Michael McFee asked me to introduce a Birds of a Feather session at Duke’s NC Festival of the Book. Festival of the Book lost some points with me for this year’s tagline, “It’s About the Story,” since there were poets involved who didn’t really care about the story as much as the language, but that’s a piddling matter. Market your celebration however you want, people.

The session was intended to be a short reading and then a conversation around a certain topic between two poets, in this case Michael and Gerald Barrax. The assigned topic, Culture’s Sway Over Poetry, was significantly less fun than one might want to hear, so Michael and Jerry decided that they would speak specifically about music. And instead of doing a somewhat stodgy reading-then-answer-some-questions session, they decided that the reading would be their conversation.

Each came equipped with some poems, and Jerry read the first poem. Michael then found an aspect of one of his poems that shared a connection with Jerry’s work, and the two riffed off of each other like that for a while. Only once did they really hit a point where they felt like the work was not directly connected to the last poem read, and that was just an opportunity to launch in a new direction.

What resulted was far more fresh than your standard poetry reading– they really managed to have a compelling and thoughtful conversation through their poems, and I think the casual viewer probably suspected several times that they must have planned which poems to read in response. It’s a format that I would gladly see over and over again around any number of vague topics like music, family, the creative process… the kind of stuff that Festival of the Book was interested in presenting.

So, if you’re planning to have a few poets read, see if they are interested in something like that.

It’s been a good day for poetry, people.

Michael McFee asked me to introduce a Birds of a Feather session at Duke’s NC Festival of the Book. Festival of the Book lost some points with me for this year’s tagline, “It’s About the Story,” since there were poets involved who didn’t really care about the story as much as the language, but that’s a piddling matter. Market your celebration however you want, people.

The session was intended to be a short reading and then a conversation around a certain topic between two poets, in this case Michael and Gerald Barrax. The assigned topic, Culture’s Sway Over Poetry, was significantly less fun than one might want to hear, so Michael and Jerry decided that they would speak specifically about music. And instead of doing a somewhat stodgy reading-then-answer-some-questions session, they decided that the reading would be their conversation.

Each came equipped with some poems, and Jerry read the first poem. Michael then found an aspect of one of his poems that shared a connection with Jerry’s work, and the two riffed off of each other like that for a while. Only once did they really hit a point where they felt like the work was not directly connected to the last poem read, and that was just an opportunity to launch in a new direction.

What resulted was far more fresh than your standard poetry reading– they really managed to have a compelling and thoughtful conversation through their poems, and I think the casual viewer probably suspected several times that they must have planned which poems to read in response. It’s a format that I would gladly see over and over again around any number of vague topics like music, family, the creative process… the kind of stuff that Festival of the Book was interested in presenting.

So, if you’re planning to have a few poets read, see if they are interested in something like that.

One thing we improvisers tend to be really good at is shitting in each others’ corn flakes. In the absence of any real worthy drama within our own theaters, we’ll look to war with another theater in our area, and we’ll generally pick the most modest of offenses to set us off. See if any of these claims sound familiar, improviser:

“You worded your ad in such a way that it might be construed as a slam on our program!”
“You began doing a show similar to the show that we have done before!”
“When you opened your new theater, you took away talent from our theater.”

That’s right, they ARE familiar. You heard them in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, North Carolina, Austin, Washington DC, St. Louis, Richmond, Green Bay, Kansas City, and a couple of other places that I’m too lazy to actually research rather than recall.

Why do we do this? Well, within our own theater, if we find ourselves predominantly performing in just one, we talk plenty of shit, but since we’ve bought into a retarded notion that everyone has to be the best of friends in order to improvise on the same stage, despite the fact that it never, ever happens that way. It’s bad form to write in your blog about what a bitch Ronnie Wilson is if you stand a pretty decent chance of being cast on a team with Ronnie Wilson during the next audition.¹ And someone in the theater will be close enough to Ronnie even that if Ronnie doesn’t care (because Ronnie thinks you’re a bitch), that someone feels insulted and hurt, or worse, feels that the mutual distance must be fixed, immediately.

So, because it’s a day-to-day headache to out-and-out despise someone in your own theater for legitimate reasons, it is often much easier to release that frustration in veiled digs and outright message board hostility towards someone else’s project or theater. Ahhh, the message board. How did we fight without you?

So here’s how it goes down. Kelly Poopinski posts something saying, “I really like improv, and I wish the community would get bigger.” This is an honest sentiment from Kelly Poopinski. All of us improvisers agree that we like improv and other people should too. Hey, even Ross White wishes the improv community would grow.

Then Mike Flatulum, who is new to the scene, makes the dire mistake of saying, “Gosh, I wish that the many theaters we have here in our community were working together.” Oh, Mike, don’t you know that seventeen years ago, Joe and Sally were part of the same theater company, and Joe liked Sally but Sally slept with Rick, and Joe harbored resentment against both Sally and Rick that lingers on? And now that Sally is the artistic director of the New Improv Theater Site (NITS), Joe has spread the word around Previous Improv Company of Krazies (PICK) that NITS is pathetic. (Joe has never seen a NITS show, or came to one with his mind made up that it would be bad.) So, Joe posts a veiled reference to the reasons that the two can never collaborate, which boils down to petty personality issues which only really relate to Joe and Sally, and no one else involved.

But because we, as improvisers, are always right, we must immediately enlist the rest of the community around us to come to bat for us. Of course, only one or two people are actually going to post anything offensive or inflammatory– maybe just Joe– but the rest of us have to at least chime in to show our teammates that we were reading the thread and pretending to agree in vague principal that yes, Sally was kind of a dick about things, when in actuality we don’t really care, because we don’t know Sally. Or we saw her show once and we genuinely didn’t care for it. Or maybe we chime in because we’ve been in Joe’s theater for five or six years and we’ve really come to genuinely believe Sally is a dick, because Joe said so and one time she teched a show and blacked it out before we had a chance to say that really funny thing we were going to say.

So we post a few times, usually something innocuous, and then someone who doesn’t know either theater feels compelled to say something about how awful it is that the two theaters are at war. Then, someone in each of the theaters believes they are at war! “If Kevin Polaski says we hate each other, he must really know something about that other theater! They hate us! They talk shit about us whenever they gather! We must hate them back!” is the rallying cry.

But the thing of it is, most people don’t care. It’s not an institutionally held hatred– it’s usually petty and personal, between a few people who have a history that extends well beyond theater and almost always involves sex somewhere along the line. (Maybe just not directly with each other.) Most of the people in each theater don’t know a lot about the other theater, or do, but don’t care because the other theater’s environment just isn’t their cup of tea. It might be geography, it might be established friendships, it might be artistic preference, it might be the cost of classes or the experience of the instructors or the horrible body odor of a member of one company². It might be feelinsg of jealousy or hurt because they were spurned on- or off-stage. Who can say why we choose one artistic endeavor over another? We all have different reasons.

I’m involved at the business end, as a co-owner of a theater currently being dragged through one of these petty spats by good-intentioned people on both sides. And as a business-person, I can safely tell you the following:

• If improv grows in my small market, that is a good thing.
• I see no way in which pettiness and enmity strengthens my goals for my improv theater. So why would I encourage it?
• I may not be at other theaters’ shows or classes on a regular basis, because I’m busy, but that doesn’t mean I think they suck. In fact, in most cases, I’m quite friendly with the members of other companies, having either worked with them on other projects or having performed alongside them for many years.
• I hope you pay no mind to any member of my company who are assholes. I pay very little attention to asshole members of your company³, because I know that they’re not representative of your theater’s ownership. In most cases, I like and respect your theater’s ownership. Your theater’s ownership may have attended my wedding. And I know those assholes are not representative of the many people in your company who are excited about improvisation, yes-and, and community.
• I have seen so many of these spats come and go, I could write a thesis on it for a sociology degree. I could then publish that thesis. And someone would think I was talking shit about their theater in my thesis. And I would still get up in the morning and not worry about it.

So, in short, because I have to go to a theater and perform a show that some people really like and some people really don’t like, here are some parting words.

If you think you’re being a dick, knock it off.

If you think someone else is being a dick, ignore them.

You have better things in life to band against than someone’s improv theater. For Christ’s sake, look at our government and the giant corporations that actually intend to screw you.

If people don’t want to do the same show or class you’re doing, don’t sweat it. There are a lot of factors that go into choosing an experience that works for you, and people aren’t all alike. It’s not an affront.

Let’s stop being rude to each other and focus our attention where it belongs: Having awkward and thoroughly ill-advised sex with the members of our own company, team, or troupe, and then dealing with the fallout from dashed expectations.

Or proposing to have awkward and thoroughly ill-advised sex with the members of our own company, team, or troupe, being rejected, and then dealing with the fallout from dashed expectations.

¹ I’ve also found that it’s retarded to make observations about Ronnie that are neutral, because if Ronnie misconstrues them as negative, you’ll end up with a strained, awkward relationship forever. (Even if you and Ronnie are taking a class in a city you don’t live in. Ronnie could move to your city one day, and end up on your team one day. And you will feel horrible about that awkwardness forever. Seriously. Trust me.)

² You may think I am joking. I am not. I was once in a company with a man who smelled so badly of his own pee that company members left to pursue other interests, and to get fresh air.

³ Someone, somewhere, in an improv company, thinks this statement is directed at them. Get over yourself. Unless you are Larry Howard. Larry Howard, you are an asshole⁴.

⁴ But I love you.

Looking more at how one might take education online, Martha sent me this link: Technology creates lectures on demand. My immediate thought has a pricetag– I don’t see a heavy implementation in the K-12 arena right now because the cost to equip the classrooms is so high. Universities tend to have the capacity to create high-tech classrooms, high schools are generally lucky to have projectors.

And the question continues to come up– who wants lectures? The article mentions that universities are using these lectures as recruiting tools. I’ll admit that I’d prefer a university where I don’t have to show up for class over one where I do, but given the investment in hardware and licensing, wouldn’t you rather look at a university that’s doing something more cutting-edge than having one person stand up in front of a group and disseminate knowledge?

That said, if you are going to be standing up disseminating, then YES, we want your lectures captured and preserved for posterity. I can’t imagine the knowledge that has been lost over time because finer points of lectures were not captured, because interested students didn’t have the chance to go back and review. I see tons and tons of potential for new teachers to succeed by using pieces of older lectures when they’re stuck on a particular topic. I see digital libraries full of lectures and lessons on similar topics, so if a student doesn’t get it one way, they can search the library for a different clip that might shed some light. And I see the role of the teacher changing from “the one true authority” to “the person who shows you how to find and effectively implement information.”

That would be a good thing.

While we wait for Apreso to become affordable, let’s rock handhled cams and YouTube.

If you’re interested, I’m performing live at DSI Comedy Theater tonight and tomorrow, 7:30 PM.

I spent some time tonight in Second Life with Dan Winckler, and I’m seriously intrigued by the educational potential of the environment. Now seems like a very, very good time to do some research, so we’re playing a little with Moodle at LEARN, and I’m goofing with some ideas that might bear some fruit.

SL isn’t all that intuitive yet, but it seems like a rapidly developing community and I get the sense that a lot of people in there are interested in some of the same kinds of things– freedom of information, collaborative learning, etc. I wonder about the feasibility of having a LEARN NC event in SL sometime soon, as a tool for recruituing prospective students.

I have spent the day working on school stuff, putting the finishing touches on one annotation and culling another from a letter I sent several packets ago. (Apparently, even my assorted thoughts on an author are starting to take the shape of useful annotations. Yikes!)

That’s not all I have done; it’s just the largest part. I’ve also found time to talk to my dad on Skype for a while; conduct an interview with a Harvard student about collaborative professional development in education; eat lunch with Corey, Bryan and Leo at Bojangles; trap Ladybug in a near-unbreakable hold and hear her woeful tales of jury duty; read all of your blogs and comment in a few of them; and concoct elaborate fantasies about what Porkins is doing when he gets off that bicycle. I’m seriously thinking about writing Porkins fanfic.

Here’s a thought I almost put into a friend’s comment section before deciding that it would be inappropriate. In my blog, nothing is inappropriate: In addition to being the fullest realization of our partnerships, weddings are our blood and guts, they are a celebration of our failings, forgiven and embraced. They are conceptually defeatist at the same time that they represent a victory for the human spirit– they are a sinister acknowledgement that we’ll never be perfect, but a thankful observance that to one person, we’re pretty damn close.

There’s a new Sarah Harmer single on iTunes! Yay! Yay! Yay! I’m also spending nickels and dimes on some other worthy audio files– an eels track on iTunes, and 1918’s New Poems (written by DH Lawrence, read by Alex Wilson) on telltaleweekly. I’ve also been listening to some awesome podcasts, like Mike Doughty and Colin Meloy (separately) at KEXP and They Might Be Giants 6A-6C. Dope. Regular podcasters are awesome.

Oh, and Jesus, I don’t want to go back to the Walgreen’s phramcist. Follow the link to find out why:

PORKINS-ON-A-BIKE-METER: 3

Yes, it’s true, blog readers, I have been holding out on you. I saw Porkins on his bicycle on Friday morning about 8:30, pedalling furiously.

Porkins must have been heading in early– I don’t usually see him unless I am heading to work at 9 AM (I sometimes work from home for a while before I head into the office. That gives me a feeling that I am getting a jump on the, reduces the afternoon doldrums on days that I am scheduled to be in the office until 5 PM, and means I have more time with kitties!). Porkins also doesn’t usually look like he’s working too hard, but on Friday, he was pedalling his Porkins heart out.

I just downloaded Minefield, which I guess is the clever way of saying “Hey this is Firefox 3.0 but it doesn’t really work yet.” I’m not really having any problems thusfar, but is anyone else out there using it, and if so, are you having problems?

My only beef is that most extensions haven’t yet been updated. I can live with it. though.

The Ferris clan invites us for a cookout on a Sunday night. Though this is a packet weekend, which means I am a little more studious than normal, we go for a couple hours. We take marinated steak. It is well-prepapred by Doctor William Ferris, and we sup nicely.

Jon Fabris, who could not be better nicknamed than “Johnny Fabulous,” and I spend plenty of time tossing a Mark Jacobson frisbee. Nugget the dog mangles and slobbers upon the frisbee. Malice the black cat comes and goes, is at one point treed, and displays his kitty-grandeur quite nicely.

The Ferris clan are becoming some of my favorite people in the world.

It wasn’t so long ago that I felt like I had hit a wall, but last weekend I began translating a Neruda poem and it changed my whole outlook. I have been in revision mode for the past few days, struggling with a long long long poem that I have been working on. I feel I am making headway. I also feel that when I publish my notes on all of my poems and the world sees just how much of my poetry has been pulled from comic books, I will be called a magnificant failure, a magnificent joke.

So, maybe I won’t publish the notes. I will, however, be tempted to sell my books on my website (if and when I publish them) and tell folks that if they can correctly name 10 or more individual, intended comics references in the book, I’ll send them their money back. Then the fanboys will get free poetry, which I would happily support.

I like to think that writing poems that obliquely reference poems isn’t too hack. I reviewed a book for the Carolina Quarterly some years ago called Monster Zero, which was a book of poems about Godzilla. Some of the poems were fantastic, but ultimately such a grand idea could not hold itself aloft through a whole book. The author, whose name I now forget and am too lazy to Google, tried to make it a cautionary tale for the atomic age, which of course I respect, since I love poems rooted in the real-world concerns of science-fiction-becoming-science-fact. But some of it was just mediocre poetry.<

As I work on Personality Test, Mary has warned me that I need to be careful-- some material will seem like it's flying just because it's on the plane. Monster Zero, you are my cautionary tale, indeed.

Ok, I amazoned him: Jay Snodgrass wrote the book. And you should buy a copy, just to see what it’s all about. Really.

Amazon has all of those “#455,956 today in books” rankings. What is the ranking if a day goes by and no one buys the book? Because hell, I know that happens.

Go vote for Dan Telfer’s t-shirt!