Required Reading

So, just when I finished one project, along comes this and I'm using it to wrap up something I'd left dangling for a while. Add that to having another period of feeling like the efficacy and usefulness of blogging is suspect at the very best, I'm not feeling very bloggy lately. So...link time! Here are some things I think you should read and discuss:

- Via the Prof, this piece about studying writing with Annie Dillard is pretty interesting.

- On the diversity follies going around, David Dower has important things to say.

- I am a avid karaoke-er. Honest to God, I am. So this piece by Amanda Marcotte struck my fancy in many ways. I think there's something to this, though, that connects with this. If I weren't a little bit over blogging this week, I'd write something cogent about it. Maybe you can. (The Pandagon link via.)

- I'm digging on The Playgoer right now because of this and this.

- All I can say about this is...heh, indeed.

- Art at The Mirror Up To Nature is right about this: it's a feel-good story, but the flip side tells us a lot of what's wrong with our industry.

And, okay, a little original writing: I have a friend, a young playwright, who is dating someone from the "real world." This guy has a real knack for storytelling, though, so my friend has roped him into a project we're both working on. The other day, we had a read-through and asked a bunch of mutual friends and acquaintances to read in for us. It was a pretty motley crew, but the reading went well. After there was talk about taking the next steps and which actors would come with. In describing one performer, my playwright friend said, "They're really great, really strong, they went to Yale." The boyfriend bristled at that description and pressed my friend, pretty relentlessly, on using a grad school as an automatic indication of acting skill. It's the kind of conversation we all have regularly in the field, but it was interesting to hear someone not connected have the same resistance. It was also interesting since this guy's a novice himself with no background, no pedigree, no real desire to get one, but a real nervousness about being around "real" writers, ones with all of those pedigrees. I don't know, it just struck me as another subtle way we reinforce the notion that all of this, all that we do, is high-level, well-educated, rarefied stuff and non-professionals need not apply. Is that a good thing?

Okay, back to the various grindstones that rule my life...