Sunday, April 5, 2015

Major and minor disappointments and some somewhere in between

Just a place to keep track of a few things on my mind lately.  I do tend to dwell on the negative.  There are two schools of thought about this.  One is that if one focuses on the positive not the negative, then one will gradually become a more positive person.  I'm not entirely sure this works, but I will say that for the relatively few remaining friends I have, I do make an effort not to overwhelm them with the negative.  I've burned out more than a few friends that way.

The second school of thought suggests that it is better to get negative feelings out there rather than letting them fester; this is akin to lancing a boil.  One advantage of this is that it let's you put things (somewhat) in perspective.  You can even list positive and negative things and try to convince yourself that the positive outweighs the negative.  My problem has always been that the negative rankles even when there is a lot of positive going on in my life.  I want, despite all evidence to the contrary, to be living in a better world than exists right now or likely could ever exist, given how generally disappointing humans are.

No question the major disappointment was getting sick right before the New York trip.  That may well end up being the biggest disappointment of the year.

A minor disappointment was finding that Cake and Dirt was a fairly boring, somewhat overwrought play.  I suppose I didn't have quite as high hopes for the Durang play, so I was less disappointed, though still a bit puzzled by its winning the Tony.  I guess that mostly reflects the general weakness of Broadway, as well as the importance of sucking up to Baby Boomers if you want to win awards.

While I did enjoy the Mendelssohn Choir and their concert of sacred music on Good Friday (and I was even happier to find a baby-sitter for said Friday, as well as quite content that the concert ended half an hour sooner than expected), I found the organ for the Faure Requiem really sounded a bit cheesy, more of an electronic organ sound with the full pipes being used rarely, if indeed they were utilized at all.  Of course I might be wrong about that, but it just did not sound right to me, particularly compared to the incredible organs in Europe.  (I have a very nice recording of Messiaen's L'Ascension played on the organ at St. Mary's Cathedral in Edinburgh.)  So that did spoil the second half to some degree after a very intense first half.

I found myself not liking Patrick Modiano and his work as much as I had hoped or expected.  I think what really irks me in a way is that he is relentlessly circling* the same constellation of events from the murky period of the Vichy government in France during WWII, particularly his father's involvement with selling items "from the back of the truck" as part of the underground economy and his brush with death, nearly being sent to an internment camp for Jews.  However, Modiano is always just reconstructing this in his mind, since he (Patrick) was born after VE Day.  It's like the impossibility of Proust knowing about certain events he is writing about (particularly Swann's inner thoughts) but on steroids.  Everything that Modiano writes about is based on second-hand information, and this is particularly acute in Honeymoon, where at least it is more obvious that the narrator is trying to reconstruct something he didn't himself experience.  Not only is the past a foreign country, but if you are trying to base a story on someone else's past, it is doubly removed.  I don't honestly know why this bothers me so much, but it does.  I guess it is just one of those quirks I have to recognize.  If I had to pin it down, it is probably to do with the fact that I think nostalgia by itself is pretty dangerous and second-hand nostalgia is fatal and should not be indulged. 

As far as the moderate or in between gripes, some are largely my own responsibility (like missing some deadlines I wasn't aware of) and others really are much more the responsibility of others, particularly the TTC for letting me down.  I guess now that I should be able to start biking, I will have more control over that.

In terms of deadlines, I really have been pressed for time at work, and it is just difficult to feel right about carving out time, even in the evenings, to work on creative writing.  When I did have time, I felt a bit obligated to wrap up some unfinished posts, partly because the time required is less compared to tackling a full-length play, for instance.  Nonetheless, I just missed the deadline for the March Sing-for-Your-Supper, and I suspect I've missed April's as well.  I'll find out today at some point.  What I clearly should have done was just roll over the March contribution to April.  I did ask Scott and Kat to roll this submission over to May if they've already filled in the slot.  Why did I do this?  Perhaps a bit of hubris, trying to show them (or even just myself) that I could pivot off of one project and work on something completely different.  Partly because I decided, rightly or wrongly, that I would kind of like to finish up the new play (The Futon Moth) and shop it around as a finished product, and that in the meantime, I could really use some assistance in fixing the second half of Corporate Codes of Conduct. And indeed, that is what I have done.  I've drawn on a bit of tension at work to make the second act a bit more stressful, and keeping Jonathan in as a much more important player in the second act.  I still haven't completely resolved how I will reconfigure the remaining scenes, but I have some ideas.  I think I will try to shorten it a bit more, and I've also decided to cut a scene from the first act.  So it is really coming along.

A related disappointment is that I hadn't checked the RedOne Facebook page in some time, and it turns out that there was a blink and you missed it announcement that they were accepting plays for development for next season.  I missed the deadline by 3 days! I think The Futon Moth would have fit in pretty well as part of this scheme, though I do have to admit that I would never have had the time to write out the full thing, or even do more than an outline plus the two scenes that are done.  And I really don't know if I would have the time to meet with the dramaturg and so forth on a monthly basis.  So perhaps just getting the whole thing done and then offering it to them (to Claire?) is the way to go. 

But what really does burn me up is how the TTC caused me to miss out on a play at Alumnae Theatre back on the 14th.  I was walking down from the library and saw 3 streetcars go by in a few minutes.  In fact, I probably could have caught the last one, but my path was blocked by an illegally parked van!  I really can't stand how the TTC doesn't make any attempt at better spacing, particularly on the weekend.  So I waited for quite a while and got on the next one, which was cutting it close.  We only got two blocks when two cars had a very minor fender bender, but they were blocking the rail and one driver wouldn't move until the police showed up.  So a bunch of us got off the streetcar and walked to Carlaw to catch the bus.  While the streetcar did get moving again (at the same time as the bus showed up), it was already too late.  I was going to miss the reading of the play I really wanted to see.  It is kind of strange how this one really caught my attention over all the other ones in the series, and yet it was only given a one-day staged reading.  Perhaps it will be reworked and presented as a full play next year.  One can only hope.  Anyway, it was Buy My House by Natalie Frijia.  When I have a bit more time, I will see if I can contact her. Apparently, she is a graduate student here in Toronto. I wasn't quite as interested in the other plays in the New Ideas Festival, and no longer was really that interested in buying a pass, but I will note the younger actress in the reading The Creases in My Sari by Sindhuri Nandhakumar.  I could definitely see her (Shweta Visva) in the Sunita role in Dharma Donuts, and perhaps the other actress (Ayesha Mansur) might be right for Madhu, the mother.  While it is a total long shot, I would love to try to tempt Harveen Sandhu (who was actually in the Shaw production of Arcadia!) with the lead role of Parvati.  But first things first -- the second half needs to be ironed out a bit more, so that things are not quite so easy for Parvati.  She has to earn her happiness after all.

On a related note, I do understand the TTC needs to make improvements, but it seems every year they take Spadina out of service for a month, and this year is no exception.  It is actually a double whammy, as the Gerrard/College streetcar is affected, and won't be serving the Queens Park subway stop on University, which is my preferred transfer point.  The streetcar will be diverting down Bay to Dundas, but this will add a fair bit of time.  I'll definitely try to remember and either stick with the 72 bus or bike, which is probably the better option.  Anyway, this is particularly relevant, as it will make it very difficult to get to the writing group after work on Thursdays.  I went to their meeting, and it was a smaller than usual group.  It actually was really stressful, as there was quite a bit of arguing going on, and points of order being raised.  In addition, I really just was totally out of sync with one of the pieces we were supposed to read and critique, with the author being most proud of the dream sequences (when in fact I find dream sequences pretty universally a drag).  What was even odder is I gave a very brief outline of my novel (in waiting) and was told it sounded a bit like Ghosted by Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall.  I took a quick look into that and decided that there is only one superficial similarity, and the main inspiration for my novel is actually Bellow's The Adventures of August Marsh.  There may be one or two contacts worth cultivating at this writing group, but I just not sure about whether I will continue as a regular member.  I can't go anyway in April, but I'll look into it again in May.  So that was basically a minor to moderate disappointment where again I got my expectations up a bit too high.  (At least I wasn't charged to find out if the group was for me or not -- and there wasn't anyone as annoying as in that play-writing course at Langara!)

I'm quite sure that there are other disappointments that I have overlooked (or better yet, even forgotten) but for the most part I am working through these and trying to learn from mistakes, particularly when they are mine and not somebody else's, and still achieve the various things I am trying to achieve.  Probably time to move on now, however.

* In the long run, I am sure it is this same ploughing the same furrow over and over that will get to me, in contrast to John Patrick Shanley, for example, who is looking at and working through different personal crises in each work, as opposed to going over different facets of the same life crisis, no matter how significant.  It does get old, speaking as someone who had great trouble in letting go of two specific incidents in my own life, and who definitely burned out friends on each.  You need to eventually move on.  Saul Bellow is a quite interesting case where the earlier work, particularly Dangling Man and The Victim seem to be a working out of specific things, sort of like Shanley, but then the seeds of whatever huge family betrayal (by an uncle most likely) were planted in Augie Marsh, and, from then on, this really overwhelmed Bellow and most of the time he is writing the same novel over and over.  He (in my view) became a much more limited writer than he should have been, and this is definitely the case with Bellow on ex-wives, who again all seem to be the same person just with different names in Bellow's later novels.  So I still get a big kick out of Augie Marsh, though I haven't reread it in a long time, and The Dean's December, and that is pretty much it.  The rest of Bellow I can leave.

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