Category Archives: workstyle

chicago, workstyle

lose the cookies

I always enjoy the freelancer camaraderie of people nestled around laptops in cafes. Yesterday, grantwriting at the Au Bon “Free Wifi” Pain on Adams, across the street from the Symphony, a group of businessmen asked me to watch their laptop, several times, as they went to get food and prolong their meeting. On one of these trips, they came back with a bag of chocolate chip cookies for me, which they gave to me like this: “You gonna be here for awhile? You want some cookies?”

“One day,” one of the guys said to another, “you’re going to ask the wrong person to watch your computer – and then you’ll lose the computer and the cookies!”

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art, comix, workstyle, writing

rote social banter

This cartoon, Snow Dope, by Dean Haspiel, is so so so wonderful. So deliciously lonely. He writes:

I realized that it was better to reject rote social banter to quell my fear of being alone and embrace solitude this holiday weekend.

If my time in New York had been like that, I’d still be there. Maybe it was – I remember a friend buying me a bottle of incredibly expensive artisanal bourbon (almost on the level of couture bourbon, or something) and us starting to drink it, and him having to explain to me that no, now I was this drunk, I could not just get back on the subway. He introduced me to the concept of the Brooklyn car service. If I had been able to never leave Brooklyn, and just stumble around being an artist with a part-time job, perhaps I would have found inspiration in that city. It was the twice-daily commute to the island that killed me, and the day job I had to hold down there to pay the rent and buy the booze. By the time I escaped, I was barely writing at all.

The problem with New York is Manhattan.
I think it would be perfectly liveable if you just stayed in the outer boroughs.

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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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quotes, style, workstyle, writing

Who are these people?

Q: Are you one of those writers who keeps a regular schedule?

A: No. How I wish! Who are these people? That sounds marvelous. It takes me a long time to write, because I think out everything before I write it. When I write something, even a tiny section of a long thing, I think about it for many weeks. Perhaps that’s why my work is always so much “my work.”

– Jamaica Kincaid in a Salon interview. I read her collection of Talk of the Town essays, TALK STORIES, today, and was overwhelmed by the exact simplicity. Every word means something. She has an overheard person at a party say “Sensation, as you know, is the tyranny of Los Angeles.”

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workstyle, writing

Shared Studio for Writers?

I was emailing with a friend of mine in a Calarts MFA, and she talked about spending long nights “in studio.” MFA students in art and design work together in a shared lab space, working on their projects simultaneously at their desks. We’ve seen a dramatization of this in PROJECT RUNWAY, where all the designers are draping and cutting at the different tables, just a few feet away from each other.

I wonder what it would be like to try the same thing with writers, or with directors. There are three new plays simultaneously being put up at the DCTC now, and I wonder if anyone has gotten the 3 directors together.

I suppose the Internet is the writers’ shared studio, of sorts.

When Meredith and I were working on our theses, senior year, we would go together to coffeehouses with our laptops and write at the same time. That was one of the most productive writing experiences I’ve ever had. If I had a bad sentence, or a tough transition – just like if I was having trouble draping a sleeve, I don’t know – Mere could help me.

And Sari has a kind of shared studio environment in her paper, where all the reporters’ desks are right near each other.

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workstyle, writing

On writing and being wrong

I’ve been working on a fiction project which is pretty loosely fictionalized memoir. It’s drawn from my own life. It’s a catalog – Amina was doing a catalog story when I was with her in Ithaca, too.

Every time one of a particular kind of event happens, you write about it. But you don’t have to join them together. So you could do a catalog of the best meals you’ve ever had in your life, and write only about them. Or every time you’ve thrown up from drinking. Or every injury or major sickness.

I’ve been having a lot of success writing this catalog so far, but as I catch up to the present I find myself having a lot of trouble continuing it.

I tried to write in my journal first, but that meant acknowledging something had happened and it affected me personally, which hurt. So then I tried to write in the Word document on the computer, but that meant distancing myself from it, which felt cold and detatched. I don’t have the right medium in which to write about these things. Paper is too personal. The computer is too official.

And now I’m blogging about the difficulty of writing about it. Which feels like the perfect combination of journaling and typing.

If you don’t write about something, can you make it disappear from your memory? Does the absence of a record make it less real? And as a writer, do you ever get to forget? Will I ever be satisfied until I manage to write about this? Why do I end my blog entries with questions I already know the answers to?
(No, or at least I can’t. Yes, it does. No. No. And, to avoid answering them.)

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politics, workstyle

As Easy As Jumping Out Of A Plane

Last night we ate at Madeleine’s on the Commons with a group of Amina and David’s friends, including a guy who’s a veteran of the war in Afghanistan and a member of IVAW, Iraq Veterans Against The War. He’s involved in the planning for their March 2008 event, Winter Soldier, where a group of veterans will testify in Washington about the war crimes in Iraq.

We talked about this, and also about his training (he was part of an airborne unit) which involved, among other things, training to jump out of a plane with other medics, find a Humvee loaded with medical supplies (which had also been dropped out of a plane) turn it upright, and drive it around looking for injuries sustained by other soldiers who ALSO jumped out of planes.

I asked him why soldiers jump out of planes, which is something I’ve never completely understood. His answer was that if you can land a force from any point in a country, defense no longer becomes about defending borders, but about defending every square inch of territory – forcing nations to spread out their armed forces in their own defense.

Practically speaking, he thinks this technique doesn’t work very well, and never has in practice – you land and are usually separated from your unit, confused, and often injured, and its successful results during WWII had more to do with the Germans being overwhelmed by the surprise of it – but that the continued existence of airborne units is a really strong recruiting pull for the Army. People like the myth and the bravado of jumping out of planes.

(He didn’t actually jump out of planes in the war in Afghanistan, only in training.)

We talked about how we could help out Winter Soldier, and he said that a big part of it was just getting the word out and helping to publicize their efforts. In that spirit, here’s the statement from their website:

In 1971, over one hundred members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War gathered in Detroit to share their stories with America. Atrocities like the My Lai massacre had ignited popular opposition to the war, but political and military leaders insisted that such crimes were isolated exceptions. The members of VVAW knew differently.

Over three days in January, these soldiers testified on the systematic brutality they had seen visited upon the people of Vietnam. They called it the Winter Soldier investigation, after Thomas Paine’s famous admonishing of the “summer soldier” who shirks his duty during difficult times. In a time of war and lies, the veterans who gathered in Detroit knew it was their duty to tell the truth.

Over thirty years later, we find ourselves faced with a new war. But the lies are the same. Once again, American troops are sinking into increasingly bloody occupations. Once again, war crimes in places like Haditha, Fallujah, and Abu Ghraib have turned the public against the war. Once again, politicians and generals are blaming “a few bad apples” instead of examining the military policies that have destroyed Iraq and Afghanistan.

Once again, our country needs Winter Soldiers.

In March of 2008, Iraq Veterans Against the War will gather in our nation’s capital to break the silence and hold our leaders accountable for these wars.

Here’s the statement of support for Winter Soldier, and more on how to get involved.

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UpstageProject, workstyle, writing

Planama

Amina and I are at Gimme, working on more UpstageProject documents. Everyone in the world in Ithaca is coming through this coffeehouse – in their variations of dressing for thirty degree weather.

She’s writing on big sheets of newsprint and I’m typing, and we’re dividing up editorial responsibilities between the blog, articles/essays, and reviews/interviews departments.

I feel like a broken record continuing to say this, but I had always assumed that we would launch this site like a baby bird and just let it struggle and sink or swim – but, with Amina’s help and her planning brain, we’re giving it so many good resources. We’re being planned parents. Very responsible.

So we’ve divided up the site into three major sections – Blog, Reviews/Interviews, and Articles/Essays – and we’re listing frequency of posting, editorial responsibilities, writing responsibilities, and resources needed for each one.

I sometimes am intimidated by making planning documents. I would rather just start working and realize what planning we haven’t done later, when it stabs us in the back.

But it’s nice to try doing something the right way for once.

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interviews, UpstageProject, workstyle

Are you volunteering to do that?

I spent today revising the Bylaws and Practices pages for UpstageProject, in preparation for another collaboration session with Amina tonight. I was surprised in doing it to find myself more interested in being editor of the Reviews & Interviews section than of the Articles. Part of this is probably from having had such a good experience doing the Crossover Interviews earlier this year, but I realized that I just have way too many opinions about what constitutes good or self-indulgent reviewing and interviewing in theater.

I remember a woman who I had some meetings with at Stanford who said that her standard response to people who suggested doing new things was:

“Are you volunteering to do that?”

She took a lot of pleasure in saying it in a really nasty tone of voice, to shoot them down, but I think it is a good principle – sometimes when you care about it that much, you should do it yourself.

Or else stay as far away from it as possible. I sometimes think I get in my own way. Excessive passion for something can be the enemy of getting it done. I spent too much time before this retreat with Amina agonizing about HOW to make the bylaws perfect, and not enough on actual revision.

Amina has suggested that it might be better to have me floating as an editor-at-large, to fill in gaps and/or be able to take over for people if needed. She’s probably right. I will remain open to any permutation on this.

We are using GoogleGroups, for the moment, to maintain our documents in progress. I still find PBWiki easier to use, and it loads faster, but in their respective free versions, GoogleGroups is a more powerful tool.

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convergence, directing, theater, workstyle

Open Ithaca

In Ithaca, staying with Amina and David. It’s so beautiful here. We had brunch, then walked up the path from the gorges to Collegetown and were overwhelmed by the color yellow. I’m going to do that walk again today, I think, up to the Cornell library to get some chorus information for the Convergence.

I observed part of a Meisner-based acting class yesterday, with all sorts of exercises – the repetition one and the open scene in particular. I was pretty happy to hear beginning actors ask questions like “How ARE you supposed to make your lines sound natural?” and “What’s blocking?”

(In an open scene, you use the lines of a scene to just respond to your partner, and you aren’t supposed to worry about playing the action of the scene or the meaning of the lines. The one I saw reminded me of the technique where you ask actors to burlesque a scene – to play it at a much faster and funnier pace.) I saw Peter do a burlesque run of one of the seduction scenes in Tartuffe, and I’ve seen Ted do it in his acting class, too, but an open scene is a more extreme version of that.

Amina and I discussed, afterwards, what the uses of the “open scene” would be in working on a process with professional actors. We thought of three:
– at the beginning of a process
– at a blocked place in a process
– at an exhausted place (like you’ve been rehearsing a very sad scene for weeks)
All three to help relax the actors, get them listening again, and perhaps discover new areas of blocking.

Amina is considering Converging in February, as is David (her roommate, a filmmaker and actor).

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