Reading Log VII-XI

I am a child-machine in the timeout corner of my own creation.

Sex Variants of 1941 has opened (and closed) and in its absence my attention is finally (re)directed to things like finishing the semester, reading my books, and buying a rug. (9x12; Medium Pile; Must Be Under $200.) I’ve fallen behind on this project of surveillance and documentation, this “reading log,” and have to grapple with the shame of failing a structure that I created. The punishment is death, I think. My life is a blank; unobserved, I am disappear-ed.

But I’ll tell you what’s happened the past few weeks, reading-wise, and in that way attempt to retroactively give flesh to my own away-ness. (Or, anyway, tell you what ought to have happened. The actual fulfillment of this reading list is impossible, of course. Its impossibility is what keeps me from causing problems at Brown. I am in a suspended state of impotence caused by my inability to achieve the impossible.)

Week VII:
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
The Instant of My Death /Demeure by Maurice Blanchot and Jaques Derrida
“In a Valley in Vorarlberg” by Lucie Varga
Stress Positions dir. Theda Hammel
In the Mood for Love dir. Wong Kar-wai

Derrida may have won me back with Circumfessions, but he immediately lost me again with Demeure. (Although his obsession with being both dead & not dead is probably where I grew this idea of disappearing in the absence of the panoptic view of God/myself/Substack.) Still, I found the diluted versions of his thoughts on ‘testimony,’ ‘secret,’ and ‘confession’ worthwhile. What is confession in the presence of an all-knowing God; why confess at all? How can we understand inside/outside in a world where technological surveillance is accelerating past our ability to comprehend or legislate around it. Is that God? It makes me think of our discussions of capital-D “Drama” in the MFA playwriting workshop: Drama as a series of escalating confessions, Drama as only being able to exist in the absence of God. The loss of God is the ultimate Drama, because it allows for the existence of Secret. Would this mean that a contemporary “neoclassical French/Greek” drama would only be possible in the absence of technology? Or is there a way that technology accelerates the potential for interiority, heightens the Secret? Maybe not.

We watched In the Mood for Love for our playwriting workshop. Most of the plays in our workshop this semester (including mine) deal with reenactment and replication, much like Su Li-zhen and Chow Mo-wan trying to re-enact their spouses affair. I wonder about this, because reenactment and replication are not Drama; they cannot possibly be singular or superior because they will always exist as an imperfect version of a perfect thing. So, why can’t we get enough of trying to make re-creation an action of Drama? Does it have to do with the socio-political climate? The hyperreality of being a person online? What’s going on! My best hypothesis right now is that we’ve all (myself included) internalized the overwhelming psychoanalytic push at Brown right now. (Freud has been discussed in all three of my classes this semester! All three!) We’re so much in the sandbox of “psychoanalysis” that we can’t help but try to replicate and perfect its obsessions with replication and perfection. Our drama is our attempt at achieving the impossible: perfecting “imperfect attempts at perfection” aka reenactments.

Week VIII:
The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
"Venus in Two Acts” by Saidiya Hartman
Of Grammatology by Jaques Derrida [Excerpts]
“Passions: An Offering” by Jaques Derrida [Excerpts]
Wicked by Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz [Excerpts from drafts 1998-2003 + current Broadway script]

I’m obsessed with the development of musicals. I love learning how the machine of a musical was built, how it changed, and how it might (in my own push to perfection) be fixed. I’m pretty maniacal about combing through archives (legitimate and otherwise), academic papers, and interviews to construct a phantom history of how the musicals I love came to be. It’s why working at the Goodspeed’s music library was such a treat. (They had an early Light in the Piazza and an early Assassins libretto. Heaven! From memory, the statue in Piazza, like the statue in Caroline or Change, originally sang. And there was a small lyric change in the opening number of Assassins that went “Be a loner/be the crowd/anybody is allowed” instead of “Rich man, poor man/Black or white/pick your apple, take a bite.”

Relatedly, for the past six years I’ve been collecting archival material, interviewing creatives, and generally collecting a detailed dramaturgical history of the musical Smile, a Marvin Hamlisch project adapted from one of my favorite films. The goal of this work has been dual: comprehensive documentation of the creative process and also that I might adapt/re-write the book of Smile. Which is, by the way, not without precedent: see Show Boat, Original Grease, The Life, the many books of Candide, Legally Blonde, Carrie, etc. I’m hoping to receive some institutional support at Brown to accelerate this project, but things seem a bit uncertain.)

Anyway, I think the dramaturgical progression of a musical can be an effective way to teach revision because it presents things like cause/effect, plot mechanism, and moment/event in ways that are more apparent (not to mention more exciting) than in straight plays. So, for my “mock class” in our playwrights workshop, I brought in the libretto to Wicked. We went back and traced the progression of Act II, Scene II (“Wicked Witch of the East”) from a 1998 plot outline to the current licensed version.

I have too much to say about the Wicked libretto to write here. (Another essay, surely.) I will say, however, that we talked about the “machine” of a play. Wicked is a “hit machine.” Every revision in Wicked brings it closer to its perfect function of being a hit machine. So we have to consider every revision in Wicked as either brining it closer-to or further-from its hit machine-ness, which is not always concurrent with what makes the most sense in terms of logic or storytelling. This is not to say that being a hit-machine is a bad thing. It isn’t. And Wicked is an example of perfect dramaturgical construction; it has been built perfectly to perform the function it performs - run twenty years, spawn a successful movie, and permeate pop-culture in a way that is unheard of for most theater-objects. This is why the question of Ariana Grande’s casting, to me, is a moot point. She is the perfect mechanism for the hit machine; it couldn’t be anybody but her. In this framework, regarding our own plays, we have to consider with ferocious reality what the machine of our own play does. Every revision of the machine brings it either closer to or further from that function. We need to strive always for closer-to. That’s rewriting.

I loved The Pleasure of the Text, of course, but imagine my shock when Barthes asserted that nobody ever reads every word of a book, that skipping over passages is to be expected. I’ve been reading every word of Barthes in this class and now he tells me I don’t even have to? This is the kind-of secret, underground rule-making that I cannot assimilate into my daily life. It’s distressing to me when the spoken and the unspoken are contradictory. I find myself always having to defer to the spoken, and this disturbs me.

Week IX:
Left Behind by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins
"The End of History” by Francis Fukuyama
“Ashglory” by Paul Celan
“Reality TV, Wife Swap and the Drama of Banality” by Helen Piper
America’s Next Top Model, Cycle 1, Episode 1
Trading Spouses : D’Amico-Flisher / Perrin
A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes [Excerpts]
Transcription from a Seminar on Witness/Testimony by Jaques Derrida [Excerpts]

I missed this week of class because of the opening of Sex Variants. I was especially disappointed to miss my cohort-mate Savannah’s presentation on early-2000s reality TV. I’ve been watching recaps of Wife Swap all the time since the Trading Spouses viewing. Although I watched all of the Trading Spouses episode (it the the God Warrior one!) I can’t seem to stomach any further direct access; it’s only pleasurable to me if I’m hearing a YouTuber or someone else dissecting it. Direct exposure is unbearable. Maybe because of the conflict. I do not find this true of America’s Next Top Model.

God Warrior leads to the Evangelicals in the play I’m working on leads to Left Behind. Stephen King for the God Squad or something else? I missed our discussion, so I guess I’ll never know, but it made me think about how Barthes/Derrida might address the problem of the rapture. I think they would fucking love it - Barthes’ “returning to absence” and Derrida’s dead-alive both seem made salient in this event. This Log has many essays-to-be-written and one of them is certainly on Christian media, which I love. A film that rises to the top for me is one I watched in secret in High School, If I Had Wings. The film was an accidentally homoerotic story about a blind high school runner paired with a high school delinquent to run cross country together. There was, of course, a lot of touching and a lot of learning of lessons.

Week X:
It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover
Incidents by Roland Barthes
East Palace, West Palace dir. Zhang Yuan
No Visible Bruises by Rachel Louise Snyder [Excerpts]
On the Concept of History by Walter Benjamin [Excerpts]
Listening to Images by Tina Campt [Excerpts]

The inclusion of It Ends With Us in my “Fictions of Conspiracy” curriculum was one of things that drove me to take the class. What a crazy book to read. And how is it related to conspiracy! I presented on this book as penance for my missing class the previous week. In my presentation, I made the argument that what is so inflammatory about It Ends With Us, what elicits such opposing and extreme reactions, is its disruptions of identity borders. It is “internet writing” that is presented in the form a physical book; it is a “dark romance” that occasionally asks us to read it as serious literary fiction; it’s characters are dystopian-fiction-teenagers in the bodies of literary-fiction adults. If Wicked is a hit-machine designed to be a hit-machine, It Ends With Us is a machine-of-another-purpose that has been misappointed as a hit machine by society. So why? Why It Ends With Us and not any of the other poorly-written romance novels about dubious consent and intimate partner violence? Why is this book-object the most perfect version of this story, causing it to become the phenomena it became? I think there’s one argument that says that it is a result of the changed dissemination of information, that is an increasingly fragmented market (BookTok) flukes like this (books not made as Hit Machines becoming Hit Machines) are to be expected and occurs randomly. On the other hand, I think the consecration of It Ends With Us is expressive of a certain despair regarding American life. And what’s interesting is that this despairing is shared by the book’s defenders and its detractors. Each are just mechanizing the book in a different way to express the same thing.

I also think, speaking of conspiracy, that the Blake Lively drama was an embarrassingly un-veiled attempt to profit off of the social phenomenon of the Don’t Worry Darling drama. I imagine we can expect paler and paler replications of this drama in movie marketing until something else happens that captures the meme-ers and the post-ers quickly and with little effort.

Much to be said about Incidents and the mid-20th-century trend of gay writers going abroad to have sex with “local” boys of questionable ages (Call Me By Your Name vibes) but I have to say that the thing that moves me most about Barthes is his concealed, stilted, weird, ugly/sublime relationship to his sexuality. My professor shared an anecdote about Barthes that really caught me. I don’t think it’s often shared because its documentation (a letter) hasn’t yet been translated into English:

Barthes offered to write a preface for the writer Hervé Guibert on the condition that Guibert slept with him. Guibert refused and later, in romantic humilation/desperation, Barthes sent Guibert a love letter. Guibert subsequently published the letter for all to see, after Barthes’ death and against his wishes.

This is the kind of gay impotence/humiliation/punishment that really cleaves to my core. Of course Barthes was wrong to proposition Guibert, but one (me) must also see Guibert as the hot young thing of France’s literary thing - a destroying bliss against Barthes own ugliness. It’s Death in Venice. It’s Instagram. To be so powerful (Barthes) and so power-less (Barthes). It’s terrible, in the Biblical sense of the world. I bought a copy of the magazine with the untranslated letter. I’d like to know what it says, but I feel a slight ethical dilemma about bringing it into English.

Week XI:
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Homeland Maternity by Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz [Excerpts]
"Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion” by Barbara Johnson

This was a short week, only my Tuesday class was held. I admit I came to The Handmaid’s Tale with a lot of baggage about the Hulu show and people dressing up in the costume after the 2016 election. (I wondered throughout the class if I could say “libbing out” or if that phrase would make people unhappy.) My previous exposure to Margaret Atwood as a writer, also, had only been the one advertisement she did for MasterClass. (“It was dark inside the wolf.”) I got that ad again and again and again. Which is all to say that, despite being prepped to not like The Handmaid’s Tale, I thought it was great. It was elegant and surprising and I felt surprised by how specifically of-the-80’s it was. I especially loved the epilogue. I have The Edible Woman, Atwood’s first book, reserved at the library now and I’m looking forward to reading some more of her work.

Next Week:
Babel, or the Necessity of Violence by R.F. Kuang

Things are winding down and there’s little reading left to do! I’m working on final projects in all three of my classes now. In Fictions of Conspiracy & Misinformation I’m writing two connected monologues - the first is a polemic against people who write plays about the worst thing that’s ever happened to them, the second is a very clinical retelling of the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. (Or is it?) In Literary Theory of Barthes/Derrida, I’m writing my final paper on the “Aporias of Mourning” in Barthes’ Mourning Diary. I’ve also been keeping my own ‘Mourning Diary’ as a creative supplement to the project. In Playwriting I’m finishing up my play about the Evangelical Hell House. Its singularity is now set against the “repeatable” Hell House, if that makes sense. The (singular) plot is now underlined by the continued and escalating recreation of evil, rather than waiting for the recreation of evil as a singular event. I’ve been thinking a lot about homemade haunted houses and confession and absence. All three projects are in some way dealing with confession and abjection and God, I think. Right?