The Glencairn Plays

Suddenly in love with Eugene O'Neill. Or The Wooster Group/New York City Players' version of him. Clunky words, cockney accents, spat out mechanically, like acting robots on a metal pipe scaffolding stage. Couplers and tubes. Sea shanties and dreams of solid land.

I always thought O'Neill's plays were a little thin compared to Chechov's or Ibsen's, slightly odd with his characters, these unlikeable people out of pulp novels or something. And the language always seemed contrived and a little embarrassing to me with the Emperor Jones's "sho' has!" and all that. But here they just put that up front, read it out like words on a page, and let the feelings underneath those words just sit there, jabbing you.

A bit in the first play (Moon of the Caribbees?) where a sailor breaks a bottle and the glass gets shattered all over the ship deck and they just walk on it. And it never gets cleaned up and then in the second one (The Long Voyage Home), another lug of a sailor has an accident and dies in agony in his bunk and then they just drag him shirtless over the glass. Those sharp edges seem to be what's underneath there. Forget complex psychology or metaphors. The dull ache of being on a ship or trying to sell alcohol to a bunch of drunken sailors or being the woman tossed around the bar is enough as it is.

Longest night of the year

benighted, adj. 1. Overtaken by the darkness of the night; affected by the night (obs.). 2. a. fig. Involved in intellectual or moral darkness. b. Involved in obscurity. Obs.*


What is it about the solstice that makes me want to stay up all night watching the best Simpsons episode ever and organizing my books? Is it the fear of literal and figurative benightedness? (What a great word.) Or just a ritual to remind me of apartments past where this very same activity always dependably inaugurated my feeling finally at home?

What I love about this "new" apartment:
-bike room
-record player
-HELLO?! awesome roommate!
-ceiling fans
-quantity of empty jars and jars full of grains and pulses
-huge kitchen table study hall
-remote control bed
-um, ROOMMATE!
-location location location (not a joke)

*Is this some kind of lexicographer's inside joke? Oh, O.E.D.

Happy Solstice 2011, dear reader. What are you doing on the New Year?

Words, Don't Come Easy*

I have recently and thoroughly fallen in love with the words of Tony Judt. It started with the essays about his ALS in the New York Review of Books and proceeded to Postwar and now Reappraisals, which sings that old song - my favorite one - about our loss of historical consciousness and shared history. Plus, he's a silver tongued messenger, as he himself freely admits. This last essay in the NYRB is lovely and good food for thought: not only what it means to live in conversation, but who gets to speak? How do people become vocal and eloquent? (What lets them know that this is good, OK, etc.?) I'm into everything he says, except the last line. Words, thankfully, are not all we have. We also have actions.

*Best tag line ever, from FR David

Blogadultery

Matthew Jensen, The 49 States, detail (2008-09)

For those of you who have not caught the F1B1 virus, just want to let you know that there's this other blog. One where the post titles probably should not be "I Hate You, So-and-So," as is the in-house standard here at the Gote Notery. Though I'm sure, actually, that such a thing would fit right in... Just sayin'.

Austin Kennedy, Twenty-Nine (2009)

And Now For Something Completely Different

Pop quiz: How would you pronounce "Featherstonehaugh"?
Give up? It's not what you think.
Whaa?

New nerd crack! (Just in case old nerd crack was getting boring.)

My favorite ones are where they try to return commonly butchered names back to their original pronunciations, such as here and here. The unintended snootiness is utterly priceless.

Also, this one.

But wait! This totally contradicts their attempts at original-language authenticity. Someone should start a petition.

Via Post

Thanks you guys for all the love and inputs. I'm still not sure what to do, but at least the sun has started shining like crazy here and I'm feeling like whatever I end up doing, interesting and unexpected things will happen. And things will be fine.

Speaking of, two packages arrived recently. One from myself and one from my hero, Dr.C.,MD, you may know her as Cookiesforbreakfast. Totally unexpected (the one from me was ordered from UDP so many eons ago, I'd just assumed it lost), and both totally extravagant and rad! So, as I've no news to report beyond the weather and my continuing indecision, I'll just adopt the brilliant MTBE-style book review format to convey the packages' contents' bounteous awesomeness (and - ahem! - get Navel Gazing off the top of the page). OK, here we go:

1) F.R.David - The "Stuff and Nonsense" Issue (Winter 2008), de Appel, Amsterdam. [This one was from C., how did she know that it was totally what I needed right now?]

first line: "Words, Don't come easy."
last line: "Is GOLDEN!"

2) Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman, Notes on Conceptualisms (UDP, 2009)

first line: "In the winter of 2008, at a launch for The noulipian Analects (C. Wertheim and M. Viegener, eds., Les Figues Press, 2007), Vanessa Place, Anna Moschovakis, and I were engaged in a conversation about the poetics of erasure techniques."
last line: "Use them all." [Actually, the last "line" is a page with a dot or period in the center, but that kind of felt like cheating.]

3) Aram Saroyan, Complete Minimal Poems (UDP, 2007)

first line: "a man stands"
last line: "Gailyn is doing the dishes."

4) Vito Acconci & Bernadette Mayer, eds., 0 to 9, The Complete Magazine: 1967-1969 (UDP, 2006)

first line: "Not '0 Through 9,' we said to each other, that would subsume us into Jasper Johns; let's call it '0 To 9' instead."
last line: "The tape is still available from The Malabe Co., Inc. but the price has gone up to 14¢ a yard."

5) Aleksandr Skidan, Red Shifting, Genya Turovskaya [et al], trans. (UDP, 2008)

first line: "In speaking about 'red shifting' I would not start with the Doppler effect, because it has no room for the word 'red,' just as in subsequent definitions of this physical process, be it cosmological, mathematical, or poetic."
last line: "knives {and}"*

*Those should be triangley brackets, but those doesn't show up in web browsers...

Bonus #1: I uploaded the editorial intro from F.R.David, cause it was just so gosh-darned right about everything. (It's about how art is not about communicating things. To which I say, YES!)

Bonus #2: Here are some of the Saroyan poems:

COUPON
Coupons are the brightest yellowest
Reddest headiest delights on the face of the earth!

--

PLACID TEAS
The cream

made an "e"

in the tea.

--

SONG
My father's my father's,
My mother's my mother's,
My sister's my sister's,
I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm.

--

It may
be the
coffee-
maker

Or it
may be
the ra-
diator.

--

I see
this
little

and
even
less.

--

JULY
It'll hit you you in July.