Here is the poem, A Different Story, by Denise Duhamel, currently published here, at the American Poetry Review.
you can’t do both
Two interesting things from a NYT article about SXSW and media:
it was obvious after a few days here that the people formerly known as the audience were too busy making content to consume much of it, unless it came from their friends. The medium is not the message; the messages are the media.
I’m very interested in this point – the (supposed) decline of the audience with the expansion of authorship, or, perhaps, the idea that everyone in the audience is now an author. That there is no separation between authors and audience members any more. And, even more importantly, this:
One participant [in a panel called “Sex Lives of the Microfamous”] said he had some very firm boundaries. If a first date goes well, and he is interested in seeing the person again, he sets out the rules of engagement.
“You can blog about me or you can date me, but you can’t do both,” he said to audible approval.
Exactly. You can’t do both. Same theme: the idea that you can’t simultaneously be experiencing and documenting something, whether that something is a person or a concert. A warning, a ultimatum, a cautionary note.
Unless, that is, the documentation is part of the experience. Somehow, I think that most people who consider themselves to be writers (bloggers, authors, humans) have already come to terms with this idea, the pillaging of experience for expression. But I, dissatisfied, am still circling it like a block in West Hollywood. I do not know where to park the car of my writing in the neighborhood of this idea. I am afraid of getting some kind of a ticket. There is a Denise Duhamel poem – but I’ll make it a separate post –
toss me a cigarette,
I think there’s one in my raincoat. Tonight is the last night of Dialogue Workshop at Chicago Dramatists. I’m going to be taking another playwriting class with them next quarter. For this one, I haven’t written much new material, only pulled portions out of a big long draft with no structure.
For the next class, I think I’m going to have to do more revising. The idea I have is that the 80-so pages of a bad two-character play I have will become a play-within-a-play about a theater company trying to produce the bad two-character play. That way you never have to see the whole thing, and I never have to write it, and never have to come to terms with its lack of a plot. But putting the 80 pages within the frame-play is something I have not yet begun to do.
bloglift
I’ve decided this blog is going to be more like this one. I was thinking about the blogs I most enjoy reading, and they are the ones where the authors permit themselves to verge on conversational. When I started SOS, I wanted it to be very professional – and I still think it’s important to be able to refer intelligently to things like writing and theater in this space. But the only way it is ever going to be interesting to read, or to reread, is to make it more messy.
I reread blogs sometimes like rereading novels, and I read them like stories. There has to be more of a story here. And by story, I mean plot.
heart, exclamation
I spent the day addressing and mailing thank-you letters for a local theater’s annual campaign. I was stunned the first time I saw something like this, but when you give money to a (proper) small theater, they send you a typed acknowledgment of your contribution, signed by several major members of the staff, with a personal note at the bottom. Yes, they care that much. Yes, they need it that badly. When you imagine hundreds of small $20 donations, that’s a lot of little notes for two people to write.
I was amused to see that one of them had resorted to just drawing a heart and putting an exclamation point next to it – I’ll have to do that the next time I’m enthusiastic but running out of penmanship.
kiss me, I’m Irish AND it’s warm outside
Today is the second St. Patrick’s Day in 4 days. Perhaps worn out from the excesses of Saturday, tonight’s celebrations are much more subdued. It’s so warm – 70 degrees! – that after I went to yoga I sat in Wicker Park, at a stone table with a chessboard set in the center, for an hour, writing and writing and writing until there was no light at all. I wasn’t the only one there – people had poured out of all the surrounding apartment buildings and graystones to be outside and feel the air. People in green T-shirts sitting on the grass.
Leaving the park, a stranger said to me, “Enjoy it – it’s only going to last two more days.” Chicagoans are so aware of the forecast.
“Don’t say that,” I said. I still believe that if you ignore the weather, it doesn’t exist.
“You know it!” he said. “You’ve got your preparedness and everything,” referring to my jacket.
It’s true that I never leave my house here without some kind of jacket, but it has less to do with preparedness and more to do with laziness. I’ve never learned to check the weather, and if a winter in this town didn’t get me to start, I don’t know what will.
ever a comfort
Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.
– John Updike, IN THE BEAUTY OF THE LILIES
Conversation with the CATHEDRAL
[You know, I tried to read CONVERSATION IN THE CATHEDRAL a couple weeks ago and couldn’t. And yet I wrote a post which was derivative of his work. I’m not Llosa, but here’s what’s left, after I took his style out of my writing:]
Chicago. Spring forward, sunny day, a conveyor sidewalk of cafes ending at a black metal bench at the northwest corner of Division and Damen. A bench without a bus stop.
Heading north, a woman in semi-transparent brown leggings with no pants and no skirt pushing herself, her husband, and her bushels of baby strollers up Damen. This is the second instance of Wicker Park-area exposure I’ve seen in a few weeks – the last one was a woman on the 70 bus with plumber’s cleavage.
Back to the present, a man on an electric bicycle is circling the block, proudly displaying his gut in his red jersey, not moving his calves one bit to move his body.
We sit, we eat, we observe other people’s bodies in motion around us, and we spend the day waiting for a bus that doesn’t come. Instead, the night does.
I say, elated, that I’m going to write a poem about the woman with no pants. I don’t. I write this instead.
[As I write this, gazing more and more inward, a little red-headed bird made out of burnt umber lands on the porch outside my window and squawks at me, as if to say “Get over yourself.” ]
one of those days
Yesterday, after dying the river green and watching Chicagoans drinking the river dry, I went down to Chinatown-Cermak and saw a woman in a punk-rock concert trying to set someone’s plaid T-shirt on fire with a cigarette lighter. I met someone at the concert who had quit his job to see this band, years ago. I left before they played.
for the first time in a long time
Last night, at the low-lying couches of DOC Wine Bar in Lincoln Park, I am asked (I ask myself) to explain the ideology of the title of this blog.
I locate it in an interest in exploring style, and in thinking that forms and styles have as much meaning in them as ideas and content. I also talk about how it could just as easily have been titled “praxis over theory.” It goes back to certain ideas I was working on at school.
But I realize, in explaining it, that the extremism of the statement is something I haven’t really held for a long time. It’s like wearing the bumper sticker of a party you joined when you were seventeen and for which you no longer vote. I’m still interested in style, but not to the exclusion of anything.
There is no me and there is no writing without it. But that doesn’t mean that it is the only thing I do.
I don’t think I can seriously consider retitling this page, except that I already have.
Dara Weinberg 