Oh great white city
I’ve got the adequate committee
Where have your walls gone?
I think about it now
Chicago, in fashion, the soft drinks, expansion
Oh Columbia!
From Paris, incentive, like Cream of Wheat invented,
The Ferris Wheel!
[…]
Chicago, the New Age, but what would Frank Lloyd Wright say?
Oh Columbia!
Amusement or treasure, these optimistic pleasures
Like the Ferris Wheel!
– Sufjan Stevens, “Come on! Feel the Illinoise!” from the album of the same title
There is no happiness like that of a young couple in a little house they have built themselves in a place of beauty and solitude.
– Annie Proulx, “Them Old Cowboy Songs”
One of the functions the chorus has is the same as the narrator – telling you the way things are, the way things should be, the way things ought to be. And the chorus has always been unreliable, because they are real characters and have information hidden from them. They continue to be optimistic even when the audience knows it’s curtains for Antigone. But this line, and others like it that I keep stumbling into in fiction, make me think of choruses. Like this:
CHORUS
There is no happiness
like that of a young couple
in a little house they have built themselves
in a place of beauty and solitude.
It is so specific – it makes an aphorism, a general statement about life, out of something so very particular. There is no happiness like – but they has to be young, the house little, the place must be beautiful and isolated. Then, and only then, is there no happiness like it.
When Kendall was drunk, when he was in odd surroundings like the Coq d’Or, when someone’s misery was on display in front of him, in moments like this Kendall still felt like a poet. He could feel the words rumbling somewhere in the back of his mind, as though he still had the diligence to write them down.
One’s country was like one’s self. The more you learned about it, the more you were ashamed of it.
– Jeffrey Eugenides, from this brilliant short story about democracy, money, and white-collar crime, “Great Experiment,” in the 3/31/08 New Yorker.
“It’s so much work. You spend years on this sucker. Then you have to deal with casting, and you have to deal with all of the egos and all of that. And yes, indeed, you do have to work with the singers, you have to work with the stage director, you need to work with the scene people, the lighting people, the musicians, the conductor, all of these extra people. And then it probably will be staged once, get ho hum reviews, and disappear forever. Uh, I don’t know. There are other things I guess I’d rather be doing.”
– composer Christopher Rouse, in an interview at Newmusicbox.org, via Artsjournal.
“Mr. White found writing difficult and bad for one’s health, but he kept at it even so. He would have liked, more than anything, to be a poet. The poets, he thought, are the great ones.”
– E.B. White
VIOLA
Make me a willow cabin at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Halloo your name to the reverberate hills
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out ‘Olivia!’ O, You should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth,
But you should pity me!
OLIVIA
You might do much…
For whatever reason, perhaps because of Viola’s “you should not rest/between the elements of air and earth,” perhaps because of the single-minded obsession of the lover she describes, which is exactly how I feel about the chorus, how I feel about most things I pursue in my work or my life, these lines have never been out of my head, this entire year. I post them here, in the hopes of moving beyond them. They are beautiful, but very dangerous. Viola might do much, but she might undo herself in doing it. Spoken like someone (like me) who needs to, as Frodo yells to the Hobbits, “Get off the road! Now!” A break, however brief. A rest. A respite.
But nothing makes the gods laugh like making plans: and I plan for less travel, knowing in my bones that you can’t really ever get off the road once you get on it.
“I was in New York mostly on account of not wanting to be in Boston.”
“Maybe instead of trying to quiet my unease, I should learn to live creatively with the fact that I am almost never sure about the right thing to do.”
– Chris Adrian, from an essay in the NYT Magazine (via Maud)
“The unusual thing about me as a choreographer is that I don’t start with movement. It’s because my pieces are always story-led. The movement doesn’t happen until we get in the studio. It’s very collaborative. I wouldn’t stand in front of the mirror working out choreography because I’m older now and I’ve got fantastic dancers who can do things I could never do. It’s their personalities I’m interested in so I’m not going to give it to them; I want them to give it to me.”
“If I stop and think about it, the satisfaction I get… well, I could die tomorrow a happy man. The journey is so perfect for me. It makes me less ambitious and more concentrated on what I really want, and that’s the company. That’s what I’ve always really loved, and what I’ve done since I was a kid. I used to get people from my street together to put on a show in the bedroom or the garden, and even then I’d call them my company.”
– Matthew Bourne, from an interview in the SCOTSMAN.
He seems so happy with his process and his collaborators.
I, too, could die tomorrow a happy man, were I a man,
(Beatrice: “Oh, were I a man!”…)
knowing about the collaboration about to happen today.
“All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.”
– Auden
Sir Peter Hall talking with Jasper Rees in the Guardian, on, among other things, the nature of the director-animal:
“[…]They’re much more difficult than writers or actors to deal with. They’re the cat who walks alone.
I’ve worked with practically all the great directors, alphabetically, from Bergman to Zeffirelli. It’s wonderful to be involved in the mystery of other directors’ work, because they’re all different.
But most will know within the first three or four days whether it’s going to work. The interesting thing is when it’s wrong they have to go on and they can’t tell anybody it’s wrong.”
Dara Weinberg 