10 May, 2014

Listening to:

Reading:

Quote of the week:

A Great Big World: Is there Anybody Out There? Wole Soyinka: You Must Set Forth at Dawn: A Memoir “Children when they ask you why your mama so funny say she is a poet she don’t have no sense.”  
— Lucille Clifton

Sign of the Times: US Road Trip

I’ve just completed a five week trip across the USA.  Atlanta, across the south to Texas, up to Kansas and Iowa, through Chicago and Detroit, down through Philly and the Carolinas and back to the South. Stopping on the way with friends, listening to Greek tragedies on tape while driving, watching the signs out my window.  Here are a few.

19 April, 2014

Listening to:

Reading:

Quote of the week:

Miles Davis: Kind of Blue Gretchen Rubin: The Happiness Project “Why indeed must ‘God’ be a noun?  Why not a verb?”
— Mary Daly

Play Reading in Iowa: “my grandpa’s dead body”

This morning my aunt Susan, uncle Steve, aunt Julie (my Skype), my mom, and my friend Jim all read through my play “my grandpa’s dead body.”  The play borrows elements and characters from our own family, although mixes them with a darkness and a skewed vision of Iowa different from the one I live. It was a brave and moving experience, art and life co-mingling.

 

12 April, 2014

Listening to:

Reading:

Quote of the week:

2Pac: All Eyez on Me Chris Abani: The Virgin of Flames “If you don’t answer my calls I’m going to massage a crocodile at the zoo (a dead one).” 
— A Zimbabwean friend telling me he’s angry because I didn’t pick up his call.


Selma, my Selma

Drove through Selma this am. Shocked at the state of downtown – this was always a magical place to me and now it’s a ghost town. What has happened to one of the birth places of the civil rights movement?

5 April, 2014

Listening to:

Reading:

Quote of the week:

Digable Planets: Blowout Comb Tracy Letts: August, Osage County “You told me again you preferred handsome men but for me you would make an exception . . . We’re ugly but we have the music.”
— Chelsea Hotel by Leonard Cohen sung by Meshell Ndegeocello. 


29 March, 2014

Listening to:

Reading:

Quote of the week:

Maria Callas: Legend Sandra Saayman: Breyten Breytenbach, A Monologue in Two Voices “ Malala pipes”
— A derogatory expression in South Africa to say someone is useless, referring to homeless boys and girls who live in big concrete pipes.