Bøger af Clark Lunberry

My father, Dale Lunberry (1927-2012), was a jeweler and watchmaker in a small town in Kansas, the place where I grew up. For decades, when traveling, always with his wife, my mother, Barbara Lunberry (1929-2002), he often purchased travel postcards of the various places visited. These hundreds of postcards (more than 750) were, as far as I know, never sent to anyone through the mail, and were instead collected and later carefully catalogued, as souvenirs, perhaps as a means of remembering the many places they had been. Rarely is anything written on the backs of these postcards (my father was a man of few words), however, there might occasionally be seen a brief inscription (in my father's unmistakable handwriting) of the date on which the place on the postcard was visited: "6-26-63,""Apr. 7, 74,""8-19-64," or, at most, for a particular Hawaiian hotel, "Here 3 days Jan 21-24, 83." At my father's death in 2012, I inherited his box of postcards, but I was uncertain of what I would ever do with it (though reluctant to throw it away, as so much else had been thrown away). So, I held onto the box, placing it in a closet, mostly forgetting about it. One day during the spring of 2020, with COVID's arrival, and the consequences of suddenly spending so much time at home (and, importantly, of not traveling), I got the box of travel postcards out of the closet and began casually sorting through them. Picking out those cards that were particularly striking or strange, often oddly beautiful, I was drawn to how so many of the colorful pictures vividly spoke of other times, other places (with, for instance, the characteristic blues of the postcard skies offering a mid-century modern variant of the poeticized French azure). While those who were anonymously photographed in the postcards (walking on sidewalks, standing on street corners, lounging on a sandy beach...) reminded me of that which, though obvious, is often overlooked-that postcards are indeed photographs.

A primary focus of this book is on the impact of time and memory as they intersect and constitute the spaces of theatre. These spaces include more traditional sites of theatre, such as those involving stages and curtains, actors and audiences, as well as those other theatres or spaces of performance that range from performance and installation art, to the performance of a string quartet, and from the writing of performance, to the performance of writing. What unites them is the presence of time as the constant and corrosive agent of theatrical absence, a vanishing site that finally affirms these theatres as theatres of thought, as spaces of thoughtful and mirroring reflection. With such time in mind, attention is directed toward theatre's own blurred and porous boundaries and, implicitly, that most conventional theatrical form, the proscenium itself, evoking questions such as: where does the performance begin and where does it end? Who is watching and who is being watched? And what, as time takes its toll, is there to be seen at all? For it is from this demarcating line of representation that - like a 'line in the sand' - such spaces of thought, theatrical or not, largely determine where the various forms of representation begin and end, where time is told of others, and where time is finally told of each of us.