books, israel, quotes

the exact opposite

“One reason for my decision was that all too many people advised me not to do it. Perhaps, like many other novelists, I tend to do the exact opposite of what I am told. If people are telling me — and especially if they are warning me — “Don’t go there,” “Don’t do that,” I tend to want to “go there” and “do that.” It’s in my nature, you might say, as a novelist. Novelists are a special breed. They cannot genuinely trust anything they have not seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands.

And that is why I am here. I chose to come here rather than stay away. I chose to see for myself rather than not to see. I chose to speak to you rather than to say nothing.”

– Haruki Murakami’s speech on accepting the Jerusalem Prize. Salon, via AJ.

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chicago

Honey? We’re out of milk.

On the way home from Star Lounge, I saw a man come out of the corner grocery store and hurry down Rockwell. He was still wearing the sweat pants he’d slept in and scrunching his face under his hat, carrying a cold gallon of cold milk in his right hand and holding both gloves in the left. I hope the rest of his breakfast proceeds without interruption.

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dialogue, writing

“,”

Experimenting with writing quotes on this blog in different formats, play or fiction. Something so intimate about putting the dialogue in quotation marks.

I think what really gets me about the “,”s is the idea of setting the spoken parts apart from the rest of the text, as if everything weren’t just another kind of dialogue. Dressing it up.

“Something so intimate,” she said, “about putting the dialogue in quotation marks.”

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writing

serious times, serious oneacts

Just finished adjudicating (er, reading) the last of the millions of high-school one-acts for the yearly festival, and ranking them. I’ve done this for four or five years now. Nice way to stay in touch with what matters to a subsubsubset of kids in Los Angeles. Although they write about dating every year, this year’s group had a nice sprinkling of electoral politics, stop-lossed soldiers, terrorists, and one very interesting surrealist piece about Facebook taking over their lives. Less pregnancy than last year (the influence of JUNO is fading, I guess) and more missed connections. In general, one of the more outward-looking slates I’ve read.

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books

“It was the New York Times that broke his heart.”

“The fact that a writer of Stegner’s stature felt ghettoized with the dreaded tag of “regional author” raises the question of whether our national literature is too tightly controlled by the so-called cultural elite – those people who talk to each other in some mythic Manhattan echo chamber.”

-Timothy Egan, “Stegner’s Complaint,” in his Outposts blog. No, there’s no class on Stegner at Stanford.

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directing, the chorus

set another before you

When I was working on THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL, at the Met Theater, at the end of 2006, I asked the producers to let us have six weeks of workshop time many months out before the actual rehearsal/production process.

A fun group of people drifted in and out of the process, including some very talented people whose schedules wouldn’t have permitted them to commit to the full calendar of rehearsals and performances. One woman only came to one workshop, but she made a big impact on my methods.

Somehow, I had also planned things far enough out in advance that, through Craigslist, I found two very talented videographer/directors who taped all the workshops. We used some of the footage later as background imagery during the production itself. I also watched it, when I had enough time to do so, at home, to go over what I had and hadn’t learned from the rehearsals.

I still have the tapes of the workshops, and I haven’t watched them since then. But I salvaged a little television with a VHS deck built in from the street, months ago, and plugged it in now – and popped one in.

There they were, and there I was, my hair wrapped in a bandanna (definitely hadn’t showered, definitely was running late that day) their legs in sweat pants and knees padded to protect from the improvisations. We were working in a theater that was maybe fifteen feet square, for the stage, and had twenty seats, for the audience. It was the truest black box I’ve ever seen. I am right on top of them. They are reciting William Blake and breaking the line into nothingness through repetition. They are dripping sweat. I am watching them like I know what it all means. I don’t.

“The most sublime act is to set another before you.
Set another before you.
Set another before you.
Before, before…”

And I am trying to figure it out, and so are they.

It was so nice to find this footage. I’ll be able to watch it, when I’m old and withered and have no more hair to put in bandannas, and be like “See? See? I used to have hair!” (And actors…)

I think that I have to do a better job of being my own archivist, of maintaining the records of the things I’ve done. It’s not that they will be significant to other people – it’s that they continue to be significant to me. I seem to be taking a break from directing choruses for the present. But if I ever do, again, I would want to know where these tapes were.

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books, quotes

into the pit

“…there are so few things, which, contemplated, do not like flimsy trapdoors open under the weight of our attention into the bottomless pit below.”

– John Updike, ROGER’S VERSION

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