It’s not unusual for Norman Fischer to offer a literary aside mid-dharma talk.
There’s nothing strange about him citing Milton’s Paradise Lost to the Mountain Rain Sangha on the May 3, 2025, “Dongshan Stories” (regarding several koans of the venerable Zen teacher) episode of the Everyday Zen podcast to which I subscribe.
What’s weird is that I didn’t hear the words I’m about to quote until three months later, right in the middle of a production inspired by the very same text (see “Dream on the Farm: Paradise Lost”, FarmArtsCollective.org). I know, it’s a popular text. Not such a great coincidence? Shhhh … I’m with the theatre people and we like magic. We make magic out of imagination and practiced skill. That’s art.
After bringing up Milton’s gorgeous language in the middle of the dharma talk, Norman says, “Adam and Eve eating the apple was not a mistake. It had to happen.” In order to mate and reproduce and propagate the human race,” he says. He’s been speaking of shame and sexual lust/desire.
He continues,
“Maybe this is what the Zen Masters are trying to tell us: don’t forget that part of us is always still in the garden of our simply being here. Of our simply, innocently being alive- beyond our shame and our worry about good and evil. We are simply here. Always right here. Maybe our practice is learning the way back to the garden, which is paradise, not utopia. Paradise- not a figment of our imaginations, but the real actual world once we can fully appreciate it as it is.”
It’s an astonishing sidebar to the writing in my journal which I don’t have time to share right now. I’m too busy living because the living is the work. The words are a fragmented documentation that may, in the end, exist more to free my memory than to mean anything to anyone else. -ag
This conversation is a couple of weeks old now and will likely sound irrelevant already. Oh well. For the record, there is value in capturing a moment in time as much as there is in the generic symbolism of the timeless. These TnR program segments give me the chance to talk through whatever challenges are gripping us at that moment in time. I’m glad they exist and hope some listener somewhere exists and agrees.
I devour vast amounts of media daily and have to hold my tongue about a lot of it all day long as I interact with students. Contrary to MAGA propaganda, teachers aren’t forcing their personal beliefs on students. All good educators encourage students to find out for themselves – do the research and then think critically about it. They were raised to take tests and to find the right answer. But the real problem is that there isn’t one right answer. Go.
I found a clip of Rather remembering that moment that was quite vivid but could not find a clip from the actual interview.
What I did find was a transcript of Letterman’s monologue from that night. Right before the end, Letterman throws in a heartwarming story about a little town in Montana named Choteau. This is what he said:
“I’ll tell you about a thing that happened last night. There’s a town in Montana by the name of Choteau. It’s about a hundred miles south of the Canadian border. And I know a little something about this town. It’s 1,600 people. 1,600 people. And it’s an ag-business community, which means farming and ranching. And Montana’s been in the middle of a drought for… I don’t know… three years? And if you’ve got no rain, you can’t grow anything. And if you can’t grow anything, you can’t farm, and if you can’t grow anything, you can’t ranch, because the cattle don’t have anything to eat, and that’s the way life is in a small town. 1,600 people.
“Last night at the high school auditorium in Choteau, Montana, they had a rally — home of the Bulldogs, by the way — they had a rally for New York City. And not just a rally for New York City, but a rally to raise money… to raise money for New York City. And if that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about the… the spirit of the United States, then I can’t help you. I’m sorry.”
The crowd applauded and I teared up reading it. But the reason for my tears was that I’m not so sure those small-town Montana residents could ever feel the same about New York City in post-Trump America. Has he destroyed our love for each other? Our ability to support the suffering and vulnerable through times of unfathomable crisis?
When the recent wildfires in California burned up so much of Los Angeles County, there were people who applauded to hear the “rich Hollywood liberal elites” had been punished (I’m not going to search X for lingering evidence – we all heard about these posts on social media if we didn’t see them first hand.) Of course, the reality is Altadena was a middle-class neighborhood – small homes in close proximity which helped the fire spread. No one deserves to suffer such a tragedy. How could they be so callous?
I’m not saying we should go back to 9/11 and press the reset button or anything but … we’ve been a kinder, more compassionate people in the past. That means we can get there again. I’m not going to tell other people how to behave but … I don’t think selling our souls to gain favor with the King is going to work out for anyone. -ag
I was trying to figure out if I could get the $25 off an American Express gift card and into one of my accounts for future use.
Am I careless or maybe I’m afraid given the chance … I will lose it? This is a quiet trauma of my life. So many moves. So many hellos and goodbyes to so many different people. I can’t remember it all and I am afraid of forgetting. Someday I will read my seventh-grade journals and I won’t shrink back in horror because I won’t recognize myself. It’s like The Notebook with crates of disturbing purgings, half-finished writings, thank you cards and kind letters from people who love me enough to have bothered, theatre programs, printouts of poetry and recipes, receipts, production histories, travel ephemera …
A puzzle of memories to piece together when it all looks brand-new again. A life’s final project.
That was a tangent I let happen because I was curious to see the words emerge.
The point of this post is to say, I found my PayPal business page and the profile has changed. I uploaded the content requested and now this exists –
I’m not actively seeking additional work at this time. I’ve still got my hands full teaching seven classes at five schools again this semester and can’t hope to free my schedule before June. So I really have no business putting this out into the world right now. Except that I am a professional who hopes to add more Gregarious work in the future as I turn down my course load and make more time for my creative writing and theatrical goals. Common Play Factory has been a fragment of a dream until now. I can make something real that will help people grow and heal and learn and connect with the arts and storytelling and collective production explorations.
At this time, I am hoping to model professional efforts for my students. Not all of my experiments with digital media will coalesce into content worth storing in those crates for the rest of my life … to the annoyance of those who watch me move my life about in boxes.
But I think I’m finally on to something.
I still believe I can make something that matters. Hopefully several things.
I am creating alongside my students this semester. Writing the same poems. Creating more digital content.
Took me well beyond 10,000 hours to feel this confident and secure in my voice. Now that I’m here, it’s hurting not to write. Words keep forcing themselves out of me when I should be doing other things. Don’t worry, I will grade the assignments. “First things first” as Covey coined. But I’m not going to leave my art out of my life. It would be unhealthy.
It’s never too late. We must make ourselves ready for when the challenge arises. Sun Tzu-style – make ourselves stronger and smarter and more skilled while we, in time, win without fighting.
Maybe I’ll revise my CV creatively to reflect the hours spent absorbing life’s details and stories and music, how energy moves us, the hours spent playing with and building with language, the hours spent writing badly, and designing badly to sharpen skills into a more powerful tool. I’ve been wanting to make an infographic.
After seeing the Scranton Shakespeare production of Troilus and Cressida in summer 2019, I began research to support a (feminist) revisionist (live theatre) story about Cressida / Bresis and women trafficked as slaves during the Trojan War. In Chaucer’s version of the Troilus and Cressida story, she is degraded for her disloyalty to Troilus and for her fickle, inconstant character, in general. It’s not a virtuous way for a woman of that time to behave. The readership knows to judge her. Shakespeare plays with moral questions of wartime but doesn’t free Cressida from “slut shaming.”
Unfortunately, after finishing grad school that same summer, my work schedule grew and grew to the scale that I haven’t had much time to devote to this project since first conceiving of its potential.
Among the seven classes I am teaching this semester are an introductory course in Media Writing and Writing for Social Media. Knowing the momentous impact AI continues to have on the media industry, it would disadvantage my students were I not to learn as much as I can first-hand about the potential dangers and benefits of the uncanny elephant in the room. I have my own moral qualms about typing a single word into any of these digital communications platforms these days but … this is the world we are living in today. Is AI going to go away if we ignore it? Can we reject this technology and still expect to earn a living? How long will it take to build a whole new unplugged underground? Are enough of us willing to confront the digital revolution with a new world order? Perhaps.
While doing research for my class this morning, I was inspired to see what Notebook LM might do with my work on the Cressida Project so far. I’ve accumulated documents including literary research papers, source texts, blog posts and my own notes and creative ideas based on the conviction that we must retell Cressida’s story because she was a trafficked woman, a sex slave traded as a win or loss in a foolishly deadly war waged for no good reason.
After a productive chat and a pretty fantastic “audio overview” was generated, I knew I had to share the results. While these results are AI-generated, they feel very personal and specific to my ideas and viewpoint. I feel a sense of pride in these results even though AI does a lot of heavy lifting here it couldn’t have made sense of my research unless there was something solid here. I fed it 27 sources to support my position and this LM makes it sound like my concept is worth pursuing. I feel re-inspired to finish the work I’ve begun.
The remainder of this post is the content generated by Notebook LM after our detailed conversation. I find it interesting that while the “Audio Overview” leaves out any specific mention of my plans for the revisionist play, the WordPress post I asked Notebook to write did not shy away from my original script in progress. The working title is “Whore Criseyde” which I know is just awful. I’ll change it later LOL.
*The works cited page that supports these footnotes is based on my uploaded sources but also complimented to texts beyond my current download folder. I’m not going to include it here but don’t hesitate to contact me if you are curious.
First: A link to the Audio Overview to help separate the AI that follows from the Alicia who wrote the first half of this post herself.
Audio Overview Logline: “In a reimagining of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, a woman’s ‘betrayal’ becomes a desperate act of survival in a world where she is both a commodity and a scapegoat for the follies of men.”
WordPress post I asked Notebook LM to write:
“My current project is a deep dive into the complexities of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, but it’s not your typical retelling. I’m not interested in simply rehashing the old story of a ‘true’ lover and a ‘false’ maiden. Instead, I want to reimagine Cressida’s story through a feminist lens, exploring her agency (or lack thereof) within a patriarchal and war-torn world. This isn’t just about making her a victim, though. It’s about understanding how she becomes the object of male projections and how her choices are shaped by the impossible constraints placed on her [1-3].
Drawing inspiration from various sources, including the original play and critical analyses [4, 5], I’m particularly interested in:
Challenging the traditional narratives: I want to move beyond the simplistic ‘true Troilus, false Cressida’ dichotomy and unpack the societal forces that lead to her condemnation [6].
Exploring the idea of Cressida as a commodity: I want to highlight how she is treated as merchandise by men like Pandarus, and how her exchange between the Trojans and Greeks reduces her to an object of political and economic trade [7, 8].
Amplifying the voices of the marginalized: I aim to give voice to the women of Troy, including the chorus and the other refugee women, and offer a more nuanced perspective on the impact of war on women [9, 10].
Examining the cynical lens of the male gaze: Through characters like Ulysses and Thersites, I want to explore the destructive nature of male cynicism and how it shapes the narrative of the play [11-13].
Highlighting the human cost of war: This project is not just about Cressida. It’s about how war dehumanizes individuals and forces them into impossible situations, reflecting a “man-made horror in a godless world” [14-16]. I want the play to be relevant to modern audiences and invite discussion on the timeless themes.
Ultimately, my goal is to create a production that is both faithful to the original text and yet challenges its assumptions, offering a more complete and sympathetic portrayal of Cressida and the women in the play [17]. I am interested in the potential of staging this play with a modern lens, using visual and aural elements to highlight the timeless relevance of its themes [18, 19]. The stage will feature a debris-filled landscape and temporary shelters to emphasise the women’s vulnerability [19, 20]. It will explore the use of hatred as a tool of control [21]. It is a project about what can be ‘taken’ from the experience of the play [22]. I want the play to be an ‘open text’, and I want my production to reflect that.”
I’ve written dozens of versions of this same advice to beginning screenwriters.
It takes reading a lot of scripts over many years to understand the form but here’s a tip I hope you can use now.
Every word of a script should convey valuable information. Writers hung up on facial choreography aren’t trusting the actors will know how to perform if given insights to character through specific behavior and choices. They forget to leave clues in description detail. They lose sight of the bigger picture while telling the actor how to time his exhalations. -ag
By it, I mean video. I’ve been taking advantage of summer outdoor adventures to practice cutting together videos of our hikes and cycling. I suppose there is some sense of visual storytelling. Some cinematic training of the mind?
I’ve learned GoPro AI is terrible at picking clips and the only way to use their app is to make your own edits. Some of the music is good, though and it’s nice to make highlight reels relatively quickly (without spending hours in Adobe).
Just in case you thought I forgot about my own creative work … I am still processing life and practicing the skills to share it. It just doesn’t look so much like script at the moment.
This is the blog of Kal Spelletich. CONTACT: Spellkal (at) gmail.com + Art, technology, humans and robots, and, well, the journey http://www.kaltek.org/
Gregarious Expressions 