Word: matthiessen
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...name choreographers as Eliot Feld, Lar Lubovitch, Laura Dean and Hannah Kahn. "I didn't have a giant attention span," he says, explaining why he was so peripatetic. But that was only part of the reason. "Modern dancers are not trained to do anything but follow directions," says Erin Matthiessen, his former lover; Morris met him when they both danced in the Dean company. "Mark thought for himself." Too often, he thought aloud, arguing with the choreographers, making unwanted suggestions on how he thought they should develop their dances. Finally, in 1980, Morris rented Merce Cunningham's studio...
...some 2,500 manuscripts submitted, a 55,000-word entry called Ishmael by free-lance writer Daniel Quinn, 55, was picked the best of the bunch. But wait a minute. The next day judges William Styron and Peter Matthiessen claimed that their panel did not want the full award to go to Ishmael -- described as "a series of philosophical conversations between a man and a great ape" -- and charged the Turner organization with misrepresenting their position in its publicity releases. Not so, said Ray Bradbury, another juror, who defended Ishmael and ragged his colleagues: "I think Styron and Matthiessen...
...drudges who are happy with modest honorariums and the free coffee and doughnuts served at meetings. The Turner people made the blunder of assuming that prestigious judges would confer glitter on the new awards. They assembled, at $10,000 a pop, a blue-ribbon panel including not only Styron, Matthiessen and Bradbury but Nadine Gordimer and Carlos Fuentes as well...
After the controversy flared in the press, Matthiessen insisted that his quarrel is with the Turner organization and not with Daniel Quinn or Ishmael. "It's not a novel yet," he says of the winner. "It is an extremely clear and lucid presentation of valuable ideas that deserve a hearing." As for Quinn, he calls his victory "a Cinderella story, complete with the stepsisters howling at the side." Whether any of this will affect the Turner Tomorrow Awards is impossible to predict. It's hard to know what the future will bring...
...Matthiessen frames his story in the buffetings of tides and storms. Not for nothing is Watson slaughtered shortly after the passage of Halley's comet and a mighty hurricane. The weather is always restless, "the wild tread of God" often heard and felt. Occasionally the terrain gets cluttered. But Matthiessen is a man who can write his way out of any storm. What an old-timer says of his wood pony applies equally to Matthiessen: He can "turn on a dime and give back nine cents change." On a good day, maybe even eleven...