Monica's Journal: joyce carol oates

so joyce carol oates came to bard today. it was cool, she wrote a play for the occasion, and bard students performed it wonderfully with only a week of rehearsal. another bard student composed music and played it during the 20-minute play. it was really good. about free will and the milgram experiment. i think it was really about war. but anyway.

    so then she came on stage after, having just seen her play for the first time, and asked the audience what they thought. then she found the actors in the audience and asked each of them, individually, what they thought. the only interesting thing she said were some comments on how actors get all shy once they leave the stage. we left an hour into the thing and she hadn't really said anything. she was just asking audience members what they thought. i dunno, but i came for a lecture, not an interactive seminar. those things are somewhat difficult in 300-seat auditoriums, especially when they're filled with middle-aged upstate-ians with their own agendas anyway.

    so then we tried to figure out what exactly it was that joyce carol oates wrote that made her so famous. and we didn't know. but we know she's supposed to be someone famous or something. that's a weird feeling, knowing you're supposed to think something, but not why.

    oh, and jamaica kincaid had dinner with creative writing majors tonight, too. damn, we're just wallowing in the literary genius.

(coulda sworn i had a picture for books)