My friend Rich Roesberg, the poet laureate of Northfield, New Jersey, recently received this poem via the Internet:
WINTER POEM
It’s winter in New Jersey
And the gentle breezes blow
Seventy miles an hour
At five below.
Oh, how I love New Jersey
When the snow’s up to your butt
You take a breath of winter
And your nose gets frozen shut.
Yes, the weather here is wonderful
So I guess I’ll hang around
I could never leave New Jersey
Cuz I’m frozen to the ground!
Which prompted him to craft this reply:
SUMMER POEM
It’s Summer now in Florida
And the heat is just plain brutal.
The bugs are everywhere —
They just ate someone’s poodle.
It’s 96 today
without a cloud in sight.
Three mailmen just expired —
They should bring the mail at night.
Yes the weather here is awesome,
At least, if you love heat.
The soles of my shoes have melted
And they’re stuck fast to the street.
Here’s what one American academic thinks: that “the way in which people frantically communicate online via Twitter, Facebook and instant messaging can be seen as a form of modern madness.” You can read the hysteria here, if you like.
This brings to mind what might have been an earlier news report:
In other news, the Holy Roman Church stepped up its attack on the new invention called “the printing press.”
“We are gravely concerned that the mass production of these so-called Bibles in English will have the effect of coming between God-fearing Christians and the church that the Lord created to deliver his message,” said Archbishop Jacub Mumblecorp. “People were not intended to study the Lord’s word on their own, and certainly not in English, the language of the masses. We fear this will lead to misinterpretation, confusion, and isolation.”
Because, you see, every time new technology arrives that gives more people access to information and communication, there’s an established ideology immediately threatened by it.
Many people know Wallace Shawn as the little self-described genius in “The Princess Bride” who keeps exclaiming that the continuing success of his nemesis is “Inconceivable!” I hope Mr. Shawn is getting a nice royalty from that movie, because he will never outlive that line, no matter how many times he voices a CGI toy dinosaur in Pixar films.
Others among us know Wallace Shawn as America’s most brilliant living playwright. Which is why I, and other “eggheads of a certain theatrical stripe,” to quote the LA Times’ Charles McNulty, will be going to UCLA Live tonight night to hear Mr. Shawn read from his work and share his pointed views on the state of things.
I’m a great admirer of Paula Vogel’s play “How I Learned to Drive,” which is the sort of play that playwrights keen to write: unexpected, theatrical, beautifully written, funny, highly entertaining, and enormously empathetic. The thing is a true achievement. She’s also a teacher of playwriting, one that I would submit her students are lucky to have. This piece shares a bit about her teaching practice, as she takes students down what some of us consider the main drag of Philadelphia — South Street, setting for many of my youthful enjoyments — to find stories in the street, waiting to become plays.
(Thanks to Paul Crist for letting me know about this.)
I’m tired of hearing people complain about Sarah Palin. Really. Because it isn’t doing them any good, and because it just feeds the Sarah Palin media machine, it comes across as counter-productive whining. So I’ll be curious to see if this will have any impact: “Ignore Sarah Palin Week,” which commences on February 28th. Please set a reminder for yourself.
Much as I appreciated the clip below, I’ll also be curious to see if Jon Stewart will participate.
There are many who deserve that title, but according to Michael Feingold in the Village Voice, perhaps none moreso than Romulus Linney, who died on Saturday. Don’t know anything about Mr. Linney? Perform a Google search and you’ll find that his daughter was the actress Laura Linney, but you’ll find comparatively far less about the playwright himself, and his work.
In his piece for the Voice, Feingold notes that Linney was a practical stranger to Broadway (only one production, largely unremarked), that he didn’t write for television or film, and that his interests were catholic. The latter in particular may have been difficult to overcome — we expect our writers to represent something, in the way that the plays of David Mamet and Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco represent singular points of view and recurring themes and situations. It sounds as though Linney’s range of interests and lines of attack were broad, making him difficult to categorize, and therefore rendering him less immediately memorable.
Why do I say “it sounds as though”? Because as relatively well-versed as I am in contemporary American playwriting, and with all the theatre I’ve attended in 30 years of playgoing, I’ve never read or seen a single play by Romulus Linney.
The Republican party has an interesting set of opportunities and challenges right now. While a fervent grassroots movement helped them seize an unprecedented number of seats in the House, the seated Republican establishment doesn’t like a lot of these new people or their new ideas, and is figuring out what to do about it. It’s notable that John Boehner was a relatively late convert to the Tea Party cause, and now must reconcile its directives with those of his mainstream.
It was with this in mind, as well as the recent calls for more probity in public discourse, that I recently came across this piece from conservative writer David Frum. Personally, I’m not a fan of Mr. Frum’s credentials — to wit, chief speechwriter for George W. Bush — but I find a lot here to agree with. Key takeaway #1: the danger of closed information systems. What was the difference between Barack Obama the candidate and Barack Obama the president? A closed information system: The former got plenty of input and personal experience out on the road, while the latter relied on an inner circle that believed its own perceptions. This sort of isolation calls to mind President George H.W. Bush marveling over how a supermarket scanner could magically ring up his purchase of white tube socks without the cashier having to punch in the numbers. From posits that the GOP is becoming an ouroboros, simultaneously feeding itself and eating itself. I actually find all five of the lessons he seeks to impart to the GOP interesting, the other three being: “the market” must be distinguished from “the markets,” i.e., capitalism is important, but the wants and needs of Wall Street should not be paramount; the economy is more important than the budget, and so restoring employment is more essential, now at least, than budget-balancing; “the welfare state is not all bad”; and “listen to the people, but beware populism.” You begin to see why among so many in the GOP he’s become an apostate. Which is unfortunate. Purges should be the exclusive province of the extremist leftist states (think “Soviet Union” and “China”), not of mainstream American political movements.
Here’s another sort of purge going on: that of the political parties losing their moderates. In Arizona, three moderate Republicans have stepped down, citing venomous attacks from Tea Party rivals. In the November elections, by and large which House Democrats lost? The moderates. I wonder how all those people telling pollsters that they’d like to see the parties work together feel about this.
Given the drubbing Ricky Gervais is getting for his turn Sunday night as host of the Golden Globes, you’d think he had turned up with a semiautomatic and bizarre notions about genocide. As someone who didn’t watch the show (I don’t care about awards — not even much about the ones I’ve won), I had to turn to the internet to see what the fuss was about. Below you can find clipped together the 10 minutes that comprise Gervais’ contribution to what in my mind was probably otherwise another endless awards show. After watching it, this particular Gervais fan finds himself sadly in agreement with LA Times television critic Mary McNamara, who writes that “The opposite of dull and deferential is not snotty and abusive.” I followed both of Gervais’ shows, the UK “Office” and “Extras,” and have seen his movies, and saw his live standup act a couple of years ago in Los Angeles. I think he’s terrifically funny. But context is everything, and most of the jokes below seem ill-fitted to the event — especially the snide remark at Steve Carell’s expense; it seems too genuine an attack, and Carell’s response seems fittingly genuine as well, as he gives Gervais a shove. As uncomfortable as it is to watch this from the safety of my laptop, imagine the vibe in that room.
I will say this, though: A lot of people who wouldn’t otherwise be talking about the Golden Globes, including me, are talking about it now. I suspect that one person who won’t be talking at the Golden Globes next year is Ricky Gervais.
