Ming On Kelly's “How I Learned To Write”
I
enjoy Kelly's posts because he comes from a clear standpoint;
that is, he's using a discernible lens: he is a (“wannabe”)
playwright. Identity is not a problem with Kelly's voice. His posts actually often sound like bits of play dialogue to me,
and I've been thinking about how that writing style functions within
the think-tank discourse of our class discussions, and what it does as a "scriptive object."
Here
are two of my favorite quotes from a recent post of Kelly's, about Mockingbird:
“If
he has NEVER heard it, truly, how can it be in this memory play?”
“It’s
almost something instilled in us since childhood to always trust the
narrator.”
These are a wonderful example of his conversational
tone, one which still manages to communicate a great deal of
knowledge about how plays work and curiosity about that
what-makes-them-tick-ness. He's unafraid to be exasperated and
annoyed, but he also furnishes these “rants” with examples and
direct quotes from other plays and some of the written works on those
plays. So, his rants are too informed to be rants insofar as rants
are pointless and self-indulgent. His aren't. Rather, this sort of
Rolling Stone-esque critique sounds like your friend who is a fan of
____ art form sounding off about it: it's fun, and also, you learn
something. The two quotes above are certainly worth considering, and
Kelly does not dress up his language in order to prove that.
In that vein, Kelly's
writerly/scholarly style in his blog also points to another advantage
of a more direct and “colloquial” form of writing about
performance: it can sometimes get at what more ornate language
couldn't, or doesn't like to, get at. As such, his blog-voice serves the
purpose of a sort of inquiry or critique in what we achieve and what
we avoid when we use high-register language—and how that language
itself is not transparent but its own animal capable of cowering and
enforcing codes of taboo. About the “Tumbling Woman” statue in
reference to our September 11th conversation, for example, Kelly simply
states, “...I did not find it disturbing...I could deal with it.”
He
doesn't leave off there, though. He doesn't simply shock us with
straightforward statements, but goes on to examine this stance of his
and ask the question at the heart of it:
“When
is too soon going to be over? And doesn’t art help us with that?”
A worthy question. Kelly's circumvention of more academic jargon in his personal blogs
and in class blog posts (I'm thinking of his post on Ani DiFranco) is
indicative of not only a--given the circumstances--admirable
commitment to "fluffy" things like, jeez, emotion and the ineffable within
academic-speak-land, but it also presents us with an interesting
script. If his blog is a scriptive object prompting action on the
part of the reader, perhaps it's asking us to subvert some of the
mores we bring to academia and examine the codes of power those mores quietly enforce--while still doing so within the confines
of class requirements, so, not completely subversive. It other words, the object is a blog, not
Kelly actually standing on a step waving his arm, inviting us to join
his cause. Still, his work makes a case for what, in his own note on Lady
Slipper, he puts best: “how we can use words and almost deconstruct
meaning in them.”
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