Here’s something that I can’t imagine I would have said when I was in graduate school:  I like writing to spec.

I do it now for a living — writing all sorts of things for clients with my firm Counterintuity — and I did it for years as a newspaper editor and freelancer. (For the LA Times and others, book reviews had to be a certain length; as an editor, headlines and captions had to be a certain size to fit.)

But for some reason, it never occurred to me how liberating it could be to write plays this way. In the past few years, though, I’ve fallen into the habit and it’s been oddly liberating. Instead of staring at a blank screen and wondering what was on my mind that I didn’t know about, the prompt has become:  “We need a play that fits these requirements, in this timeframe, and works this way. Can you do it?” The parameters in these instances direct you to solutions.

In the most recent example, I was asked to write a short play that was 50% silent and that takes place in a very constrained space. That was fun. I had numerous launching-pad ideas, drilled down into one, started writing it, then my wife called form work and actually happened to give me what I thought was a better idea. I finished it and sent it.

While in that mode of mind,  I happened to be on Facebook and responded to a comment left on my wall that “that sounds like the title of a play. I should write that.” Within minutes, I had an email from an actor friend of 15 years saying, essentially, “Seriously. You should write that. Let’s have lunch.” and linking me to a set of guidelines for a theatre series here in LA where this play might fit.

Now I just got an email about someone else looking for a short play with very specific guidelines. I’m considering writing one. Even if they don’t take it, someone will.

We talk a lot about breaking the rules and going outside the box and coloring outside the lines. I understand why that’s appealing. But many artists far greater than we are forged great work within those rules, that box, those lines.

My friend Bill is an actor and playwright. Here’s something he just shared:

My mother, Florence, ninety, passed away tonight after a long illness. I was in rehearsal three thousand miles away. She said she’d see us on the other side but had “to go to a summer job.” She asked where was I, her eldest son. My siblings told her that I was starring in a show. She smiled and passed away, they tell me. I loved her very much, she was my initial audience, my reader, my safe harbor, my inspiration, my teacher.

Dramatists live for good dialogue, strong images, and fitting resolutions. I love Florence’s line that she had “to go to a summer job.” (Great metaphor!) And then, when she hears that her son is starring in a show, she smiles and passes away. Great exit.

First there was cut-up, courtesy of Brion Gysin, which gave us new poetry without human direction.

Then there were spambots, delivering broken and elliptical little messages culled from people’s hard drives and issued out across the world like dented sperm trying to take root.

Now, I predict, we’re entering an age where Apple’s new virtual assistant Siri will be composing blank verse for us. Here’s an example, from my Facebook Friend (capital “f”) Terry Kinney (have we met, Terry? I think so):

I’m well and out I just like that Destrier 520 to pick up 123 why did you kill a cloud through proximate lead again. We’ll be looking”

Terry reports that Siri was apparently texting this message to Terry’s friend Doug.

Looks like the language poets like Jorie Graham can call it a day. They’ve been replaced.

Early this evening, just before running down to Moving Arts for the latest set of readings from my playwriting workshop, I finished Julian Barnes’ new novel, The Sense of an Ending. I was deeply struck by the book, which among other things concerns 40 years’ of misunderstandings by our narrator and his immediate circle. Things that happen during school days and immediately afterward are reinterpreted decades later with emotionally devastating results for the protagonist. Much of the book concerns emails back and forth between that protagonist and a former paramour. And tonight, before those readings, I received an email that showed just how deft and resonant the novel is.

The night before, I had gone to a reading by my friend, and also my grad-school professor, David Scott Milton. David’s new novel, Iron City, has just been published by another friend of mine, Christopher Meeks, who is also a former student of David’s.  I took my 9-year-old son Dietrich with me, and bought him a couple of books to keep him occupied and also distracted from what I imagined, judging from David’s previous work, would be a  reading from a novel with lots of sex and violence (an assumption proved right, as the detective in his novel haggles over money with a bar full of prostitutes. Dietrich asked me later what a prostitute is and I told him, “A person who has sex for money,” to which he replied, “Oh, that’s right.” No doubt I had already explained this to him. Or he’d heard it on TV. Or on the playground. Who knows? There’s no sense in saving anything for adulthood any more.) At the reading, I also saw one of my own former grad students. I was surprised to see her, but went up to her and embraced her and said hello. Immediately after the reading I looked for her, but couldn’t find her; evidently she had left right away, and somehow I knew it was because of me. When I got home, I emailed her:

Subject: Nice seeing you tonight.

Nice seeing you tonight, however briefly. I looked for you afterward — wanted to find out what you’ve been up to — but you had left.

And, as I said, tonight, just after finishing the Barnes novel about misunderstandings and misinterpretations, I got this reply:

Hi, Lee,

Thanks for writing this… I felt that you didn’t want to talk to me, and it saddened me.

Always too sensitive… the only good part about that is that I can write.

So she had seen something in me, something in my face, that she read this way. And, to some degree, she was right in seeing what she’d seen, but wrong in the interpretation. Here’s what she had seen cross my face:  Oh no, what’s her name? Yes, I was glad to see her — but I was mentally fishing for her name.  Once I had it, I was even more eager to see her, to prove that of course I remembered her and wanted to speak to her and now had her name, but she had gone. I remember her distinctly, of course, and believe I was her thesis advisor (or was that David?), I remember her plays and many other things, but for a moment I couldn’t remember her first name, and didn’t want to embarrass her or hurt her feelings, and she mistook that for something else, and that misapprehension actually did hurt her feelings.

David is 77. When I was his student, from 1988 to 1990, we would play racquetball; he was a better shot, and had a better serve; the only way I could win was to run him to ground, to wind him, because he was 28 years older than I. Now someone in his 20s could do this to me. After his reading, we talked briefly. I told him that I’d seen X. He said, “I was trying to remember her last name.” I said, “Really? I was trying to remember the first one.”

In Julian Barnes’ book, the protagonist is shaken to discover that not only was he not the person he believed he was early in life, he may not be the person he now believes himself to be. If character is changeable, and if our self-perceptions are wrong, how are we ever to understand each other, if not ourselves?

Why the potential closing of the Friendly’s chain might put a damper on Nicholson Baker’s output. (It’s where he does his rewriting.)

Here’s a fun stunt:  Neil LaBute and Theresa Rebeck will write plays next week in a webcast event, based on prompts provided by the LA Times. Vote here for your pick of prompts. For the record, I’m drumming up support for this one: “Kristin enrolls in a figure studies class, then realizes that she knows the nude model, Ron, from church.” I’m eager to see what former Mormon LaBute and feminist Rebeck come up with on that one.

Twenty-five years ago, when I was a copy editor at the Press of Atlantic City (which long-time residents still call by its original, and should-be, name, The Atlantic City Press), occasionally the text that came onto our editing queue from one of the syndicates would be garbled. Somewhere in my files I’ve got an epic poem, the ur text of which was a feature profile of some gentleman somewhere, called “Old Man.Sat.” As you can see, it was slated for a Saturday edition (hence the “.Sat”) and it was a profile of an old man. Within that text was an agglomeration of mangled diction and mismatched word bits spliced together haphazardly in a way I associated with Brion Gyson and William S. Burroughs. It was rhythmically fantastic and sounded great read aloud, and I believe I got it published somewhere in the late 80’s or early 90’s. (I don’t know who can keep track of these little accomplishments, other than my friend Gerald Locklin, who is an ace documenter of his own work and, even better, someone who has amassed a cohort of adherents eager to document it all for him as well.)

Sometimes you find accidental poetry in spam emails, in which a bot has read someone’s hard drive and sent you a mutant version of text from it. Here’s something I got this morning from some poor soul somewhere whose computer has been hacked (without, I’ll bet, his knowing it). I’m sorry for him, but I quite like this:

Like any deer I the herd.

And intenible sieveI still pour.

Is sure to loseThat seeks.

What I spoke unpitied let me.

Torcher his diurnal ringEre.

Pretty good, right?

I’m still an editor, though, all these years later, and so can’t help helping it a little. Below is my first take at what I hope is an improvement (I do like to think that while I appreciate automated systems generating language for me, my human touch and years of experience can add a little; but maybe I’m wrong), but first, here are my reasons.

I like that first line (and think it should be the title), so I’m repeating it. Something that is “intenible” cannot be grasped, and someone who is an intenible sieve can neither grasp nor hold (but, evidently, can still pour); this person is a phantom, someone unable to hold onto or to be held. Imagine the emotional state, then, the desperation; this is a key to why this is so powerful, especially when matched with being a deer in the herd. Compared to the emotionally fragile subject of this poem — were it a human — Emily Dickinson would be a paragon of strength, a pro wrestler in the cultural arena. I’m breaking the line “Is sure to lose / That seeks.” because the break subtly changes the meaning and increases our sense of the loss, that any striving by this subject is sure to be met with failure. And when something was attempted — when, for example, this person spoke — that act had the effect of “unpitying” him, revealing him in his phantasmic state, bereft and distant but visible. Powerful stuff. In English, a “torcher” is one who gives light with a torch; in French, however, it’s a verb meaning “to wipe.” I think that in this case, we’re looking at the latter meaning:  “wiping  his diurnal ring.” This bespeaks a servitude that is distressing. It’s certainly a phrase that gives me pause. “Ere” means before, but I actually think it’s in the way here.

 Like any deer I the herd.

Like any deer I the herd.

And intenible sieve I still pour.

Is sure to lose

That seeks.

What I spoke unpitied let me.

Torcher his diurnal ring.

So there it is. A poem written, mostly, by a spam bot.

I wonder if I can get it published.

There are two phrases that mean nothing to almost anyone else, but which have stuck with me most of my life: “Glx sptzl glaah!” and “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”

The former is the baby-speak cry of Sugar and Spike in the comics of the same name by Sheldon Mayer. When the babies talk, all the parents hear is gibberish. But we lucky readers are privy to the rather sophisticated notions and outlandish schemes of these toddlers. If you’re wondering if this was unacknowledged source material for “Rugrats,” I suspect so. The first season of “Rugrats,” before rampant commercial needs overwhelmed creative impulses, was often wonderful. “Sugar and Spike” was consistently wonderful; even as an adolescent reader of mainstream superhero comics who groaned when some relative would mistakenly give him a “Richie Rich” or, God forbid, “Archie” comic, I was devoted to “Sugar and Spike.” And soon, very soon, you too will be able to share the joy:  an archive edition will finally be released by DC Comics next month.

(By the way, I bought the issue above right off the stands in 1970. I was 8.)

“Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges that I first read almost 30 years ago. It concerns a massive conspiracy by intellectuals to plant the false idea that there is a secret world called Tlon, with a nation called Uqbar. Inserting this false information into encyclopedias and referencing it elsewhere helps to, in essence, create the actuality — just as the creation of fiction implants ideas in readers that sometimes become reality. (Who invented the satellite? Well, the notion came from Arthur C. Clarke.) The fact that this phrase has stuck with me for 30 years proves the point.

In other words, both phrases are about imaginary languages and secret meanings.

Which takes me to today’s Google Logo (shown above). I was thrilled beyond measure to see that it was an homage to Borges, born 112 years ago today. More about that Google doodle, and how  Borges’ thinking led to the creation of hypertext links, can be found via this hypertext link.

To some degree, we are all of us privy to secret languages all around us every day, even when spoken in languages we purport to speak:  the thrum of jargon and subtext and obscure reference. It’s amazing we can understand anything. To some degree, this is what all of Harold Pinter’s plays are about:  that we understand nothing, while understanding everything all too well.

This little photo on Facebook is generating some traffic. It’s a shot of books in the backpack of a U.S. soldier deployed in Afghanistan. We can’t make out all of them, but I applaud the thinking behind two of them:  Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” (which must be required reading in every college literature or creative-writing class, because everyone I know in one of those has read it) and “The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre.”

I would add “Cat’s Cradle” by Kurt Vonnegut (and not, notably, “Slaughterhouse Five,” probably best left for reading when one isn’t actively deployed).

What would you add, if you were fighting a miserable war in a terrible faraway clime?

What would better suit your little cutie than this adorable Charles Bukowski onesie? Available in 6 colors, including “Asphalt,” and just right for that upcoming baby shower, this snap-shut one-piece for your little bundle includes a lovingly rendered image of the great man, as well this memorable quote:  “Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.” All yours, for just 21 Buks.