I’ve had a draft of this particular newsletter for a long time.
And then I moved to Minneapolis, transferred to working at a different bookstore, and began rehearsals for Saint Joan. It’s a lot! So here’s an update for the first seven weeks of 2020:
January was a state of major hermitage.
It started with sickness. There was much bookselling. Much reading of books and watching of films. It sometimes felt extremely slothful, but it was all engaging, imaginative work.
Now, I’m finding a groove in Minnesota, making large-ish food batches for lunch, memorizing when I can, and trying not to freeze. It’s majorly cold right now.
If you’re anywhere near Minneapolis from March 6 - 21, make plans to see Saint Joan!
A still from Wim Wenders’s epic film: Until the End of the World
LINKS
Instagram for Actors via American Theatre Magazine:
“When we say actors should have a strong presence on social media, we mean they should have a helpful presence,” says company partner Benton Whitley. “That doesn’t mean I want their numbers to be high, but for them to have good material that is representative of their skills. Instead of Googling, one of the first things we do now is go on Instagram or YouTube. We’re looking for material that helps us understand where they fit in the landscape of what we’re casting, not whether they have 100,000 followers.”
Are Regional Actors Third-Rate? (obviously, no; and I mean no disrespect to my friends in New York who are killing it)
The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective People
Here’s Everything Steven Soderbergh Watched, Read, and Listened to in 2019
A friend recently shared this quote:
"Actors are some of the most driven, courageous people on the face of the earth. They deal with more day-to-day rejection in one year than most people do in a lifetime. Every day, actors face the financial challenge of living a freelance lifestyle, the disrespect of people who think they should get real jobs, and their own fear that they'll never work again. Every day, they have to ignore the possibility that the vision they have dedicated their lives to is a pipe dream. With every passing year, many of them watch as the other people their age achieve the predictable milestones of normal life - the car, the family, the house, the nest egg. Why? Because actors are willing to give their entire lives to a moment - to that line, that laugh, that gesture, or that interpretation that will stir the audience's soul. Actors are beings who have tasted life's nectar in that crystal moment when they poured out their creative spirit and touched another's heart. In that instant, they were as close to magic, God, and perfection as anyone could ever be. And in their own hearts, they know that to dedicate oneself to that moment is worth a thousand lifetimes.”
-David Ackert, LA Times
I’VE BEEN WATCHING
These are all brilliant:
Local Hero (1983) dir. Bill Forsyth
Brief Encounter (1945) dir. David Lean
Little Women (2019) dir. Greta Gerwig
Parasite (2019) dir. Bong Joon-ho
Until the End of the World (1991) dir. Wim Wenders
Pain and Glory (2019) dir. Pedro Almodóvar
And on the TV front:
Homeland seasons 6 and 7
I’VE BEEN LISTENING TO
Bandits on the Run (thanks to my buddy Ross for the suggestion) - when I revisit New York, I’m begging my all my NYC friends to track this band down and we’ll watch them live together. It would be so. much. fun.
TŌTH “Practice Magic and Seek Professional Help When Necessary” - There are times when I hear bits that remind me of Fleet Foxes and Andrew Bird. Also, Alex is a trained jazz trumpet player (he plays a bit every now and then on the album). I’ve been waiting for the trumpet to be used in a more indie/hazy way. I love it. So yeah, I’ve been listening to this a lot
The soundtracks to Little Women and Pain and Glory
DAZZLED GRATITUDE WINTER 2020 PLAYLIST
I’ll be slowly adding tracks over the season (rather than have a new one each month).
I’VE BEEN READING
Here’s what I read in January with some…remarks and quotes. I started copying down the first sentence of each book, and, when I can remember, some other passages that grabbed me.
Call for the Dead (1961) by John le Carré
First Sentence: “When Lady Ann Sercomb married George Smiley towards the end of the war, she described him to her astonished Mayfair friends as breathtakingly ordinary.”
The first George Smiley novel! I wanna read them all now. This one is more of a detective story than full-blown espionage tale. Otto Penzler wrote a nice premise in an introduction: “An apparent suicide had arranged a wake-up call for the morning after he died.” And then we go from there on an adventure in throughout London and its surroundings (including a trip to the theatre).
There’s great writing and action. Smiley feels like such a lived-in character.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) by Ocean Vuong
First Sentence: “Let me begin again.”
Totally beautiful, lush, tender, writing. It’s mesmerizing and almost too beautiful. The structure is tricky and elliptical. Admittedly, I got bogged down at the end. But this has (I think) more to do with me. Vuong is exploring the limits of a novel. In the acknowledgments he wrote to Ben Lerner (another poet-novelist): “Thank you for always reminding me that rules are merely tendencies, not truths, and genre borders only as real as our imaginations small.” I just wanted a little more momentum. This spirals, but I also understand that’s the point. Vuong is struggling with language and feelings and memory, beauty and horror, pride and shame.
OTHER QUOTES:
“That time, in third grade, with the help of Mrs. Callahan, my ESL teacher, I read the first book that I loved, a children’s book called Thunder Cake, by Patricia Polacco. In the story, when a girl and her grandmother spot a storm brewing on the green horizon, instead of shuttering the windows or nailing boards on the doors, they set out to bake a cake. I was unmoored by this act, its precarious yet bold refusal of common sense. As Mrs. Callahan stood behind me, her mouth at my ear, I was pulled deeper into the current of language. The story unfurled, its storm rolled in as she spoke, then rolled in once more as I repeated the words. To bake a cake in the eye of the storm; to feed yourself sugar on the cusp of danger.”
“I’m not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck--the pieces floating, finally legible.”
The Man Who Saw Everything (2019) by Deborah Levy
First Sentence: It’s like this, Saul Adler: when I was twenty-three I loved the way you touched me, but when the afternoon slipped in and you slipped out of me, you were already looking for someone else.
I’m gobsmacked by this book. I can’t even describe it. Mystifying, beguiling, heart-wrenching, beautiful. Levy has total control and poise and finesse. It’s a remarkable book that I can’t figure out, and that’s fine by me. I don’t even know how to summarize it. It does involve art students and a journalist in Germany in the late 1980s. There’s also something fascinating going on with trauma and memory (and the Beatles). I devoured it.
The Most Fun We Ever Had (2019) by Claire Lombardo
First Sentence: Other people overwhelmed her.
Lombardo provides a sprawling family saga full of wit, secrets and dysfunction, and a lot of heart. I loved it. It’s long, but it’s a breezy read (and that’s a compliment).
Reinhardt’s Garden (2019) by Mark Haber
First Sentence: The Rio de la Plata is a corpulent snake, mused Ulrich; it nestled around your neck, it strangles you for your wallet or wedding band, anything of vale, he said; whoever escapes alive?
Magnificent. The book is narrated by Jacov Reinhardt’s assistant/transcriber in a single, meandering paragraph. Jacov and his band of assistant, guides, and servants are on a South American expedition to find the “legendary prophet of melancholic philosophy.” Reading this was like watching a long Rube Goldberg machine. It winds and twists and makes a bit of a mess, but there’s something propulsive and clever about the movement. Also, this book is totally hilarious. It’s also about privilege (Reinhardt receives a giant fortune from his family’s tobacco farm), grief (his twin sister died at a young age), addiction (Jacov is taking cocaine all the time), excess. I’ve never read anything like it. You gotta give yourself over to it.
The following is a single sentence regarding Jacov Reinhardt’s castle project, trouble with architects, and a glimpse into Reinhardt’s obsession:
“Cuypers was charged with building the castle in a style that, in Jacov’s words, portrayed a perpetually mocking God gazing at our insignificance; thus hallways were built that gradually narrowed into dead ends, stairways assembled to climb straight into walls; the use of borrowed light and mute expression was prodigious, invoked in every room, giving even the most well-balanced visitor an impending sense of vertigo; every ceiling vaulted to convey emptiness and desolation, gimmicks, claimed Cuypers, who promptly quit after six month, asserting that Jacov was dangerous and unyielding and Cuypers went further as he packed his return suitcase for Amsterdam, explaining that the castle he’d been instructed to build was not only not architecture but the antithesis of architecture and even, perhaps, architecture’s nemesis; Jacov received the news with indifference, for he was months into his first serious meditations on melancholy and couldn’t be bothered, five notebooks filled and me at his feet taking dictation or making his coffee, rolling his cigarettes or fluffing his pillow, his imagination on fire, his mind clutching the divine, and later, less famous and less experienced architects were hired to finish the castle, and on this went for ten more years; more perverse construction, more mystifying designs that mirrored the undulations of my master’s mind: the upper and lower floors as well as the cellar constructed at a subtle, nearly indiscernible tilt, and if this was due to Jacov’s singular artistic vision or the inexperience of the laborers, I can’t say.”
The Monster of Elendhaven (2019) by Jennifer Giesbrecht
First sentence: “For a long time, he didn’t have a name.”
I don’t read much horror, but this novella is jam-packed with a lot: world-building, character, plot. Some truly squirmy moments. I’m glad my bookseller friend Mindy recommended it to me.
Lost Children Archive (2019) by Valeria Luiselli
First sentence: “Mouths open to the sun, they sleep.”
I don’t think I’ve ever read anything like this. I don’t even know what my “pitch” would be. But this is a major book regarding, families, undocumented children, archiving/documenting our lives and the world. I will never look at a train in the same way.
Some words about reading from the book:
“I don’t keep a journal. My journals are the things I underline in books. I would never lend a book to anyone after having read it. I underline too much, sometimes entire pages, sometimes with double underline.
…
I suppose that words, timely and arranged in the right order, beautiful words, a powerful but fleeting emotion ensues. And you also know that soon, it’ll all be gone: the concept you just grasped and the emotion it produced. Then comes a need to possess that strange, ephemeral afterglow, and to hold on to that emotion. So you reread, underline, and perhaps even memorize and transcribe the words somewhere--in a notebook, on a napkin, on your hand. In our copy of Sontag’s journals, underlined once, twice, sometimes boxed-in and marked at the margins.
…
I do remember, though, that when I read Sontag for the first time...I kept having those sudden, subtle, and possibly microchemical raptures--little lights flickering deep inside the brain tissue--that some people experience when they finally find words for a very simple and yet till then utterly unspeakable feeling. When someone else’s words enter your consciousness like that, they become small conceptual light-marks. They’re not necessarily illuminating. A match struck alight in a dark hallway, the lit tip of a cigarette smoked in bed at midnight, embers in a dying chimney: none of these things has enough light of its own to reveal anything. Neither do anyone’s words. But sometimes a little light can make you aware of the dark, unknown space that surrounds it, of the enormous ignorance that envelops everything we think we know. And that recognition and coming to terms with darkness is more valuable than all the factual knowledge we may ever accumulate.”
That’s all for now.
-Tim