 Red Room Writer Profile
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Judith Tannenbaum's Blog
March 19, 2009
- I’m glad no one took my blood pressure as I watched “The Class,” for it would have been soaring. The movie – which takes place almost completely inside a high school on the edge of Paris – is great (as nearly all reviewers agree). So it wasn’t the quality of the film that nearly gave me a stroke.I’d done two site visits that day, watching WritersCorps teaching artists share poetry ...
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February 24, 2009
- I'm with David Denby, who wrote in The New Yorker about "Slumdog Millionaire:" "... every surface and texture shine glamorously, including the piles of garbage that Jamal and his brother live amongst. Boyle has created what looks like a jumpy, hyper-edited commercial for poverty -- he uses the squalor and violence touristically, as an aspect of the fabulous."
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October 30, 2008
- Please visit a wonderful new blog site that allows people sharing art-making in prison to share information about programs and resources, as well as to post blogs about the work. The group that worked on this blog site is in the process of developing what we need (mission statement, etc) to create an actual Prison Arts Coalition entity. We hope to find funding that will allow in-person gatherings ...
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September 4, 2008
- I'm deep into writing By Heart: A Prison Conversation, and just re-read what I wrote in Disguised as a Poem about Milosz's visit to the prison. I haven't been able to spend much time on Red Room these days, but I did catch a bit of the thread about Famous Writers I've Met. So here is a shorted-version of the pages I wrote about meeting Milosz. One writer whose vision I cherished, was Czeslaw ...
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July 30, 2008
- I've been on the road the past couple weeks, and missed the Belle-inspired What is a Poem? conversation, but here are two late-in-the-game responses. The first is a poem by Angel Boyar (who was my student at San Quentin in the 1980s), and the second (in response to Matthew Biberman's post) is a story about Frank Bidart, who came to San Quentin as a guest artist. WHAT IS A POEM?I am a poemThe ...
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July 3, 2008
- Evie Shockley's post about cultivating audience inspired interesting comments describing a few Red Roomers' experiences. Two of my books came out at just about the same time, and the story of each was so different. It took me years to find how to write Disguised as a Poem: My Years Teaching Poetry at San Quentin - -- to discover what was, and wasn't, mine to tell -- and then a couple more ...
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July 2, 2008
- If you haven't already, check out Belle Yang's most recent post -- helpful and fabulously illustrated.My father taught at UCLA, and when I was a little girl I often spent a day with him on campus . The woman who played the campanile at lunch time worked in my father's department, and on the days I was there she'd play Oh Tannenbaum on the bells . It felt amazing to have the melody attached to my ...
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June 30, 2008
- Matthew Biberman writes today about the "tragedy of tragedy," about nothing and nowhere to fall from. Beckett's "that's how it is on this bitch of an earth," sums up much in today's Lear-related posts. That's the line we repeatedly sighed around San Quentin as the men worked on their 1988 production of "Godot." In an obvious example, no line characterized better ...
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June 27, 2008
- In a comment to a post, James Whyle wrote that “theatre is ritual,” and that its purpose is to remind us of the important questions. See the thread. There have been a number of posts on Red Room over the months wondering about the purpose of art and art-making. This is an old, on-going, conversation, and no one answer is The Answer. However, my what's-true-for-me answer resonates with ...
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June 26, 2008
- Woven into the Red Room King Lear conversation, James Whyle wrote that Lear's "thank you" is the most important line in the play. "Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir." Then a plea to look, then Lear dies.http://www.redroom.com/blog/matthew-biberman/it-raineth-every-day-a-bridge-12th-night-lear#comment-5712Whyle writes that this Thank You is Lear's redemption, an ...
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June 24, 2008
- Seeing the motorcycles on Matthew's Red Room page, I wrote him that the only motorcycle in my life is Richard Thompson 's Vincent Black Lightning. Here are a couple links to Thompson singing this truly great song:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxKTzwaEa2ohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azB7B8hrVZYAnd the motorcycle story I sent Matthew is this: When my younger sister was about to leave for college ...
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June 23, 2008
- The first time I saw King Lear performed was in 1964 -- the year of Shakespeare's quadricentennial. I was a high school senior and Shakespeare was everywhere in Los Angeles that year. Morris Carnovsky (originally an actor in Yiddish Theater) was Lear in that production and he brought me right to the heart of Lear -- the man and the play. Eleven years later, we watched Lear at the festival in ...
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June 22, 2008
- Thank you, Belle, for your inviation to dive into a Redroom conversation about King Lear. Here's a response, though I wrote it 26 years ago, when I lived in a small town in Mendocino county (California) and wrote a column for a community paper. A tragic car accident in town that was the subject of this particular column. "King Lear" (and Bob Dylan) helped me -- and many in the ...
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June 21, 2008
- SF MOMA has been showing the Fassbinder epic in segments this month. The director adapted Alfred Doblin's 1929 novel about Weimar Berlin, and the 13 episodes were shown on German TV in 1980. Watching the film, for four hours each week for four weeks (either on Thursday evenings or Saturday afternoons) is an amazing experience -- asssaulted by the brutality of the story (the times, the ...
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June 19, 2008
- Spent yesterday afternoon writing poems with a group of men at New Folsom – aka California State Prison: Sacramento. The Arts in Corrections room at this prison is small and stifling, but filled with paintings, books, musical instruments, and men doing serious work to make the next steps on their journey more in line with their hearts and souls than previous steps may have been. When we walked ...
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