Poem-A-Day #32 : The Sinking of the Titanic

The Sinking of the Titanic

: why so many questions :
          : ice becomes blue after it salts and confronts itself at night :

     : these are just the things
you can carry :                    : here is an X on a map it has no emotions :

                                : underneath the waves :
                      : the sound of one lone viola in the largest theater on earth is the sound a conch hears when it holds a human skull to its ear :

The Only Thing I Have To Declare Is...

Last night I went to the opera. The show was the new opera 'Oscar' that had its premier at the Santa Fe Opera this summer. It moves to Philadelphia in 2015.

It is a good thing that the show has over a year before its next performance because it was not good. The worst I've ever seen.

It managed to be outdated, dull, poorly directed, drama free, and generally awful. How does a new show feel like it's 30 years old?

It was witless. Artless. My jaw dropped and I held my sweater in front of my mouth so bugs wouldn't fly in there.

It was not about overcoming adversity. It wasn't about love. It wasn't about politics. It wasn't about Oscar Wilde. I don't even know what it was about because it was so so so broken.

The lyrics were laughable. The prison was played for comedy then discussed as a hellish place. It was all telling and zero showing. Walt Whitman was the narrator? Bosie was a mute dancer......

I have no real words to describe it beyond this. Because it was that bad. There was a song about ABSINTHE.

When I see bad art I have to think it out. I joked last night that I would need to go to therapy to process the night. It was a joke, but kinda true. Bad art is depressing, sad, etc. But gigantic failures have lessons hidden in them. Lessons about process and editing. Lessons about huge corporations pumping money into the creative process. Lessons about people not telling other people no.

It makes me want to scream. Scream then write a better version.

As we were clapping for the cast at the end you could feel the sadness in the room. A sort of 'sorry guys' vibe. I clapped for the fact that the cast was trying their best. The score was interesting. The set was really good.

But every time the show would get to something good it would do something absolutely mind-numbingly dumb. Like end with Walt Whitman ushering Oscar Wilde into heaven...where a pantheon of classic writers dressed in white angel costumes welcome him into 'immortality'. And his response? He makes a joke about wanting to make a good sauce and says 'thanks'...

I don't even know what more to say right now. That is how weird the experience was. It is hard to be coherent about incoherence. Hard to form a center about a non-held object.

Will someone in Philadelphia go see this hot mess in 2015 and tell me if it is good? Better yet, someone let me stay with them so I can watch it again and see what's different. Because it will ALL be different.

The Ten Thousand Things

I've been listening to Azealia Banks' new mixtape Fantasea all day while I vacuum and mop. You can download it for free. There's a link in this MTV article.

All week my headaches have come and gone, so I'm writing very little. I did read The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermoût.

Dermoût was not published until she was 63. The Ten Thousand Things was released in 1955 and then translated into English in 1958. Time named it one of the best books of the year alongside Breakfast At Tiffany's, Doctor Zhivago, and Lolita. She is still considered one of the great Dutch authors.

She was born in Java and her work could be viewed as a precursor to post-colonial writing. The novel follows a woman as she returns to her ancestral home with her young son. The island is a world of magic and danger. The book reminds me of Gabriel García Márquez, Murakami and specifically of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping.

The worlds of Ten Thousand Things and Housekeeping are of women wrapped in, and dealing with, life. In Robinson's book we have two girls orphaned and descending into a world of water and drifting boundaries of 'home' and 'family'. Dermoût's book gives us a woman coming home after being abandoned by her husband/lover. She comes back to a world of myth, ghosts and superstition.

Both books deal with the world overtaking the main characters. Taking them in then altering them to fit within. And both have similar, swirling voids of an ending. The main character left staring into the abyss, whether the view is negative or not is up to the reader.

What does this have to do with Ms. Banks?

Well. She's part of the supposed resurgence of the female rap star. And she's already come head up against the culture and in response said she wanted to be considered a vocalist, not a rapper. And her new album is themed around water, around the ocean. And she seems interested in creating a world for herself outside the one that people have made for her.

Basically, it's connected by feminism, post-colonialism, and the fact that I have a headache and am mopping. Just go with me, OK? Thanks.