Reading and really enjoying The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, some kind of bleak and funny post-modern diaspora saga by Junot Diaz. The frame of reference (linguistic and cultural) is beautiful in its mixture; the contemporary characters caught between their (nightmarish, semi-mythical) Dominican Republic cultural heritage on the one hand and the alien wasteland of 80s New Jersey on the other. Here and there in the Spanglish (I sometimes understand by inference, or not at all) you find characters sketched by comical nods to Dune, Tolkien, Marvel Comics or even A. E. Van Vogt (whose book Slan I guess I havent seen much mention of since reading it as a teenager). The vibe is nerdy meets smart crossed with shit-talking at a party; conversational but quite happy to dip into detail on some aspect of Carribean culture and history.

In fact it's especially the direct/bad tempered and from time-to-time abusive-staccato of the footnotes on the Dominican Republic that are super enjoyable. "You don't know that we were occupied twice in the Twentieth Century...", the narrator taunts explaining something at one point, only to console in the same sentence, "...don't worry, when you have kids they wont know the U.S. occupied Iraq either".  In related spirit a general level of flashy badmouthing is meeted out to latter-day Dominican public/political figures - Tujillo is "a portly, pig-eyed sadistic mulato who bleached his own skin... our Sauron, our Arawan, our Darkseid...", whilst Balaguer started out as "one of El Jefe [Tujillo's] more efficient ringwraiths" but in the period of his own rule is "...a Negrophobe, an apologist for genocide, an election thief and a killer of people that wrote better than himself..."

Diaz' own contemporary characters -  a fat nerdy kid Oscar and his punk sister Lola  - born to a powerhouse of negativity/Dominican-immigrant single-mother Beli, don't always fare much better, perpetually shadowed by intimations of Fuki (a curse) and often described with perversely enjoyable skepticism and disdain. Oscar has a rough adolescence; "scrambling his face into nothing you could call cute, splotching his skin with zits.. too dorky, too shy, and (if the kids from the neighborhood are to be believed) too weird." Another character (suitor to Beli) is framed like this; "there is something about the binding, selling and degradation of women that brought out the best in the Gangster".  Diaz can be a great enthuser too though - brash and funny - Beli, for example, gains a cleavage that is something "so beserk that only a pornographer or a comic-book artist could have designed it with a clear conscience".

Though it's from a very different universe both the mix of voices and the negativity thing set me thinking about my own tactics in Endland Stories and elsewhere (Lisa, protagonist in the first story of that book for example, is "an unlucky misery guts with a hidden gift for brilliant ideas"). There's something so charged about the act of creating figures who at the same time you dismiss, threaten or paint-as-doomed. It's a method that perhaps strikes at and immediately doubles the process of making-through-writing. It's tense too, at least in Diaz' book. I'm worried about Oscar, even though I guess the title has pretty well given it away.

What's interesting for me also is reading a book like this that really does 'generations and family history' - small characters in a time of big change - it's a genre that I more or less never go near (except maybe via Marquez). Seeing it done so well though - very now, no reverence,  a lot of play, and a kind of light-touch cool self-consciousness alongside really sharp politics and vivid characters - has made me think about it all over again. Diaz' shift of voices for different sections of the book - jumping and tracking back through family generations, and between figures in the story - reminds me a little bit of David Mitchell too. All good. I didn't finnish this one yet but I already Amazoned his earlier short story collection called Drown.

New one for the Empty Stages series that Hugo and I have been working on. This from Croatia, New Years Day.

P.T. Anderson interviewed about his new movie There Will Be Blood here.
A beautiful quote about editing:

You learn that omitting things is the same as writing things.

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A while back I wrote a definition of choreography for Corpus and now the complete issue, with definitions from 52 of the usual and not so usual suspects, is up online here. Some great contributions there - lots to explore in English and German. For brevity there's Jonathan Burrows;  Choreography is about making a choice, including the choice to make no choice.  For more extended playfulness try this (below) from Superamas. The Corpus site won't let me link to individual entries so I'm quoting in full here, with apologies, since otherwise finding this is hard.

Superamas:

I was reading a novel of Dashiell Hammett, "The Gutting of Couffignal".

(…)
"Stop!" I ordered.
"I shan't," she said, but she did, for the time at least. "I'm going out."
"You're going out when I take you."
I thought: Choreography is the art of giving orders.

She laughed, a pleasant laugh, low and confident.
"I'm going out before that," she insisted good-naturedly. I shook my head.
"How do you propose stopping me?" she asked.
"I don't think I'll have to," I told her. "You've too much sense to try to run while I'm holding a gun on you."
Choreography is the art of being obeyed: no drama, no psychological matters, only shapes and moves. Like for a military parade, you decide and off they go.

She laughed again, an amused ripple.
"I've got too much sense to stay," she corrected me. "Your crutch is broken and you're lame. You can't catch me by running after me then. You pretend you'll shoot me, but I don't believe you. You'd shoot me if I attacked you, of course, but I shan't do that. I shall simply walk out, and you know you won't shoot me for that. You'll wish you could, but you won't. You'll see."
Her face turned over her shoulder, her dark eyes twinkling at me, she took a step toward the door.
"Better not count on that!" I threatened.
The point is: how to grasp the reality which always escapes from our will and our understanding. Why this rather than that? Is choreography a means to be more objective? There is always a part of the "indeterminable", of the "not discernible" in things.

For answer to that she gave me a cooing laugh. And took another step.
"Stop, you idiot!" I bawled at her.
Her face laughed over her shoulder at me. She walked without haste to the door, her short skirt of gray flannel shaping itself to the calf of each gray wool-stockinged leg as its mate stepped foward.
Choreography is a projection. It is based on the gaze of the spectator.
It's the onlooker who decides if what he sees is not only what he sees but also a piece of art with choreographic qualities.

Sweat greased the gun in my hand.
When her right foot was on the doorsill, a little chuckling sound came from her throat.
"Adieu!" she said softly.
And I put a bullet in the calf of her left leg.
Here we are! One can easily take a part of reality and reframe it, and doing so in a specific context, can create a choreography.
She sat down – plump! Utter suprise stretched her white face. It was too soon for pain.
I had never shot a woman before. I felt queer about it.
"You ought to have known I'd do it!" My voice sounded harsh and savage and like a stranger's in my ears.
"Didn't I steal a crutch from a cripple?"
So does Superamas: Choreography is a dirty business.

I have two video pieces in Skipping the Page at The Center for Book Arts in New York, which runs from January 18 - March 29, 2008. You can see Kent Beeson is a Classic & an Absolutely New Thing and 100 People which I wrote about very briefly here. The exhibition, curated by my friend Graham Parker, considers the relationship between the printed page and other forms of media in representing rhythm and tempo. Other artists include Michael Baers, Svetlana Boym, Beth Campbell, Julie Chen, Neil Goldberg, Karen Hanmer, Ryan Holmberg, Vlatka Horvat, Sam Lewitt, Marie Lorenz, Richard McGuire, Trong Nguyen, Leah Oates, Mark Orange, Garret Ricardi, Marco Roso, Seth Price, Lan Tuazon, Uwasa, Chris Ware, and 432a (Nami Matsuo & Lars Niki). More about the show here. Details for finding The Center for Book Arts here.

Thinking about relationship between page and perfrmance here's the start of the text I wrote for Kent Beeson and below it a chunk of transcript from Kent's actual performance as he loops around the script, commenting on his performance, starting lines over and getting distracted. In some ways this is an absurd case of it I know, but I really love the very particular extra layer of glitches and noise that performance (and speech rather than print) can bring to a text.

*

I am going to have a great big house and a basement romperoom with a big high definition colour tv and all the latest gaming consoles and a games room and games and a pool room and a big fridge always full up of beer and coke and I will be like Elvis Presley always larking about with the guys and like Tom Hanks in Big - a big kid in a rich guys apartment and able to do anything. And I will have all the girls I want around all the time just hanging around by swimming pool and they will wear those bikinis that are more or less just a piece of string and too small and they will always be dancing or playfighting or sunning themselves and maybe some other girls who will have beepers and I will have an arrangement with them where I just beep them and they come over and spend the night with me.

*

I’m going to have a great big house and a big um naagh fuck, Im sorry these conditions are hard. I’m going to have a great big house and a…..  basement romper room. I’m going to have a great big house and a basement romper room and a big high definition colour TV and all the latest game consoles and a games room and games and a pool room and a big fridge all full up of coke and beer and I will be like Elvis Presley, always larking about with the guys and I’ll be like Tom Hanks in Big er uugh…shit…[punches arm].. ow that actually hurt. I’m going to have a great big house and a basement romper room and….I’m going to have a great big house and a basement romper room…I’m going to have a great big house and a un.. ..not underground Kent, fuck you Kent, you piece of shit. I’m going to have a great big house and a basement romper room and a big high definition colour TV, and all the latest game consoles and a games room and games and a big…. pool room and a big fridge full up of coke and beer and I will be like Elvis Presley, always larking about with the guys and I will be like Tom Hanks in Big, a big kid in a rich guy’s apartment and able to do anything and I’ll have all the girls I want around all the time, just hanging around by the swimming pool and they’ll be wearing those little bikinis that are just made out of string, more or less and.. er too small….naagh. And I will have all the girls I want around all the time, just hanging around by the swimming pool and they’ll wear those bikinis, that are more or less just a piece of string and too small and they’ll always be dancing or play fighting or sunning themselves and some of the girls will have beepers and I’ll have an arrangement with them where I just beep them and they come over and spend the night with me.