Word Blur

Wodehouse Medicine

Earlier in the week I had food poisoning. When I started to feel a little better, but not that much better, I lay in bed sorting through all the clothes my kids had recently grown out of and into and so on. That’s one of the endless preoccupations of parenting that no one really mentions ahead of time. The clothes sorting process, particularly if you rely on hand-me-downs, never ends. I had just gotten everything put away in the proper bureaus, storage bins, bags to return to friends, and boxes to drop off at the Salvation Army on Tuesday. On Wednesday my mom handed me a new pile of things she picked up at a sale. Anyway, when I was endlessly sorting pajamas and dresses and socks I listened to an audio recording of Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves.

Anthony Lane wrote a remarkable, critical, heartfelt appreciation of P. G. Wodehouse in the New Yorker some time back that I suggest tracking down if you can. My brain is foggy and I can’t properly explain Wodehouse’s gift for language, but I can recommend it as a tonic for stomach troubles. The lilting affability and dry vacancy of Bertram Wooster are positively medicinal.

The Food Issue

Despite the fact that I’m coming off a dispiriting bout of food poisoning, I’m going to recommend that any and all Wordblur readers check out the current issue of Boldtype. The entire thing is devoted to food and every book there looks immensely readable, from the memoir about the dysfunctional family who invented the sugar packet to the biography of Alice Waters, from the photographs of leftovers to the story of the search for the secret recipe of the Twinkie. But then, I like to eat about things I could put in my mouth.

Whippet good

Last night I had a dream that I was performing street theater in some unknown town that hosted an MFA performance program.  A bunch of students were watching.  I was invited to give a lecture/demonstration at their school.  When I showed up in the corriders of the Art Building a girl who recongnized me from the street came up to greet me.

"You're performance was..."  I prepared myself for the accolades.  "Three-quarters bullshit."

"It was a whippet of snip-snobbery," she concluded.

Why am I having MFA anxiety dreams?  Maybe it's because I've been reading Taken by Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader.  Should I have gone to UCLA and studied with Simone Forti?  And having not committed in full at the exact right moment in life, am I making a mistake digging back into this turf?  After all, this was not the plan. 

Dance, some days I wish I could quit you.  Other days it's like mainlining Prozac directly into my befuddled post-partum brain.

Work/dance

I’ve been rereading the awesome Terpsichore in Sneakers, Sally Banes’ profile of seminal post-modern dancers. It’s every bit as fun and inspiring as it was when I was a freshman in college coming into direct contact with the ideas of people like Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, and Trisha Brown for the first time. I’m particularly struck by the desire to stage Steve Paxton’s Satisfying Lover (instructions appear in the book), a piece for a large cast comprised of detailed instructions about walking, standing, and sitting.

 

This is partly because I’m making performance work grounded in my past, present, and future as a dancer, which is turning out to be more fun and amazing than I could possibly have dreamt. As part of the process I’m blogging about the work at FlynnBlog. Check it out.

 

Comfort Reading

Someone in my family has been sick continuously for the last two months, but we’ve finally hit the jackpot. Right now every single one of us has some version of The Cold. I’d like to write about some of the great books I’ve been reading – The Tipping Point, Stumbling to Happiness, Veronica – but it seems like an enormous amount of effort. Ditto the thought of finishing any of the books I’ve started but not finished so far this year. It’s time for comfort reading, when you turn to those books you read over and over again. So right now I’m debating…Persuasion or Pride and Prejudice? The last time I read both was about a year ago, after being slammed with two consecutive stomach bugs on top of my incessant morning sickness. If I got a tattoo it would probably say “When the going gets tough, the tough read Pride and Prejudice.”

I’m with E. M. Forster:

“I am a Jane Austenite, and therefore slightly imbecile about Jane Austen. My fatuous expression, and airs of personal immunity – how ill they sit on the face, say, of a Stevensonian! But Jane Austen is so different. She is my favourite author! I read and re-read, the mouth open and the mind closed. Shut up in measureless content, I greet her by the name of the most kind hostess, while criticism slumbers.”

 That’s exactly it. I want to be shut up in measureless content.

Weekend Update

I know the three of you checking back on occasion to see if I’ve gotten my act together are only here for the cultural consumption. I oblige.

Things that met with my approval during my most recent prolonged absence: Sports Night, Mary Gaitskill, the Battlestar Galactica finale (for, if nothing else, asking us to consider the possibility that Bob Dylan might be a cylon), Buffy the Vampire Slayer in comic book form, Japanese post-war performance art, progressive education and the Prospect Center, cookie cutters, homemade pizza, the art of making dance, applying social contagion theory at work, my reinvigorated book group, and the Will Farrell ice skating movie (holy crap!).