Sometimes our world seems divided between the fast and the slow. There’s slow food and fast food, yoga and Zumba, the long take and the montage; we instant message friends to meet us so we can listen to some lengthy, endless story at the Moth. Some bemoan the loss of true leisure and others freak out if their needs are not met immediately, especially by businesses. This summer, when I was at the Norman Mailer House in a workshop organized by Alana Newhouse, I heard New Yorker writer David Samuel express it this way, “You have to find your pace,” he said, “Some stuff is too fast for me and some stuff is too slow.” I wasn’t sure what he meant by that until I joined Twitter. Before I had actually participated in the medium (when our opinions are most speedily formed) I thought Twitter was all about strangers telling me Srsly, this #pizza is gr8. I mean, really, who cares? But then I started to follow news, both lofty and trashy, and I realized I had found my comfort pace—lightening.

In olden times I was a Times reader rather than a TV news viewer. In fact one of the most shocking things that happened to me at Reed College was that my house mates watched the evening news. I had never met literate people who watched news—can you tell I led a somewhat sheltered life? I tried to gamely sit and listen but it felt too narrow. In those days the divide was between the narrow and the wide, between local and global, between palazzo pants and leggings, between salad bars and nouveau cuisine. But once I began to get my news from Twitter, I couldn’t imagine returning to a paper feed. I mean, I still read the Times and if I’m interested in a story (Pope stories!) I will seek a more detailed and nuanced analysis. But to return to turning pages to find out what is going on around me? Nope. #Nevergoingbacksrsly.

Yet nothing about information is quite that simple now. At the same time I’m getting all my news literally every second on Twitter, I’m totally immersed in a book called “Conversations with Eugene Ionesco.” In it the auteur Claude Bonnefoy poses questions and the playwright and the novelist Eugene Ionesco answers them. I am crazy about this book, and yet, in a sense, nothing could be slower. These two take all the time in the world to bat about process, ethics, Moliere, existential dilemma. A question and response will lead them into another discussion, which they follow as far as they like. Why would I find anything so languorous acceptable or even beautiful?

I think the answer lies in how different kinds of information require different speeds. It is not all one thing. My FB page is full of people I would run away from if I saw them in real life, women who  *squeal* and men who harangue and someone wanting to humble brag and someone expressing outrage as if this was the only outrage that had existed ever. I find FB too slow while I find Twitter perfectly fast and yet I don’t want to hear two French intellectuals converse on either one.  I think in our panic about the death of print, we forget that a book is also a piece of technology and that readers are discerning about what I call ‘the arrival of information.” We don’t want to hear everything the same way. Someone soon is going to be the genius that figures that out and gives me an object the size of a wristband for my speed feed that stretches out into a screen so I can check FB (or someone can, not me)  lets me eyeball Tumblr and then pulls out into pages so I can read this:

CB: We are at once both actors and spectators. In one way, isn’t this the ideal theatrical situation?

E.I: the theater should be this and nothing more. The theater is man offering himself as a spectacle for his own entertainment.

See? Isn’t that amazing? Brilliant and prescient and it totally predicts You Tube, lol

Theatre de la Ville<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
Photo credit: Jean-Louis Fernandez" src="http://merridawnduckler.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/w-rhino-092612-300x166.jpg" width="300" height="166" />

You can read his answers here

www.ericsassonnow.com

and at the end of mine you can check out the talented, super smart speculative fiction writer William Hertling who I’ve tagged next.

“What is your working title of your book?”

The Analysand

“Where did the idea come from for the book?”

Psychoanalysts are sworn to secrecy, they’re the high priests of the heart, so I kinda wondered but what would happen if one of them started spilling all their secrets!

“What genre does your book fall under?”

Comic novel

“Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?”

Well, going the direction of Todd Haynes “Superstar” is pretty tempting but I recently loved how Richard Linklater’s film “Bernie” incorporated real inhabitants from the actual town where the story was set. So it’s also possible that my family could play every role. They’re super photogenic and never saw a piece of scenery they wouldn’t want to chew. Of course it would be awesome to have my narrator, Gem’s daughter Isa played by a young unknown actress who then goes on to be a huge star. I love those stories.

“What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?”

It’s a Freudian mystery with an unconscious desire to…

“Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?”

Actually, I’m thinking of handwriting it. Seriously, I hand wrote all my wedding invitations and I’m just now getting the feeling back in my hand.

“How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?”

How old are you?

“What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?”

Maybe it’s a little like Patricia Marx’s terrific  “Him, Her, Him Again.” My favorite comic writer is Lawrence Sterne, so there’s always that hope.

“Who or what inspired you to write this book?”

Someone needed to get the Freudian Mystery Genre going and I was really in the best position.

“What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?”

I come armed with love.

Now don’t forget to jump to check Will out at

http://www.williamhertling.com

You may never look at email the same way again!

The cardboard signs did not work out. Those signs should be made in a hurry, with a certain amount of thought as to how the audience will respond. I was far too precious with mine. But I remained fixed on the idea of re-minding. So I decided to take a soaker hose and spell out the word Drought. Use it and you’d always be reminded of the necessity of water. We went to Home Depot and bought a fifty foot soaker hose and an equal amount of copper wire. We had a little argument about the copper wire, which I considered two expensive but Bryan, my maker, prevailed. We wrapped the hose around our living room and I tried to get the wire into it for an hour, he at one end and me at the other crawling around, shaking the hose. If only we had a big space this would take ten minutes, Bryan kept muttering. Um, the garage in his office? So we bought another hose, laid it out in the garage, and had it bendable in ten minutes.

I love that I made a working art object; you could actually use as a soaker hose. But there remains the original soaker hose, now in pieces and what happens to that? I feel responsible for both the made thing and the discarded thing. On the other hand, I easily discard thousands images. And because I spend so much of my time looking at images of things rather than the things themselves; I wonder what the future holds for objects. I can imagine a time when dimensional objects (we’ll have to call them something to distinguish them from their imagistic counterparts) will be a powerful currency. Remember in Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” where people forget names of objects and they have to have word tags? This is already happening. We are returning to Eden, becoming namers like Adam. Those who name exercise both great dominion and deep responsibility. Perhaps words and images have a whole new world ahead of them. For certain, they have never existed in such abundance, proximity, flux. 

lines on truth

31 Plays in 31 Days

I liked the friend who emailed me “You mean you’re seeing 31 plays in 31 days?” No, writing them. From August 1^st to August 31^st I participated in a fantastic challenge : to write a play a day. 400+ of us started and 119 broke the finish line ribbon. Here’s my takeaway

1. Suzan Lori-Parks, whoa.

2. My dialogue has no time to get pretentious when it is desperately trying to speak.

3. Malcolm Gladwell’s 10k hours rule. OK, he’s annoying but here’s my first hundred.

4. Only hard things (kinda sadly) keep my attention.

5. I have 31 plays.

6. Speed jumps the internal censor hurdles.

7. I stopped thinking up the synopsis and wrote the actual play.

8. I might be a playwright.

9. Ideas arrive every morning without fail.

10. My awesome teacher Annie Baker made us a write one in fifteen minutes, so this luxury.

11. I’ll have 31 plays!!

12. This reason is secret.

13. I can write even the craziest idea because, hey, I have to.

14. My characters went unexpected places.

15. I’m starting to list things!

16. The Olympics were on at the same time.

17. I hear dialogue everywhere I go.

18. I failed better.

19. I made the language show the emotion because there was no time to add it.

20. I read fantastic plays for inspiration.

21. My imagination is a force I have no idea how to handle.

22. I secretly cast them out of my own life.

23. Maybe 31 plays isn’t even all that many.

24. I see the characters before I hear them.

25. My heart is in the absurd.

26. I dreamed I had to direct all of them. At once.

27. I was absurdly happy when my nineteen year old nephew liked one.

28. I immediately wrote one for my nineteen year old nephew.

29. I crave a writers attention.

30. Exactly when you are sick to death of something, you start to understand it.

31. Time is a great teacher, but not in the ways you expect.

road runner

We flew out last Wednesday, landed in Dallas and arrived in Canton, Texas at 3 am. Our room, on the grounds of one of America’s biggest and best tag sales, was decorated full on Driving Drunk Miss Daisy,  lampshades and doilies and plastic flowers and a flat screen. The sleepy owner said he had left the key for us under a pot of plastic flowers. Half an hour later we were still examining pot bottoms, in the warm, windy, sweet and touching air of Texas. The room, for some reason, had four giant beds, one in each corner, like the grandparents in Willy Wonka. In the morning we learned we were a week early for the Canton Trade Days where 40,000 people swell a town of many fewer zeros. What is so great about Canton Trade Days? Our host cast his eyes upwards, trying to explain

“Well, suppose yew go to the State Fair. You’re gonna spend around 200 dollars and whaddreyew going to get?”

A cotton candy headache? That’s what I always get. He had two adorable little dogs and one began licking my hand

“A bayer. Just maybe a little tiny bayer.”

We looked at him through time lagged faces of loving incomprehension. We were just so happy to be on the road.  Meanwhile the little dog went at it. Lick, lick, licklicklicklick.

“A bayer.”

An aspirin?

He forms something with his hands. “A bare!”

Oh, Jesus. Yes. A bear!

At the State Fair all you get is a bear. But at Canton Trade days, it’s enough for four giant, be-sprigged beds.

In the morning we left Canton. Our goal was the Donald Judd boxes in Marfa, Texas by way of New Orleans. We had four days to get there. The Texas highways were wide open. The signs were numbers out of our dream speed limit, 70, 75, 80—did we see, or only imagine, that one for 85? We’d gotten in a Texas-style brawl at the car rental. No guns were slinged but a nervous kid in a suit offered us our pick of cars. He was so polite. Every Texan was so polite. In San Antonio gang bangers guided us to the restroom. Thar it is ma’am. You caint miss it. Have a nice day!

Under the nervous, polite gaze of the kid in the suit we walked down a long row of cars and saw a parking space that looked empty. When we walked up to it, this turned out to be a Fiat the size of a walk-in refrigerator. That’s how we barreled down the freeways. In fact state signs flashed exactly that: Please Don’t Barrel Through the Great State of Texas. But we couldn’t help it. We were just so happy to be on the road. Everywhere we went people spoke Fiat to us. Leaving Baton Rouge, we took a ferry across the wide, flat, cement-gray Mississippi. A cop came over to us and made a motion to roll down the window. He wanted to know how our mileage was. We said gas for the entire trip was going to cost us less than a visit to the State Fair. Then we headed to Oak Alley.

Shhhh, it's only Jeanne

This weekend we went over to my son’s and watched “Céline and Julie Go Boating” New Waves director Jacques Rivette’s ultra-charming masterpiece. It turns out that “to go boating” aller en bateau is French slang meaning “to be caught up in fiction” or “to be taken for a ride”. I don’t know if I was being taken for a ride, but if so, push me off forever. I was so happy, sitting there with my son and husband, eating pastries and watching on a VHS. I love my son(s), I love my husband and man do I love French films. I fell for them when I saw Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast” as a child, with those cool sconces made from real human hands and a beast who turns into something out of Fragonard. But I really came down with French film flu in college, watching “The Mother and the Whore.” I’ve basically forgotten every term from college biology, but I can still recall that film, frame for frame.

My favorite French film maker is Eric Rohmer and I pity the number of poor friends I’ve dragged to see his work. Is this why I don’t any friends anymore? I guess he is an acquired taste. Not by me. I saw the “Green Ray” so many times, my eyes turned green for four years. Serious! It says so on my old driver’s license—vert yeux. The night before this pleasant pastry-crumbed afternoon, we’d seen a restored print of Truffaut’s “The Bride Wore Black.” Naturally, I also love Truffaut but now my passion is spilling over into Jeanne Moreau territory.  How amazing is she? Half-English and half French and when she sings that song in the Black Forest part of “Jules et Jim” she is All Woman. I love that song! She evidently once performed with Frank Sinatra at Carnegie Hall and the minute I finish this blog, I’m going to find that recording.

I find her very continental in that the nuances of the characters she play in her films are all accomplished through her mouth and eyes—weapons of great artistry in French actresses. I’m still remembering her quick looks around the studio as she searches for a weapon with which to off Charles Denner (naturally it’s right in the hands of this cool-as-a-cucumber avenger.) I think American actresses tend to be more embodied and maybe that’s why they are more often shown in fuller shots. But Moreau’s face so often fills the screen, I have no idea what the rest of her looks like. I suppose my theory is slightly ruined by “Breathless” (among countless others) but then, there are those clothes to show us, so much a part of that story. French films are beloved by the poet in me—you must read the line but also what’s in between them. My whole family is otaku for films and between us all, we cover most every genre, country and era. If I go for a while without seeing a movie, I always feel a little forlorn, as if I am parted too long from one part of myself that I love.

The wall

The month is nearly gone and my wall painting comes down in a few days. This “painting” I painted, in black wall paint, on an entire wall of Blackfish Gallery, is composed of Walter Benjamin’s excellent essay “The Work of the Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Actually, I couldn’t quite fit it all, so some sections are missing. I had to let go of a grand scheme, which I am not very good at.

Its one thing to champion the conceptual, I’m finding and another to really adhere to its practices. Maybe I kind of understand Louise Bourgeois better when she says “The subject of pain is the business I am in.” Not that it’s my business but you can’t be faint of heart, in making art, even when you secretly wish to back down. In writing I find the secret wish about the subject is part of the scaffolding of the story but I wonder how true this is, in art

Because I was always thinking of the piece in conceptual terms, it didn’t really occur to me that there was going to be an overpoweringly physical component. How could I not have known?  I climbed up and down a very high ladder for maybe four hours and then up and down a shorter one for about six. In order to write the final words I had to lie on my stomach and scoot along. Of course I became filthy. During the day, when I wasn’t painting, my whole body ached and my mind just wouldn’t shut up.  I would get really excited and then also fall into a depression. I kept thinking about Walter Benjamin writing the essay I was painting, only a short way from his death. The whole nature of temporality floated on my mind. The interesting lesson was that it came out of making the work. If I had to set out to make a piece on our very temporary stay on the planet here, I doubt I would have figured out how.

In ten days the whole thing will be painted over. I can’t mourn the conceptual part because it lives on. But the part that my body was involved in, wishes to hold on. All that effort and a damn can of paint erases it? I’m wondering about making more pieces that are even more ephemeral and also trying the opposite. What if permanence was the goal? One thing I am newly aware of is the spiritual component of the work of the conceptual artists. We think of them as jokers and gadflies, ready to puncture all our notions of object and subject. But, underneath, I suspect, is a deep glance into the effervescence of materiality, the power of authority, the stamp of the human. I notice it now in so many works I am studying, preparing to write a paper. Robert Rauschenberg, sending his telegram into the show of portraits of Iris Cert and the telegram says “This is a portrait of Iris Cert if I say so.” Our invention! We just can’t get over it.

Writers on the longest poem in the world

In the old room with high ceilings and walls in the colors of the past, the good old colors that knew when to blaze and when to fade, we gather to hear the poets. The one that will read has the correct eyes for a poet; clear, slanted, looking upward and into the distance. She has the hair of a poet, which is always dynamic and the face of the poet which is fully expecting lightening to arrive and open the sky for a moment. Nothing else matters but this moment, so she is very composed, like a poem.

When the reading starts I feel agitated because poetry is rare, and the moments pass quickly. Can I forget myself long enough to hear them? It requires almost as much attention to hear a poem as to write one. I’ve already been critical of so many things tonight. I wear my criticism like a triumphant wreath of black flies. But behind me the hostess is settled in her antique chair, designed with the old-fashioned, near forgotten idea that furniture should be comfortable. Behind the sofa stands her husband, a Mexican poet and a playwright. She fell in love with him while editing his face, she tells me. We have to agree she did an amazing job.

The poet begins to speak. Since another listener is blocking my view I can only see her eyes. But I am reluctant to shift because already the poet is moving her poems. The poems arrive, obtain something useful and fly off, like birds in the park. These are in English. But when she begins to read from the new book Eros Et Thantos, it is in Spanish. I do not speak Spanish but I know Latin. I know love and death.

The poems in Spanish are round with beauty. They sing with insight and make a picture out of  a thousand new words. I know if I spoke Spanish they would mean even more to me possibly, but you can feel their necessity, like looking at an ancient implement in a museum case. Maybe the use is now a mystery but the necessity still cuts through glass. She reads and reads. I decide I am going to learn Spanish tomorrow, as you should learn a language, so that you can understand one poem in it. She ends. We clap. I can see her eyes on fire for a moment. Then the person in front of me bows.

When she is finished perhaps the more romantic types were hoping we would sigh and float. Instead the discussion turns briskly to trivial matters, like whether they are Latino or Hispanic on the census forms. But are they trivial? Shouldn’t the poets, above all, speak of how to address ourselves, how to identify our memories, align ourselves with history; how to vote, honor our parentage, fill out a form, how to teach the young, in what language to speak about death, about love.

le El

I went to a week-long writer’s residency in Chicago, came home, taught my class at the Attic, got on a red eye and flew to Florida.  I’ve got “coast lash” which is like whiplash, except you get miles.

In Chicago I checked into the House of Two Urns but did not see either of them. I had exactly one week to edit my 280 page novel. Every morning I rolled out of bed, sat straight up and commenced work. At noon I snatched my sandwich like a rabid dog, by 4 pm, I was pretty much clinically insane. But Chicago was the perfect place for concentration. The air is brisk, the sky businesslike and the sharp-dressed Chicagoans sweep on and off the El in practical gloves and scarves. I had a meeting every night; then I watched the late night shows (which I never do at home) doused the light and started all over again the next day.

Finished the edits Friday night, flew home Saturday, got on a plane Tuesday, flew to Boca Raton.

This was a different kind of labor, the love kind. My parents could not make the trip on their own, so my husband and I were chauffeur, attendant, map reader, everything. I got into Ft Lauderdale at noon, after a sleepless flight. It was hot, damp and rainy, the ocean rolling languidly behind a sky high wedding cake white flight of condos. Paunchy guys in no shirts slowly ate a big plate of lasagna. A man was fishing for flounder off the pier at A1A—he didn’t catch anything and he didn’t care. Even the fish took their time to see what all the fuss was about. I was still racing a million miles an hour but there is nowhere to race to in Florida. It is the end of the earth.

On our one day off, we drove to Everglade City. We pulled into the intersection minutes after there had been a horrific wreck. An SUV was sitting on its side, smashed into the shape of a small retaining wall. At the service station the woman behind the register was  crying. We asked what hit it and she said: the car. As we drove off you could see, on the other side of what used to an SUV, a little car, crushed like a hat. There is nothing like tragedy to make everything in the world look impossibly beautiful. In Everglade City kids rode their bikes around the most spectacular trailer park in the universe. At dusk we walked down a boardwalk that went directly from freeway into jungle. A huge brown heron was rising off the pond as we walked in a Verdi of crickets. You could hear the plop of something swimming quickly beneath breathtaking neon orchids growing nonchalantly in the hollows of trees. The air got dark and creamy, all around us was the restless fecundity of the south, which grows an inch a minute, will grow up around and swallow you whole were you to follow the night like a snake.

Chicago and Florida are not only on opposite coasts, they are operated by different universes. Now I wake up and can’t tell where the hell I am. I check into a book and can feel, temporarily, at home. But I can tell the coasts have awakened a wandering spirit in me and I just can’t wait to be back on the move.

What does influence mean to you?

Influence in the Medieval Latin means stellar, and it still carries connotations of stuff that affects you from afar.  But the artist wants intention, action, and decision—although in conceptual art, my field, the prevailing god is chance. So influences aren’t something you can really disconnect from yourself. That’s one way they are different from inspiration, which we actively seek out. I don’t think influences are affecting me, I think they are me.

How does the phenomenon of influence manifest in your art practice?

Conceptual art places a high value on the idea of the original. But it has also been historically interested in both the history of art—that mustache on the Mona Lisa—and in pop culture which influences all of us.  The phenomenon of influence really allows me to play, interact and commune with ideas. A world empty of influences would be one in which you proved to have been unmarked by the world and ideas don’t grow in that kind of petri dish for me. I have to have a matrix, even if it’s something I’m going to disavow or reject.

How much are you influenced by regional, cultural and political surroundings?

I’m strongly influenced by the culture I live in but maybe not in ways that advertisers might wish. When I read Janson’s History of Art as a youngster I was really taken with the idea of folding art into history, like folding in egg whites.  I thought to myself, here is a whole other way to order the world, by visual chronology. On the other hand, important components of my self such as gender, religion, social roles etc. (at least in the 1973 edition) were missing. So that was exciting. I could argue with a core text, because I respected it.

In today’s art world, no single issue or philosophy dominates. How does “influence” manifest in this environment?

I think artists often consider themselves from the point of view of lineage, if not influence. They come from somewhere. They seek out others who have interests in images and objects, and these days we can do that with a mouse click. Technology, even if you think of yourself as a technophobe, is altering our notions of image. Technology has always done this; from oil paint, to movable type, to perspective; science and art were always linked. Now I don’t know what the constant barrage of millions of generated images is doing to me, but I doubt it’s doing nothing. Yesterday I was thinking about how, in the general scheme of things, art as individual expression is relatively recent. It had existed for centuries as anonymous and communal, in the service of survival and celebration. In some ways the internet is making originality, individuality and ownership of images again problematic. Look at the current fight with Richard Prince. I think it’s going to have a huge effect. It makes sense that museums have become performance spaces, because that’s a unique, ephemeral experience. Have we become disconnected from the idea of a painting as a unique experience? Now I don’t have to travel but can just call one up anytime, on line.  Or is that an entirely different thing?

Brock Linhan influencing my concept of a panel moderator