Success as albatross

Many writers, at all levels, have this experience: a "hit" that becomes identified with them, even though the writer feels s/he has "grown beyond" the popular work. In my case, "Christmas at the Juniper Tavern" is such a work.

clipped from www.todayinliterature.com He Do the Police in Different Voices On this day in 1922 T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land was published -- making something of a benchmark for modern literature, given that Joyce's Ulysses and Woolf's Jacob's Room were also published that year. Even before book publication Eliot said that he had grown beyond The Waste Land; when everyone began calling it and him the voice of a generation, or of the Age, he began to regard the poem as an albatross. But running from the label and the attention was to no avail, and as the poem and the poet were placed on an ever-higher pedestal, so each became a larger target for gossip and parody.

Blackbird Wineshop: First Wednesdays

Stopped by last night and met owners Andy and Amelia. What a perfect venue for the new First Wednesdays series! Small, intimate, filled with Amelia's art (and other artists will be featured, i.e. a gallery), and a collection of their favorite wines for sale.

We strive for hand-crafted, small production (5000 cases or less) to insure higher quality.

Reasonably priced, most wines seem to be in the $15-20 range. A really nice wineshop.

So the adventure begins January 2nd! We're excited, they're excited. I've got the Jan. 2nd program set and am working on Feb. 6th. I plan to schedule a few months ahead. Also, Andy has video expertise and a projector, which means we should be able to add to our program a short video now and again, the sort of thing we publish.

The January 2nd program:

Readers: Evelyn Sharenov (nonfiction editor), Joshua Weber (fiction editor), Paul Pintarich, Charles Deemer (editor), folksinger Judith Richmond.

Blackbird is at 3519 NE 44th in Portland, just north of Fremont. If you're coming east out Fremont, 44th is split, the north branch to the left coming before the southern branch. Turn north/left on 44th at the bank, and Blackbird is the next building on the left. Lots of parking along the street.

The first First Wednesday is Jan. 2, 2008, 7-9pm. Be there or be square.

Blackbird Wineshop.

P.S. In less than an hour, I found this posting on Google! Man, they have the world's fastest spider.

Remembering Peter Fornara

Looks like my essay for the anthology is fine. Book due out early in 2008. Looks like a good one, a collection of essays about Oregon and what makes it unique.

At last, a book in OLR

Ever since founding Oregon Literary Review, I've wanted to take advantage of our electronic environment by publishing book-length works. But none have come our way -- until now. Terry Simons, a radical writer, thinker, and playwright, who wrote a teleplay I acted in decades ago, sent me a collection of essays, and I've decided to publish the entire book in our new issue. I expect it might cause a stink. My note suggests why:

From time to time, a large body of writing drops into my lap that impresses me by its energy, iconoclasm and seriousness. Such is the case with the following book of essays by Terry Simons. These essays are radical, idiosyncratic, revisionist -- and I cannot think of an academic publisher who would look at them with favor. However, I think they deserve an audience and so am publishing them. This is a work in progress. CD

What else can be said with a book of essays with titles like "The Essential Spirituality of the Communist Manifesto"? and "Teachers As First Responders." I'm delighted to make this unusual and challenging book available. Its wonderful title is Alt-Everything: Notes on History, Cinema & Education.

Golden Globe nominees

The Globes usually reflect my own tastes more closely than the Oscars do.

HOLLYWOOD FOREIGN PRESS ASSOCIATION 2008 GOLDEN GLOBE AWARDS FOR THE YEAR ENDED DECEMBER 31, 2007


12. BEST SCREENPLAY – MOTION PICTURE

1. DIABLO CODY – JUNO
2. ETHAN COEN & JOEL COEN – NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
3. CHRISTOPHER HAMPTON – ATONEMENT
4. RONALD HARWOOD – THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY
5. AARON SORKIN – CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR


1. BEST MOTION PICTURE – DRAMA

1. AMERICAN GANGSTER
Imagine Entertainment/Scott Free Productions; Universal Pictures
2. ATONEMENT
Working Title Productions; Focus Features
3. EASTERN PROMISES
Kudos Pictures – UK Serendipity Point Films – Canada A UK/Canada Co-Production; Focus Features
4. THE GREAT DEBATERS
Harpo Films; The Weinstein Company/MGM
5. MICHAEL CLAYTON
Clayton Productions LLC; Warner Bros. Pictures
6. NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
A Scott Rudin/Mike Zoss Production; Miramax/Paramount Vantage
7. THERE WILL BE BLOOD
A Joanne Sellar/Ghoulardi Film Company Production; Paramount Vantage and Miramax Films

2. BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A MOTION PICTURE – DRAMA

1. CATE BLANCHETT – ELIZABETH: THE GOLDEN AGE
2. JULIE CHRISTIE – AWAY FROM HER
3. JODIE FOSTER – THE BRAVE ONE
4. ANGELINA JOLIE – A MIGHTY HEART
5. KEIRA KNIGHTLEY – ATONEMENT

3. BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE – DRAMA

1. GEORGE CLOONEY – MICHAEL CLAYTON
2. DANIEL DAY-LEWIS – THERE WILL BE BLOOD
3. JAMES MCAVOY – ATONEMENT
4. VIGGO MORTENSEN – EASTERN PROMISES
5. DENZEL WASHINGTON – AMERICAN GANGSTER

4. BEST MOTION PICTURE – COMEDY OR MUSICAL

1. ACROSS THE UNIVERSE
Revolution Studios International; Sony Pictures Releasing
2. CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR
Universal Pictures/Relativity Media/Participant Productions/Playtone; Universal Pictures
3. HAIRSPRAY
New Line Cinema in association with Ingenious Film Partners; New Line Cinema
4. JUNO
Mandate Pictures/Mr. Mudd Production; Fox Searchlight Pictures
5. SWEENEY TODD
Parkes/Mac Donald and Zanuck Company; Warner Bros. Pictures

5.BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A MOTION PICTURE – COMEDY OR MUSICAL

1. AMY ADAMS – ENCHANTED
2. NIKKI BLONSKY – HAIRSPRAY
3. HELENA BONHAM CARTER – SWEENEY TODD
4. MARION COTILLARD – LA VIE EN ROSE
5. ELLEN PAGE – JUNO

6. BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A MOTION PICTURE – COMEDY OR MUSICAL

1. JOHNNY DEPP – SWEENEY TODD
2. RYAN GOSLING – LARS AND THE REAL GIRL
3. TOM HANKS – CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR
4. PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN – THE SAVAGES
5. JOHN C. REILLY – WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY

7. BEST ANIMATED FEATURE FILM

1. BEE MOVIE
DreamWorks Animation; DreamWorks Animation
2. RATATOUILLE
Pixar; Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Distribution
3. THE SIMPSONS MOVIE
Gracie Films; Twentieth Century Fox

8. BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

1. 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS (ROMANIA)
Mobra Films; IFC First Take
2. THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY (FRANCE AND USA)
A Kennedy/Marshall Company and Jon Kilik Production; Miramax/Paramount Vantage
3. THE KITE RUNNER (USA)
DreamWorks Pictures Sidney Kimmel Entertainment and Paramount Classics Participant Productions Present a Sidney Kimmel Entertainment and Parkes/Macdonald Production Distributed by Paramount Classics
4. LUST, CAUTION (TAIWAN)
Haishang Films; Focus Features
5. PERSEPOLIS (FRANCE)
247 Films; Sony Pictures Classics

9. BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE IN A MOTION PICTURE

1. CATE BLANCHETT – I’M NOT THERE
2. JULIA ROBERTS – CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR
3. SAOIRSE RONAN –ATONEMENT
4. AMY RYAN – GONE BABY GONE
5. TILDA SWINTON – MICHAEL CLAYTON

10. BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE IN A MOTION PICTURE

1. CASEY AFFLECK – THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD
2. JAVIER BARDEM –NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
3. PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN – CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR
4. JOHN TRAVOLTA – HAIRSPRAY
5. TOM WILKINSON – MICHAEL CLAYTON

11. BEST DIRECTOR – MOTION PICTURE

1. TIM BURTON – SWEENEY TODD
2. ETHAN COEN & JOEL COEN – NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
3. JULIAN SCHNABEL – THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY
4. RIDLEY SCOTT – AMERICAN GANGSTER
5. JOE WRIGHT – ATONEMENT


Complete list.

Domain resolution

With extraordinary help from a woman at enom.com, I now have control of the "soft" domain oregonlitrev.org for OLR -- and have pointed it where it needs to go. I am pinching myself that this is resolved. I had kissed a solution off.

Henderson the Rain King

...and Seize the Day are my two favorites from his body of work.

clipped from www.todayinliterature.com Saul Bellow's Human Comedy On this day in 1976 Saul Bellow delivered his speech in acceptance of the Nobel Prize. At this point, Bellow had written only fifteen of his twenty-nine books, but among these are his major prize-winners -- The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), and Humboldt's Gift (1975). These were proof enough, said the Academy, of Bellow's "exuberant ideas, flashing irony, hilarious comedy and burning compassion." His characters are anti-heroes more or less lost in a ram-shackle world, but they keep their chin up even as they stick their neck out, and are funny. In his acceptance speech, Bellow seemed to make an appeal on their behalf, urging modern writers to stick to the human comedy, and build their novels as if "a sort of latter-day lean-to, a hovel in which the spirit takes shelter" from the dehumanizing storm.

A call for readers in the Portland area

Oregon Literary Review is co-hosting a new series of "First Wednesday" readings and wine tastings at the Blackbird Wineshop, 3519 NE 44th at Fremont. Writers interested in being considered to read should contact OLR editor Charles Deemer (charles@oregonliteraryreview.org) with a sample of their work. Readings are the first
Wednesday of each month. We are interested in hearing not only from poets and fiction
writers but from essayists, playwrights, screenwriters, song writers, etc.

First Wednesdays

Oregon Literary Review is going to co-host a new series of readings and wine tasting at the Blackbird Wineshop in Portland on the first Wednesday of each month. We'll start January 2nd, which means we're rushing around to line up some readers. I'll do it, so will our nonfiction editor Evelyn Sharenov, and maybe two others. The wineshop approached me with the idea, and I like it. It puts us on the ground floor of the event with input to shape it in interesting new ways.

Check out Blackbird Wineshop.

Check out Oregon Literary Review.

Editor's hat

Put in a few hours on the new issue of the review this afternoon. Looks like about a 30 or 40 hour job, so I have a good shot at finishing before Christmas, which is my goal. My major disappointment is with the music section, which for the second issue in a row is weak. I need to talk to my music editor about this.

Domain schnomain

And today, this:

12/11/2007 4:30PM EST

One Avenue Networks we have backed out of the Avid Hosting Deal

We wish the best for all those affected. Any questions regarding domains or Websites should be directed to Avid Hosting.

Thank You

One Avenue Networks LLC

Easier said than done -- I've yet to figure out how to contact the vanished Avid.

Chris Connor at Quinnipiac College

Mary Flower's Terminal Rag

Remembering Paul deLay

Santa Tells the Christmas Story

Testing one click add service.

Sanctuary

I went to my office this morning -- it was so quiet! Tied together loose ends from last term and did some research for background music for a video on Wordstock that I'm making from footage shot by Primus. This definitely is our "video issue," with many additions to Julie's usual good work in the area.

Domain II

One Avenue changed the URL address of their info site without providing a link from the old to the new. At the new is this:

UPDATE 12/10/2007: Avid Hosting Servers with Customer Records and Web Data were delivered by FedEx at 9:30 AM EST, we are in the process of unpacking and sorting the servers in order to restore service.

One likes to be hopeful that this gigantic mess might actually be resolved, but I'll believe it when I see it. I think we're losing about 20 or 30 visitors a day because of the screw up. Not the end of the world.

Domain soap opera

Will this never end? The latest ...

This is all very disconcerting, IMO. Originally there was a form at Avidhosting.com. Then that page was forwarded to http://avidhosting.oneavenue.com and One Avenue Networks mentioned they had "obtained control of all active avidhosting clients....etc.. I can't quote that because the link is no longer on the server!!!! Why is IT gone too?? What is going on here?

The above is quoted from avidhosting.org, a site put up by another avidhosting.com victim who is documenting this continuing mess. I have no idea how many websites have been screwed up by them. Fortunately, I was able to upload everything to a different host quickly ... but the problem remains that the avid URL, which alas is what most folks bookmarked, now goes nowhere and will continue to until I can get control of the domain, which after all I own, but to do this, to transfer it, I need the cooperation of avid, which doesn't exist. Catch-22.

Term break

I just finished up my grading. The term break officially begins. I have almost a month off, a time to get a lot of writing and reading done. We're taking off to the coast for a couple days but otherwise staying close to home.

I'm on an Edward Albee kick. Have a tall stack of books, mainly interviews and prose pieces but also the last volume of his collected plays.

When winter term begins, I hope to have drafts of a new screenplay and new stage play. Once I do this, I bring fiction front burner and finish the novel draft, hopefully before summer.

Liquor and Its Discontents

Those who drink more booze than is good for them, whether addicted alcoholics or not, react across a broad spectrum of behaviors and physical consequences. No doubt genetics play a role in this. I appear to have been blessed with good equipment in this regard, which is why I'm healthier today than I have a right to be. This comes to mind because I just got off the phone with someone who was dealt a bad deck and at 50 already has major health issues brought about by alcohol abuse.

It makes no sense that he should suffer more than I. So many things in life make no sense to the rational mind. I call it luck of the draw; others would say God's will. But my friend, with a kid starting college and his own business he now has little energy to run, is in a personal and financial crisis. He gets very down on himself for "wasting his life drinking," as he puts it. If he gets through this, however, he may be able to come to his past with a different perspective.

I have as many good memories of drinking as bad ones, which is not the sort of thing alcohol counselors like to hear. But I was never a very good "treatment student." Try suggesting the exchange of the Lord's Prayer with a Buddhist chant in an AA meeting ha ha. I'm an existentialist, which means I take full responsibility for bad behavior and don't take the excuse of being powerless or a victim. I know how addiction works: a little like gravity. But you don't have to throw yourself off the cliff in the first place.

At any rate, it's sad to see my friend suffering so much. He's got a lot to live for and I hope the gods of fate cut him a break.

The Decline of the West

For some time, I've had this vague notion of how history works: cultures progress, and as they do, they lose their appetite for war. Unfortunately, this makes them inferior warriors, so that when challenged by "inferior" cultures in which warriors are valued, eventually they face an enemy that defeats them. Thus Greece fell. Thus Rome fell. And so on. And the pattern repeats itself throughout history.

Here is a recent book that articulates this logic much better than I can.

The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam's Threat to the West
Lee Harris
Basic Books, NY, 2007

This is not a pleasant book to read because the news is bad. But I believe it's an important book and that Harris' insights are mostly true. Excerpts:

The approach this book will take is that there is no guarantee of inevitable progress because the law of the jungle can never be abolished, though it can be, and has been, ameliorated by various cultural traditions including our own. There can be no hope of an end of history or of a golden age in which men will no longer be driven to conflict and struggle. Furthermore, there can be no guarantee that these struggles will be merely inconclusive "clashes" between civilizations. On the contrary, there is every reason to assume that future struggles will end in the triumph of one civilization and the demise of another. The first Arab conquerors did not clash with the Sassanian Empire_they absorbed and transformed it. The Ottomans did not clash with the Byzantine Empire_they conquered it and remade it in their own image. The Spanish did not clash with the Aztec civilization_they annihilated it. The Anglo-Saxons in North America did not clash with the native American cultures_they wiped them out.

---

If the modern liberal West is to survive, it must begin by recognizing the laws of power that govern the jungle. Even if it does not wish to obey these laws, it must know them. For example, it must clearly understand that our own liberal and popular cultures of reason are serendipitous exceptions to these laws; they must not be taken as evidence that the laws of the jungle are destined to wither away. Where the tribe is a person's only guarantee of security and defense, men will continue to rely on their tribes, and they will act as tribal actors because it is the rational thing for them to do. On the other hand, the rational actor cannot exist unless his whole society has managed somehow to escape the laws of the jungle; hence, the rational actor must recognize that if he is to remain a rational actor, he must be willing to defend at all cost the traditions and institutions of the society that permits him this option. If he is deluded into believing that all men are rational actors by nature, then he will be clueless when confronted with the tribal actor, whose conduct and behavior will make no sense to him. Worse, because the rational actor will be tempted to dismiss the tribal actor as behaving irrationally, the rational actor will fail to see that it is the tribal actor, and not himself, who is acting rationally in terms of the universal struggle for survival and supremacy.

When art + commerce = farce

clipped from www.todayinliterature.com Poetry, Ford in Head-On Crash On this day in 1955, American poet Marianne Moore submitted the last of the names that she had contracted to provide to the Ford Motor Company for the new car they were about to launch. What they got was "Anticipator," "Thunder Crester," "Pastelogram," "Intelligent Whale," "The Resilient Bullet," "Mongoose Civique," "Andante con Moto," "Varsity Stroke" and then, as her very last try for the name magic, "Utopian Turtletop." None of the final contenders, neither "Corsair" nor "Citation" nor "Ranger" nor "Pacer," made the grade in the end, and Ford returned to its better, much earlier idea: the Edsel. Moore was almost a cult figure in America during the 50s and 60s, known as much for her love of baseball (sometimes throwing the first pitch) and prize fights (sometimes dining with Cassius Clay), as for her Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry.

9 years ago today...

...my best friend died. It doesn't feel like almost a decade ago, perhaps because his presence is still strong. The experience of time is strange indeed.

Translation?

Christmas at the Juniper Tavern (Taschenbuch)
von Charles Deemer (Autor)

Noch keine Kundenrezensionen vorhanden: Schreiben Sie die erste!

The domain soap opera continues

Now if you try to go to Avid Hosting, you get this:

As of 12/8/2007 One Avenue Networks Obtained Control of all Active Avid Hosting Clients

On 12/10/2007 all the Web Servers previously owned and Managed by Avid Hosting will be in the One Avenue Networks Tampa, Florida Data Center.

Our plans are to have all the Servers and Websites online no later than Friday 12/14/2007, this is a wide estimate in order to compensate for all that can go wrong during a large scale migration.

This will be interesting. I just want to get control of the domain so I can change its redirection.

There's no accounting for taste

H and I can't agree on a movie to see, so we're going to the same theater, going to two different films, and fortunately come out within minutes of one another.

She wants to see I'M NOT THERE. This sounds too cute for me. Besides, I recently saw an excellent documentary about Dylan at the Newport Folk Festivals and don't want to spoil the memory of it.

I want to see NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. This sounds too dark for her. Heavy dramas and dark comedies, my favorite two genres, are not her thing.

Also in the taste department: got a phone call from H's brother-in-law, who loved Juniper Tavern. What's nice about this is that he's lived on the east coast all his life and doesn't know or remember squat about the Rajneeshi. Around here, folks still put the story in the context of our local history, which reduces its reach. Here we have someone who appreciates it for its broader appeal. I like that.

I thank the gods of serendipity for the two major accidents that make it even available to watch today: the young director who got it done in the first place, which never would have happened if a. he weren't in Portland to see his girlfriend while the play was running and b. he didn't have the personal connections to get it to Oregon Public Television on very short notice; and a writer friend finding a VHS tape of the television premier and giving it to me so I could make a DVD and get it on the web. So easily none of this could have happened, and JT would be another play that comes and goes without dynamic visual record.

Indeed, just about everything that's happened in my career to a significant positive degree has been accidental. You have to have the right material -- but you also have to be in the right place at the right time with it. You only control the former. And "right material" is defined by something YOU value. Alas, my dramatic and entertainment values are in a small minority in this culture.

Along the same lines, my agent recently shared that film executives are asking him all the time if he has anything like Little Miss Sunshine. Interesting. Maybe the commercial moral is, whenever there's an odd hit, something different, quickly clone it and send it out.

I am hoping this for THE BRAZEN WING, which my agent was marketing before the strike and will continue to market after the strike. The upcoming THE BUCKET LIST is a male-male version of the same kind of story, getting a terminal illness and doing all you can before it strikes. With Freeman-Nicholson, this may be a hit. If it is, then BW is in the same genre and of the same spirit. (And may have been there first, actually.) Interesting.

Symptoms

clipped from www.todayinliterature.com Salinger, Lennon, Browning On this day in 1980 Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon outside his New York City apartment building. There are two books by him (In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works), and many about him, but the book which will forever be associated with Lennon is The Catcher in the Rye. At the trial, he killed because he was too Holden, his pre-sentence statement being a reading aloud of the passage from the text which begins, "Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all...." And months afterwards Chapman was happily handing out autographed copies of the book from the supply he kept in his cell. last week four bidders met the half-million dollar asking price for the "Double Fantasy" album which Lennon autographed for Chapman just hours before being shot. This was found on the ground at the murder scene, and as it was used in evidence at Chapman's trial, it boasts his "forensically enhanced" fingerprints.

34 years of Christmas jazz

We had a delightful night, seeing jazz pianist Jeannie Hoffman and bassist David Friesen in their 34th season of performing holiday jazz, last night with a drummer and alto sax player in the intimate "performance room" next to O'Conners restaurant in Multnomah Village. I last saw them about 20 years ago. For a decade before that, when Hoffman was the house pianist at the Left Bank saloon, I came by regularly for a pitcher of beer, a bucket of clams, and a request of "I'll Remember April," a routine with me then. The Multnomah performance space is intimate, 40 a full house, and we had dinner, both loving our orders. I'd never heard of Jambalaya Macaroni and Cheese but it was excellent.

H is so damn busy, we don't get out often for a night like this, and it was great fun. We were seated next to a couple almost our age, whose passion is doing the Argentine Tango -- he told me all the differences between it and the "inferior" American version of the dance. I didn't realize Portland was a big tango town but he said the international tango convention is often here, that you can tango any night of the week in Portland, and a typical ballroom will draw 50-100 tango dancers.

I like Multnomah Village. It hasn't changed all that much since 1967 when I briefly lived here, the year I dropped out of grad school to "become a writer" and succeeded. Left a PhD candidate, returned an MFA candidate, first in fiction, finally in playwriting.

Just a wonderful night. And later in the month we're having a fellow in my piano class and his wife over for dinner. He and I laugh a lot. Always a good sign. We have similar senses of humor and spend a lot of before class, and even in class, time cracking one another up.

A great loss, a new adventure

Today is the last day at The Oregonian for senior critic Bob Hicks. Hicks was the drama critic in the 80s, who didn't always like what I was doing on stage but often did and was a staunch supporter in either case. He was a good writer and a fair critic, the best I've seen in Portland since I've been here. He's been at the paper for 34 years, so it's understandable he's ready to move on. He says he'll be doing some freelance writing. I wouldn't be surprised if we read even better things from him now that he's free of the paper.

Here's an example of his work, in this case in support of my play, Christmas at the Juniper Tavern.

"Juniper Tavern" is topical, philosophical, very funny, and crafted with great skill. It goes beyond local effort and stands as a fully professional play that could be produced and enjoyed anywhere.

This is when Portland was just beginning to spread its theater wings, ready to get national attention. Indeed, if the building of the Performing Arts Center hadn't pulled the rug out from this growth, if instead of theater in that artifice they had restricted it to the symphony and such, embracing an alternative option to link downtown theater companies with a trolley car, creating a theater district -- oh if this, if this, then Portland would have challenged Louisville for being the most progressive theater city in the country. But money talks and the money behind the PAC demanded theater there. So, predictably, within a few years, all but one of the thriving Portland theater companies were bankrupt. When will they ever learn? Never.

An irony to all this: before the transition happened, a Seattle writer came down and reviewed the Portland theater scene (including my play about Moliere) and found it more daring than Seattle's, from which he talked about the disadvantages of building theater edifices for professional companies.

But Portland has come full circle and once again there are homes for new plays here, though the context is very different because the times are so different. I still call the 80s the Golden Age of Portland theater, and I'm not alone.

Bob Hicks, when I interviewed him for my essay on Peter Fornara, put it this way:

Those were great days for Portland theater [i.e. 1980s], with an enduring value that hasn’t been matched overall since then. I believe Fornara, more than anyone else, stands for the best of what Portland theater has been.

Amen to that.

Frantic Friday

A very busy day, and busy weekend, ahead, piano class, grading, trying to tie loose ends together. It may be Saturday or even Sunday before I get all my grades in. I'm about 80% done.

I have a huge, HUGE amount of work to do in order to get the new issue of Oregon Literary Review out by the end of the year. Not editing stuff so much as computer coding stuff. Geek stuff. But it's always satisfying to see it all come together.

I'm working on getting the old domain straightened out, jumping through hoops. Access to OLR has really been down since the crash of the old host.

I thought I was retired as a playwright but an idea for a three-character play came to me in almost whole cloth, and I really like it. I suppose I could write it and stick it in the archive. I don't think I have the energy for all the networking that's required to get a play produced; I'm definitely, absolutely, in the "solitary" mode of my writing career, my way or the highway, and doing as much as possible that requires no help from anyone at all. Maybe, if I actually start writing plays again, I could think of them as a body of unproduced posthumous work. There have been playwrights (O'Neill comes to mind) who did some of their best work this way.

A remarkable writer

Thornton Wilder is greatly under-estimated and under-appreciated today. His play are remarkable in their form and dramaturgy but curiously influenced European theater far more than American theater (Durrenmatt, my favorite playwright, was influenced by Wilder). And he's our ONLY writer to win Pulitzers for both fiction and drama.

clipped from www.todayinliterature.com Wilder and the Lost Generation On this day in 1975 Thornton Wilder died, at the age of seventy-eight. Wilder is the only person to receive Pulitzer Prizes for both literature (The Bridge of San Luis Rey, 1927) and drama (Our Town, 1938; The Skin of Our Teeth, 1943). Add his The Merchant of Yonkers (evolved to The Matchmaker, then Hello, Dolly) to the list and it becomes clear what critics such as Edmund Wilson are talking about: "Wilder occupies a unique position, between the Great Books and Parisian sophistication one way, and the entertainment industry the other way, and in our culture this region, though central, is a dark and almost uninhabited no man's land." Which is to say that while most of Wilder's contemporaries were building their reputations upon Lost Generation despair, he went his own popular, warm-hearted, life-affirming way.

Haiku

Have you discovered Haiku Nurse's daily haiku yet? Examples:

12/03/2007
why do I do this
every day laboring
over a few words

11/13/2007
women when they talk
pause to emphasize deep thought
hoping to appeal

11/04/2007
they say books are dead
let me be buried
my eyes see by reflection

10/29/2007
he says he can't think
without the radio on
silence distracts him

And then it played ...

clipped from news.yahoo.com Toyota shows violin-playing robot TOKYO - Compared to a virtuoso, its rendition was a trifle stilted and, well, robotic. But Toyota's new robot plays a pretty solid "Pomp and Circumstance" on the violin. The 5-foot-tall all-white robot, shown Thursday, used its mechanical fingers to press the strings correctly and bowed with its other arm, coordinating the movements well.

Interesting idea

But will they have the inventory to pull it off? Or just deal with popular books?

clipped from seattlepi.nwsource.com Paperspine aims to be a Netflix for books Founder envisions online rental service for readers By JOHN COOK P-I REPORTER Paperspine is trying to do for books what Netflix did for DVDs. In fact, Dustin Hubbard -- the Microsoft Corp. program manager who co-founded the Issaquah startup on a leave of absence this summer -- said he was inspired by the online movie rental company when he came up with the idea. Subscribers can check out up to five books at a time. Like Netflix there are no late fees, and members return books in a prepaid envelope. They also can browse by category, say history, romance or science fiction. "If you read four or five books a year, the service is not that useful," he says. "But if you read one or two or more books a month the service really pays for itself."

Go to Paperspine.

Winesburg, Ohio

From National Public Radio:

Tom Perrotta, author of Election, Little Children and most recently The Abstinence Teacher, chooses a Sherwood Anderson classic, Winesburg, Ohio.

"In the American imagination, small-town life provides an antidote to the cold anonymity of the city," Perrotta writes. "But Winesburg, Ohio feels like a village full of eccentric strangers desperate for a moment of connection."

Perrotta re-read Anderson's 1919 story collection not long ago.

"It made me remember what it felt like to be a high-school sophomore, wandering the quiet night-time streets of my hometown, slowly coming to realize that the people I knew were more complicated and interesting than they appeared," he writes. "Sherwood Anderson's strange and beautiful book made me remember why I'd wanted to be a writer in the first place."

Jeremiah Rickert, a former student of mine and current contributing columnist to OLR, wrote a fine screenplay adaptation of this classic.

Winesburg, Ohio, the screenplay.

Call it a day

I've done about as much reading and grading as I can take in a day, so I'll finish up tomorrow what I didn't get done today. A couple students didn't complete their work, always a hassle. Time to watch a movie or, better, something mindless.

Domain melodrama

When I decided to start Oregon Literary Review a couple years ago, the first thing I did was purchase the domain oregonliteraryreview.org, amazed actually that it was available. Then I looked around for a web host. I didn't want to host it at the university because I wanted total control.

I settled on Avid Hosting, a company with a good track record at the time. Then I did something I'm thankful for: instead of transferring the domain to Avid, I opened a new free domain there, oregonlitrev.org, and directed the former to the latter. I can't remember why I did this except that the original domain was at Yahoo! and I liked the interface there. I didn't know what I'd be getting into at Avid.

The downside of this is that those making bookmarks or creating links to OLR usually used the Avid domain, not my original domain. I always told people to use the full original one but then they'd see the actual address as oregonlitrev.org and use that. This now has caused problems.

Avid sold out and apparently the new owner is a notorious Internet King of Porn and Scams. The site immediately went down -- and of course, all the sites it hosted went down as well. Phones weren't answered. No email possible. Snail mail ignored. You get the picture.

Meanwhile oregonlitrev.org can't be transfered because the administration of it is at Avid.

Frustration!

Of course, I have EVERYTHING backed up on my hard drive. So I found another web host and uploaded everything there -- oregonliteraryreview.org, the full preferable domain, goes there. The Avid domain still goes nowhere.

But I'm thinking, there must be a way for me to get control of oregonlitrev.org again since theoretically I own it. But how?

The wondrous Internet! It didn't take long to find a forum filled with Avid victims who also wanted control of their domains back. And lo! a few found out how to do this and shared the info -- but you needed proof of purchase. I had all the original receipts, of course, so I just zapped them off to the company that apparently can fix this. If I can get control of oregonlitrev.org again, then I can redirect it and all will be back to normal.

What an adventure.

Moral: if you link to Oregon Literary Review, use oregonliteraryreview.org, which always will be correct.

Famous last words? Well, correct as long as Yahoo! is around.

The bigger picture.

To the midpoint

Did a little work on the new splay and I'm 50 pages in, about to the midpoint. Looking good so far, I think.

Will spend the day reading finals. First, back for a couple more hours of snooze.

Tony N' Tina's Wedding

A film version opens today -- and I can't imagine a film version of a hyperdrama being very interesting. This has been the most popular hyperdrama by far, but it's not a "pure hyperdrama" the way Tamara, which popularized the new form in the 1980s, or my own hyperdrama (I've had seven produced but my most ambitious, The Seagull Hyperdrama, is unproduced and probably never will get produced, given the difficulty of staging this expansion of the Chekhov classic). T&T relies more on improvisation than my scripted work.

But the commercial attraction of T&T was at least half "for the form." Here's a blurb that emphasizes this:

At Tony n' Tina's Wedding, audience members actually play the roles of Tony n' Tina's family and/or friends. These are roles we have all been practicing, every time we go to a real wedding. This universal familiarity with the union of two individuals from 2 distinct families, regardless as to where you are from, will take you back and forth between fantasy and reality throughout the entire evening. For the ultimate experience... eat, drink, dance, converse and allow yourself to be caught up in the activities. This all inclusive evening of entertainment will be something you and your friends will be talking about for many years to come.

The concept here is brilliant in commercial terms. Tamara, in contast, is a serious play set in Facist Italy. I've done so much work in this area that I've tried a variety of story genres, from satire and comedy to drama and even a musical (one of the three plays within Cocktail Suite).

But I don't know if the story alone is enough to carry T&T the movie. We'll find out soon enough.

More about hyperdrama.

Waking to wealth

Here's the sort of astounding news that typically greets me when I check email:

In this regards we are going to send your contract part payment of
4.1Million UNITED STATES DOLLAR.
...
RIGHT NOW I ARRANGED YOUR PAYMENT OF($1.500)ONE MILLION FIVE HUNDRED
THOUSAND
UNITED STATES DOLLARS THROUGH SWIFT CARD PAYMENT CENTER DEPT HERE IN
OUR
BANK
...
I have contacted my secretary to confirm if you have received the
compensation
draft cheque of (US$1.500.000) which I issued in your name,

And this is what sneaks through my spam filters. 7.1 million dollars! Not a bad start on the day. Isn't it great to be lucky?

Need a cat in Portland?

Nurse Fusion found a lovable stray.

Santa tells the Christmas Story

Santa is played by the late B. Joe Medley, an actor who died with his boots on (i.e. in costume and makeup in the dressing room after a show).

Into the stretch

Pick up finals in a little over an hour ... many students turned them in early in my box. Met with Primus regarding last minute OLR things. I have my work cut out for me, getting the new issue up before January 1, but I enjoy computer grunt work now and again, and the goal -- a superb new issue -- is a great motivator. I like all the video in the new issue, indeed it might be called our "video issue." Not only in the Video section proper but throughout the journal.

Also, I have syllabus revisions to do over the break, too. And my writing. Ah, a busy time. But I love busy times. The more distractions from Realpolitik the better, ha ha.

Escape

Except for minor flooding in the basement, we survived the storm, at least so far. I think the brunt is over but there's more rain forecast for today.

clipped from news.yahoo.com Storm leaves closed roads, outages in NW PORTLAND, Ore. - Downed trees, mudslide-blocked roads and widespread power outages plagued the Northeast Tuesday, a day after the second of back-to-back storms moved out of region and left residents with a massive cleanup. The storm that hit Monday smacked the region with hurricane-force winds and several inches of rain, and was blamed for four deaths in Oregon and Washington state. It came only a day after another severe system moved through Sunday.

Fame v. Marginality

The recent piece below on Tennessee Williams, especially its commentary on the end of his career, reminds me how fickle "fame" can be. The most blatant personal example I know is the case of Robert Sheckley. While he was still alive, I had the pleasure of spending time with him over coffee a couple times as he lamented about how difficult his professional and personal lives had become. Indeed, the last time he asked me out for coffee, he wanted to know if I knew of any inexpensive places to live in Portland. Not any more.

Now here is a giant science-fiction writer, one of the top writers in the Golden Age of Scifi. He was one of my favorite writers when I was in high school, so meeting him many years later was like meeting a hero. I couldn't believe it when he told me how he couldn't get published any more, had resorted to publishing himself on the Internet, even though he still was welcome in scifi conferences around the world. His work hadn't deteriorated. The marketplace had changed.

Robert Sheckley is one of the great science fiction writers of the last fifty years. His satiric wit and graceful prose are as refreshing today as ever. From humorous Science Fiction to off-beat, soft-boiled crime, much of his work has a meaningful playfulness which has thus far gone unmatched.

---

You are enchiladas with salsa.
Bad jokes and too many cigarettes.
Old stories retold with relish
A wrinkled smile
and crinkled eyes.

Half remembered plot twists
Naughty thoughts about this or that
Joy and broken hearts
Friends who are strangers
And stranger friends.

We talk about family
Lost and estranged
We talk about Europe
Days in the sun
Days in the rain.

There's not much science in illness
Nor compassion in pain
One leads to another back and forth
By some twisted route
Toward happiness fictional and real.

If only the stories
Could come true as we wrote them
If only we could craft those ironic endings
With that twinge of harsh recognition
Wrapped in a giggle.

For you, I think,
I'll remember the enchiladas
And remember the laughs
And remember the crinkled eyes
And perceive the tears as rain to make things grow.

Edward Summer
Dec 10, 2005
New York, NY

To a lesser degree, I experienced the same thing myself, as I'm reminded as I scan items in my literary scrapbooks, most of which are from the 1980s. There was a time when columnists contacted me just to know what I was working on. How extraordinary! I don't know a columnist who would give me the time of day today. Many writers, of course, get no taste of "fame" at all, however small, so what you get, you have to be thankful for. But it's a curious phenomenon in this star-driven culture.

None of this would matter except for the fact that fame inevitably increases a writer's audience, and the name of the game is communication, at least for most writers. Sometimes the audience is abstract: those who like x will like my work, eventually. The work has to be visible, it has to be accessible, to be appreciated. The revolution of the Internet surely will reveal startling accomplishments in the future, things written today and lost in cyberspace, discovered decades later. The private drawer of Emily Dickinson today might be some obscure website somewhere.

Of course, fame also has disadvantages, most severely the more famous you get, I think. Few writers ever reach this plateau (compared to movie stars or politicians). You lose privacy.

Well, writers surely know about privacy. Privacy and isolation are their bedfellows much of the time. Fame is the exception, not the rule, for most of us.

But it makes no more actual sense how you got it than how you lost it. A writer keeps writing, and how the chips fall is how the chips fall. A mystery.

Legacy of a miserable life

And not the first.

clipped from www.todayinliterature.com Cornell Woolrich and the Noir Life On this day in 1903 the crime writer Cornell Woolrich was born. Woolrich (sometimes as "William Irish" or "George Hopley") wrote two dozen novels and over two hundred stories, most of them so dark that he has been called "the Poe of the 20th century." Looking at the many movies made from his work -- most famously, Hitchcock's Rear Window and Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black -- many have also dubbed him the "Father of Film Noir." After examining every book, story and movie (and cataloguing over 120 television and radio adaptations), Francis Nevins Jr. titles his biography of Woolrich, First You Dream, Then You Die -- a story title that Woolrich proposed to himself but never used, and that all too appropriately captures his odd, obscure and sometimes creepy life.

First hoop

Two waves of student work arrive at the end of the term: their term scripts and the final exam, which usually is an essay. I'm just about through the first of these, will finish up this morning, and I collect their finals this afternoon.

This also is an unusually busy week in other parts of my life, so I may not get my grades in by Friday as I had hoped. But I'll give it a shot. If not, by the weekend.

I'm almost to the midpoint in the new screenplay. Definitely want a good draft done before winter term begins.

Video for scientists

A number of specialized video-exchange sites are available for scientists. Among them are:

• SciVee, "make your research known."
  
• Lab Action, sharing lab experiments.
  
• DNATube, "a visual scientific resource."
  

Writing v. Having written

Some writer of note, the name escapes me, said that he didn't like writing but liked having written.

I'm the opposite. Maybe it's the difference between being famous and being marginal. At any rate, I love being obsessed about my work, living completely within its parameters. What I don't like is finishing, being proud of what I've done, and then looking around to discover that nobody actually gives a shit. Well, it's not always this way -- but it's more like this the older I get. The only response is to go back into the cave of work on another project. If you keep busy, you don't have to look around very often; you create a solipsistic reality.

A Cyber Poem

Advice to an Artist on Choosing a Wife is several years old. I woke one morning with the poem complete in my head, on a whim sent it off to the Oregonian's poetry page, where it appeared shortly thereafter. Almost never happens this way. Later, I coded it as a series of automatically renewing pages, "a cyber poem."

TW's journey

Click link below for complete story. The loneliness of which Williams speaks is not uncommon among writers and artists, I think. Something about the difference between reach and grasp, in a less romantic context than Tennyson wrote about. Recommended.

clipped from www.todayinliterature.com Tennessee Williams and Desire When 28 year-old Tom Williams finally left his parents' Missouri home, he headed for New Orleans, for a new life as a writer, a newly-realized sexual identity as a homosexual, even a new first name: Tennessee. As he describes it in his Memoirs, the exchange of his mother's "monolithic puritanism" and the middle-class Midwest for the bars and bohemians of New Orleans was a late coming of age, as a person and a writer. He lived and wrote among the artists and prostitutes and working poor of the French Quarter, in a neighbourhood where the streetcars had names. A decade later, Williams would turn a streetcar named "Desire" into one of the most famous plays in 20th century American theatre, and a Pulitzer Prize.

Teaser

A 4-minute teaser for my 2-hour adult comedy.

1984 comedy now online

The original 1984 public television telecast of Christmas at the Juniper Tavern can now be viewed online. It went on to win an ACE award (the cable Emmys) for producer Charles Jennings.

Finishing touches

At the office, a break from reading scripts, to upload the Juniper Tavern files. Will take a couple hours.

When pop and lit converge

Although most "popular authors" get forgotten, not all do. A few are both popular and accepted into the club of immortal literati.

clipped from www.todayinliterature.com Dickens in America On this day in 1867 Charles Dickens gave the first reading of his American tour. Like all but a few over the five months, the evening was a sell-out, some having slept out overnight to beat a ticket line almost a half-mile long. This first-night audience included all the great and triple-named of the New England literary elite -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton -- though not all were impressed. Emerson complained that the performance was too polished for his taste, as Twain would say later that the New Year's Eve reading he attended was but "glittering frostwork." But this was the minority view, and from two used to getting the lecture-hall praise and dollars that now went to Dickens -- some $140,000 profit for this tour, and an estimated two million dollars in today's money for Dickens's last two years of readings at home and abroad.

A season of upsets

The last week of the regular college football season. If #1 Missouri and #2 West Virginia win their games, they play one another for the championship.

On paper, this should be a snap for WV. They are 28-pt favorites over Pitt, playing at home. The previous week they had over 600 yards of offense. So what happens? Lowly Pitt shuts them down -- and the 28 pt underdog wins, spoils the party, and leaves the packed home stadium stunned. It's that kind of season.

Moreover, as I write, #1 Missouri is being beaten by Oklahoma. So this week's top two teams may not end up in the championship game after all. It's that kind of season.

Unfortunately, this means #3 Ohio State goes to the championship game. Being raised in Rose Bowl country, I don't root for Big 10 teams.

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (AP) -- The curse of No. 2 claimed another victim.

West Virginia is out of the national title race. Ohio State is in.

In a season defined by upsets, Pittsburgh came up with an enormous one, beating the second-ranked Mounatineers 13-9 Saturday night to throw another curveball at the BCS.

A win away from playing for the national championship, the Moutaineers were expected to roll over rival Pittsburgh (5-7) on their way to New Orleans for the Bowl Championship Series title game.

Oh, yes. my MFA alma mater Oregon lost to Oregon State as well, a sort of upset since the home team usually wins. But Oregon was wearing one of their worse designer uniforms, the one with the day-glo puke yellow helmets, so they looked like losers before the game even began.

Enduring myths

Surely the most enduring myth associated with writers and artists: the misunderstood, tortured, sensitive soul in pursuit of Truth and Beauty, in a sordid world of the commonplace.

clipped from www.todayinliterature.com Tortured Romantics On this day in 1821 Percy Shelley's "Adonais," his elegy to John Keats, was published in England in the Literary Chronicle. The poem has become a cornerstone document for those interested in Shelley (left) or Keats, or in all that is best and incredible in Romanticism. By linking Keats's death at the age of twenty-five to the Adonis myth, Shelley helped immortalize the idea of the 'tortured Romantic,' he who has one eye upwards on the pursuit of Beauty and Truth, and one downwards on all that is in pursuit of him.

Rethinking an old passion

A former student reminded me that the Juniper Tavern material could be reshaped for an unusual, entertaining holiday comedy. I've thought the same thing myself, the issue being whether to make it "a family film" as most are. This would cut the logger-soul out of the piece. So I don't want to go that way with it. However, I've thought of a new approach for an adult comedy and may pursue it after I finish the romantic thriller I'm working on now for my agent. The entire story strategy has to be different for film, and I feel like I'm getting a handle on a workable approach.

I don't know why I'm up at this hour. Need a few more hours sleep, and the Army-Navy game starts early, 9 a.m. Have pig's feet thawing for the blackeyed peas. A great day for cooking and games, a day off before I seriously hit my students' final projects on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. Tuesday I pick up their finals. I hope to have my grades in next Friday. Then it's a month off until Winter term begins, a time filled with editing chores and writing projects.

The blogger I read most often is rebelling against the Internet. Nothing wrong with that. But what will I check up on every morning?