I'll be blogging less frequently for a while. Two main reasons: One, with classes starting up again plus my job, I just won't have as much time. And two, Robin arrives for a three-week visit tomorrow (hurray). One thing that's good about a blog is it gives me somebody to share experiences and thoughts with—that phantom You out there. One thing that's even better about Robin's visit is that I can share my experiences and thoughts with her. (That and several other good things about her visit...)
But there was one other thing about last term that I've been thinking back on that I wanted to record here. At times last term felt like a complete waste, or at least I was afraid that I'd squandered it and not gotten anything out of it. Whether I'm here for one year or two, a whole term is too much to feel that way about. And so I keep going back and mulling over it. Michael (one of our teachers) commented today that with so much that was abstract last term, it would have been hard for us to get much perspective on our work, but that it will pay off this term. We're doing much more concrete work now, observing animals and portraying them, though not simply in an imitative way, and also starting to build characters. He said we'll find that we can physically express more now after having worked so hard with much less accessible material. God, I hope so.
One thing I've been recalling again of late is this odd and wondrous thing that is part of the approach here: Don't try to think it out too much; your body knows, even if you aren't aware of it. That's such a different way of approaching things (and trusting yourself) than I've ever been at home with, or even been encouraged to give way to in the circles in which I've moved.
There was one exercise we did late last term that reminded me of the insight I can sometimes get from my body. We'd learned a particular stylized movement that's based on poling a boat on a river. Kind of like punting, to give it a British term. And then we started to abstract the movement. Then at one point—any point—to go so far with one part of the movement so as to fall off-balance. I didn't know why I found myself going with my one particular moment. It simply happened, and felt natural. As we kept working with our chosen moments, Thomas called one person up in front of the class after another to do their movement, and then he kept pressing: Why that one? What does it mean? What's your feeling there? Give words to what's going on.
I wasn't one who worked in front of the class that day, but it was amazing how telling my moment was when I started to look at it. It had simply felt like an easy and fluid motion, but it actually showed something of the state I kept finding myself in last term. The moment of off-balance came for me after the point where I had just pushed the pole to the stern, thus propelling my (imaginary) boat forward. The next thing you do is pull the pole out, which entails first shifting your weight toward the bow of the boat as you pull the pole out of the water at the stern. Then you shift your weight so that you're leaning back, and looking forward, before moving forward again as you basically throw the pole end into the water out in front of the boat. (The boat's momentum then brings to boat alongside the pole, making the pole vertical in the water, then slightly past vertical as you then push to the stern to propel the boat further.) But when I did the backward shift of weight while looking forward toward where I was heading, I found myself falling off balance to the stern. It occurred to me that that was an apt picture of the frustration I'd been feeling. I'd been wanting to move forward, even seeming to look forward, but I kept falling backwards though how easily I got discouraged.
Writing all this out makes it seem a little woo-woo out there. Kind of a "sure, Eric, whatever you say" kind of thing. But it makes sense to me. And it also makes some sense that there was part of me—and not my rational faculty—that knew it and could find a way to express it, if only I'd pay attention. I find that quite hopeful and encouraging, actually.
The body knows. My brain keeps dismissing that or coming up with arguments against it. But maybe my brain should just shut up every once in a while and listen.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Catching my breath, part 3
On the train back from Exeter. It’s a three-hour ride so, like the train, this post will cover a lot of territory. I start back to school tomorrow, and a lot has been simmering for a while.
Yesterday I took a bus to Okehampton, then made the long uphill hike onto the moor, past the military station from which they sometimes do maneuvers and fire shells up on the moor. Yesterday (not a shelling day) the camp was marked by young men shouting—from a distance it looked like they were engaged in what was for them surely an epic match of tug-o-war—and sheep grazing in the fields. Nice little contrast. The day was blue and blustery. After getting battered by the wind up on one of the tors (the bald, round, rocky peaks) I decided I preferred the wooded hike of the day before. But all in all a lovely day.
Three days out of the city, and not a word about Jade Goody. All that is about to come to an end. Sigh. London tabloids are obsessed with this woman. She made her fame on “Big Brother” or some such reality TV show, on which she was told (on camera) that she has cervical cancer and that it would probably kill her. Now at age 27, she’s on her deathbed. Every day brings reports of how Jade is doing. Her wedding day a couple of weeks ago was a media event. (She wore a dress fitted with a morphine pump.) Then came her husband’s trial for assault or something (not against her, blessedly). Then the baptism of Jade and her two young sons. Then her checking back into the hospital, where one day Jade awoke to find an odd woman with a hammer in her bag standing over her bedside. Then the discharge from the hospital so she can die at home. The tabs have no end of material. If Jade is still alive, I’m sure she’ll be front-page material on the Tube again tomorrow morning.
This is a really odd time we live in, where so little is private anymore. (Yes, blogs are part of that.) There’s another row going on these days over a book published by an apparently well-known writer (Julie Myerson’s “The Lost Child: A True Story”) in which she details her 20-year-old son’s drug abuse, whether with or without his permission is a matter of some debate. What’s private? What’s appropriately public? What’s fair game for a mother to publish about her children?
The Guardian carried an essay last week about such matters, in which it quoted an American writer from 50 years ago (Philip Roth, I think it was; he must have been young then), commenting on how reality was surpassing fiction for inventiveness. The same day carried a review of TC Boyle’s novel about the real-life story of the women in Frank Lloyd Wright’s life—the nonfiction story is gripping enough; why Boyle had to novelize it I’m not sure—and a piece about how somebody other than Maya Angelou has been writing Maya Angelou’s Twitter page. Who can even tell what’s true anymore? Then again, Pontius Pilate had the jump on that question 2000 years ago.
The essay in the Guardian (largely about Myerson’s book) said: “Philip Roth called the memoir ‘probably the most manipulative of all literary forms’: it could never be as frank as it presented itself to be—true frankness was to be found in fiction. ‘With autobiography there’s always another text, a countertext, if you will, to the one presented,” said the US writer. Partly what he meant by that was that the things a writer excluded in a memoir were as interesting as those included, and also that, this being the real and not fictional world, others would have different versions of the same experience. Counter-texts often remain invisible…”
A blog is like a running memoir, I suppose—or rather, a memoir without the tempering process that happens as memories sit over time, like wine aging in a bottle. (Which probably makes it unlike a memoir at all, but humor me.) What to include, what to process privately, what’s worth neither, I suppose anyone who blogs ponders these things. I hope so anyway.
And this brings me back to that play I was part of last December, as promised. This being March, you can see my ambivalence over whether to write about it at all. But this one has gone through the moderate deliberations of a short aging process, so here goes. (And not to be coy here, but as always, what I leave out, you simply don't know. Or why. It’s all part of the conundrum of getting what we trust is information from what we read.) ("Ooooh," he added with some self-mockery. "How post-modern is that?")
First of all, my qualifications for being part of this endeavor came not through acing an audition or my having any particular talent. A classmate invited me simply because I have an American accent. Not that Brits can’t speak with an American accent, but that's how I got cast. There’s a series on London called Showflat in which artists present exhibits or installations or theatrical works in their own homes. My classmate shared a house with a guy who organizes the events. And thus I was invited to take part in a provocative piece on waterboarding. (Waterboarding, as you may recall, is a practice that the US used recently in interrogations of suspected terrorists. It’s often described as “simulated drowning.” There’s been a lot of debate over whether it’s torture.)
An American expat artist in London decided to do a piece on waterboarding. He invited friends and the public to his Showflat event, but didn’t really explain what it was about. For the first part of the evening people milled about downstairs, drinking wine, noshing and schmoozing, and looking form time to time at video monitors showing a chess match. After an hour or two they were invited one by one to come up into the attic, where they found the artist, hooded, strapped to a board with his head lower than his feet, two masked people standing by him and another sitting in the corner making drawings of the event. The chess board was off to the side. Loud music was playing, some of it quite insipid and ironic, like the theme song for Barney the purple dinosaur, which is a saccharine song about friendship. (Apparently some of these songs have been played loudly and incessantly during waterboardings abroad.) As the person from the party below climbed the ladder into the attic, she or he was given a piece of paper that said the artist is on the board and he wants you to pour water on his face. It identified this practice as waterboarding. (I was one of the masked figures, but since the music was so loud and I was standing on the other side of the board to which the artist was strapped, there was nothing for me to say. So much for the reason I was cast.) Then the person had to confront the decision of whether to participate or not. As masked figures, we were simply to point out the water, hold a towel tight over the artist’s face, and leave the person to decide. We were not to try to persuade them one way or the other.
Jon (the artist) had worked out a signal with us whereby he would indicate when he wanted the person to stop. When we got the signal, we stopped the person and checked to make sure Jon was OK. Then the person would go back downstairs again, sworn to secrecy until the end of the evening as to what was going on upstairs. I’m told several troubled-looking people descended the attic stairs, but there were very few who decided not to pour the water when given the choice. Some seemed very uncomfortable but did it anyway. A few did it with smiles on their faces. One or two were uncomfortable and smiling, both.
I was invited into this about a week in advance, and I was really torn as to whether to take part. Jon and I exchanged extensive emails over several days. You can read Jon’s description of the project, along with some excerpts he took from my emails here and here. (The second one gets more to the meat of the matter.) I’m still troubled by the whole thing. I can see what Jon was trying to provoke in his audience (I think the chess match was to add a horrid sense of rational detachment), but I wonder, by domesticating waterboarding—literally domesticating it—did he actually make it less horrific? As I continue to reflect on this, I think he (we) did. Still, was it worthwhile? Maybe. Of course, there’s a lot more that could be said.
Not to distract from the event itself, but one of the spookiest aspects of the whole evening for me was leaving his flat and knowing what had gone on behind closed doors there. Each house on the street looks the same from the outside. Each gives no sign of what goes on inside. With the news stories of Josef Fritzl still relatively fresh (Fritzl is the Austrian who kept his daughter in his basement as a sexual prisoner for 24 years), I found myself wondering what was going on behind other closed doors on that or any other block.
The ironic coda to all this was that when I left Jon’s house that night, the last thing I said to the man I had recently stood by while he was strapped to a waterboard was “Merry Christmas.”
A few excerpts from the papers recently:
¶ From a review of the book “The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better": “We are rich enough. Economic growth has done as much as it can to improve material conditions in the developed countries, and in some cases appears to be damaging health. If Britain were instead to concentrate on making its citizens' incomes as equal as those of people in Japan and Scandinavia, we could each have seven extra weeks’ holiday a year, we would be thinner, we would each live a year longer or so, and we’d trust each other more.” The book tracks all sorts of scales of social wellness and ill health (e.g., mental illness, obesity, child mortality), and sets them against scales of economic equality, country by country. In almost all categories, the most equal societies like Japan and Sweden fare best in social wellness and the least equal (the UK, Portugal, and the US) fare worst.
[Eric’s editorial comment: Is anybody in the US taking note?]
¶ The British Medical Association is calling for elimination of charges for all prescription drugs in England—as is already the practice in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. As it is now, those who do not qualify for free medicines pay only £7.10 per prescription (about $10), and given the extensive list of conditions that exempt people from having to pay for their drugs, only 11% of prescriptions require payment. “The BMA chairman, Dr Hamish Meldrum, said: ‘Free prescriptions for people with long-term conditions is a laudable aim, but it does not go far enough. The system we have at the moment isn't working, and is unfair on many patients. Making the list of exemptions longer will not make it fairer. Ultimately, we could end up with a situation where only a tiny proportion of prescriptions attract a charge, which would be nonsensical. Abolishing prescription charges altogether is the fairest and the simplest option.’"
[Eric’s editorial comment: See above.]
Back in London
... and I have my window open for the first time in months. Time to air this musty old house out a bit. Birds are singing. I have my sheets on the line for that fresh spring smell. Robin arrives for a visit on Wednesday.
I feel like I've caught my breath. Tomorrow we start up again.
Note to self: Remember to breathe...
Yesterday I took a bus to Okehampton, then made the long uphill hike onto the moor, past the military station from which they sometimes do maneuvers and fire shells up on the moor. Yesterday (not a shelling day) the camp was marked by young men shouting—from a distance it looked like they were engaged in what was for them surely an epic match of tug-o-war—and sheep grazing in the fields. Nice little contrast. The day was blue and blustery. After getting battered by the wind up on one of the tors (the bald, round, rocky peaks) I decided I preferred the wooded hike of the day before. But all in all a lovely day.
Three days out of the city, and not a word about Jade Goody. All that is about to come to an end. Sigh. London tabloids are obsessed with this woman. She made her fame on “Big Brother” or some such reality TV show, on which she was told (on camera) that she has cervical cancer and that it would probably kill her. Now at age 27, she’s on her deathbed. Every day brings reports of how Jade is doing. Her wedding day a couple of weeks ago was a media event. (She wore a dress fitted with a morphine pump.) Then came her husband’s trial for assault or something (not against her, blessedly). Then the baptism of Jade and her two young sons. Then her checking back into the hospital, where one day Jade awoke to find an odd woman with a hammer in her bag standing over her bedside. Then the discharge from the hospital so she can die at home. The tabs have no end of material. If Jade is still alive, I’m sure she’ll be front-page material on the Tube again tomorrow morning.
This is a really odd time we live in, where so little is private anymore. (Yes, blogs are part of that.) There’s another row going on these days over a book published by an apparently well-known writer (Julie Myerson’s “The Lost Child: A True Story”) in which she details her 20-year-old son’s drug abuse, whether with or without his permission is a matter of some debate. What’s private? What’s appropriately public? What’s fair game for a mother to publish about her children?
The Guardian carried an essay last week about such matters, in which it quoted an American writer from 50 years ago (Philip Roth, I think it was; he must have been young then), commenting on how reality was surpassing fiction for inventiveness. The same day carried a review of TC Boyle’s novel about the real-life story of the women in Frank Lloyd Wright’s life—the nonfiction story is gripping enough; why Boyle had to novelize it I’m not sure—and a piece about how somebody other than Maya Angelou has been writing Maya Angelou’s Twitter page. Who can even tell what’s true anymore? Then again, Pontius Pilate had the jump on that question 2000 years ago.
The essay in the Guardian (largely about Myerson’s book) said: “Philip Roth called the memoir ‘probably the most manipulative of all literary forms’: it could never be as frank as it presented itself to be—true frankness was to be found in fiction. ‘With autobiography there’s always another text, a countertext, if you will, to the one presented,” said the US writer. Partly what he meant by that was that the things a writer excluded in a memoir were as interesting as those included, and also that, this being the real and not fictional world, others would have different versions of the same experience. Counter-texts often remain invisible…”
A blog is like a running memoir, I suppose—or rather, a memoir without the tempering process that happens as memories sit over time, like wine aging in a bottle. (Which probably makes it unlike a memoir at all, but humor me.) What to include, what to process privately, what’s worth neither, I suppose anyone who blogs ponders these things. I hope so anyway.
And this brings me back to that play I was part of last December, as promised. This being March, you can see my ambivalence over whether to write about it at all. But this one has gone through the moderate deliberations of a short aging process, so here goes. (And not to be coy here, but as always, what I leave out, you simply don't know. Or why. It’s all part of the conundrum of getting what we trust is information from what we read.) ("Ooooh," he added with some self-mockery. "How post-modern is that?")
First of all, my qualifications for being part of this endeavor came not through acing an audition or my having any particular talent. A classmate invited me simply because I have an American accent. Not that Brits can’t speak with an American accent, but that's how I got cast. There’s a series on London called Showflat in which artists present exhibits or installations or theatrical works in their own homes. My classmate shared a house with a guy who organizes the events. And thus I was invited to take part in a provocative piece on waterboarding. (Waterboarding, as you may recall, is a practice that the US used recently in interrogations of suspected terrorists. It’s often described as “simulated drowning.” There’s been a lot of debate over whether it’s torture.)
An American expat artist in London decided to do a piece on waterboarding. He invited friends and the public to his Showflat event, but didn’t really explain what it was about. For the first part of the evening people milled about downstairs, drinking wine, noshing and schmoozing, and looking form time to time at video monitors showing a chess match. After an hour or two they were invited one by one to come up into the attic, where they found the artist, hooded, strapped to a board with his head lower than his feet, two masked people standing by him and another sitting in the corner making drawings of the event. The chess board was off to the side. Loud music was playing, some of it quite insipid and ironic, like the theme song for Barney the purple dinosaur, which is a saccharine song about friendship. (Apparently some of these songs have been played loudly and incessantly during waterboardings abroad.) As the person from the party below climbed the ladder into the attic, she or he was given a piece of paper that said the artist is on the board and he wants you to pour water on his face. It identified this practice as waterboarding. (I was one of the masked figures, but since the music was so loud and I was standing on the other side of the board to which the artist was strapped, there was nothing for me to say. So much for the reason I was cast.) Then the person had to confront the decision of whether to participate or not. As masked figures, we were simply to point out the water, hold a towel tight over the artist’s face, and leave the person to decide. We were not to try to persuade them one way or the other.
Jon (the artist) had worked out a signal with us whereby he would indicate when he wanted the person to stop. When we got the signal, we stopped the person and checked to make sure Jon was OK. Then the person would go back downstairs again, sworn to secrecy until the end of the evening as to what was going on upstairs. I’m told several troubled-looking people descended the attic stairs, but there were very few who decided not to pour the water when given the choice. Some seemed very uncomfortable but did it anyway. A few did it with smiles on their faces. One or two were uncomfortable and smiling, both.
I was invited into this about a week in advance, and I was really torn as to whether to take part. Jon and I exchanged extensive emails over several days. You can read Jon’s description of the project, along with some excerpts he took from my emails here and here. (The second one gets more to the meat of the matter.) I’m still troubled by the whole thing. I can see what Jon was trying to provoke in his audience (I think the chess match was to add a horrid sense of rational detachment), but I wonder, by domesticating waterboarding—literally domesticating it—did he actually make it less horrific? As I continue to reflect on this, I think he (we) did. Still, was it worthwhile? Maybe. Of course, there’s a lot more that could be said.
Not to distract from the event itself, but one of the spookiest aspects of the whole evening for me was leaving his flat and knowing what had gone on behind closed doors there. Each house on the street looks the same from the outside. Each gives no sign of what goes on inside. With the news stories of Josef Fritzl still relatively fresh (Fritzl is the Austrian who kept his daughter in his basement as a sexual prisoner for 24 years), I found myself wondering what was going on behind other closed doors on that or any other block.
The ironic coda to all this was that when I left Jon’s house that night, the last thing I said to the man I had recently stood by while he was strapped to a waterboard was “Merry Christmas.”
A few excerpts from the papers recently:
¶ From a review of the book “The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better": “We are rich enough. Economic growth has done as much as it can to improve material conditions in the developed countries, and in some cases appears to be damaging health. If Britain were instead to concentrate on making its citizens' incomes as equal as those of people in Japan and Scandinavia, we could each have seven extra weeks’ holiday a year, we would be thinner, we would each live a year longer or so, and we’d trust each other more.” The book tracks all sorts of scales of social wellness and ill health (e.g., mental illness, obesity, child mortality), and sets them against scales of economic equality, country by country. In almost all categories, the most equal societies like Japan and Sweden fare best in social wellness and the least equal (the UK, Portugal, and the US) fare worst.
[Eric’s editorial comment: Is anybody in the US taking note?]
¶ The British Medical Association is calling for elimination of charges for all prescription drugs in England—as is already the practice in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. As it is now, those who do not qualify for free medicines pay only £7.10 per prescription (about $10), and given the extensive list of conditions that exempt people from having to pay for their drugs, only 11% of prescriptions require payment. “The BMA chairman, Dr Hamish Meldrum, said: ‘Free prescriptions for people with long-term conditions is a laudable aim, but it does not go far enough. The system we have at the moment isn't working, and is unfair on many patients. Making the list of exemptions longer will not make it fairer. Ultimately, we could end up with a situation where only a tiny proportion of prescriptions attract a charge, which would be nonsensical. Abolishing prescription charges altogether is the fairest and the simplest option.’"
[Eric’s editorial comment: See above.]
Back in London
... and I have my window open for the first time in months. Time to air this musty old house out a bit. Birds are singing. I have my sheets on the line for that fresh spring smell. Robin arrives for a visit on Wednesday.
I feel like I've caught my breath. Tomorrow we start up again.
Note to self: Remember to breathe...
Friday, March 13, 2009
Gee, Toto...
... I don't think we're in London anymore.
No, we're definitely not. I'm in Devon (about 3 hours west of London) and spent most of the day in Dartmoor National Park. Unfortunately, I couldn't get "up on the moor," because at this time of year the buses don't go up there in the part I was in (except for Sundays), which the guidebooks--and the staff at the Exeter visitors center--don't tell you. Ahem. Still, I had a lovely 10-mile hike through field and forest, up hill and down dale (now I see where those phrases come from), and with the help of two farmers in the field and a knock on a farmhouse door, I didn't get lost, though I did lose the trail once.
Yesterday I came to Exeter on the train from London and went to Evensong in Exeter's marvelous Gothic cathedral. This morning I started the day with a bus trip to Moretonhampstead, from which I'd been told I could get up onto the moors, but couldn't. Moretonhampstead is a lovely little town, and the folks at the visitors center there dissuaded me from trying to walk the last 4 miles up onto the moor on a very narrow road. "It's just not safe," they said, and later I saw how narrow the roads are, with hedgerows nearly thick as thatch that simply won't let you jump far from an oncoming car. Tomorrow I'll try to get to the northern part of the park via a bus to Okehampton, if the weather isn't a factor. From there (I'm told), I can hike up onto the moors. The folks in Moretonhampstead talked me into a hike over to Fingle Bridge and the River Teign gorge, under the shadow of Castle Drogo. (Don't you just love these names?) I had the walk to myself, except for the farmers, their sheep and dogs, and the woman in the farmhouse who put me back on the trail when I'd missed a signpost. ("Do you want the long way or the short way?" she asked. I took the long way.) I scared up a pheasant, saw some wild ponies, hawks and ravens, and came upon two standing stones. There were other people hiking in the river gorge, and there's a cozy riverside pub and inn at the bridge, which made for a nice stop in the afternoon.
All in all, a lovely day, and not a drop of rain.
No, we're definitely not. I'm in Devon (about 3 hours west of London) and spent most of the day in Dartmoor National Park. Unfortunately, I couldn't get "up on the moor," because at this time of year the buses don't go up there in the part I was in (except for Sundays), which the guidebooks--and the staff at the Exeter visitors center--don't tell you. Ahem. Still, I had a lovely 10-mile hike through field and forest, up hill and down dale (now I see where those phrases come from), and with the help of two farmers in the field and a knock on a farmhouse door, I didn't get lost, though I did lose the trail once.
Yesterday I came to Exeter on the train from London and went to Evensong in Exeter's marvelous Gothic cathedral. This morning I started the day with a bus trip to Moretonhampstead, from which I'd been told I could get up onto the moors, but couldn't. Moretonhampstead is a lovely little town, and the folks at the visitors center there dissuaded me from trying to walk the last 4 miles up onto the moor on a very narrow road. "It's just not safe," they said, and later I saw how narrow the roads are, with hedgerows nearly thick as thatch that simply won't let you jump far from an oncoming car. Tomorrow I'll try to get to the northern part of the park via a bus to Okehampton, if the weather isn't a factor. From there (I'm told), I can hike up onto the moors. The folks in Moretonhampstead talked me into a hike over to Fingle Bridge and the River Teign gorge, under the shadow of Castle Drogo. (Don't you just love these names?) I had the walk to myself, except for the farmers, their sheep and dogs, and the woman in the farmhouse who put me back on the trail when I'd missed a signpost. ("Do you want the long way or the short way?" she asked. I took the long way.) I scared up a pheasant, saw some wild ponies, hawks and ravens, and came upon two standing stones. There were other people hiking in the river gorge, and there's a cozy riverside pub and inn at the bridge, which made for a nice stop in the afternoon.
All in all, a lovely day, and not a drop of rain.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Odd product of the week
Walker's "Cajun Squirrel"-flavored crisps (a.k.a. potato chips).
No, I haven't tried them. And really, who's going to argue that they don't taste authentic? How would you know?
No, I haven't tried them. And really, who's going to argue that they don't taste authentic? How would you know?
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Catching my breath, part 2
My housemates are fleeing town for the break. Two took the bus to Edinburgh Friday night. Another bikes to Brighton today. The fourth is going somewhere soon, Liverpool tomorrow, I think. Feels like Spring Break in a dorm. Which isn't far from the truth. I'll have the place to myself for a day or two before I go to Exeter and Dartmoor from Thursday to Sunday. Until then I'm pounding out the hours at my jobs. I look forward to my out-of-town break. As these term gaps approach, I've been looking forward to opportunities to get together with classmates to reflect on what we're doing, what we've been through. But so many of us leave town that it's not as easy to have those conversations as it might have seemed.
I've been thinking back on another of the films that we watched this past term--the one about different ways of seeing. It was called something like "Window of the Soul" or whatever that phrase translates to in Portuguese. In particular I've been thinking of the blind photographer who was one of those featured in it. It's not just a surprising thing that there would be a blind photographer. How can he see what he shoots? is an obvious question (and reminiscent of a very funny David Sedaris vignette about how blind people can get a hunting license in Michigan, but that's another matter entirely). But of course this particular photographer has found ways, even without an autofocus camera. The film showed him taking close-up portraits by measuring how far away his subject is and focusing the camera in that way. He also tells a story about having his niece wear a small bell as she ran through a field, and him pointing the camera according to where he could hear the bell's sound. (I assume he used autofocus then.) It produced quite a lovely shot, which someone else must have printed for him. That's all interesting, but what intrigues me more is this: He can't see the results of his own artistic process. As I mentioned before, one of the difficulties I've been having here is that I have little or no sense of what I'm doing well, of how I look, of how I sound. It's not exactly analogous to the blind photographer's art, but it's close enough, and I suppose that's what keeps me hearkening back to him. The Initiation Course at Lispa isn't much about results, but it's hard to find the mileposts on your journey in a situation like this. As I think I mentioned before, the goal here seems to be to foster a creative drive that isn't too dependent on or cowed by others' reactions to one's specific artistic vision. But getting there takes one through a bit of a Tolkeinish swamp.
Nights at the theater
I know I should be seeing more shows, but I've seen few thus far, partly because of my schedule, partly because of finances, partly from my own inertia. The production of "Brief Encounter" I wrote about last fall has definitely been the highlight. Other than that I went to a Butoh piece at Sadler's Wells (my first and thus far only exposure to that art form--the set and costumes were in shades of sand and bone that reflected the spareness of the movement; a few arresting images in a long and slow drama without an apparent narrative), and a pair of events that were part of the London International Mime Festival. One was a collection of mechanical Rube Goldbergesque thingamajigs that simply took turns doing their thing. The other was, for better and for worse, an example of what happens when creative people say yes to every impulse. It was a Russian trio who presented an over-the-top high energy hour of high decibel music, mural painting, hammering light bulbs on the back of each other's heads, and audience involvement (including passing out fruits and vegetables for people to throw at their naked drummer--a guy who looked like he must have been Paul Shafer's separated-at-birth Russian twin). It was either simply awful or admirably bizarre. I don't think this is quite what Lispa is after--clearly these guys didn't give a shit about what their critics might have to say--but they certainly were committed to whatever their artistic vision is. And I came away amazed that they have enough of a following that they get a booking at an international arts festival.
Oops, my mistake: There was one other highlight besides "Brief Encounter." A production of Tom Stoppard's "Every Good Boy Deserves Favour" at the National Theatre, a witty, haunting, technically brilliant piece that is rarely staged, in large part because it requires having a full orchestra on stage for the whole show.
And I had plans to see a couple of other pieces with Isabel (one that she wrote music for, another that she was to be in), but her getting turned away at Heathrow prevented those.
Oh, and there was my own theatrical debut. If there's a London equivalent of off-off-off-off-off Broadway, this was it--in an artist's attic way out in a suburb. But that one may get its own post, another time.
I've been thinking back on another of the films that we watched this past term--the one about different ways of seeing. It was called something like "Window of the Soul" or whatever that phrase translates to in Portuguese. In particular I've been thinking of the blind photographer who was one of those featured in it. It's not just a surprising thing that there would be a blind photographer. How can he see what he shoots? is an obvious question (and reminiscent of a very funny David Sedaris vignette about how blind people can get a hunting license in Michigan, but that's another matter entirely). But of course this particular photographer has found ways, even without an autofocus camera. The film showed him taking close-up portraits by measuring how far away his subject is and focusing the camera in that way. He also tells a story about having his niece wear a small bell as she ran through a field, and him pointing the camera according to where he could hear the bell's sound. (I assume he used autofocus then.) It produced quite a lovely shot, which someone else must have printed for him. That's all interesting, but what intrigues me more is this: He can't see the results of his own artistic process. As I mentioned before, one of the difficulties I've been having here is that I have little or no sense of what I'm doing well, of how I look, of how I sound. It's not exactly analogous to the blind photographer's art, but it's close enough, and I suppose that's what keeps me hearkening back to him. The Initiation Course at Lispa isn't much about results, but it's hard to find the mileposts on your journey in a situation like this. As I think I mentioned before, the goal here seems to be to foster a creative drive that isn't too dependent on or cowed by others' reactions to one's specific artistic vision. But getting there takes one through a bit of a Tolkeinish swamp.
Nights at the theater
I know I should be seeing more shows, but I've seen few thus far, partly because of my schedule, partly because of finances, partly from my own inertia. The production of "Brief Encounter" I wrote about last fall has definitely been the highlight. Other than that I went to a Butoh piece at Sadler's Wells (my first and thus far only exposure to that art form--the set and costumes were in shades of sand and bone that reflected the spareness of the movement; a few arresting images in a long and slow drama without an apparent narrative), and a pair of events that were part of the London International Mime Festival. One was a collection of mechanical Rube Goldbergesque thingamajigs that simply took turns doing their thing. The other was, for better and for worse, an example of what happens when creative people say yes to every impulse. It was a Russian trio who presented an over-the-top high energy hour of high decibel music, mural painting, hammering light bulbs on the back of each other's heads, and audience involvement (including passing out fruits and vegetables for people to throw at their naked drummer--a guy who looked like he must have been Paul Shafer's separated-at-birth Russian twin). It was either simply awful or admirably bizarre. I don't think this is quite what Lispa is after--clearly these guys didn't give a shit about what their critics might have to say--but they certainly were committed to whatever their artistic vision is. And I came away amazed that they have enough of a following that they get a booking at an international arts festival.
Oops, my mistake: There was one other highlight besides "Brief Encounter." A production of Tom Stoppard's "Every Good Boy Deserves Favour" at the National Theatre, a witty, haunting, technically brilliant piece that is rarely staged, in large part because it requires having a full orchestra on stage for the whole show.
And I had plans to see a couple of other pieces with Isabel (one that she wrote music for, another that she was to be in), but her getting turned away at Heathrow prevented those.
Oh, and there was my own theatrical debut. If there's a London equivalent of off-off-off-off-off Broadway, this was it--in an artist's attic way out in a suburb. But that one may get its own post, another time.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Preview of coming attractions
One of the teachers promised us a couple of weeks ago that London would be a much more pleasant place after the break. Apparently this is the hinge of the year weatherwise, when we finally move from the bleakness of gray winter to the daylight of spring. And it seems to be so, though I’m not about to make a declarative statement yet. It’s been too bleak for too long. Still, we’ve had hours of sunshine each of the past several days, something that was a rare occurrence in the past several months. And so London is indeed becoming a more livable place again.
[The previous paragraph was from yesterday. Tonight it's cold and rainy and windy. A dose of reality for those of us dreaming of spring. Then again, it is only the first week in March. But spring, like baseball, has a way of raising your hopes, luring you with siren song to set aside what you know is really true but seems suspendable--Maybe this will be the year. Yeah, this will be the year!--and then reminding you of what you already knew but had tried to wish away. Spring, cruel as only the sweetest child can be, loves to break your heart.]
This coming term we’ll be working with masks again. I’m looking forward to that (I think). Having a mask to work behind is helpful for me somehow. Freeing. Still, it makes the bodywork all the more essential since that’s basically what you have to express yourself with. We’ll also be making at least one of the masks we use, and I look forward to the hands-on creativity.
(PS—Add Tamil, Japanese, and Irish Gaelic to the list of languages in the previous entry.)
[The previous paragraph was from yesterday. Tonight it's cold and rainy and windy. A dose of reality for those of us dreaming of spring. Then again, it is only the first week in March. But spring, like baseball, has a way of raising your hopes, luring you with siren song to set aside what you know is really true but seems suspendable--Maybe this will be the year. Yeah, this will be the year!--and then reminding you of what you already knew but had tried to wish away. Spring, cruel as only the sweetest child can be, loves to break your heart.]
This coming term we’ll be working with masks again. I’m looking forward to that (I think). Having a mask to work behind is helpful for me somehow. Freeing. Still, it makes the bodywork all the more essential since that’s basically what you have to express yourself with. We’ll also be making at least one of the masks we use, and I look forward to the hands-on creativity.
(PS—Add Tamil, Japanese, and Irish Gaelic to the list of languages in the previous entry.)
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Catching my breath, part 1
So Term 2 is over.
You'll note that I didn't complain once in the past two months about landing on my neck. I confess that I had resolved not to speak of it anyway, but it's also the case that I paced myself in Acrobatics this term and came through in better shape. (Now if I could just stop wrenching my neck in Improv classes where the motions are more spontaneous and less controlled! I did that repeatedly in the past eight weeks but less and less so as the term came to a close.)
I'll be working a lot during the next 10 days--a student visa allows 20 hours of employment per week during terms, 40 hours between terms. As of about a week-and-a-half ago, I'm fortunate enough in the midst of this awful economy to have two part-time jobs, one of which pays twice what the other does. I know things are hard in the US right now, but Britain is really tanking, and the government is expecting violence this summer because of rising unemployment. Layoffs and lost jobs are combining with pockets of xenophobic and sometimes racist British-jobs-for-British-workers protests in industrial areas, especially in the north. Meaning: lay off the immigrant workers first. Or don't hire them in the first place.
I plan to get out of town at the end of next week for a few days into what I keep hearing is such a green and beautiful country. I can't wait to be a few hours away from London. I may head west to Devon--Exeter and Dartmoor National Park. In the meantime I hope to blog shorter and more frequently since I'll have my mornings free.
This blogging thing is still a bit odd for me. First of all, I never know who I'm writing for. For me, yes of course, but since anybody can wander in and hear my soliloquy, I don't put every thought and feeling in here. Still, it's a bit odd not knowing who, when, and even if anyone is passing through the room. Whatever. Now I really feel like I'm talking to myself!
As you (whoever you are) may recall, we dealt some with poetry during part of this term. One of the richnesses of a program like this is that it includes people from such a variety of countries. Each of us is encouraged to work in our mother tongue. And so when we were asked to bring in a poem from our home country, we had poems in English (of three types--English, American, and Australian), poems in Norwegian and Swedish, poems in Spanish and Portuguese and Euskara (from Basque country), in French and Italian, in German and Swiss German, in Croatian and Hebrew and Bembe. And I'm not sure I've even remembered them all.
So how do you appreciate a poem in a language you don't understand? The answer here is that you actually do have some understanding of it, through the sounds of the words. Because it's a poem, not a scientific treatise. And so, one morning found four or five of us huddled with a Croatian woman, hearing her read her poem once, twice, three times, and then moving to the sounds of it--first individually, then as a group. She wasn't to tell us what the poem was about, but we talked about what we heard and what images came to our minds from the rhythms of the lines and the sounds of the words. And of course from the way she read it, which clearly had some influence, though there was little or no acknowledgment of that, obvious though it may be. The poem's rhythm advanced and circled back, it pulsed, the sounds were often rounded. We ended up creating a narrative of a young woman in the circle of her family, breaking out of it and getting pulled back, the tension of youth and age, innovation and tradition, individuality and family. After we were finished, Sonja, the Croatian woman, said we were very close to the sense of the poem, which was written by a man who lived near the sea but who had never seen it because of the mountain range that separates his home from the coast. The Israeli woman in our class who worked with a group who knew no Hebrew said she saw things afterward in her poem (a poem written by her father) that she had never seen before. People are very generous here, but I do take their comments on this matter as genuine. I've been playing with writing poetry for a while now, and this experience makes it all the more fascinating. And daunting. If I needed an experience to make me even more appreciative of actors and poets (and painters and architects), my time here is reinforcing that.
This weekend I also returned to Kew Gardens. Twice. The purple and white crocuses (and some other small lavender-colored flower) are up by the thousands beneath the bare-limbed trees. It's a tonic for my soul to visit there.
You'll note that I didn't complain once in the past two months about landing on my neck. I confess that I had resolved not to speak of it anyway, but it's also the case that I paced myself in Acrobatics this term and came through in better shape. (Now if I could just stop wrenching my neck in Improv classes where the motions are more spontaneous and less controlled! I did that repeatedly in the past eight weeks but less and less so as the term came to a close.)
I'll be working a lot during the next 10 days--a student visa allows 20 hours of employment per week during terms, 40 hours between terms. As of about a week-and-a-half ago, I'm fortunate enough in the midst of this awful economy to have two part-time jobs, one of which pays twice what the other does. I know things are hard in the US right now, but Britain is really tanking, and the government is expecting violence this summer because of rising unemployment. Layoffs and lost jobs are combining with pockets of xenophobic and sometimes racist British-jobs-for-British-workers protests in industrial areas, especially in the north. Meaning: lay off the immigrant workers first. Or don't hire them in the first place.
I plan to get out of town at the end of next week for a few days into what I keep hearing is such a green and beautiful country. I can't wait to be a few hours away from London. I may head west to Devon--Exeter and Dartmoor National Park. In the meantime I hope to blog shorter and more frequently since I'll have my mornings free.
This blogging thing is still a bit odd for me. First of all, I never know who I'm writing for. For me, yes of course, but since anybody can wander in and hear my soliloquy, I don't put every thought and feeling in here. Still, it's a bit odd not knowing who, when, and even if anyone is passing through the room. Whatever. Now I really feel like I'm talking to myself!
As you (whoever you are) may recall, we dealt some with poetry during part of this term. One of the richnesses of a program like this is that it includes people from such a variety of countries. Each of us is encouraged to work in our mother tongue. And so when we were asked to bring in a poem from our home country, we had poems in English (of three types--English, American, and Australian), poems in Norwegian and Swedish, poems in Spanish and Portuguese and Euskara (from Basque country), in French and Italian, in German and Swiss German, in Croatian and Hebrew and Bembe. And I'm not sure I've even remembered them all.
So how do you appreciate a poem in a language you don't understand? The answer here is that you actually do have some understanding of it, through the sounds of the words. Because it's a poem, not a scientific treatise. And so, one morning found four or five of us huddled with a Croatian woman, hearing her read her poem once, twice, three times, and then moving to the sounds of it--first individually, then as a group. She wasn't to tell us what the poem was about, but we talked about what we heard and what images came to our minds from the rhythms of the lines and the sounds of the words. And of course from the way she read it, which clearly had some influence, though there was little or no acknowledgment of that, obvious though it may be. The poem's rhythm advanced and circled back, it pulsed, the sounds were often rounded. We ended up creating a narrative of a young woman in the circle of her family, breaking out of it and getting pulled back, the tension of youth and age, innovation and tradition, individuality and family. After we were finished, Sonja, the Croatian woman, said we were very close to the sense of the poem, which was written by a man who lived near the sea but who had never seen it because of the mountain range that separates his home from the coast. The Israeli woman in our class who worked with a group who knew no Hebrew said she saw things afterward in her poem (a poem written by her father) that she had never seen before. People are very generous here, but I do take their comments on this matter as genuine. I've been playing with writing poetry for a while now, and this experience makes it all the more fascinating. And daunting. If I needed an experience to make me even more appreciative of actors and poets (and painters and architects), my time here is reinforcing that.
This weekend I also returned to Kew Gardens. Twice. The purple and white crocuses (and some other small lavender-colored flower) are up by the thousands beneath the bare-limbed trees. It's a tonic for my soul to visit there.
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