29 Saturday Jul 2017
Episode 271 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
In this week’s episode, I curate more blues music that has sustained me in this summer of working too hard.
Episode 271 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
28 Friday Jul 2017
Posted in Film, The Curator of Schlock
The Curator of Schlock #189 by Jeff Shuster
Rambo III
Rambo versus the USSR!
No blog last week. My MacBook power cord went kaput right before I started the review. This means no Rambo IV review this month. It’s like the fates are trying to prevent me from reviewing Rambo IV, the best Rambo movie. That’s the one where he goes into Burma to rescue a bunch of namby-pamby do-gooders. I think one of them gets fed to a hog. Why would anyone want to eat a pig after it’s feasted on human flesh? I mean, there’s sick and there’s sick. I’ll touch on this more one day, but we’ll wrap up Patriots Month with Rambo III.
Rambo III begins with John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) hanging out in Thailand. He keeps getting into stick fights with local street fighters, winning big money that he forks over to Buddhist monks. He’s also been helping them build a temple while enjoying the quiet life. Colonel Trautman (Richard Crenna) shows up, asking Rambo to help him smuggle weapons to freedom fighters in Afghanistan. Rambo says no! He’s done his time! Maybe he’s still bitter about being left to die by the United States government in the last movie. Colonel Trautman gives some speech about how Rambo was a born fighter and that he just chiseled him to perfection or something to that effect. Rambo says no again, and Trautman leaves Rambo to his life of peace and tranquility.
Colonel Traitman goes off to Afghanistan where his delivery of weapons to local Afghani freedom fighters goes awry. Trautman’s men are killed and he’s taken prisoner by…wait for it…THE SOVIETS! Yes, the evil empire has invaded Afghanistan, making life hell for the tribes living there.
Their leader is the evil Colonel Alexie Zaysen (Marc de Jonge). His name reminds me of Count Zar Zon, the villain from Starcrash. Huh? According to Wikipedia, his name was Count Zarth Arn. That name is stupid.
Also, in the trailer for Starcrash, Christopher Plummer clearly states his name as Zar Zon. He was played by Joe Spinell.
Joe Spinell was also in Maniac. That was the movie where Joe Spinell plays a maniac living in New York City.
Caroline Munro was in that movie. She was dating Joe Spinell’s character in that movie. Caroline Munro also played Stella Star in Starcrash. Kind of funny how she was the love interest for Joe Spinell in Maniac, but was his arch nemesis in Starcrash.
Neither of these actors star in Rambo III. You might be wondering where I’m going with this and I don’t know. I’ve lost the plot.
Okay. I have to wrap this up. Rambo saunters off to Afghanistan to rescue his former CO. He befriends a street urchin named Hamid, plays toss the sheep with the Mujahideen, kills some Soviets, rams a tank into a chopper, and guts the leader of the Burmese army like a fish. Yeah, you see his guts fall out and everything! Oh wait! That was the end of Rambo IV also known as John Rambo also known as Rambo. It’s late. I’m tired. Before I go, an obituary.
George Romero
February 4th, 1940 to July 16, 2017
For many people, and myself, George Romero was the gatekeeper to the modern horror movie. Frankly, one could argue he invented the genre. His Living Dead trilogy is my favorite trilogy of all time. I covered Dawn of the Dead. I will get to the other two someday. And I will watch Knightriders. Rest in peace, George. You will be missed.
Photo by Leslie Salas
Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, and episode 131) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
24 Monday Jul 2017
Posted in Pensive Prowler
Pensive Prowler #9 by Dmetri Kakmi
The Writer at Work
W. H. Auden relied on amphetamines, alcohol, coffee and tobacco to keep him at his poetry from 7:00 AM until 11:30 AM every day. Patricia Highsmith, who viewed writing as a compulsion without which life is a misery, applied herself to the novel from three to four hours every morning, completing two thousand words. She sat in bed, surrounded with doughnuts, cigarettes and a mug of coffee, intending to create “a womb of her own,” as her biographer noted. She also carried snails under her breasts and in her handbag but that’s another matter all together.
I’m interested in how writers work. What are the daily habits, the routines, if they have any? How do they summon the muse so that they may hedge closer to a blank page and fill it with tentative words? Or is it just hard slog, dependent on sitting down and bloody well doing what has to be done?
The answers to these questions are stepping stones, guidelines, and perhaps even crumbs that deliver us out of the forest into the glade.
Writers’ working habits are relevant because I’m a year late delivering the manuscript for my novel. The agent asks and I tell her it’s coming. But then so is Armageddon and any number of porno stars. Finally, in a rash moment, like an elf, I promised delivery next Christmas. And I’m determined to make it happen, come what may.
No sooner did the email go off, promising a December money shot, then panic set in. Can I do it?
Yes, you can, chirped a small voice in my head. You just need focus and discipline. But where do I find a surplus of these elusive qualities?
I am, by and large, a disciplined individual. I have to be. Otherwise nothing will get done. When not writing, I work as a freelance editor and writing tutor. In the normal course of the day, I’m either teaching, mentoring, reading someone else’s manuscript, copy editing, or composing a manuscript assessment. The monetary proceeds from these tasks bring in the moussaka and the Bombay Gin, an enticement at the end of the day.
The problem is that I prioritise freelance work and squeeze in writing when I can. This is usually the weekend or a rare free day. Sometimes weeks go by without me so much as glancing at my novel. The fallout is incredible. You lose track of events. You can’t remember character names, what they were doing and why. You fall out of the novel’s mindset and then you scramble hard to get back up there. Only to find that after a day’s work you can’t go near it again for another fortnight. It’s hopeless.
When I was at Penguin Books I worked with Ursula Dubosarsky, a well-known children’s author. She had a family and held a day job. Where did she find time to write? I often wondered.
“I get up at five in the morning,” she said, “and put in two hours a day before I prepare the kids for school.”
The pronouncement stuck and came chiming back when I read about Anthony Trollope’s writing habits. The Victorian novelist began writing at 5:30 AM every morning without question and continued for three hours, before taking breakfast and going to work at the General Post Office.
Going by his stopwatch, he produce 250 words every fifteen minutes. This allowed him to write ten pages a day, which explains his prodigious output in fiction and non-fiction.
By Pan’s beard, I thought, if Dubosarsky and Trollope can do it, so can I.
As a consequence, for the past few weeks, I’ve been getting out of bed at 6:00 AM and putting in 2.5 hours a day, before turning to other tasks. Excluding Fridays (my day off), that’s 15 hours a week. Not being particularly numerical, I have no idea how many pages or words that is per day. But you know what? I’m now in the rhythm. I’m writing almost every day and I don’t feel like climbing walls any more. The frustration is gone and I can bend my energies to my clients’ work for several hours without resenting them.
Like Trollope, I start by reading what I wrote the day before. I make corrections, adjustments, fix infelicitous sentences and add any new ideas that might have cropped up over the course of the previous day. Then I tackle new material and try to push through the fears and hesitations that find their way into my thinking as I work. The trick is to work quickly and following the dictates of the story. Like Trollope, I don’t allow myself to nibble uselessly at my pen or gaze at the wall before my eyes. I try to train my mind to focus and to work continuously during the precious 2.5 hours.
It’s amazing how time flies; it’s 8:30 before I know it and it’s time to log out of one document and get stuck into someone else’s manuscript. In the afternoon, I go to the gym or walk to the beach for a coffee. It’s my treat for applying Sadean discipline to weak mind and still weaker flesh.
The trick is to keep at it. It’s winter in Melbourne, bitterly cold and dark until 7:30 AM. Still, I’m determined to enchain myself. He who dares do less is surely not a writer but a newt in a hag’s blackened cauldron.
_______
Dmetri Kakmi (Episode 158) is a writer and editor based in Melbourne, Australia. The memoir Mother Land was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards in Australia; and is published in England and Turkey. His essays and short stories appear in anthologies and journals. You can find out more about him here.
23 Sunday Jul 2017
Posted in Film, Horror, Shakespeare, The Rogue's Guide to Shakespeare on Film
59. Orson Welles’s Othello (1951)
Orson Welles’s Othello opens with some weird music by Alberto Barbers and/or Angelo Francesco Lavagnino that splits the difference between a Modernist march and Gregorian chant during the funeral march of the Moor and Desdemona, with Iago brought along, caged in captivity, like some dolorous triumph. The tragic destinies are foretold rather than having any opening credits.
The film is in black and white, which may have turned off 1951 audiences. The restored version, however, makes the scenes look crisp, and so the black and white adds an antiquarian touch rather than just making the film look moldy. While I would have adored to see more of Venice, since the Venice scenes take place at night, perhaps black and white is just as well.
I say this with hesitant irony, since Othello is a play in part about the uses made of the color of a man’s skin. White actors who portray the Moor these days forgo the unpleasant tradition of blackface. Ideally, since there are only two black parts in Shakespeare (Othello and Aaron in Titus Andronicus), the parts could be reserved for black actors, even in these times of color-blind casting.
While I shrink from the practice of blackface, though, I don’t find it dreadfully offensive in the case of Welles. In black and white, it looks natural enough, and doesn’t impart direct associations with minstrelsy, although again I might have preferred to see Welles tackle Iago and grant the Moor’s part to a black actor. As weird as the casting of a white man in black make-up might seem to us now, the practice was considered totally normal in Welles’s time.
And Micheál MacLiammóir as Iago brings to mind the importance of Iago’s lack of something, some lack of charisma despite being eloquent and shrewd in the ways of Machiavellian political intrigue. I don’t mean that MacLiammóir is a poor actor, for that is certainly not the case. But physically, MacLiammóir looks rather skinny and average, bland compared to Othello and Michael Cassio. Kenneth Branagh as Iago is too handsome for us to sense that his private griefs are that compelling. Branagh makes us believe that Iago’s lies feel like truth to him, as a compulsive liar begins to have difficulty recognizing the difference. Butit’s difficult to believe he didn’t get what he wanted in the first place. MacLiammóir’s Iago is harder to root for, but easier to empathize with. It makes the tragic destructions of Othello feel less wanton and more tragic.
The sense of Othello’s testimony before the council regarding his courtship of Desdemona comes off poignantly in Welles’s mouth. Othello declares,
Rude am I in my speech,
And little bless’d with the soft phrase of peace:
For since these arms of mine had seven years’ pith,
Till now some nine moons wasted, they have used
Their dearest action in the tented field,
And little of this great world can I speak,
More than pertains to feats of broil and battle,
And therefore little shall I grace my cause
In speaking for myself. Yet, by your gracious patience,
I will a round unvarnish’d tale deliver
Of my whole course of love; what drugs, what charms,
What conjuration and what mighty magic,
For such proceeding I am charged withal,
I won his daughter.
Othello seems to be protesting the rudeness of his speech too much since his tale does not seem especially “unvarnish’d.” However, addressing these white Europeans with whom he serves, Othello seems to understand that his audience may hear his speech as rude, and is ingratiating them against their presumed racism. (I think of Trump supporters who feel like he has made the executive office “classy” again. Institutional racism means that there is a sliding scale for judgment.) This seems all the more enhanced from Welles’s amazing instrument of a voice. (Lawrence Fishburne’s Caribbean accent as Othello made the speech seem potentially rougher in tongue to Europeans, even though Fishburne’s instrument is excellent as well.)
For textual purists, the director was perhaps too rough with the cuts. Welles has added expository voiceovers to speed the play along, allowing the story to reach its conclusion within about ninety minutes.
Sizanne Cloutier makes for a taut Desdemona. She looks uncannily like a Disney princess in such Renaissance attire, and successfully conveys both a strong, clear will and a heartbreaking innocence.
The fortress at Cypress, abutting its geometry against the ocean, looks stark, adding to this antiquarian flair.
One of the later sequences occurs at a sauna. Iago convinced the lovesick dupe, Rodrigo, that he may win Desdemona after all if he will only kill Michael Cassio. Welles has a mandolin playing a gypsy-like tune, and added an essential ingredient to this scene: a poodle. I am not making this up. The scene is so uncanny as to be wholly believable.
When Iago kills Rodrigo through the floorboards of the sauna, the effect is goofy, yet psychedelically terrifying. Indeed, as the film dispatches its climax, the effect is that of a classic horror film, in which nearly everyone left alive is a monster, imprisoned in the ancient jails of their psyches.
The gazes of the dying and the damned.
John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.
22 Saturday Jul 2017
Episode 270 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
In this week’s episode, I talk with Curtis X. Meyer and Caleb Zachary Matthews about the Slam Nationals that Team Orlando will be attending, the upsides and downsides of Slam Poetry, plus they perform their work!
Caleb Zachary Matthews, Raquel Henry, John King, and Curtis Meyer.
NOTES
Episode 270 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
16 Sunday Jul 2017
58. Julie Taymor’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2014)
Dear readers,
I have reached the point where my experience as a reviewer is becoming a liability. It is the responsibility of every production of Shakespeare’s work to both make it new while simultaneously tapping into the essence of what makes Shakespearean drama work. The more films and plays I have seen, the more difficult I am to impress. How do you make it new, yet old, after people have been making it new for so long?
Not long ago, I review Julie Tamor’s Tempest, which was mostly lackluster if compared with Prospero’s Books or especially if compared with Taymor’s own Titus. Nonetheless, I have looked forward to seeing the film of Taymor’s stage adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, since the preview for it seemed darker and stranger than her Tempest despite the generally lighter source material. I longed to know if Taymor’s tepid Tempest was anomalous. Could she make Dream both new and old?
Yes, she could. Her Midsummer Night’s Dream is too delightful.
The constraint of the stage seemed to help immensely. How does one convey the sense of metaphysical wonder of fairies in three-dimensional space? Taymor’s solution was to work vertically to convey the sense of worlds passing through worlds.
A clownish-looking fellow who will turn out to be our Puck goes to bed in the middle of the stage. Branches lift that bed high above the stage, and construction workers, our rude mechanicals, attach ropes and chains to the corners of the bed, and chainsaw the bed from its rustic frame. The sheet is yanked diaphanously across the entire stage, making Puck disappear before the arrival of the Duke and the nattering of our love triangle.
While there are natural and pagan elements in this Dream, Taymor uses the fun of a stage production to avoid (mostly) the predictable color green. Es Devlin’s stage design and Constance Hoffman’s costume design is mostly a gothic palette emphasizing black, white, and gray that seems to make all of the aerial work seem all the more ethereal. The grass-covered barcalounger is a nice touch. Even Titania’s fairy attendants are dressed like ghostly Victorian orphans.
There are no movie stars in this production, just actors doing mostly perfect work.
Max Casella gives let’s an old-fashioned New York Italian accent do most of his work as Bottom before his transformation. He doesn’t overdo Bottom’s overacting, which is a relief.
One of the great scenes we expect is of course Bottom as an ass, and in this case, leaning on Taymor’s earlier theatrical instincts to involve puppetry, Bottom’s jackass puss is rendered through a prosthetic head that tapers to an alarmingly human mouth.
Tina Benko as Titiana and David Harewood as Oberon prove quite regal and compelling.
There is the usual inter-gender wrestling performed charmingly.
Jake Horowitz was underwhelming as Lysander, but that is a minor part, and since he kind of looks like Russell Brand but isn’t Russell Brand, we must count ourselves lucky.
Puck, who isn’t a minor part, is daringly performed by Kathryn Hunter, who makes it look easy.
Taymor’s minimalism and eclectic style work wonders on this film of her stage version. The cinematography somehow managed to convey a cinematic sense without getting in the way of the performance. This is a superior Dream!
John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.
15 Saturday Jul 2017
Posted in Craft of Fiction Writing, Episode
Tags
Art Matters Hemingway Craft and the Creation of the Modern Short Story, Conradian Split, Ernest Hemingway, Purdue University, Robert Paul Lamb
Episode 269 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
Zoë liked this work of scholarship. I basically had to borrow the book from her.
In this week’s episode, I talk with Vanessa Blakeslee about Robert Paul Lamb’s Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story. Five years in, TDO finally devotes a show to Hemingway, and Bob’s discussion of Hemingway’s craft is profoundly illuminating to how effectively extraordinary Hemingway’s aesthetics were. I somehow manage not to tell the story how in my Purdue years, my roommates and I dubbed the more rustic of our two bathrooms as The Ernest Hemingway Memorial toilet, with a lot of great photos of Hem in it.
TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
Special thanks to Mistie Watkins for her encouragement with this episode.
On July 28th, I am hosting a reading by Jaimal Yogis at the Kerouac House.
Episode 269 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
14 Friday Jul 2017
Posted in Film, The Curator of Schlock
The Curator of Schlock #188 by Jeff Shuster
Rambo: First Blood Part II
Rambo: First Blood Part II (It’s worth repeating.)
Oh, I hit pay dirt with this one. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. We don’t do namby-pamby movies here at the Museum of Schlock. What does namby-pamby mean? It’s an adjective used to describe someone as weak, feeble, and cowardly. John Rambo is the exact opposite of namby-pamby. He’s a one-man army. Enjoy the show.
1985’s Rambo: First Blood Part II from director George P. Cosmatos begins with John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) doing hard time in prison, smashing rocks and what not. Rambo’s former commander, Colonel Sam Trautman (Richard Crenna), offers him a deal. It seems the United states government needs a special operative to do some recon over in Vietnam, see if there’s any truth to the rumors of American POWs still being held captive over there. A presidential pardon might be in it for him. Rambo agrees to the deal, but I know he’s not doing it for any presidential pardon. He’s doing it for our guys over there.
Rambo ships out to Thailand where he meets up with Colonel Trautman and a government bureaucrat by the name of Marshall Murdock. Rambo is given strict orders to sneak in and just take pictures. Do not engage the enemy! Rambo meets up with Co-Bao (Julia Nickson), a special agent who can sneak him into Vietnam aboard a pirate ship. They have a heart to heart. She tells him war is all she’s ever known and that she wants to live in America. Rambo tells her that there was another kind of war waiting for him when he got back to America. Love is in the air, but they have a mission.
They make there way to an abandoned Viet Cong camp, but the camp ain’t so abandoned. There are American POWs stuck in rat-infested cages, slowly dying from starvation and disease. Rambo finds one POW strung up in the sun. He frees him, figuring he’s better proof than those photos he was supposed to take. Rambo and company kill some Viet Cong, make their way over to the extraction point, but the chopper doesn’t rescue them. Murdock never expected Rambo to find any POWs over in Vietnam. At least if it was just photos, Murdock could destroy the evidence, but a live POW. Forget about it. That could cause a stink, start the war all over again. Murdock orders his men to leave Rambo and company behind to get captured.
Rambo is placed in a leach-infested pool of pig excrement when, obviously, the Soviets show up to lend assistance to their Viet Cong buddies. It’s a regular Brotherhood of Evil over there, the enemies of America all gathered in one place.
Lt. Col. Podovsky (Steven Berkoff) decides to torture Rambo for information by electrocuting him. Our hero escapes the camp with the help of Co-Bao. They share a quiet moment while on the run. She kisses Rambo, asks her to take her back to America with him. Rambo agrees, but a Viet Cong guns her down moments later. With nothing to lose, Rambo goes on a killing spree in an effort to rescue the POWs.
The carnage that ensues is the stuff of legend, a testament 1980s excess and patriotism.
Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, and episode 131) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.
12 Wednesday Jul 2017
Posted in Shakespeare, Shakespearing
Shakespearing #46 by David Foley
Passion and Confusion: Measure for Measure at Theatre for a New Audience
Measure for Measure has the bones of a simple story. The Duke of Vienna leaves his city in charge of Angelo, a cold-hearted moralist who condemns a man to death for fornication. When Isabella, the man’s sister, comes to plead for his life, Angelo’s cold blood heats up and he offers mercy in exchange for her virtue. The Duke, however, has remained in the city disguised as a friar. He foils Angelo’s stratagems and leads everyone to a happy ending.
But Measure for Measure isn’t simple. It’s a mess, and a moral mess at that. In her Riverside introduction to the play, Ann Barton argues that its “moral confusion” is “surely deliberate,” though that may depend on what you mean by deliberate. When I wrote about it a couple of years ago, it seemed to me that, here and in his two previous plays, Shakespeare was “thrashing about” in a “moral wilderness.” Whether this is true, and if true, why (artistic crisis, the soul’s dark night, drunken incoherence), it’s a difficult play. More than difficult. Other Shakespeare plays are difficult, but it’s satisfying to wrestle with them. This one leaves you fretful and anxious.
Whether it needs to leave you as fretful as the recent production at Theatre for a New Audience I don’t actually know. It’s a fun production, and the director, Simon Godwin, strives to make the play relevant. As the evening starts, you are ushered through the back passageways of Brooklyn’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center, which have been transformed into Mistress Overdone’s brothel.
Cast members loll around in bondage gear among displays of dildos and butt plugs. Leaving the brothel, you find yourself onstage. This is pleasing. It suggests the way we all step from the world of unseemly desire into the performance of a public self. And since the stage is an enormous conference table, it creates a sharp division between two worlds: the world of desire and the bureaucratic world that seeks to control it. It’s a smart image for a play about the dangers and difficulties of controlling desire.
Then the play starts, and we see the Duke writhing about on stage shooting up, the first of a series of images whose relevance is both provocative and hard to pin down. Angelo appears. He looks like Nixon, wears a Trumpian red tie, and speaks with the hidebound certainty of a CEO or Republican senator. Escalus, now Escala, appears in a red power suit and a helmet of auburn hair. They’ve got a microphone on their desk, which they resort to from time to time, giving their lines the heft of public pronouncements.
None of this is necessarily bad. You can have some fun teasing out the contemporary associations for what they produce. But they don’t help to make sense of a play which, to be fair, is difficult to make sense of. The Duke’s behavior is particularly hard to parse, though I’m not sure it helps to imagine he’s tweaking.
The most powerful moment in the production is also, I think, the most misguided. When Angelo makes his offer to Isabella, he pulls her violently towards him, groping her breast. It’s a moment of visceral contemporary relevance: a woman’s body physically violated by a powerful man.
But the offense to Isabella is not to her body; it’s to her sense of justice (“justice, justice, justice, justice!” as she cries in the last scene) and moral purity. Angelo and Isabella are matched in this sense, proponents of a purity the play dismantles. Theirs may be the play’s central relationship, and if Isabella becomes merely Angelo’s prey, it loses its unifying force.
One of the oddities of the play is that sparks fly more convincingly between Isabella and Angelo than between her and the guy she ends up with. Before going to the show, I’d assumed that sexy Jonathan Cake, who plays the Duke, would be playing Angelo. It might be better if he had, just as Thomas Jay Ryan (Angelo) might have better captured the Duke’s gentle and disturbing ambiguity. Both do great work in the parts as conceived; it’s the way the parts are conceived that makes the play harder to track.
If there’s a lesson here, it’s that contemporary resonance is all well and good, but with Shakespeare character runs the show. As contradictory as she is, there’s a reason actresses love to play Isabella. She’s a woman possessed of a moral passion. (Is it an accident that Henry James called another character possessed of a moral passion Isabel?) Tap into that moral passion and, though you might not make sense of the play, you can ride the rhythm that drives it: moral certainties crashing against the unaccountable world.
Shakespeare’s comedies test the moral world. We re-learn the rules by breaking them and, in so doing, reaffirm them. If the ending of Measure for Measure leaves us anxious, it’s because here the moral world fails the test and nobody seems to notice. They go on behaving as if it hasn’t. Central to our understanding of this is the Duke, whom Barton cannily sees as a playwright failing at his task. He’s not strung out on drugs. He’s high on the belief that he can make sense of a world that exceeds all his efforts to do so. This is its own kind of moral passion. And confusion. Whether the play’s moral confusion is deliberate or not, it leaves us with the image of a man unaware that the sense he’s made of the world makes no sense.
Measure for Measure at Theatre for a New Audience plays until July 16th.
David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.
11 Tuesday Jul 2017
Posted in Buzzed Books, Memoir
Buzzed Books # 53 by Amy Watkins
Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History
Near the end of my MFA, a new writer friend asked the topic of my critical thesis. I launched into a long and not particularly coherent description of the 20 or so ideas–all inextricably related in my mind–that had almost coalesced into a workable subject after four months and 30-odd pages of writing. The other writer laughed and said, “You must be a poet.” All good art is about more than one thing, but we poets seem especially inclined to the mental leaps that link ideas, cross disciplines, and complicate our elevator pitches.
Camille T. Dungy is best known as a poet and editor of the anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. We often say that poets bring a poetic eye or ear to their prose, but I would argue that Dungy brings a poetic mind to her collection of essays. Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History (Norton, 2017) includes some beautiful, lyrical moments, but it is most poetic in the way it interweaves experience, history, family stories, scientific research, and naturalist lore.
On the surface, the book is about Dungy traveling to speaking engagements around the country with her baby daughter, but that subject quickly becomes more complicated as Dungy brings her full poetic intellect to bear on each situation. A conversation about movies, a hike through unfamiliar terrain, a layover at a small airport with a restless baby, a walk through her own neighborhood prove equally promising starting points for reflections on race, American history, conservation, and academic life, as well as more personal concerns. Or, perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that Dungy’s essays remind us that all these subjects are simultaneously scholarly and personal.
In “Bounds,” a multi-part essay near the middle of the book, Dungy tells a story about her daughter learning to sing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” With scientific attention to detail, Dungy observes how the toddler develops her new skill in stages–humming the tune then singing nonsense words then losing the tune temporarily as she acquires each word of the lyrics then, finally, combining language and melody. An essay that meticulously charts the development of the writer’s child could easily become sentimental, boring, or both, but Dungy brings all her intellect, knowledge, and curiosity to the subject. She weaves in research on neurological development and linguistics, memories of her own childhood, and lyrical musings on the nature and purpose of language to create an essay at once intimate and intellectual.
Besides enhancing individual essays, this richness of ideas in a book about and by a new mother directly contradicts the obnoxious notion that parents–mothers in particular–become so narrowly focused on their children that they lose their intellectual curiosity or drive. As Dungy puts it in “Bounds”:
When I seem to be focused on a narrative about my daughter’s childhood, I might shift to a memory of an event that happened years before I was born because we live through multiple domains of relation at once….once a domain of relation is available, there is no guarantee that it will ever fully cease to influence us.
This complexity is what makes Guidebook so engaging. It’s also a main point of the collection. The domains of race, history, and nature are available to Dungy, even as she explores the new “domain” of motherhood. Hers is a poetic intelligence at work at masterful prose.
Amy Watkins (Episodes 124, 161, 164, 192, and 209) grew up in the Central Florida scrub, surrounded by armadillos and palmetto brush and a big, loud, oddly religious family, a situation that’s produced generations of Southern writers. She married her high school sweetheart, had a baby girl and earned her MFA in poetry from Spalding University. She is the author of Milk & Water (Yellow Flag Press, 2014) and the art editor for Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine.
