Buggeryville

The Scream has continued, with and without me.

Since my last update, my friends Anthony and Sundar performed Christian Marclay's Shuffle, a conceptual piece that wasn't really designed to be performed -- or, at least, had its concept (photos of musical notation on signage and objects, to be played) well ahead of its execution (including some notation that cannot, on its own, just be played).

Then there was a perfectly pleasant library-based reading which situated various events in various sections of the library -- everyone shuffled over to drama for a drama-based thing, and then over to fiction for some ficiton, etc., etc. Simple and pleasant enough. Having a little exercise (of moving from one section to another) between events was a nice feature.

Then there was an interesting event that I utterly failed to go to. Running with an idea from Fahrenheit 451, Maggie Helwig asked the audience to do their best to remember a text -- one that was not announced beforehand -- as if trying to salvage it from oblivion. The text she chose was Hamlet. The unexpected outcome: Apparently two friends of mine who were at the event remembered rather a lot of Hamlet, and the event went on for something like two hours as they reconstructed various scenes. A shame I missed that one.

Then there was the main panel event, in which six manifestos were given on the topic of "the book is dead". All the panelists were quite thoughtful, and you can read their various manifesti at the link (or, I guess, watch the panel -- yay the Internet!). Particular kudos goes to Bill Kennedy for coming closest to representing my own take on the various topics that came up, but even the people I disagreed with had interesting things to say. (This is not a very content-filled paragraph. I'm sorry. I did not take the detailed notes that I took last year. I am not even giving you an example of anything anyone said, or my reaction to it. This is useless. Your eyes should have flitted down to the next paragraph, or the next blog, or the next life experience by now.)

Then I was feeling full and headed home, so I missed the magazine launch reading, and I missed the next night's fun, but I'll be going tonight to the event that involves comics. Comics! And poetry! And Kate Beaton! Rah rah rah.