Today we are going to watch the river being dyed green from E’s friend’s lake-looking apartment, and then later on I’m going to hear a bunch of “acid jazz,” “prog-rock,” and “wandering electric piano” at Reggie’s. The slight but consistent improvement in the weather has made everyone much more social, and we are all back in the business of overcompensating for the snow.
me, a name I call myself
Just got back from the second to last session of Dialogue Workshop @ Chicago Dramatists. Again, characters taken from life become or unrecognizable in the mouths of others. This is a relief and a regret. I realize that I am, or have been, writing poetry because I am, or have been, feeling very self-centered, and to write plays requires you to hear other people’s voices besides your own. The plays, the fiction, the all of everything I’ve been writing is all about the third note of the scale. The comments I get on the scene are, not surprisingly, about wanting to hear more points of view.
R&C have returned from the Convergence, bearing photographs and stories. R refuses to believe that I am taking a break from theater. I refuse to believe it, too, but it’s happening anyway. We watch, to great success, CARS projected on an enormous white curtain. God, I love cars. Especially when I don’t have to drive them. Little red cars named Lightning. Cars with big blinking windshield-eyelashes. So cute. So LA right now.
For the first time in years of inactivity, the Random Rhyme Generator in my head turns on, and I hear this: “official / prejudicial.” Later on, “interstitial,” but the first one’s the important one. I only really like them between words of different syllable counts…I used to get these things the way I now get sinus infections. I haven’t had one since this blog was founded. It’s been a long time, been a long time, been a long lonely, lonely lonely lonely lonely ti-ime. Is this because my mother asked me about the location of a lost volume of Lear?
– I don’t have a category for myself on this blog. (I guess the blog is the category for myself.)
stranger than
I once wrote a short story in a college fiction class where the characters, but not the events, were all based on real people – myself and two of my friends.
I worried for a long time about the ethics of doing this, but decided I had disguised everyone enough that it wouldn’t matter. I felt very guilty about “using” my friends in this way, but not at all so about myself. I was, I thought, fair game for my own writing.
When I turned in the story to my classmates, the character whom they all found the most morally repugnant was the one based on me. This taught me that I contained, or sympathized with, a person who was highly dislikeable.
It also taught me that in the process of transferring “truth” to “fiction,” enough is always changed so that you don’t have to worry about “using” anyone. I remind myself of this now, because you have to keep learning it over and over and over again.
do you want the good news or the bad news?
No more Madison Rep, the Los Angeles freelance artists are having to go back to working day jobs, and just because everyone’s going to the movies doesn’t mean the film industry will thrive. I guess I forgot what the good news was. Via, via, via ArtsJournal, which is more and more and more like the TickerTape of DoomForTheArtsWorld.
as you already know by now,
the playwright Horton Foote has died. I haven’t wanted to post it, because I haven’t wanted it to be true.
When I directed a scene from COURTSHIP, a few years ago, a small scene between two women built on alternating levels of quietness, I and the two actresses – high school students – earnestly worked away on it for two weeks. We knew it was good, but we didn’t know how good. When they performed it, in almost no light, it was the most real thing I’d ever seen. More real than life. I and the actors and everyone were all so surprised by the way these simple words made something so, I can’t be smarter about this, so REAL.
At eight o’clock in New York tonight, the Broadway marquees will be dimmed for a minute, in his honor.
untitled post
“I don’t fuck around with titles. I come up with them immediately and then don’t ever think about changing them.”
the wine-dark sea
If your son is not intimidating
On the line of scrimmage,
If your daughter’s report card
Is not the brightest image,
If your children are not turning out
As healthy as you’d wished,
Perhaps on your dinner table
You might be missing fish.
– fisherman/poet Rob Seitz in a NYT article about the 12th annual Oregon Fisher Poets gathering. Participants come from Alaska, British Columbia, CA and Oregon, of course, and even Rhode Island and Florida.
oh, those poets
“Rather than killing it off, modern technologies like email, social networking sites such as Facebook and online media players are helping poets reach new audiences.”
heroism
“I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.”
– More David Foster “I Have Dara’s Initials” Wallace, quoted in this article, which is so good. I have never before posted 3 quotes from an article before reading the whole thing. Who is this “D.T. Max” person? Only one of the best article writers ever, obviously. He has also, beside having written this amazing DFW article, written a book on fatal familial insomnia. (D.T., not DFW.) So, so, good.
Dara Weinberg 