September Check In (Patreon)

Hey there,

Thank you all for your patience this month - after a paranoid, mask-filled trip, I naturally caught COVID from my first close contact upon coming home, in what rapidly proved to be mathematically the worst possible time. As such, I have been dealing with a mess of canceling and rescheduling shows, contacting venues, and also doing the “human body” thing, which increasingly appears to be nothing more than a list of chores.

BUT since September is 50% gone and I’m finally collecting negative test results, it seems like I may need to get started. If you’re looking for what happened last month, we looked back at some of my highs and lows from doing “Zoom Theater” in the Archive Highlight, then drove the crowds absolutely mild with the monthly Reading Excerpt: a high-octane tour through scientific literature and references for Fair Trade.

This month, after chasing some planned rest with an unplanned illness, I thought I’d change my plans and treat myself to something I’ve been wanting to read for a long time….

“Finite and Infinite Games”

James P. Carse

“In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate but equally important modes of play…”

Oops - wrong franchise.

Despite being on my radar for many years (with countless recommendations, including one notable entry in The Telelibrary’s expanded feature, the “Book Club”), I’d never actually gotten my hands on this book until it was gifted to me recently by a dear collaborator. And so, trapped indoors and restless, I decided I’d make something out of my medical isolation and engage in the age-old tradition of jumping my endless cue of books to read with whatever has most recently been put in my hand.

It doesn’t take long to see why this book comes up so often in the world of The Telelibrary - Carse gets into the weeds to delineate the structures, rules, conventions, and aims that arise when consider the difference between finite games, where we play to win, and infinite games, which we win by playing. I’m reading to better understand the differences Carse draws, and to see what I can learn about my own strange little immortal jellyfish…

RELATED READING

“What Game Theory Teaches Us About War”

Simon Sinek | TED, 2015

Both of my related readings this month come from people who take this writing very differently than I do. In Sinek’s case, watching a few of his videos will reveal the same talking points again and again (some other month we’ll discuss the ways presentational speaking as a performance of “conversational). As someone with little passion for war history and no interest in Business, I found it striking to see someone so clearly draw from the same source for such a different set of concerns.

“Machines are out, Gardens are In”

Francis Kane, April 12, 1987. NYTimes

Since I’ve never heard anything but good things about this book, it was interesting to discover some of the negative press it received around the time of its publication; and sometimes I understand my relationship to a concept better when I identify which kinds of people it pisses off. I think Kane has some fair complaints, but I also think Kane’s so entirely fixed on what such a philosophy might permit that he misses it as an invitation to create. To his credit, Kane has a small piece of prescience that seems to see me coming a few decades away:

“I suppose, though, that in this self-indulgent age this work will create its own disciples, and one could dismiss my objections as the cavils of a cranky old Confucian who little understands his ever-youthful Taoist colleague.”

~

Once upon a time, I got injured during an artist intensive, but stubbornly kept trying to participate, to the point of taking dance classes by hopping on one leg. My Kathakali teacher apparently mocked me from the sides and remarked — “doesn’t he know he’ll be doing this for the rest of his life?”

Thanks for playing this round of the infinite game with me - more fun to come later in the month, and the next, and the next.

Until then,

Yannick Trapman-O’Brien