Formatted

Marshall McLuhan wrote that when you speak on the radio you have no face and no body. This is a big part of why, as a youngster, I enjoyed radio drama; I would listen and imagine all the performers and myself folded together in a cozy abstract environment. Radio drama enthusiasts rhapsodize about how radio allows the listener to imagine the visuals; I would add that they allow the listener to NOT imagine any more visuals than they want. I like to imagine the radio drama world as a series of warm, quilted beds in dark rooms, with the actors all snuggled up together (this is very much a pre-sexual holdover from my childhood) in the comfy dark.

Stop laughing at me!

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I've read and enjoyed the novel Ragtime, but never seen the movie or checked out the musical. I suspect the musical format is a better medium for a Ragtime adaptation. The novel has multiple storylines and is saturated with information; in the movies it's hard to do justice to that without compressing it, being confusing, or being offputtingly arty and abstract. In a musical (particularly post-Sondheim) songs can provide that richness of detail and information while being entertaining, rather than seeming like an infodump. Set it to song and it's entertainment as well as information. Movies tend to thrive on saturation of sensuousness rather than saturation of information.

Why Can't You See

I just had my first vision exam since maybe infancy, and tried to get some contact lenses set up. I need them so I can get around stage, but moreover, it's hard to act off someone if you can't tread what they're communicating facially. Without my glasses I'm blind, so it's time for contacts.

Sadly I'm flunking Contacts 101. I have been sentenced to take some eye drops home and practice touching my eye. I've always believed that nothing should touch an eye except an eyelid, so this will be quite the trial.

I'm such a nerd that I'm steeling myself for this by telling myself it's like the self-improvement trials the heroes and heroines of my favorite fantasy novels have to go through. That actually comforts me a bit. Learning to wear contacts isn't that different from learning to, say, cast a spell. Yeah, that's the ticket. Ya nerd!

"Faerie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons, it holds the sea, the sun, the moon, the sky, and the earth and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, when we are enchanted." -J. R. R. T.

Second Post of the Day

Our latest production lost an actress because her job scheduled a business trip right in the middle of the performance. We lost a possible replacement because she wasn't comfortable with all the profanity.

The other day I was discussing the production with our sound/music guru, and he expressed astonishment that someone would drop out of the show because she was expected to swear onstage. "I understand if you don't want to talk that way in your personal life, but it's not like these words will hurt you!" I responded that once upon I time I firmly believed that these words do hurt users and hearers; cursing was like maliciously sneezing on people. I had a hygienic attitude to profanity; "dirty" words were actually dirty. No doubt our lost actress shares this view. For those of you who don't understand why some people are SO very upset by cussin', that's why. For some of us Calvinist types there's a real "compulsive hand washing" attitude about Sin, and Dirty Words really are Dirty.

Scattershot

Per this morning's NPR News, Kellogg's is planning to stop advertising their more egregiously unhealthy cereal to kids, at least until they can rework the recipes to be less awful for you. I'm the kind of person who is filled with despair whenever someone wants to waste precious time talking about a funny commercial, but I confess to a deep-rooted nostalgia for the cereal ads that kept my Saturday morning toons in the air. I'd as soon eat something I found in a parking lot as put froot loops in my mouth, but you show me a picture of Toucan freakin' Sam and I'm a happy camper. It's totally Pavlovian. And those weird New Wave ads for Bubbilicious bubble gum stir fond memories of cute people turning into flying, dancing neon signs. I'm sure these ads would look way less cool to me today; I resist going onto Youtube to check this stuff out. I wonder how today's slicker ads are shaping and warping today's kids?

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When I was in second grade I had a crush on a pretty girl in my class; let's call her Debbie. I didn't know a thing about her except she fit a conventional prettiness template that I hadn't yet thought my way past. A year later she moved away. And although I'd never spoken to her or gotten to know her, I prayed "Dear God, please let me meet Debbie again and have one more chance with her."

A year or two later my family and I went to Pops in the Park, an orchestral Pops music concert they held every year at the foot of an pseudo-medieval tower on a battlefield (why a medieval-style tower on a Civil War Battlefield? Ya got me). So we spread out our picnic blanket, and there on the blanket in front of me was... Debbie. I sat there and quietly stared at the back of her head for the whole evening. She never seemed to notice me, and I never uttered a word to her. I think God just gave up on granting my requests after that. Maybe that's why He didn't burn that comic book I mentioned a while back.

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Speaking of comics, I got a thing called Elvis Road recently. It's in book binding, but open it up and it's a 24-foot long sheet of paper with a big doodled mural on it. It's pricey at twenty-five bucks, but it's richly rewarding. It's basically a picture of a fantastical street with lots of cheerless strip malls and such. Weird cartoon characters run and drive around, getting into wrecks, getting attacked by monsters; it may sound trivial, but the density and variety of it makes it hypnotic. It's a small triumph of world-building; every page is crammed with detail. It's like Richard Scary on an ether binge.

More Golden Notebook

Well, poo. I wanted to post some more about Golden Notebook, but I went and left the book at home. This makes it tough to dig up specific quotes I wanted to address. At any rate:

The novel is built up from a nested series of overlapping narratives; there's a five-chapter novella, "Free Women." Each chapter is interspersed with several color-coded notebooks presenting more or less factual ruminations from Anna, the protagonist/author of the novella. There are multiple intriguing cross-readings available, but one in particular came at the end. Saul, Anna's "unsuitable" lover in the final fifth of the novel, is presented in shockingly negative terms for most of the sequence. His anger, nastiness, mean-spirited infidelity, is most of what the author presents. She tells us he can be wonderful, but shows us only his nastiness, although at one point she acknowledges that she's mostly scoured all traces of his goodness and kindness out of this account. (Wish I could pull the quote! Maybe I'll edit this post with book in hand later.) Then we get the final chapter of Free Women, in which she finally reveals what was in those narrative gaps; his kindnesses are genuine, and deserve to be revealed after all. It forces us to reevaluate Saul. She's shown us that the relationship was sick, bad craziness, but then she reveals why she stayed in it, and why it was a net gain for them both.

This ties in with a remark she makes earlier in the book, about why "good women" take up with "unsuitable men," which is something I intend to explore a bit more later.

Golden Notebook

Okay, enough goofin' around. I'm almost finished with The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, and I'm finding it awfully useful.

In the final fifth or so of the book, the protagonist Anna starts a crazy affair with a guy named Saul. Saul seems to have a fragmented personality; he shifts abruptly from one mode of engaging the world to another, and Anna never knows if he's going to be the thoughtful and kind man she loves, a hectoring jerk, a compulsively lying sleazebag... and the aspects of his personality don't flow together naturally; it's like they're distinct persons functioning in one body. This concept isn't unfamiliar; fragmented or split personality is a bit of a chestnut nowadays. But it's one thing to understand a problem at a conceptual level; it's another thing to understand how it plays out, day by day, hour by hour. Lessing does a splendid job of describing what it's like to live with such a person, and leads us to understand the variable ways these personality fragments can manifest, one after the other, in dizzying sequence.

This is useful because I'm rehearsing a show in which I play a character who makes some really, really abrupt transitions, and I find it difficult. I guess I make more gradual emotional transitions. Lessing has almost written an instruction manual in portraying out-of-control fragmented personalities.

I have many more thoughts on this book, or thoughts which have been triggered by this book, but I'll need to get back to it later.

I Barely Remember the Future

I recall that when I was a child in the 80's I saw a book in Waldenbooks, a book that made a brief splash before disappearing beneath the waves... it was book of scientific or pseudo scientific speculation about how humans might evolve in the future. I think it was a coffee-table book, although I was young enough that most books seemed pretty large to me at the time, and it had color illustrations showing scary freakish future humans. There was one image I recall as a two-page spread showing a barren landscape, with a large God Emperor of Dune type worm or slug... with a human-like face. Creeped me out.

Does anyone have a clue what book I'm talking about? Cursory Googling turns up nothing.

Edit: Man After Man by Dougal Dixon. Long out of print, fairly pricey on the old book market. Not to be confused with After Man, also by Dougal Dixon and more easily available.