Books of the Mo'

Finished reading An American Childhood by Annie Dillard and went straight into Pilgrim at Tinker Creek also by Dillard. Previous bouts with Dillard include Holy the Firm and The Writing Life. She obsesses about the impossibility of seeing, of knowing, of being fully alive.

...it is not you or I that is important, neither what sort we might be nor how we came to be each where we are. What is important is anyone's coming awake and discovering a place, finding in full orbit a spinning globe one can lean over, catch, and jump on. What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch - with an electric hiss and cry - the speckled mineral sphere, our present world. - From An American Childhood.

My mind is hooked on Annie's unrelenting prose. I put down one book and open up another to keep the flow going. And it works. She spills from one book to the next. There is no end to her.

But I can see stretching out before me a long list of books that this reading is making necessary. Dillard mentions On The Road by Kerouac and I'd been meaning to pick it up and read it again having last month ploughed through Cormac McCarthy's The Road (which is one of those books that is so good it ruins you for reading anything else for a long while - that is until I picked up Annie). Oprah announced last month that The Road is her latest bookclub selection, so now there is a softcover edition. I intend to read my copy (a really ugly hardcover) again as soon as I'm finished with Dillard. No McCarthy isn't finished with me yet. The only cure for reading The Road is to read it again and again. It's devastating.

I've realized lately that I don't read a lot of plays. I do when I'm teaching and looking for scenes for students or when I'm pitching for directing work. But typically, I tend to read books. I tend to be inspired by novelists instead of playwrights. I don't know what that means. Well, not true really. Most of the plays that get produced aren't really that interesting to me. I don't see much exploration in terms of narrative and structure or subject matter. Probably my favorite playwrights at the moment are Naomi Iizuka and Jason Craig. Naomi captures voice and place and plays with form in unconventional ways while Jason frustrates the entire venture, what he's doing shouldn't even work, but it does - ah the magic of theater. Oh. And there's Chuck Mee.