I've generally felt that flouncing (i.e. making a big deal about quitting a thread or an entire bulletin board) only makes you look silly, particularly since at root you really are only doing it to attract more attention to yourself. (It then looks especially foolish when you come back, which virtually always happens.) I suppose narcissists are largely the folks driving the internet, particularly these days, but you still don't have to make such a big production of it.
It does seem like stirring up internet beefs is an art these days, with probably the majority being arranged beforehand. While it is tempting to say that we are shallower these days, there really was a lot of trite celebrity news in the 1960s and 70s (esp. anything related to Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton), and La Dolce Vita indicates the seeds of this worship of pop culture icons started in the 1950s (if not even before). The difference (to me) seems that the balance is off. We always had the human interest news and celebrity news, but this always was given third or even fourth billing after the serious state of the world business. Now celebrity news (and feuds) drive the media cycle.
Anyway, as tempting as it is to launch a feud with some parties that have slighted me, I think it is better to refrain. Perhaps some day I will end up working with them, though for moment, I am going to work on getting into another circle. I think that really is all I can say, since if I say anything more about why I am disappointed, it will become apparent whom I am speaking of and that would defeat my larger purpose of trying to be the nobler party who suffers silently (mostly).
Monday, August 3, 2015
Updates on the household tasks
Well, I have been tracking my progress, and things are generally coming together. I've gotten the desk fixed and the bathroom door sanded down to the point where it doesn't seem to be sticking.
I did empty out two more boxes downstairs (though in one case just by adding greatly to some piles of books next to the bookcase in the basement). I did find the last major box of TBRD books, and I even tracked down a paperback copy of Margaret Laurence's The Fire-Dwellers (just when I was about to go look for a newer copy with what appears to be a cover by Alex Colville -- well, maybe I won't resist if I happen to see if for really cheap in a shop...). In terms of the things -- that I am aware of -- that I can't track down at the moment, it is down to La Dolce Vita on Blu-ray and Giulini in America (Chicago Symphony Orchestra). That's not too shabby. They'll probably turn up when I am looking for something else.*
I also managed to get the outdoor table up just before a huge rain storm. (Fortunately, it passed by the time I had to cycle down to Red Sandcastle for the reading, though it did rain a second time during the readings.)
I think the deck will be quite nice this fall.
I had hoped to get a bit further with the painting of the downstairs bathroom. I may be able to get through all the taping in the morning. I am not sure I can finish the painting before 1:15, which is when I am probably heading out for 1000 Monkeys. It really would be rude not to turn back up, particularly if I want to try to stage some of my plays there from time to time. I don't know what the rental fees are, but I'll ask Rosemary tomorrow. I also forgot my business cards, and I should definitely have handed out some of those yesterday (to say nothing of Sing-for-Your-Supper, if I feel up to going to that).
The main setback -- and it may be a significant one -- is that the ceiling fan box does not appear to be properly wired. It took a few hours to pull down the old fan, and I thought I could handle the job myself, when I found this problem. It does not have the appropriate ground wire, which means that it could shock someone (not now but in the future if the wires short out), particularly as you do have to pull the switch to turn on the light. I've got a friend who probably does know enough to help out, but he may decide that this is indeed a job for a professional. What I really dread is having to open up the ceiling and/or the wall, but I'm in a really terrible position now, having a couple of wires dangling from the ceiling and no fan (when it has been such a hot, hot summer with few signs this is changing any time soon).
Oh well. The joys of owning an older house...
Edit to add: I did manage to get the bathroom painted, so all in all, it was a very, very busy but productive weekend (I am glad for the holiday though) with only one significant snag due to old wiring. Now if it doesn't dry evenly, I'll probably have to hit it with one more coat, but that should go faster since the tape is still up. Maybe it will only take two hours or so, which isn't too bad.
Aside from the ceiling fan where it looks like I will have to call in professionals, I think the only significant remaining task is to cut down a board to add one more shelf to my son's bookcase. That can definitely be done one evening this week or next, so everything will be done by the end of summer. Not bad...
* So yes to the Giulini and no to Dolce Vita so far. (I do, however, know where the DVD version is, which is the more critical at this point.) I can't put my hands on the hair clippers at the moment, and I also am wondering about two books (out of the many, many books that are stashed away). I am fairly sure that I hung onto my copy of Nin's Cities of the Interior and will keep my eye out for it. I am equally confident that I parted with Jean Rhys's Complete Novels, and I am contemplating buying a trade paperback copy as a replacement. Reading those back to back, while tempting, would probably be a mistake.
I did empty out two more boxes downstairs (though in one case just by adding greatly to some piles of books next to the bookcase in the basement). I did find the last major box of TBRD books, and I even tracked down a paperback copy of Margaret Laurence's The Fire-Dwellers (just when I was about to go look for a newer copy with what appears to be a cover by Alex Colville -- well, maybe I won't resist if I happen to see if for really cheap in a shop...). In terms of the things -- that I am aware of -- that I can't track down at the moment, it is down to La Dolce Vita on Blu-ray and Giulini in America (Chicago Symphony Orchestra). That's not too shabby. They'll probably turn up when I am looking for something else.*
I also managed to get the outdoor table up just before a huge rain storm. (Fortunately, it passed by the time I had to cycle down to Red Sandcastle for the reading, though it did rain a second time during the readings.)
I think the deck will be quite nice this fall.
I had hoped to get a bit further with the painting of the downstairs bathroom. I may be able to get through all the taping in the morning. I am not sure I can finish the painting before 1:15, which is when I am probably heading out for 1000 Monkeys. It really would be rude not to turn back up, particularly if I want to try to stage some of my plays there from time to time. I don't know what the rental fees are, but I'll ask Rosemary tomorrow. I also forgot my business cards, and I should definitely have handed out some of those yesterday (to say nothing of Sing-for-Your-Supper, if I feel up to going to that).
The main setback -- and it may be a significant one -- is that the ceiling fan box does not appear to be properly wired. It took a few hours to pull down the old fan, and I thought I could handle the job myself, when I found this problem. It does not have the appropriate ground wire, which means that it could shock someone (not now but in the future if the wires short out), particularly as you do have to pull the switch to turn on the light. I've got a friend who probably does know enough to help out, but he may decide that this is indeed a job for a professional. What I really dread is having to open up the ceiling and/or the wall, but I'm in a really terrible position now, having a couple of wires dangling from the ceiling and no fan (when it has been such a hot, hot summer with few signs this is changing any time soon).
Oh well. The joys of owning an older house...
Edit to add: I did manage to get the bathroom painted, so all in all, it was a very, very busy but productive weekend (I am glad for the holiday though) with only one significant snag due to old wiring. Now if it doesn't dry evenly, I'll probably have to hit it with one more coat, but that should go faster since the tape is still up. Maybe it will only take two hours or so, which isn't too bad.
Aside from the ceiling fan where it looks like I will have to call in professionals, I think the only significant remaining task is to cut down a board to add one more shelf to my son's bookcase. That can definitely be done one evening this week or next, so everything will be done by the end of summer. Not bad...
* So yes to the Giulini and no to Dolce Vita so far. (I do, however, know where the DVD version is, which is the more critical at this point.) I can't put my hands on the hair clippers at the moment, and I also am wondering about two books (out of the many, many books that are stashed away). I am fairly sure that I hung onto my copy of Nin's Cities of the Interior and will keep my eye out for it. I am equally confident that I parted with Jean Rhys's Complete Novels, and I am contemplating buying a trade paperback copy as a replacement. Reading those back to back, while tempting, would probably be a mistake.
Saturday, August 1, 2015
1000 Monkeys @ Red Sandcastle
I didn't write much about this, or perhaps at all, not wanting to jinx the process, but I am lately returned from the 1000 Monkeys 24-hour playwriting festival held at the Red Sandcastle Theatre, which is in my old stomping grounds (practically) of Leslieville. Forget about play in a month or novel in a month, this is a deeply immersive experience where a number of playwrights or wannabe playwrights in my case come together and don't leave until they have each hammered out a play on the assigned theme. It's basically a writing marathon. (I think there is indeed something sort of similar for novels, though it is over the entire weekend. And as far as I know there are not clubs that gather the budding writers together to make sure they adhere to the rules of the 3-Day Novel competition, though that might in itself be kind of interesting. Aside from the fact that watching writers write is not very cinematic, filming a room full of writers over a weekend and watching a few of them crack up might make for an interesting reality show.)
Despite what I said about there not being that much general interest in watching writers write, from a professional or semi-professional perspective I was interested in how people went about the task of writing. When we showed up we picked three words out of the dictionary. Mine were: muster, epilepsy and dentine. Then at 6 sharp, the organizer was texted the theme for the festival. As best as I can remember it was: everything changes in a single moment, or does it. And the secondary set of key works was: maturity, openness and something I am blanking on. It wasn't transformation, but maybe along those lines. (Edit: it was recovery.)
Now in addition to simply seeing if I could write a play in one day, I did have an ulterior motive and that is that one or more of the plays written during the festival will be staged at Red Sandcastle. I really wanted to see if either of the plays I had started (The Study Group or Straying South) might fit with the theme, and I could use them as a good starting point for the writing and maybe have a shot at getting one of them staged. But frankly, I didn't think either of them fit particularly well. The play based loosely on King Lear does have more of this transformative aspect to it, but it is a darker play, and this seemed to be calling for something more upbeat and positive. I'm sure they wouldn't reject a play with an unhappy ending -- this is mostly about kick-starting the creative juices -- but I decided I would start completely from scratch.
I'll get to my own process in a minute, but I was interested to see how these various writers started on the task. (There were 13 of us, including me.) Several had the specialized writing software that puts the dialogue and stage directions in the proper format. That looks pretty handy, though maybe a bit more software than I really need. I think most people were just writing in word. The guy next to me had an upgraded writing software that actually allowed him to put notes in various places and rearrange chunks of text to fit into an outline. I can see if one was a professional writer tackling books and so forth, this could be really handy. Nonetheless, I am a bit more old-school, preferring to write straight through and not make too many revisions on the first pass, just trusting the characters to start interactions and see how the story develops. That doesn't mean in some cases I don't have clear plot points I want to hit, but I have some flexibility in how I get there. Corporate Codes of Conduct was completely open when I started it, and I thought it might even be about aliens when I first started out, though it morphed into a relatively conventional office romance story, though with some slightly strange elements (the cryptography).*
There was one younger woman who wrote out notes to herself and tore them out of her notebook and kept rearranging the pieces. Finally, there was another woman who pondered the theme and then reached for her Tarot cards to help decide what the plot meant. I thought I heard her rolling dice or throwing runes as well, but I didn't actually see that. I know that the festival organizer tore up (metaphorically) everything she had written in the first 2 hours and then went off in a totally different direction.
For myself, I basically start with a core idea and then try to gin up some dialogue around it, and then see where things are going. I try to just barrel through, relying on dialogue and not worrying overly much if the characters sound like distinct characters or just variants of my own voice. There doesn't seem to be too much point in being precious about the writing in the early stages. I have to admit that of the three or so major issues I wanted to work through in my writing, I have basically done so. After some thought, I decided that maybe I should address in an oblique way the household tensions that came up when I moved the family to Vancouver. I added a bit to what might have been the biggest trauma had the family actually split up (maybe even surprising myself).
As far as the form, I have had PKD (Philip K. Dick) on my mind recently, and I originally thought that the theme might call for a Sliding Doors kind of approach where things go one way in Act I and a different way in Act II. I moved away from that, though it is still alluded to a bit. Then I decided nested stories might be kind of interesting, drawing a bit on David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas or perhaps John Barth's The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor. The final story is told while two characters are in bed, a la Scheherazade/Shahrazad from 1001 Nights.** Then I thought I would need something to make it a bit more interesting, so occasionally you have the scene freeze and voices from the higher level story intrude, then the story picks up again. (Actors and directors tend to love this sort of thing; audiences perhaps less so.) This may have been somewhat influenced by the Chris Nolan's Inception.
So I got to the core story and found myself writing a somewhat stereotypical tear-jerker about a poor girl (probably in Greece though this is not completely spelled out) who more or less becomes the chattel of the wealthier and much older neighbour. But it has some physical action (most of my plays are just talk, talk, talk) and it doesn't last that long. Then I slowly close down the story layers.
I thought the thing might go in a completely different direction, sort of a third act, to bring it to 45 pages, but I was getting kind of sick of the whole thing. I had written the first 20 pages from 6 to midnight, which I thought was not a bad pace at all, but deciding exactly how to wrap it up -- and not be too sentimental or too cynical -- was tougher. I squeezed out the last 10 pages (or really 9.5) from midnight to 3:30 am, which is actually not too bad. One person finished much sooner, 12:30 or 1, and I will be quite interested to see how long a piece she wrote. At 3:30 everyone else was either working away, or far more common were sleeping in the basement. Given that I knew this wasn't going to be a 2 Act epic, I figured it was just better to wrap it up and go home.
One factor in this decision was that the food provided was less than ideal. The pasta had ham in it, and basically the only other thing to eat were these loaves of bread, though someone went out and brought back some cheese. Apparently, the original idea behind the festival was to keep everyone completely locked in, but this never happened. That was good for me, as I wandered over to the Shoppers and got some diet Coke and a yogurt parfait, along with some other snacks to see me through until morning. A few of the writers went off for smoke breaks periodically. I took a short walk to clear my head a bit at 10 (and almost bought ice cream next door at the parlor that was just closing) and then a bit after midnight, as I was struggling with closure. As it became apparent that I was not going to need anything like 24 hours (or even 12 hours), I grabbed some cash from the local ATM.
I had to do this because, even though most streetcars run 24 hours, the subway does not, and more critically buses that feed the subway (like the 72) don't run either at 3 in the morning. I faced this at the end of Nuit Blanche last year when the subway was indeed running, but not the buses, and I had to cab it home. This year, assuming I go again, I probably can just walk home from the subway assuming it is not raining. So I cabbed it home. I kind of stumbled into the house and picked up the paper, then crashed pretty hard. In the morning, I called the newspaper asking where my Sunday paper was! I suspect they thought I was dealing with a hang-over.
One of my goals all along had been to finish up in time to get back to TIFF at 5:30 today to see La Dolce Vita. Then it became apparent that I had several more hours than that (a kind of bonus time I guess), though I've tried to take it pretty easy. I sat outside for a while and read part of the paper and finished up Bruno Schulz's Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, which is quite good, even though I like Street of Crocodiles a bit more. I'll be writing about Schulz shortly. This deck should be quite the refuge this fall (I didn't even realize that there was a flowering bush there), and tomorrow I will probably have the time to put up the patio table, which we bought last year and never used once!
I was hoping to get started on putting up the new ceiling fan today, but actually I am still still just a bit woozy, so I think I'll put that off for another day. I think I'll head out fairly soon (after taking a nice long shower!), stop off at the library and then work just before I settle in for this long, long movie.
Tomorrow, I have to be back at Red Sandcastle for the reading of the scripts. If anyone is interested, they are welcome to drop by. This will be at 8 pm, so I have almost the entire day. In the morning I should get some groceries, since the stores will be shut on Monday. Most likely I will tape up and paint the bathroom in the late morning. It's pretty small, so I should be done by early afternoon, and then I may tackle the ceiling fan or leave that until Monday. Now there may be a few scripts left to go through Monday afternoon, though I may bail. It partly depends on whether Sing-for-Your-Supper takes place or not and whether my Shakespeare spoof was accepted. But anyway, I should have a bit of time left over to take care of some house things, straightening up and maybe catching up a bit more on work. I kind of want to put that out of my mind for a day or two, since I have been pushing very, very hard at work, and I do need a break. (Edit: Mine was the last read on Sunday night, and I thought it went over pretty well. But I'll try to still make it Monday from 2-5 or so (assuming I can paint at least a little bit tomorrow and perhaps run a couple of model runs) and then maybe run up to Sing-for-your-Supper with Burke. I still haven't heard if the Hamlet in Wittenberg piece was accepted.)
I have to admit, I don't have enough distance on this new piece to even tell if I want to see it staged in the future, in part because it is too short to stand alone. But if the consensus is positive, I might suggest pairing it with this piece I wrote many years ago and then polished up for a stage reading just before we left Chicago. It also has twinned moments where everything changes and similarly it ends on a somewhat ambiguous note. Anyway, no point in getting ahead of myself, though I will go ahead and link to the older piece here. I thought this was a useful exercise, though more than anything it just points out that I need to carve out space from work and working on the house and even from blogging, and then I should be able to crank out these final plays. Then I can have a marathon editing session and decide if it is worth getting them staged. So watch this space over the next year or so.
* As a total side note, I am starting to agree with Adam that original dynamic worked well in the first act and it was a bit of a shame to break it up in the second act, which is almost entirely conventional. I've started changing it around (I did some serious editing a couple of months ago). I probably need to leave them entirely in the office setting, and if Li's mother shows up at all (rather than being one more voice-over) she has to show up in the office, catching Li in the corridor right outside the offices. Now if I can squeeze in one more bit of cryptography into the second act that would also improve the structure.
** Actually, leaving the Burton translation of 1001 Nights boxed up downstairs is a significant shortcoming of the current arrangement. I will give myself roughly 9 months to figure out which books I need to discard or demote to make room for 1001 Nights, but it has to be out where I can get my hands on it from time to time. The most likely space is where the Canadian paperbacks are stashed, since I have read or will read most of them over the next year.
Despite what I said about there not being that much general interest in watching writers write, from a professional or semi-professional perspective I was interested in how people went about the task of writing. When we showed up we picked three words out of the dictionary. Mine were: muster, epilepsy and dentine. Then at 6 sharp, the organizer was texted the theme for the festival. As best as I can remember it was: everything changes in a single moment, or does it. And the secondary set of key works was: maturity, openness and something I am blanking on. It wasn't transformation, but maybe along those lines. (Edit: it was recovery.)
 |
| Words, words, words |
 |
| The theme for the festival |
Now in addition to simply seeing if I could write a play in one day, I did have an ulterior motive and that is that one or more of the plays written during the festival will be staged at Red Sandcastle. I really wanted to see if either of the plays I had started (The Study Group or Straying South) might fit with the theme, and I could use them as a good starting point for the writing and maybe have a shot at getting one of them staged. But frankly, I didn't think either of them fit particularly well. The play based loosely on King Lear does have more of this transformative aspect to it, but it is a darker play, and this seemed to be calling for something more upbeat and positive. I'm sure they wouldn't reject a play with an unhappy ending -- this is mostly about kick-starting the creative juices -- but I decided I would start completely from scratch.
I'll get to my own process in a minute, but I was interested to see how these various writers started on the task. (There were 13 of us, including me.) Several had the specialized writing software that puts the dialogue and stage directions in the proper format. That looks pretty handy, though maybe a bit more software than I really need. I think most people were just writing in word. The guy next to me had an upgraded writing software that actually allowed him to put notes in various places and rearrange chunks of text to fit into an outline. I can see if one was a professional writer tackling books and so forth, this could be really handy. Nonetheless, I am a bit more old-school, preferring to write straight through and not make too many revisions on the first pass, just trusting the characters to start interactions and see how the story develops. That doesn't mean in some cases I don't have clear plot points I want to hit, but I have some flexibility in how I get there. Corporate Codes of Conduct was completely open when I started it, and I thought it might even be about aliens when I first started out, though it morphed into a relatively conventional office romance story, though with some slightly strange elements (the cryptography).*
There was one younger woman who wrote out notes to herself and tore them out of her notebook and kept rearranging the pieces. Finally, there was another woman who pondered the theme and then reached for her Tarot cards to help decide what the plot meant. I thought I heard her rolling dice or throwing runes as well, but I didn't actually see that. I know that the festival organizer tore up (metaphorically) everything she had written in the first 2 hours and then went off in a totally different direction.
For myself, I basically start with a core idea and then try to gin up some dialogue around it, and then see where things are going. I try to just barrel through, relying on dialogue and not worrying overly much if the characters sound like distinct characters or just variants of my own voice. There doesn't seem to be too much point in being precious about the writing in the early stages. I have to admit that of the three or so major issues I wanted to work through in my writing, I have basically done so. After some thought, I decided that maybe I should address in an oblique way the household tensions that came up when I moved the family to Vancouver. I added a bit to what might have been the biggest trauma had the family actually split up (maybe even surprising myself).
As far as the form, I have had PKD (Philip K. Dick) on my mind recently, and I originally thought that the theme might call for a Sliding Doors kind of approach where things go one way in Act I and a different way in Act II. I moved away from that, though it is still alluded to a bit. Then I decided nested stories might be kind of interesting, drawing a bit on David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas or perhaps John Barth's The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor. The final story is told while two characters are in bed, a la Scheherazade/Shahrazad from 1001 Nights.** Then I thought I would need something to make it a bit more interesting, so occasionally you have the scene freeze and voices from the higher level story intrude, then the story picks up again. (Actors and directors tend to love this sort of thing; audiences perhaps less so.) This may have been somewhat influenced by the Chris Nolan's Inception.
So I got to the core story and found myself writing a somewhat stereotypical tear-jerker about a poor girl (probably in Greece though this is not completely spelled out) who more or less becomes the chattel of the wealthier and much older neighbour. But it has some physical action (most of my plays are just talk, talk, talk) and it doesn't last that long. Then I slowly close down the story layers.
I thought the thing might go in a completely different direction, sort of a third act, to bring it to 45 pages, but I was getting kind of sick of the whole thing. I had written the first 20 pages from 6 to midnight, which I thought was not a bad pace at all, but deciding exactly how to wrap it up -- and not be too sentimental or too cynical -- was tougher. I squeezed out the last 10 pages (or really 9.5) from midnight to 3:30 am, which is actually not too bad. One person finished much sooner, 12:30 or 1, and I will be quite interested to see how long a piece she wrote. At 3:30 everyone else was either working away, or far more common were sleeping in the basement. Given that I knew this wasn't going to be a 2 Act epic, I figured it was just better to wrap it up and go home.
One factor in this decision was that the food provided was less than ideal. The pasta had ham in it, and basically the only other thing to eat were these loaves of bread, though someone went out and brought back some cheese. Apparently, the original idea behind the festival was to keep everyone completely locked in, but this never happened. That was good for me, as I wandered over to the Shoppers and got some diet Coke and a yogurt parfait, along with some other snacks to see me through until morning. A few of the writers went off for smoke breaks periodically. I took a short walk to clear my head a bit at 10 (and almost bought ice cream next door at the parlor that was just closing) and then a bit after midnight, as I was struggling with closure. As it became apparent that I was not going to need anything like 24 hours (or even 12 hours), I grabbed some cash from the local ATM.
I had to do this because, even though most streetcars run 24 hours, the subway does not, and more critically buses that feed the subway (like the 72) don't run either at 3 in the morning. I faced this at the end of Nuit Blanche last year when the subway was indeed running, but not the buses, and I had to cab it home. This year, assuming I go again, I probably can just walk home from the subway assuming it is not raining. So I cabbed it home. I kind of stumbled into the house and picked up the paper, then crashed pretty hard. In the morning, I called the newspaper asking where my Sunday paper was! I suspect they thought I was dealing with a hang-over.
One of my goals all along had been to finish up in time to get back to TIFF at 5:30 today to see La Dolce Vita. Then it became apparent that I had several more hours than that (a kind of bonus time I guess), though I've tried to take it pretty easy. I sat outside for a while and read part of the paper and finished up Bruno Schulz's Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, which is quite good, even though I like Street of Crocodiles a bit more. I'll be writing about Schulz shortly. This deck should be quite the refuge this fall (I didn't even realize that there was a flowering bush there), and tomorrow I will probably have the time to put up the patio table, which we bought last year and never used once!
I was hoping to get started on putting up the new ceiling fan today, but actually I am still still just a bit woozy, so I think I'll put that off for another day. I think I'll head out fairly soon (after taking a nice long shower!), stop off at the library and then work just before I settle in for this long, long movie.
Tomorrow, I have to be back at Red Sandcastle for the reading of the scripts. If anyone is interested, they are welcome to drop by. This will be at 8 pm, so I have almost the entire day. In the morning I should get some groceries, since the stores will be shut on Monday. Most likely I will tape up and paint the bathroom in the late morning. It's pretty small, so I should be done by early afternoon, and then I may tackle the ceiling fan or leave that until Monday. Now there may be a few scripts left to go through Monday afternoon, though I may bail. It partly depends on whether Sing-for-Your-Supper takes place or not and whether my Shakespeare spoof was accepted. But anyway, I should have a bit of time left over to take care of some house things, straightening up and maybe catching up a bit more on work. I kind of want to put that out of my mind for a day or two, since I have been pushing very, very hard at work, and I do need a break. (Edit: Mine was the last read on Sunday night, and I thought it went over pretty well. But I'll try to still make it Monday from 2-5 or so (assuming I can paint at least a little bit tomorrow and perhaps run a couple of model runs) and then maybe run up to Sing-for-your-Supper with Burke. I still haven't heard if the Hamlet in Wittenberg piece was accepted.)
 |
| The scripts! |
I have to admit, I don't have enough distance on this new piece to even tell if I want to see it staged in the future, in part because it is too short to stand alone. But if the consensus is positive, I might suggest pairing it with this piece I wrote many years ago and then polished up for a stage reading just before we left Chicago. It also has twinned moments where everything changes and similarly it ends on a somewhat ambiguous note. Anyway, no point in getting ahead of myself, though I will go ahead and link to the older piece here. I thought this was a useful exercise, though more than anything it just points out that I need to carve out space from work and working on the house and even from blogging, and then I should be able to crank out these final plays. Then I can have a marathon editing session and decide if it is worth getting them staged. So watch this space over the next year or so.
* As a total side note, I am starting to agree with Adam that original dynamic worked well in the first act and it was a bit of a shame to break it up in the second act, which is almost entirely conventional. I've started changing it around (I did some serious editing a couple of months ago). I probably need to leave them entirely in the office setting, and if Li's mother shows up at all (rather than being one more voice-over) she has to show up in the office, catching Li in the corridor right outside the offices. Now if I can squeeze in one more bit of cryptography into the second act that would also improve the structure.
** Actually, leaving the Burton translation of 1001 Nights boxed up downstairs is a significant shortcoming of the current arrangement. I will give myself roughly 9 months to figure out which books I need to discard or demote to make room for 1001 Nights, but it has to be out where I can get my hands on it from time to time. The most likely space is where the Canadian paperbacks are stashed, since I have read or will read most of them over the next year.
Friday, July 31, 2015
The Conversation
It has already been close to two weeks since the Stratford trip.
I was a bit nervous about missing the bus and left a bit early. I actually had close to half an hour to spare, so I stopped off at work first.
I wasn't terribly surprised that the bus was full, but I was secretly glad when this pair of women, who had planned to chat the whole time (and would have been sitting near me) split up. The woman who sat next to me tried to get some work done on her smartphone but the display was too small. I offered to lend her a few sections of the paper that I still had with me. I was planning on reading Coover's Pricksongs and Descants.
I can't quite remember what set it off, but perhaps it was exasperation at the delay and then the seemingly endless video display before the driver finally took off, but we started talking about the relative merits of the art scene in Vancouver vs. Toronto. I said it was quite sad that opera was not thriving in Vancouver, and it seems that it is likely to be extinguished soon (they are trying just a short festival season and no programming the rest of the year, which seems destined to fail). I think we talked a bit about how the TSO was slightly underwhelming for a city this side, and the VSO punches above its weight. (Though I just read that Dale Barltrop is moving back to Australia permanently, which will be a huge loss. I felt quite privileged to see a number of concerts where he was featured.)
We somehow got onto the fact that I was a transportation planner and then talked a fair bit about unrealistic expectations (both on the part of the public and the planners) and how almost everything in Toronto is complicated by the amalgamation and the low tax regime insisted on by the suburban voters. But fundamentally, there is no easy fix, and Toronto traffic will always be bad unless the region gets very serious about rezoning and redeveloping a number of clusters outside the downtown core.
The conversation kept going into odd directions, and we dwelt several times on some of the downsides of US culture, particularly rise of religious fundamentalism in the US* but also the fascination with guns and the fact that the 2nd Amendment makes it impossible to do anything about it. Then Chicago and its issues, both deep segregation and looming pension problems. In some ways, the Illinois constitution is even more limiting, and has put the state into a really deep hole. This ties in with ideas I have been kicking around about how inter-generational equity is essentially impossible when the current population (mixed with a slavish adherence to the primacy of contract law) can tie up future generations indefinitely. Just look at Greece. Indeed, we did talk about the mess that is Greece and the fact that the EU is not willing to sponsor poorer countries for generations. Also, just how helpful is it for the IMF to come around and lecture Europe about debt relief (when Greece's lenders already took a massive haircut) when the IMF turns around and says that its debts are sacrosanct. At that point, I thought they lost the right to criticize others.
We actually ending up talking quite a bit about the huge problems with the structural transformation of economy, and how overall "society" benefitted from free trade. Unfortunately (and probably predictably) the real benefits were not redistributed or used to prop up safety net for those who were net losers. Robert Reich was a bit of an optimist in The Work of Nations (from around his time in the Clinton adminstration), but since then he has become quite pessimistic about the impacts of free trade on the working class. Just in general, we in the west could not have nice things, like day trips to Stratford, if resources were spread out equally. I know this intellectually of course, but when I really dwell on it, I start to feel guilty and it does put a damper on my mood...
We sort of ended with a darker prediction of how bad things will get, particularly in Europe, when global warming generates attempts at mass migration several times above what they see now, along with struggles over water (to say nothing of the impact of a sustained sea rise). We both agreed that there will be a general global catastrophe unless we move away from carbon-based economy, and its probably already too late. Ontario is probably better positioned than most of the rest of the world, but there will still be some terrible impacts here. I suspect I feel this more than she does, simply because I am more of a pessimist and, being younger, I will have to deal with these messes for longer than she will. The conversation was starting to peter out, but we talked a bit about China. Unfortunately, I got the name wrong at that time, but the author of Concrete Dragon admits that what the Chinese are doing at the moment is incredibly environmentally destructive, but at the same time they seem to offer the only meaningful escape from the carbon economy, since they are probably the only country with the resources and will to actually make solar power panels cheap enough so it is truly competitive with oil and we can make the transition to a post-carbon economy. That's a very slender reed on which to hang one's hopes, but I guess it is better than giving in completely to despair.
Since this woman was clearly into documentaries, I told her about a powerful one called Last Train Home, which is both about the terrible human impact on the rural villagers who move to the outskirts of the cities where they have almost no rights, but also about the fact that almost the entire country tries to go home at the same time at Chinese New Year and all transportation systems grind to a halt. Unfortunately, I got the name of the documentation wrong as well, but I think she had enough clues to find it if she wants to look it up.
And that was how I spent the trip to Stratford, chatting with a complete stranger the whole way in (hopefully not disturbing others too much). We only exchanged names at the very end of the ride! It is definitely not like me at all, but it was actually fun and probably the most intellectually stimulating talk I've had in years, just due to the length and breadth of topics covered (of which I only touched on a few). Maybe moving to Poucher, where people are generally more outgoing, has had a subtle influence on me. Certainly my mother was very outgoing and could talk to strangers pretty much anywhere, which was always mortifying to a more closed-off teenager like myself. In general, taking changes has led to good outcomes for me, so why I don't interact more with strangers is a bit peculiar, but it is a deeply ingrained habit for me now.
I did mention to her that she might want to check out the Hamlet in Withrow Park, since she said she loved the tragedies, but I didn't force it. I thought this conversation was lightening in a bottle, and if you tried to recreate it, it wouldn't work.
As it turned out, I was still able to read the Coover book and finish Keane's Good Behaviour and even read Dürrenmatt's The Physicists during my short stay at Stratford, so I might actually have been bored on the way back had I stuck my nose in the book and read on the way there. Just something to consider for the future.
* This actually led to an interesting but inconclusive discussion of what to do when one is a secular or secular-leaning person in a red-state, or more extreme case of Iran. Democratically, it may be the case that a majority want religion imposed upon themselves (and everyone else) but there may not be much room for dissidents. Minority rights are always so hard to square with the overall political process. I'd say that even in the US and Canada, acceptance of the validity of different views is decreasing.
I was a bit nervous about missing the bus and left a bit early. I actually had close to half an hour to spare, so I stopped off at work first.
I wasn't terribly surprised that the bus was full, but I was secretly glad when this pair of women, who had planned to chat the whole time (and would have been sitting near me) split up. The woman who sat next to me tried to get some work done on her smartphone but the display was too small. I offered to lend her a few sections of the paper that I still had with me. I was planning on reading Coover's Pricksongs and Descants.
I can't quite remember what set it off, but perhaps it was exasperation at the delay and then the seemingly endless video display before the driver finally took off, but we started talking about the relative merits of the art scene in Vancouver vs. Toronto. I said it was quite sad that opera was not thriving in Vancouver, and it seems that it is likely to be extinguished soon (they are trying just a short festival season and no programming the rest of the year, which seems destined to fail). I think we talked a bit about how the TSO was slightly underwhelming for a city this side, and the VSO punches above its weight. (Though I just read that Dale Barltrop is moving back to Australia permanently, which will be a huge loss. I felt quite privileged to see a number of concerts where he was featured.)
We somehow got onto the fact that I was a transportation planner and then talked a fair bit about unrealistic expectations (both on the part of the public and the planners) and how almost everything in Toronto is complicated by the amalgamation and the low tax regime insisted on by the suburban voters. But fundamentally, there is no easy fix, and Toronto traffic will always be bad unless the region gets very serious about rezoning and redeveloping a number of clusters outside the downtown core.
The conversation kept going into odd directions, and we dwelt several times on some of the downsides of US culture, particularly rise of religious fundamentalism in the US* but also the fascination with guns and the fact that the 2nd Amendment makes it impossible to do anything about it. Then Chicago and its issues, both deep segregation and looming pension problems. In some ways, the Illinois constitution is even more limiting, and has put the state into a really deep hole. This ties in with ideas I have been kicking around about how inter-generational equity is essentially impossible when the current population (mixed with a slavish adherence to the primacy of contract law) can tie up future generations indefinitely. Just look at Greece. Indeed, we did talk about the mess that is Greece and the fact that the EU is not willing to sponsor poorer countries for generations. Also, just how helpful is it for the IMF to come around and lecture Europe about debt relief (when Greece's lenders already took a massive haircut) when the IMF turns around and says that its debts are sacrosanct. At that point, I thought they lost the right to criticize others.
We actually ending up talking quite a bit about the huge problems with the structural transformation of economy, and how overall "society" benefitted from free trade. Unfortunately (and probably predictably) the real benefits were not redistributed or used to prop up safety net for those who were net losers. Robert Reich was a bit of an optimist in The Work of Nations (from around his time in the Clinton adminstration), but since then he has become quite pessimistic about the impacts of free trade on the working class. Just in general, we in the west could not have nice things, like day trips to Stratford, if resources were spread out equally. I know this intellectually of course, but when I really dwell on it, I start to feel guilty and it does put a damper on my mood...
We sort of ended with a darker prediction of how bad things will get, particularly in Europe, when global warming generates attempts at mass migration several times above what they see now, along with struggles over water (to say nothing of the impact of a sustained sea rise). We both agreed that there will be a general global catastrophe unless we move away from carbon-based economy, and its probably already too late. Ontario is probably better positioned than most of the rest of the world, but there will still be some terrible impacts here. I suspect I feel this more than she does, simply because I am more of a pessimist and, being younger, I will have to deal with these messes for longer than she will. The conversation was starting to peter out, but we talked a bit about China. Unfortunately, I got the name wrong at that time, but the author of Concrete Dragon admits that what the Chinese are doing at the moment is incredibly environmentally destructive, but at the same time they seem to offer the only meaningful escape from the carbon economy, since they are probably the only country with the resources and will to actually make solar power panels cheap enough so it is truly competitive with oil and we can make the transition to a post-carbon economy. That's a very slender reed on which to hang one's hopes, but I guess it is better than giving in completely to despair.
Since this woman was clearly into documentaries, I told her about a powerful one called Last Train Home, which is both about the terrible human impact on the rural villagers who move to the outskirts of the cities where they have almost no rights, but also about the fact that almost the entire country tries to go home at the same time at Chinese New Year and all transportation systems grind to a halt. Unfortunately, I got the name of the documentation wrong as well, but I think she had enough clues to find it if she wants to look it up.
And that was how I spent the trip to Stratford, chatting with a complete stranger the whole way in (hopefully not disturbing others too much). We only exchanged names at the very end of the ride! It is definitely not like me at all, but it was actually fun and probably the most intellectually stimulating talk I've had in years, just due to the length and breadth of topics covered (of which I only touched on a few). Maybe moving to Poucher, where people are generally more outgoing, has had a subtle influence on me. Certainly my mother was very outgoing and could talk to strangers pretty much anywhere, which was always mortifying to a more closed-off teenager like myself. In general, taking changes has led to good outcomes for me, so why I don't interact more with strangers is a bit peculiar, but it is a deeply ingrained habit for me now.
I did mention to her that she might want to check out the Hamlet in Withrow Park, since she said she loved the tragedies, but I didn't force it. I thought this conversation was lightening in a bottle, and if you tried to recreate it, it wouldn't work.
As it turned out, I was still able to read the Coover book and finish Keane's Good Behaviour and even read Dürrenmatt's The Physicists during my short stay at Stratford, so I might actually have been bored on the way back had I stuck my nose in the book and read on the way there. Just something to consider for the future.
* This actually led to an interesting but inconclusive discussion of what to do when one is a secular or secular-leaning person in a red-state, or more extreme case of Iran. Democratically, it may be the case that a majority want religion imposed upon themselves (and everyone else) but there may not be much room for dissidents. Minority rights are always so hard to square with the overall political process. I'd say that even in the US and Canada, acceptance of the validity of different views is decreasing.
Wednesday, July 29, 2015
Hot hot hot
Nothing really more to add to that. It is hot out, and while I do enjoy riding the bike (I'm basically up to 4 days a week, which is great) it would be better if it were 5 degrees cooler out.
My trip to Ottawa, which I will discuss more tonight (or more probably tomorrow), was also marked by heat. It was fortunate that most of my walking was done inside the National Gallery or after 10 pm, by which time it cooled down a little bit.
My trip to Ottawa, which I will discuss more tonight (or more probably tomorrow), was also marked by heat. It was fortunate that most of my walking was done inside the National Gallery or after 10 pm, by which time it cooled down a little bit.
Saturday, July 25, 2015
The one(s) that got away -- novels that I should have read
I know this seems sort of crazy, since one can always get a book from the library or interlibrary loan on in extremis one can buy it on-line. That is, if one remembers the particulars of the book, namely author and/or title.
I was just at BMV and I picked up a copy of Graham Greene's The Quiet American that I had been eyeing for a while, and there was a copy of Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex for $1. Well, I've heard many good things about that novel, and even if I don't get to it for a while, that was a steal.
Back up all the way to 1992-3 when I was living in Newark and spending a fair bit of time at the Newark Public Library. I honestly can't remember if they had local branches, but I always went to the main one right near the Newark Museum, since that had a pretty decent literature and poetry section. During this period I read all the novels of Saul Bellow (except Ravelstein which hadn't come out), Barbara Pym and Graham Greene. There may have been one other author involved, but if so, I am completely blanking on him or her. It would have had to have been someone with 10-12 novels published as of 1992, and I can't think of any other novelist where I have read essentially their entire oeuvre. (Though there will be a few more when I finally get to the end of the latest reading list.)
I did read other things, and in fact I read something like 100 books in 1992. However, I remember thinking seriously about two books on those shelves and I kept passing them up. I thought that one was Middlesex, but it was published in 2002, which is much, much too late. With just a bit of prompting, I remembered that the other one was Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, which is one I should get to, but will put it off a bit longer.
That leads to another one of these literary puzzles. I have a couple of posts where I discuss books that I read that I can no longer recall the title. At least there you have some hope that you will recall a bit more and identify it. (There are even people that specialize in this and charge a fee. I used one to find The Great Alphabet Race, though honestly I have no idea why Google just didn't point me to the book in the first place, since I kept typing in alphabet race children's book. Oh well...) But if you never read the book at all beyond the book blurb in the back, well that is quite challenging.
I'm pretty sure this one one of those trendy books from the late 1980s or very early 1990s. I am also convinced that the main character either was a hermaphrodite or changed sex during the course of the novel (again according to the blurb). I know for a fact this isn't Woolf's Orlando, or Winterson's Sexing the Cherry, or even Carter's Nights at the Circus. And it can't be Middlesex either. (On the other hand, even the Library of Congress seems to suggest there are only 13 or so novels about intersex characters, and none of those looked familiar. So this is becoming a real challenge.)
So far Goodreads is looking like the most promising resource to find literary fiction books that would have been trendy at that time. As long as I am taking the trouble, I will go ahead and list a few other books that look like I might like them (in 2020 or so!):
Julian Barnes - Metroland
Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others
Jhumpa Lahiri - The Lowland (probably will order this when the price drops low enough)
W.G. Sebald - The Rings of Saturn (might actually have this in deep storage)
Richard Powers - The Gold Bug Variations
Jeanette Winterson - Written on the Body
Téa Obreh - The Tiger's Wife
Herta Müller - The Appointment
Cees Nooteboom - All Souls' Day
Cees Nooteboom - Rituals
These are not necessarily from the proper time period, but are books that do seem to be up my alley.
Well, despite a couple of hours of deep thinking about this, I haven't been able to trigger anything more. It's kind of interesting how a fair bit of the 1980s and even the early 1990s is pre-web and thus not easily searchable, so it might as well not even have happened for the Millennials. In any case, if this does sound vaguely familiar, please leave a note in the comments. Thanks.
I was just at BMV and I picked up a copy of Graham Greene's The Quiet American that I had been eyeing for a while, and there was a copy of Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex for $1. Well, I've heard many good things about that novel, and even if I don't get to it for a while, that was a steal.
Back up all the way to 1992-3 when I was living in Newark and spending a fair bit of time at the Newark Public Library. I honestly can't remember if they had local branches, but I always went to the main one right near the Newark Museum, since that had a pretty decent literature and poetry section. During this period I read all the novels of Saul Bellow (except Ravelstein which hadn't come out), Barbara Pym and Graham Greene. There may have been one other author involved, but if so, I am completely blanking on him or her. It would have had to have been someone with 10-12 novels published as of 1992, and I can't think of any other novelist where I have read essentially their entire oeuvre. (Though there will be a few more when I finally get to the end of the latest reading list.)
I did read other things, and in fact I read something like 100 books in 1992. However, I remember thinking seriously about two books on those shelves and I kept passing them up. I thought that one was Middlesex, but it was published in 2002, which is much, much too late. With just a bit of prompting, I remembered that the other one was Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, which is one I should get to, but will put it off a bit longer.
That leads to another one of these literary puzzles. I have a couple of posts where I discuss books that I read that I can no longer recall the title. At least there you have some hope that you will recall a bit more and identify it. (There are even people that specialize in this and charge a fee. I used one to find The Great Alphabet Race, though honestly I have no idea why Google just didn't point me to the book in the first place, since I kept typing in alphabet race children's book. Oh well...) But if you never read the book at all beyond the book blurb in the back, well that is quite challenging.
I'm pretty sure this one one of those trendy books from the late 1980s or very early 1990s. I am also convinced that the main character either was a hermaphrodite or changed sex during the course of the novel (again according to the blurb). I know for a fact this isn't Woolf's Orlando, or Winterson's Sexing the Cherry, or even Carter's Nights at the Circus. And it can't be Middlesex either. (On the other hand, even the Library of Congress seems to suggest there are only 13 or so novels about intersex characters, and none of those looked familiar. So this is becoming a real challenge.)
So far Goodreads is looking like the most promising resource to find literary fiction books that would have been trendy at that time. As long as I am taking the trouble, I will go ahead and list a few other books that look like I might like them (in 2020 or so!):
Julian Barnes - Metroland
Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others
Jhumpa Lahiri - The Lowland (probably will order this when the price drops low enough)
W.G. Sebald - The Rings of Saturn (might actually have this in deep storage)
Richard Powers - The Gold Bug Variations
Jeanette Winterson - Written on the Body
Téa Obreh - The Tiger's Wife
Herta Müller - The Appointment
Cees Nooteboom - All Souls' Day
Cees Nooteboom - Rituals
These are not necessarily from the proper time period, but are books that do seem to be up my alley.
Well, despite a couple of hours of deep thinking about this, I haven't been able to trigger anything more. It's kind of interesting how a fair bit of the 1980s and even the early 1990s is pre-web and thus not easily searchable, so it might as well not even have happened for the Millennials. In any case, if this does sound vaguely familiar, please leave a note in the comments. Thanks.
Art crawl in Toronto
I don't get out to the art galleries nearly often enough. I think a large part of the problem is that they don't advertise particularly well, the listings in the Toronto Star and Now are kind of sporadic, but mostly the shows only last a very short period of time (sometimes as short as 2-3 weeks, though more frequently they will be up for a month or so).
Unfortunately, I did miss André Kertész at Stephen Bulger Gallery. What's unbelievably frustrating is that I was looking into photography at that time, but somehow this wasn't listed with all the Scotiabank photography material. So I don't know who dropped the ball, but it should have been included in the listings somewhere rather than being treated as a completely stand alone exhibit. In any case, there is another Kertész exhibition at the Corkin Gallery, so I should manage to get there on the way back home this afternoon.
There was some gallery way to the north, almost at the 401, with a few Botero paintings. I wasn't crazy about the idea of going, but decided I might make the trip (more time to read Bruno Schulz). It turns out that it is only open Mon-Fri 10-5. How totally ridiculous. It sounds more like a tax dodge than an actual museum/gallery. I am so personally offended by this that I am going to scrub this place from my consciousness (and obviously not link to it).
What I will do is make a stop off at MOCCA to see the last exhibit there before it relocates to a new location (perhaps opening in early 2017 if all goes well).
I don't have any major plans other than that. I may stop off at the Eaton Centre and possibly the AGO, and I'll probably stop off at work as well, though I mostly need to get some rest, as Sunday will be a fairly hectic day. I am off to Ottawa to see the Chagall exhibit at the National Gallery and then see Arthur Miller's The Creation of the World. I'm hoping to get some work done on the train,* as well as to write a short playlet (to get in training, since I've signed up for the 1000 Monkeys event at Red Sandcastle where you write an entire play in 24 hours). While I will probably be completely wiped out that weekend if I happen to be completely inspired and wrap up my play a few hours early, I might just head back west on Queen St. to shower at work and go see La Dolce Vita at TIFF. That's probably completely insane, however. I'm still not entirely sure if Sing-for-your-Supper has settled back into a groove and it will be on Aug. 3 or not. It would probably be better for me if it shifted to Aug. 10. Anyway, I definitely have not done any of the creative writing I swore I would do this summer, so starting tomorrow, I need to get back in the saddle.
* I suspect this is a case where if the wireless craps out after an hour, like it did on the way to Montreal, I will actually get more work done, not less.
Unfortunately, I did miss André Kertész at Stephen Bulger Gallery. What's unbelievably frustrating is that I was looking into photography at that time, but somehow this wasn't listed with all the Scotiabank photography material. So I don't know who dropped the ball, but it should have been included in the listings somewhere rather than being treated as a completely stand alone exhibit. In any case, there is another Kertész exhibition at the Corkin Gallery, so I should manage to get there on the way back home this afternoon.
There was some gallery way to the north, almost at the 401, with a few Botero paintings. I wasn't crazy about the idea of going, but decided I might make the trip (more time to read Bruno Schulz). It turns out that it is only open Mon-Fri 10-5. How totally ridiculous. It sounds more like a tax dodge than an actual museum/gallery. I am so personally offended by this that I am going to scrub this place from my consciousness (and obviously not link to it).
What I will do is make a stop off at MOCCA to see the last exhibit there before it relocates to a new location (perhaps opening in early 2017 if all goes well).
I don't have any major plans other than that. I may stop off at the Eaton Centre and possibly the AGO, and I'll probably stop off at work as well, though I mostly need to get some rest, as Sunday will be a fairly hectic day. I am off to Ottawa to see the Chagall exhibit at the National Gallery and then see Arthur Miller's The Creation of the World. I'm hoping to get some work done on the train,* as well as to write a short playlet (to get in training, since I've signed up for the 1000 Monkeys event at Red Sandcastle where you write an entire play in 24 hours). While I will probably be completely wiped out that weekend if I happen to be completely inspired and wrap up my play a few hours early, I might just head back west on Queen St. to shower at work and go see La Dolce Vita at TIFF. That's probably completely insane, however. I'm still not entirely sure if Sing-for-your-Supper has settled back into a groove and it will be on Aug. 3 or not. It would probably be better for me if it shifted to Aug. 10. Anyway, I definitely have not done any of the creative writing I swore I would do this summer, so starting tomorrow, I need to get back in the saddle.
* I suspect this is a case where if the wireless craps out after an hour, like it did on the way to Montreal, I will actually get more work done, not less.
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