h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have stumbled on Kenneth Burke (when I do a H2g2 search it comes up with Jack the Ripper ??). His outlook seems to be postmodern: people generate to some extent their own reality through symbols & different peoples with different symbol sets operate in different "realities":

"It stands to reason then that people who consider themselves to be Christian, and who internalize that religion's symbol system, inhabit a reality that is different from the one of practicing Buddhists, or Jews, or Muslims. The same would hold true for people who believe in the tenets of free market capitalism or socialism, Freudian psychoanalysis or ..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Burke#Principal_works

Someone with a background in science learns of one reality ... but in social theory & something called "literary theory" one learns that there are many realities. Literary theory seems such an innocent label - on the outside it seems to be simply a study of literature but on the inside it seems to be something far more expansive. Is this something a thespian would study? I would imagine a thespian would need to understand & attempt to construct separate realities in order to really get "inside" a role.

>> ..something a thespian would study? <<

I began an acting career at age five on CBC radio dramas
and it wasn't until well into my 30s that I noticed that a new
generation of younger actors had actually gone to school
to 'learn' their craft. Universities had begun offering degrees.

It seemed such an unreasonable expectation. My experience
and logic had observed that succesful artists and musicians did
at some point have some sort formal of training but I still found
it hard to believe it possible to teach someone how to act.

At about this time I was fired from a position as a 'teacher' by a
theater company because my advice to aspiring thesbians was
to forget about it - there's no sense in pursuing false expectations
about stardom, fame and fortune when the majority (99%plus) of
hopeful actors will never make a proper living.

Worse still than discovering that acting methods can be taught
was the realisation that so many of these young 'graduates' spent
considerable time trying to improve their skills and to 'get inside'
their role. I didn't get that at all and wondered where they had ever
gotten these weird ideas. I blamed the Acting classes. (Not the ones
I had briefly taught of course.)

This sort of dedicated expectation is forrin, even alien, to me
as someone who gladly went home at the end of an acting day and
would never again think about what had transpired. It was just a job.
Not unlike factory work, assembly line work, repetitious, vacuous...

Now... writing is something else again innit. That can become a
vocation, an obsession, a maturing and constantly evolving skill-set.


~jwf~

You must be Laurence Olivier to my Dustbin Hoffman ... there's that famous story about Olivier recommending acting to Dustin Hoffman when they were making Marathon Man.

Maybe if you started acting aged 5 then the acting process must have been more or less wired into your brain ... like young kids learning another language. A late teenager or young adult without much childhood acting experience must find it more difficult to learn how to act - like a monolingual adult trying to learn a new language. I agree that there is world of difference between theory & practical experience (getting on with it) but maybe with the late starter without relevant previous experiences different hooks need to be used. I am aware of the criticism concerning academia ... appropriating & academising subjects that don't need to be (e.g. English language, nursing, golfing, star trek studies ...) and I would tend to agree with this.

I am interested in the way different people think & create their own realities & it seems to me that actors & the theories that go along with acting etc have probably covered this to some extent.

In my college days (late 60s - 70s) I registered or 'dropped in'
to classes at seven different Unis in Canada. One was Waterloo in
Ontario, the birthplace of Blackberry and later home of the (mobile
wheel) Chair in Theoretical Physics for S. Hawking.

They had a lot of new ideas. A huge glass walled building housed
their new mainframe computer with catwalks across the top of the
machine. Very sci-fi. Place reeked of marijuana smoke and ozone.

They also had courses in Urban Management and for a time I was
seriously thinking of exploring that. Glad I didn't. In fact just the other
day while negotiating some odd highway interchanges and off-ramps
and parking lots I began thinking how I could have done it better.

Then I laughed out loud at myself. God! I can't begin to imagine
the state of my mind if I had pursued the career of Urban Planner -
designing parking lots for criessake! How arbitrary. How anal. LOL.

No, I am happy to have simply carried on playing the fool.


Cheers
~jwf~

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~jwf~

hidden postings? my interest has piqued!

Having read and responded to all of Stone Aart's series
of short posts and replied with just one posting of smileys
since words had failed me. I remember nothing offensive in any
of them (other than heavy sighs of resignation from h2g2) so
I suspect they were deleted under the offense of 'flooding'.

Flooding is when you take more than two posts in a row to say
what could have been said in one post. At least that's what they
told me when I got moderated for a similar misuse of space.

Since this has occurred in my message center I feel I ought to
have the right to say whether I objected. Or been consulted.


~jwf~

thought it might be some automated process,

As for "Since this has occurred in my message center I feel I ought to
have the right to say whether I objected. Or been consulted" you havw a better chance of Canada voting yes in a referendum to become part of the U.S.A....(insert smiley of your choice)

Sounds like a dead cert.

~jwf~