Under "scene three"

I've noticed that I formatted these posts differently. That's what happens when you work on something piecemeal over the course of a few months and yet post it as you work on it. If I just wrote the whole thing and edited it in one file as I went, it might not have happened... But I think posting it on the blog has been as much a reason for writing this play as anything else. If I didn't post it, I might not have stuck with it. Now I can see the end and I plan to have it all wrapped up within a few days. I watched the first episode of Horace and Pete a couple weeks back and the way that Louis CK describes creating and posting that show up on the internet makes me think of this play. The medium is the message (or massage) and all that.



I think this is the shortest part of the play. I'm not going to check for sure, but I'm bringing this up because I'm worried that each section at the end here is going to be short. This is a problem I have--things I write tend to go out with a whimper rather than a bang of so many more words typed into a computer. Usually that means I don't finish anything, so I'm happy that I'll actually be able to complete this play, but there's a certain feeling of ambivalence I am reaching now as I finish it and see my usual writing problems popping up once again. That said, it's short, but I think it does a lot.

When I began "Waiting for Gadot," I knew it would be a weird talking heads play where nothing really happens. While writing, I wondered if I would come up with an explanation for why it's the way it is--that's pretty much how we got to this scene. In college, I took a creative writing course where we had to write the same short story three times to practice the editing experience; to avoid doing that, I wrote three short stories that were about the same characters and somehow in my head were versions of the same story. I wasn't enough of a rule breaker to just say I threw everything out, but yeah I don't think I really followed the goal of the project. The story was called "When Dalí ruled the World," and it introduced a number of elements into my writing plans. That's what I think of as all the characters and stories I haven't written: my writing plans. The first story was full of references to how I perceived different Dalí paintings and was very hard to make much sense out of. The second story, on the other hand, was broken up into different scenes, and it worked the best of the whole lot. I think at the end of it the narrator talks to the reader and explains what the whole story was about. Even though consensus with the class was that the story worked quite well, my professor made the point that perhaps this explanation put too tight a bow on the uncertainty and the questions of the first story. When I realized that Carl was having all these weird talks with himself because he was preparing a podcast, I had a similar thought: I liked the explanation, but maybe it was a little too safe. It took away from the oddity of this man just sitting there, ignorant of the world, talking.

Then I thought about it some more. Carl, in "Smitten," is defined as much by how he is me as by how he isn't me. Does that make sense? He's a character that stands in for me in the narrative, but like any character he is a mix of me talking about myself and me talking about, well, not-myself. It's not always about a specific different person, although it is sometimes, but it is distinctly not about me. When it came to "Waiting for Gadot," I wanted to play with that a little bit, since it's ripe for mocking. Writers are frequently mocked for the exploits of their characters and, to some extent, rightfully so. When Bret Easton Ellis chose to include fellow literary brat pack writer Jay McInerney in Lunar Park, his fictional novel about Bret Easton Ellis writing a novel, he would say of McInerney's negative reaction that whatever the he wrote about the man was no worse than what Jay had already written in his own books. Just because this time it was a fictional character named Jay McInerney doing these things didn't make that much difference. In a way, that's another gimmick of "Gadot," since writers are often criticized for their characters all sounding the same: I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before but I imagine this play as an impossible to stage one-man show, where in fact that criticism is an act of genius. The characters all sound the same because, secretly, they are the same! You're in on the joke. Or at least that's the excuse I'm going to use. So anyway, back to Carl: my thought was, okay in the play I will just make him even more like me. I'm not going to worry about the character being seen as simply me, because there's all these other characters that the reader could choose to see that way. Of course, then, Carl would have this long discussion of voice and address what is one of the weird experiences in my life when it comes to voices. That is to say that Carl's discussion of having almost auditory dreams in a pre-sleep state is me talking about something that happens to me. I don't think it's a serious thing, but I do think it's uncommon... I've not yet discussed it with someone who's said, "Oh yeah that happens to me too!" Carl says at one point, "I don’t want to label it. I don’t know if it’s some kind of mental illness or just the sign of an overactive mind." and I think that's a fair enough way to put it.

In Room 237, a documentary that collects a variety of different interpretations and readings of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, one person points out how in certain scenes of the film, if you map out the hotel, when Danny is riding his tricycle he is going through the halls of the floor above either his father or his mother. In a way, you can view it as him exploring their subconscious. When I decided Carl would talk about hearing voices before he goes to sleep, I thought I would do something similar and have my writer characters come out and act out his subconscious. I wasn't sure how to do though, so I had to think a bit more. To me, when this happens, it's nothing like getting a song stuck in your head, but I have also laid down in bed and been afraid I wouldn't be able to fall asleep because there was a song stuck in my head, so the comparison seemed fitting. The writers, then, had to spout song lyrics! But song lyrics about what? Well, why not voices, since this was Carl's interest in attempting to record the podcast. I must admit that only the first lyric came to my mind at first, as "This is the way you wish your voice sounds/So handsome and smart" from Brand New's "Okay I Believe You, But My Tommy Gun Don't" on Deja Entendu, is a song lyric that I come back to often and also perfectly describes that feeling of uneasiness that one gets from hearing one's own voice. In a sense, it is fitting that Pandrio says it here, as it shows the distance from Carl: Carl might be imagining this being said, his brain might be creating this phrase in his head, but it is the exact opposite of what he is describing, and that alienation is the weirdest part of this experience of hearing voices. It is when I think back on such an episode, if I am briefly brought more awake, for example, and can sometimes name the speakers in question and for a few seconds conceptualize what they were discussing, that I am the most confused by it. I'm not sure if Carl comments on this in the play, but I had the thought that this is what writers often talk about when the writing is going well: that the characters talk to them, but on this literal sense it is befuddling and nevertheless additionally impractical because I forget these incidents just as we commonly forget dreams.

Once I had the first quote from a song, I wanted to come up with very disparate examples from different artists and genres. Pandrio speaks a Brand New lyric, Pasha quotes Hilary Duff, and Andrew quotes J. Cole. I could write more about the lyrics, but I don't really feel that authentic in doing so. What I really did was just text a few friends about song lyrics they might remember that dealt with the word "voice," and from texting and researching, I came to these examples. I think it says something in how they are positioned, but I want to leave it up to the reader (or the audience! it is a play, after all!) to imagine what it might be that is being said.

I actually wanted/want to write a horror story about hearing voices, in part inspired by these episodes, combined with a case of tinnitus I have had for going on eight months now, and the irritation that comes from starting to hear the beginning of static over headphones that are starting to fray. I think I've actually started the story at least once, but it went the way of much of my writing as I mentioned at the beginning of the post, I could only write a short start to it and then couldn't go any further. The story in my head is called "Headphones" and is about just that, a pair of headphones that start to break, or do they? The child who is wearing them becomes convinced that a demon is communicating with him. Very high concept, ahaha, probably the reason I can never actually write it. Just like the earlier conceived play that I was able to actually write, in some form, with the "Feature Presentation" in this play, I'm happy that I could actually get an idea out as a part of something I've written, even if I haven't actually written the story I've imagined.

I haven't necessarily had the same consideration of comics that Carl has, when he speaks of way a word bubble tells you distinctly who said it, but I was the one at that Lego building contest, and I do consider myself to have a poor visual... Visual what? Visually creative mind? I think I'm a visual learner in that I need visuals provided, because I can't always visualize things in my head with any consistency. What Carl says about Michael Chabon's fiction is my experience--I blame myself, since his books are very well received, but for some reason third person writing is harder for me to read and I connect this with it requiring a different kind of visualizing. When you read first person, you are having a conversation with the speaker--it's like listening to someone talking to you. In third person, you have to imagine the whole thing, visualize the story if you will. I further have this feeling that I am face blind, even though I've looked at the occasional celebrity faces provided in examples of such a condition and been able to recognize them, because when I am not looking at a person's face, I find it hard to imagine it. I think what happens to me that leads me to associate with face blindness is that I don't have a strong mental image of a person's features and then, for some reason, I'll make a connection between two people, and think they look a lot alike only to tell someone and get the reply, "Are you blind?" Have I mentioned this in the play? Does Pompo talk about it? Because I think hair plays an important part in my recognizing someone--their hair and their voice. It's funny that Pompo and Carl get reduced to these two things as well as a part of the play.

A few things to wrap this up: My dad read this scene as a proofreader and asked me about Carl's line, "I liked being told what to do. I still do, but I used to, too. Sorry, stolen joke." This is a reference to a Mitch Hedberg joke that I'm realizing now that I've reread the line that I've messed up. Ha. The Anthropologist appears in contrast to Carl's focus on voice, as he has constantly derided writers in this play and presents himself as a director. I thought it was fitting he would discuss film here again, as the inspiration for the whole play is the film Wonder Woman coming out, something we've gotten a bit away from, which was the point, but still seems worth a callback. When he begins saying "mood" over and over it stops making sense to him, just like words do sometimes (especially when we type them out--writing a later scene in the play I was struck by the word "great" being spelled the way it is, when the homophone "grate" seems to make so much more sense phonetically, that for a second I thought "great" just couldn't be how you spell it!), but I had him say this in reference to Padgett Powell's book of questions, The Interrogative Mood. I'm sure other people have thought this when they heard the title, but the poet in me has always wanted to reference this book by having a quizzical cow make an interrogative moo, so I've come a bit closer to that with this scene as well.