Sunday Salon: Week Two

9 a.m.

This week has not been as readerly as I anticipated. I had thought I would have all the time in the world to read after I submitted my dissertation a few weeks ago, but it turns out that teaching prep and long-neglected housework can expand to fill any amount of time you allot them.

I did, however, pick up a copy of the first volume (1950-1952) of Charles Schulz's Complete Peanuts from the library this week, and found it so effortlessly thoughtful and wry that I immediately rushed out and ordered a copy of my own. In the very first strip, a little boy sees our hero approaching, baldly, and remarks to his wee friend with period quaintness: "Well! Here comes Ol' Charlie Brown! Good Ol' Charlie Brown .... Yes, Sir! Good Ol' Charlie Brown." He trails off as the smiling form recedes, and a furrow of discontent appears over his eyes: "How I hate him!"

This reversal really sets the tone for everything I have read so far; none of the cloying, eventless sentiment that we might associate with Peanuts in its later reign over the canon of classic comic strips. My comics-wise friend J had recommended this to me long ago, but I was a doubter. Well, now Complete Peanuts is to me what my Battlestar Galactica recommendation was to him: an endorsement that looked absurd on paper, and ended up being totally converting.

So, my goals for today: There is a lot of Ulysses yet to prepare for tomorrow's class, so that will undoubtedly loom large on my reading horizon (as if a tome like Ulysses could do anything but loom!). I would like (time permitting) to make a habit of reading a play and a graphic novel on each of these Sundays. This week: the first volume of Mark Oakley's Thieves and Kings, which has been recalled by the library, and George Ryga's The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, the depressing subject matter of which has doomed it to lurk on my "Currently Reading" list for far too long. I would also like to make a little progress in To Hate Like This is To Be Happy Forever (an account of the Duke-Carolina basketball rivalry), to soothe my fevered brain after last night's incredibly depressing Final Four game (I don't want to talk about it. Let's never speak of this tournament again).

On a practical note: last week my updates to my original post never - alas! - showed up in either my feed or Sunday Salon's. So this week I am going to post a series (possibly a series of two, but no matter) of separately published updates, and see whether that is the only solution to the problem. Does anyone have any alternate strategies to offer by way of advice?

The Final Four

I am despondent. Let's never speak of this game again.

I, unlike nature, do not abhor a vacuum

What have I been up to this week? Well, I bought a vacuum - a vacuum that has both the Inteli-clean system (little lights that tell you how dirty your carpet is) and surprisingly stringent standards of cleanliness. The first day I had it, I became entranced by how dirty our apartment was; I swear to you that this vacuum cleaner was as engrossing as a video game. I was also, somehow, desperate to impress this Victorian schoolmarm of a household appliance - to convince it that I was willing to put in the many hours of elbow grease it demanded to upgrade me from the filthy wasteland of a red light to the civilized dustlessness of a green light. And when I realized the level of satisfaction, self-affirmation, and indeed entertainment I was gleaning from housework, I felt terribly, terribly old.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was my week. The long, boring slog through the basketballess limbo between the Elite Eight and the Final Four. (Go Heels!)

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Ever since reading Manjula Padmanabhan's wonderful play Harvest, about a dystopian near future in which citizens of developing countries are paid by aging first-world moneybags to keep their organs and body parts in good condition for future "harvesting" and transplant, I have wondered why there wasn't more science fiction in the theatre. Now Andrew Haydon, blogging at the Guardian, asks the same question.

There is plenty of science in the theatre; plays like Copenhagen and Arcadia are productively obsessed with finding ways to get theatrical forms (like blocking, plot structure, games with theatrical time and space, etc.) to echo scientific content (chaos theory, entropy, the Uncertainty Principle). So why aren't there more utopias, dystopias, alternate histories, artificial intelligences, etc. in contemporary plays? Is it a prudish fear of being invaded by the pop forms of cinema, TV, and mass market fiction? That fear is surely absurd, as the eagerness of mainstream publishers to pick up works that "transcend genre" attests. Or is it rather a limitation of resources, the difficulty of constructing a world of futuristic effects in the limited spaces and financially strapped budgets of most theatres? This is a pressure that film and literature don't have to worry about, but that sci-fi TV often shows the burden of in cheesy parades of low-budget special effects. But, no - there is nothing that the theatre cannot represent, given a sufficiently loose relationship to realism, and realism is in fact one of the most expensive addictions of the theatre, much less financially viable than the fantastical.

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The first excavation at Stonehenge since 1964 is about to start. Sounds like a setting ripe for a Dan Brown/Elizabeth Peters hybrid thriller-mystery.

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Shakespeare's 444th birthday's a-comin' (on April 23, or thereabouts - we aren't actually that sure of Willy the Shake's exactly birthday, but we are sure that he died on that date many years later), and theatre groups around the world will celebrate by performing his plays simultaneously.

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In the continuing saga of operatic oddities, a conductor for the Pittsburgh Opera had to sing the male lead in Aida after the tenor lost his voice as a result of illness. Even odder: the conductor/understudy never left the orchestra pit, "dubbing" (in a sense) the singing while the tenor continuing to act the part.

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A little more than a year ago, UNC endured a tragic loss when our mascot, Jason Ray, was struck by a car as he walked by the side of the road in New Jersey, where he had accompanied the team on their trip to the Sweet Sixteen. The tributes to Ray by the other teams in the tournament games that followed (cheerleaders wore mourning bands, fellow mascots wrote messages to Jason on their costumes) made me feel hopeful that sports was a connective, fraternal pastime rather than a sublimation of our divisive, violent, warlike social instincts. I felt this way again when the teams of the ACC came together to support the Wake Forest community after the death of Skip Prosser, their basketball coach, and the Carolina community after the murder of student body president Eve Carson (both in the last year).

I have been watching the lead-up material to the Final Four in the background of my chores all day, and CBS just aired a long piece on Jason Ray, his decision to become an organ donor, and the people who now live every day with a part of Jason inside of them. I bawled uncontrollably throughout the entire piece.

I can't find a copy of the segment I saw, so here is another, older piece about Jason and those he donated his organs to (a text version of the story, which goes into more detail about a reunion Jason's parents held with some of the organ recipients, can be found here):