Engineering

"I understand
you've been running from the man
that goes by the name of the Sandman.
He flies the sky
like an eagle in the eye
of a hurricane that's abandoned."

-- America, "Sandman"

--

The blinds are pulled on the north side of the building, but there's no doubt it's raining outside. The room is tinted gray, the colors a little flatter. The calendar on my desk shows half of June's days slashed, and the bright yellow highlighter strokes are turning green, gangrening.

When the cat's away, the mice will have in-office drinking parties. I'm bringing the fruit salad and some buko, a coconut milk drink I stole from the Philippines.

--

This afternoon, I teach a workshop that doesn't exist yet, vaguely titled "Teen Acting." Word on the phone is, teenagers are mounting a play for the kindergarten kids at a library out in the boonies.

The play is an adaptation (which also doesn't exist yet) of Where the Wild Things Are. I'm hoping they already have the script and parts assigned. In my blueprint of theatre games are some staples from Misdirection!:

- Whoosh-Whoosh-Whoa
- Zip-Zap-Zop
- Bippity-Bippity-Bop (and that finishes the hyphenated games)
- Freeze
- Welcome to the Machine/Complete the Machine
- Can I Stand in Your Place?
- Say the ABCs
- ABX
- Half Life

If there are any I missed that you think I should incorporate, I'm open to suggestions. Gotta build this staircase somehow.

--

How Does a Poem Mean? is rocking my shit. I wish I'd read the book ten years ago; might have laid a better foundation for a life of reading than Ms. Johnson's pseudo-Socratic method of having us engineer questions about diction and theme and engineer answers about diction and theme as we sat at desks pushed together, smelling everyone else's educated sweat, books open but their lines of magic blurred and curbed by speaking them aloud and we "learned about literature" while she graded spelling tests in the corner. Huck Finn almost died before us on our desks, etherized by us amateur word surgeons.

Ciardi is the English teacher you never had. He tells you that if you nail down a poem, it cannot fly. So put down the hammer, he says. Take the nail and carve into the wood the word possibility and leave it alone.

--

Listened to the opera Ainadamar this morning, all ninety or so minutes of it. It is about Lorca, whose Blood Wedding we read in Theatre History class. (He strikes me as a sort of Spanish Oscar Wilde...with a lot of pessimism thrown into the mix.)

The opera is very fine, with a lot of flamenco-based rhythms and some twinges of Arabic song, giving it a frenzied, almost atonal quality. It feels like revolution. And there are some dramatic gunshots in the score as well. Always a plus.

Can't wait to see this one...for free. I know people.