Aimee Mullins Talks About Her Legs: Aesthetics, Form, Function

Beowulf: Pay What You Wish Preview Tomorrow Night

You're going to see Beowulf, aren't you? Just FYI: tomorrow night's preview (March 31) is Pay-What-You-Wish. It's first come, first served and the show starts @ 8pm.

The show runs Wednesdays through Saturdays, April 1 - 18 @ 8pm, Sunday @ 5pm. Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand Street @ Pitt, New York City.

Two For One: Beowulf Tickets in NYC

Jessica Jelliffe as Academic 2/Mother & Jason Craig as Beowulf

New York people: this beast is coming your way. It's the story of Beowulf. Done in an off the rails cabaret-meets-boxing-match-meets-academic-lecture-panel-style. Do not miss it. I saw the show last summer when it premiered at Shotgun Players in Berkeley. Sit close. Like in the front row. Do it. It'll be delicious.

Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage opens April 1st at the Henry Street Settlement, New York City. 2 for 1 tix for the first week's shows are available through March 25. Click on this link to order tix and then type in the code: "Baggage" to get the 2 for 1. The show runs April 1 - April 18 with a preview on March 31.

Oh. And. Yes. I know Jason and Jessica. And Chris Kuckenbaker and Beth Wilmurt. And they have some crazy fine actor-type skilz. But don't let my obviously biased opinion stop you from having a romping good time at the theater. Go. Go. Report back.

Grow Your Own...

Hydroponic David Foster Wallacian sentences.

Questions for D.T. Max about his recent article about DFW in the New Yorker.

(via Kottke).

FYI: Exactly 100 pages (+ footnotes) to finish. Most of the book read late at night either horizontal on the floor in my bedroom or in my bed avec ma peu de lumière bleue. So much for the criticism that it couldn't be read in bed. Like what kind of wimpy criticism is that, I ask you?

Oh. And don't think I'll stop writing posts about Infinite Jest when I finish the book. I'm just getting warmed up. You've been warned.

De Brevitate Vitae (on the Shortness of Life): Gaudeamus Igitur (therefore let us rejoice)

Ubi sunt, qui ante nos
In mundo fuere?

Where are they
Who were in the world before us?

Wraith

Last night I read the part in Infinite Jest where Don Gately is visited by a wraith (not sayin' who the wraith is, just talkin' wraith here). Maybe it's because I've been staying up to 2 and 3 in the morning for the past several weeks, but folks, that scene was really terrifying - and like my blue light didn't help, it just gave everything a creepy glow and you know, it all seemed so plausible and like at any moment maybe I would be visited too and so I kind of rolled my eyes up above my head and scanned the wall behind me, just in case. But then my brain started making connections to other parts of the book and I started to feel like reality was falling away and my mind was spinning with the possiblities of where the story might go and I had to shut it down. You know, close the book. I am just not ready to go there. And there's only 100 or so pages left and I'm feeling that end of the book feeling where you know the end is coming and you don't want it to end so you start feeling nostaligic for the beginning and ha ha ha DFW. Ha fucking ha. And, yes, I mean that in the nicest possible way.

HAMLET
Why, what should be the fear?
I do not set my life in a pin's fee;
And for my soul, what can it do to that,
Being a thing immortal as itself?
It waves me forth again: I'll follow it.
HORATIO
What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,
Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff
That beetles o'er his base into the sea,
And there assume some other horrible form,
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason
And draw you into madness? think of it:
The very place puts toys of desperation,
Without more motive, into every brain
That looks so many fathoms to the sea
And hears it roar beneath.
Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4

The Map is Not the Territory #2

Sonnet 66
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And guilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly doctor-like controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.



Sonnet 67
Ah! wherefore with infection should he live,
And with his presence grace impiety,
That sin by him advantage should achieve
And lace itself with his society?
Why should false painting imitate his cheek
And steal dead seeing of his living hue?
Why should poor beauty indirectly seek
Roses of shadow, since his rose is true?
Why should he live, now Nature bankrupt is,
Beggar'd of blood to blush through lively veins?
For she hath no exchequer now but his,
And, proud of many, lives upon his gains.
O, him she stores, to show what wealth she had
In days long since, before these last so bad.



Sonnet 68
Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn,
When beauty lived and died as flowers do now,
Before these bastard signs of fair were born,
Or durst inhabit on a living brow;
Before the golden tresses of the dead,
The right of sepulchres, were shorn away,
To live a second life on second head;
Ere beauty's dead fleece made another gay:
In him those holy antique hours are seen,
Without all ornament, itself and true,
Making no summer of another's green,
Robbing no old to dress his beauty new;
And him as for a map doth Nature store,
To show false Art what beauty was of yore.



Sonnet 127
In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were, it bore not beauty's name;
But now is black beauty's successive heir,
And beauty slander'd with a bastard shame:
For since each hand hath put on Nature's power,
Fairing the foul with Art's false borrowed face,
Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower,
But is profan'd, if not lives in disgrace.
Therefore my mistress' eyes are raven black,
Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem
At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,
Sland'ring creation with a false esteem:
Yet so they mourn becoming of their woe,
That every tongue says beauty should look so.

- William Shakespeare

Entertainment Cartridge Located: Good Looking Men In Small Clever Rooms That Utilize Every Centimeter Of Available Space With Mind-Boggling Efficiency

James O. Incandenza. Unfinished due to hospitalization. Unreleased.

Infinite Jest: Ack!

I'm on page 789 and the tension is building. Ironically, reading is slower with both eyes. And the book seems to have gotten more dense, kind of like when particles get closer together their speed decreases. And that is all that can be said at this point. I can't talk about the book until I've finished reading it. That's the new bargain.

Edward Albee

Edward Albee spoke at the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. The evening featured him in conversation with Tony Taccone. Albee was a pretty lively speaker and a fast thinker and it took little prompting from Taccone to get him talking.

Albee spoke about how he came to be a playwright. About how he started as a poet and "not a very good one." "I basically tried everything else and playwrighting was the only thing I hadn't tried, so I did that." He then shared with us how he'd met Thorton Wilder. Albee had gone up to a writer's retreat and Wilder was there. Albee travelled with a trunk containing everything he'd written because "you never know..." When he met Wilder, he handed him all of his poems to read.

The next day Wilder came up to him and said: "Albee, I want to get drunk with you." So the two of them went down to the lake and drank bourbon while Wilder critiqued every one of Albee's poems. After Wilder finished discussing each poem, he set it afloat on the lake. By the time he finished, Albee said, "there was a substantial dent in the bourbon and a good bit of the lake was covered with my poems." Wilder then said to him, "Albee, I've read every one of your poems." "I can see that," Albee replied, "They're all out there on the lake." Then Wilder said: "Albee, you should be a playwright."

*******************

Excuse me while I editorialize for a moment:
I loved this story. It's the sort of lyrical event that seems unlikely to happen now. I guess the closest I've come to it was the closing night party of Forced Entertainment's Club of No Regrets in San Francisco in 1997. There was a giddy sort of tribal aspect that took hold that night and things went up in flames - an apocalyptic sort of weinie-roast that just seemed right. When I think about it, even that seems unlikely to happen now. Every thing and every one seem so buttoned up and held in tight. It's all about business and marketing and so little about the enjoyment of each other's company. I admit: that's me. It may not reflect others experience.

*******************

Continuing:
Albee described moving to New York and living in Greenwich Village in the 40's and 50's. He stated, "Nobody was famous, nobody had an agent, nobody was making any money at anything, but everyone was having a great time."

Taccone described the first time he'd read Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf as being terrifying and disturbing and asked Albee what compelled him to write about the subjects he does and to look at things in such subversive, disturbing ways. "I never think about what it means or about symbolism. I don't get up in the morning and sit down and ask myself how can I be provocative."

Albee described how his writing process works for him - how characters start to form in his subconscious and then move to consciousness. He doesn't rush his plays to the page, instead he prefers to think about them and to let them percolate for awhile. "I wait before I write anything down until I know the characters sufficiently enough."

When he feels that they're "three-dimensional enough," he gives them a test. He comes up with a situation that he knows "isn't going to be in the play and then the characters improvise that." If they can function in the improvisation, then he knows that he's ready to begin writing.

He described himself as an observer. An observer of his life with the ability to both "experience a situation in his life at the same time as being able to step outside of it and observe it from a distance." He stressed the importance for him in writing objectively, not in the heat of passion. His plays are written in "memory of my feelings."



He compared the playwright with a music composer stating that "they used many of the same devices." He feels that a plawright needs to be sensitive to the "arrangement of the silences and the sounds." Albee believes that "a playwright needs to be able to adjust and to hear the sounds of the words on the page as precisely as a composer hears them."



During the Q & A following the conversation, Albee admitted that " My favorite play is always the one I'm writing because it's the only one I haven't fucked up."

When asked what he thought about current theater, he responded, "I don't much like the theater that I see today. So much of it is frivolous and empty." He feels that "life is short and time is valuable" and that "anything we sit down to look at or listen to had better damn well be worth the time." In terms of his own work, "My obligation is to write as truthfully and well as I can. The audience's obligation is to experience a work of art on it's own terms."

DFW in The New Yorker

The Unfinished by D.T. Max

Wiggle Room, an excerpt from DFW's unfinished novel.

My thanks to JW.

It Was News to Me

Okay. So. Umm. Well. Something I learned in the past two weeks. When you get some strange growth on your face - don't wait seven years to have it checked out. Possibly you have a cyst. See, pimples don't last seven years. Cysts, which look remarkably pimple-like, are, in fact, not pimples even though they share some of the same organic characteristics which I won't begin to describe because I know how delicate a stomach can be when it is void of coffee.

Trust me on this, growth for a few months? Not a pimple. Growth for seven years, you are too busy and possibly into some high level denial. I know how it is, you get in rehearsal and it seems like you just never get out of the room, but trust me, get the growth checked out. A simple procedure to remove it and done: you're back in the studio and out of the light of day. What you don't want to do is wait until your 2-year old son kicks you in the face and then it ruptures into many pieces and requires two surgeries and it's still possible it will come back because you waited so long to take care of yourself. That's a scenario you want to avoid.