Marie

Monstrous Manuscript

2008-05-09T19:27:44Z

The word 'manuscript' is little bit intimidating, especially when it stands alone, as in: "You'll all be writing manuscripts this quarter."

Manuscripts about what? Manuscripts following what guidelines? Fulfilling what ends?

None of these questions were raised, let alone answered, during the first week of my spring quarter program, Monstrous Possibility. The only thing we were told about our manuscripts-to-be was that they would be included in an anthology at the end of the quarter. There are no requirements about length, content, form, structure, or copy standards. The possibilities were monstrous.

]]> Some people in the program took this as an opportunity to pursue, revise, or expand on ongoing projects. I, on the other hand, was taken aback – the task of starting something new, mapping out a life plan for an idea that doesn't even exist yet, was appropriately daunting. Of course, thinking about an unborn idea is the surest way to kill it, so I tried to let the program material guide my creative thinking (I knew one thing for sure: my last big project at Evergreen would be creative, not analytical).

Sure enough, the ingredients of my project manifested almost immediately. During the first lecture of the quarter, I found that my notes looked more like poetic snapshots than reasoned outlines. So for the first two or so weeks, I took the meat of my lecture notes and translated them into poems, reworking them around devices like repetition, alliteration, rhyme, assonance, and space-use. By about the third week, though, I cut out the restructuring process and started taking my notes as poems, committing to the page only words that I felt really belonged there.

At this point. I've begun a new translation period. Since we're nearing the end of the quarter, it's time to stop adding material and start "cleaning up" our manuscripts. As it stands right now, my manuscript is a series of dated entries, with no guiding theme except for the method in which they were conceived. So my clean-up process will consist in rewriting the piece – that is, re-translating it – according to the way it sounds. This means I'll need someone to read it to me...over and over and over again. Any volunteers?

MUSE: Encounters with the Classical Canon

2008-04-18T22:06:23Z

So reads the title of the Phrontisterion's upcoming event. The Phrontisterion, Evergreen's Classical Studies Club, has traditionally organized events solo, but for our next project we're getting some awesome – and much needed – help from the Writers' Guild.

]]> We had originally planned to host a benefit show to revitalize our scant budget (we spent lots of money Winter Quarter on face paint, feathers, and other carnivalesque items) but we realized that our event would be much more successful if we reached out to other corners of the community. Since our group focuses largely on academia – a focus happily interrupted by Ancient Greek comedies and hopscotch – we figured our audience is also intensely interested in writing. So we decided to organize our event around all three of these aspects – Classics, music, and writing. Four to six students and one teacher will read original Classics-inspired poetry at the event, an activity that will set the stage for two local musical acts: Moonstruck, a six-person indie rock ensemble, and Adam Jessup, a singer-songwriter.

Hopefully our collaboration with the Writers' Guild will pay off with double the audience, double the energy...and if we're so lucky, double the donations. :)

Monstrous Possibility

2008-04-05T00:13:05Z

This spring I'm taking a literary arts and theory program called Monstrous Possibility. A hybrid of creative and analytic writing, we're garnering inspiration for our work from an eclectic range of authors: Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein, Friedrich Neitschze, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and others. Our assignment this week is to write with constraints; that is, to establish a set of 13 rules and rituals by which to govern, not necessarily the content, but the direction of our work. (The assignment is dubbed "Toward the Zero Point", by the way, with our teachers encouraging us to "write toward meaninglessness").

]]> So here are the conditions of my writing sessions. Before beginning to write: eat a bowl of yogurt with granola, strawberry, and apple; do one 4-7-8 breathing cycle; collect a few excellent quotes from Edith Wharton's House of Mirth; turn off cell phone; put hair up, and heat my room. While writing: use a black liquid (but not felt-tip) pen, avoid using alliteration for merely its own sake; avoid making use of space (i.e., let the words do their "non-spatial" thing); insert a reference to fruit, and insert at least one line from The House of Mirth. After writing, let hair down. All this in my last constraint: a span of 45 minutes.

Spring Break in Seattle

2008-04-03T02:19:44Z

This spring break, I spent the week on my uncle's houseboat in Seattle. Docked on Lake Union, it has a great view of downtown Seattle and Queen Anne, with the Space Needle seeming only a stone's throw away. Even though I lived in Seattle for a summer when I was 18, I spent most of my break doing the tourist thing. I went to the Seattle Art Museum to see the Roman art exhibit, which was great, but after seeing 30 or so marble statues of emperors and their wives, I sort of got the picture and was ready to move on...the best part was the Gates of Paradise exhibit. The Gates are made up of 9 bronze panels, each depicting a scene from Genesis. It begins with Adam and Eve, moving through the stories of Noah, Cain and Abel, Abraham, and other major biblical figures. Only three of the panels are on display, but the incredible detail of the carvings makes the trip worth it.

]]> On my last night in Seattle, I went to a show at the Sunset Tavern in Ballard. The feature was my friends' band from NYC, The Lisps. I have their first CD and have always been a fan, but their live show blew me away. It was by far one of the most entertaining performances I've ever seen, complete with a chase scene and an epic improv about boats...The Lisps are so awesome that I'm gonna' plug them. Their website is thelisps.com and they also have a myspace page. Check out these tracks for maximum listening satisfaction: "Pepperspray", "Documents", "Brackish Water", and "Heaven".

Early Morning Edits

2008-03-07T04:00:02Z

Last week I got a position copy editing for Evergreen's student newspaper, the Cooper Point Journal. I've been an avid, well, browser, of the CPJ since my freshman year, but I've never gotten particularly excited about it. I'm not sure how it measures up as far as student papers go, but its content (oh, letters to the editor!) and style (if I had a dollar for each copy error...) have long been points of contention around these parts. Finally, I decided to stop being a passive observer and get involved.

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The straw that broke the camel's back was an article that one of the staff reporters wrote about the play I produced, The Birds. The article was benign enough, no scathing critiques or wild claims, but it boasted a slew of embarrassing mistakes that began with a missing word in the first sentence. My own writing is far from perfect and I'm not immune to copy errors, but I decided that if I was upset enough to blab about it to everyone I knew, I should at least translate my energy into something productive. So last night was my first attempt--the task of copy editing began at 9p.m. and ended at 4:30 a.m. (yes, a.m.!) with a few cups of coffee and cold egg rolls in between. Needless to say, though I did my best as a first-timer, I was humbled by how daunting and nuanced a task editing is. Today, we had a "postmortem" meeting to flesh out all the errors that we let slip through...and there were plenty. Agenda for next week: talk less talk, walk more walk.

The Woods Distract

2008-02-28T17:18:00Z

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.

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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.

Respite

2008-02-25T23:38:16Z

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?

The Art of Conversations on Art (and Politics)

2008-02-15T18:57:30Z

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.

Socrates is a Cat

2008-02-05T02:15:33Z

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."

The Birds, The Birds!

2008-01-26T01:40:38Z

This quarter, I'm producing a play for The Phrontisterion, the student group I coordinate. We're staging The Birds, an ancient Greek comedy by laugh master Aristophanes. We started rehearsals this week, starting things off with a string of ridiculous improv games, which basically serve to break the ice between a gaggle of relative strangers. It would be a drag to describe the games in detail here, but suffice it to say that one of them is called "Bunny Bunny" and another "Big Booty, Little Booty".

So what does this all boil down to? Four weeks of rehearsals, infinite emails, phone calls, meetings, signatures, paperwork. And how is all this possible? How am I, a student unaffiliated with any academic program, allowed and able to put on a full-scale comedy in one of Evergreen's most coveted performance venues? The Student Acitivities Board, that's how. One of Evergreen's most endearing qualities is its commitment to making services and facilities open to students. If there's a will, there's (almost always) a way, and this time, the way is three nights of performance to a total audience of 600 people. I can't wait, but I'll be holding my breath until then...

The Most Olympia Moment

2008-01-20T22:41:08Z

Sitting in Caffe Vita on a Sunday afternoon, these are the things I see:

Two young men in black suits, looking ridiculously serious, cross the street and storm into the cafe. They cross the room in measured, authoritative, steps. One of them slams a black briefcase down on a table where a hipster-looking student type sits unperturbed. He, the tall one, reaches into the briefcase and grabs a roll of ducktape. Oh crap, I laugh. He rips off a piece of tape and smacks it over the kid's the mouth. What the hell, I laugh harder.

]]> I'm not worried--I see one of these black suits, the short one, on the bus all the time; I'm pretty sure he works at Evergreen. They leave just as surely as they came in, amid muffled laughter and DID YOU SEE THATs. One of the baristas asks the kid if he's okay, if he wants her to call the police. He keeps his head down, shakes out an ambiguous "no". I laugh again, look out the window. I see a rockabilly couple crossing the street: skinny pale dude with a pompadour escorting a plump vixen decked out in a black skirt and heels, wearing lots of blush, laughing. She knows she looks good.

Meanwhile the couple next to me (are they a couple, I wonder, or is she his personal trainer?) carry on their conversation about pumping iron. She is the dominant voice here, outlining the best way to get cut, as opposed to buff. He looks terrified. Maybe they're a couple, I consider, but if they are, he's trying to escape...

This is great, I laugh once more. I catch a glimpse of "low-rider bike guy" cruising around outside, headphones on as usual. He's got tattoos on his arms, on his face. Wears a backward cap. He rides about six different versions of the same bicycle, frame kissing the ground, arms stretched toward the handles above his head.

I love it. I see him all the time.

Weekend of Absurd and Musical Things

2008-01-13T21:10:08Z

'Oh, the cathartic qualities of electronic music,' I mused as I stood squished between giant speakers on my right and a kinetic, dancing couple on my left. Friday night I was privy to the intoxicating sights and sounds of Gumar and his Magical Midi Band, an Oly-based performative phenomenon that's swept through the town like wild fire. This weekend, the band--a DJ, two additional vocalists, and a slew of friends touting glammed up mock instruments-- took prestigious stage at the Washington Center for Performing Arts, "rocking out" to a crowd of fiercely loyal followers. I'd caught snippets of Midi Band shows in the past, but this was the first time I had the privilege of experiencing an entire set. Yes, experiencing, not listening or watching. The band performs, in the strongest sense of the word, and the audience ingests it all: emphatic and infectious beats, heartwarming and hilarious lyrics, off the cuff dance moves, glamor and glitz to the utmost, and sweat--a whole lotta' sweat.

Speaking of sweat, Gumar's audience got a little warm-up from another Oly-originated group, The Blow. Comprised of a behind-the-scenes DJ and a commanding front woman, The Blow elevates electronic music to philosophy and sophisticated stand-up. While the dude provides the beats, the singer traverses the set with songs and stories of break-ups, trips through the digestive system, and girl power. If you listen closely, you'll even glean lessons in econ and existentialism; if you attend a show, you'll learn how to dance like a malfunctioning robot and still look cool.