Class Prep: Looking for Scripts that Ring Bells

The week before school starts every semester involves heavy research. I read as many plays as I can, as many articles as I can find. It's like I'm cramming for a test, as I tell my students not to do. I like to use new and little-known plays for class, mostly because the chances of my students finding online summaries or essays on them is so low. I've discovered quite a few ones I adore thanks to New Play Exchange. Sometimes you have to go through several before finding one that works. 

"Works" means I feel an inner resonance, like a bell rung, at the end. It means I love the play. Admittedly it's easier to feel that when reading published and produced plays. Such works have generally already gone through several layers of workshopping and refinement. I remember feeling it the first time I read Gidion's Knot by Johnna Addams, Skeleton Crew and Pipeline by Dominique Morisseau, The Ghosts of Lote Bravo by Hilary Bettis, Cambodian Rock Band by Lauren Yee, and most recently Primary Trust by Eboni Booth. (What a lovely gem of a play Primary Trust is!)

But I feel especially proud when I find a ringer script in NPX. Often it's a play that's long, so long I wonder if I want to read it at all. But then it turns into Marianas Trench by Scott Sickles or Even Flowers Bloom in Hell, Sometimes by Franky D. Gonzales or Crying on Television by R. Eric Thomas or House of Joy by Madhuri Shekar. These become some of my favorite plays, at least for a time. And I put them into my course and see how they fly.

For any number of reasons, some scripts that I really enjoy just fall flat with students. I continue loving them but take them out of rotation for use with undergrads. I love The Nether by Jennifer Haley, for example, but her Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom--which I also love--just poses fewer mental roadblocks for students. Others prove pretty durable. Students never tire of Diana Son's Stop Kiss, and 'night,Mother by Marsha Norman--for all its iffy representation of epilepsy--keeps their attention. 

Some scripts I have to take out of rotation because students (or at least a few students) like them so much they propose them for our season. This happened with Jen Silverman's The Moors as well as Gullem Clua's Marburg--and now with Haley's Neighborhood 3. I hate to lose these (at least for a four- or five-year stretch), but I'm also pleased that they sparked someone's interest.

And then there are plays I keep in rotation even if they aren't the students' favorite. I use Eugene Scribe's The Glass of Water every semester (I took this cue from Shelly Orr) because (1) I like it, and (2) it so neatly encapsulates the well-made play format so many of the other scripts I choose alter or reject. Few students enjoy that one, exactly, but many come at least to appreciate it. Susan Glaspell's Trifles is ubiquitous and dated but rock-solid as a starter script for the semester (I put that alongside Alice Gersternberg's Overtones and Alice Childress's one-act Florence). Jackie Sibblies Drury's Really doesn't enjoy the popularity of her better-known (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) works, and it confounds students. But the way she plays with time and ambiguity is so rewarding.

Some plays I put in precisely because they'll confound students, usually by refusing to resolve ambiguities or explain themselves. Caryl Churchill's Far Away is a favorite of mine (just about any Churchill would work). A little-known play called D Deb Debbie Deborah by Jerry Lieblich is so, so delightfully complicated. 

Not every script I use is one that resonates with me immediately. My perspective as a white cis US guy (a minority with outsized power) is limited, my bell (like everyone's) is tuned better to certain frequencies than to others. I try to remember that most plays aren't made for me, in other words. I wasn't immediately bell-rung with Jaja's African Hair Braiding by Jocelyn Bioh, for example, but I appreciated Bioh's craft and noted how the script checked several of my preferred boxes at once (interesting structure, centers African diasporic voices, centers women, recently popular). I put it in last semester. And as students engaged it, it grew on me. It'll likely be in my rotation for a while. 

I write this having just read another one tonight that rang a bell: Juan Ramirez, Jr.'s Calling Puerto Rico. An agoraphobic man uses ham radio to reach out to both a friend on the International Space Station and his estranged grandfather on Puerto Rico just as Hurricane Maria hits. I'll need to give it a night or two to reality check myself, making sure I'm not just reacting out of personal resonance. My father was a ham radio operator, learning that hobby while serving in the air force on a base in Puerto Rico. I've been through a number of bad hurricanes here in the South myself. I'll need to do some thinking to see if this script is just one I liked or one I liked that would also be useful in class.

More tomorrow.

Careful Work and Stormy Skies

I didn't get much more work done on classes today. My best friend contacted me about a Lego half-day to finish up our prior projects before the semester started. I took him up on that.

I got a bit done--mostly errands and some minor administrative tasks. There's almost always tasks that need to be done but don't really matter much, at least not as much as finishing a syllabus. But when you're stuck on syllabus-writing, as I am, you welcome distracting tasks. They keep you busy and give you some vague feeling of productivity even though they are at heart distractions.

I also recognize I'm in a bit of a depression season. I have really, really low-grade depression most of the time. "Dysthymia," my therapist tells me, "if you need a label." Most of the time it's just a low mood and a ramping up of my usual Eeyore outlook on things. Occasionally it blossoms into something a bit more nihilistic, marked by some really awful internal monologues.

I've adopted a metaphor (simile, I suppose) I heard from Stephen Fry. Depression, he says (I paraphrase--see here for the original), is like the weather, a rain shower or thunderstorm. On the one hand, you don't want to deny that it's storming when there's a storm. You wouldn't stroll outside and defiantly talk about how sunny things are as the downpour soaks you. You have to accept that, yes, it's raining. You take steps to adapt: staying indoors, bringing an umbrella, driving carefully with wipers and lights on, and even monitoring reports for anything worse.

But on the other hand, he continues, depression is like a storm in that it passes eventually. (He's talking about his depression;mileage varies, of course.) You don't assume that even a bad storm is just here forever. "Well, I guess it's raining from now on." (Imagine Eeyore voice.) It won't. It'll pass. It's out of your control when it'll pass, just like it's out of control that it rains or storms at all. But pass it will.

Usually, when I'm in a depression shower, I try to let myself off the hook of having to make any big decisions. My perspective when depressed isn't great. It's hard to see in a torrential rain. I'm prone to catastrophize, to make decisions not in my best interests, to gum up my own works in ways I rue later. So usually I try to wait out the storm before deciding things.

But time is short. I gotta make some big decisions about my script analysis class--a big cloud in my depressive stormy skies right now. Having two packed sections with no TA means I need to cut back on grading. How will I record attendance? Can I even teach writing (with planning and revision phases) as I'd planned to do? How do I keep the class rigorous and rewarding for students? Can I keep my ungrading practice? How do I make it through the semester without burning out?

I don't know. I have to determine how to do this, but my stormy weather is giving me some unhelpful suggestions. 

Perhaps my storm will pass in the next few days, giving me enough time to adapt. B

But I suspect I'll just need to do some careful work in the rain.

Class Prep: Canon Questions, Continued

 An anthology I'm most of the way through now that's helping me envision my seminar on contemporary dramatic canonicity is Troubling Traditions: Canonicity, Theatre, and Performance in the US, edited by Lindsay Mantoan, Matthew Moore, and Angela Schiller (Routledge, 2022). I think this book might form the backbone of my course. The contributors are diverse, thoughtful folk. Their contributions are intentionally conversational, mainly edited exchanges and interviews (with some bibliographic tags). 

It's the kind of book ripe for use in a seminar; instructors can pick and choose which essays most resonate with their course. Everything is pretty self-contained, like a streaming series that consists of bottle episodes. As with many such series, some themes and academic tropes recur. Several entries revisit the etymology of canon (from the Greek term for a measuring reed or stick). Multiple authors  nod to the term's Christian-Biblical connotations, and a few (such as Kuftinec and Rauch) even indulge in some dad-joke punning with the military homophone. (I adore dad jokes.)

Audre Lorde crops up many chapters. Well, what crops up is a piece of one quote from one essay by Lorde, that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" (from the essay titled by that clause). Usually the quote gets used as a way to dismiss works within a traditional (i.e, white, male, cis-het, Euro/US-centric, non-disabled, well-off) canon--or canons altogether. That's not exactly what Lorde is talking about in that essay, but it's not not what she's talking about, either. 

Most of the contributors seem to be writing in the wake of the "We See You, White American Theatre" manifesto/statement of 2020, which calls out professional and university theatres (and theatre-makers) for their failure to walk the walk of antiracist (and anti/decolonial) talk in terms of their seasons, audience outreach, and production practices. Says Bill Rauch (white cis artistic director of first Cornerstone, then Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and now the Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center): "I took every single sentence of that letter personally. As I should have. That is the point."

For several contributors, the weariness with playing nice with/kowtowing to mainstream (white) expectations manifests as well-earned fed-up-ness with the canon(s) handed down to them. "The American Musical Theatre Canon," argues Brandon Webster in a chapter about the canon of musicals, "fails every non-white student who comes in contact with it, in spite of the fact that it's used as the primary took for training and education, both as musical history and pedagogy." Other authors dispute the need for the idea of a canon at all, pointing out that canons are by nature exclusionary, that their intended function is to distinguish the worthy/sainted from those who aren't. As such, they are necessarily operations of power. Not everyone can be canonized. Canons ensure most folk are left out.

Some contributors take a nuanced approach, asking (as Webster does) what a new canon might look like. A few scholars (like Carrie Sandahl) cop to liking parts of the canon they were taught in undergrad and grad school even as they now recognize its exclusionary functions. Finn Lefevre, writing about queer canons, echoes this sentiment, rejecting the notion of simply eradicating 

And some selectivity is necessary given constraints of time/energy/resources. Lefevre references Umberto Eco's notion that we have to have some way to "make infinity comprehensible." It really isn't possible to include everything in a season (or a semester). We produce and teach some things rather than everything. Nor can we simply pretend that we can simply swap some other, non-white identity as the core of a new or better canon. Replacing a white canon with, say, a Black trans disabled canon might provide a valuable respite (especially but not exclusively for Black trans disabled folk), but the master's tools keep their potency. Adopting such tools, as Lorde says, "may allow us temporarily to beat [the master] at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change." 

Sukanya Chakrabarti moves deftly through such considerations, arriving at an idea drawn from Robert Dale Parker, who argues that any selection system (like a canon) should "not only represent what it systemizes but also advertise the limits of its own systematicity." "Any stable canonizing projects for queer theatre," writes Lefevre, "necessarily mark themselves in one specific moment of queerness. What was transgressive at that moment will someday, and possibly even through canonization itself, become naturalized. A queer canon today will be queer theatre history tomorrow, and a new canon--or several--will emerge." 

We might have to earn to hold canons loosely, as we are learning to do with so many other linguistic and conceptual tools that help to make infinity (and ourselves) comprehensible.

I think I'm going to assign the whole anthology. It's a winner.

Class Prep: Big Questions

 The other class I'm prepping for aside from two sections of script analysis is a grad seminar in contemporary theatre history and lit. I've taught the course several times before. It's one of several classes scheduled to be reformatted in a revision of the PhD curriculum currently in process. Lord willing, this is the last time this course will be taught.

There's nothing wrong with studying theatre history and lit from a particular era. Our current curriculum requires many such classes. PhD students have to travel through about six semesters' worth of history from ancient times (Egypt, India, Greece, etc.) to the present. That's the model we instructors were all trained in. But we've decided to move away from "encyclopedic survey of theatre/performance history." That goal was based in a prior vision of what a PhD in Theatre was for--a generalized expert who knew a bit of everything even if they specialized in one particular thing. All of us trained in this model felt prepared to teach seminars and classes on any era of theatre or performance.

Yet years of actually trying to fulfill that Renaissance person role taught us the gaps between expectation and reality. The version of "theatre history" we were taught--the history we supposedly became experts in--turns out to be pretty limited, restricted mainly to Europe and North America. To be sure, there's plenty of theatre and performance in those locations. But they're hardly the whole world. 

You can see the field of theatre history slowly rousing itself from a Euro/American (specifically Euro/USA-nian) stupor over the last three decades. Successive editions of theatre history texts and drama lit anthologies have grown larger and longer, the authors discovering whole new continents and hemispheres equally full of performance practices and traditions. Every year, those of us trained in theatre and performance have become more and more aware of and uncomfortable with the holes in our picture of "world theatre history." Each semester we tried to fit more and more material into the same already overcrowded syllabi and semesters. The classic syllabus question--What do I leave out?--takes on a new poignancy when you recognize how much has always been left out of our traditional historical narratives.

Thus, our program--like many of our peer programs--decided to relinquish the notion of encyclopedic knowledge, a core of facts or canon of texts that every graduate of a PhD Theatre program should know. We're shifting away from a seminar-by-seminar march through theatre history; there's no realistic way to do justice to such a history. Instead we're adopting an openly piecemeal approach, a curriculum composed of modular special-topics courses from different eras and focused on different themes. 

Assigned a seminar whose catalog title is "Theatre from World War II to the Millennium," then, I'm trying already to wrest the class away from its place in the old order. I'm instead shaping the seminar around the question of what a dramatic literature class can or should do. I've advertised the course especially to folk in sibling disciplines like English, Comparative Lit, and History. "Suppose you're assigned the 'Modern Drama' class," I wrote in the blurb I passed around to other grad programs in my university. "What do you teach?"

Underpinning this question are a host of others. What is theatre for? Why study dramatic literature? What plays or playwrights should we study? Do we include practices that aren't so text-centric? Are those practices even literature? What criteria might guide us as we design classes and reading lists? What role if any should the canon play? Is that idea even useful anymore? Do we lose anything by jettisoning the values canons purported to champion--universality, quality, timelessness--or are those concepts irredeemably contaminated with hegemonic and oppressive systems? On the other hand, given human limits on time and attention, is there any way not to have some kind of functional canon, a focus on some plays and not others? What then might an ethical practice of canonicity look like?

Hopefully I can harness the energy of such big questions to create a coherent, interesting, and rewarding seminar.

Class Prep: Curiosity and Boredom

 I'm in that fretful phase of class prep where, a little more than a week out from Day 1 of the spring semester, I have zero syllabi complete. 

I'm teaching two sections of script analysis and a PhD seminar in contemporary performance (i.e., post-World War II). I teach script analysis every semester to undergrads and every other fall to our masters students. (PhD students will join starting fall 2025.) I inherited the course after several years as "theatre history guy"--handling the complete theatre history sequence for undergrads, which I loved. After a faculty turnover, none of my new colleagues were especially interested in script analysis, which had been taught by one of their predecessors. I took it over.

I grew to love it, focusing the course mainly on structural analysis rather than history or theme or production dramaturgy. My aim, I tell students, is to get them to be able to approach play texts as mechanics approach vehicle engines. They can set aside whether they like the car/engine. They can set aside what the car is for (Sporty show-off? Family transport? Freight?). They focus only on taking apart (analyzing) and putting back together (synthesizing) the engine. How does this play work? I give them a number of tools--questions you can ask of any script--and challenge them to account for how scripts do what they do.

Students have found the class challenging, but mostly in good ways. They come with a wide range of experience levels in producing and reading plays. Some have never read nor seen a play (including some theatre majors!). Some gobble up any script that comes their way. Most are trained to approach literature looking for "theme"--what is this work about? What statement does it make? How can I apply its lessons to my life? How does it make me think about humanity and life etc.? And of course the stronger, truer undercurrent for many theatre majors overrides all: Do I like this? Is there a part for me in it?

One of my first course-corrections for class includes clear notice that this class is not about plays that entertain you. "You're already aware of things that entertain you," I tell them. You all have multiple devices and apps and accounts that pour billions of dollars into catching and holding your attention, curating a taste for what they have on offer. But when something's wrong with my old car (2007 hybrid Camry) and I take it to the mechanic, I couldn't give a hoot about whether the mechanic likes my vehicle. I'd be worried if the mechanic went on and on about how much they enjoy Camrys, or how much hybrid vehicles from the aughts entertain them. I'd be even less impressed, I continue, if the mechanic took a look under the hood, sighed, and said, "This is boring. Your car just isn't interesting me." I'd be looking for another mechanic. Does the mechanic really enjoy my car? Do Camrys bore them? I don't care. Any decent mechanic is professional enough to put such personal reactions aside in favor of just fixing the car.

Similarly, I tell them, you as theatrical artists need to be able to shift into a professional mental gear. I try to assign plays that are fun, I stress, but entertaining you is not my goal. Students nod appreciatively. 

I underscore that point with a quote from Dorothy Parker: "The cure for boredom is curiosity." Curiosity, I tell them, is an act of will. It's a muscle of attention we can develop as professionals. I may not like a particular play, but if I'm hired to design it, I'll find a way to become curious about it. This class, I say, aims to equip you with tools to focus your curiosity about play structures. 

And...some students get it. This class regularly appears on graduating seniors' lists of most rewarding classes--a rarity for non-specialized core curriculum courses. Of course, it also appears on a few lists of least enjoyable courses for some students. And it is hard! I'm asking them to look at play scripts without what Elinor Fuchs calls "the immediate (and crippling) leap to character" (i.e., who the protagonist is, what journey they go on, how "real" they are). I'm also asking them to segregate WHAT a play is about in terms of both plot and theme from HOW the playwright selects, arranges, and expresses that plot/theme. 

The class is also one of most intensive theatre courses in terms of reading and writing. I have them write (and often re-write) four to five analyses over the course of the semester. They read about a dozen plays along with "EF's Visit to a Small Planet." As I mentioned yesterday, the reading and writing requirements have gotten harder and harder for students. We're in an era of atrophied curiosity muscles. I try to introduce students to the notion that boredom and frustration are defense mechanisms against the harder work of change and intellectual exercise. 

I've also in recent years made things harder on myself by switching to a policy of "ungrading." I'll talk through that tomorrow.

The Simulcraprum

 Timothy Burke, one of my favorite scholars to follow, posted a doozy of a Substack today. There he looks ahead at the future of AI in pedagogical settings. It's not a sunny vision:

My worries are many, but one of the most prepossessing concerns I have, perhaps outweighing the dark political clouds on the horizon, are the consequences of the unconstrained, unmediated, unconsidered release of generative AI tools and components into our informational and expressive environment. Whatever happens to our governments and institutions in the episodic to-and-fro of the next decade may turn out to be less consequential by far than the conjuncture of our informational and cultural infrastructures with generative AI.

Burke explains that his concern isn't so much with students' pernicious use of AI to cheat. That problem, he notes, is not new, nor is it entirely the fault of students themselves. "The use of writing as a proof that a student did the reading has always been a baleful mistake," he argues. "The idea that a large quantity of writing would by itself secure mastery of writing expression equally so. At the university level, combine that with introductory courses that have hundreds of students listening to lectures and then meeting with teaching assistants and you have a recipe that has always encouraged cheating, that has always been bedeviled by forms of indetectable dishonesty."

Ouch--but accurate. I assign a lot of writing in my script analysis class, and it bears rethinking why I do so. I try not to have my writing assignments perform did-you-read-this police functions. (That's what short daily quizzes are for--policing reading and policing attendance--a practice I'm uneasily resigned to for now.) I'd hoped to move my script analysis class more fully into the realm of writing as process this next semester. By splitting my one section (with 40 students on average) into two, I hoped to qualify for writing-intensive designation. With that designation and the assistance it brings, I could craft a course in which students write to understand and then revise that writing in order to communicate effectively. I'm currently in a pretty dark place in terms of my optimism regarding those goals this semester. I have fifty-two students in the two classes and--for the first time teaching this class in over a decade--no TAs. I don't see a way for me alone to teach them both right now, not at least without radically reneging on my original plans.

Student reading and student writing seem to have gotten worse--drastically so--in the last few years post COVID. And, pace Burke's arguments, AI really has changed the game. Have some students always cheated and BS'd their way through essays? Sure. But AI does more than just make this halfassery easier to accomplish and harder to detect (though it does both those things). A student copy-and-pasting from some website at least realizes on some level that they're doing something wrong, literally taking someone else's work and presenting it as their own. Most of the plagiarism I see in student papers now is different. Sure, sometimes a student has made use of one of the many, many AI essay-writing products advertising themselves to students as harmless, even essential helps. ("My prof wanted me to write three whole pages!" sales-students in these ads gripe. "Who has time for that? That's why I let [PRODUCT] do it for me...") And sure, "just say you used Grammarly" is a common bit of get-out-of-jail-free advice circulating online for students.

But increasingly, I fear that students really are just using Grammarly or some program like it to check their writing, only to find that the program is AI-helping ("AIding"?) them by replacing words or phrases with "better" ones. The result is often a ship-of-Theseus trick, where the new ship consists of lots of adverbs and pseudo-profound statements about how we humans need to hold onto our dreams or somesuch. Like I heard from a colleague: "I used to get terribly written papers with some good ideas. Now I get perfectly written papers with terrible ideas." When I flag such AI-ded essays as violations of my course policies, I think some students really are honestly confused. They don't know what good writing looks like. They don't know what their own writing feels like. They can't tell why the AI version, while usually grammar-perfect--reads like queasy mush. And from their perspective, they did nothing wrong. They wrote something and, as I (used to) tell them to, checked and proofread their writing with a program that purports to do just that. But AI's version of "improvement" tends to mean "make the essay sound smart [lots of big words and adverbs] and uplifting [unctuous praise for the play/playwright, grand talk about generic, humanistic themes]." Students just learning how to write, just learning what real criticism and analysis are, can't tell the difference between quality and crap. And AI makes it all the less likely they will ever be able to do so.

My concern here echoes Burke's big worries about society at large:

[T]he indiscriminate vomiting of generative AI into everything we read and view, every tool we use, every device in our homes, every technological infrastructure we operate or own, means at best an unproductive estrangement, a new mediating layer that no one, expert or otherwise, can really understand or control. A kind of techno-tinnitus, a buzzing hum of interference or diffusion. When things break, when things don’t quite do what we want them to do, when we don’t get what we’re owed from what we’ve created or done, there won’t be anything to do about it. When we’re described, evaluated, measured, assessed in all the ways that are already balefully mindless when they’re done by actual human beings that we actually can see, we’ll suddenly become even less recognizable, even less true to our realities, and there won’t be anything to be done about it. You’ll complain about the AI processes in the black box to another black box AI and there will be no one anywhere who actually knows why it gave the results that it did, no expert Delphic oracle who can take it apart and get it back on track. At worst, it means that everything that is translocal to our material surrounds will be untrustworthy and unknowable. Not even an interesting fiction, just a kind of informational drift, a noise so pervasive that the entirety of the signal gets lost. 

It'd be one thing if the infonoise (cAIcophony? I'll stop now) were reliable. But LLMs like ChatGPT specialize not in truth but in bullshit--words spewed out with utter confidence and no regard for their truth value. It's like Poe's Law but applied to all digital representations of reality itself: can't tell if true or BS. Students using AI now often, I'm convinced, simply don't know that they're indulging in BS, producing it, absorbing it, starving themselves on a diet of predigested slop.

Increasingly, it looks like infopoop is going to be what we get from AI. Or, as Burke puts it:

Generative AI is being used so heedlessly, so much like a silicon equivalent of the Human Centipede, gulping down its own shit as it hungrily demands more and more and more text for its training models, that it is going to end up spewing informational diarrhea forever all over the entire infrastructure of knowledge production. It is going to pollute all forms of many-to-many communication, all forms of mass media. When we hit that point, it will be impossible to cleanse it all out again. Everything we know will become a Superfund toxic waste site, full of forever hallucinations and distortions.

Now there's an image: AI as (in)Human Centipede. BS recycling BS recycling BS, crowding out other exchanges, eating up available energy and attention. "We’re probably only a few years away from mandatory brown-outs in ordinary homes," predicts Burke, "because the AI needs the power." 

What did Baudrillard say about the ultimate stage of the simulacrum? The representation replaces reality? Only now the eclipsing representation is crap. Welcome to the simulcraprum. 

Sigh.

Lego Pieces

 Time for me to get back into a habit of writing.

It's New Year's Day. I'd planned originally to spend the day crash-course prepping my spring classes, which start in under two weeks.

Instead, my best friend texted early this morning with an invitation to spend the day building Lego at his place. It was a day well spent, I think. I had a backlog of Lego sets--the TIE Bomber from Star Wars, Bumblebee the transformer (who actually transforms!), and the Ghost and Phantom from Ahsoka (and Star Wars: Rebels). I'd gotten those sets in various bouts of gift-getting and splurge-buying over the last year. Yet they sat in their boxes for who knows how long. 

Lego-building is an extravagance. It demands time and some effort, all to create a fragile thing to look at or play with. No set lasts forever. I'm reminded of a Zen insight from Frank Ostaseski's The Five Invitations. Recalling a time a visitor broke a valued piece of pottery belonging to a Buddhist monk, Ostaseski focuses us on the monk's reply: The cup was always broken. 

Lego embody mortality and transience. They take care and attention to build, they're a wonder to enjoy and show off, but once built they can only break. And they break so easily--a part comes loose here, a bookshelf or display case collapses, a cat decides to investigate--it's like they yearn to return to their original status as mixed bricks and flats. My friend, for example, had an enviable collection we had built together, only to lose it all when his bookshelf fell, shattering them all. In a bit of sort-of-Buddhist insight, he let the old sets go, gathering the pieces to donate somewhere. His shelf cleared, he found room to open new boxes that had been waiting--and to invite me to build with him.

Someone on Reddit today asked if anyone thought that one day a carefully preserved collection of Lego might be cherished and shown off and handed down like a grandmother's prized teacup collection. I suppose it's possible, but more than likely any personal collection of sets shares the same destiny as most repositories of stuff. It's ultimately trash. 

Of course, the pleasure of Lego is that, once destroyed, the pieces can find new life as something else, some new creation. The Lego sets of my childhood (Space was my bag back then) were advertised not only with the starship or sci-fi rover one could build with the instructions but also with pictures of the other possible vehicles one could create with that same set. Now sets are so precisely, ingeniously specific (the Bumblebee that actually transforms from car to robot and back) that free-form play is rarer, more the realm of dedicated Legoistas. And let me tell you, after spending eight hours piecing together Bumblebee and the TIE Bomber, I'm in no mood to contemplate shattering them anytime soon.

But they will shatter someday. I hope their pieces find their way into new creations and not (as I fear) merely end up in a landfill.

More important than the sets themselves was the gift my friend gave me of time and company. He negated my busyness with a different kind of activity. We built together all day, marveling at how clever the designers were, cursing the dropped piece as we hunted for it, wondering exasperatedly whether some tiny piece had been left out. That latter frustration almost always turns out to be a false alarm. The piece we'd hunted for so hard was underneath another piece the whole time. We laughed and talked and joked and watched Drawfee on YouTube.

And then--at one point--I discovered a tiny piece from my set that did seem to be missing. I shook out the brick bags, checked my piles, looked again at my work, and nope: a tiny little piece the instructions called for was not there. My friend hopped up, went to his pile of ruined, yet-to-be-donated Lego pieces, and picked out a brick matching the one I couldn't find.  

It was a good day.