1) Plays are written with a communal audience in mind I was, and remain, fascinated by the idea of an audience as a community of people who gather willingly to bear witness. A novelist writes a novel and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal…
Tomorrow when the farm boys find this freak of nature, they will wrap his body in newspaper and carry him to the museum. But tonight he is alive and in the north field with his mother. It is a perfect summer evening: the moon rising over the orchard, the wind in the grass. And as…
Cultural criticism: The Sears catalog might well be considered a great work of American literature, having influenced the syntax of advertising, transformed mail-order commerce, and catalyzed America’s (decidedly democratic) language of desire.
A 2021 podcast-interview episode about this essay is online here. Twenty-five years ago my friend Liesl made me an audiocassette mixtape called Rondo Rolf. I haven’t owned a functioning tape player for more than a decade, yet I can’t bring myself to throw Rondo Rolf out, since that would be akin to, say, burning a treasured scrapbook…
In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, media pundits have pinpointed a number of seeming prophets — philosopher Richard Rorty, Supreme Court justice David Souter, the TV show Black Mirror — that anticipated the conditions of the election before they happened. To me, the most salient prognostication of 2016 comes from historian Daniel J. Boorstin’s 1962 book The…
THE MASSIVE SWASTIKA, twenty meters in size, can only be seen from the air in autumn, when the larch trees turn a yellowish brown and stand out against the evergreen forest. Had the pattern been sown in the distant past, it would have been visible only to a higher being. At halftime, the marching band…
Writing craft: Studying a show’s pilot script is a useful way for aspiring scriptwriters to get a sense for how its creators chose to establish the world of the story, introduce its characters, and leave the viewer wanting more.
“Friends and vagabonders, “Welcome to my newly redesigned website!” I wrote that phrase almost exactly sixteen years ago, when (thanks to a lot of heavy-lifting from my webmaster Mike Marlett) I updated RolfPotts.com from its basic, blue-and-white 1998 design to a black-and-tan layout with ambitious new content. A prominent feature of this new content was my “Vagabonding…
For the past 25 years I’ve regarded July of 1991 as being significant for two reasons. First, it was the month I chopped off the “mullet” hairstyle I’d been wearing since 1986 and began to grow out what might be termed “grunge hair.” And, just as significantly, it was the month I attended the first Lollapalooza festival when…
About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially…
Poetry: “At least, not in the pages of Billboard Magazine / Which chronicled showbiz scuttlebutt in the days / When entertainments were an in-the-flesh affair.”
