Category Archives: writing

writing

2 + 6 = 8

Good morning, 2009. In the category of things-you’ve-always-meant-to-do: today I stopped in at 826 Chicago, the Midwestern outpost of the Eggersian armada of tutoring organizations / oddball emporiums, to see if I could volunteer as one of their writing tutors. I would like to get back to working with kids more.

The SF branch 826 sells pirate implements, but this one is a spy supply shop. It has the same assortment of McSweeneys-published items, though, the same delicious magazines and books. I felt like I was back on Valencia.

The man behind the desk was another one of these Chicago transplants I keep meeting, someone who moved here in the last year, who chose this city, not for a particular job, but for its generally high quality of life.

I think it’s a good sign that this 826 is walking distance from my home in Humboldt Park.

I hope this is the year, for all of us, of doing the things we always meant to do.

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writing

reverse psychology

I am amused by writing prompts that tell you what they’re not interested in hearing about. “Please write 500 words, not about X, but about Y.” They always make me want to write either:

a) Theory of X
b) else about something entirely other than both.

The best writing prompt is “Tell us something that will surprise us.” Or: “Tell us something interesting.” Or, better yet, “Tell me something I don’t know.”

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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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quotes, writing

one long escape from myself

There was no cure for the human condition, he thought, not least his own. He [Samuel Johnson] was a prisoner of compulsions. A monster of a man, with a huge and powerful frame, and a blunt bulldog head set above it, he could pick up warring street dogs and toss them aside like kittens, and once beat an insolent publisher senseless with a folio volume. Yet since his youth he had suffered from a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or even Tourette’s syndrome, which became aggravated with the years. Walking down a London alley, he had to touch every post with his cane, and, if he missed one, would go back and start over; he constantly spoke to himself, repeating half-audible incantations under his breath, and would sit in a reverie for hours, muttering and whistling; when he peeled an orange, he always had to keep the peel in his pocket.

Still, the pill of life could be sweetened – above all, with friendship. Johnson made a religion of social life: he ate with friends every night, adored his small circle of intimates […] “My life is one long escape from myself,” he said, and he ran to the table to get away.

– Critic Adam Gopnik, from “Man of Fetters: Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale,” an article on Samuel Johnson and the new biographies of him, in the 12/8/08 New Yorker.

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art, ethics, writing

il me semble que

For a writer not to write about the things she has experienced is like a painter not painting the things she sees.

I have been taking this, lately, to the level of including my own name, Dara, and the names of my friends and acquaintances in my work. I really like it.

I know I’m stealing Elizabeth Bishop’s “you are an Elizabeth” line, and certainly many someones’ lines before her, but the theft seems most particularly taken from the Bishop cabinet for me, right now, if that makes sense. It’s been a productive device.

It feels honest, because poets use “I” with great freedom. When I use my own name as well as the “I,” I am being particularly particular.

But I was taken aback, the other day, to wonder – how would I feel if someone wrote something about me, and used my own name in it? I don’t think I would like that at all. I suppose I would have to be ready to accept this, given that I’ve done the same thing to others. But the idea freaked me out.

It felt like a violation, like an exposure. It felt doubly so because I am an artist myself. What if someone first writes the story, about me, with my name in it, and I wanted to do my own version of it? What if they get there first?

My friend M had this happen to her once, telling a story of her life to a writer (she intended to write the story herself) only to have him “use it,” disguised, in his work.

Perhaps there is some dignity in using real names because then you have to be truthful and seek permission, and this writer didn’t do that.

Chris Krauss writes something very like that in her novel/memoir, I LOVE DICK – the use of real names is, to her, significant. She distinguished between men’s and women’s writing by the use of “fictional” and real names. I will look up the quote tomorrow, I’m too tired now, but just to finish, one more thought:

My friend M (different from the previous M), speaking of names, has advised me once before on a question of poetic ethics. I told her about something I had written, which mentioned no names but which concerned, largely, one particular person. Although no one would recognize it but that person, they would. I asked her if I could ever publish it. She said, “If you read it to them first.” I should ask her what she thinks about real-name-dropping.

Another thought: if two people experience something, it can hardly be said that either one possesses priority in the struggle for the relating-it rights.

But what if one person tells another a story – and the Another makes it into their own little Story, Screenplay, So On?

What if the Another steals their journal entries, as I read about someone doing (a man plaigarizing from a woman’s journals, again, I don’t have the reference)?

What, indeed?

Created an “Ethics” category with this post.

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the chorus, writing

derevision

There is no use in continuing to pretend that I am, in any way, still actively revising the script of 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE CHORUS, TO DIE IN ATHENS, or whatever on earth you want to call one chorus from every Greek playwright plus a few extra mashed up into an Oedipus v. Medea plot. I’m not. Or, rather, it’s not – and we’re not. The only word for that project is “not” right now. Every time I log onto this site and see, under “Ongoing Projects,” something about revising that script, I become discouraged. So I’m taking it down. The reading we had in Los Angeles was so successful that it seems a shame to not be able to work on it any more. But, for whatever reason, it’s not happening. I am only interested in writing more poetry these days. A lot of first drafts.

A revision is, I think, like a first draft – an impetus for it has to come to you. Barring that, there ought to be some kind of incentive to revise, like public opinion, an impending rehearsal, someone’s reading of it, or, (ha!) money. Or a sense that you know where you’re going. Or a sense that there is somewhere to be gone. Direction. Without that, you’re just messing around with the parts that already work, often making them worse.

There have been flickerings of interest in the script since the reading. People check in with me about it. One of the audience members even recommended me to a literary manager at a theater. But it’s simply not where my heart is at this moment.

I listen to it often, the recording. When I first had it, I listened to it daily, sometimes twice a day. These days I only play through it when my Ipod shuffles it to the top. I’m very proud of what we did. I don’t yet know how to do more. Worse yet, I don’t know why. What more is there to do? I proved the point I wanted to prove to myself, which was that the project was Possible. Whether or not it can, or should, be Produced, is a different kettle of P’s and R’s altogether.

I have less and less interest these days in bringing theater to a full realization, to staging, and more in simply writing. If there was some other collaborator on this project, someone who wanted to see it move forward, I think I would work on it day and night until it was perfect. But for both the composer and I, we have achieved what we set out to do. In the absence of a director, or something, there is no more to be done.

That’s kind of sad.

I’m sure I will work on it again one day, though I don’t know how. This, in a way, is a goodbye letter. Almost a breakup.

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poetry, quotes, writing

the literal sense

A poem is about many things and the literal sense is only one of them. The rhetorical and musical features of poetry are as intrinsic to a formal poem as its ostensible meaning, which may be little more than a coat hanger; the dazzling gown draped on that hanger may be made of quite other elements.

– Stephen Edgar, in the April 2008 issue of POETRY Magazine, on translating Anna Akhmatova

I was rereading my old POETRYs and refound this quote, which I love. The hanger business is apropos – I just cut out the unused pages from a journal I stopped writing in 2001 to avoid writing about something sad. I am binding them, by hand, to one severed limb of a plastic coat hanger, to make a new journal. I haven’t done this since I made a blank book from a make-a-book kit as a kid, and that book was so pretty I didn’t want to write in it. This one is nice and ugly and serviceable.

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metablog, writing

navel-gazing

I have had a little blurb titled “Who Am I?” for a long time on this blog, which always says that I write here about style. I think that’s true, but I want that blurb to now reflect the fact that I am moving my focus in life towards writing. I’m going to revise it, for the third time, and I wanted to document that here.

WHO AM I (v.1), Year-Of-Freelance-Assistant-Directing-Edition
My name is Dara Weinberg. I’m a transient writer and director. I write here about style: the way we rehearse, the way we perform, and the way we live by doing both.

I revised it again when I moved to Chi-town,

WHO AM I (v.2), Chicago-Edition
My name is Dara Weinberg. I’m a Chicago-based freelance writer and director. I write here about style, in art and in life, but especially in theater. Welcome.

And now I’m revising it again.

WHO AM I (v.2.1), Chicago-Edition-Markup
My name is Dara Weinberg. I’m a Chicago-based writer who’s directed a lot of theater. I write here about style: the way we write, the way we work, and the way we live while doing both.

I reserve the right to keep on changing, as we all should, but I feel much more comfortable with this as a calling card to the planet.

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