Epic Theater

The act of writing, taking pen to paper
or keying letters to a staccato beat
is high drama, an ancient high drama at that.

THE RETURN TO LONDON

ONE: IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER

You are reading the blog of Griffin Horn, who, in his adventures abroad in England, returned to London with none other than Mackenzie Worrall to meet their friend, Alison Byrle, for a jolly old time about town. What? you ask, Alison Byrle? I've seen her comment on facebook about Griffin's blog. She's a regular reader. If I show up in England and hang out with Griffin, does that mean I, a regular reader, will become a character in his writings?

You skip a few paragraphs ahead and double check: yes, yes it would most certainly appear so.

You learn, however, that Alison was not always present in the story, for Griffin goes on, lengthily in fact, about how he brought not one but two books with him on the train: G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man and Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler. At length he discusses the postmodern effect of reading a story about a reader reading If on a winter's night a traveler and the joy he felt when he discovered a chapter in "Translatese," the form of English created when one translates on sight from a foreign, ancient, and dead language. Then look at this whole chunk about how he imagined staging it as he read it, as if he could! Everyone who's anyone knows that If on a winter's night a traveler can only ever be read, because it's about reading! Ah, but he has this wacked out theory about how it's the only novel he's read that's taken place in the present tense, lending itself to drama. Well, my word! He goes on praising it for a complete paragraph! Hmph, if you came to visit Griffin, forget about being the protagonist in his blog entry about you: visiting readers seem to pale in comparison to floofy avant-garde writers from the 70's. Is Calvino even from the 70's? you ask yourself. How would anyone ever know?

Ugh, surely there's got to be a prologue in here that's more interesting than literary analysis.

INTERLUDE: A PROLOGUE

Here we are. Conflict! Adventure! Drama! But damn, he replaced it with some kind of verse.

"I booked a hostel:
Quick and cheap - I wanted it.
Fate said otherwise."

A haiku? Really, Mr. Horn. If I paid to come to this site I'd give you a piece of my mind.

TWO: THE DESCENT INTO THE ABYSS

Well that's a catchy title! You're bound to love something so mythic-structure, so Joseph-Campbell, so Are-You-Afraid-of-the-Dark as that!

You read on, and on, and on. This part actually goes on for a while. 'London has gone down a notch on my cosmic order of cities.' Cosmic? 'We got off the train and met Alison - it was great! We all went up to a Subway at the Victoria Station and paid far too much money for mediocre sub sandwiches. So we couldn't pay for drinks. I went to fill up my water bottle in the sink in the bathroom, discovered a horrible truth, and then walked back to Ken and Alison, singing:

'Better hope your pennies add up to the fee,
We can't have you peeing for free.
If you do we'll catch you,
We, we never fail.
And we will not bother with jail.

YOU'LL GET URINETOWN'

'What?' Ken asks, a la Erin Ellingwood - another reader, you note. He's heavy on reader reference tonight. What is it they call it when George W. Bush gathers all the rich people who vote for him together and has a dinner to make sure they keep voting for him? Whatever it is, he must be doing that, but with readers. Also, Urinetown, a parody of Brechtian theater. Does this have anything to do with the title, Epic Theater? you wonder. How unbearably self-referential.

'The bathrooms cost 20p! And there's no tap water in the stores!'

'Cockfoster!' Alison moans. You wonder how much of this is true.

'Our hostel had better be darn good,' Griffin remarks, but wait! That haiku! Ah, now you see. Griffin was not simply condensing an entire dramatic scene and representing it with a haiku, but he was setting the sense of mystery, the forshadowing, as it were, of the crisis! Your opinion of him has just gone up for that subtle literary parlor trick.

You skip ahead to the paragraph about the hostel: AUGH, it's a ranting description of absolute squalor! Hooray, the juicy part! He describes it, mildly, as "some rooms around a bar, a bar that played horrible music." How simply he begins, but this is just the first note. Look, he tells about how the manager at the bar was fairly tipsy himself, and how this manager and the bouncer sat around staring at the computer for 10 minutes because they couldn't find Griffin's online reservation. Oops! What fun! Wait a minute, you skipped a paragraph that looks important.

Ah, apparently it took them a while to find this place. Apparently they walked right by it because you couldn't tell it, a hostel, from the sketchy-ass bar it was attached to, that was bouncing with all kinds of the seedy London night life that just makes Griffin knock London down a few more pegs on that cosmic rack. You have to say, though, a cosmic order of cities? This Griffin character is just a little pretentious sometimes, but hey, you've gotta love him! Oh my, it appears they walked so far that they eventually turned around and attracted the attention of a nice man on the street - see, there are good people in the world. But wait, you read that he informed them that they missed the action entirely right outside of the bar. Oh? Apparently, a man was hit by a taxi. The man from the street tells Alison, Ken, and Griffin that if they only had checked in on time they might have "been there for the action."

Okay, stop. Griffin's leaving parts out here. This man helped them! How could he portray him and this bartender and this bouncer and Alison, who's only line has been 'cockfoster' so far and that doesn't sound like her at all! Surely these people must be wholly rounded individuals, have a life story somewhere that requires us to abstain from judgment.

Apparently this matters little to the author, at least it would seem from the text, since away he goes. How brutish.

Now, where were you in that later paragraph....the bar...ah yes. They can't find the reservation. They don't quite know how to make the computer work. One of them, at least, is drunk. There's terrible metal music playing and a bar filled with a bunch of drunk Brits who sound even more British by virtue of being drunk. Well that didn't make much sense, you think. But you read on.

Fate smiles! The manager gives Alison an extra bed and Griffin and Ken room to sleep in the 'Chill Out Room.' Hm. 'Chill Out Room?' But they get free drinks! Oh what fun.

THREE: THE CHILL OUT ROOM, or IN THE ABYSS

You can't imagine this is actually true. He describes this whole thing as a "basement on steroids, with large couches and a ping pong table, and clashing colors painted everywhere - inhabited by the kind of Europeans you'd see in a James Bond video game, a sort of stock angularity programed into the faces of the nameless characters you shoot." Well that's mildly racist, isn't it? Are Europeans a race? And what's this? Hm, the three Kenyonites are reminiscing about their school that they miss so much in the face of this sketchtastic-Jackson experience. SKIP.

Oo, the bar and caretaking staff all come down to the hangout spot and drink and carry on until 4 a.m. Ken tries to get some sleep but Griffin knows better, and stays up trying to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation on the TV, which somebody left on. 'Star Trek, The Everlasting Man, try to sleep, If on a winter's night a traveler, listen to the conversation and the drama unfold between the staff, who're all late teens or twenty somethings, I think, and, being drunk and in some cases stoned, say some crazy stuff. And I still need to pee, and I don't think I can make it to the bathrooms from here. I don't know where they are. Help me Obi-Wan Kanobi. You're my only hope.' The list...you find effective if a little out-of-left-field, but hey, that's what this writer is known for anyway, at least amongst his readers. Perhaps another ploy?

And he touches on a theme here, nay, a motif: a need to pee. Is that all we are? Do we go through life in the following order: born, need to pee, find a toilet, pee, need to pee, find a toilet, etc. etc. etc. die? Is this all there is in a landscape where it seems the author forgoes pleasant assumptions about the goodness of humanity and replaces it with these caricatures? How very Beckett, how very post-world-war-two-minimalist.

And yet, as he references Urinetown earlier in the piece, he seems to point out that this motif is already explored territory. Rather than shooting himself in the foot, this seems to be an even more nuanced motif: there is nothing new under the sun. That these caricatured characters, himself included, have been constantly rearranging themselves and living out these petty dramas for all eternity in a variety of different outcomes for the sake of the entertainment of someone, somewhere in the intercosmic galaxy of the time/space/literary continuum.

Oh dear, lost the spot, where were you?

THREE: THE CHILL OUT ROOM or THE ABYSS
Part Two

Now the scene is dark - all the drunkies have gone outside to shoot off fireworks. Ugh, anthropology time. He speculates for a number of paragraphs about why the English insist on shooting off fireworks from Halloween through the present day. Get to the good stuff.

Here we go, everyone's asleep and he needs to pee again: motif. The bouncer from before is wandering around looking for his credit card. He asks, they chat, the bouncer directs him, he gets lost. The bouncer finds him again -

he touches his stomach and directs him up the stairs -

did that just happen?

He and the bouncer exchange awkward conversation outside of the bathroom. ......... when Griffin gets back to his couch in the chillout room, the bouncer insists he goes to sleep and shakes his hand, lingering as Griffin lets go -

IS THIS HAPPENING?

Is this bouncer guy hitting on him? Is there going to be a triste in the hallway? That's so skeevy!

Griffin says nothing happened after that and writes it off as the guy was drunk but you think otherwise: that Griffin is a giant whore, as you know from experience, if you get what you're thinking.

FOUR: A HERO REBORN

Thank merciful secularism that allows you to thank whatever merciful entity with or without a personality or perhaps no entity of mercy at all and only ever in the privacy of your own head and never aloud in front of anyone else, a list:

'Top Ten Moments of the Good Day, November 10th, 2007.

5. Finding not one, but TWO comic book stores, and at these comic book stores, copies of the complete collection of Sandman, sourcebooks for Hunter: The Reckoning, the core rules for Changeling: The Lost and even some sourcebooks for the first roleplaying game I ever really got into: In Nomine.

8. Finding Alison a really good hostel to stay at tonight, since her plane is tomorrow and Ken and I go back on a train at 8.

4. The British Museum/taking pictures with Egyptian statues/learning the history of money/coming up with Hunter ideas around a museum.

10. Almost buying roasted chesnuts on the street.

7. Getting on a tube, noticing an unattended bag, deciding it was a bomb, considering ourselves on the brink of life and death, getting off at the next stop and waiting for the next train without telling anybody about the potential bomb, and being thankful when there wasn't an explosion and it turning out that we were just playing pretend. I think this happened today.

3. Lunch at a great cafe with Ken's friend Kyle who's at an international school in London. Not only did I discover a fun new person, but the notion of sparkling lemonade, of which I bought two cans, and the first peanut butter-chocolate square I've had since Gund desserts.

6. Discovering the British equivalent of Cracklin' Oat Bran: Crunchy Wheat Flakes, or something like that.

9. Alison's gift of tea biscuits from France.

2. Hearing Alison's stories from France and news from Kenyon.

1. The last supper at Sugo's italian restaurant in Notting Hill, recommended to all for its availability of tap water and its amazing food. This dinner included an amazing conversation between Ken, Alison and I that was simply amazing, to be redundant."

UNEXPECTED: A JELLULAR EVENT

Quick, he's making a reference to earlier publications in his blog, Encyclopedic Knowledge (A Conspiracy of Cartographers) roll: success! You remember Griffin's Orvis Leather Carry On Bag (bought at a 50% + 20% discount from the Orvis outlet in Lahaska, PA) from his first entry with sadness and despair. For snacks, is seems, Griffin brought along rice cakes and jelly, and the jelly had an accident inside his travel bag. Again, need to pee and what happens when that need is unfulfilled. The AtoZ, The Everlasting Man and If on a winter's night a traveler (which should be noted is a yellowed used edition probably from the seventies that smells of old book) formed the first line of defense against the marauding raspberry preserves, sacrificing themselves so that the clothes might go on. You take a moment of silence to remember their actions.

MOMENT OF SILENCE

FIVE: THE MIDNIGHT TRAIN

'We could've taken the midnight train into St. David's, but it literally would've taken all night, so Alison decided she was going to catch a movie and then afterwards sprint back to her hostel. Being a girl alone on the streets in London isn't a very viable option for long, even in Notting Hill. I felt bad that we were leaving her, but what with all of the hostel scheduling problems and all we couldn't really deviate from the schedule we had. He had to have a little order in our lives.

So we left Alison as she went to see ... something, I actually forget what. It might have been Elizabeth or something. Ken and I meandered over to Paddington and hopped on the train home, which was bookless for fear of making the jelly situation worse, and mostly revolved around trying to get some sleep. I had strange dreams that kept making me twitch, like the dreams I had at the hostel of what it would be like to be swallowed whole by a shark and try to claw your way out, but I can't remember what they were. It must've looked funny.

And then home again home again, "to know it for the first time."'