Habits

I am wishing I had bought Eagleton’s Literary Theory instead of having relied on the Library’s copy. That said, I can always add it to the BOOKS WISH LIST I have been compiling.

I have made a habit, since entering grad-school, of keeping two lists at the end of the class notes documents I keep for each of my courses. One list is simply comprised of quotes from class. The quotes are often humorous, sometimes beautiful, sometimes brilliant and always entertaining. I also keep a list which I title READ/KNOW THIS. In this list I keep a tally of terms, movements, ideas and people I deem vital to my mental rolodex. This is also where I keep the staggeringly long list of books I want to read.

The READ/KNOW list is daunting. Glancing at it makes me nervous sometimes. There is an uncomfortable imbalance between what I KNOW and what I WANT to know or THINK I should know. That’s the part of the list that makes me feel fidgety. The book part of the list just makes me WANT.

I have a book addiction. I can’t get enough of them. I have a few shelves, boxes, cabinets and stacks of them here in Baton Rouge, more stacks at my home with my husband, and I have boxes and boxes of them stored in the home of my parents.

I have relied on the library a good deal since coming to LSU. Not because I want to but because finances made it necessary. This has kept my library from eating me out of house and home. But OHHHHHH once I have money and time again…boy howdy. The book buying is going to be staggering.

I have long envisioned a home of my own…one that I design from a book of images I’ve been compiling. The room in my dream-house which I day-dream about the most is the library. I want a library with rolling ladders, a fire-place and chunky plush antique chairs.

Oh, and I would like to read by osmosis.

I want the power to touch a book and simply absorb it.

That’d be an excellent super-power.

Speaking of book absorption, I best get back to my Eagleton.

My bed is calling and I ache with longing for sleep but I must, must, must keep GOING!!!

Do NOT go into your bedroom. Do NOT close your eyes. Do NOT rest your head on this armchair.

!@#$&

What an incredibly aggravating, art-stifling class we had this afternoon. What an irresponsibly managed conversation. A student’s play was read aloud and discussed. It was the third play we have discussed and the first with a central character driven by a clear and strong objective, the first with clear stakes, the first with build and flow.

And what do we do? We tell him a multiple-act play should not have blackouts or scene changes. Huh? We suggest that he shouldn’t have multiple locations. What? We posit that there are extraneous scenes. No. None of these things are true.

I am frustrated because there are no guidelines for student reactions to these works. Many of the students in the room have little to no experience with theatre and yet they are given leave not to just ask questions but to tell their peers what they should be doing to fix their scripts.

It is absolutely not true that a blackout is an inherently bad thing. We’re simply being expected to cater to an individual's preferences. This is exactly why courses devoted to creativity require vigilance. This kid’s work is better than his peers and now he’s going to go back to the drawing-board to strip things down, rearrange scenes, cut locations, shift focus and remove scenes.

We are just sitting around throwing out “what-ifs” for narratives. We could do that all day long. Why are we writing each others stories?

"Maybe a dog could come in from outer-space."
"What if we swapped main-characters?"
"What if..."

Why aren’t we just asking questions or identifying areas that might need clarification?

(Ok...I have edited this rant a bit. Well, I edited it considerably. I believe that what remains is reasonable.)

Ughhhhhhhh.

Strategy

Packing up for Baton Rouge again. The commute with half a week in BR and half a week two hours away one direction or another is getting tedious. And now that the air is out, I have to keep the windows down which means for two hours I get hair whipping in my eyes.  One more half semester before I get a break.

Cannot WAIT.

This morning I am preoccupied with logistics. I want to square things away. Right now I am scheduled to TA for a large Intro class next semester and am having my HM duties clustered at the end of the semester so that I can have a few months off with my newborn. It will not be possible to pay rent for an apartment I am not going to be in for a few months, so I am going to need to rent a room and plan to commute. I don’t know how that will work with a baby. Luckily I am married to a man who is eager to pack the kid with him all the time. While most women I know have a difficult time getting their partner to take a reasonable amount of the load with baby-rearing, mine has confessed that he’s already imagined the arguments we will get into because he will constantly want to cart the baby around himself. For all the things that are up in the air, nebulous and worrisome, one thing I am thrilled to NOT be worrying about is how that man is going to be as a father.  I can say without an ounce of hesitation that there is NOBODY I would rather do this with than my husband.

But as for logistics, mightn’t it be easier to gracefully decline my assistantship as a colleague of mine recently did? I asked him how everything equaled out financially and he said he figured it would cost him $1,000 per semester. I don’t see how that could be correct but if it was, the math would be easy. It would cost over six times that much to maintain a second household for that duration. And besides, I have lost my chance to direct or perform at LSU as I'd hoped to do. If I stayed on, I'd only be staying for the drudgery work. I need to figure out what I am doing as soon as I am able so that the department can prepare as well. It makes me happy to think that if I declined, another individual may be able to realize the dream of pursuing a PhD.

My to-do list is getting hairy and monstrous.

Speaking of, I was just informed that a storm is coming which means I need to beat the weather to Baton Rouge or I will be condemned to a 2 hour drive with no air circulation and my windshield wipers aren’t stellar and my windows aren’t very clean so I best be off.

Until  tomorrow…

(Not) Well-Hung

Last night, my husband and I went to check out the oldest operating theatre in Lake Charles. Since I will be moving here to have the baby and will be here while I write my dissertation, we are looking for things I can get involved with here so that I don’t go into extreme culture shock.

I came across an ad for said theatre’s currently running show, the musical 9 to 5, and though the show itself would not usually inspire me to attend, I was pretty excited about the chance to see what Lake Charles has to offer. I read up on the history of the theatre and found that it was founded in 1965. A theatre that has existed that long in this area surely had something going for it.

Just walking to the theatre from the parking area was exciting for me. The venue, just off of I-10, was reportedly an old silent movie theatre. I am mesmerized by old buildings, old theatres in particular. This space was a tad rough. There were old rocking cinema-chairs in the house, held together with tape. There was a balcony, I assume for segregated audience members of years past. One lighting bar hung over the extreme back end of the house, just before the balcony, and two lighting trees stood on the apron, stage right and stage left. I’d guess there were about six instruments on the bar and four on each tree. None appeared to have gels and some looked as though they may be  non-functional.

Still, there were around 40 folks in the audience. Tickets were $25, so surely…

Now, I am AWARE that the surging hormones of pregnancy are no myth but I was entirely unprepared when, 30 seconds after the curtains opened and my brain wrapped itself about what was unfolding before me, I was overwhelmed with a nearly unstoppable urge to cry. I actually had to focus and breathe for a second to refrain from tears.

There are always good things to notice about a performance. There are noble efforts, shining moments and in this case there were certainly individuals who are to be commended for volunteering their time and energy. I want to say positive things here…

A few of the performers had lovely voices. A few of them also had some fine acting ability. I could envision using two or three of them in another show. That said, the resultant theatrical production from Waiting for Guffman would have been an unreachable summit for this show.

The band was placed on-stage, which could have worked had the lighting designers not lit them at the same level of the performers for the duration of the show. The musicians were perched atop a platform with mismatched stools holding up the keyboard and various instruments. A random group of singers would meander in and sing back-up when not on stage. There were three musicians who watched the show and seemed genuinely charmed by it, the rest sat glumly staring at their feet or the floor with pained expressions of tortured boredom on their faces. If anything can kill a show immediately, it is forcing the audience to stare at fully-lit members of the show team who ooze distaste for their own production. Though the theatre seems to run mostly on old musicals, the sound system was terrible. Ballads could be heard but the singers got lost in the drums and chaos whenever a large or loud number came up. Apparently there were two lighting designers yet there seemed to be no actual light cues, at least none where they were desperately needed. Shoddy set pieces and uneven scuffed stage blacks could have been softened, areas could have been delineated.

The actress in the Dolly Parton role was a fair actor but was lost beneath an extremely cheap-looking curly bleach-blonde wig which did nothing but make you marvel continuously at how cheap-looking her wig was.

I do not walk out of shows. I am pretty staunch in my feelings about that, but I’d had my fill at the end of Act I when the women put a parachute harness on the boss-character for no textually supported reason. I sat wondering why in the world these characters would be harnessing their boss when they were planning to spirit him away to his home to figure out how to get out of trouble for accidentally poisoning him. Then suddenly a hook was wheeled apologetically in from the fly loft, the man was attached and the last few notes of the final act-break song were sung while the man was inexplicably hauled about two and a half unimpressive feet into the air.

The audience was delighted.

I had to take a moment.

The dangling man was the last I saw of the show.

Muses and Questions I want to Answer...

Inspiration! I am taking the advice of my colleague,  Mz. M.D.J  and have pilfered a scene from my screen-play to use as the jumping-off point for my one-act.

CHEERS and much adulation to Muse MDJ!

Gonna attempt to add a Bacot-esque character to help me pass the Bechdel test this time around, as I so shamefully failed it with the screen-play. I’m just six pages away from my goal and am hoping to get done with it today so that I can read ahead for my Monday classes by this time tomorrow and then dedicate Sunday to my book and article précis which is due on Wednesday.

Depending on how the playwrighting goes, I may just flesh this piece out to a full-length and bypass writing a second one-act since my creative well seems to be filled with tumble-weed these days.

ALSO…something occurred to me yesterday and my thoughts are fragmented still, but I was thinking about possibilities for my second U.S. Theatre teaching week and was mulling over lots of ideas…

None struck me as overwhelmingly on-target, but I did get to thinking about an area of study where I haven’t seen much scholarship.

After living in Orlando and performing for the Orlando International Fringe Festival, I moved back to Louisiana for a while where I was involved in creating a small mini-Fringe in Covington, Louisiana. After the first year, I ended up letting the project cease because I was asked to return to Florida and serve as Assistant Producer for the OIFF. The following year, I took over and served as Executive Producer/Artistic Director of the festival. The board voted to have me stay on in the same capacity the year after that while I entered into my first year as an MFA student. But a few months into the program, I realized that it would not be humanly possible to pull off an MFA and a major arts festival with grace and sanity intact and so I stepped down from my position with the Fringe to devote myself to graduate school.

While with the Fringe, I traveled to Canada for two Fringe Producer Conferences, I was involved in PR, grant writing, venue management, tech and staff hiring, volunteer relations, product design, advertising, fundraisers, scheduling and special events. I’ve experienced the Fringe as a spectator, performer and producer. While the Fringe was born in Scotland, it has become an international phenomenon with a particularly strong presence in the Unites States. And though it hasn’t been realized yet, there is (or at least WAS) a collective goal among the U.S. and Canadian producers to create a circuit that would ostensibly allow performers to cross state and province borders in an unbroken chain of performance opportunities. While Orlando is the largest and longest-standing Fringe in the states, there are others spanning coast-to-coast with a comparatively new one now finding its legs in New Orleans. Each of these festivals has a unique history and unique relationship to the political and artistic goals which first inspired the Scottish Fringe.

Shouldn’t someone be writing about this? Why isn’t there a proper history of the American Fringe? What a worthwhile project. As I said, I’m unfocused still, but I’m really excited about the idea of doing some research and scholarship in this area. I feel like my history with the festival might position me as a good (and passionate) candidate for this work.

Gears turning…

NOW.

　

Muses didn’t visit me last night and I am sitting here with a blank page and a ticking clock.

MUST write a One Act.

NOW.

Why on earth am I dry of ideas? Workable ideas? Is this block because I disagree with the form I am told a one act should take? Is it because my “creativity” is all focused towards my little girl? Is it because I’ve been too far-removed from theatre which I actually do find inspiring?

I make a point of keeping up with my colleagues across the states and abroad via Facecrack. I get production notices, show reviews, casting calls, and event invitations. I see production photographs and read posts about my artist family’s challenges, victories and other show-related musings. In this way I try to stay vicariously connected to work that is meaningful, high-quality and IN the MOMENT.

In some ways, this interaction is soothing. I am at least reminded that there are engaging things going on every day and that people I know, respect and love are at the center of these things. In other ways, the cyber-quality of my connection to these people and their art only serves to make me feel more isolated and further removed. It is a bit like looking at a picture of a feast…it looks fabulous but you know you can’t smell it, can’t taste it, can’t share in its preparation.

I would HATE to be disembodied. The senses are SO important.

So…blank page. Clock ticking. MUST write a One Act.

NOW.

Snooze...

So, growing a baby while rounding third on the ole PhD adventure…

I like to make things challenging for myself. Today, after class, I walked into my house too tired to bring my heavy back-pack upstairs, acknowledged the cat on the way to my bedroom and dropped to my bed without a moment of action between. Does anyone else have GOTTA DO MORE WORK anxiety like I do? I felt momentarily guilty about hitting the sheets but assured myself that it was OK to take a small break. Then, in a wave of generosity, I set my alarm, allowing myself a FULL HOUR for a nap.

TWO and a HALF hours later, I realized I’d been pressing the snooze button and re-setting my alarm for an EXTRA hour and a half. Oops. I think I was tuckered out. I woke up finally because I knew that if I didn’t rouse myself, I’d sleep through to morning and miss my daily blog-obligation (Blogbligation?)…that and I’m fast running out of time to re-write the playwright assignment lowering above me. I’ve gotten absolutely NOTHING accomplished on that front. All four of the ideas I had will not work in this particular class because my Prof feels that a one-act ought best be a single-location action piece, unbroken by transitions. My ideas…the ones I am moved by…aren’t abstract, but they do not fit neatly into what I know he is looking for. Again, I will save those ideas for a time when I am not performing for a grade. But WHAT to do in this fast-vanishing time?! I’ve never felt such a lack of creativity. My imagination is usually sharp. Not the case with this assignment. And at this point, having slept my afternoon away, I will need to rise early and just write through the day tomorrow until I have to leave for class.

Muse, oh MUSE…please O please visit me in my sleep.

HA! My baby-girl has the hiccups again. The night before last was her first bout with them. Once I realized what it was that first time, I couldn’t stop laughing. The sensation is sort-of…adorable. And it is a good sign, I read that the hiccups are caused because she is practicing the movement of breathing. I was unaware of how much rehearsing is going on with developing babies. I guess I just thought they hung out in a sort-of sleep state while their bodies grew. Not so…they practice breathing, they “walk” against your belly, they react to loud noises, they play with their toes (I saw Izzy do this when she was getting her 21-week sonogram), they suck their thumbs and they hiccup…

I have noticed that she is a night-owl like me. I also think her she senses her dad’s touch because she gets peaceful and still when he puts his hand on my belly…except for that one time when he was listening for her and she socked him in the ear.

I sing to her a bunch. In the morning, after I finish up whatever reading I am doing for class, I try to sit down with my guitar and play/sing her a song before heading to school. I also sing to her when I am driving. I also play Claudio Abbado and Vivaldi and Bach…

It is odd to be surrounded by colleagues and students and professors while this momentous interior thing is happening and not to be surrounded by family, outside friends or my husband.

BUT…we are at MID-term and my time here is coming to a close for a while.

Now back to other work for me…