The Sheila Variations

The quality most needed - by Laurette Taylor

Here is an essay written by Laurette Taylor - my obsession over the last couple of days.

I dug it up out of this great book called Actors on Acting which is, like the title says, a book filled with quotes and essays by actors throughout the ages - all the way back to the Greeks.

Laurette Taylor's essay, called "The Quality Most Needed", is the second to last piece in the book. It is a classic. See what I mean when I say she was way ahead of her time, and American theatre needed to catch up with her?

Oh, and in my first post about her, I paraphrased one of Taylor's quotes - how "someday the Irish will be portrayed truly on the stage"... The quote, in full, appears in this essay.

The Quality Most Needed - by Laurette Taylor

I have been asked to discuss, for the benefit of those who may go on the stage, the qualities which are most important as elements of success. If merely the financial or popular success of a woman star is meant, I should say that beauty is more essential than magnetism. But if by success you mean all that is implied by the magical word Art - success in the sense of Bernhardt, Duse and Ellen Terry are successes - I should say most emphatically the reverse. And I should add that imagination is more important than either.

Mere beauty is unimportant; in many cases it proves a genuine handicap. Beautiful women seldom want to act. They are afraid of emotion and they do not try to extract anything from a character that they are portraying, because in expressing emotion they may encourage crow's feet and laughing wrinkles. They avoid anything that will disturb their placidity of countenance, for placidity of countenance insures a smooth skin.

Beauty is not all-important as an asset, even when the star is not anxious to achieve true greatness. Many of our most charming comediennes are not pretty women. Rather, they are women of great charm and personality. I cannot for the moment recall a single great actress who is a beauty. At least not in the popularly accepted idea of what constitutes beauty.

Personality is more important than beauty, but imagination is more important than both of them.

Beauty as I understand it does not mean simple prettiness, but stands for something allusive and subtle. The obvious seldom charms after one has had to live close to it for any length of time. Being all on the surface, there is nothing left to exhilarate, once the surface has been explored. On the other hand, the beauty which emanates from within becomes more enchanting upon close acquaintance. It is constantly revealing itself in some new guise and becomes a continual source of joy to the fortunate persons who have the privilege of meeting it frequently.

That is beauty of the imagination, and that beauty all the really great actresses have.

The case of [Sarah] Bernhardt is as good an example as one would wish. In her youth, especially, she was the very apotheosis of ugliness; still, through the power of her rich imagination that glorified her every thought and act, she held her audiences in the hollow of her hand. It is the strength and richness of her wonderful creative mind tha tmakes it possible for her to present the amazing illusion of youth which she does even today.

It isn't beauty or personality or magnetism that makes a really great actress. It is imagination, though these other qualities are useful.

You see a queer little child sitting in the middle of a mud puddle. She attracts you and holds your interest. You even smile in sympathy. Why? Simply because that child is exercising her creative imagination. She is attributing to mud pies the delicious qualities of the pies which mother makes in the kitchen. You may not stop to realize that this is what is going on in the child's mind, but unconsciously it is communicated to you. It is the quality of imagination that has held your attention ...

We create in the imagination the character we wish to express. If it is real and vital to us in imagination we will be able to express it with freedom and surety. But we must conceive it as a whole before we begin to express it.

There will be those who will disagree with me and say that magnetism presupposes imagination. This is a mistake. Many magnetic actresses are wholly lacking in imagination, their hold upon the public resting chiefly upon personality and charm and beauty. Have you ever gone to a tea party where you met some very magnetic woman who radiated charm, who not only held your attention but exhilarated you until you became impatient to see this scintillating creature on the stage, where you might realize the fullness of her wonder? And have you not felt, when your opportunity came and you saw her on the stage at last, the disappointment of realizing a wooden lady with a beautiful mask for a face, speaking faultlessly articulated lines - an actress who rose desperately to the big moments of her part, and who never for a moment let you forget that it was she, that actress, whom you saw, not the character whom she was portraying? There may have been splendid acting but you were conscious of the fact that it was acting. There was no illusion. She was conscious at the big climax that she was acting this part and that she must reach this climax. She was acting as much to herself as to you.

That is not the art of the great actress.

The imaginative actress builds a picture, using all her heart and soul and brain. She builds this picture not alone for the people out in front but for herself. She believes in it and she makes the people across the footlights believe in it. Unless she has done this she has failed. She must stimulate the imagination of the audience. An actress should not only be able to play a part; she should be able to play with it. Above all, she should not allow anything to stand between her and the thing she is expressing.

How often does an actress play a part so as to leave you with the feeling that you have so intimate a knowledge of the character that you could imagine its conduct in any position, aside from the situations involved in the action of the play? Unless this happens, you feel that after all you have seen a limited portrayal of the character and you realize that though the acting was practically flawless there was something missing. And, in nine cases out of ten, that is because the woman playing the part did not use any imagination. She was entirely bound by the tradition of the theatre. She did everything just as it would have been done by anyone else on the stage. This is fatal.

You feel untouched by the play because it was not made real to you.

The artist looks for the unusual. She watches everyone, always searching for the unusual in clothes, in manner, in gesture. The imaginative actress will even remember that the French have characteristics other than the shrug!

Think of the number of times that there have been Irish plays, of the number of times that the Irish character has been used in the working out of a plot. Yet never, to my knowledge, has an Irishman been played on the stage. (This excepts, of course, Lady Gregory's players and Guy Standing's rendition of a current Irish-American role.) Real Irishmen have never been played. The Irish can be the most melancholy people on the face of the earth, yet the traditional stage Irish have been lilting colleens and joking Paddies.

The most interesting thing to me in acting is the working out of the character itself, the finding of what which is uncommon and the small, seemingly insignificant trait which will unconsciously make an appeal to the audience and establish the human appeal. Too much importance is laid on clothes. In the main, I think that all clothes hamper unless they express the character. Personally, I detest 'straight' parts for that reason. They necessitate the clothes that make me self-conscious - or, rather "clothes conscious".

I want to get right inside the character and act from the heart as well as from the head. That is impossible unless one is free from outside interference.

I think actresses pay too much attention to the tradition of acting. That is a great mistake. It cramps creative instinct. I received a good deal of criticism for my walk in The Bird of Paradise. Some of the critics said I should be taught how to walk across the stage. Of course I paid no attention to that. My walk was the walk of the barefoot Italians who carry loads on their heads, and I had learned it from them. It was certainly not the traditional stage walk, but we are living in a time when simplicity and truth are the watchwords of the theatre. The traditional stage walk would not have fitted the character I played.

The stage has come to a period of simplicity. A few years ago the direct attitude adopted by the younger actresses of today toward their roles would have been considered ridiculous. The changes have been positive but subtle, and the actress without concentration has been unable to discern them. They are the ones who are still sparring for time in their emotional scenes, using the traditional tricks to express grief, joy, surprise, chagrin; and they wonder why they are sitting at home without engagements. They cannot comprehend that the very little basket of tricks which made them the idols of a few years ago fails utterly to get results today ...

The time has come when we may as well realize that we can no longer give a filmy portrayal of emotion and pad it out wiht stereotyped pieces of "business". The younger actresses of today express the elemental emotions as the elemental person would express them in real life. There is no such thing as a compromise in the logical development of a character in order to make a theatrical effect ...

Too few actresses follow their instinct. I think instinct is the direct connection with truth.

It is not enough to know just what you are to do yourself in the action of a piece; you must know also the exact relation you must bear to every other character in the play.

For instance, take the business of dying. You must in your imagination realize not only the fact that you are dying but the effect which your death will have on every character related to your part. You know that you are not dying and the audience knows it, but in your imagination you must really believe you are. The business of dying becomes actual to you; also, you compel the audience to believe in you by the very sincerity of your attitude.

This trait is really remarkable in Maude Adams. Recall her work in Chantecler. Without her tremendous imagination to gild her impersonation, this frail little woman would have been hopeless in the part. Yet through her marvelous richness of imagination she produced the illusion of bigness that many women better fitted physically could not have done.

One would never say that Maude Adams is beautiful, in the sense that she is pretty or has a beautiful physique; but she has charm, magnetism and imagination. These three make a beauty that transcends mere beauty.

Beauty, personality, and magnetism are not important in the equipment of a star, when compared to the creative faculty of imagination. The first three qualities are valuable adjuncts, and no one should sneeze at them. But you might get along without the slightest beauty and little or no personal magnetism if you were generously endowed with the imaginative mind.

Glass Menagerie, Continued

A couple days ago, I wrote an essay about actress Laurette Taylor, whose portrayal of Amanda Wingfield in the first production of The Glass Menagerie raised the bar for actors everywhere - in her time, and still, in our own. I referenced a "dogmatic and brilliant theatre director" who had demanded that I learn about Laurette Taylor.

Beautifully, a friend of mine still in touch with this man sent him my post - and this "dogmatic brilliant man" has added a long and gorgeous comment at the bottom, about Laurette Taylor, and the other great actors of the past - theatre actors whose work was never televised, put on film, etc. The giants of our theatrical culture. Our Laurence Oliviers, our John Gielguds. Giants in a culture that does not remember them.

This "dogmatic" director was the man who headed up the highly-underpraised and under-seen production of Golden Boy I was in in Chicago - the one where William Hurt showed up one night, and we did the entire production for Hurt, and ONLY him, because nobody else came!

Anyway. I am very excited that he has read my post and added his own thoughts about the theatre tradition (or lack thereof) in this country. This man is one of the foremost experts on that tradition, nobody can touch him, in terms of his knowledge. It's encyclopedic.

I thought I would continue on in this vein, and post another excerpt from Tom, the biography by Lyle Leverich, on the first half of Tennessee Williams' life.

Yesterday, I posted a lengthy excerpt having to do with The Glass Menagerie opening in Chicago, in 1944.

Today, I will post excerpts having to do with the production moving, finally, to Broadway, in 1945.

Glass Menagerie, continued...

The show continues its run in Chicago. Laurette Taylor has become the toast of the town. New York bigwigs fly in to see this new extraordinary show, and to see her performance, in particular. It is unclear at first, whether or not it will move on to New York. New York is the center of the universe. "If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere..." Being a huge success in Chicago was wonderful and gratifying, for this sixty-year-old actress whom everyone had given up on for years. But she knew that ... Manhattan and the theatre audience and theatre critics in Manhattan were other animals altogether. Her anxiety grows.

As much as she was being lionized in Chicago and was enjoying it, Laurette knew the fawning for what it was: skittering leaves in the Windy City. Offstage now, she was becoming bored and edgy and more and more in need of a drink. Tom [Tennessee Williams] felt that what she actually needed was the seclusion of her own apartment and the protection of her young actress friend, Eloise. One who could understand Laurette's quicksilver disposition was Helen Hayes, then in Chicago playing in Harriet. She remembered Laurette saying over and over like an incantation, " 'I'm going to break this witch's curse.' "

Hayes said that Laurette was one of her idols and that they had been friends for a long time. "Harriet was closed on Sunday nights, and that was when I saw The Glass Menagerie. The play and Laurette were simply superb. Most nights after work, I would join her and Tennessee (they were very close) and Tony Ross, too, and we would go to their favorite bar. Laurette would order a double scotch, and when she saw my eyes widen, she reassured me that if she ordered a second drink, her deceased husband, Hartley, would come down and gently tap her on the shoulder. Being Irish, she believed that to be perfectly true."

Hayes remembered that Laurette's career had nose-dived and that hers was "a daring comeback attempt at age sixty ... One night the phone was ringing when I returned to my suite at the Ambassador. It was Laurette. 'I can't go on tomorrow,' she said in despair. 'My throat hurts, and I'm losing my voice. If I don't go on, everyone will think I'm drunk. If they say I'm drunk, I will get drunk and stay drunk till I die.' Her cry for help galvanized me." Hayes said that she always carried an electric steam kettle when she went on tour, to which she could add medicine. 'It had been helpful when I came down with bronchitis or laryngitis. I told Laurette I would come right away with the kettle ... I taxied downtown to the Sherman House. I stayed with her through most of the night, making sure she was breathing properly ... the next evening she gave a magnificent performance."

That image kills me. Helen Hayes steaming Laurette Taylor. Jesus.

The buzz around the show grew.

The word had spread to Broadway and Hollywood, and the wagers were on: Would she or would she not make it back? Everyone in the Chicago company was now, by mid-February, plainly nervous. The more Laurette was surrounded by flattery and the excitement of prominent visitors, the greater was the strain on her to keep from joining in the carouse around her. The marvelously witty and stylish actress Ina Claire was in the audience every night, and Tom wrote Audrey: "Everybody stops off here between Hollywood and New York, so our social life is terrific. We've had Helen Hayes, Ruth Gordon, Katherine Helpburn, Terry Helburn, Maxwell Anderson, Mary Chase, Guthrie McClintic Lindsay and Crouse, Raymond Massey, Gregory Peck, Luther Adler and God knows what all! Everybody has been favorable except Maxwell Anderson. He didn't like it."...

Katherine Hepburn's enthusiasm for The Glass Menagerie, on the other hand, was such that she went straightway to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Louis B. Mayer, saying that the studio should buy the play, assign George Cukor to direct, cast her as Laura and Spencer Tracy as the gentleman caller, and, above all, to capture on film Laurette's incomparable performance. She was to say later that Amanda Wingfield was Tennessee's "most tenderly observed, the most accessible woman he has ever created."

Dammit, but the project never came about, and so we will never know what Taylor's performance actually looked like. We can only take the words of all of the people who saw it as truth.

The play finally moves to New York. They uproot from Chicago, the glorious snowy town which had put Tennessee Williams on the map, made him a star, the town that catapulted Laurette Taylor, now a 60 year old woman, back into the limelight, after 40 years.

The pressure on this company is enormous. The show is going to be done at the Playhouse Theatre.

Laurette was well aware that both her disgrace in Alice and her comeback in Outward Bound had taken place on this same Playhouse stage. Across the street was the Cort Theatre, where her career had begun in the title role of Peg O' My Heart. She had much to look back upon, but the present confronting her was virtually unendurable. Back in her apartment, she found that her impulse was not to leave it and to seek escape in alcohol, but she also recognized this as an enemy that could bring upon her a terrible, final disagrace. In the hours before the curtain was to rise, she was under the watchful care of Eloise Sheldon, who had taken time off from her role in Harvey to be close to her.

The Glass Menagerie was scheduled to open on Saturday, March 31, Easter eve - a week after Tom's thirty-fourth birthday ... and the day before Laurette's sixty-first. Born a few weeks before Easter and reared in the symbolism of the Christian church, Tom saw this season as a special one, and he used the passage from crucifixion to resurrection as a constant theme in his work.

And so, opening night arrives. Everyone who is anyone showed up. It was a star-studded evening. Every powerhouse in town was in the audience.

That afternoon, there had been a technical run-through and the usual chaotic dress rehearsal. Audrey wrote:

I don't remember where the author was that last afternoon but I shan't ever forget sitting in an unairconditioned Playhouse Theatre. There was a frenetic veiling over everything - and everybody. The actors paced nervously before the run-through began. The light technicians tinkered with never-ending light cues and most of them came out just a little bit wrong. Having played their roles for months in Chicago meant absolutely nothing. This was the day of the New York opening. This was it. I kept remembering Liebling's remark, "You're only as good as the night they catch you."

Audrey recalled that when Laurette began her opening scene, she seemed under control "but after a few words in recognizable anguish she said, 'I'm sorry, I have to leave the stage. I'm going to be sick.' And sick she was offstage and then returned to try once more, a little whiter." The illness continued all afternoon.

The star of the show throwing up in between scenes was not the only problem during the technical run-through. (To those of you not in the theatre, a "technical run-through", or, in shorthand, "tech" is when you run through the whole show, focusing on getting all the technical aspects correct - music cues, light cues, costume changes. The actors have had 3 weeks of rehearsal to get their stuff down correctly, and the technical crew gets one day. "Tech"s are long and monotonous, and notoriously very tense. They are 10 hour days. At the end of the day, you do what is known as a "cue to cue". Which is self-explanatory. You run the couple of lines before a music or a light cue, the light cue is then executed, either correctly or not correctly, and then you run it again. Or you move on, if there are no mistakes.)

So The Glass Menagerie, with its musical cues, its projections on a screen in the back, its delicate light cues, was what is known as a "tech-heavy" show. The play relies upon these cues being executed in a sensitive intuitive way - it's PART of the show. It's how Tennessee wrote it. David Mamet's plays, by contrast, are pretty much: 'Lights up. Play happens. Lights out." Very different sensibility. And easier "techs".

Back to the disastrous "tech" on Easter Eve, 1946.

Paul Bowles's sensitive incidental score roared out when it should have sounded

(another quote from Audrey Wood) like circus music, away off in the distance of memory. Julie Haydon was trying to keep a stiff upper lip, but her concern for Miss Taylor was considerable. The two men, Eddie Dowling and Tony Ross, may have been scared to death, but they made a brave attempt at pretending they didn't care a damn what day it was.

The coproducer, Louis Singer, felt his way over to my side of the otherwise dark, empty auditorium where I was crouched down in my seat. Peering at me through the darkness, he said, 'Tell me - you are supposed to know a great deal about the theatre - is this or is it not the worst dress rehearsal you've ever seen in your life?' I nodded 'Yes.' I was too frightened to try and open my mouth.

During the rehearsal, Randy Echols had placed a bucket in the wings and, except for the two hours that Amanda was onstage, Laurette was leaning over it. Tony Ross later said, "It seemed incredible to us that by curtain time Laurette would have the strength left to give a performance. We went home for a few hours for supper, but Eloise told me Laurette could eat nothing."

In her dressing room, Laurette had placed in front of her a large framed photograph of her [long-deceased] husband, Harley Manners.

Now we are into the final stretch. Curtain time is moments away. The description of what followed is so moving to me that tears blur my eyes as I type it out.

Eloise had [Laurette] dressed by the time of Randy's summons, "Curtain, Miss Taylor!" Tony Ross said that Mary Jean Copeland and Julie had to hlep her to her place onstage. "As the lights dimmed on Dowling at the end of his opening narration and began going up on the dining-room table we could hear Laurette's voice, 'Honey, don't push with your fingers ... And chew -- chew!' It seemed thin and uncertain. Slowly the lights came up full, and as she continued to speak, her voice gained strength. The audience didn't recognize her at first, and by the time they did she was well into her speech, and kept on going right through the applause. They soon quieted down." The bucket stayed int he wings, and "the few minutes she had between scenes, she was leaning over it retching horribly. There was nothing left inside her, poor thing, but onstage - good God! - what a performance she gave!"

In the final tableau of the play, with Tom departed, Amanda hovers protectively over a broken, deeply disturbed Laura, symbolizing what Tennessee Williams saw in his own mother: "Now that we cannot hear the mother's speech, her silliness is gone and she has dignity and tragic beauty."

At the end, the audience roared its approval. There were twenty-four curtain calls. As Laurette took her bows, tears streaked down her cheeks and she smiled somewhat tentatively while she held out the pleated frills of her worn blue party dress and curtsied. Her daughter said that she had the look of "a great ruin of a child gazing timorously upon a world she found to be infinitely pleasing."

At length, there were shouts of "Author! Author!" Eddie Dowling came down to the edge of the stage and beckoned Tom to come forward and take his place with the company. The young man who rose from the fourth row, his hair in a crew cut, his suit button missing, looked more like a junior in college than an eminent playwright. Standing in the aisle, he turned toward the stage and made a deep bow to the actors, his posterior in full view of the audience.

From this moment on, there was no turning back for Tom Williams. His prayers and those of his mother had been answered. Now he could give Edwina [his mother] financial independence and freedom from the bondage of her unhappy marriage. To his father's dismay, the little boy who could not put his blocks back in the box exactly as he had found them had become the artist who would rearrange them in a lasting architecture. And now there was no escape save into himself, and no place in the world he could go where he would not be known.

He had become Tennessee Williams.

I think my favorite part of that anecdote is that, in the moment he became a celebrity, in the moment Tom left Tom behind, to become Tennessee, his first act - the first thing he did - was bow to the ACTORS. Not to the audience who had been cheering for him, but to the company of actors who had made this success possible.

Now that is a class act.

Diary Friday

In keeping with my post yesterday about 360/180 Boy in college, here is a post about our first date. We cut class and went to go see "Fatal Attraction". Which is hilarious, in retrospect. Nice date movie. We referred to it later, casually, as the "Fatal Attraction" night.

I found this entry today and read it, amazed - I didn't remember most of it. But the image of the "condescending" fir trees surrounding the garden came back to me in a rush ... So glad I write this stuff down.

He was 18. I was 19. So please factor that in.

I re-named him "Jack".

This entry is so long that - I am amazed I had the time to write it, what with my classes, my homework, and my rehearsals. I suppose I should be a bit mortified that ONE date generated about 15 pages of prose - but I guess I'm not. If he read this now, he probably would be horrified that I had been paying such close attention to him, that the details really mattered that much to me ...

Or who knows, maybe he would be flattered.

December, 1988

It was the Monday night before the massive blizzard but it was spring-warm, misty, mild. Not like November at all. We had plans to meet for dinner. The two of us.

He was in Julius' lab, and I knew they were all in J Studio so I sat in the Actor's Lobby waiting for him, listening to The Manhattan Transfer in a state of pretty-near-perfect content. (Ed: Manhattan Transfer!! Ha! We LOVED Manhattan Transfer in college.) Life contains so many interesting twists and surprises – little subtle things. I was engrossed in the music, reading something, and singing "Barkely Square" outloud to the empty lobby, choosing a harmony line to follow: "The moon that lingered over London T---" I stopped the song in mid-word, cause I looked up and saw Jack coming in, catching me in my private moment. He started laughing at me immediately, and we still laugh about it. He recreates the moment, pretending to be – but the way he does it is, he sings absolutely unintelligible words, in a supersonically high disconnected voice – which is probably what he heard – and stops it very short too. "T----" As though someone stabbed me with an axe in the middle of the word "Town".

We started off. We had no definite plans. Just dinner.

We decided to go to Del Mor's. (Ed: This is absolutely hysterical. Del Mor's no longer exists, but it was THE restaurant on campus – basically a cavernous dark place, where you could have bottomless cups of coffee, and big sandwiches. Sandwiches which cost 2 dollars. I love that we went on a date to Del Mor's – a place we ate in every single day anyway. Ah, college. Also, I'm sure we were broke. We were teenagers.) Talk for some reason was rather stilted. I didn't know why I felt awkward and uncomfortable but I did. He looked so nice. He had a tie on!!

He made an observation about how I always look away whenever I take a bite. "What's over there? Why do you always avert your eyes when you take a bite?"

"Uh … I never realized I did."

And once he made me conscious of it, it completely shocked me. Every single time I took a bite, I looked over to the right. And every single time I did that, we'd both start laughing.

Oh, and we had a lot of trouble with our food that night. Spitting, dropping things in our lap, spills. I took a sip of Coke and it dribbled down my chin. It was a chronic situation, for both of us. And by the end of the night, when one of us would spill something, or drop cole slaw on ourselves, we would start to laugh absolutely uproariously. I am sure we seemed very obnoxious to nearby tables, since none of our food would stay in our mouths and all we did was guffaw with laughter. He kept trying to shove French fries in my mouth and I would say, "No, I don't want any" which he would ignore. "Jack, please … no thank you."

He kept this blank inquisitive look on his face like, "You want this? You don't want a fry? You sure? You want a fry?" He acted deaf.

Finally, I opened my mouth wide to say, "NO" and he popped the fry into my mouth.

We were howling.

I began to get itchy. Restless. I wasn't sure why. I felt like I needed to be active. He commented on my jiggling leg. "Are you nervous?"

"Yeah. I don't know why. I'm really antsy for some reason."

So we decided to go. We took a walk around campus. It was a perfect night for a walk. Not chilly at all, no wind, a light mist. We walked across the Quad. Surrounded by huge stone buildings, a few windows lit, orange lamplight fuzzed by the mist, the sky a velvety musty black with an orange tint from the lamps.

It struck me as we meandered along, not talking, "This is how I always thought college would be. This is exactly what I pictured." The deserted campus. The light mist.

I wanted to hug the whole big beautiful world.

We were walking by the biological science building, which is all underground, like Bilbo Baggins' house – The top of it is like this mound of grass with a big space on top of it, with a cinder-block ground – doorways leading down into the depths. It's like a future world – or another world. Especially at night. We climbed up the mound of grass to get the top of this strange alien world – cinder-blocks stretching to the horizon, strange cement formations popping up with lights on them – like a martian world – or like a futuristic Stone Henge. We discussed all of this as we explored. There was no sound. It was dead quiet. Mist getting a little thicker. We skulked around. We lay down on our backs for a while, and talked about how much it looked like a deserted planet. A deserted martian world.

A stray person, nondescript in shadow, strolled by the two of us, laying spreadeagled on the cement ground like lunatics, and didn't say a word.

We found an open door leading down into the underworld (or: the biological science building). Feeling more and more like imposters, we tiptoed down the stairs, went through the door at the bottom, and found ourselves in this deserted courtyard, surrounded by glassed-in hallways. From the top, you could peek down over the railing into the enclosed space. We felt like we were in a terrarium, or an aquarium.

I said, "What would we do if the door had locked behind us? Also – what would we do if the door had locked, and out from behind that corner over there came a huge hungry lion?"

On such a misty deserted night, I almost believed that such a thing could happen.

But he suddenly didn't like that thought, and he felt confined, and he suddenly got this ominous feeling. "Let's get out of here."

So we left, and went back up to above-ground. We left the biological science area, off the opposite side, down a long sloping grassy hill. He ran down the hill. So did I. I felt like we were Anne and Gilbert (our two roles in the musical).

We walked along the main road, up towards Fine Arts, talking. I talked about my Moliere monologue that I was going to do for class that night. I recited some of it for him.

We both were still in an exploring frame of mind. And as we passed the dark form of the Fine Arts building, I felt so much revulsion for it. All I wanted to do was stay outside, stay away from it, stay free. I didn't feel the sucking draw of it at all, like I usually do. He and I stalked defiantly past it, and decided to go explore the water tower in the woods across the street from the building.

Once again, we were plunged into a world other than our own.

We stumbled down a rocky rutted path, through the forest. There was no light now, and everything looked very different. And towering way way over us was this massive ballooning water tower. It looked like a huge satellite, or so massive that it just couldn't be man-made. It had an ominous quality too, standing alone in the dark woods. Like Ozymandius or something – a structure left behind on earth long long after man had left it. There was a lone red light shining way at the top. We circled around it looking for a ladder.

And I am telling you, as scared as I am of heights, and as overwhelmed as I was by that tower – if we had found a ladder I would have climbed it. It was that kind of night.

What a spectacular adventure that would have been – to be so high up – to see the whole campus below us.

But there wasn't a ladder accessible to us. We made our way through the brush under the tower, to the column that we knew contained the stairway, but we saw with the glow of Jack's cigarette lighter that it was quite locked.

So we made our way back out to the main road. We still had some time to kill before class. I said, "Where to next?"

He thought a minute as we walked. Then suggested, "How about the botanical gardens?"

Sounded good to me.

The whole night had a charged anticipatory feeling – superaware – we were comfortable with each other, but the whole night had this feeling that something else should be happening – we were looking for an adventure of some kind. Whatever it was we were currently up to was not enough, and we had to go seek out more. Even if it was just looking at a water-tower.

We headed for the gardens. The gardens were black and shadowy and hidden from the main road.

This entire time I had been lugging around my cumbersome duffel bag, and I was very tired of it so I dumped it in a bush, making a mental note of where it was for later. The garden is surrounded by a tall thick stone wall, about as tall as me, and to get into the garden, you walk through an opening in the gate, with two thick pine trees making it almost necessary to go single file. And in this way, we entered the garden.

It was tres symbolic. The evening was so innocent. Of course, he and I would hang out in a garden.

Some digging had obviously been going on, there were these long black furrows in the ground. Jack said, "They look like graves."

"Cheery."

From inside the garden you can't see anything else outside. There is a row of huge tall pine trees skirting the whole space. It is a separate world in there.

Between two of the dug rows was a strip of clear grass. Jack leaned down to pat it with his hand. "It's dry!"

He flung himself face down on the grass, and I followed. We are silly together. We are impractical. As I got settled in, I kicked my legs out, and one of my loosely tied shoes flew spontaneously off my foot, flew over my head, and landed in the grass, facing us.

"Look at that shoe pointing at us." Jack said.

We stared at it. It looked like it was coming to get us. I got a little weird feeling then. Because of Sylvia Plath and her whole shoes-as-death theme. Any time in her poems or in The Bell Jar a shoe shows up – it is an omen of death, a whiff of mortality. Especially if they are pointing AT you.

But I suppose that is just me being silly and superstitious. But still it was weird. I got up and went and retrieved the shoe to put it back on. I didn't want it staring at me like that.

The grass was lusciously thick, it was like a cushion. Hypnotic. I wanted to fall asleep.

He said after a while, "Don't those trees look like a row of people watching us?"

They sure did. An immovable row of tall towering black forms, some leaning into others as though they were whispering about us, some just standing stiff and tall in righteous judgment of us.

"What do they remind me of?" mused Jack, trying to figure it out.

They reminded me of people from Whoville. I said, "They look like Whovilles to me."

"What?"

"You know. The Grinch. The people from Whoville." I sang a little bit of the "Whoville" song, and it was exactly what Jack had been trying to remember.

"That's it! Yes! That is so perfect!!"

For a while, we didn't talk, and just looked up at those surrounding trees, all the silently watching pine trees.

Finally Jack murmured, "They're so fucking condescending."

Behind us, keeping their eye on us, was the Mommy and Daddy – two huge fat pine trees, practically merged into one, and their two pointed heads leaning into each other.

I was deep in thought. I remember feeling for the first time in a long time like all my pores were OPEN. The beginning of the first semester was not unhappy, in fact it was pretty positive, and I was extremely busy, and juggling 6 classes and homework and a job – I only had one breakdown in that whole time. But still – during that time, I don't remember feeling particularly aware or alive or sensitive – the way I remember being all the time in high school, when EVERYTHING affected me. It's been a long time, come to think of it, since I've been that aware.

Like – seeing the trees as sentinels of some kind … and seeing the biological science building as a deserted martian planet … It seemed like I was seeing things in this new way because of Jack.

He looks like James Dean. He was smoking there, in the garden, not caring that the trees judged him, blowing smoke up into the air.

And eventually – we started talking. I don't remember most of what we talked about, but it was special. It was our first real conversation. It felt like communion.

We discussed our thoughts, our dreams, we discussed acting. We discussed each other, our first impressions of each other.

He said to me, "How would you describe me to someone who didn't know me?"

I thought for a while. I wanted to make sure that my thoughts came out precisely the way I wanted them to so I took my time. Finally I said, "He is very very psyched about being intelligent."

I was aware of a little to-himself laugh beside me. I knew I had gotten him, right where it counted. Zap!

I said, "He is trustworthy. I do trust him, although I am not sure why I do. He is honest, and although he wants everyone to think that he is the most serious person who has ever lived, underneath it all, he's really just a goofball."

I'm only guessing. I really don't know him at all, so I said, "Is that right?"

He was looking at me, kind of surprised. (He thinks he is so deep, so DEEP, but he's really not.) "Yeah, that's right."

"Okay, so how about me? How would you describe me?"

He thought for a minute and said, "She's very talented. She has great cheekbones. She's intelligent. She's funny. She's cautious. She's cautious but at the same time carefree." He waited. "Is that right?"

I nodded. "Except about the cheekbones."

He burst out laughing. "I knew you were gonna say that!! I knew it!"

He said, "What was your first impression of me? Before you knew me?"

I said, "I saw you that first day and thought, 'Oh, what a jackass.'" (Jack snorted with laughter beside me - I went on:)"'He wants everyone to buy his image – this deep tortured image – with the trenchcoat and the walkman and the scarf and the cigarette – and I don't buy it at all. He's also unbelievably antisocial.'"

He roared with laughter.

Anyway, during all of this, this conversation that went on for some time, I just could not, for the life of me, imagine getting up in 10 minutes, and going off to class to do my stupid Moliere monologue. I just could not see it happening. I had never in my life not wanted to do something as badly as I didn't want to go to that class. All I wanted to do was stay put, and see where the night took us. the time was right for a major breakthrough in our friendship, and I knew it, I could feel it in the air, and I just did not want to ruin it.

So I groaned, and began to verbalize my inner torment. Rationalizing everything.

"I have gone to every class this semester! For Christ's sake! I haven't missed ONE class! Other people cut class on occasion – why can't I?" Then I launched into a major defensive monologue about how the faculty seemed to be harder on me than on others, other people get breaks, other people are forgiven – but I never get a break. I cut a class, and the entire department goes into an uproar as though it is the approach of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Also, other students don't get huge guilt pangs when they skip ONE CLASS – how come I do? I am always so hard on myself. I wanted to blow my whole night off and spend it playing with Jack – this feeling was so strong that it was a driving beat in my brain. But I was scared to skip class. What would everyone think? They all KNEW I had a date with Jack earlier – what would they say?

God, I can be so dramatic. Just chill out.

Jack quietly listened to my raving monologue, and didn't say a word. It seemed he knew I had to talk myself through the whole thing, but he also seemed to know that eventually I would decide to blow everything off.

Finally, I felt this wild breath of freedom and irresponsibility, happiness rushed in my lungs, and I turned to him and said, "Let's go to a movie!!"

He stared at me flatly, and then said, "You're not gonna spend the entire night talking about class and how guilty you feel, are you?"

"No! Let's go! Come on!"

The excitement I felt about merely going to a movie is embarrassing. I felt like I was 5 years old and it was Christmas Eve. It was the thrill of being irresponsible, and suddenly not GIVING A SHIT what everybody thinks.

We decided to use my parents car. We went back to the bush to retrieve my duffel bag, now in full view of the staff parking lot at Fine Arts. I felt like an escaped felon. Jack was a little surprised at how scared I was to skip one class. He skips class constantly. It got to be a joke.

"Haven't you ever skipped a class before?"

"Never Judith's. [Ed: Judith was the brilliant and rather terrifying chairman of the department] I have never skipped an ACTING class in my life."

I stood at a pay phone and called Mum – Mum came to pick us up. we sat on the curb waiting for her. it was very pathetic. She had never met Jack before. I got in front, he in back. I introduced them. He initiated shaking her hand – it was cute. I wanted to kiss him. But we hadn't kissed yet at all, so I couldn't. I took Jack in our house, he met Dad, there was some casual banter about his last name – which was a last name in our family too – Jack said, "I bet you don't acknowledge that side of the family" and Dad roared.

It's so easy to get along with Dad. If he likes you, you know right away.

Then we were off to see a movie. Listening to Depeche Mode. And having a hell of a time. Free free free.

We decided to go see Fatal Attraction, but it was too late to catch the 7 pm show, so we decided to go up to the malls and look around for an hour or so.

I did have quite a few moments of guilty conscience, thinking about everyone else in acting class, but I would check my tongue, and not mention it to him.

We went to the Midland Malls. We went into the kitchen appliance section. We wandered through acres of fake kitchens, and we became a newlywed couple. An absolutely obnoxious newlywed couple.

"I am partial to the rustic look, you know that. Nothing too modern," he said at one point, with a completely straight face.

Did we want an island in our kitchen? We had a very important discussion about that. We become 8 years old together. Playing pretend games.

"There are two more things I want to look at today, honey," I said. "Beds and leather whips."

(This was a 9 ½ Weeks reference – a movie we had had a conversation about – and he got it immediately and howled with laughter.)

We spent a good 15 minutes playing in the cassio section. We practically caused a scene. I blasted my cassio – rhumba beat, big band – disco – heavy metal – cha cha. We both were quite busy creating things on our own, going from cassio to cassio, engrossed. I messed with the song book, experimenting. Other people who had been browsing stopped after 5 minutes of close contact with us. We took over the area, and all around us was the ruckus of 5 or 6 cassios all doggedly pursuing their own contrasting beats at the same time.

At one point, as we meandered around, he looked at me and said, "Promise me you will never cut your hair."

I thought it was still part of our newlywed-game, so I laughed at him, and he said, "No, I'm serious, Sheila. Don't ever cut it."

Hmmm.

We made a beeline for the bookstore, and plopped down with a TV trivia book to find out the name of Genie's evil twin – something that had tormented us earlier. We crouched on the floor, heads bent over this one book – and I still had this reckless feeling inside from missing class.

We went to Newport Creamery. I bought him a shake, I had some ice cream. We ate, and made cynical comments about everyone around us. We also kept (in accordance with the theme of the night) dribbling stuff onto the table, or onto our clothes, by accident. We were behaving in an extremely immature way, and it was fun. We had a very unfriendly waitress, and we couldn't stop laughing about her. Everything he said about her would come at an inopportune time, so I would spit stuff out of my mouth.

We browsed in Midland Records for quite some time. I also showed him the store where I had bought my prom shoes.

He said, "Who'd you go to the prom with?"

"Oh, some asshole."

He burst out laughing. And then he squeezed my shoulders roughly and said, in a Dean Martin kind of tone, "Who loves ya, baby…"

We rode in the glass elevator, which was extremely exciting for us, seeing as we were EIGHT YEARS OLD.

The malls had become this enormous sparkling playground. Constructed strictly to keep us amused.

We went to the pet shop and looked at sleeping puppies. We kissed our lips up against the glass of the fish tank and watched all the little glowing fish flutter away or kiss us back.

The two of us sat on the floor in the mall, and he had a cigarette. [Ed: Woah, now that's a time-travel moment.] There were benches nearby, I am sure, but the two of us were on the floor, quite content. I became aware of two people who appeared to be staring at us. The woman seemed to be smiling right at me. I had no idea who they were. Jack noticed them too. I said, " Jack, do you know those people?" "No." We looked around us to see if they were looking at someone near us. Nope. We glanced at each other, and then back at them, the two of them smiling straight at us. We both said, "Us? You mean us?" They gestured at us. We were in a sea of confusion. "Jack – is she waving at me?" "I have no idea – what do they want?" Of course, as it turns out, (you dipshits) they were store managers telling us to please not sit on the floor.

Finally, we got the picture. "Oh! They want us—" "Oh! Okay – I get it…"

Jack said, "Let us leave this place if we can not sit on the floor in peace."

As we left, Jack stated, "We are the best-dressed couple in this mall. Hands down."

Outside in the parking lot – it was still warm and misty. It felt like it might rain. There was a dampness, and the sky looked heavier with clouds. We walked to my car, and Jack stopped me before I could put in my keys and said, "Look! Let's go rock-climbing!"

The mall parking lots are at the bottom of a hill, the highway runs along the top, and if one was inclined to climb from the lot up to the highway, one would have to literally go rock-climbing up a vertical way in order to get to the grassy side of the highway. He took off running towards the wall. So did I.

And what the hell, we went rock-climbing. In the parking lot of the Midland Mall.

Jack said, later, "See? Now – when you look back on this night – will you be sorry you skipped class? If you had gone to class, you would not have cared 10 years from now, but 10 years from now you will be glad you did this."

[Ed: Well, this is now more than 10 years ago, and I have to say, in retrospect, he was right!]

Eventually we both reached the grassy top of the wall, even though neither of us had one proper rock-climbing gear. We turned to look victoriously at the mall and the wide parking lot below us. We both flopped down on the grass, it was a gentle accommodating slope. And we looked down over the view. At one point he took an entire handful of cut grass and tried to put it in my mouth, and then put on this totally perplexed expression when I wouldn't let him – as though he were shocked. "You don't want this? Why?"

At one point, when I was on my back, I felt a raindrop hit my face.

At the same moment, Jack said, "Oh, I felt a raindrop."

"Me too. Let's go."

We climbed back down, which was much more difficult. I suddenly became terrified – because of the show. "What if I fall and totally sprain my ankle? I can't get hurt, I can't get hurt."

The mixture of caution and carefree – which he pointed out.

The drizzle began and we booked it for the car. We cranked the tunes, and peeled out. [Ed: Sheila – who are you? "cranked the tunes"?? "peeled out"??]

The movie was really crowded – it's a huge hit right now. We sat down together, bounced around in the fun seats for a while … He was like a little boy when he discovered the fun seats.

"Look! Look at me!" bouncing madly.

Yes, Jack. I know about the seats.

The theatre filled up around us, we munched on popcorn, and finally the lights dimmed. We grinned at each other, excited, eyes glimmering, popcorn balanced between us.

Then the movie.

It was one of the scariest things I have ever seen in my life. We were totally riveted. We both absolutely fell in LOVE with the little girl who played the daughter. And throughout the whole thing – we basically lost our minds. We totally lost our minds. The movie grabs you by the neck and does not let you go. Does not let you breathe. Glenn Close was horrifying.

We forgot the popcorn, we forgot our surroundings, we were on a roller-coaster ride. The movie was like having your picture taken with the flash too close.

During one of the crazy sex scenes (which made us both so uncomfortable to watch, it was hysterical) – they were screwing on the kitchen counter. We watched the scene in silence for a while, and then Jack leaned over and murmured to me, "This is rated R?"

We DIED of embarrassment during all of the sex scenes. I told Mitchell about this later and he laughed so hard. "Oh my God, I wish I could have a film of you two then … of the body language … it must have been hilarious."

At one point, Jack murmured again, trying to break up our embarrassment, "I really do think that some of these camera angles are unnecessary."

So cute.

By the end of the movie, I had actually stood up at one point and screamed at the top of my lungs. Jack had become a human pretzel, everyone was FREAKED. The audience was a quivering mass of shrieking exclaiming people. It was raw. He and I just grabbed for each other when we saw the bubbling pot on the stove.

Later, while madly discussing the movie, we found that we had both had the same experience – the thought of the rabbit never crossed our minds, as obvious as it now seems. The first thing I thought (and he thought, too, which was weird) was that it was a massive spaghetti dinner. Like she had shared with him during their weekend of sordid lust filled with unnecessary camera angles. Neither of us anticipated the rabbit. So when we finally made the connection, simultaneously, we grabbed for each other, and exclaimed, "NO!"

And, like I said before, the two of us were absolutely slain by that poor little girl. At one point, she started to cry – this little girl is like 5 or 6 years old – and those tears looked real. It was awful. Jack saw her start to cry, and put his hand over his eyes – I thought he was gonna have to leave. He said to me later, "Either she is the most amazing actress in the world, or she has a really terrible home life."

When the lights came up at the end, he and I were in twisted mangled positions of horror. You feel a little ashamed of yourself walking out of that movie. We could not calm down. All the credits were done, the theatre was empty. Finally I put on my coat and said, "Wow, that really SUCKED."

"Yeah," Jack said, disengaging himself from the pretzel twist, "I'm really disappointed."

We drove home, the rain was coming down hard, and we talked and talked and talked about it.

We kept exploding:

"SHIT! What a MOVIE!"

"That little girl – I literally thought I was going to die when she was in the doorway. I couldn't take it."

Then - on the way home, we experienced something that we now call "Can Hell".

I don't even know if I am going to be able to describe it, but it was a significantly frightening experience, and I was not equipped to deal with it. I almost had a nervous breakdown at the wheel, calling out his name, "Jack! Jack!" It was scary. NOW, it's funny to remember – but it was terrifying – and I was already jumpy after that movie.

So we came to the rotary after the Sunoco station – (This was directly before "Can Hell") – and as we swerved around the rain-wet rotary, Jack said, "Want to hit the beach?"

I wish I could take things calmly. It's just an invitation. You are 19 years old. You are not being asked to transport illegal drugs across international borders. It's a walk on the beach.

But I kind of lost my head. I realized in that moment how much fun we had had that night, and also how much I really like him. And my heart slip-slid down into my toes. I looked at him and said, "Are you serious?" Clutching the wheel, trying to drive (having no idea that "Can Hell" was approaching.) I was behaving like a cliché in a John Hughes movie. I am a movie cliché! But those clichés exist for a reason! I nodded that sure, let's go 'hit the beach'.

And then – "Can Hell" began. And from then on, we were otherwise occupied with trying not to get killed – and trying to drive on whatever the right side of the road was – (the street was filled with trash cans, zigzagging us through different lanes, but nothing was marked, nothing was clear, we feared we would drive between two of the wrong "cans" and end up in a head-on collision – It was an obstacle course – it was pouring rain – and none of it was funny at the time. I was terrified – and he was trying to be calm – it was awful. "Can Hell".)

Finally everything straightened out and the highway looked like itself again.

We were both pretty freaked out.

I know it's superstitious and all, but I thought of that shoe, in the botanical garden, pointing at us. I got this chill of fear, like - something bad was going to happen. Okay. I need to get off the road. NOW.

We drove to the beach. By then, we were calming down a bit, letting the horror of "Can Hell" fade into memory. We got out of the car, there was a drizzle in the air, not really a rain. It was a very black night, not really misty anymore, and the ocean was turbulent. And loud.

It reminded me of the end of my junior year when Betsy ran into the water fully-clothed. There was really foamy turbulent waves that night too.

He and I walked down the stairs onto the sand, and started to walk the beach. We were quiet, though. It was like … I don't know. We were both lost in thought, no longer finishing each other's sentences.

"Can Hell" had broken the intimate spell between us.

Tennessee Williams - that "nice little guy"

Yesterday, I wanted to post, as a kind of companion piece to the post about the first production of Death of a Salesman, and Lee. J. Cobb's groundbreaking performance as Willy Loman, an excerpt from a biography of Tennessee Williams describing the equally extraordinary first production ever of The Glass Menagerie. But then - as often happens - the preamble to the whole thing, an introduction to Laurette Taylor, the fabled actress who was the first Amanda Wingfield, became an entire post, complete in and of itself.

Laurette Taylor died in 1946. I never saw her perform. She was never on television. There is no record of what she did. But it's like descriptions from theatregoers centuries ago, telling about David Garrick's Hamlet or his Macbeth. I don't have to have actually seen him act, to know that he was extraordinary, and to love him. To love his talent, across the centuries. Laurette Taylor's work in The Glass Menagerie really means something to me - means something to a lot of people - and I suddenly felt the need to acknowledge her. This long-forgotten great actress.

Lyle Leverich wrote the first half of a biography of Tennessee Williams called Tom. That was Tennessee's real name. The book ends with The Glass Menagerie opening on Broadway, to stunning success, after its absolutely amazing trial run in Chicago. This was back when regional theatre really made a difference, in a huge way, in this country. There are still regional theatres out there that are important - Steppenwolf, Trinity - but it is a completely different business now.

Unfortunately, Lyle Leverich died before he could write the second volume, which would be the description of Tennessee Williams' life and work after his sudden (ha! he had been working like a dog for years!) fame.

But The Glass Menagerie was what put him on the map.

Here are some excerpts from Leverich's extraordinary book - about the rehearsal process, about Laurette Taylor in rehearsal (again, like Lee J. Cobb, she worried everybody for the first few weeks - she didn't seem to be DOING anything - she wasn't learning her lines - she held her script - she wasn't up to par with the rest of the cast. And again - everybody's concerns proved completely meaningless, because they didn't understand her genius. She was percolating, that's all. She was letting the script work on her, rather than working on the script), about Paul Bowles' response to the terrible dress rehearsal (Bowles had been hired to compose the mood-music for the play) and then .... about the play's opening. In a frigid ice-drenched winter in Chicago - where audiences didn't feel like coming out to see a new play - didn't want to come out in the cold. They played to semi-empty houses for a while.

And then - an amazing thing happened - and maybe I'm cynical, but I can't imagine this happening now - two theatre reviewers who had seen the play recognized that something absolutely amazing was occurring, they recognized that a play like this had never been written before, they recognized that something IMPORTANT was going on, and so - they became town-criers - they wrote column after column after column - exhorting the people of Chicago to go see this play. They took on the survival of this production as though it were a personal goal. It NEEDED to be seen. It could NOT be allowed to die in the water.

People in New York began to hear the rumors - that something amazing was going on in Chicago - and began to travel across the miles to see it.

Stuff like this makes me sad, in a way. Could this ever happen now? Who cares about theatre like that anymore?

Anyway - enough exposition - Let me let Lyle Leverich take over:

The first production of The Glass Menagerie

The cast gathers, and travels together by train to Chicago (any time you see the name "Tom", it's Tennessee:

On a cold Saturday, December 16, the company gathered at Pennsylvania Station. Tom and Donald came together. Jane Smith, who shortly before had returned to New York, picked up Margo at her hotel. Eddie Dowling was already at the station with Louis Singer...

On the following bitterly cold morning, the troupe "disgorged from the train into Chicago's barnlike Union Station. The impression was hardly that of a winning team. With scarcely a nod at one another they scattered in all directions. Laurette's daughter described the occasion, saying Dowling and Singer went off arm in arm, ignoring their tiny star [Laurette Taylor], who stood hesitant and alone on the platform. "Julie, hatless and pinched-looking, flitted by as insubstantial as a puff of steam from any of the locomotives. Tony Ross, a six foot three protest against the cold and early hour, passed somnambulistically. The anxious author, who had forgotten something, dove back into the car and emerged again to feel the bleakness of the station like an unfriendly slap - a dismal portent of his play's reception. Desperately he longed for the sight of a familiar figure and at last saw one." Tennessee recalled the event: " 'Laurette!' I called her name and she turned and cried out mine. Then and there we joined forces." Together they went in search of a taxi. "It was Laurette who hailed it with an imperious wave of her ungloved hand, hesitation all gone as she sprang like a tiger out of her cloud of softness: such a light spring, but such an amazingly far one."

After this inauspicious beginning, rehearsals begin. From the start, they do not go well. Laurette Taylor, who I mentioned in the post yesterday, had not been in anything substantial for years. She was a serious drunk - who apparently WASN'T drinking at that moment - but everyone was terrified she would go off the rails. She wasn't interested in learning her lines, or trying to get scenes right, she barely had any interest (it seemed) in ACTING. People watched her rehearse, and suddenly everyone started getting very very scared.

Tom may have become aware of the hidden tiger in Laurette, but, like everyone else in the company, he was puzzled by her odd behavior at rehearsal. Using a large magnifying glass, she hovered over her script, peering at it and mumbling her lines - this, while the other actors had memorized their dialogue and were following Dowling's direction. At one point, Eddie was heard to mutter, "That woman is crucifying me," and the nervous Mr. Singer, looking in on one of the rehearsals, cried out, "Eddie! Eddie! You're ruining me!" Laurette's daughter wrote that her mother was simply "up to her old trick of watching the others, seemingly much more interested in them than her own part, neither learning her lines nor her business."

Tennessee remembered that Laurette appeared to know only a fraction of her lines, and these she was delivering in "a Southern accent which she had acquired from some long-ago black domestic." He was even more disconcerted when she said she was modeling her accent after his! Tom wrote to Donald Windham, complaining that Laurette was ad-libbing many of her speeches and that the play was beginning to sound more like the Aunt Jemima Pancake hour.

To him, Laurette's "bright-eyed attentiveness to the other performances seemed a symptom of lunacy, and so did the rapturous manner of dear Julie." He was witnessing a characteristic of many of the theatre's great actors who were quick studies but painfully deliberate in their approach to a role. As Laurette's daughter explained, "She seemed blandly unconscious of the discomfort of the others ... Amanda [the role] fascinated her. She could see whole facets of the woman's life before the action of the play and after it was over." This is what her husband had taught her was the test of a good part. "The outer aspect of this inner search concerned her not at all."

But Laurette did not explain herself, she did not say to Dowling the director or Tennessee, "Listen, this is just my process - it's how I work - don't worry, I'll get it, I'll get it." She was a genius and you cannot expect geniuses to behave rationally. Finally Tennessee blows up.

Tom told Donald that he finally lost his temper when Laurette made some trifling changes. He said he screamed, "My God, what corn!" She railed that he was a fool, that she had been a star for forty years and had made a living as a writer which in her opinion was more than he had done. After they had returned from lunch, she "suddenly began giving a real acting performance - so good that Julie and I, the sentimental element in the company, wept."

The rehearsals stumble to a close - many problems with the set design, integration of the music, etc. And Laurette starts to drink, after rehearsals, as the pressure grows. Everybody is grim, scared.

Paul Bowles, the composer, flew out to Chicago to view the dress rehearsal, which was, by all accounts, a complete disaster.

Integrating the scenery changes with Mielziner's light and Paul Bowles's music cues was difficult enough, but, as Bowles recalled, the dress rehearsal was a nightmare. "I flew out to Chicago [and] arrived in a terrible blizzard, I remember. It was horrible. A traumatic experience. And the auditorium was cold. Laurette Taylor was on the bottle, unfortunately. Back on it, really. She had got off it with the first part of the rehearsals but suddenly the dress rehearsal coming up was too much." Laurette was nowhere to be found. Finally she was discovered by the janitor, "unconscious, down behind the furnace in the basement. And there was gloom, I can tell you, all over the theatre because no one thought she would be able to go on the next night."

Bowles, new to the theatre, asked the producer, "Are dress rehearsals normally this awful?" And the producer, with a terrified look, responded, "I have never seen a dress rehearsal go this badly."

Correction: I typed a lot of this from memory, and in the case of the anecdote above, my memory failed me. This moment occurred later - when they were about to open in New York...More to come.

Tennesee's mother, Edwina, on whom Amanda was based, flies into Chicago for the opening night. Which was December 26, 1944.

Still - on December 26 - things were not set, people were running around like lunatics, a doom-laden atmosphere.

The following is one of my favorite Laurette Taylor stories. I do not know why it touches me so deeply, and brings tears to my eyes, but it does.

On opening night, December 26, Laurette had disappeared again. They were forty minutes from curtain. While Dowling checked with her hotel and restrained Singer from calling the police, Jo Mielziner [the lighting designer] decided to try the basement, as Paul Bowles had. He recalled:

"Far down a passage I saw a light and heard the sound of running water. There, in a sort of janitor's storage and washroom, was Laurette Taylor, dressed in a rather soiled old dressing-gown with the sleeves rolled up, bending over a washtub, wringing out the dress that she was to wear in the second act. Her hands and arms were dripping with lavendar dye. I said, 'Laurette, can't somebody do this for you? You should be resting in your room or getting made up.' Her great, tragic, beautiful eyes smiled at me and she said, 'No, it's all done.' The dress was an important costume, a much-talked-about party frock. Early in the production I had assumed that the management would have something specifically designed; but pennies were being pinched to such an extent that the dress had been 'bought off the pile.' At the dress parade the day before, Tennessee Williams had commented that it was far from right, and so Laurette Taylor, on her own, had bought some dye and was trying to remedy matters."

She thrust the soggy clump of costume into Randy Echols' [the production stage manager] hands with the command, "Here, dry this." He met the challenge. "The sweating Echols constructed a dryer of bits and pieces backstage, played lights on it, fanned it, blew on it, went quietly mad."

I love Randy Echols.

And so - curtain-time approaches.

Before the curtain's rise, a small storm-buffeted audience had made it to the theatre, including Chicago's two most formidable critics, Claudia Cassidy and Ashton Stevens. Edwina [Williams] recalled that "everything seemed against the play, even the weather. The streets were so ice-laden we could not find a taxi to take us to the Civic Theatre and had to walk. The gale blowing off Lake Michigan literally hurled us through the theatre door." Too nervous to sit and wait for the curtain, Tom went backstage, only to find the cast and crew even more gripped with fear than he was. Donald Windham arrived and sat next to Edwina...

Donald not only recognized Laurette Taylor's Southern accent as Tennessee's but he also felt that she had co-opted a good deal more and had modeled her performance on her careful observation of Tom. "Her sideways, suspicious glances at her children when she was displeased; her silences that spoke more than words; her bright obliviousness to the reality before her eyes when she was determined to show that she, at least, was agreeable, and her childish pleasure in the chance to charm and show off her best features..."

Edwina had not realized that Tom had written a play about HER, about his family, about his torment in regards to his sister who was mad, and eventually lobotomized. Laura is based on his sister Rose.

What Edwina was witnessing was in no real sense an autobiographical account of Tom's family life in St. Louis. It was a transmutation created by the artist who had taken refuge in the identity of Tennessee Williams - for it is true, as critic Frank Rich has said, that "anyone can write an autobiography, but only an artist knows how to remake his past so completely, by refracting it through a different aesthetic lens." For Edwina, the play was more dream than memory - a flux of disordered images of "loss, loss, loss." There could be no avoiding the similarities between Amanda Wingfield's travail and her own ... And there was the pain she had to feel in response to the reminders of Rose on that Christmas night, imprisoned in an asylum, with Laura's malformation acting as a metaphor for her daughter's enveloping madness. Then there was Tom's hope of escape - Tennessee's lifelong illusion - in pursuit of a father in love with long distances.

On one occasion, Tennessee said he could not remember his mother's reaction to the play; then on another he said that, as she sat listening to Laurette Taylor reciting her own utterances and aphorisms, "Mother began to sit up stiffer and stiffer. She looked like a horse eating briars. She was touching her throat and clasping her hands and quite unable to look at me." He thought that "what made it particularly hard for Mother to hear is that she is a tiny, delicate woman with great dignity and always managed to be extremely chic in dress, while Laurette Taylor invested the part with that blowzy, powerful quality of hers - and thank God she did, for it made the play."

That night, after the show, the cast and crew sat around waiting for the reviews to come in. Tennessee wanted to go to church, there was a midnight service down the street, but the weather was insane, freezing, a huge storm. And then - one by one, the reviews started coming in - "each more superlative than the last."

Claudia Cassidy said that the play "holds in its shadowed fragility the stamina of success" and she added "If it is your play, as it is mine, it reaches out tentacles, first tentative, then gripping, and you are caught in its spell." Ashton Stevens of the Herald-American called Menagerie "a lovely thing and an original thing. It has the courage of true poetry couched in colloquial prose. It is eerie and earthy in the same breath." He added that fifty years of first-nighting had provided him with few jolts so "miraculously electrical" as Laurette's portrayal and that he had not been so moved "since Eleanora Duse gave her last performance on this planet."

But still - the audience wasn't coming. The houses were small. Cassidy and Stevens began evangelists for the production.

...Claudia Cassidy ... returned for three successive performances ... Ashton Stevens virtually moved into the theatre. Everyone was faced with one of the most heartrending experiences in the theatre: helplessly watching a beautiful, highly praised production slowly expire because of the lack of public response.

This was about the time that theatre-people in New York started to make the trek out to Chicago to see what was going on.

Great playwright William Inge (who was unknown at this point) came out to see it. He describes his response:

"I sat in a half-filled theatre but I watched the most thrilling performance of the most beautiful American play I felt I had ever seen. I had the feeling at the time that what I was seeing would become an American classic...I was expecting a good play, yes, but I didn't know that I was going to encounter a work of genius ... The play itself was written so beautifully, like carved crystal and so it was a stunning experience for me and it shocked me alittle, too, to suddenly see this great work emerge from a person that I had come to know so casually."

Laurette Taylor's performance was being hailed as one of the most extraordinary pieces of acting the world had ever seen. But, as is typical with all great actors, she had huge humility and felt she could not take complete credit.

Laurette Taylor never lost an opportunity to divert the praise that was being heaped upon her to that "nice little guy," Tennessee Williams. She was always quick to remind her admirers that it was he, not she, who had written the lines that gave The Glass Menagerie its special power and beauty. And she told Tennessee, "It's a beautiful - a wonderful - a great play!"

For his part, Tennessee Williams always said that, as much as he regarded Laurette Taylor a personal friend, he never ceased to be in awe of her. "She had such a creative mind," he once remarked. "Something magical happened with Laurette. I used to stand backstage. There was a little peephole in the scenery, and I could be just about three feet from her, and when the lights hit her face, suddenly twenty years would drop off. An incandescent thing would happen in her face; it was really supernatural."

What was perhaps most extraordinary about The Glass Menagerie as a theatrical event was the meeting of these two great artists, one ending her career and the other beginning his. On that cold night of December 26, 1944, the convergence of two enormous theatre talents made theatre history. The performance itself became legendary, and the play became a classic in the literature of the American theatre.

God bless them both.

In Memory of Laurette Taylor

Maybe a lot of you won't know the name Laurette Taylor. That's okay - I didn't either - until I became friends with a dogmatic and brilliant theatre director back in the early 1990s who was so horrified that I did not know who she was that he yelled at me in a late-night coffee shop after rehearsal. ("SHEila," he boomed, "YOU, of all PEOPle, should know who Laurette Taylor is!!")

But, in actuality, I DID know who she was. I just didn't know that I knew.

She had a long (and rather checkered) stage career - Broadway and regional - starting in 1909 - a career where her really big hit, the thing she was known for (besides being an on-again off-again drunkard) was Peg o' my Heart in 1912. Peg o' my Heart was such a success, and she became the toast of New York. She was basically still a kid. Success came very early - and then faded almost just as quickly. But she kept going, she kept trying, kept trying to find the next Peg o' my Heart. They did a revival of that show, years later, and she was in it ... but she was still only grasping at a long-ago glory. Nobody cared anymore.

Her beloved husband died in 1928 - and she went on a 10-year bender. By the end of the bender, her entire fortune was gone, and everybody who had loved her, who had thought she was going to be the next biggest star, assumed that she must have died.

She was a wild-woman, a fall-down drunk, and one of the most quotable people I have ever encountered.

My favorite Laurette Taylor anecdote (or one of them) is this:

Taylor was in the midst of doing a play, a play which was not a success. Nobody was showing up, it was universally panned. After one of the performances, Taylor went to a party, where I am sure she began to imbibe. She struck up a conversation with a young man, also at the party. They talked for a bit, and then he left, to go mingle. Taylor immediately turned to the hostess and said, "That man walked out on me tonight at the theatre!!"

The hostess, disbelieving, said, "Are you sure? How do you know?"

Taylor snapped, "I sometimes forget a face, but I never forget a back!"

Taylor also described the 10-year drinking binge after the death of her husband as "the longest wake in history."

She was a tough cookie, this one. And yet people talked (and still talk, oh my GOD, do they still talk) about her gift on the stage.

However - after Peg o' My Heart, in 1912, she went on and on and on ... doing bit parts, living in hotel rooms, doing Merchant of Venice in Toledo ... blah blah. A bleak life. Everyone kept thinking she was "making a comeback" - but the expectations were too high. There were many disappointments. This was a woman with a ton of demons. And none of the parts she got really exploited that tormented side of her, that beautiful poetic tragedy she had.

I can't find a picture of her online at the moment - although I've searched a bit just now - but if you see what she actually LOOKS like, you will understand why it might have been a challenge for her to find the role that would really let her shine.

(Update: Here is a picture of her. And another one. Look at the expression in her eyes in that one. And this one. Thank you SO MUCH to Carrie, who sent me a veritable archive. Laurette Taylor was also the one, very very early on, who bemoaned the stereotyping of Irish people on stage. She said, and I paraphrase, "Someday, the full tragedy and the full humor of the Irish people will be portrayed, without resorting to flirty Colleens and drunken paddies." Thank you, Carrie, for tracking those photos down. Isn't she beautiful?)

She has an impish babyish face, she looks like a grinning mischievous cherub. This look was perfect for when she was a young vaudevillian, tap dancing her way through life ... but as she grew older, as she became middle-aged, as her soul became darker, her looks did not fit her psyche.

Also - and this is just a theory of mine - American theatre had not yet caught up with her. Her gift was wayyyyyyyy ahead of its time. NOW, there are so many venues for weird quirky actors - cable TV, independent film, whatever. But then - there was only Broadway and Hollywood. Laurette Taylor did not fit in.

She was a vaudeville baby. And yet - and yet - there was a genius there. A genius. But throughout the 20s and 30s, Broadway was only producing drawing-room comedies, Philip Barry stuff - Kaufman & Hart stuff - all wonderful funny plays - but very very WASP-y, very upper-crust stuff. Laurette Taylor, with her blowsy curls, her blasted-open smile, her snarky wise-cracking mouth, did not fit in with the style of the times.

But all it took was one playwright.

One playwright to, first of all, usher in a new age in American theatre. But also - to write the role, THE role, that Laurette Taylor had been waiting for ... for almost FORTY YEARS.

The script by the unknown playwright was sent to her, she stayed up all night reading it, and the next morning called her assistant Eloise who had sent it to her, and Taylor was completely jubiliant: "I've found it, Eloise! I've found the play I've been waiting for!"

That playwright was Tennessee Williams, and the role was Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie - in its inaugural production in 1946.

My acting teacher saw that original production and still talks about it. Nobody who saw it ever forgot it.

People changed the courses of their lives, after seeing Laurette Taylor playing Amanda Wingfield. Jose Quintero, a young kid, who eventually would become one of the most successful theatre directors of his day (and would direct many of Tennessee Williams' plays years later, although he was mainly known as the interpreter of Eugene O'Neill) - saw the first production, when it opened in Chicago, and it made him realize, finally, that he had to go into the theatre.

He says, "I walked all night long. I knew then something had made me feel whole."

God, how I wish I could have seen that performance. It is a watershed, a landmark. But I know that I don't even HAVE to have seen it to undertstand that I am affected by it, to know that it has, to some degree, created the entire landscape of my profession.

None of us stand alone, none of us re-discover the wheel.

We all stand on the shoulders of giants. And Laurette Taylor was one of the biggest giants the American theatre has ever had.

It must have been something else - to see her in that part.

Amanda Wingfield would be her final role. The play ran from March 31, 1945 - August 3, 1946.

And Laurette Taylor died on December 7, 1946.

Name that country

Carlos has issued a challenge on his blog. He has posted 3 photos from an unidentified country, and asks us to guess the location.

My guess, Cambodia, was blazingly wrong. It didn't FEEL right to me, either ... I have never been to Cambodia but my idea of it is that the foliage is a bit more messy, more jungly.

Anyway, go check out the photos - see if you can guess. He will continue to post photos, until someone guesses correctly.

I am as sick of J.Lo and Ben Affleck as the next person...

Evidence to that here. And here.

But something occurred to me during my freezing commute today. (I'm a bit insane - musing about JLO and Ben when I have some free time...)

This may be an extremely controversial point to make, but I am going to make it, and it involves me telling a wee story for you all:

The time is the late 1980s. I am in college. I land the lead in the major musical that is done every year in the theatre department. It is a part beyond my wildest dreams. I am very excited.

My co-star - the person who my character falls in love with over the course of the show - was a new kid in school. Suffice it to say, he was absolutely gorgeous, compelling, talented ... blah blah. By this point, we all, in the department, knew each other so well ... and there were no more prospects for those of us who were still single - so someone NEW was very exciting. Especially this new guy.

Rehearsals begin. He and I rehearse together all the time, because we have so many duets, and so many scenes together.

A romance blossoms.

It is unbeLIEVably exciting for me. And for him.

Every day was a new adventure, every day was thrilling. Not only did I have this great new romance, but I also was starring in this huge show. So my life was completely full, with a great balance between work and love. Something I have never achieved since, by the way. Since then, work has always won out.

And then - boom - he backs off. He starts to do the "aloof and distant" thing.

(He was young. Then again, so was I.)

One night, after rehearsal, I chase him outside onto the sidewalk and confront him wildly. "What's going on? Why are you being so distant??"

It was the typical story - "I'm not ready for a relationship - You are so amazing but I'm just not ready..."

And I did not accept this. (I had such balls in those days.) I said, "Come on! We were having so much fun! Let's have some more fun! We don't have to be all serious!!"

This conversation went on for literally an hour. There was a huge wind in the air, it was night, everything was VERY dramatic. Funnier still was the entire cast, one by one, driving by to go out for beers somewhere, driving by us fighting, and I just KNEW that every car was FILLED with gossip-hounds (namely: my friends). I KNEW that as they drove to Tony's Pizza, everyone was saying, "Omigod, did you see that? What's going on there? What's happening??" They all would wave at us,the fighting co-stars, as they drove by.

So by the end of this conversation - I had worked my magic. He ended up laughing - laughing at himself - laughing at his fears - and he agreed to not give up on us.

Later, I referred to this as "360 #1."

Throughout the course of that winter and spring, there were about 4 more 360s.

Him suddenly saying, "I can't!!" And then 2 weeks later coming back and saying, "No wait, yes I can!!"

The musical we were in was a massive success and ended up being chosen to compete in the ACTF (American College Theatre Festival). So once our run in Rhode Island was over - we had to keep rehearsing, and re-blocking, etc., so that the show would fit on the new stage. We were takin' our show on the road.

The ACTF was in February.

This time was a time of HIGH drama.

There were moments when I, the star, would literally be SOBBING backstage. SOBBING about the latest 360. And then, I would have to run onstage, sing a song, dance a dance, say some lines, all pretending that I wasn't having a nervous breakdown. It was like a Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney movie.

We had huge blow-up fights at parties. There was one infamous evening when I threw a pretzel at his head. (We laughed about this later, once he did 360 #3 and all of our dramas became funny once again...)

We traveled, by bus, to the ACTF competition which was, to this day, one of the most exciting nights of my entire life.

I got a standing ovation. Well, we all did - as a cast - but they leapt to their feet when I came out to bow. I cried. It was such a rush. This girl somehow got backstage, an audience member, and she was sobbing, and she saw me, raced at me, and hugged me, weeping. I mean, this is ridiculous stuff, but it actually happened.

At the time of the ACTF, this boy and I were in the "aloof and distant" part of our cycle.

We were not speaking to one another. At all.

And yet, of course, we were only aware of each other. The irony was that we had this very hostile angry vibe between us - and then we would go onstage and sing these lovey-dovey lyrics.

It was absurd.

We came back from the ACTF and a bunch of us went out the next week for beers at a local pizza joint. My former co-star was there, too, and he spent the night, drinking quietly, and watching me from afar - watching me talk, watching me laugh. I knew he was watching me, but we still weren't talking to each other ... and I was THRILLED to know that he had regrets, etc.

At the end of the night he came over to me and whispered, in front of all my friends, "Can we get together for breakfast tomorrow? I really need to talk to you."

I groaned audibly.

"Is this 360 #72?"

And, of course, it was. We met at 7 am for breakfast, he told me he was in love with me, I said, "You're an idiot, I knew that all along" - we laughed -

And then we were in love.

For about 2 weeks.

When he then did another 360. Which ended up being the final 360. For me. I wrote him off after that one.

A girlfriend of mine said to me, "Does that boy ever get dizzy?"

So I broke up with him, finally, and very publicly - (I forgot to mention that, of COURSE, the entire time this dance of love and hate was going on - we were completely in the "public eye", in a small way - Every person was aware of what was going on. Gossip raged. I remember after one of the 360s, we were all starting up rehearsals for the ACTF - and I was very upset. Having a hard time getting through rehearsals and stuff, not really enjoying this great opportunity. One of the older women in the cast said to my friend Mitchell, the two of them gossiping in a good-natured way about my drama, the 360s, "Doesn't he realize she has a show to do???")

I love that.

She wasn't concerned about my heart getting broken - she was concerned that my concentration wasn't on the SHOW. I love the theatre. Who cares about the breakups, the drama ... As long as your work remains untouched!

Okay, so NOW FINALLY - here is my point:

My point about J. Lo and Ben Affleck - and their 360s, and how sick and tired everyone is of their drama, their back and forth -

Romances are not neat things, with nice little linear steps forward. Romances can be messy, ugly, irrational. People behave in ways that are incomprehensible. I threw a pretzel at someone's head.

Imagine if I had thrown the pretzel at his head during a Golden Globes party ... or at a film opening ...

If he and I had been world-famous at the time of our 360 Dance of Misery and Love - we would have been absolutely scorned by the press, and also by the public, who finally would get completely sick of our shenanigans.

"Oh, for God's SAKE, just BREAK UP ALREADY!" people would moan in line at the supermarket, looking at the tabloids.

I, thankfully, was not famous when I was having my chaotic (and, ultimately, TOTALLY FUN) romance. I could make all my mistakes in private. The "public" would not remember, would not hold it against me.

I thought about this this morning - randomly - because I had seen some other stupid headline about J. Lo crying somewhere - and my first response was, "Oh for God's sake, I am so sick of having to hear about your emotions and your stupid relationship ... "

And out of nowhere, I thought of that boy in my junior year in college - I thought of what we put each other through - I thought of how badly he behaved - I thought of how badly I behaved - but then I thought, too, of how much fun it was, how exciting it was ... how, by the end, even "the 360s" were hilarious ...

Time is very forgiving.

I look back on that entire experience with fondness.

Thank God I didn't have to do it in front of the eyes of the world - the world that is, to say the least, NOT forgiving.

Again

and again and again. I get this sinking feeling in my gut every time I see that another terrorist has blown him/herself up. When will this culture of people stop worshiping death? Certainly not when they "get what they want" - because what they want is impossible, a dream that does not exist, a mythical Palestine in the past with no Jews and where the grass grows green and the fruits ripen on the trees. It's not REAL what they want. There is no CAUSE, there is no REASON, NONE. Or if there ever was one, it no longer exists. All they do now is worship death. There is no negotiation that will touch these people, there is nothing that will work. They are beyond the pale.

It makes me feel sick, helpless.

Even with the chaos of the bombing, Israel still went ahead with the Hezbollah prisoner-transfer scheduled to take place.

Just so ya know...

The Hudson River is frozen.

Last night was such a chore getting home (don't ask) that I considered just strolling across the West Side Highway, leaping out onto the chunks of ice, and making my way across to the Jersey side.

Probably would have gotten home quicker.

Or just drowned in the icy depths.

It was a crapshoot.

"Slipped the surly bonds of earth"

On January 28, 1986, Reagan made a speech to the nation, responding to the Challenger explosion. Written by Peggy Noonan, (whose column I like, but whose book on Reagan made me want to gag) this speech is often listed in compilations of "greatest speeches in the 20th century", and it is not hard to understand why. Noonan hit the nail on the head with this speech, which is simply spoken, deeply felt, and, I would dare say, perfect.

President Reagan's Speech on The Challenger Disaster, January 28, 1986

Nineteen years ago, almost to the day, we lost three astronauts in a terrible accident on the ground. But, we've never lost an astronaut in flight; we've never had a tragedy like this. And perhaps we've forgotten the courage it took for the crew of the shuttle; but they, the Challenger Seven, were aware of the dangers, but overcame them and did their jobs brilliantly. We mourn seven heroes: Michael Smith, Dick Scobee, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe. We mourn their loss as a nation together.

For the families of the seven, we cannot bear, as you do, the full impact of this tragedy. But we feel the loss, and we're thinking about you so very much. Your loved ones were daring and brave, and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says, 'Give me a challenge and I'll meet it with joy.' They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths. They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us.

We've grown used to wonders in this century. It's hard to dazzle us. But for twenty-five years the United States space program has been doing just that. We've grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we've only just begun. We're still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers.

And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them...

There's a coincidence today. On this day 390 years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. In his lifetime the great frontiers were the oceans, and a historian later said, 'He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it.' Well, today we can say of the Challenger crew: Their dedication was, like Drake's, complete.

The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honoured us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and 'slipped the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God.'

I am old

Realizing that 18 years ago I was a freshman in college ... WHAT? That cannot be right. Am I that old?

Big Stupid Tommy talks about where he was when the Challenger exploded.

Bill McCabe has his story.

We all have our story. We all remember where we were on that awful day.

I was a freshman in college when the Challenger exploded. I lived in Merrow, the only all-girl's dorm on campus. I was home, in between classes, when suddenly I heard someone down the hall start screaming. A terrible scream. Unlike anything you ever hear on a normal day , at least here in America.

A girl down the hall started screaming, tears in her voice, "OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD!" My roommate and I raced down the hall, along with most of the other girls who were around at that time.

We huddled in the dorm room, watching on a tiny little television, the disaster unfolding. Live. Those horrible long trails of smoke, splitting apart, diverging ... in a way which we knew was just not supposed to happen. This was bad. This was worse than bad.

I was crying. Everybody was. We were glued to the television, holding onto each other, crying. Saying things like, "No ... NO!" And the age-old cry, "Oh my God." Which takes on a whole other meaning when said in a true moment of duress. God with a capital G.

It was beyond belief. The lead-up to the Challenger launch, with the Christa McAuliffe coverage, had been overwhelming. Everyone knew about Christa McAuliffe, everyone knew that the Challenger was going up ... it was a big big deal. And to watch it explode, before our very eyes ... we were almost baffled. Hurt by the callousness of the universe. How could this happen? How could this happen?

The shots of the family members who watched it all unfold from the bleechers below have stayed with me always. I remembered certain images exactly. McAuliffe's parents clinging to one another, screaming up into the sky.

I do not understand "why" things like this happen. I do not understand why some people experience such tremendous loss, and why others seem to escape.

But I do not believe that God "lets" things like this happen. I do not. I cannot explain my theology, I cannot back up my beliefs with Bible verses ... but I don't believe that God is with some people and not with others. I believe He is there through all of it. With all of us.

God didn't choose to bless the nine saved miners in Pennsylvania, and choose NOT to bless the thousands of innocent people who died on September 11. (That only comes to mind because I remember all of the miners' wives saying, "God has blessed us, God has blessed us." I totally can understand, on a human level, why they would say that, but having witnessed with my own eyes the horrors of September 11, it bothered me a bit. Where was God on September 11? Why didn't he bless US? Why not us??)

These are not questions for me to answer.

I will not apologize...

for being so excited for the movie Miracle to come out that I can think of little else.

My entire personality is yearning towards next week - which, I believe, is when it opens.

I am excited on mulitple levels.

1. Yay, for Kurt Russell. Getting a nice meaty role like Herb Brooks. He's always been good, always, but he hasn't always had good roles, roles where he can show what he can really do. It looks like he has gone through a nice transformation, too, at least from the previews - his hair, his voice, the look in his eyes. Can't wait.

2. All of the hot young unknown hockey players/actors. I loved, in the previews, that the kids from Boston actually HAVE the Boston accents, which I would recognize if I heard it in the wastes of the Kara Kum desert. My entire family has that accent, so I am very particular about it - and that was my main issue with Robin Williams' over-praised turn in "Good Will Hunting". No accent. He's supposed to be a Southie boy, a local guy - Matt Damon and Ben Affleck both did the accent - Williams did not. Williams is usually a chameleon, in terms of his speech, etc. But I think this was a lazy performance, for that reason.

3. I loved the HBO documentary about the 1980 Olympic team. I taped it, and I watch it on occasion, and get completely thrilled every single time. When the assistant coach, at the end, chokes up unexpectedly as he says the words, "Those guys ..." (Suddenly, the feeling comes up - surprising him - his throat closes - You can see this embarrassment go over his face - this manly man - It is so moving ... He clears his throat, trying to get it under control - and then finishes his sentence:) "Those guys deserved that medal." Oh, it kills me every time.

I wrote a thing a while back about my response to that documentary, the first time I saw it. Join me in my obsession. I am counting the days till the movie opens.

Do You Believe in Miracles? YES!!

I had such a catharsis last night, watching the HBO documentary Do You Believe In Miracles? It is the story of the U.S. Olympic hockey team, winning the gold in 1980.

I don't know exactly what doors it opens up in me ... All I know is I was a blubbery MESS, and I still am one today. Perhaps it is the story of bucking the odds so unexpectedly that gets me. Or the fact that those kids came from nowhere, nowhere, and beat the greatest hockey team in the world. No one expected that of them.

I think, though, it is merely the specific human moments represented in this well-done documentary that slay my heart. The moments are emblazoned in my brain.

--The Iranian hostage, being released from captivity, and shown a videotape of everything that happened in America during his absence. The hostage said that the best part of the videotape, for him, was watching the hockey game, and watching all the people in the stands losing their minds. He said, "I was in deep captivity for over a year. Being held hostage shows you the ultimate depravity of humanity. But then ... watching that hockey game ... I saw the complete opposite. I saw all of these Americans going crazy over a hockey game. I just wish that I had been there."

--The one shot of Jim Craig, the goalie, draped in an American flag, right after they won the gold, skating along, looking up into the stands, searching with his eyes, saying, "Where's my father? Where's my father?"

--Pretty much every single shot of coach Herb Brooks' face. What a face! He rode those kids HARD, he made them a team. There was rivalry between the Minnesota kids and the New England kids - they hated each other. Herb Brooks said, "I wanted to blur the boundaries of this country. I wanted them to know that the USA on the front of their jerseys really meant something." He also knew that they HAD to win. And they did. After that "miracle game", they still had one more game to win before they could take home the gold. They had to beat Finland. Herb Brooks came into the locker room beforehand, and said, "If you lose this game, you will take it to your fucking grave." Then he turned and walked almost all the way out, before turning around and saying again, "To your fucking grave."

--The Russian player described watching the American team flipping out when they won. He said, "We were so used to winning. We watched how emotional they were … and we had forgotten that. I was almost jealous of their emotions."

Okay. Whatever. The entire documentary rips my heart out. The next time it is on is at, like, 6 a.m. a month from now, and I (of course) will be awake. And I will tape the whole damn thing. It is beautiful. A beautiful story.

Lee J. Cobb: "Like a giant moving the Rocky Mountains into position..."

Occasionally, if I need inspiration, if I need help sticking with my dreams, my plans ... I take out Arthur Miller's autobiography: Timebends.

I read it voraciously during my thesis acting project in graduate school - My project was a couple of different scenes from Miller's play about his marriage to Marilyn Monroe: After the Fall. His passages about Marilyn, who she was, what he remembered of her, are heartbreaking. And they were very helpful to me, in terms of creating that kind of character. You could go with the cliche - the sex-bomb, the woman constantly used by men - or you could get deeper into her world, her inconsistencies, her strengths. Marilyn Monroe, after all, was a real woman, a 3-dimensional real woman. That's what I wanted to try to portray.

One of the things Miller remembered about her was - that the famous jiggly walk of hers was completely natural. That was just how her body moved - naturally. Men (and women) happened to find it unbelievably attractive, and Monroe knew this, but it was not a "put-on". Miller remembers taking a walk with her on the beach, and at one point turning around to look back at their footprints in the sand. Miller's prints are slightly spread apart - Most of us walk that way, we do not place our feet exactly in front of each other when we move forward. But Monroe did. And the tracks she left in the sand made it look like she had actually been hopping along beside him ... a singular row of prints. He said that she walked "like a cat". If you walk, placing one foot directly in front of the other, wait till you see what it does to how your hips move. You cannot help it. I completely STOLE that, when creating this character, and it helped enormously. I put one foot directly in front of the other, as I walked and suddenly, just by doing that, I became this teetery woman, with a sensuous walk, it was all about the hips, the movement of the hips.

Other things I love about this book are his memories about people I revere: Harold Clurman, Clifford Odets, Tennessee Williams. These were Miller's inspirations, the ones he looked to, the ones who galvanized him. He saw Kazan's famous production of Streetcar with Marlon Brando and Jessica Tandy, and it was that that made him sit down and write Death of a Salesman. Seeing such greatness, such perfection, was inspirational to him. He knew that he had to take his work to a new level, he knew that Tennessee Williams was doing something no American playwright had ever done before ... He knew that what he was seeing was going to change everything forever.

His chapter on the creation of Willy Loman, on the writing of that famous play, is my favorite in the book.

First of all - it goes into the writing process. The struggle with those demons in your head that tell you you can't do anything, you won't ever amount to anything ... We all have those demons. It also talks about the demon of the blank page .... how terrifying that can be for writers, how daunting. Miller had to go and basically build a cabin in the woods to write that play. He needed to be separate from his wife, from his entire life. He built a tiny one-room shack with his own hands, and sat there, sweating it out, until the play was done.

And second of all - I LOVE the chapter because it talks with such love, such respect, for the work of the actors. It's all well and good that you write a masterpiece, but without a Lee J. Cobb to make it come to life, who cares? The same was true for Streetcar. Without Marlon Brando, without the EVENT of Marlon Brando, Williams' play may have been recognized as a nice poetical piece of writing ... but it wouldn't have had the impact. The impact which still, to this day, influences any actor who moves us. They are all Brando's children, as far as I'm concerned.

So here, for my own reading pleasure, and hopefully yours, are some excerpts from the "Death of a Salesman" chapter.

Excerpts from Arthur Miller's Timebends:

On the impact "Streetcar Named Desire" had on Arthur Miller:

When Kazan invited me up to New Haven to see the new Williams play, A Streetcar Named Desire - it seemed to me a rather too garishly attention-getting title - I was already feeling a certain amount of envious curiosity since I was still unable to commit myself to the salesman play, around which I kept suspiciously circling and sniffing. But at the same time I hoped that Streetcar would be good; it was not that I was high-minded but simply that I shared the common assumption of the time that the greater the number of exciting plays there were on Broadway the better for each of us., At least in our minds there was still something approximating a theatre culture to which we more or less pridefully belonged, and the higher its achievement the greater the glory we all shared. The playwright was then king of the hill, not the star actor or director, and certainly not the producer or theatre owner, as would later by the case ...

Streetcar - especially when it was still so fresh and the actors almost as amazed as the audience at the vitality of this theatrical experience - opened one specific door for me. Not the story or the characters or the direction, but the words and their liberation, the joy of the writer in writing them, the radiant eloquence of its composition, moved me more than all its pathos. It formed a bridge to Europe for me, to Jouvet's performance in Ondine, to the whole tradition of unashamed word-joy that, with the exception of Odets, we had either turned our backs on or, as with Maxwell Anderson, only used archaically, as though eloquence could only be justified by cloaking it in sentimental romanticism.

Returning to New York, I felt speeded up, in motion now. With Streetcar, Tennessee had printed a license to speak at full throat, and it helped strengthen me as I turned to Willy Loman, a salesman always full of words, and better yet, a man who could never cease trying, like Adam, to name himself and the world's wonders. I had known all along that this play could not be encompassed by conventional realism, and for one integral reason: in Willy the past was as alive as what was happening at the moment, sometimes even crashing in to completely overwhelm his mind. I wanted precisely the same fluidity in the form, and now it was clear to me that this must be primarily verbal. The language would of course have to be recognizably his to begin with, but it seemed possible now to infiltrate it with a kind of superconsciousness. The play, after all, involved the attempts of his son and his wife and Willy himself to understand what was killing him. And to understand meant to lift the experience into emergency speech of an unashamedly open kind rather than to proceed by the crabbed dramatic hints and pretexts of the "natural". If the structure had to mirror the psychology as directly as could be done, it was still a psychology hammered into its strange shape by society, the business life Willy had lived and believed in. The play could reflect what I had always sensed as the unbroken tissue that was man and society, a single unit rather than two.

Miller finishes the play and sends it to Kazan.

I did not move far from the phone for two days after sending the script to Kazan. By the end of the second silent day I would have accepted his calling to tell me that it was a scrambled egg, an impenetrable, unstageable piece of wreckage. And his tone when he finally did call was alarmingly sober.

"I've read your play." He sounded at a loss as to how to give me the bad news. "My God, it's so sad."

"It's supposed to be."

"I just put it down. I don't know what to say. My father..." He broke off, the first of a great many men - and women - who would tell me that Willy was their father. I still thought he was letting me down easy. "It's a great play, Artie. I want to do it in the fall or winter. I'll start thinking about casting." He was talking as though someone we both knew had just died, and it filled me with happiness. Such is art.

Then came the business of casting the actor for Willy Loman, which was quite difficult.

Willy had to be small, I thought, but we soon realized that Roman Bohnen and Ernest Truex and a few other very good actors seemed to lack the size of the character even if they fit the body. The script had been sent to Lee Cobb, an actor I remembered mainly as a mountainous hulk covered with a towel in a Turkish bath in an Irwin Shaw play, with the hilarious oy vey delivery of a forever persecuted businessman. Having flown himself across the country in his own two-engine airplane, he sat facing me in Bloomgarden's office and announced, "This is my part. Nobody else can play this part. I know this man."

And he did indeed seem to be the man when a bit later in a coffee shop downstairs he looked up at the young waitress and smiled winsomely as though he had to win her loving embrace before she could be seduced into bringing him his turkey sandwich and coffee - ahead of all the other men's orders, and only after bestowing on his unique slice of pickle her longing kiss.

But while I trusted his and Kazan's experience, I lacked any conviction of my own about him until one evening in our Grace Court living room Lee looked down at my son, Bob, on the floor and I heard him laugh at something funny the child had said. The sorrow in his laughter flew out at me, touched me; it was deeply depressed and at the same time joyous, all flowing through a baritone voice that was gorgeously reedy. So large and handsome a man pretending to be thoroughly at ease in a world where he obviously did not fit could be moving.

"You know - or do you? -," Lee said to me one day in Bloomgarden's office a week or so before rehearsals were about to begin, "that this play is a watershed. The American theatre will never be the same." I could only gulp and nod in silence at his portentousness - which I feared might augur a stately performance - and hope that he would make Willy come alive anyway.

So Death of a Salesman goes into rehearsal. Kazan directing. And - at first - it does not go well. Lee J. Cobb is not doing well. People start getting nervous. The following excerpt sends chills up my spine every single time I read it. Oh, how I wish I had been there!

But as rehearsals proceeded in the small, periodically abandoned theatre on the ratty roof of the New Amsterdam on Forty-second street, where Ziegfeld in the twenties had staged some intimate revues, Lee seemed to move about in a buffalo's stupefied trance, muttering his lines, plodding with deathly slowness from position to position, and behaving like a man who had been punched in the head.

"He's just learning it," Kazan shakily reassured me after three or four days.

I waited as a week went by, and then ten days, and all that was emerging from Lee Cobb's throat was a bumpy hum. The other actors were nearing performance levels, but when they had to get a response from Lee all their rhythms slowed to near collapse.

Kazan was no longer so sure and kept huddling with Lee, trying to pump him up. Nor did Lee offer any explanation, and I wondered whether he thought to actually play the part like a man with a foot in the grave. Between us, Kazan and I began referring to him as "the Walrus".

On about the twelfth day, in the afternoon, with Eddie Kook, our lighting supplier, and Jimmy Proctor, our pressman, and Kazan and myself in the seats, Lee stood up as usual from the bedroom chair and turned to Mildred Dunnock and bawled, "No, there's more people now ... There's more people!" and, gesturing toward the empty upstage where the window was supposed to be, caused a block of apartment houses to spring up in my brain, and the air became sour with the smell of kitchens where once there had been only the odors of earth, and he began to move frighteningly, with such ominous reality that my chest felt pressed down by an immense weight. After the scene had gone on for a few minutes, I glanced around to see if the others had my reaction. Jim Proctor had his head bent into his hands and was weeping, Eddie Kook was looking shocked, almost appalled, and tears were pouring over his cheeks, and Kazan behind me was grinning like a fiend, gripping his temples with both hands, and we knew we had it - there was an unmistakable wave of life moving across the air of the empty theatre, a wave of Willy's pain and protest.

I began to weep myself at some point that was not particularly sad, but it was as much, I think, out of pride in our art, in Lee's magical capacity to imagine, to collect within himself every mote of life since Genesis and to let it pour forth. He stood up there like a giant moving the Rocky Mountains into position.

At the end of the act, Del Hughes, our sweet but hardheaded, absolutely devoted, competent stage manager, came out from a wing and looked out at us. His stunned eyes started us all laughing. I ran up and kissed Lee, who pretended to be surprised. "But what did you expect, Arthur?" he said, his eyes full of his playful vanity. My God, I thought - he really is Willy!

On the subway going home to Brooklyn I felt once again the aching pain in my muscles that the performance had tensed up so tightly, just as in the writing time. And when I thought of it later, it seemed as though Lee's sniffing around the role for so long recapitulated what I had done in the months before daring to begin to write.

GOD. That's all I need to say. GOD.

The play opens in Philadelphia. This is the first time anyone on the planet has ever seen this play.

Salesman had its first public performance at the Locust Street Theatre in Philadelphia. Across the street the Philadelphia Orchestra was playing Beethoven's Seventh Symphony that afternoon, and Kazan thought Cobb ought to hear some of it, wanting, I suppose, to prime the great hulk on whom all our hopes depended. The three of us were in a conspiracy to make absolutely every moment of every scene cohere to what preceded and followed it; we were now aware that Willy's part was among the longest in dramatic literature, and Lee was showing signs of wearying. We sat at either side of him in a box, inviting him, as it were, to drink of the heroism of that music, to fling himself into his role tonight without holding back. We thought of ourselves, still, as a kind of continuation of a long and undying past.

As sometimes happened later on during the run, there was no applause at the final curtain of the first performance. Strange things began to go on in the audience. With the curtain down, some people stood to put their coats on and then sat again, some, especially men, were bent forward covering their faces, and others were openly weeping. People crossed the theatre to stand quietly talking with one another. It seemed forever before someone remembered to applaud, and then there was no end of it.

Beware of angry clowns

I have a story about my good friend Beth. Any regular reader of my blog will recognize her name, she comments all the time. I have been friends with Beth since junior high. We also went to the same college.

My first two years in college, I lived in the dorms. My third year, I lived with my parents. And my senior year, I lived "down the line", which meant: down by the beach, in a rented house with a bunch of other people.

I found a great situation (I thought) in this massive rambling house, which actually had a name: Breezy Corners. It had a huge yard, it was an old house, there were French doors, a fireplace, etc. The entire set-up ended up becoming a nightmare, and Breezy Corners turned into an unofficial halfway-house for every runaway teenager in the town. I would come home after rehearsal and there would be 10 drunk or stoned runaway high school students taking over the living room.

But the house was awesome, I had my own room, blah blah.

And Beth's boyfriend (now husband) Tom was one of my roommates. Which is so funny for me to think of, in retrospect. Breezy Corners was NOTORIOUS. It was a complete nut-house.

Before it all went bad (I moved out after the first term, and found another great house to live in, down the line) - we threw a massive Halloween party.

I cannot even count how many people showed up. It was absolutely insane.

My friend Mitchell and I dressed up together - he was Andy Warhol, and I dressed up as silver-haired Edie Sedgwick, who was Warhol's muse for a time. We both had on white face makeup, so we looked totally pale and nocturnal, I had on huge fake eyelashes, I had spray-painted my hair silver, and, because Edie was a heroin addict, I put colorful Band-aids up and down my arms.

My brother showed up as "Elvis in Blue Hawaii" - only to be shocked to find out that someone else was also there as "Elvis in Blue Hawaii". We took a picture of the two of them together, it was hilarious.

My friend Beth came as a clown. Her boyfriend came as Indiana Jones. One of my favorite images of the party was the two of them, in costume, sitting on the couch, talking. As though nothing was off or different about their appearances. Indiana having a serious conversation with this little earnest clown.

Beth had ponytails all over her head, she was wearing a kind of one-suit polka-dot pajama-type thing, and she had a full clown face - white makeup, big red smiling lips, the whole deal.

At one point, as the night raged further and further and out of control, and basically the entire 'down the line' community started crashing the party (I knew only about 10 people there, and it was my house) - Beth and I were standing in the kitchen. Drinking beer, talking.

And then, two guys, guys we did not know, knocked a beer over onto the kitchen floor.

And they did not clean it up. They did not even make a move to clean it up. They just glanced down, didn't care, and kept talking to each other.

Well, this made the clown angry.

She yelled at them. "This isn't your house! This isn't your kitchen! You are a GUEST here, and if you spill something - clean it up!" Furious, she grabbed some paper towels, and started to clean up the spill, still bitching out the two boys. "It's ridiculous. You still need someone to clean up after you? Is that it? It's not. your. house. If you spill something - CLEAN IT UP."

By the time she finished with them, they were cowering in fear.

It was only later that it occurred to us: Beth was a clown. She was a clown. She had a big shiny clown smile, but she was standing there, reading these guys their rights.

We are still laughing about this today. We imagined the two guys who had made the spill kind of skulking away, and then later, when someone asked them how the party was, they would say, vaguely, a bit uneasy, "Oh ... it was okay ... until we got bitched out by an angry clown."

Additional Epitaphs/Last Words - Part II

Many of you have written to me with additions to my post on epitaphs and famous last words. I thought I would list them all here, for your continued enjoyment.

Oh, and I'll also take the ones left in the comments into the original post.

Here they all be:

From Dan :

Epitaph of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - "Steel True, Blade Straight."

From reader Noggie:

Lord Byron's epitaph:
"One who possessed beauty without vanity,
strength without insolence,
courage without ferocity,
and all the virtues of man,
without his vices.
This praise would be unmeaning flattery if inscribed over human ashes, is but a just tribute to the memory of my dog."

From Dave J.:

The epitaph of Sir Christopher Wren, in the crypt of his archictectural crowning glory, St. Paul's Cathedral: "Lector Si Monumentum Requiris Circumspice" (Reader, if you seek his monument, look about you).

From Mike Ramsey:

Joan of Arc's last words: "Hold the cross high so I may see it through the flames!"

Also from Mike R:

Pablo Picasso's last words: "Drink to me!"

From Steve Wilson:

Stonewall Jackson's last words: "Let us cross over the river and rest in the shade of the trees."

Also from Steve:

Robert E. Lee's last words: "Strike the tent."

From BP:

BP says in the comments: There's an old story told in my family of an ancestor who rose up on her deathbed, exclaimed "Oh the flames!" and promptly died.

From Mark Lippert - (Mark, do you have a blog? Besides Pat McCurdy?):

Socrates' last words: "I drank what?"

From The 5th dentist:

Last words of Billy the Kid: "Quien es?" (who's there?) He was then promptly shot.

Also from The 5th dentist:

Poet and wild-drinking man Charles Bukowski's epitaph: Don't try.

John sent in this absolute GEM:

H.L. Mencken's epitaph was: "If, after I depart this vale, you ever rememberr me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl."

Pat sent in this tale:

At her prodding [Sam Houston] began attending church services in Washington, joined the Baptist church in Huntsville, and was baptised in a Baptist ceremony at Rocky Creek near Independence in 1854. When he died in 1863 Margaret was at his side, and his last words were "Texas...Texas...Margaret." [margaret being, of course, his wife.]

"So I keep writing...

"I'm very conscious of my decline in popularity, but I don't permit it to stop me because I have the example of so many playwrights before me. I know the dreadful notices Ibsen got. And O'Neill -- he had to die to make 'Moon' successful. And to me it has been providential to be an artist, a great act of providence that I was able to turn my borderline psychosis into creativity -- my sister Rose did not manage this. So I keep writing. I am sometimes pleased with what I do -- for me, that's enough."

-- Tennessee Williams, interviewed in 1981

That is one of my favorite quotes. Words to live by:

So I keep writing. I am sometimes pleased with what I do -- for me, that's enough.

A Cashel/Brooklyn Memory

My 6-year-old nephew Cashel lives far away from me now, but for the first five years of his life he lived in Brooklyn. I knew, at the time, how lucky I was, to be so close to him ... Many of my friends have nephews or nieces who live in France, or across the country ... They get to see them once a year, if that much. I saw Cashel every week, babysat him all the time. It was truly a blessing in my life.

Came across this old entry of a November afternoon I spent with Cashel, and wanted to share it.

A Brooklyn Afternoon
It's winter now, but the trees are still fighting with the season: "Dammit, we're not ready yet. It's still autumn! LOOK AT US. The yellows, the oranges....aren't we spectacular?" Meanwhile, everyone is wearing winter coats, and the babies in the strollers literally cannot move their limbs at all, and sit frozen, like mummified papooses in their massive snow suits. Their wide eyeballs staring out.

I arrived, rang the doorbell, and nobody answered. Hmmm. I called, left a message. Then I went across the street into Prospect Park. There's a playground right there and I thought that maybe Maria, Steve (her new boyfriend) and Cashel might be over there. They were not. Curiouser and curiouser. I left another message saying, "Okay, so clearly I have the time wrong ... I will be sitting in the park across the street, if you just stepped out for a second and come home and get this message." I sat at a picnic table and wrote in my journal for a while. About Crazy Erik. Which is a long story and absolutely none of your business.

There was a slope of hill behind me covered in flaming yellow leaves - not one spot of brown ground visible. The sun was low in the sky now, the rays long and mellow. Shining through the bare trees on the top of the slope, washing over the carpet of yellow. One of those images that pierce your heart.

It was cold enough that my fingers felt like little stiff carrot sticks. But I enjoyed my time with myself. Writing, listening to the screams of kids at the playground.

Finally Maria called. 45 minutes later. She had thought I was coming over in the evening. I was sure I had said, "So I'll be there at 3." She said, "Are you FREEZING?" "Yes. I am freezing." "Come over right now. Do you want tea or hot chocolate?" "Tea would be great." "Putting the kettle on right now."

In 2 minutes, I was ensconced in her warm and cozy apartment. Her living room now looks like an old-fashioned Victorian living room. The piano, the oriental rug, the dark walls. It is so cozy that I never want to leave. Steve was slicing up a pomegranate, Maria was at the stove ... and Cashel and Brendan were apparently on their way over, after seeing Attack of the Clones at the IMAX.

We sat around her table, eating, drinking tea, talking, laughing. Cashel eventually arrived. Or, perhaps, to be more accurate, I should say Obi Wan Kenobi arrived. Cashel was completely in the fantasy world. Leaping about with his invisible light saber, manically running by us, making light-saber sounds, checking himself out in the mirror.

Maria said to me at one point, "I guess I have been wondering lately: .... Is there such a thing as too much Star Wars?"

This brought up a memory for me.

When I was 9 and 10 years old, I became so obsessed with the movie Oliver that I was actually experiencing a semi-psychotic break with reality. I would sit in our den at the Paul Avenue house, listen to the whole thing through, pick up the needle, and place it back at the beginning again. Over and over and over and over. It bordered on being an unpleasant experience, to be quite honest. I ACHED. My heart ACHED. I would sit with my ear right next to the speaker, literally pressed up against the speaker, dreaming myself into the world of the musical. I couldn't even really have a conversation about it. Nobody could touch my level of obsession. Well, nobody except my friend Betsy. We would dress up, and act it out. She was Nancy, I was the Artful Dodger.

This was the ushering in, for me, of my dream-world, my fantasy-world, which I still live with today. I am truly the greatest "fan" you will ever meet. I am as loyal as a battered wife. I don't care if the object of my desire makes a bad film, puts out a crappy album, whatever. I will wait, loyal, faithful, for them to return to greatness. But Oliver was the first. And, again, it was almost a painful experience. No matter what I did, no matter how close I sat to the speakers, I couldn't get inside. I couldn't FULLY express how that musical made me feel.

And here is a vivid memory: I was in the den, sitting with my ear pressed up against the speakers, staring at the album cover, lost to the world, listening to the musical for probably the tenth time through, and suddenly the door opened, and my mother peeked her head inside. Her face was very kind, a bit tentative, and apologetic. And she said, with utmost gentleness: "I don't think we're gonna be able to listen to Oliver anymore, okay?" She said it as NICELY as she could.

Now, as an adult, I imagine her and my father sitting in the other room, and they hear the first strains of the overture start up for the tenth time in a row, and the two of them saying, "Oh my GOD, I can't take it anymore!!!"

My whole head got red at her request. So red I felt like it would explode spontaneously off of my neck. Reality crashed into my perfect dream-world. Silently, embarrassed, I took the needle off the record. And sat there, blankly, wondering what the HELL I was going to do with myself NOW.

Cashel's obsession with Star Wars has been raging on unabated for a couple of years now, and it shows no sign of stopping. Funny: I saw the damn movie in its original release, and I have to say that MY obsession with that film pretty much continues on to this day.

I hung out with Cashel in his room for a long time. He was playing feverishly with his Star Wars action figures, letting me know what was going on, informing me of things bluntly: "This is the assassin droid." "Anakin has the dark side in him, but then he goes back to the light side." I would ask him questions and he would answer me forthrightly, after giving the matter some thought.

"Cashel, which one of the Star Wars movies is your favorite?"

Brief moment of contemplation, then matter-of-fact statement: "Attack of the Clones--" (Of course, because he just saw it!!) "And then Phantom Menace."

I nodded. "I think my favorite is Empire Strikes Back."

He glanced at me briefly, took this in, kind of couldn't deal with it, and then went back to playing.

He was singing the Star Wars theme, as he played. I joined in at one point. But I guess I got TOO into it, because he said to me, "Stop." I said, "You don't want me to sing?" He said, "Well ... no ... because ... I am trying to concentrate."

Then would come the random questions from Cashel, his head tilted at me, thoughtful. "Why did the Senator turn the cameras off in her room?"

I said, "Well, I think she was so used to being stared at, and watched, that she just got sick of it. She wanted some privacy so that she could sleep. I mean, how would you feel if your whole life, people were looking at you like this --" I shoved my face right up against his face, with big googly eyes. Cashel burst into laughter. I love how he laughs. It's like that moment in "The Night Before Christmas" where Santa laughs like a bowlful of jelly. Cashel is definitely a bowlful of jelly.

I was then put through rigorous Jedi training. Obi Wan Kenobi was quite a stern taskmaster, I must say. I had a light saber, and I was practicing my moves. I was going in a very Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon direction. Obi Wan Kenobi then froze me like a statue. Told me sternly to not move, because he had to go have an important conference with another Jedi master. Cashel then walked away, leaving me there. Frozen. He was outside the room and I could hear him having a pretend conversation about important galaxy matters. Which was hysterical.

He also said to me, in a tone of huge generosity and open-mindedness, "Girls can be Jedi Knights."

"Phew! Glad to hear it!"

Which Founding Father Are You?

Pretty funny - I think I remember taking this quiz last year and I came up as George Washington.

How does one go from George Washington to Thomas Paine? Have I lost my sanity, my ability to hold my tongue? To chill out?

Quote

"A great writer within any culture changes everything. Because the thing is different afterwards and people comprehend themselves differently. If you take Ireland before James Joyce, and Ireland fifty years afterwards, the reality of being part of the collective life is enhanced and changed."

-- Seamus Heaney

This evening...

I am unable to attend the "Blogger Bash" sadly - A lot of friends are going to be there. So have a couple for me, guys.

I have what is known as "Girl Group" tonight. It's not a consciousness-raising thing, or anything like what it sounds. It is a group of girlfriends who live in the area - some from college - some more recent friends - and once a month we gather, rotating apartments, to drink wine, and talk like FREAKS in the wild. We cover every topic under the sun, but I am sworn to secrecy. Secrets are divulged. Emotional breakdowns occur. We have, on average, one breakdown a month. We take turns. It's not a good "Girl Group" if at least ONE of us doesn't burst into tears. Hysterical laughter also ricochets about, stories are told, everyone shrieks at once, and then everyone falls silent and listens. It's so much fun. I have known many of these women since I was 17 years old.

We've been meeting like this for a couple of years now - without a break. It takes quite a commitment, at times, getting schedules right, etc., but it hasn't fallen apart.

I am friends with a lot of these women's husbands - and the "husbands" (as we call them) try, by devious manipulations, to get all of us to "tell" what happens at "Girl Group". The "wives" are FEROCIOUS about keeping the secrets, but sometimes the "husbands" think that I will be more amenable to revealing what goes on, that I can be bent. They sidle up to me at group parties, and say, "So ... Sheila ... what happened at Group last week?" They are sorely mistaken if they think I am gonna "talk".

I will never talk!

The "husbands" have formed a poker group, in retaliation - but we really don't care - because we came up with our idea first.

I made a pasta dish, I have to go get some wine ... and then I shall be off.

Damn

This is one of the most depressing things I have read all day.

Famous Epitaphs/Last Words

Famous Epitaphs

A reader sent me a bit of trivia she thought I might be interested in (she was right!)

John Keats, great poet, who died in 1821, wrote his own epitaph, which is as follows:

"Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

But actually, the full epitaph reads like this:

This Grave
contains all that was Mortal
of a
Young English Poet
Who
on his Death Bed
in the Bitterness of his Heart
at the Malicious Power of his Enemies
Desired
these words to be engraved on his Tomb Stone
"Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water."

"the Malicious Power of his Enemies" ... Woah.

So this got me to thinking about epitaphs in general. As a kid, me and my siblings had to memorize William Butler Yeats' epitaph, in order to get our allowance of 50 measly cents. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, could knock that epitaph out of my brain.

It is:

Cast a cold eye
On life On death
Horseman pass by

Damn. Now that is something. I could ponder that forever.

There are a couple of other relatively famous epitaphs I am familiar with - (I used to plan out, as a teenager, what I wanted on my tombstone - Finally, I settled on "After life's fitful fever, she sleeps" - Shakespeare - I was insane. I was 15 years old, picking out the best epitaph for myself.)

Anyway, speaking of Shakespeare, here is his epitaph, written on his grave in Stratford-on-Avon:

Good friend for Jesus's sake forbear
To dig the dust enclosed here
Blest be the man that spares these stones
And cursed be he that moves my bones

Got it, Bill. We won't move your bones. We promise.

Other epitaphs I know by heart - I don't know if any of my readers out there also have an interest in this kind of thing - but if you do, feel free to pipe up.

Jack Dempsey's epitaph was (and I LOVE this):

A Gentle Man and a Gentleman

Robert Frost has as his epitaph (and this is certainly something to keep me up at night, pondering):

I had A Lover's Quarrel With The World

Me too. Me too.

Emily Dickinson, like Keats, wrote her own. It says it all:

Called Back

F. Scott Fitzgerald has, as his epitaph, the famous last line of Gatsby:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

(Come to think of it, I wouldn't mind having that as my epitaph either ... Hm. Must make a note of it.)

Thomas Jefferson wrote his own:

Here was buried Thomas Jefferson,
author of the Declaration of American Independence,
of the statute of Virginia for religious freedom,
and father of the University of Virginia.

And of course, the epitaph of the Unknown Soldier, which everybody knows:

Here Rests in
Honored Glory
An American
Soldier
Known But to God

And finally - Jack London - who has this mysterious phrase as his epitaph:

The Stone the Builders Rejected

Famous Last Words

Another small obsessive side of me collects "famous last words". A couple of years ago I met a man at a party - and very soon into our conversing, we realized that we both had little compilations of "famous last words" - We loved them. We shared notes, sending emails back and forth, exchanging "last words". Needless to say, I fell madly madly madly in love with him in a 24 hour period. Oh MAN did I have it bad for this guy. It didn't work out, sadly, but I still have a nice little compilation of "famous last words". So here they be:

John Adams - died July 4, 1826 "Thomas Jefferson--still survives..." (He didn't know Jefferson had died earlier the same day - They both died on July 4?? I mean - come ON)

On the exact same day, Thomas Jefferson died. He began slipping in and out of a coma. At one point, he woke up and said, "Is it the Fourth?" Then he died. I have tears in my eyes. I have no idea if that is actually true - or just a rumor - It is reported in his biographies, with caveats - "Rumor has it..." etc. But I choose to believe it.

Ethan Allen, American Revolutionary general, died in 1789, and was told by his doctor, "General, I fear the angels are waiting for you." Ethan Allen responded, "Waiting are they? Waiting are they? Well--let 'em wait." Those were his last words.

Lady Nancy Astor, fell very ill, and woke up, to find her entire family standing around her bed. She said, "Am I dying or is this my birthday?" These were her last words.

James Joyce apparently said, as his last words, "Does nobody understand?" I don't seem to recall this fact being told in the Ellmann biography, though, so it may not be true. No, Jim, nobody really does understand - but your work will live on regardless. Genius lives. Understanding is over-rated.

Tallulah Bankhead, wild-woman actress, died in 1968. Her last words were, "Codeine . . . bourbon."

P. T. Barnum, died in 1891. His last words were, "How were the receipts today at Madison Square Garden?"

I think my favorite might be Beethoven's last words: "Friends applaud, the comedy is finished." Jesus. Amazing.

Humphrey Bogart's last words are almost TOO perfect. "I should never have switched from Scotch to Martinis." Classic.

Napoleon died, murmuring, "Josephine ... Josephine ..."

Oh, and the following was a contribution from the man I met at the party. It is so damn funny.

Dominique Bouhours, who was one of those strict hard-nosed French grammarians, died in 1702. Last words were: "I am about to -- or I am going to -- die: either expression is correct."

Tacitus tells us that Caligula, who was stabbed to death by his own guards in 41 AD, had as his last words the following scream: "I am still alive!"

Louise, Queen of Prussia, who died in 1820, faced the harsh realities in her last moments, and said, before dying, "I am a Queen, but I have not the power to move my arms."

Chekhov's last words are also a personal favorite of mine. They seem to encapsulate exactly what I love about his writing, his outlook on life: "I am dying. I haven't drunk champagne for a long time."

Chopin's last words are horrific. He died of tuberculosis. His last words are: "The earth is suffocating . . . Swear to make them cut me open, so that I won't be buried alive." A terrible death.

Very different from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's last words. Her husband asked her how she felt. She replied, "Beautiful" and died. You couldn't ask for a nicer death.

Winston's Churchill's last words before slipping into a coma were: "I'm bored with it all." 9 days after saying that, he died.

Joan Crawford, the old bitch, was on her death-bed. Her housekeeper started to pray out loud to God. Joan Crawford snapped, "Damn it . . . Don't you dare ask God to help me." Then Mommie Dearest died.

Karl Marx died in 1883. As he lay dying, his housekeeper apparently raced in with a pad of paper, and hovered over him, waiting, literally waiting for him to die, so that she could write down his last words for posterity. Marx barked at her, "Go on, get out - last words are for fools who haven't said enough."

Teddy Roosevelt said, bluntly, "Put out the light." and then died.

Charles Darwin, unsurprisingly, stated, "I am not the least afraid to die." And then promptly died.

(It's incredible how people reveal themselves so completely in these intimate vulnerable last moments.)

I find Edison's last words so comforting, so mysterious. I wonder what it was he saw: "It is very beautiful over there."

Eugene O'Neill's last words, which hold a world of grief and loss, and he's also PISSED, "I knew it. I knew it. Born in a hotel room - and God damn it - died in a hotel room."

Edmund Gwenn, an actor in the 30s and 40s (Miracle on 34th Street, Life with Father, a couple of Lassie films) said, when someone asked him if it was "tough" facing death: "Yes, it's tough, but not as tough as doing comedy." Then he died. God bless him.

Victor Hugo said, as his last words before death, something which chills me, "I see black light." Maybe he saw a "darkling plain".

Boris Pasternak died saying the following, and I know it's uncompassionate of me, but I find his last words rather comical: "Good-bye . . . why am I hemorrhaging?"

Anna Pavlova, one of the most famous ballerinas who ever lived, said before she died, in 1931, "Get my swan costume ready."

General John Sedgwick, Union Commander in the Civil War, was killed in battle in 1864, saying, "They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist. . . ."

A relatively famous (and comi-tragic) one is the last words of Dylan Thomas, who reportedly said, "I've had eighteen straight whiskies, I think that's the record . . ."

This next one cracks my heart in two. Jesus. If he only knew. Leonardo DaVinci's last words were, "I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have."

Oscar Wilde's might be the most famous of all, and for good reason. "Either that wallpaper goes, or I do." Clearly, the wallpaper stayed.

Diary Friday

So last week's Diary Friday was a mortifying entry from my journal during the O'Malley Ireland trip when I was 14. I am going to continue in that theme of Embarrassment, and post yet another entry from that journal.

I went out last night with my great friend David, who loved last week's entry, but he, as a father of two, was a bit in awe of my parents taking 4 small children to Ireland for a month. I am a bit in awe of it, too, although, in memory, they were very matter-of-fact. They took us out of school, we ranged in age from 14 to 4 - and we lived in B&Bs across Ireland, traveling around in a teeny car, Siobhan (the 4 year old) sitting on my mother's lap in the front seat. Completely dangerously, but whatever - It was the tenor of the times. I know we all used to roll around in the back seat during family trips, absolutely no seat belts on, nothing. Or we would literally STAND in the front seat, our 3 foot tall bodies erect and unafraid, inches away from the windshield. Hilarious.

Anyway - I have no idea how my parents did it, how they got up the gumption to do this - It's really quite amazing to me.

By the end of the trip, I was so damn sick of looking at old monasteries that I would sit in the car, and refuse to move.

The following entry is very very very embarrassing. There I am, in Ireland, and all I can talk about is the TV shows I watch, the stars I love, Gregory freakin' Harrison of all people ... It's so funny.

And yet also kind of sad.

It's a typical adolescent girl's journal entry, with a complete overuse of italics.

April 20, 1982

We left bright and early for Cork. I was so exhausted I slept the whole way.

Today is sort of grey but not bad. We are staying in the St. Kilda's B&B, a huge brick house in town. Cork - oh, I have been waiting to be in a really big city for a long time. The bustle -- the drive -- I love it. Our rooms are really large and I have a double bed all to myself. To be truthful, though, the view from the window stinks. An alley with clothes hanging out on lines. Oh, well. I love the city.

After we settled down and I relaxed, we walked into town to find a coffee shop. I watched all the kids in uniforms come flooding out of the schools for lunch. It took us a while to find a place but we spotted a cafe in this huge internal mall that sold sugar doughnuts. The stools were really high. The doughnuts were all right, to say the most. Since it was lunch hour, 1000s of kids were in every coffee shop we passed and sitting out on steps and benches. They practically take over Cork for an hour.

After a while, we got up and started to look around the mall. They had a great bookstore and a great poster store with posters of Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and ... drumroll ... HARRISON FORD!!! Oh, I wanted it so much, and I still can't figure out why I didn't ask Mum. Probably because she would have said, "Well, we don't have to get that in Ireland." But that's why it would have been so special.

We went outside and while Mum and Jean went to the Tourist Office, me, Dad, Bren, and Siobhan sat down beside the river (very polluted). It was so so sunny and bright. Everything glared and we had to squint. The park was quiet, in great contrast to the mad rush of millions of kids a quarter of an hour ago. Siobhan got big thrills by throwing rocks in the water and all that sun on my back was starting to make me drowsy. I put my head down and dozed off until Mum and Jean came back. They had a few pamphlets on tourist things in Cork. Dad wanted to go back to some bookstores and Jean and Siobhan were dying to go on a double-decker bus.

And so we went back to the Tourist Office, a cool soft place with no blaring lights to find out where to get on the bus. So we went back out. Oh, I love the city. There was a big fountain and everything on the go. Stripes is playing at the cinema. Bill Murray's face makes me laugh. We found the bus stop and just in time. A big shiny green double-decker was waiting. We ran on, went up the stairway, and sat down up front. I wasn't really sweating in the thrill of it all, but it was neat to be so high.

But we had to get off two bus-stops later, right after the conductor collected our fare.

We came back up to our rooms and I studied English for a while, so I could watch Trapper John, M.D., with gorgeous Gregory Harrison. I really got a lot done, so I drew for a while while Mum and Dad went out to supper. When it was 7:55 (TV shows are always on at the strangest times here), we all trooped down the stairs to the lounge, a nice comfy room with a big heater. A girl, Paula (13) was there doing her homework. I liked the look of her at first, but then when Gregory came on and I said, "Oh, I like him", she snorted and covered her mouth. And through the whole show, she kept groaning and flipping through all her school books, wanting us to think, "Oh, my, what a lot of hard work she has. Irish kids have so much homework." We didn't say a word.

Dad found a bookstore with all these second-hand Enid Blyton's for only 35p each. So he's going to let me buy them all!! YAY!

Comments on the above from my present-day self:

-- Notice how I absolutely scorn the doughnuts. "They were all right, to say the MOST." Sheila - why are you judging the doughnuts so contemptuously?

-- I am absolutely mortified that I felt the name Harrison Ford deserved a "drumroll". That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.

-- Oh, and "Jean and Siobhan couldn't wait to go on a double-decker" - I was above such simple pleasures, I say "I wasn't really sweating in the thrill of it all.." GOD! That is SO OBNOXIOUS! Jean, Siobhan - I apologize. I'm sure I was just as thrilled as they were, but I acted all nonchalant and over it. "Yeah, whatever, I'm just goin' on a double-decker ... No big deal ... But what REALLY excites me is ... drumroll, please ... a poster of Harrison Ford..."

-- And I completely remember the heavy annoyed sighs of Paula, the irritable Irish girl. I set my jaw, in true American fashion, and REFUSED to be impressed with how much homework she had. It was the least I could do for my country.

-- Oh, and the detail of Siobhan, 4 year old Siobhan, throwing rocks into the polluted river running through Cork ... It just cracks my heart.

-- Enid Blyton's! HA HA Her name just came up recently on my blog, during the discussion of favorite childhood books. But what is so amusing is that I am in IRELAND and I am dying to buy things I just as easily could buy at the Midland Mall. But I knew in my heart that it would be DIFFERENT, and more "special" if I bought an Enid Blyton book in Ireland - It would be very very very different.

Television

I do not have television right now. Last night I got together with my friend (and old roommate - wrote an essay about her here) - and we caught up. It has been a while. Also, I lived with her for almost 9 years - We are used to being "caught up" with each other on a daily and intimate level along the lines of "Oooh, you got your eyebrows waxed!" Or "I had this crazy dream last night..." Or "Let me read you the email I just got from that guy we met a couple nights ago..."

So seeing each other once every couple of weeks is quite disconcerting. Now we have to do big catch-ups. How's your life, are you dating anyone, how's your show going, how is your family?

We are still not used to it.

We hung out in her candlelit apartment, we talked, we rolled about roaring with laughter. Nobody makes me laugh like Jen. And her laugh! I know you haven't met her and all, and maybe you have someone in your life who you THINK has the best laugh - but you haven't heard Jen's laugh!

And then - we watched television.

Jen admitted to me in a shamefaced way that she is addicted to "The Apprentice", the new reality show, starring Donald Trump. Jen is a discerning person, Jen has good taste, but Jen has succumbed. And after watching "The Apprentice" with her, I can see why. Now I'M addicted.

It was odd - I was absolutely entranced by the television. By the commercials. It was hypnotic. Jen surfed around, channel to channel, and I watched, agog. So weird. In a way, I'm glad I don't have TV because my time would be taken up at night, surfing around for hours. But I am sorry that I missed Howard Dean's "AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGH" speech. (I loved Jane Galt's description of comments overheard the next day about the speech. I loved the one guy who said, "What does this say? He's angry and he's got an atlas.")

I couldn't take my eyes off the television. I drank in the images.

And within 2 seconds, I got COMPLETELY sucked into "The Apprentice".

The thrust of this episode was that they would all be challenged on negotiating techniques. They all had assignments: get golf clubs for THIS price, get your legs waxed for THIS price ... The two teams (split up between men and women) raced around the city, trying to get these vendors to come down in their prices.

Although the women did win the challenge, (they crushed the guys) I was completely disgusted by what they resorted to. These are business women, these are professional women, and they resorted to little-girl pleading techniques - One assignment was they had to get squid at a certain price, and one of the women showed the fish vendor her concave belly, ostensibly to say "I'm so hungry, look how hungry I am!" But what it really was was a flirtatious gesture. She was showing some SKIN to get what she wanted.

And the guys, meanwhile, were using more recognizably corporate negotiating techniques - and not having as much luck.

I found it gross. Demeaning. And it was even worse (or more telling) that the girls WON with that shit. Only one of them did not use her sexuality to get what she wanted. She basically talked the golf-club seller down, telling him what HE would get out of it, making it seem like HE was winning.

I was proud of her. I was proud of my SEX at that moment. I was embarrassed to be a woman watching that other shit. But ah, what an irony: they won the challenge. They crushed the guys. So I suppose flashing your skin during a negotiation is acceptable. I wonder how that would work if you were trying to negotiate a deal with a corporation.

"Oh, come on, PLEASE give us what we want! Look at my underwear!! Aren't my panties so cute???"

Listen to how much I am talking about this. I am a goofball. I do not have television. I found the entire thing completely captivating.

Afterwards, Jen and I discussed the show, as seriously as if it were Tolstoy.

It was a blast.

The hoax of "debriefing"

Fantastic article in The New Yorker on grief and trauma counseling. I have quite a bit to say about this but not a lot of time at the moment.

The article discusses, with the context of September 11, the trend of grief counseling - grief counselors rushing to the scene of the trauma, to de-brief those who witnessed it, to try to head off any debilitating Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

There was a WONDERFUL essay in The New York Times about a year ago - which I did print out - I'll have to dig it up out of my files to quote from it - but it was called "In Praise of Repression". The title certainly caught my eye, because I, like so many others, have been taught, by our culture more than anything else, that repression of anything is bad. Unhealthy.

The author, cannot remember her name, said something like, "In the immediate wake of September 11, there were 5 grief counselors for every traumatized person. That image alone is something I am going to need to repress."

In the last couple of years - I would say since September 11 - I have come to the conclusion that repression of terrible events is not only NOT bad, but it can be the psyche's way of healing itself. This is not always the case, and there are certainly some people who become so debilitated by their trauma that they can no longer function, they start drinking heavily, they abandon their families, whatever. They are unaccustomed to having strong emotions of any kind, and so they freak out. But in the New York Times piece - follow-up had been done a year later, with many of the survivors of the catastrophe, and they found that those people who successfully "repressed", who did not continuously re-live that day, were the ones who had a high quality of life, who had survived psychologically. People re-committed themselves to their families, people became workaholics, people played golf like maniacs. These are coping mechanisms, yes, but they are coping mechanisms on the side of LIFE. What good does it do to keep talking about it, keep reliving it?

Dredging up the pain, re-living memories (especially very soon after the event) is not only not helpful, but can be quite damaging.

Read the article in The New Yorker - I thought it was incredible. I'll have more to say about it, when I have time.

Favorite Poem

Like Dave J said in the comments below - choosing a favorite line from Shakespeare is like choosing your favorite parent - it's wrong! I do agree - and my changes will fluctuate on an almost daily basis, but I do love hearing everybody's choices.

So - how about just favorite poems, in general? What are your favorite poems?

I have so many - Yeats' "The Second Coming" is surely one, Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium" is another. I love Mary Oliver's poems.

But I think, hovering over all of these, is the following poem by Auden. It's one of the few poems I know by heart.

It's another one of those pieces of writing which has followed me through my life, showing up at different moments, providing different insights. It almost doesn't seem to be the same poem, from day to day.

On a personal note, too, this poem, along with the Hail Mary, was almost a mantra during the crazy day of September 11 - and the chaotic days following. I saw the towers fall with my own eyes. My sister Siobhan who worked down there was out of communication and missing for 3 hours. The air was literally filled with the sound of screaming. I saw grown men in suits fall to their knees and scream, "NO" up at the sky.

Later that night, raw and still stunned, I lay in my bed, sleep was months away, and said Auden's poem to myself in the dark.

I still couldn't cry - it was WEEKS before I would shed a tear - but there was something comforting and eternal in Auden's words. I cherish this poem because of what it meant to me during those terrible days. It's that last line, man ... It's the very last line that makes this poem great. And true.

The More Loving One
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now i see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

So - I told you mine, now you tell me yours - Favorite poem?

Favorite line from Shakespeare...

I know ... how can one choose, right?

With all that he wrote, and all of the genius phrases, I think this might be my favorite:

How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

-- Merchant of Venice, Act 5, Sc. 1

I remember when I first heard that line, I was a kid ... and at the word "naughty" this strange chill went up my back. A chill of fear, and foreboding ... "Naughty" is such a potent world to a child. To think of the entire "world" as naughty ...

As I have grown up, that line has taken on different meanings for me, it has different impacts at different times ... but it's always with me, for some reason.

What are your favorite lines from Shakespeare? Who cares if it's paraphrased ... tell me the lines you love, the lines you carry with you.

From Jung to Joyce

I don't write about James Joyce enough here. I suppose I feel that the quote which floats above in the masthead, and has since the beginning of this blog, says it all. But I love Joyce, and I love to think about him, and puzzle over him, and marvel at him. Just as he predicted: "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality", he proclaimed.

"Keep the professors busy for centuries..."

Carl Jung wrote a letter to Joyce about Ulysses, which I will print here in its entirety.

But first - a bit about Molly Bloom, about Nora Joyce, and about rhododendrons. Richard Ellmann, in his masterful biography of James Joyce, wrote:

Joyce had fixed upon June 16, 1904, as the date of Ulysses because it was the anniversary of his first walk with Nora Barnacle. He was able to obtain, perhaps on his last visit to Dublin, copies of the newspapers of that day. In his book, Bloom's fondest memory is of a moment of affection plighted among the rhododendrons on Howth, and so is Mrs. Bloom's; it is with her recollection of it that the book ends. In this sense Ulysses is an epithalamium; love is its cause of motion. The spirit is liberated from its bonds through a eucharistic occasion, an occasion characterized by the joy that, even as a young man, Joyce had praised as the emotion in comedy which makes it a higher form than tragedy. Though such occasions are as rare as miracles, they are permanently sustaining; and unlike miracles, they require no divine intercession. They arise in quintessential purity from the mottled life of everyday.

Leopold Bloom's sensuous memories of Molly Bloom amongst the rhododendrons are reflected back to him, during Molly Bloom's stream-of-consciousness monologue at the end of the book, 40 pages without a period or a comma. Nora Joyce apparently was quite cavalier with her punctuation, and Joyce, with his belief in the underlying meaning and sense of things, thought that that said something about the female mind. The deeper subconscious level, which is, of course, always a MESS.

And now, onto Carl Jung. Jung had analyzed (briefly) Joyce's daughter, who was schizophrenic, but I suppose Jung eventually realized the truth of Sigmund Freud's statement about the Irish and psychiatrists, because Lucia did not stay with Jung for long.

But anyway, upon reading Ulysses, Jung wrote this letter to James Joyce. Savor every word. Joyce did!

Dear Sir,

Your Ulysses has presented the world such an upsetting psychological problem, that repeatedly I have been called in as a supposed authority on psychological matters.

Ulysses proved to be an exceedingly hard nut and it has forced my mind not only to most unusual efforts, but also to rather extravagant peregrinations (speaking from the standpoint of a scientist). Your book as a whole has given me no end of trouble and I was brooding over it for about three years until I succeeded to put myself into it. But I must tell you that I'm profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it. I shall probably never be quite sure whether I did enjoy it, because it meant too much grinding of nerves and of grey matter. I also don't know whether you will enjoy what I have written about Ulysses because I couldn't help telling the world how much I was bored, how I grumbled, how I cursed and how I admired. The 40 pages of non stop run at the end is a string of veritable psychological peaches. I suppose the devil's grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman, I didn't.

Well I just try to recommend my little essay to you, as an amusing attempt of a perfect stranger that went astray in the labyrinth of your Ulysses and happened to get out of it again by sheer good luck. At all events you may gather from my article what Ulysses has done to a supposedly balanced psychologist.

With the expression of my deepest appreciation, I remain, dear Sir,

Yours faithfully,
C.G. Jung

I suppose the devil's grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman, I didn't.

Joyce was very proud of this letter, very proud that he had won Jung's boredom and admiration, that he had made Jung curse him. Joyce read it out loud to a group of people, Nora included. Nora's comment was typically brief. She turned to someone else and said, after hearing the quote about "the real psychology of a woman", "Jim knows nothing at all about women."

Just for fun - just so you can read and decide for yourself - here is the "rhododendron episode" which ends the entirety of Ulysses. But I'll let Nora Joyce have the last word.

the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Nora's unsentimental response to all of this was: "I guess the man's a genius, but what a dirty mind he has, hasn't he?"

Speaking of "the greatest speeches of the 20th century"...

Here is the full text of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech, delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963.

"I have a dream"

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity. But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free.

One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.

So we have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition. In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.

This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.

So we have come to cash this check -- a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God's children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment and to underestimate the determination of the Negro. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights.

The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges. But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. we must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" we can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.

Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal." I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor's lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring." And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania! Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado! Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California! But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia! Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee! Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

The Czech Republic - Essays

Introductory words

Part I - History

Part II - The 20th Century

Part III - Vaclav Havel's speech, January 1, 1990

Part IV - Ivan Klima - The Spirit of Prague

The Czech Republic - Part IV - The Spirit of Prague

Here are some excerpts from Ivan Klima's wonderful collection of essays "The Spirit of Prague". Klima's a great novelist, too. I highly recommend his work. Here he talks about Prague itself, he talks about Havel, about Kafka, about the "velvet revolution". Don't miss these excerpts, and check out that book if you ever get the chance.

The Czech Republic - Part IV - The Spirit of Prague

Klima on Prague:

The Prague of past eras is gone. No one can bring the murdered back to life, and most of those who were driven out will probably never return to the city. Nevertheless Prague has survived and has, finally, tasted freedom again. Its spirit is intact as well. This manifested itself vividly during the revolution that opened the way to freedom in 1989. Revolutions are usually marked by high-sounding slogans and flags; blood flows, or at least glass is shattered and stones fly.

The November revolution, which earned the epithet "velvet", differed from other revolutions not only in its peacefulness, but also in the main weapon used in the struggle. It was ridicule. Almost every available space in Prague -- the walls of the buildings, the subway stations, the windows of buses and streetcars, shop windows, lampposts, even statues and monuments -- were covered, in the space of a few days, with an unbelievable number of signs and posters. Although the slogans had a single object -- to overthrow the dictatorship -- their tone was light, ironic. The citizens of Prague delivered the coup de grace to their despised rulers not with a sword, but with a joke. Yet at the heart of this original, unemotional style of struggle there dwelt a stunning passion. It was the most recent and perhaps the most remarkable paradox to date in the life of this remarkable city.

Klima on Kafka

What you call the dream world was, for Kafka, the real world -- the world in which order reigned, in which people were able to grow fond of each other, make love, raise families, be orderly in all their duties -- but for him, with his obsessive truthfulness, this world was unattainable. His heroes suffered not because they could not realize their dreams, but because they were not strong enough properly to enter the real world, to fulfill their duty.

The reason Kafka was banned under communist regimes is explained in a single sentence by the hero of my novel Love and Garbage: "What matters most about Kafka's personality is his honesty." A regime that is built on deception, that asks people to pretend, that demands external agreement without caring about the inner conviction of those to whom it turns for consent, a regime afraid of anyone who asks about the sense of his actions, cannot allow anyone whose veracity attained such fascinating or even terrifying completeness to speak to the people.

If you ask what Kafka meant to me, we get back to the question we somehow keep circling. On the whole Kafka was an unpolitical writer. I like to quote the entry in his diary for 2 August 1914. "Germany has declared war on Russia. -- Swimming in the afternoon." Here the historic, world-shaking plane and the personal one are exactly level ...

Kafka's metaphors were so powerful that they far exceeded his original intentions. I know that The Trial as well as "In the Penal Colony" have been explained as ingenious prophecies of the terrible fate that befell the Jewish nation during the war, which broke out fifteen years after Kafka's death. But it was no prophecy of genius; these works merely prove that a creator who knows how to reflect his most personal experiences deeply and truthfully also touches the suprapersonal or social spheres. Again I am answering the question about political content in literature. Literature doesn't have to scratch around for political realities, or even worry about systems that come and go; it can transcend them and still answer questions that the system evokes in people.

This is the most important lesson that I extracted for myself from Kafka.

Klima on Havel

Havel's candidacy for president and his later election were, in the first place, an expression of the precipitate, truly revolutionary course of events in this country. When I was returning from a meeting of one of the committees of Civic Forum [the organization Havel formed in November, 1989, to investigate police brutality] one day towards the end of November, my friends and I were saying to each other that the time was near when we should nominate our candidate for the office of president. We agreed then that the only candidate to consider, for he enjoyed the relatively wide support of the public, was Alexander Dubcek. But it became clear a few days later that the revolution had gone beyond the point where any candidate who was connected, if only by his past, with the Communist Party, was acceptable to the younger generation of Czechs.

At that moment the only suitable candidate emerged -- Vaclav Havel.

To a certain sector of the Czech public, Havel was, indeed, more or less unknown, or known as the son of a rich capitalist, even as a convict, but the revolutionary ethos that seized the nation brought about a change of attitude. In a certain atmosphere, in the midst of a crowd, however civil and restrained, an individual suddenly identifies himself with the prevailing mood and state of mind, and captures the crowd's enthusiasm. It's true that the majority of the country shared in the doings of the former system, but it's also true that the majority hated it just because it had made them complicit in its awfulness, and hardly anyone still identified himself with that regime which had so often humiliated, deceived and cheated them.

Within a few days, Havel became the symbol of revolutionary change, the man who would lead society out of its crisis.

Klima on fear and power

If power becomes so total that it can commit any arbitrary act, can falsely accuse anyone, arrest, try and sentence him for imaginary crimes, confiscate his property, his job, his freedom and, on top of it all, publicly dishonor him with insults, then fear can also become so total that almost none of those things need actually be done to maintain it. The powers that be need only occasionally demonstrate that they are willing and able to behave arbitrarily. We live in a world in which the powerful govern by means unlike anything humanity has ever known. They can control and exterminate individuals and entire peoples. As long as these means exist, our world will remain a world of fear.

The fear that sleeps in the beds of the powerless gives a strong impetus to their dreams and their actions. The powerless person longing to escape his anxiety usually sees only two ways out: to flee beyond the reach of the hostile powers, or to become powerful himself. Fear engenders dreams of power.

...Power is soulless and it is derived from soullessness. It builds on it and draws its strength from it. Soullessness keeps company with fear. People who have given up their souls have only a body, and it is the body they are terrified for ... People who have not given up their souls can overcome fear because they know that in the end, fear comes from within and not from without. The person who has let anxiety from the external world replace his soul can never drive out his fear. Anyone who has defended his soul, his inner integrity, and is prepared to surrender everything, to risk even his freedom of movement and, in extreme need, even his life, cannot be broken by fear and is thus beyond the reach of power. He becomes free, he becomes a partner of power, not as a competitor in the struggle for control of the country, people and things, but as a living reminder of the mendacity and the transcience of everything power defends and represents ...

A person who, out of inner need, consistently stands up to the powerful, risking everything, has a single small hope: that by his actions, he will remind those in power where that power came from, what its origins are and what their responsibility is, and perhaps he will make them a little more human.

Klima on the 1968 invasion

The invasion of my country in August 1968 was a singular act in modern history: it was the only time a foreign country had intervened militarily in the peaceful affairs of a neighbor to which it was allegedly tied with bonds of friendship. The invasion was, of course, traumatic for most citizens ... But the shameful nature of the invasion indelibly tarnished all those whose intention it was to renew the old-style totalitarian power.

As I have said, the appearance of being cultured and civilized is particularly important in Czech lands, where centuries of national and cultural repression have made culture, and especially literature, popular and highly respected. The powers-that-be needed poets to cloak their intentions and actions in verse ... But they needed them pliant, or even broken ... The powers-that-be were usually able to win over a part of the intellectual elite through promises, bribery, concessions and sometimes even by force.

But how could a power that was indelibly tarnished win them over? It could not. It sensed its own isolation and therefore decided to use compulsion. The early 70s were a turning-point for both the powers-that-be and for Czech culture. The regime decided to break those who, in their eyes, represented that culture, even at the cost of destroying the culture altogether. For their part, the members of the intellectual elite decided that they would rather be destroyed than have anything to do with this indelibly tarnished power.

Klima on the 1989 velvet revolution

The authorities frequently used police brutality to break up memorial assemblies to commemorate the country's national holiday or the memory of Jan Palach ... Those who came to pay their respects to a person who symbolized the possibility of individual protest taken to its furthest extreme became the object of a violent attack by special units who used truncheons, water-cannons and tear-gas. People, mostly the young, decided not to give way to violence.

For 5 consecutive days the peaceful assemblies were repeated, and on four occasions the police used violence to break them up. Several people were arrested, Vaclav Havel among them.

During these events, which aroused the emotions of the whole country, the cruel truth about power was publicly revealed for the first time. At this critical juncture, the government could not find a single person with sufficient authority to address the nation. No one was willing to give public support to the regime, but many could be found to protest against police brutality, against imprisoning the innocent. Among the protestors were actors, filmmakers, and writers who, until then, the regime had believed to be on "its side".

In this critical situation, the authorities -- and it is hard to say whether this was out of stupidity or desperation or arrogance, or the awareness that they were indeed indelibly tarnished -- refused all invitations by the cultural opposition to take part in a dialogue. The deep chasm between totalitarian power and all the "shaken", to use Patocka's term, became unbridgeable. It was clear that any further error, any further act of arrogance, might be fatal.

What happened in November 1989 is well known. As an eyewitness and a participant, I wish to emphasize that this revoltuion, which really was the outcome of a clash between culture and power, was the most non-violent revolution imaginable. In the mass meetings attended by up to three-quarters of a million people, no one was hurt, not a window was broken, not a car damaged. Many of the tens of thousands of pamphlets that flooded Prague and other cities and towns urged people to peaceful, tolerant action; not one called for ciolence. For those who still believe in the power of culture, the power of words, of good and of love, and their dominance over violence, who believe that neither the poet nor Archimedes, in their struggle against the man in uniform, are beaten before they begin, the Prague revolution must have been an inspiration.

Amen!

The Czech Republic - Part III - Vaclav Havel's speech in 1990

Vaclav Havel made a speech on January 1, 1990, immediately following all of the extraordinary changes which had occurred in his country. This speech along with many many others made it into the book I have of "Speeches of the 20th Century".

The first time I read it, I was sitting on a crowded subway. By the end, tears were rolling down my face. In retrospect, I think that is hysterical. If anyone noticed I was crying, I am sure they would never have guessed the reason - and would have thought I was insane if they had asked:

"Ma'am, are you all right? Why are you crying? Did your boyfriend break up with you?"

"Oh ... uh ... no. I'm crying because of Vaclav Havel's speech to the Czech people in 1990."

".....Oh..."

Havel's speech, broadcast on the radio, set the tone for all that was to follow. It is referred to as "the contaminated moral environment" speech. After decades of double-speak, decades of being lied to by their own government, decades of muffling their true sentiments, Vaclav Havel stood up and told the truth. He had been preparing for this moment since the 1960s.

And that's another thing. We, as human beings, can recognize truth when we hear it. We know when we're being lied to, deceived. Truth is unmistakable, and Havel knew that. And Havel did not let the Czech people off the hook - another reason why the "velvet revolution" was so amazing. It was not about pointing fingers, screaming, "YOU DID THIS TO US". Havel encouraged the Czech people to take responsibility in their destinies, to take responsibility for having endured the tyranny for so long. The "contaminated moral environment" is not only addressing the Communist regime. He addressed that comment to every Czech person who had tolerated living under tyranny. No passing the buck, no blame. Take responsibility.

Imagine. How many leaders ever speak to their people in such a way? This speech is one of the myriad reasons that Vaclav Havel is one of my political heroes.

Quotes from his extraordinary speech - (the last line makes me want to cheer):

The Czech Republic - Havel's speech, Jan. 1990

Our country is not flourishing. The enormous creative and spiritual potential of our nation is not being used sensibly ... We have polluted our soil, our rivers and forests, bequeathed to us by our ancestors, and we have today the most contaminated environment in Europe. Adult people in our country die earlier than in most other European countries.

But all this is still not the main problem. The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous ...

The previous regime -- armed with its arrogant and intolerant ideology -- reduced man to a force of production and nature to a tool of production ... It reduced gifted and autonomous people, skillfully working in their own country, to nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy, and stinking machine, whose real meaning is not clear to anyone ...

When I talk about contaminated moral atmosphere ... I am talking about all of us. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all -- though naturally to differing extremes -- responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery; none of us is just its victim: we are all also its co-creators ...

We have to accept this legacy as a sin we committed against ourselves. If we accept it as such, we will understand that it is up to us all, and up to us only, to do something about it. We cannot blame the previous rulers for everything, not only because it would be untrue but also because it could blunt the duty that each of us faces today, namely, the obligation to act independently, freely, reasonably and quickly ... Freedom and democracy include participation and therefore responsibility from us all.

If we realize this, then all the horrors that the new Czechoslovak democracy inherited will cease to appear so terrible. If we realize this, hope will return to our hearts ...

In the effort to rectify matters ... we have something to lean on. The recent period -- and in particular, the last six weeks of our peaceful revolution -- has shown the enormous human, moral, and spiritual potential and civil culture that slumbered in our society under the enforced mask of apathy. Whenever someone categorically claimed that we were this or that, I always objected that society is a very mysterious creature and that it is not wise to trust only the face it presents to you. I am happy that I was not mistaken. Everywhere in the world people wonder where those meek, humiliated, skeptical, and seemingly cynical citizens of Czechoslovakia found the marvelous strength to shake from their shoulders in several weeks and in a decent and peaceful way the totalitarian yoke...

There are free elections and an election campaign ahead of us. Let us not allow this struggle to dirty the so far clean face of our gentle revoltuion ... It is not really important now which party, club, or group will prevail in the elections. The important thing is that the winners will be the best of us, in the moral, civil, political and professional sense, regardless of their political affiliations ...

In conclusion, I would like to say that I want to be a president who will speak less and work more. To be a president who will ... always be present among his fellow citizens and listen to them well.

You may ask what kind of republic I dream of. Let me reply: I dream of a republic independent, free, and democratic, of a republic economically prosperous and yet socially just, in short, of a humane republic which serves the individual and which therefore holds the hope that the individual will serve it in turn. Of a republic of well-rounded people, because without such it is impossible to solve any of our problems, human, economic, ecological, social, or political.

People, your government has returned to you!

The Czech Republic - Part II - The 20th Century

This is mercilessly long. Just a little heads-up. It's the story of Czechoslovakia throughout the tumultuous 20th century.

The Czech Republic - Part II - The 20th Century

Post World War I... World War I ended with the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the Czechs won recognition as a free and independent state. Actually, the Czech people and the Slovak people decided to join up and unite. They created what became known as Czechoslovakia: a single federal state of two equal republics. Things were moving right along, going well, until the Great Depression came, and they, like everybody else, fell on hard times. The economy plummeted so low that the Slovaks started thinking they should secede (as though the rest of the world wasn't suffering as well, and it was the Czechs who were holding the Slovaks back!) So there were definitely some problems, some underlying tension in this unification.

World War II
But all of that became meaningless with the outbreak of World War II. Czechoslovakia's location was disastrous for them. I mean, in actuality, their location was strategically fantastic for them in other times. They sat right on one of those most significant land routes in Europe, which was all very good for shipping goods in and out, for their military to move in and out, for trade to travel. But with all of Europe gone to hell, Czechoslovakia was caught right in the middle.

Look at a map of Czechoslovakia, and take a look at the countries surrounding them (at the time, Slovakia was part of the nation though, of course). It is obvious how trapped they were. It is like they are trapped in a vise: Germany chomping on them to the West like a big Pacman, Austria yawning beneath them like quicksand.

Czechoslovakia had millions of German-speakers, who got caught up in the nationalistic fever happening in the Pacman-country to the West. They wanted to join their country-men. They NEEDED to join their German countrymen. Hitler agreed. This is the whole "Sudetenland German" problem. The first terrible moment of appeasement.

The Munich Agreement, the betrayal of the Allies
And this is where Czechoslovakia was sold down the river in the Munich Agreement in 1938. Hitler demanded that the Sudetenland be returned to him. And then (famous last words): "That will be my last demand! All I want is the Sudetenland!" It was given to him. Czechoslovakia was handed to Germany by the countries of Europe.

There was a Czech underground, there were protests, there was some preparation for going head-to-head with Hitler all on their own, since the big leaders of Europe seemed willing to let them be chewed up and spit out. Europe basically said to Czechoslovakia in the Munich Agreement, "Buh-bye. We are feeding you to the lions. Sorry. We just can't fight this guy." Most of the Czech intelligentsia were killed (and this is very important to remember: resistance in Czechoslovakia has always been at the hands of the intellectuals). So the Germans, of course, knew this, and all of the intelligentsia were shipped off to concentration camps or just killed outright.

Ivan Klima, a Czechoslovakian writer was sent to a concentration camp as a small boy. There is a wonderful collection of his essays called The Spirit of Prague which I'm going to quote from later. He's awesome. He can describe the experience of living under a totalitarian fascistic regime, using no theory, no abstractions.

But anyway. Onward.

The Germans leave, the Soviets arrive
In 1945, the Czechs were rising up against the German forces, war breaking out, mini-battles, fighting for their lives. With no help from the Allies, who had abandoned them in the Munich Agreement. Meanwhile, the Soviets were closing in on them from the east.

On May 5, 1945, the Czech resistance in Prague rose up so fiercely against the Germans, that the German troops retreated out of the country. By that point, the German army was a rag-tag bunch of terrified starving soldiers, trying to do their best for the Fuhrer, but losing, losing, losing. They had already lost. This was a big victory for the Czechs, but then, on May 8, 1945, three days later, the Soviets rolled into town.

Under the Soviet umbrella
Czechoslovakia was established as an independent state in the Soviet sphere. There were large-scale deportations of German and Hungarian populations. The Germans who were deported following World War II, are still, to this day, demanding the return of their property. The country was permitted the freest multiparty democracy in Eastern Europe. This was mostly because there was genuine sympathy for Communism already existing in Czechoslovakia. In Czechoslovakia you didn't see the kind of harsh enforced Communism the way you saw in Poland or Lithuania or many other places.

An interesting factoid that I pulled off the CIA website (and take these statistics - like all statistics - with a grain of salt): the religious breakdown in the Czech Republic goes like this:

39% atheist
39% Roman Catholic
4% Protestant

That really stood out for me - I haven't encountered any other country in the Factbook with religious statistics like that, and so it got my attention. Atheists are tied as the largest religious group in the country. If this number is true, then it would make sense that the Communists didn't have as tough a time. In other countries, seriously Catholic countries like Poland, atheism had to forced down the people's throats, and the Poles fought back HARD against this. Catholicism was an essential part of their identity - it was the receptacle of their collective spirit. This intensified with Pope John Paul II - a Pole. They looked to HIM for guidance, not to the Politburo. The Communists, to punish the Poles, would turn their cathedrals into "Museums of Atheism". This would not have outraged the Czechs as much as it did other more religiously faithful countries.

They had elections in 1946 and the Communist candidates won the majority of the popular vote. This was one of the only instances where a country occupied by the Soviet Union willingly chose Communists to run their country. But by 1948, with the economy still suffering, the country going bankrupt, support for Communism was definitely waning.

The Communists could feel that they might be losing their grasp, so in 1948 they organized a coup d'etat, and seized absolute power, through the unions and the police. And Czechoslovakia fell. And fell. And fell.

After 1948
It soon became one of the most repressive regimes in Eastern Europe. People imprisoned, executed, sent off into exile, sent off to prison camps, the gulag ... All dissent was squashed, through fear and terror. Only the intellectuals kept the identity of Czechoslovakia alive. Only the intellectuals tried to keep the Czech language alive. Only the intellectuals tried to maintain the memory of the country. Everybody else was cowed. Beaten.

Then along comes:

The 1960s
Czechoslovakia started waking up. I suppose it must have been the tenor of the times, but there were other factors as well. The 1960s was a fever, spreading all over the world. The Czechs experienced a cultural awakening, they started remembering who they were.

But along with the Zeitgeist of the time, a lot of this awakening had to do with who was in charge of the country: Alexander Dubcek. He was a Communist, he was one of the founders of the Czech Communist Party actually. But he had different ideas from Moscow. He began making moves to liberalize the country. He wanted to end censorship. He wanted to open up dialogues again. His motto was: "We will show the world Socialism with a Human Face." Socialism with a Human Face. He wanted to prove to the world that Communism need not be synonymous with Dictatorship. He dismantled any vestige of a personality cult around himself (a necessity for all other Communist leaders). He promised the Czechs "rule of law".

It's hard to imagine what it must have been like for the people of Czechoslovakia at that heady time. I can only try. I can only read what they write, the memoirs of that time - Kundera, Klima, Havel, and others. Hope rising up, happiness, freedom, being able to SPEAK, being able to feel like they are joining the rest of the world again, after decades of repression, hope, hope, all of this hope coming from their LEADER. Who seemed to hear what they were saying, expressing their own desires.

All of this was going on without the blessing of Moscow. Dubcek, a die-hard Communist, assumed that the Soviets would not care. He trusted the leaders in Moscow. He underestimated them.

He, maybe even more than the Czech people themselves, was devastated by what happened next.

1968: The Prague Spring
The Prague Spring refers to the cultural awakening coming to a real head through the early months of 1968. There was a sense of possiblity, of hope.

Moscow was alarmed by what was going on in Czechoslovakia. They had no interest in promoting Socialism with a Human Face. Freedom of the press means that people can criticize the regime, can criticize Communism, and if people can criticize then the cracks in the entire facade will widen. Moscow felt that they must have an unbroken Red Wall of Unity to present to the rest of the world. Nobody can deviate from the party line.

Moscow demanded that all of the Warsaw Pact allies participate in an invasion of Czechoslovakia to crush Socialism with a Human Face, to crush what was also called "the Czech Experiment". (An interesting sidenote: Nicolae Ceausescu, dictator of Romania, refused to join in the invasion, and because of that, the West LOVED him, and ignored the fact that the man was a villain, a despot, a crackpot. He was wined and dined all over the West for not stepping in line with the rest of the Warsaw Pact, and hailed as a maverick leader. Yeah, he was a maverick all right! So maverick that he starved his own citizens in order to built dams, he turned off heat and electricity in the middle of the winter so he could pay back the country's debt ahead of schedule, he criminalized birth control ... you remember those horror images of starving Romanian orphans strapped to their beds in the late 1980s? That's his doing.)

In early August of 1968, the entire leadership of Czechoslovakia was flown to Moscow, to be scolded by Brezhnev. Actually, no, it wasn't a scolding. He was warning them. "Cut this shit OUT." Dubcek (a real hero) refused to cut the shit out. Dubcek refused to turn his back on his ideas that Socialism did not have to mean cruelty and tyranny. He would not denounce the Prague Spring. But Dubcek still did not believe that Moscow would invade. He did not believe that Moscow would turn on him. And so - in a way - he was brainwashed by the Politburo as well.

On the night of August 20-21, 1968, the Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Prague and took the city back by force. By the next day, 58 people had been killed.

Wenceslas Square, in Prague, was the focal point of the resistance to the Soviet invasion. (See the movie "Unbearable Lightness of Being" for an incredible look at what it must have been like.) Chaos. Horror. Grief. And utter betrayal. The "Czech experiment" was over.

The world was horrified. But nobody did anything. Nobody stopped it. The Czechs, once again, were thrown to the wolves.

Dark dark days ahead.

The Crackdown
After the invasion, Gustav Husak was responsible for whipping the country back into shape. He himself had been a victim of Stalinist repression and had spent 8 years in prison. That, to me, is one of the most insidious things about such tyranny: the persecuted become the persecutor. Nobody escapes.

Husak whirled through the country like a tornado. He did a major purge of the Czech Communist Party, getting rid of anybody who might have sympathized with the idea of Socialism with a Human Face. Anybody who might even be on the FENCE about it was gone. And major Stalinist hard-liners were brought in to replace them.

And once again, nothing changed in Czechoslovakia until 1989 when everything fell apart in two weeks time.

The country was completely closed off from the rest of the world. Prague became a Communist backwater, as opposed to one of Europe's premier cities. Nobody could travel, nobody could leave. Censorship was imposed. All liberalization programs introduced by Dubcek were cut off.

Oh, and what happened to Dubcek?? The father of Czechoslovakian Communism was forced to resign, obviously, in 1969, and then he was kept under house arrest from 1968 until 1987. And he wasn't allowed to communicate, or write, or let the Czech people know he was alive, and still around. The Communists, in the words of the Mafia, "disappeared" Dubcek. I am so glad they didn't "disappear" him forever, because once the Soviet Union started collapsing, suddenly Dubcek emerged again, and the Czech nation was able to express, openly, to him just how much he meant to them. Just how much they appreciated his sacrifices. How much, basically, that they loved him. Nobody had heard from him in decades. They thought he was dead. And then ... like a ghost ... he came out from house arrest, accompanied by Vaclav Havel, and the people of Czechoslovakia, waking up once again, could not believe their eyes. Dubcek! The man who tried to set them free! His emergence made them remember who they were. And then they fought back like hell, and toppled the house of cards. At last.

1968 - 1989
But up until 1989, the Czechs suffered under a hardline Stalinist regime. Who knows what was going on in the privacy of Czechoslovakian homes, but on the outside: they became a drab backwards silent Communist country. The borders closed, the trade unions shut down, everything got very reactionary, and extremely rigid.

GLASNOST
Gorbachev's idea of glasnost was a huge threat to Gustav Husak. Husak LIVED in the shadow of the 1968 invasion. He did not want the humiliation of Dubcek, being rejected by his former Communist friends. Husak refused to take on glasnost as a concept, even though Gorbachev was encouraging all of his "clients" to do so. Husak held on, and held on tight, to the old way.

And again, it was as though the Czech people were under a cloud. Glasnost did not infect the Czech nation. The 1968 invasion had been so devastating, so painful.

The only people protesting, and demanding that Husak start adopting glasnost, were the intellectuals. The writers. Vaclav Havel, most of all. Vaclav Havel had been there the whole time, stirring up shit, creating human rights organizations, writing plays, getting arrested, getting in trouble ... but it was never enough to make the population, as a whole, rise up. It was more like a "cafe" revolution. Tortured intellectuals talking about a better world over cups of coffee, while outside, all the normal people slogged off to work, unaware, uncaring.

As the astonishing changes started sweeping through Eastern Europe, during 1988 and 1989, the Husak regime became more and more alarmed. Their response was to crack down harder and harder, isolate their country even more. Idiots. You can't keep out life!

Oh, and I forgot to tell about one important thing:

Jan Palach ... and what he meant
The year after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, in 1969, Jan Palach, a young student in Prague, burned himself to death in the middle of Wenceslas Square to protest the invasion of his country. He killed himself on January 16, 1969.

In the years after, the decades after, nobody was ever allowed to memorialize Palach. People would secretly gather together on the day of his death to remember him, but any public sentiment of mourning for Palach was punishable with prison time. This was one of Havel's raison d'etres: every single year he would stage some sort of public memorial service for Palach, and every year he would get arrested. But this never stopped him, this never shut him up. Palach WOULD be remembered.

Today, the spot of his death is marked with a cross and a plaque. People every year gather around to remember this martyr for the cause of a free Czechoslovakia.

So back to glasnost.

Glasnost 1988, 1989
Suddenly, unbelievably, during 1988 and 1989, without Moscow's "permission", without Husak's "permission", Czech people started flaunting forbidden things: the Czech flag, photos of Dubcek, photos of Palach. They were, in the words of Havel, "behaving AS IF they were free in an unfree nation". It was a quiet rebellion, though. No demands for change were made, and Husak had created an environment that barely let the Czech people breathe on their own.

On November 17, 1989, the Communist youth movement in Prague organized a demonstration, a peaceful demonstration, to memorialize 9 students killed by the Nazis in 1939. A peaceful crowd of 50,000 people gathered. Mostly students and intellectuals. The workers of the country remained slumbering. Rip Van Winkle. The Husak regime brutally crushed this peaceful demonstration. 500 people were beaten by the police. 100 people were arrested.

And this, suddenly, was the spark. The straw. The galvanizing moment when the entire Czech nation woke up. When the entire Czech nation suddenly HEARD what Havel had been saying for so many years, and stepped in line beside him.

Instead of crushing the rebellion, the regime, through its own actions, exploded it into an inferno.

The Velvet Revolution
Let me try to describe it to you from an uber-perspective, so you can get just how fast this all happened. It stuns me.

In 1988: Czechoslovakia remained a place of repressive calm. The only loudmouth was Vaclav Havel. And nobody was listening, except for people in the West. His own country ignored him.

In 1989: a movement began, a student movement. The students began calling for a change in government, they began calling for change.

Oct. 1989: 10,000 students demonstrated, calling for change. There was a massive show of force from the government. Heavily armed police put down the demonstrations, and the tyrants stayed in power. (Here's something else: by December, 2 months later, the entire Communist Party in Czechoslovakia had resigned. I mean, this is stunning. But I get ahead of myself.)

Nov. 17, 1989: The memorial demonstration for those killed by the Nazis, people arrested, people beaten ... This was the spark I have spoken of.

The days following Nov. 17: Instead of backing down, the students kept demonstrating. Every single day. Every single day the crowds got larger, and larger, and larger. The students, the intellectuals, kept begging the workers to join them. They needed their support. It was a difficult fight, it took a lot of persuading over the days following Nov. 17, but the workers, so long asleep, finally left their jobs, went on strike, and joined the students. Constant demonstrations. Husak had no more authority.

More in November, 1989, it was a big month: Vaclav Havel, at the forefront, created an organization called the Civic Forum, to investigate charges of police brutality on November 17. He was relentless. And every day, the crowds got bigger. And louder. Vaclav Havel not only was calling for investigations, he was also calling for the entire Communist Party to resign.

And...

on November 24, 1989 They did. The entire Politburo resigned, in one shot.

From November 17 to November 24 is just 7 days. Unbelievable.

AND: (it gets better, it gets even more breathtaking)

On December 29, 1989, Vaclav Havel is elected president of the new free Czechoslovakia. And Dubcek emerged from hiding, at Havel's side, and was elected speaker of the national assembly.

A peaceful transition of power. A so-called "velvet revolution". The Communists basically gave up, and walked away.

There was not one casualty in Czechoslovakia, following the Nov. 17 demonstration. Compared to other countries in Eastern Europe, this is phenomenal. A tribute to the Czech people, I would say.

In 1993, the nation experienced what they called "a velvet divorce" from the Slovaks. They split into two national components: the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Havel was president of Czechoslovakia for 10 years. He stepped down in February of 2003, and Vaclav Klaus is now the President. The Czech Republic is now a member of NATO, and were invited to join the EU in 2002. It is expected that they will be ready to join in 2004. Their economic policies have been working for them, and they have made an amazing economic recovery, after decades of Soviet mismanagement. Tourism is booming. The industrial base (completely decrepit and outdated through the years of Communism) has been updated, and is functioning at a very high level. There are goods to buy, the cities are blossoming, Prague is back. They've still got problems, of course. Every country does. They suffer from severe pollution, much of the land was destroyed during the decades of Communism, there's a lot of crime ... but these are the basic problems for every city. The Czech Republic has joined the world again.

It's one of my favorite stories of the 20th century. The story of their "velvet revolution".

The Czech Republic - Part I - History

Per my dad's request, here are my "Czech Republic" pieces, hijacked over from my old blog.

To all the historian readers I have - please feel free to interject at any time - and let me know if my interpretation is faulty, or if I'm missing certain elements. I am not an expert. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

Also - I have a love for Czechoslovakia, primarily through its art - a deep love - and so I am completely biased, and this may color how I talk about things.

Let me know if this is the case!

This first piece is on the long history of what is now called The Czech Republic.

The Czech Republic - Part I - History

One of the things I have noticed is: things seem to stay the same in the Czech Republic (or Bohemia, or Czechoslovakia, or whatever other name it is known by), unquestioned, unchanging, for a long long time. Centuries sometimes. And then - suddenly - everything collapses, spectacularly, in a matter of 2 weeks.

This first essay takes us up to World War I.

Back in the day
Czechoslovakia has never stayed in the same form for too long.

In the 5th and 6th centuries, the Slavs arrived in this region. The various tribes adopted Christianity soon after and eventually cohered into an empire. An empire that didn't last very long. It was called the Great Moravian Empire, and had its glory days from 830 to 906. It was a large empire, encompassing areas in Germany, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Silesia and Bohemia. Silesia and Bohemia are now regions in the Czech Republic.

At the end of the 9th century, the Czechs seceded from this empire to form the country of Bohemia. (A country named Bohemia clearly would eventually elect Vaclav Havel as president.) But the Czechs still were factioned off into little tribes, squabbling tribes, without any unification. So it was very easy for King Otto I (King of Germany) to stroll into Bohemia in 950 and conquer them. Bohemia was incorporated into the Holy Roman Empire, but still: King Otto gave the Bohemian prince (Otakar I) at the time the right to some degree of autonomy (again: this is a theme which also comes up again and again in Czech history) and self-rule. The son of the Bohemian prince (Otakar II) was more ambitious than was expected of him: he tried to claim for himself the title of Holy Roman Emperor, and he also tried to proclaim himself King of the Czechs. This all happened during the middle ages, the 1200s.

Otakar II was doomed for disappointment. The imperial crown instead went to Rudolph Hapsburg, which ushers in a whole new phase in Czech history.

The Hapsburgs were strong rulers. Tyrannical to some, benign to others. It was an empire, after all. The Czech people were subjects in this empire, subjects with a long memory, a memory of a grand past, when they had princes and kings. This past is symbolized (to this day) by Prague Castle, an undeniable reminder of the greatness of this nation once upon a time. During the long drab years under Soviet rule, their borders were closed off, and they were completely cut off from the rest of the world. But there ... in Prague ... was their castle. The memory of the country contained in its borders; the Soviets could not erase that memory, even though they tried.

Under the Hapsburgs, Bohemia flourished. They had strong protection from the empire, and so were able to blossom, and experience a Golden Age, since they didn't have worries about self-defense or keeping enemies at bay. Prague became one of the most important cities in Europe.

Moving along in history...
I know a lot of huge stuff went down in the 14th and 15th centuries, but it gets confusing, and I am not too sure of my facts, so I will not be vague, and pretend I understand it all.

I know there were revolutions, I know there was some sort of mass religious reform movement which alarmed the Catholics, and caused a lot of problems. The status quo of Catholicism in Europe was threatened by the reform. And then along came the Hapsburgs again. The Hapsburgs were, of course, a Catholic empire.

The Czech nation came under the Hapsburg sphere again in the 1500s. The Hapsburgs made promises to the Czechs, and did not follow through. (This is yet another theme in the story of Czechoslovakia.) They said that they would have religious tolerance for minorities, they promised freedom, and they also promised the Bohemian royal families that they would maintain their royal privileges. None of this occurred. The Bohemian Royal Estates revolted against this, violently. Two Hapsburg officials were pushed out of a window, and plummeted to their deaths. This event sparked the Thirty Years War. Well, no. That is an exaggeration. There was a hell of a lot of religious turmoil swirling all across Europe at that time. And THAT was what sparked the Thirty Years War ... but the Bohemians were so rebellious, and so angry, and actually killed some of the Hapsburgs, so the Hapsburgs felt they had no choice but to crack-down, and crack down HARD, on the pesky little Czechs.

But the real issue in Bohemia, is that the Hapsburgs wanted to stomp out Protestantism, squash it like a bug.

Like I said: I am tearing through this story. I am missing a lot.

The Thirty Years War
This war was crushing to the Czechs.

Here's a quote about what happened (one of those interminable quotes I collect - sometimes I remember to write down where it came from, sometimes I do not - This one, unfortunately, is un-attributed):

The Austrian Habsburgs had failed in their efforts to increase their authority in the Empire and to eradicate Protestantism, but they emerged from the war stronger than before. In Bohemia, they had stamped out Protestantism, broken the power of the old nobility, and declared the crown hereditary in the male line of their family. With Bohemia now firmly in their grasp and with their large group of adjoining territories, they were ready to expand to the east in the Balkans, to the south in Italy, or to interfere once more in the Empire.

So in the end, the Czechs lost everything. They lost all of their rights. They lost all of their hard-won freedom. They lost their property. They also then were put through forced Catholicization and forced Germanization. The Hapsburgs (again: sometimes benign, sometimes tyrannical) wanted to wipe out the concept of Czech national identity. They wanted to erase the individuality of the Czech people off the map forever. This was devastating. And they nearly succeeded.

What is so incredible, and hopeful, is that it did NOT succeed. You cannot do that to people. You cannot. They will, no matter what the hell you do to them, remember who they are, and where they came from. Sometimes, the worse the tyranny, the stronger the cultural memory. Milan Kundera writes about that so well.

But here's what's even more incredible:

After the Thirty Years War, the Hapsburgs kept Bohemia under such a strong thumb that nothing changed in that country for THREE CENTURIES. I mean, of course, people grew up, got married, died, had fun, cried, built buildings, tore buildings down. But I'm talking about evolution as a nation. That completely stopped. They were beaten. Defeated.

The Hapsburgs won.

Until ...

The mid-1800s
Tracy Chapman may think that revolution "sounds like a whisper", but the year of 1848 was a year of shriekingly loud revolutions, which caught on like a brushfire, leaping across borders, igniting in first this country, then that one. Not a hell of a lot of whispering going on. Empires, monarchies - all going up in flames.

Bohemia got caught up in it, too, despite the lead cloak of the Hapsburgs. They began to buck against the authority (the Czechs seem to have a talent for that). They may LOOK like they are being compliant, but underneath it all: they are ready to explode.

I read a great quote from Vaclav Havel about his many years living under Soviet oppression. And of course, he was a big loud-mouth trouble-maker, writing inflammatory plays (none of which were allowed to be performed in his own country), creating human rights organizations, ignoring the ban on public meetings of more than 10 people. Vaclav Havel, at one point, decided to "behave AS IF he were free, in an unfree nation". He was arrested countless times, he was constantly followed, spied upon ... but he behaved AS IF he were free. This seems to me to be a talent of the Czech people.

Anyway. Back to the story.

Slowly, slowly ... the Czech people began to contemplate being a free and independent state. This desire percolated for many years, as the Hapsburg Empire slowly deteriorated.

All of that ended when Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian student, stepped out of the crowd one day in Sarajevo and assassinated the heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Of course, this was the shot heard round the world. The shot that began World War I.

History was about to speed up again for the Czechs. Only to come to a shrieking halt once more.

A Request

My dear parents stopped by my place yesterday - on their way to a wedding out in Jersey. They arrived, in the middle of the snow, bearing VERY COOL kitchen chairs for me - kitchen chairs which look like they came out of a 1950s kitchen. Red leather and chrome. So comfortable, you just sink down into them. But there were my parents, beaming at me in the foyer, covered in snow, holding the two chairs. My heart just cracks!!

They hung out with me for a while - we had coffee - we sat in my kitchen, talking, and laughing. My mom had brought turkey, cheese, and a huge dill pickle, which we all shared. A picnic.

It was so nice to see them, and so nice to have them over in my place. There have been times in my life when I have lived in apartments where it was impossible to have anyone over. Either they were too small - or, like the apartment I lived in briefly on 63rd Street - I had two roommates who were completely insane, who both had cats and the entire space was like a lunatic asylum.

Now it's MY palace - and I can welcome them into it.

It was a joy. My parents. It's always an interesting conversation with them.

Funny thing - my dad now reads Mike Toole on a daily basis - (what a world I have ushered them into) - and we all were ROARING about some of his posts. Osama Bin Laden's head in the hands of John McCain...

Anyway, at one point - we started talking about Prague, and Czechoslovakia in general. Kafka, Kundera ... My dad said something about Kepler and Tycho Brahe being brought to Prague - and he asked me, (which I love) "Did you 'do' Czechoslovakia?" Meaning ... in my whole Country series.

I did - but on my old blog.

So since my dad requests it, I'll bring those posts over. Most of my initial knowledge about Czechoslovakia came from reading writers I love.

Kundera. Kafka's journals (which are absolutely phenomenal). Ivan Klima is a great favorite of mine. Vaclav Havel. It seems extraordinary that one country would produce so many great writers. (But then again - I'm Irish. What country on the planet has given us more great writers than that one small island?) Maybe it's something in the air. Or the water.

I knew about "Prague Spring" from reading Unbearable Lightness of Being and then seeing the film.

Etc.

It was only much later in my life that I decided to investigate the roots of this fascinating country, to see how it fit into the rest of Europe, and to learn about what Klima calls "the spirit of Prague" - the very spirit which made such things as "the Prague Spring" possible.

I know it's petty of me

and I know I shouldn't care ...

BUT I JUST WANT PARIS HILTON TO GO AWAY.

I WANT HER TO GO AWAY.

I don't even have television - so I am not as bombarded as the rest of you - but even without television, she is everywhere, and I tell you - I HAVE HAD ENOUGH.

I don't want anything bad to happen to her - I JUST WANT HER TO GO THE FUCK AWAY.

Overhaul

On days when it is a winter wonderland, and Manhattan is completely cut off by snow at the end of my street - I hunker down. My apartment isn't so cold as it was so it's not as FREAKY hanging out here.

I spent the morning cleaning, throwing shit out - On one of my trips down to the recycle area in the cellar, ran into my next door neighbor who asked me randomly if I wanted a small filing cabinet.

Seeing as all of my writing is now sitting in carefully labeled piles and file-folders in a damn box under my dresser, I jumped at his offer.

I have to get down to some real work this winter/spring - There's some writing shit to be done. There is no deadline, except the one in my head - but there is also someone waiting for my jottings. And having my 5 drafts of one story sitting in a cardboard box is not good karma. It is not organized. It also is not a good signal, to have one of the most important parts of my life, my writing, tucked away in a box, as though it is summer clothes. No. Time to re-shuffle the room, and bring the work up to the forefront.

And - lo and behold - here comes a free filing cabinet.

I have now filled it up - all different stories in different labeled hanging folders - all correspondence with magazines, editors, agents in one folder, so I can keep track of WHAT THE HELL I AM DOING ...

Can I tell you the peace of mind it brings?

I know I'm a simple creature. A filing cabinet fills me with peace.

But so be it. Tis the God's honest truth.

Meanwhile, the snow keeps coming down.

Now, though, as I look about my room - with all my writing organized and placed in an easy-access kind of way - there's a space in my brain cleared. And Work can now fill up that space. Before, that space was filled with free-floating anxiety along the lines of, "Okay, now WHICH draft of this story is the latest one? And WHERE did I send out this one? Which magazine is holding onto this piece?" That's bullshit. It's no way to write, or to try to succeed.

I've got some room now.

I can get going.

"Of course, The Lord of the Rings does not belong to me"

I post this excerpt from one of Tolkien's letters for all my Tolkien-fan readers, and also specifically to annoy Patrick Prescott (who moved off Blogspot - Yeah!) Patrick has finally come to the conclusion that he is an "unwashed heathen", in terms of the Trilogy. It's okay, Patrick, I'm sure you and I could work something out.

This is a draft of a letter to one of the many many fans who wrote to him with questions. Many of these letters were never sent. He would have carbon copies made, and continue to work on the drafts of the letters. Especially as he got older.

This woman wrote to him, and here is his response.

I love it because it illuminates (without him knowing it, of course) his genius. He didn't ultimately see himself as a writer, or a creator of worlds - he saw himself as a historian. Fantastic. He saw Middle-Earth as a revealed place, he himself explored the landscape, unsure of what he would find.

To get a bit uber here, the story works itself way out into our world, using him as the vehicle, the voice.

Phenomenal.

Autumn 1971 Draft of letter to Carole Batten-Phelps
I am very grateful for your remarks on the critics and for your account of your personal delight in Lord of the Rings. You write in terms of such high praise that [to] accept it with just a 'thank you' might seem complacently conceited, though actually it only makes me wonder how this has been achieved - by me! Of course the book was written to please myself (at different levels), and as an experiment in the arts of long narrative, and of inducing 'Secondary Belief'. It was written slowly and with great care for detail & finally emerged as a Frameless Picture: a searchlight, as it were, on a brief episode in History, and on a small part of our Middle-earth, surrounded by the glimmer of limitless extensions in time and space. Very well: that may explain to some extent why it 'feels' like history; why it was accepted for publication; and why it has proved readable for a large number of very different kinds of people.

But it does not fully explain what has actually happened. Looking back on the wholly unexpected things that have followed its publication - beginning at once with the appearance of Vol. I - I feel as if an ever darkening sky over our present world had been suddenly pierced, the clouds rolled back, and an almost forgotten sunlight had poured down again. As if indeed the horns of Hope had been heard again, as Pippin heard them suddenly at the absolute nadir of the fortunes of the West. But How? and Why?

I think I can now guess what Gandalf would reply. A few years ago I was visited in Oxford by a man whose name I have fogotten (though I believe he was well-known). He had been much struck by the curious way in which old pictures seemed to him to have been designed to illustrate The Lord of the Rings long before its time. He brought one or two reproductions. I think he wanted at first simply to discover whether my imagination had fed on pictures, as it clearly had been by certain kinds of literature and languages. When it became obvious that, unless I was a liar, I had never seen the pictures before and was not well acquainted with pictorial Art, he fell silent. I became aware that he was looking fixedly at me. Suddenly he said, "Of course you don't suppose, do you, that you wrote all that book yourself?"

Pure Gandalf! I was too well acquainted with Gandalf to expose myself rashly, or to ask what he meant. I think I said: "No, I don't suppose so any longer." I have never since been able to suppose so. An alarming conclusion for an old philologist to draw concerning his private amusement. But not one that should puff any one up who considers the imperfections of "chosen instruments", and indeed what sometimes seems their lamentable unfitness for the purpose.

You speak of "a sanity and sanctity" in the L.R. "which is a power in itself." I was deeply moved. Nothing of the kind had been said to me before. But by a strange chance, just as I was beginning this letter, I had one from a man, who classified himself as "an unbeliever, or at best a man of belatedly and dimly dawning religious feeling ... but you", he said, "create a world in which some sort of faith seems to be everywhere without a viable source, like light from an invisible lamp." I can only answer: "Of his own sanity no man can securely judge. If sanctity inhabits his work or as a pervading light illumines it then it does not come from him but through him. And neither of you would perceive it in these terms unless it was with you also. Otherwise you would see and feel nothing, or (if some other spirit was present) you would be filled with contempt, nausea, hatred. "Leaves out of the elf-country, gah!" "Lembas - dust and ashes, we don't eat that!"

Of course The L.R. does not belong to me. It has been brought forth and must now go its appointed way in the world, though naturally I take a deep interest in its fortunes, as a parent would of a child. I am comforted to know that it has good friends to defend it against the malice of its enemies. (But all the fools are not in the other camp.) With best wishes to one of its best friends. I am

Yours sincerely
JRR Tolkien

Waking the Dead

Just wanted to mention a movie I saw a couple years ago - and loved. I saw it again yesterday afternoon ... It's called "Waking the Dead", and it stars Billy Crudup and Jennifer Connelly. Crudup may have just behaved like a jackass, leaving his girlfriend Mary Louise Parker, while she was 7 months pregnant with his child ... (but who knows ... you never know what goes on between people ... She may be a complete psycho ...she may have said to him, "Get the hell out. I am a Mother-Goddess and will raise this child alone ... BUH-BYE") But regardless: Crudup can ACT, okay?

It's the story of a guy named Fielding, a working-class guy, from a family of Democrats. Nobody in the family really amounted to much, and Fielding is their shining hope. The dreams of the entire family, of making a difference, of contributing to the world, is put onto his head. He accepts this willingly. He knows from a very young age what he wants to do - he wants to go into politics. And not just politics. He wants to be President of the United States. He keeps his eye on the ball. It is the time of the Vietnam War, and he knows what he must do if he ever wants to be elected President. He joins the military.

He is a likable character, a smart man, who loves his family, and loves his country. He loves politics, he loves "issues", he lives and breathes the working of the political system.

He meets a young secretary at his brother's office, played by Jennifer Connelly. He is immediately attracted to her.

She is passionately against the Vietnam War. Yet there is something very strong between them. They go out on a date, where they talk about politics, the war. She is one of those people on the Left who cannot understand why anyone would ever ever want to join the "system". He thinks that if he is INSIDE the system, then maybe he can do some good. She wants to work against the system, because the system itself is the problem.

I'm making this sound dryer than it actually is. Their conversations buzz with sexual attraction and frustration. He wants her, he thinks she is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen ...

They begin a romance.

She starts to work for a local Catholic church, and through a priest there, becomes involved with the dangerous events in Chile. She travels to Chile, even though it is very dangerous and Fielding doesn't want her to go.

These two characters - both with passionate beliefs - opposed to one another ideologically - and yet in love with the other's conviction - have, as is obvious, a rather difficult time. Fielding begins to climb higher and higher within the ranks of the Democratic Party in Illinois. She supports him, because she loves him, but she - a hippie Catholic girl - who doesn't shave her underarms, completely does not fit in at the political parties.

There are some GREAT scenes between them.

She starts to move further and further over to the Left. Fielding, a Democrat, thinks she has lost her mind, and thinks the people she hangs out with are self-righteous superior assholes.

What the movie really is about is their love. But there's so much more in there. It's about America - it's about politics - it's about, to some degree, what happened to the best and brightest of the Left, during the Vietnam War. How so many of them became so disenchanted that they had to check out entirely. They stopped being a part of the conversation in this country.

The movie doesn't really take sides - we see both viewpoints. Fielding is the true narrator of the piece, so I suppose there is some bias there.

She never comes off as being insane. She just wants to do good. She believes in God, she believes in a just universe. She also, because she loves him, believes that if anyone could do any good in politics, Fielding would be the one.

Yet, on some level, she holds him in contempt.

And on some level, he holds her in contempt.

And then (and this is not a spoiler - it's in the first scene) - during one of her trips to Chile with the radical Catholic priest who is her friend (and he does come off as a self-righteous asshole) - she is killed. In a car with two Chilean nationalists. Fielding hears about it on the news, the first scene.

The movie then switches back and forth in time - Fielding's life after Sarah dies - and then flashbacks of their romance, the steps she took leading up to her death.

Fielding is being groomed to be a Congressman. Powerful people start to support him. But, increasingly, as he becomes more and more successful - he is haunted by Sarah. Literally. He sees her everywhere.

There is a terrible scene where he is walking through a hallway in an airport, and he sees someone approach, wearing a big woollen poncho, with long dark hair, and he thinks it is her. Then he sees it is not her. Then he sees another poncho-clad girl coming at him ... and then another ... and then another ... until the entire hallway is filled with various versions of the girl he once loved, the girl he still loves. (I would venture to say that this may be a bit of a metaphor - although it is not presented so in the movie, because the movie is subtle. But here is this Democrat Congressman-to-be, haunted by his radical Left girlfriend, killed by her political beliefs. The Democrats, haunted by that side of their party, by that fringe element - the Democrats haunted by the ghost of the Vietnam War. But that's just an interpretation. It's handled very delicately - it doesn't hit you over the head)

He becomes convinced that she actually did not die in that car. He became convinced that her death was faked, that it was a political move engineered by the far-Left. That she actually is still alive somewhere, in the underground (like Running on Empty.)

It is never clear in the movie whether he is actually losing his mind, or whether there might be some truth to these fantasies. We are totally in his point of view throughout.

Billy Crudup is phenomenal. Hal Holbrook plays the big-wig in the Democratic Party who manages his campaign. Crudup starts to lose it, slowly ... talking about Sarah more and more ... trying to convince people that she is still alive, that he is NOT going crazy, that he has SEEN her on the streets.

It is heart-wrenching. His grief is heart-wrenching. He is literally unable to get over her.

It's a very interesting film - not surprising that not too many people saw it. It's one of those romantic films which use, as a backdrop, politics, and bigger issues. Like The Way We Were, sort of.

I highly recommend it.

The Best of Betty

I am reading a very funny book of short stories right now, by a Jincy Willett (she just came out with her first novel which Bill McCabe gave me for my birthday - thank you!) Haven't read the novel yet but I am tearing through her short stories. The collection is called Jenny and the Jaws of Life.

Oh, how I love writers who can make me laugh. It is such a gift. A precious gift. So rare.

One of the stories is called "The Best of Betty" - and it is a series of letters to an Ann Landers-type columnist - named Betty. We read the questions, and Betty's responses. And throughout the story, we watch as Betty goes off the rails. Her letters become more and more hostile, she has less and less tolerance for her readers, she loses her mind. It's hilarious. And the majority of the letters are written by the same group of people, her regulars, so you get to know their wacked-out issues, their hostilities, their complexes ... All of them are obsessed in finding out what Betty thinks.

A couple of my favorite letters and response are as follows:

Dear Betty:
Lately, at parties, my husband has started calling me "Lard Bottom". I know he loves me, and he says he doesn't mean anything by it, but he hurts me terribly. Last night, at the bowling alley with some of his trucker buddies, he kept referring to me as "Wide Load". Betty, I cried all night!

We're both big fans of yours. Would you comment on his cruel behavior? He'd pay attention to you. Tell him that I may have put on weight, but I'm still a

Human Being

Dear Human:
Yes, a human being with an enormous behind. Sorry, Toots. If I read correctly between the lines, hubby's worried sick about your health. Try a little self-control. Quit stuffing your face.

Dear Betty:
Do you believe in God? I don't. Also, do you ever sit in front of a mirror and stare at your face? My face is so blobby that I can't figure out how even my own parents can recognize me. Lastly, do you think we should be selling weapons to Jordan?

Fifteen and Wondering

Dear Fifteen:
Take five years off after you graduate from high school. Move away from home, get a menial job, fall for as many unworthy men as it takes to get all that nonsense out of your system. Don't even think about college until your mind is parched and you are frantic to learn. Don't marry in your twenties. Don't be kind to yourself. Keep in touch.

And lastly - this one is my favorite:

Dear Betty:
You hear from so many unfortunates with serious problems that I feel a bit ashamed to take up your time this way. I am an attractive woman of 59, my thighs are perfectly smooth, my waist unthickened, I still have both my breasts and all my teeth in fact. I am two dress sizes smaller than I was at eighteen. My three grown daughters are intelligent, healthy, and independent. My husband and I are as much in love as when we first were married, despite the depth of our familiarity, and the, by now, considerable conflation of our tastes, political beliefs, preferences in music and art, and, of course, memories. He still interests and pleasures me; miraculously our sex life remains joyous, inventive, and mutually fulfilling. I continue to adore the challenge and variety of my career as an ethnic dance therapist. We have never had to worry about money. Our country home is lovely, and very old, and solidly set down in a place of incomparable, ever shifting beauty; our many friends, old and new, are delightful people, amusing and wise, and every one of them honorable and a source of strength to us.

And yet, with all of this, and more, I am frequently very sad, and cannot rid myself of a growing, formless, yet very real sense of devastating loss, no less hideous for its utter irrationality. Forgive me, but does this make any sense to you?

Niobe

Dear Niobe:

Certainly. You're lying about the sex.

Birthday party tonight

...wayyyy over on the east side in the 50s. Meanwhile, the weatherman tells us that it is colder here than it is in Iceland.

Party's being held at some upscale Mexican joint. Pomegranate margaritas, good food, and lots of old old friends in attendance.

Should keep me warm for a bit ... but oh, that commute cross-town to catch my bus afterwards ...

Where oh where are my duck boots?

Diary Friday

And here is yet another embarrassing installment of the series I call "Diary Friday". It is Friday, isn't it? I take old journal entries and post them here, word for word. I am a glutton for punishment.

Today's is another import from my old blog (sorry Beth, sorry Dad) - and one of the most embarrassing things I have ever read in my life. Hence - it is wonderful "Diary Friday" material.

It's the first entry in the journal I kept during the O'Malley trip to Ireland, years and years ago. My parents took us all to Ireland for a month … I was 14, my youngest sister Siobhan was 4, and there are two other siblings in between. We traveled around as a family in teeny European cars, all staying in two rooms at various B&Bs. It was insane. This journal is mortifyingly embarrassing to read, because I am 14 years old, in the full bloom of self-obsessed adolescence. But it is also painfully funny (Oh, and MikeR - TOTALLY by coincidence, I reference Rick Springfield in the following journal entry - HA!).

I could not resist - I had to add a list of snarky observations at the bottom. I could not let the ridiculous adolescent prose slide by without a comment.

April 3

Logan Airport, 10:00 pm It is raining like crazy, and it was lightning and thundering. But Anne Ross called Aer Lingus and everything is on schedule. I am psyched but I am pretending that I am cool as a cucumber. I'm going to be very adult on this trip.

As of 10:00 pm I am sitting in a chair after going through that metal zapper machine (without a hitch, I might add) and watching all the punk white sneakers stroll by. I am crazy about white sneakers (Rick Springfield, Rod Stewart, Blackie Parrish and Darryl Hall all wear them), a contributing factor to my fondness for them. I'm pretty punk tonight with my jeans, purple coat and safety pins.

But why am I talking about this??? My family is going to Ireland for a whole month!!! I am going to miss all of my friends incredible. Mere and Betsy and Beth and Kate. I've never even been on a plane before and I am stocked up with gum.

I went to a Good Works play last night with Mere, Betsy, and Beth. Brian Cerullo was there. OH GOD. I love those three kids so much – Mere, Betsy and Beth. We all hugged and kissed goodbye and this morning I talked to them all on the phone and said, "See ya next month."

10:15 pm
I am now on the plane all buckled in next to Brendan (thrrrills … he's gonna talk the whole way). I have a window seat, nanny nanny boo boo. (Oh, how adult I'm being.)

We have a really nice English stewardess. I like her accent. She's talking to us. Her best friend's name is Siobhan. Imaaaaaaagine that!

A grease bomb just walked by.

I have never been so frightened. We are going a trillion miles an hour. Don't let me die. We are up SO high! I'm really scared, folks.

1:00 am (6:00 Irish time)
We just had dinner.

Guess what movie they're showing – FOUL PLAY. Is that a coincidence or what? (I am madly in love with Chevy Chase.)

April 4
County Clare
Watching the sunrise out of the plane windows was gorgeous. All the clouds were pink and orange and we couldn't even see the ocean. And flying in over Ireland – oh, it was so pretty! All of the fields divided by hedges – oh, it was so wild. But I forgot to chew gum on the way down and it felt as if someone was pounding on my head with a hammer. I hurt incredibly.

We had to stand in line at the Shannon airport and wait around. We got this tiny gold car that is so cute. We drove around those winding streets lined with tall hedges and after an hour or so we found a place to stay - McMahon's Bed and Breakfast Place. It is in Ennistymon. The beds are so comfortable (featherbeds) and Mrs. McMahon is so nice. So are all the people here. They all wave. We unwound for an hour or so and then we went down the street to the Falls Hotel. There we found a river and beautiful waterfalls. Dad took some pictures and then we took off in the car for the Cliffs of Moher. The roads were thin and high and we could look down over the hills and thatched roofs . It was great!

But the cliffs! They were SO incredible. I felt quite nauseous because they were so high. I only went up to this tiny stone castle but Jean, Brendan and Dad went all the way up to the top. It was SO FAR DOWN. I almost couldn't look.

We took a different ride home and on the way back we stopped in Kilfenora to watch an Irish football game. We stopped and we asked this girl if we had missed the whole thing. And she said in her Irish brogue, "No, we've got another half to go." I like listening to them talk.

We watched the game and it was not at all like our football. The ball was round and they dribbled and pushed and shoved. It was kind of neat.

But I was wiped out and slept the whole way home. I went upstairs and wrote letters to Betsy, Mere, and Beth until supper. We washed up and Mrs. McMahon served us soup and lamb and homemade French fries. It was delicious. Jean loved the soup but I didn't, so I drank some of my broth, then we secretly switched bowls. Brendan started to cry at supper. It was all very embarrassing.

After supper we went upstairs and we took care of Siobhan while Mum and Dad went for a walk.

I listened to my SK Pades tape and then got into my pjs. I was the only one who got into my pajamas.

God, I am so tired. I'm going to bed.

Comments on the above from my present-day self:
Here are things I noticed:

-- White sneakers are "punk", Sheila? "PUNK"? Uh ... Are you sure about that? Sid Vicious is punk, okay? Putting one safety pin through the lapel of the purple coat you bought at Weathervane does not make you punk. Also, "white sneakers" were never punk. Ever.

-- Additionally: Blackie Parrish???? HAHAHA That was the character John Stamos played on "General Hospital" and I thought I had never seen a better looking man in my life. But I suppose the REAL appeal was that he 'wore white sneakers'. Jesus, Sheila, that is just so crazy.

-- I went to the trouble to buy chewing gum to guard against ear-popping during the plane-landing. And then completely forgot to use the gum until it was too late.

-- I start the entry at "10:00 pm". I write a couple of paragraphs. Then I state "10:15 pm." It's not like a huge gap, like I wrote the first section at 10:00 am, and the next time I mention the time it's 3:00 pm. Like: a lot can happen in 6 hours that would warrant an update. But I clearly had only been writing for about 15 minutes! What is the purpose of listing that "10:15 pm"? Obviously nothing earth-shattering had gone down since I had written "10:00 pm".

-- I am embarrassed at how mean and annoyed I was by my little brother Brendan. Brendan was so homesick he never really got over the fact that he was in Ireland. To this day, Brendan remembers nothing about our trip. Siobhan, who was 4 years old, probably remembers more. Recently, Brendan said to me, "The only thing I remember was that I accidentally put salt on my corn flakes, and then had to eat the whole thing."

-- The line "I'm really scared, folks" makes me blush with mortification. Folks? Who ya' talkin' to, Sheila?

-- "I listened to my SK Pades tape". Now, I am not even sure what I am referring to here. SK Pades is a variety show, put on by the junior class every year at my high school. It's meant to bond the class together so that they can then face the difficult last year. But it's for the JUNIOR class. I was only a freshman at the time of the trip to Ireland. So ... what I am gathering is that I had snuck a tape recorder into the SK Pades of that year, the class two years ahead of me, taped the whole thing, and then hauled the tape around Ireland with me, listening to it like a lunatic. Please remember, too, that this was pre-Walkman. Or, if there were Walkmans in existence, I sure didn't have one. So when I say "I listened to my SK Pades tape" what that means is that I had a little cassette recorder, and played the damn tape for all to hear, which also means that saying "I listened to the tape" is not quite correct. What it means is "I made everybody in my room at the B&B listen to the SK Pades tape with me." I was clearly insane, and probably should have been in an institution.

Put away childhood things? Never

As discussed today - I have come up with my favorite childhood reads. I can't wait to read Dan's and Emily's. I look forward to hearing everyone's comments on this, additions, etc. Hopefully, you will look at some of my titles and remember books you once read, authors you once loved.

Update:
This is great. Here is Dan's list. I love his description of Harriet the Spy as a "proto-blogger". I loved Rikki Tikki Tavi, too. That book haunted me.

Also - kudos to your dad for not getting you the early "horrible Bakshi film" of Lord of the Rings, but telling you he wanted to "get you the real thing" instead. Meaning: THE BOOK. Yeah, man, good stuff.

And here is the list of Miss Emily. As she pointed out, conversations about deadly heat waves usually turn to conversations about favorite childhood books - so it all makes sense.

I read her list and thought: HOW could I have left Charlotte's Web off?? I also loved EB White's Trumpet of the Swan - a wonderful book about a swan who is deaf and learns how to play the trumpet in order to communicate. But Charlotte is the best of all. I still remember how the last sentence went - and again, this is a paraphrase: "It is not often that one comes into contact with someone who is a good friend and also a good writer. Charlotte was both." Tears! I'm in tears!

Here's my list...

Favorite Childhood Books

Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh - This has got to be number one on my list. It had such a huge impact I can't even start to talk about it. I would say that Harriet, with her obsessive journals and people-watching notes, is why I'm a writer. Or one of the reasons. This book didn't just draw me in - this book scared me. People were REAL in this book. They were HUMAN. Harriet's parents - upper class Manhattanites - were REAL - and there was Harriet - 10 years old, roaming the streets, breaking into other people's houses basically so that she could then write about them - and who was looking after her? Ole Golly, of course ... but Ole Golly was a wack-job as well (and looks NOTHING LIKE ROSIE O'DONNELL, WHAT AN OUTRAGE.) This book is up there with Catcher in the Rye for me, in terms of its importance. It's also laugh-out-loud funny.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis - Sheer magic. I lived this book. I wanted them to make it into a movie, and I wanted to star as Lucy. I wanted to live it, I wanted to find that world beyond the wardrobe. CS Lewis made it REAL. I still can remember some of his descriptions. The taste of the Turkish taffy - the "thick green ice" around the home of the Beaver couple - I so wanted to be there.

Little Women - Come to think of it, I need to read this book again. Of course I related to Jo March the most - the rebellious independent tomboy of the family - Jo March is a FANTASTIC character. Absolutely flesh and blood. But all of them definitely have their moments. When Mr. Laurence gives Beth the piano - what a scene! And then when Beth almost dies, and they are waiting for Marmee to return, and Jo and Laurie watch over Beth in the night, and Laurie (who is a man, God bless him, an amazing character) gives Jo a sip of wine to calm herself down ... and then Marmee arrives at dawn, just in time ... It is a great story, and I lived it. I read this book constantly. I wanted to slip between the lines and enter that family.

The entire Beezus and Ramona series by Beverly Cleary - These books were staples of the O'Malley household. Beezus (Beatrice) was the older sister, Ramona the younger. These books are the kind of books not safe to be read in the library because you will start to guffaw with laughter and then be asked to leave. I should read them again.

Alice in Wonderland - I don't even know what to say. This book wasn't even a READING experience. I LIVED those books (Looking Glass too). It was a window into some other realm - a glimpse of something else - something completely undefinable - but also totally real, compelling, frightening, interesting. I STILL do not understand Alice in Wonderland. I hope I never will.

Ballet Shoes This was a book by Noel Streatfield - and part of a series of books (Circus Shoes, Tennis Shoes, etc.) They were all books about little girls who ended up being very good at something - ballet, tennis, whatever. This sounds so pedantic and so stupid but they are really quite wonderful - Ballet Shoes, in particular. It was made into a Masterpiece Theatre mini-series. 3 orphan girls - unrelated - are adopted. And somehow - I forget how - they get accepted to this school of dramatic arts in London. It's really a fluke ... they don't know yet what they are good at. And one ... one of them ends up being what they would call a genius ballerina. At the age of 9 years old. This book was not just a book to me - It was a guide-book - It was instructions to me, at age 8, of how I wanted to live my life. I was going to devote my life to my art. Just like Pauline, Petrova and Posy. I still own this book.

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle, a personal idol. GREAT BOOK. Can't describe it. But GREAT BOOK. A new way to look at the universe. And at love. A ground-breaking book. Also, it's always on the Top 100 Banned Books, along with Catcher in the Rye and Huck Finn - so that must mean it's REALLY good.

Anne of Green Gables, and all the sequels - by Lucy Maud Montgomery. When it first came out, in 1906, Mark Twain wrote a review and called Anne "one of the immortal girls of literature". And he was right. This is an indelible character, a character who will NEVER leave you once you have met her. Lucy Maud Montgomery herself wrote in her journals, years later, and I paraphrase, "Sometimes I walk through the woods and I wish that I could come upon Anne Shirley - I wonder what she would say to me, and I to her." These books cannot be overpraised.

The Diamond in the Window - by Jane Langton. I don't even know if this is in print anymore, but DAMMIT what a book. It's about a brother and sister, who live in Concord Massachusetts, with their crazy uncle and weary aunt - The uncle is an Emerson freak. One day, when looking up at their house, the brother and sister notice a window shaped like a keyhole. A window they have never seen before even though they have always lived there. They do a bit of exploring and discover a secret room in the attic, filled with old treasures - but no one will explain what it means to them. Both of them start having dreams - dreams which become increasingly real. Emerson shows up in the dreams. Louisa May Alcott does too. All the Concord stars of old. It is an extraordinary book - It doesn't talk DOWN to kids. I LEARNED stuff when reading this book. I read Emerson because of this book. But it is, indeed, a kid's book. Magical. Completely magical.

From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler - by EL Konigsburg. Another brother and sister having adventures on their own kind of story. I could not even tell you the plot now. Does anyone else remember? All I can recall is that they run away, and they camp out in the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan, hiding in the bathrooms until the janitorial staff leaves, and then they have the run of the entire place. They take baths in the fountain, and gather up the pennies dropped at the bottom, so that they have funds. I guess I loved books about orphan kids - kids who are orphaned even though they have parents (like Harriet) - kids who have to survive by their wits.

The All-of-a-Kind Family series - I don't even know who wrote it. It was a story about a Jewish family who lived on the lower east side of Manhattan at the turn of the century. The all-of-a-kind part of it referred to the fact that there were 5 GIRLS in the family. No boys. I think in one of the later books in the series they finally had a boy. All of the sisters are fully fleshed-out characters (and I, of course, related to Henny the most - the wild rebellious one who was always getting into trouble). The book is filled with the rhythm of Jewish religous rituals, which I found fascinating, magical. Every holiday celebrated had a story to it - stories foreign to me - and yet I could relate. After all, how different was the ritual of the Advent calendar in the O'Malley family from the rituals I read about in the book? They didn't seem so far apart. I LOVED these books. And it was a series - so I read them as I grew up. When I hit puberty, so did the 5 Jewish girls. When I started being interested in boys, so did the 5 Jewish girls.

-- Other favorites:

I LOVED Carolyn Heywood. But I can't remember any of her titles. She's a wonderful story writer for children.

I LOVED this one story called The Lonesome Manor, which took place in Quebec. A little Quebec-ian girl, with 8 brothers and sisters, befriends a lonely mysterious woman in a "lonesome manor" down the street. What I loved about it primarily was its glimpse of a different world - little girls who filled up wash basins to clean their faces and then put on snow shoes to get to school.

I LOVED Oliver Twist. I read it in 6th grade. It tormented me. It was challenging. I didn't understand half of it. But I loved those people. I loved Fagan. I loved Nancy. I loved the Artful Dodger. This is an example of reading something beyond your abilities and what GOOD it can do you. I read that book - and I think that somewhere I thought, "Hm. Gonna have to come back to this one."

Best of 2003

I just came across this in Slate now, and thought I would post it for all you movie lovers out there.

It's David Edelstein's Best of 2003. He picks 34 films. Not 35, not 30, but 34. Edelstein is one of my favorite film critics writing today. He wrote the laugh-out-loud funny review of Battlefield Earth which I quote from in this compilation of reviews from that train-wreck. Some of Edelstein's contributions to this compilation were:

Visually, "Battlefield Earth" is a bewildering procession of non sequiturs, held together by the most assaultive soundtrack in cinema history. That is not an overstatement. A horse hitting the ground sounds like a bomb going off. A bomb going off sounds like a planet exploding. A planet exploding sounds like—I'm out of hyperbole. People in the audience dig their fingers into their ears and howl in agony—it's a wonder the roof doesn't come down.

Also:

Only alien DNA could account for instincts so paranormally terrible.

And the piece de resistance:

He zaps Jonnie with a knowledge ray and then, for some reason, lets him read the Declaration of Independence. I'm not sure what happens next because I went out for malted milk balls and then remembered I owed my mom a phone call.

Anyway, Edelstein's "34 best movies of 2003" is quite an enjoyable read, even if you haven't seen many of the films.

ROTK is, of course, on the list - I liked his description of the day-long screening he went to of all of the films:

My movie event of the year was watching all three Rings films (the first two in extended cuts) back to back to back at the Loews 42nd Street E-walk on Dec. 16. I was lucky to be there, beside people who'd stood in line for as long as 16 hours to buy tickets and then again for six hours to get good seats. The atmosphere was electric, and the movies looked better this way, flowing easily into one another. Before the third movie started, three hobbits and Gollum showed up to pay tribute to these fans: Frodo kept saying "F---in' A!" and was very sweet in his enthusiasm, and Gollum sang a verse of "My Way" ("And now, the end is near …"). Somewhere in the last hour of our 14-hour marathon (including intermissions), two outsiders wandered into the theater, looked for seats, and sat down on the stairs next to me. They weren't being obnoxious, but I wanted to kill them anyway: They hadn't been on this odyssey with us and were violating a sacred space. When it was all over, many people were crying, and even though it was 1:30 a.m., a lot of my fellow geeks lingered in the theater and on the sidewalk outside.

I was writing a story on all this for the New York Times and was lucky enough to talk to a young woman named Miriam Kriss, who put down her Tolkien book long enough to explain that she was here in tribute to Jackson, "a fan who understood." Then she delivered a rather stunning testament to the fan aesthetic. "The problem with the last George Lucas Star Wars movies is that he's not a fan of his own work," she told me. "You can't be if it's your work. He doesn't understand anymore why we loved Star Wars; he just sits and stares at special effects on his computers. I'd rather see Star Wars movies by people who grew up with Star Wars. A fan would get it."

I'm not sure I buy as a general rule the idea that fans have more insight than artists who create the work in the first place. But in the case of Star Wars, who can contradict her?

I love that. The "fan" aesthetic. Many times, the "fan" aesthetic leads people down sorry alleyways, where they find themselves discussing Rick Springfield's earlier ouevre in an important manner. But sometimes - with films like Star Wars, or LOTR - which become so much more than just a film - which tap into some ... zeitgeist, shall we say ... the "fan aesthetic" is as wise as the hills, and as deep as the ocean.

Other quotes from this piece:

Altman was a gun-for-hire on The Company (it's Neve Campbell's project, and she's exciting to watch), but my colleague Charles Taylor of Salon has pointed out that the movie is held together by the director's connection to these dancers through his sense of his own mortality. Their bodies are powerful yet fragile: Every time they land, something could snap—and end their careers. We should cherish Altman, my favorite living director, while we have him.

Absolutely agreed.

On ROTK:

From little worms to colossal battlefields, you never lose the human scale, the human pulse. Even with 50 special effects in a shot, the movie feels as alive as any hand-held documentary.

And finally - proving my point - that a good writer can really show his genius when reviewing the bad movies:

The movies I loathed most: The Cat in the Hat, whose makers should be paraded nude down the street and spat on, and 21 Grams, with its pretentious pretzeled syntax and use of the death of children like an art-house striptease. Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle was not just horrendous, it made me ashamed for having praised the campy charm of the first and encouraging those idiots.

Anyway - I highly recommend Edelstein's list. He's a terrific writer.

I have a psychic twin

and his name is Dennis Miller. Although I would never think to say something like, "To me Dennis Kucinich's politics are more scrambled than Rod Steiger's dream journal". Rod Steiger's dream journal. That is funny to me on such a deep level that I don't even know how to talk about it.

Great piece on Miller in the New York Times, discussing his conservative transformation after September 11, which appears to be identical to my own.

I agree with all that he says - and better yet, I love what he says, because it is done with wit. I relate. I like how he speaks. Although - again - I also would never ever ever think to call John Madden "the Pliny the Elder of football announcers". WHAT?? So freakin' FUNNY.

The man is insanely brilliant - and right-on-the-money.

People say I've slid to the right. Well, can you blame me? One of the biggest malfeasances of the left right now is the mislabeling of Hitler. Quit saying this guy is Hitler. Hitler is Hitler. That's the quintessential evil in the history of the universe, and we're throwing it around on MoveOn.org to win a contest. That's grotesque to me."

Also:

I think abortion's wrong, but it's none of my business to tell somebody what's wrong. So I'm pro-choice. I want to keep my nose out of other people's personal business. I guess I fall into conservative when it comes to protecting the United States in a world where a lot of people hate the United States."

And:

Everybody should be in the protection business now. I can't imagine anybody not saying that. Well, I guess on the farthest end of the left they'd say, `That's our fault.' And on the middle end they'd say, `Well, there's another way to deal with it other than flat-out protecting ourselves.' I just don't believe that. People say we're the ones who make them hate us because of what we do. That's garbage to me. I think they're nuts. And you've got to protect yourself from nuts."

Yeah - like NUTS. You don't need to understand why NUTS hate you because they are not rational and they are NUTS.

Dennis Miller is my psychic twin and that's all I'm saying.

But still - Rod Steiger's dream journal??

(via Vodka Pundit)

Chicago Extremes: Cold

It is another frigidly cold day here in Manhattan, the kind of day where total strangers bond in line at the deli and say camaraderie-like things like: "Woah! It's cold, isn't it??"

Having spent many winters in Chicago, my idea of what "cold" actually means is a bit different.

I was thinking about that this morning, as I struggled through the freezing wind to the bus, and remembering the coldest winter I ever experienced - which then made me think about the opposite - the hottest SUMMER I ever experienced. Chicago was the locale for both.

Read on, Macduff, about Chicago extremes. I go off onto long tangents during these stories. I do so, because it pleases me.

The first one is the Cold Extreme.

The Cold Extreme
It was the winter of 1993. I lived at a drafty apartment on Ashland, with my dear friend Mitchell. A 3rd floor walk up, with hard-wood floors, big old windows, on the corner of a big brick building - Our windows looked out on the endless expanse of Ashland, which appeared, during winter, to be a snowy wasteland, with stoplights changing for no cars. It was from this apartment that we witnessed, as though it were a movie, the destruction following the Bulls' "3-Peat". Riots of joy broke out, stupid idiots went around smashing windows and tipping over cars. Everyone was told by the Police Chief to stay home, and then Michael Jordan came onto the television and said, "We're all really glad you're happy we won, but please stop destroying the city." Mitchell and I watched wild groups of boys prowling around on Ashland, restless with blood-lust, ignorant, tipping over Port-a-Potties and smashing windows. Idiots.

The temperature began to drop in January 1993. And drop and drop. Add to that the wind chill factor. I come from the Ocean State. I had never experienced such cold in my life. It was a whole other animal. First: you have your basic cold days. Everyone knows what those are like. Today in NYC is one of those days. Then you have your days where it suddenly becomes clear, like an ice pick on your spine: "I am in danger. This cold will kill me. This cold wants to kill me."

The cold of the winter of 1993 was of the second variety.

Radio announcers filled the air with warnings: "Do not go outside unless you absolutely have to. If you have to go outside - then make sure that no skin is exposed."

Eskimos wrapped up like cocoons staggered against the wind up and down Ashland. Everyone became sexless. The entire city was caught up in crisis mode. Which ... as I said ... having never experienced the "I am in danger" kind of cold, I only paid attention to half-heartedly.

I was working as a temp at a security agency down in the Loop, which was one of my favorite assignments ever - not because my job was great, I was a secretary. I answered phones for a bunch of cops, who worked as bodyguards (Donny Osmond was one of our clients), who escorted millionaire's little kids to school ... It was the best job ever because of the cops, who were great. Just GREAT guys. On their lunch breaks, they would teach me self-defense techniques. One of them in particular I befriended. He was a little leprechaun of a man - but tough as nails. He said to me once, "Part of my job description is that I will take a bullet for Donny Osmond. That's it. I accept it." He had a wife and daughter - and they understood this code of ethics as well. He was Irish, I loved him. He would talk to me over the receptionist's desk. Once, we were in the middle of a conversation, talking about movies or something, and he stopped suddenly, looking at me as though something new had occurred to him. "What?" I asked. He hesitated, and then said, "I had heard people talk about 'pheromones' before. But I didn't really believe they existed. Until now." This became one of our jokes. I paged him once to let him know that I had spoken to "Mr. Osmond", and had a message to pass on. Leprechaun-cop called me back, I gave him the message, and before we hung up he said joyfully, "I had no idea that pheromones could come through a phone!"

On the coldest day - I wish I could remember what the temperature was. With the wind-chill it was something like 40 degrees below zero. Perhaps more. The radio chanted dire warnings. I bundled myself up, as though it were a normal cold day, not an "I AM GONNA DIE" cold day, and trudged to the L station.

The walk to the station was 10 minutes long.

I cannot describe the agony. It was cold which was so cold that it burned. It felt like burning hot spikes. Nothing I wore kept that burning cold out. Only my eyeballs peeped out from the scarf wrapped around my head.

The bottom of my right earlobe was exposed for that 10 minute walk. The scarf slipped, and the hat did not cover the lobe.

But everything was so freezing - there really should be another word for cold like that - that the agony of my exposed earlobe did not register. Or, it registered - but it was just another item on the list of the agonies.

Frightened by the weather, in a state of advanced agony (saying to someone in a jovial way "Wooh, it's cold out!" would be unheard of on a day such as that one - because nobody was outside to begin with) - I sat on the train. Feeling like I would never thaw. The cold was in my bones.

I did not unwrap myself on the train. I sat there, a sexless Eskimo.

Suddenly a woman across the aisle spoke to me. Sternly. "The bottom of your ear is exposed, ma'am. You have GOT to cover it up."

"Oh ... thanks."

I covered up the lobe - which, if I had really paid attention, had started to throb and burn.

For the morning, I sat at my desk at the security place. I felt as though the winter were pushing against the walls of the building. The Loop was deserted, a maze of concrete canyons, filled with wind which would rip your face off. Lake Michigan heaved with ice at the edge of the city.

I had no business going to work on that day. I had no business being outside.

I answered phones. My earlobe had begun to feel very uncomfortable - but I ignored it - for a while. I adjusted. I put the phone to my left ear. The burning intensified. It ached. The ache started to spread ... into my head. I had to take my earring out. I thought that maybe my lobe was infected, because of the earring and the cold or some such stupid nonsense. Finally, I was reduced to sitting at the desk, in a mute state of pain, holding my palm firmly over the burning earlobe, trying to cool it down.

When I finally got my act together and went into the bathroom to see what was going on with my ear, I burst into hysterical sobs at the sight.

My earlobe had swelled to the size of a broccoli blossom - a big broccoli blossom. It was a violent burned red, the skin was puffed out, and it was enormous. It looked ready to explode.

Fear. Finally, I felt fear.

What is going to happen? Am I going to lose my ear? How bad is it?

I had never had frostbite before. I had only heard horror stories. And my ear looked like the star of my own personal horror story.

I wept in the bathroom, gibbering like a lunatic. I suddenly LOVED my ears, with a passion beyond belief. I CHERISHED my ears, and I didn't want to lose them.

"Oh my God ... please stop burning ... please go down ... please go down..."

I came back out into the bleak little security office, ravaged by fear and tears.

The "pheromone" cop, dressed up as a bodyguard but a bodyguard who was also dressed up as an Eskimo, came into the reception area.

I was a mess, and I trusted him. I turned my head - "Oh my God - look. Look at my ear. Am I gonna lose my ear? What should I do?"

He took one look at my ear and said, like a stern leprechaun, "Call the hospital right now."

So I did. He waited as I called, staring at me with those dead-on eyes that so many cops have. They do not panic. They do not freak. They take action.

The harassed nurse who answered the phone at the Emergency Room could not have cared less about what ended up being a mild case of frostbite during an enormous city-wide disaster where many people died of the cold.

She said to me, "Ma'am - people are dying in the other room right now. I have got to go." She briefly told me what to do for frostbite, and hung up.

I left the office immediately. I was so wrapped up (the "pheromone" cop had given me an extra fur hat he had, to put on over my other hat) that I could barely walk. I set my teeth, and got back onto the L, which was filled with other grim-faced Eskimos.

I got off at Ashland, and endured - that's the only word for it - endured the walk back to my apartment. Only sheer force of will got me there. I wanted to lie down and give up. I had to get my keys out, which I could not do with my mittens on my hand - and now the fear of God was in me, and instead of an earlobe I had a broccoli - but I took my mitten off as quickly as I could to grasp my keys in my purse. Instantly, my fingers froze up into little ice-sticks. I couldn't control them. They started to burn.

I thought: Holy SHIT. I am going to die. I am going to lose my ear and my fingers, because of 10 minutes of exposure.

Finally - I got inside (the lock had frozen, too... I had to jiggle the keys inside to get things moving) - and sat in my apartment for three days, ministering to my ear.

The swelling did go down, and the ear eventually looked normal, but the damage to my skin tissue was irrevocable. To this day, I have to be extra careful of that ear, even on mildly cold days.

I still think fondly of that "pheromone cop", by the way. What a nice man.

Frodo, Free Will, More Tolkien Mania

The excerpt I posted, where Tolkien discusses "the failure of Frodo", in the end, to complete his mission, generated a very interesting discussion. If you're a Tolkien freak like myself.

Bill McCabe commented: You're right, but he also makes the point that no man could hold an object with such power without succumbing to it's power. While he makes the one point that men are weak and easily corrupted, he also shows the men of Gondor and Rohan finding the strength within to stand againt the Dark Lord. I'm wondering if any of the letters address this in more detail.

Well. Naturally because I am developing a form of Tolkien autism I searched out more quotes on this very important issue.

Tolkien has a lot to say about free will - and also about the "failure" of Frodo at the end. But he is never more clear than in this unforgivably long excerpt. (I type over 80 words a minute)

In this excerpt, Tolkien tackles the power of the Ring - and what the Ring does to people (except for Tom B., as discussed in the comments, as well). I mean, Galadriel, in her 2-second contact with the Ring, is wrung dry. And she is a veteran of wars and rebellions and Great Events.

Perhaps it is Great people who are more prone to the power of the Ring - because their egos tell them that they can actually have an impact on the course of events. While hobbits just want to have a nice smoke and gossip about their neighbors as they watch the stars rise.

Hobbits don't have a well-developed sense of "agency" (read: EGO).

Anyway. In this letter, Tolkien describes what would have happened, he believes, if other members of the Fellowship had somehow found themselves in the position Frodo found himself in, at Mount Doom.

Again, this excerpt is LONG, my friends (it's long enough that I omitted stuff not completely relevant to this discussion of free will. Please don't kill me. I put ellipses where stuff is left out). It's long, yeah, but people seem to enjoy reading these excerpts. So I will be the drudge. It's great stuff.

I particularly like his cautionary tone at the end - when he described what possession of the Ring would do to a man of such great moral stature as Gandalf. Despite his message of hope, and the possibility of redemption, Tolkien seems, to me, most like a cynic.

I almost laughed out loud when I read this short letter to a fan, who had written asking him if he was working on a sequel to LOTR. Tolkien replied:

I did begin a story placed about 100 years after the Downfall of Mordor, but it proved both sinister and depressing. Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice and prosperity, would become discontented and restless - while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors - like Denethor or worse. I found that even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a center of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going round doing damage. I could have written a thriller about the plot and its discovery and overthrow - but it would be just that. Not worth doing.

Tolkien knew peace never lasts, and in his imagination he sees that little boys will form secret "Orc-clubs", and not revere all that has gone before ... It is human nature. Perhaps cynical.

But cynical in the way our Founding Fathers were, drafting the articles of impeachment before George Washington even became the first President. That fact alone is evidence of grave cynicism, but I would also call it ultimately pragmatism: Men will be men. Men are corruptible. No one is above making a grab for power. NO ONE.

September 1963 Draft of letter to Mrs. Eileen Elgar
Very few (indeed so far as letters go only you and one other) have observed or commented on Frodo's "failure". It is a very important point.

From the point of view of the storyteller the events on Mt Doom proceed simply from the logic of the tale up to that time. They were not deliberately worked up to nor foreseen until they occured. But, for one thing, it became at last quite clear that Frodo after all that had happened would be incapable of voluntarily destroyoing the Ring. Reflecting on the solution after it was arrived at (as a mere event) I feel that it is central to the whole "theory" of true nobility and heroism that is presented.

Frodo indeed "failed" as a hero, as conceived by simple minds: he did not endure to the end; he gave in, ratted. I do not say "simple minded" with contempt: they often see with clarity the simple truth and the absolute ideal to which effort must be directed, even if it is unattainable. Their weakness, however, is twofold. They do not perceive the complexty of any given situation in Time, in which an absolute ideal is enmeshed. They tend to forget that strange element in the World that we call Pity or Mercy, which is also an absolute requirement in moral judgement (since it is present in the Divine nature). In its highest exercise it belongs to God. For finite judges of imperfect knowledge it must lead to the use of two different scales of "morality". To ourselves we must present the absolute ideal without compromise, for we do not know our own limits of natural strength (+ grace), and if we do not aim at the highest we shall certainly fall short of the utmost that we could achieve. To others, in any case of which we know enough to make a judgement, we must apply a scale tempered by "mercy": that is, since we can with good will do this without the bias inevitable in judgements of ourselves, we must estimate the limits of another's strength and weigh this against the force of particular circumstances. (We frequently see this double scale used by the saints in their judgements upon themselves when suffering great hardships or temptations, and upon others in like trials.)

I do not think that Frodo's was a moral failure. At the last moment the pressure of the Ring would reach its maximum - impossible, I should have said, for any one to resist, certainly after long possession, months of increasing torment, and when starved and exhausted. Frodo had done what he could and spent himself completely (as an instrument of Providence) and had produced a situation in which the object of his quest could be achieved. His humility (with which he began) and his sufferings were justly reqarded by the highest honour; and his exercise of patience and mercy towards Gollum gained him Mercy: his failure was redressed.

We are finite creatures with absolute limitations upon the powers of our soul-body structure in either action or endurance. Moral failure can only be asserted, I think, when a man's effort or endurance falls short of his limits, and the blame decreases as that limit is closer approached. (No account is here taken of "grace" or the enhancement of our powers as instruments of Providence. Frodo was given "grace": first to answer the call (at the end of the Council) after long resisiting a complete surrender; and later in his resistance to the temptation of the Ring (at times when to claim and so reveal it would have been fatal), and in his endurance of fear and suffering. But grace is not infinite, and for the most part seems in the Divine economy limited to what is sufficient for the accomplishment of the task appointed to one instrument in a pattern of circumstances and other instruments.)

...Frodo undertook his quest out of love - to save the world he knew from disaster at his own expense, if he could; and also in complete humility, acknowledging that he was wholly inadequate to the task. His real contract was only to do what he could, to try to find a way, and to go as far on the road as his strength of mind and body allowed. He did that. I do not myself see that the breaking of his mind and will under demonic pressure after torment was any more a moral failure than the breaking of the body would have been ...

That appears to have been the judgement of Gandalf and Aragorn and of all who learned the full story of his journey. Certainly nothing would be concealed by Frodo! But what Frodo himself thought about the events is quite another matter.

He appears at first to have had no sense of guilt ("And there was Frodo, pale and worn, and yet himself again; and in his eyes there was peace now, neither strain of will nor madness, nor any fear ... 'The Quest is achieved, and now all is over,'"); he was restored to sanity and peace. But then he thought that he had given his life in sacrifice: he expected to die very soon. But he did not, and one can observe the disquiet growing in him. Arwen was the first to observe the signs, and gave him her jewel for comfort, and thought of a way of healing him...Slowly he fades "out of the picture", saying and doing less and less. I think it is clear on reflection to an attentive reader that when his dark times came upon him and he was conscious of being "wounded by knife sting and tooth and a long burden", it was not only nightmare memories of past horrors that afflicted him, but also unreasoning self-reproach: he saw himself and all that he done as a broken failure ... And it was mixed with another temptation, blacker and yet (in a sense) more merited, for however that may be explained, he had not in fact cast away the Ring by a voluntary act: he was tempted to regret its destruction, and still to desire it. "It is gone for ever, and now all is dark and empty," he said as he wakened from his sickness in 1420.

"Alas! there are some wounds that cannot be wholly cured," said Gandalf - not in Middle-earth. Frodo was sent or allowed to pass over Sea to heal him - if that could be done, before he died...Bilbo went too. No doubt as a completion of the plan due to Gandalf himself. Gandalf had a very great affection for Bilbo, from the hobbit's childhood onwards. His companionship was really necessary for Frodo's sake - it is difficult to imagine a hobbit, even one who had been through Frodo's experiences, being really happy even in an earthly paradise without a companion of his own kind, and Bilbo was the person that Frodo most loved. But he also needed and deserved the favour on his own account. He bore still the mark of the Ring that needed to be finally erased: a trace of pride and personal possessiveness. Of course he was old and confused in mind, but it was still a revealation of the "black mark" when he said in Rivendell, "What's become of my ring, Frodo, that you took away?" and when he was reminded of what had happened, his immediate reply was: "What a pity! I should have liked to see it again!"...

Sam is meant to be lovable and laughable. Some readers he irritates and even infuriates. I can well understand it. All hobbits at times affect me in the same way, though I remain very fond of them. But Sam can be very "trying". He is a more representative hobbit than any others that we have to see much of; and he consequently has a stronger ingeredient of that quality which even some hobbits found at times hard to bear: a vulgarity - by which I do not mean a mere "down-to-earthiness" - a mental myopia which is proud of itself, a smugness (in varying degrees) and cocksureness, and a readiness to measure and sum up all things from a limited experience, largely enshrined in sententious traditional "wisdom". We only meet exceptional hobbits in close companionship - those who had a grace or gift: a vision of beauty, and a reverence for things nobler than thmselves, at war with their rustic self-satisfaction. Imagine Sam without his education by Bilbo and his fascination wtih things Elvish!...

Sam was cocksure, and deep down a little conceited; but his conceit had been transformed by his devotion to Frodo. He did not think of himself as heroic or even brave, or in any way admirable - except in his service and loyalty to his master. That had an ingredient (probably inevitable) of pride and possessiveness ... In any case it prevented him from fully understanding the master tha the loved, and from following him in his gradual education to the nobility of service to the unlovable and of perception of damaged goods in the corrupt. He plainly did not fully understand Frodo's motives or his distress in the incident of the Forbidden Pool. If he had understood better what was going on between Frodo and Gollum, things might have turned out differently in the end.

For me perhaps the most tragic moment in the Tale comes in II 323 ff. when Sam fails to note the complete change in Gollum's tone and aspect. "Nothing, nothing," said Gollum softly. "Nice master!" His repentance is blighted and all Frodo's pity is (in a sense) wasted. Shelob's lair becomes inevitable.

This is due of course to the "logic of the story". Sam could hardly have acted differently ... If he had, what could then have happened? The course of the entry into Mordor and the struggle to reach Mount Doom would have been different, and so would the ending. The insterest would have shifted to Gollum, I think, and the battle that would have gone on between his repentance and his new love on one side and the Ring. Though the love would have been strengthened daily it could not have wrested the mastery from the Ring. I think that in some queer twisted and pitiable way Gollum would have tried (not maybe with conscious design) to satisfy both. Certainly at some point not long before the end he would have stolen the Ring or taken it by violence (as he does in the actual Tale). But "possession" satisfied, I think he would then have sacrificed himself for Frodo's sake and have voluntarily cast himself into the fiery abyss.

I think that an effect of his partial regeneration by love would have been a clearer vision when he claimed the Ring. He would have perceived the evil of Sauron, and suddenly realized that he could not use the Ring and had not the strength or stature to keep it in Sauron's despite: the only way to keep it and hurt Sauron was to destory it and himself together - and in a flash he may have seen that this would also be the greatest service to Frodo. Frodo in the tale actually takes the Ring and claims it, and certainly he too would have had a clear vision - but he was not given any time: he was immediately attacked by Gollum. When Sauron was aware of the seizure of the Ring his one hope was in its power: that the claimant would be unable to relinquish it until Sauron had time to deal with him. Frodo too would then probably, if not attacked, have had to take the same way: cast himself with the Ring into the abyss. If not he would of course have completely failed. It is an interesting problem: how Sauron would have acted or the claimant have resisted. Sauron sent at once the Ringwraiths. They were naturally fully instructed, and in no way deceived as to the real lordship of the Ring. The wearer would not be invisible to them, but the reverse; and the more vulnerable to their weapons. But the situation was now different to that under Weathertop, where Frodo acted merely in fear and wished only to use (in vain) the Ring's subsidiary power of conferring invisibility. He had grown since then. Would they have been immune from its power if he claimed it as an instrument of command and domination?

Not wholly. I do not think they could have attacked him with violence, nor laid hold upon him or taken him captive; they would have obeyed or feigned to obey any minor commands of his that did not interfere with their errand - laid upon them by Sauron, who still through their nine rings (which he held) had primary control of their wills. That errand was to remove Frodo from the Crack. Once he lost the power or opportunity to destroy the Ring, the end could not be in doubt - saving help from outside, which was hardly even remotely possible.

Frodo had become a considerable person, but of a special kind: in spiritual enlargement rather than in increase of physical or mental power; his will was much stronger than it had been, but so far it had been exercised in resisting not using the Ring and with the object of destroying it. He needed time, much time, before he could control the Ring or (which in such a case is the same) before it could control him; before his will and arrogance could grow to a stature in which he could dominate other major hostile wills. Even so for a long time his acts and commands would still have to seem 'good" to him, to be for the benefit of others beside himself.

The situation as between Frodo with the Ring and the Eight (the Witch-king had been reduced to impotence) might be compared to that of a small brave man armed with a devastating weapon, faced by eight savage warriors of great strength and agility armed with poisoned blades. The man's weakness was that he did not know how to use his weapon yet; and he was by temperament and training averse to violence. Their weakness that the man's weapon was a thing that filled them with fear as an object of terror in their religious cult, by which they had been conditioned to treat one who wielded it with servility. I think they would have shown "servility". They would have greeted Frodo as "Lord". With fair speeches they would have induced him to leave the Sammath Naur - for instance "to look upon his new kingdom, and behold afar with his new sight the abode of power that he must now claim and turn to his own purposes." Once outside the chamber while he was gazing some of them would have destroyed the entrance. Frodo would by then probably have been already too enmeshed in great plans of reformed rule - like but far greater and wider than the vision that tempted Sam ("Wild fantasies arose in his mind; and he saw Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age, striding with a sword across the darkened land, and armies flocking to his call as he marched to the overthrow of Barad-due.") - to heed this. But if he still preserved some sanity and partly understood the significance of it, so that he refused now to go with them to Barad-due, they would simply have waited. Until Sauron himself came.

In any case a confrontation of Frodo and Sauron would soon have taken place, if the Ring was intact. Its result was inevitable. Frodo would have been utterly overthrown: crushed to dust, or preserved in torment as a gibbering slave. Sauron would not have feared the Ring! It was his own and under his will. Even from afar he had an effect upon it, to make it work for its return to himsefl. In his actual presence none but very few of equal stature could have hoped to withhold it from him. Of "mortals" no one, not even Artagorn. In the contest with the Palantir Aragorn was the rightful owner. Also the contest took place at a distance, and in a tale which allows the incarnation of great spirits in a physical and destructivle form their power must be far greater when actually physically present. Sauron should be thought of as very terrible. The form that he took was that of a man of more than human stature, but not gigantic. In his earlier incarnation he was able to veil his power (as Gandalf did) and could appear as a commanding figure of great strength of body and supremely royal demeanour and countenance.

Of the others only Gandalf might be expected to master him - being an emissary of the Powers and a creature of the same order, an immortal spirit taking a visible physical form. In the "Mirror of Galadriel", it appears that Galadriel conceived of herself as capable of wielding the Ring and supplanting the Dark Lord. IF so, so also were the other guardians of the Three, especially Elrond. But this is another matter. It was part of the essential deceit of the Ring to fill minds with imaginations of supreme power. But this the Great had well considered and had rejected, as is seen in Elrond's words at the Council. Galadriel's rejection of the temptation was founded upon previous thought and resolve. In any case Elrond or Galadriel would have proceeded in the policy now adopted by Sauron: they would have built up an empire with great and absolutely subservient generals and armies and engines of war, until they could challenge Sauron and destroy him by force. Confrontation of Sauron alone, unaided, self to self, was not contemplated.

One can impagine the scene in which Gandalf, say, was placed in such a position. It would be a delicate balance. On one side the true allegiance of the Ring to Sauron; on the other superior strength because Sauron was not actually in possession, and perhaps also because he was weakened by long corruption and expenditure of will in dominating inferiors. If Gandalf proved the victor, the result would have been for Sauron the same as the destruction of the Ring; for him it would have been destroyed, taken from him for ever. But the Ring and all its works would have endured. It would have been the master in the end.

Gandalf as Ring-Lord would have been far worse than Sauron. He would have remained "righteous", but self-righteous. He would have continued to rule and order things for "good", and the benefit of his subjects according to his wisdom (which would have remained great.

Thus while Sauron multiplied evil, he left "good" clearly distinguishable from it. Gandalf would have made good destestable and seem evil.

Hungary Essays

Here are all my blitherings about Hungary, compiled:

Part I - Geography as Destiny

Part II - Culture

Part III - 1989

Part IV - Budapest

Part V - 1956

Hungary - Part V - 1956

This post is a simple version of the Hungarian revolt against Soviet Russia in 1956, the revolt which had such long-lasting implications, in terms of its effect on the psyche of Hungarians.

HUNGARY - PART V - 1956

In 1956, Hungarians rose up in revolt against Communist and Soviet power. They were led by a man named Imre Nagy who was the prime minister at the time. Nagy was hanged for his actions and tossed into a prison grave. Finally, in June 1989 Nagy was given a solemn funeral in the largest square in Budapest, and a hero's burial. Over 100,000 people showed up for the ceremony, a public display of nationalistic grief and pride which never would have been allowed in days of stricter control. Milan Kundera's books, so wonderful, have as one of their themes the problem of memory, of forgetting. The Soviet State not only wanted to control people's movements, people's income, people's property - but they wanted to control people's memories as well.

This is why, as the edifice cracked in the late 1980s, demonstrations commemorating fallen heroes were such a massive deal in all of the countries of the Soviet bloc. Heroes whose names had been erased from the public record, heroes the Communist Party wanted to wipe out of people's memory banks ...

The 1956 revolt in Hungary cost an estimated 30,000 lives.

The Soviet Army tried to control the protests, the demonstrations. They cracked down on the journalists, the academics, the students ... all to no avail. The revolt kept escalating, gathering speed and momentum.

The year was 1956. The Cold War was in full bloom. The Communists were not going to give an inch. So the Soviet Army feigned a withdrawal from all the hotspots in Hungary. People noticed the troops were gone, they noticed that they were no longer being watched and persecuted. So they relaxed. The dissidents and loud-mouthed intellectuals and journalists came out of hiding.

And on November 4, 1956, the Soviet Army launched a surprise attack and crushed the uprising, decimating the opposition. The tanks rolled through Hungary, terrorizing the population. There were Stalinist show trials, tons of people were hanged and tossed in unmarked graves. People were forced to rat each other out, people were tortured, murdered, executed. The spirit of Hungary was crushed (temporarily), along with the revolution. It's like the country went into a deep depression after that, a clinical depression which lingered, and lingered, and lingered.

Moscow then secretly put Janos Kadar in full charge of the country. He had actually been freed from prison by Mr. Nagy. Kadar dominated Hungary from 1956 until 1988, when he was deposed. It sounds to me like he was a Soviet puppet.

The long-delayed funeral service for Nagy in 1989 was one of the sparks which lit the match which ignited the entire world of Eastern Europe to throw off the Communist dominators. You cannot obliterate a people's memory. You cannot tell them who to care about. You cannot say, "No no no no, Nagy really wasn't for YOU ... he was a pawn of the Communists ... Love KADAR...LOVE KADAR." People are NOT that stupid.

I am thinking of Iran. The Shah (the last Shah, anyway) could not make the Iranian people love him and get behind his plans for their country. No matter how hard he tried, he had not captured the hearts and minds of his people. You cannot fake the kind of devotion and mania the Iranians had when Khomeini returned to Iran. This sort of devotion can be dysfunctional, and terrifying, like all of the Aryan youths marching around screaming "Heil, Hitler!", or it can take on a more benign form.

Imre Nagy, the prime minister of Hungary, a Communist himself!, did not want the country to be crushed and dominated by Communism. He did not want the citizens of Hungary to be dogged by secret police wherever they went. He stood up for them, he spoke up for them. He paid for this with his life. The Hungarians love him. He is their hero. Their voice.

The outpouring of love over 30 years later at Nagy's funeral was baffling to the Communist Party, which continued to try to control things in Hungary. But they were increasingly losing it. They refused to rehabilitate Nagy's memory.

But here is the New York Times article (or an excerpt from it), describing what happened at this memorial service in June, 1989.

Thirty-one years after he was hanged and his body thrown into a prison grave, Imre Nagy, who led the 1956 uprising against Soviet domination, was given a solemn funeral today ... The ceremonies were organized by the opposition, which worships the former Prime Minister as a national hero, but four leading members of the ruling Communist Party came to pay tribute ... The four top party officials ...left before a succession of eulogies to Imre Nagy that were unsparing in their condemnation of the Communist Party and its ally, the Soviet Union.

Many in the crowd looked up in shock and seemed to be holding their breath to hear at so public a ceremony, in so sumptuous a setting, words of such astonishing candor ...

Victor Orban, a spokesman for the Federation of Young Democrats, paid tribute to Mr. Nagy as a man who, although a Communist, "identified himself with the wishes of the Hungarian nation to put an end to the Communist taboos, blind obedience to the Russian empire and the dictatorship of a single party." ...

Sandor Racz, who led the Budapest Workers' Council during the uprising and spent seven years in prison, condemned the Soviet Army and the Communist Party as "obstacles for Hungarian society". ... He said the party was "clinging fearfully to power," although it was clear that "what it failed to achieve in the last 44 years cannot be remedied now." He continued, "They are responsible for the past. They are responsible for the damaged lives of Hungarians."

Budapest experienced a day full of anomalies and contradictions. No state funeral could have been more solemnly and publicly marked or held in a more prestigious settling, but for the Hungarian Governemtn and the ruling party, Mr. Nagy and the four companions who were sentenced to death and now reburied with him remain traitors and counterrrevolutionaries...As recently as earlier this year, Mr. Grosz still ruled out Mr. Nagy's rehabilitation. On the 30th anniversary of the hangings last year, the police broke up with considerable violence a small tribute organized by dissidents on a Budapest square.

It was an anomaly also that the Soviet Union and Hungary's other Communist friends sent diplomats, but not their ambassadors, to attend the ceremony, although it had no official character that would have obliged them to be there. But other Communist countries -- China, North Korea, Romania, and Albania -- stayed away.

The Heroes Square ceremony was staged, in one more irony, by the son of another executed Communist, Laszlo Rajk, who was Interior and Foreign Minister. Mr. Rajk, a loyal Communist, was hanged after a show trial in 1949 at the height of the Stalinist period. The younger Laszlo Rajk, an architect and movie set deisgner, draped the neoclassical facade of the art museum and a tall column in the center of the square's vast expanse fully in black and white, traditional mourning colors among the Hungarians of Transylvania, annexed by Romania. He devised strikingly modern wood and metal structures as a setting on which to display the five coffins, as well as a sixth, empty one commemorating the more than 300 victims of judicial retributions after the uprising. Tall, flaming torches stood between the coffins, and a permanent rotation of honorary pallbearers -- including widows, children, and other relatives of the five victims being buried -- flanked them ...

Today, after the wreath-laying and eulogies, a procession of hearses, followed by cars and buses, set out for the huge public ceremony next to the prison where the hangings took place ... Beyond them, in an adjoining field full of mainly unmarked graves, a tomb had been dug for Mr. Nagy. His daughter had requested that he be laid to rest amid the bulk of those who paid with their lives for following his lead.

Two actors read in alphabetical order the names of the 260 victims, who were executed from 1956 to 1961, their occupations and their ages. At each name, a torchbearer stepped forward, held high the flame and replied, "He has lived in us; he has not gone."

When the name of one of the five was called, surname first, in the Hungarian fashion, like "Nagy Imre, Prime Minister, 62 years," his coffin was carried to the grave and a friend delivered a eulogy. Then, supporting one another, his nearest relatives stepped to the grave to put down flowers and stand, with bowed heads, allowed for the first time to mourn in public, together with those who share their grief.

Unbelievable.

After that funeral service, the power of the Communist Party continued to erode throughout the summer. The party leadership elected a four-man presidency, and then it stripped one of the four (who had succeeded Kadar as party leader) of all authority. The party liberals were rising, and suddenly: other parties outside the political system started sprouting up. Parties of dissidents, cultural activists, ecologists, cultural nationalists. These parties all started calling for pluralistic free elctions. They demanded that they occur in 1990. No more "some day", no more "we're working on it." It was 1989. They wanted the elections in 1990.

And indeed, elections were scheduled by 1990, and secretly the Communist Party members in Hungary began talking amongst themselves about how to liquidate the party's assets, and change its name (so they could participate in the free elections as well).

Hungary - Part IV - Budapest

This post is made up of excerpts from Robert Kaplan's man-on-the-street reporting from the streets of Budapest. It is a mix of historical information, personal impressions, and quotes from a man he meets - Rudolf Fischer. Kaplan's books are never straight history, which is why I enjoy them, although they may be displeasing to history buffs because it focuses on the personal, and on somewhat anecdotal information.

I like the anecdotes. I like meeting the people of the country through Kaplan's eyes.

HUNGARY - PART IV - BUDAPEST

In the first chapter of Robert Kaplan's Eastward to Tartary he hangs out in Budapest with a Hungarian named Rudolf Fischer. They drink plum brandy in Fischer's study full of books, and Fischer basically prepares Kaplan mentally for his upcoming journey through the Balkans. Fischer speaks about concrete things in a way that goes beneath the surface and he tries to let Kaplan know what is REALLY going on. He tries to let Kaplan know how to look at things.

These excerpts are snapshots from that chapter.

Fischer unfurled his set of late-nineteenth-century Austrian army staff maps and a somewhat earlier German one. "These are the maps you must use at the start of your journey," he told me. "They are better than Cold War era maps. The maps before 1989 are, of course, useless. The Iron Curtain is still a social and cultural border. Do you know the real service provided by McDonald's in Hungary and the other formerly socialist countries? They are the only place where people -- women, especially -- can find a clean public lavatory."

Kaplan on the still reverberating echo of the Roman empire:

Very simply put, the split running through the Balkans between the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires to which Fischer referred reflects a much earlier division. In the fourth century A.D., the Roman empire divided into western and eastern halves. Rome remained the capital of the western empire, while Constantinople became the capital of the eastern one. Rome's western empire eventually gave way to Charlemagne's kingdom and to the Vatican: Western Europe, in other words. The eastern empire -- Byzantium -- was populated mainly by Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians, and later by Moslems, when the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople in 1453. The border between the eastern and western empires ran through the middle of what after World War I became the multiethnic state of Yugoslavia. When that state broke apart violently in 1991, at least initially it echoed the division of Rome sixteen centuries earlier: The Slovenes and Croats were Roman Catholics, heirs to a tradition that went back from Austria-Hungary to Rome in the West; the Serbs, however, were Eastern Orthodox and heirs to the Ottoman-Byzantine legacy of Rome in the East.

Kaplan on the Carpathian Mountains:

The Carpathians, which run northeast of the former Yugoslavia and divide Romania into two parts, reinforced this boundary between Rome and Byzantium and, later, between the Habsburg emperors in Vienna and the Turkish sultans in Constantinople. Rudolf Fischer told me that the Carpathians, which were not easily traversed, halted the eastward spread of European culture, marked by Romanesque and Gothic architecture and by the Renaissance and Reformation.

A quote from Rudolf Fischer on the Carpathian Mountains and the divide between West and East:

"Romania -- because of the influence of the Renaissance and the Reformation in the northwest of the country -- had been more developed than Greece before World War II! It was only the Truman Doctrine -- $10 billion in American aid, in 1940s dollars no less -- that created today's westernized Greece. Let me go on in the same vein. The differences between the Hungarian Stalinist leader Matyas Rakosi and the Romanian Stalinist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, and even more so between their successors, Janos Kadar and Nicolae Ceausescu, were the differences -- don't you see! -- between Habsburg Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey. Rakosi and Kadar may have been perverse Central Europeans, but as Hungarians, they were Central Europeans nonetheless. But Gheorghiu-Dej and Ceausescu were Oriental despots, from a part of Europe influenced more by Ottoman Turkey than by Habsburg Austria. That's why communism did less damage to Hungary than to Romania."

Fischer on the difficulty Hungary faces in escaping its communist past:

"Our whores in Budapest are Russian and Ukrainian; our money -- though it floats freely -- is still worthless in the West; our oil and gas are from Russia; and we have mafia murders and corruption just like in the countries to the south and east. Mafia shootings and the drug trade put pressure on the Hungarian government to make [entrance] visas compulsory for Romanians, Serbs, and Ukrainians, who are thought to be the culprits, but that will never happen, because it will separate us from the ethnic Hungarians just over the [Romanian] border. We are tied to the ex-Communist East, whether we like it or not."

Kaplan on the lingering effects of Communism in the Hungarian urban landscape:

...the hallway in his building was dark and untidy, like many that I had seen throughout the former Communist world, where decades of state ownership had given people no incentive to maintain property, an attitude that was changing slowly. There was, too, the building itself, and all the others in Fischer's neighborhood, whose unfinished look and poor construction -- plate glass and mustard-colored cinder blocks -- were more typical of buildings in formerly Communist Central Asia than those in Austria, just a two-hour ride away by train. The Berlin Wall may have fallen in November 1989, but for a traveler almost a decade later, its ghost was still present.

A conversation between Kaplan and Fischer about Hungary, NATO, and the EU:

Kaplan: "What about NATO? Will its new eastern frontier -- following the admission of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary-- mark the border of the Near East?" Fischer: "NATO doesn't matter. Only the EU is real. The EU is about currency, border controls, passports, trade, interest rates, environmental and dietary regulations -- the details of daily life -- which will change Hungary. For decades Austria was not part of NATO, but did you ever think of Austria as part of Eastern Europe or the Near East? Of course not."

Kaplan expanding on the new Near East:

Therefore, it appeared likely -- at least if the EU expanded into Hungary, Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Poland but took a decade to grant full membership to Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Turkey, and Russia -- that the Western alliance would be an eerie variation of the Holy Roman Empire at its zenith in the 11th century, and the split between Western and Eastern Christianity would be institutionalized once more, as it had been during the divisions between Rome and Byzantium and the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. The Near East would then begin on the border of Hungary and Romania. Completing the reemergence of this older map, Russia was now returning to the dimensions of 16th century Muscovy: a vibrant city-state within a chaotic hinterland.

A conversation between Fischer and Kaplan about the borders of Hungary:

Fischer: "Hungarians want to spiritualize the frontiers -- that is the word that they use here."
Kaplan: "You mean they want the borders to be filters: to protect, but not to divide."
Fischer: "Perhaps. What the Hungarians really want is to let ethnic Hungarians from the east into Hungary, but nobody else."

Fischer on modern-day Europe:

Fischer then railed against the "modern age" in Europe, in which democratic stirrings in the late 19th and early 20th centuries strengthened ethnic nationalism, while industrialization strengthened the power of states. The result was the collapse of multiethnic empires like Habsburg Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey and the rise of uniethnic powers like Germany and of nasty tribal principalities in the post-World War I Balkans, though they were in some cases called parliamentary democracies. Even the 1848 democratic revolutions in Central Europe, it seemed, were not so pure; they were based on ethnicity as much as on liberal ideals, and in Hungarian (Magyar) areas, at least, were opposed by the minority Croats, Serbs, and Romanians. For Fischer, with his background, the modern age had meant "Magyarization campaigns" and other forms of "ethnic cleansing", crucial to the establishment of petty states tyrannized by ethnic majorities.

A personal story from Fischer's past which illuminates the problems with Hungarian nationalism. It is the story of what happened to him on his 21st birthday, September 17, 1944:

"Because my father and I had fled Romania when World War II broke out and managed to get visas to Australia, I was in the Australian army on my 21st birthday. My commanding officer had given me a short leave. Thus, I spent my birthday alone, walking in the Australian countryside and thinking about who among my family and friends back in Transylvania were alive or dead. What had happened to them? Soon after the war, I learned that on that very day, Hungarian soldiers shot the entire Jewish population of Sarmas, a village east of Kolozsvar, in Transylvania. Those poor people. They had thought of themselves as Hungarian. They spoke Hungarian. They had managed to survive five years of fascism without being deported to concentration camps. It was as if they had been miraculously forgotten while every kind of horror reigned around them. Then their own Hungarian soldiers appears in Sarmas, and what did they do? They herded all the Jews into pigsties for several days and then took them to a hill and massacred them. Within the Holocaust, there were many little pogroms. This is why I remember so vividly walking alone in Australia on my 21st birthday. Because the memory of it was preserved by what I later found out had occurred on that same day in Sarmasu. You see, Robert, Hungarian nationalism, Romanian nationalism -- they're all bad. The boundary formed by the Carpathians was benign compared to these modern nationalistic boundaries, because the Carpathians divided empires within which peoples and religions mixed. I am a cosmopolitan. That is what every civilized person must now try to be!"

Fischer says to Kaplan: "We are going for a walk. I have something to show you which you must see before you start on your journey.":

Near Orczy Square, in the far-off southeast corner of Budapest, we came to an immense hodgepodge of metal-framed stalls and greasy canteens set up in abandoned Russian railway cars. I saw Chinese-manufactured high-top running shoes on sale for the equivalent of ten dollars, sweaters for four dollars, socks, clocks, jackets, cell phones, shampoo, toys, and just about any other necessity -- all cheap and made in either Asia or formerly Communist Europe. Many of the goods were Russian. The food at the canteens was Turkish. The merchants were Chinese, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, and other Central Asian nationalities, but mostly Chinese. i noticed bus stops for destinations in Romania and other points east, but never west. Hungarian policemen were ubiquitous, for there had been several murders here recently. Nobody was well dressed.

"People in Budapest call this place the Chinese market," Fischer told me. "It grew in the early 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed and China loosened travel restrictions on its own citizens. It is a real caravansary." Chinese families dominated a vast underground trading network that provided cheap goods for the overwhelming majority of people in Eastern Europe, who could not afford the new Western-style shops. Here, any language worked. Commerce was the great equalizer. "Yes, it is a bit violent, with gangland killings," Fischer said. "But is it any different from the backstreets of Odessa one or two hundred years ago, where my Jewish ancestors and yours were carrying on much as these people do now?"

"This is all I have to show you, Robert," Fischer concluded. "Remember that the Iron Curtain still forms a community. Just look at this market. Over four decades of the most comprehensive repression cannot be wished away in a few years." Fischer guided me onto a tram and rode with me for a few stops. "It is good that you will be passing through Transylvania. Ah, so much to see there," he said, his voice full of longing. Then he stepped off the tram and waved good-bye by lifting his walking stick.

Hungary - Part III - 1989

This post is about the world-wrenching events of 1989, and Hungary's role in all of that.

HUNGARY - PART III - 1989

So now, wrenchingly, I skip ahead to 1989. We are now in the absolutely tumultuous and astonishing autumn of that year. Unbelievable ... the stuff that went down in a matter of 3 or 4 months. Truly incredible.

The Berlin Wall came down in November. But that mind-blowing development was created by a crisis in Hungary. A crisis for the Communist Party and for the Soviet Union in general.

Basically, the edifice of the Communist Party had been crumbling for awhile, and suddenly, in a matter of a year, there was no mask left. Nobody cared, nobody listened to them anymore. There was no belief in the power of the Communist Party. It was a paper dragon. The slaughter in Beijing, under the eyes of the visiting Gorbachev, had something to do with it, but it also was a fever which spread across the world, in all places at once. Lech Walesa and Solidarity, the massacre of demonstrators in Tbilisi ... every single country began to explode, and the Communist Party was completely ineffective in dealing with all of these crises. There would be no Prague Spring this time. No one listened to the mouthpieces anymore. No one feared the Paper Dragon.

And here is what the Hungarians did: Let me make sure I get this straight:

For decades, Hungary was a popular vacation spot for people from behind the Iron Curtain. It was a summer "resort" spot, with lakes and cabins (as opposed to a wintry Alp-type atmosphere.) Knowing the holiday season in Hungary is important because it was when everyone started returning home for their vacations in late August, early September 1989, that everything started changing, cracking, accelerating.

East Germans and West Germans would use Hungary (a relatively open and relaxed Communist country ... as opposed to the more Stalinist Romania, or the wacky militant Bulgars) as a meeting spot in the summer months. Families would be reunited, would have vacations together on a yearly basis, and then return to their respective homes, on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain.

For forty years, the Hungarian border guards were fierce about making sure that the East Germans returned to East Germany. The border with Austria was one of the toughest and most harassing in the world, because it was the place where you could escape. Austria represented Europe, and the West. Hungary was Communist, so the poor East Germans didn't have a chance to escape because everybody had their eye on them. First of all, they were hated because they were Germans, part of the country that started two World Wars. Second of all, they were from a divided country. They still had enormous family connections on the other side of the wall. Of course they wanted the wall to be taken down, so that they could be with their relatives again, see their families again. This was just the sort of tight family bond that the Communist Party frowned upon. And the situation in Germany was extremely volatile because of this. The Berlin Wall did not make things easier for the Communists. It made things worse.

So anyway. Back to Hungary.

Hungary had a treaty agreement with East Germany, signed in 1968, saying that they would not permit East German citizens to travel to the West via Hungary.

And then suddenly, in the early autumn of 1989, the foreign minister of Hungary (Gyula Horn) decided to ignore his treaty obligations. He did so without any permission from Moscow, without any discussion with the politburo. This is just incredible.

But here's what led up to that autonomous decision which changed everything. What is so incredible is how quickly the massive Communist structure toppled. The rot within was so extensive. The East Germany refugee crisis was in September1989, the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, and it all was over by summer of 1991.

Phenomenal.

Hungary decided to let some of the East German refugees pass through to the West with their families and the border guards turned a blind eye. At first. So this is in itself incredible, and goes to show you how much things had relaxed, how the power had been crumbling bit by bit - until in one fell swoop, it no longer existed. But what began as a small trickle of people exploded, and quickly, into a massive refugee crisis. Once people heard that you could get to the West easily through Hungary, they all basically packed their bags, left East Germany, and poured into Hungary. This was an incredibly embarrassing situation for the Communists in Moscow, and for the politburo in Hungary. What should they do? There were thousands and thousands of people suddenly crushing up against the border with Austria. Tens of thousands of refugees. And this was not a refugee crisis of the kind we are accustomed to - poor bedraggled people, huddled in tents on a windy plain. These people were young, educated, and supposedly the future of the Communist Party.

Here's a quote from Michael Dobbs' great book Down with Big Brother:

Unbeknownst to either man, the foreign minister of Hungary made a decision, in the privacy of his Budapest home, that led inexorably to the fall of the Berlin Wall less than three months later. Gyula Horn was grappling with the kind of excruciating moral and political dilemma familiar to many Communist reformers that summer. Over the past few months Hungary had been transformed into a holding pen for tens of thousands of East German refugees. Very few were political dissidents. For the most part they were young people, fed up with the austerity of life under communism and the never-ending snooping of the secret police. They had given up on their dogmatic Communist leaders, who seemed allergic to the very idea of reform, and were voting with their feet. From Hungary they wanted nothing more than safe passage to the bright lights of capitalism in West Germany. "There is no future for us in the East" was a common refrain. The foreign minister had to decide whether to let them go or keep them penned up in the Communist East.

Now this is amazing: Yes, Hungary had this treaty with East Germany. Hungary did fear that the hard-liners in Berlin, in Moscow, would come down on them fiercely if they broke this treaty and let the refugees go through. Czechloslovakia's "Prague Spring" in 1968 had been a warning to all Communist countries everywhere of what could happen if you started ignoring Moscow.

HOWEVER: a few months before Hungary filled up with East German refugees it had also signed an international agreement pledging freedom of travel, and also "humane treatment" of refugees.

So this was Horn's dilemma. He knew the whole world was watching his country's behavior because Hungary had signed this international agreement, stating its commitment to human rights. Hungary was a Communist state. Was it possible for a Communist country to protect the human rights of its citizens, as well as people "visiting" their country? Beijing was an obvious debacle in this regard. The world was still shocked, stunned, and devastated (one more descriptive term, Sheila??) by the massacre in Tienamen Square. There had been hope that the Chinese government was changing: allowing the students to speak out, allowing forums on democracy, etc. But once they were confronted by an actual revolution, they crushed it like a bug.

Would Hungary go the same way? Would Hungary reveal itself to be as hypocritical and as afraid as China? Would it honor its agreement with Moscow? Or would it honor its agreement with the world?

Horn (a hero in my book) decided, on his own, without getting permission from the powers-that-be in Moscow, to stand by the international human-rights agreement, and NOT the agreement with East Germany.

Another quote from Dobbs:

After a sleepless night, pacing up and down his sitting room, the 57 year old foreign minister made up his mind. He decided to abrogate the treaty with East Berlin and let the refugees go. Hungarian leaders had earlier taken the precaution of informally testing the waters with Moscow. The Soviets appeared to have no objection.

"There was no other way," Horn recalled later. "We had to look for the humanist solution, no matter what sort of conflict might arise. It was quite obvious to me that this would be the first step in a landslide-like series of events."

And he was certainly correct. East Germans fled their own country in droves. They piled into Hungary, poured out through Austria, and then poured into West Germany to be reunited joyously with their families. This directly led to the Berlin Wall coming down a couple of months later.

"We had to look for the humanist solution, no matter what sort of conflict might arise" said Horn. God bless him. He may have acted out of a sense of his own political survival, and not out of any lofty goal. But still - in an uber sense, he did the right thing.

Hungary - Part II - Culture

Unfortunately, my notes about Hungary start in the 800 ADs, and then skip to World War I. My apologies for that. One of the many cool things about doing this whole "Country of the Week" thing is that I get to see what I don't know, and the obvious gaps. I have no idea what Hungary was like in between the 10th century and the 20th century, and that's a pretty huge freakin' gap.

Here are a couple of general points about Hungary:

HUNGARY - PART II - CULTURE

It has always been more European than Eastern. This has to do partly with topography; the western side of Hungary is completely open to Europe, and has borders with Austria, it is a gateway to the West. Compare this with a country like Romania, or Bulgaria - which are completely blocked by mountains/forests into the Balkans, with borders with Russia or Turkey, and you will see what a huge difference geography has made.

Hungary had always been way more influenced by Habsburg Austria than by Ottoman Turkey.

Hungary has a large Calvinist population, mostly in the eastern part of the country. Hungary also has a large Catholic population. Robert Kaplan describes the interesting (and potentially volatile) relationship between these two faiths, and also how these faiths have manifested themselves in Hungary in areas like economic development:

"In the mid-sixteenth century Debrecen [a city in eastern Hungary] was a hotbed of the Reformation, and Catholics were forbidden to settle. Here, a Calvinist college was established and local Calvinists made a pact with the ruling Moslem Turks to provide for the town's security. But the so-called Prussian work ethic did not invigorate the Calvinists of Debrecen. 'In eastern Hungary, Calvinism has been mere conservatism and fatalism, yet another element of ethnicity surrounded by religious walls, proscribing innovation,' Laszlo Csaba, a Hungarian economist and social critic, had told me in Budapest. It has always been the Catholic areas of Hungary that displayed economic dynamism. (Csaba had added that the 'Prussian work ethic,' based partly on Protestantism, was also misunderstood. 'The Prussian work ethic was not entrepreneurial, but fitted to bureaucracy and mass industrialization. It functioned only if somebody else supplied the jobs and told people what to do. In a postindustrial entrepreneurial age,' he continued, 'don't expect the formerly Prussian parts of Germany to be economically impressive. Budapest and the rest of Hungary are closer to Catholic Munich than to Prussian-Protestant Berlin, and in a new Europe of region-states, the region oriented toward Munich may be stronger.')"

Now, this is just me personally, but a paragraph like that completely turns me on. I can read it 10 times in a row, and I have, and still feel like I have only scratched the surface of what is going on. I have my eye jammed up against a tiny hole in the wall, trying to see the whole world beyond. And I have only that paragraph to go on. It is just one man's interpretation of events - but it provides me with avenues of inquiry, it tells me some of the right questions to ask.

In the next post, I'll talk about Hungary's role in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Before the Berlin Wall ever came down, Hungarians were already dismantling the empire in their own country. In a very sneaky and entrepreneurial way. Very cool.

Hungary - Part I - Geography as Destiny

More essays from the "Country of the Week" thing I did on my old blog. Here are the other essays, for those of you new to me, or for anyone who is interested.

I had done a bunch of them, focusing on Turkmenistan, Macedonia - and I got a random email from someone: "Could you do Hungary?"

Uh ... Could I "do" Hungary? In what way, might I ask?

But anyway, I took on the challenge.

All errors of facts or interpretation are my fault, if any come up.

HUNGARY - PART I - GEOGRAPHY AS DESTINY

There is an enormous field on the eastern side of Hungary which is called "The Great Plain". I suppose "Field" is a ridiculous word choice, but if you can imagine a field which takes up an entire half of a country, then you will know what I am talking about. Like the western plains in America. An unbroken field, stretching for hundreds of miles. As has been described in this blog before, only in regards to other places, this plain was a crossing-ground, a land-bridge, a connector of peoples way back into antiquity.

This is a long way of saying geography is destiny.

It makes a lot of sense if you check it out on a map. I actually just spent 15 minutes searching the Web for a good topographical map of the area, and came up lacking. Frustrating. If you have access to a globe, just look at Hungary, and look at the inverted "C" of the Carpathians, cutting a swath through Romania. See how those mountains block Romania off from surrounding areas, and also see how the Great Plain on the eastern side of Hungary runs right up to the Carpathians, spreading upwards into the foothills of the mountain range, leaving the plain open to the north.

Such a simple thing, but crucial to the development of nations. A huge open plain, surrounded by a curving mountain range, with foothills to the north, provided easy access to the nomadic tribes and wandering people in the Middle Ages and before. This is how Hungary was born.

In 896 A.D. (how in the world do people come up with such specific dates??) seven "Magyar tribes" entered what is now modern-day Hungary, through the Great Plain, after being on the move for more than a thousand years. The Magyars are the ancestors of Hungarians. Who were they? To be honest, I'm not sure. Please feel free to illuminate me. Here is all I know, and this is basically regurgitated from one of my books: In the 9th and 10th centuries, the Magyars, along with the Finns, were the first Ural-Altaic peoples in Europe. (Those are two regions in Siberia, by the way.) They were horsemen of the Asian steppe, distantly related to the fantastic Uighur Turks. I have an endless fascination with these ancient little-known equestrian tribes.

The Magyars spent a thousand years migrating from the western edge of Siberia. Who knows why. They passed through the Caucasus, where they encountered Bulgars and Turks before coming in to Hungary.

Here is one of the things I have picked up about the Magyars. They had a genius for assimilation. Their culture was enormously flexible and expansive. Well, perhaps "culture" is not the correct word for a tribe who basically lived on their horses, with no country to call their own, without even the concept of "country" or "nation-state" in their collective consciousness. But this assimilative talent is very important to keep in mind, if you want to understand Hungary and present-day Hungarians. It seems that the open intelligence of the Magyars, their willingness to transform, their willingness to add words to their language taken from the Bulgars and the Turks, is one of the keys to the character of Hungary today.

I love that. The thought that an ancient tribe's personality can course through the culture of the generations to follow, 600 years later. It seems to me that this view may not be a very politically correct one, but it also seems to me to be true. Why else would my heart rise up out of my chest when I hear the beat of a bodhran or the sound of Uilleann Pipes? Why else would the stamp of riverdancing feet make me feel like I am remembering something? I personally did not grow up in Ireland, I was not part of a Celtic tribe, I cannot speak Gaelic ... but there is something familiar about the entire thing. I go to Ireland and there is something about it that feels like home. Is this just a trick of the mind? As in: I know that my ancestors are Irish and so I relate to the Irish experience? Maybe. But I think that that is just part of what is going on. Perhaps it's a Jungian view of the world. That there is such a thing as a collective unconscious. In my case, I tap into the collective Irish unconscious in a way which does not feel intellectual, or analytical, or understood in any normal way. It is like a memory. Only these memories are not my own, personally. They are of "my people".

Tangent over.

Anyway, what is known of the Magyars is that they had a genius for evolution and assimilation. They came to Europe from Siberia, they were primitive people who lived on their horses, who were buried with their horses, and within a century, a CENTURY, had completely adopted European manners, and a European mindset. This is extraordinary. A century is a blip on the radar screen of history. But the Magyars accomplished this. They must have been an amazing people.

Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language, with many words of Turkish. A bizarre mix, and it is one of the legacies of the nomadic Magyars.

The Great Plain of Hungary had been important long before the arrival of the Magyars. Way earlier, it had been the northeasternmost frontier region of Rome, and like all frontier regions, it was filled with chaos and conflict. The order provided by the Roman empire dissolved a bit the further away you got from the center, and the Great Plain was filled with tribes, fighting for supremacy.

The Magyars were not the first tribes to pass through this area. For centuries, nomadic tribes with fascinating ancient names (Scythians, Huns, Avars, Tartars, Kumyks) migrated here. But they did not have the staying power of the Magyars, who arrived, settled in, and prospered. These other Central Asian tribes came, left a genetic imprint of one kind or another, and then disappeared off the face of the earth.

I love the idea that ancient history is a better guide to current events than the major newspapers of our day. Apparently, in Hungary now, Inner Asian studies has become enormously popular, because the country (after decades of crushing communism) is now interested in understanding its ethnic roots.

The other thing I have mentioned here which continues to be important in Hungary today, is the topography of the country. It is a small and very flat country. Budapest is in the center. Because there are no physical barriers (like the Carpathian mountains in Romania) it makes it very easy for ideas, movements, influences to move out from Budapest into the rest of the country. Things like Western investment (now a big big deal in Budapest) is fanning outwards, and the entire country is benefiting.

Take a look at Romania - again, on a globe if you have one. You can't get topographical maps online, obviously. Romania is filled with enormous mountain ranges, cutting one side of the country off from the other, and the rest of it is thick forests. It must be incredibly beautiful, but perhaps it makes it difficult for Romania to cohere. Eastern and Western Romania may as well be two different countries.

Hungary remains open, assimilative, flexible, expansive. Maybe partly due to the ancient Magyar culture coursing in the collective unconscious of the country to this day.

That's just a guess, though.

"The Failure of Frodo"

Tolkien responds to many letters from fans and reviewers about the failure of Frodo, in the end, to complete the Quest. I have a lot more to say on this - Tolkien's discussion of Pity, and Mercy - and how salvation can only come through those things - not through Power, Might, or even Success. But I'll get back to that.

Here's a couple excerpts on what Tolkien calls "the failure of Frodo":

26 July 1956 Draft of letter to Miss J. Burn
If you re-read all the passages dealing with Frodo and the Ring, I think you will see that not only was it quite impossible for him to surrender the Ring, in act or will, especially at its point of maximum power, but that this failure was adumbrated from far back. He was honoured because he had accepted the burden voluntarily, and then had done all that was within his utmost physical and mental strength to do. He (and the Cause) were saved - by mercy: by the supreme value and efficacy of Pity and forgiveness of injury.

Corinthians I x. 12-13 may not at first sight seem to fit ("Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall. There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.") - unless "bearing temptation" is taken to mean resisting it while still a free agent in normal command of the will. I think rather of the mysterious last petitions of the Lord's Prayer: Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. A petition against something that cannot happen is unmeaning. There exists the possibility of being placed in positions beyond one's power. In which case (as I believe) salvation from ruin will depend on something apparently unconnected: the general sanctity (and humility and mercy) of the sacrificial person. I did not "arrange" the deliverance in this case: it again follows the logic of the story. (Gollum had had his chance of repentance, and of returning generosity with love; and had fallen off the knife-edge). In the case of those who now issue from prison "brainwashed", broken, or insane, praising their torturers, no such immediate deliverance is as a rule to be seen. But we can at least judge them by the will and intentions with which they entered the Sammath Naur; and not demand impossible feats of will, which could only happen in stories unconcerned with real moral and mental probability.

No, Frodo "failed". It is possible that once the ring was destroyed he had little recollection of the last scene. But one must face the fact: the power of Evil in the world is not finally resistible by incarnate creatures, however "good"; and the Writer of the Story is not one of us.

27 July 1956 Letter to Amy Ronald
By chance, I have just had another letter regarding the failure of Frodo. Very few seem even to have observed it. But following the logic of the plot, it was clearly inevitable, as an event. And surely it is a more significant and real event than a mere "fairy story" ending in which the hero is indomitable? It is possible for the good, even the saintly, to be subjected to a power of evil which is too great for them to overcome - in themselves. In this case the cause (not the "hero") was triumphant, because by the exercise of pity, mercy, and forgiveness of injury, a situation was produced in which all was redressed and disaster averted. Gandalf certainly foresaw this. ("Pity? It was pity that stayed [Bilbo's] hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity.") Of course he did not mean to say that one must be merciful, for it may prove useful later - it would not then be mercy or pity, which are only truly present when contrary to prudence. Not ours to plan! But we are assured that we must be ourselves extravagantly generous, if we are to hope for the extravagant generosity which the slightest easing of, or escape from, the consequences of our own follies and errors represents. And that mercy does sometimes occur in this life.

Frodo deserved all honour because he spent every drop of his power of will and body, and that was just sufficient to bring him to the destined point, and no further. Few others, possibly no others of his time, would have got so far. The Other Power then took over: the Writer of the Story (by which I do not mean myself), "that one ever-present Person who is never absent and never named" (as one critic has said). (Gandalf to Frodo: "Behind that there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-Maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker.")

A third (the only other) commentator on the point some months ago reviled Frodo as a scoundrel (who should have been hung and not honoured), and me too. It seems sad and strange that, in this evil time when daily people of good will are tortured, "brainwashed", and broken, anyone could be so fiercely simpleminded and righteous.

"I am not Gandalf..."

Tolkien wrote a draft to an unidentified reader, and in it he describes his affinity to Faramir. (Or should I say, his affinity "with" Faramir? Patrick, Grammar Guru, care to comment?)

14 January 1856
... There is hardly any reference in The Lord of the Rings to things that do not actually exist on its own plane (of secondary or sub-creationary reality): sc. have been written. (The cats of Queen Beruthiel and the names and adventures of the other 2 wizards (5 minus Saruman, Gandalf, Radagast) are all that I recollect.) The Silmarillion was offered for publication years ago, and turned down. Good may come of such blows. The Lord of the Rings was the result. The hobbits had been welcomed. I loved them myself, since I love the vulgar and simple as dearly as the noble, and nothing moves my heart (beyond all the passions and heartbreaks of the world) so much as "ennoblement" (from the Ugly Duckling to Frodo). I would build on the hobbits. And I saw that I was meant to do it (as Gandalf would say - I am not Gandalf, being a transcendent Sub-creator in this little world. As far as any character is "like me" it is Faramir - except that I lack what all my characters possess (let the psychoanalysts note!) Courage), since without thought, in a "blurb" I wrote for The Hobbit, I spoke of the time between the Elder Days and the Dominion of Men. Out of that came the "missing link": The "Downfall of Numenor", releasing some hidden "complex". For when Faramir speaks of his private vision of the Great Wave, he speaks for me. That vision and dream has been ever with me - and has been inherited (as I only discovered recently) by one of my children.

Benign poets

"The poet in our current time is complacent, maintaining an air of respectability or is the creator of outrageous manifestos -- in either case is benign. In times past poets were leaders and creators of reality; they were respected and entrusted with the keeping of cultural inheritance. Somehow this has changed, and poets now are non-entities for the most part; sure, they are politely applauded by small audiences, they sell a few volumes; they put their private lives on display to make others feel human. But this is all 'culture', a word which now seems to mean, not the whole of society, but entertainment for the few -- dividends received for living in a 'civilized' society. Furthermore, poets generally believe that they are effective, believe they make an impact on society; and who is responsible for this misconception is a great mystery -- some influence outside the poetic community, or worse yet, the poets themselves -- an important question that will not be answered here. This, for us, is the important fact: the poet has somehow been marginalized, and there is no sense that our society would die without the presence of poetry or poets. Perhaps this is the gravest sign of cultural coma."

- Brad N. Haas

My cousin Mike ... at the Patriots game

My insane and wonderful cousin Mike flew across the country to see the Patriots. Hi-jinks ensued. ESPN was there.

One small note:

I love how "cousins" appear in the story. If you're talking about an O'Malley, there will always be myriad "cousins".

Where are my wings?

As a child, I was a Brownie. All of my friends were Brownies. It was part of being a kid. My memories of Brownie meetings and Brownie activities are rather dim ... I have other memories from those long-ago days, very vivid ones, but nothing really remains in my head about "being a Brownie".

But at the end of my sojourn as a Brownie there came a moment which I think of now as my first loss of innocence, my first real disappointment. I can laugh at it now, whatever, but it absolutely crushed me when I was 8 years old. It was the first time that dearly-held illusions of mine were shattered. I suppose I should be grateful that it came from something as benign as a Brownie meeting, and not something more ominous. But whatever, this is my blog, my story, and this is the story of my first encounter with the inevitable disappointments of life.

You don't lose your innocence all at once. It's a gradual process. Bits and pieces chipped away, as you go through your life.

So here, briefly, are the memories of Brownie-hood before "the Fall" -

-- I remember having meetings in the big cafeteria ("caf")/gymnasium at South Road School - which was called "the Multi-Purpose Room" which, in retrospect, I love. It really says what it is. "Okay, so we're all going to go watch a play now in the Multi-Purpose Room!" All of us little Brownies sat in a circle as the troupe leaders (who were mothers of my friends) led the meeting. It's hilarious to think: I have friends now, old old friends, from college, etc., who have kids of their own, and are now Brownie troupe leaders.

-- I remember marching in the Parade, and feeling so proud of my little brown uniform, my little beanie hat. I particularly loved holding the flag - Oh, my heart swelled with importance. I tripped on my shoelaces, however, and fell while holding the flag. But still - the day of the Parade glowed in my memory.

-- I remember being absolutely entranced with the "Brownie book" - which I don't think they use anymore. Probably because it had too much of a pagan aspect and religious parents would object. WhatEVER. I came from a religious family, but I always appreciated a good fairy tale. The book tells the story of the Brownies, with illustrations which, in my memory, were so evocative. The Brownies were small fairies - who would creep out into the moonlight around a magical pool in the middle of the woods - and dance and sing their Brownie songs ... Well, that for me was the ENTIRE appeal of being a Brownie. I wanted to be part of that pixie fellowship.

Little did I know that, in actuality, being a Brownie had nothing to do with shimmering moonlit nights and pagan rituals around a mirrored pool - it was more about gluing interminable amounts of spray-painted macaroni onto random pieces of cardboard.

I was never into prose, especially in terms of life-style, even back then. I always preferred poetry. The romance of the moonlit woods. I wanted life itself to be poetic. I suppose I still do.

I accepted the "prose" nature of being a Brownie, but our meetings in the Multi-Purpose Room were a pale ghost of the poetry that went on in my imagination, secret meetings in the middle of the night, out in the woods.

But all lukewarm things must end, and it was time to move on and become a Girl Scout.

It was referred to as "flying up". Brownie leaders also talked about how we would "get wings". There would be a "flying up ceremony".

All of this was never explained to us in literal terms. Or if there ever was a literal explanation of what "flying up" actually meant - I was out that day. I missed that memo.

I took it all completely literally - since no one explained to me that the whole thing was basically just an elaborate metaphor for a "graduation" ceremony. Everything, to me, resonated and shimmered with magic. "The flying up ceremony"....It sounded so ... fantastical. So exciting! What did it mean? What would happen at the ceremony?

What were the "wings" we were going to get? It all was so mysterious.

I took the "flying up" part quite literally. Somehow - during the ceremony - I would "fly up". There were "wings" I would get that would help me to do this.

Some sort of transformation was going to take place. THAT was clear.

I pictured the wings in my mind and I imagined that they would be elaborate huge constructions - wings that Icarus would wear. They would HAVE to be big - if they were going to carry us up off the ground. I imagined them into reality in my brain. I worked it all out. Some of the wings (we each would get two, one to fit over each arm) were made of actual feathers, soft as down. But there were other wings made of sparkles, and glitter. It would only be revealed on the day of the "flying up ceremony" what kind of wings each of us would get. I wondered if mine would be the feathered kind. I thought that I would prefer big feathery wings to the glittery ones - but I told myself that I wouldn't mind either way. I was quite realistic about that. I talked myself down from disappointment beforehand. "It'll be okay if the wings I get are glittery. It won't matter."

The fantasies about the wings went even further. (And this element, to me, is the most interesting thing about the entire memory) Not only did I imagine what the wings would look like, the wings which would help us "fly up" to be Girl Scouts during the "flying up ceremony" - but I also imagined the wings a couple months later, crushed in the bottom of my closet, after the novelty of them wore off. That, to me, was THE most pleasing fantasy of all: to be "over" the wings, to be lackadaisacal about what was going to prove to be a transcendent experience. "What are those feathery things in my closet? Ah, those are nothing ... no big deal ... just my wings from my flying-up ceremony ... No big deal ..." I LOVED that fantasy. Even more than dreaming about the upcoming "flying up ceremony" - I LOVED fantasizing about being "over" the wings, and seeing them crushed in a heap in the bottom of my closet. That was the coolest fantasy of all.

So the big day comes. The day when all the Brownies will "fly up".

The ceremony was held in the Multi-Purpose Room. I had wondered to myself: How will we get high enough up, so that we will actually be able to fly? I had thought, Well, maybe they will stack some of the lunch tables on top of each other, and then put them on the stage ... Maybe that will be high up enough for when we put on our wings ...

Again: This all may sound incredibly silly. But nobody had ever actually told me what the ceremony was going to be, and that "flying up" was just a metaphor. Nobody explained it to me in a prosey way so my imagination just took over.

I suppose I was eager, even then, even as a little girl, for transformation. For transcendence.

I wasn't sure how the Powers-that-Be were going to handle the challenge of getting all us Brownies up to a good height so that we wouldn't fall like stones when we leapt - but I was sure that SOMEONE would figure it out.

I was a bit ... stunned ... to see how few people were in attendance. I believe my mother was there ... and a couple of other mothers ... but it seemed to be a VERY thin crowd, for such an extraordinary ceremony of transformation.

The reality did not match the magnitude in my mind. It was very disheartening.

I'll just say this, for those of you who were never Brownies, I'll tell you what the real thing is: The "flying up ceremony" is when each Brownie gets a small badge, a badge of two outstretched wings, pinned onto their sash. This wing-badge means: You are now a Girl Scout.

That's IT. That's all it was.

It had never been said to me: "You will get a wing-badge, and then you will make the Girl Scout vow, and then you will be a Girl Scout, and that is what the flying-up ceremony is all about."

They spoke in shorthand. "So, girls, when you fly up ..." "During the flying up ceremony..." "After you get your wings..." They assumed that we all KNEW.

But there I was, making up elaborate fantasies of Icarus wings, tables stacked on top of each other, little girls flying through the air of the Multi-Purpose Room, trying to convince myself that it would be okay if my wings were glittery and not feathery, and then looking forward to the day when said wings were crushed in a heap in my closet.

The ceremony began.

In a flash, when the first girl "flew up" and became a Girl Scout - the veil was pulled back from my eyes irrevocably. Horribly. I saw the teeny wing-badge, I heard her say the Girl Scout vow, and then I saw her step aside to let the next person go - and I realized that that was it. That was all the "flying-up ceremony" was going to be.

Furtively, I glanced around the Multi-Purpose Room, hoping to see a big cardboard box ... a box which would contain the REAL wings ...

but already I knew it wasn't there.

It was never there.

I went through my "flying up ceremony" with a huge smile on my face - I acted like I was really happy about my little wing-badge (my mother has a picture of my beaming face right after I "flew up") - I didn't want to show how much my heart had just cracked, how unbelievably disappointed I was, how grey the entire world suddenly looked.

I hid my heart from everyone. I was very ashamed of my fantasies. I felt stupid. Like - of course, everybody else knew what the "flying up ceremony" was going to be. I was the only one who had misunderstood. I was the only one who was devastated. Everybody else was giggling, and excited to be a Girl Scout. Inside - inside - I was crying with disappointment.

Where are my wings??? Where are my REAL wings?

There weren't going to be any wings, feathery or glittery. There would never be wings crumpled up in my closet.

There would be no transformation.

Oh, and here's a Coda:
The disillusion was complete. I only made it as a Girl Scout for a couple of months. I made my decision to quit after the day when there was a group activity where we all had to make duffel bags.

Nope. This ain't for me. There ain't no poetry in duffel bags. I am OUTTA here.

Family Pride

My sister's show last night was wonderful - lots of fun. It was like old-home week, too - a bunch of Rhode Islanders showed up, a bunch of Siobhan's friends from college - I saw a couple of people I haven't seen in a long time. It was wonderful. To have everyone come together in support for Siobhan. And Bill McCabe showed up too! That was awesome. It was a good crowd, a good mix.

Siobhan looked gorgeous, she sounded great - she played a couple of new songs. And, hooray, she played "161", one of my all-time favorites. There are 162 games in a baseball season, and she wrote this song as an ode of hope and longing, a song of Red Sox love, after opening day of 2002.

One game done and hope abounds

and i'm already hearing World Series sounds.

That one quote alone explains the entire Red Sox fan psyche.

"161". It's hilarious. The word "Nomar" is used. Repeatedly. There is a ghost of Babe Ruth floating over Fenway. Lyrics here.

Anyway, it's hysterical, and everybody got very into it. Great to hear the guffaws of laughter throughout the room.

Everyone's a baseball fan.

Afterwards, we all went over to the Parkside Lounge, sat in a corner, drank beer, ate an alarmingly large volume of Chex Mix, watched the snow coming down, blowing across Houston like wraiths, and talked like maniacs. There was some kind of a burlesque show going on in the back - so as we had our conversation, random phrases from the burlesque MC came out to our ears.

"Do you like The Onion?"
"Oh my God, I read it every day..."
"It's hilarious - I've been reading them for years..."

"COME ONE! COME ALL! COME AND LOOK AT SOME BOOBIES!"

There would be a pause in our conversation. We were stunned into silence. After one of these interjections, I said, "Boobies??"

They actually said the word "boobies", which seems rather juvenile. (Rather!) Isn't a burlesque show supposed to be a bit more erotic, a bit more ... suggestive?

Oh well, what do I know.

The MC, by the way, was a woman who was no larger than 4 feet tall, wearing very thick glasses, and a man's suit. A man's grey suit. She came over to our table and said, "Burlesque show starting in the back in one minute."

It was so specific. One minute.

But we preferred to stay over by our Chex Mix, and watch the snow coming down outside, than see some .... boobies.

Perhaps it is our loss.

But anyway - it was a wonderful night. Very proud of my younger sister. Very proud.

Tolkien scholars? Help...

In the film, we see Orcs being "born" out of the mud of the earth. It is as though Sauron is creating them, it seems as though the Orcs are being genetically engineered by the Dark Power, to be his own personal army.

I didn't really get that impression from the book, however - and the letters of Tolkien seem to support that.

Tolkien seems to suggest that Orcs already existed - but they were corrupted by Mordor - and encouraged to do the dirty work of Sauron. They are genetically encouraged by Sauron to be bigger, stronger, more brutal.

But - is this true?

Are Orcs actually created from the mud of the earth, as depicted in the movie? Or - (I feel supremely silly asking this): do Orcs have parents? Are there mummy and daddy Orcs?

What the hell is going on with the Orcs, is basically my question.

I'm in dire straits...

I have no heat in my apartment. My radiators are cold as stone. I am wearing a winter coat, a scarf, gloves, and a hat. I slept in my knitted Irish hat last night. I stayed under my down comforter reading, until 12:30 pm today. This is unheard-of behavior. But I could see my breath in my stupid apartment.

I just now cooked for the week - (I cook in bulk.) And I kept the oven door open, and sat beside it, toasting my feet.

What is this - the 17th century?

My next-door neighbor said the same was true for him - only he admitted that he is "warm-blooded" and it doesn't bother him. His girlfriend, standing in the doorway with a scarf wrapped around her head, piped in, "It bothers ME."

Something must be done.

"But why gloat!"

For those of you who have no interest whatsoever in Tolkien, I have a couple of things to say.

First off: WHAT THE HELL IS THE MATTER WITH YOU??

No, just kidding.

Really, what I wanted to say is - I am deeply involved (obviously) in reading his letters right now - and I will be posting them extensively because I cannot seem to help myself.

So if it doesn't interest you - forgive me. The mania will pass.

The letters he wrote to his son Christopher during WWII, while Christopher was stationed in South Africa are astonishing. He sent him chapters of LOTR for Christopher's comments - It seems to me that Tolkien survived those very dark days (not just dark for the world, but dark in the sense that he was separated from his son, and very worried about him - not to mention the fact that Christopher was in the RAF and Tolkien thought the airplane was a monstrous invention - monstrous, at least, in how it was being used during wartime - He was horrified that his son had anything to do with it) - but anyway, it appears that Tolkien made it through those worrisome days by pouring all of his heart into the Ring Trilogy - and sending off excerpts to his son. He says numerous times, "I write this with you in mind."

The letters are incredibly moving.

Here is an excerpt from a letter dated January 30, 1945. I post it because I relate to it - because there is something in me that abhors "gloating" at our enemies - There is something in me that finds that "hoo-yah" blood-lust terrible, indicative of our worst sides as human beings. If we should win, if we should conquer the enemy, then let us not gloat. Because, after all, what separates us from beasts, is our ability to have compassion for others. Even people on the "other side". What separates us from beasts is the ability to have feeling in our hearts for people we do not know.

Not to say that there should not be punishment, that justice should not be done, but to gloat happily in the face of the enemy's downfall is an ugly emotion, an ugly thing - It does not suit us. It does not suit the nobility of our cause. We must approach victory with solemnity, and sadness, I would say.

Sadness that it has come to this.

Peggy Noonan wrote a column in September of 2002 called "What's Missing in the Iraq Debate". It struck me at such a deep level - that I recall parts of it almost word for word.

The Democrats on Capitol Hill have so far failed to mount a principled, coherent opposition. I am not shocked by this, are you? One senses they are looking at the whole question merely as a matter of popular positioning: Will they like me if I say take out Saddam? Will they get mad at me if we try to take him out and it's a disaster? Will they like me if I say there's no reason to go to war? Have I focus-grouped this? Such unseriousness is potentially deeply destructive. It is certainly irresponsible. And here's the funny thing: If some Democrat stood up and spoke thoughtfully and without regard for political consequences about what is right for us to do, he'd likely garner enhanced respect and heightened standing. He'd seem taller than his colleagues. At any rate, more than usual, I am missing Pat Moynihan and Sam Nunn.

Members of the administration, on the other hand, seem lately almost inebriated with a sense of mission. And maybe that's inevitable when the stakes are high and you're sure you're right. But in off-the-cuff remarks and unprepared moments the president and some of his men often seem to have missing within them a sense of the tragic. Which is odd because we're talking about war, after all. Leaders can't lead by moping, but a certain, well, solemnity, I suppose, might be well received by many of us.

This letter from JRR Tolkien to his son speaks to our higher selves.

30 January 1945
Russians 60 miles from Berlin. It does look as if something decisive might happen soon. The appalling destruction and misery of this war mount hourly: destruction of what should be (indeed is) the common wealth of Europe, and the world, if mankind were not so besotted, wealth the loss of which will affect us all, victors or not. Yet people gloat to hear of the endless lines, 40 miles long, of miserable refugees, women and children pouring West, dying on the way. There seem no bowels of mercy or compassion, no imagination, left in this dark diabolic hour. By which I do not mean that it may not all, in the present situation, mainly (not solely) created by Germany, be necessary and inevitable. But why gloat! We were supposed to have reached a stage of civilization in which it might still be necessary to execute a criminal, but not to gloat, or to hang his wife and child by him while the orc-crowd hooted. The destruction of Germany, be it 100 times merited, is one of the most appalling world-catastrophes. Well, well - you and I can do nothing about it. And that shd. be a measure of the amount of guilt that can justly be assumed to attach to any member of a country who is not a member of its actual Government. Well the first War of the Machines seems to be drawing to its final inconclusive chapter - leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereached or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines. As the servants of the Machines are becoming a privileged class, the Machines are going to be enormously more powerful. What's their next move?

For Bill McCabe -

who just mentioned how much he admires Alec Guinness as an actor.

Alec Guinness has published a volume of his journals which I absolutely love - It is called My Name Escapes Me. It is filled with great stuff - and is made up only of entries from 1995 and 1996 - Only a year from his life, and basically from way after he has mostly retired. So it is not a journal of ambition, or great stories - just ruminations of a great actor, who loves his garden, loves going to Mass, loves reading with his wife. His humor is so delicate, so wonderful.

Anyway, Bill, I read your small entry today and thought I would post some quotes from My Name Escapes Me for your enjoyment.

Here they are (and just so you know - my particular favorite, my favorite in the whole book, is the anecdote he tells about Coral Browne, wife of Vincent Price, on Feb. 27, 1996):

Tuesday 21 February
Today I have picked up a rather good notice in an American film trade paper for a performance I have never given in a film I have never heard of. It says that I am 'almost unrecognizable' in the film. I like the 'almost'.

Sunday 26 February
The amount of space in the papers given up to Stephen Fry's defection from the Simon Gray play Cell Mates is astonishing. His reported faxed statements from the Continent have been somewhat elaborate, very apologetic and sympathy-seeking. Well, he will get the sympathy he needs, I'm sure, for what is presumably a sort of breakdown; but I can't help fedeling an actor should be made of sterner stuff. Most actors are as tough as old boots. As Shakespeare knew. "After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live."

'What do you want to be when you grow up, Billy?'

'I hope to be an actor.'

'But Billy, actors don't grow up. And you, Lancelot?'

'A drama critic.'

'Really? That's unusual. I hope you won't find it a bore after a year or two. And you, Penelope, if you ever grow up?'

'I'm going to be a director, a director, a director.'

'You always were a chatterbox, Penelope. Not one of you has said you want to be a playwright. How sad. All of you wish to put the cart before the horse.'

Tuesday 14 March
When British actors go to the USA to sell their wares and set about their lawful business, the press in New York, LA, Boston or wherever treats them with great courtesy. It is a pity that American performers visiting this country aren't welcomed in the same way. Many of them must dread the English experience.

Thursday 6 July
Spent the evening reading Patrick O'Brian's HMS Surprise. The smell of the sea lifts off his pages together with that of tar and the oiliness of so many Mediterranean harbours. His description of a storm in the south Atlantic catches one's breath away with fear and excitement. This is the third of his books I have read (in the wrong order) and I am now resolved to climb up the rigging of all of them.

Monday 18 September
A smiling, pleasant chap, probably in his thirties, accosted me near the station with, 'Could I have your autograph?' He proferred paper and brio. I was graciousness itself and wrote, 'Good wishes' followed by my name. 'Thanks ever so,' he said. 'My granny will be thrilled.'

Thursday 12 October
Yesterday I listened to Sir Edward Heath on the radio and thought how excellent and balanced he is. I never cared for his premiership but now I feel he is the only statesman we have. What is more, when seen on TV, he doesn't smile ad nauseum as so many of the others do. I don't want to be wooed; I want to be truthfully informed in a straightforward manner.

Many MPs seem to have been gulled, like Malvolio in Twelfth Night. Maria's fake letter reads in part, "If thou entertainest my love, let it appear in thy smiling; thy smiles become thee well; therefore in my presence still smile." I look forward to the day when Hon. Members will sport yellow stockings and cross-gartering.

Wednesday 18 October
This morning, accompanied by M's sister Chattie, we were kindly shown round the Globe Theatre (still under construction) by Mrs Bladget. There is much to be done but it is already impressive. Considering what sniping and counter-sniping there must have been among so many Shakespeare academics it is amazing it has got off the ground at all. The position, so close to the river and with St Paul's Cathedral in the background, is very striking. I just hope the poor actors, sweating it out under the summer sky, aren't deafened by megaphones on the tourist boats informing the world, 'That's Shakespeare's Globe, his 'Wooden O' burned down during a performance of Henry VIII on 29 June 1613.' By the time the guide gets that out his boat will have chugged under the bridge and another will have taken its place with the same information. Overhead aircraft will be droning their way to Heathrow. Oh, I wish the actors good fortune but I wouldn't wish to be wearing their buskins or chopins and having to face such competition. It is the acoustics that will cause the headaches. I can't see any line being able to be said "trippingly off the tongue" as Shakespeare requested...

The theatre looks larger than expected. I can't help feeling that, whatever the experts say, the stage is about half a meter too high. Actors need to look down on a section of the audience in order to feel in control but I don't believe the groundlings should have to crick their necks ...

One encouraging thing I learned from our tour of the Globe is that the plaster used around the walls is mixed with goat hair. Many of our grand old provincial theatres have horsehair under their gilded decoration and this (or so I was told years ago) gives exactly the right resonance to the human voice. Walk on to the stage of any of those big old theatres and you know at once that you are going to be heard with very little effort.

You can stand in the center of the vast semicircular theatre at Epidaurus, which I did some twenty years ago, and speak a piece of Shakespeare in an almost conversational tone knowing your voice will carry to the distant heights of the back row. For all our technology we don't compare with the ancients.

Saturday 16 December
Today I have felt querulous. Behavior has been spiky; largely due, I think, to our affable postman dutifully pushing piles of junk mail through the letter-box daily. It gets worse near Christmas. The rubbish, the charity appeals (often in duplicate) and, worst of all, the photographs from Star Wars demanding autographs. They mostly come from America and as often as not enclose a stamped addressed envelope - the stamps being US stamps, are useless here. The English usually make their demand without photograph, envelope, stamp or money. The nation has got acclimatized to asking something for nothing...Bills in the post are welcome in comparison. It's mean and hard of me but from 1 January 1996 I am resolved to throw it all in the waste bin unopened (bills excepted, of course); I no longer have the energy to assist teenagers in their idiotic, albeit lucrative, hobby.

Sunday 31 December 1995
A New Year Resolution which surely I can keep: to greet each day with a verse from the Psalms, "Cause me to hear thy loving-kindness isn the morning."

Should I ever act again (the idea doesn't much appeal), it would be cheering to remember a verse from another Psalm, "The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places." Yet there would be small hope of me remembering the lines. And most rehearsal rooms are dispiriting. Such things were better catered for in the old days when you usually worked on the stage you were to appear on.

We watched the Australian film Strictly Ballroom for the third time and found it as enjoyable as ever. The credits slip by so swiftly, and in such small print, that I always miss the name of the actor/dancer who plays the boy's father. All the acting is lovely but his performance is wonderfully subtle and true.

Saturday 6 January 1996
When I played Malvolio in a poor TV of Twelfth Night, Larry [Olivier] came to the final run-through (Joan Plowright, Lady Olivier, was giving her Viola). Just before we went on air, [Larry] said to me, "Marvellous, old cock! I never realized Malvolio could be played as a bore."

Tuesday 27 February 1996
Victoria Price telephoned. She is writing a biography of her father, Vincent, and wanted to quiz me about him and Corol Browne, whom he married. I have never met Miss Price but judging from our talk I bet she makes a good job of the book. Vinney and I had dozens of meals together, either here or in LA or New York but, although I was charmed by him and liked him enormously, I never felt I knew him intimately.

Coral was a close friend. We corresponded regularly, at length and with affection...

Coral's Australian cadence, which often surfaced, always added a witty harshness to her comments on people and life. She sometimes sounded destructive but in fact she was wonderfully kind and generous in every way; it was just that she couldn't resist raising a laugh with her use of words - which were, for the most part, unprintable.

There are almost too many stories about her but one I particularly cherish because I witnessed it. Tony Guthrie directed a production of Tamburlaine in New York starring her and Tony Quayle. Guthrie invited me to the first dress rehearsal. Coral came on stage before the performance to query some minor point. As always, she looked magnificent and was gloriously dressed in some barbaric style, but perhaps there was a tidge too much hair in her wig.

Tony G called out from the stalls, 'Coral, are you happy with that wig?'

She stared out front and then said, 'If you really fucking want to know, I feel as if I'm looking out of a yak's asshole.'

goverment - with a small "g"

This is a letter JRR Tolkien wrote to his son Chistopher, in November of 1943

"My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control, not whiskered men with bombs) - or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to 'King George's council, Winston and his gang,' it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy.

Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. And at least it is done only to a small group of men who know who their master is. The medievals were only too right in taking nolo episcopari ['I do not wish to be made a bishop'] as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop ...

Well, cheers and all that to you dearest son. We were born in a dark age out of due time (for us). But there is this comfort: otherwise we should not know, or so much love, what we do love. I imagine the fish out of water is the only fish to have an inkling of water. Also we have still small swords to use. 'I will not bow before the Iron Crown, nor cast my own small golden sceptre down.' Have at the Orcs, with winged words, hildenaeddran (war-adders), biting darts - but make sure of the mark, before shooting."

This amazing letter reminds me of one of my favorite movies - ELECTION. A wicked satire about the political process. You should see it, if you haven't already. In it - the point is made: those who choose to be leaders, early on in high school, are those destined to be our leaders as adults. And who ever liked those people in the first place?

"That noble northern spirit"

This is from a letter JRR Tolkien wrote to his son, Michael, in June of 1941

"People in this land seem not even yet to realize that in the Germans we have enemies whose virtues (and they are virtues) of obedience and patriotism are greater than ours in the mass. Whose brave men are just about as brave as ours. Whose industry is about 10 times greater. And who are - under the curse of God - now led by a man inspired by a mad, whirlwind, devil: a typhoon, a passion: that makes the poor old Kaiser look like an old woman knitting.

I have spent most of my life, since I was your age, studying Germanic matters (in the general sense that includes England and Scandinavia). There is a great deal more force (and truth) than ignorant people imagine in the 'Germanic' ideal. I was much attracted by it as an undergraduate (when Hitler was, I suppose, dabbling in paint, and had not heard of it), in reaction against the 'Classics'. You have to understand the good in things, to detect the real evil. But no one ever calls on me to 'broadcast', or do a postscript! Yet I suppose I know better than most what is the truth about this 'Nordic' nonsense. Anyway, I have in this War a burning private grudge - which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light."

You have to understand the good in things, to detect the real evil.

"The sequel to the Hobbit"

"I have begun again on the sequel to the 'Hobbit' - The Lord of the Ring. It is now flowing along, and getting quite out of hand. It has reached about Chapter VII and progresses towards quite unforeseen goals. I must say I think it is a good deal better in places and some ways than the predecessor; but that does not say that I think it either more suitable or more adapted for its audience. For one thing it is, like my own children (who have the immediate serial rights), rather 'older'. I can only say that Mr. [C.S.] Lewis (my stout backer of the Times and T.L.S.) professes himself more than pleased. If the weather is wet in the next fortnight we may have got still further on. But it is no bed-time story."

--letter of JRR Tolkien to Allen & Unwin, his publisher, 31 August 1938

I love the understatement of that. "Out of hand" indeed. If he could see the LOTR mania now, he would truly understand how "out of hand" it all is.

And the last sentence kills me. "...it is no bed-time story..."

DAY-um

It's cold. I walk around in my apartment wrapped up in a fleece blanket and I sleep with gloves on. The radiator is hot - but ... the heat somehow is not filling up my room.

Last night I went out with my siblings - or, at least, two of them - my brother, my sister Siobhan. Joining us was my brother's girlfriend, and a couple of my brother's other friends. We were toasty warm in the bar - and then we went around the corner to get burgers and beer. Oh, and hot wings too.

It was very good to be all together. It's been a while.

One of my brother's friends George had been interviewed by a TV reporter at an airport during the blackout. We all had seen him on TV, when we watched the footage from our beach house on the Cape. Additionally, George had been standing at a pay phone, calling whoever, trapped in the airport, and he noticed that a photographer was snapping pictures of him with a digital camera. Turns out he was a photographer with the Associated Press. George's picture went out across the wires that night.

So that night and the next day - George's face was everywhere.

We called him "the face of the blackout".

It was as though the blackout had ONLY affected George, and we needed to check in with him periodically, to see how he was taking it.

"Okay ... so all airports are closed ... let's see how George handles that information..."

Anyway, last night we drank beer, ate wings, licked our fingers, sat over by the radiator, laughed, talked, kept warm ... Brendan and Melody went off to a movie, and then Siobhan and I went out for another drink, and a catch-up conversation. But really - we were avoiding the frigid air we would have to deal with during our long trips home.

But it was a good night. So good when all my siblings are close by - and we can get together. It doesn't happen enough these days.

"Impertinent and irrelevant inquiries"

The German publishing firm of Rutten & Loening contacted Allen & Unwin in 1938 (the publishers of The Hobbit) and wanted to negotiate with them for a German translation of the book. But first and foremost, they wanted to know if Tolkien was of "arisch" origin. (Aryan) Tolkien wrote a brief note to Stanley Unwin, saying that he wanted to refuse to give them an answer - He didn't want to add to "the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine" by comfirming or denying. However - he didn't want to ruin his chances of The Hobbit being read in Germany. He submitted to Mr. Unwin two drafts of letters to the German publishers, and left it up to Unwin to decide.

Here is one of the drafts:

25 July 1938
To Rutten & Loening Verlag
Dear Sirs,
Thank you for your letter ... I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-iranian; as far as I am aware noone of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject - which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.

Your enquiry is doubtless made in order to comply with the laws of your own country, but that this should be held to apply to the subjects of another state would be improper, even if it had (as it has not) any bearing whatsoever on the merits of my work or its sustainability for publication, of which you appear to have satisfied yourselves without reference to my Abstammung.

I trust you will find this reply satisfactory, and remain yours faithfully

J.R.R. Tolkien

Michael Totten

Excellent post by Michael Totten, entitled History and Total War. I would suggest you do not miss it.

This goes along with Thomas Friedman's most recent column, which we discussed here yesterday. We face a terrifying foe, and we underestimate it at our peril.

The fanatic Muslims have been at war with us for years. They always knew their enemy, and they fought against us, doing damage and killing us in drips and drabs for years. And we only just now are noticing it. It took September 11 for us to realize it. Not to be an asshole, but I had realized it years before - (uhm - CAN YOU SAY BOMBING OF WORLD TRADE CENTER IN 1993?? Jesus CHRIST). The people I read and respected also realized it years ago. But nobody was really listening. Bill Clinton didn't even visit the World Trade Center in 1993 after it was bombed. Can you believe that?

I couldn't. Doesn't he get it? That was an act of war. On our soil.

Unfortunately, I am not the Secretary of War or Defense or Secretary of State, or SOMEONE in a position of authority, otherwise I might have pointed out the realities of the situation to the powers-that-be.

Aragorn says (sorry for the ROTK reference) to Theoden who falters in the face of violence, "War is upon you."

This is the situation we have found ourselves in now. We have acted with enormous restraint, we have not nuked Mecca, we have gone out of our way to not target the civilians. We drop food down onto Afghanistan, as we prepare for war with those hiding out in the country. We have held ourselves back. Saddam is alive. Saddam gets his teeth checked. He was not torn apart limb from limb.

But still and all: war is upon us, and we have finally woken up and realized this.

Nobody wants war. Or anyone who does want war is a lunatic. But this is the dilemma we face, now, this is the new challenge of the world.

Totten writes:

We’re still arguing about Iraq after the fact. And sometimes this discussion seems so petty. Compared to other people and ourselves in other times, we are spoiled. The Holocaust informs my view, but what we have suffered is nothing - nothing - nearly as bad as that.

Even if you opposed intervening in Iraq, surely you realize that some moral good has come out of it; a tyrant is gone. And we didn't need to nuke Baghdad to get him out.

The perceived immorality of our action may weigh heavily on your soul. But it’s nothing compared to what we might have to face if our goal of limited war for democracy fails.

Go over there and read it.

In Praise of my Cousin Emma

If you have ever read John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany, then you will know the relationship that I have with my throng of cousins. John Irving completely GETS the specificity of what that whole cousin-thing is about, and it's extremely specific. There is a manic quality to my relationships with my cousins - mainly because we would see each other rarely, and when we did see each other, we had to cram in months of fun into a 2 hour period. So we all would lose our collective minds. I have many many cousins. The oldest is in his 40s now, and the youngest is a toddler. Typical Irish stuff.

I have been wanting to write something about my cousin Emma for a while. Emma is now a teenager. However, her soul is probably about 45 years old. Her soul has ALWAYS been about 45 years old. Even when she was 3 years old, she had this wise-cracking world-weary persona. It was as though she always had an imaginary cigar clenched between her lips. She was a 3 year old Robert Evans: a freckled chubby-cheeked toddler, making weary wisecracks, saying stuff like, "Lemme tell ya, sweetheart, that's what life is all about."

Uhm ... what? You're three.

It makes me think that this is definitely not her first time around on this planet.

There is a picture of Emma, standing on a hill in Los Angeles, with the Hollywood sign unfurling behind her in all its blindingly white weirdness. Emma must be about 3 years old in the picture. She is wearing huge movie-star sunglasses (not kid's glasses, but adult glasses, so they are enormous on her face - It looks like Glenn Close as Sonny Von Bulow), and a scarf around her throat. She holds up her arms in a victory gesture, and her face is absolutely insane. Her mouth is open, she is obviously screaming in Hollywood triumph. It's like she's Harvey Weinstein or something.

But she's THREE.

Well, now Emma is a teenager. She's a beautiful young woman, still with the freckles and the rosy cheeks, still with the same "lemme tell ya, sweetheart, that's life" world-weary attitude.

Here is one of my favorite anecdotes, which will illuminate Emma's personality.

My cousin Mike got married a couple years ago. It was a massive affair, with hundreds of people. Emma was 12 years old at the time. I sat next to Emma in the pew. Emma dresses like she's Mary J. Blige or something. Big puffy coats, big chunky sneakers which match the coat ... Anyway, at the wedding, Emma was in a powder-blue Mary J. Blige ensemble. She looked great.

The ceremony was wonderful - very detailed - with many different traditional moments. Emma, throughout the entire thing, peppered me with questions. Whispered under her breath.

"What's happening now?"
"What are those candles? What's that?"
"And what does that mean?"
"What's that about?"

Finally, I hissed at her, "Emma. I don't know."

There was a long pause. Emma did not respond. She turned back to look up at the pulpit, and didn't say anything. I went back to trying to lose myself in the beautiful ceremony.

Then, I heard her say, out of the corner of her mouth, her eyes still looking forward, "Hey. Lose the 'tude."

Oh God, I just burst into laughter.

She was so RIGHT. I had a 'tude. She called me on it.

"Emma, you're right. I have a 'tude. I am sorry."

We still laugh about "lose the 'tude".

A couple of years ago, I was busy at work on a one-woman show. I am not going to say what it is about, because I fear piracy. But suffice it to say, it is based on the life of a real person. Who had an insane husband. This woman would write letters, describing how she could hear him moaning down the hall in psychic agony.

Emma and her mom were visiting my parents while I was home - and we were sitting out on the patio. Regina (Emma's mom) asked if she could hear a little bit of what I was working on. I said sure, fine. I gave a bit of background, before I launched into what I had written.

"So she has an insane husband, and he would moan all night down the hallway, and she would lock the doors of her study to keep him out."

Then I did my little reading - which, frankly, I thought went very well, and I was very proud of it. Basically, I was moved by MYSELF. (Not a good sign for an artist, by the way.) But I was excited to share the monologue with them. It was heartfelt, it was tragic, etc. etc.

When I was done, there was a pause. Regina, who is also an actress, a wonderful actress, was deep in thought. I was excited for the conversation that would ensue.

Then Emma piped up. "Hey, Sheila, you know what you should do? When you're doing that monologue during the production - here's how it should be done." (Suddenly, again, with the Harvey Weinstein persona.) "You should be standing downstage - and everything should be dark - and then - as you do the monologue - slowly - way over in the corner - a circle of light should come up on your husband and this is what he should be doing..." (Emma hunched over, biting her nails nervously, her eyes flitting about in a panic, and she began to rock - back and forth, back and forth - making strange odd moaning sounds.)

The precious little spell of my monologue was broken by this hysterical and almost Mel Brooks interpretation of how I should do my play - and I started roaring with laughter.

Suddenly the insanity of the husband is going to be used as a comic element??

Regina said, "Emma, please, let's have a serious conversation about Sheila's work."

Emma kept rocking back and forth, back and forth, rolling her eyes around in her head, making these cow-like moaning sounds.

In spite of herself, Regina started laughing ... I started laughing too - I'm laughing now...

Emma kept going. "So it'll go like this." She stood up straight, as me, and said, as though she were doing the production, "So I have always felt that life must go on - and that I must always focus on my work -" Suddenly Emma hunched over herself, and started rocking manically - moaning like a cow - Then she straightened up again, as me, and said, "My work. My work is the most important thing." Back to the lowing-like-a-cow husband in the corner.

Regina and I were CRYING.

One other Emma story -

Regina, Emma, my other cousin Rachel and I went to the anniversary production of "Forbidden Broadway", here in New York. The audience was full of Regina's old friends, people Emma knew. It was a BLAST. Again, Emma looked like a little Irish ghetto goddess, with her puffy coat, and her big sneakers. Emma knew mostly everyone, too, because they were friends of her mother. One of the guys was the head writer on a major soap opera, I can't remember which one. Days of Our Lives, or something.

Emma buttonholed him before the show. This is a paraphrase of the conversation, but here's the spirit of it:

Emma said to him, point-blank, "Okay, listen, I just don't like what you have done to my favorite character."

He was fabulous, whoever he was. He said, "Oh no, which one?"

She told him how she didn't approve of the plot-lines for this character, and that she thought the actor this character had to work with was terrible.

"It's boring, my friend, boring." Emma said to the head-writer of One Life to Live. She called him "my friend", in this kind of world-weary cynical tone. "That whole plot line is very boring, my friend."

He completely took her concerns seriously, which is why I loved him.

"Yes, we have had some problems with that actor. You won't have to watch him for much longer."

"Well, that's good to hear. Because he's very boring." (Again, I had the impression that she was chewing on a cigar, as though she were Jack Warner or something.)

This man was hungry for more feedback from the teenager. "What else, Emma? What else?"

She launched into an in-depth analysis of every element of the show - character development problems, boring side-plots, bad actor issues - She also made sure she complimented him on what DID work. He was very grateful for her praise (which she gave to him with the tired attitude of throwing him a bone - which was equally hysterical). I loved this guy. I loved how he was with Emma.

He said, "I should have you come in to one of our script meetings."

She is, after all, representative of a huge chunk of their audience.

As she continued on her long analytical monologue, completely unafraid, and also completely clear on what did work and what didn't work - I suddenly saw that the victory-dance in front of the Hollywood sign when she was three could actually be a prophecy of things to come. This girl could do anything she wanted to do. She really could.

She could be a stand-up comedian (OBVIOUSLY) - she could be an actress - but she also could be a movie producer. Hell, Emma could run a movie studio someday.

She is a lovely girl, a kind person, absolutely hysterical, and also - mixed in with that - she is a wise-cracking world-weary movie producer who dresses as though she is Mary J. Blige on occasion.

I also love that she told me to "lose the 'tude." I'll never forget it. I needed to be taken down a peg, and she did it. She talks straight, she tells it like it is.

Whatever Emma ends up doing - wherever her life takes her - I know that I will watch with baited breath. It looks like it is going to be an incredible journey.

The Hobbit of Oxford

So I have begun the letters of JRR Tolkien (thank you, Ann Marie!!). I will definitely have to post some excerpts here.

I love reading letters of writers, anyway. Gives me chills - to hear a writer discuss what will end up being a great or a classic work of literature - and the writer has no idea of what is to come.

Lucy Maud Montgomery's letters are like that. Her journals, too. She will write, "I am working on something now which is very different for me. It's about a little red-headed orphan girl. This will be different - there will be no moral to the story. It will just be the story of what happens to this little girl."

She had made her success in writing short stories with major morals to them - things that could be taught in Sunday school. She was sick of it. She wanted to write about human beings. She didn't think anyone would read it, she didn't even think it would get published.

And lo and behold, it turned out to be Anne of Green Gables.

Tolkien's letters, so far, give me the same chill.

He has completed The Hobbit and people are already wondering: What next? What happens to the Hobbits next? He had not written The Hobbit for there to be a sequel. He was stuck. But then in a letter to his publisher he says, "Here is the first chapter of a new book about Hobbits. It's called 'A Long Expected Party'. Give it to your son to read - let me know what he thinks."

A Long Expected Party is the first chapter of the Ring trilogy.

I also just LOVE how he wants a child to read it. Children are the true judges. Look at what happened to Harry Potter!!

Diary Friday

I went out to dinner with my friend Ted last night - and so thought that, in honor of him, I would post the entry from my journal of the night our friendship was born. We had known one another for a couple of months - he was an acting teacher at something called The Actor's Gym, I was involved there - so I knew of him from that, and had always been drawn to him - but the night I describe below is the night we actually became friends.

Of course it involves Harold and Maude, one of the best movies about friendship in existence.

May 20

Two weeks ago, Ted, J. and I went out. The three of us have been hanging out. The two of them are becoming friends - J. just moved into an apartment right across from Ted - and me and Ted are becoming friends - and me and J. hang out alone - and J. gets a little bit nervous - He gets nervous if he sees me interacting wildly with someone else. Not possessive, but nervous. Let's just say - he notices. He angsts. And then days go by, and eventually he will mention it, trying to be casual, affecting indifference, "I see you and so-and-so were really hitting it off." It's really not as annoying as it sounds. In fact, it's endearing, because he's not doing it in a wholly possessive way. That would irritate the shit out of me. I won't BE possessed. But also - J. is a gossip-hound. He is an absolute gossip-hound. I can't tell him anything in confidence.

So anyway, me, Ted and J. made plans to go see a double feature at the Music Box - Play it Again, Sam and Harold and Maude. J. had to work late, so Ted and I decided to meet for a drink at this place J. had taken me to Southport Lanes. It's a wonderful funny comfy bar, with a really good jukebox, pool tables, and a little bowling alley. Welcoming atmosphere. J. and I had gone to a midnight show of Mondo New York, and had had a drink at Southport Lanes beforehand.

I headed over for the bar. I walked. I had a book. There is nothing worse than sitting alone in a bar when you WANT to be alone. People feel compelled to come up to you and invade your space. It was a gorgeous sunset. There was no spring in Chicago. We went straight from winter to 60 degree weather.

There was a Cubs game so the streets were basically an open frat party. Mobbed. Drunken girls propped up against walls. It was insane. People walking around with open beers, lines to get into every bar, a constant parade of people. I got to Southport Lanes, about an hour and a half before Ted and I had planned to meet. I needed to give myself some leisure-time, to drink things in, soak up experiences. You really do have to MAKE time for that.

There was a table by the window. I pumped some $ into the jukebox. I ordered a beer and sat down. Within one minute, I saw Ted walk by the window, carrying his book in his hand. Ha!! We are so similar! He arrived an hour and a half early, to give himself some leisure reading time - and there I am with my book. He saw me, I saw him, we waved.

Then he came in, tripped over the step, and came staggering wildly into the bar. Hysterical! He made such a hilarious entrance. On this particular evening, Ted ended up falling all over the place, throughout the night. "Another graceful Ted moment!" I would say, after he would stumble or trip or stagger about.

We were totally tickling each other's funny bones. Everything he did was hilarious. And I was making him cry tears of laughter. By the end of the evening, the two of us were in this totally raucous slap-happy mood. J., on the other hand, when we met up with him, was very quiet, pensive, and vaguely irritable.

I think part of it had to do with having just come from work - and he couldn't segue into another mood - Ted and I were giggling innocently like two lunatics the entire night. As J. watched us and angsted about it. I would look into J.'s eyes and he was light-years away.

Ted and I hung out at the bar, had some beers, and a wonderful talk. I really really like being with this person - on a very pure level. I like to be with him. And I get the same feeling from him. We interest each other. We excite each other. We have so much in common - from books and tapes and movies and actors (Ed: Wow. There's a time-traveler. Before the era of CDs.) - to outlooks, views on acting, views on life in general. Also, we both arrived at the meeting place an hour and a half earlier to give ourselves good reading time. Ted and I still barely know anything about each other - nothing but the barest details. Our talks are on the level of books, music, acting, not biography. I know quite a bit about him from the movies he likes.

I guess you could say I have a low-key crush on him. But I find it so relaxing to be with him. It's relaxing in the truest sense of the word. It's not laid-back or casual. I feel energized when I'm with Ted. Focused. Open. LOVE IT.

Ted and I laughed so hard at Harold and Maude that I HURT the next day. I had never seen it before, and Ted and J. were so excited to show the movie to me. At the part with the general who has only one arm - I started screeching like a banshee. I made a scene. I haven't laughed that hard, that intensely, in what feels like eons. It wasn't laughter through the whole movie - at least not Harold and Maude. I pretty much laughed my way through the entirety of Play it Again, Sam - I mean, there were times during Harold and Maude when I was in tears. It was so poignant. I looked over at Ted, next to me, at one point, and his eyes were all wet. But there were also a couple of moments of raucous explosions - I can still remember them - about 3 or 4 moments when I fucking lost my mind.

And I noticed something - I was weeping tears of laughter - just SNORTING - Ted and I were totally in sync - he has a wonderful laugh - and I think that his laughter had as much to do with my laughing as the movie did. I would hear Ted's laugh, and it would set me off again. It was so FUN. But I noticed that J. - although he was laughing too - at one point, he made a slight suppressing gesture, to "Sh" me. He was laughing, but there was an element of sincerity in that "Sh" moment. I was too out of hand for him.

Jesus. It's not like I was hollering with laughter through Sophie's Choice, for God's sake.

People definitely were turning around to see who was laughing in such an out-of-control way - but it wasn't a big deal. It's Harold and Maude!!

The harder Ted and I laughed, the quieter J. became. The next day Ted and I were talking on the phone, and he mentioned how quiet J. seemed, in contrast with our slapstick giggling. Somehow J. responded to our hilarity by going deep into himself. It totally took the color out of J.. I did kind of notice this at the time, but I noticed it through the tears of laughter streaming down my face - and I did not want to calm myself down to ask J. what was the matter. I didn't feel a smidgeon of need to tone it down a little, just because J. was on another plane.

Anyway - me and Ted's laughter continued. I have not belly-laughed like that since - maybe since me and Liz's "blue monkey" exchange at New Years. Harold and Maude ended, we were hanging in the lobby, J. went to the bathroom, and Ted and I were propped up against the wall in exhausted limp poses - but I STILL could not stop laughing. I'd calm down for about 15 seconds, and so would he - we would stand in worn-out silence, teary-eyed, and I would think it was all over. "Okay. It's stopped now. It's stopped." But then a shriek would spontaneously burst from my throat and I'd double over again, which would start him off - we were stumbling and falling and clutching each other and mopping away tears. We were totally making a scene.

It was that damn general with the one arm which kept automatically going into a salute.

I could not get that image out of my mind.

We headed for the car. J. strode along quietly, hands in pockets, head down, as Ted and I staggered along in the middle of the street, roaring with laughter, sometimes stopping, bent over. J. drove me home. I literally LAY DOWN in the back seat, trying to catch my breath, but guffawing randomly. Then there would be silence - and suddenly I would hear Ted burst out laughing again, and that would set me off.

The laughter was an unstoppable force.

It was, I think, the healthiest night I have had since I have been here. That laugh just ROARED out of me - and I felt so GOOD about - I felt so GOOD about this connection I felt with Ted - my new friend - and laughing like that again. The glow of it stayed with me for the next couple of days. So did the stomach-ache.

I loved Ted's laugh. He is such a wonderful person. There is - somewhere deep inside him - a very acute sadness. Perhaps the sadness in me recognizes the sadness in him. I don't know. I mean, everyone experiences sadness - but there's something in his kind of sadness that is very familiar to me. This makes my heart go out to him. And this is why laughing with him like that was so glorious.

Once you have a really good laugh with somebody, you have reached a new level. And - you can't go back from that level. Even if a friendship on an everyday level doesn't evolve - I could never think of a person with whom I laughed like that as just an "acquaintance" ever again.

Some people you never reach that level with. You can't. It's not there to be reached.

This night - Ted and I propelled ourselves into a wonderful new level.

We laughed well together.

Hmmm

What Classic Movie Are You?

Didn't see that one coming at all.

Also, though, I wonder if the people who made this quiz are aware of what a violent book Wuthering Heights is? It is many things, but I'm not sure I would call it romantic.

Or, sure, it's romantic, but romance in a world where it is always a stormy stormy night.

Found this one from Michele, who is Apocalypse Now, which I think is just perfect.

(Why the hell is my image so enormous, and hers is teeny? I'm such a technological loser.)

And the second quiz - What Famous Leader Are You?

Ah ... my nephew Cashel would be pleased. He loves Einstein. As do I.

Einstein said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge, because with imagination you can change reality."

(Normally, when that quote is listed, it is cut off. They only list: "Imagination is more important than knowledge" - but my favorite part is the second half of the damn quote, and so here I list it.)

A Pregnant Pause

Mighty Jimbo links often to the online pregnancy journal "Dooce". Dooce is categorically enjoyable reading - although disturbing as well. It's disturbing (in a good way) because it is so honest. It is also disturbing because I have never gone through any of that. It sounds like Science Fiction. (One post is called "The Hemorrhoid that Ate Manhattan") At times it reads as though her entire body has been taken over by an alien force.

The following entry made me laugh out loud, and also made me wince with sympathy.

Here's the laugh-out-loud part:

I am also under the impression that everyone else in the world is pregnant, men and children included, and when I see anyone bump their stomach into a solid surface I want to make sure their baby is okay. I can’t watch more than 30 seconds of a football game, because there are over 20 babies on that field at any given time, all in danger of being tackled and stomped. By the fourth play of the game I’m in tears, having just seen six or seven babies smooshed into the astroturf, appalled that these men could just run around bumping into each other without one concern for the babies in their bellies. Last week I saw a commercial where this gigantic man belly-flops into a pool, and I immediately called my husband at work and sobbed How come no one loves their baby?!

"By the fourth play of the game I'm in tears..."

Classic.

Here's her Pregnancy Archive.

Brrr...It's cold in here...

There must be some Toros in the atmosphere...

It's freezing in my apartment. I sit wrapped up in fleece blankets. The heat is blasting out of my radiators, but it must be absolutely freezing outside.

I was really busy at work yesterday, and my mom called me.

I saw it was her number, and I picked up.

"Mum?"

"Hi, Sheila!"

"I can't really talk right now."

Mum took a deep breath and then said (and this was pretty much what it sounded like): "It'sgoingtobefreezingtomorrowsomakesureyoubundleup."

Oh God, it makes me laugh.

I said, "Okay, bye."

Later I called her and we laughed about it. She said she had just called to say Hello but when I couldn't talk, she decided to get in as much motherly advice as possible before I hung up.

An Eyeball and a Dozen Roses

Since my post about my ridiculous Match.com dates went over so well, I thought I would embarrass myself a little bit more, and put up another date story. This is from years ago - and ... to be honest with you, makes me look completely ridiculous. (My favorite kind of story.) I call it An Eyeball and a Dozen Roses.

I was living in Chicago, having a grand old time. There were a couple of men buzzing around me. One of them, who was so sweet, so nice, a guy I had seen perform numerous times, approached me at a party and, after chatting me up for a while in a very humorous and effortless way, asked me out to dinner. (He shall remain nameless, although I will say that he has a couple of national TV commercials running right now, and I feel a bolt of weird recognition every time I see his face yapping away on TV).

I said Sure, I would go out to dinner with him. I already knew he was very talented and very funny (having seen him on stage. Henry Kissinger was wrong. Power is not the ultimate aphrodisiac. Talent is. Or - I would say, more specifically, Comedy is the ultimate aphrodisiac.)

As I have said before, I'm not a real date-r, I haven't been on too many "let me pick you up and we'll go have dinner" kind of dates. But this guy was very traditional, and so - like a true gentleman - he set up this entire date (picked the spot, picked the after-dinner spot, etc.)

It turned out being one of the best dates I have ever been on before IN MY LIFE. Not because there were amazing sparks between us (there weren't) - but because of where he took me to dinner, and the people we met there, and what we ended up doing. To give you a small image, it involved a bunch of 70 year old Greek women, caked with makeup, dancing around in a circle, holding hands, holding their hands out to us to join their dance, as their 70 year old Greek husbands, or lovers, stood on the outskirts, throwing money up into the air. 78 year old Greek women picked up 20 dollar bills and plastered them onto their sweaty necks and sweaty 78 year old cleavage. Everyone was LAUGHING, and DANCING, and everyone except for us was over 70 years of age. It was 3 am, and he and I joined the geriatric Greek dance, as money swirled through the air. We scuffed through the bills on the floor.

But that's a tangent, and not the story I want to tell which is the story of the Eyeball and the Dozen Roses.

During the great date at the late-night Greek place - for some UNFATHOMABLE reason - I told him that my eye doctor had taken a picture of the back of my eyeball. (Great date banter, Sheila. Way to go.)

He: "Your grey eyes look so lovely. I could drown in their sparkley depths."

Me: "Oh yeah? I should show you a picture of the BACK of my eyeball, pal."

I have no idea how the subject came up - but anyway, he (bless him) seemed completely fascinated by the idea of having a picture taken of the back of his eyeball. (Or maybe he was just being polite. Politeness was in this man's veins. He did gentlemanly things instinctually. Holding out the chair, holding out my coat, holding open the door ...)

Okay, so there's the eyeball setup.

During the date at the Greek place - he already set up the next date. "Okay, so Valentine's Day is next week. And I know we don't know each other at all or anything, but I think it would be fun to have a date on Valentine's Day. Whaddya say?"

I said, as I Zorba-the-Greek'ed my way through the carpet of money, "That sounds like fun!!"

So.

A date on Valentine's Day. I'm not big on Valentine's Day - not being a romantic type (as this story will OBVIOUSLY prove) - and also: it just seems like a hell of a lot of pressure. But he and I had such an unbelievably fabulous time on that first date, I thought: It's cool. It's cool. We'll have a good time again.

And then I came up with what I considered to be an inspired idea.

I know you all will laugh out loud at me. Feel free. Go ahead. (Ann Marie - I believe you laughed right in my face at the time it was happening. You said something like, "How in the world could you have thought that would be appropriate??")

Instead of getting him a nice Hallmark-y little Valentine's Day card, I PUT THE PHOTO OF THE BACK OF MY EYEBALL into a little red envelope, with his name on it. On the margins of the photo I wrote, "Happy Valentine's Day."

I know it is insane.

I cannot defend it.

I am just reporting the facts of the case, which are: I put a photograph of the back of my eyeball into an envelope to give to a guy on Valentine's Day.

So I went over to his apartment. We were going out to dinner or something like that. He greeted me at the door, so nice, so sweet. He let me into the apartment - he got me a drink. We didn't really know each other at all, but we had had (hands down) the best date EVER. One for the books. We were kind of proud of ourselves for that.

He went into the kitchen, and came back out, holding a dozen red roses for me. For Valentine's Day.

He got me a dozen red roses.

I gave him a picture of my eyeball.

Let me say it again, just so we all are clear:

He got me a dozen red roses.

I gave him a picture of my eyeball.

The second I saw the roses (and I don't know why I didn't anticipate that he would do such a thing! He was such an old-fashioned gentlemanly kind of guy - I should have expected it - but I have never received a dozen red roses in my life - I never expect that kind of behavior) - Anyway, the second I saw the red roses coming at me, I remembered the little red envelope in my purse, and I could feel my face getting all hot with mortification.

Oh my God. I am such an asshole. I have given him a photograph of the back of my eyeball. To echo my friend Ann: What the hell was going through my mind at the time that made me think that was appropriate???

My head was literally burning with embarrassment and shame about my eyeball.

I could no longer bear the agony.

I said, "Okay, so this is completely embarrassing, seeing as you gave me a beautiful bouquet of roses ... but here's what I got you."

He opened it up - and he BURST into laughter. (Thank God.) He thought it was hysterical.

Throughout the night he kept making jokes, pretending he was describing who his Valentine's date had been to friends who didn't know me:

"Hey, man, did you go out on Valentine's Day?"
"Oh yeah, dude, I went out with this sweet girl I just met."
"Really? What does she look like?"
Long long pause.
"Oh .... she looks like a circle."

Or - when someone would ask, "What did your date look like?", he would take out the photograph of the back of my eyeball and give it to them.

"Here she is. Isn't she beautiful?"

He ended up being very kind about the whole thing, turning it into a huge joke - which I needed.

But that is the mortifying story of a man who gave me a dozen roses, while I only gave him my eyeball.

A Coda:
And a brief coda to this tale -

He and I ended up going on something like 4 dates, stretched out over an 8 week period. Obviously there wasn't a sense of urgency to it all - Occasionally we would hook up and go to a movie, or out to dinner, whatever - but nothing ever really happened beyond that. There were no games, no weirdness, nothing like that. It just was what it was. I would forget for 4 weeks at a time that he even existed, and then he would call and invite me to do something.

So the whole thing ended when I called him up, after another 3 week break, and asked him to go to a movie, or something like that.

He sounded very hesitant. I could tell immediately something was up.

I said, "You don't want to? What's up?"

He said, "Well ... I guess I'm thinking that we should slow down."

I sat there, on the other end, filled with utter blankness. I thought nothing, I felt nothing - I was completely blank.

Finally, random phrases started floating through my brain.

Slow down? What? 4 dates in 8 weeks? Slow down?

And what came out of my mouth, finally, was: "I literally do not know how much slower I can go."

This was greeted with a deafening pause.

And then what came out of my mouth was: "If I go any slower, I think I will stop."

An even louder pause from the other end.

So the long and short of it was, we stopped. And to this day, amongst my group of friends, "If I go any slower, I think I'll stop" is a favorite phrase.

I ran into him a couple of years ago at another party in Chicago, and we had a hilarious conversation about it all. I said, "To this day, that date at the Greek place is the best date I've ever gone on." He said the same was true for him as well.

But I didn't ask him if he had kept the picture of my eyeball. That would have been too embarrassing.

The Ring Trilogy...

One brief comment:

The character of Eowyn in the film is completely unrecognizable from the character that Tolkien wrote.

So far as I can tell, this is the most extreme example, when comparing the movie and the book.

I'm not talking about what was left out, the scenes in the Houses of Healing, etc. I'm really talking about the actual spirit of the character, the INTENT of the character. Characters do have souls, you know. And Eowyn's soul in the film appears to be warm, lusty, restless, emotional. Am I wrong on this? She wants to go to war because she is restless. That is basically the message I got from the film. She doesn't want to live in a "cage". Modern-day female audiences are suppoed to relate to that, I guess.

In the book, Eowyn is cold. The word "frost" is used repeatedly. There is actually something wrong with her - and I mean, inside. Something has hardened within her. She cannot accept softness. She cannot accept a hand outstretched. And when Aragorn does not return her love - she decides that death would be her only attractive choice. It's not a feministic struggle against the ties that bind women to the home - or, at least it's not just that. She has a wounded soul, and yet she does not allow herself any weakness - She is cold, as Tolkien tells us again and again.

Not by any stretch of the imagination could the character as depicted in the film be portrayed as COLD. As a matter of fact, it is just the opposite. She comes off as impulsive, loving, emotional - Her soul shines through her face.

Eowyn in the book would never be so open. At the end of the book, in the Houses of Healing, is when Faramir finally cracks through the ice. She is not well, she is not healing - I suppose Tolkien suggests that this is so because there is something wrong in her psyche. A coldness, a hardness - She cannot accept Faramir's love, she wants no pity - she only wants death. She yearns for death.

What - a movie audience couldn't accept a young woman who is cold, frosty, unemotional - and yet who also deeply loves Aragorn and is devastated when he doesn't return her feelings - and yet who also has a deep death wish ...?

I think they could.

I actually related more to the Eowyn in the book. She's tragic. Her soul has turned to ice. She hates her life - she hates having been born "in the body of a maid" as Faramir says - and if she can't have the love of one man, then she chooses death. She wants glory, she wants to have something BIG happen to her. But the quest does not enliven her, the quest for having something BIG happen to her does not envigorate her, or make her excited - It turns her to ice. That's a very human thing. I loved her.

Ukrainian Essays

Part I - The Famine

Part II - The Events of 1991

Part III - The People

The Ukraine - Part III - The People

I will close with a couple of quotes from Colin Thubron's book Among the Russians. (It's part of his awesome Russian trilogy. Other titles in this trilogy: In Siberia and The Lost Heart of Asia.)

Among the Russians was published in 1983, and it was based on Thubron's travels through Russia (western Russia), Georgia, Armenia, Latvia, Estonia, and the Ukraine. The Soviet Union was still a behemoth at the time, albeit a rotting one. But all of these countries were still under the thumb of Moscow.

Thubron drove around these countries in his car, camping in camp sites, and talking with people. It's kind of a depressing book, actually. There is next to no intimation of the cataclysmic changes which would rock the world a mere six years later.

And more than anything - you can feel the lingering shadow of Stalin.

The entire Soviet system is just maintaining. Like that joke about all of Russia on a broken train, and the Soviet leaders pull the shades down and demand that everybody on the train pretend that they are still moving.

THE UKRAINE - PART III - THE PEOPLE

All quotes from Among the Russians, by Colin Thubron:

The first describes Thubron's vodka-soaked experience at one camp ground in Zaporozhye, in the Ukraine. He ends up hanging out with a group of 20 year old students. Music is playing, and he dances with one girl:

She was a 19 year old student from the local polytechnic ... She looked embarrassed and lost. "You're English?" She jigged in my arms with her head turned away, blushing. "You're not really English?" She answered my questions in rushed, flat monosyllables. The polytechnic was quite nice. Dancing was all right. Zaporozhye was quite nice. But I wasn't really English?

I settled with the students round our table, talking about poetry; one was eloquent on Blok, another passionate about Yesenin. Albert got fed up. He tried to join in, but he was irreversibly of the Jack London generation. In a moment, I thought, he would quote Burns. "They're just students," he said. "They don't know anything. They've no experience of life." And they seemed indeed to be of a different race. Alternately my gaze focused on them and on Albert through the deepening pool of my inebriation. I was not sure if I were looking at a generation gap or at some other, deeper human division. "You're my guest," Albert mumbled, "not theirs ..."

They were gentle with him, as with a child. They refused to take offense. His petty vanities and ritualized hospitality seemed to be as foreign to them as to me. When his talk turned crassly to politics, they deflected him. "No, no, no," they said. Politics threatened differences; they were less important than the flesh and blood of my presence. When Albert tried to force drinks on me, they tactfully dissuaded him.

I was dimly aware that I was witnessing two Russias. I hoped that one was the future and the other the past, although even in my drunkenness I realized that nothing was as simple as that. Yet Albert was typical of his deprived generation. He was practical, tough, and narrow. To him these others were too pampered and easy. They were, I sensed, apolitical. He resented them; and they, in turn, looked on him not only with the old Russian respect for seniority but with a feeling that he was somehow irrelevant, and belonged to a world of absolutes which was forever past.

"They're too young," he said.

I'll take a couple of more quotes from his book, on the major cities of the Ukraine (it's very interesting, especially for an armchair traveler like myself).

On Odessa:

I imagined the gossipy pre-Revolutionary port which I had read about somewhere: the Grrek, Jewish, and Italianite cosmopolis with its polyglot interchange of wares and ideas, its tang of French architecture. But morning disclosed a city quieter, tamer, more uniform. Its trade, once the highest in the Soviet Union, has been deflected to the satellite port of Ilyichovsk ... leaving Odessa becalmed among its 19th century streets and plane trees. It rises above the sea in terraced avenues fringed with old business houses ... The Odessans show an old humor and entrepreneurial cunning. One in every three families is employed by the sea, and a desultory life still revolves around the cafes.

On Yalta:

Once these shores were the evening playground of the tsarist aristocracy. Their lush slopes gleam and bristle with the architectural fancies of western Europe and the Orient. But now the palaces have been turned into sanatoria for the people (as inscriptions on the base of every Lenin statue remind you). Confections in the Moorish or Ottoman taste, overblown Swiss chalets and Renaissance palazzi, sprout and ramble among parklands or botanical gardens fat with oak and arbutus ... Yalta itself has doubled its size in twenty years; but its alleys still twine through a 19th century heart of parks and verandahed mansions, and its quay tinkles with a children's funfair; while higher inland, in a stone house and a garden jungly with lilies, Chekhov wrote The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard.

On The Crimea:

The Crimea, like the Caucasus, is darkened by a displaced people. On a thin suspicion of collaboration with Germany, its two hundred thousand Tartars were deported en masse to Central Asia by Stalin in 1944, and their role in the partisan fight against Nazism was systematically distorted or suppressed. In 1967 the charges against them were withdrawn; but thousands had already died in the hardship of exile, and their efforts to filter back into the Crimea have been harassed ever since.

On Kiev:

Kiev, "the mother of Russian cities," still keeps the unrest, the size and a trace of the refinement of a great capital. From the 9th to the 12th centuries it was the heart of a Russia which flowered in the sunlight of Byzantium, standing where the Dnieper headwaters gathered the Viking traffic before flooding south united to the Black Sea. Now, on one bank, the apartments sprawl in a colder-than-usual rhetoric -- within 15 years the population has doubled to two and a half million -- while opposite, where the Church of St. Andrew rises like a trumpet-blast from the old city, the boulevards are plump with spaced gardens and parklands ...

Kiev is still the capital of the Ukraine, and was a strategic lodestar for the Germans in 1941. War memorials reach a deafening crescendo: mounds of immortality, obelisks of glory, parks of eternity. I noticed more than ten which had been built as late as the 1960s and 70s. Russians and Germans between them destroyed much of the central city, and in the rambling complex called the Monastery of the Cross, once Russia's holiest shrine, the 11th century cathedral was reduced to a shattered body upholding a single dome. Far down the monastery's gardened slopes, a covered way plunges to a little square and a church. The place has been disused for two decades. Nothing gives you to expect what is coming. But within the church the plaster-smooth walls suddenly close around the monks' catacombs. For hundreds of yards, past dimly gleaming chapels and down water-dripping steps, the corridor beetles and bifurcates through a ghastly mausoleum. Robed in white silk, their faces covered by purple velet or black embroidery and their feet slippered in silk, the abbots lie in their glass-topped coffins, with a single claw-like hand exposed on the breast. The cell-shrines are stacked with bones. Blackened skulls gape in their powder or leer from glass jars. Eight centuries of skeletons and mummified cadavers lie in their niches, hung with anti-religious plaques -- the intolerance of Marxism hounding them even in their dust -- until the defiled labyrinth washes you up again before the church's tarnished icon-screen...

You would not know, from its exterior, that Kiev's cathedral of Haghia Sophia contained a pure 11th century core, built at the zenith of Russia's early power...Inside, the Byzantine glory breaks like an ocean in wave upon wave of fresco and mosaic, embracing for ever the divine and earthly order of things, engulfing arches, pillars and galleries in its petrified and self-existent splendour. In the dome hovers the soft mosaic presence of Christ the Ruler... He looks unfit to rule...

The tourist groups were attending doggedly to their guides, and were being dealt a Marxist interpretation of theocratic art ... Once this Byzantine world had exercised so profound an appeal to the Russian spirit that despite all persecution its decline would be inexplicable had not its power so clearly been deflected into a new redemption on earth. Sometimes in the past months I had almost envied this entirety of vision. Now, wandering in the forest of pillars, I felt old and alienated ... And as I walked through these aisles of faded certainty, it seemed that after even the most tragic failings had been counted, despite the public tyranny and private dissimulation, the travestied history and the sallow men on the edge of crowds, there yet remained a bruised grandeur about this race who could still dream, however faintly, of a perfectible community on earth.

But all around me the frescoed ancestors of this foolishness were thinning away. The blemished saints and Church fathers no longer held the heart and gaze. They were draining back into the paster, into their unimaginable centuries.

"It was just superstition," a guide said. "Primitive daydreams..."

Thubron was tailed by the KGB his entire time in Kiev. He was afraid to visit the friends he had there, because it would have gotten them into trouble. His room was searched, his diaries gone through. He writes:

It seems foolish, in retrospect, that Kiev should be so contaminated for me. I thought it a handsome city, but it remains discolored in my mind. I remember staring into foodshops whose stock was wretchedly little and expensive: in one only a heap of decapitated chickens, in another some crates of aubergines. And this was the capital of the Ukraine, of the Black Earth!

Thubron meets up with Julian in the Crimea. Julian lives in the Ukraine. He is Russian. They travel together for a couple of days. This final anecdote brings tears to my eyes.

It was our last evening. He had bought a bottle of Caucasion dessert wine -- we never normally drank much together -- and we celebrated a somber farewell. From time to time his gaze wandered uneasily to the restaurant television. "You've heard the news?"

It came non-committally from the television announcer: the outbreak of war between Iran and Iraq.

We stared at one another, wondering where the Soviet and Western governments would stand, what we would be told to feel. "It looks like Moscow and Washington are hanging back," Julian said. "It's not time for us to report for duty." He tried to laugh. But we touched glasses unhappily, as if already clothed in invisible battledress. The news had momentarily reduced us.

"Sometimes I think of my father," Julian said, "and of that whole war generation, and I think: 'Let the dead bury their dead.' " He grimaced. "Is that in the Bible or Longfellow?" Then out of his schoolboy memory, he began to quote Burns. I suppressed a moan as My Heart's in the Highlands came up. But the words rolled out of him with a kind of ponderous wonder, restoring the poem to itself ...

Dusk had turned to night, and the wine glasses empty. Above us, as we wandered back to our huts, the one crag stood out in moon-streaked solitude from the consensus of the rest. "In the Kruschev years, the golden years," Julian said, "I managed to buy a copy of Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero -- the book of a pacifist. Have you read it? It had a deep influence on me." We stopped in front of our hut doors. The noise of a radio sounded in the trees: Iraqi advance, Iranian casualties, American silence. We listened. "I don't know how to talk about our meeting like this" -- he was suddenly fumbling for phrases. "It's important, you and I ... like two people meeting in outer space ... " He ran his fingers over his face, as if to order its expression, his thoughts. Outer space. His country immaterial.

As we said goodbye, he clasped my hand and said, "If in some future time I see you in the sights of my rifle -- I'll miss."

"And I won't fire at all."

We laughed, but with deep emotion. I've never felt so brief a friendship more.

The Ukraine - Part II - The Events of 1991

Another essay on The Ukraine, this one about the extraordinary events of 1991.

THE UKRAINE - PART II - THE EVENTS OF 1991

The Ukraine proclaimed independence in 1918. This independence was extremely short-lived, but it has remained fresh in the country's consciousness.

For example:
In January, 1990, thousands joined hands to celebrate that first independence in 1918. This would have been unheard-of, even two or three years before. But the tone of the world at that time was one of upheaval, change, hope. Countries breaking free of their chains. Pope John Paul ratified the structure of the Ukrainian Catholic Church.

Once we hit 1990, history starts speeding up again. After decades of silence.

In March of 1990, elections are held throughout the republic. The democratic opposition comes to power.

On June 16, 1990, there is a Declaration of Parliament stating that the Ukraine will be neutral and nonatomic.

In autumn of 1990, there were student strikes, and miners' strikes. The students were demanding the resignations of all the Soviet leaders (many who had been incorporated in this new government.) The country was sliding into chaos.

In August, 1991, there was the infamous coup d'etat attempt in Moscow. Which is interesting on 5,000 different levels, but basically what the coup d'etat did was reveal (once and for all) the indecisive incompetence of the leaders in Moscow.

The Ukraine decided immediately to choose its own destiny, and the Supreme Council proclaims the Ukraine's independence on August 24, 1991.

Since then, the Ukraine's executive branch has basically been taken over by gangsters. Many of the former countries of the USSR have nearly identical experiences following the collapse.

The governement is like a mafia. It embezzles cash. It manipulates elections, appropriates businesses, destroys the media, blackmails people it doesn't like. It's a netherworld of vaguely criminal activity.

More and more Ukrainians are emigrating.

I have to admit I don't know the steps in between 1990 and now, which would lead to this development (except for the fact that it's the same old story in all the former republics -- they have no experience with representative democracy, the Soviets crushed the infrastructure of the government, there is a power vacuum and so these gangster mafia types have a very easy time filling up the gap).

There is also the little matter of ethnicity and ethnic cleansing, which is such a common theme in these former republics. In the 1980s and the 1990s a virtual war was fought in the Ukraine over language. 350 years of Russification had obliterated Ukrainian. There was a ban on printing books in Ukrainian. Etc. Well, the Ukrainians started rebelling. There was a desire to get rid of all Russian. To go back to their roots.

A lovely theory, no? The only problem is is that there are millions and millions of Russians who live in the Ukraine, and who have lived there for generations, and who consider themselves Ukrainian. They speak Russian, but they think of themselves as belonging to the Ukraine, as well. The Ukrainians beg to differ. This is the same old "we belong here, you don't" bullshit which causes so much trouble all over the world.

It is like the colonists who ended up fleeing Angola when the revolution occurred. These were Portugese people, yes. They were the "colonizers". Whatever. These people had lived in Angola for generations. Angola was their home. But the natives disagreed and rode them out of the country on a rail. As it turns out, of course, the Portugese were the only people in the country who knew how to do the things which would keep a country running. But the natives weren't thinking logically. They were thinking ethnically.

So now, the Ukraine has been described as two countries: Eastern and Western. These two sides have almost completely different characters. None of this has been resolved yet, by the way. The nation has not cohered, or worked it all out. The current president, Kuchma, was re-elected in 1999 by intimidation and fraud. The Ukraine is losing it, quite frankly.

The Western side of the Ukraine belonged to Poland before the war. It is definitely more Ukrainian than the eastern side of the country. They speak Ukrainian here. The soul of the country and the people survived here, through the Soviet tyranny.

The Eastern side of the Ukraine is a different story, resting, as it does, right up against the Soviet Union. 13 million native Russians live here. The "Russification" campaign was brutal on the eastern side of the Ukraine. The entire Ukrainian intelligentsia was murdered by Stalin, in the 1930s, and, of course, the country has not yet recovered from that loss. It will take generations more.

Ukraine - Part I - The Famine

Somehow, it's all been about Communism today. Along those lines - here are three short pieces I wrote about the Ukraine, on my old blog. Actually, the third piece is a compilation of excerpts from Colin Thubron's wonderful book Among the Russians.

The first piece is on the horrific famine in the Ukraine, engineered by the Soviets in the 1930s. My piece barely scratches the surface at all. Robert Conquest's book The Harvest of Sorrow is the most thorough explanation of exactly how this man-made famine occurred.

But for now:

THE UKRAINE - PART 1 - THE FAMINE

The Ukraine was called "the bread basket" of the Soviet Union. It is a large nation with fertile soil and hospitable people. Basically, it is one large farm. The Ukrainians are very attached to the land. They have a "peasant patriotism", their feelings for their own nation rooted in the rich soil. Ukrainians that emigrate to other areas of the world invariably become very influential and very successful. They are ambitious and resilient.

Until 1917, the Ukraine was one of the world's tapestries of culture, religion, and language. Peoples overlapped here. Then the Bolsheviks conquered the nation. The Ukraine was one of the countries most severely damaged by Communism, the people were some of the most trapped and terrorized: mainly because the Ukraine was the most valuable commodity the Soviets had. The Ukraine fed the entire empire. There was no way on earth that the Ukraine would ever break free of the Soviet Imperium. They had no independence, no freedom of movement, no slack was ever given (like was given to some of the other more remote republics). The Ukraine was crushed like a bug under the thumb of the Imperium.

They declared independence in 1918, directly following being conquered. This was very short-lived, of course. And then the relentless crushing began.

The Great Famine was caused by the collectivization of the farms, a "program" (or a pogrom) implemented across the Soviet Union. Tens and tens of millions (this is not an exaggeration) died as a result of collectivization. And the world did nothing. Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Charles Lindbergh traveled to Russia in the middle of this great hidden famine. I have her journals from that time, and she writes in glorious positive terms about the "busy" Russians. She loved seeing everybody so "busy", so productive. She had never been in a country which had such industry, such commitment to public works. It's disgusting to read her journals now (at least her journals during World War II), because of 20/20 hindsight. They were willfully lied to. The happy productive Russians were trotted out for their benefit. And 200 miles away, the fields of the Ukraine were piled high with corpses.

In brief: collectivization began in 1929. Lenin was long gone. Trotsky was long gone. Stalin was now king. All of the USSR had to be moved off of their own little farms into kholkozes (collectivized farms). People were herded into barracks, there were armed guards around the peripheries, there were gates outside the collective farms with lovely slogans like: Work is Beautiful. Or whatever. Communist bullshit. The peasants resisted this move. They did not want to go. They hunkered down.

Stalin sent hundreds of thousands of people into the gulag, the massive prison camp structure he erected throughout Siberia, and none of these people were ever heard of again.

The rest of them he decided to starve out. This was a conscious decision. Public policy.

The famine began in 1930 and lasted seven years.

Moscow determined the quotas that each village had to deliver to the state. These quotas were purposefully greater than whatever the land could yield. Authorities confiscated everything that was edible. Schools were closed. Three year olds had to work in the fields, to try to squeeze the quotas out of the land. No one was allowed to leave the villages. People who tried were shot.

The main element of Ukrainian identity is the peasantry. The Ukrainian spirit resides in the peasantry. So Stalin had to destroy that peasantry.

In 1932, a terrifying edict came down called The Law of the Blade of Grain. It's a heartless law. One could be shot or sent to prison for life if one stole one blade of grain.

Meanwhile, the famine is reaching massive proportions. There were villages which resorted to cannibalism. There were not enough graves to contain all the dead. People lay in the streets, in the fields, in their own beds. Entire families dead from starvation in their own homes. Howling filling the streets, people crazed from hunger.

The Law of the Blade of Grain was Stalin's final screw. Outside each village were enormous grain fields. Every single blade of grain, due to the unrealistic quotas, was "earmarked" for Moscow. Within the village, people were starving. They had to work these fields, they had to harvest this grain which could conceivably save their lives and the lives of their families, but the punishment was not just severe, it was basically the end of your life. Nobody came out of the gulag. Soldiers and secret police were posted on watchtowers around the fields, to make sure nobody stole even ONE BLADE of grain.

Desperate mothers would send their toddlers into the field, to see if they could steal a couple of blades, in the hopes that their size would keep them better-hidden than an adult. Of course, many toddlers were shot dead because of this.

It is estimated that 30 million people starved as a result of collectivization and the Law of the Blade of Grain. This estimate may even be low.

Today, in the Ukraine, the collectivized farms still exist, but they are now abandoned. Derelict barracks, gates swinging on the hinges, peeling murals of sickles and clasped hands ... The ghost of the famine still exists in the Ukrainian psychology, in the same way it does in the Irish psychology, but it also exists because of these falling-down buildings haunting the countryside. Relics from that brutal time.

"They had to fool the people..."

To go along with the "crimes of Communism" theme today - here is an excerpt from a book I really dig: Michael Dobbs' Down With Big Brothjer: The Fall of the Soviet Empire. It's my favorite excerpt.

Despite a willingness to redefine the word "socialism", so that it lost much of its meaning, Gorbachev was unwilling to abandon Communist ideology altogether. He prattled on about the irrevocable "socialist choice" that Russia had allegedly made in November 1917. Lenin remained an unassailable authority for him. Yeltsin, on the other hand, was undergoing an ideological conversation that was both painful and public. Spurred on by his conflict with the Communist Party establishment, he had reexamined his most basic political beliefs, and he had come to the conclusion that he was no longer a Communist.

A turning point in Yeltsin's intellectual development occurred during his first visit to the United States in September 1989, more specifically his first visit to an American supermarket, in Houston, Texas. The sight of aisle after aisle of shelves neatly stacked with every conceivable type of foodstuff and household item, each in a dozen varieties, both amazed and depressed him. For Yeltsin, like many other first-time Russian visitors to America, this was infinitely more impressive than tourist attractions like the Statue of Liberty and the Lincoln Memorial. It was impressive precisely because of its ordinariness. A cornucopia of consumer goods beyond the imagination of most Soviets was within the reach of ordinary citizens without standing in line for hours. And it was all so attractively displayed. For someone brought up in the drab conditions of communism, even a member of the relatively privileged elite, a visit to a Western supermarket involved a full-scale assault on the senses.

"What we saw in that supermarket was no less amazing than America itself," recalled Lev Sukhanov, who accompanied Yeltsin on his trip to the United States and shared his sense of shock and dismay at the gap in living standards between the two superpowers. "I think it is quite likely that the last prop of Yeltsin's Bolshevik consciousness finally collapsed after Houston. His decision to leave theparty and join the struggle for supreme power in Russia may have ripened irrevocably at that moment of mental confusion."

On the plane, traveling from Houston to Miami, Yeltsin seemed lost in his thoughts for a long time. He clutched his head in his hands. Eventually he broke his silence. "They had to fool the people," he told Sukhanov. "It is now clear why they made it so difficult for the average Soviet citizen to go abroad. They were afraid that people's eyes would open."

The former party apparatchik understood the yearning of the narod -- the long-suffering Russian people -- for a normal life, its anger at being deceived and humiliated. He, too, had been humiliated. He, too, had been deceived. He would help the narod secure its revenge against the party establishment. The narod's revenge would also be his.

Orwell's genius was recognizing the trick, recognizing how "they" had to fool "the people" - recognizing the utter lie of Communism or Socialism - decades before anyone else did. I'm gonna go home and pull out that excerpt from 1984 where Winston reads the forbidden book which outlines the tenets of Newspeak and totalitarianism - and Orwell (duh) finds a much deeper level to all of it than I could see originally.

"They had to fool the people". People are still being fooled.

The Holocaust of Communism

There is an interesting conversation going on in the comments for this post about communism and its evils. There were no Nuremberg trials after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The discussion reminded me of the quiz I found this morning over on Dean Esmay's blog.

The quiz is called:

The Holocausts of Communism

Test your knowledge on the evils of Communism and get back to me on it.

I was disappointed to find out that I only got an "Advanced" score - but in my defense, I found some of the questions confusing - not to mention the terrible flashback-inducing format of multiple choice, with such answers as: "A, C, and D, but not B". It appears, however, that my score is above the median curve - Most who have taken the quiz score as "Novice" or "Intermediate". Cold comfort indeed.

However, that's neither here nor there. It's a terrific quiz - and once you get your score - all answers are discussed. You can see which is correct, and why.

Oh, and I realized the "blanks" in my knowledge, of which there are many.

I know about the Great Leap Forward, but I'm not so sure about the later days. I'm not as clear on Vietnam - but I got almost all of the questions right about the Russian Revolution. Cambodia I'm clear on ... but the inner workings of Chinese politics are not in my realm.

YET.

Why I'm proud to be an O'Malley

There may be other families who have similar stories to tell - but this is a short story about an O'Malley thing - an O'Malley "thing" being passed on to the next generation. I'm proud of it.

My nephew Cashel (of whom I write about a lot) is 6.

He got 5,891 presents for Christmas - because of "the aunties" (me and my sisters) - and all of the adults in his life who basically love him to pieces.

One of the things I gave him he was not too thrilled by. Or - I think he was a bit overwhelmed by the thousands of presents he had received, and had a hard time taking it all in. He could only focus on one or two things. (I know just how he feels.)

Anyway - I bought him two Play Mobile guys (member those?) - and they were two little Revolutionary War Minute Men - and there's a cannon, two cannon balls, and one horse. And a bucket for the horse.

I feared this would not attract his attention because of his overwhelming interest in Star Wars and Harry Potter, and I was right. Originally. He could not have cared less.

But two days later, I called home and talked with my mom. In the background, I could basically hear the sounds of some kind of war going on, running up and down the hallway. Explosions, etc. Our house was under attack?

"What's going on over there?" I asked.

"Oh, Cashel is playing with your two soldiers. It appears that ... a battle from the Revolutionary War is taking place in our hallway."

"He's playing with them? That's great!"

"I think one of them is Paul Revere. He appears to be fighting in the battles as well."

"That is so cute." (Burst of pride in my heart that Cashel knows of the existence of Paul Revere.)

Then my mom said: "He knows about Paul Revere because of Longfellow."

Let me repeat that:

My nephew Cashel knows about Paul Revere not because of a movie, or because he learned about it in school - but because we, as a family, have read to him Longfellow's great poem "Paul Revere's Ride". That poem is in the legacy of our family - and it has turned him on to the possibilities of the Revolutionary War as imaginary material.

This is the legacy of being an O'Malley.

The printed word comes first.

I think that Longfellow would be pleased!!

Here's my description of reading that poem to Cashel one night.

Quote

But let us be generous. We will not shoot them. We will not pour salt water into them, nor bury them in bedbugs, nor bridle them up into a "swan dive," nor keep them on sleepless "stand-up" for a week, nor kick them with jackboots, nor beat them with rubber truncheons, nor squeeze their skulls with iron rings, nor push them into a cell so that they lie atop one another like pieces of baggage - we will not do any of the things they did! But for the sake of our country and our children we have the duty to seek them all out and bring them all to trial! Not to put them on trial so much as their crimes. And to compel each one of them to announce loudly: "Yes, I was an executioner and a murderer."

-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The so-called villainy of Ted Hughes

I need to write a post about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath - it's been a long time coming - and I have much to say. But first - I have got to point you over to Emily Jones' new blog ("It comes in pints?") - to read her post on the subject.

I couldn't agree with her assessment more. Ted Hughes has suffered enough to appease the gods of angry feminists - He has suffered MORE than enough. Well, he's dead now - so his suffering is over - and I hope he was able to find some peace at the end. Judging from the tone of The Birthday Letters, (the book of poems he published right before he died - poems in which he broke his long long silence about his marriage to Plath) he did not. He was a tormented man. He could not save her from herself. He would not sign up to be her Living God, the Ghost of her father come back to redeem the world of Men to her ... But so soon after leaving her, she committed suicide. And for this - he has been blamed for her death for 40 years.

Like I said, I have a lot to say. Let me formulate my thoughts a bit more.

But additionally - I must add, on a side note: Emily Jones is hilarious. The title of her post is Je n'accuse pas Ted Hughes. I can't explain why I think it is so funny, so a propos - but it is perfect. Je ne'accuse pas Ted Hughes.

ONE LAST THING: I write this post as a lifelong fan of Sylvia Plath's poems. I have gone through many phases of Plathian response - but what it really comes down to is - she's a frightening writer, a possessed writer - Something seems to be speaking through her. In high school, I was very angry with Ted Hughes. My anger came merely from reading her journals, and knowing that she would end up killing herself. How could he leave her?? How could he betray her?? I was in high school. I didn't really get, yet, that things are not foreordained. Ted Hughes could not have known she would take that step. He may have feared it, he may have tried to stop it ... but he is not to blame.

Like I said - I need to sit my ass down and write an essay.

Personal ads for Intellectuals

I love to read the personal ads in such publications as The Times Literary Supplement - it is highly entertaining. You should definitely check it out some time, if you remember to. My friend Ernie was the first one to turn me on to how well-written, how specific, and how bizarre these ads are ... These are definitely not your "I'm looking for a soulmate. I would love to walk on the beach with you" ramblings of the idiots on Match.com.

Anyway, here is an article about personal ads. It's very funny.

Catherine Keenan, the Australian author, lists ads from literary and academic journals - such gems as the following came from The London Review of Books:

Some chances are once in a lifetime. Not this one, I've been in the last 12 issues. Either I strike gold this time or I become a lesbian. Man, 43.

And:

67-year-old disaffiliated flaneur, jacked-up on Viagra and looking for a contortionist trumpeter.

See what I mean? They're addictive.

The article analyzes the difference between personal ads in America, and those in England. The people who place the ads in England, apparently, (and not too surprisingly) are much more willing to be self-deprecating about themselses:

Public school failure. Insipid, directionless, probably poor in bed. Looking for M or F reason to take life seriously.

or to use wit as the primary attraction (with an underbelly of twisted sexuality, as seen in this ad):

Must enjoy computer battleships, segregated bathrooms and respect my mother by wearing clothes just like hers (cavalry twill, mainly.)

The people who place the ads in America are much more positive and cheery, much more willing to sell themselves ("I'm a good-looking guy ... women tell me they like my eyes ... I have a good sense of humor") - and also are very very specific about the appearance of the mate they seek.

Examples from the article:

Resembles a petite Julia Roberts.

...the sophistication of Diana Rigg combined with likeness to Lady Diana (cheekbones, eyes, hair)

A pi