Ch-ch-ch-changes (but not for you)
Yet
Dear Reader — Well, I finally seem to be over my walking pneumonia and am back to normal. During that time when I was mostly too tired to do much, I did manage to finally create a brand new author page for my writings. This website (scottwalters.net) brings together in one place my books, some of my articles, connections to my old blog, and a brand new blog, called “Back to My Books.” The title is drawn from Ruined by Reading by Lynne Sharon Schwartz: “I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now?" That’s kind of where I am these days. I will be canceling my micro.blog subscription and writing exclusively on “Back to My Books.”
Why change yet again? As I think I mentioned before, I had become frustrated by the increasing complexity of WordPress, which, in turn, drew me to the simplicity of micro.blog. But for what I really wanted to do, I needed something midway between WordPress and micro.blog, something that would give me some formatting flexibility without a daunting learning curve. I found it in a somewhat new addition to my hosting site; it’s called SiteJet Builder, and it is free as part of my Reclaim Hosting cPanel.
So what does this mean for you? For the time being, nothing — I will continue to send out a “weekly” newsletter of my writing through Substack. For a variety of reasons, my goal is to get off of the Substack platform, whether that means simply downloading my subscriber email list and sending an email from my personal email newsletter, or using the newsletter function on SiteJet (if there is one — I’m still learning what SiteJet can do). The one change you may notice is that the topics I write about may be more interdisciplinary — i.e., not solely theater-related. If that’s not something that interests you, you may want to unsubscribe now.
POSTS
Not a whole lot about theater.
On micro.blog, I posted a quotation from the book Monoculture by F. S. Michaels:
“As arts organizations become part of the world of markets instead of being buffered from it, their focus shifts from preserving human heritage and culture to attracting and building a paying audience. It’s easier, after all, to measure artistic success in terms of tickets sold than in terms of something vague like aesthetic triumph. Arts organizations start to think and act like businesses, adopting management philosophies and marketing techniques and training staff in management and business practices. That training is offered mostly through business schools, which also stress the importance of the market.”
On “Back to My Books,” I wrote two posts so far.
One is an “about this blog” post to give you an idea of the focus.
The second is more substantive: “We Need a New Theatrical Movement,” which is in response to Fergus Morgan’s Crush Bar post (on Substack) called “I want to see a new theatrical movement. Someone start one: When was the last time a group of artists with a new idea took our stages by storm?” I think Fergus main point is spot on — there’s not much creativity on display in the contemporary theater of late. But I felt as if I needed to talk about one of the barriers to creativity he placed at the center of his post: subsidy. There’s an old saying that, if you want something to get done, give it to someone who is busy. That has also been the case historically as far as movements are concerned: most we created by people who had little money, limited time, and not much room for error. In other words, creativity thrives within limits, not abundance, so don’t let anything stand in your way!
Otherwise, I posted a few things about politics that weren’t worth sharing. But I have plans!
Thanks for reading! It’s good to feel better again.
—Scott