David Eldridge, Chris Goode in conversation

“The loveliest conversation with an archenemy I’ve ever had” Chris Goode on David Eldridge.

Over a decade ago, when I was first mainly theatre blogging (in the first golden age of blogs, now mostly faded) two of the fiercest and sharpest bloggers and writers were (and are) Chris Goode and David Eldridge.

Both far more successful, older and sure of their work than me, I looked up to them in many aspects of my writing practice. Chris Goode in the devised new work tradition and David Eldridge in the playwright as the primacy voice type tradition.

Emerging after an almost decade long hibernation (although behind the practitioner scene first at Talawa on board and chair, then and now at Coney)  in theatre writing I find it joyful and enlightening to find them in conversation.

They’ve both grown as artists and l find it fascinating having known them somewhat from afar (although Chris while AD at Camden’s People Theatre did programme my piece Lost in Peru, so I know him a little) to see how they now arrive in a place closer than perhaps one might have guessed from 10 years ago.

Coming back to my writing practice, it also gives me a spot of hope that I can travel further and that there are stories I still have to tell and pieces I can still make.

In any case, in my view, these are two of our most brilliant theatre makers of our generation and anyone interested in practical theatre making will enjoy listening to them in conversation, (click below or see here for Chris Goode's podcast series)

Want more theatre posts?  Check out a look at Massie-Blomfield's  20 Theatres to see before you die.

On climate  - click here for more carbon related  posts.  There's an argument made by risk philospher and Black Swan author Nassim Taleb on why we should lower pollution regardless of models.

The current Arts blog, cross-over, the current Investing blog.  Cross fertilise, some thoughts on autism.  Discover what the last arts/business mingle was all about (sign up for invites to the next event in the list below).

My Op-Ed in the Financial Times  (My Financial Times opinion article) about asking long-term questions surrounding sustainability and ESG.

Some popular posts:   the commencement address by Nassim Taleb (Black Swan author, risk management philosopher),  Neil Gaiman on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes;  JK Rowling on the benefits of failure.  Charlie Munger on always inverting;  Sheryl Sandberg on grief, resilience and gratitude.

How to live a life, well lived. Thoughts from a dying man. On play and playing games.

A provoking read on how to raise a feminist child.

Learnings from a Welsh goalkeeper

A top flight goal keeper and (1) Learning from failure (2) the primary voice of stories not told (3) Mixing (mingle!) with people and views you otherwise would not.

This profile of former top flight Everton goalkeeper, Neville Southall, touches upon the 3 above ideas I am interested in. (It's also a good argument for why when I have time, I flick and read through all sections of a newspaper from News to Arts to Sport...)

On (1) he notes goal keepers often fail but it is how they react to that failure which will mark them out. He still remembers some painful goals scored against him and reflects on the Liverpool goal keeper's mistakes in the recent Champions League Final.

My Mum is a big Liverpool fan, my Dad supported Arsenal - I’ve always been fascinated about what sport and teams and fans tells us about what it means to be human.

This is currently also of note as my work team recently failed in two big pitches / proposals. How we improve from failure will be a mark of how good (or not) our processes and culture are. I hear a lot of talk about learning from failure but it is hard. It is also difficult to teach to children. What makes one child pick themselves up and throw themselves at a problem again and another to shy away....

On (2) Neville Southall talks about giving a platform to unheard voices and genuinely listen to what they say - I like this for several reasons  (i) I like to rely more on more on primary source voices not filtered too many times by tropes or media reporters - the primary voices are often more nuanced, complex and fascinating than the filtered reflection of such voices. Good journalism can bring those voices out (but the medium and long form art of that is under pressure)

This increasingly is how I do company research as well, constructive skepticism is practiced by all good business and company analysts - but how do you research what is really happening ? The famous fund manager Peter Lynch suggested you could learn a lot by observing the world. I concur but would also add speaking to people - experts or customers - can also add insights.

It intersects with a primary force behind why some are involved in theatre - to tell the stories / listen to the stories from the voices that are not often heard. And listening to those primary voices is important.

It is an important thread for why I share autistic voice narratives (see here for E Price and here for Naoki Higashida). It’s important to hear from the people themselves.

Finally this idea that twitter is a place where you can meet people you would not usually meet - while I think that’s true of social media I do believe that bringing it to a real life mingle is also useful. Hence the mingle event idea.


A thoughtful read you can find here

The current Arts blog, cross-over, the current Investing blog.  Cross fertilise, some thoughts on autism.  Discover what the last arts/business mingle was all about (sign up for invites to the next event in the list below).

My Op-Ed in the Financial Times  (My Financial Times opinion article) about asking long-term questions surrounding sustainability and ESG.

Some popular posts:   the commencement address;  by Nassim Taleb (Black Swan author, risk management philosopher),  Neil Gaiman on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes;  JK Rowling on the benefits of failure.  Charlie Munger on always inverting;  Sheryl Sandberg on grief, resilience and gratitude.

How to live a life, well lived. Thoughts from a dying man. On play and playing games.

A provoking read on how to raise a feminist child.

Eddo-Lodge: Why I am no longer talking to white people about race

Reni Eddo-Lodge published a blog post  ‘Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race’ in 2014. 

It read: I’m no longer engaging with white people on the topic of race. Not all white people, just the vast majority who refuse to accept the legitimacy of structural racism and its symptoms. I can no longer engage with the gulf of an emotional disconnect that white people display when a person of colour articulates their experience. You can see their eyes shut down and harden. It’s like treacle is poured into their ears, blocking up their ear canals. It’s like they can no longer hear us. This emotional disconnect is the conclusion of living a life oblivious to the fact that their skin colour is the norm and all others deviate from it. At best, white people have been taught not to mention that people of colour are ‘different’ in case it offends us. They truly believe that the experiences of their life as a result of their skin colour can and should be universal. I just can’t engage with the bewilderment and the defensiveness as they try to grapple with the fact that not everyone experiences the world in the way that they do. They’ve never had to think about what it means, in power terms, to be white, so any time they’re vaguely reminded of this fact, they interpret it as an affront. Their eyes glaze over in boredom or widen in indignation. Their mouths start twitching as they get defensive. Their throats open up as they try to interrupt, itching to talk over you but not really listen, because they need to let you know that you’ve got it wrong. The journey towards understanding structural racism still requires people of colour to prioritise white feelings. Even if they can hear you, they’re not really listening. It’s like something happens to the words as they leave our mouths and reach their ears. The words hit a barrier of denial and they don’t get any further. That’s the emotional disconnect. It’s not really surprising, because they’ve never known what it means to embrace a person of colour as a true equal, with thoughts and feelings that are as valid as their own.  

 

..So I can’t talk to white people about race any more because of the consequent denials, awkward cartwheels and mental acrobatics that they display when this is brought to their attention. Who really wants to be alerted to a structural system that benefits them at the expense of others? I can no longer have this conversation, because we’re often coming at it from completely different places. I can’t have a conversation with them about the details of a problem if they don’t even recognise that the problem exists. Worse still is the white person who might be willing to entertain the possibility of said racism, but who thinks we enter this conversation as equals. We don’t. Not to mention that entering into conversation with defiant white people is a frankly dangerous task for me. As the heckles rise and the defiance grows, I have to tread incredibly carefully, because if I express frustration, anger or exasperation at their refusal to understand, they will tap into their pre-subscribed racist tropes about angry black people who are a threat to them and their safety. It’s very likely that they’ll then paint me as a bully or an abuser. It’s also likely that their white friends will rally round them, rewrite history and make the lies the truth. Trying to engage with them and navigate their racism is not worth that. Amid every conversation about Nice White People feeling silenced by conversations about race, there is a sort of ironic and glaring lack of understanding or empathy for those of us who have been visibly marked out as different for our entire lives, and live the consequences. It’s truly a lifetime of self-censorship that people of colour have to live. The options are: speak your truth and face the reprisal, or bite your tongue and get ahead in life. It must be a strange life, always having permission to speak and feeling indignant when you’re finally asked to listen. It stems from white people’s never-questioned entitlement, I suppose. I cannot continue to emotionally exhaust myself trying to get this message across, while also toeing a very precarious line that tries not to implicate any one white person in their role of perpetuating structural racism, lest they character assassinate me. So I’m no longer talking to white people about race. I don’t have a huge amount of power to change the way the world works, but I can set boundaries. I can halt the entitlement they feel towards me and I’ll start that by stopping the conversation. The balance is too far swung in their favour. Their intent is often not to listen or learn, but to exert their power, to prove me wrong, to emotionally drain me, and to rebalance the status quo. I’m not talking to white people about race unless I absolutely have to. … “ 

In her book she writes: 

……  It was never written with the intention of prompting guilt in white people, or to provoke any kind of epiphany. I didn’t know at the time that I had inadvertently written a break-up letter to whiteness. And I didn’t expect white readers to do the Internet equivalent of standing outside my bedroom window with a boom box and a bunch of flowers, confessing their flaws and mistakes, begging me not to leave. This all seemed strange and slightly uncomfortable to me. Because, in writing that blog post, all I had felt I was saying was that I had had enough. It wasn’t a cry for help, or a grovelling plea for white people’s understanding and compassion. It wasn’t an invitation for white people to indulge in self-flagellation. I stopped talking to white people about race because I don’t think giving up is a sign of weakness. Sometimes it’s about self-preservation. I’ve turned ‘Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race’ into a book –paradoxically –to continue the conversation. Since I set my boundary, I’ve done almost nothing but speak about race…. 

 

Reni Eddo-Lodge’s book then proceeds to talk about race particularly through a black British lens but perhaps more in the tradition of Black American writing (eg Coates, Baldwin, West)

It makes a good companion read to Afrua Hirsch  and the lens of female black hair (blog here - Black America female hair) and is a good chime with This is America (the recent Gambino music video) and Coates on the back American experience. (Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Black American)  

 

Guardian book review here by Colin Grant.   

 

I do think there are lessons from Martin Luther King, Jr here on loving your enemy – although Grant quotes other lessons. 

 

It’s his sermon on “Loving your Enemies”. 

“A … thing that an individual must do in seeking to love his enemy is to discover the element of good in his enemy, and every time you begin to hate that person and think of hating that person, realize that there is some good there and look at those good points which will over-balance the bad points. 

If you'd like to feel inspired by commencement addresses and life lessons try:  Neil Gaiman on making wonderful, fabulous, brilliant mistakes; or Nassim Taleb's commencement address; or JK Rowling on the benefits of failure.  Or Charlie Munger on always inverting;  Sheryl Sandberg on grief, resilience and gratitude or investor Ray Dalio  on Principles.

Cross fertilise. Read about the autistic mind here.

More thoughts:  My Financial Times opinion article on the importance of long-term questions to management teams and Environment, Social and Governance capital.

How to live a life, well lived. Thoughts from a dying man.

Science Fiction Writing startling fresh ideas

"Genre" writers are often put into different buckets than their "literary" siblings. I'd like to think readers whether avid, casual, militant or connoisseur tend to put books into buckets of "good books" and "bad books" and mostly ignore the assertions of literary criticism.  

Ursula Le Guin - who I've blogged about a number of times - wrote mainly fantastical tales and I'd suggest her hooks fall into the good books category.  That connoisseur-reader Zadie Smith would agree, I believe. 

I recently came across Orson Scott Card (via Mark Lawrence) and I found what he has to say about science fiction writers paying homage to their idols not by copying but

 "In science fiction, however, the whole point is that the ideas are fresh and startling and intriguing; you imitate the great ones, not by rewriting their stories, but rather by creating stories that are just as startling and new." 

I like that notion. I copy your premise of inventing something fresh and startling.  A type of second order imitation.  

Below is an extract from his foreward to Ender's Game.  

"…I had just read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, which was (more or less) an extrapolation of the ideas in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, applied to a galaxy-wide empire in some far future time. The novel set me not to dreaming, but to thinking, which is Asimov’s most extraordinary ability as a fiction writer.  

 

What would the future be like? How would things change? What would remain the same? The premise of Foundation seemed to be that even though you might change the props and the actors, the play of human history is always the same. And yet that fundamentally pessimistic premise (you mean we’ll never change?) was tempered by Asimov’s idea of a group of human beings who, not through genetic change, but through learned skills, are able to understand and heal the minds of other people.  

It was an idea that rang true with me, perhaps in part because of my Mormon upbringing and beliefs: human beings may be miserable specimens in the main, but we can learn and, through learning, become decent people. Those were some of the ideas that played through my mind as I read Foundation, curled on my bed –a thin mattress on a slab of plywood, a bed my father had made for me –in my basement bedroom in our little rambler on 650 East in Orem, Utah. And then, as so many science fiction readers have done over the years, I felt a strong desire to write stories that would do for others what Asimov’s story had done for me.  

 

In other genres, that desire is usually expressed by producing thinly veiled rewrites of the great work: Tolkien’s disciples far too often simply rewrite Tolkien, for example. In science fiction, however, the whole point is that the ideas are fresh and startling and intriguing; you imitate the great ones, not by rewriting their stories, but rather by creating stories that are just as startling and new.  

 

But new in what way? Asimov was a scientist, and approached every field of human knowledge in a scientific manner –assimilating data, combining it in new and startling ways, thinking through the implications of each new idea. I was no scientist, and unlikely ever to be one, at least not a real scientist –not a physicist, not a chemist, not a biologist, not even an engineer. I had no gift for mathematics and no great love for it either. Though I relished the study of logic and languages, and virtually inhaled histories and biographies, it never occurred to me at the time that these were just as valid sources of science fiction stories as astronomy or quantum mechanics.  

How, then, could I possibly come up with a science fiction idea? What did I actually know about anything? … " 

Power of silence. Gun control advocate.

 Emma González, a survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, delivered the speech to the March For Our Lies rally on Saturday in Washington, USA. 

I cried.  The Power of silence.  Truncated sentences. Caesura.  Emma Gonzalez used the truncated “would never” and the gaps we had to fill in to lay a moving tribute to her friends.


Extending this further into over 4 minutes of silence, she held a powerful testimony.


The grief and anger is too much for words.

Imagine this time.  Place yourself there.

The timing of 6 minutes 20 seconds also the timing of the shooting. 

...in that it reminds me of Carly Churchill in the truncated loss of words (Here We Go, Blue Kettle, and a silence more complex, sad and defiant than what I’ve seen theatre with Pinter or Beckett. ... a crowd of hundreds of thousands would do that.... 

Michael Moore, Twitter

Michael Moore, Twitter


EMMA GONZALEZ: Six minutes and about 20 seconds. In a little over six minutes, 17 of our friends were taken from us. Fifteen were injured. And everyone - absolutely everyone - in the Douglas Community was forever altered. Everyone who was there understands. Everyone who has been touched by the cold grip of gun violence understands.

Six minutes and 20 seconds with an AR-15, and my friend Carmen would never complain to me about piano practice. Aaron Feis would never call Kyra, Miss Sunshine. Alex Schachter would never walk into school with his brother Ryan. Scott Beigel would never joke around with Cameron at camp. Helena Ramsay would never hang out after school with Max. Gina Montalto would never wave to her friend Liam at lunch. Joaquin Oliver would never play basketball with Sam or Dylan. Alaina Petty would never. Cara Loughran would never. Chris Hixon would never. Luke Hoyer would never. Martin Duque Anguiano would never. Peter Wang would never. Alyssa Alhadeff would never. Jamie Guttenberg would never. Meadow Pollack would never.

[Silence.  4 minutes]  

GONZALEZ: Since the time that I came out here, it has been six minutes and 20 seconds. The shooter has ceased shooting and will soon abandon his rifle, blend in with the students as they escape and walk free for an hour before arrest. Fight for your lives before it's someone else's job.