1/22/02
Been a bit again. Sorry not to have updated; I've been poorly. I'm doing better now, though dear Lisa's throes are about four days behind my own.
The Beast is finally up at the Voice site, and my reaction is a little more "well, now I can get on with my life" than anything else. In the meantime, I've been filling in some of the more shocking gaps in my lacuna-packed knowledge of movies. Went out last night with a medium-sized posse to see Performanceat Film Forum, and immediately on returning home called up IMDB to find out what else Michèle Breton had been in. (Answer: evidently an Italian TV show in 1968, and nothing else.) Also curious about the significance of Borges to the movie--his face shows up briefly in the middle of a crucial shot a couple of minutes before the end. Apparently there are some ornate theories about Performance out there; anyone who's got one of their own is welcome to fill me in.
At dinner after the show (with Sharon & David, as well as Andrea and Jay and Naomi), I brought up my recent idee fixe that there needs to be a new kind of writing workshop in New York City (besides the school-affiliated ones and the horrible one that advertises in the dirty yellow boxes on every streetcorner). Motto (suggested by Liz G.): "We Will Make You Cry." Policy: no positive comments allowed on anyone's work until its every weakness has been ripped to shreds, and maybe not even then. Some people take writing classes to have their egos massaged; others take them to figure out what's wrong with their writing and fix it, and there should be a class for those people.
Also, I want to teach a class on Lying in Fiction--a fiction-writing workshop that explicitly forbids students from "writing what they know" or presenting thinly veiled autobiography (the plague of contemporary fiction and especially contemporary fiction workshops), and guides them into the process of simply making stuff up.
The night before that, Lisa and I went (with the endearing Meredith Yayanos and a young friend of hers, Pandora, who's exactly like her but taller--and Liz B. and Matt H. were there too!) to see Gates of Heavenat Cinema Classics (deadpan Errol Morris documentary about a pet cemetery from the late '70s). Has anybody ever transcribed that old woman's monologue? As Mer noted, "Tennessee Williams couldn't have written that thing."