One of my pet annoyances is announcements by friends of things just found, which they hope to be first to show you: posts of clickbait articles and RIPs to just-dead celebrities being two of the most grating. But I am here to confess I am the worst offender. And my likes and dislikes aren't simply joined to the ephemera ebbing and detriting on the waves of the social networks, easily posted and as easily ignored. No, mine are crafted into Great Works of Art - Operas for God's sake - that take years of toil and untold piles of euros and dollars and scribbling, writing and rewriting and marketing and pushing and asking for money and then berating singers for not getting it right and reducing them to tears, and after that the premiere and the lights and the hushed silence of those who have paid for the experience to listen to What I Have to Say about this Thing I Found.
So, at the beginning of last year, after the English language production of UKSUS, I decided I just wasn't going to do it anymore. The silliness of it all became frighteningly apparent, as when the clouds open and the rays of the sun come a'shining through. Stop showing off, I said to myself, stop seducing people, stop ruining other people's perfectly good novels and stories with your tepid attempt to adapt the unadaptable. Does one really need approbation and its associated sycophants? Isn't it enough, I asked myself, to simply read a book one loves and to bathe in its language, and maybe to put it on a special golden shelf with a bit of glitter, and to dust it carefully from time to time?
And so this I did, for many months. And I became everything I had never been before: a layabout and a slugabed, one who spends her days watching videos on p-adic numbers, who whiles away the night on the meaningless drivels of the day job, and in between the jack off and then the jack off again. And in between I would read and read about Donald Trump and any else I could find that would deepen my depression, and it was during one of those wallowings that I came across this interview with Mark Leyner, whose books are in fact on that special golden shelf. He interviews like he writes, which is to say brilliantly. My favorite quote:
Now I feel like a completely alienated and marginalized person who traffics in some form of discredited esoterica.Yes, this is me as well, although Leyner's esoterica is much in the pop world, whereas mine is modern opera and a never-ending fascination with the intricacies of the Christian Religion, cf. Synodus Horrenda.
But now a year has gone by and I've forgotten almost all the resolutions I made. Except for the seducing part. And I'm doing another production of UKSUS in August at the Oakland Metro Opera House, and I seem to be starting another project as well, an Umbrellas of Cherbourg for the modern fascist age.
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