I recently started reading Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction, which has essays on raisons d’etre and raisons d’pick up a fucking pen, from the likes of Norman Mailer, Mary Gaitskill, David Foster Wallace (who was apparently at the time still in a big deformed-baby-metaphor phase), Mary Gaitskill, on and on. In the intro, editor Will Blythe talks about the many, many raisons d’not pick up a fucking pen. He’s pretty spot-on:
Unquestionably, there are many compelling reasons not to write. Some are mundane, like having a job, a spouse, a headache. These things can take time and energy away from the creation of literature. So can not having a job, a spouse, and a headache. (In regard to the absence of the headache, it must be said that you can feel too good to write.) There are other mighty rationales for shirking the pen. Not enough money. Too little experience. Bad speller. Not good enough yet. Not good enough compared to Garcia Marquez. Not good enough compared to Shakespeare. Better than Shakespeare but no one seems to agree. Too much ambition. Insufficient ambition. Paranoia. Alcohol. Heroin. Gas pains. Gout. Hay fever.
And of course, there are always powerful metaphysical reasons for not writing. For instance, deep existential dread. The distortions of solitude. The ravages of time. Black holes. The eventual death of the solar system. Being adrift in a meaningless universe in which everything is floating away from everything else. The temptation of silence. By this, I mean that sometimes silence seems more articulate, more full of possibility than language itself; it is the realm of vision, of the masterfully unwritten, of astounding books that will forever be undiminished by their narrowing in reality.
And yet, we go on. Cause… why not?


Like a teenager with a new LiveJournal, MSG Entertainment’s
The Charlestown Working Theater may be one of the most overlooked performance spaces in Boston. A weirdly beautiful space at the base of Bunker Hill, the theater is built inside what was once a 19th-century firehouse. The CWT plays host to smaller local companies like
I-love-it comedy written by scarred veterans of the Hollywood meat factory, walking the same stilettoed path as Douglas Carter Beane’s The Little Dog Laughed and Theresa Rebeck’s The Scene. That is to say, it’s nothing much new. But the stage’s love affair with the movie business will never wane, even though the screen rarely reciprocates. And for a world premiere by a playwright with few credits to his name, Caruso is a slick and well-turned-out package.

ssed with Margo, having watched her every night in her starring role as a slutty teenage reindeer in a play called “Party on the Pole.” Karen brings Eve to meet Margo (Landry, natch) in her dressing room, and before long, Eve has insinuated herself into her idol’s life. From trying to seduce Margo’s boyfriend, Bill (Chris Loftus), to jumping in as her fur-bikinied understudy, there’s nothing Eve won’t do to claw her way to the top.
—though mostly the dirty kind.