Wednesday, May 12, 2004
shocked
To see that I haven't written in this long--but I've been hesitant about writing when I haven't had the time to figure out how to do what I want to do with this, layout-wise. I think I should download Dreamweaver and call it a day. Suggestions welcome.
Also been very busy with the play (we have a space! but we lost our stage manager! we have a great cast! but people are really flaky in San Diego!). Also realizing that theater has been my personal life as long as I've been an adult and now that I have an actual personal life, I'm not balancing anything very well.
So.
Yesterday's seminar was surpringly GREAT. Every week, we have to write short papers discussing our reaction to the reading (if you care: mid-20th-century French plays, Genet and Ionesco and Beckett--don't let's have that fight now, we'll talk later--and Camus and Sartre). The professor started discussion by stating that we should write short, that most academic writing should strive for such brevity and clarity.
He also enjoys the "associative reading logic" that dictates these papers. Academia assumes we can write about art the way we write about the news, about science--it focuses on a single idea about a play, thus impoverishing the conversation. We need to fatten our writing with questions. We should read and write associatively--whenever we see a play, he says, we read it in the context of everything we know and ever have known. Once we see a play, it is always still there, in us and with us.
Also been very busy with the play (we have a space! but we lost our stage manager! we have a great cast! but people are really flaky in San Diego!). Also realizing that theater has been my personal life as long as I've been an adult and now that I have an actual personal life, I'm not balancing anything very well.
So.
Yesterday's seminar was surpringly GREAT. Every week, we have to write short papers discussing our reaction to the reading (if you care: mid-20th-century French plays, Genet and Ionesco and Beckett--don't let's have that fight now, we'll talk later--and Camus and Sartre). The professor started discussion by stating that we should write short, that most academic writing should strive for such brevity and clarity.
He also enjoys the "associative reading logic" that dictates these papers. Academia assumes we can write about art the way we write about the news, about science--it focuses on a single idea about a play, thus impoverishing the conversation. We need to fatten our writing with questions. We should read and write associatively--whenever we see a play, he says, we read it in the context of everything we know and ever have known. Once we see a play, it is always still there, in us and with us.
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