Thanks, Max. These Friend Reports are lovely info-fun.
Best,
Judy
2009/7/7 Max Richards <[log in to unmask]>
> Tim Winton is a novelist based in Western Australia whom I have only
> sampled but
> who keeps having successes, with readers and with prizes.
> Here is a friend's report of his reading at Geelong, one hour west of
> Melbourne:
>
> Monday night we saw Tim Winton in Geelong reading to a packed house.
> He read from his new book and then answered questions, some of which were
> interesting, others were plain weird.
> One woman asked him to marry her, another woman was nursing a baby and
> asked a
> question about sexual asphyxiation, which apparently occurs in the book.
> Many people wanted to know how he wrote the book, it seems there is not a
> lot of
> room for people accepting books for what they are, or for the mystery of
> writing. Some people want everything explained.
> He seemed like a decent guy.
>
> And here is a friend's report on Edward Albee's Sydney theatre
> 'conversation':
>
> Last Sunday in Sydney Edward Albee was fairly negative about film as a
> visual
> medium. It is their visual nature that makes film more commercially
> exploitable
> compared with plays which of course, center on words. But one film he
> considers
> high art is the Russian film 'Burnt By the Sun' - just a name to me.
>
> Albee was irritable on Sunday, refusing to give anything to the slick,
> annoying
> Jonathan Biggins of the (?) STC.
> So it was sarcasm and enigmatic silences that prevailed, disappointingly,
> though
> one did get to feel Albee's famous anger rather powerfully.
> And his passion for Participation in Life was the one message he was
> prepared to
> spell out.
> That satisfied me anyway.
>
> (But Biggins kept pressing him: 'You say that writing plays should just
> feel
> natural if one is made a playwright, but what is it that makes a
> playwright,
> what is it do you think that made you a playwright, how does one know that
> one
> is made a playwright rather than a poet or a novelist, what do you think of
> when
> you're writing plays????'
> 'I think about how glad I am that the lines don't need to rhyme', came
> Albee's
> quick response to this last question).
>
> At one point Biggins asked Albee why he has a tendency to walk out on
> plays.
> Because life's too short, came the obvious answer. And because sometimes
> life
> is more interesting than plays.
> Once Albee went to a Samuel Beckett play in (some city in) Ohio, deciding
> at
> interval to take a walk. He didn't return to the theatre that night,
> because he
> found much more drama on the streets he walked than could be expected in
> any
> theatre, even if 'Sam' is the single most brilliant playwright of the 20th
> century....
>
>
>
>
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