“J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans.” (Charles Baudelaire, born 4/9/1821)
or
“I swear to you that if I lived a thousand years / I could not be more crammed with dubious souvenirs.” (Edna St. Vincent Millay)
or
“I am as old as all the memories” (Laurence Lerner)
or
“More memories than the fossils of the ages” (Roy Fuller)
or
“I have more memories than if I had lived a thousand years” (Anthony Hecht)
[Image: Édouard Manet, Portrait of Charles Baudelaire, 1862]
“Heinz Ireland is celebrating St. Patrick’s Day 2021 with the launch of its very first, limited-edition [Seriously] Good Shamrock Mayo. Only 75 jars are up for grabs across the Republic of Ireland of the new creation that Heinz Ireland says combines its rich and creamy Heinz [Seriously] Good Mayonnaise with shamrock grown in the beautiful fields of Co. Kerry.” (IrishCentral.com, 3/10/21)
“Mornings are Mysteries” (Robert Vaughan, “Rules and lessons”)
“I never let my reflection fall on water” (Alice Oswald, “Dart”)
“She responded to him as if he were human, as if he lived in the same world as she.” (Richard Wright, “Native son”)
“Rhobert wears a house, like a monstrous diver’s helmet, on his head. His legs are banty-bowed and shaky because as a child he had rickets. He is way down. Rods of the house like antennae of a dead thing, stuffed, prop up in the air. He is way down. He is sinking. His house is a dead thing that weights him down.”
The Round House Theatre’s Adrienne Kennedy festival, with online videos of four plays was a gift. She fuses elegance and fury. Words, images, identities are put into play. Personal history isn’t the focus, but one of the elements. The process of writing is another. She embraces messiness and loose ends and the endlessness of obsessions.
“Sleep deprivation chamber” stands out: no props, no slides, no symbolic images. “Just” words: Suzanne’s letters pleading for help, the insane theater of cross-examinations, depositions, Mom’s voice on the telephone, …. Above all, Suzanne’s insisting on the uprightness and respectability of Teddy and their whole family. They are law-abiding, moral, industrious, successful, educated, public-spirited, …. The crux of the drama is the discovery that none of that matters.
Cuts and blackouts, repetition, starting over and over, commenting on the story, … it’s not anti-realism but a higher, realer realism.It was a shame not to experience it embodied and in person, but even as a stream it hits its mark.
Born January 19, 1921, author of Strangers on a train, the Ripley stories, and many other books, including The Price of Salt (1952):
“I don’t know any small towns in Illinois," Carol was saying. "Why Illinois? … All right, Rockford … I’ll remember, I’ll think of Roquefort …”
...
Therese could smell Carol’s perfume faintly, that familiar sweetness that was strangely unfamiliar now, because it did not evoke what it had once evoked.