Dismantling a Tree (or ode on the occasion of ending a very long relationship)

Don’t believe the hype – it’s all lies, these stories about trees falling in the forest. To fell a tree you don’t hack away at the core, you don’t throw your weight against its large trunk and emerge victorious, you don’t take vicious strokes and then yell “timber . . . “  This is all myth – there is no struggle, no crack, no thud.

Instead when you remove a tree, you do so in parts. You start from the top and you cut away: branches with a chainsaw, side trunks with an axe, ropes and pulleys to guide each falling piece. This is how you take apart a tree, until, in the end, the removal is so clean and so complete, you forget that the tree was even there.

 

 

 

Alex Burger Writing Featured in New Book

My play, Whose Blood, is featured in a new book Challenging History in the Museum: International Perspectives.  The play is discussed, along with George Wolfe’s The Colored Museum (not bad company) in the Chapter “Making Them Laugh: Making Them Cry: Theatre’s Role in Challenging History. ”  In the chapter, the lovely Judith Bryan credits the play with an elegance and depth that I can only hope are actually there.

 

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.