gift from the sea

the novel got gilled. action-packed. hat damn. it's a mess. lovely to read all your posts vinod. this is berkeley. signing out.

*Flowering Earth

Flowering Earth -Donald Culross Peattie
One of the many wisdoms is that there is everything botanically effusive about Flowering Earth. Peattie’s poetry is simple, scientific, culling, fulsome and flattering. He tosses around epochs like peatmoss. And he tosses around peatmoss with passionate, patient, love and curiosity. The book has a tremendous arcing plot, disregarding chronology or suspense, and simply, heliotropically, moves where it will, where it sees fit, just like a plant.
“True a plant may not think; neither will the profoundest of men ever put forth a flower.”
I recognize the beauty in Peattie’s thought, yet I believe with my whole soul in the literal possibility of a man flowering.
There is nothing but truth, however, in the following quote: “The further men get, I think, from pines, the worse for them.”
“The grand, hard truth of it is that nothing in Nature happens in order that something else shall happen, but only as it must.”
“Why is it sad to be so happy?”

*The Prophet

The Prophet -Kahlil Gibran
One of the many wisdoms is that there is nothing prophetic about The Prophet. The rest of it stands for itself. Searching, loving, curious, watchful, strong, these words. I would like to forcefully butt heads with Gibran, maybe push him, hard, slap-push him, in the chest, see what he does. Maybe it’s my mood. Maybe I’m angry that I believe, even know, even first-hand, that there is an underlying peace in the world and yet can still have this steaming vehemence clamping down my last four molars. It’s a pressure that really does build in the ears. I would surely lose to Gibran in arm-wrestling. I can feel it now, the cramp popping my bicep like a popsicle stick. My sclera spilling with blood. My heart slinging around my chest cavity like an animate, vengeful pinball. Like a loose fist trying to dig its fingernails out of my elastic sternum. The fleshlayers holding tight though. Until a pithy, hot, rancid spraying of my heart blood… staining my pants, and a nice carpet… not even very much blood, but blood with debris, stinking. Coagulating even outside of me into a fecal black and magenta syrup. Maybe it’s my mood. Or the crystal wine glass shattering in my palm. Or maybe I really do feel it, the prophecy of war. The longing for war. Crimes against humanity. Sickness and dying. Maybe I want to hear the feeling of crushing a skull, of listening to my jaw torn out of place. Maybe the drugs should be stuck into the neck. Right at the trachea, listening to your own wet wind of who knows what sickness. Maybe there is something in the sky that I can bang my head on. The stomachless sensation of being flat-hit in the head with a billet. Then vomit. Bile squeegeeing through your tear-ducts. There is more to life than violence. There is the following death.
“And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.”
“That whenever I come to the fountain to drink I find the living water itself thirsty; And it drinks me while I drink it.”

*The Chandler Apartments

The Chandler Apartments -Owen Hill
In the downstairs of Moe’s books I showed Owen that I was buying his book and he told me that he hoped it would be a quick fun read and it was. It wasn’t “just pulp” that Raymond Chandler wrote and here the crown prince of chiaroscuro verse’s artistic bent is more expressly, obviously espoused in a poet/bookmonger’s book about poetry and books. Twas a joy to read about the un-lionized, moonlight poetry world of Berkeley, whose landmarks I am vaguely familiar with.
“The human voice can be soothing, regardless of content.”

*The Subterraneans

The Subterraneans -Jack Kerouac
Yes, yes we all need some Jack Kerouac every for and again to bring some levity into our lives, no not levity, some jazzbo onto our palates, that’s right, something turbine into our writing. But here is sad old Buddha-bellied Jack, mingling with the new crowd, tizzying over lovehaps and drunk all the time, stale beer, wants his mamma he admits it, WHA WHA WHA. Which of course is to say that where I find stuttering Jack I recognize myself. Wanting to build steam into the conversation instead of patience. It’s his speed that saves him. His art-on-the-fly that (does it?) makes up for the rabblepaging antics of a probably balding semi-celeb writer who wants to pass as any old Tolstoy on the corner but can’t shake the limelight, and who’s to blame you, Jack, what a sweet, sad, sweet run you had.
and how’s this as essence of Jack for you: “Okay, I said, I believe in you believing in freedom and maybe you’re right, have another wine.”
or the nostalgia his brighter days: “with stars above and the smashby Zipper and the fragrance of locomotive coalsmoke as I sit there and let them pass and far down the line in the night around that South San Francisco airport you can see that sonofabitch red light waving Mars signal light swimming in the dark big red markers blowing up and down and sending fires in the keenpure lostpurity lovelyskies of old California in the late sad night of autumn spring comefall winter’s summertime tall, like trees—“
What I learned most, because there’s a lot to learn from his keenpure energetics, is that to love a woman it isn’t necessarily to squawk and pull your beard about it. And other things.

Movie Blog

Hey guys,

A buddy of mine asked me to write a movie blog for a website he's running, check it out and give me comments, I want to get better at writing these reviews cause it would be a pretty cool job in the future. I stole your newsie moniker for it John, sorry...I'm adding a link to it in the links on the side.

later skaters

P.S. Look at the rest of this website at your own risk, it's pretty lame...

*The Empty Space

The Empty Space: A Book About the Theater: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate - Peter Brook

"The exchange of impressions through images is our basic language: at the moment when one man expresses an image at that same instant the other man meets him in belief."

"Chekhov never just made a slice of life, he was a doctor who with infinite gentleness and care took thousands and thousands of fine layer off life. These he cultured and then arranged them in an exquisitely cunning, completely artificial and meaningful order in which part of the cunning lay in so disguising the artifice that the result looked like the keyhole view it never had been."

I was wondering if there is any benefit in disguising the artifice of art, it seems another unworthy goal. Hiding the process seems an attempt to trick an audience, why not invite them in by showing the inner workings? What is there that is useful in a secret?

"I stopped, and walked away from my book, in amongst the actors, and I have never looked at a written plan since. I recognized once and for all the presumption and the folly of thinking that an inanimate model can stand for a man."

"He is searching inside himself for an alphabet that is also fossilized, for the language of signs from life that he knows is the language not of invention but of his conditioning. His observations of behavior are often observations of projections of himself...Clearly the true and instantaneous inner reaction was checked and like lighting the memory substituted some imitation of a form once seen. Dabbing the paint was even more revealing: the hair's breadth of terror before the blackness, and then the reassuring ready-made idea coming to the rescue. This Deadly Theater lurks inside all of us."

"A creative actor will be most ready to discard the hardened shells of his work at the last rehearsal because here, with the first night approaching, a brilliant searchlight is cast on his creation, and he sees its pitiful inadequacy. The creative actor also longs to cling on to all he's found, he too wants at all costs to avoid the trauma of appearing in front of an audience, naked and unprepared - still this is exactly what he must do. He must destroy and abandon his results even if what he picks up seems almost the same...And this is the only way that a part, instead of being built, can be born."

"In everyday life, 'if' is a fiction, in the theater 'if' is an experiment.
In everyday life, 'if; is an evasion, in the theater 'if' is the truth.
When we are persuaded to believe in this truth, then the theater and life are one.
This is a high aim. It sounds like hard work.
To play needs much work. But when we experience the work as play, then it is not work anymore."
A play is play."

The Holy Theater is the one chapter in this book I would definitely want you guys to read. In it they talk about theater as a ritual. I seem to knock up against the idea of art as ritual quite a bit in my reading, Joseph Campbell or those European Marxist literary critics with their penchant for romanticizing Oriental art, or Artaud's Theater of Cruelty, but I have yet to be convinced of the necessity of ritual. what purpose does it really serve? It seems to create a separation, a privileged portion (and perhaps players) in life, which I think is dangerous. who gets to pick what constitutes a ritual? Anything that connects us to something bigger? I dunno, lets talk about this one...

*The Big Con

The Big Con - David W. Maurer

I read this book because it's the text that they based The Sting off of, and it was great, full of that talkie newsie humor I love so much, in the same realm as You Can't Win by Jack Black, but with grifters instead of hobos riding the rails. Even as academic as the book strives to be, it's hard to be anything but engaging and colorful with this subject matter.

"The grift has a gentle touch. It takes its toll from the verdant sucker by means of the skilled hand or the sharp wit. In this, it differs from all other forms of crime, and especially from the heavy rackets. It never employs violence to separate the mark from his money. Of all the grifters the confidence man is the aristocrat."

Though much of the book is a history it also intends to be a record of the language of the con-man.

"It is a peculiar fact that every professional criminal group has its own language...It is a mark of professional affiliation, a union card, so to speak, which requires several years to acquire and which is difficult to counterfeit."

"But con men, as contrasted to other professional criminals, have creative imagination. Their proclivity for coining and using argot extends much beyond the technical vocabulary. They like to express all life-situations in argot, to give their sense of humor free play, to result against conventional language."

It anything this is a book that shows language stretching to communicate new actions, clear evidence of the malleability of English.

This got me thinking a little about how strongly representational a new invented word can be. For the most part the con man lingo in this book had been confined in its use to a relatively narrow historical period, and if not that, then fairly specific technical actions and players. In creating language they could divorce the words from their historical weight. Maybe a new word is a counterpoint to the ambiguous word ("love" as in the Thomas Mann quote from The Magic Mountain in my earlier post), no better or worse, but another tool maybe. and perhaps to create that sort of precision the word must be connected to a concrete reality, an action for example, or maybe any precision is fleeting as any action shifts in time from reality to perception and memory. I guess all this is obvious though...

A good book though, cleanse your palate of Proust, or maybe read this and cleanse your palate with Proust, it's fun stuff, a really good glossary to boot.

The cackle-bladder - A method of blowing off recalcitrant or dangerous marks after they have been fleeced. The inside-man shoots the roper with blank cartridges on the pretense that the roper has ruined both the mark and the inside-man. He then hands the mark the gun, while the roper spurts blood on the mark from a rubber bladder he holds in his mouth. The mark flees, thinking he is an accessory to murder. The inside-man keeps in touch with him for some time and sends him to various cities on the pretext of avoiding arrest. (Big Con.) Cf. to cool a mark out.

*The Real Thing

The Real Thing - Tom Stoppard

This play felt like stuff I have written, at least I wrote that stuff before I read this and at least Tom Stoppard gets a lot or work...it also had a writer character which I always cringe at. I'm not sure what to say about this play, it was pretty good, but to continue what I was talking about with All in the Timing, it spends a lot of time creating a reality, connecting the characters with the present of the play's writing and initial performance, which I'm not sure is beneficial or perhaps just not what I want to do. It seems a fairly useless goal to me, it will never be real simply because it is being acted. It does exploit the stage's unreality with some well played time jumps, repetitions in scenery that point out the contradictions between shifting time and place and unchanged characters. I'm sure some sort of middle ground is an answer, but it seems if one is trying to make a point through verisimilitude then one should just make a documentary or live your life to make that point. (That sounds like too much even as I am writing it...wait a minute, words are a fiction too...phew).

*All in the Timing

All in the Timing - David Ives

I read this one to get back on a play-writing kick. Mr Foster put this on (or parts of it at least) at Lake Ridge our freshman or sophomore year...The only cast I can remember are Dimitri as Trotsky and Alex Venizalos as the guy trying to pick up a girl (what fictions the stage can bring). Upon reading this whole book it strikes me just how hard it is to write a short form play, I mean this guy is good and even a couple of these are duds. Maybe its because I have a lot of theater memories of watching people I know but, this is something so acted about watching someone tell a joke on stage, not that it has to be less funny for it, but it seems hard to imagine being lost in a joke. I almost prefer the skit stuff we did with honor patrol where character takes a back-seat to punch-line. It seems easier to suspend disbelief when watching a movie instead of real people actually talking in the same room at that instant. It seems more prudent to me to embrace that unreality, I mean the audience can give you such leeway with it. Two chairs side by side can easily be a car, you could jump across the planet with a change in backdrop, or even just a few explanatory lines.

more thoughts on theater to come (I know you can't wait...)