At the gym, on the treadmill. Price is Right comes on. Displays of consumer goods like sets moving past the contestant – “and what would you be willing to do for this?” on the treadmill – too obvious? Too static? Thinking Beckett made a complete play with Billie Whitelaw walking back and forth on a line on the stage “1,2,3…wheel” – what made that work? I need to go read it and think about how it looked on the stage.
Thinking – structure like a cup – it’s liberating in a way not to worry so much about the shape of the thing but how to take character, action, plot and make it fill the vessel.
Google Zoe Keating – cello player.
10 September
Ideas to consider for two people
– an almost-affair, the arc of entire relationship from meeting to “divorcing” in the space of one conversation.
– after the funeral of a famous person, the children trying to decide on which papers are valuable, trying to preserve a public “persona” vs. showing the real person. Talking about narratives and how construct the story of our life – what is says and what we’d like it to say.
At the farmer’s market – it was a good year for berries, but not for apricots. Cycle of seasons and how each year varies. Also, the uglier the fruit, the sweeter and better it tastes and that sweet and bland fruit grows on the same tree – what makes the difference?
11 September
- next you’re going to tell me he molested you
- no, but I did walk in on him once masturbating in the shower
- that’s disgusting.
- I know, it scarred me for life.
- no, that you would tell me.
12 September
Moving quickly through the day towards Ian’s Bar Mitzvah. How when I am focused on task the reflective reflex goes away. I don’t stop to think about how things impact me, I just do them. To write about them, to notice them, is to take a step back from them, a step away, rather than being in the muck of the moment.
13 September
Structure of the Bar Mitzvah service – like Bernstein using the Catholic mass as the structure for The Mass and at the same time encompassing the whole of man’s creation of religion from a simple song of worship to a highly structured, mannered entity with a right and wrong way to do it. Call to prayer. Reading from the Torah – the idea that these words are the same words that have been spoken on this day for the past 5,000 years, that every Jew in the world reading from the Torah on this day reads the same words that my son is reading to us. Taking a place in that lineage, moving into a larger sense of community and family.
14 September
Not even going to pretend that I started working on the 40-line play before this evening. Not this week. But funny thing of writing – I so don’t know what I’m doing, and yet, the thing begins to live on the page. Like watching Frankenstein’s monster take its first breaths on the slab, these two paper creations begin to think and move in my mind, start taking up space, begin to have a voice of their own, a personality, begin to ask to behave in a certain way. Such an odd way to go through life – having people taking up space in your mind, and they’re living, breathing fully embodied people except they have no bodies at all.
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