Rehearsing Vanya on a cold spring night; a play about the loss of beauty; a play about what we’ve destroyed. We have the window open. I have Vanya try to play the Don Giovanni theme on the piano—when he accuses the Professor of being “a Don Juan” and Waffles joins him on guitar. Unexplainable emotion in the springtime—this flow of play and crosstalk and coffee and cigarettes and music. Close to happiness.
Vanya: a play about people in a time when boredom was still real, when there was less overt distraction, when distraction was hard to find, hard to come by—the boredom of 1900 is closer to the Middle Ages than to 2024.
Passion boredom death—all more interesting existentially than optimization and financialization; everything is gamified because nothing is actually real. There are no stakes to things happening in pixels. stakes are in the body—it’s the animal wanting to live, not wanting to die, wanting to reproduce. Dopamine-desire cannablizes all other desires.
The primary business of book reviewing, at the present moment, is to remind us that there are no books of lasting quality now, only money, deals incarnate, whose hollowness must be revealed, whose snobbish silliness masquerading and posing as literature (without bones and blood, emotions, ideas) must be exposed. This is rjght and good and a pan serves this end—urges us to cut the adipose tissue of banality from the work, even if that leaves nothing left, even if it kills the patient… And yet—