I Find Artaud Strangely Calming In Ways That Theodore Kaczynski Is Not

Working here and there on a rewrite of a play I wrote for the first NAPLWRIMO. Looking over some of the source material for that play which now has no title (I really suck at naming things that are not my children) I found this little quote from Artaud which really gave me some perspective. These words resonate still and get at the heart of what I'm trying to accomplish in the writing - the horror and realization of one's death and the ways denial and avoidance manifest themselves. Oh and you know have a bit of humor about it.

Five Things: Video Edition

Looking for Cormac:
Part 1


2, 3, 4

Woody Allen Interviews Billy Graham




Sherman's March by Ross McElwee


Janek Schaefer: Vacant Space
Soundworks & Videoworks


Dinner with Henry Miller.
Henry Miller Library saved from the fires. DJ Spooky and Philip Glass benefit shows.








Elvis Costello: The Other Side of Summer

The Crossroads: Let Me Tell You About My Dream

Over at Theatre Ideas Scott is asking the following big questions:

What is your possibility? What is the crossroads where you find yourself at this stage of your life or work in the project around which we are assembled? What declaration of possibility can you make that has the power to transform the community and inspire you?

Which are very important questions I'm asking myself right now when I'm not crying in my beer or lemongrass tea as the case may be. I really needed to read this post today and have the questions reframed for me because I have been feeling pretty sorry for myself lately and feeling hopeless about so many things both art and life related. So here goes.

My possibility is about changing the model of theater and challenging the idea of the play itself. I've resolved to write my plays as I envision them without care or concern about how or if they'll be produced. It's better that they be written - that they at least exist on paper - we'll see what follows from that. This simple choice has opened up my writing and taken me in directions that over a year ago I couldn't even imagine. My daughter, Vivienne Westwood, and Mary Overlie also provided large amounts of inspiration.

I find myself at a crossroads artistically and personally in that the life I'm living is not supporting me spiritually. In the past couple of days, I've run out of road and am in need of roadside assistance or a brand new map. If it were possible for me to move away from the Bay area I would. I've stayed here five years longer than I wanted. Since it's not possible to leave at the moment, I need to make changes so that I'm living more in line with my values and interests and passions: My family, theater, art, food, and community. I need to find ways to make bring my vision for my life to fruition here before embarking on the next great adventure, big idea - enormous possibility that awaits.

My declaration of possibility is that failure is necessary and important in theater and in adapting/growing as a community. Learning that you can survive and thrive on failure is an important life lesson and it's a good one to get early and often. So to that end I want to start a theater center/artist retreat where artists can fail without the concern of financial loss attached to the commercial model. I am looking for a piece of land with facilities that accommodate my family and artists and has room for large community gatherings. It will need to have space for theaters of a sort - mostly outdoor stages. I like the idea that there are a maybe three flexible, outdoor theater spaces that are not stages in any conventional sense.


I was inspired by this backdrop at a local school. I've been collecting images of evocative spaces and taking pictures of interesting outdoor stages when I see them. I wish I could find a picture of the stage in Washington Park that I took when I was in Portland, OR last September for the PICA Festival. You can kind of get an idea of it from these pictures here and here. But mostly, the stages would be found, the theaters created and if a play wanted to stretch itself across a field or confine itself to a box, it could.


I imagine that there will be down times, where a few artists are there on retreat. In the summer I imagine a month-long intensive with artists and various collaborators getting together for a to experiment and create work.

For the past three years, my son has attended Camp Galileo, a camp that combines art and science. When he was in kindergarten he learned about friction, roller coasters, and Pop Art. He was more engaged in the projects at camp than he'd been all year in school. A parent whose son was also going to the camp laughed at me when I pointed this out - "well, sure, it's camp!" But why can't school be that engaging? Why can't you study physics in kindergarten? You can learn to read from any book. Anyway, this leads to the second part - the community part of my vision.

Part of participation at the center will involve offering camps for children where they can work with artists and create their own plays, films, art installations or whatever else they dream up based on the experiments and themes the artists are working with. I see a review process of some sort where the topics/experiments for the summer are chosen and then a curriculum is put together for the children. The kids would be involved in all aspects of creation. Kids could learn about painting, photography, film-making, animation, music, dance, science, depending on who was going to be at the center at the time. So I'm looking for cross discipline collaboration.

I think involving the children is key to getting the community invested in the project and to creating a supportive, local audience. I want the work with the kids to be integral to what we do and not something that is done in addition to the "real work." I envision that all the work created that month by the children, the participating artists, and the two groups working together would be presented to the community at the end of the month topped off with a big potluck feast where everyone could mingle, talk about and celebrate what's been created.

I realize at this point I'm largely unqualified to embark on this endeavor. I am not lacking in vision, but this is an enormous project that requires a multiplicity of skill sets. Consider this is my pitch for guidance from those who are interested in offering it.

Managing the Psychology: Fear of the Beyond

Dear lovely Internets-girlfriend-thing:

We have grown close over the past five or so years. Wow. It is so...all about me with us. You give and you give and that's what works about this relationship. Thank you. But maybe those google maps could be a bit more accurate sometimes can you work on that part 'coz that would really take our relationship to eleven. Way up to eleven really.

'Kay. Anyway. You probably already know this 'coz not only are you omnipresent, you are practically omniscient and that's why I feel I can confide in you. I mean like sometimes it's almost as if you know my in-most thoughts even before I think them. Like how great is that? It's pretty great is what I think.

'Kay. Like I said, I'm sure this isn't gonna surprise you but I'm having trouble with my thesis thingie. The most difficult part of writing said "thingie" is what my advisors call "managing the psychology." When I first started I thought "no big deal I can manage my psychology - I've written and produced plays. I get things done. All my graduate colleagues talk of lonely work - well, I'm a writer I'm used to being alone."

Oh for the days. Once upon a time I used to be alone. Oh the hours before, after and in between massage clients - why I spent them alone! Writing. Except for that time when my husband bought me a PalmPilot and I got intensely into Hamachi (kind of a Japanese version of Tetris -like why am I telling you that hmmm? - and yes, Hamachi is one of my favorite kinds of sushi but very different from Tetris I'm sure you'll agree). The Hamachi days were hours lost furiously trying to fit those little squares into patterns that covered the screen. Days spent telling my clients "oh, I'll be right with you. As soon as I finish this chart! Must fit squares together cover space." Ah...bliss. Those hours will never be recovered but they were oh so sweet. When my son asks why he can't have a DS I feel secretly guilty but it's for his own good. Hand eye coordination be damned I know what's at the end of that road!

Right. Time management may be an issue too, lot's of shiny distractions.

'Kay. So. Right. Managing the psychology. Got it in spades. Humbling. Probably necessary. But the latest bump is the hardest: like what happens when I finish? Try googling that hmmm?

I tell ya.

I'm looking at big lot of nothin' and it's terrifying.

Completely irrational 'coz I have at least five plays and three screenplays queued up to be written and I'm aching to write.

You know.

Really write.

Somehow academic writing does not provide the same righteous euphoria as writing plays. (More satisfying than Tetris or Hamachi yes indeedy. There must be some neurological explanation for this surely. )

And as much as I like you internet-girlfriend-thing, I have to say, blogging and surfing are no substitute for writing a play but excellent forms of procrastination yes.

I finally came out and admitted my concern to a friend recently which helped - you know give the damn fear some air and see what happens. So consider this post my attempt to manage my psychology. Humbly admitting my powerlessness over said fear and attempting to write my way out of it. Yes.

Thank you for your patience.

Kindly,
E-

Writing Writes

In the novel, the voice that speaks the first sentence, then the second, and so onward - call it the voice of the narrator - has, to begin with, no authority at all. Authority must be earned; on the novelist author lies the onus to build up, out of nothing, such authority. No one is better at building up authority than Tolstoy. In this sense of the word, Tolstoy is an exemplary author.

Announcements of the death of the author and of authorship made by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault a quarter of a century ago came to down to the claim that the authority of the author has never amounted to more than a bagful of rhetorical tricks. Barthes and Foucault took their cue from Diderot and Sterne, who long ago made a game of exposing the impostures of authorship.

The Russian formalist critics of the 1920's, from whom Barthes in particular learned much, concentrated their efforts on exposing Tolstoy, above all other writers, as a rhetorician. Tolstoy became their exemplary target because Tolstoy's storytelling seemed so natural, that is to say, concealed its rhetorical artistry so well.

As a child of my times, I read, admired, and imitated Diderot and Sterne. But I never gave up reading Tolstory, nor could I ever persuade myself that his effect on me was just a consequence of his rhetorical skill. I read him with an uneasy, even shamefaced absorption, just as (I now believe) the formalist critics who held sway in the twentieth century continued in their spare to read the masters of realism: with guilty fascination (Barthe's own anti-theoretical theory of the pleasure of reading was, I suspect, put together to explain and justify the obscure pleasure that Zola gave him). Now that the dust has settled, the mystery of Tolstoy's authority, and of the authority of other great authors, remains untouched.

During his later years, Tolstoy was treated not only as a great author but as an authority on life, a wise man, a sage. His contemporary Walt Whitman endured a similar fate. But neither had much wisdom to offer: wisdom was not what they dealt in. They were poets above all; otherwise they were ordinary men with ordinary fallible opinions. The disciples who swarmed to them in quest of enlightenment look sadly foolish in retrospect.

What the great authors are masters of is authority. What is the source of authority, or what the formalists called the authority-effect? If authority could be achieved simply by tricks of rhetoric, then Plato surely justified expelling poets from his ideal republic. But what if authority can be attained only by opening the poet-self to some higher force, by ceasing to be oneself and beginning to speak vatically?

The god can be invoked, but does not necessarily come. Learn to speak without authority, says Kierkegaard. By copying Kierkegaard's words here, I make Kierkegaard into an authority. Authority cannot be taught, cannot be learned. The paradox is a true one. - On Authority in Fiction, Senor J.C. from Diary of a Bad Year, J.M. Coetzee

Blood Meridian Requires a Change of Venue

Sex and literature are geographic. Which is why, for example, I bought and read Moby Dick in Venice, Italy. Which is why after drawing the obvious parallels between Moby Dick and Blood Meridian it occurred to me that I might be more open to it if I were in another country. Where I can appreciate looking at our cultural miasma from the outside. Or maybe I'm just making excuses.

How is sex geographic? Or maybe it's atmospheric? More likely. I can only speak for myself, but the humidity of the south really does have a positive effect on one's libido. I've confirmed this theory with exactly one other southerner who also agreed that California can be rather dry. Ahem.

Thoughts On Blood Meridian: One Week In

I think after I finish Blood Meridian I may never read another book. Perhaps I exaggerate. Yet I will need time to recover. I've been at this a week now and it's psychically exhausting - it's not hard to read stylistically - but the violence and the atavism take a toll. What happens when you take away the nostalgia and the romanticism from the wild west? You get Blood Meridian and for that I admire it. But it is one of the most challenging works of art I've encountered in many a year. I'm 3/4 of the way through and McCarthy still manages to shock me with every violent episode.