Giddiness Redux

Still feeling like I avoided disaster on election night. Immigrants and other minorities may yet save this country. It's clear old white men are incapable of doing it.

An old notion for a project has returned to haunt me: "dramatic and musical notes for a chamber opera," in which I'd write the script and musical line for someone else to fill in later, probably posthumously, if at all. Hearing riffs. No story notion yet, which is why it hasn't gone anywhere. Yet I haven't forgotten it.

An easy day, showing Wag the Dog. But I also pick up scripts for a very busy weekend of reading. End of the term rhythm begins.

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About readers and audience

Here is my ideal reader:

From English Composition as a Happening by Geoffrey Sirc ("this book-length homage to Charles Deemer's 1967 article, in which the theories and practices of Happenings artists (multi-disciplinary performance pioneers) were used to invigorate college writing." --Amazon):

"One of the Composition-specific articles in this genre of radical sixties pedagogy, one which I have never been able to forget since the day I first read it in the dimly-lit stacks of my university's library, was written in 1967 by a young graduate teaching assistant at the University of Oregon, Charles Deemer. His article, "English Composition as a Happening," did what many of these articles did, but did it in a formally compelling way (the article is a collage of brief sound-bite snippets, alternating between Deemer's own poetic reflections-as-manifesto and quotations from Sontag, McLuhan, Dewey, Goodman, and others), and Deemer's ideas seemed to catalyze my own discontent with what passed for Composition during the 1980s." 

I love the image of my work being discovered this way (two decades after it was written!). Somehow this is more appropriate than being on a best selling list or something, which offers money but little else; here we have discovery in the shadows and a reaction of being blown away. I have a sense here of actual important "same wave length" communication, which is rather the point of writing in the first place. Here's how I see it, you have faith that someone else can see it the same way.

Writers don't often get concrete evidence that this actually happens. You can get it more often as a playwright if you observe a live audience reacting appropriately. I forever will remember the lights coming up after the first act of my MFA thesis play, when I was in grad school. Facing me across the stage in the small theater in the round was a woman in tears! I had moved her to tears! This actually scared the hell out of me and I spent the second act outside, pacing. What a responsibility! It had not occurred to me. Eventually I accepted it. Okay, let's play hardball.

Special moments, these, reminding me why I spent my life as a writer. It's not about entertaining anyone. It's about engaging someone.