering that the man who gave my computer a new brain is a playwright. But I have had all these things for months. I have been surrounded by performers. I have had connections and chances and every opportunity to work in the field I love, and have turned them all down, in favor of a winter of writing and moping and yoga. Tomorrow, I don’t know.

It’s not the first time I have pretended to myself to “give up” theater. But this time, I didn’t know I would come back. At least not to directing.

I don’t know where any of this is going. I don’t have a plan. I just know it’s time to stick one foot back in the pool. Tomorrow, I don’t know.

I look forward to it more than I look forward to sleep. I understand now how it is I have slept so much since moving here. I haven’t had rehearsals.

Maybe we won’t even do choruses. Maybe I’ll try out the French rhyme stuff. Or maybe we’ll do some simultaneous text that’s not choral. I don’t care, really. I just want to get in the room again.

If you were me, you would be happy to think of this. I know I am, and I know that having the strength to come back to it has taken more willpower than an exponent. Tomorrow, I don’t know.

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poetry

post-compare

After a few days of trying not to compare things for the purpose of poetry, I have come up with some more refreshing sorts of contemporary comparisons, so that poems may still be written by me.

1) Comparing within the world of nature, but only with things being compared to things they are not at all like.
The sky, like a curdled fish. (This is even better because fishes can’t curdle.)
The cat, like a tectonic plate.

2) Comparing without reference to the world of “nature,” such as technology or human construct being compared to abstract concepts.
The window-panes, like a heap of syllables.
The Xerox machine, like a theory.


This train of thought I must purge all common comparisons from my prose as well! This syringe of thought led me to a new discovery today, at lunch.

I was sitting on a bench, eating a sandwich, looking at a tree. I started to reach for a comparison, and instead, I suddenly thought of this as a first line:
I am sitting on a sandwich, eating a tree, looking at a bench.

It’s perfect. It’s like a kind of word-level anagram. The right placement of nouns instantly flashes into your head. And through juxtaposition, somehow all three things are compared.

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technology

ZombieBook

Back in Mac. Apparently hard drives are like tires – you need to replace them every few years, but it doesn’t mean the car is dead. I’m staring into the big blue rectangular eye of the same laptop body that’s traveled with me for two years, but it’s got a brand-new hard drive, enviably empty of memory.

I asked the nice man at the Apple store if he could do the same thing for humans: destroy all the data and give me a new brain. He says it’s a few years off.

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writing

word processor

In my playwriting class on Saturday, my third revision of the first scene of the play met with the greatest approval. I am revising it again for next week, but I suspect that I have finally gone far enough back in time to start before the story does. Almost. I want to have a production meeting with the producer addressing the assembled staff in something in the manner of “Though of Hamlet our brother’s death / The memory be yet green…” I feel a sort of momentum around this idea that I haven’t felt around the other beginnings.

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books, quotes

Nature may have done something

“But, perhaps, I keep no journal.”

“Perhaps you are not sitting in this room, and I am not sitting by you. Not keep a journal! How are your absent cousins to understand the tenour of your life in Bath without one? How are the civilities and compliments of every day to be related as they ought to be, unless noted down every evening in a journal? How are your various dresses to be remembered, and the particular state of your complexion, and curl of your hair to be described in all their diversities, without having constant recourse to a journal? My dear madam, I am not so ignorant of young ladies’ ways as you wish to believe me; it is this delightful habit of journalizing which largely contributes to form the easy style of writing for which ladies are so generally celebrated. Everybody allows that the talent of writing agreeable letters is peculiarly female. Nature may have done something, but I am sure it must be essentially assisted by the practice of keeping a journal.”

– Catherine Morland & Mr. Tilney, NORTHANGER ABBEY (Jane Austen)

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chicago, dialogue

the wheels on the bus

The 70 Division eastbound from Ashland to North Branch.

GIRL: Dude, you just, like, jabbed your elbow into my gut.
MAN: Sorry.
GIRL: Ow.
MAN: You want to go out with me? I have a phone.
GIRL: No.
MAN: I can call you.
GIRL: No.
MAN: I’m only 61.
GIRL: I’m 16!
MAN: That’s, like, 61 reversed.
A seat opens up and GIRL moves to sit down.
MAN: Don’t leave me!
MAN’S SEATMATE, A WOMAN OF FEW BUT APT WORDS: She thought you were a dirty old man.
MAN: Yeah.
MSAWOFBAW: Ha, ha, ha.
MAN: Yeah, all right.

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chicago, dialogue, metablog

no action

Friday night at La Pasadita, one of three of the La Pasadita taquerias in the block south of Ashland and Division. B and her friend C are eating carne asada Super Tacos.

A: Where did you ladies get that beer?
C: Around the corner.
A: Around that corner there?
C: Yep.
B: There’s a giant arrow sign pointing to it. You can’t miss it.
A: We appreciate it.

In rereading a portion of this blog yesterday, I decided that the parts I like reading the best are:
1) the observations about writing, which I’m getting better about doing regularly
2) the dialogue excerpts, which there aren’t enough of. I’m going to create a new category.

I will try to have dialogue even when, as is typical in my plays, there is no action. Maybe by writing a little bit of dialogue regularly in the blog I will find more action in the sound of people’s words.

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