Comment on Readings by Shakar, Levine, Wycoff

Tonight I went to a reading at The Book Cellar, 4736-38 N. Lincoln Avenue, a relatively new bookstore, only three years old. As expected, since it's a Monday night, it's a small, independent, neighborhood bookstore, and all writers are still young and relatively unknown, though the star of Alex Shakar seems on the rise. The audience consisted of a handful of people. This was my first visit to this bookstore, and it's quite an impressive store: the elegance of the black, tall bookshelves, the coffee-wine-beer seating area.

What in the world am I doing there? Well, I work from home, and it begins to get on your nerves and makes you feel isolated and lonely, so I make a point of going out in the evenings. Also, I hadn't been to a reading for a while, and I'd stopped going to my regular Monday night figure drawing class.

Let me begin by saying that the second reader, Alex Shakar, entertained me most of all, dazzling me with his long, periodic sentences, brimming with humorous observation and word play, from his novel in progress about a feckless business man who turns to religion and out of body experiences for solace and stability in his life. I’m looking forward to reading it when it is published.

Shakar seems to be in his early or mid-thirties, looked stylishly scruffy, letting his brown beard grow out a bit, and his most striking features are his large eyes. He read with some verve and animation, more so than the other two readers, but their prose didn't lend itself to such a reading tone.

Shakar has a novel and a collection of short stories to his credit, and I ordered his novel in hardcover, The Savage Girl (2001), for 1 cent online plus the shipping fee $3.49 through Amazon. The new paperback edition was there on sale, which is a sign of success, but its print size is so small and compressed that I balked at the notion of reading it. For, in principal, unless no other edition is available, I've stopped reading small print books without much space between the lines and small margins. That's the way most books used to be published in the former Soviet Union with hardly enough room to even make a check mark, much less fit a readable phrase in the margin.

Lest my reader assume I'm a stingy and impoverished bookworm, let me add that I did by copies of the books by Stacey Levine, Frances Johnson (a novel) in a small, striking paperback copy printed by Clearcut Press and Corrina Wycoff ‘s O Street: Stories published by the college sponsored journal Other Voices.

Levine hails from Seattle, Washington; she has fair skin and short red hair. Levine read from her novel comic passages about a family that is too clutching and possessive of its newlyweds and already planning their grandchild's life. This sounds all too familiar and close to comfort for me: I lived longer with my parents than I should have, and could have stayed longer and have even been invited back so that I could save money by not paying them rent. But I'd pay heavily in frayed nerves and stunted personal development.

Corrina Wycoff lives near Seattle and studied at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where I studied English and Slavic literature. She has a fine, sculpted cheekbones and chin, framed in wavy, short hair style. Wycoff read a passage from her stories; again the tone was comedic, though dark, about a narrator's recollections of childhood, describing tragic incidents from a child who has become inured to such incidents that surround her.

Well, my fiction reading is cut out for me. Eventually, though not in the too distant future, I would like to finish reading all three authors books and comment on them briefly.

For more about the reading see my comment.

Theatre Review: "The Swan" Trap Door Theatre

On Saturday night, I saw the play "The Swan" staged at the Trap Door Theatre. It was a modest play featuring really only leading role, Dora, who on occasion argues with her lover, Kevin, a strapping milkman, who is married, and claims with bluster he can support two women, and Bill, a man who believes he is a bird, who for much of the play cannot talk, and then talks in bursts at times or parrots others speech. The elaborate and well designed set of the play is a ramshackle house interior with a large, partly broken window, which figures importantly as a symbol in the play.

The casting is appropriate: Dora is played by a young woman who projects naivety and disorientation, always involved in relations that are spinning out of control, Kevin, by a strapping young man who is pleasant and overbearing, who often seems on the verge of losing his temper, and the swan, by a physically much smaller and shorter man, who convincingly plays the part of a man with limited faculties. Throughout the production some popular rock oldies play in the background, as well as on a few occasions we hear the sound of beating wings. If you come to the play early, you will see Dora moping around on stage, trying to sleep, obviously looking troubled. This is a standard feature pre-opening feature at the Trap Door: actors moving around on the set, usually silently.

Just who or what is Bill is--man or bird, or man-bird, or a man suffering from the delusion that he is a bird--is left indeterminate, so he is a postmodernist character, who most importantly also serves as a mirror or projection of Dora's own desires to find a man who she can love, for she can't seem to hold on to the three previous ones who she meets. What better way to meet the next one than if he comes crashing through her window. Initially, Dora is on the verge of shooting Bill, but gradually comes to see him as vulnerable, hurt, needy and even as a man (or bird-man?) willing to return her affection.

Tim Burton's film "Edward Scissorhands" (1990) immediately came to mind--a naive, otherwordly, and different and seemingly not entirely human being comes to town, and predictably ruffles feathers. (Checking a reference, I see that Egloff first produced her play in 1989, before the Burton film was released.) The other avian plays that come to my mind which use genuine birds as their symbolic centers and plot hinge points are Chekhov's, "The Seagull", and Ibsen's "Wild Ducks."

While Burton's film is a more accessible and sentimental production, Egloff's is darker, since Dora is herself is clearly a troubled young woman, who keeps making bad choices in life. The fact that she allows herself to become a mistress to the milkman, Kevin, is already a sign that though she seems a good person, she lacks the discernment to claim what she deserves--a better man and relationship. She gradually, however, begins to realize this when she begins nursing for and caring for the bird-man Bill; inevitably, she becomes attracted to the bird man, and a conflict results with Kevin milkman. I'll leave it at that.

The play has some flashes of humor, passages of eloquent, poetic language, and raw, unnerving expression of need and desire by the bird-man Bill; the last seemed too overindulged to me and made me squirm in my seat the way that babies do who won't stop crying. Also, Dora, is a difficult character to empathize with because she seems so lost and misguided, though at the end of the play there is a hint however forlorn, she attains some tragic insight. Overall, it's a well done production by talented young actors who work for free and experience in Chicago's semi-professional/amateur theatre scene.

For more text see comments; the photo is of Man Ray's oil painting, Leda and the Swan, 1941.

http://www.trapdoortheatre.com/trapdoor/page.cfm?id=1

Overspending Abroad, Paying for It at Home

Funding Militarism Abroad and a Breakdown of Domestic Infrastructure

The looming disaster facing Chicago's elevated and underground train system (CTA) was a feature today in the New York Times, a sign that the situation is dire and only to threatens to get worse in the immediate future. Specifically, tracks and stations are old and being replaced, which has been lengthening waiting times, even doubling them, and the reconstruction of several stations will only make matters worse in April.

This is simply a short, informative article, and not a longer piece which touches on deeper underlying problems, but as I read it, I was thinking about the larger context of this issue. To be sure, to some degree this is an internal problem of mismanagement, as well as lack of adequate state funding, but I wonder even if those factors were not contributing causes to the transit system's decline and shortfall in funding, would there still be a problem? Probably, I surmise, there would still be one.

The larger issue behind this issue of CTA's impending problems is a lack of federal funding for public transportation, which results from simply a lack of available federal funds for it. Where is the money going? What is a higher priority? Clearly, it's national security and defense, military spending, especially for the last few years for the Iraq war. Even without this war, military spending was high; the last few years, it went out of control.

Thus, the war, distant and abstract, to most of us, who have neither been in military service, nor are related to someone it it, has come home. America has overreached itself, and is beginning to suffer the consequences.

Listening to an interview on a public radio station today, Worldview, of Chalmer's Johnson, a retired historian of East Asia, who has just published his third book critical of American foreign policy and militarism, led me to jot down these points.

In a recent conversation with a friend, the issue came up of why isn't there more protest and dissent against the American invasion of Iraq. Well, it seems, plainly that most people are not directly affected by it, at least until now.

See the comment for the New York Times article; photo: Pieter Breugel's Tower of Babel

Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (Feb 2007)

For the interview of Chalmers Johnson about his recent book, Nemesis, you can listen to NPR's Worldview
http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Program_WV.aspx?episode=9579