Before NEWS

THE CEILING

This is a bit of a placeholder and a bit of just a weird post for today. The title is actually not political; I'll explain it in a couple paragraphs. I probably have to admit now that I'd finished the first two parts of THE ROOF before posting anything so it might start to slow down now but I want to push myself to find this narrative. If you've read "Waiting for Gadot" you might notice that THE ROOF is more plotted. Even if we essentially have opening scene monologue and second scene dialogue. Am I repeating myself?

I think that's probably pretty relatable during the quarantine. Everyday blends together. This makes me think of an idea from The Rewatchables podcast episode on Groundhog Day: these last few months in some ways we've all felt like Bill Murray when it comes to going through the same day each morning. Unfortunately we don't have the predictability that Murray has in that film; that's something we would want in this year when it seems like every six days something completely unexpected happens. In the future, I might just teach situational irony by telling the students, "Think about 2020."

Am I repeating myself? We teach Antigone in the 10th grade at my school district and I very easily could have talked about all this on the blog before, but Antigone got a weird translation/adaptation by my author crush Anne Carson called Antigonick* that came out the year I graduated college. Throughout the whole play Carson is just fucking with us readers and is, as always, smarter than all of us. I haven't finished the last episode of I Know This Much Is True yet, but Nedra (played by Juliette Lewis who also sings but isn't Jenny Lewis, I just confirmed) tells Mark Ruffalo's Dominick back in episode one that she wants to leave parts of the Italian in his grandfather's manuscript untranslated to give the flavor of the language. That's not what Carson does but she translates freely as a way to capture more information that a literal word for word breakdown would allow.

I don't mean just some sort of explanation or adapting of idioms, I mean that as a translator Carson is also being a critic and intellectual. This ancient Greek play begins with Antigone and her sister discussing Hegel and Samuel Beckett thousands of years before the men were born. But why not? If you stage her translation you stage it now, don't you? And when ideas from the past echo ideas that come later, viewers in the future will consider that future context in evaluating the previous work. One hopes, anyway. There was a time when The Birth of a Nation was incredibly popular, you know. Societies outgrow some narratives or twist them and reform them. Heroes become villains and vice versa.

I've read(?) and watched a video about a staged version of Antigonick (see below) that presents the play as occurring not on a stage but in a building with characters moving from room to room as a way of having scene transitions. I'm not sure how people watched the performance but I imagine that the audience would also move around the theatre like museum exhibits. The idea of the play as an exhibit messes with the literal words on the page--in a museum things happen simultaneously, whereas any way of transcribing would put the words on the page in different places. Imagine two different exhibits in a museum with audio recordings playing at the same time. Of course, if you are very particular, you could listen to one whole recording and then move to the second one and listen to the whole thing. That assumes, though, that the recordings are looped and limited in timing. If you had two different transcriptions of the recordings, you could read these at your leisure. You could focus on each and every word. If you are moving from exhibit to exhibit with recordings playing, you would perhaps capture a mood rather than the specifics of any given recording.

My idea is to essentially have a party on the roof in THE ROOF. Am I repeating myself? To give a feel of moving across the roof as an audience member, there are separate conversations in each corner, noted by the cardinal directions and the reader will have a choice for how to move among them. Those of you who orienteer or have a background in the Boy Scouts like me will know that if you write out an abbreviation of the cardinal directions you have, somewhat oddly perhaps NEWS. So 3 in THE ROOF will include NEWS as four separate mini-scenes and we are currently Before NEWS. I told you I'd get there and it wasn't political.


*I think I posted a separate video/trailer for this performance of Antigonick here years ago but it's down now so I found this: https://vimeo.com/275712033. Here's also a dance theatre version that talks a lot about the construction of the Carson book as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSemjY_n_zc.