dialogue, ovhd, travel

you don’t like it

SCENE: This morning, DARA is reading, for the nth year running, a large group of one-act plays for a high school festival. She is sitting with her travelworn laptop at Janik’s at the corner of Division & Damen. Overhead, an exposed heating pipe is wrapped in plastic-tubed Christmas lights. Underneath, the floor is tiled like a chessboard. To her right is a wall of comic-book art plated in glass stacked like a European museum, where there’s so much art you can’t afford to let each piece have its own place on the x axis. To her left, a flatscreen is streaming images from NASA, interspersed with images of the menu. Galaxy – catering available. Supernova – Stella Artois. Behind DARA, people are glossing over emotions, in that way when someone has given you too much information, and you have to say something – but nothing you can say will be enough. She listens. It’s never too early.

A: (trying) Hey, that’s how life is, right – you don’t like it, hit the road.
B: Yeah. And I did.

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chicago, workstyle

lose the cookies

I always enjoy the freelancer camaraderie of people nestled around laptops in cafes. Yesterday, grantwriting at the Au Bon “Free Wifi” Pain on Adams, across the street from the Symphony, a group of businessmen asked me to watch their laptop, several times, as they went to get food and prolong their meeting. On one of these trips, they came back with a bag of chocolate chip cookies for me, which they gave to me like this: “You gonna be here for awhile? You want some cookies?”

“One day,” one of the guys said to another, “you’re going to ask the wrong person to watch your computer – and then you’ll lose the computer and the cookies!”

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chicago, writing

you should have heard the scream she let out, bro

Grantwriting at the Mercury Cafe on Chicago Avenue, distinguished by its large number of electrical outlets and its cavernous space, large enough to perform surgery on a truck.

I ask my tablemate for the wireless password. By answer, he turns to his IPhone, caresses his screen for far too long, and eventually comes up with a photograph of the scribbled piece of paper by the counter where the wireless password is written. It’s so digital it’s analog.

The writer’s group is talking:

A: She’s the kind of person who eats a bird shoved inside of a bird shoved inside of a bird.
B: I am from Michigan…
A: You’re crusty, bro.

There really is no reason to ever feel alone in this city. I have spared the readers of this blog the more graphic discussion to which the group proceeded, about genital piercing, but I had to listen to it. Count yourselves lucky.

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books, quotes

a mere expression of something

“You and I,” said Ames – “what are we? We don’t know where we came from nor where we are going to. Tomorrow you might die and dissolve and I could search high and low in all the winds and waters and not find you. Here you are a mere expression of something – you know not what. It so happens that you have the power to act. That is no credit to you. You might not have had it. It isn’t an excuse for either pride or self-glorification. You paid nothing to get it. But now that you have it, you must do something with it.”

He paused again.

“What must I do?” said Carrie.”

“Every person according to his light,” said Ames. “You must help the world express itself. Use will make your powers endure.”

– Theodore Dreiser, SISTER CARRIE

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books, criticism, writing

tragical-comical-historical-pastoral

I have often thought but never written on this blog that dating, relationships, and sex are the feminine-thematic literary equivalent of war and fighting.

I was reminded of this in December, while watching FOUR CHRISTMASES with Eileen. Watching Vince Vaughn get beat up by his brothers was juxtaposed with watching Reese Witherspoon get female-relationship-attacked by her sisters. Punching someone in the gut was the same as asking “When are you getting married?” Stereotypes, yes, but more than that. Models. Themes. Some truth.

Sometimes this thought train leads me to think that PRIDE AND PREJUDICE is the feminine version of, I don’t know, THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK. As you moved forward in the history of the novel, you could set up things like THE RADETSKY MARCH alongside THE HOUSE OF MIRTH. You could contrast, historically, the depiction of sex to the depiction of violence. Someone’s probably already done this. What would you put up against THE NAKED AND THE DEAD?

Sometimes the idea leads me to think that there ought to be sex choreographers as well as fight choreographers, for the New Theater.

Mostly I use it to remind myself that I am, as a writer, more of a woman than I sometimes want to admit. I have never written about a fight. I’ve never even been in a fight. I have written, a lot, about relationships, and as I write more, that subject matter keeps coming to the forefront. There may be no avoiding it.

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books, writing

“lily bart is dead!” – anguished early Wharton reader

I went to the library a few days ago for John Updike, but he was all checked out. Instead, in the last 72 hours, I have read, for the first time, PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT, SISTER CARRIE, and THE HOUSE OF MIRTH. Thematically, it made a nice seminar on the futility of mating.

Roth, Dreiser, and Wharton are novelists who I’m not sure would often be compared to each other in terms of style, but they have made a nice picture of contemporary confusion for me. Topic: a bunch of young people trying to live, trying to fall in love, and all ending up either alone or dead.

This subject matter is one which has consumed my writing lately. The only thing I have to write about, other than young humanoids trying – and failing – to mate with each other, is theater.

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music

who cares if you understand?

Yesterday a friend and I attended Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s piano recital at the CSO. Although we both love music, we aren’t experts, so when PLA only paused very briefly between the various pieces in his program, we had no idea he had moved on to a different composer. I feel like I’m outing myself as a musical imbecile here, but we thought that a three-part half composed of Schumann, Chopin, and Debussy was all the same piece. Both of us.

Abashed, in the second half, we tried to be smarter, watched for when his page-turner took one score off the music stand, and, this time, caught the change from Messiaen to Carter. We both listened much more closely.

His performance style was similarly masterful and understated. He made you come to him rather than the other way around. The entire program was all about keeping your eyes and ears open. Even as the pieces got more contemporary, louder, more showy in some ways, his playing was still all subtlety.

I watched him play for two hours, and I still know nothing about him as a person. He seemed concerned only with the music – and that music was almost beyond my understanding. It was a great concert.

I want to see theater that doesn’t explain itself any more than PLA’s playing did, that doesn’t worry about whether or not the work is accessible to the audience – only if it’s being performed at the highest artistic level possible. I’ve sat through so many theater production meetings concerned about comprehension.

For a medium driven by plot, this factor may be more significant than it is in a medium driven by sound – but the recital made me feel like the significance of understanding every single thing that happens in a play has been a little overvalued. It was challenging, and that challenge was welcome.

I haven’t felt so stimulated and provoked by a play since Richard Foreman’s WHAT TO WEAR at Redcat. When I saw that play, I felt that I couldn’t possibly take it all in, and that it would require six more viewings to get it. I miss feeling so overwhelmed by theater.

Do I feel this way about music because I know less about it, or because music is more complicated – or because this particular performer chose to challenge his audience?

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books, writing

the future of fiction

“And what will that fiction look like? Like fan fiction, it will be ravenously referential and intertextual in ways that will strain copyright law to the breaking point. Novels will get longer–electronic books aren’t bound by physical constraints–and they’ll be patchable and updatable, like software. We’ll see more novels doled out episodically, on the model of TV series or, for that matter, the serial novels of the 19th century. We can expect a literary culture of pleasure and immediate gratification. Reading on a screen speeds you up: you don’t linger on the language; you just click through. We’ll see less modernist-style difficulty and more romance-novel-style sentiment and high-speed-narrative throughput. Novels will compete to hook you in the first paragraph and then hang on for dear life.”

– Lev Grossman, “Books Gone Wild: The Digital Age Reshapes Literature,” TIME

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art, quotes

unwarranted

“Shepard Fairey was completely unaware that there were any warrants for his arrest. Had he known, he would have resolved all such issues before the opening of his art exhibit at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston,” [Fairey’s attorney Jeffrey] Wiesner said.
– LAT, via AJ.

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