041: Blanche, Honey, I'm Back With Your Lemon Coke
First, Tha NEWS.
I got to take part in the opening of a new reading series in Chicago, Written on a Napkin. Monthly poetry (and more) at the Oromo Cafe in Bucktown. Went alright read most of “After Jack”, minus the really really saucy section.
One of the formative voices in who I have become died. The NYT obit for Christopher Durang is here. Without him I don't think I would have discovered, well, anything about myself. I don't recall if I've mentioned it in this space, but I'm a former speech and theatre geek. (Shocking, I know.) But I personally performed two of his pieces, "For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls" and "Desire, Desire, Desire". Both were parodies of Tennessee Williams plays--the former being The Glass Menagerie and the latter being a combination of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire. The difficulty I had in dropping the southern feminine accent after speech season should have been a clue as to certain leanings for Baby Ricki, but just embodying those characters... by turns exasperated, refined, and seductive... helped me understand, in some insane way, that who I thought I was as a kid definitely wasn't.
But it wasn't just that. Speech in northern Minnesota, especially Humorous Interpretation, was A Very Big Deal. And competitive as all get out. And Durang loomed large over the entire scene. So I heard and/or saw another ten of his plays, which I won't list here. But I placed in the finals of the state tournament with "Desire...". Across the river in North Dakota, my partner's younger sister won state with the piece Durang co-wrote with Wendy Wasserstein, "Medea". Hell, right now I have five Durang books on my shelf, including my mom's vintage hardcover of "Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You"/"The Actor's Nightmare" and my former coach's copy of "Mrs. Witherspoon" (which I borrowed and then moved out of state before returning.)
So yeah. His death hurt. Bonus fact: Durang was very good friends with Sigourney Weaver--they met at Yale and he often cast her in his works.
Unrelated to the above, I started therapy again. In-person! It's been four years since I last had an in-person therapy appointment, and let me tell ya, it's a hell of a lot better than video chat. I have this thing about both video chat and the telephone in that I become extra aware of the medium. It doesn't really feel real, if that makes sense. Like I know the person on the other line exists, and we're talking in real time, but it just doesn't seem real. Certainly less real than you do to me right this moment. Plus there's the added fun of body language becoming almost entirely irrelevent in communciation and the absolute immediacy of the format. Pausing in a room feels like natural conversation. Pausing in video feels like dead air. But! I got some good advice about finding some way upward and outward out of... this. ("This" here being the depression and confusion and all that, not the newsletter or writing or whatever.)
Finally, this past weekend I took part in The World's Largest Trivia Contest with a few dozen friends and acquaintances from an internet forum I frequent. The short version is that it's 54 straight hours of multimedia trivia that is comprised of every kind of useless knowledge you can imagine, plus some more. Interestingly enough, this year was the 54th year. Our team has been involved for something like 15 years now, and we got our highest showing ever this year. It was a weekend of weird, questionable, and/or thirsty music, junk food, and lots of laughing, along with some incredible data acquisition skills, team coordination, phone strategy (it's a call-in contest--if you want to compete entirely online, you can!), and even some tears. Seriously. This is a big deal. We're already preparing for next year.
Second, INTERLUDE.
Lidia: My father thinks I'm very promiscuous for my age. What do you think?
Teddy: I don't know your age.
~ Christopher Durang, "Titanic"
Third, CONSUMPTION.
- Finished reading DEATH AND by Yarrow Yes Woods. For now. I've read it twice, and I still don't think I've found everything in it. What a piece of writing.
- Started reading Cybernetics, or: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. "Wow," you might be thinking, "that sounds really weird and specific." And it is. But it's basically the framework that made almost every kind of mechanical and electronic communication we have now possible, plus it's a huge exploration into how people communicate with each other. It was also a very big influence on Pink Floyd's last original studio album, The Division Bell. It also coined the term, y'know, "cybernetic". This one is a little research and a little pleasure.
- Oh shit another dang St. Vincent song. New album at the end of the month and I'm hype as shit.
Fourth, HUSTLE.
First and foremost is my most recent book, confessions from a drainage ditch, which was released on Sept 1st through Amazon, and is available in ebook and paperback formats. If you haven't picked it up, it's a great introduction to my more concrete and mainstream work.
If you're looking for something weirder, you can check out A Void and Cloudless Sky, a chapbook, which is also available from Amazon, as well as most other retailers. By being a subscriber to this newsletter, you're also entitled to a free PDF version, which you can get here.
If you're liking this whole project and want to support it directly, here is my Patreon. There are lots of little benefits you can get there, from poems written to your specifications to subscriber-only limited-edition chapbooks.
Finally, THE OUTRO.
I don't actually know what was supposed to be here. Really. My notes just say "newsletter lost" and I have no damn idea what that was supposed to mean. So I guess I'll let you go early, just this once. You've earned it. (But don't think it's gonna be a habit or anything!)