The Sheila Variations

Please say it ain't so

No. No. I can't take it.

My main response to that announcement is one of stunned silence. (And you have to read the article in order to understand what I'm about to discuss.)

The next thing that comes into my mind, after the stunned silence has passed, is: "Uhm ... world-class, Paula? Really? You were a world-class choreographer?? Ya ever heard of Balanchine? Mark Morris? No? You were obviously successful, hon, I'll give you that ... but world-class?" Also: I wince when I hear someone describe THEMSELVES as 'world-class'.

Only people who AREN'T world-class at a craft would ever describe their OWN ART as "world-class". If you know what I mean.

It's kind of like one of the rules of online dating (a rule I stumbled over myself, after some disastrous experiments): If some guy describes himself in his profile as "laidback", "mellow", or "easygoing", you can bet that the dude has a corn cob up his ass. The same is probably true on the female side. Like, any chick who goes out of her way to describe herself as "mellow" is most assuredly a raging Type-A nightmare. It happened to me TIME AND TIME AGAIN. Some "laidback" guy would show up on the date, and I would find him to be uptight, controlling, and no fun at all. Invariably, he would be rude to the waitstaff (I think I've described my pet peeve about that in some detail), and reveal himself as a bonehead. So I learned quickly. I would scan the profile beforehand. "Hm. Laidback? Oh, he's probably a dick. Next."

Don't get me wrong. I love "laidback". I love other things, too, but I like someone who is relaxing to be around. The problem is with those people who describe THEMSELVES that way ... Maybe it's a problem of self-perception. They truly BELIEVE themselves to be "mellow" ... and yet ... huh? I'm a pretty good judge of character ... and these people were not "mellow". Their senses of their personalities, and how they came across, was ... off. Shall we say.

What I'm really trying to get at here is - there has NEVER been a time when Paula Abdul would be ranked among "world-class choreographers". Her name wouldn't even be on the list. Again: successful? YES. Hip with the latest dance moves? PERHAPS. But come on. World-class?

Anyone who point-blank says, "I am a world-class sculptor" is probably an idiot. And a bad sculptor.

My sisters and I watched some starry-eyed retrospective about the gleaming career of Paula Abdul (ehm ... a Laker girl? Not that there's anything wrong with being a Laker girl, but the sepia-toned quality of the special made it seem like being a Laker girl was on the same level of accomplishment as being Bobby Fischer or something). And the special took a completely uncritical view of Abdul. It was very fawning, which confused all of us. I mean, not that she's heinous or anything, but the special made it seem like she literally had changed the face of pop music, it made it seem like after Paula Abdul appeared on the scene, nothing ever was the same again. But ... huh? Paula Abdul? What? And she said something like, "My choreography is what I am best at. I am truly a great choreographer." And then they cut to some BOGUS shot of the Laker girls dancing, doing choreography that looked like it came out of the first 5 minutes of "Zoom" or something. Like ... they were all in a line, and one by one each of them jumped up and down That was it. My sisters and I were howling. Like ... couldn't they find some better choreography than THAT in order to prove how amazing Paula Abdul is as an artiste?

So the lesson is: even if you THINK you're "world-class" ... don't feckin' SAY it. Cause ... I don't know. Basically, cause it's ikky, that's why. And ... if you're Paula Abdul, you should NEVER say it.

Snapshots

-- The Hudson is now pretty much encased in ice. It's gorgeous in a fierce glittering kind of way. I stood out there this morning, freezing-cold, watching the mini icebergs float by. Then this morning, I checked in on CW's site, and had to laugh at his latest post. Just because of the contrast.

-- I finished the biography of Howard Hughes I had been reading. The ending of his life is not only tragic but enraging. It's weirder than fiction. The evil Mormon aides ... so WEIRD. I have no idea how much of it is true. I have no idea if he really was trapped by his own people who were vying for control of his billionis, and who encouraged his drug addiction in order to keep him docile ... And they were all MORMONS, which ... the whole thing is very odd. Apparently, Hughes had all of the various women in his life followed, tailed, bugged, etc. And he had a problem, in the beginning, with his staff assigned to follow these girls falling in love with them, or stealing them. So Hughes said he only wanted homosexuals to be on his staff. Since this was in the 1940s and 50s, though, being out was not a common thing, and Hughes found it hard to find anyone who would admit to being gay. So then he came upon the brilliant idea: straight-laced Mormons! But the way they treated him, neglected him, pumped him full of drugs ... it's tragic. It made me mad.

-- I'm writing like a Tasmanian devil. Lots of plans. Lots of things going on. It stresses me out. But I'm also very pleased with my work, even though it is all just in progress right now.

-- I watched the movie 61* last night, for ... oh ... the HUNDREDTH TIME???? In my estimation, it is that rarity: a perfect movie. Every scene, every performance, the story itself ... the way the story is told ... it just WORKS. On every level. Barry Pepper and Thomas Jane ... day-um. That is some fine acting. And ... I may be insane, but it really looks like, in certain scenes, that they are ACTUALLY playing baseball. It's awesome. Like ... Thomas Jane is just an actor and all, but there were certain moments on the field when I believed I was looking at Mickey Mantle. And Barry Pepper has Roger Maris' specific swing down to a T. Oh, and Bruce McGill as the General Manager ... who the hell is better than Bruce McGill??? Let me scream it from the hilltops: I LOVE BRUCE MCGILL. He's one of those character actors that you probably know, you would know his face ... I LOVE his work. Bagger Vance - as one of the golfers, his movie-stealing turn in The Insider... There's not a more exciting moment in The Insider than during the deposition when he suddenly screams at the tobacco lawyer: "WIPE THAT SMIRK OFF YOUR FACE." Bruce feckin' McGill. A fine fine actor. Great scene between McGill and Pepper (as Roger Maris - who is pretty much freaking out from all the stress) in McGill's office. Where McGill finally says to him, "Like it or not, Roger, right now ... you're bigger than the game." 61* is a great film. Congrats, Billy Crystal ... you really GOT it. Not only did you tell a compelling and fascinating story, but you infused the entire tale with a love of baseball, a true understanding of the sport, the love of the sport. Barry Pepper's work in some scenes makes me cry. BRAVO TO ALL INVOLVED.

-- Last night was a cooking night. I don't cook every night ... but last night I did. It was fun. Went to the grocery store, stocked up ... There is a feeling of well-being when the fridge is full. So I cooked. The kitchen was warm, cozy, the lights were low ... and I felt even MORE cozy because I knew that pretty much just outside the river was clogged up with icebergs.

-- Strange crying jags. But then also strange laughing jags. Guffawing on the phone with my friend Beth... Like Joni Mitchell said: "Laughter or tears ... it's the same release." (MJF? Is that the quote??) You know. Laughter/Tears. Par for the course.

-- Oh, forgot to mention: saw the movie Mean Girls. I was completely surprised by how much I loved it. I actually think I need to own it. Strangely enough. It was witty, ridiculous, the script was smart and FUNNY ("But honey, you love Ladysmith Black Mambazo!") - there were some laugh-out-loud funny moments, and it was also quite poignant. It had some meaning. I was not expecting any of that, and again ... it was a lovely surprise. Love a movie that makes me laugh. And I finally, grudgingly, realized why Lindsay Lohan has become the latest "It Girl". Because, ehm, she's kind of feckin' adorable, that's why. She's lovable. She's a perfect teen star. I loved her character. And go, Tina Fey!! Tim Meadows as the beleaguered principal with chronic carpal-tunnel was hilarious.

-- I like to sit at my desk, in my pre-dawn morning ritual, with the cup of coffee next to me, the desk-lamp on ... and re-read what I have written the day before. I've got this whole system with my off-line writing, how I write, when I edit, blah blah blah. In a weird way, the drudgery of editing is one of my favorite parts. I sit there, it's still dark out, the curtains are drawn, I've got incense burning, I've cooked a couple hard-boiled eggs for the breakfast, and I read what I've written out loud to myself. It's enormously helpful. You hear things you might have missed, (like repetitive words, awkward phrasing, or too much writing in general) - than when you just edit with your eye scanning the page. Precious dawn moments. I would be so wigged out without that time.

-- My friend Ted and I went to go see Vera Drake last week, and I'm pretty much still haunted by it. The movie has remained with me, I have found it hard to shake it. Imelda Staunton ... holy crapola. I remember her highly comedic performance as the dim-witted curly-haired wife of the big ol' CURMUDGEON in Sense and Sensibility. She played a woman who did not have a brain in her head, who literally had never had a thought worth thinking. An AIRHEAD. And so nothing could prepare me for what she did in Vera Drake. God. It was one of the harshest most upsetting movies I had seen all year. Stellar acting all around.

-- Funny. I just saw my entire family on Saturday. And I already miss them all. It was wonderful, I got to talk to pretty much everyone for at least SOME amount of time ... but still. The family is so huge. Invariably there are people you "miss".

-- Continuing on with reading the Adams-Jefferson correspondence. I am already getting ready to do a big Presidents Day thing here on the blog, made up of quotes from the letters. These letters are so intense, and so incredible, that it's almost like I can SEE the hair rising up on my arms as I read them. Yay for being a Founding Fathers geek!!

-- Cool, man. A fireball over Madrid.

-- I think I need to get out more.

O'Malleys on the loose

My cousin Liam had his birthday last night. O'Malleys from all around descended onto the city, to celebrate. Liam's wife Lydia organized the whole night, and did an incredible job. I'm still kind of all verklempt about the whole thing. I love my family. I had moments when I looked around the bar, and saw cousins sitting and blabbing with each other, my uncles and dad all sitting together talking, friends of the family talking with multiple O'Malley cousins, my brother, my sisters, my parents ... just the whole O'Malley THING ... and think: God. This is truly fantastic. To me, there is pretty much nothing more important than my family. I can't think of one thing that would win out. Ever.

Babies have been born since last we all saw one another. Seamus ... Henry ... there are babies out there who I STILL have not met. Fiona comes to mind. And so everyone had digital cameras or little iPod thingies ... so we could all revel in the new O'Malley babies. And we all talked about how this baby has THAT mouth, that baby has THIS chin ... you know. Family stuff. It's all about the baby-worship.

Photo albums were passed around, filled with old snapshots of Liam, and his siblings when they were kids ... late 1960s photos, early 70s photos ... photos with the white border to them, some color photos, mostly black and white. There is this sort of infamous picture of my cousin Liam, my cousin Mike (they're brothers), and me, all sitting on the couch. I am a baby, I must be 6 or 7 months?? And so Liam is 3 and Mike is 2. It is SUCH A FUNNY PICTURE ... basically because none of us have changed AT ALL. I think the 3 of us now, as adults, should re-create that picture, because it's classic. I am in a onesie, I am smiling goofily at the camera (is that a real smile? Or is it just gas? Hard to tell). I am a small lima bean shaped creature, I cannot move, but I am a happy baby. Mike looks like he is being FORCED to sit still for the picture, kind of pouting and scowling at the camera, and he's sitting with his knee up, and you can blatantly see the cuts on his knee. And Liam, with the sweet face, sits there, smiling openly at the camera. The contrast between Mike and Liam is hilarious. Meanwhile, I lie propped up between them, oblivious.

I got to catch up with my cousin Kerry, my cousin Tim, my cousin Marianne ... her husband ... Pretty much everybody is talking about the Patriots now. Not QUITE as much as we talked about the Red Sox, but still. The Patriots are on everyone's minds.

And then came the MANIA of karaoke. We rented a room at the weirdest place on the planet, called Orange Valve. (Highly recommend it to New Yorkers who love karaoke by the way. The rooms you can rent are really comfortable, you can totally settle in there. It was a blast.) It was our entire clan, in this weirdly lit cheesy room, with mirrors, and strange little glowing space heaters, and low plushy couches ... but it was filled with my FAMILY. So incongruous, and funny. Like ... my uncles, aunts, my parents ... a multi-generational group clustered in what looked like a cheese-ball decadent Miami Vice set. The drinks were INSANELY expensive, and also so watered down as to be irritating. I ordered a scotch and soda from the terrifying Japanese female bartender, and I watched how little scotch she put in the glass. Usually they try to be a bit more subtle about it, but this bartender did not care. It was a glass of soda, with a teensy weensy splash of scotch. The next time I came up for a drink, I ordered a straight scotch, and she SO did not want to give it to me!! She gave me this look, like: Hmm. I can't get out of this one ...

But still, it's okay. It's all good. Terrifying-Japanese-bartender-lady was a part of the night. Part of the comedy of the night. (And yes. That is how we all referred to her. "So have you had a run-in yet with terrifying-Japanese-bartender-lady?" "No, man ... no. Have you?")

The karaoke began. Liam is basically a rock star. The guy knows every song ever written. My sister Jean is pretty much on the same level. They know all the lyrics, they don't need to read the words ...

My parents had never been to a karaoke place, and were crying with laughter. Just CRYING. Actually, we all were. The VIDEOS they played, too, behind the lyrics to all the songs ... I can barely describe how ridiculous they were. It was a loop of footage, completely random. A boat going through the waves, shots of Venice, strange shots of what looked like Octoberfest, guys in lederhosen, random shots of Russian churches, a random shot of an Amish farmer on his horse and buggy (I'm not kidding ... and yet that image is on the screen while my cousin Tim and my sisters are doing a KICK-ASS version of "Superstitious" ... like ... what? Amish? Superstitious?) My parents were like: where on earth ARE WE RIGHT NOW?

Liam and I pretty much brought down the house with our rocking version of "Lithium". Yeah, baby. Lithium. I'm so happy. Cause today I found my friends. They're in my head.

Liam and I also kicked some ass with "Baby You're a Rich Man". First of all, I had no idea I knew all the words to that song. "How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people??" I know every stinkin' word. But performing it is another ballgame: You feel distinctly insane during the performance. Why? Because during the verses, you must sing in a tiny delicate falsetto. And then, for the chorus, you must SCREAM. So you must embrace a split personality for that particular song. I think Liam and I did so admirably.

My sisters did "Fame". (The video-screen informed us that this song was performed by "OREME CARA". heh heh heh) Jean, during the musical interlude, stepped out with the microphone and said, point-blank, to all of us, speaking dead seriously: "You got big dreams. You want FAME. Well, fame costs. And right here is where you start paying. In sweat." Those of you who know the reference will know that she said it word for word. Genius. I thought Mike was gonna piss his pants.

Also, Mike and Liam, sitting on the couch during the "Fame" rendition took it upon themselves to shout out the echo "FAME" whenever appropriate, as occurs in the real song.

"Fame! (Fame!) I'm gonna live forever ..."

Etc. So at the beginning their shouts of "FAME" were filled with energy, hysteria, greed. They were right ON. But who knew how many echoes there really were in that song?? By the end, their shouts of "FAME" were exhausted. They could barely get them out anymore. It was a chore.

At one point, my cousin Mike had gotten all sucked into watching the ridiculous "videos" ... and he leaned across his couch to say to my parents and myself, "You know ... watching these videos makes me not want to travel."

My sister Siobhan performed the SHIT out of "Oops I did it again". Excellent work, Siobhan. Excellent.

Liam just kept singing, strolling around in his suit, engaging all of us, like a lounge singer on the loose. It was AWESOME. He knows every song ever written.

I was out until 2:30 in the morning. And for the first time in ... uhm ... FIVE YEARS ... I overslept. I woke up at noon. This is positively unheard of. But I figured I'm entitled.

A great great night. I felt a positive GLOW, standing there, surrounded by my crazy beautiful loving family.

Oh, and here's some humor:

Multiple times over the evening I was introduced to a friend of Liam's, or a friend of Lydia's, or a friend of my cousin Mike's.

Invariably, this friend would ask me: "So are you one of the cousins?"

heh heh heh I'm sure it happened to all of the other cousins, too. Just put us all in a huge labeled lump: "the cousins". That's all you need to do. I would say, "Yes. I am one of the cousins", and the friend would nod, accepting it. I just find that so funny.

Happy birthday, Liam. Great job with the planning, Lydia. Beautiful night. Beautiful. There's never enough time to revel in my family ... but still. Last night was a feast for the soul and heart. Loved looking around, in the crowded bar where we all gathered at first, and seeing my entire family scattered throughout. Makes me feel like "God's in His heaven, all's right with world".

Congratulations ...

... to the people of Iraq, for turning out to the polls in droves, despite the violence, despite the threats. I am finding the pictures of the voting extremely moving.

And here is one of the lines for the polls:

Emily has posted some wonderful quotes from Iraqis, about their experiences voting. Go read their words (and follow her link to read more).

And Patrick has posted what is, perhaps, the most emotional photo out there I've seen. Beautiful.

Movies Billy Wilder wanted to make - but never did

Okay, so you probably know that Billy Wilder directed Spirit of St. Louis, starring Jimmy Stewart as Charles Lindbergh.

Wilder and Lindbergh were friends, of a sort. Stewart is way too old to play Lindbergh, in my humble opinion, but he still does a wonderful job. (The movie don't quite work, though ... not sure why ... It just doesn't work, really). Jimmy Stewart was 19 when Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic, and remembers listening to the radio broadcast, that Lindbergh had taken off ... and he remembers sitting in his father's hardware store, taking a model airplane and making it fly on Lindbergh's projected path over his father's globe. He also went into the Air Force himself in WWII, in part because of Lindbergh's inspiration. (WHY ON EARTH IS ALL OF THIS STUFF IN MY BRAIN?? I literally have no idea why my brain retains the smallest details of JIMMY STEWART'S BOYHOOD EXPERIENCES. But mine is not to reason why.)

Anyway, I've posted before Billy Wilder's description of what he would have LIKED to do with Spirit of St. Louis - HIS idea for how to frame the story. But he knew to even suggest it would mean that Lindbergh would withdraw the project. So he held his tongue. Anyway, here's the movie Wilder WANTED to make.

Another very well-known fact is that Billy Wilder and Cary Grant were friends for many many years. And yet, oddly, Cary Grant never appeared in any Wilder movie. Even though, Cary Grant seems MADE for a Billy Wilder picture, and Billy Wilder had written role after role after role (Humphrey Bogart's part in Sabrina, for example) with Grant in mind. Here's Wilder's description of all of that. Cary Grant's elusiveness never hurt their friendship ... and yet still, it is one of those "what-if" situations. What IF Cary Grant had said Yes? Billy Wilder never cried over spilt milk ... and he ended up making Tony Curtis basically DO a Cary Grant imitation for most of Some Like it Hot as his indirect tribute. He adored Cary Grant.

But Cary Grant worked with only a couple of directors. He was not a trusting man. He had no agent, and had chosen to not wed himself to any one studio. He was extremely wary of having anyone mess with his image ... and Hitchcock was pretty much the only one he trusted completely.

Fascinating.

Anyway, in all of the stuff I have read of Billy Wilder, Cary Grant's name comes up again and again and again. "And he would have been great in THIS part ... and I wrote THAT part for him ..."

That was why Wilder and Humphrey Bogart didn't get along (to put it mildly) during the filming of Sabrina. Bogart KNEW that that part was meant for Cary, that he was second choice, and that pissed him OFF. (Would piss me off, too!! Not a good situation, not a confidence-builder ... to know you're second choice).

So, in one of my favorite art-of-filmmaking books - Conversations with Wilder, where Cameron Crowe sat down with Billy Wilder over the course of a couple of months, and asked him a billion questions about all of his movies ... Billy Wilder talked about Cary Grant.

And - he said that until they were old men together, Wilder kept trying to get Cary Grant to act again. Cary Grant had long retired, and Wilder kept sending him scripts "with grey-haired old guys in them". The answer was always NO.

Wilder had a fantasy of the ULTIMATE movie he wanted to do, starring Cary Grant. He had the entire thing shot in his head. And Cary Grant, because he was Cary Grant, never would have grown out of the part, even though he was 60 years old. He was always a leading man.

So anyway, here is the first 10 minutes of Billy Wilder's dream-movie, the movie he always wanted to do, but never did, starring Cary Grant:

-- It takes place during the Crusades.

-- There is a long sweeping shot through the muddy streets of a medieval town. Something is obviously about to happen, much activity.

-- A series of shots of the men of the town putting on coats of armor. Buckling up, raising flags, putting on helmets, getting the swords ready ... Okay. So we get the picture. The men are going off to the Crusade.

-- Another series of shots ... showing the men of the town locking their wives into chastity belts. They all have huge keys, their wives are crying, pleading not to be locked up, also not to go away ... but the men are firm. Their wife must be protected! She must be locked up! So a series of shots ... throughout the town ... lock, lock, lock, lock, lock, lock, lock. (You got it? A montage.)

-- Then, leaving their crying locked-up wives behind them, the men all leap onto their horses and, holding up flags and swords and shields, gallop out of town.

-- The camera follows the horses through the town, the galloping, the mud flying ... and as the horses pass by, out of frame, the camera rests on a small storefront. Unassuming. Medieval. And on a small sign by the door are the words: "Locksmith". And the camera slowly pans by the window, and we see the locksmith at work at his table inside. The locksmith is Cary Grant.

heh heh heh heh

God. It's so witty, so clever ... I think that's why I love Wilder movies, and Lubitsch movies ... all those old guys, from the golden age of Hollywood. The WIT. Where do ideas come from? Who knows. The idea fairy. I have no idea. But I love Billy Wilder's idea ... and I also love that even as a frail man, close to death, he got all excited, telling Cameron Crowe about his "dream movie", and how the first 10 minutes would go.

It really sucks when ...

... you find yourself in a dark alley, dressed up in a bodacious sundress, smoking a cigarette, with a knowing smirk on your face ...

and you suddenly, with no warning whatsoever ... find yourself confronted by ...

2 jitterbugging LUST PIGS.

Oscar philosophy

So. The Oscars.

Alex, Mitchell and I sat around in the living room, talking about Diane Keaton's incredible performance in Something's Gotta Give. (I have discussed my own feelings about her work ad nauseum. And you know what? I could go on for even LONGER about it. But I will restrain myself. For now, anyway.) The three of us were all QUITE CLEAR in our convictions. (Please realize, folks, too, that we're all actors. We don't feel embarrassed about how much we love all this stuff, and how long we talk about it. We take it seriously, we eat it up, and we do not censor ourselves. We aren't constantly editing ourselves, like: "I know the Oscars are silly, but ..." or "Who cares about a bunch of actors congratulating themselves, but ..." WHAT? This is the stuff we LIVE for. A bunch of actors congratulating themselves??? SIGN ME THE HELL UP, BABY. I NEVER thought the Academy Awards show was too long. Even when I complained about how long it was - in those old days when there were the god-awful dance numbers - I wanted it go on forever.)

Anyhoo.

We were discussing, seriously, how wonderful Diane Keaton was in that movie. We discussed WHY she was so good. We discussed why we think it is, indeed, some of her best work. EVER. I would say it was the best performance given, by an actress, that year. We all agreed.

But Charlize Theron won for Monster. Which is not surprising. It was a break-out performance, it was also the TOPIC that got people's attention ... and also the fact that nobody was really prepared for what Theron actually pulled off in that part. She made us forget how beautiful she is. We all were in agreement on this. Theron was great, yes, yes. But ... Keaton was better.

It's not a huge secret that it is not the ACTOR who gets the Oscar. It is the ROLE ITSELF that gets the Oscar. You play a jibbering lunatic, while someone else quietly brings a normal everyday character to life ... you'll get the award. Play someone who's mentally deficient, insane, or only has 3 fingers ... you'll get the award. Charlize Theron played a murderous freak of nature. She transformed her loveliness into something grotesque. (And quite quite well, I might add. I thought she was terrific.) But Diane Keaton ... the way Mitchell put it (and we're now about 2 hours into our group discussion about the Oscars) was: "I think Diane Keaton deserved the Oscar because it is literally impossible for me to imagine ANYONE ELSE playing that part."

And finally I said, flatly, "Yeah, well, you have to play a limping retarded Inuit in order to get any recognition from the Academy."

My journey with Annie Proulx ...

Get ready for a bit of a ramble.

I've only read The Shipping News. I tried to read The Accordion Diaries, or whatever the hell it was called, but just COULD. NOT. get through it. And I gave it my best shot. I really did.

My experience of The Shipping News was what I call "one of THOSE reading experiences". I can count "THOSE" reading experiences on almost one hand. By that I mean: intensely personal. The book almost BURNS me. It's a fiery experience. I feel pointed out by the book. I feel recognized. I feel SEEN. I think: "How on earth could this author know about what goes on in the deepest recesses of my soul?" It's almost embarrassing, that feeling. You don't want people to know your own pettiness, your own sadness, your own cruelty, your lies. I am DIFFERENT when I finish the book, because of this recognition factor. You can't have "one of THOSE reading experiences" too often. It takes too much out of you.

Other books that were like that for me:

-- Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn
-- Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving
-- Atonement, by Ian McEwan

Atonement was such a devastating book that it still seems radioactive to me. I went to pick it up and flip through it about a month ago, glanced at a couple of paragraphs, and thought: "Uhm. No. No need to read this again."

These books cut me open to myself. I don't think I will ever put myself through Geek Love again. (However, I don't want to make this sound too bleak and grim. These aren't, on the whole, depressing books. Well, Atonement is, actually. These aren't gloom and doom books. That's not what I'm talking about here. I'm not talking about SAD books. I'm talking about books that feel like they were written FOR me.) These are books that describe the human condition in such a way that I feel KNOWN. The spotlight shines onto the darker corners. These books slice back any artifice I might hold onto. These books made me look into the abyss. My own abyss. To see my own sham, my own drudgery, my own redemption.

THOSE reading experiences.

Does anyone know what I'm talking about here??

The Shipping News was one of THOSE books for me.

There was a good 5 or 6 months in 1994 when it seemed like everyone was reading that book. I saw people on the El train reading it. My entire family read it. Everyone talked about it. My parents KEPT ASKING ME: "Have you read it yet? Have you read it yet?" I remember, to this day, how my dad described the book to me. The characters, what it was about ... EVERY conversation I had with my parents: "Have you read The Shipping News yet?" Finally, I would just cut to the chase before they even asked: "I'm doing great, I got cast in this, I'm doing that, and NO, I haven't read The Shipping News yet." Everyone seemed to think that I, in particular, should read the book.

So, of course, I didn't read it. You never do anything just because 5,000 people tell you HAVE to.

I was madly in love with someone in 1994. And he, too, was on the "YOU OF ALL PEOPLE HAVE TO READ THE SHIPPING NEWS." chorus-line. He went on vacation at one point, to Florida or something? Can't remember. Anyway, he came back ... this was when we were in the flirty unexpressed part of the whole thing ... madly in love but not admitting it ... and he said, "I thought about you my entire vacation." "You did?" "Yeah. I sat on the beach and read The Shipping News and I just kept wanting to tell you how much you would love this book. It reminds me of you." "It does?" "Totally!" "Why?" But he never could say why. All he said was, "The lead character is this ... kind of loser guy ... a sad sap ... who has a really big chin ... and he gets a job on a newspaper ... and he starts to see his entire life in terms of headlines ... " That was all he would say. I still couldn't get a line on why this book reminded him of me. Loser guy? Sad sap? Big chin? And ... this to you says SHEILA? You wanna explain that to me??

On the very same day that this man told me "YOU HAVE TO READ THIS BOOK", I came home and there was a package in my mailbox from my parents. I opened it up, and there was a dern copy of the book.

It makes me laugh, in retrospect. They were DESPERATE for me to read it. They just KNEW how I would respond to it, and they could. not. wait. for me to read it on my own.

And I'm not exaggerating ... I got the package on the same day I talked with Love-Man. I laughed out loud when I pulled out The Shipping News, like: "Okay, universe, okay, I GET THE MESSAGE!"

Long story even longer (see this is why this book means so much to me ... it's all wrapped in that year - 1994 - a WACKO year if ever there was one):

I still didn't read the damn book though, at that time ... because my life got NUTS. Love-Man and I ended up not working out ... and everything was a big feckin' disaster. And suddenly I couldn't bear to even LOOK at The Shipping News. It seemed to represent him or something. Whatever. I was really upset. I remember being bummed out, though (in addition to all the other stuff I was bumming on) - thinking: Wow, I'll probably never read that book now.

But I did. A year later. I had moved from Chicago to New York by then. Everything was different, including my zip code. My entire life had changed in 6 months. So I picked up that book.

And never. EVER. wanted it to end.

EVER.

I will NEVER forget my experience reading that book. It shimmers in my memory. I laughed out loud. I had searing pain at times. At times, I was just SEARCHING for clues ... clues as to why Love-Man had thought of me so much when he read it. It's about a bunch of weirdos who live in Newfoundland. Why was that book so full of me for him? I will never know. But I do know that The Shipping News is also so full of HIM for me. I mean ... it's about pain, and redemption ... about finding what it is that you DO, and then doing it like Hercules. It's about thinking that you have a "lot" in life. That you have a certain path, and then ... often with wrenching results ... you go another way. But ... I can't even talk about what that book is about. It's not ABOUT what it's about.

The writing is startlingly good. It's a rare rare thing, to come across an original voice. Proulx's voice in that book is original. It's funny, it's biting ... each character has a different and distinct speaking pattern, accent. Everyone has secrets. Things are left unexplained. And the PLOT. This is not a book where nothing happens. The plot is out of control. So interesting. You are introduced to a small three-dimensional world, full of weirdos, cranks, curmudgeons, and lonely hermits. And yet ... while they may not be "likable", in any sense, you end up LOVING them. Yes. LOVING them.

My experience, by the end of that book, was painful. It wasn't that anything bad happened. No. It was that it brought up all this weird LOVE in my heart - for these characters, for the Love-Man, for my parents and siblings, for Annie Proulx - love that HURT. Like, you want to clutch your heart and say "Ouch."

I know I'm belaboring this point but I don't give a crap.

The last paragraph of the book is not just amazing - it's transcendent. Transcendent. After spending time with all the crabs and secretive curmudgeons and unpleasant people in the book ... to have Annie Proulx draw back the curtain ... and let the HEART flow forth ... in that last paragraph ... It was almost too much for me.

And yes. Love-Man in Chicago was a huge part of my response. When I finished the book, I SO wanted to go back in time and talk with him about it ... talk about every tiny detail. But the time for that was long long past.

And so The Shipping News is one of those reading experiences I will never forget. I am a better person, I swear to God, for having read that book.

I loved it so much that I refused to see the movie. Kevin Spacey as Quoyle???? Are you out of your goddamned mind?? NOT. If they had cast John C. Reilly, then MAYBE I would have considered seeing it.

Years passed.

Then ... oh my God ... so exciting ... Annie Proulx came out with another one! The Accordion Journals or whatever. I bought it IMMEDIATELY. Another book from the woman who helped me grow, who gave me a reading experience I will never forget!! Whoopee!

That accordion book STANK. UP. THE. JOINT.

In a way, I admire that she didn't choose to write Shipping News II, and tried something totally different.

But I couldn't even get through 2 chapters. I put it down. Devastated.

And never read any of her work since. Although I have to say, she's always on my radar.

Erin, at Critical Mass, is the reason why I have babbled on like this thus far. She is a big Annie Proulx reader herself, and many of her posts about Proulx have made me think quite a bit. Annie Proulx didn't just have a success with The Shipping News - she hit the feckin' jackpot. That book was EVERYWHERE. And so ... what does a writer do? Following a jackpot book?

She's got a couple of short story collections out right now, which I have not read. I was so crushed by how awful Accordion Yadda Yadda was that I decided to just let my memory of Proulx stay pure. The Shipping News was one of THOSE reading experiences. And I don't expect her to do that for me every time ... I know, I know ... but it's still hard to not look for that kind of transcendence every time.

Erin is reading Proulx's latest collection right now.

Great observations there, and some great excerpts.

I guess I need to ease my way back into Annie Proulx's world ... since I've been out of it for so long, and since The Shipping News was such a formative book for me. I must forgive her for not giving that to me every time. I must, if I am a true fan, go where she wants me to go. At least give it a SHOT.

Beautiful!!

So beautiful!!

The caption of the photo on Yahoo reads:

Two horses run through the deep snow on a meadow near Bayrischzell, Upper Bavaria, southern Germany, on Wednesday, Jan. 26, 2005. Heavy snowfalls added a thick layer of fresh snow to the Upper Bavaria region overnight.

Theo Van Gogh ...

The trial of the murderer of Theo van Gogh has just begun. Lots of information about what's going on here. That guy's face makes me ANGRY. He looks smug. I want to smack him up. Wipe the smug smirk off his face.

It made me think of our recent slaughter here in Jersey City ... which, apparently, has now been deemed a "robbery". Yeah, whatever. The family had their Coptic Cross tattooes all slashed, there was the fury and the threats of the Muslim man on the message board, basically saying: "You and your family will die" ...

Yeah. A robbery. Whatever. Let's just ignore the warnings. Fine. Ignore that we have been warned.

Obsession Central: Cary Grant on "His Girl Friday"

A couple things about "His Girl Friday" - one of my favorites. I mean with dialogue like this? (And most of it overlaps ... genius)

Hildy: Listen to me, you great big bumble-headed baboon.
Walter: I'll make it thirty-five bucks and not a cent more.
Hildy: Walter, are you gonna listen?
Walter: But good grief, how much is that other paper gonna pay you?
Hildy: There isn't any other paper.
Walter: Oh! Well in that case, the raise is off. You go back to your old salary... (The phone rings and he answers it.)
Hildy: Walter, I want to show you something. It's here. It's a ring. Take a good look at it. Do you know what it is? It's an engagement ring. I tried to tell you right away, but you would start reminiscing. I'm getting married, Walter, and I'm also getting as far away from the newspaper business as I can get.
Walter: What?
Hildy: I am through.
Walter: You can marry all you want to, Hildy, but you can't quit the newspaper business.
Hildy: Oh! Why not?
Walter: I know you, Hildy. I know what quitting would mean to you.
Hildy: And what would it mean?
Walter: It would kill ya.
Hildy: You can't sell me that, Walter Burns.
Walter: Who says I can't? You're a newspaperman.
Hildy: That's why I'm quitting. I want to go someplace where I can be a woman.
Walter: You mean be a traitor.
Hildy: A traitor? A traitor to what?
Walter: A traitor to journalism. You're a journalist, Hildy.
Hildy: A journalist? Hell, what does that mean? Peeking through keyholes? Chasing after fire engines? Waking people up in the middle of the night to ask them if Hitler's gonna start another war? Stealing pictures off old ladies? I know all about reporters, Walter. A lot of daffy buttinskis running around without a nickel in their pockets and for what? So a million hired girls and motormen's wives'll know what's going on. Why... Golly, what's the use? Walter, you-you wouldn't know what it means to want to be respectable and live a half-way normal life. The point is, I-I'm through.

"A lot of daffy buttinskis" ... so FUNNY. So QUICK.

Rosalind Russell. Her performance as Hildy is one of my favorite performances EVER. And the two of them together!

Cary Grant has this to say about THAT:

When I first started in pictures, an actor didn't have the freedom to interrupt the dialogue. But in "His Girl Friday", Rosalind Russell and I were constantly interrupting each other. The sound men would say, "We can't hear you." And we'd say, "Well, you're not supposed to hear us. People do interrupt each other, you know."

And Ralph Bellamy, cast as the sappy goofball (like he always was) who was trying to marry Hildy, said this about Grant's penchant for improvisation:

On my day off I went to see the rushes from the previous day. What I saw was a complete surprise. Cary was asked to describe my character and says, 'He looks like, er, that fellow in the movies ... you know, Ralph Bellamy.' Well, that was Cary's contribution. It was one of the biggest laughs in the picture.

Hysterical. That would be like having some character say to Tom Cruise in Collateral or something; "You know, you look an awful lot like that Tom Cruise guy."

It's so RIDICULOUS. It's a wink at the audience. Saying: "You and I both know that none of this is really real, so let's not take ourselves TOO seriously."

I love that. So next time you see the film, look out for Cary Grant referring to Ralph Bellamy's character as "that fellow in the movies, Ralph Bellamy"! He made it up on the fly, and Howard Hawks decided to keep it in.

Obsession Central: Cary Grant on himself

To Cary Grant afficianadoes, this will be a familiar quote. But I thought I'd share it here. Nobody on earth like him. He CREATED a personality. Brick by brick ... He CREATED himself from scratch. And yet, the result seems so natural, so inhabited. I'll never get to the bottom of this guy. Love him to death.

Anyway, here's Cary Grant's words on "playing himself" (also, I love it how critics seem to think that's an insult. "He's just playing himself!" Uh ... YOU try to just "play yourself" ... "Playing yourself" truthfully is one of the most difficult things an actor can pull off. This is why Clark Gable is so LOVED, to this day. John Wayne. Humphrey Bogart. Yes, there were little differences in between roles, but for the most part: you recognize John Wayne as John Wayne. He's "playing himself". As though that is simple. BAH, HUMBUG.)

Anyway. Sorry.

Here's Grant:

To play yourself -- your true self -- is the hardest thing in the world. Watch people at a party. They're playing themselves ... but nine out of ten times the image they adopt for themselves is the wrong one.

In my earlier career I patterned myself on a combination of Englishmen -- AE Matthews, Noel Coward, and Jack Buchanan, who impressed me as a character actor. He always looked so natural. I tried to copy men I thought were sophisticated and well dressed like Douglas Fairbanks or Cole Porter. And Freddie Lonsdale, the British playwright, always had an engaging answer for everything.

I cultivated raising one eyebrow and tried to imitate those who put their hands in their pockets with a certain amount of ease and nonchalance. But at times, when I put my hand in my trouser pocket with what I imagined was great elegance, I couldn't get the blinking thing out again because it dripped from nervous perspiration!

I guess to a certain extent I did eventually become the characters I was playing. I played at someone I wanted to be until I became that person. Or he became me.

His process sounds so self-conscious, doesn't it ... so NOT natural. THINKING about how he was going to put his hand in his pocket, IMITATING guys he thought were suave ... and yet, the end result, finally, was total naturalness. He became that guy better than those he was imitating, if that makes sense.

How many times have you seen someone who is basically POSING their way through their life? You know? And maybe it started out that way with Mr. Grant ... he wanted to APPEAR relaxed, hoping that that would relax him INSIDE. And eventually, it worked. I mean ... nobody lights a cigarette, comes through a door, takes off his jacket, kisses a girl ... with as much naturalness as he does.

And yet ... he created "that guy" from scratch.

Amazing.

Obsession Central: Cary Grant on George Burns

Cary Grant met George Burns back in his vaudeville days, when he would go on tour as an acrobat, or with stand-up comedians. He met George, Gracie, Jack Benny ... all of these giants. He said that one of the greatest influences on him was George Burns. Cary Grant would stand backstage and just STUDY what it was that made George funny, HOW he did it.

There is, obviously, an element of genius to anyone who can make you laugh like that. You either have it or you don't. Nathan Lane came and talked at my school, and that guy is one of the most NATURALLY funny people I have ever met. He COULD. NOT. STOP. He kept TRYING to be serious ... but he COULD. NOT. STOP. We all ACHED the next day from laughter. So. There's that. The genius factor. But there's also a science to it. It's a fascinating thing, a blend of right-brain, left-brain ... I love comedians. I love them (even though they can literally ride your last nerve if they are the kind of person who can NEVER be serious.) I've dated a couple comedian guys. I mean, I lived in Chicago. Most people move there for the comedy scene ... you couldn't avoid it. Some of the wannabe comedians were toe-curlingly terrible. You ached, you wanted to run from the room screaming when you saw them onstage. Ick. Nothing worse than someone TRYING to be funny. But then there were others - people who stood out immediately as: "Okay. Wow. That person is feckin' FUNNY" - and all of these people are stars now. I remember seeing them perform in tiny grungy improv clubs, and now they're all on Saturday Night Live, or writing for Conan O'Brien, or whatever. So there were definitely some stars in the bunch, and I dated one in particular. He was a genius, that dude. He had perfect comedic pitch. Hard to explain. It's like being a mathematical prodigy or something. He just KNEW how to do it. Others struggled, flailed about, TRIED to be funny. He just WAS funny. And he made it look easy. AND he couldn't really explain HOW he did it. We talked about it all the time, and he was pretty much COMPLETELY inarticulate off stage (right, MJF?) – and yet onstage? You would laugh so hard your stomach hurt the next day. I found it fascinating.

Cary Grant’s earliest training came from hanging around comedians, old comedian pros … and watching them closely, studying them.

Cary Grant reminisced about George and Gracie:

I watched him and Gracie ever night I could when they were at the Palace. For their opening night five of us got together and chipped in five dollars apiece and bought them twenty-five dollars' worth of flowers, a princely sum in those days. I asked George when we should have the usher bring up the flowers, and he said, "After the third encore!" Now, that's confidence! George is an absolute genius ... timing his laughs with that cigar. He's brilliant."

And about that cigar. Here's what George Burns had to say about THAT. Now ... here's the deal. He's talking about something magical, he's talking about TALENT ... Like, any Joe Schmoe could follow George Burns' instructions below. Sure. Sounds simple. But to have it be so funny that you basically have sell-out shows for 40 years? That can't be taught.

But anyway. Here's George Burns on his cigar:

What is timing? Timing is this. You're working with somebody. When the people laugh, I smoke. When they stop laughing, I stop smoking and I ask the questions. I talk. So what's so great about timing? If I talk while the people are laughing, they'd have to put me away. So I use the cigar. It works for me.

Love that. "It works for me." Uh, yeah, George, I would say it does.

Cary Grant had started to get cast as "the straight man" in these vaudevillian touring acts. The "straight man" to the comic. The straight man's job is basically to set up the jokes by asking the questions. That's how Cary Grant studied all of these fantastically funny people.

Cary Grant had more to say about Burns.

George was a straight man, the one who would make the act work. The straight man says the plant line, such as "Who was that man I saw with?" and the comic answers it: "Oh, that was not a man, that was my uncle." He doesn't move while that line is said. That's the comedy line. The laugh goes up and up in volume and cascades down. As soon as it's getting a little quiet, the straight man talks into it, and the comic answers it. And up goes the laugh again.

George Burns' response to this? I love this. He read Cary Grant's words on being a "straight man" and he had this to say:

Now, that's one way of being a straight man. Another way is to do nothing. Gracie and I worked together for forty years. I said to Gracie, 'How is your brother?' And Gracie talked for forty years.

Willie McBride's meet-up

David and I got together last night, meeting up at Willie McBride's, for some convo, some catch-up, some alcohol. The drifts are now about as tall as I am, due to the snowplows, so parking in Hoboken is this HYSTERICAL challenge. But it all worked out.

I got there first, and when David came in - he walked over to me to hug me. We're both going through a lot. So we hugged, holding onto each other for a while. And in our deep tenderness, our deep old friendship, we knocked my beer off the table, and the glass shattered into a million pieces. It was ridiculous. David had been there literally 2 seconds, and we were having a quiet hello hug, and all HELL broke loose.

We were joking with the poor bartender, who had to sweep up the pieces. "We weren't even DOING anything - we were just HUGGING!" "It was just LOVE! That's all! Just LOVE!" She was laughing, and said, "Lemme tell ya, I would rather see LOVE break a beer glass, than the shenanigans of some drunken asshole bozo."

Yes. Very good point.

Willie McBride's is dark, there was a fire blazing, almost no one was there, ESPN Ocho was on, and David and I haven't seen each other in a long time. (In our world, 4 weeks is a long time. We're always having epiphanies and life-changing events and all that jazz ... we need to get caught up.)

And so we did just that.

We talked a lot about what's up with me right now. In my life, with my work, what I want. There's a ton. I won't share any of it here, but it's deep, and I'm struggling, and I'm also doing really WELL. It's everything. All at once.

We talked about AFTRA. SAG. Soap operas. Many great stories. Fascinating. Life-changing epiphanies every other second, basically.

We talked about the Patriots.

We talked about his beautiful daughters. Love those girls ... they're growing up so fast.

We talked about Scott Peck's book People of the Lie ... something David is really passionate about, something I've just picked up myself. Incredible stuff. Chilling. Lots and lots to discuss there. Scott Peck's psychology of evil. It's incredible stuff, and David and I talked about it like mad.

We talked about our dreams.

I'm all emotional right now. Having kind of a hard time, and yet it's also a really GOOD time. Hard to explain. It's intense. The intensity is unrelenting. I feel so AWAKE. (And yet - I've also been sleeping like a baby.) Sometimes I wish for less consciousness, less ... awareness. You know. I wish I was a little bit denser or something. But ... in order to achieve that ... I would need to have an entire personality change. (And so would David, by the way. We both talked about this.) And so ... the intensity, while exhausting, while upsetting sometimes, is actually (I know in my heart) my gift. Not just A gift, but really the only gift I have to share with the world. That's IT. If I don't share that ... then I got NOTHIN'.

Stella Adler, acting teacher, said once, "It is not that important to know who you are. It is important to know what you DO and then do it like Hercules."

That's kind of what I'm going through here.

Know what it is that you DO and then do it like Hercules.

I can't create some persona ... where stuff doesn't matter to me. Where I can't be hurt. You know, like: hey man, I'm cool, yeah man, whatever ... nah ... that didn't hurt me ... no worries ... whatever ... yeah, man ... cool ...

Uhm. No more. That kind of attitude was NEVER me anyway, but I cultivated this persona-thing around my work, etc., so I would be protected.

This is a survival technique. I won't completely discount it. That hard-cool persona saved my freakin' BUTT for a couple years there. But it no longer serves me now.

Whatever I experience, whatever intensity I have (kind of a dumb word ... can't think of a better one) MUST go into my work. That IS my work.

I can't try to calm it down, smooth it out, justify it, psychologize it, or be embarrassed about it (like: ooh, if I'm THAT intense, people will get uncomfortable) - because all of that? I will have nothing left. Fuck it. Without all of that SHITE, there is no art at all. At least for me. None. That's just the way it goes.

David and I talked about all of this a lot. We're kindred spirits in a way.

I've got a lot of pots bubbling on the stove right now. It's very very cool, actually. But it certainly helps to talk about all the OTHER stuff, with a friend who won't judge me, or try to fix it, or be all "helpful" with advice. If I don't talk about all this stuff, then that "hey man, yeah, it's cool, whatever happens happens" persona will come up again ... and I DON'T WANT HER ANYMORE.

SHE IS NO LONGER WELCOME.

Buh-bye chickie. You were a great help to me a while back ... you really were. I needed you then. But I don't need you anymore.

Take a hike.

I must pass this on

An absolutely WONDERFUL tribute to Johnny Carson written by comedian Larry Miller (who ... I mean, come on ... the dude is hilarious. Waiting for Guffman?? Best in Show? When he's that cocky asshole hostage negotiator? I love Larry Miller.)

PLEASE don't miss his tribute. He talks about what it meant for young comedians to be on the show, what it was actually like to stand behind that curtain, waiting for Carson to introduce you ... and the saga of Miller waiting for his pants to be rushed to him backstage at The Tonight Show made me sweat in anxiety and fear.

But it's a beautiful piece. (Interesting how, of all the tributes I've read to Carson in the last couple of days, the ones that made me all verklempt are the ones written by comedians. Of course.)

(Thanks, DBW ... for sending me the piece. You rock.)

After many many many years ...

... my search is finally over.

I have waited, I have been creative in my search, and patient ... I have kept my eye on the ball ... I have left no stone unturned ...

I have waited a long long time. I have dreamt of this moment. And I cannot believe my own triumph.

Here's what happened.

I have a VIVID memory of being about 4 or 5 years old, and of LOVING (yes - LOVING - more like OBSESSING OVER) a picture-book that had to do with something called a "bimulous night". [Correction: My father told me I was in the 7 or 8 year-old realm ... due to the publication date. There are many many benefits to having a librarian for a father.]

What "bimulous" meant, in the book, was one of those magical summer nights, when you're a kid, when ANYthing can happen. When it feels like animals can talk to you. When it seems like grown-ups don't exist. Like a midsummer bimulous night's dream.

The pictures, as I remember them, were amazing watercolors: purple raggedy clouds in the sky, with a full moon beaming through, trees tossing by the lake - I can see those watercolors in front of me right now. They made a huge impression on me.

What happens on a "bimulous night" is quite extraordinary. First of all: there must be a raggedy purple sky. Second of all: the otters start to sing. Third of all: you MUST eat spaghetti. That's all I remember. In the book, we follow three little girls, who all are in white nightdresses, and all have long blonde hair ... they lie in their beds, in the middle of the night, fast asleep. It is dark. A purply dark. And then, the "bimulous"-ness of the night wakes them up. The otters are singing by the lake. The sky is ragged and purple. The moon is full. They sneak downstairs and cook a vat of spaghetti. Because, of course, that's what you must do. And then they race outside to cavort through the woods and by the lake, reveling in bimulous-ness.

This is all from memory, I assure you.

It's a picture book, so I had to be a wee girl when I read it.

And then I moved on with my life. I left the bimulous night far far behind.

But I never forgot it.

I could not remember the author or the title of the book, but I was sure the book was called "On a Bimulous Night" - I mean, what else could it be called? And so ... at various times in my adulthood, whenever I would remember the book, and remember WHILE I was in a bookstore, I would ask a clerk: "Do you have a children's book called 'On a Bimulous Night'?" The answer was always, sadly, No. And so then I kept my eyes peeled in second-hand book stores, at flea markets, and I would periodically check at the Strand.

On a Bimulous Night? Do you have it? No? Okay, thanks.

I have no idea why this book suddenly came into my brain again last week, but it did. And, duh, like I SHOULD have done long ago, I googled the phrase "bimulous night".

And OH. MY. GOD. It came up. I found it!

Only it is NOT entitled On a Bimulous Night, like I thought. It is called When the Sky Is Like Lace. The author is Elinor Lander Horwitz and the stunning watercolors are done by Barbara Cooney (whose work I have recognized in OTHER books, thanks to my sister ... who ALSO loved Bimulous Night when she was little).

Barbara Cooney rocks.

My breath literally caught in my throat, when the Amazon link came up, to this long-lost book, this book I have dreamt of since I was 5 years old.

There it is!!!

I bought it immediately. And, heavens and saints be praised, it just arrived. It's sitting next to me RIGHT NOW. I can't believe it. I haven't read this book since I was three feet tall, and here it is. I remember some of the illustrations exactly.

The watercolor of the three little girls cooking spaghetti in the middle of the night, the linoleum, the old-fashioned stove ...

The purply-dark nighttime, with the three little girls fast asleep in their bed, but outside the window you can get a glimpse of the bimulous-ness starting ...

And the last illustration, of the three girls running down the front lawn, towards a lake, with a purple lacy sky above, and trees swaying in the wind ... That one I used to REVEL over, when I was little. I wished I could somehow dematerialize from THIS plane, and step through the pages, into that watercolor. It LIVED for me.

And so now. I have it!

Thrilling. I've been dreaming about this book for 30 years. Which is pretty scary, if you think about it.

Here's the cover:

I LOVE this book, and I'm so happy to be reunited with it.

Nazis and UFOs and X-files kind of stuff

All brought to you by CW. So cool. Pictures of UFOs and everything. (My personal favorite part of his post is when he compares OUR flying machines to the Nazi flying machines ... and then comments: "Sometimes it's hard to believe we managed to defeat those people.") Neat-o images galore.

Happy Birthday to "the Ploughman Poet" of Scotland

In other words: Robert Burns. Or, as they say in Scotland, "Rahbbie Barrrrrrrrns."

Robert Burns (love this guy, have his collected works at home) is a national hero in Scotland, his works are known by heart, and festivals go on in his name. Right now in Scotland, I assure you, people are standing up and proclaiming his verses into crowded pubs, while everybody chants along, everyone knowing the words. I love that. I love a nation that celebrates its writers, its own national voice. You kind of can't get any more beloved than Robert Burns to the Scots.

He was born poor, in the middle of the 18th century. He had a lot of brothers and sisters, and his parents were farmers. Yet his father decided that Robert, his eldest, should have a bit of an education. A tutor was hired, and Robert, in between the farm chores and hard work, learned how to read and write. And a whole world opened up to him through language (as it is wont to do). Writing came naturally to him. He started writing poems and songs almost immediately, some of which are still famous today.

Robert Burns was a wild man, a person who loved pleasure, loved fun. He loved women. He loved scotch. He had many illegitimate children. He loved life, basically. All of this shows in his work - which sparks with humor, sentiment, love, wit. He's AWEsome.

Here's one of my favorite quotes from Burns (outside of his poetry, I mean). Burns here writes about how he, a farmer's son, with informal education at best, had started to write. Where did the writing bug come from? And why?

Here is Burns' answer to that question:

For my own part I never had the least thought or inclination of turning poet till I got once heartily in Love, and then Rhyme and Song were, in a manner, the spontaneous language of my heart.

HA. Love that.

Burns hated the climate in Scotland, and yearned to get the hell out and go someplace warm. But this ended up not being his fate. He eventually got married (to one of the chicks he had knocked up) ... and when his poems started being published, in collected works, he became famous in Scotland. People LOVED him. He wrote in their voice, he wrote in their dialects, he wrote about THEM. He became known as "the Ploughman Poet". With this fame, he decided to stay in Scotland.

He was prolific. Nobody even knows how much he actually wrote ... because there are probably lots of traditional songs and verses out there which he DID write, but which cannot be pinned down on him. As it stands, there are over 400 Robert Burns known songs in existence. He was a celebrity in his own time. (So rare for writers!!) But the fame he achieved in his own lifetime is NOTHING compared to the FRENZY that goes on now. It's kind of like the Bloomsday-freaks (ahem - I include myself) who behave like autistic lunatics every June 16. Sure, Joyce was famous in his day. But ... that famous?

The lyrics Robert Burns wrote have lasted generations. Some of them are so engrained in our culture that we can't even imagine that one person even penned them at all. They seem to have just descended upon us, whole, from Olympus, or something. But no ... someone actually WROTE these things.

Like "Auld Lang Syne" for example. That's a Robert Burns lyric.

He also wrote this simple little love lyric, one of his most famous I suppose (outside of Auld Lang Syne, I mean) ... but just because it's famous and "in the canon" and all that, doesn't mean that it shouldn't be relished and admired. I love it. I love it for its simplicity, its openness, its unembarrassed joy.

My Luve is Like a Red, Red Rose
O, my luve is like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June.
O, my luve is like a melodie,
That's sweetly play'd in tune.

As fair art thou, my bonie lass,
So deep in luve am I,
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry.

Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi the sun!
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
While the sands o life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only luve!
And fare thee weel, a while!
And I will come again, my luve,
Tho it were ten thousand mile!

One of the reasons why Burns is so cherished and revered in Scotland is because of how he put the voices of Scots, the accents, into his poems. He is THEIRS. We can all enjoy him, but he is THEIRS.

He died at 37. Over 10,000 people showed up at his funeral. The thought of that gives me the chills, I tell ya.

So I suppose it would be highly appropriate to end this commemorative post in honor of this extraordinary writer with his own words, words we all know:

Auld Lang Syne

For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll tak a cup of kindness yet,
For auld lang syne!

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne?

And surely ye'll be your pint-stowp,
And surely I'll be mine,
And we'll tak a cup o kindness yet,
For auld lang syne!

We twa hae run about the braes,
And pou'd the gowans fine,
But we've wander'd monie a weary fit,
Sin auld lang syne.

We twa hae paidl'd in the burn
Frae morning sun till dine,
But seas between us braid hae roar'd
Sin auld lang syne.

And there's a hand my trusty fiere,
And gie's a hand o thine,
And we'll tak a right guid-willie waught,
For auld lang syne.

Here's a link to the official Robert Burns website.

Here is a chronological list of his published poems.

If you only read one tribute to Johnny Carson ...

make SURE it's this one by Steve Martin. Perfection.

I'm booked. Don't even ask. Don't even try, CHiPs!

I am fortunate to live very close, geographically, to many of my college best friends. We have, of course, congregated in this area because of the theatre, and that's why we all became friends in the first place, in college, but still - it is a rare thing, and a beautiful thing. I see my core group of college friends on a pretty regular basis.

And so ... over the past couple of weeks we have been trying to organize a bit of a Sunday brunch. Due to Thanksgiving, due to Christmas, due to family obligations, due to my Ireland jaunt, due to our busy lives, it's been a while since we've all gotten together.

Many group emails went back and forth in January.

"We need to get together!"
"January is already booked solid for me."
"Yeah, me too."
"How about February?"
"February, so far, looks good."
"We should plan it NOW though, because you know how things get."
"Is a Saturday or a Sunday better?"
"I can't do Saturday because I host the Brownie troop at my house."
"Sunday then? Any Sunday in February?"
"Can we all agree that Sunday is better? Okay, then. Sunday."
"Let's have some kind of a brunch on February 6 then. Is February 6 good for all of us?"
"February 6 is fine. Let's do it!"
"February 6 sounds great."
"February 6. Check."
"I'm in."
"I'm in."
"Count me in."
"February 6."
"February 6."
"February 6."
"February 6."
"February 6."

And now, of course. FEBRUARY 6.

Ahem.

Needless to say, over the last week, we all frantically began emailing one another, AT THE SAME TIME.

"Uhm ... can't do February 6, now."
"Because of the Patriots, February 6 is now no good for me."
"Count me out. February 6 is out."
"Need to see you guys, but not on that particular day."
"Love you all. But won't make it on Feb. 6 so don't even ask."

Cary Grant on Howard Hughes

Cary Grant met Howard Hughes in 1932. Grant said about Hughes:

Howard was the most restful man I've ever been with. Sometimes we'd sit for two hours and never say a word. He owned only two suits. He never owned a tuxedo. If he needed one, he'd borrow one of mine. I'd show up at the airport with matching luggage. Howard would drive up in an old car and a brown paper bag with a change of underwear. He was a little deaf, but for some reason he could hear better in an airplane. I would forget and yell so he could hear me, and he'd say, "Why are you shouting?" He was a brilliant man. Way ahead of his time. I would listen to him for hours, not always understanding at the time exactly what he meant. But as time went by, his thoughts would be proven correct.

Grant also said:

I think Howard Hughes and I were friends because he didn't want anything from me and I didn't want anything from him."

After Howard Hughes' horrific plane crash in 1946, he recuperated in the privacy of Cary Grant's home.

Howard Hughes was Cary Grant's best man, when Grant married Betsy Drake.

There is also a story (perhaps apocryphal) of the two of them flying over the Warner Brothers studio in Howard's plane, and dropping bags of flour out of the window, and watching them explode on the roof. A symbolic revenge on the Hollywood system. They got into big trouble for that one, because people inside Warner Brothers thought another Pearl Harbor had commenced.

Hughes and Grant were two perpetual outsiders. Their good looks helped them to navigate the Hollywood terrain easily, helped them to fit in. Beauty opened many doors. The similarities went further. Two grown men who had twisted painful unresolved relationships with their mothers. Two fiercely independent souls. One who was part of the Hollywood elite, and one who was DYING to be part of the Hollywood elite - but both of them only would be part of that elite if they could play by their own rules. For the most part, they both succeeded in this. Very rare.

Similar temperaments. Similar natures - and completely forgiving of one another's eccentricities.

Katharine Hepburn and Howard Hughes

So naturally, I am thrilled when 2 of my interests dovetail. In this case - Cary Grant and Howard Hughes. Oh, and Kate Hepburn, too. 3 of my interests.

The only reason I have any knowledge about Howard Hughes at all is because of my interest in Cary Grant ... and so now I will vomit forth a couple of anecdotes about all of these people.

Why?

Because it pleases me to do so.

Cary Grant and Howard Hughes were best friends. Cary Grant also, in the early 30s, had become very good friends with Katharine Hepburn. Hepburn, at that point, hard as it is to believe, was finding it difficult to get work in Hollywood, despite her two back-to-back Oscars. She had then appeared in 4 flops in a row, she couldn't get her own projects off the ground, she was turning down bad projects, and so she got a reputation for being difficult.

Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn met when they made Sylvia Scarlett together (a very odd and unforgettable little film). It was the film which launched Cary Grant's real career. He didn't become a star because of it, but for the first time, it was apparent that he wasn't just any old leading man. But Hepburn, by her own admission, felt completely LOST during the filming of that movie. She didn't think she was funny, she didn't think she was any good ... and basically she felt like she had lost her grip on her own enormous success. In a way, she had.

And at this kind of fragile moment in her life, she met Howard Hughes, the boy billionaire who had come to Hollywood with his inherited fortune, to become an independent film producer.

Cary Grant and Howard Hughes became fast friends. And Grant had it in his head that Howard Hughes and Kate Hepburn would be really good together. Hughes was known as a womanizer, he hung out with every floozy starlet in town (making some of them big stars, by the way, like Harlow). But for whatever reason, Grant's sense was that the boyish wild-man millionaire and the boyish hard-to-pin-down actress would make a good match.

Cary Grant invited Hughes to come to the location shoot of Sylvia Scarlett, to meet Hepburn, see what he thought of her. Cary Grant did NOT inform Katharine Hepburn of his nefarious love-match plans. Howard Hughes basically landed his plane on the beach, and strolled over to join the cast and crew for lunch. This, in those early days of flying, made a huge sensation. Hepburn, nobody's fool, knew that Grant was behind the stunt and said she wouldn't speak to him for the rest of the day, and that she kept throwing him "black looks". Like: don't you try to set me up! However, Grant's sense of the appropriate-ness of this match ended up being spot-on.

They were together for a couple of years, they lived together, they were on the cover of every movie magazine ... quite a strange thing for, basically, two world-famous people who HATED crowds. The two of them were very very similiar, in that way. They both yearned to be famous, and yet they both found the fame itself to be uncomfortable. Hepburn hated putting on a dress and schmoozing in Hollywood, she hated being "seen". She would rather host her own small dinner parties, or go play golf. Howard Hughes found the frenzy of stardom highly frightening, and had a hermit sensibility anyway (despite all of his shenanigans) - and so he and Hepburn were, in a funny way, made for each other. To the end of her life, Katharine Hepburn never had a bad word to say about Howard Hughes. She maintained her fondness for him, and also for what he gave her. He taught her how to fly. He didn't have a desire to change her, or put her in a skirt, or have her be different than what she was. For whatever reason, they found each other supremely relaxing.

Her chapter on her love affair with Howard Hughes in her autobiography Me is very moving, very interesting. She could relax with him, have fun with him, be herself. She also could hide from the world. They would go out on his yacht, and have total privacy. She didn't have to conform to someone else's ideas of womanhood ... she was, in her own way, as much of a daredevil as he was.

Later, though, after the break-up, she told Cary Grant that she and Hughes were both "dedicated loners" - and could two dedicated loners ever make it together as a couple?

She decided to move back East, give up on Hollywood, go back on the stage. (The eventual result? Philadelphia Story. Ahem. Good move, Kate, good feckin' move.)

Hughes wanted to stay in Hollywood.

And so they parted ways. This was in 1937, I believe. The next year, 1938, came the hurricane. The hurricane of (of course) 1938 - in which Katharine Hepburn's family home in Connecticut literally floated away, as the entire family watched from the next house over, on higher ground. Their ancestral home floated away - leaving only a couple bricks from the foundation, and a random claw-footed bathtub. Everything gone. The Hepburn family, destroyed, started to re-build, to try to recover. There was nothing left. They built on the same spot, only the house was raised up by three feet or something like that.

Anyway ... when Howard Hughes heard of what had happened to Kate, and her family, he had a plane deliver a supply of bottled water, since nobody's water worked in the area, post-hurricane ... and he kept the entire area in full supply until everyone was back up and running again.

Strangely moving, huh...A kind gesture.

Hepburn wrote in her autobiography that it was then that she knew that the relationship was really over. That there was no more love, just water. And yet - that water lasted. She never had a bad word to say about the guy. Ever.

Two class acts there.

RIP dear dear dear Johnny Carson

I feel so SO grateful that I grew up in a time when Johnny Carson was on the air ... it was the tail-end, granted ... but he was a HUGE part of my life. And I feel so SO grateful for that.

Johnny Carson said, about his retirement, "I have an ego like anybody else, but I don't need to be stoked by going before the public all the time."

Really, there was nobody like him. He was absolutely one of a kind. A true original. He really LISTENED, didn't he. He really LISTENED.

Doc Severinsen, the Tonight Show bandleader, said, that during the long quiet years of Carson's withdrawal from public life, "Every place we go people ask 'How is he? Where is he? What is he doing? Tell him how much we miss him.' It doesn't surprise me."

He became virtually invisible, after he retired. And yet ... never really gone. He withdrew. He was done. "The Tonight Show" was his pinnacle, and he chose to absent himself from publicity ... and yet nobody forgot him. He was still "out there", he was still "alive" ... how was he? Where was he?

He was, indeed, always missed. At least by this chick, writing this post.

Here are two funny quotes from Johnny Carson, which I have quoted on this blog. Beautiful.

Johnny Carson's automatic answers to all interview questions

and

Johnny Carson and Fernando Lamas

Forever, Johnny Carson ... you will be remembered forever. Thank you for being in my life, in the way that you were in all of our lives. I have this fondness for you, intense, even though I never met you. You made me feel like I knew you. You let me in. And I thank you for that. From the bottom of my heart.

Rest in peace.

Please feel free to add your own thoughts, recollections, favorite memories of Johnny Carson in the comments.

Howard Hughes' OCD

My thoughts on the movie will come later - I'm still processing most of it. But what I found so upsetting, so interesting, was his OCD. Specifically when it manifested itself in the compulsive repetition of certain phrases. And how this repetitive frenzy would come over him when he would least expect it. Out of nowhere, apparently. He's in the middle of a meeting, or at a party, and suddenly, this one phrase seems to get stuck on Repeat in his brain, and he keeps saying it over and over and over ...

In the film, the first time we see this happen - it is as though some demon has taken over Hughes. Leonardo played it in a way which broke my heart. Like ... he was scared of what was happening to him. He couldn't stop the repetition. His eyes got panicked, and yet his body wouldn't obey, and out would come the same old phrase, over and over and over ... It was very very scary.

I know that this is a common component of OCD. Along with other things like switching lights on and off, and certain tapping of fingers rituals, and washing hands 20 times a day ...

My question about the repetition thing is: Does anyone know from where this springs? Like ... why?

My interpretation of it - at least from the film - is that, for whatever reason, in sudden unexpected moments, Howard Hughes would completely dissociate from himself. Another "self" would split off, dramatically, from his other self. The self that was able to function, and be in the real world. But suddenly - like a plate cracking in half - there would be two Howards.

And the one that split off to the side was the judgmental voice, the critical voice ... the voice we all have, to some degree, inside of us. But most of us can control the inner critic, or even listen to the inner critic - see if it has some valid points. But if the inner critic gets out of control, most of us can talk it out of the clocktower, or calm it down. Like if I make a mistake, or if I'm at a party and talking with strangers and I suddenly feel self-conscious, or phony ... there is that voice that comes sometimes, the hard task-master voice. Whispering in my ear as I try to navigate. "God, listen to you. You sound like such a phony. God. How do you live with yourself, you big fat phony?" Or when I make a mistake. It's an unforgiving voice. "What a stupid mistake. You are so stupid." To some degree, this unforgiving task-master voice is a blessing, and people who DON'T have it probably hold themselves in too high a regard. If you never ever think you're capable of doing better, being better, correcting yourself - then you can be a big fat know-it-all BORE.

But what I saw in those Howard Hughes OCD attacks (and correct me if I'm wrong about OCD) ... is that the critical voice took over. The critical voice won the battle completely. The critical voice, out of nowhere, started SCREAMING. And so Hughes, trying to please this inner critic, this unforgiving inner voice (the ghost of his wack-job mother??) - had to keep repeating whatever phrase it was he was saying when the voice inside started screaming. And to try, desperately, to get it right. Just keep saying the same words, over and over ... does this sound right? Does this sound phony? Will this please that voice? No? How 'bout this? How 'bout if I say it like this? Until Hughes was completely lost in the compulsion, and would have to absent himself from the room.

I was very moved, almost to tears, at the shot of him, holed up in a car with himself, after removing himself from a party - when an OCD thing came on - and he had his hand clamped over his mouth, as hard as he could, with tears in his eyes, trying to STOP the repetition. His own body, his own mind, out of his own control. And yet ... the conscious self, the real self, the one NOT controlled by OCD, knows that this repetition must stop. He is in between selves. The madness has not completely taken over yet. He knows the compulsion is out of control, and he is afraid, sad, trying to control it.

Does anyone know anything about OCD? In particular, this compulsion to repeat things over and over?

Is it to control themselves? Is it a fear of failure, a fear of seeming wrong, or bad, or phony?

It seemed to me a very very sad thing. On one sort of surface level (the level I described above, with the inner critic voice thing) I related to it. But the levels to which that inner critic (if that's even the correct way to look at it) took over Hughes' life struck me as tragic.

What I'm reading now ...

Maybe I have ADD or something. Is it possible to develop it in your 30s? I don't know. But I'm juggling many books at once.

-- Underworld by Don DeLillo. Still. See the post below. grrrrr

-- The Correspondence between John Adams, Abigail Adams and Thomas Jefferson ... I have now reached the point where the correspondence between the two revolutionaries opens up again, after years of absence. Abigail's letters to Jefferson at this time ... holy crap. She takes him TO TASK. (The whole "faithfull are the wounds of a friend" thing ... and then how she decides to 'close' the correspondence. She is DONE with him. And John Adams added a note at the bottom of her last letter to Jefferson: "This correspondence has occurred without my knowledge or suspicion. I have nothing to add at this time." What is THAT about? It would take a couple more years of silence, and the intervention of Benjamin Rush, to get these 2 guys talking again.) It's all so moving, so real to me. And I still have years to go, to get to 1826 when they both die. There's so much still to learn about these two gentlemen.

-- Inside the CIA by Ronald Kessler. This is my commute book. My short commute book. It's a fast read - each chapter is about 3 pages long - so I can get in a chapter a day on the bus. It's pre-September 11, this book ... so a lot of it strikes me as chillingly naive. But still, I do find it very interesting. Spies, and James Bond, and all that stuff.

-- George Washington, by Willard Sterne Randall. In terms of the Founding Fathers, good old George is the one I know the least about. So I have plunged into this biography with gusto. I like Randall's writing a lot, and read his books on Alexander Hamilton and on Thomas Jefferson. I believe he wrote another book on Benedict Arnold, which I'd like to read as well. George. Wow. What a FASCINATING individual. After hanging out in the lofty political philosophizing regions with Adams and Jefferson, this is quite a change. A man of few words, and of action. Right now, I'm reading of the battles in Philadelphia. I lived there for a couple of years, so it's so interesting, so funny, to imagine all of that stuff occurring pretty much right where I lived. I lived out in Mt. Airy, in Germantown ... and the place is SOAKED in American history. So that's good stuff. I'm tearing through that book. It's interesting: when I read the letters of John Adams or of Jefferson - their prose is so clear, so precise, so alive ... that it is as though their old personalities come right up off the page. I am not finding that to be the case with Washington. His writing is muddy. I have to read some of his letters a couple of times to figure out his meaning. Here's what I think: he used overly formal prose most of the time. He used byzantine grammatical structures, so it's hard to get at the truth. EXCEPT when he was angry, frustrated. THEN it's quite clear. And THEN his writing is even more clear than Adams or Jefferson, who pretty much kept a lid on their more volatile emotions. (You know ... even though they're pissed off, they still sign with "With esteem, your most humble servant, etc.) But George? When he's pissed? His letters read like: "This situation, as it stands, is unacceptable." Blunt, forthright, no bullshit. But most of his other letters, to me, are rather opaque. He is not writing in his own voice, but in a certain STYLE.

Just an interpretation there.

I love all the war stories though. I love the Polish guy (Tadeuz Kosalkdjsldkflkjsdflkj - i have no idea how to spell his name - Nobody did, apparently. So everyone just referred to him as "Kos".) who basically came over to fight in the war, and he was an expert on how to build barricades in the water. He was basically hired to build up defenses along the Delaware, and figure out how to trap the British boats as they came along. He sounds a bit like a genius. Fascinating man.

So there's THAT book.

And then I've been reading the Bible quite a bit. Just a little bit every day. I used to do that all the time, and got out of the habit. But I've been doing it again. I find it quite relaxing and enjoyable. My morning ritual. I read it chronologically, too. From Genesis on. I dig it.

I think those are all the book-balls I have in the air right now. The Howard Hughes biography will have to wait. I just can't fit him in right now.

Dear Don De Lillo:

First off, let me just say, I loved White Noise. Wonderful book, and you certainly are a fine fine writer.

This is not in dispute.

I am now 3/4 of the way through Underworld, and I have one message for you:

Dude, you need an editor. Sorry to tell ya, but it's true. Or ... you probably had an editor. Right? So then you need to LISTEN to your editor.

The opening of that book, the 1951 playoffs game, is one of the most stunning sequences of writing I have ever read. I could not believe my own eyes ... I was EXCITED by it. I felt PUMPED.

6,000 pages later, I am exhausted.

WHY AM I SUPPOSED TO CARE about Bronzini, the feckin' chess teacher? He disappeared from the book for about 800 pages, and now he's back ... and I can't even remember why he was important in the first place!!!

And what about all of those old planes out in the desert? Are you ever gonna write about THOSE again? Because that was pretty dern cool. But that was on page 70. It made me feel, then, like this book might be ... oh ... you know ... important. And judging from all the press you have received, this book IS important.

But I'm telling you one thing:

The "Delete" key is your friend. Your editor is your friend.

Your. Book. Is. Too. Long.

And I have now put three stupid months of my life into this thing ... and now I'm PISSED that the next chapter is one that stars Bronzini, the chess teacher, and I feel exhausted, and unwilling ... but I have put so much damn TIME into this book ... that now completing it feels like a duty and a chore.

I do not want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, my friend. You are a stunning writer. You know how to turn a phrase. There are startlingly beautiful passages. Sadly, the book is so long I can't remember what they are right now, where they are located, and why I thought they were startlingly beautiful.

There is no main character. Okay. So that's probably your point. Some random point about Americans during the Cold War ... a generational thing, a look at our country at a certain time ... a cross-section of people ... yadda yadda.

But ... Jaysus, I'm tired.

And so, even though that opening, Mr. DeLillo ... that OPENING ... the OPENING of your book ... is pretty much beyond compare ...

the rest of the book don't hold up, my friend.

It just don't hold up.

I am gonna finish the damn thing, because now I'm pissed. I can't leave the last 200 pages unread, after the commitment I made to the rest of it ...

but I just think you should know, Mr. DeLillo, that this one reader is annoyed and exhausted by your masterpiece.

I'm not a person who needs books to be short. I can read long books. Sure, man, no problem. But at this point? In your magnum opus? I look back longingly on the days of White Noise because THAT BOOK IS SHORT. BLESSEDLY SHORT.

Thanks for listening.

Best,

Red

The snow is general all over New York

It's early Sunday morning, and there appears to be some sort of ... ehm ... a BLIZZARD outside. I slept over my friend Jen's last night, a cozy warm port in the storm (which had already begun). Out the window is insanity. The snow is still coming down, and the wind appears to be quite strong - I can hear it. I love snow. I do wonder, however, about my prospects getting home today. Hmmmm

Yesterday Jen and I had plans to go see a matinee of The Aviator. We met up at the Chelsea Clearview (where on May 6, 2005, a convening of the brightest minds of our generation will occur, to see the premiere of the long-awaited Hitchhiker's Guide!!!). The snow was already coming down pretty hard. It was beautiful. You could tell it meant business, but it was beautiful. New York City transforms when it snows. At least to my eyes. It becomes magic. Poetic. Everywhere you look you see beauty. In New York?? Yes. When it snows.

To get into the city from my small cliffside dwelling across the Hudson, I take these little rickety shuttle busses ... which are hysterical, and ... it feels a bit third-world. Like ... if you had a complaint about the driver, you literally wouldn't know who to call. Is it a legitimate company? No idea. But this is how everyone gets into the city from my town. What's amazing is that, on a good day, with no traffic, my commute (door to door, I'm talking) is 15 minutes. I leave my apartment, and in 15 minutes I'm in Times Square. Not too shabby.

So anyway, the snow is already coming down pretty seriously. I get on the bus. Which has about 20 seats. There are 6 other people on the bus, all bundled up like myself. The roads are very slushy, everyone is driving very cautiously. And on our approach to the Lincoln Tunnel, our wee bus did a damn DONUT. A full DONUT, careeening our way towards the turnstiles. It was nauseating. You could feel the skid start to happen ... and then ... uh oh ... here we go ... All 6 of us passengers, at the same time, went like this: "WoaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAohhhhhhhhhhhh" It was a roller-coaster sound ... starting slow and soft, then getting louder as we spun all the way around, and then dying down when ... we realized we were not dead.

So there was THAT.

I need to talk about The Aviator in some detail (in MAD detail) but I'll save that for another post. Jen and I came out of the movie at 6 pm. It was now dark, and the snow had continued to fall, without letup. The streets looked noticeably more difficult to manage. Almost no cars were driving. Everyone on the sidewalks hunched by us, faces down, staggering through the growing drifts.

We decided to have a sleepover. First, we went to Barnes & Noble to satisfy my immediate desire to buy a biography of Howard Hughes. (That is how I am. Curiosity about something blossoms overnight? Immediately go get 5 books about it. Ask no questions. Follow the obsession).

Jen and I slogged our way back to Hoboken. We decided to make dinner. Have some beer. Rent some movies. Jen decided to make cookies. So we had a shopping list. It took us about 45 minutes to do all of our errands, because our mobility was quite compromised, due to the growing drifts. Certain bars and restaurants were continuously shoveling in front of their establishments, and so as we strolled by, say, The Black Bear, we could move freely. But the second we reached the next storefront, we were in big trouble. However, snow is great. We love snow. We were happy.

We saw THE CUTEST LITTLE KID walking along with his mother. He was probably three years old. He was stuffed into a snowsuit (hence, he could barely move his arms) - and he was wearing a cool biking helmet and MASSIVE orange snow goggles. He looked like a small insect, with big bug-eyes. Or like a wee wee ninja fighter. And his mother was trying to move them along, to do her errands, stocking up for the storm ... but he, of course, HAD to try to walk through the drifts. His tiny mouse-voice blabbing to his mother, coming at us through the snowy night.

Errands finally accomplished ... ingredients for cookies purchased ... 2 movies rented (Dodgeball and Mean Girls) ... and finally we were ready for home.

In her apartment, we lit candles, we cooked, we drank beer, we talked incessantly about our lives, what we're going through right now, what we're struggling with, what we're excited about. She's one of my dearest friends. We played Bare Naked Ladies, blasted it really, and danced around manically, in our pajamas. Laughing hysterically. Bare Naked Ladies. Such HAPPY music. Really. Love them.

Then we settled down with our healthy feast of food, and watched Dodgeball.

And LAUGHED OUR ASSES OFF.

It is SO stupid. It is SO funny. It is SO ridiculous. I enjoyed every stinkin' second of that movie. My kind of humor. Absolutely STUPID. Like ... Vince Vaughn playing dodgeball?? What???? And that hilarious guy from Office Space? When has that actor EVER been asked to do ANYthing physical in a movie? He must, with his looks, always play geeks and weirdos. When has that actor ever had a slow-motion action sequence in a movie?? Well, in Dodgeball, he does. It is riotous.

And I fell suddenly and deeply in love with Justin Bateman. I couldn't get over the guy. Does anyone remember his small part in the movie? He plays the sidekick commentator, who is just kind of a cool clueless dude, wearing sunglasses, spiked hair ... with a name like Pepper or something ... Bateman doesn't have much to do in the movie, but he was cracking me UP. I am in love with him now.

We kept checking out the window at the progress of the storm.

Then we curled up under a fleece blanket, and I read out loud the Introduction to my new Howard Hughes biography. Then we talked about Howard Hughes for a while, talked about the movie.

I slept on the couch, like a feckin' diving bell under the ocean. I've been sleeping really really well lately ... different for me. Normally, I'm a bit more restless.

I dreamt about the Spruce Goose.

And woke up to a blindingly white snow-covered world.

O, how full of briers is this working-day world! - As You Like It

I just came across two cool articles about one of my favorite plays - Shakespeare's As You Like It - and so I'm going to point to them, and also rant and rave on about the play itself.

Here's a review of As You Like It, now playing out at BAM. Sadly, I cannot go. It sounds to me like this production really NAILED what is, for me, the magic of that whimsical piece. I would call it the complete loss of order - the complete destruction of social conventions - with dukes and duchesses stripped of their titles frolicking about in the Forest of Arden - and ... at the end, quick-quick-quick, order is restored. Rosalind stops cross-dressing, she becomes a woman again, she gets married to Orlando, and all is VERY QUICKLY made well.

But ... what I love about the play, as a whole, is that, yes, order is necessarily restored at the end. This soothes the audience's anxieties about chaos.

But ... still ... Shakespeare does not deny that it seems like so much FUN out there in the Forest! Don't it? Everything goes INSANE out there. These people may be dukes and duchesses and such, but the second they are freed from the court, all hell breaks loose. It's hilarious. The Forest is a place where people can be free ("Ay, now am I in Arden: the more fool I. When I was at home I was in a better place; but travellers must be content.") where you can run and laugh, where you can fall in love freely - without worrying about titles and courtship and stuff ... and yet - civilization is always there. That's the dark side. You never ever want to go back to civilization - but civilization doesn't just DISAPPEAR. Everyone, eventually, must "go back".

It's a comedy, yes, and it's "light" - but I've seen the play time and time again, and have pretty much despised it (except for one unbelievable production of it in Philadelphia with the Arden Theatre Company - who are still around, thank goodness). The WORST tone to take with the piece, the tone most usually taken, is one of smugness. There is nothing more insufferable than a smug Rosalind. It's so WRONG, too.

No. No. She is NOT smug. She has that monologue about how to woo women, but ... she's making it up as she goes along. She's desperately in love with Orlando. She's out of control. SHE HERSELF has descended into chaos. Love is chaos. She dresses up as a boy. Orlando has lost his mind because of love. He's behaving like a lunatic. She takes it upon herself to "train" him in the ways of love, because, frankly, racing around the Forest like a madman pinning love lyrics on trees is kind of ... well ... ikky. Rosalind decides she needs to teach him how to woo. But ... she doesn't go into it having ANY idea what she is doing.

She says to Orlando: "Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do: and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is, that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too. Yet I profess curing it by counsel."

He says, drip that he is: "You would not cure me."

She says, "I would cure you, if you would but call me Rosalind and come every day to my cote and woo me."

Okay. So there's the gamble. Hmmm. Let me see if he'll take this bait. Hmmm. That's where it gets exciting - when Rosalind doesn't treat him like he's a TOTAL idiot ... because, after all, she is MADLY in love with the poor guy.

He says something like: "How would you cure me?"

She says: "He was to imagine me his love, his mistress; and I set him every day to woo me: at which time would I, being but a moonish youth, grieve, be effeminate, changeable, longing and liking, proud, fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles, for every passion something and for no passion truly any thing, as boys and women are for the most part cattle of this colour; would now like him, now loathe him; then entertain him, then forswear him; now weep for him, then spit at him; that I drave my suitor from his mad humour of love to a living humour of madness; which was, to forswear the full stream of the world, and to live in a nook merely monastic. And thus I cured him; and this way will I take upon me to wash your liver as clean as a sound sheep's heart, that there shall not be one spot of love in't."

Heh heh. "I will show you how INSANE women can be ... and I will CURE you of it."

But of course, she really just wants more of an opportunity to hang out with the guy, and see where he stands, in terms of his feelings for "Rosalind". See if he would be a suitable suitor, or just a wimpy bonehead.

The mistake most productions make is to turn Rosalind into a little snippety PhD candidate. "So. Here is the dissertation on love. I know everything."

All of this, when done in a SMUG way, is literally disgusting. You want to smack Rosalind and tell her to stop being such a damn know-it-all.

However, 'SMUGNESS' is the opposite of what Shakespeare wrote. If you read that play, just READ the damn thing, the LAST thing you will find woven through the words is any sense of smugness.

Also, let us not forget her beautiful line which comes following her first "training session" with Orlando. He leaves her little forest hut ... and she re-hashes the whole thing breathlessly with Celia. In typical girl fashion. "And then THIS happened ... and then he said THIS ... and then THIS ..." Celia intercuts her ravings with more prosaic comments, basically saying to her cousin, "Babe, chill out. Don't get too crazy yet ..." Rosalind ends the scene with this beautiful line:

"I cannot be out of the sight of Orlando: I'll go find a shadow and sigh till he come."

Ahhh. "Go find a shadow and sigh till he come." What a perfect description of what it feels like to be in an unrequited unfulfilled love affair. Perfect.

So ... Uhm - please tell me: with that line in the play, why do MOST directors make Rosalind to be a smug little know-it-all? Do they just SKIP that line when they read the play, or ...?? The SECOND Orlando leaves her, she drops the tutor pose, and completely falls apart. It's hysterical, and charming, and human, when played correctly.

Rosalind has NO idea what will happen when she gets dressed up like a boy. It's a survival technique. And ... strangely ... oddly ... she finds herself kind of liberated by the whole thing - but she doesn't dress up to 'stick it to male society' ... She does it because to hang out in the Forest as a woman would be unthinkably dangerous. But then a transformation occurs. She actually kind of LIKES being a boy. She is able to become "friends" with Orlando, in a way she NEVER could have, if she were in female garb. She becomes, actually, quite BUTCH. But to assume that Rosalind is OKAY with this shift in the balance, that she is ACCUSTOMED to her new powerful role, is to miss all of the clues Shakespeare has left. She is giddy, yes, she is MADLY in love with Orlando ... MADLY. She is NOT smug, and she has NO idea if her gamble will work. Orlando might not be train-able. He may continue to be a ridiculous weenie, mooning about the forest, and refuse to step up to the plate. Rosalind might get her heart broke.

In this way, the stakes are raised. The stakes must be just as high in a comedy, as in a tragedy. THAT'S why it's funny. Not because oh-ho-ho everything's-a-lark, hahahaha ... NO! David Huxley, in Bringing Up Baby, is hilarious because it is literally LIFE OR DEATH to him to get that brontosaurus finished. It looks ridiculous to US, but it is IMPORTANT to him.

If Rosalind sashays into the forest like a little know-it-all, then ... where are her high stakes? Where is her gamble? What are her obstacles? She's the lead of the damn play. If she has no stakes in anything, then what is the point?

This subtlety in her character (which, I believe, is what makes the play so delicious, so fun, so HUMAN) is often lost. Directors want to make some 20th century point about gender roles, or whatever, or they LOVE the idea of a woman kicking a man around ... and so they turn Rosalind into this wymyn's-studies-petty-tyrant.

But that's missing the point.

I'm thinking now of the whole Howard Hawks discussion. There is a war between the sexes, there is incomprehension between the sexes ... and this will cause anxiety and misunderstanding. But ... is there any way to ENJOY the war between the sexes? Is there any way to SPAR with a member of the opposite sex without having it be tinged with humility, smugness, or some sense that you are BETTER than the other one because of your stupid gender? Can't we ENJOY the difference?

THAT'S what I see going on in those marvelous scenes between Orlando and Rosalind. Equal sparring. BUT - there's a huge problem. Orlando thinks Rosalind is another guy. Would he ever open up to her like that if he knew her sex?

The play leaves that question unanswered. In a denouement which literally takes 2 seconds, conventional gender roles are back in play, Rosalind puts on a skirt, and she and Orlando are married. Literally - in like 2 seconds. It's hysterical. It's like Shakespeare himself didn't want to drag them all out of the Forest!

Yeah, marriage is cool and all that ... but ...

... but ... what about all that weirdness and intimacy and wildness in the Forest? Is there any place for that stuff in a "conventional" marriage? Is there any way to bring the Forest back into the palace? Would Rosalind EVER be able to COMPLETELY give up what she learned when she put on pants?

Again, Shakespeare answers none of these questions. The play ends with a marriage. Comedies always ended in marriage. The world may get all out of whack during the play ... but order must be restored in the end.

I love As You Like It, in particular, because of all of these unanswered issues.

And I guess it's just my fantasy, but I like to think of Rosalind and Orlando sparring and making up and sparring and making up ... LONG after the end of the play.

But I guess we'll never know. That's what I like to imagine, though - that the two of them will never stop sparring, never stop learning from each other, will bring the Forest of Arden with them (at least a little bit) wherever they go.

A couple quotes from the review, which I really like:

It's as if the whole spectrum of human nature had been crammed into a fast-footed three hours: the self-warping perversities of both youth and old age, the irrationality of all-consuming love and cancerous hate, the limited extremes of heedless idealism and joy-killing cynicism, the arbitrary eruptions of kindness and cruelty.

This is what I love about this play, and what I find so missing in most productions of it - the whole "spectrum of human nature" thing.

More:

People are bound to be wounded in this world, but discovering its strangeness is well worth the battle scars. Besides, what choice do you have?

More:

The 22-year-old Ms. Hall, who made a smashing London debut in her father's production of Shaw's "Mrs. Warren's Profession" two years ago, endows Rosalind, the play's cross-dressing heroine, with not only the restless vigor and romanticism of youth, but also its trepidation as her character braces herself for the leap into dangerous adulthood. And the scenes in which Rosalind, dressed as a boy, teaches the lessons of courtship to the man she adores, the unwitting Orlando (the delightfully goony Dan Stevens), have surely never been so fraught with the fears of how love might go wrong.

This to me sounds EXACTLY right. I mean, hey, whatever, it's just my opinion ... but in MY little world-view of Shakespeare and Rosalind, this "fraught with fears of how love might go wrong" is JUST what those scenes need, and JUST what those scenes so often lack. Again, if Rosalind goes into this situation SURE that she will whip him into shape, SURE that she will succeed, SURE that she won't be hurt ...

Well, first of all, she's not a very likable or human character then. And second of all: where's the drama then? If she already knows how it's all gonna turn out?

Drama 101, here, but most productions of As You Like It miss this completely.

And lastly - to echo all of this:

Both Ms. Hall's Rosalind and Mr. Stevens's Orlando wear their feelings close to their skins. You are acutely conscious of their pained sense of betrayal and injustice when they learn, in different scenes, that they have been exiled. With their shared sensitivity and volatility, this Rosalind and Orlando are clearly made for each other. But they are still too raw to be together. And as usual, the forest becomes the schoolhouse for the sentimental and moral education that pushes them into adulthood.

This process can seem didactic in a garden-variety "As You Like It," with the disguised Rosalind playing witty, controlling and rather smug teacher to the love-struck Orlando. Such pitfalls are averted here. "More than common tall," as she rightly describes herself, and gracefully gawky as only adolescent girls can be, this Rosalind is by no means mistress of her emotions.

Beautiful. I wish I could see it.

Also - it has always been my feeling that Celia, the cousin, is JUST as good a role as Rosalind, if played well and directed well. But only in that one production in Philadelphia have I EVER seen a Celia AS three-dimensional and fantastic and interesting as Rosalind. I would love to play Celia. She's got one of my favorite Shakespeare lines ever:

O, wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful! and yet again wonderful, and after that out of all hooping.

God!!!

The second article states that Bare Naked Ladies have been hired to compose music for yet another production of As You Like It, to be done up at the enormous Stratford festival in Canada. This, to me, seems like a wonderful choice. I love the band - and they have this mixture of whimsy, emotion, bittersweet nostalgia, and sheer goofball humor that seems PERFECT for this particular play.

And now ...

... a beautiful scary nature picture.

I guess they're afraid that that ice-monolith is gonna crash into another ice-monolith. Or ... not afraid. Maybe even hopeful. Seaways opening up, happy penguins, I have no idea. I just like the picture.

I know I have succeeded in my mission here ...

... when an inordinate number of people get to me by Googling "Kara Kum Desert".

The Jersey City murders

I'm sure many of you have heard about the brutal murder of an entire family in Jersey City this past weekend. I woke up to the headlines, and the rage of the locals talking about it at my corner deli. The murder occurred down the road from where I live. The next town over. So it was on everyone's lips.

"What the hell?" "An entire family stabbed?" "What is this world coming to?" "It's AWFUL."

The NY Post link above (dated Jan. 16) has more information, chilling information:

The father of the family was an outspoken Coptic Christian, an Egyptian, and he got into some flame-wars on Muslim message boards. A Muslim threatened him (online). And this past Friday, the entire family (Husband, wife, 2 daughters - aged 15 and 8) was butchered. Stabbed.

I can't find anything else online about this right now. The NY Daily News says that, "Newly revealed evidence suggests the family slaughtered in their Jersey City home were victims of a robbery". The original article I read in the paper said that nothing was stolen from the house, the jewelry was all there, but now it appears that all the money in the house was gone. But the savagery of the murders suggests (to my untrained eyes anyway) that something much more personal was going on here.

The funerals occurred yesterday, and fights broke out outside the church, between Muslims and Christians. I saw that on the front page of my little local newspaper - but can't find anything else about it online.

More Information:

Here's the 1010 Wins story on the funerals. Scary stuff. Protests, marches, people standing up and screaming during the service and then being dragged out of the church by police officers, violence ... etc.

Oh, and one other thing: This is from ABC ... Apparently, a cousin of the slaughtered family was working for the prosecution (as a translator) in the trial of Lynne Stewart.

In honor of Archie Leach's birthday

... here is, probably, the most obsessive post I wrote about him. I write about the man as though I am an expert and have devoted my life to knowing every single detail. Ah, well. Such as we are made.

And then ... also in honor of Archie are two posts about "the Howard Hawks woman". Not to brag or whatever, but I'm particularly fond of the first one, and think it's one of my own favorite posts. Not that I sit around pondering: "what's your favorite post?" But still, I had a hell of a good time writing that analysis of what Howard Hawks was trying to say/create/illuminate in his female characters, and the romances depicted in his films.

The Howard Hawks Woman, Part 1

The Howard Hawks Woman, Part 2

Below you will see Archie, in action, with the Howard-Hawks-woman-in-training Jean Arthur, in Only Angels Have Wings. She hasn't quite got the rules of the game down yet ... he has to "train" her. She's a quick study, thank goodness. You've GOT to be in order to be a true Howard Hawks woman.

The importance of January 18

So, a couple of things to note, about this date:

In 1996, on this date, Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley announced that their marriage was over and SHOCKED THE WORLD. I still don't think I've recovered my emotional equilibrium from that one. What? If THEY don't make it ... then ... what????

In 1975, on this date, The Jeffersons premiered.

In 1871, on this date, William I of Prussia was proclaimed the first emperor of Germany in the hall of mirrors at the Palace of Versailles.

But I care none for these trifles.

January 18 is important to me because it's Cary Grant's birthday. Yes, Archie Leach was born on January 18, 1904, to Elias and Elsie Leach in the seaport town of Bristol, England.

Here's what the man himself had to say about his birth, in a 3-part article he wrote for Good Housekeeping - really, the only time he was ever open about his childhood experiences:

I first saw the light of day -- or rather the dark of night -- around 1:00 a.m. on a cold January morning, in a suburban stone house which, lacking modern heating conveniences, kept only one step ahead of freezing by means of small coal fires in small bedroom fireplaces; and ever since, I've persistently arranged to spend every possible moment where the sun shines warmest.

He's my favorite actor. Ever.

I've got this GRATITUDE thing with Cary Grant that I don't have with many other actors. I feel GRATEFUL to him. Like ... I want to THANK him. I think this mainly comes because of his humor, and how much he makes me laugh. Sure, serious actors are cool and all, I admire the skill involved, and Cary Grant is unmatched as a serious actor, too, ... but in general I LOVE the actor who can make me laugh.

So. Happy birthday, Archie. Your movies are gifts that just keep on giving. Thank. You.

Below is a photo of Cary Grant in "Bringing Up Baby" - racing to the aid of Katherine Hepburn, who is apparently being attacked by a wild leopard. (Of course she is only PRETENDING to be attacked by a wild leopard, in order to get Cary Grant to come over and "save" her, because she has decided that she is in love with him - without his knowledge or consent). Cary Grant hears her wild screams for help through the phone and, clutching the box holding the long-awaited "intercostal clavicle" of the brontosaurus he has been putting together, SHRIEKS into the telephone: "SUSAN?? SUSAN? Oh, SUSAN, be brave!!" - and races to the door, promptly tripping over the telephone wire and falling flat on his face. No matter how many times I have seen Cary Grant do that, I still laugh.

Snapshots

-- Wintry weather. At last. I took a long walk this morning as the sun was coming up, and I was loving the icy wind, the cold clear colors in the sky, my fabulous green Marc Jacobs fuzzy gloves. (Ahem)

-- I am now tearing along through Underworld, by Don DeLillo, after a couple month's break. (Not really my style, with a book I like. Especially fiction.) But Underworld is so big, so dense - and the chapters are all pretty self-contained - there's not an unbroken narrative - I've found it easy to put it down, pick it back up. I'm now in the kaleidoscopic section called "Better Living Through Better Chemistry" - which is subtitled something like "Fragments Public and Private - 1950s - 1970s". It's hypnotic. We've got a series of anecdotes - showing Lenny Bruce in action in various comedy clubs - during the tense week of the Cuban missile crisis. We've got a couple of anecdotes about J. Edgar Hoover going to Truman Capote's famous black & white ball in Nov. 1966. We've got one of the main characters in the book driving his girlfriend over the border to get an abortion in 1957. A bleak and surreal scene. Our main character is thinking about unlived lives, basically. The unlived lives of the aborted. But meanwhile, he's sitting in the waiting room of this dingy weird office over the border in Mexico, with indigenous art on the walls, and the smells of cooking coming from an apartment above, and his girlfriend is getting an abortion, and ... he sits there, thinking about unlived lives. We've got a weird anecdote (which I cannot figure out yet, why it's there, what it means) about the mother of one of the other characters in the book (but this other character is so incidental, so small, that I had to look back through the book to even figure out who he was) - anyway, this mother is OBSESSED with jello molds. So we go through her jello process, on a summer day in the late 1950s, she's in her perfect kitchn, making 5,000 jello molds ... it's a CREEPY chapter. I have no idea yet what that one is about. There are many more ... "fragments public and private". It's adding up to a collage, a bit mysterious, not a complete picture yet. But certainly riveting reading. Especially because all of this stuff is well-known history to me, due to my interests, my nationality, my generation. Great stuff.

-- My parents are here this weekend. We're going out to dinner tonight at a little place in the Village (one of my favorite joints on the island of Manhattan - love it. It has about 7 tables, a wonderful waitstaff, an incredible wine list ... and it's chilled out, and yet romantic ... they don't rush you out, even though there are only 7 tables). Anyway, I'm very much looking forward to that time with the parents. They're also sleeping over tonight in my broom-closet-sized apartment, so that should be interesting.

-- I am also continuing on with the correspondence of John and Abigail Adams and Thomas Jefferson. I am still in the early years, when they are all in Europe (the Adams' are now in England, Jefferson still back in Paris) and exchanging letters - many of them in code. Great stuff. They're very prosaic - not like the philosophical flights-of-fancy letters at the ends of their lives, when they were pretty much off the public stage, and in the process of contemplating mortality. These early letters are all: Please have Dr. Franklin sign this so and so and send it back to me...The situation here is quite uncomfortable ... Prosaic diplomatic stuff. Still outrageously fascinating. I find it VERY interesting, too, to see the entire change in demeanor when Jefferson writes to Abigail as opposed to John. Perhaps not all that surprising, but still very interesting. Abigail and Jefferson had a very special bond ... and it was many many many years later, when Jefferson was trying to heal the relationship with her (in his own aloof strange way) - that she wrote the immortal words: "Faithfull are the Wounds of a Friend." Jaysus, Abigail, you are correct on that one. There is nothing so FAITHFUL as the wound given to you by a FRIEND. That shit lasts forever. So to read the BEGINNINGS of this special relationship, in the exchange of letters when she was in London and he in Paris, is beautiful. Jefferson seems like a completely different man when writing to Abigail. Open, teasing, emotional ... it's quite astonishing. In comparison to the bluntness of his other letters. It's great stuff. I'm tearing through it.

-- I find this photograph, especially the eyeballs, intensely amusing.

Another great reason to live in New York - and it has to do with Barbara Stanwyck ...

The restored version of Baby Face starring Barbara Stanwyck (rowr), originally released in 1933, is going to have a run at the Film Forum, starting Jan. 24.

Oh, man. I am so there. I have never seen Baby Face, although I have heard much about it (it's a bit notorious), and I am a HUGE Barbara Stanwyck fan.

Baby Face tells the story of Lily, a trampy bootlegger's daughter (who is better than Stanwyck at playing a tramp??) who sleeps her way to the top. Literally. She goes conquest to conquest, starting in the basement, in her father's boot-legging headquarters.

The interesting thing about Baby Face is that ... like Public Enemy (well, actually, many others, too - but that one comes to mind immediately) - it was filmed in between 1930 and 1933 (before the infamous "code" descended on Hollywood).

Mark. A. Vieira, author and general film know-it-all, says in that NY Times article, "'Baby Face' was certainly one of the top 10 films that caused the Production Code to be enforced."

Public Enemy was another one. Public Enemy has no restraint on it. NONE.

Movies in the late 30s, and 40s had to deal with the strict censorship of the Hayes office, they knew that any blatant suggestion of sex or any other "deviance" would be vetoed - and so they had to come up with clever sneaky ways to get their message across (all of this, I might add, led to some spectacular film-making, amazing scripts - and the Golden Age of Hollywood). Censorship ain't always bad. And sometimes the sexiest stuff is what you DON'T see.

Like when Michael Curtiz cuts away after the big kiss in Bogart's office between Bogart and Bergman in Casablanca. She comes to him, desperate, it is night ... they talk ... they fight ... they kiss. Fade out. It is OBVIOUS that they then proceed to have hot monkey sex, but the head-office MADE CERTAIN that neither of them had changed clothes in the next "scene" - they were in the same clothes, no hair mussed, nothing. BUT - the sneaky Curtiz put in one sneaky pesky little shot - one tiny thing which subverts the entire censorship. There's a shot of the searchlight, swooping through the night sky. So how it goes is:

-- Bogart and Bergman fall into a passionate embrace. Cut away from scene.
-- Random shot of searchlight swiveling, like a lighthouse.
-- Cut back to Bogart at the window smoking, still in a tuxedo. He says some line which picks up (apparently) RIGHT where they left off before the kiss.

What I love about the searchlight subversion, though, is this:

-- It implies passage of time. So the audience can think: What would happen after a kiss like that? Only one thing, of course! BED!!!

-- It also has a vaguely sexual look to it, somehow - that searchlight tower. Phallic. With this massive swiveling searchlight.

I am SURE that that was not an accidental choice. Curtiz didn't just show an empty cobblestone street, or a random desert landscape ... He CHOSE to cut away to this huge tall tower jutting up into the sky. A tower that ... er ... also moved.

It says to you a couple of different things: Ahem, these 2 characters are now writhing about naked. Even though when we cut back to them, we are going to PRETEND that nothing happened. We all KNOW what has happened.

I don't know. I think it's kind of sexy to NOT see the sex. If you know what I mean. Power of the imagination and all that.

Goodness. I am a blabbermouth today.

Speaking of the power of the imagination: I have to bring up Cary Grant's performance in Only Angels Have Wings again. That movie was made in 1937, I think? 1938, something like that. Full on into censorship. So there can be no blatant intimation that the 2 main characters fuck, there can be no suggestion of any consummation of ANY kind ... and so there isn't. But that doesn't take anything away from the movie, the censorship actually makes it even MORE sexy, somehow. It sizzles. It pulses. (Or maybe that's just me. Highly possible.) All you need to do to see what I'm talking about is to hear Cary Grant say to Jean Arthur, "Want to come up to my room?" and you'll see what I'm talking about. It's a casual line. He's talking about showing her his family pictures. Or at least that's what the LANGUAGE says. But it ain't about the words. Cary Grant makes "want to come up to my room" sound like the most indecent and dirty proposal I have ever heard.

But I digress.

I remember when I rented Public Enemy last year - and I had just been coming off an EXHAUSTING Cary Grant jag. I barely escaped from that one with my sanity intact. All of Cary Grant's main films are made POST-code. So I decided I needed to ... get AHOLD OF MYSELF AND WATCH A MOVIE THAT HAD SOMEONE OTHER THAN CARY GRANT IN IT ... so I rented Public Enemy. Public Enemy is PRE-Code. HUGE difference.

And there's one scene in particular in Public Enemy - I think it's the grapefruit-in-the-face scene ...

I mean, I know I live in the 21st century and all, but MOST of the movies I watch were made in between 1935 and 1950 ... so sometimes, watching modern movies can be this weird experience, like: did they just DO THAT??? You can't just take off your clothes, ma'am, please! Cover yourself up, you young hussy!!

The scene in Public Enemy has the two criminals shacking up (literally) in a hotel with two slutty broads. There's no bones about it. The women are sluts. These people are not married. The women are always in slutty negligees. They are all living in blatant sin. It's not suggestive, like later films. It's right there. The grapefruit scene starts with Cagney being annoyed, feeling trapped ... he wants to get out of the situation with his girl (hence - the grapefruit in the face) ... and you can HEAR the sounds of raucous laughing sex in the next room. Yes. The sound of 2 people messing around. Public Enemy was released in 1931.

Pre-code.

The NY Times article about Baby Face has this to say about the film (and I've never seen it - although I have been dying to. I'm a HUGE Barbara Stanwyck fan):

"Baby Face," directed by Alfred E. Green from an original story by Darryl F. Zanuck (who was then in charge of production at Warner), remains one of the most stunningly sordid films ever made, a standout even among the wave of risqué entertainments that filled American screens in the early years of the Depression. Even the cut version is a jaw-dropper; with its five full minutes of sleaze restored, it has to be seen to be not quite believed.

The heroine of "Baby Face," Lily Powers (Ms. Stanwyck), was raised in her father's second-story speakeasy in a working-class neighborhood of Erie. Pa. Dad (Robert Barrat), apparently, has been offering her services to the local steelworkers (one describes her as "the sweetheart of the night shift"), but when he sells her in a whispered conversation with a corrupt politician (we see a greasy wad of bills passing between them), Lily has had enough. The pol tries to touch her thigh, and she dumps a cup of hot coffee on his hand; obviously a slow learner, he comes up from behind to grab her breasts, and Lily smashes a beer bottle against his forehead and knocks him cold.

And that's only the first reel.

And more and more and more ...

Dee-lish. Fascinating.

Barbara Stanwyck - an American treasure. The lady never seemed to make a false move. I've never seen her be phony. Ever.

She's a real idol o' the O'Mallster. Here she is in Ball of Fire with Gary Cooper, my personal favorite of her movies ("I love him cause he gets drunk on a glass of buttermilk...") ...

but there are SO many other indelible performances.

So. Film Forum rocks. The "missing scenes" of Baby Face have been restored ... and I am SO there. To glory, once again, in the earthy MIRACLE that is Barbara Stanwyck.

Janet Leigh and Hitchcock and Cary Grant and all that good fun stuff ...

Janet Leigh, on her role in Psycho:

"I saw that she was really a shabby, mousy little woman. She wasn't in any way glamorous or anything. So we chose clothes that she could have afforded. We didn't have a dressmaker do them; we just went out and bought clothes that she could have bought on her salary. And I didn't have the hairdresser do my hair, I did it myself as she would: she couldn't afford a beauty parlour…I knew the background of this girl: it was lonely, poor…she was the older sister who took care of the younger one. And her drab life, in that office with that terrible man trying to take her out…"

And here, for all you film fans, is a beautiful and in-depth look at the work of Janet Leigh in one of my favorite film-obsession sites Images Journal.

Janet Leigh will probably always be remembered for Psycho - but her career lasted decades. And it was with Touch of Evil and Psycho that her talent was actually utilized, for the first time. These directors saw beneath that lovely surface, they saw the guts there, the truth. I mean, read that quote above from her. It makes me want to hug her. If you look like Janet Leigh, directors often don't WANT you to be talented. You are there for the sole reason of your beauty.

But, in the same way that Hitchcock sensed a darkness underneath the surface glitter of Cary Grant, and worked to bring it to the surface (time and time and time again), Hitchcock sensed something ELSE going on with this beautiful all-American blonde.

Perhaps it is not so much that Hitchcock cared what was ACTUALLY going on within Cary Grant, or Janet Leigh - but he knew that audiences would come to these films with a certain set of expectations - or anxieties - and he was going to either shatter the audience's expectations or play on their anxieties.

What the hell am I talking about?

The handsomeness of Cary Grant is undeniable. It's a God-given gift. It's barely REAL. Normal people don't look like that. Hitchcock knew this ... and so (North by Northwest is a perfect example) put this oh-so-handsome gentleman through tormenting situation after tormenting situation. NOBODY is more degraded and crashed off the pedestal than poor Roger Thornhill. In a weird way, you could look at that film as Hitchcock's revenge. "Okay, fine, SOME people are born looking like Cary Grant, while OTHER PEOPLE are born looking like me?? Let's see how Cary Grant deals with THIS." Hitchcock envied people who were beautiful (which was why his films were always filled with such gods and goddesses). He wanted to look like Cary Grant. So maybe subconsciously, it pleased him to some degree to make Cary Grant, the idol of a million women, go through all of these horrible experiences. Like: hahahaha, I may be fat and bald and homely, but I can make THE Cary Grant crouch in a corn field!! Ha!

But ALSO - Hitchcock knew that audiences would come to a Cary Grant movie expecting a certain thing. Hitchcock LOVED to make audiences uneasy. He LOVED to make people gasp with horror. He loved to set them up: Okay, you think this is a Cary Grant movie? You want to see him urbane and suave? TOO BAD, here's what I have in store!! (evil laugh)

(Side note: Hitchcock said that the only actor he ever "loved", of all the actors he worked with, was Cary Grant. Cary Grant was his alter ego, his favorite actor. And Cary Grant believed that he and Hitchcock had some kind of psychic connection/understanding ... one of those rare actor/director relationships that sometimes occurs, like Scorsese and DeNiro. Cary Grant, who trusted almost NO ONE, trusted Hitchcock. He would do ANYTHING in those Hitchcock movies. Because he knew he was in good hands with Hitchcock. Howard Hawks was another one. I mean, good LORD, look at the outfit Howard Hawks was able to get Cary Grant to wear in Only Angels Have Wings. Gouchos? A gun holster? A wide Panama hat? And - ahem - that has to be one of the sexiest performances ever given by an American male. EVER. Flowing goucho pants and all.)

But back to Hitchcock, and his penchant for taking these beautiful people, putting them in his movies, and messing with an audience's expectations:

Think of the raging FIRE beneath the surface of Grace Kelly's heiress in To Catch a Thief. That actress was NOT just a cool blonde, although audiences kind of expected only that from her. Many directors only saw her coolness, her blondeness, her cool blondeness, whatever. Hitchcock saw something else. He made her eat a drumstick WITH HER FINGERS, in that picnic scene, and then had her LICK HER FINGERS. Yum. It's a great scene. Movie star actress-types did NOT do stuff like that on screen in those days. But Hitchcock made this blonde have a chill exterior, sure, but underneath was this earthy hungry woman ... and ... well ... the moment when SHE initiates the kiss with Grant? I read some reviewer who said, "It was a small kiss, but the look on Cary Grant's face afterwards is as though she had unzipped his fly." Yup.

Okay. Sorry. Back to the story at hand. Even though it's all over the place. Follow me if you dare.

I'm now leaping back to Hitchcock's Suspicion:

Hitchcock sets Cary Grant up as ... a sketchy character in Suspicion - you don't know what to make of him, is he evil? Is he bad? But ... the looks!! That CHIN! Hitchcock plays on our experiences of Cary Grant's beauty, and the fallacy that beautiful people are always good and to be admired. That movie turns that expectation on its ear. Suspicion was the first of many Cary Grant/Hitchcock collaborations ... Here are some of my posts on that movie: Here, and here ... There are probably more in that Cary Grant archive.

The studio made Hitchcock change the ending to Suspicion, because they were shocked that Cary Grant would be such a villain. So the movie doesn't QUITE work ... but it's fascinating to watch nonetheless.

It's one of the reasons why I think Cary Grant is one of the best actors to have ever practiced the craft. PERIOD. If all you saw was Bringing Up Baby, you'd STILL have to admit that the guy was special - but put it alongside Suspicion, and Notorious and North by Northwest??

Hitchcock loved messing with the audience.

And in Psycho - with that shower scene ... with the entire set-up to the scene ... and the fact that it was JANET FECKIN' LEIGH - Hitchcock messed with the audience in a way that still reverberates today.

I meet people who haven't seen that movie NOW, and I guard the secrets of the film zealously - like: "OmiGod you have to see it but I can't even talk about it right now because I will give it away ..."

And right now I must shout:

DO NOT read the following excerpt if you haven't seen the film:

It discusses Janet's ACTING in that famous scene, something many overlook - because the scene itself is so notorious. It's about so much more than one woman's performance.

But anyway, here's an excerpt from the article I linked to:

What Janet Leigh does with her body in Psycho is not nearly as interesting as what she does with her face. In a very black sense, Hitchcock acknowledges this by destroying her body and leaving us with that lovely face smeared against the bathroom floor. When Marion and Norman talk in her room, Norman walks over to and past Marion and she turns towards him as he passes her. It is as though they are going to dance. As he passes and she turns, she smiles to herself at his ineptitude--he cannot bring himself to say "bathroom" in front of her--and as she looks up the private grin segues into, not a look, more a regard. It is as if for all his ineptitude, his strangeness, she is actually beginning to like this boy. Her look momentarily opens her tired face to new possibilities.

In this brief moment, she renews her habitually positive pact with experience, she bounces back as she has a million times before. Emboldened as much as we are charmed, Norman invites Marion to have something to eat with him. Her look is such that we do not notice the cut to him as he issues the invitation, with its mute intimation of disconnection, alienation, horror. The scene is then swallowed up in Perkins' boyish glee that this dreamboat is actually prepared to break bread with him. It feels as though the modern stray who has dominated the first half of the film now "throws" the initiative, the narrative, his way and he's thrilled. "She is so clearly like the all-American girl you saw on the magazine covers," Harvey writes, "in the cigarette ads, even the movies--like Janet Leigh, to put it plainly--the ideal daughter, the ideal wife." And now she is his.

THAT'S what is so freaky about that movie. (Or one of the main things anyway.)

In her short tenure on screen, Leigh's face runs the gamut from contented to perplexed, sad to sympathetic, worried to agonized. It is the expressive lexicon of a million working girls as they negotiate the troubled terrain of contemporary sex and manners, the life (and death) of the American Girl.

Short tenure on screen, indeed. Brilliant.

Go read the whole thing.

Ignorant of the Ingalls Family? What??

Dan has a shocking personal revelation. Especially given the year he was born. It has to do with the immortal "Little House on the Prairie".

And so now seems an appropriate time to re-link to this classic post, written by my good friend Betsy.

Enjoy. I still read that piece and guffaw randomly with laughter. And she sent it to me with NO WARNING, like ... she just took down notes, wrote out her thoughts, and emailed it to me. I had no preparation for the comedy. The comedy ASSAULTED me.

Diary Friday

And so onward with this ridiculous Diary Friday stuff. Posting excerpts from childhood/teenage diaries, merely because I enjoy my own mortification. Or maybe it's that ... we all can relate, to some degree, to how dorky teenagers are ... and I enjoy hearing other people's memories. About their own dorkiness.

I'm going to post a couple other excerpts from my travel journal, of our time in Ireland as a family. I am 13 years old. I find this first excerpt hysterical. I am in IRELAND, and here is what I choose to write about.

WESTPORT, IRELAND

These are some of the fashions here: tight jeans and black and gold leather pumps, grey pinstriped blazers, tube tops, jackets that go below the hips, mini-skirts (black velvet), dotted white tights, red velvet crushed boots, Adidas sneakers, tight-tight-tight spray-painted-on jeans are EVERYWHERE. No one has baggies. [Ed: I am assuming that I am talking about baggie jeans here, which were all the rage in the States at this time.] They also love bobby socks here, especially with mini skirts. [Oh my God - do you remember that look??] No one has top siders or loafers. [That whole preppy thing was OUT OF CONTROL at my school. I never got into it, so I am sure the lack of top siders on the Emerald Isle was quite a relief.] The girls wear maroon, silver, yellow leather pumps. They seem to be very influenced by the English [Ed: Uhm... what, Sheila? You're 13. What are you talking about??]. All that punk stuff started in England, and it seems to be very big here too. Tight jeans are the thing to wear here. White sneakers (yippee) are also popular. Minidresses too, like I've seen in Seventeen. All the girls wear kilts, bobby socks, and black leather Mary Janes shined like a mirror.

[Ed: You may wonder why I shrieked "yippee" about white sneakers. Here is the RIDICULOUS reason, from another journal entry at this time. And yes, Blackie Parrish is involved.]

ACHILL ISLAND, IRELAND

The towns over here are not towns. Just villages on hills, with like one store and a butcher. The people seem really nice, though. Two boys on bikes literally led us to our B&B. This B&B is called Connaught House. CONNAUGHT, MUNSTER, LEINSTER, ULSTER, MEATH. [Ed: Ahem. We were made to memorize these place-names as tots in order to get our allowances.]

My room has a wonderful view of fields, little houses, and then the ocean. There are lots of peat bogs here, and we might be able to cut some peat!!!!!!! [God, I am such a geek.] Soon we're going downtown to look around. But I don't feel like it because I am SO COLD!!!!! IT'S FREEZING!!!!!

Later:

The walk was ok. It certainly warmed me up. We saw a field of sheep and the babies were the cutest things I have ever seen. All white, with black heads. Siobhan "baaahed" at them all. [Siobhan was 4. The image of her, in Ireland, is a favorite family memory.]

We might go to church tonight but I don't want to because everyone here dresses up SO much for church and all I have is this plaid skirt that looks like it comes from the 50s. [Beth? I bet you will remember that skirt.] And all the girls wear Mary Janes and I only have my saddle shoes. [Saddle shoes? What are you, Lucy Van Pelt?]

I wonder how Mere and Betsy and Beth and Kate are. OH I MISS THEM SO MUCH!!!!!

Just thinking about living on this island makes me sick. [Note. I completely changed my tune only 3 days later. I wanted to move to Achill Island, for good.] No t.v., one school, not knowing about fashions. [Oh my God, that is so embarrassing. NOT KNOWING ABOUT FASHIONS? This from a girl wearing SADDLE SHOES??? I am so sorry, lovely people of Achill Island, for my judgment.] All they have here is Irish knit sweaters and skirts. I mean, clothes aren't everything but I want to know something about what is in and what isn't. [Okay, this is getting even more embarrassing. This is awful.]

Our house has the most WONDERFUL living room [I sound schizophrenic. Achill Island BAD, oh wait a minute Achill Island GOOD] with a fire, the softest fur rug in front of it and a HUGE tv. [Hm. I seem to recall you mentioning in the paragraph above this one that the people on the island didn't HAVE tv. Hmmm.] We watched "David Copperfield" all afternoon, and now we are going for a drive up a mountain. This is a very mountainous island.

The old couple who own the B&B are so nice. The old man is so funny, so nice. He said to my father that he looked like Kojak from behind. He has been to America and he said that the sand in Florida was so hot that you could "fry a rasher on it". He also asked us if Rhode Island was very close to Houston!!

[For some reason, the first line of this next entry made me laugh OUT LOUD when I was reading it this morning.]

ACHILL ISLAND, THURSDAY

Last night we watched "Father Damien - the Leper Priest" on TV with Ken Howard. [HAHAHA What???? However - member Ken Howard? The white shadow? Loved him.] He is SO good. I had already seen the movie before though. [That's the kicker. I had seen FATHER DAMIEN - THE LEPER PRIEST twice???]

Today we are going to visit a man's peat bog, and then we are going to look up some old crosses, etc.

I washed my hair this morning, and washed my face, and rubbed in face cream and put on mascara. [Extremely important to list my morning skin ritual, apparently.]

I am getting really sick of the same old breakfast every day. But Dad says that there is this coffee shop in Dublin called Bewley's or something where they sell delicious donuts and jelly pastries, etc. [Sniff, sniff. Bewley's ... one of my favorite pitstops ... soon to be no more ...] My mouth is watering already!

Tomorrow we're going to church.

I should have brought my curling iron.

In the blink of an eye

I'm a huge fan of the writer Malcolm Gladwell. He writes really cool really eclectic pieces for The New Yorker (here's an archive of his stuff). He doesn't seem to have one specific area of interest. I have NO idea where he "gets" his ideas. I'd love to know.

Just scroll through that archive and you'll see the breadth of stuff he talks about. Not only that, but ... stuff I never would even have THOUGHT of. Like - topics he seems to draw out of thin air. He makes me see things, makes me think about things, and also ... well ... introduces me to many concepts I'd never even feckin' heard of, frankly.

For example, this gem:

Physical Genius: What do Wayne Gretzky, Yo-Yo Ma, and a brain surgeon have in common?

(These are long pieces, by the way. If you're interested in them, it would really be worth your while to print them out, or read them when you have a bit of spare time. It's worth it.)

Here's another one:

Smaller: The disposable diaper and the meaning of progress.

Here's yet another:

Political Heat: The great Chicago heat wave, and other unnatural disasters.

(This last one was fascinating to me - because I lived through "the great Chicago heat wave" - but I had no idea the context or whatever behind that huge disaster. I will never forget that month - or that heat - in All. My. Life. Read the story here. If you want to.)

And then (drumroll, please) - my favorite Malcolm Gladwell piece ever written (and I really have no idea WHY):

The Art of Failure: Why some people choke and others panic

In that FASCINATING piece, Gladwell takes on what he sees to be the essential difference between 'choking' and 'panicking'. I can't tell you how interesting I find all of this. He talks to psychologists, people who study this kind of stuff ... but he basically breaks it down into this:

Choking he describes as, essentially, forgetting everything you know, under stress. (Psychologists talk about the difference between "explicit learning" and "implicit learning". Explicit learning is how we learn stuff when we are beginners. Rote memorization, trial and error, whatever. Implicit learning happens "outside of awareness". A prima ballerina isn't consciously working on pointing her toes in just the right way ... she has done so much EXPLICIT learning in that area that her knowledge has become IMPLICIT. There are many other examples.) Anyway, psychologists believe that when someone "chokes", suddenly EXPLICIT learning takes over. You see someone, inexplicably, become a beginner. Malcolm Gladwell finds the PERFECT example for this.

So there's that.

But he also posits that choking is different from panic. What is panic? Panic is the almost complete cessation of conscious thought. (Like a drowning man trying to pull the lifeguard under - there's no consciousness there - it is a panicked lack of thought.)

PANIC is more common to novices (Gladwell writes: "People with lots of experience tend not to panic, because when the stress suppresses their short- term memory they still have some residue of experience to draw on.") and CHOKING is more common to experts.

Very interesting.

Gladwell chooses 2 perfect examples of these different kinds of responses to stress - choking and panicking.

The choking example: Jana Novotna, at the 1993 Wimbledon final, against Steffi Graf. Novotna was winning- unbelievably - and then ... in front of the eyes of the world - all of her "implicit tennis learning" went out the window, and she became an embarrassing beginner and, of course, lost.

The panicking example: John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane-crash.

The piece has so many interesting things to say, about the nature of fear, about experience, about how different people process stress differently, about how we learn things ... Great piece of writing.

Now that I've summed up the piece for you unnecessarily, I highly suggest you go read it. Great stuff.

Anyway, he has come out with a new book: Blink, which a lot of people are talking about right now. Again, he takes on a very interesting idea: how first impressions are, usually, spot-on. That there is, indeed, something called 'intuition' - something outside of the conscious thinking brain - and what, exactly, is it? It is "the blink effect" - we know within the blink of an eye whether someone is trustworthy, whether someone is kind, whether someone is lying.

I have a good friend who pretty much only dated homicide detectives (when she was out in the dating world, I mean). She knew a lot of cops, because of her job, etc., and those homicide guys were the ones she naturally gravitated towards. She LOVED homicide detectives, and ended up marrying one, actually. One of the things she loves about those guys, the good ones, is their 6th sense about people, situations, emotions, truth. They KNOW when someone is lying. They KNOW when something is "wrong". They can walk into a crime scene and in "the blink of an eye" know if something is "off", or "staged". They KNOW. And - because that's their line of work - they don't second-guess their own blink effect (like many of us do). They have a nose for lies. My friend, a brilliant and accomplished woman in her own right, always was drawn to men like this, because of their staunch integrity, their no-bull-shit sense of the truth, their willingness to stand up for what is right, and their spot-on snap judgments about people.

In Gladwell's new book, he studies this "blink effect".

Janet Maslin (unsurprisingly) gave a hostile review of it in The New York Times. Or - not hostile. But kind of condescending. I like Janet Maslin a lot. But ... I could feel the "dammit, I wish I had written that book" energy coming out of her prose. Again, I really like her stuff ... but anyway. I will discount her bad review. My dad called her review an expression of "professional jealousy" and I agree.

But besides that, Gladwell's book is getting generally really good reviews (like this one) and I can't wait to read it.

A couple excerpts from that there review:

Mr. Gladwell opens "Blink" (Little, Brown, 304 pages, $25.95) with the fascinating story of how the Getty Museum got taken by a forgery. Despite an intuitive hunch many of its experts had that there was something about the piece that was not quite right, there was no smoking gun of fakery any one could identify. So the artwork was purchased, and only later was it exposed as a fake. The best assessment of whether a work of art is a forgery, it turns out, is the first impression an art expert has on seeing it, not necessarily a battery of scientific tests.

What is happening here is non-rational (not irrational) analysis at a level below conscious awareness. Students who view three 10-second video clips of a professor, for example, give roughly the same ratings of that professor's effectiveness as those students who actually took the course. The same effect can be seen in dating, where first impressions are everything, as is well known by those who have tried "speed dating" (a trendy way to meet people, in which each of multiple "dates" in one evening lasts only six minutes).

On a side note: I have learned to always trust my first impressions when reading a script. It's really only the first impression that matters. If you read a script, and you think it's boring, cliched, or flat-out crap - then reading it a second time is not going to change that first impression. A lot of actors are taught by charlatan teachers (who probably NEVER want their students to stop studying acting and NEVER want their students to trust themselves because then THEY would be rendered superfluous) to second-guess their first impressions, and to "dig deeper", "ask more questions". But ... as Elia Kazan said when he first read Streetcar: "That thing came to me a complete script. I added nothing. It was DONE when it arrived."

First impressions are also really important in interpersonal relationships. I look back on old boyfriends, and issues that were red flags ignored on first dates ended up being, indeed, one of the reasons for the eventual breakup. (Like: Huh. He doesn't get my sense of humor. Or: Hm. I don't get HIS sense of humor. Or: Huh. He just was rude to the waitress. I HATE people who are rude to waitresses - and not only that, but I think that someone who is commonly rude to waitstaff is, in general, an assholic type of personality. I am usually never wrong about this. So not only do I HATE people who treat waiters like shit, but I ACTIVELY keep an eagle eye out for that kind of behavior in first meetings with people. You know. First impressions.)

In terms of first-impression red flags: I'm sure my boyfriend/date was having his own set of red-flag warnings about me but of course, in the first flush of love, we ignore many of the red flags we receive. It's part of the game. (Hopefully, we're not ignoring such red flags as being hit upside the head or anything like that ... I'm talking about incompatabilities. That cannot really become clear until much later. But oh, how much time I could have wasted if I could have stood up, ON THAT FIRST DATE, and said, "You know what? You just treated that waitress like a stupid piece of shit. And that SAYS something about who you are. And I don't want to be with someone who does that. EVER."

Ahem. As is obvious: I'm a haranguing witch when it comes to being polite to waitresses and waiters - sure, if there's a problem with your order, let them know - but do you have to be rude and condescending? You treat a waitress like a stupid cunt? That's a total deal-breaker for me. I can even handle someone, for a while, who doesn't "get" my sense of humor. But not being an asshole to waitstaff. grrrrr It is one of my pet peeves.

There's a danger in all of this - snap judgments can be used to write people off, you can write someone off because of your own prejudices, or your own filter for them (what they look like, their sex, their race, their accent, whatever). So first impressions are not EVERYTHING, and I have certainly been wrong in my first evaluation of certain people - but they are not NOTHING.

The book, apparently, covers how often strangers will know you better than your own family, will pick up on more subtleties in your personality - because of this "blink effect".

Another excerpt from the review:

Evaluating whether someone is trustworthy or not, or whether someone is lying or telling the truth, is more accurately done by intuitive "feel" in a brief interaction than by subjecting them to a polygraph test. The best predictor of how well a psychotherapist or marriage counselor will work for you is the impression you have of that person in the first five minutes of the first session. University of Washington psychologist and marriage counselor John Gottman, who has reversed the process, can predict with 95% accuracy whether a marriage will last or not after observing the couple for only one hour.

Malcolm Gladwell's last book The Tipping Point was a fascinating study of trends/fads and the spread of information - and how epidemics "tip". How do fads catch on? What is the whole six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon thing? Who ARE these people? Gladwell calls such people "connectors", in one of my favorite sections of the book. My friend Mitchell is a connector. Gladwell talks about Paul Revere being a "connector". Fascinating stuff. Malcolm Gladwell talks about Revere's personality, and how such a "word-of-mouth epidemic" as his "The British are coming" could ONLY be performed successfully by one of these very rare "connector types". SO INTERESTING. Here's an excerpt from "The Tipping Point" about all of this.

I look forward to seeing where else Malcolm Gladwell takes me, in the whole blink of an eye phenomenon. Pretty cool.

Snapshots:

-- I saw Kinsey. I'll write more about it later. You know who I liked the most, surprisingly? Laura Linney. Not really wacky about her acting in general, but she was terrific in this movie. HOWEVER, no one can hold a candle to the one-scene-cameo at the very end of the movie by Lynn Redgrave. Oh. My. God. It's underplayed, it's completely real, it feels like you're watching a documentary. And not only that ... but it moved me to tears. The rest of the movie kind of left me cold, I didn't really care about any of those people, even though the topic itself is of great interest to me. It felt like a survey course, like Psych 103, or something. Too general. But Lynn Redgrave's monologue at the end? Tears ran down my face. Bravo. I'll probably babble on about the movie later when I have a bit more time. You know, my typical obsessive thing that I do.

-- Horrible dreams lately. Horrible. HORRIBLE. I wake up feeling like I've been beaten about the psyche. Yuck. Something's going on.

-- The weather has been unseasonably warm here, and also very wet. Every day I walk outside to a light drizzle, the steps damp in the morning air. The wind is soft and moist, and I can hear birds chirping in the dawn. It's January. I literally do not know what the heck is going on with this weather. This morning, I walked out of my apartment. Again, greeted by the mild wet air. Looked to my right (morning ritual) and saw a thick white mist filling the space between Manhattan and my cliff-dwelling. It was like my cliff was floating on the edge of nothingness. Manhattan disappeared behind the white. Odd.

-- This post about Derek Lowe is so perfect. It reflects my own feelings about that guy. So strangely unreliable, and emotional, like a head case, with the pink spots on the cheeks, and the stressed-out exhales ... but then suddenly ... genius erupts. This quote from the post says it best: "Yeah, there was something infuriating about the way he'd unravel like a sweater before our eyes, and the way he looked as if he was receiving messages from a distant space station when he should have been focusing on his catcher. But, remarkably, he could always slip into the big pants when we needed him most." Exactly.

-- Of course, I started "the correspondence" last night. I get this weird lump of pride in my throat when I read the prose, the ideas, the concerns of "those guys". It's terrific stuff, and when I get further into it, I'll be posting some stuff from it. I am planning another Presidents Day extravaganza ... only I think this year it will be solely from "the correspondence". Abigail Adams' letters to Jefferson make me want to cry.

-- I miss my friends. I miss my family. I've been too much of a hermit lately. Too many cobwebs in the brain. Need to get out into the world more.

I think about the Founding Fathers a lot

I think about "those guys". I think about those guys when the going gets rough, when I wonder which way we are headed, when I need strength to carry on. They inspire me.

But do they inspire me as much as this?

Absolutely not.

A hugely incoherent post that goes all over the place ...

brought about by my excitement at receiving another gift ... off the old Wish List. Ehm ... peteb? Thank you???

My own spanking-new gehnormous copy of the correspondence between John and Abigail Adams and Thomas Jefferson. YEE-HAW.

It's a gorgeous book! It's HUGE! It's MASSIVE. It will weigh down my book bag, and I already can't wait to dive right in. Now, I used to have a copy of it, from a second-hand store, I think. And it got lost in all of the moving that I do. I lost track of it. I thought that perhaps it wasn't in print anymore, not sure ... the copy I originally had looked like it had been published shortly after the simultaneous death of Adams and Jefferson on July 4, 1826 (can never write that fact down without feeling a small chill/thrill) - My copy was old, and battered. But alas. I lost it. Between Los Angeles and San Fran and Chicago and New York ... I don't know. It's in a garage somewhere.

I have a couple of books on a list in my head. These books are all out-of-print or hard to find and I have them on a 'MUST TRACK DOWN SOMEDAY' list in my head. The correspondence, though, wasn't on that list. I guess I just forgot about it for a while or something.

Side note: The MAIN book on that "Must Track Down" list was I Was a Teenage Dwarf, the classic book written in the 1950s by Max Shulman, starring the unnaturally short teenage lady-killer Dobie Gillis. I was on a MISSION to find that book after being kicked out of my high school library while reading it, because my guffaws of laughter were disturbing the peace. That Dwarf book has been out of print for YEARS, but I never forgot how hard it made me laugh, and every time I went into a 2nd hand book store, ANYwhere, I would look for a copy. I searched at flea markets, libraries, periodically I'd go check The Strand ... This search went on for years. Literally. Remember, we're talking pre-eBay years. Finally, after YEARS of this, I told my dad about my never-ending search. He said, casually, "Oh, we have about 10 copies at the library. I'll send you one." Duh. Forgot to ask the one person who could actually help me out. A copy of that beloved book arrived in the mail 5 days later, and I read it in my apartment, and laughed JUST as hard as I had when I was 16. I HOWLED. I had to put the book down at times, and just guffaw, waves of hysteria breaking over me ... This time I disturbed the peace of my neighbors, not the high school library. To find the book STILL that funny?? Max Shulman, wherever you are, I. Love. You.)

Back to the correspondence.

I'm sorry. This post is incoherent. It's just cause the book just arrived and I am so excited to have it in my hands. Obviously, I have read multiple and lengthy excerpts from the famous correspondence, because of my general obsession about those guys (that's what I call them. "Those guys."), but to have it all in one place ...

I don't know what to do with myself.

I am still reading American Sphinx and LOVING it. I have re-entered the world of Underworld, after being out of it for a while. I have, for the moment, put down Great Terror because I have the feeling I can't read that one on the side.

But THE CORRESPONDENCE!

I have the whole thing now!

From Abigail to Thomas and back to Abigail ... from Jefferson to Adams and back and forth and back and forth ...

A 12-year correspondence. All in one place. The book is HUGE. I feel so manic about it that I fear I will read the entire thing in one evening.

Breathe, Sheila ... breathe ...

Peteb!! Thank you! I love that a person from another country would buy me this particular book. It seems kind of beautiful somehow.

Breathe ... breathe ...

Guilty pleasure post

Oh why the hell not. Everyone's doin' it. I got it from Llama Boys.

GUILTY PLEASURES (oh, and as ever - please add your own in the comments.)

CD I have in my car that I roll up the windows to listen to -
This question assumes that I have a car. So there's THAT. But if I HAD a car? I think I would feel weird about BLASTING "Hit me baby one more time", by the newly married Ms. Spears, as I cruised through a crowded section of town. But dammit, it's a good song, and a huge guilty pleasure. I play it often.

Book I read flat so no one could see the title
He's Just Not That Into You. The book that is sweeping the nation. Or whatever it's doing. I mean, it's not like I read it repeatedly. I read it once. And it was a very funny book, by the way, and reiterates many of the conversations I have had with my friends over the years, in terms of relationships. "Uhm ... maybe he's just not interested in you?? Can we consider that option?" But the book is bright pink, and ... the title ... I mean. No. I'm not reading that on the subway.

Crappiest song ever sung at karaoke
I remember singing Alanis Morrissette's shriek-fest "You Oughta Know" to GREAT success at a dingy karaoke bar on the north side of Chicago.

Bad movie I watch repeatedly -
That list you will find here.

The main ones? Bring it on and Center Stage. Cannot. Get. Enough.

Article of clothing I love though I know it's wrong -
This fishnet-type thing. I will not elaborate further.

What I order at the bar when no one is listening
I literally have no idea what this one means. I drink what I want to drink, and I order it freely. Is this not the case with other people?

Update: This just occurred to me that this question is geared towards men, who might feel more silly than women when ordering a "peach-fizz margarita" or whatever. I would feel no shame ordering a "sour apple martini" - but I can see why a guy might. I'm not really a girlie-drink girl anyway, despite my ... uhm ... gender. I like boy drinks. Scotch. Beer. Whiskey. You know. Tough-guy stuff.

Fast food item I adore
First off: I do not eat fast food. At least not anymore.

But in my fast-food days (high school and college) I was all about McD's Chicken McNuggets. I so rarely have McDonalds anymore, because it makes me SICK to think of what I would be putting in my body ... not to mention the fact that I do, actually, always feel sick after eating McDonalds ... but damn. I loved those McNuggets.

A TV show that is a good example of the downfall of civilization that I love anyway
Well, I don't have TV now. But let's see. I pretty much love them all, and think the "downfall of civilization" types are big bummers. I love love E! True Hollywood Story, and could watch it all day. I loved Survivor. I even got into The Apprentice. Maybe some people think soap operas are the downfall of civilization? Well, I have loved MANY a soap opera in my day. I was a General Hospital gal in my early teens, and CRIED when my swimming lessons conflicted with the time-slot. Yes, I CRIED. (It was the advent of Blackie Parrish - ahem - JOHN STAMOS - who hooked me in, irrevocably, as a teenager.) Any more?

"I got you, babe..."

I link to the following post because it references Punxsutawney, PA, which then, naturally, leads to a Groundhog Day reference.

And I just need to say that I love that movie. Dearly.

Any others out there? Please discuss.

Favorite scene? Where Bill Murray tries to re-create the magical original moment when he and Andie MacDowell kissed in the snow ... and yet ... because he is so eager, so frenzied to get to the kiss, (and she, of course, has no idea that he is caught in some time-warp, and that this moment had happened before) he freaks her out completely, and she has no idea why he is flailing around like an idiot, before LUNGING at her randomly.

It is hilarious. Maybe I'll rent it tonight. Bill Murray at his cranky curmudgeonly snarky best.

Humorous side note:

One of my long-term old flames (yes, indeed, a member of the famous triumvirate) was an extra on that movie. He was excited because Bill Murray is one of his idols. And he and Bill Murray had studied at the same improv place in Chicago. So he went up to Mr. Murray in between takes (something they tell extras to NEVER do. They will throw you off the set if they catch you babbling at the star) and made some rambling inarticulate comment (I am sure, knowing this guy, that it was so awkward that your toes would curl watching him) about how much they had in common ... and Mr. Murray smiled and nodded, but obviously couldn't wait to get away. Like: "Uhm, why is this extra babbling at me, and scuffing his feet, and trying - and FAILING - to complete a full sentence ..." (Believe me. This guy was so awkward socially that you almost couldn't believe he could make it through the day. On the flipside, his gift as an improv comedian is up there with the best. The guy was fearless on stage. But social situations? You ACHED for him, as you watched him try to get through normal stuff. As my good friend Ann Marie once said, when I told her he was going on a trip that required him to fly, "I have a hard time imagining him boarding a plane." That's pretty much the size of it.)

Second of all:

This guy had a huge crush on Andie MacDowell. And he told me, completely convinced, that during the shoot she had glanced at him once, in between scenes, and then ... (drumroll, please) looked over at him again. I laughed in his face when he told me that, because he made such a big deal out of it. He sounded like a lunatic, like: "No, Andie MacDowell likes me ... I swear ..." which then became the huge joke. He was shouting, "She KNOWS who I am, I am TELLING you. She TOOK A SECOND LOOK."

Meanwhile, his dreams of getting on screen were dashed. They asked him to hold a piece of cardboard in front of a huge light ... to dim the harshness of the glow.

He said to me, knowing the humor of it, "I wasn't even in the movie. They used my body to block the light. I was basically a prop, okay?" But then he had to reiterate, "But still - Andie MacDowell looked at me, man. She looked TWICE."

"Okay, buddy, okay. I'm sure she's totally in love with you. Okay."

Due to the number of...

... condescending lecturing emails I get from MORONS (who I wish didn't read me at all ... why do you read me if you find me so ... confusing, and stupid?? I don't get it.) - and I've gotten more of these lecturing sanctimonious emails in the last couple of days or so than I've ever had before - I think it's time to issue the reminder. Read it. And learn. Or go the hell away. Along with the reminder, I think I will point you to THIS fun post , in which I attempted to "please everybody at once".

This is genius

Bad book covers.

To give you a sneak preview, click here. But that's just the beginning ...

(via Book Slut)

Exhale

I see something like this, and I just exhale in satisfaction. It's hard to believe that there is such beauty in real life, not just in paintings, or in dreams.

Early morning steam from Lake Superior shrouds the Aerial Lift Bridge in Duluth, Minn. Tuesday, Jan. 11, 2005. Cold air over the warmer water created the steam and a temperature inversion kept the steam from dissipating, producing this cloudy view.

The torture

... must continue. Only over THERE, not here.

And then.

There are times when the frenzy stops.

When the mania dies down.

When you come across something which leaves a blankness within you ... something for which you cannot find the words ...

And now?

Well. Excuse me. As I go vomit up and down 7th Avenue.

Because I must.

(Is it too much of a broken record if I keep screaming about the lack of irony?? Now imagine Jim Carrey taking this pose ... imagine Robin Williams in this pose ... or Jack Nicholson ... It would be DRIPPING with irony. A sense of irony could save Western civilization. You cannot pose with cute little puppies and NOT do it ironically. At least if you don't want to be completely disgusting.)

All right I need to drop the pose

LOOK AT THIS FECKIN' PICTURE.

I mean, Jesus H. Christ. WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON WITH THAT???

And again I shout:

WHERE IS THE IRONY? All would be FINE if there were just a smidgeon of irony ... but no. THERE IS NONE.

You know, I love John Wayne and all ...

True Grit. The Quiet Man. Oh sure.

John Wayne's great.

But he's missing that extra special somethin', I think ...

Not sure what to call it, or how to describe it ...

Only an image will do.

Okay, folks, okay

I know it's been crazy around here ... with the whole no irony thing ... and the pirate shirts ... and the tire swings ... and the general awfulness ...

but I would just like to take things down a minute, mmkay?

Just slow things down ...

take a moment ...

slow ...

sh ...

Ouch.

My soul hurts. It literally HURTS.

Because of ...

A pirate shirt. A guitar. And NO SENSE OF IRONY ABOUT ANY OF IT.

I'm sorry to keep hurting everybody

... but when one is in pain, sometimes it feels GOOD to just inflict it on others.

And so I give to you:

Woah. I think I need to kill someone.

Both photos below ...

(and believe me, I could go on) are directly a result of Curly McDimple sending me URLs. This is all her fault.

I think I need to keep posting these though. They are delicious.

I have something else to impart ...

... that is going to hurt even more.

Do not say I didn't warn you.

Once again. Please note the utter lack of irony.

Not to mention the slippers.

All right, people, listen up

I'm going to post something, and I warn you. It might hurt.

I really need you to be ready for it. I need you to do whatever it is you must do to prepare yourselves. I will not be held responsible for what might happen if you do not.

Are you ready?

Okay. Here it is.

David Hasselhoff. On a tire swing.

Uhm ... what????

The thing that I find MOST disturbing and MOST amusing about this image is its utter lack of irony. There is NO IRONY there. NONE.

How can one pose like that with NO IRONY???

Speaking of famous people

... who cannot deal with fame ... how 'bout Randy Johnson, huh?? Heh heh heh ...

Amusingly enough, this was the story that woke me up this morning at 5:30 a.m. with my alarm. Two New York radio-jocks arguing, into the darkness of my room, about Randy Johnson. It was hysterical. My first conscious moment of the day ...

One of the radio-jocks was saying, angrily, "He was just walkin' down the sidewalk ... he wasn't in a Yankees uniform ... he was dressed like a civilian -"

The other one interrupted. "He was wearing a sweat suit, okay? He is 8 feet tall, and he is wearing a sweat suit ... on the streets of New York City, okay???"

I love the torment of sports radio shows. It cracks me up. I'd probably like it better if I were living in Boston, but hey ... this is the price I pay.

Dammit. Is it baseball season yet ...

(via Bill McCabe)

The choppy spacetime sea

Here is why I love science, even though I don't understand what scientists are talking about half the time.

First of all, because of images like this:

That has got to be one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in my life.

Second of all, because the language of science, at its most awe-some, AND its most practical, verges on poetry, mysticism. In order to talk about what is going on out in space, one MUST speak in terms almost poetic.

Here's the article.

Favorite quote from the "scientists":

"Gas whipping around the black hole has no choice but to ride that wave of choppy spacetime sea that distorts everything falling into the black hole."

Ride that wave of choppy spacetime sea.

God. Beautiful. Language like that is trying to describe reality, trying to describe what is actually happening out there ... and yet, for me, it tips over the edge into some kind of poetic metaphor. I love that. All the good science writers have that tone. It's what hooks ME in, that language, the wondrous language, because I can't understand the math.

More cool stuff about "The Aviator"

from CW. Awesome photos, too.

I still haven't seen the damn movie.

I haven't seen anything - and there are a bunch of movies out now I really want to see. But er ... having a cold ... and having no money ... holds me back.

So:

Kinsey. Haven't seen it. Very much want to.

The Woodsman (even though the subject matter is horrible ... I really want to see it. Love Kevin Bacon - Roger Ebert says it best about Bacon: "Bacon is a strong and subtle actor, something that is often said but insufficiently appreciated." TOTALLY agree. So I do want to see him in that movie). But I haven't seen it.

I haven't seen Sideways, but frankly - it's too hyped-up for me. Too over-praised. I can SMELL over-praise sometimes, and Sideways reeks of it.

Life Aquatic. Haven't seen it. It hasn't gotten great reviews, but I don't give a shit. Those guys are responsible for Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, 2 of my favorite flicks ever, and frankly, Bill Murray is a freakin' GOD to me. So I do want to see that.

I haven't seen Motorcycle Diaries NOR DO I PLAN TO! NOR DO I WANT TO! Romanticizing a fucking fascist murderer? No, thanks. I don't care if the guys are hot. Cross it off the list.

Haven't seen Lemony Snickets, and I really want to see THAT as well. Love Jim Carrey. LOVE that guy.

I just ... can't seem to ... get my act together ...

That list overwhelms me when I look at it all together. How on earth will I see all of these movies ... Save my pennies ...

Oh, the torment

Oh, the woe. To quote Mercutio and freakin' Macduff and all of the other dead heroes: O! I am slain!

Oh, the confusion. Oh, the hurt. The hurt that is felt when two people behave in a way that YOU DO NOT LIKE OR UNDERSTAND.

How DARE they??

The prose in this article, and in the headline (not to mention the RIDICULOUS fact that these vultures call themselves "pundits"), is tortured, tormented, baffled, and most of all - hurt.

Jess Cagle (editor of People) cannot understand what has HAPPENED to her universe. She speculates, she worries, she wonders ... but she cannot KNOW ... and so she is left to her own tormented devices, worrying to herself, "Maybe they'll get back together."

Oh, and the irony of Cagle wondering to herself why "this private couple" would go through all this trouble ... Well, bitch, I am sure they did their best to be a "private couple", but your entire profession hounded them into the ground from Day One.

Cagle writhes about in her "crumpled sheets" (phrase stolen from Jewel's poetry), staring up into the empty air above her bed, saying over and over to herself, "Maybe they'll get back together .... Maybe they'll get back together ... Maybe they'll get back together ..."

It helps her get through those long nights.

O! I am slain.

(And thank you, Emily, for reminding me ... that while there are a LOT of important issues today ... NONE are as important as this one. Thank you.)

Full pathetic disclosure below:

I loved those two as a couple. If it were up to ME, they would have stayed together.

But alas, they did not call me for marital counseling or cheerleading.

Every photo I saw of them together seemed to radiate sheer enjoyment, pleasure in one another's company. It seemed like a real connection, to me.

And, for those of you who would like my FURTHER thoughts on all of this nonsense, I will point you to an old post of mine. I wrote it at the height of Ben and J-Lo (a couple I, to put it mildly) did NOT like together ... and I was beside myself. I thought if I saw another photo of the two of them together I would knock over the magazine kiosks like a Tasmanian devil.

I spent TIME thinking about Ben and J-Lo. I was PISSED at Ben and J-Lo.

But then ... a thought occurred to me ...

And I wrote the following post about it. Read it. It's actually a pretty funny story. It involves me throwing a pretzel at someone's head. Uhm ... at my boyfriend's head, to be totally clear.

Good times, good times.

Teaching kids self-defense

I have another big post percolating in my brain, about teaching kids self-defense techniques, and not only that but instilling in them a healthy sense of paranoia towards strangers. Not protecting them from the fact that there are INSANE FREAKS out there, and they should be PARANOID, and WATCH THEIR BACKS. It is never too early to learn that stuff. Do NOT protect the innocence of your children to the degree that they then became the perfect little victim. I've got a lot of feelings on the matter (as I'm sure many of us do) - and I think it's REALLY important to talk about this stuff openly.

A little kid disappeared from my home town when I was 7 years old. He and I were the same age. I did not know him, but we would have ended up graduating in the same high school class. So when he disappeared off the face of the earth, I had one of my first experiences of - realizing the dangers in the big bad world. He could be me. He lived in my town. We were the same age. Why him, and not me? I want to tell the story of what happened to that little kid ... but need to work my way up to it.

The point being, though, is that because of that experience - I grew up in a town that (way before Amber Alerts, way before children being snatched from under their parents noses made national news on a constant basis) was TERRIFIED of stranger-danger. We all grew up, as a town, because of the mysterious disappearance of this little boy. (He was playing in his front yard, under the watchful eyes of his mother, who was washing dishes in the kitchen. She looked away for a moment, literally a moment, and he was gone. And people - the ending of this story is not a good one. He literally DISAPPEARED, as though a UFO came down and took him away forever.) So because of THAT, the paranoia was jacked UP, in our community.

I remember the helicopters swooping over my neighborhood. I remember the neighborhood-mothers having a system set in place, where they would call each other, and have a head-count of all of us in the backyard. Because this little boy disappeared from right beneath his mother's nose ... (and was not returned, folks ...He was "found" - years and years and years later ... but he was not "returned". Horrific story.)

Cops came to our elementary schools and taught us about self-defense techniques (some of these techniques have stayed with me until this day, and I STILL use the Point A/Point B mindset, if I ever feel at risk.

Basically: what we learned in stranger/danger seminars when we were kids is this: If a showdown is gonna happen, then make sure it happens at Point A, not Point B. DO NOT LET anyone MOVE you. Fight to the death, if you have to - but dammit, do it at Point A. The second you let them move you, you are as good as dead.

This was drilled into us. Later, in self-defense classes I have taken, the same thing was drilled into our heads.

"Girls don't get raped and die at Point A. Girls get raped and die at Point B."

If there's ONE lesson that should be learned, I believe it is this lesson.

I have NO problem with making a huge muthaf**in SCENE in public, if I feel like someone is trying to mess with me. And usually, situations can be diffused at Point A. (This is why it's so tough with kids ... because the insane freaks out there are ALL ABOUT getting the little kid to come to Point B with them.) But truly, if you (as the one being attacked, or even if you just feel "wrong" about something, like something "bad" is about to happen) - make an enormous scene at Point A. Most usually, the attacker-to-be was HOPING you would docilely come along to Point B ... and will give up and look for a more willing victim. So: Point A. I SHOUTED at a guy who was messin' with me on a subway platform late at night. I could feel that something was coming, some confrontation ... there were no cops at this station, it was in a bad area, and there were a couple of other bystanders, but other than that - I was alone. The only woman, too. Small note: I was an idiot for being there in the first place. I should have taken a cab. Lesson learned. But I felt such a sense of threat, such a sense of doom, that I had NO problem with SHOUTING, in public, at the top of my lungs, "DON'T F***IN COME NEAR ME." The situation diffused immediately. I made the situation public, I pointed a finger at him, I made people look at him ... Basically, I would NOT be a victim. I was READY to make a bigger scene, I was READY for a fight - and no way would this asshole get me to move from Point A. He'd have to kill me first.

Back in grade school, in the wake of the disappearance of our little comrade, cops taught us about how to run, scream, bite, make a fuss - they taught us that it is good to sometimes NOT be polite. And because we had the glaring example of a missing little boy our own age, we listened to the cops, we listened because ... we hoped that maybe their tips could help us NOT disappear like that little boy. Their tips had an immediacy, an urgency ... they were not abstract theories or concepts. They were REAL, and could have real repercussions in our short little lives.

Our town was in an uproar for a good YEAR after the disappearance of this little boy. This was in the 1970s. NOW, you hear about stuff like this all the time. But back then? No.

I know that a nation-wide search was done for this wee boy who disappeared. But as far as I know, his face wasn't splashed across the evening news. Does anyone know when the whole milk-carton thing began? Putting disappeared kids on milk-cartons? I don't know. Maybe he was on a milk-carton. His face HAUNTED our town, the posters, the fliers ... he was EVERYWHERE. I can see his little 7 year old face right now.

If any of you have any thoughts on teaching kids self-defense techniques - and also not being afraid to make your kids paranoid, please discuss.

(I truly believe that the paranoia experienced by our town, collectively, was a good and a healthy thing. We were indoctrinated in "stranger danger" stuff, we HAD to learn that we had to look over our backs and take care of ourselves ... and not trust anyone. Because this little boy disappeared from his own front yard, while his mother was watching!!! So paranoia ruled. Our parents became paranoid, the teachers became paranoid, the cops became paranoid, the kids became paranoid ... and I remember an overwhelming feeling of SAFETY because of that paranoia.)

I'll be talking more about this later.

Other entries by "Big Dan"

More on Big Dan here.

(And Dan, I love the URL to your blog ... it is a Roald Dahl reference, is it not?)

I wanted to point to some other examples of what you can find on Big Dan's blog:

A post on James Dickey (one of my personal favorite poets ... not to mention the author of the nightmare of a million men Deliverance)

Andrew Wyeth ... that painting

Big Dan's post on Sandra Bullock's donation to tsunami relief

A nice excerpt on the artwork of Escher

2004: A Fantasy Football Odyssey

There are many many more. He's always up to something interesting and unexpected.

Big Dan's blog

Many of you who read me regularly will recognize the name "Big Dan". He's a commenter here ... "Big Dan" has been around on this here blog for quite some time, and is a cherished member of my little community here.

Perhaps you don't know that Big Dan has a fantastic blog called Popped Culture.

Perhaps many of you don't know that Big Dan is a pastor.

And perhaps many of you don't know that Big Dan has recently been re-diagnosed with cancer, after years of living with the spectre of it over his head. Now, it is back. I have been aware of Big Dan's struggle with cancer for some time now, but never pointed to any of his "cancer" posts. Why not? I don't know. Maybe because even though it is a BLOG, on the INTERNET ... it seemed to me like his private business.

However, now I need to stop that shite, and tell you to go read this post entitled: "The day the local minister got pissed off".

Please. Do yourself a favor. Read that post. Take a deep breath, take your time, and read the post from beginning to end. That's all I need to say.

Ignoring Germaine Greer and Loving Judy Davis

Still working on a couple more posts about this whole soulmate thing ... but in the meantime, Norm has a compilation of great links, and I'm bummed that I can't get in to read the whole article on Germaine Greer (getting a Sign In thing) because woah, nelly, it looks like a doozy. I've ranted about her before, even though I pretty much do my best to IGNORE HER. Ignoring Germaine Greer feels like a full-time job. (Side note: I will always be grateful to Germaine Greer, on one level, because Emily - back when she was "Hawk Girl" - wrote one of the bitchiest funniest rants about Germaine Greer that I have ever read in my life ... and that was the first post I read of our Ms. Jones. Someone else linked to Emily, and I read the piece, laughing out loud ... and now, 2 years later, I consider Emily a friend. So Germaine? THANKS for being the inspiration for an Emily rant. I owe ya one.)

Judy Davis told a very funny story about Germaine Greer. When My Brilliant Career came out, the movie which pretty much introduced Davis to the world, (wonderful flick by the way) - Judy Davis, because of the role she played, suddenly found herself thrust into "feminist-icon" land. Something she wasn't interested in AT ALL.

She describes being at some reception, and suddenly being ATTACKED by this overly enthusiastic woman, who would not let Judy Davis get a word in edgewise, who crowded Judy Davis' personal space, and, in general, behaved like a bonehead. Judy Davis had no idea who she was, but found out later that it was Germaine Greer. Greer pounced on the young actress Davis, took her by the arm, and led her around ... parading her about to meet all her friends ... blabbing in her ear ... talking about feminism, and what the film meant in the feminist canon ... etc.

Later, in some interview, when Davis was explaining what it was like to be in a movie which inadvertently turned you into some kind of SYMBOL, Davis related that tale. Of Germaine Greer pretty much trying to OWN Judy Davis' success. "She's ours, girls, she's OURS."

And Davis said that the entire time this was going on, she was thinking helplessly, "Would someone please save me from this shrieking troll latched onto my arm?"

Yes. Davis called Germaine Greer a "shrieking troll". Reason # 382 why I love Judy Davis.

Soulmates - the timeline

I've got soulmates on the brain.

Soulmate essay 1 - the overview

Soulmate essay 2 - Intro to Richard Bach

So now I'm gonna talk, briefly, about how I got sucked into Richard Bach's world (before I escaped, thank goodness.). There's a timeline to the whole thing. His books, for the years that I was into them, were coming out at what felt like exactly the right time. Like - there was something in sync between his experiences and my own. I know I'm not alone in feeling this way - a lot of Richard Bach fans had identical experiences as mine, which is why I think his books hit it so huge, and made him a millionaire many many times over.

I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull in high school. Whatever. It is an 80 page book about a seagull who decides to push his own limits, and refuses to accept that he must only fly like a seagull, but he can go beyond ... he can fly like an eagle, hawk ... he can transcend his own body. I don't even know how I came about reading it - but I did. It's okay. It didn't make a huge impression on me or anything. I still have my original copy, which I had bought second-hand.

The guy who had owned it before me has written his name on the front page:

Lt. DJ (something ... illegible)
GT Jackson, S.C
17 Mar 73

He wrote his name there in purple pen, and has made his mark underlining passages throughout the pages. I was 5 years old in 1973. The book, obviously, didn't get into my hands until much later. 10 years later. So even though normally I don't like to have books marked up by strangers before me, I held onto this one. I felt, weirdly, close to the Lieutenant. Like - I could completely tell his concerns from what he underlined.

"For in spite of his lonely past, Jonathan Seagull was born to be an instructor, and his own way of demonstrating love was to give something of the truth that he had seen to a gull who asked only a chance to see truth for himself."

The Lieutenant underlined these words. Why, I wonder? I wonder where that Lieutenant is now. If he learned to "see truth for himself" by "demonstrating love".

That's one of the things that hooked me in to the Richard Bach book thing - a sense that there was this vast family of readers out there, people who also were looking for something, looking for truth, searching, looking for others like themselves. (Naturally, this is pre-Internet. Now, this whole Richard Bach thing might not have taken off so enormously because ... we CAN find others like ourselves. By clicking around on the Web. We don't have to learn how to astral travel. Who knows, just a theory).

Anyway.

At some point, during high school, I read Bach's next book: Illusions. Perhaps it was recommended to me. I don't think I would have just picked it up myself. I'm too practical, too pragmatic. (Please don't laugh out loud. You have to trust me when I say I am practical-minded. Despite all the emotions, and the obsessions.) Because of my practical bent, I never gravitated towards all that new age stuff, it just ... it's not that it didn't appeal to me. It did, on some level. It's just I never succumbed to it completely. I don't succumb to ANYthing completely. Maybe that's just the part of me that always retains its critical thinking powers, and there always seemed to be something a little brain-less about the New Age stuff. Like: Don't think so much, stop thinking, let go, stop thinking ...

Tangent about the brain-less New Age ideal: The movie The Legend of Bagger Vance - while I love a lot of it - is a perfect example of this anti-brain philosophy. "Good things only can REALLY happen when you STOP THINKING. True wisdom is NOT IN THE BRAIN." Now we could argue about whether or not my perception of the New Age stuff is true or not, but ... I never want to get rid of my brain. I never want to stop using my brain, and not only that - but I don't think I COULD stop using my brain, if I tried. That's one of the many reasons why I'm so fascinated by cults and brainwashing and Patty Hearst and stuff like that. Where IS thought? Where IS self? If someone locked me in a closet for 5 weeks, what impact would that have? Etc.

I think that our ability to think, critically, is one of our most important assets, as a race of beings. NOT the fact that we can "let go" and "stop thinking". I had NO words for any of this stuff in high school. I just knew I couldn't accept the New Age stuff completely. I maintained some distance from it.

Also, I was pretty seriously Catholic in high school. I mean, I'm Catholic always and forever, but I was really INTO it in high school. In a big way. So ... there was THAT holding me back from leaping off the cliff with Richard Bach into New Age waters.

Illusions, though, in my humble opinion, is really the book of his to read.

Weird thing: Yesterday I went back and re-read many of his books (a lot of them are only 100 pages long or so). And I was doing so because I have all these OPINIONS about the soulmate garbage he has put forth ... but then, ha ha ha, I found myself getting sucked into his stories again.

However, this time - there was that critical eye. I was reading through Illusions and a couple of times I thought: "Damn. This is pretty good." I went back to the books expecting to SCORN. Some of it I did scorn, but my response was more complex than that.

Even now, I can still see the appeal of his ideas.

Illusions tells the story of a guy who drops out of society to go be a barnstormer through the Midwest. (The lead character's name is Richard. The lead character in Richard Bach's books is ALWAYS named Richard. So he is ASKING you to identify with him, he is ASKING you to say: "This is all true".) And Richard, while barnstorming, meets another barnstormer, a mysterious guy named Donald Shimoda. Donald Shimoda, it turns out, is one of many "reluctant Messiahs" - people who have been given wisdom to impart, and insight ... and yet, in Shimoda's words, "couldn't take the crowds". So Shimoda, instead of wandering the world to share his message, flies a plane from field to field in Illinois, taking people up for rides. Illusions, a short book, is the story of this friendship, which quickly takes on a Master-Pupil vibe. Donald Shimoda has things to teach. Richard Bach wants to learn. (Richard Bach most certainly does not lack an enormous ego. You do not have to be a rocket scientist to realize that Bach also sees himself as Donald Shimoda - the "reluctant messiah" - who has wisdom to impart to the masses.)

I read that book and liked it very much. I was about 16, something like that. The Richard Bach thing hadn't really "hit" me yet, though.

That happened a year or so later.

I'll skim over this part a bit:

When I was 17 years old, something horrible happened to me. It was a human event - brought about by humans - but it had the effect of a natural disaster. I won't say too much more about it. This horrible thing happened to me when I was 17 - and I woke up the next day an adult. I had, indeed, led a pretty sheltered life, and was allowed to be a child, and have a childhood. Not like many of my friends who were thrust into adult situations WAY before they were ready. I was 16, 17, but I was still, in essence, a young girl. And then - no more. Buh-bye childhood. Nice knowin' ya.

I don't want to dwell on all of that, because that's not the point. It is, though, part of the timeline, and part of why Richard Bach was able to WEASEL his way into my heart. (heh heh heh) I was vulnerable. Not even vulnerable. That's not the right word. Vulnerability implies emotion. I was raw. I was in shock. It's like how people describe getting a horrible gunshot wound, or something. At first they don't recognize how bad it is. They might even be able to walk, talk ... but then the reality starts to dawn ...

That's what it was like.

And a friend of mine gave me Bridge Across Forever to read - Richard Bach's latest book. It was published in 1984. So in looking back on it, it came out at JUST the time I would be PRIMED to hear his message of hope.

I can't even say I "read" that book. I devoured it. I finished it. And then I started from the beginning again. Immediately. High school was over, I was now in college, but I was still reeling from this thing that had happened to me - I couldn't even feel emotions yet, nothing like that. I was just surviving.

And then along came that book. Bridge Across Forever tells the story of Richard Bach's eternal search for the perfect woman, what he calls a "soulmate". It starts during his barnstorming days. And every day he lands in another field, and a crowd gathers ... and he wonders if today will be the day that he meets "her".

You could always see the word in capital words, in Richard Bach's world. "Her".

Now I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater here. That book got me through the roughest couple of months in my life. And I'm gonna give Richard Bach the props he deserves for that. At that point in my life, I was going to church every day, before class. Praying to God for help ... stuff like that. Couldn't recover. But God wasn't there. At least I couldn't feel Him. Richard Bach was.

That book is a message of hope, and eternal love ... it's got so many elements to it. Fear of committing, fear of saying 'yes', that whole perfection thing we do to one another (Richard Bach had a long list of SHE-MUST-HAVE-THIS requirements ... and if any new woman in his life didn't fit PERFECTLY, she was out...) All that stuff.

But indeed, he does find love. With the woman he ends up marrying at the end of the book. They do not have an easy time. Back, forth, commit, back off, this, that ... SHE'S not his perfect woman either. She is (horrors) a living, breathing, three-dimensional, unexpected woman ... who doesn't fit into his nice little boxed-in ideas ... and who actually says and does things that he sometimes finds offensive - or at least, doesn't fit in with his "imaginary woman", his "dream girl".

The book's romantic, yes, but there's more to it than that. I'll get into Bridge Across Forever later. (Oh God, no, you must be thinking).

Suffice it to say, that that book was a life-preserver thrown to me in the night. At a time when I really needed it ... that book showed up. I was not well. I was half a person. That book gave me something to hope for. (Which, in and of itself, is quite dangerous, if you think about. No book, no author, should have that much power).

The crisis passed. I recovered. Mostly.

College went on. I had no boyfriends, no mates, no hook-ups, nothing like that. I had no one night-stands - I never could do stuff like that. I was waiting for "him", I guess. Maybe not. I mean, yes, I wanted a boyfriend, I guess - but also, I always had some self-preservation instinct about the college social scene. I would go to frat parties and stuff, but I never ever got sucked into some of the nightmare scenarios I heard about from girlfriends. I never put myself in sketchy situations, I was never promiscuous ... There was something in me that always resisted that stuff. I guess what I'm trying to say is: unlike a lot of other girls in college, I NEVER looked for love or a mate at a frat party. Thank the good Lord.

When I finally had a relationship, my first relationship, it was with a guy I had already known for years. I had been friends with him since I was 17 years old. And suddenly, when I was 21, 22 (he was older than me) - we became inseparable.

Now ... I loved this guy. He was awesome (he still is, actually). But I never ever got the "soulmate" feeling from him. I didn't fault him for that ... the whole "soulmate" thing just never came up, because the REALITY of our romance was much more exciting, at least initially. There was no 'dream man', no "He" with a capital H. There was just this dude, the dude I was having an adventure with right at that moment. I think I made him read Bridge Across Forever and he didn't really get into it, but other than that ... he and I were boyfriend/girlfriend, in the basic way that people are boyfriend/girlfriend. We did not astral travel. No. We went to the movies. You know. Ain't nothin' wrong with the movies. I don't think I could astral travel anyway. I would have a hard time taking it seriously, in any way, shape, or form.

But he and I weren't meant to be. Buh-bye.

It wasn't until years later, long after he and I broke up, that I found someone who ... fit the soulmate bill. Now this guy is really hard to talk about ... but it was the kind of relationship where we literally didn't have to speak to one another. We had complex conversations, all through ESP. One glance told 1000 words. Basically, we did not need to speak. Now this guy, being Irish, and big and goofy (and blurpy), was SO not into the "soulmate" thing ... he had to make fun of it. All sentiment must be mocked. Doesn't mean he doesn't feel it all deeply, but to TALK ABOUT IT? No. We had a good balance, come to think of it. Mockery can be quite healthy.

And in looking back on that whole thing with him, my experience with him is what convinced me that this "soulmate" thing is a bunch of crap. What I did feel with him? It was a chemical reaction, it was the pheromones, it was his chemistry meeting my chemistry ... and it was crazy. We had crazy chemistry. I am not talking about sex here. Not at all. I'm talking about brain-chemistry, and the chemistry of sensibilities. The chemistry of personalities combining. It's not even that we were the SAME in all things. It's just that he and I, within 5 minutes, instinctively knew one another. We knew how to talk to each other. We KNEW each other. I KNEW him without even knowing a damn thing about him. And I now think that this was just a matter of an intense chemical response to one another, the likes of which is very rare.

But it wasn't the way Richard Bach set it up in his book: In his world-view, he and Leslie (his wife) have been through many lifetimes, and have always encoutnered one another in those lifetimes ... sometimes they are together, sometimes not, sometimes they take other forms ... but that he and she have been SEARCHING for one another forever, have been SEARCHING for "the" lifetime where they get to hook up, and not "miss" each other. A very compelling and hypnotic world-view, I must say.

But me and blurp-boy didn't have that going on ... I didn't feel that he and I had been searching for one another ... through multiple lifetimes ... cavorting through the space-time continuum ... Oh look, there you're the Viking and there I'm the Druid ... Whatever.

(This, by the way, is what Richard Bach's One is all about. One was his follow-up book to Bridge Across Forever. In One he and Leslie, his wife, travel through time, backwards and forwards, meeting alternate selves - who they were in long-ago times, meeting themselves in the future, meeting themselves on alternate planes where they DON'T hook up ... Gotta say it: One is a DEEPLY boring book).

Maybe I'll write more on that later. Not sure.

I think that's enough for now. I'm just gonna keep blabbing on about this, because ... I'm not even sure where this is all going, but for whatever reason, it's what I feel like talking about right now.

Thank God for blogs.

A bit of an interruption to the Soulmate program

This is a funny story, and I just thought I'd share it. My friend David and I were howling about it yesterday.

Earlier this week, before I got sick, David and I got together. We had some beers, we talked about everything under the sun. (The whole "soulmate" thing came up. He had read Richard Bach's stuff, too ... so he and I had a LOT to talk about. Talking with him helped clarify some of the things I wanted to say in my soulmate posts that I am working on right now.)

He also told me that he's doing some play-reading for a theatre company (where new plays are submitted, and they need "readers" to send on comments and recommendations to the company about the play) - and one of the plays he's reading right now is about Thomas Jefferson. David wanted to talk with me about it, since he knows I'm a freak.

Naturally, I had 7,000 comments.

Vigorous conversation then followed about Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence. Which then led into a conversation about the Constitution.

I was in my glory. As you can imagine.

So, after many hours of convo, David had to head home. He dropped me off at my apartment, and drove off into the night.

15 minutes later, my cell phone rings. It's midnight or so, so I KNOW it's David. He has about half an hour drive to get back to his place, and it was a rainy night, and late, so David wanted company for the drive. Keep him awake, all that stuff. So we pick up just where we left off. We talked more about Thomas Jefferson. I was standing in my kitchen, babbling about Jefferson, pacing like a lunatic, gesturing with my free hand.

Then, Constitutional amendments came up. David asked a question.

I, naturally, have a copy of the Constitution, so I pulled it out, and started to read out loud to him all of the Amendments.

He would stop me, we would discuss, I would start up again ... and this went on until he pulled safely into his driveway.

It wasn't until the next day that we realized the ridiculous humor of this, the semi-unbelievable nature of it. Did I just READ OUT LOUD from the Constitution to help him get through his drive home? And that was OKAY WITH HIM???

Geeks of the world unite.

It's obvious, on many levels, why David and I are friends. Dare I say soulmates? Nah, not soulmates. More like kindred spirits.

How 'bout just FRIENDS? I like that word best. Friends.

"Soulmates" - intro to Richard Bach

Here's my first essay on this topic.

Now? I'll take on how I got suckered into the whole thing in my early 20s, and escaped from its clutches within an inch of my life. Had to go through the phase, I suppose, but day-um, it was kind of ridiculous while it lasted.

Richard Bach is a huge part of this story. For those of you who have never heard of Richard Bach (is that possible?) - he is a writer. He wrote the book Jonathan Livingston Seagull, published in 1970, which has become pretty much a cult classic. Or, hell, not EVEN a cult classic - it was on the New York Times bestseller list for years. Richard Bach is seeping his way into this post before his time ... I wanted to contain my comments on him to its own post, but I can't help it.

Richard Bach has written quite a few books, but it was in the mid-80s to mid-90s that he started this whole "soulmate" thing.

Up until then, he was, yes, a kind of New Agey type, and wrote books about pushing your own limits, and daring to fly higher (like in JLS) - stuff that was very much of his time. He was also a pilot, and had kind of dropped out of regular society in the early 1970s to be a barnstormer throughout the midwest. He decided to try his hand at writing, and went freelance. All of his pieces on flying (Biplane, Stranger to the Ground and Gift of Wings) are compilations of all of those early pieces.

It would not be right to compare his stuff to Antoine de Saint-Exupery, although many people do (you know: pilot + writer = same thing) But ... St. Ex is, indeed, the much better writer. I like some of Richard Bach's stuff on flying, don't get me wrong, his enthusiasm and wonder are catching ... but St. Ex stands apart. Richard Bach has written forewards to re-issues of St.-Ex's books, etc. Bach is in that very specific genre WITH St.Ex, to be sure: People who are pilots who also can write about their experiences in truly poetic terms, and can get across to a land-bound audience what it is like to fly. The magic of it.

That is Richard Bach's deal.

But then ... he got married. In the mid-1980s. And wrote three books over the next ten years which turned him into THE soulmate guru. It's all about the search for the "perfect" woman. And then ... holy mackerel ... he finds her. They marry. All is well. Magic reigns. Soulmates exist. Let's fly through the ether together.

His 3 books about love and relationships are called Bridge Across Forever, One and Running from Safety.

Okay, I'm gonna save all of my thoughts about all of these books for my big-ass post I'm planning on Richard Bach himself. This is all just for background.

I have read all of these books, and I read them AS they were coming out. I was into the whole Richard Bach phenomena thing AS it was going on. And lemme tell ya - those books have been gathering dust on my shelf for over ten years now, I haven't picked them up, touched them, flipped through them since then (well, until yesterday ... in getting ready for this post). It is a very odd feeling. There was a good six years in my life when I NEEDED new books from Richard Bach. He wasn't prolific enough for me. I stood in line for three hours in Chicago to meet him and get him to sign my copy of Illusions, stuff like that. This man MEANT something to me.

And then ... poof ... it's like he never meant anything to me at all.

It's like it never happened. Most of my books that I once adored are STILL adored books. (Wrinkle in Time. Lion, the witch and the wardrobe. Jane Eyre.) My taste in books is pretty consistent. But Richard Bach's stuff? For a while there, his books were DOG-eared from re-readings, and now? I can barely remember a word.

Strange. It's like I was under hypnosis or something, heh heh. My views on him and those books have changed so drastically that I wonder at my old self, I wonder at her credulity, I wonder what was going on with her that she needed to believe his words so desperately ...

But whatever. I'll talk about that in a minute.

Now I'm just marveling at how much one can change. These views I had were deeply held. And now ... there's almost no remnant left of them at all. The Sheila back then would have been unable to comprehend the Sheila now who says, "If there's one phrase I wish I could STRIKE from the English language, it's "soul mate"." The Sheila then would have thought: ho-ly crap-ola ... what on EARTH happened to me that would make me say that??? The Sheila then would have looked on such a transformation as a tragedy. The Sheila now sees it as liberation.

I guess I better get down to brass tacks here, I can already tell I'm circling the plane with this topic ...

More to come ...

Consider this an intro to Richard Bach.

Soulmates - an overview

As promised ...

Here is how I see it. I may have some of the dates wrong, or some of the trends reversed, and some of you who are older than I am, who also remember the onslaught of the whole "FIND YOUR SOULMATE" craze may be able to illuminate me, but here is how I remember it:

At some point, in the mid-1980s, (and I was in high school then, and college, so I wasn't really paying attention to cultural trends as such. It was more like I was fully participating in them, unconsciously) Anyway, at some point in the mid-1980s, the whole love-industry took off like a nuclear explosion. We live in that world now, we take it for granted to some degree, we live in the repercussions of that original explosion (and again, anyone who is older than I am may have a different perspective, and be able to enlighten me) - There are now entire sections in book stores devoted to love, finding love, how to keep love, how to embrace love, how to find the perfect man/woman, how to give the perfect man/woman the perfect orgasm, how to make your marriage last, how to keep your man in line, how to encourage your woman to masturbate like a banshee, how to go on dates and snag a man, how to float through the ether of time and astral travel and find that perfect "soulmate" ... It is now an INDUSTRY. Whereas before, not so much. Maybe there would be a "Relationships" SHELF in the bookstore, and on it would be the memoirs of a hippie-dippie tofu-eating middle-aged couple who wrote erotic love letters to each other (filled with phrases like: "When you go away, I feel the soulful energy in the house disappear...") and then published them (anyone remember that book? I used to have it ... can't recall the author, but the book was called "Notes to Myself". It's pure ICK. Update: Oh my God. I just found it.) So there would be that kind of stuff: hippie-dippie love memoirs illustrated with line drawings that look like they were done by a kindergartener. There would also be the old standard The Joy of Sex. And a couple others, on how to have a happy marriage, you know - basic. No big deal. It was a topic like any other: gardening, cooking, pregnancy.

But now? We are talking full-blown OBSESSION. This also goes back to the comments down here on Jean Kerr, come to think about it. In the article I linked to, the writer said that mothers now want to get Straight A's in parenting, whereas women of Jean Kerr's generation pretty much took mothering on a Pass-Fail basis. They weren't trying to score higher than everybody else, or be the Valedictorian-Mommy, whatever.

That obsession is also apparent in these books about love, finding a mate. Look at the cover of Cosmo, Glamour, Redbook, and over and over, you see the same PANICKED headlines.

For example:

"GET HIM TO COMMIT." (Uhm ... whaddya think I am, an idiot? Is "he" not also a full person, able to make his own choices? WHY ON EARTH do I want to be with someone who WON'T commit to me and I have to turn myself inside out to "GET HIM" to say Yes to me? I'm tellin' ya, I've had boyfriends - and when they're into you? Wild horses wouldn't drag them away. They are all over you. When they're into you, they can't WAIT to "commit". It's such a better experience. Trust me. When someone (duh) actually chooses you because he WANTS TO CHOOSE YOU, not because you read some article in Cosmo about how to "get him to commit". I find this whole "trend" disgusting, in general, and very insulting to the guys.)

"GIVE HIM THE BEST SEX OF HIS LIFE." (Er. Okay. Thanks for SCREAMING that at me, as I stand in line buying orange juice. Thanks. You're givin' me a heart attack though. Can't he and I just mess around like a normal man and a normal woman and give each other pleasure in, you know, the basic way that humans do? Does it have to be 'THE BEST EVER'? Am I allowed to take this one on a Pass-Fail basis, or ... are you demanding that I get a Straight A?)

The panic is everywhere.

I am not saying that I submit, constantly, to the panic. And I am not blaming Glamour magazine for SHRIEKING at me as I stand in line at the store. I don't HAVE to buy those magazines, and in general, I do not. I don't HAVE to succumb to the general "WHERE IS MY SOULMATE" panic. We all have choices. But that's not really what this little overview piece is about. For me, this is about how the way we even TALK about these issues (love, sex, relationships) has changed, dramatically, in the last 30 years.

Some of these changes are good. There isn't a complete mystique around sex, there isn't a silence around relationships - we can talk about stuff now that was completely taboo not too long ago. I'm for that (to some degree). Like my mother telling me, when I was 10 years old, about my period, and what to expect, and how to use the feminine products and stuff like that. I know women of other generations who were completely unprepared for the changes their bodies would go through, and were (naturally) TERRIFIED when they suddenly started bleeding. "Randomly". So I'm all for getting the information out there. You can make choices about your life and how you are going to conduct yourself only if you know what you're up against, and what you can expect. This is a positive change.

But if you actually go and scan all of the titles in the "LOVE & RELATIONSHIPS" section at Barnes & Noble, which I did a couple days ago, in preparation for this post, you start to get the feeling that something has gone seriously wrong here. You start to feel like everybody in this country is completely psychotic. You start to feel like you are surrounded by complete and utter morons, who are unable to even wipe their asses without a book to tell them how to do it.

Just as an experiment, go to the LOVE & RELATIONSHIPS aisle, take 2 seconds, and scan the titles. It's scary. The books, taken all together, emanate extreme neuroses. I'm sure some of them are quite good, and helpful. I'm talking about this whole thing as an INDUSTRY. The industry itself emanantes neuroses, perfectionism, and anxiety. Cripplingly so.

So back to the "soulmate industry", which is an entire sub-topic of all of this.

I believe that the "soulmate" thing has taken on so much meaning, and become so popular for a couple of reasons:

1. The self-help industry becoming so ubiquitous and so everywhere that we really, actually, don't even NOTICE it anymore.

2. In line with that: the assumption made by the self-help industry that everything in life is a PROBLEM which has a SOLUTION. (I should probably say more on this later, too, cause it's difficult waters and I do not want to paint with too broad a brush. I am not anti-therapy. But I am anti the attitude of the industry that everything in life, every mess, every human problem, can be "fixed", as though something is perpetually WRONG. I take a cold-eyed view of this. To the self-help industry, everybody BETTER walk around feeling perpetually wounded, because otherwise THEY would be out of a job.) So - Let's FIX everybody, shouts the self-help industry. "You lost your child in a car accident and 2 years later you still have bouts of weeping? That is a PROBLEM and here is the SOLUTION". That's an extreme example, but I think I've made my point. The self-help industry wants a neat and clean and tidy little world, where everyone's "issues" are compartmentalized, and "fixed", where you can always "talk" about your "issues", and "talking through your issues" (we all know) helps you to heal yourself. (I think that's a load of crap, by the way, but that's another post entirely).

Let me just say something quickly here, because I REALLY don't want to hurt someone's feelings with this: I have been in therapy myself. And it did me a lot of good. In my late 20s to early 30s I had a serious problem with depression. Might as well just say it. Actually, the problem goes wayyyy back to when I was a teenager, but it really became debilitating later in life. And so I do not want to say that all therapy sucks, and also that MY way is right for EVERYone. I do not think that. Finally, a couple years ago, I spontaneously fired my therapist, and I've never looked back. I had HAD it with just talking about shit, going over and over the same territory ... so I fired her ass, started up the blog, and I haven't had a bout with depression since. (If you knew me, you would know that this is a miracle). However, I know people whose entire lives were saved by therapy (not to mention antidepressants) - so I do not want to discount that. This stuff is really personal, and what's good for one person wouldn't be right for another.

As I see it:

The love/relationships book explosion is closely related to the self-help-book explosion. Again, it is because of this whole "Let's FIX everything and everybody" mentality that has now completely taken over our culture. You're single? That is a PROBLEM. Let's FIX it. (Now, obviously, if you hate being single, then you hate being single, but do you need to read 20 books to validate this? Can't you just ... oh, you know ... go on some dates, maybe?? Join the school of REAL life, not the 12-Days-to-a-Brand-New-You program?)

The explosion of books on the whole LOVE THING has occurred in my lifetime. Book stores, and books in general, changed drastically. I would say that this probably occurred in the early to mid 1980s. And it has STILL not died down.

I will admit that I got completely sucked into the whole "I want a soulmate" thing, and this was, I would say, between the ages of 17 and 25. Those were the years when that kind of thinking dominated my choices. Which makes sense. In looking back on it, it does seem that the "perfect soulmate" conversation belongs to youth. And immaturity, dare I say. And yet the people who are heading up this whole industry are far from young. These people are middle-aged, some of them are older than that.

In other words, they should know better!!!

I outgrew my obsession with finding a soulmate. Maybe it's just the word itself I dislike so much. Soulmate? It comes with so much baggage now, it's a shorthand and the word itself has no meaning. It's thrown around too much, and so has no power.

More to come on this topic ... I would say I have about 2 more essays to go on this whole "soulmate" thing. (One thing: A note to anyone out there who disagrees with me, and who believes in soulmates, or who believes they have actually "found" a soulmate ... I definitely want to hear from you. All of this stuff comes from my own personal experience, like I said - I have no proof, how could I have proof? I do have some DAMN strong opinions about it, but still ... I would love to hear from other sides on this issue.)

I am sure, that by now,

you all have heard this distressing news. My entire world-view has shattered.

And so, I suppose that now is as good a time as ever to say that I have been working on a rather geh-normous post about "soulmates", which all started from what I said in this post.

I believe in true love. Not only do I believe in it, but I also believe it is as rare as the rarest of diamonds. It's not an "ooh, I believe in soul mates" kind of malarkey. If there's one phrase I wish I could STRIKE from the English language, it's "soul mate". No. Fuck soul mates. But I do believe in a very specific kind of love ... er ... how to explain it. "True love" will have to suffice. My belief in this kind of love is scientific. I think true love (not your garden variety love, but TRUE love - huge difference) has to do with chemistry. Literally. Body chemistry, brain chemistry, pheromones, the 5 senses ... Nothing about souls or heart or spirit ... but chemistry. Can't prove it, but this is what I believe. (And believe it or not, I think that MY way of looking at it is MORE romantic than the "soul mate" way. But then again, I am certifiable.)

A discussion then ensued with Bryan (and others) in the COMMENTS to that post, having to do with soulmates, and why I don't "believe" in them, and all that jazz. In explaining where I was coming from, in explaining the whole Richard-Bach craze (more on that later - MUCH more on that later) - I suddenly I knew I had to write about it.

I've got a TON of stuff to say about "soulmates", and the whole "soulmate" phenomena (really, I'd just call it a trend, and a marketing ploy at this point), and I've wanted to write about it before, but ... I just knew the post would be huge, and would require me to do a bit of work beforehand. I'm nuts like that.

So.

The work has been done. I have compiled information. Quotes. Anecdotes. I will be posting it at some point today or tomorrow.

That's one of the good things about being sick. You end up having a looooot of free time on your hands.

There will probably be a SERIES of posts on soulmates. Because I want to go at this thing from many different angles.

I am, legitimately, insane.

This is for all the tourists ...

... who come to New York City and feel overwhelmed about finding public bathrooms. I relate. I understand.

And as I said, in the comments to this post below: If you put me down on any random street corner in New York City, I will be able to locate the nearest public bathroom in, oh, less than 5 minutes. It is not that I have been on every street corner in the 5 boroughs - it is just that I know what to look for.

I have one rule about this:

-- I avoid having to go to a place where I need to buy anything in order to use the facilities

No. I am looking for PUBLIC BATHROOMS. Preferably public bathrooms that look NOTHING like the public toilet Ewan McGregor was forced to use in Trainspotting. So my standards are, admittedly high, however I have narrowed it all down to a fine art, and so ... I am going to pass on my words of wisdom to those of you who ever visit here, and want to window-shop for 5 hours at a time, and have no idea what the hell to do if you have to pee.

I am here to teach. Print this out, next time you come my way. You won't be sorry.

Two words:

Starbucks.
Barnes & Noble.

(Oops, that's 4 words)

These two mega-chains have completely taken over our fair city (Starbucks, especially) - and Starbucks always has public bathrooms, that are usually clean. I am not exaggerating when I say that there is practically a Starbucks on every block here in NYC. I don't like Starbucks coffee myself, but I ADORE their ubiquitousness, because I have had MANY a pitstop there in my walkabout days in NYC.

So there's that.

2nd of all. Barnes & Noble. These are also everywhere and there are usually MULTIPLE stalls, so that you can do your thing and not feel the impatient line gathering outside the door (which is one bad thing about Starbucks.)

My philosophy (and I try to live up to it) is this:- if I have to pee, I look for a Starbucks. (Due to it being quick, easy, and there usually is a line waiting to get into the bathroom after me - so I don't feel weird or ikky about the whole thing.) If I have to shit, I'm all about lookin' for the Barnes & Noble.

Take this wisdom from me, and go forth and flourish.

Other public bathrooms:

-- If you're in the Times Square area: make your way to Port Authority (corner of 42nd and 8th). Go to the SECOND floor. There is an enormous bathroom facility with about 40 stalls up there. If you're anywhere near Times Square, Port Authority is a short walk away.

-- Another good place (despite the massive crowds shopping there) for a pitstop in Times Square is the Virgin Megastore. Now it's always a MADHOUSE there - but there are bathroom facilities (down on the lower level, in back of the DVD area). Hanging out in Times Square? Head to the Virgin Megastore to do your thing in utter chaos.

-- Across town, there is Grand Central Station. This also has HUGE bathroom facilities (down on the lower level). If I'm shopping over there, which I am wont to do because it's a shopping haven, I can RELAX because I know Grand Central is only moments away.

-- I must reiterate: Barnes & Nobles (and they are usually located RIGHT in the hub of things, in Chelsea, near Lincoln Center - big tourist traps - so unless you're hanging out in the wilds of Spanish Harlem, you WILL be near a Barnes & Noble in your visits to NYC): Here, off the top of my head, are the B&N scattered up and down Manhattan:

- 22nd and 6th
- Union Square (mega-store, 4 stories) Bathroom on the 2nd floor, in the back of the Kids Books section
- 66th and Broadway (another mega-store - bathrooms all the way at the top)
- 86th and Lexington (good for pit-stops if you're hanging out in Central Park, right nearby)
- 82nd and Broadway
- The Astor Place Barnes & Noble. (If you're hanging out down in the East Village, getting tattooes or whatever, and feel the need to "go" - know that this Barnes & Noble is there for you. It's a bit hidden, so ask where it is. Everyone knows it. Additionally, there is a Starbucks a block away. So you have two options.)

-- There is, as well, the McDonalds factor. Although I really try to avoid McDonalds (to eat, or to do anything else there), they are EVERYWHERE. In an emergency?? Know that all you need to do is scan up and down the block, and you will PROBABLY see a McDonalds within your view ... and you do not have to be a customer there to use the bathroom. Because no one who works at McDonalds gives a damn about anything. In general. So you can stroll right in, and head to the toilets and no one will stop you. Warning though: McDonalds are NASTY in this city. They're like 3rd world bathrooms. Only use this option if you literally cannot wait a moment longer.

-- This is a little-known secret, to all book lovers: The Strand has public facilities. I hang out at the Strand ALL. THE. TIME. For HOURS. ON. END. And before I discovered the bathrooms, I always felt a bit stressed out there, because I thought I would have to LEAVE if I had to "go", and then come back. But no. There are 2 rickety bathrooms on the premises. Just know that the toilets look like they are from the late 19th century, AND that the bathrooms are so small that you must urinate with your knees up around your ears. But that being said. THEY DO EXIST. Just ask, if you happen to be there.

I certainly hope that this helps and that this frees you up from any "what the hell do I do if I have to go??" anxiety, as you pound the pavement of this gorgeous dirty town.

Before you see "The Aviator"

you really need to read CW's post. He's an expert on this stuff, and the globe is too small.

The real question is:

Poop discussion following. Enter at your own risk.

Do you, or do you not, poop at work?

This makes me think of a tangential discussion: are you able to poop in a public bathroom stall at all? This may be only applicable to women - or MOSTLY applicable to women - not sure ... but many of us sit around agonizing about this.

Now not to be totally gross but here goes: I got no problem with it. Bathrooms are THERE for me to do my thing. Why should I be embarrassed about ... er... using the bathroom appropriately?

I swear to God that ... from wherever I am in NYC - you put me down on any random street corner - and I will be able to tell you where the nearest public bathroom is. I mean, to some degree, you HAVE to have that talent here in the city. If you want any freedom, I mean, if you want to be able to spend 6 hours window-shopping in Soho. (And sorry, but the women who work in the shoe stores in Soho NEVER poop. Those women look inhumanly perfect, and it would be impossible to go up to them and say, "Uh ... I need to use your bathroom ... ???") No. They would shame you. "Bathroom? Wow. I don't need to use those."

Maybe I'm weird, but I have no problem doing my business in a public bathroom. I don't know. IT'S A BATHROOM. WHAT THE HELL ELSE AM I GONNA DO IN THERE? It's not like I poop in the fountain at Lincoln Center, or on the escalator at Virgin Records. IT'S A BATHROOM. THAT'S WHAT IT'S THERE FOR.

However, I do know many people (not just women - although they are MOSTLY women) who are completely unable to poop in a public bathroom. I am glad I am not cursed with that. I have a level of ambulatory freedom that these women don't. (Especially with my talent for knowing where all public bathrooms are, in all of the 5 boroughs.) Don't want to make it sound like I poop all day long. Of course not. But if I have to go? I am able to go. And I know where to go. Immediately.

I have pneumonia. Forgive me. I'm a bit consumed with bodily functions right now, and Dooce's post brought it to the forefront.

Diary Friday

Here's an explanation of what I'm doing.

I'm going to post a couple of entries from our time in Ireland as a family, when I was ... 13? 14? Something like that. I pulled out this dog-eared notebook this morning, read these entries, and laughed so hard I cried.

I know that I am going to have to insert little editorial comments throughout the text. I will not be able to help myself.

APRIL - EASTER IN IRELAND

We are in the car on our way up to a mountain and Grania O'Malley's castle.

We are now here at Grania's fort - a small stone castle with tiny windows. There are yellow butterflies here. The fort is right on the beach with water of the most gorgeous blue I have ever seen. There are low windows and I can climb out. I am now sitting on a window ledge with my feet dangling over rocks. And I can look across that beautiful water to the mainland with the heather and the mountains and the big puffy clouds. It is really windy and cold here.

I am having my lunch (a piece of white bread). [Ed: WTF? Are you a pauper or something?]

It is so nice here!!! This place is called Carrickkildaunel or something like that. It was probably built in the 15th century. Grania was a pirate queen and she visited Queen Elizabeth I in London and received the same reception as the queen did. Inside, there are balconies and windows and openings for other floors. There used to be ladders but there aren't now. It would be so neat to go up there and explore. Dad said it's probably filled with bird droppings. [Ed: Thanks for the magic, Dad. heh heh]

We have stopped again at this fort facing Achill Sound with all these little islands and patches of sand from the low tide. We look across the Sound to a green mountain divided into squares by stone walls. Looking across the water (it is all blue-green and clear and you can see the bottom), we can see Grania's castle.

We came home. Finally. I was exhausted. And we sat around and relaxed for an hour and a half. I write my stories, listened to my tape recorder [Ed: HAHAHAHA This is pre-walkman days ... so ... I'm in the B&B ... listening to my tape recorder. What on EARTH was I listening to? Probably ELO or something.]. Then I romped crazily with Siobhan for a while, and then I got myself locked in the bathroom!!!!!!!!! [Ed: Yes. That many exclamation points.]

I'm going to miss staying on Achill Island. I really love it here.

APRIL

Guess where we're going now --- another Abbey. I don't believe it. I am not getting out of the car. Do you know how boring stupid old Abbeys get??? [Ed: No, Sheila. We don't. Why don't you tell us.]

We are staying now in this really nice B&B in Sligo and I HAVE A ROOM ALL TO MYSELF. I love it!!!! I can listen to my tapes [Ed: Oh Jeez. Those tapes again.] and I love it!!

After we settled in, I read some History and English, listened to my tapes [Ed: Okay, Sheila, we got it. You listened to your tapes. You told us that.], and then went down into their wonderful sitting room with a furry rug to watch the movie "Oliver Twist" (no music). IT WAS SO WONDERFUL. [Ed: Stop screaming] It had Alec Guinness and Anthony Newley as the Artful Dodger. It was terrific!

I went back upstairs and painted my nails [Ed: Uh-oh. Even at 14 I was a slave to the beauty myth. Call Naomi Wolf.], and then I read about the Renaissance for a while, and after that I went back downstairs and watched Giselle with Rudolph Nureyev. TERRIFIC. TERRIFIC. TERRIFIC. [Ed: Again, with the screaming?]

Siobhan now wants to be a ballerina and she asked me to point my toes and then she told me I wasn't doing it right.

Then we watched a special on the Ritz Hotel that was INCREDIBLE [Ed: Apparently, TV in Ireland makes one scream at the top of one's lungs. Repeatedly.] and then I went to bed in my cozy little room and I watched all the city toughs walk by. One boy noticed me and waved to me.

By the way, I found a Pac-man machine today and played three games. [Ed: Which, if you think about it, is REALLY the important thing. Feck Grania's castle. Where's the Pac-man?]

The revival of Diary Friday

Yes, Beth, yes, Dad, yes, siblings, and old friends from high school (and the couple of you out there who don't know me who enjoyed that stuff) ... I have decided to bring back the old Diary Friday feature. This was one of the things I started, the second I started up this site in 2002: post entries from my journals, every Friday. I have kept a journal since I was 11 years old. I have literally boxes and boxes of them stashed away in various cupboards up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Journal-keeping is a habit with me. I rarely look through them - except when I'm trying to get inspired to start a new story, a new essay, whatever. I wrote stuff down in those long-ago days that I would NEVER remember now ... and sometimes that's a good thing, sometimes it's a bad thing. Like - who wants to remember in detail the pain and angst of adolescence? However, sometimes, just sometimes, I can read my yowls of teenage agony about this or that, and I start to laugh so hard that tears stream down my face.

I love that feeling. It gives one perspective. It helps you (me) not to take things so damn seriously.

Here's the archive of all that Diary Friday stuff.

I stopped doing "Diary Friday" mainly because the readership got way bigger. And strangers were reading me. I posted that stuff mainly for my parents, my siblings, and my friends - who were the only people who read me at first. I suddenly got shyer about sharing some of this old stuff. I did get a couple of sweet emails from "strangers" out there, saying, "I hope you bring back those diary entries. I loved them."

So I'm mainly posting this stuff for my family and friends, who are all co-stars in these old entries - and also to those of you out there who were bummed when I stopped the "feature", whatever you want to call it. I'm also posting these entries to the people out there who have kept journals, who remember what it was like to be a teenager, and who can revel in their own memories here in my comments section. I realize that not too many people out there would ever want to share unedited versions of their high school diaries. However, I find it amusing, cathartic, and interesting. The emails I got from strangers, some of the comments left by strangers in those posts ... were all along the lines of: "Wow, I SO remember feeling that way when I was 14 ... It brought back so many memories - I cringe when I remember how awkward I was, or that time when I ... blah blah blah"

This is the main reason I want to post these things. If it's cathartic for me to share this stuff, then I have got to believe it's cathartic for people to read it. Not everybody - some people will probably cringe in horror at these journal entries. That's fine. I'm not posting them for you.

You out there ... who loved this stuff ... These are for you.

I'll be posting an entry shortly. It's a doozy.

The adventures of Cashel, continued

As we all know, Cashel got through his first day at a new school relatively unscathed.

Here is the update.

There is a "bully on the bus". Of course there is. Isn't there always a bully on the bus? As I remember from my own childhood, the school bus could be treacherous territory, because there was only one adult around to monitor things, and that adult was also ... er ... driving. So some pretty sketchy Lord of the Flies behavior could flourish on the bus. I lived in terror of the girls who sat in the back of the bus. They were evil incarnate, frankly.

So Cashel has had a run-in with "the bully on the bus". The "bully on the bus" is a girl.

He told my brother (his dad) all about it. Apparently, this little she-witch (I want to wring her neck) hit Cashel over the head with a bottle, and declared loudly, "YOU'RE GROSS."

Cashel confided seriously to his dad, "The bottle didn't hurt too bad. But it did hurt that she said 'you're gross.' "

So much for that whole sticks and stones thing ...

God, I hate it when the patriarchy straps me to my treadmill

A fantastic post by Ann Althouse which pretty much describes my problems with current-day feminism.

Huh.

I wasn't aware that when I put on lipstick, it was because I am a slave to the beauty myth. Poor me. Now I'm enlightened.

I wasn't aware that when I curled my hair, I was actually a pathetic little female, who is only doing such things to attract men. (Sidenote: Er ... okay ... got one question though: WHAT THE F*** IS WRONG WITH WANTING TO ATTRACT MEN?)

I wasn't aware that wanting to lose weight and be fit meant that I was actually brainwashed about body image by the patriarchal structures.

Feminism of the kind skewered by Ann A. is - well, it's always struck me as rather silly, but obviously that kind of thinking has dominated any feminist discourse for ... oh ... 30 years ... despite its increasing irrelevance. Thank God for Camille Paglia. For years, she was the only one shrieking (yes, shrieking) about how idiotic (and destructive) these views actually were. The main thing I feel from such stuff is condescension. They STILL are trying to tell women who to be, how to behave, what to wanthow to think ... Jesus. Do they EVER listen to themselves??

And so tonight, in honor of the feminist losers, I am going to paint my nails, take a bubble bath, and afterwards I will shave my legs, and then I will break out all the girlie products I can find (the moisturizer, the sea salt body scrub, the facial mask, the eye cream) ... and as I do all this, stuff that I actually enjoy, I will wonder: Huh, am I doing all this stuff because I really enjoy it, or am I just fooling myself, and am I really doing it all out of pathetic ignorance, unaware that all of this stuff is actually IMPOSED on me from above by the PATRIARCHY.

Yawn.

Where's my lipstick.

I am evil

I literally laughed out loud when I read this news.

Oh so what, you might think, that's not evil ... (and please, spare me any comments along the lines of: "Why do you think that's evil? That's not evil ... you're not evil ..." I'M KIDDING. Okay? I enjoy hyperbole, so don't try to talk me out of it, cause it totally kills the joke. I hate to even say this, because even THIS much is killing the joke!)

So anyway. I read the news, and I guffawed with laughter. Immediately. Loudly.

And then I felt a prick of shame. Because of my evil-ness.

Here's the deal:

I didn't laugh out loud because it was FUNNY. I laughed out loud because I was GLAD.

And I am STILL laughing. This is so AWESOME!!! I am so GLAD this has happened. I cannot tell you how funny I think this is. And tragic ... in a truly delicious way. But still. Laughing! I glory in my own evil. Please glory in evil with me.

"His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe ..."

A lovely piece on endings in art. The ends of books, plays, symphonies ...

An excerpt:

A great artistic ending, by contrast, is both startling and inevitable, mysteriously certain. It clarifies even as it complicates, crystallizes and expands. Think of the snow that falls across Dublin in James Joyce's short story "The Dead," or the ravishing last scene of "Der Rosenkavalier." Think of Rosebud in "Citizen Kane" or "Ode to Joy," that exultant crown of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony....

For David Thomson, author of the New Biographical Dictionary of Film, the last image of John Wayne in "The Searchers" comes to mind. The shot of Wayne silhouetted in the doorway, deciding whether he might stay or must move on, telescopes the film's action to a single moment. "Extraordinary," says Thomson, his voice hushed. "When he walks away and that door closes, we know this man is an endless wanderer, doomed to never live indoors."

Great stuff. The last sentence of The Dead is the best ending ever written. This isn't an opinion. It's a fact. Do not argue. At least not on this blog.

The end.

God bless the child

Yesterday, Cashel ... my dear brave nephew ... started a new school. He is seven. He has had a rocky road. But yesterday, he faced his fears, and walked into a new school. His mother said she peeked into the room as he sat down at his little desk, surrounded by strangers, and he sat there, with himself, and then he took a deep sighing shaky breath, in and out, getting ready for the day. SO BRAVE.

Apparently, he did very well. He made three new friends - they all invited him to do stuff with them. (I love these little boys DEARLY for that reason alone).

One invited Cashel to play "hotshot".

"Hey, Cashel, wanna play hot shot?"

Cashel had no idea what "hotshot" was. A video game? A gameboy extravaganza? But he said (being brave), "Sure."

Turns out that the kid had said "hopscotch". Cashel had never heard of it.

I am so glad that hopscotch is alive and well on playgrounds in America.

My dearest Cashel, my brave boy, meeting new people, facing his fears. HEART-CRACK!!

Cool!

Okay, this is fabulously interesting.

John Brockman, publisher and editor of Edge (which describes itself as The World's Question Center) asked 100 scientists and thinkers and ... you know, big brainiac-types, the question:

"WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?"

I have just gotten LOST in all of the responses. They are all so thought-provoking (and so diverse) that I feel like I might have a heart attack.

A couple snippets (each of these has an accompanying essay with it):

"I believe that human talents are based on distinct patterns of brain connectivity."

"I am convinced that quantum mechanics is not a final theory."

"There are good reasons to believe that the universe is infinite. "

"I believe that we are writing software the wrong way."

"I can't prove it more than anecdotally, but I believe evolution has purpose and direction."

Etc. Etc. I'm tellin' ya, this site is a black hole. It will suck you in, and you will NEVER WANT TO LEAVE.

And so:

What do I believe that I can't prove? Well, first of all, I'm not a scientist, so I can't really prove anything ANYway.

But I'll give it a go.

I believe in a collective human unconscious. I believe that we all (past and present) are connected in ways that are - primal, eternal, archtypal. Dreams are symbolic messages from that collective. I'm a Jungian, basically. Not a Freudian.

I believe that there is life on other planets. I believe in ET. I believe in many ETs. I believe the universe is FILLED with life.

I believe in true love. Not only do I believe in it, but I also believe it is as rare as the rarest of diamonds. It's not an "ooh, I believe in soul mates" kind of malarkey. If there's one phrase I wish I could STRIKE from the English language, it's "soul mate". No. Fuck soul mates. But I do believe in a very specific kind of love ... er ... how to explain it. "True love" will have to suffice. My belief in this kind of love is scientific. I think true love (not your garden variety love, but TRUE love - huge difference) has to do with chemistry. Literally. Body chemistry, brain chemistry, pheromones, the 5 senses ... Nothing about souls or heart or spirit ... but chemistry. Can't prove it, but this is what I believe. (And believe it or not, I think that MY way of looking at it is MORE romantic than the "soul mate" way. But then again, I am certifiable.)

And - to quote Annie Lennox: "I believe in the power of creation, I believe in the good vibration, I believe in love alone, yeah yeah ..."

Anyway, here is the link to the coolest site. EVER.

The perfect imaginary dinner - continued

As I mentioned, I did do a post on "People I would like to dine with, living or dead"

But I'm gonna re-launch it, and re-format it, following El Capitan's lead. Like Emily, this list would probably change on a daily basis. Here is where I stand, today. I will add one category. Because ... I MUST.

Please add your own in the comments section.

THE AUTHORS

Christopher Marlowe. I have a TON of questions to ask that guy.

Charles Dickens. Just because I have a feeling that the dude was a blast. He could sit at the head of the table, keep the liquor flowing, regale us with stories ... I would bet there wouldn't be one awkward pause with Chuck around.

Emily Bronte. Because I think it would have done the woman good to get out a bit, and lighten up. I'd like to get drunk with Emily, and hear what she thought about things. In her poem "Often rebuked", she wrote what has become, for me, a personal credo: "I walk where my own nature leads me. It vexes me to choose another guide". I've got all these ideas about who Emily was, what she must have been like - but I'd like to see her for myself.

Edmund Burke. I think he and I would have a lot to talk about. I'd probably monopolize his company at the table, when I wasn't whispering in the corner with Emily Bronte.

James and Nora Joyce. I mean. That's all that really needs to be said about THAT.

Rebecca West. Naturally. I'd have to get over my idolatry, though ... because idolatry doesn't make for good conversation. I would just want to sit next to her, and kiss the hem of her skirt. Also, ask her about her affairs with Chaplin and HG Wells. Oh yeah, and pump her for information about Split. If I were in charge of the seating arrangements, I would place her in between me and CW.

Which leads me to the next category of guests:

THE BLOGGERS I am choosing these folks merely because it would be FIREWORKS if we all got together at the same time. Er ... May 6, 2005, right Emily??

Emily

Bill

CW

Dan

Mitch

The world would never recover from such a meeting of the minds.

THE HISTORICAL FIGURES

John and Abigail Adams Oh God, just the thought of it!!!

Alexander Hamilton Now THAT would be interesting, and I would definitely have to make sure he sat nowhere near John or Abigail. Alexander Hamilton is on my "historical freebie" list, although that's not the ONLY reason I would want him to be there. I want to talk about the Federalist Papers. I want to ask him what happened during the duel. However. I also have a little historical crush on him, so I would probably end up in some dark corner, making out with him like a banshee, before the night was out. Don't judge me for it. You only live once.

Ulugh Beg. Why? Cause he sounds incredible, that's why. Grandson of Tamerlane, 15th century astronomer, ruler (briefly) of Samarqand ... His observatories (the ruins of them anyway) still stand in Uzbekistan. I'd love to meet him.

THE ARTISTS - and by that, I mean actors

Cary Grant. Even though I'd be terrified to meet him, I am sure he would make me feel comfortable immediately. Get me a drink, get me talking about myself, make me laugh ... you know, all of those things that true gentlemen know how to do instinctively.

Lauren Bacall circa "To Have and Have Not". I realize that I would have to drag her away from CW in order to get a word in edgewise, but still ... I'd love to hang out with her at that time in her life.

Gena Rowlands This white-hot talent is my favorite actress. She was married to John Cassavetes - another idol. I need to ask her so many questions about working with him, and how she works. She's still alive. So this meeting could still, conceivably, happen.

Gary Cooper After I'm done with Alexander Hamilton, I'll take on Gary Cooper. Uhm ... woah. That's a thought. No, but seriously. I love Gary Cooper, I'd love to sit and converse with him. And ask him questions about his life, and acting, etc. etc.

Oh God, there's so many more people I'd love to meet ... but this will stand for now.

Please add your own in the comments.

Best of 2004? Oh hell, my memory sucks

But if memory serves ...

The best movie I saw in 2004 was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. (Or, make that, the best NEW movie I saw).

2004 also marked the momentous occasion of my first viewing of Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious which has quickly become, I think, one of my favorite movies ever made. In fact, there were a couple of months there when I thought I would need to check myself into some sort of rehab center.

Ahem.

But in terms of movies MADE in 2004, Eternal Sunshine was the best. I saw it in the movie theatre 4 times, and I now own it. It had, perhaps, the best trailer for a film I have ever seen (it should be studied in marketing/advertising classes). Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind touches me on that rare level - the soul. I rambled about my response to it here. I took that movie personally. Great film.

And the best BOOK I read this year?

No contest. Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. I babbled about the book when I finished it here, but words can't describe my experience with that book. It BLEW me away. Took me from May to September to complete it, but ... I already know that I will NEVER be done with that book. It'll be one of those dog-eared falling-apart copies on my bookshelf (like Norman Rush's Mating, like Nicholas Mosley's Hopeful Monsters - both books have taped-on covers, and markings in the margins) ... books that are like companions, not like books at all.

The spirit of St. Louis

In line with this massive post I did on the Lindberghs - here's something else. I love this story. It combines two of the Sheila obsessions: the Lindberghs, and Billy Wilder (who, of course, directed Jimmy Stewart in The Spirit of St. Louis). Wilder and Lindbergh were good friends and here is Wilder's story (or one of them) of filming that movie (and what he would have done, if he had been free from obligations to Lindbergh) - I got this excerpt from the book Conversations with Billy Wilder - a genius book, where Cameron Crowe interviews Billy Wilder about each and every film he directed (I've posted 6,000 quotes from it before):

Billy Wilder: "Spirit of St. Louis". I got into that. I suggested it. But I could not get in a little deeper, into Lindbergh's character. There was a wall there. We were friends, but there were many things I could not talk to him about. It was understood -- the picture had to follow the book. The book was immaculate. It had to be about the flight only. Not about his family, about the daughter, the Hauptmann thing, what happened after the flight ... just the flight itself.

I heard a story from newspapermen who were there in Long Island waiting for him to take off. And the newspapermen told me a little episode that happened there, and that would have been enough to make this a real picture.

The episode was that Lindbergh was waiting for the clouds to disappear -- the rain and the weather had to be perfect before he took off. There was a waitress in a little restaurant there. She was young, and she was very pretty. And they came to her and said, "Look, this young guy there, Lindbergh, sweet, you know, handsome. He is going to--" "Yes, I know, he is going to fly over the water." And they said, "It's going to be a flying coffin, full of gas, and he's not going to make it. But we come to you for the following reason. The guy has never been laid. Would you do us a favor, please. Just knock on the door, because the guy cannot sleep..."

So she does it.

And then, at the very end of the picture, when there's the parade down Fifth Avenue, millions of people, and there is that girl standing there in the crowd. She's waving at him. And he doesn't see her. She waves her hand at him, during the ticker-tape parade, the confetti raining down. He never sees her. He's God now.

This would be, this alone would be, enough to make the picture. Would have been a good scene. That's right -- would have been a good scene. But I could not even suggest it to him.

Cameron Crowe: Couldn't you have had your producer bring it up?

Billy Wilder: No. Absolutely not. They would have withdrawn the book or something, "There you go, Hollywood, out of here!" I don't know -- very tough guy, very tough guy. I know, because I pulled jokes on him. One day when we were flying to Washington, Charles Lindbergh and I, we were going to the Smithsonian Institution to see the real Spirit of St. Louis, which we had duplicated. Hanging off the ceiling, it's there. And we were in a plane flying to Washington, and it's very rough, so I turned to him and I said, "Charles, wouldn't that be fun if this plane now crashed, can you see the headlines? -- LUCKY LINDY IN CRASH WITH JEWISH FRIEND!" And he said, "Oh, no no no, don't talk like this!"

Cameron Crowe: Did you ever think about using that character in another picture? The waitress from the early days?

Billy Wilder: Sure, that can be used, yeah, but it fit there. And just that girl, who we'd see again at the very end. And you fade out on that. That would have made the whole picture.

But it was not to be, so we had to invent ... because I did not want to have voice-over. I had to invent a fly that finds its way into the cockpit, and Lindbergh, played by James Stewart, talks to the fly. The fly is very good, because when Lindbergh talks to the fly, he says, "Look, you're good luck, because nobody's ever seen a fly crash."

One of my favorite memories of all time:

Standing on a high windy plain with my first boyfriend (can't remember which state we were in ... we traveled through so many ... might have been one of the Dakotas, but not sure) - as a thunderstorm gathered on the horizon and the light got low, and sickly-green, and so charged with potential you nearly wanted to scream. Waiting for the release. We had been hiking for hours, watching as the day changed, as the sky got more ominous. There had been a massive wind, whipping the tall grass on its side, nearly carrying me away with it. We got some incredible pictures of the approaching storm (we had no business being up on the high plains watching forks of lightning jag their way towards us, but whatever, it was gorgeous) ... but the pictures cannot convey the feeling in the air itself . The hairs on my arm rose up, to meet the electricity in the molecules.

There were no people out there but us. (For obvious reasons. We were idiots.) Just a huge sky, changing on a moment to moment basis, getting fuller and fuller, lower and lower, and GREEN - not black, not purple ... but GREEN ... the sound of the wind in the grass ... the feeling that we were about to get caught out in something pretty enormous and spectacular.

And then, I'll never forget it:

For a brief whooshing moment, everything went still. The wind stopped. As though a giant hand had turned off the wind machine. Hush. A sudden alarming hush fell over the land. My boyfriend and I both stopped, feeling the change. We paused ... holding our breath ...

We were having the time of our lives. We were watching the storm unfold as though it was the best movie we had ever seen. We kept looking at each other, wordlessly, like: hoooly shiiiiit ...

Silence covered the plains (this was the real calm before the storm, turns out - when everything came to a sudden sharp stop ... took a breath ... and then the heavens opened up) ... and in that silence, we heard a sound. Something that, to be honest, I've only heard in movies.

The thundering sound of horses hooves ... galloping horses ... the galloping sound of MANY horses ...

It has got to be one of the most exciting sounds I've ever heard in my life. Even though I've only heard that sound in movies, when it came to my ears, there was a rush of familiarity, and love, and knowing: Yes. That is that sound. I know that sound. Something in my DNA knows that sound intimately. It was thrilling.

We were on the edge of a large dip in the land, a bit off the trail, and the sound came from far below. We walked over to the edge, in the middle of the eerie stillness, all the grass suddenly straight, still, motionless, and looked out over the dip in the land. And there we saw them - we had only heard about them and heard that it was rare to get a glimpse of them - but there they were - a herd of wild horses, racing along the bottom of the plain in a massive herd. There were about 20 of them, galloping like mad things, freaking out because of the storm ... their manes and tails flying, their hooves churning up the dirt ... neighing and whinnying in alarm, bucking and kicking and running ...

I have never seen anything so beautiful, so moving, so unbelievable in my life.

They were fierce, savage, a bit scary, almost mythical. I've seen wild horses like that in my dreams. My fantasies.

We got no pictures, obviously. We couldn't have captured it. We didn't need to capture it.

I love horses anyway, but ... to see wild horses ... and not to see them grazing on a hill ... but to see them AS wild, to see them running ... Oh my God. Like Marlowe said: "the wondrous architecture of the world..."

Boyfriend said to me after we gaped at their frenzy far down the plain for a while, "We should get the hell back to the van. They know something we don't."

And we RAN off the plains, as quickly as we could, as the wind started picking up again, alarmingly, this time cold - a whoosh of cold ... and we made it back to the van before all FECKIN' HELL BROKE LOOSE. Massive thunder and lightning and wind storm on the high plains.

But I am glad we took the risk. To see those horses. Those spectacular wild horses.

And so this news ... sent to me by Noggie (one of my dear readers) ... is potentially horrible. Hurts my heart to think about.

Oh well

I have this big post I want to do on Christopher Marlowe, and Shakespeare, and Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Shakespeare's Henry plays ... and the compare, and the contrast ... I had it all planned out in my head, and I assure you it was quite brilliant. But I have the flu. So the brilliance will have to wait. "Damn", you all must be thinking.

I will leave you with this tidbit from Tamburlaine, Marlowe's feckin's GENIUS play (I love Marlowe. Like Shakespeare, he BEGS to be read outloud):

Nature, that framed us of four elements,
Warring within our breasts for regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world
And measure every wand'ring planet's course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all:
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.

Yum.

Yum. On multiple levels.

First of all, the language level: "the wondrous architecture of the world" ... "the restless spheres" ... "climbing after knowledge infinite"

"The wondrous architecture of the world."

You know, I know exactly what he's talking about.

Marlowe completely rocks.

But I have the flu. One cannot be brilliant, and also have the flu. Not possible.

And so, to bed.

Resolutions

Michele has a funny take on New Year's Resolutions: "It has been my experience that the best New Year resolutions to make are the ones that are easiest to keep." I think I am going to follow her lead.

2005 List of Resolutions That I Vow to Keep:

-- Have at least 3 obsessions with dead male movie stars per year.

-- Say to friends, "No thanks, I can't tonight, I'm busy" - and then stay home and read.

-- Read an insane number of books every year. Add to the library. Buy more book shelves. Build them if you must.

-- Worry obsessively over things I cannot control

-- Get up at 5:30 every day and write for 3 hours before heading out into the world.

-- Make sure Cashel knows that his Auntie Sheila is there for him

-- Blog.

-- Watch Bring It On at least once a month

-- Same with Office Space and Notting Hill

-- Moisturize skin daily

-- Rant about how much I hate Renee Zellweger as much as possible

-- Same with Jewel. Rant about Jewel MORE

Add your own in the comments.

"Self-evident"

In this post below, I mentioned the fact that Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence, had the words "sacred and undeniable" instead of what is now there: "self-evident": "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable ..."

The stories of the editing sessions in the Continental Congress that sweltering summer in Philadelphia are famous. Jefferson couldn't stand to be edited. He lived in a lofty realm of abstract ideals, and when he put his ideals down on paper, nothing was accidental or coincidental. He liked dichotomies - he used them often - pitting one thing against another. Perhaps exaggerating the case, or, in some cases, fictionalizing the struggle altogether. But his strength was never as a lawmaker, really - or a down-and-dirty compromiser. His strength lay in setting down the ideal - in no uncertain terms. And so to have all those petty other little delegates touch his prose was intolerable to him.

You can see Jefferson's original mindset, with his word choice: the rights are "sacred and undeniable". There's something a bit more lofty and philosophical about those words, in comparison to the more blunt "self-evident". Just an interpretation o' mine. I find all of this interesting, because of how it reveals to us the workings of Jefferson's mind, his concerns. Or, I like to think it does.

Joseph Ellis, in his prologue, discusses the hold that Jefferson has over Americans ...and tries to figure out where it comes from, where the magic actually lies. It's great great stuff. I love Ellis' writing. So here's a small excerpt about this whole issue of "sacred and undeniable" vs. "self-evident":

Before editorial changes were made by the Continental Congress, Jefferson's early draft made it even clearer that his intention was to express a spiritual vision: ' We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & unalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness." These are the core articles of faith in the American Creed. Jefferson's authorship of these words is the core of his seductive appeal across the ages, his central claim, on posterity's affection. What, then, do they mean? How do they make magic?

Merely to ask the question is to risk being accused of some combination of treason and sacrilege, since self-evident truths are not meant to be analyzed; that is what being self-evident is all about. But when these words are stripped of the patriotic haze, read straightaway and literally, two monumental claims are being made here. The explicit claim is that the individual is the sovereign unit in society; his natural state is freedom from and equality with all other individuals; this is the natural order of things. The implicit claim is that all restrictions on this natural order are immoral transgressions, violations of what God intended; individuals liberated from such restrictions will interact with their fellows in a harmonious scheme requiring no external discipline and producing maximum human happiness.

This is a wildly idealistic message, the kind of good news simply too good to be true. It is, truth be told, a recipe for anarchy. Any national government that seriously attempted to operate in accord with these principles would be committing suicide. But, of course, the words were not intended to serve as an operational political blueprint. Jefferson was not a profound political thinker. He was, however, an utterly brilliant political rhetorician and visionary. The genius of his vision is to propose that our deepest yearnings for personal freedom are in fact attainable. The genius of his rhetoric is to articulate irreconcilable human urges at a sufficiently abstract level to mask their mutual exclusiveness. Jefferson guards the American Creed at this inspirational level, which is inherently immune to scholarly skepticism and a place where ordinary Americans can congregate to speak the magic words together. The Jeffersonian magic works because we permit it to function at a rarefied region where real-life choices do not have to be made.

This kind of "rarefied region" is why Jefferson is such a lightning rod for controversy. Who is this man of high ideals, lofty goals ... who lived a life of such contradictions?

Bah.

As a person who has behaved, at times, in completely incomprehensible ways, in ways that would BAFFLE biographers or historians trying to pin me down ... I'm not all that disturbed by a man of contradictions.

The contradictions make him more interesting, not less. As I've said before, I'm an Adams girl myself - Thomas Jefferson always baffled me. I couldn't seem to get in there, I couldn't relate. Politically, I'm usually on John Adams' side, through their many years of correspondence and collaboration. Not always, but usually. Jefferson's political ideas and thoughts were ... almost trying to create a Utopia. And I'm scared of utopias. Or scared of those who really believe they can bring them about. (Er ... communism, mmkay?) But then ... there's something really necessary about ideals, and abstracts ... Hard to explain, but I think that that's the realm where Jefferson really shone. He put the abstract into language. Unforgettable language. But still. The guy is confusing. Infuriating, at times. That's why reading about him is always a fun endeavor. Everyone's got a different take, the lines are clearly drawn ...

I like Ellis' style, though. He accepts that there will be contradictions, and he also seems to accept (rare for historians) that there are just some things we can never know. First of all, because of the massive fire at Monticello in 1770 - which destroyed pretty much all of Jefferson's personal papers up until that time. We just don't know what was lost, and so there are huge gaps in the knowledge-base, because of that fire.

Here's what Ellis has to say about the current trend of tearing down the old heroes - the "let's trash the dead white males" syndrome. Ellis is speaking, in particular, about historian Gordon Wood, who had this to say about Jefferson: "We Americans make a great mistake in idolizing and making symbols of authentic figures who cannot and should not be ripped out of their time and place ... By turning Jefferson into the kind of transcendently moral hero that no authentic historically situated human being could ever be, we leave ourselves demoralized by the time-bound weaknesses of this 18th century slaveholder." Okay - this is pretty typical rhetoric about Jefferson right now and for the last, oh, 30 years. Whatever. And he asked for it, really, because he's such a contradictory kind of guy - but still. I get a bit tired of the argument, because - you know how PESKY actual FACTS can be - there is more than one side to this story. However, Ellis responds to Gordon Wood in this manner:

It seemed to me that Wood's point was true enough; in fact, just the kind of sober assessment of the Jefferson problem one wanted to hear amid all the shrill pronouncements. But it also seemed abundantly clear that it would make absolutely no practical difference. Yes, perhaps we all would be better served if Americans were allowed to select their heroes (and villains) only from fictional characters, who would therefore never disappoint us. But we won't and can't. We would be even better served if we discarded our need for heroes altogether. But no people in recorded history have ever been able to do that, and there was no reason to believe that modern Americans would prove an exception. Moreover, the scholarly instinct to establish a secure checkpoint between the past and the present in order to prevent the flow of traffic back and forth, while it had the advantage of deterring those ideologiically motivated raiding parties that wanted to go back to capture heroes and villains to suit their own political agenda, also had the disadvantage of making history an irrelevant, cloistered, indeed dead place, populated only by historians.

And all of this makes me think of my favorite line of Walt Whitman's:

"Do I contradict myself?
All right then. I contradict myself.
I am large.
I contain multitudes."

It's all just very very cool. As is obvious, I'm digging this book enormously.

I have commitment issues

I cannot settle down on reading JUST ONE BOOK. It is impossible. I cannot commit. I want to keep my options perpetually open.

And so I am juggling the following books now:

-- still working on Underworld (took a break on that one during the Ireland trip)

-- still working on Secret History of the IRA- usually read that one during my commute (which lasts, on a bad day, about 15 minutes - so it's kind of slow going)

-- tearing through Conquest's The Great Terror. It's dense, yeah, but the dude can feckin' WRITE, okay?? It's a page-turner.

-- and now - I couldn't help myself. I had to start my latest: Joseph Ellis' American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. The prologue alone brought mushy tears to my eyes. Why? Because I am a total fucking geek. That's why.

My first overheard snippet of 2005

Today it is 60 degrees out. Unseasonably warm. It feels completely STRANGE. Nobody can believe it. People are wearing shorts. It is January.

So I woke up today. At 7:45 a.m., which, to me, is like sleeping until 1 in the afternoon. I felt like a decadent lazy sultan or something.

I'm still sick, so I got up to just take a nice mild walk through the morning.

Put the hair in the ponytail, put on the sneaks, the jeans, the sunglasses, put the kleenex in the pocket, and emerged into the misty glimmering morning. New York City looked like a mirage across the water.

I meandered along. Nobody was up except for me, of course. I walked by the reservoir. I listened to birds chirping. Occasionally, I blew my nose. I enjoyed myself.

2 women approached me on the sidewalk. They were probably in their late 20s. The morning was so quiet, and still, that their conversation, while occurring at a normal decibel, seemed rather loud.

And as they passed me by, I heard one girl say this to the other girl, obviously in the middle of telling a story:

"So I said to her, 'Thanks very much, I'm really flattered, but I like cock.' "

8 a.m. January 1. 2005. Happy new year.