Slashes

"Why don't you take a good look at yourself and describe what you see,
and baby, baby, baby, do you like it?
There you sit, sitting spare like a book on a shelf rustin',
ah, not trying to fight it."

-- Led Zeppelin, "Misty Mountain Hop"

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No workshops, no emails, no phone calls today. Been here two hours and distraction is the name of the game.

Been reading out of The Arbuthnot Anthology of Children's Literature, assembled by May Hill Arbuthnot. Stories written to stir a child's mind are stirring mine, too.

It's just one of the books I took to work at the Children's Theatre. I chose them not only to impress colleagues but for actual usability. These are the titles, on spines slanting sideways on the shelf like slashes of many widths:

- The Arbuthnoth Anthology of Children's Literature, ed. May Hill Arbuthnot
- The Creative Habit, by Twyla Tharp
- Acting Power, by Robert Cohen
- The Complete Play Production Handbook, by Carl Allensworth
- The Viewpoints Book, by Anne Bogart and Tina Landau
- Accents: A Manual for Actors, by Robert Blumenfeld
- To the Actor, by Michael Chekhov
- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, by Tom Stoppard
- Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, by Shunryu Suzuki
- Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett
- Take Ten: New 10-Minute Plays, ed. Eric Lane and Nina Shengold
- Experimental Theatre, by James Roose-Evans
- Three Plays (The Skin of Our Teeth, Our Town, and The Match Maker), by Thornton Wilder
- Hamlet, by William Shakespeare

and, of course,

- The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White

Now, I'm a sucker for books I'll never read, but I can honestly say that on the work shelf are books which I've either read many times or of which I've read large enough sections to fake having read the whole thing. The one exception is the Anthology; hence, my daily dose of poems, tales and morality yarns.

Interestingly, a lot of Yeats in this book.

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Watched the famous Glengarry Glen Ross last night. Superb acting, the dialogue just great, classic, gritty Mamet. I think I could watch Al Pacino get pissed off and yell sarcasm at people for days and not get bored.

Favorite line:

"You ever take a dump made you feel like you'd just slept for twelve hours?"

Also been sailing through the second season of Arrested Development. So fun and fresh a show I have not seen.

--

I mark the days as I finish them on the big white desk calendar. Blue-lined boxes slashed with yellow highlighter streaks: days done.

In the lower-right corners, drawn boxes with numbers of hours in them. This is how I count the ways, count the days, count the stays. The lazy daze.