I recently said to a director, ‘Audiences are like furtive strangers standing outside school gates with bags of sweets. You follow them at your peril.’ They lead you down the wrong path, and then they say, 'We don’t believe you’ at the end of it when they’ve laughed and laughed and encouraged you to be funnier and funnier. They drop you, and you’re dumped as a character and as an actor, so always stay true. That’s the point.
I see time as sailors see wind, or photographers see light, as something to use, manage, and shape, not as something to be a victim of, or to see go by.
Martin Vasky
Annie Dillard observed that “Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.”
Few writers have managed more fully than Stacton to bear out Gore Vidal’s maxim that writers shouldn’t “write what they know” but, rather, what they imagine or suspect. The Stacton oeuvre also flies in the face of Michael Frayn’s droll advice that authors do well to write the same book “over and over again, just very slightly different, so that people get used to it”.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1999, the Holy Spirit directed Rick Karr, a 51-year-old Texan, to answer the calls made to a phone booth located in the middle of the Mojave Desert, 15 miles from a highway. He spent 32 days camping beside the phone booth on the desert playa in scorching heat. During that time he answered over 500 calls, many of which came from someone named Sergeant Zeno, who said he was phoning from the Pentagon.
