Pina Bausch

Pina Bausch

I always try to speak about all of us, about what we feel, about our same language, about our wishes, our hope, our desires, our fears, about love, about yes, being human -- and how beautiful each person is, and how fragile each person is... And I think all these together is what I have to say. - Pina Bausch

Infinite Jest: The Return

WhatABurger, 737 E Mcdowell Rd, Phoenix, AZ, April 2009

I'm on page 55. I should be on page 94 if you go by the infinite summer schedule, which is what I'm doing. My excuse is that I felt compelled to finish Butcher's Crossing.

What's different this time around? It's funnier; in these first pages I'm able to read a more consistent parodic tone than I was on the first read-thru (so if you're wondering why I'm going to spend six months of 2009 reading this book, there's your first reason, it's already made me a better reader). I'm not as thrown off by the repetitive nature of the more obsessive passages, ie, the Erdedy section and Orin. I'm also able to see how DFW is consistently giving information, sometimes in the form of minute details, in each section that relates to the larger story. You know how you feel when you're watching Pulp Fiction for the second time or Momento or Fight Club for the like 20th or so? Kind of like that.

As for the Erdedy section: I suggest reading it outloud for full-humor-effect. That's what I did on Friday in my kitchen and really busted myself up because, if I must say so myself, I am a great read-aloud reader (I'm also a read-aloud writer, which means that I have to be around very understanding folks when I'm writing at a cafe).

I read the description of Enfield Tennis Academy this afternoon while I was putting my son down for a nap and I'll standby my previous post about that section. Understanding what cardioid might mean is helpful in understanding the structure if you really feel like you need that sort of thing. I'll add one thing that I've learned since then that may or may not relate to ETA being cardioid-shaped which is this: a cardioid is also a type of microphone.

I guess I should explain about the pictures. I went to Phoenix to see Under Construction. I intended to go to this restuarant, but when I set the GPS, I thought for fun, I'll just see what would come up under burgers - and well, there it was. I had no idea Whataburger was real - I won't go so far as to say that it qualifies as fast food since it took over 15 minutes to place an order at speaker/microphone unit and have it handed to me at the pick-up window.

I'm sure everyone else knew of the existence of WhatABurger. Well anyway, I had to go. The first Whataburger that came up was located just outside ASU (interesting, huh?), but when I got there the whole thing had been scraped to the concrete presumably to make way for the lightrail. So anyway, I had to find another. What can I say? WhatABurger. You can read my review of that experience here.

Big List: Need a Fairy Godmother/father/or any combination of the above Edition

There is one show I want to see more than any other. I've wanted to see it since I read about it here.

Les Éphémères @ Lincoln Center Festival, July 7 - 19.

I checked into flights last night. It's doable, no it's insane, if you consider that I'd be spending $600 to see a show. If you're going to see it, please let me know. I'll be envious, but glad to hear about the experience. In the meantime, the entire production is available online and filmed well-enough, so I'll have to content myself with watching it here.

My Room is the Kitchen

I've always found it interesting to read A Room of One's Own and substitute Theater for Fiction: As in Women and Theater. You can even sub in Playwrighting for similar effect: Women and Playwrighting.

All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority. belong to the private–school stage of human existence where there are ‘sides’, and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot. As people mature they cease to believe in sides or in Headmasters or in highly ornamental pots. At any rate, where books are concerned, it is notoriously difficult to fix labels of merit in such a way that they do not come off. Are not reviews of current literature a perpetual illustration of the difficulty of judgement? ‘This great book’, ‘this worthless book’, the same book is called by both names. Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes. So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring–rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea–bite in comparison.

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

How can I further encourage you to go about the business of life? Young women, I would say, and please attend, for the peroration is beginning, you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays of Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse? - Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Infinte Jest: The Warm Up

I start re-reading Infinite Jest on June 21st. This project will extend through September 22nd, so if you got fed up with me during the first blog through, you can come visit me here.

In preparation for the next read, I've been warming up with the following essays: E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction and Host. I read E Unibus Pluram previously, in 2001 as research for a play I was writing, and it's the second thing I read by DFW (here is the first). At the time I read the essay, I found it to be a huge affirmation of what I'd experienced with Post-Modernism, theater-wise, but couldn't articulate anywhere near as succinctly.

So then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde tried to write about? One clue’s to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It’s not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As [Lewis] Hyde. . .puts it, "Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage." This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly funny to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing by trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow...oppressed.

I'm also trying to finish up Butcher's Crossing, another of those genre-bending westerns that pre-dates Blood Meridian (also on the re-read list).

Playwright in the Sound Store

I took my first sound design class on Saturday. It was a four-hour workshop and more specifically related to film, animation, and video-game work. I wish I could say that I feel confident in whipping out a sound design, but I don't. Just like I don't call myself a lighting designer because I took a lighting design class. What I do have, as a playwright and a devisor, is one more toy to play with.

And that's what I was most aware of while I was searching and pulling sounds from freesound.org: I was doing it as a playwright. I was writing with sound, composing with sounds, finding text and isolating phrases so that I could devise around them. This has added a whole new dimension to the creative process. I realize I haven't discovered anything new here. It was just exciting to find this new (for me) way of creating characters or adding details to characters by running random searches for sound and text. I'm always looking for ways to get me out of my own head, ways to collaborate with the universe so to speak. In the past, I've been reliant on a sound designer to do this - after the fact. I've always wanted to do it during the playwrighting/devising process. I feel like I've stepped out of my cave and into the light (or...um...sound rather).

Goodbye to An Earthshaker

I'm Going Back In

Ever since I finished it, I've had the urge to plunge right back in. Here's as good an excuse as any. Won't you join me? You can follow along on Twitter (infinitesummer) or join the FB group (Infinite Summer). 75 pages a week. From June 21st to September 22nd. Cake. Deep, bitter chocolate cake with strong espresso filling. You bet.