Had fun headlining the NYU KGB reading series, with current MFA writers Alanna Weissman, Will Frazier, Alex Foster, and Sara Elkamel. Spending time with poets and writers feels like taking a step sideways into a secret world that is adjacent to theatre/ TV but is not theatre/ TV, and in which everyone has read all the books I would like to read.
Tag Archives: Counting words and the spaces between them which I hear in some places is called Reading
Category Is Still: Patricia Highsmith
The Island Dwellers // Pub Day
Oberon Books // 3 Plays
Available here.
The Island Dwellers // Random House
Out May 1. More info here.
Collective Rage // UK
My article for The Independent about how queer feminism is (believe it or not) universal.
What we choose to fight is so tiny
The Man Watching // Rilke
I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister.
The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.
What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great.
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.
When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers’ sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.
Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.
–Translated by Robert Bly
Oberon Books (UK)
3-play anthology available here on Jan 24. (Cover photograph by Scott Suchman, of Dane Laffrey’s set for the premiere of Collective Rage.)
Single editions of Collective Rage available here, also on Jan 24, in concert with the upcoming UK Premiere at Southwark Playhouse. (Cover photograph by Thurstan Redding, of Betty 5 actor Genesis Lynea.)
Galleys
NRT -> SYD
Yesterday it was winter. Today, on the other side of the hemisphere, it’s summer. Hello Sydney.
Are these not the best names you’ve ever seen? Recent reading for/on/during trains/planes/shinkansens/hotel-rooms:
After two weeks of mostly-research, the laptop is back open… This would be a more nerve-wracking affair if there weren’t a giant container of Tim-Tams currently in the fridge.