Recovering playwright, once won a STRANGER Genius Award for theater. Now writing a bloated novel about… G-d help me! Theatre.
8/7/07 – 5:0? PM
If I do this grudge play it has to be in the spirit of Wilder. It has to seem silly and overly earnest and then cut to the bone and then throw up its hands and say, “Oh, no, no you misunderstand. Forget that last part. I really AM just silly and overly earnest.” It has to ring a bell true and then say, “Who me? What? Ring a bell? Well, yes, I guess I have. But I didn’t mean anything by it. Honest.”
For reasons I would rather not get into I have taken to re-reading all my journals since I started handwriting them into marble comp books back in 1997. (I was typing for a living at the time and wanted to spare my wrists keyboarding my personal thoughts. I never went back to a digital.) The review is a pretty tedious endeavor. I wish I had described a lot less of my career woes and a lot more of my physical delights, but youth is ever wasted on the baselessly self-fascinated. Every so often as I read, however, I run across a little snippet, or string of them, that pleases me such that it prompts a desire to share.
9/26/07
. . . . Surprisingly, I find a deep correspondence between the Gould and the McMurtry. Both maintain—one overtly, the other subtly and subversively and ultimately more convincingly—that life has no plan, no forward progress, not even dominant echoes or themes; just the faintest hints of them. Contingency is all and contingency is one brutal motherfucker.