Fri 12 Feb 2021 02.30 EST
In 2018, the American writer Patricia Lockwood published an essay entitled âHow Do We Write Now?â. The piece was an attempt to reckon with the damage done to a creative mind by years of excessive exposure to the internet. Of her efforts to reclaim some mental space from the endless swirling absurdity of online life, she wrote: âIf I look at a phone first thing the phone becomes my brain for the day [â¦] If I open up Twitter and the first thing I see is the presidentâs weird bunched ass above a sand dune as he swings a golf club I am doomed. The ass will take up residence in my mind. It will install a gold toilet there.â
In March of last year, Reddit user Oneawkwardpanda mentioned that the pandemic stay-home order had resulted in a “massive dip in productivity” for them and asked for advice. “How do you keep yourself accountable? How do you stop snacking?” Many others shared this anxiety about getting as much work as possible done from home; responses included setting up a home office, putting on a tie and shoes in the morning, and “parental controls on your laptop and phone or literally putting your TV in a closet.” Other users describe feeling guilty when relaxing or when not getting “eight hours of ‘real work’ done each day.”
(photo courtesy of Ms. Kaufman)
If your former spouse wrote a book describing how they left you to take up with someone else, even quoting your personal letters during the breakup - what would you do? That is the tantalizing question explored by Lynne Kaufman in her newest play,
Divine Madness, debuting January 30th and 31st on MarshStream. Local stage favorites Julia McNeal and Charles Shaw Robinson will play the roles of celebrated writer Elizabeth Hardwick and poet Robert Lowell, who had a long and intensely complicated marriage. Lowell went on the win the Pulitzer for this work, while Hardwick was left destroyed. What are the chances
This week on Open Air, KALW’s radio magazine for the Bay Area Performing Arts in Times of Corona, we welcome back artists from The Marsh onto the virtual
Shirley Hazzard, 1984. (Photo by Robert Pearce / Fairfax Media via Getty Images)
What wholeness might contemporary literary fiction aspire to? Heavy plotting is outmoded, if not willfully retrograde. Many novelists avoid omniscience, like inept or unwilling gods. Trusty, plausible narrative structures the picaresque, say, or the bildungsroman are approached cautiously, as if they might collapse while one is yet inside. Coherence, difficult enough to find in life, seems even scarcer in the fictive imagination. “The vastness of sensation and experience, of history and knowledge, limits us, sends us back to the small as a relief from the incomprehensible,” Elizabeth Hardwick wrote in 1969. Half a century later, the dimensions she identified seem to have further contracted. The popular trappings of classical works pride, guilt, Eros, the quest have given way to something else. Truer to experience is the accumulation of apprehensive detail: fragment, digression, traumatic memory, ap