(And I mean hurt in that good, post-exercise sort of way. Click on the link to see what I’m talking about. -ag)
Via the Other Michael…
texts that change the conscious parameters of literature, both for readers and for writers. from a different angle than these, r.p. blackmur adds: poetry: …language so twisted and posed in a form that…it adds to the stock of available reality.
via experiential-experimental-literature: text || Jukka-Pekka Kervinen.
New etsy.com treasury contemplating the fresh energy of innocence in a rainbow of spring pastels… so naive i still believe by Alicia Grega on Etsy.
The idea that any woman is speaking for her entire gender every time she opens her mouth is idiotic.
Men don’t speak for all of mankind- they speak for themselves.
that they were brave enough to speak as women without speaking for the whole gender is admirable and nearly impossible in a society that demands ideological consistency from women who self-identify as feminist or otherwise.
via Time to Catch a New Wave?.
The fact of the matter – no matter how much it may infuritate and frustrate – is that we are judged by our appearance with an unjust weight. The day a woman can wake up, throw on yesterday’s suit and run out the door for work with no make up on and not be treated with scornful, questioning sideways glances, or doubts about her ability once she arrives at the office, is the day we can say that cosmetic concerns are trivial.
This is something that we’ve been forced to struggle with as we watch our teenage daughters spend hours of their precious youth applying completely unnecessary and too-expensive makeup and hair product.
The double standard smacks us in the face with each year we age — as the number of men who find us a sexual option decreases, will we be taken more seriously or will we just be ignored, assumed to be out of touch and unfashionable because we’ve learned comfort is more fun than the constant pressure to always be desirable?
All tastes and political inclinations and goals and dreams aside — this is what unites us.
If you’ve chosen to live to live outside society’s judgement, I commend and envy you. Unfortunately, I learned to too late that life really is a popularity contest, that is, if you want to make an impact in the world. And this is true for men and women alike (although what makes men “cool” is significantly different from what makes women “cool.”) My colleagues and I can make theater that no one will see or can cultivate support for our work. In a town like Scranton, that means surface likeability — the first impression that makes people want to be associated with you — backed up second by substance that matters. -ag
I can’t remember making the conscious decision to be different. My mother traveled to the beat of a different drum, as the Mike Nesmith song goes, and so I suppose I was challenged to “fit in” from birth. Moving across the country from California to PA in 1979 only proved to emphasize my difference in experience from my classmates.
Puberty was unkind to me and my peers were even crueler. It was during this time, I suppose, that I came to accept my place on the outside looking in. I never intentionally tried to be different from other people, but I never tried to falsify myself either– to like things I didn’t like, and act against my grain in order to be more like them, and therefore more likable.
I’ve grown comfortable with my “eccentricities,” but existing in a world in which others demand we conform to a shape that for me feels threateningly claustrophobic and unnecessairily prohibitive, has not gotten any easier.
Like everyone else in this world — at least I assume this is a common desire of all humans from the child’s first inkling of individual being — I want my uniqueness to be appreciated. I want to be valued and liked for who I am, not who others would rather I be.
I’m honestly quite jealous of people who naturally and happily fit in and don’t have to choose beween being true to themselves or being the sort of person rewarded with security and success.
Feeling especially cursed today and hoping to find some inspiration to stop feeling sorry for myself, I did a quick internet search on the origins of the phrase “square peg in a round hole.”
Zen Master Dogen used the phrase in “Shobogenzo” in the first half of the 11th century, but it doesn’t appear to be commonly used to describe a person who feels like a misfit and/or does not fit in to the dominant paradigm until the 1800s.
I like this bit cited at the Wikipedia entry for “square peg in a round hole.”
Kenelm Chillingly asks: “Does it not prove that no man, however wise, is a good judge of his own case? Now, your son’s case is really your case —- you see it through the medium of your likings and dislikings, and insist upon forcing a square peg into a round hole, because in a round hole you, being a round peg, feel tight and comfortable. Now I call that irrational.”
The farmer responded: “I don’t see why my son has any right to fancy himself a square peg … when his father, and his grandfather, and his great-grandfather, have been round pegs; and it is agin’ nature for any creature not to take after its own kind.”
— Edward Bulwer Lynton in Kenelm Chillingly, His Adventures and Opinions (1873)
Sydey Smith reportedly presented the following in Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy (1849):
It is a prodigious point gained if any man can find out where his powers lie, and what are his deficiencies, — if he can contrive to ascertain what Nature intended him for: and such are the changes and chances of the world, and so difficult is it to ascertain our own understandings, or those of others, that most things are done by persons who could have done something else better. If you choose to represent the various parts in life by holes upon a table, of different shapes, — some circular, some triangular, some square, some oblong, — and the persons acting these parts by bits of wood of similar shapes, we shall generally find that the triangular person has got into the square hole, the oblong into the triangular, and a square person has squeezed himself into the round hole.
It is a commonly understood that the mismatch might not only be uncomfortable or impractical but perhaps, impossible. A 1957 book by Irving Wallace might be what I had set out to find. I’ve only skimmed the first few pages of The Square Pegs: Some Americans Who Dared to Be Different, but I am curious to read more. It’s available for free download in several formats online, if you’re interested.
-ag
A few notes scribbled down on my iPhone notepad in the middle of the night aside, I finally started the physical work on my true, five minute story for the Scranton Story Slam yesterday morning.
The event will be held on Saturday, March 31 at The Vintage Theatre in Scranton. So it seems as if there is plenty of time. Except we have a show (Octavia) going up at the theater on Wednesday. And there’s that pesky day job. And the thing putting food on the table after the day job pays the rent & utilities seems to be my jewelry sales.
And there’s that play I’ve been trying to write. And the call for proposals for the September playwriting invitational that needs to be ready by Wednesday. And that guest blog I said I would do for March. And all the other volunteer work I’m committed to. And last but not least, those lovely teenagers of mine need a mother’s love and taxi service some of the time.
I love my life, all poverty aside, but dang what I wouldn’t give for the ability to stop time.
I’m pretty comfortable with the first 287 words — yeah, that’s not very much — of my story minus the fact that I can’t find the name of that blonde reporter from A Current Affair who reported on the Soon Yi/Woody Allen scandal from Drew University in 1992. These details matter when you’re telling a true story. Which is why I prefer fiction.
Fortunately, I chose a story that feels like fiction in my memory. It happened to another Alicia a couple of Alicias ago. It has nothing to do with Soon Yi and Woody really. Except that you can’t help who you fall in love with. Or who you don’t.
There is some pain in the story — mostly that kind that comes from being honest with one’s own faults and failings. Hopefully I can twist most of it into a sort of comedy. There’s a lot of comedy in the story. More than I can find in most my adult, post-collegiate life when children changed the tone of whim and made it something more akin to irresponsibility.
They’ll be recording the life out of this event — audio and video both from what I understand and I expect the camera will be snapping. So you’ll get to taste the end results if you’re so inclined. (See future post.)
-ag
Other than an extended facebook comment I made in regards to This American Life’s melodramatic retraction of its Mike Daisey story broadcast, I’ve been trying not to get too sucked in to the controversey.
But it does excite me that people are talking about theatre and the power that theatre has to move people.
Also, some really great points are being made about fiction vs. non-fiction vs. memoir vs. documentary as writers respond to the big picture of the story in an age during which we’ve intentionally been messing with genre tradition in the hopes of “achieving something new.”
The following bit makes perfect sense to me:
First, let’s dispatch this ridiculous “theater not journalism” argument which is about as useful a discussion as “is blogging journalism?”. Theater and journalism aren’t separate or opposite endeavors. The New York Times front page is a kind of theater, and plenty of theatrical events are a kind of journalism.
Gregarious Expressions 