The extraordinary playwright and poet Ron Allen, from Detroit, author of the plays EYE MOUTH GRAFFITI BODYSHOP and x restrung cortex, among many other texts, died last night at a hospital in Los Angeles.

He left me a phone message on July 16, and in the extreme bustle that’s been happening, I didn’t call him back. The message is still on my phone.

“Dara Weinberg: Ron Allen calling. Wanted to (…) see how you’re doing, tell you how I’m doing, so give me a call when you get a chance.”

I had a chance–you always have a chance–but I didn’t call.

He had a stroke, was in a coma, and his family decided to let him go rather than to let him linger–which I’m sure was what he would have wanted.

Ron was a teacher as well as a writer. He taught young people, old people, people at rehab centers, monasteries, and prisons, in Detroit and here. He was someone whose life touched many, many, many people, through his Buddhist practice, his writing, his classes, and his love. I will be thinking of him today. I hope you will all take a moment to think of him, as well.

you can edit for hours, with multiple windows in multiple programs, Tracked Changes and Notes and all that, with clipboards of both the paper and electronic variety; you can do all that till the cows come home; but no one will walk by your cubicle until the exact moment when you’re staring at your fingernails like there’s a little green alien dancing on them.

there is a truck with a handpainted sign reading "FLAMABLE" (sp) hanging from the railings above the bed.

“Remember when you could tell a lot about a guy by what cassette tapes—Journey or the Smiths?—littered the floor of his used station wagon? No more, because now the music of our lives is stored on MP3 players and iPhones. Our important papers live on hard drives or in the computing cloud, and DVDs are becoming obsolete, as we stream movies on demand. One by one, the meaningful artifacts that we used to scatter about our apartments and cars, disclosing our habits to any visitor, are vanishing from sight.”

–Mark Oppenheimer, “Judging A Girl By Her Cover,” Slate
(http://www.slate.com/id/2261955/?from=rss)

Scheduled Thursday afternoon thunderstorm (every Thursday!) occurred as usual, followed by a state of weather where it is raining only in some places–where you can walk ten feet and go from rain to not-rain, like in a video game, or like the guy who brings his own cloud with him.

Lynda Barry: CRUDDY and THE GOOD TIMES ARE KILLING ME
Julianna Baggott: GIRL TALK and POEMS IN WOMEN’S VOICES

that the Maryland Poison Control Center, which I had to look up online for work purposes, has such a great website (http://www.mdpoison.com/) that it makes me feel like poisoning someone just so I can use their resources. Note especially the little icon of the guy sticking out his tongue.

“[…] These are all theater pieces meant to be experienced by an audience of one. High-concept and immersive, intimate theater has been cropping up for years, but now in Europe it has reached such a critical mass that the Battersea Arts Center in London, known for innovation, hosted the largest one-person-audience festival this month. […]

“We had a couple of hundred people in the building every night, and there was an incredible buzz about what people saw and experienced,” he [festival artistic director Mark Ball] said. A festival setting is a good way to work out the logistical and economic challenges of one-audience theater, he added, since the paying audience for any one show is limited.

By the end of the Battersea festival there had been 10,000
performances in the center’s big building in southwest London. With dozens of choices each day, one could be bathed in the nude by a performer, “kidnapped,” slid out of a window and much more, all for the price of admission.

For the creators of these works, part of the appeal is the enforced focus they bring…”

– NYT, “Up Close and Personal: Theater for Audiences of One.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/theater/28one.html?hp)

“…while our senses can only ever bring us verifiable knowledge about how the world appears in time and space, our reason always strives to know more than appearances can show it. This tendency of reason to always know more is and was a good thing. It is why human kind is always curious, always progressing to greater and greater knowledge and accomplishments. But if not tempered by a respect for its limits and an understanding of its innate tendencies to overreach, reason can lead us into error and fanaticism.”

– JHU professor William Egginton, “The Limits of the Coded World,” in the NYT, on free will and other things
(http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/the-end-of-knowing/?hp)

“Poetry, the most precise and precious of literary forms, is also so far the least adaptable to the growing e-book market. A three-line stanza might be expanded to four if a line is too long or a four-line stanza compressed into three if the second and fourth lines have sharp indentations, as with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Hymn to the Night.”

Royalty disputes, philosophical objections and suspicions of technology are keeping countless books from appearing in electronic form, from “The Catcher in the Rye” to “Gravity’s Rainbow.” But for poetry, the gap is especially large because publishers and e-book makers have not figured out how the integrity of a poem can be guaranteed. And a displaced word, even a comma, can alter a poem’s meaning as surely as skipping a note changes a song.

“The critical difference between prose and poetry is that prose is kind of like water and will become the shape of any vessel you pour it into to. Poetry is like a piece of sculpture and can easily break,” Collins says.”

– Yahoo! article on poems in electronic form, esp. in e-books (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100714/ap_en_ot/us_books_e_poetry_blues)