where there are more birds heading north on Charles Street than cars.
Taught the first day of the second year of my Intersession class on musicals today. One of my students made an interesting observation–that perhaps one of the reasons some people dislike musicals has to do with the fakeness of concealing the musicians. I had not thought of this before. I think it might be right.
A theatrical friend in Baltimore sent me a link to this new blog, the Hungarian Watch site, a website aggregating articles about the deteriorating situation for freedom of the press and arts in Hungary.
Here’s a sonnet I like, by the poet one of our professors called the greatest female poet of the 20th century.
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.– Edna St. Vincent Millay
Yeah, I like it OK–but I would like it better, I think, if it weren’t a sonnet.
“[Saunders]…In a certain way, if you keep trying to serve the story you would inadvertently or unwittingly push something into a three-act structure.
Guernica: In steering away from your own drift…
George Saunders: I think so. Someone told me once–I mean I said, “Is it ok that I don’t really know what the three-act structure is?” And he said, “It’s basically: Act 1–a guy climbs up a tree; Act 2–people come and throw stuff at him; Act 3–he gets down.”
Guernica: [laughs]
George Saunders: It’s like that with any story. If I say, “Oh, I got so wasted last night, and I drove my car into the Mississippi and then a fish came up and bit me on the ass and luckily I was able to swim to shore,” that’s a three-act structure. I spent a lot of time when I was in my twenties really torturing myself about things like scene and plot and character and stucture–is this a story? is this a novella? So, you know, and then I realized, “Actually, dumbass, all I have to do is keep the reader’s attention for twenty pages, by whatever means necessary.”
-George Saunders, interviewed in Guernica. He has a great short story in the New Yorker now. Via T.B.
The bottles of Torani syrup line your shelves like monks in their bunks,
and the window across the boulevard is almost smothered with tall green trees of all heights and varieties,
which are themselves obscured by an assortment of capital-lettered SUPERIOR auto-body shops,
and those are covered by cars in motion, square-backed and train-straight in their paths,
and those part-obscured by parked cars,
and those bisected by tables,
and those appended by people with drinks on barstool chairs,
and those cut off by the screen of my laptop,
and my hands on the keys. This place.
This place. I am getting increasingly less work done
the more I look at the landscape. This place, where all things
are several at once.
when editing is like being punched in the brain with a sandbag, and others when it is like sliding down a staircase, and others when it is like sliding down a staircase made of sandbags.
Man: Aren’t you my bus driver? I know you’re my bus driver.
Woman: (unintelligible)
Man: You’re great.
Woman: (pause)
Man: Come on. You’re great. I know you’re great. I know you’re great! Come on!
prevented this site from opening a pop-up window, but it didn’t prevent me from feeling a sense of nostalgia for Northern California. Stay classy, Mountain View! It’s never enough time with anyone there.
that different components of the application are mailed and/or emailed to three different places within the university.
Dara Weinberg 