Redirection

I've been rethinking my use of both blog and website. My website was designed several years ago, so I'm stuck with categories which no longer reflect my writing practice, which is now a bit less theatre and quite bit more prose and poetry and other things. As for the blog, I haven't added anything in months. And of course the whole online environment has changed, and is continuing to change. So I'm changing too. I will no longer post on this blog or run my old website. (Although they will continue to bounce around in cyberspace: the blog for who knows how long, and the website until my current subscription runs out early 2012.)

My new address is http://noelle-janaczewska.com and it's part website part blog. I'm still working out how I'll use it (I've migrated over the odd favourite from the website) but it will reflect my current writing interests and praxis. Check it out.

In praise of complexity

Less is more and simplicity can speak volumes …

As a dramatist I compose what’s said and what is not, words and silence, into a play or performance text. Keep it simple, we’re so often told—at least, I’m often told that—by dramaturgs, directors, critics and others. Like a mantra. But why? What’s so great about simplicity? Why is complication such a no-no?

I like complexity. I think some subjects and situations demand it, and that simplicity can be reductive and flattening. I’ve read and seen a few things recently that, in my opinion, could have done with a few more complications.

The simplicity I mean here is not that distilled and eloquent simplicity that insightful writers sweat to tease from complexity, nor the iceberg structure of a good poem, but a kind of intellectual laziness. 

‘We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our methods of questioning.’ Werner Heisenberg in Physics and Philosophy. (I think this line also crops up in Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen.)

Sometimes less is just less.

Readings of jazz poetry from extempore

I'm part of the Readings of jazz poetry from extempore, along with fellow poets Andrew Lindsay, Lynn Hard, Nigel Roberts and Arjun von Caemmerer. Saturday 15 January, 6:00—8:00, at Macleay Bookshop, 103 Macleay Street, Potts Point. 

Hope to see you there.