library game day plan

I don't yet have an ultimate vision for this day, but getting closer. One thing I hope is that whatever we create is interesting and pretty, and if not, then at least the experience can be interesting and pretty. Anyway, here's a draft of an outlined schedule for the library games.

(Warmup) 

1. Question games- What is/it is. If/then. When/then

2. One word at a time stories- written and in improv

(First) Six steps to six lines: exquisite corpse sketch, haiku, & palimpsest

1. Exquisite corpse drawing practice, vegetation theme.  I hand out paper and colored pencils. "Draw a plant. You will then pass your paper and receive a paper, and draw your plant again, but modify it to , each person is instructed to spend two minutes to draw a plant. . , and then they pass it and the next person draws some plant life.

2. When the drawings are completed (whenever that is, perhaps by informal consensus), write a haiku inspired by the drawing in front of you

3. Pass your haiku; to the haiku passed to you, add a line (the haiku form can be broken now) and make at least one alteration to the previous three lines

4. Pass the haiku; to the haiku passed to you, add a line and make at least one alteration to the previous four

5. Pass the haiku; to the haiku passed to you, add a line and make at least one alteration to the previous five

6. Six lines. 

(Second) Babbling humans: operations for encountering people 

and using those encounters to start a story

1. Find a library patron that you think would be amenable to answering some questions. Tell them that you are playing a game, or taking a survey, and ask them about the following:

2. Are they looking for a specific book, or a general topic? What inquiry do they have that books might answer? What courage and wisdom do they think the book will impart? You just want a general sense of what they are looking for and why, how they're encountering the library today, and generally.

3. Come back together to tell us about who you spoke with.

4. Ask yourself also why this person seemed amenable to answering questions. Why did you choose them? Were they attractive, young? Why did they seem interested in curiosity? (Also, I can add an operation here, to make the other operation both easier and harder. Something funny to ask a stranger in Brooklyn, and maybe profound. 

(Third- still refining) "There I was" stories using mid Atlantic film noir voice, 

written in circuits (still refining the circuit structures)

1. Thinking about the person you encountered in the library, you will be writing the opening of a story. You can use this person and their quest directly in your story, or use it as a "beat" and bounce off of it.

2. Starting with the phrase, "there I was..." and imagining a mid-Atlantic film noir accent, you write the opening of a story. In a few lines, give us (a) a character, (b) a setting, (c) a thing that the character suddenly understands that they don't understand, or that they had understood wrongly. (Again, use the person you encountered as inspiration or general starting principle.)

3. Pass your story to the right, and then you write about the first step that this character took in order to change their understanding.

4. * drafter commentary: is this just a one sentence at a time story, or is there another mechanism/operation to add to the game? I'm not sure how effective the "thing that they realize they're understanding incorrectly" theme is going to be in driving the exercise, or if editing is a better mechanism, or if there is a better mechanism that I haven't thought of.

5. The story eventually becomes about a book that changed the way the character understood the world.

(Fourth) Babbling books: operations for making chimera books (a minotaur?)

1. Collect books from sections. Each player needs one: 1-poetry book (any era or area), 2-book of rhetoric or literary criticism, 3-fiction book, 4-book of social sciences (economics, politics, civil rights, etc), 5-philosophy or self help book, 6-art book, 7-science book, 8-food/cook book. 

2. Mixing book games: (individually or in teams, and collaboratively or competitively) give each book a voice or character, and put them in conversation with other characters. Or mix genres, or mix books of the same genre, or mix titles, or mix lines, or a hundred different ways to put these 8 books into conversation with each other, and to make collages. It not actual collage, then outline of the collage, a table of contents, or whatever other madness. Our Frankenstein book. 

(Fifth) Create the minotaur

Put this in conversation with our earlier created works (haikus and palimpsests and...) 

Workshop to put together everything we've created into a book. It's a minotaur. It needs a name.

(6th) Labyrinth: operations for placing your minotaur and escaping the library

1. Place your minotaur, like Borges placing the nightmare book that he's desperate to misplace, to put it somewhere that he will never ever remember

2. Place your minotaur, where he'll be ready for when you need him, like placing a gun or the nuclear codes, or the piece of blackmail you have on a senator, or the cash, or another magic object, something that you need to have access to, but only in that one moment

3. Place your minotaur, where he will protect the labyrinth/library

4. Place your minotaur, where he can defeat the other minotaur

5. Place your minotaur, where he can get some rest

6. Place your minotaur, where he can work

Then escape the library, like Indiana Jones, running out of the now collapsing maze that he had so carefully navigated his way into. 

Then to the park for running games running games

Warmup: usually it's silly run and mirror to start, but I think hero sprints from the top of the park along the trail that follows Flatbush, and then into the rose garden above the veil of cashmere. If the three circles aren't crowded, we can definitely create some great games there. Here is a smattering of ideas

Mirror and conductor and other silly running games, played in and around the circles and using them as permeable boundaries.

Running haiku and other writing mixes using the three circles (first line in the first circle, second in the second, third in the third- and then see what mixes properly.)

Meditation games for running

Obstacle courses and possibly ceremony development using dances, short meditations, short writing prompts, other games. You run to a spot, find a notepad, encounter its orders. 

Affect running is a game that I want to try out too, where you instruct a player to imagine an emotion or a feeling or a scenario, and then they run with that feeling.