2002-01-24 1:14 p.m.
make them your own

There are few times in life that feel like this...transformative, dazed, full of inner movement that you can�t quite sense the path of.

The last time I felt like this was when I started writing the Shimmer stories (email me about them sometime) in Atlanta, when I was working for a hair salon and waking up from unsound sleep or just not sleeping at all, feverish from minor ailments, dreams afire from a source I can't name, and bizarre stories oozing out of my brain. It's a lot like when I moved to New York, and almost exactly like those two months working at Allan Ryan Hair Salon. I had shades of this while living with Mom in Plantation, when I wrote "my babies".

I'm dreaming again. I only have wild sets of dreams in consecutive nights when my subconscious is gearing me up for something, either an eruption of something I'm working on, or something else entirely just outside my field of view, in a blind spot somewhere.

Or maybe I'm just getting sick.

The Myth Man is tickling all sorts of memories, desires, thoughts from theater school...reminding me of working at the Chemistry Library, reading the history of The Living Theatre all the while, reading up on Arch Oboler, Norman Corwin, Tom Stoppard...reading the history of New York avant-garde theater of the 70s. The Judson Church playwrights, Megan Terry, Fornes, Sam Shepard...Swados' novel slaps me with the momentary desire I had while reading these playwrights to be one of them, to be a homeless waif taken in, a torch-bearer or a chorus singer, pulled into these nascent scenes and growing up with these people as they find their path.

And even as the novel begins, the narrator notes that the "genius" of the book is no genius � all of his master strokes are appropriated from other places and sources. The trick is to make them your own.