Category Archives: quotes

books, quotes

We are now officially out of tech

and, feeling behind on all my other work, and attempting the rewrite again (the pages of the Greeks are scattered on the coffee table in front of me), here is an appropriate article about talking about books you haven’t really read, by Pierre Bayard – his book on the subject, “How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read,” came out Jan. 10th and is getting really popular.

“Non-reading goes far beyond the act of leaving a book unopened. To varying degrees, books we’ve skimmed, books we’ve heard about and books we have forgotten also fall into the rich category that is non-reading. Life, in its cruelty, presents us with a plethora of situations in which we might find ourselves talking about books we haven’t read.

To get to the heart of things, I believe we must significantly modify how we talk about books, even the specific words we use to describe them. Our relation to books is not the continuous and homogeneous process that certain critics would have us imagine, nor the site of some transparent self-knowledge. Our relation to books is a shadowy space haunted by the ghosts of memory, and the real value of books lies in their ability to conjure these spectres. “

And another article, on why authors want to be anonymous, by John Mullen, whose book on THAT subject, “Anoymity,” comes out on Jan. 17.

“Jonathan Swift arranged for a sample part of Gulliver’s Travels, transcribed in another man’s handwriting, to be dropped in secret by an intermediary at the house of publisher Benjamin Motte. It was accompanied by a letter from one “Richard Sympson”, supposedly Lemuel Gulliver’s cousin, offering the whole of the Travels for publication in return for £200. Motte was told that, within three days, he should either return the “Papers” or give the money “to the Hand from whence you receive this, who will come in the same manner exactly at 9 a clock [sic] at night on Thursday”. Motte bravely accepted the mysterious offer and a few nights later he duly got the rest of the book.”

Both of these are testing my resolve to not acquire more books until I have acquired a place to live. Now, if someone would just write an book on how to write plays you haven’t written.

All of this is via ArtsJournal and the Guardian.

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quotes, travel

The dream is forming into a chain.

“…Memory becomes a cataract that threatens to drown her, and Inez Prada wakes with a cry. She isn’t in a cave. She’s in a suite at the Savoy in London. She casts a sideways glance at the telephone, the hotel notepad and pencils, to reassure herself. Where am I? An opera singer often doesn’t know where she is or where she’s just come from.”
– from INEZ, (Carlos Fuentes)

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books, quotes, style, writing

He was…elsewhere. “Il est ailleurs.”

“I am dying but the universe goes on. I can’t bear being separated from you. But if you are my soul and you live in me like a second body, my death will not be as inconsequential as a stranger’s.”
– from INEZ, by Carlos Fuentes

Sarah Rose and I were talking yesterday about dialogue and narration in fiction style. She read me a short story of hers which contained a dialogue scene without dialogue. The narrator told the story of the conversation without quoting any of the words.

It’s a device that I wouldn’t have thought of, being so stylistically geared towards plays and spoken words, but I’m curious to see if I can do it.

Reading INEZ this morning made me realize, too, that when the narrator’s voice is distinct, all narration is dialogue.

Off to a props meeting and first rehearsal for LYDIA.

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criticism, quotes, style

“a justification for their pitiable and base existence”

From a fellow formalist. I really like the way that Wolfe, using language, blames the language itself for the use it’s being put to. This is out of a description of a graduate class in theater criticism, at Harvard:

“…He gave them a language they could use with a feeling of authority and knowledge, even when authority and knowledge were lacking to them. It was a dangerous and often very trivial language – a kind of jargonese of art that was coming into use in the world of those days….

But although this jargon was perhaps innocuous enough when rattled off the rattling tongue of some ignorant boy or rattle-pated girl, it could be a very dangerous thing when uttered seriously by men who were trying to achieve the best, the rarest, and the highest life on earth – the life which may be won only by bitter toil and knowledge and stern living – the life of the artist.

And the great danger of this glib and easy jargon of the arts was this: that instead of knowledge, the experience of hard work and patient living, they were given a formula for knowledge; a language that sounded very knowing, expert and assured, and yet that knew nothing, was experienced in nothing, was sure of nothing.

It gave to people without talent and without sincerity of soul or integrity of purpose, with nothing, in fact, except a feeble incapacity for the shock and agony of life, and the desire to escape into a glamorous and unreal world of make believe – a justification for their pitiable and base existence.

It gave to people who had no power in themselves to create anything of merit or of beauty- people who were the true Philistines and enemies of art and of the artist’s living spirit – the language to talk with glib knowingness of things they knew nothing of…”

(Thomas Wolfe, OF TIME AND THE RIVER)

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books, quotes, style

I do not wish to appear smug

“Then we were kissing – just like, I suppose, a couple on the cinema screen. It was almost exactly as I had always imagined it would be, except there was something oddly inelegant about our embrace, and I tried more than once to adjust my posture; but my right foot was hard against a heavy box and I could not quite negotiate the necessary turn without risking my balance.”

– from When We Were Orphans. One of the reviews on there called Ishiguro “emotionally strangulated” – for heaven’s sake- his precision, and especially his modifiers upon descriptions (“oddly inelegant”) have much emotion as anyone could want. There’s nothing minimalist about his adjectives. His characters feel more than any ten others.

“My feeling is that she is thinking of herself as much as of me when she talks of a sense of mission, and the futility of attempting to evade it. Perhaps there are those who are able to go about their lives unfettered by such concerns. For those like us, our fate is to face the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm.”

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quotes, theater

99-Cent…

Aaron and I have been discussing LA waiver theater and whether it’s better to make art with the resources you have ( a contract that pays no one very much ) or to hold off and advocate / fundraise for better payment. I think you should do both.

I found myself very close to the bone on the argument, having directed 3 LA waiver productions, and knowing exactly how hard it was to raise enough money to pay people – and being a member of a waiver company, and proud of its work in producing new plays and experimental work.

But, just imagine…if there was no 99-seat plan, would theaters all be like Syzygy in LA, and fundraise all year until they could produce a play under an Equity contract? And would that be better than producing 4 or 5 shows a year, where no one gets wages to speak of?

I don’t want to see a world without Theatre of NOTE but I find myself hard-pressed to defend the model of waiver theater as a method of making a living. Which is why I’ve left LA.

I do believe that NOTE’s role in producing new plays and new work makes it ideally suited for a lower-tier contract, and I don’t want to see it or companies like it driven out of business. But should some theaters be forced to go on a low-level Equity contract? Should there be a timespan under which you can operate waiver, and then have to go union?

The best way of instituting more change is probably just to have more union companies in LA, to have more houses make the jump – to make it seem successful, to figure out marketing and survival models for it, not just legislate change and then watch as meaningful, small companies are driven out of the landscape.

Incentive, not destructive.

Keep the waiver model in place until another is working, but put incentives in place for companies that do migrate to a union contract.

I’m very torn about it.

This quote came up in the conversation.

“The artist in ancient times inspired, entertained, educated his
fellow citizens. Modern artists have an additional responsibility —
to encourage others to be artists. Why? Because technology is going
to destroy the human soul unless we realize that each of us must in
some way be a creator as well as a spectator or consumer. Make your
own music, write your own books, if you would keep your soul.”
— Pete Seeger

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quotes

The Need For…

From Diane Duane’s weblog. I’d never heard this before, but it’s a comfort to us speeders.

“The faster I write the better my output. If I’m going slow I’m in trouble. It means I’m pushing the word instead of being pulled by them.”
— Raymond Chandler

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quotes

Quotestuck

“So with the devil’s-advocate moon grinning over my shoulder, with demure quails calling and bullbats diving and old Henry honking across the river that gurgled coyly to the stars, and with my stomach heavy with Viv’s cooking and my head light with Hank’s praise, right then and right there I decided to bury the hatchet. I would blame my sad beginnings on no fiend but my own. Live and let live. Forgive me as I forgive my debtors. The man who seeks revenge digs two graves.”

(from Kesey’s SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION.)

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