Brandon > Recent Status Updates

We must become creative about being creative.

By not reading this book on schedule, I think I might have missed something. I returned to it—specifically the chapter on encouragement—after finishing another book and found that it got me off the couch.

Process & Product: “Claude is reading out these pages. We have patiently extracted from the void every afternoon for the last two months (131).

Does Bauby’s “butterfly hearing” mean he’s getting closer to the inside and farther from the outside of the diving bell?

The speed of wit is not conducive to dictation…one letter at a time (71).

Doing creative work, “we need before, during and after friends” (190).

Ueland advocates for my liberation: “if you have a kind of cultured know-it-all in yourself who takes pleasure in pointing out what is not good, in discriminating, reasoning, and comparing, you are bound under a knave. I wish you could be delivered.” I have sniped.

Sandwich call: call a friend and tell of an artistic step that needs taking; call back to say’ “I did it,” or “mission accomplished.”

V.iii is a funeral—of sorts—V.iv is a wedding. Like Lear, MAAN has it all.

Benedict critiques his rhymes (V.ii). There is also an unusual moment when is alone on stage, speaking to himself but apparently NOT in soliloquy because when he says, “wouldst thou come when I call thee?” she answers “Yea, signor, and depart when you bid me.”

The “butterfly” can animate a smile onto a statue of the empress (25). That’s comedy.

The poetry of misunderstanding: narrator wants to ask for glasses (“lunettes” in French), but as soon as the visitor sees the word “lune” spelled out, s/he asks what the narrator wanted to do with the moon (22).

More humor: “Since the demarcation line runs across my mouth, I can only half-smile, which fairly faithfully reflects my ups and downs” (16).

The narrator’s dry sense of humor regarding prayer and healing his body is what might be left to someone with locked in syndrome (13).

The body is bother: “ these uncooperative, deadweight limbs, which serve me only as a source of pain” (8).

In TOG’s production, the First Watchman is literate and has notes of Don John, Borachio and Conrad. This record and Dogberry’s confidence takedown/unmask the “honorable men,” Don Pedro and Claudio (V.i).

Beatrice persuades Benedict to kill his comrade Claudio. How interesting it must’ve been in Shakespeare’s day to listen to a young male say, “O that I had any friend would be a man for my sake! But manhood is melted into curtsies, vaulor into compliment, and men are only turned into tongue, and trim ones too” (VI.i). Did men in the audience become women’s friends?

What a tremendous line about plots intersecting! Beatrice says, “It were as possible for me to say I loved nothing so well as you, but believe me not: and yet I lie not. I confess nothing, nor I deny nothing. I am sorry for my cousin” (IV.i).

Source of title: “[S]omething like a giant diving bell holds my whole body prisoner….My diving bell becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly” (3, 5).

Borcachio and Margaret are attentive to the effects of “fashion” (III.iii and III.iv).

1st Viewing Suspense: listening to Dogberry and Verges describe hypothetical incidents, the audience feels the complexity of comic superiority to the clowning and yet anxiety that they will not detect Don John’s false accusations (III.iii). 2nd Viewing: the audience is charmed that justice can use asses like Dogberry and us.

Hero helps manipulate Beatrice at Leonato’s behest as directed by Don Pedro (54).

Don Leonato: “merry war betwixt….skirmish of wit between….” Euphony, and then….
Beatrice: “…four of his five wits went halting off….” appropriates Don Leonato’s metaphor, extending it as well as her critical portrayal of Benedict.

“Comedy is tragedy averted” (9).

“Los zombies de Jeffrey” could’ve been a great poem. Some of the quotes are horrifying. He drill through skulls to make zombies; murder was an unintended consequence. That Christopher Scarver believed he was carrying out God’s will when he beat Dahmer to death seemed as perverse as anything in the Dahmer case, including the division of Dahmer’s ashes, half to his mother, half to his father.

What I meant by Chp. 14’s effect on the arc is really about Tony telling Beatrice to wait for them to be united in in/by death. Sounds horribly dark for her, death being the rest of eternity with the man who murdered her because she stopped loving him.

By “arc,” I mean how a character changes during the story. So Tony arcs from playing for Sinatra to leaving music and Italy to returning and singing for The Nostalgia Biz and waiting to die and be with Beatrice.

Chp. 14: On “One of the most beautiful terraces in the universe” (366), Tonio Paziente and Gegè Raja deliver respective monologues to party guests not unlike Jep’s in La Grande Ballezza. Tony embeds scenes with Antonella Te, his parents and ends addressing Beatrice. Is that fair to her? Life isn’t fair. Why should death be any different?

Chp. 13: Performance for Fabio frames Tony’s inner monologue on economics followed by the band on the beach where Titta the guitarist plays The Big Rest (348).

Fabio seduces Tony back to Italy to sing again, but is his “secret. This little hiding place that nestles inside me like a wound” still nestled (56)?