A speculative mind

  I just finished Beloved by Toni Morison. You don’t need me to tell you this is a good book. It is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel from a Nobel Prize winning author. But this is a story about people dealing with terrible situations and trying to make the best of it. The main focus of the story takes place in 1873, after the Civil War has ended, but black people still find their world in conflict (they still do 150 years later). The main character, Sethe, is a woman who escaped from her slaveholder and abuse, only to have to make a terrible decision afterward that left a rip in the fabric of the world. There is a supernatural element to this book starting with the ghost of Sethe’s dead child. But despite a ghost and other speculative things, this story is grounded in a stark reality. This family has gone through a lot. We occasionally get flashbacks to slavery days. And in 1873 they continue to go through difficult times, yet they do find happiness now and then. They find things...

  I have done some stupid things in my life. But only once have I been chased by the police for one of those stupid things. One night my college roommates and I were sitting around. I mentioned this thing I had heard somebody say, about how you could take two lengths of surgical tubing, attach them to a funnel and use them to shoot water balloons over a long distance. You needed three people: one to hold the funnel and balloon and the other two to each hold an end of the tubing. Roommate one (we’ll call him D) said he knew about it but said you didn’t want to use surgical tubing because after a few shots it would break and snap you in the face. But, he said he had some rubber tubing that would work. Roommate number two (let’s call him V) said, “Let’s do it!” Cautious me thought, maybe I didn’t think this through before mentioning it because this is something we could get in trouble for, I mean depending on where we shoot them, and if we were actually shooting them at people, this...

  Some authors are prolific, writing more books than many people will ever read in a lifetime. Isaac Asimov and Ursula Bloom each wrote over 500 books. But they are not even close to the record. Jozef Ignacy Kraszewski – 600 books John Creasey – 600 books Barbara Cartland – 723 books Kathleen Mary Lindsay – 904 books Jacob Neusner – 950 books Ryoki Inoue - 1075 books Yes, some people write lots of books. That doesn’t mean they write good books. The authors on the list above might be good writers. I don’t know. I have only heard of a couple of them and have only read Asimov. In contrast, some authors make an incredible splash with only a single book. In the music industry they have one-hit wonders. That’s not really the same thing because in the case of musical one-hit wonders, it is not because the artist didn’t try to produce more. They often produced many other songs, it’s just that only one caught on. When I am talking about books, it is the author that only produced one novel...

  We have just passed the 25 th anniversary of September 11 th 2001. It is one of those dates forever etched in my mind. I recently completed the performance run of a play with a dozen teenagers in the cast, and I realized that none of them were alive when September 11 th happened. For them it is just one of those historical events that old people talk about. It is the same way I feel about Pearl Harbor. It was a tragic life-changing event. But what’s missing is the personal visceral imprint on the psyche that happened on that day in September of 2001. Anyone who was alive when Pearl Harbor happened would have that same visceral feeling about it. The world was a different place before December 7 th , 1941, than it was after. Roosevelt called it “A date which will live in infamy.” There have been a number of dates that live in infamy. You can go through history and find these life-changing events periodically: the sinking of the Lusitania, the attack on Fort Sumter, the beh...

  I enjoy playing board games, but I am not really a serious gamer in the modern sense of the word. Serious gamers have their own lore, a catalogue of titles ready in their brain and a community of like-minded folk. But when I was in college my roommate Vern turned me on to SPI war games. Prior to this, my experience with war games consists of Risk, Battleship, checkers, and chess. SPI war games were about five levels above Risk. SPI stands for Simulation Publications Inc. This company was in existence from 1969 to 1982. They produced a great variety of war games which usually consisted of a map (some of which were multiple pages) and chits that represented individual units. Some of the games were based on historical battles and so the chits represented real units that fought in that battle, for example, one chit might represent the second battalion of the 506 th regiment of the 101 st Airborne Division. Sometimes the chits represented even smaller units than that. There were dif...

  Audiences don’t realize how important they are to a play. It’s not just ticket sales. They are part of the show. As I write this, last night we had our dress rehearsal for the play we are about to put on: The Outsiders . After the rehearsal our director told us that even though we have been working at this for six weeks, we have not yet produced “theatre.” He said that tomorrow, after we do it in front of an audience, that will be theatre. He was correct. A play isn’t a play without an audience, just like a song isn’t a song without someone to hear it. A stage play is a symbiotic relationship between actors, crew and audience. The audience draws energy and emotions from the players. But also, the actors draw energy from the audience. Not just in a comedy when they can hear the laughter, not just at the end of the act when there is applause. The energy is there. It is palpable. The actors feed off it. A play performance is a tenuous thing. It only exists once at that particul...