L'Internet, wordage, writing

hoist ourselves atop the oblongs

I just got totally Gmail-ad-snatched by this blurb: “Isn’t it time you started reading The Straddler?” Well, I clicked over, and sure enough, it’s a litmag, they have Robert Frost’s Twitter page, and a bunch of stuff on architecture. Another example of successful advertising through guilt.

The Editors write:
If we are able to see more clearly the web of forces structuring, to a greater or lesser extent, our lives, we may be able to hoist ourselves atop the oblongs for a few moments—or even longer—and hear more clearly what it actually is that beats in our deep heart’s core.

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workstyle, writing

now approaching

I have been riding a lot of trains lately, for job interviews. Chicago is linked by many, many train lines – not just the rainbow of the El but also the less-colorful veins of the Metra. And I find whenever I am on an above-ground train, I write. Below-ground trains make me want to go find the Minotaur, or fall asleep, but if I can see the sky, I can think of things to say. I sit as high up as I can, always in the second story of the Metra, and write and watch.

I like writing on trains so much that I almost, but not quite, accepted a job last week with an enormous multi-train commute package. It was a little excessive. But I do think I would get more writing done.

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books, quotes

You see that can?

Sometimes there are so many things to say that you don’t know where to start.

I’ll say this: I’ve been reading Jacques Lacan for a book club, and here is my favorite anecdote so far.

I was in my early twenties or thereabouts – and at that time, of course, being a young intellectual, I wanted desperately to get away, see something different, throw myself into something practical, something physical, in the country say, or the sea. One day, I was on a small boat, with a few people from a family of fishermen in a small port. At that time, Brittany was not as industrialized as it is now. There were no trawlers. The fisherman went out in his frail craft at his own risk. It was this risk, this danger, that I loved to share. But it wasn’t all danger and excitement – there were also fine days. One day, then, as we were waiting for the moment to pull in the nets, an individual known as Petit-Jean, that’s what we called him – like all his family, he died very young from tuberculosis, which at that time was a constant threat to the whole of that social class – this Petit-Jean pointed out to me something floating on the surface of the waves. It was a small can, a sardine can. It floated there in the sun, a witness to the canning industry, which we, in fact, were suppose to supply. It glittered in the sun. And Petit-Jean said to me – “You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn’t see you!”

He found this incident highly amusing – I less so.

– Jacques Lacan, The Line And Light, “Of the Gaze as Objet petit a,” THE FOUR FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS

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poetry, rhyme, wordage, writing

sputter sputter

Today, during yoga, the Random Rhyme Generator turns on again, and hands this over: “marzipan-pale, mandolin-frail.” What do I do with that? It’s so retro – those are the kinds of poems I was writing in 1999 – and if I ever wanted to describe women in terms of musical instruments (high-strung), sugar, and alliteration, I don’t want to do it now.

To be honest, there is a very, very regrettable and derivative poem I wrote that year, in high school, which is some kind of Rapunzel-Greensleeves-Shalott-courtlylove-clusterstuck, and that is SO a line from that poem, which I thought I had left composting in the backyard of my brain, to feed future poems but not ever to remerge. Surprise. It’s back, shuffling its overwritten zombie stanzas up the stairs, dropping rhymes like clods of earth all over the kitchen floor.

Maybe, as I write more poetry, lines from the poems I was writing ten years ago will keep coming back. It’s like you can’t turn it on without turning it all on.

I wouldn’t use a line like that now, but I’m still proud of myself that that skill, matching words to one another on as many qualities as possible, which I cultivated so exclusively and so extremely for twenty-two years, is still dormant in my skull. (No more rhyming and I mean it.)

The kind of thing I would do now, and I’m about to, is write a poem about thinking of a line you can no longer use.

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workstyle

it’s not selling out, it’s selling in.

Last night, for a job interview, I ironed a shirt for the first time in four years. I even ran the iron over each interlocking pleat, like separating seaweed out from water and straightening it, one strand at a time. It was peaceful and ominous.

The shirt is part of a program of wearing businessable attire every weekday between 9 and 5, even if what I have to do is just sit at my computer and write. It’s supposed to help me have separation between my work and my personal life – difficult when you can work at any time, in any attire. It’s been very effective.

And the interview is part of a program of making a more stable life for myself than can be afforded through freelance grantwriting, exclusively – and anything with the word “freelance” on it – assistant directing, you name it.

These are good things, and necessary, and perhaps a little overdue for someone about to be 27 in a couple weeks. But on the way home from said interview, I heard The Chariot, by Cat Empire, in my ears: “we never yield / to conformity.” For a glorious moment, I leaned against the side of a building on Rockwell and pretended I had a plane to catch, a show to do, an all-nighter to pull, a tech to run. I felt a spasm of defiance, like someone shaking me by my spine. I wanted to run, as fast as I could, away from anything that takes place in an office.

And I walked home, calmly and concisely, still wearing the ironed shirt.

I am reminded of an interview I had with a female director some months ago, who gave me this advice: Align (or ally?) yourself with institutions. It was advice spoken of honesty and experience, from the point of view of someone who had tried to live as a freelancer and also within the structure of a theater, who successfully had a child, a relationship, and a career in the arts. It was wise. I’m trying to take it.

To this end, I continue to try to self-institutionalize, for my own safety and security. But who wouldn’t sometimes hear that music and wish they could still be as young and stupid as they, perhaps, still are?

(For the record, I am blogging on my self-imposed “lunch break.”)

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poetry, theater

a slim volume of poetry

The longer I do theater, the more shocked I am that you can get the play’s punctuation, the story, the casting, even the director right. Still, you have to deal with variables like: Is this the right audience? Do I have the right month of the year, the right city? Is the right reviewer coming? So much of it is chance in terms of how the aesthetic object is received. Sometimes it makes you just want to write a slim volume of poetry.

– Sarah Ruhl, interviewed by Paula Vogel

I’ve read this interview many times over the years, but went back to it when I heard recently that her new play, IN THE NEXT ROOM (or the vibrator play) will be on Broadway in the fall.

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books, quotes

me and the deer both dead

My wife is a killer. She dreams at night of my death, and when she awakens, in her guilty consciousness she gives my body a hug that shatters my own desirous dreams. By daylight she pumps me full of vitamins and advice as if to prolong my life but I know her dreams’ truth: she wants me and the deer both dead.

– John Updike, TOWARDS THE END OF TIME

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the academy

an armchair in flames

A dynamic new school of thought is emerging that wants to kick down the walls of recent philosophy and place experimentation back at its centre. It has a name to delight an advertising executive: x-phi. It has blogs and books devoted to it, and boasts an expanding body of researchers in elite universities. It even has an icon: an armchair in flames. If philosophy ever can be, x-phi is trendy. But, increasingly, it is also attracting hostility.

– David Edmonds & Nigel Warburton in Prospect Magazine on “x-phi” (experimental philosophy). Via AJ.

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