Marie

The background: Evergreen is nestled in acres and acres of temperate rain forest. We have trails. We have a beach. There are creatures at the beach.

Yesterday I had a meeting scheduled from 4-5pm. An important meeting, though it wouldn't particularly suffer from my absence. Still, an obligation all the same. It was at the meeting before this one (Evergreen is also nestled in acres and acres of meetings, especially on Wednesdays) that I could feel myself gravitating, not toward the seminar room where my next meeting was scheduled, but to the beach. I began to negotiate with myself and soon enough, I had convinced myself of the virtues of walking through the woods, away from my commitments and into that part of Evergreen where nature vanquishes concrete.

I recruited a friend to escape Wednesday meeting hours with me. At the beach, we walked across the sand, pausing periodically to watch the seagulls drop crustaceans onto the ground to break their shells. The sand is usually covered with the vestiges of seagull meals--myriad exoskeletons and fragrant (that is, rotting) crab meat. The occasional dead jellyfish, bright pink and leaking purple, washes up to brighten up the otherwise gray landscape. The beach is also where the geoducks live, and in the right season, you can see the thousands of tiny holes they create in the sand with their jet propulsions. We saw no geoducks yesterday, but we did find the most bizarre part of a creature I've ever seen. I spotted a row of sharp, curved teeth on the ground, attached to what looked like a piece of beach wood. That's honestly as far as we could get in speculating...a row of teeth melded onto a piece of wood.

We extracted our find from tangles of seaweed and sand fleas. Now, we rely on the trusty scientists in the Lab building to tell us exactly what we found--hopefully it's exciting enough to fully justify playing hooky.

Posted by Marie at 09:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sooooo, after two and a half months of auditions, emails, flyering, rehearsing, costume-making, and general hysteria, The Birds is over. Not the Hitchcock version, but the Classical Greek comedy by laugh master Aristophanes. I produced The Birds as part of my coordinating gig for The Phrontisterion, Evergreen's one and only Classical Studies club. Each winter, the coordinators stage an Aristophanes play--last year they did Lysistrata, the year before that, The Clouds.

(Before I go any further, check out these awesome production pix--http://www.flickr.com/photos/rwhitlock/sets/72157603962243346).

All of Aristophanes' work is raunchy and hilarious, there's no doubt about that. But there's something about The Birds that separates it from the rest of his comedies, and from most comedies in general. It's not that it's necessarily tamer, though it's less saturated with sex than Lysistrata, but it has
no...climax. Or rather, no lesson. Comedies, although they always end happily, usually let their characters stumble a bit before ascending into success. Not so with The Birds. There's no moment of realization, at least not for the human characters--and this is perhaps why the play is so politically profound. While the line between man and beast gets blurred, man ultimately triumphs, making it a tragedy for the birds. After all, they sow the seeds of their own destruction and are wiped from the picture with a bird-basted banquet. If we are to glean any lessons from The Birds (really, if we're to avoid being eaten) we must first admit our own naivete in the face of elegant political rhetoric.

And what better time to be on our feet than election time?

Posted by Marie at 03:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Aside from the contract I'm doing on absurdist theater, I'm enrolled in a weekend class called “Conversations on Art and Politics”. And that's pretty much the gist of it—conversation. Each week a guest artist comes in to present his or her work and talk about its relationship to politics. The presentations are followed up by Q & A, but we get down to most of our business on the class blog, responding weekly to initial posts by our teacher and to the work presented in class.

This is where things get fun, a little bit messy, sometimes controversial. Since we students can't see each other and don't have to face each other in a seminar setting later, we really only hold each other accountable via the web. Some bloggers treat the assignment like any other, responding responsibly, tactfully, graciously, and with examples. Some take the “this is just a blog” road, neglecting grammar, spelling, punctuation, and shirking anything remotely resembling a claim. And then there are the bloggers who gleefully discard the restrictions of tact, fully embracing their relative anonymity and taking the low blows they might otherwise reserve for more casual conversation. Their posts are often the most fun to read, not only for their content (which varies in quality) but for their childlike sass. Admittedly, some of these blogs are excellent, but what makes them so entertaining is the “real life” identity of the blogger, which tends toward awkward and disheveled educational nomads. They're not really sure what they want out of school, and indeed rarely attend, but they've perfected the art of cocky blogging.

Posted by Marie at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Or so claims the Logician in Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros. Teaching his ill-conceived brand of logic to his comrade, he says, "Another syllogism is this: All cats are dead. Socrates is dead. Socrates is a cat." Ah, I see, his friend replies, at which point they launch into a ridiculous banter about how many paws two cats would have if you subtracted 2 from their collective amount of paws. This is the nature of my Independent Learning Contract, entitled "Investigating the Absurd." And although the above conversation is certainly absurd, I'm delving into a more specific definition of absurdity. Albert Camus, the first author I read for the contract, put it better than I ever could in The Myth of Sisyphus. "The world in itself is not reasonable," he admits, "...But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart."

So who cares? Why read this stuff? Camus seems like a downer...but there's an upside, and that's what I'm interested in rooting out in my contract. Camus, for all his discerning qualities, didn't think that the absurd dictated the absolute worst. He believed in "absurd creation", for a revolt against the weight of consciousness. So my big question is this: to what extent does art salve absurd wounds? how do we create without renouncing the very thing that's inspired us? Camus warns, "[Art] does not offer an escape for the intellectual ailment. Rather it is [a] symptom[]..But...it makes the mind get outside of itself."

Posted by Marie at 06:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)