Gedney Checks In! (like Dunstin Checks In, but no monkeys, and no Jason Alexander)

I feel bad because Mark sent me a message on facebook telling me, among other things, that I had become distant. He is right. I've been having weird dreams lately, and to boot I feel like my sleep patterns have been off. I don't know how stuff like that affects you guys, but dreams involving real people and weird sleep cycles warp my perceptions for a while, so everything gets warbly. When that happens, I make a little cocoon of movie channels, chocolate, and my cats and don't come out for a little while. I think I'm slowly reemerging.

I've been turning Dubliners and Kafka over a little bit in my mind, and am slowly working through To the Lighthouse. A few things I'm thinking of:
-the parentheticals of deaths in To the Lighthouse. Why? How else could the deaths have occurred? Would that have lessened or increased their impact?
-the gore of Kafka on the Shore, it's explicit and straightforward languages. The phrase "rock hard cock" comes to mind. How is this different/similar to the deaths in Woolf.
-the darkness in Dubliners. Can we put a finger on the mechanism of melancholy Joyce creates? Stories I'm thinking of in particular:
An Encounter
Araby
Eveline
Clay
A Painful Case
The Dead

I'm not asking these to initiate a purely literary discussion, but rather to look at why these works function the way they do, flow the way they do. Also, I love Lily in To the Lighthouse. I just reread her scene with Mr. Ramsey in The Lighthouse section. "What beautiful boots!" I also think the entire section in Time Passes works so well for what we may be exploring.

Also, not on our reading list, but something I discovered while I way this weekend was a little book called Novels in Three Lines by Felix Feneon. They are true stories that were anonymously published in the French Newspaper Le Matin, but they're quite violent and cheeky. IE:
A criminal virago, Mlle Tulle, was sentenced by the Rouen court to 10 years' hard labor, while her lover got five.

Nurse Elise Bachmann, whose day off was yesterday, put on a public display of insanity.

Since childhood Mlle Mehnette, 16 had harvested artificial flowers from the tombs of Saint-Denis. That's over; she's in the workhouse.

A certain madwoman arrested downtown falsely claimed to be nurse Elise Bachmann. The latter is perfectly sane.

Caged, tortured, and starved by their stepmother, the three little daughters of Joseph Ilou, of Brest, now rescued, are skeletal.

Finding her son, Hyacinthe, 69, hanged, Mme Ranvier, of Bussy-Saint-Georges, was so depressed she could not cut him down.

Seventy-year-old beggar Verniot, of Clichy, died of hunger. His pallet disgorged 2,000 francs. But no one should make generalizations.

"To die like Joan of Arc!" cried Terbaud from the top of a pyre made of his furniture. The fireman of Saint-Ouen stifled his ambition.

The guys who wrote these was an anarchist and a publisher. Very private.

Thoughts on our project, and I'm just throwing them out there as honestly as I can:

I think, for simplicity's sake, I would prefer for us to work with Pig Iron this summer. From my end, to go to Europe and back while trying to get a job would be more difficult than getting a job in perhaps New Haven or coming back home, then going to Philly, then coming back to the West coast. Because both of you are going abroad, that might not be the case. Also, and again Asa this is not because I don't trust you, but I know Pig Iron, I know and admire their work, and I know they're really supportive of me and Asa and our trying to make new theater together. I don't know anyone in Poland except for Gey Pin, and I feel like I still don't quite know what we'd be doing in Poland. These are, again, my inclinations, and I can be persuaded.

Additionally, I've been thinking about the work we've been talking about doing, and I wonder if it wouldn't be better if we still do the reading we've planned on, but maybe use songs/text with which we aren't nearly as familiar, and thus don't have many prior attachments or associations with them. Already when I read Emily Dickinson, I have this grandiose idea of what it could be, this over-mystified idea of what her poems are about. I think we should challenge ourselves to find text that really makes us dig and investigate, and isn't something that we've been in love with or fascinated by forever.

We can talk about this tomorrow via phone, of course, and I can't emphasize enough that over the past few years at Wesleyan I hadn't found people I really felt I wanted to collaborate with. Then you two came along, and I finally feel like I won't necessarily leave Wesleyan without some really good friends who are also really great collaborators.

Many hugs, much love,
G.B.

Emily dickinson and protestantism

Emily Dickinson often modeled her poems off of the structure of Protestant hymns. I still need to figure out which ones she liked the best, but this could be great for our piece. I know my dad knows a lot of protestant hymns because for a while he sang with a church to earn money. Also Edward's mom is a minister.

God-war-poets play? It seems like we could be moving in this direction as far as the center of our play's focus. Also, if we DO do move in this direction, some things we should consider (maybe not now, but soon)
--I think 1 musician would make a great bard/m.c., with maybe a banjo, a fiddle, something that we associate as American. This doesn't mean there can't be other music (harmonium, piano, guitar, etc) but to have one musician m.c. could be neat.
--if we decide to do this in Russell House, how big of a cast do we feel could fit there? At this point I could envision a piece on this theme with just the three of us plus an m.c., but that depends on what direction we want to take it.
--One that note, if it's just about Rainer and Dickinson, who would other cast members be in relation to them? I'm not saying they have to be huge historical personalities, but we should consider what their relationship to the material and the space is.
--If we do pursue the poet/god/war triumpherate, I think Joyce (irish identity, easter uprising of 1916, catholicism, sexual repression) and Virginia Woolfe (gender and domesticity before and after world war I, depression and domesticity in post-Victorian England) would be great candidates of sources/characters to add to the pile.
--Joe Hill would be a neat musician to consider because of his relationship to the labor movement in america and his response to immigration industrialization in the wake of world war I
--Stephen Foster is the quintessential white American composer (cause really, slave songs and spirituals were the first post-settlement reindigenized American form of music. we could also look to what these offer.)
--Civil War v. WWI? Also, I couldn't help but notice that Emily Dickinson is from the U.S., Virginia Woolfe from England, Joyce from Ireland, and Rilke from Germany. I don't know what that means, but it's interesting. Both Dickinson and Woolfe had very queer relationships with the non-human world, gardens, trees, etc.

Sorry if these questions are pushing us ahead of ourselves; it's the way my directorish brain works. And even if we don't answer any of these questions/proposals now, I think it's good to get them in the air. I'll stop before I overdo it more than I already have.

The Rilke text is wonderful. So wonderful.

I am getting SO EXCITED!!!! Like even more excited than I was before.

Love,
Gedney.