var. links and reflections
And now let all the ships come in
pity and love the Return the Flower
the Gift and the Alligator catches
–and the mind go forth to the end of the world
Charles Olsen, from the Maximus Poems
I have links! Neandellus lives! Ring the old bell till its clapper cracks! Here, where I’ve been and what I’ve seen, the links are all for Time Out:
The Rabble’s wonderful tragedy Special which I’ve sketched a longer more coherent response to but haven’t had the time to blog .
The Rising Water thing.
Winterfall Theatre’s take on Caryl Churchill’s A Number.
This was a most welcome production. By my rough count there have been only half a dozen Churchill plays staged in Melbourne since 2005, when Barnaby Chiverton’s Evaporating Sun put on this very play at fortyfivedownstairs. I did see a Churchill play as part of VCA Masters Season last year, neatly put together by Tanya Dickson (the production was so darn classical it even had a periaktoi), but that’s been it for me. One a year is perhaps better than many worthy playwrights get in this town, but I almost feel like it’s a matter of urgency that audiences are exposed to an uncompromisingly intelligent mainstage writer like Churchill, particularly, I think, if we want our mainstage theatres to come into any new kind of seriousness.
The Annie Baker double of Circle Mirror Transformation and The Aliens
In the weeks leading up to seeing these two plays, I was very much down on the prospect of having to sit through two productions from any of-the-moment playwright, especially one whom the publicity was comparing to Sarah Ruhl—and that was despite even VICE Magazine telling me how brilliant she is. (Despite? Because?) Well, Beckett she ain’t, but I still really, really got a lot from especially the Red Stitch production.
The Aliens is a sensitive portrait of the very tail-end of a certain threat (threat? I meant thread) in the the American counter-culture pancho (pancho? I meant poncho–oh, but this was very carefully done). The title references a poem of the same name by Bukowski, a poem which finishes “but they are / there / and I am / here”. Although I’ve managed to read a couple of his novels, I’ve never spent much time with the poetry of Bukowski. What can you do with a poet whose lines are inked indelibly over all the bright-eyed youth of this world’s only superpower? Baker’s would-be Beat novelist Jasper says, “he cuts out all the bullshit”; well, for me he only ever seemed to talk the bullshit up. It’s all perspective I suppose, and this play helps reposition him more sympathetically in my eyes: Bukowski as the hero of small-press America, the great underground of literary magazines. And I’m kinda inspired by that. Bukowski was a great supporter of zines and small-press journals, contributing notably to New Orleans’ The Outsider, which, with its archaic nineteenth century screw press and dedication to full eight-hole binding, which to my tastes is probably the most inspiring of them all.
Although The Aliens has nothing specifically to do with small press publishing, I think the precarious freedom which Baker is describing in the slacker-life of Jasper and KJ, is the same offered by a small press, and, like their protégé Evan, I’m fascinated by that ideal.
Incidentally, The Aliens takes place in the same apparently fictional town as Circle Mirror, Shirley, Vermont. There are plenty of real towns in America and the UK called Shirley, but none in Vermont. But, also, did you know that until the publication and subsequent success of Jane Eyre’s Shirley, that name was basically reserved for boys? Because of the popularity of the heroine in Eyre’s book, who had been dubbed Shirley by a father especially eager for a son, the name then took off as a name for girls. There you go. And here, too… you go… Shiiirleee!
