quotes, writing

David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008

Rest in peace.

Part of it has to do with living in an era when there’s so much entertainment available, genuine entertainment, and figuring out how fiction is going to stake out its territory in that sort of era. You can try to confront what it is that makes fiction magical in a way that other kinds of art and entertainment aren’t. And to figure out how fiction can engage a reader, much of whose sensibility has been formed by pop culture, without simply becoming more shit in the pop culture machine. It’s unbelievably difficult and confusing and scary, but it’s neat. There’s so much mass commercial entertainment that’s so good and so slick, this is something that I don’t think any other generation has confronted. That’s what it’s like to be a writer now. I think it’s the best time to be alive ever and it’s probably the best time to be a writer. I’m not sure it’s the easiest time.

-DFW (he has my initials) in an 1996 interview with Laura Miller.

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the chorus

“Your mother’ll hardly know you, you’ve grown so bold…” – Women’s Chorus, LYSISTRATA

Today is the end of the Minneapolis mini-trip.

I touch down in Chicago this evening and then prepare for next week’s set of chorus workshops at Q School. I’m coming in for a full week to focus on the LYSISTRATA choruses. Three days with the full cast (20 girls & 8 boys), and one day each with girls or with boys only.

Our goal for the week is, by the end of it, to empower the actors with confidence in choral work. We want to have the students comfortable enough with working in choruses that they can use improvisation while blocking and rehearsing chorus scenes for the rest of the process. We’ve built a schedule that touches on each chorus in the play at least once. I’m excited to be working as a chorus consultant on someone else’s production! It’s going to be lots of fun.

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workstyle, writing

– in which I finally work a 9 to 5 –

9 pm – 5 am, that is. I had a mentor and boss tell me this past year that I have a problem with perfectionism – I don’t like to turn in drafts of anything until I consider them to be almost done. Well, he was right, and it only gets worse as I get higher standards. Time to listen to TANGLED UP IN BLUE for the sixth time tonight, as a reward, and go to sleep. Simple pleasures.

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writing

dispatches from the conference room

Writing, this time, in the lobby of a mixed-use condo and office building, across from Mt. Normandale Lake, with wireless from a nearby coffee shop.. There is a piano sitting to my left, businessmen on cell phones to my right (as I write those directions, I realize I have unconsciously made them stage left and right) and the lake behind me. My entire post-Stanford writing career is about discovering computer clusters where none exist. It’s a familiar, but lonely, landscape – enough to almost make one turn to the “ambient awareness” of Facebooking and Twittering to bring community to being a freelancer. Almost. SK challenged me (well, suggested, but I take it as a welcome challenge) to write something about that article, and I haven’t done it yet. But I will.

As for getting work done by staying up all night, I’m officially too old to do it any more. Yesterday’s midnight writing session devolved into reading my former roommate’s father’s blog, a rare Chicago conservative. Some interesting stuff from the other side of the aisle. And this morning, death warmed over would have been putting it kindly. I suppose if I had known that my body was going to rebel against this kind of usage, I might – might – have developed other work habits. Maybe.

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location, travel, writing

the enterprise is docked in the lobby

Writing in a hotel lobby makes me feel like a character in a noir novel. There’s a canned version of “Summertime” on piano coming in through the speakers, fake and inappropriate and poignant in the rapidly cooling fall weather, and an unused massage chair behind me. Upstairs is my employer and her baby, and her assistant, all now asleep. Behind me, Minneapolis executives (the only people chilling at this hotel mid-week) drink and talk.

A: No, that’s not the story!
B: The story is, the story –
A: The story is –

I sat outside talking to my friend on the phone awhile, and someone pulled up in an SUV to ask if I needed a ride somewhere.

“No,” I said, “I’m staying at the hotel. Just talking on the phone.”

“Okay,” he said, and drove off.

It’s only in the Midwest that anyone has ever offered me a ride from the side of the road, or expected me to take it, without feeling like someone was going to get brutally murdered. I still don’t hitch, but it’s amazing that here, people even offer. It’s surprising that there’s a place in this country, a city, even, where that exchange is more about friendship – “guest-friendship” – than fear.

So I’m inside, and I write, things I’m supposed to be, things I’m not supposed to be, things I’ve never heard of before, the only way I ever get writing done – between 11 pm and the morning.

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location

Valley pride

The “Mall of America” is no bigger than the malls of Woodland Hills, rollercoasters or no rollercoasters. I visited, with an 8-month-old baby, this afternoon, and we were both underwhelmed. She fell asleep.

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location, travel

What’re you going to catch?

Walking the cold, green circuit around Mt. Normandale Lake today, in Bloomington, Minnesota, I met a fisherman. The shores were so landscaped and office-parkized that I couldn’t believe there were fish, but there he was, wearing a plaid shirt, standing in the grass, throwing a line out into the reeds.

D: Are you really fishing here?
S: Yup.
D: What’re you going to catch?
S: Bass, hopefully.

This trip is just a side trip for my day job, and I have no explicit theatrical agenda. I guess that must mean I like travel for its own sake, now – meeting new people, and imagining theater projects in the future. Seeing new places, like pancake-flat Minnesota, with lakes like the holes in the dough. I’m surprised how much I’m enjoying this. It’s very nice to be back on the road again, but with a home to return to.

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writing

there’s a spinet in it

I have a short story, SPINET, up on Six Sentences now. 6S is a blog I found out about through Gmail text ads, believe it or not, and I’ve read it regularly since then. They publish a very particular kind of microfiction – pieces exactly 6 sentences in length.

Writing this story was a lot like writing a monologue. I found that having an even number gave the paragraph a sort of up-and-down fall, which I tried to fight by having the sentences generally get longer. I found that the speaker was fighting his tendency towards run-ons, but let himself go at the end, when he finally imagines getting exactly what he wants.

PS. One of the commenters (commentators?) on 6S mentioned that he wondered how two of the
minor characters in the story would ‘hit it off’. Maybe this is the opportunity I’ve been wanting to write a serial – I could keep developing this guy’s voice and try to send them more micro-monologues. I hadn’t even thought about that. But I love the idea!

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writing

stranger than fiction

I’m in Minneapolis this week, which is dotted with lakes large and small like holes in a piece of cheese. It’s my first trip since settling in Chicago. Being a stranger on a plane again got me writing. I was worried that I wouldn’t want to travel any more, that I’d overdosed on the experience in the year of assistant directing. However, I enjoyed it. And knowing I have a proper home to come back to made it feel less dangerous.

So I wrote. Zack knows that I’ve been trying to get back to some science fiction / fantasy material for quite some time, and my seatmate was reading a Mercedes Lackey, so I tried to follow up on an idea I had about “earlids” – a biology where you could close your ears, but not your eyes.

This is the first time I’ve messed around writing a longer short story since fiction class in college, and especially one which isn’t just a glorified short play. It was fun – I just scribbled everything I could think about the idea of “earlids,” including some sample dialogue and some questions to ask a biologist.

I would like to have the power of hearing be limited, and the power of sight be unlimitable – so that you could see, but not hear, through closed doors.

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art

closer than those who have living children

…could these women have imagined that their faces would shine forth from works that are a key to some of the most extraordinary moments in the history of art, and that paintings and sculptures for which their presences were central would be sold for fabulous sums of money in a century not yet born? Could they possibly have imagined that the work they did would be so celebrated and that it would live forever?

– Ruth Butler, from her book HIDDEN IN THE SHADOW OF THE MASTER: THE MODEL-WIVES OF CEZANNE, MONET, AND RODIN, profiled yesterday in the NYT. There’s a downloadable first chapter too.

The statues of me made by mon Maitre are our children, mine as much as his. And we are married through a love much closer than those who have living children, because our children and more beautiful and thus immortal.

– British painter & model (to Rodin) Gwen John, quoted by Butler

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