Page 2 of 4

Posted on

What the Dramatist Knows About Monsters

I sold my first paid byline to a Lincoln, Nebraska, newspaper at the age of ten. That was 1975. In the fifty-one years since, I have continued to be paid to construct figures that audiences will find frightening, or sympathetic, or contemptible, or laughable, on schedule, in plays and musicals and screenplays and novels and podcast scripts and editorial work. My Dramatists Guild membership dates from 1984. My MFA is from the Oscar Hammerstein II Center for Graduate Theatre Studies at Columbia University. A publishing house I founded in the same year I sold the first byline has operated without interruption since. The inventory exists for a single reason: the labor of figure-construction is something I know from inside the work, and the working-dramatist’s perspective on that labor is the perspective from which my new book is written.

Continue reading → What the Dramatist Knows About Monsters

Posted on

Notes on Tomorrow as Tribute

The book is out. The title is Tomorrow as Tribute: The Politics of the Burnt Future. It is available in paperback, in Kindle, and as a free web edition through David Boles Books. The audiobook is in production with narrator selection underway. The web edition is free because I want the argument to circulate as widely as possible.

Continue reading → Notes on Tomorrow as Tribute

Posted on

Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years

Most books are written. A few are excavated. Ischia is Burning is a book I excavated from a steel filing cabinet in a Manhattan apartment, where it had been sitting for more than three decades inside a folder marked Ischia, in the form of a screenplay I wrote at twenty-five years old in the second year of an MFA program at Columbia. The novel that has just been published is what happened when I sat down with that folder in May, found the staples rusted and half the dialogue wincing, and wrote what the twenty-five-year-old version could not yet write. The novel is now available as a paperback and a Kindle edition, and a complete free web reading edition lives at BolesBooks.com.

Ischia is Burning book cover, topographic map design with crimson title and CLASSIFIED stamp

Continue reading → Ischia is Burning: The Novel I Have Been Writing for Thirty-Six Years

Posted on

The Conditions Were Not the Ones I Would Have Chosen

The cultural and political conditions under which my new book RelationShaping: Field Studies has been published are not the conditions I would have chosen for it. The book is an argument for sustained attention, long apprenticeship, and the slow acquisition of perceptual capacities that operate below the level of declarative description. It enters a culture where the dominant economic logic rewards short attention, fast turnover, and the substitution of automated outputs for the trained reading those outputs are supposed to approximate. I make the case anyway, because the case needs making, and because the people who recognize what the book is describing will recognize it whether the cultural moment is favorable or not.

Continue reading → The Conditions Were Not the Ones I Would Have Chosen

Posted on

What the First Photographer Knew

Photography spent its first half-century being mocked. The painters who controlled the academies and the salons looked at the daguerreotypists and saw mechanics. You pressed a button. You waited for the silver to fix. The machine did the work. Real art required a hand, an eye, a soul, a brush moving through hours of decision. The photographers were craftsmen at best, vandals at worst, and certainly not making Art. This was the consensus from Daguerre’s 1839 announcement until the Photo-Secession movement around 1900, when Alfred Stieglitz spent decades arguing the opposite and slowly won. The Museum of Modern Art opened its photography department in 1940. The Metropolitan Museum followed eventually. By 1980 photographs sold at auction for sums that would have stunned the painters who once sneered at them. The mockers were wrong, and they were wrong in a particular way that matters here.

Continue reading → What the First Photographer Knew

Posted on

The Station Across Town: A Lincoln Boyhood, the Federation I Did Not Watch, and the Second Half of a Television Diptych

When I was sixteen, I had a television show called Kidding Around on KOLN/KGIN-TV in Lincoln, Nebraska. It was 1981. I was a teenager hosting a teenager-aimed program on a commercial CBS affiliate, three blocks of which I have no doubt were paid for by advertising for Pepsi and Levi’s and the Lincoln car dealerships that kept American local television alive in the early Reagan years. The format was loose. The show featured kid interviews, viewer letters read on air, and unscripted segments of the kind that the FCC’s mandates for “ascertainment of community needs” were supposed to encourage and that the FCC’s 1981 decision to deregulate radio, followed by the parallel television deregulation of 1984, was designed to kill. Kidding Around did not survive into the late 1980s. It was a casualty of a specific federal policy decision documented in the book I published earlier this year, Selling Saturday Morning.

Continue reading → The Station Across Town: A Lincoln Boyhood, the Federation I Did Not Watch, and the Second Half of a Television Diptych

Posted on

Now I Become Em-Dash Triple Anaphora, Destroyer of Words

In July of 1945, at the Trinity site in the New Mexico desert, J. Robert Oppenheimer watched the first atomic detonation and, by his own later telling, thought of a line from the Bhagavad Gita. The Sanskrit word he rendered as Death is kāla, which scholars also translate as Time depending on context, and Oppenheimer’s decision to reach for the more theatrical English word tells you something about the difference between a physicist and a translator. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The sentence has haunted the century because it collapses the distance between maker and unmaker into a single grammatical act.

Continue reading → Now I Become Em-Dash Triple Anaphora, Destroyer of Words

Posted on

A New Old Musical, Now Available in Book Form

I have written a new musical. It is also, simultaneously, an old musical. The story happened in 1537. Shakespeare wrote the central character in 1595 and disappeared him from the text in the same scene that introduced him. My piece sits in Renaissance dramatic verse arranged into two acts with song cues a composer can set for voice and chamber orchestra. So when I say I have written a new musical, I mean that I have written the most ancient kind of thing a person can write and I have written it in 2026 and I am calling it new because that is what it is.

Continue reading → A New Old Musical, Now Available in Book Form

Posted on

The Claim I Filed in 2006

This week I published The Claimed Body: How American Institutions Divided the Human Organism Among Themselves. Fifteen chapters, 559 pages in paperback, 349 in the web edition, a Kindle ebook, and a wraparound cover that took the shape of a parcel map of the body. The book is out on Amazon and through BolesBooks.com. Readers who have followed the constellation for any length of time will recognize the argument before they finish the first chapter. I have been writing toward this book since December of 2006, when I first used these pages to ask a question I did not yet have the vocabulary to answer.

Continue reading → The Claim I Filed in 2006

Posted on

Carceral Nation: Twenty Years from Blog Post to Book

In December 2006, I published an article on this blog about mass incarceration, racial disparities in the American prison system, and a concept I was trying to name: the carceral citizen, the person whose freedom exists in a state of permanent conditional revocation. The article was one entry among many in the Boles Blogs Network, which at its peak ran fourteen blogs across a range of subjects. One of those fourteen was called Panopticonic.

Continue reading → Carceral Nation: Twenty Years from Blog Post to Book