The Sheila Variations

Happy place

These images always make me think of my grandparents house in Newton - and my aunt Regina, who had a big book of Maxfield Parrish's work in her room. I was transported by him. Still love him - and every year when I buy a wall calendar, it's a Maxfield Parrish one. Maybe it's the smidgeon of romantic spirit left in me (Keith would laugh at me for saying that. "You're over-the-top romantic, Sheila. Gimme a break.") - but I find him almost gushingly fantastic. I look at his stuff and I find myself going off into lovely beautiful worlds in my head, ramparts upon ramparts, vaulted clouds in the sky. You know. Romantic! I'm not generally into fantasy (as a genre), or pretty Renaissance Faire princesses running through misty woods wearing big cone-hats. Not my style. But Maxfield Parrish? Bring it on. There's something psychedelic about him. Druggy. (More on Parrish here.)

Happy happy place!

(That last one is my favorite of all - I wrote a wee bit about it here.)

More happy places here!

The Books: "Sugar and Other Stories" - 'The Dried Witch' (A.S. Byatt)

Next up in my Daily Book Excerpt ... Adult fiction shelves:

This excerpt is from "The Dried Witch", another short story from the collection Sugar and Other Stories - by A.S. Byatt. This is an early version of one of Byatt's fables. It has the sound of myth, or legend ... there's an impersonal tone to the narrator (which is quite different from the more chatty or subjective tones of many of her narrators - like the one in 'Racine and the Tablecloth', among others). The story takes place in a primitive society (primitive meaning: not modern, no dishwashers or cars, so just calm down) - perhaps in Africa - somewhere definitely hot. It's not a Muslim community - the villagers believe in many gods. But it has the same hatred and suspicion of women. You just can't win if you're a woman. Everything is your fault. Infidelity? You brought it on. Sexuality is in women's hands, completely. You're raped? Your fault. The crime? Being a woman. Don't try to win, you won't be able to. Women are beheaded for being alone with a man who is not her relative. That fear hangs over all of the interpersonal relationships in the village. A-Oa is the heroine of our story ... which feels like an analogy for menopause, but I may be reading too much into it. It feels like the devastation of not being OF USE anymore. A-Oa is a woman who has suffered extraordinary losses. She had four sons - all of whom died. Her husband went off to fight in some war - and never returned. The village now suspects that she is a "jinx". She is bad luck. Not only is she bad luck - but she is purposefully malevolent. (She actually isn't - but that's how the village feels about her). She scares them. It's like whatever bad luck hovers around her is catching. There's also a fiery drought on. Everything is drying up. Is this the fault of the "jinx" too? The whole story has a malevolent feeling to it - A-Oa is blameless, yet is she? It's almost like the demands of communal living insist on a literal interpretation of events - not too much room for grey areas. A-Oa has interactions with people full of subtlety, like we all do ... but again: the literalists will take over, they turn everything ugly - those literal-minded people ... and that's what happens here. Meanwhile, A-Oa is also overwhelmingly aware of the dryness of her own body, the lack of saliva - it's a torment.

I would say the story is about 5 or 6 pages too long. It loses its impact just a tiny bit .... the ending is powerful and terrible. Byatt could have gotten there quicker.

Here's an excerpt.

Excerpt from from "The Dried Witch", another short story from the collection Sugar and Other Stories - by A.S. Byatt.

The courtyards were busy and chattering: worshippers moved between greater and lesser temples, brown-robed monk ofs carried baskets of rain and vegetables, families squatted in the dust and argued. In the greater Temple were the huge figures of the Wise Ones, three and awful, taller and wider than the eye could ever see at once, so that it was as much as you could do to focus on a heavy knee, or monstrous, mountainous hand, or far away the three faces, up in the dark of the roofspace, staring quietly out over the heads of the worshipping ants, wonderfully, characteristically blank, bearing a family resemblance in their perfect stillness. The brass lamps were all at the level of the altars, which were themselves below the level of the vast feet, which were dusty but not travel-stained. This gave the illusion that the Wise Ones towered away for ever, out of sight, out of apprehension, out of form. A-Oak bought an incense stick from a monk, lit it, and stood it with the others on one of the smaller altars; she bowed repeatedly, and set out her dishes of beans and fruit before kneeling to pray, her black and silver hair in the dust. It seemed to her that she did not know how to pray or what to ask for. In the past she had asked for sons: or to be forgiven for whatever had caused the sons she had to sicken and fail. To one side of her, standing beside the altar, was a small squat brass boy, a fat and polished child, not dusty like everything else in the huge, smoky and rattling place, but gleaming where countless soft dark hands had touched and caressed him. He wore a small scarlet cloth on a string, just large enough to cover whatever he had between his legs. It was known that his touch brought luck, brought boy-children. On every previous visit A-Oa had touched him. When she was young and humorous she had tickled him like a lover, laughing back quietly at her husband; after the loss of the first child she had touched the warm metal with fearful fingertips. Once she had come with Da-Shin and had touched the boy furtively, laying her fingers over his metal ones, asking friendship, complicity. He had a smile that took up his whole face, curling both mouth and eyebrow corners. She tried to tell the Wise Ones that she was afraid, that she was not herself, that there were changes she couldn't describe. All she was conscious of was the presence of the grinning boy, the sheen of countless handlings, gratified or denied, the dangling red cloth that was never lifted. She thought: when I am dead, this will be over, meaning by "this" the boy and all his works. The Wise Ones vouchsafed no relief, perhaps because she expected so little, was closed to their silent lines of life as her tongue and palate were to water.

Trot

This great post pretty much sums up my feelings about Trot Nixon.

One more below the jump ...

Writer's rooms

Edna O'Brien's room. I'm lovin' it. The fireplace. Beckett and Joyce - and also the red. There's something very nice about that red. Also, the "harvest of dregs" inscription made me laugh.

The bookcases in Kureishi's writing room make me want to weep from envy.

And there's something I really like in this one too. The slants, the bookshelves - and that CHAIR!

Oh, and since I'm in the "Byatt" section of my bookshelf - for the daily excerpt - here is HER writer's room. That one doesn't appeal to me as much - too modern - that lamp doesn't work for me (as inspiration, I mean) but I am interested to hear her words about why the room works for her.

One size most definitely does not fit all.

More glimpses into "writer's rooms" here.

COMMONPLACE BOOK

Member my old commonplace book? Here are a ton more. Many of them are writers either talking about their writing, or commenting on other writers. I feel I should say this: whether or not I agree with the sentiments of the quotes is irrelevant to me. It's the quote ITSELF I am interested in. [For example: I agree with all of the quotes bad-mouthing James. I hate James. But I am also highly interested in the opinions of those who found him brilliant. It's all good to me. It's all part of learning more about life, and writing, and people.] I feel I have to say this because when I've posted such quotes before, some readers get defensive - like: "Hey! I love Henry James!" or whatever - some tiresome remark like that. The quotes are not endorsements one way or the other. I like the quotes because they are a montage of artistic comments ... it's a jigsaw-puzzle of responses, and reading over them make me feel alive. They make me remember my own intellectual curiosity, my own ambitions ... and they make me love (all over again) people who READ. People who inquire, and love, and hate things strongly. This is why I keep those quotes.

My commonplace book is to remind me never to stop questioning, never to think, "There. Now I'm DONE".

It helps keep me in the conversation.

I hope you enjoy the quotes - I hope they make you think, or make you laugh (some very funny ones!!) God bless Oscar Wilde and his wit!

Commonplace

Will you do a total stranger the kindness of reading his verse?

Thank you!

Thomas Lanier Williams

-- Tennessee Williams, letter to editor Harriet Monroe, March 11, 1933

Commonplace

Dear Madame, you make an absurd, though common mistake in supposing that any human creature can help you to be an authoress, if you cannot become one in virtue of your own powers.

-- Charles Dickens, letter to reader, Dec. 27, 1866

Commonplace

Had I been a passionate man ... we should now have separated, I living in Montevideo as H.M. Minster and she breeding Samoyeds in the Gobi desert.

-- Harold Nicholson, diary entry, Dec. 24, 1933 - on his marriage to Vita Sackville-West

Commonplace

I have a higher and greater standard of principle [than George Washington]. Washington could not lie. I can lie but I won't.

-- Mark Twain, 1871

Commonplace

The works of [Samuel] Richardson ... are pictures of high life as conceived by a bookseller, and romances as they would be spiritualized by a Methodist preacher.

-- Horace Walpole, 1764

Commonplace

Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

-- Heinrich Heine

Commonplace

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

-- Emily Dickinson

Commonplace

Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the daytime or when both were sober.

-- James Thurber

Commonplace

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of 15.

-- Willa Cather

Commonplace

I have no more right to the name of a poet than a maker of mousetraps has to that of an engineer.

-- William Cowper

Commonplace

It resembles nothing that I know of, and reminds me of everything I admire.

-- Jean Cocteau on Marcel Proust's "Swann's Way"

Commonplace

Like Peter Pan, he never grew up, and he lived his own stories with such intensity that he ended by believing them himself.

-- Ford Madox Ford on Jack London, 1916

Commonplace

It is curious how vanity helps keep the successful man and wrecks the failure. In old days half of my strength was my vanity.

-- Oscar Wilde letter to friend following Wilde's release from jail, Nov. 16, 1897

Commonplace

His style has the desperate jauntiness of an orchestra fiddling away for dear life on a sinking ship.

-- Edmund Wilson on Evelyn Waugh

Commonplace

Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publication.

-- Fran Lebowitz

Commonplace

I don't mind what the opposition say of me, so long as they don't tell the truth.

-- Mark Twain, 1880

Commonplace

The years between 50 and 70 are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things and yet are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

-- TS Eliot, 1950

Commonplace

Dear Sir, excuse my enthusiasm or rather madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or engraver into my hand ....

-- William Blake, letter to William Hayley, Oct. 23, 1804

Commonplace

It was good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four.

-- Samuel Butler on Thomas Carlyle

Commonplace

Lord Sandwich: "Wilkes, you will die of a pox or the gallows."

John Wilkes: "That depends, my lord, on whether I embrace your lordship's mistress or your lordship's principles."

Commonplace

To write adequately one must know, above all, how bad are one's first drafts.

-- John Kenneth Galbraith

Commonplace

I'm a little shocked by her commonness at first sight; lines so hard and cheap. However, when this diminishes, she is so intelligent and inscrutable that she repays friendship.

-- Virginia Woolf on Katherine Mansfield, journal entry, Oct. 11, 1917

Commonplace

Some drunk dame told [James Thurber] at a party that she would like to have a baby by him. Jim said, "Surely you don't by unartificial insemination!"

-- Nunnally Johnson, letter to Groucho Marx, Oct. 9 1961

Commonplace

Thomas Hardy taught me to like Edgar Allan Poe, and Poe taught me about those 'Mimes in the form of God on high, blind prophets that come and go.'

--John Cowper Powys

Commonplace

I'm writing my third autobiography. The other two were premature.

-- Louis Untermeyer, said on his 90th birthday

Commonplace

It is in order to shine sooner that authors refuse to rewrite. Despicable. Begin again.

-- Albert Camus, Sept. 30, 1937

Commonplace

For my part I keep the Commandments, I love my neighbour as my selfe, and to avoid Coveting my neighbour's wife I desire to be covered by her; which you know is quite another thing.

-- William Congreve, Sept 27, 1700

Commonplace

There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

-- Red Smith

Commonplace

Paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.

-- Faulkner on his writing requirements

Commonplace

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Commonplace

Play to the lines, through the lines, but never between the lines. There simply isn't time for it.

-- George Bernard Shaw to actress Ellen Terry on performing Shakespeare, 1896

Commonplace

[I am working on] a poem of immeasurable length which will occupy me for the next four decades, unless it becomes a bore.

-- Ezra Pound, 1915

Commonplace

I always write my last line, my last paragraphs, my last page first.

-- Katherine Anne Porter

Commonplace

I don't play golf, am not a joiner. I vote Democrat, read as much as my eyes will stand, and work at my trade day in and day out. When I can find nothing better to do, I write.

-- William Carlos Williams

Commonplace

It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.

-- Robert Benchley

Commonplace

The possessor of a brilliant and almost inimitable prose style, and of scarcely any ideas at all.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald on Sherwood Anderson

Commonplace

The most complete example of human symbiosis I have ever seen.

-- Edmund Wilson to John Dos Passos on Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

Commonplace

Well, I hope they understand one another - nobody else would.

-- Wordsworth, 1846 - musing on the marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning

Commonplace

Now, my darling Nora, I want you to read over and over all I have written you. Some of it is ugly, obscene and bestial, some of it is pure and holy and spiritual; all of it is myself.

-- James Joyce, letter to Nora, Sept. 7 1909

Commonplace

In the time of your life, live - so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches. Seek goodness everywhere, and where it is found, bring it out of its hiding-place and let it be free and unashamed.

-- William Saroyan, preface to "Time of Your Life"

Commonplace

I am earnest, terribly earnest. Carlyle bending over the history of Frederick the Great was a mere trifle, a volatile butterfly, in comparison.

-- Joseph Conrad to critic Edward Garnelt

Commonplace

I am following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.

-- Dorothy Parker

Commonplace

The fictional Christophr Robin ... and his real-life namesake were not always on the best of terms ... In pessimistic moments ... it seemed to me, almost, that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders.

-- Christopher Milne, son of AA Milne

Commonplace

The simple truth is that she was the poet, and I the clever person by comparison.

-- Robert Browning on his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1871

Commonplace

The people die so, that now it seems they are fain to carry the dead to be buried by daylight, the nights not sufficing to do it in.

-- Samuel Pepys, diary, Aug. 12 1665 - during the plague

Commonplace

He had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet; he was also undoubtedly the stupidest; there was little about melancholia he didn't know; there was little else that he did.

-- Auden on Tennyson

Commonplace

First she starved herself of love, which meant also life; then of poetry ... Consequently, as I think, she starved into austere emaciation a very fine original gift.

-- Virginia Woolf on Christina Rossetti, journal entry, Aug 5 1918

Commonplace

I go to bed feeling terribly Edwardian and back-number, and yet, thank God, delighted that people like Wystan Auden should actually exist.

-- Harold Nicolson after a reading by Auden

Commonplace

[I have been] weeping steadily because once again I had come to the great healing chapter of the brothers Karamazov. It always chokes me up and fills me with a love of mankind which sometimes lasts till noon of the following day.

-- Alexander Woollcott to Mrs. Otis Skinner, Aug. 2 1935

Commonplace

If I could I would work in silence and obscurity, and let my efforts be known by their results.

-- Emily Bronte

Commonplace

He hasn't an enemy in the world, and none of his friends like him.

-- Oscar Wilde on George Bernard Shaw

Commonplace

What a commonplace genius he has; or a genius for the commonplace.

-- DH Lawrence on Thomas Hardy, 1928

Commonplace

I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her 'a beautiful little knitter.'

-- Edith Sitwell on Virginia Woolf

Commonplace

You never cut anything out of a book you regret later.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald to Thomas Wolfe, who was struggling over his revisions of "Of Time and the River"

Commonplace

When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes, and that is my idea.

-- Ernest Hemingway

Commonplace

With 60 staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.

-- James Thurber, 1955

Commonplace

[Henry] James felt buried in America; but he came here to be embalmed.

-- George Bernard Shaw on Henry James becoming a British subject

Commonplace

... this voluble Jack-of-all-Trades ... this carnivorous vegetarian.

-- NY Times critic on George Bernard Shaw, 1898

Commonplace

He is a very great loss. He had a large loving mind and the strongest sympathy with the poorer classes.

-- Queen Victoria, journal entry - 2 days after the death of Charles Dickens, June 11, 1870

Commonplace

The picture of you in the newspaper saying that, amongst other reasons, you have come to London to see me has greatly enhanced my credit line in the neighborhood, and particularly with the greengrocer across the street.

-- TS Eliot, letter to Groucho Marx, June 3, 1964

Commonplace

A most surprising compound of plain grandeur, sentimental affection, and downright nonsense.

-- Robert Louis Stevenson on Walt Whitman

Commonplace

I could readily see in Emerson ... the insinuation that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions.

-- Herman Melville

Commonplace

Her writings are a capital picture of real life, with all the little wheels and machinery laid bare like a patent clock. But she explains and fills out too much.

-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on Jane Austen

Commonplace

A delicious little old dandy ... Much of what he said would have been commonplace but for his exquisite delivery.

-- Evelyn Waugh on Max Beerbohm, 1947

Commonplace

... rather ill and rather American ... But by no means to be sniffed at.

-- Lytton Strachey on TS Eliot, May 14, 1919

Commonplace

... a purge, at the end of it one is empty ... like a dry shell on the beach, waiting for the tide to come in again.

-- Daphne du Maurier on writing a book

Commonplace

I heard TS Eliot read his poems the other night ... He is an actor and really put on a better show than Shaw.

-- Edmund Wilson to John Dos Passos, May 11, 1933

Commonplace

For several days after my first book was published I carried it about in my pocket, and took surreptitious peeps at it to make sure the ink had not faded.

-- James M. Barrie, 1888

Commonplace

It really is most unfortunate that she rules out copulation - not the ghost of it visible - so that her presentation of things becomes little more ... than an arabesque --- an exquisite arabesque, of course.

-- Lytton Strachey, 1927, on "To the Lighthouse"

Commonplace

Well, Jim I haven't read any of your books but I'll have to someday because they must be good considering how well they sell.

-- Nora Joyce, letter to Jimmy, 1940

Commonplace

"Yes, that's a good one, and tomorrow I shall be telling it on the Golden Floor."

-- A.E. Houseman, 1936 - he was on his deathbed, and his doctor told him a dirty joke. This was Houseman's response

Commonplace

"I quite agree with you, sir, but what can two do against so many?"

-- George Bernard Shaw, 1894. "Arms and the Man", opening night - unanimous cheers and hullaballoo - Shaw goes up onto the stage to take his bow. As he does so - ONE man boos. And the quote above was Shaw's response to the boo-er.

Commonplace

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography.

-- Oscar Wilde

Commonplace

I was an old man when I was 12; and now I am an old man, and it's splendid.

-- Thornton Wilder on his 70th birthday

Commonplace

Whatever our theme in writing, it is old and tried. Whatever our place, it has been visited by the stranger, it will never be new again. It is only the vision that can be new, but that is enough.

-- Eudora Welty

Commonplace

I hereby formally bequeath you to the female vagina, which vortex will inevitably receive you with or without my permission.

-- Tennessee Williams, letter to Kip Kiernan - a man he loved who just left him for a woman, August 22, 1940

Commonplace

His abiding complex and the source of much of his misery was that he was not a 6 foot all, extremely handsome and rich duke.

-- Cecil Beaton on Evelyn Waugh

Commonplace

In his youth Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry, and had a natural daughter. At this period, he was called a 'bad' man. Then he became 'good', abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles, and wrote bad poetry.

-- Bertrand Russell

Commonplace

I don't go upstairs to bed 2 nights out of 7 without taking Washington Irving under my arm.

-- Charles Dickens

Commonplace

Whether children will find anything amusing in it, only time will tell.

-- EB White to his editor Cass Canfield, on the manuscript of "Charlotte's Web"

Commonplace

Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull every where. He was dull in a new way, and that made people think him GREAT.

-- Samuel Johnson on Thomas Gray, 1775

Commonplace

For writing in the cause of Virtue, and against the fashionable vices, I am lookt upon at present as the most obnoxious person almost in England.

-- John Gay to Jonathan Swift, 1728 - after "Beggar's Opera" opened

Commonplace

... the exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting ... is denied to me.

-- Sir Walter Scott on Jane Austen, 1826

Commonplace

If it will satisfy you that I should know you, love you, love you - why then indeed ... You should have my soul to stand on if it could make you stand higher.

-- Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning, 1846

Commonplace

The poor little woman of genius! ... I can read a great deal of her life as I fancy in her book, and see that rather than have fame ... she wants some Tomkins or other to ... be in love with.

-- William Makepeace Thackeray after reading Charlotte Bronte's "Villette", 1835

Commonplace

From the beginning [Oscar] Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fate had taken the plot out of his hands.

-- WH Auden, 1963

Commonplace

Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.

-- Gene Fowler

Commonplace

[Henry] James had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.

-- TS Eliot

Commonplace

As I get older, and things get gloomier and more difficult, it is to poets like Horace and Pope that I find myself more and more turning for the kind of refreshment I require.

-- WH Auden, 1969

Commonplace

I want to look like an American Voltaire or Gibbon, but am slowly settling down to be a third-rate Boswell hunting for a Dr. Johnson.

-- Henry Adams

Commonplace

A past master in making nothing happen very slowly.

-- Clifton Fadiman on Gertrude Stein

Commonplace

A cord breaking.
1000 miles away.
Rose.
Her head cut open. A knife thrust in her brain.
Me. Here. Smoking.

-- Tennessee Williams, journal entry, Marcy 24, 1943

Commonplace

I'd just as soon play tennis with the net down.

-- Robert Frost on writing free verse, 1956

Commonplace

I worshipped Kipling at 13, loathed him at 17, enjoyed him at 20, despised him at 25, and now again rather admire him.

-- George Orwell, 1936

Commonplace

Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it - if he wants a safe seat in the audience - let him read somebody else.

-- DH Lawrence, 1925

Commonplace

Horatio Alger wrote the same novel 135 times and never lost his audience.

-- George Juergens

Commonplace

Wonderful man! I long to get drunk with him.

-- Lord Byron on Sir Walter Scott, journal entry, Jan. 5, 1782

Commonplace

Never, I believe, were such talents and such drudgery united.

-- William Cowper on John Dryden

Commonplace

Customs official: "Anything to declare?"

Oscar Wilde: "Nothing but my genius."

-- perhaps an apocryphal story, from 1882

Commonplace

Forster never gets any further than warming the teapot ... Feel this teapot. Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain't going to be no tea.

-- Katherine Mansfield, journal entry, May 1917

Commonplace

I have been reading a good number of biographies this year which I am sure you will commend. Probably you remember how I picked up that volume of Ludwig's Napoleon on the boat and liked it so well that the owner had to ask me for it. I tried to get it at the library but it was out. Instead i got a life of the Kaiser Wilhelm by the same author. Since then I hve read several others of celebrated literary personages. I have one at home now about Shelley, whose poetry I am studying at school. His life is very interesting. He seems to have been the wild, passionate and dissolute type of genius: which makes him very entertaining to read about.

-- Tennessee Williams, letter to his grandfather, Nov. 22, 1928

The Books: "Sugar and Other Stories" - 'The Next Room' (A.S. Byatt)

Next up in my Daily Book Excerpt ... Adult fiction shelves:

This excerpt is from "The Next Room", another short story from the collection Sugar and Other Stories - by A.S. Byatt. I was very moved by this story. Joanna is a woman whose mother just died. Her feelings about her mother (named Molly) are complicated. Her mother was an invalid and Joanna gave up many years of her life - the prime career years - to take care of her. Her mother was not grateful. Now that her mother is dead, Joanna is trying to get back into her career - only now she's 59 years old. Her career (before her mother got sick) had been traveling to third world countries and helping with development projects. A young woman's game, most definitely. So Joanna feels almost relieved her mother is gone - and also resentful that here she is, almost old now ... and what will she do? She wants to sell her mother's house immediately - get RID of it ... but in the meantime, she stays there ... and intermittently she hears voices in "the next room". It is not ever clearly identified who they are ... but they argue, they complain ... and they are aware of her. Eventually, when Joanna says through the wall - Please be quiet ... she can hear the voices stop, as though they hear her ... and then just begin to complain louder. She wonders if she is going crazy.

And I know people like Molly - people who are perpetually disappointed by life ... making me wonder: What exactly did you want?

Here's an excerpt:

Excerpt from "The Next Room", another short story from the collection Sugar and Other Stories - by A.S. Byatt.

She became aware of two quite different aspects of her sense of her mother who was not here. The first was an expectation of her imminent arrival, querulous or ready with a piece of witty self-deprecation, to take up her seat in her chair and ask for this and that to be fetched or taken away. This almost comfortable epectation was uncanny only because Molly would never come again; it was usual, and would not be switched off to order, or for reason's sake. The second was not expectation, but reminiscence and later came to constitute itself in Joanna's thought as "the jigsaw". She had had such a jigsaw during the long and tedious years at boarding school - a set of images, strip-cartoon pictures, patches of colour, she seemed to snip out with mental scissors and fit together awkwardly and with overlaps or gaps, labelling this for reference "my mother", an entity which had little or nothing to do with the living, slippered creature who would not again patter between Cliff Thorburn and the toaster, or take up the knitting-needles and count stitches. "My mother" in Joanna's schooldays had, like most people's mothers, worn embarrassing and strident hats. She was frozen forever in Joanna's playroom doorway like an avenging angel crying out against powder paint on the carpet fifty-four years ago. A comforting corner of the jigsaw held a kitchen mother with a wooden spoon, dripping cochineal into birthday icing: she was good at cakes, and enjoyed Joanna's pleasure. Joanna turned the finished jigsaw in her mind like a kaleidosocope; there were things now, that constituted sharp corners and jagged edges, that she had never brought out to look at in those long flickering evenings in case Molly overlooked or overheard her thoughts. Many of these pieces were to do with her vanished father, who had begun to vanish long before he had in fact chosed gently to death, who had begun to vanish at precisely the moment when he had become perpetually present, which his premature retirement, or whatever it had been, had confined him to Molly's territory and its margins, the far reaches of the garden, the bonfire, the compost heap, the battle with ground elder from next door. Molly had been a great requirer: she had expected much from life, and had not had it, and had made her disappointment vociferous. Joanna was not, and now never would be, quite sure what she had wanted - it was not particularly to do anything, but to be something, the wife of an influential and successful man. (Joanna's own life, a career devoted to useful work for underdeveloped socieites, had been conceived in direct opposition to this want.) Joanna sometimes suspected that her mother had married her father simply because he represented the nearest thing she knew to this vicarious influence and success. He had been clever, shy, and formal, a step up the social scale for the daughter of a sub-postmistress. He might have become an Under-Secretary or even better. He never talked about his work, and then, suddenly, there was trouble - "the silly mess your father got into" - Joanna would never know what - and it was at an end.

He had become ill, almost immediately, within a year at most. A wasting disease had attacked him. Joanna had heard him say once, in the conservatory, "I wasted time, and now doth time waste me," but he had been saying it into the trumpets of his lilies, not to her. He said nothing to Molly, who said a great deal to him, and Joanna had always bitterly felt that he saw Joanna herself as an extension of his wife. He had had fine, cobwebby grey hair, that when he worked he sleeked, briefly, with water. As he wasted away he became all grey; his face grew thinner, and ashen, and developed long fine downwards pleats and incisions, and then a crazy criss-cross of cracks as he diminished steadily. His eyes had always been a pale, smoky grey. He wandered among the smoke of his bonfires in a grey V-necked pullover, carrying increasingly small forkfuls of twigs and dried weeds, ghost-grey. Joanna had been very startled that the ashes which she sifted onto the roots of Madame Alfred Carriere, at the last, had been creamy white.

The stages of his slow decline were marked on the whole by jigsaw pieces depicting, not him, but Molly's dealings with him. Molly declaring, after the fateful interview with the specialist, "There's nothing really wrong with him: he just needs to pull himself together, you'll see." Molly's distaste for his bodily presence and all his activities. He had tried, in the early days, to have a glass of beer in the early evenings. Molly had taken exception to this. The smell, she said, disgusted her. Beer was a sickening smell. (The fact that Joanna also disliked its smell had rendered her icily neutral in this dispute.) Molly had pounced on his beer glass the moment it was emptied, when the air still lingered in the fringe of froth at its brim, and had washed and washed it, her mouth set. Later, she had commented to Joanna on every small eructation. Your father's tummy grumbles all the time. He makes awful belching noises. It's the beer. It's disgusting. Towards the end, when the discreet belches were an inevitable function of his failing body, she had not even waited for his absence to comment. He appeared not to hear. He gave up the beer.

I forgot to mention:

I am now a member of the paparazzi. Obviously.

(The stories of the grizzled cynical hysterical press photographers around me - and what they say - and who they are ... will be saved for a later date. But I love it. These guys are hard, man ... and funny. Shouting up at Adam Levine, "GROUP HUG, GROUP HUG", etc.)

Jeff Buckley ... in memory

This is for my sister Jean, who called me at 7:30 am today to tell me that today is the 10 year anniversary of Jeff Buckley's death.

On a rainy night in Chicago many years ago, my friend Ted (now the BLOGGER Ted! ha!!) and I went to go see some singer I had never heard of at The Green Mill. His name was Jeff Buckley. He had a couple of tiny albums out - recordings of live shows he had done at Cafe Sin-� in New York - but he was about to have a large album released - the album that would be called Grace ... and so he was on the cusp of stardom. Ted had heard something about Buckley on NPR, I think - so we got tickets and met up to go see him.

It is, to date, the most amazing live show I have ever seen.

Jeff Buckley's voice is rightly famous - it has a kind of eerie Brideshead revisited choirboy-with-an-evil-streak sound - his "Corpus Christi Carol" on Grace has to be heard to be believed. What? That's a grown man?

But what I want to talk about is the VIBE of the show Ted and I saw. We still talk about it today. We still reference it.

A lot of people were pissed off at Jeff Buckley that night. But Ted and I were enraptured. Buckley was there, at the bar, mingling, hanging out. In looking back on it - I think he knew that stardom was about to hit. The tourbus parked outside was indicative of what was about to happen. But he seemed so ... small, almost - dwarfed by the bus, by the circumstances appraoching. He was freaked out. Freaked OUT. He had just given an interview to Rolling Stone and had apparently said wildly inappropriate things to the reporter. Success was coming, man ... and don't we all want success? Well, sure ... but what success actually means, in the reality of the day to day life, is not always welcome ... it's intimidating, it's scary, and artists oftentimes are people who have trouble with reality. That's why they're artists. Stardom comes with responsiblity, with lots of have-tos, with obligations, with loss of anonymity (Goldie Hawn talks about how she used to go to a little grubby bar in Malibu - before she was famous - have a glass of wine by herself, sit staring out at the waves, and write in her journal, working out any problems she might have at that moment ... it was one of her meditative healing things to do. To her, stardom was always a great great blessing ... but that doesn't mean she doesn't mourn that anonymous self ... the person who could go have a glass of wine alone, write in her diary, and not have someone take a picture of it, sell it to a tabloid and have it appear on the newsstand the next day: GOLDIE HAWN DRINKS ALONE - or whatever. Hawn is not an ungrateful person - but she does grieve that loss of solitude.) - Harrison Ford talks about this quite eloquently, and with no self-pity. "It took me years to be able to cope with the loss of privacy." It's a sacrifice. Not for some - some glory in the reality-TV aspect of stardom ... but for others it is a soul-crushing experience that separates them from their fellow man. Jeff Buckley was in that latter category.

So there he was, doing shots at the bar - talking with people, but ... you could sense things shifting. He wasn't "normal" anymore ... he couldn't blend in ... he was not anonymous. He had been playing shows at Cafe Sin-� ... a teeny joint in New York ... where the musicians who are gonna play sit out in the audience, guitars propped up against the wall ... and just walk up to the "stage" when it's their turn ... The blending of audience and performer is complete.

This world was already receding for Jeff Buckley on the rainy night at the Green Mill.

And like I said - success of course is desirable. Exciting. But it's more complex than that (for some).

I'm talking about this like I sat down and had a conversation with Jeff Buckley about his thoguhts and feelings. I did not. This is what I gleaned from his behavior that night - his brilliance of performing - his obviously self-destructive tendencies - but also his beautiful human need to connect. It was all going on at the same time. And ALL of it went into his performance. ALL of it. I have never seen anything like it. NOTHING was excluded. He didn't judge any of his own emotions - fear, anger, sadness, excitement - as inappropriate for his show. It was like watching a master-diva at work - a Judy Garland or someone like that. No matter what came up in Judy Garland - she used it. EVERYTHING was to be used. Other, more careful, artists ... craft performances in a more intellectual way. And many of these artists are brilliant, too, in their own way. But to see a raw nerve - at work - and to see him struggle - OPENLY - with all of this ... in front of us ...

Like I said, a lot of people ended up being pissed off at him because they wanted a conventional show. They didn't want him to talk in between sets about how freaked out he was, they didn't want him to suddenly stop a song he was singing, announce, "God, that sucks - let's start it over again ..." and then start the song over again ... They wanted a straight show. But Jeff Buckley couldn't have given a straight show if you paid him a million dollars. He was honest. He was true.

There were a couple of moments where I got goosebumps - because I was watching a man truly grappling with himself. In front of us.

And - I must mention this: he sang the HELL out of all of his songs. That voice.

As an actor - watching him up there - and watching how private he was, even in public (that's the definition of good performance art as far as I'm concerned - the ability to be private while people are watching you ...) was something I have never encountered before or since. He had no polish. NONE. The record company who had obviously funded this tour - and funded the tour bus - was probably trying to iron Jeff Buckley into some kind of appropriate behavior - Buckley seemed to feel the enormous institution behind him ... and there were obligations there, and responsiblities - he was no longer a free insane agent ... He had to show up, he had to get back on his mega-bus, he had to do the songs the record company wanted him to do ...

The show was chaotic. He got heckled at times. "SHUT UP - JUST SING THE SONG!" shouted from the back. Buckley didn't fight back - he didn't engage the heckler - not in a "hey, fuck you, man, I'm up here doing my thing" way ... He apologized - profusely - kept saying things like, "I suck ... Im so sorry ... I just suck ..."

But then - he'd sing "Lilac Wine" and you'd find yourself standing there, stunned at what you were witnessing and hearing.

Buckley was grappling with some demons there. He was drunk. He announced to us, at one point:

"You guys, I'm so sorry, but I am drunk. D - U - R - N - K. DRUNK!"

He started to sing Leonard Cohen's "Halleluia". But ... but ... he just wasn't being true ... it didn't feel true to him ... or something ... so he stopped the song. "Stop stop stop stop ..." It was like he was almost in pain - so far away was he from his own ideals. I am thinking of Odets in Hollywood, writing trash. Spiritual death. So what Ted and I saw (and we went out and talked about it all night afterwards, in a diner down the street - as the rain splashed against the windows) - was a man trying to imagine himself, work himself, closer to his own ideal in his head. And if that meant starting a song over - even though there was a whole crowd there - so be it. What we were seeing was not a finished product. He would not BE a 'product'. He was in process.

Buckley said at one point, "I want to give everybody their money back ... i am so sorry about the show tonight ... I suck so bad ..."

This could not have been farther from the truth. It was self-indulgent, yes - but any artists process MUST be self-indulgent. How else will you know what works, what failure feels like? You have to GO there. It was unconventional - that he would GO there during a show, and not during a rehearsal or whatever ... but to expect Jeff Buckley to be conventional in any way, shape, or form, is ludicrous. I watched him up there, alone by the mike - with that stunning James Dean-esque face - the innocence of it, but also the wildness - and how he would throw himself up towards those high notes, launching his voice up fearlessly into the octaves above - eyes closed, body slack and open - letting it happen, letting it come ... and I remember wondering: God, what is going to happen to this boy. This special wild boy. This is not just retrospect talking. The whole night was like that. Buckley told us about the interview with Rolling Stone, he seemed to be having a nervous breakdown almost - about the impending fame ... It was like we were getting to see him in a small club for the last time. He was going. He was going somewhere else now. Buckley felt the loss of that.

He handled the heckling with grace - but he also didn't change his approach. He didn't "get it together". One song he started to sing - and for whatever reason - he felt like he needed to sit down - so he crossed his legs, and sat down - with his back to the audience, and sang the whole song in that position. Beautifully, by the way.

It was his way, it seemed, of getting back into his private world.

His band was amazing. They just went wherever he went. If he stopped a song - they stopped, started over, whatever.

The best thing of it was this: They started to play one of his songs - I think it was "So Real". Like I said, I didn't know Buckley's music at that point. But I loved the song immediately - and his voice just pierced right through me. That voice. Holy God. Ted and I stood there, lost in it (many of us were lost in it - the hecklers in the crowd were few and far between, although they were loud) - and maybe after a verse and a chorus, Buckley said, in a "oh, fuckitalltohell" tone, "God, stop stop stop ... " He wasn't an indignant arrogant maestro. He seemed like a little boy, hurt, because his mom interrupted his make-believe game of knights and dragons with the prosaic request that he set the table. He was BUMMED that ... he wasn't being transported. He had a requirement of his own art. So anyway - he stopped the song. Which had sounded FINE to me. He was in pain. "God, that sucked ... we SUCK ... " (heckling) "I know, I know, you guys ... I'm so sorry ... Let's start it again ..."

They started the song again. And the hairs on the back of my neck rose up. It was as though Jeff Buckley had realized that going into the song he was a bit cloudy, in terms of motivation, or ... sound ... and he needed to clear the deck. He needed to FOCUS ... so that he could "go there" in the song. And that's what happened after the interruption. The band almost blew the roof of that tiny club. Jeff Buckley stood up there - a shaman, a madman, a choirboy with a direct line to heaven and hell - wailing to the skies, catapulting his voice up, down - his gestures free, fearless, uninhibited - and yet totally specific and germane to the song. When he "got it together" - by taking that pause - when he cleared the deck of everything extraneous and unnecessary to his performance - the genius that came, the power of that voice, gives me goosebumps to this day.

I was so sad when he died. So so sad. I imagined him ... swimming in the current, drunk, stars wheeling by overhead ... I can't say I was surprised - because there had been a wildness in him, and a potential for unhinged grief - you could sense it.

But I miss him. I miss the albums he didn't make.

To me, Jeff Buckley was always that wild pale-faced boy, doing shots at the bar, on a rainy night in Chicago, many years ago. A tour bus looming outside. Change coming, change coming so fast ... and yet ... in the moment, there was just him ... on stage ... trying to transport himself into the world that he imagined.

The Books: "Sugar and Other Stories" - 'The July Ghost' (A.S. Byatt)

Next up in my Daily Book Excerpt ... Adult fiction shelves:

This excerpt is from "The July Ghosts", another short story from the collection Sugar and Other Stories - by A.S. Byatt. A creepy story. Byatt is so good psychologically. A young man, whose girlfriend up and left him for another man, is kind of reeling from the shock of it - he needs to find another place to live, so he rents a room in a woman's house. There's a husband in the picture - but things are prickly between them - the young man is a witness to the weirdness in the relationship, and the weirdness of the woman herself. He minds his own business, he has a lot of work to do, he's a writer, and he sits out in the back garden, writing and reading. Kids play in the next yard - so often one of them will come over to retrieve a ball that flew over the fence, or whatever. One day, he sees a little boy sitting up in the tree, staring down at him. He says to him, "You be careful up there ... don't fall ..." The boy doesn't respond. There's something about the boy that really strikes him. His smile, first of all. The boy continues to appear, intermittently, out in the garden, lying in the grass in the corner, smiling over at him. One day, the young man sees the little boy exiting the house, coming out of the kitchen door - as though he lived there. He decides to mention the little boy to the woman.

What I meant earlier by saying that Byatt is so good psychologically is that in just a few sentences she has set up our expectations of how this woman will behave. So that when she starts to behave in unexpected ways - it is breathtaking, and very moving. She seems practical, unemotional, repressed, humorless - not unkind ... but certainly not a woman of any deep feeling.

Here's an excerpt.

Excerpt from "The July Ghosts", another short story from the collection Sugar and Other Stories - by A.S. Byatt.

He felt reluctant to inform on the boy, who seemed so harmless and considerate: but when he met him walking out of the kitchen door, spoke to him, and got no answer but the gentle smile before the boy ran off towards the wall, he wondered if he should speak to his landlady. So he asked her, did she mind the children coming in the garden. She said no, children must look for balls, that was part of being children. He persisted - they sat there, too, and he had met one coming out of the house. He hadn't seemed to be doing any harm, the boy, but you couldn't tell. He thought she should know.

He was probably a friend of her son's, she said. She looked at him kindly and explained. Her son had run off the Common with some other children, two years ago, in the summer, in July, and had been killed on the road. More or less instantly, she had added drily, as though calculating that just enough information would preclude the need for further questions. He said he was sorry, very sorry, feeling to blame, which was ridiculous, and a little injured, because he had not known about her son, and might inadvertently have made a fool of himself with some casual refernence whose ignorance would be embarrassing.

What was the boy like, she said. The one in the house? "I don't -- talk to his friends. I find it painful. It could be Timmy, or Martin. They might have lost something, or want ..."

He described the boy. Blond, almost ten at a guess, he was not very good at children's ages, very blue eyes, slightly built, with a rainbow-striped tee shirt and blue jeans, mostly though not always - oh, and those football practice shoes, black and green. And the other tee shirt, with the ships and wavy lines. And an extraordinarily nice smile. A really warm smile. A nice-looking boy.

He was used to her being silent. But this silence went on and on and on. She was just staring into the garden. After a time, she said, in her precise conversational tone,

"The only thing I want, the only thing I want at all in this world, is to see that boy."

She stared at the garden and he stared with her, until the grass began to dance with empty light, and the edges of the shrubbery wavered. For a brief moment he shared the strain of not seeing the boy. Then she gave a little sigh, sat down, neatly as always, and passed out at his feet.

After this she became, for her, voluble. He didn't move her after she fainted, but sat patiently by her, until she stirred and sat up; then he fetched her some water, and would have gone away, but she talked.

"I'm too rational to see ghosts, I'm not someone who would see anything there was to see, I don't believe in an after-life, I don't see how anyone can, I always found a kind of satisfaction for myself in the idea that one just came to an end, to a sliced-off stop. But that was myself; I didn't think he - not he - I thought ghosts were - what people wanted to see, or were afraid to see ... and after he died, the best hope I had, it sounds silly, was that I would go mad enough so that instead of waiting every day for him to come home from school and rattle the letter-box I might actually have the illusion of seeing or hearing him come in. Because I can't stop my body and mind waiting, every day, every day, I can't let go. And his bedroom, sometimes at night I go in, I think I might just for a moment forget he wasn't in there sleeping, I think I would pay almost anything - anything at all - for a moment of seeing him like I used to. In his pyjamas, with his - his - his hair ... ruffled, and, his ... you said, his ... that smile.

"When it happened, they got Noel, and Noel came in and shouted my name, like he did the other day, that's why I screamed, because it - seemed to same - and then they said, he is dead, and I thought coolly, is dead, that will go on and on and on till the end of time, it's a continuous present tense, one thinks the most ridiculous things, there I was thinking about grammar, the verb to be, when it ends to be dead ... And then I came out into the garden, and I half saw, in my mind's eye, a kind of ghost of his face, just the eyes and hair, coming towards me - like every day waiting for him to come home, the way you think of your son, with such pleasure, when he's -- not there -- and I -- I thought -- no, I won't see him, because he is dead, and I won't dream about him because he is dead, I'll be rational and practical and continue to live because one must, and there was Noel ...

"I got it wrong, you see, I was so sensible, and then I was so shockecd because I couldn't get to want anything - I couldn't talk to Noel -- I -- I -- made Noel take away, destroy, all the photos, I -- didn't dream, you can will not to dream, I didn't ... visit a grave, flowers, there isn't any point. I was so sensible. Only my body wouldn't stop waiting and all it wants is to -- to see that boy. That boy you -- saw."

He did not say that he might have seen another boy, maybe even a boy who had been given the tee shirts and jeans afterwards. He did not say, though the idea crossed his mind, that maybe what he had seen was some kind of impression from her terrible desire to see a boy where nothing was. The boy had had nothing terrible, no aura of pain about him: he had been, his memory insisted, such a pleasant, courteous, self-contained boy, with his own purposes. And in fact the woman herself almost immediately raised the possibility that what he had seen was what she desired to see, a kind of mix-up of radio waves, like when you overheard police messages on the radio, or got BBC I on a switch that said ITV. She was thinking fast, and went on almost immediately to say that perhaps his sense of loss, his loss of Anne, which was what had led her to feel she could bear his presence in her house, was what had brought them - dare she say - near enough, for their wavelengths to mingle, perhaps, had made him susceptible ... You mean, he had said, we are a kind of emotional vacuum between us, that must be filled. Something like that, she had said, and had added, "But I don't believe in ghosts."

Anne, he thought, could not be a ghost, because she was elsewhere, with someone else, doing for someone else those little things she had done so gaily for him, tasty little suppers, bits of research, a sudden vase of unusual flowers, new bold shirt, unlike his own cautious taste, but suiting him, suiting him. In a sense, Anne was worse lost because voluntarily absent, an absence that could not be loved because love was at an end, for Anne.

"I don't suppose you will, now," the woman was saying. "I think talking would probably stop any - mixing of messages, if that's what it is, don't you? But - if - if he comes again" -- and here for the first time her eyes were full of tears -- "if -- you must promise, you will tell me, you must promise."

MEMORIAL WAY

This is something I wanted to post last year - but it took some planning ahead and it also took, er, a camera. All along Boulevard East (a winding road on the cliffs opposite Manhattan) is a memorial park - it goes from Weehawken to West New York. It is so beautiful. I wanted to move along from south to north and take pictures of every memorial I came across. They aren't just for wars, as you will see below ... but I've included them all. This is what I did last night (before I went home and tried on my blue sparkley false eyelashes). The south end of Boulevard East marks the estimated spot above where they estimate the dueling grounds were where my dead boyfriend lost his life. When I run along Boulevard East, I pass this spot. There's a bust of Hamilton there ... so that's where I start. And I just moved north - snapping shots of each thing I saw.

Some of these get kind of artsy. I was experimenting. Also, it was dusk - perfect lighting - until I reached the end ... when lighting my "subjects" became quite challenging. I did my best.

I had an interaction with a little boy by a huge bell - a memorial for the Weehawken Fire Department, erected in 1907. I heard a little mouse-voice announce behind me, "That's the Liberty Bell!" I turned and saw him. A pipsqueak of about 7 years old, with brown skin, thick black hair, and a little scooter he was pushing along. He was with his mom. He kept talking, "Actually, I don't think that's the Liberty Bell." I loved how he was taking himself thru his thought process. I also loved his deductive reasoning. Age 7. He said confidently, "The Liberty Bell is in Washington D.C." Oh it is, bub? Really? He kept babbling, his mother being busy with her smaller baby, "I really don't think that's the Liberty Bell." I felt he was waiting for some confirmation so I stepped in. Little did he know who he was dealing with. You wanna talk about the Liberty Bell? The chick in the white skirt and the hi-top sneakers is JUST the girl you want. I said, "No, that's not the Liberty Bell." He said, 'What is it?" I said, "It was put up for the firemen in Weehawken way at the beginning of the LAST century." (This child was obviously born in THIS century. He's a 21st century kid.) He said, "Why?" "Oh, you know. To thank them for their help in the town and stuff like that." "I knew it wasn't the Liberty Bell." "You are totally right. The Liberty Bell is in Philadelphia." He was thrown off by this, but silently. He adjusted his brain's information. Okay. It's not in DC. It's in Philly. Got it. He reminded me of Cashel. He then asked, "Why are there all these things up?" Meaning - the red white and blue bunting everywhere. I said, "It's for Memorial Day on Monday. You probably don't have school, right? It's a holiday." "Oh." Then they were off ... meandering away thru the dusk ... little black-haired boy babbling on and on to his mother. It was a perfect and very human little exchange.

So - in honor of Memorial Day - of all the American veterans, past and present, of all of those who have lost their lives in service for this country, and in honor of all of those in harm's way in the present-day ... here's my wee tribute. And my deepest gratitude.

First: the view from Boulevard East. Dusk.

Midtown.

Downtown. DAMmit.

ALEXANDER HAMILTON MEMORIAL

ALEXANDER HAMILTON MEMORIAL PARK

People were out in droves. Escaping the heat.

THE "LIBERTY BELL" OF THE WEEHAWKEN FIRE DEPARTMENT

MEMORIAL TO THE KOREAN AND VIETNAM WAR

WORLD WAR I MEMORIAL

WORLD WAR II MEMORIAL

SKYLINE BREAK

Repetitive, perhaps, but I never EVER get tired of the view.

JOSE MARTI MEMORIAL

I would have had no idea who Jose Marti was if Val from Babalu Blog hadn't asked me to participate in his BlogCuba celebration years ago. He asked bloggers to write something about Cuba. I know nothing about Cuba, except the political stuff that everybody knows. I like Cuban food. I felt like I would be an asshole if I wrote about a Cuban restaurant I liked, so I emailed Val - "I don't know what to write about!" He basically set me free, saying - whatever you want! A movie you like, an author you like, whatever! I decided to write about Cuban poetry. I know nothing about Cuban poetry. But I educated myself. And, naturally, I discovered Jose Marti immediately. What a gift! Here's the piece I wrote for Val - I don't just focus on Marti - there are other poets - but Marti is basically the father of Cuban poetry. So I felt like an insider when I came across this memorial. I live in a heavily Cuban area ... as will become obvious. I thought of Val, as I stood there in the darkness, looking at Marti's face, with the Manhattan skyline in the background.

MEMORIAL TO CUBAN PATRIOTS

WEST NEW YORK VETERANS MEMORIAL PARK

WAR MEMORIAL

This was erected in 1935. Notice that at that time WWI was just called "World War". WWII was gathering, approaching ... but at the time of the memorial's birth, it was just "the Great War". Sad. It's kind of an ugly memorial in the light of day - but seen in the dusk it takes on a mythical aspect. It's funereal, like a mausoleum ... with plaques all over it - of all of the wars ... and the names of everybody from West New York who lost their lives in "the Great War" (not enough space for everybody else from all the other wars). Sad - this memorial made me sad. Perhaps because of the year it was put up. Retrospect can kill ya.

MEMORIAL TO TWO CUBAN DUDES

SKYLINE BREAK

AMERICAN VETERANS MEMORIAL

THE COMMUNITY ...

Boys ... playing basketball in the dying of the light ...

Girls playing a game of baseball on the tennis courts

COMMEMORATING THE SIGNING OF THE CONSITUTION

Plaque erected in 1937.

STATUE HONORING CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

I really struggled with the light here. I could not get a good shot of the Roman frieze-esque plaque ... it's a ship, struggling in the waves. Anyway, here's what I got.

SKYLINE BREAK

Okay. It's totally night now.

ANOTHER PLAQUE HONORING THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION

(The trees planted now tower around the plaque. Sniff.)

SEPT. 11, 2001 MEMORIAL

The memorial day parade

I have another photo essay planned - that I actually wanted to do last year - but never got around to it (uhm, mainly cause I didn't have a camera). I took all the photos I need last night for this photo-essay idea (before the visit from the firemen, naturally) ... but I need to go thru them, and organize them. In the meantime: here (and below the fold) are the photos I took of the Memorial Day parade in Hoboken. (Warning: I took a million photos. This camera has created a monster. Me.)

Please assume that every caption for every photo should be: "I love these people."

The veterans. The high school bands. The cops. The firemen. The ROTC clubs. The Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. And everybody knows everybody in Hoboken - so there's a lot of waving, and joviality.

I love parades.

And here they all come!! (Oh, and it was sunset time. So that light glowing on the buildings in the background is not an exaggeration or a Photo Shop trick. It was that magical hour when everything blazes up into utter clarity, shadows take on stark and vivid outlines, and the bricks glow like gold. I was glad that some of that was captured)

And there they all go ....

I hope you all have a wonderful Memorial Day.

Stagehands on break.

Hot day.

Hot men.

I couldn't resist - they looked so perfect - their poses, the yellow walls ...

A two-pronged experience

THE THRILL: The fire alarm in the main stairwell of my building went off last night. I investigated. No smell of smoke. But whatever - people were gathering, so I called 911. It was about 10:30 p.m. Within 3 minutes, my building was crawling with firemen. Now - nobody asked me "who here's wearing Sierra" like the last time I was overrun with hot firemen ... but still. There they all were. Tromping up and down the stairs, with axes, and helmets, and day-glo stripes and big boots ... I just loved standing back and watching them. Hot. So that was the thrill. (Especially since the building was NOT burning down. No fire.) I was free to hang back in a leisurely manner and watch firemen do their thing, without the fear of my 8 boxes of journals going up in smoke, or the plastic folder of letters over the years from 74 Facts guy being incinerated into a smoking pile of cinders. There was only glory in the moment, and in the undeniable FACT of the gorgeous-ness of the firemen.

THE MORTIFICATION: I was wearing Hello Kitty pajamas and also bright-blue sparkley false eyelashes. I had just been messing around with them - had just bought them yesterday, as a matter of fact and wanted to see what they looked like. Let me reiterate: they were sparkley, and they were blue.

I realize now that I must have looked like some tragic Tennessee Williams character, there in the shadowy dingy hallway, in my flimsy pajamas printed with 100s of Hello Kitty heads ... and the La Cage Aux Folles ambience of the blue sparkley eyelashes ... a tragic failed debutante, 20 years past her prime, playing dress-up by herself in her own apartment, waiting for a Gentleman Caller who will never come.

The Books: "Sugar and Other Stories" - 'Racine and the Tablecloth' (A.S. Byatt)

Next up in my Daily Book Excerpt ... Adult fiction shelves:

Sugar and Other Stories - by A.S. Byatt. A short story collection - her first. She has a ton more out and I'll be excerpting from them quite a bit. She's fantastic. As anyone who reads Byatt knows, she's very into fairy tales (remember Christabel's story 'The Glass Coffin' - in Possession)? Byatt cites as some of her main influences - not just giants like George Eliot - but also the Brothers Grimm and Arabian Nights (the copy of Arabian Nights I'm reading now has a preface by AS Byatt). The influence is clear, in all of her writing. The stories in this particular collection are not fairy tales, not exactly - but there's something in the writing - a distance, a perspective - that makes them not quite real. They become fables. The narrator is not omniscent - the narrator has a point of view, it's more like a story being told round a fire. I love that aspect of Byatt's short stories. They're thrilling to read.

The first story in this collection is a haunting tale called 'Racine and the Tablecloth'. It reminds me a bit of Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye ... the terror and potency of being a young girl, surrounded by other young girls. The danger ... the danger especially of pulling ahead of the pack. In a way, this is a feminist fable. Emily - the lead of the story - is a brilliant student, she is a scholarship student at a boarding school - and she is clearly better, academically, than everyone else. This does not make her any friends. She is isolated. And worse than that - the headmistress of the school, named Miss Crighton-Walker, seems to hone in on Emily - in a way that can only be described as malevolent. She is an adult ... yet she finds something antagonistic about this young girl, who is only 14 years old. And although Miss Crighton-Walker would never admit it, she sets out to destroy Emily's spirit.

Great story. Chilling. And with a narrative voice that is very interesting - continuiing to assert itself into the story. Who is the narrator? Not Emily. No. It's a story-teller, who ruminates over the meaning of things, who pulls us out of the driving action - to contemplate motivations, themes. It's a great device because it elevates the story.

Excerpt from Sugar and Other Stories - by A.S. Byatt. - 'Racine and the Tablecloth'.

I am not going to describe the dance, which was sad for almost all of them, must have been, as they stood in their resolutely unmingled ranks on either side of the grey school hall. Nothing of interest really happened to Emily on that occasion, as she must, in her secret mind, have known it would not. It faded rapidly enough in her memory, whereas Miss Crichton-Walker's peculiar anxiety about it, even down to her curious analogy between razors and lawn-mowers, remained stamped there, clear and pungent, an odd and significant trace of the days of her education. In due course this memory accrued to itself Emily's later reflections on the punning names of depilatories, all of which aroused in her mind a trace-image of Miss Crichton-Walker's swinging, white, hairless body in th emoonlight. Veet. Immac. Nair. Emily at the time of the static dance was beginning to sample the pleasures of being a linguist. Nair sounded like a Miltonic coinage for Satanic scaliness. Veet was a thick English version of French rapidity and discreet efficiency. Immac, in the connexion of Miss Crichton-Walker, was particularly satisfying, carrying with it the Latin, maculata, stained or spotted, immaculata, unstained, unspotted, and the Immaculate Conception, which, Emily was taught at this time, referred to the stainless or spotless begetting of the Virgin herself, not to the subsequent self-contained, unpunctured, manless begetting of the Son. The girls in the dormitories were roused by Miss Crichton-Walker to swap anecdotes about Veet, which according to them had 'the - most - terrible - smell' and produced a stinking slop of hairy grease. No one sent her razor home. It was generally agreed that Miss Crichton-Walker had too little bodily hair to know what it was to worry about it.

Meanwhile, and at the same time, there was Racine. You may be amused that Miss Crichton-Walker should simultaneously ban ladies' razors and promote the study of Ph�dre. It is amusing. It is amusing that the same girls should already have been exposed to the betrayed and betraying cries of Ophelia's madness. 'Then up he rose, and doffed his clothes, and dupped the chamber door. Let in the maid that out a maid, never departed more.' It is the word 'dupped' that is so upsetting in that little song, perhaps because it recalls another Shakespearean word that rhymes with it, Iago's black ram tupping the white ewe, Desdemona. Get thee to a nunnery, said Hamlet, and there was Emily, in a nunnery, never out of one, in a rustle of terrible words and delicate and gross suggestions, the stuff of her studies. But that is not what I wanted to say about Racine. Shakespeare came upon Emily gradually, she could accommodate him, he had always been there. Racine was sudden and new. That is not it, either, not what I wanted to say.

Think of it. Twenty girls or so - were there so many? - in the A level French class, and in front of each a similar, if not identical, small, slim greenish book, more or less used, more or less stained. When they riffled through the pages, the text did not look attractive. It proceeded in strict, soldierly columns of rhymed couplets, a form disliked by both the poetry-lovers and the indifferent amongst them. Nothings eemed to be happening, it all seemed to be the same. The speeches were very long. There appeared to be no interchange, no battle of dialogue. No action. Ph�dre. The French teacher told them that the play was based on the Hippolytus of Euripides, and that Racine had altered the plot by adding a character, a young girl, Aricie, whom Hippolytus should fall in love with. She neglected to describe the original play, which they did not know. They wrote down, Hippolytus, Euripides, Aricie. She told them that the play kept the unities of classical drama, and told them what these unities were, and they wrote them down. The Unity of Time = One Day. The Unity of Space = One Place. The Unity of Action = One Plot. She neglected to say what kind of effect these constrictions might have on an imagined world: she offered a half-hearted rationale she clearly despised a little herself, as though the Greeks and the French were children who made unnecessary rules for themselves, did not see wider horizons. The girls were embarrassed by having to read this passionate sing-song verse aloud in French. Emily shared their initial reluctance, their near-apathy. She was later to believe that only she became a secret addict of Racine's convoluted world, tortuously lucid, savage and controlled. As I said, the imagination of the other girls' thoughts was not Emily's strength. In Racine's world, all the inmates were gripped wholly by incompatible passions which swelled uncontrollably to fill their whole universe, brimming over and drowning its hoizons. They were all creatures of excess, their secret blood burned and boiled and an unimaginably hot bright sun glared down in judgment. They were all horribly and beautifully interwoven, tearing each other apart in a perfectly choreographed dance, every move inevitable, lovely, destroying. In this world men and women had high and terrible fates which were themselves and yet greater than themselves. Ph�dre's love for Hippolyte was wholly unnatural, dragging her world askew, wholly inevitable, a force like a flood, or a conflagration, or an eruption. This art described a world of monstrous disorder and excess and at the same time ordered it with iron control and constrictions, the closed world of the classical stage and the prescribed dialogue, the flexible, shining, inescapable steel mesh of that regular, regulated singing verse. It was a world in which the artist was in unusual collusion with the Reader, his art like a mapping trellis between the voyeur and the terrible writhing of the characters. It was an austere and adult art, Emily thought, who knew little about adults, only that they were unlike Miss Crichton-Walker, and had anxieties other than those of her tired and over-stretched mother. The Reader was adult. The Reader saw with the pitiless clarity of Racine - and also with Racine's impersonal sympathy - just how far human beings could go, what they were capable of.

Happy birthday, John Wayne!

Or should I say ... happy birthday Marion Robert Morrison?

Uhm, no, let's stick with John Wayne. Smart move changing your name there, bub.

First of all: go here. Keep scrolling. Terrific photos - I was riveted.

David Thomson - in his massive film encyclopedia - devotes almost three pages to John Wayne. Here are some excerpts. The excerpts go in order (I don't quote the entire entry - just pulled out things I really liked) ... but I placed them in order so you can get a sense of the scope of this amazing guy's journey as an actor.

David Thomson:

As a child he moved West and, after a football scholarship at the University of Southern California, Tom Mix got him a job at Fox. There he met John Ford and worked as a set decorator on Mother Machree (28). Gradually he edged into acting, by the storybook means of being a bystander. His first big part was in The Big Trail (30, Raoul Walsh). Walsh had seen him carrying a big armchair above his head - carrying it witih flair and flourish.

David Thomson:

Throughout the 1930s Wayne was a star of matinee Westerns, sometimes a singing cowboy, working his way round most of the smaller studios and making something like a hundred films. By 1939 he was with Republic when John Ford asked him to be the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach. The success of that film lifted Wayne from regular work to stardom. Republic pulled themselves together for a major vehicle for him - Dark Command (40, Walsh) - and Ford called on him again to play a seaman in The Long Voyage Home (40).

David Thomson:

Even at that stage [the late 30s, early 40s], Wayne had this virtue denied to Ford's "stock company": he did not ham. Universal put him opposite Dietrich in Seven Sinners (40, Tay Garnett) and Republic lowered its sights to more Westerns. For the next few years he made fodder at his home studio and more adventurous work outside, much of which only exposed his monotonous fierceness: Reap the Wild Wind (42, Cecil B. De Mille); The Spoilers (42, Ray Enright); Flying Tigers (42, David Miller); with Joan Crawford in Jules Dassin's crazy Reunion in France (42); and The Fighting Seabees (44, Edward Ludwig). In 1945, he was in Back to Bataan (Edward Dmytryk), Flame of the Barbary Coast (Joseph Kane), and was overshadowed by Robert Montgomery in They Were Expendable (Ford). He was bizarrely paired with Claudette Colbert in a comedy, Without Reservations (46, Mervyn Le Roy), but Rebublic still pushed straight Westerns at him.

David Thomson:

Then came two films that radically enlarged his image: Fort Apache (48, Ford), in which he played a cavalry captain, and Red River (48, Howard Hawks). Not least of his achievements as a guide to players is the way Hawks was the first to see the slit-eyed obdurate side to Wayne's character. Tom Dunson is a fine character study: a man made hard by an early mistake and by the emphasis on achievement with which he tried to conceal that mistake. With Ford again, Wayne was one of Three Godfathers (48), a truly awful movie. But in 1949, he was Captain Nathan Brittles at the point of retirement in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (Ford), and in 1950 the trilogy was completed withthe leisurely Rio Grande (Ford). Asked to be older, a husband and a father, Wayne became human and touching.

David Thomson:

Next, however, came The Searchers (56, Ford), one of his finest films - once more a study of an unapproachable stubborn man, finally excluded from the family reunion as a romantic but lonely figure facing the landscape. He coasted with The Wings of Eagles (57, Ford), Legend of the Lost (57, Hathaway), and The Barbarian and the Geisha (58, John Huston), before making Rio Bravo (59, Hawks). Once more, Hawks enlarged Wayne by concentrating on an alcoholic Dean Martin and having Wayne watch him "like a friend". It worked - as did the application of Angie Dickinson's talkative emotional crises to Wayne's solidity - so that Rio Bravo is not just Wayne's most humane picture but the one that makes him most comic.

David Thomson:

His death moved nearly everyone, as had his brave walk down the Academy staircase, two months before death, to give the best picture Oscar to ... The Deer Hunter (that'll be the day, indeed.)

He made too many pictures, of course; but only because for so long he was a guarantee of profit.

David Thomson:

But what a star, what a presence, and what a wealth of reserve he brought to that bold presence. (So you wonder if he couldn't have played comedy.)

Nor has he dated. All one can say is that he filled the screen role of a necessarily difficult man as naturally as most actors wore clothes. There was an age when people could be stars without undue grandeur or self-mockery. Whether Wayne is looking at the land that may make a great ranch, or turning in a doorway to survey his true home, the desert, every gesture was authentic and a prized disclosure. He moved the way singers sing, with huge confidence and daring. You have to imagine how it all began in the way Raoul Walsh saw him carrying that armchair - as if it was a young girl in a red robe being lifted up in mercy and wonder.

Happy birthday, Duke. And thanks!

Great tribute to him here. (Really illuminating quote from Henry Hathaway starts it all off.)

And if you haven't been reading The Shamus' posts on the Duke then I don't know what to say for you.

Two last pictures. Just cause, you know ... YUM!

Fragment ending in laughter II

P.: "So ... this is where you have class?"
Me: "Yup."
He looks around. Looks at the shelves of random objects.
P.: [in a grandiose tone, gesturing] "Are these props??"
[Basically showing me he knows the word.]
Me [deadpan]: "Yes, P. They're props."
P.: [another Master Thespus gesture] "But .... aren't you supposed to become them?"
Me: [howling. Could not stop laughing. Tears of laughter.] "What?? Become them? No, I'm not supposed to become my props ... hahahahahahaha"

Similar energy ...

Fragment ending in laughter I

Me: "I love you."
Long pause full of terror. For him.
M.: "I love you too."
Me: "Don't get scared, now."
M.: "No, I know. I know this doesn't mean you'll show up tomorrow in a wedding dress."
Me: "Oh God. NEVER. I would NEVER want to marry you."
M.: "Uhm - thanks? ..."
Me: "I just love you, that's all."
Pause. I could feel him thinking. Then:
M.: "What the hell do you mean - you would NEVER want to marry me?"
Me: "Oh, what - suddenly you think we should be married just because I said I would never marry you?? Can you picture us married?"
M.: "Fuck no."
Me: "hahahahahahahahahahaha see what I mean?"

Similar energy ...

The Books: "The Biographer's Tale" (A.S. Byatt)

Next up in my Daily Book Excerpt ... Adult fiction shelves:

The Biographer's Tale - by A.S. Byatt.

For the love of Pete, I barely remember a word of this book. It came out in December 2001 - and I bought it and also read it in Dec. of 2001 (I keep a list of the books I read) - and so that may explain why I remember NOTHING of this book. Dec. 2001. That's all that really needs to be said.

I tried to read fiction ... but it would be a year and a half or so before I could submit to a novel ... everything I read had to be historical, factual, whatever. So that might be why I have NO memory of Biographer's Tale - and I can tell that I actually read it because I've marked out certain passages, underlined certain sentences. What? Was I even THERE? There's a good 6 or 7 months around that time that I have almost no memory of, anyway - and I read Biographer's Tale during that time. Vanished from ye olde brain cells.

I don't remember it making a big splash - compared to Possession and Babel Tower it's almost like a sketchbook of an idea ... From what I can gather ... it's about a man who leaves his graduate program in English, or literary theory - something extremely postmodern and analytical ... and decides to confront reality by writing a biography of a great biographer. He begins his research and finds a box of material in an attic somewhere (forgive the vagueness) ... notebooks full of notes written by this great biographer. Because it's Byatt writing - we get to feel like we are rifling through this box. There are catalog cards with notes and quotes scribbled on them - some attributed, some not - we get to read them. "Card No. 29", etc. Byatt loves to do that - books within books, trying to get at a first-hand experience as opposed to something told to us. It becomes apparent - as you read through the notes of the great biographer that he had been in the planning stages for books on Henrik Ibsen - Darwin ... and some other dude. No memory of it.

Uhm ... what the point of all of this is is beyond me. I'd need to read it again. I read this book in the direct aftermath of terrorist attacks and - I guess I thought I needed an escape (well, I did!) ... and maybe this book did help me escape, but nothing of it remains in my brain.

I flipped through the book and decided to excerpt from one of the sections of the biographer's notebook. (I mean - the one that the narrator, the OTHER biographer, is investigating. As always, there are layers within layers in this book). Although "Ibsen" is not named ... it becomes obvious who the notes are referring to.

And re-reading this this morning - I really like it. Especially this line from Ibsen: "summer is best described on a winter day." !!!!!!!!!!

Makes me think I need to read it now - when I'm no longer shell-shocked from a certain blinding blue September day.

Excerpt from The Biographer's Tale - by A.S. Byatt.

III
[The third document, to which I gave the provisional title "I ..."]

He was a public man, and he made a daily public progress. He set out at two o'clock from Victoria Terrace, and walked to the Grand Hotel. He dressed carefully, always in the same clothes - a black, broadcloth frock-coat, black trousers, concertinaed at the ankles over highly polished, high-heeled black boots, a carefully folded umbrella, a glistening silk top-hat, a little fence of miniature medals. His white beard, and his white hair surrounded his sallow, unsmiling face, like the copious flare of a halo. He was a tiny personage, and carried himself stiffly erect, full of a dignity at once self-important and threatening. His lips were thin; his eyes, under their snowy ledges, have been called, finely, "fierce badger eyes". Cartoonists found him easy to "take"; their images proliferated, all recognisable projections, all the same, all different. He knew he was looked at. He had constructed himself to be looked at. Famous men walk behind, or inside, a simplified mask, constructed from inside and outside simultaneously. He groomed his parchment skin and his sleek boot-leather to turn back the light to the onlooker. The onlookers, even as they watched the precise, dandified advance, knew they saw the outside, not the inside. They let their imaginations flicker round the inchoate "inside," which remained bland and opaque. He belonged to them, their countryman. They had never been sure if they liked him.

His effigies were round him in his lifetime. In his latter days, his statue stood outside the National Theatre, larger than life, looming through the snow. He was photographed, diminutive and bristling amongst the dignitaries, at ceremonies of dedication. There was a Platz named for him in Gossensass. There was a proposal to make a waxwork double of him to preside over a Freie Buhne festival in Berlin. They wrote to ask for the loan of an old suit. "Be so good as to tell this gentleman that I do not wear 'old suits,' nor do I wish a wax model of myself to be clothed in an 'old suit'. Obviously I cannot give him a new one, and I therefore suggest he order one from my tailor, Herr Friess, of Maximilianstrasse, Munich." Sculptors and painters found him somehow inordinate. He had, he informed one of them, the largest brainpan ever measured by a certain German expert. Another, having asked him to remove his spectacles, was appalled by the disparity between his eyes.

"One was large, I might almost say horrible - so it seemed to me - and deeply mystical; the other much smaller, rather pinched up, cold and clear and calmy probing. I stood speechless a few seconds and stared at those eyes, and spoke the thought that flashed into my mind: 'I wouldn't like to have you as an enemy.' Then his eyes and his whole body seemed to blaze, and I thought instinctively of the troll in the fairy tale who pops out of his hole and roars: 'Who is chopping trees in my forest?'"

He was a man mjok trollaukinn, with "augmented inhumanity" as one ludicrous translation has it. He wrote:

To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul.
To write is to sit in judgement on oneself.

Division and self-division. The trolls ensconced in the blood and under the pelt of the human creature; the writer, watching himself, summing up, delivering judgement. He wrote surrounded by a swarm of red-tongued gutta-percha trolls. "There must be a troll in what I write," he said. His monstrous troll came out only in extremis, when things were impossibly difficult. "Then I lock my door and bring him out. No other human eye has seen him, not even my wife ... He is a bear, playing the violin, and beating time with his feet."

So there he was, man and troll, badger and bear, black integument and lined parchment sac containing blood, bones, and busy creatures, proceeding towards the Grand Hotel, in Christiania, in Norway, which he did not want to think was home. "Up here among the fjords I have my native land. But-but-but: where do I find my homeland?" "Ten years ago, after my second absence of ten years, when I sailed up the fjord, I literally felt my chest contract with revulsion and a feeling of sickness. I felt the same during my whole stay; I was no longer myself among all these cold and uncomprehending Norwegian eyes in the windows and on the pavements." In the South, he thought of the North.

He turned his ship's
Prow from the north,
Seeking the trail
Of brighter gods.

The snow-land's beacons
Quenched in the sea.
The fauns of the seashore
Stilled his longing

He burned his ships.
Blue smoke drifted
Like a bridge's span
Towards the north.

To those snow-capped huts
From the hills of the south
There rides a rider
Every night.

He was a northerner who went south for light, for distance, in order to see the north, in light, from a distance. He crossed the Alps on May 9th 1864. On April 1, 1898, in Copenhagen, he spoke of the transition.

"Over the high mountains the clouds hung like great, dark curtains, and beneath these we drove through the tunnel and, suddenly, found ourselves at Mira Mara, where that marvellously bright light which is the beauty of the south suddenly revealed itself to me, gleaming like white marble. It was to affect all my later work, even if the content thereof was not always beautiful." He had "a feeling of being released from the darkness into light, emerging from mists through a tunnel into the sunshine."

He was, or had been, a narrow northern Puritan. He was shocked, and then exhilerated, by the excess of energy of Michelangelo and Bernini. "Those fellows had the courage to commit a madness now and then." The Norweigians, he recalled contemptuously, "speak with intense complacency of our Norwegian 'good sense,' which really means nothing but a tepidity of spirit which makes it impossible for those honest souls to commit a madness."

It was his great desire to commit a madness like Michelangelo. Was it for fear of tepidity and dim light only that he fled Norway? Was there a madness, already committed, working away like yeast in the Norwegian small beer of his past, ready to explode the bottle? As a letter-writer, he was inhibited, crabbed, tortuously formal, uncommunicative. After leaving his home town, he never returned there, though on the occasion of his mother's death he wrote a stilted letter to his sister Hedwig, saying that he was just setting off for Egypt, but would like to receive letters. Later, he wrote to his father, who did not preserve the letter, but sent a reply, which was preserved, in which he said, "I tried to read your letter, but I couldn't understand it, I felt ashamed ..."

It is doubly difficult for a famous man, once returned to his native land, not to make a pious pilgrimage to the place of his birth. Spectators of the public life are interested in its beginnings, in the source. It is patently untrue to claim that he himself was indifferent or uninterested. In 1881 he began an autobiography, rapidly abandoned, expressing surprise that a street had been renamed for him. "Or so at any rate the newspapers have reported, and I have also heard it from reliable travellers." He recorded a grim town - "nothing green; no rural, open landscape" -- full of the sound of weirs and, penetrating the watery roar, "from morning to dusk, something resembling the sharp cries of women, now shrieking, now moaning. It was the hundreds of sawblades at work on the weirs. When later I read of the guillotine, I thought of those sawblades." In the tall church, raised by a Copenhagen master builder, the child was exposed, by his nursemaid, sitting in the open window of the town, high, high up. The unexpected sight of him there caused his mother to scream and faint. In the church, too, lived a demonic black poodle with fiery red eyes, the sight of which, at that same window, had shocked a watchman into falling to his death, bursting open his head in the square below. "I felt that the window belonged to me and the church poodle," he wrote. Then he gave up his autobiographical enterprise. It clearly never tempted him into revisiting those scenes. Something forbade him. He stayed away.

Sometimes he described how he set his characters in motion. How, one may ask, does such a man set about constructing another human being, in some sense ex nihilo, an individual who was not there before, and now exists, but whose very identity must leave space for the creative puppet-mastery of a director, the defining touches of a costumier and a maquilleuse, the deliberate accidents of directed light-rays and non-functional, even painted, cloth, chairs and tables? Above all, how does he make such a person "real," whatever that is, and yet leave that "reality" sketched and incomplete, to be fleshed out, to be wormed into, to bulge and sag around the unimagined, unaccommodating perhaps, body, voice - and history, and soul, and human limitations - of an actor? And not even one, definitive, magesterial actor, but a succession of these too fleshy ghosts each filling out different pouches and pockets? How could he collaborate, in his work of imagination, with these unknown helpers or opponents?

Such descriptions as he left of this process - few, as always, fewer than one might reasonably hope or expect - are disappointing in this regard. They could have been written by a novelist, or even - stretching the imagination a little - by a biographer. There is perhaps a little more emphasis on the body and the voice, but this is scratching for grains in sand. In a way, his accounts are platitudes, multiplied in other records of other observers. Nevertheless, the precise form of his platitudes, his own platitudes, cannnot be without interest; we should, if everything were accessible to know, be interested also in the precise combination of flora in his intestine, or layered convolutions in his brain. Do we have instruments for dissecting platitudes finely enough to yield precise local truths?

"Before I write one word," runs this rare confidence, then, "I must know the character through and through, I must penetrate into the last wrinkle of his soul. I always proceed from the individual; the staging, the dramatic ensemble, all that comes naturally and causes me no worry, as soon as I am certain of the individual in every aspect of his humanity. But I have to have his exterior in mind also, down to the last button, how he stands and walks, how he carries himself, what his voice sounds like. Then I do not let him go until his fate is fulfilled."

Now we may ask - must ask, indeed, since it appears pointless to raise hypothetical theoretical barriers against such a profound and natural human curiosity - where these imagined humans come from? As we shall see, he compares them, ingeniously or disingenuously, to strangers met on a train. He observed those he met on trains, as a naturalist observes new and familiar species. With an overtone of moral judgement, added to pure observation. He is on record as having driven himself into rage and hatred over some unknown fellow-traveller, a woman, who slept in his railway-compartment all the way from Rome to Gossensass, without once looking out of the window. "What a lazy woman! To sleep the whole way! How can anyone be so lazy? ... Most people die without ever having lived. Luckily for them, they don't realise it."

But the people he, to use a primitive phrase, "made up" must in some sense be not only watched strangers but spun from his own fabric, sensed inside his own stance, seen through one or the other of those terrible disparate eyes?

"As a rule, I make three drafts of my plays, which differ greatly from each other - in characterisation, not in plot. When I approach the first working-out of my material, it is as though I knew my characters from a railway-journey. One has made a preliminary acquaintance, one has chatted about this and that. At the next draft I already see everything much more clearly, and I know the people roughly as one would after a month spent with them at a spa; I have discovered the fundamentals of their characters and their little peculiarities; but I may still be wrong about certain essentials. Finally, in my last draft I have reached the limit of my knowledge; I know from characters from close and long acquaintance - they are my intimate friends, who will no longer disappoint me; as I see them now, I shall always see them.

He took things from others, certainly. A very young woman sent him, in Dresden, a sequel to his dramatic poem Brand, which she had called Brand's Daughters. She called it a religious book. He called it a novel. He bothered, unusually, to give her advice. He liked very young women. He enjoyed their admiration. Something more than talent is required, he told her: "One must have something to create from, some life experience ... Now I know very well that a life in solitude is not a life devoid of experiences. But the human being is in the spiritual sense a long-sighted creature. We see most clearly at a distance; details confuse us; we must get away from what we desire to judge; summer is best described on a winter day."

Light like white marble, remembered amongst crisp snow under steel skies.

Later he appropriated the same young woman's confusion and folly to construct his doll-wife in his dolls' house; she too had borrowed to pay for her sick husband's travel, she too had forged a cheque. Nora arouses the sympathy of millions. Laura, whose acts were stolen, had periods of madness and shame. He did not choose to make, or keep friends.

"Friends are an expensive luxury; and when one sinks all one's capital in a vocation and a mission in life, then one cannot afford to have friends. The extravagance of keeping friends lies not in what one does for them, but what, out of consideration for them, one omits to do. On that account, many intellectual shoots are crippled in oneself. I have gone through this, and on that account, I have several years behind me, in which I did not succeed in being myself."

Bang Bang You're Dead

Holden's death scene in "Sunset Boulevard"

All in one take. I love it because it's the best kind of make-believe acting. The kind of acting that little kids do so brilliantly when they're playing and making up games. The kind of belief in the imaginary circumstances that so many adult actors have to WORK to remember how to do. It's the "Bang bang you're dead" school of acting. Because it's in one take - Holden has to be shot three times - stagger forward - turn back - turn the other way - be shot one last time and fall face first into the pool. One take. That takes not only acting chops - and make-believe chops (you know, not to be embarrassed or self-conscious about the "bang bang you're dead" energy of the thing) ... but also athletic chops.

Watch that scene again when you have the chance. Watch Holden's swan dive into that pool. Watch the lead-up to that last moment. And notice the unbroken take. It's just gorgeous - really FUN movie-making. I mean, yes, a man is being murdered, so it's not fun for HIM ... but that kind of take is almost unheard of nowadays - what with the love affair with closeups, and cutaways, and CGI effects ... One long take of an actor being shot multiple times, twirling this way, that, before plunging himself into the pool is old-fashioned film-making. Great great stuff.

Billy Wilder said to Cameron Crowe, about Holden: "Holden was very good. Physically, he was first-class."

Holden comes out onto the lawn - followed by Norma with her gun - he is shot in the back the first time. It stops him in his tracks - his back kind of arches, his head goes back ...

Then he plunges forward - wounded - dropping his suitcase ...

She shoots him again - from the side - he takes the hit ...

Out of control now, staggering away from her - turning back to see his attacker -

Disoriented, wounded - he flails about - flailing for the dropped suitcase ...

Which is when she shoots him for the final time. The death blow. His swoon is practically balletic. Fearless. Throwing himself off to the side and over the edge.

Bang Bang You're Dead of the highest order.

Friday Favorites ...

Star Wars art.

The nostalgia! She burns my soul!!

Awesome post, Carl V - a treasure-trove!

BY THE WAY:

The Star Wars Blog-a-Thon has begun!

"Citizen Kane" poster

Wow. Never seen that one before.

1997 quotes. No context.

"Somebody needs to call him up and tell him he's an asshole!" - Maria W. on Scott Hamilton

"I'm glad you're back ... even though I didn't know you were gone." - Ann

"M. and I were not really made for public viewing. We were a private exhibit. Invitation Only." - Me

"Who the hell is Tex Watson?" - Barbara

"SLUGWORTH." - Ann

"When she styled it, I looked like Sylvia Plath in her college years." - Maria M.

"I need to get some new cuss words. I want to start using words like 'asshole' and 'bitch.'" - Stephen

"...his snowbeard penis." - Jackie

"Buhsh 'n Pudding ..." - Shelagh, trying to say "button pushing"

"So I want you to operate out of complete panic." - Gene

"I'm on a roll! I'm on a very second-rate roll here!" - Sam

"It's a great mistake to try to be original." - Sam

"This is not a relaxing job." - Sam

"So. You've just heard from the portobellos ..." - Sam

"I had a bolt of stress that you didn't know where he worked. Literally. I had a bolt of stress .... You know, for the coma contingency." - Ann

"If I could say goodbye to you in a Rebus form I would ..." - Me to Ann

"I wish there was such a thing as Open Boob Night." - Brooke

"Where Alan Thicke meets Frankenstein ..." - Ann

"And then Tim hugged me." Long pause. "Well, electronically." - Ann

"She puts marshmallows on brownies!" - Maria's indictment of Jo

"She then plunged a dagger into my heart. Literally. She impaled me with her horns." - Ann

"Honey Nut Clusters, steamed squash, and red wine ..." - Jen, describing our nights at home

Kevin: "I just said 'Fuck it'."
Pause.
Robert: "Which is Latin for 'Be Free!'"

Me: "What about Adam?"
Ann: "Oh please. That rumor has already been squelched."

"And then, of course, there was the Bo Deans debacle ..." - Me to Kate

"Once you get to my stage, you have no standards, and you just feel grateful to still be standing here!" - Sam

"It seems to me, Rodney, that the importance of the hyoid bone is in having one." - Robert

Shelagh: "Isn't it true that Meryl Streep used to throw up before she used to go onstage?"
Cheryl: "Yeah, but that's because she was drunk."
Shelagh: "Oh! Okay! Thanks for clearing that up for me!"

"I am so charmed by him that I can barely sleep." - Mitchell on Scott Wolf

"What am I - the Profiler?" - Mere

"This is so Cohort One." - Matt

Discussion about Kenneth Branagh's Frankenstein:
Maria: "What annoyed me was that he called the movie 'Mary Shelley's Frankenstein' when it clearly should have been called 'My Chest.'"

The Wookie holiday: "Life Day"

I am so happy - an analytical essay on The Star Wars Holiday Special.

Quote from the essay:

"If ever a television program defined “so bad, it’s good," this is it, as if the initial pain of having one’s brain cells killed off is followed by the euphoria that accompanies their absence. "

Tooooo many books

Got this meme (Mere - BWAHAHAHA) from my dear friend Ted - who just started blogging - go, Ted. (Here's a Diary Friday, by the way, which describes the night Ted and I became friends. We had known each other for a couple of months - but it was on this night that we realized: Uhm ... kindred spirit???)

A book that made you cry: Atonement. I was a freakin' wreck at the end of that book. The rest of the book was a chilling and almost still experience - I didn't cry all the way through reading it. But that last paragraph. I cried so intensely that I scared the dude I was dating at the time. I have been unable to pick up that book ever since - even though I sometimes do yearn to re-read it, it was so good. But nope. Too painful.

A book that scared you: House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Uhm ... I've never written a post about this book. I will when I get to it. This book was a mind-freak. I actually had nightmares reading it. It tapped into a deep core of utter terror that I guess I walk around with at all times. Fear of dark, fear of claustrophobia, fear of ... reaching out to find the wall in the darkness and having it not be there ... This book is out of this world. Has anyone else read it? I'll get into more detail during my book excerpt thing - but I was blown away. Not just by the look of the book (you sometimes have to turn it upside down, you have to hold it up to the mirror sometimes) ... but also by his writing, which is startlingly good. I was terrified by this damn book. I felt like a little kid reading it. I didn't want to turn off my light because I knew I would have a bad dream. I read it a couple years ago. Great GREAT read. Scared the shit out of me.

A book that made you laugh: Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh I read it in a recent Book Blogger Classics Challenge - and it made me laugh so hard that I embarrassed myself during public commutes. One of the funniest books I have ever read in my life.

A book that disgusted you: Less than Zero, by Bret Easton Ellis. Those people have no redeeming qualities.

A book you loved in elementary school: Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh I mean ... LOOK at Harriet. I STILL dress like Harriet. Coincidence? I think not. She's why I started putting my thoughts down on paper when I was 10 years old.

A book you loved in middle school: The Pigman by Paul Zindel - this is still one of my all-time favorite books. Ever. I still read it, on average, once a year - and have ever since middle school.

A book you loved in high school: The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath The book does not hold up. The poetry, however, just gets better and better ... but the book is juvenile, and doesn't holdup. Still some well-written sections - I latched onto this book in high school. I loved it. Thank goodness it was a phase. Her POETRY is where it's really at.

A book you hated in high school:Billy Budd, by Herman Melville. I still have feelings of revulsion when i think of how much I hated reading that book.

A book you loved in college: Cider House Rules, by John Irving. Still one of my favorite books.

A book that challenged your identity: Diary of Anne Frank. I was 11 when I read it. I realized, for the first time in my innocent life, how much God has to answer for. It was devastating to me. Shattering, really. I remember kneeling by my bed and screaming at God so loudly that I was scared I would be struck by lightning. That book completely re-worked how I thought about the universe, fate, fairness, free will ... It was a horrible experience. I never fully recovered, I guess - and for that I am truly grateful.

A series that you love: The "Emily" books by LM Montgomery
All the Madeleine L'Engle series

Your favorite horror book: It, by Stephen King. A masterwork, as far as I'm concerned.

Your favorite science fiction book: Wrinkle in Time, I suppose is my answer.

Your favorite fantasy: The Narnia books.

Your favorite mystery: I must honor my younger self and say that the first 10 books in the Trixie Belden mega-series are pretty damn great. I should re-read them. I DEVOURED them when I was a kid. Nancy Drew Shmancy Drew. Give me Trixie.

Your favorite biography: Oh God, I'm with Ted. Only one?? I'm a biography freak. Let's see. Chernow's Alexander Hamilton, McCullough's John Adams, the two-part biography of Orson Welles by Simon Callow (oh my God), Joseph Ellis' books on Jefferson and Washington, A. Scott Berg's book on Lindbergh - the Joe Papp biography - Leverich's book Tom about Tennessee Williams (and he died before he could finish Volume 2! Tragedy!), Gerald Clarke's Capote is a masterpiece of the genre - and Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte. Yes, it's gossipy - yes, it's biased - and mythologizes the sisters -but listen - the book has not ever been out of print since it was first published. GIVE IT THE PROPS it deserves. Biographies go out of style so quickly - as new "theories" come up and go down ... but that kind of staying power is notable. I love Mrs. Gaskell's gossipy "I knew Charlotte Bronte" book ... and I know I'm reading a myth, but it's a damn good book anyway. Richard Ellmann's James Joyce is spectacular.

I can't stop. There are even more I need to add.

Your favorite �coming of age� book: Probably Tiger Eyes, by Judy Blume. Awesome book. I still love it. Wrote about it here.

Your favorite classic: Why must I choose. Why.

The first thing that comes to mind is Jane Eyre.

But I also have to say Tale of Two Cities, Brothers K, Crime and Punishment - Pride and Prejudice, Huckleberry Finn. Great Expectations. These are the main ones.

Oh shit, and how could I forget - Moby Dick. Hated it in high school - re-read it in 2003 ... and felt it was one of the most EXCITING books I've ever read. Love it. Love love love it.

Your favorite romance book: Flowers in the Attic by VC Andrews.

JUST KIDDING.

I suppose I would have to say Jane Eyre is the best romance ever. Although ... sigh. I want to add Possession to the list - as well as Life without Friends, a young adult book. Best romance I've ever read. It STILL gets to me.

Your favorite book not on this list:

Hopeful Monsters, by Nicholas Mosley.

The Books: "Babel Tower" (A.S. Byatt)

Next up in my Daily Book Excerpt ... Adult fiction shelves:

Babel Tower - by A.S. Byatt.

The third novel featuring the Potter family - this book is epic. Fantastic. Frederica Potter is the star of this book ... but the real star is the 1960s, or - more specifically - London in the 1960s. It's not so much about the counterculture - not yet - but about the upheavals going on at all levels of society. Frederica flees in the night with her son from an abusive marriage. Her husband is an old-school Englishman - who has very specific ideas about what a wife should be. (Why he would marry someone like Frederica then, is beyond me) His disappointment in his wife translates into rage, and domestic violence. Frederica takes her son and leaves - goes and stays with some of her old college friends (all men) in London. They all take her and her son on. It's a collective kind of community - they love Frederica, she needs them, her son needs them ... they step up to the plate. Frederica's husband naturally will not go down without a fight - and divorce proceedings begin, where he drags Frederica's name through the mud. She has to go to trial to prove her fitness as a mother. Meanwhile (sorry, I realize I'm making this sound like a soap opera - and it's NOT) - a book written by an acquaintance of Frederica - a kind of loopy Nitszchean-influenced outcast - is going on trial for obscenity. It's a book along the lines of Marquis de Sade - it purports that it's showing a Utopia, a world of ultimate freedom. Brutal. At the same time that Frederica is fighting for her son and her reputation - this book is standing trial. Because it's Byatt here - we get to read long sections of the controversial book. It has a sort of Anne Rice "Sleeping Beauty" feel to it - only it's more political, less pornographic. Babel Tower - with all of these different elements - ends up being about rebellion - useful rebellion and also useless ... the ideas of the 60s, loopy ones, and also revolutionary ones. How on earth Byatt writes a book about an entire society I will never know - but that's what she does. She does so without sacrificing character - Frederica is as clearly drawn as ever, all the characters are ... but Byatt is really interested here in language - the breaking apart of convention and what that does to our language - this is reflected even down to the personal level of what a word like "wife" or "marriage" means. As society upends itself, as the Swinging Sixties really kick in ... it is not a bold new day dawning ... even with all the new ideas, and new freedoms ... it is just another day, with new struggles, new annoyances - and the rebellion of those days will end up creating the rigid academic world Byatt so beautifully portrays in Possession. All that freedom, all that openness ... ends up solidifying, petrifying - into the postmodernist theoretical atmosphere that is so influential and, at times, annoying, today. Byatt is looking at the beginning of all of that in Babel Tower (I mean, her title kind of says it all).

This is a bold book. A book with huge sweep and ambition. I love it - I am feeling the need to read it again. As with all of the Byatt books I've excerpted - I flip through them, get a glimpse of a passage here, a paragraph there, and think ... argh, have to read it again!!

Here's an excerpt. Frederica is in London. She has left her husband. She's taken a lover. (I love how Byatt writes about sex.)

Excerpt from Babel Tower - by A.S. Byatt.

John and Frederica come back to Gothland in the evening. They walk in the dusk through the village, where the black-faced sheep stare with yellow, inhuman eyes. Something tugs at Frederica's memory. She came here once, in a bus, on a trip, and had what she has now docketed as an interesting and instructive experience with a traveller in dolls. The sight of a sheep and a thorn bush brings back this person, Ed, in his interesting and repelling flishiness, but it also brings back a thought. It was a thought about her own separateness, and the power that was possibly inherent in keeping things separate - sex and language, she thinks, ambition and marriage, what was I thinking? She remembers she was thinking about Racine, and the rhythmic movement of her feet, comfortably in time with the rhythmic movement of the feet of John Ottokar, brings back the couplet in the landscape to which it was wholly irrelevant then, and for that reason interesting, for that reason compelling:

Ce n'est pas une ardeur dans mes veines cachee
C'est Venus toute entiere a sa proie attachee

She remembers, and with it her delight in the balance of the lines, the way they pivot on the caesura and are both separated and joined by the rhyme. She says the verse out loud, and John Ottokar puts his hand over her buttocks, lovingly, and laughs, and says, "Precisely." Frederica stops in her tracks, dizzy with sex, and puts her arms tightly round him: watched by sheep, and by the man who was reading Lady Chatterley in the rosy restaurant, they embrace, they kiss, they walk on. They lean together. Frederica's mind, a dark snake burrowing in darkness, looks for a word which then seemed the key to power and safety. She remembers her distress that Stephanie had apparently found happiness with Daniel. She thinks of Forster and Lawrence, only connect, the mystic Oneness, and her word comes back to her again, more insistently: laminations. Laminations. Keeping things separate. Not linked by metaphor or sex or desire, but separate objects of knowledge, systems of work, or discovery. In her pocket her fingers touch Luk Lysgaard-Peacock's snail shells, two greenish and one striped. Are the stripes laminations, or organic growths? The layer of strontium, exposed by the diamond saw in the spiral form, is a layer - an accident in Cumberland, a time of fall-out in the air - what is she saying? Partly that even fear of death in the air is not all-consuming or all-pervading. She has the first vague premonition of an art-form of fragments, juxtaposed, not interwoven, not "organically" spiralling up like a tree or a shell, but constructed brick by brick, layer by layer, like the Post Office Tower. The radomes are on the moor and are seen amongst the heather and the neolithic stones and barrows, but their beauty is in the difference as well as in the simultaneity of the vision.

She is feeling for something, and doesn't know what it is, cannot push the thought further. Laminations. Separation. I was thinking about the Virgin Queen and the power of her solitude and her separation, the fact that her power and her intelligence were dependent upon her solitude and her separation.

"What are you thinking?" says John Ottokar, and takes her shoulders, and turns her face to his. "You've gone away from me. Where? What are you thinking?"

Desire moves round the column of Frederica's spine like the spiral of a helter-skelter, round which she spins screaming with fear and delight.

"I had an idea for a book called Laminations."

"Why Laminations?" he says later, in the bedroom. At the time, he simply smiled and nodded.

"I haven't thought it out. It's to do with what was in the lectures, the Romantic desire for everything to be One - lovers, body and mind, life and work. I thought it might be interesting to be interested in keeping things separate."

"I know about that," he says, sitting naked on the edge of the bed. The lights are out, but the room is full of pale moonlight. "I know what it is like to be afraid of being two separate creatures confined in one skin."

They are naked and cool in the night, sitting companionably on the edge of the bed. On an impulse she touches his sex, the two balls moving loose and separate inside the cool bag of skin. The penis shrinks like a soft curled snail, and then swings out blindly, a lumbering and supple serpent becoming a rod or a branch. Two in one, thinks Frederica, as his arms go round her. You might think, she thinks, as their bodies join, that her are two beings striving to lose themselves in each other, to become one. The growing heat, the wetness, the rhythmic movements, the hot breath, the slippery skins, inside and out, are one, are part of one thing. But we both need to be separate, she thinks. I lend myself to this, the language in her head goes on, with its own rhythm, I lose myself, it remarks with gleeful breathlessness, I am not, I come, I come to the point of crossing over, of not being, and then I fall away, I am myself again, only more so, more so. His face, post coitum is calm like an Apollonian statue. There is no clue to wghat is inside his brain-box. I love that, says Frederica's chatty linguistic self, I love not knowing, I love it that I don't know him.

Sewanee Review:

So much is going on right now - my real-life is extremely consuming right now ... but yo, I'm psyched about this.

Sewanee Review has launched their website, and check out who they're promoting on the home page. Sniff, sniff. I get all choked up and proud and goofy about this stuff. Especially cause my dad is mentioned.

Everything is poignant. Painful. Strange feeling ... to just be proud and humble and psyched all at the same time. Things are good right now.

Letters

Here's one of my new favorite blogs. What a great idea: "A Daily Selection of Correspondence by Authors, Writers, Poets, Painters and others".

I love reading people's letters. I just bought a second-hand copy of the correspondence of my intellectual idol Rebecca West - and I'm almost scared to start it. It's so voluminous ... daunting ... but still: I drool just looking at that book!

Anyway - back to that blog. One letter a day. Awesome.

Excerpt from letter to Sir Walter Scott:

The moment all was done, the Duke clapped spurs to his horse, and was back in Downing Street within the 2 hours--breakfasted--and off for Windsor, where he transacted business for an hour or so, and then said: "By the bye, I was forgetting: I have had a Field day with Lord W. this morning." They say the King rowed Arthur much for exposing himself at such a crisis. Such is the gossip of the Club. . . .
Yours affectionately,

J. G. Lockhart

Also - letter from Max Beerbohm!

More here. It's a new blog - but I look forward to checking in with it daily.

Famous person said to Alex:

"I'm glad you liked my Asshole."

You'll just have to go read the whole thing.

I love it when Alex runs into famous people. It's like this extremely articulate fiercely intelligent woman becomes a bumbling idiot, saying the famous person's name over ... and over ... and over ... (or just plain old calling the person a "Ho" like she did to Chita Rivera). And then there was her red carpet moment with Stockard Channing where Alex could not stop saying the words "Stockard Channing" RIGHT TO Stockard Channing herself. "Nice to meet you, Stockard Channing ... Stockard Channing, beautiful night, eh, Stockard Channing?" hahahaha

My next goal in life is to run into a famous person when I am with Alex, so I can watch the disintegration of my friend's personality. And point and laugh.

1938

From the personal notebooks of Tennessee Williams (he just won a play contest, sponsored by the Group Theatre - he is not famous yet):

My next play will be simple, direct and terrible - a picture of my own heart - there will be no artifice in it - I will speak truth as I see it - distort as I see distortion - be wild as I am wild - tender as I am tender - mad as I am mad - passionate as I am passionate - It will be myself without concealment or evasion and with a fearless unashamed frontal assault upon life that will leave no room for trepidation. I believe that the way to write a good play is to convince yourself that it is easy to do - then go ahead and do it with ease. Don't maul, don't suffer, don't groan - till the first draft is finished. Then Calvary - but not till then. Doubt - and be lost - until the first draft is finished.

"Passionate minutiae"

David frantically emailed me yesterday saying we needed to get together, it had been way too long, and we needed to sit and talk endlessly about "passionate minutiae".

Nobody like David.

I can't wait. I am allllll about passionate minutiae. You have no idea just how passionate my minutiae can get. You have no idea just how minute my passion can become. And etc. and etc.

I think I need to write a short story with that as the title. Or a poem. Or something.

David and me. Passionate minutiae. It's gonna be a long night!

The Books: "Angels and Insects" - 'Conjugal Angel' (A.S. Byatt)

Next up in my Daily Book Excerpt ... Adult fiction shelves:

Conjugal Angel - by A.S. Byatt.

This is the second novella in the collection Angels and Insects. It also takes place in the 1800s - late 1800s I believe. It has, as its plot-line and theme, another one of AS Byatt's pet interests - the whole seance phenomenon, the table-rapping, mesmerism, etc. - that was such a fad then. This also is featured heavily in Possession - Christabel gets very into it after the breakup with Ash ... and Ash, memorably, infiltratees himself into a seance so that he can confront Christabel. The two novellas - "Morpho Eugenia" and "Conjugal Angel" stand back to back - two sides of the same 19th century coin. The mania for insects, and the mania for seances and spirit-world visitations. There is so much IN these novellas - seriously, Byatt is just a master. I LOVE her.

"Conjugal Angel" takes place at one particular seance. We get to know all the participants - and what they are looking for, the dead person they are hoping to communicate with ... Byatt has a lot to say about what was REALLY going on with this 'fad' ... what people were really looking for. Mrs. Papagay is the "medium" who runs the thing. She was married to a sea captain - who was apparently lost at sea 10 or so years back - his ship never returned. It was through a medium that she "contacted" her dead husband ... and since then has found that she has a talent for this stuff herself.

The ending of this novella was surprisingly moving to me. Something happens on the very last page which takes the breath away - I did not see it coming. At all. And the event is one that completely upends the entire seance proceedings ... and yet also deepens my understanding of it. Byatt isn't interested in judging the silliness of this fad (and the charlatans involved) ... she is more interested in what it indicates, philosophically. What it shows us about ourselves.

Here's an excerpt.

Excerpt from Conjugal Angel - by A.S. Byatt.

Mr. Hawke arranged them. He sat between Sophy Sheekhy and Lilias Papagay, with a copy of the Bible, and a copy of Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell in front of him. Mrs. Jesse was next to Mrs. Papagay and on her other side was Mrs. Hearnshaw. Captain Jesse sat between Mrs. Hearnshaw and Sophy Sheekhy, in a kind of parody of dinner-party placement when there were insufficient men. It was Mr. Hawke's custome to begin the proceedings with a reading from Swedenborg and a reading from the Bible. Emily Jesse was not quite sure how he had made himself so central a figure, since he had exhibited no mediumistic powers up to that point. She had been glad at first, when she told him of their promising, if alarming results from their early cautious spiritual experiments, that he had asked to be included. Like her eldest brother, Frederick, and her sister, Mary, she was a dedicated member of the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church, and also a convinced spiritualist. Whilst the spiritualists claimed Swedenborg, who had made such momentous journeys into the interior of the spirit world, as a founder of the faith, many of the more orthodox Swedenborgians looked askance at what they saw as the loose and dangerous power-play of the spiritualists. Mr. Hawke was not an ordaining minister in the New Church, but a wandering preacher, ordained to speak but with no society to govern, a grade, as he never tired of explaining, referred to by Swedenborg as sacerdos, canonicus, or flamen. He sat with his back to the fire and read out:

'The Church on earth before the Lord is One Man. It is also distinguished into societies, and each society again is a Man, and all who are within that Man are also in Heaven. Every member of the Church also is an angel of heaven, for he becomes an angel after death. Moreover, the Church on earth, together with the angels, not only constitutes the inward parts of that Grand Man, but also its outward parts, which are called cartilaginous and osseous. The Church brings this about because men on earth are furnished with a body in which the spiritual ultimate is clothed with a natural. This makes the conjunction of Heaven with the Church, of the Church with Heaven.

'Today's reading from the Word,' he went on, 'is taken from the Book of Revelation, the twentieth chapter, verses 11 to 15.

'And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them.
And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the book swere opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.
And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.
And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.
And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.'

The passage from Revelation sent a frisson of accustomed delight through the frame of Mrs. Papagay, who loved its sonorous booming and its lurid colours, scarlet, gold, white and the black of the Pit. She loved too, and had loved since childhood, all its strange visions and images, the angels rolling up the scroll of the heavens and tidying them away forever, the stars falling out of the sky into the sea like a rain of golden fiery globes, the dragons and swords, the blood and the honey, the swarms of locusts and the hosts of angels, those creatures at once pure white and fiery-eyed, casting down their golden crowns around a glassy sea. She had asked herself often and often why everyone loved the ferocious Saint John and his terrible vision so, and had answered herself variously, like a good psychologist, that human beings liked to be terrified - look how they enjoyed the nastier Tales of Mr. Poe, pits, pendulums, buried alive. Not only that, they liked to be judged, she considered, they could not go on if their lives were not of importance, of absolute importance, in some higher Eye which watched and made real. For if there were not death and judgement, if there were not heaven and hell, men were no better than creepy-crawlies, no better than butterflies and blowflies. And if this was all, sitting and supping tea, and waiting for bed-time, why were we given such a range of things guessed at, hoped for and feared beyond our fat bosoms confined in stays, and troubles wiht stoves? Why the white airy creatures towering, the woman clothed with the sun and the Angel standing in it?

Mrs. Papagay was not good at giving up thinking. Their practice was to sit in silence, composing the circle, holding hands lightly, to join them into one, waiting, passive mind mind for the spirits to use, to enter, to speak through. At first they had used a system of raps and answers, one for yes, two for no, and every now and then they were still startled by great peals of banging from beneath the table, or shakings of the surface below their fingers. But mostly now they waited until the spirits gave signs of their presence, and then proceeded to automatic writing - all might hold pencil over paper, all, except Captain Jese, had produced scripts, long or short, which they had studied and interrogated. And then, if it was a good day, the visitors would speak through Sophy, or more rarely, through herself. And once or twice, Sophy could see them, she could describe what she saw to others. She had seen Mrs. Jesse's dead nephew and nieces, the three children of her sister Cecilia - Edmund, Emily, and ucy, dead at thirteen, nineteen and only last year at twenty-one. So slow, so sad, Mrs. Papagay thought, though the spirits said how happy and busy they were in a land of Summer amongst flowers and orchards of wonderful light. It was the marriage of this sister, Cecilia, which had been celebrated at the end of In Memoriam as the triumph of Love over Death, with the bride's little slippered feet, Mrs. Papagay could just see them, tripping on the tablets of the dead in the old church. But we live in a Vale of Tears, Mrs. Papagay had to conclude, we need to know that there is Summerland. The unborn child who was the future hope of the Laureate's poem had come and gone, like A.H.H. himself. With whom, for some reason, they were none of them not even Sophy Sheekhy, able to esstablish communication.

The firelight made shadows on walls and ceilings. Captain Jesse's mane of white hair stood out like a crown, his beard was god-like, and Aaron's smooth black head appeared in a smoky and wavering silhouette. Their hands were fitfully lit. Mrs. Jesse's were long and brown, gipsy hands with glinting red rings. Mrs. Hearnshaw's were softly white, covered with mourning rings containing the hair of the lost in littler caskets. Mr. Hawke's were muddy, with a few gingery hairs on them. He took good care of his nails, and wore a little signet ring with a bloodstone. He was given to making little pats and squeezes of encouragement and reassurance to his neighbours. Mrs. Papagay could also feel his knees, which occasionally rubbed her own, and, she was sure, Sophy Sheekhy's. She knew, without having to think about it, that Mr. Hawke was an excitable man in that way, that he liked female flesh, and thought much and very frequently about it. She knew, or thought she knew, that he liked the idea of the cool pale limbs of Sophy Sheekhy, that he imagined undoing that smooth unornamented bodice, or running his hands up those pale legs under the dove-coloured dress. She knew, with slightly less assurance, that Sophy Sheekhy did not respond to this interest. She saw Sophy's pale hands, creamy-pale even under the nails, motionless and at rest in his grip, with no answering sweat, Mrs. Papagay was sure. Sophy seemed to have no interest in that kind of thing. Part of her spiritual success might be due to this intact quality of hers. She was a pure vessel, cool, waiting dreamily.

Mrs. Papagay also knew that Mr. Hawke had considered her own possibilities as a source of creature comfort. She had caught his eye on her breast and waist, involuntarily speculative, she had felt his warm fingers massage her palm, at moments of excitement. She had met his eye, once or twice, as he weighed up her full mouth and her still-youthful coils of hair. She had never offered him any voluntary encouragement, but she had not, as she could have done, repelled him once and for all when he looked too long or brushed against her. She was trying to weigh it all up. She believed any woman who put her mind to it could have Mr. Hawke for the asking, if only that woman were reasonably buxom and inclined to him. Did she want to be Mrs. Hawke? The truth was she wanted Arturo, she wanted what Swedenborg would call the 'conjugal delights' of her married life. She wanted to sleep with male arms round her in the scent of marriage-sheets. Arturo had taught her much and she had been an apt pupil. He had gained courage to tell his wide-eyed wife of what he had seen in various ports, of women who had entertained him - he went so far, and further, as he saw that his surprising wife did not take umbrage, but evinced detailed curiosity. She could teach Mr. Hawke, or some other man, a thing or two, could Lilias Papagay, that would surprise him. If she could bring herself to it, after Arturo. She had a terrible nightmare once, about embracing Arturo and finding herself engorged with a great sea-eel, dragon or sea-serpent, which had somehow half-absorbed or half-extruded parts of him. Though the occasional dream in which he returned, as it were, 'to the life' hurt almost more, on waking. ' "Ah, dear, but come thou back to me," ' said Mrs. Papagay to herself, to her dead man. Her outside thumb found itself measured, and rubbed, by Mr. Hawke's stiff outside thumb. She tried to compose her mind to the purpose of the meeting. She reproached her own backsliding by looking at the expectant strain on Mrs. Hearnshaw's large soft face.

It was just a matter of time.

Red Sox iiiiiin spaaaaaaaace ....

5 for the day: Katharine Hepburn

Matt at House Next Door asked me to write a certain essay for a certain centennial anniversary that comes up this month, May 2007 ... no, not John Wayne ... another one.

It just went up: 5 for the day: Kate Hepburn.

The images below are of my research pile. I am so grateful that I apparently never throw a book away. I lurve my library. It is always there for me.

The Books: "Angels and Insects" - 'Morpho Eugenia' (A.S. Byatt)

Next up in my Daily Book Excerpt ... Adult fiction shelves:

Morpho Eugenia - by A.S. Byatt. After Possession, which hit the literary world like a bomb going off ... AS Byatt hung back for a while. I'm sure it was nuts for her. Awards and interviews and fame. The next book that came out (and believe me - after I read Possession, the first of her books I read, I read everything else of hers I could get my hands on ... which took about 3 weeks ... and then ... dadblastit ... I WAITED, and WAITED and WAITED .... It was agony!) Anyway, finally - out came Angels and Insects which is two novellas published as one book. They are peripherally connected to one another - one character overlaps with both stories (a very peripheral character) ... and yet the themes are similar. "Morpho Eugenia" is the first novella in Angels and Insects and it is that story that was turned into a movie called Angels and Insects. Never mind that ONE of the stories is the "insect" story while the other one is the "angels" story ... "Morpho Eugenia" is the insect story. I disliked that they used the title of the collection of novellas for the film of just ONE of the stories. But oh well. I wasn't consulted. It actually wasn't a bad movie - and it's my favorite of Kirstin Scott Thomas' performances, although - I wish she had been made even LESS attractive. (It's hard, though - she's so gorgeous). It's just wrong for the part for her to have any conventional beauty whatsoever. It's a MUCH stronger story if she barely seems like a woman at all. She says that in the electrifying scene at the end of the book (and actually - it's electrifying in the movie, too - you think she is going to EXPLODE) ... "You don't think of me as a woman at all. So why should you be concerned about such and such?"

But let's talk about the story itself, not the film. If you haven't read Angels and Insects, I highly recommend it. Actually, just flipping through it right now made me realize I have to re-read it. I loved every word. It's a feast for the mind and spirit.

"Morpho Eugenia" is the first story in the collection. The story is, well, relatively simple ... although layers of complexity are added until you feel kind of like William himself (he's the main character): buried in innuendoes, lies, and half-truths. You don't know WHAT is going on. It takes place in 1860. William Adamson is a naturalist, who has spent years in the Amazon - living with the indigenous people - and studying flora, fauna, but mainly insects. Byatt returns again and again in all of her books to the fascination 19th century folks had for insects. It was nearly a mania. Randolph Henry Ash in Possession has the same fascination. And some of Christabel's letters and poems in Possession have to do with various insects as metaphors. Mid 19th century. A time of Darwin, of scientific exploration and discovery ... William Adamson represents that. He has spent years outside of normal British society. On his return home to England, his ship sank - and he was rescued, and managed to save his once-in-a-lifetime only specimen collection of tropical butterflies. In comes Harald Alabaster - a rich dude who lives on a self-sustaining estate with his wife, many children, and a bazillion servants. He is interested in Adamson's work - so he basically invites him to come stay on his estate, as the resident naturalist. Bring his specimens. A conservatory is set up where the butterflies can fly free - and a laboratory is set up for Adamson to do his work in peace and quiet. Adamson very quickly kind of falls in love with Eugenia - one of the Harald Alabaster's daughters. At the same time - he begins to "work with" Matty Crompton, a spinster, who is the younger children's governess. Matty Crompton, a woman whose position would never allow her the freedom of Adamson (her position in her class, her sex, her education) ... so she asks Adamson if he woudln't mind helping her teach the children, and go on nature walks with them - to pass on some of his knowledge about insects.

I'm making this book sound very boring. It's actually the total opposite. Something is deeply deeply wrong in the Alabaster household and it takes William a long long time to figure it out. He is in an awkward position because he is indebted to Alabaster - and once he marries Eugenia - he almost becomes enslaved to him. He begins to lose his purpose in life. Eugenia doesn't understand any of his issues. She is most definitely Daddy's little girl. So William tries to lose himself more and more in his work ... only he doesn't know anymore what his work is FOR. He feels trapped on the Alabaster estate.

Matty Crompton, meanwhile, has this intense (one might say fiery) interest in ants - ant societies and communities ... so they set up observation posts to watch the ants do their thing. Because this is Byatt - we get multiple levels of narrative. Crompton keeps notes on what she observes. Instead of Byatt describing the notes to us as an omniscent narrator - we get to read the notes themselves. We get to read William's personal journal. Matty has actually written a fanciful and violent fairy tale - she asks William to read it and give her comments. We get to read the whole thing. You go deeper and deeper into the intellectual pursuits of these two characters - you lose sight of the Alabaster estate altogether (which is what these two experience when they lie in the grass, watching the ants) ... and when you come back up for air - after 20 pages of his journals or whatever ... and you are "back to reality" - it's quite jarring.

A man needs to be free. A man must not be beholden to anyone - father-in-law, wife, job ... William has chosen his own prison - but he didn't realize at the time what a prison it would be. Matty Crompton, the spinster governess, sees all. And yet until the electrifying scene at the end - you never know what it is that she sees. She seems to only be consumed with ants. And John Milton. Other than that ... she is barely human.

It's a brilliant novella - full of ideas, and passion, and long conversations about Darwin and God and Milton ... and also a couple of plot-shockers ... ugliness at the core of life at the Alabasters.

I highly recommend it.

Here's an excerpt. William has not yet married Eugenia. But he is overly conscious of her presence and being at all times ... he's a bit obsessed with her physicality. Another way of saying: he wants her. Yet you can tell too ... from the first sentence ... that there is something about this life ... on an estate where you never have to leave ... that doesnt' suit him. Especially because he is, essentially, an employee.

Watch how he's having this lovely (he thinks) conversation with Eugenia ... where he has been made the 'star' of her attentions ... and watch Matty Crompton's jujitsu move (physical and cerebral). Good for you, Matty. Intellectuals everywhere thank you.

Excerpt from Morpho Eugenia - by A.S. Byatt.

He went on nature rambles. He felt coerced into doing this, reminded of his dependent status by the organisation of Miss Mead and Matty Crompton, and yet at the same time he enjoyed the outings. All three elder girls sometimes came and sometimes did not. Sometimes he did not know whether Eugenia would make one of the party until the very moment of setting out, when they would assemble on the gravel walk in front of the house armed with nets, with jam-jars on string handles, with metal boxes and useful scissors. There were days when his morning's work became almost impossible because of the tension in his diaphragm over whether he would or would not see her, because of the imagination he lavished on how she would look, crossing thel awn to the gate in the wall, crossing the paddock and the orchard under the blossoming fruit trees to the fields which sloped down to the little stream, where they fished for minnows and sticklebacks, caddis grubs and water-snails. He liked the little girls well enough; they were docile, pale little creatures, well buttoned up, who spoke when they were spoken to. Elaine in particular had a good eye for hidden treasures on the undersides of leaves, or interesting bore-holes in muddy banks. When Eugenia was not in the party he felt his old self again, scanning everything with a minute attention that in the forests had been the attention of a primitive hunter as well as a modern naturalist, of a small animal afraid amongst threatening sounds and movements, as well as a scientific explorer. Here the pricking of his skin was associated not with fear, but with the invisible cloud of electric forces that spangled Eugenia's air as she strolled calmly through the meadows. Perhaps it was fear. He did not wish to feel it. He was only in abeyance, untnil he felt it again.

One day, when they were all occupied on the bank of the streams, including both Eugenia and Enid, he was drawn into speaking of his feelings about all this. There had been a great fall of spring rain, and various loose clumps of grass and twigs were floating along the unusually placid surface of the stream, between the trailing arms of the weeping willows and the groups of white poplar. There were two white ducks and a coot, swimming busily; the sun was over the water, kingcups were golden, early midges danced. Matty Crompton, a patient huntress, had captured two sticklebacks and trailed her net in the water, watching the shadows under the bank. Eugenia stood next to William. She breathed in deeply, and sighed out.

"How beautiful all this is," she said. "How lucky I always feel to live just here, of all the spots on the earth. To see the same flowers come out every spring in the meadows, and the same stream always running. I suppose it must seem a very bounded existence to you, with your experience of the world. But my roots go deep ..."

"When I was in the Amazon," he answered simply and truthfully, "I was haunted by an image of an English meadow in spring - just as it is today, with the flowers, and the new grass, and the early blossom, and the little breeze lifting everything, and the earth smelling fresh after the rain. It seemed to me that such scenes were truly Paradise - that there was not anything on earth more beautiful than an English bank in flower, than an English mixed hedge, with roses and hawthorn, honeysuckle and bryony. Before I went, I had read highly coloured accounts of the brilliance of the tropical jungle, the flowers and fruits and gaudy creatures, but there is nothing there so colourful as this. It is all a monotonous sameness of green, and such a mass of struggling, climbing, suffocating vegetation - often you cannot see the sky. It is true that the weather is like that of the Golden Age - everything flowers and fruits perpetually and simultaneously in the tropical heat, you have always Spring, Summer, and Autumn at once, and no Winter. But there is something inimical about the vegetation itself. There is a kind of tree called the Sipo Matador - which translates, the Murderer Sipo - which grows tall and thin like a creeper and clings to another tree, to make its way up the thirty, forty feet to the canopy, eating its way into the very substance of its host until that dies - and the Sipo perforce crashes down with it. You hear the strange retorts of crashing trees suddenly in the silence, like cracks of gunshot, a terrible and terrifying sound I could not for some months explain to myself. Everything there is inordinate, Miss Alabaster. There is a form of the violet, there - see, here are some - that grow to be a huge tree. And yet that is in so many ways the innocent, the unfallen world, the virgin forest, the wild people in the interior who are as unaware of modern ways - modern evils - as our first parents. There are strange analogies. Out there, no woman may touch a snake. They run to ask you to kill one for them. I have killed many snakes for frightened women. I have been fetched considerable distances to do so. The connection of the woman and the snake in the garden is made even out there, as though it is indeed part of some universal pattern ofs ymbols, even where Genesis has never been heard of - I talk too much, I bore you, I am afraid."

"Oh no. I am quite fascinated. I am glad to hear that our Spring world in some sense remains your ideal. I want you to be happy here, Mr. Adamson. And I am most intrigued by what you have to say of the women and snakes. Did you live entirely without the company of civilised peoples, Mr. Adamson? Among naked savages?"

"Not entirely. I had various friends, of all colours and races, during my stay in various communities. But sometimes, yes, I was the only white guest in tribal villages."

"Were you not afraid?"

"Oh, often. Upon two occasions I overheard plots to murder me, made by men ignorant of my knowledge of their tongue. But also I met with much kindness and friendship from people not so simple as you might suppose from seeing them."

"Are they really naked and painted?"

"Some are. Some are part-clothed. Some wholly clothed. They are greatly given to decorating their skins with vegetable dyes."

He was aware of the limpid blue eyes resting on him, and felt that behind her delicate frown she was considering his relations with the naked people. And then felt that his thoughts smutched her, that he was too muddied and dirty to think of her, let alone touch at her secret thoughts from his own secret self. He said, "Those floating grasses, even, remind me of the great floating islands of uprooted trees and creepers and bushes that make their way along the great river. I used to compare those to Paradise Lost. I read my Milton in my rest-times. I thought of the passage where Paradise is cast loose, after the Deluge."

Matty Crompton, without lifting her eyes from the stream surface, provided the quotation.

'then shall this mount
Of Paradise by might of waves be moved
Out of his place, pushed by the horned flood,
With all his verdure spoiled, and trees adrift,
Down the great river to the opening gulf,
And there take root an island salt and bare,
The haunt of seals and orcs, and sea-mews' clang.'

"Clever Matty," said Eugenia. Matty Crompton did not answer, but made a sudden plunge and twist with her fishing net and brought up a thrashing, furious fish, a stickleback, large, at least for a stickleback, rosybreasted and olive-backed. She tipped it out of the net into the jar with the other captives, and the little girls crowded round to look.

The creature gasped for a moment and floated inert. Then it could be seen to gather its forces. It blushed rosier - its chest was the most amazing colour, a fiery pink overlaid, or underlaid, with the olive colour that pervaded the rest of it. It raised its dorsal fin, which became a kind of spiny, draconian ridge, and then it became an almost invisible whirling lash, attacking the other fish, who had nowhere, in their cylindrical prison, to hide. The water boiled. Eugenia began to laugh ,and Elaine began to cry. William came to the rescue, pouring fish from jar to jar until, after some gasping on grass, he had managed to isolate the rosy-waistcoated aggressor in a jar of his own. The other fish opened and closed their tremulous mouths. Elaine crouched over them.

William said, "It is very interesting that it is only this very aggressive male who has the pink coat. Two of the others are male, but they are not flushed with anger, or elation, as he is. Mr. Wallace argues that females are dull because they keep the nests in general, but this father both makes and guards his own hatchery until the fry swim away. And yet he remains an angry red, perhaps as a warning, long after the need to attract a female into his handsome house has quite vanished."

Matty said, "We have probably orphaned his eggs."

"Put him back," said Elaine.

"No, no, bring him home, let us keep him awhile, and put him back when we have studied him," said Miss Mead. "He will build another nest. Thousands of fish eggs are eaten every minute, Elaine, it is the way of Nature."

"We are not Nature," said Elaine.

"What else are we?" asked Matty Crompton. She had not thought out her theology, William said to himself, without speaking out loud. Nature was smiling and cruel, that was clear. He offered his hands to Eugenia, to help her up the bank of the stream, and she took hold with her hands, gripping his, through her cotton gloves, always through cotton gloves, warmed by her warmth, impregnated by whatever it was that breathed from her skin.

One week to go ...

... until the Star Wars Blog-a-Thon over on Edward Copeland's wonderful site.

Ryland Walker Knight has a jump on things and has posted a fantastic essay about Revenge of the Sith. Not "fantastic" because I agree with him (although I do agree with a lot of it) - but "fantastic" because he's such a good writer and he put into words a lot of my own thoughts way better than I could.

(In case anyone's interested, I babbled about my response to the movie here)

Can't wait to read the entries in the Star Wars Blog-a-Thon when they all go live!

Thinking:

I'm not clear on a couple of things.

I need to get clear.

Hmmmmm.....

What do I need ...

what am I looking for ....

to get CLEAR ...

Passive-aggressive notes

An entire blog devoted to passive-aggressive notes.

Like this one.

I am in heaven. So funny!!!

Thank you so much for sending me the link, Ilyka - I love it!!

I think this is something Johnny Virgil would love ... with all of his documentation of insane signs at work.

The Books: "Possession: A Romance" (A.S. Byatt)

Next up in my Daily Book Excerpt ... Adult fiction shelves:

Possession: A Romance - by A.S. Byatt. I know I've written here before what that book meant to me (and continues to mean to me - I just re-read it ... again!!). I read it in December of 92 - which means nothing to anyone but me, but I was in a specific place in my life when this book became necessary. Not just a good book ... but a helpful guide - a lantern in the darkness. It didn't solve any problems but it sure as hell put into words - and beautiful words - so many of my own wordless struggles, my too-frightening-to-talk-about fears ... my heartache, which I had a lot at that time. And every single time I have read the book since then - in different stages of my life - I've seen different things, gotten different things ... As a matter of fact, just recently - I had a bit of a crack-up, and was out o' commission for maybe 3 days - not a huge crack-up, but definitely a teeny one - and I immediately turned to Possession again. I knew the passage I needed. It helped. In a weird way, it really did. It's one of those miraculous books that seems to grow with you, the devoted reader. I continue to be amazed by the breadth and depth of AS Byatt's skill. I linked to a piece once where Byatt talked about the writing of this book - Here it is - and there's a fantastic discussion in the comments about the book itself (I have awesome readers. Yay!) I guess the fact that I would place Possession on such a list as this one says it all. I write in that post:

As my life changes, as I grow older ... the book appears to take on deeper meanings - I fluctuate between sympathy for Roland, for Christabel, for Val, for poor Ellen Ash, for Maud ... depending on my mood, or where I am at in my life. Also, and this is a deeper comment: This is a book about intellectuals having love affairs. The cerebral mixed with the primal. This is something that strikes a very intense chord in me ... a problem that has come up in my life repeatedly, because of who I am, and because of my emotional makeup - a fiery mix of brains and passion. Tough for anybody to handle. How will it work? How will I find my way, find peace? My intellectual side is rigid, hard-working, and can be very inflexible. I will not "tone it down" to make others feel comfortable around me. I've been asked (outright, and also subliminally) to "tone it down" and the price (for me) is too great. It's too much of a betrayal. And yet I do not lack feelings, I am not cold ... Maud's struggle in the book with "letting her hair down", her resistance to love, her fear of having her boundaries melded with somebody else's, is my eternal struggle. I have never ever read a better prolonged study of the issues a woman like myself has when she falls in love. It's very specific. There isn't anything generic about a love affair - and yet most books do not tackle it from Byatt's angle. Not only did I love the story, but I felt validated and vindicated by it. It's something I go to again and again, sometimes searchingly, sometimes just with the knowledge that I will be able to lose myself in it ... and sometimes with trepidation. The truths revealed in this book are only live-able to me when I am in a good head-space, and dealing with myself openly. If I'm trying to "hide" (in the same way that Maud hides) - then the book rebukes me. I can't think of too many other books that maintain such a vibrant presence in my life.

I always get kind of nervous when, during this daily book excerpt thing I do, I approach a book which has been truly meaningful to me - like the Emily books - many others.

Byatt is at the top of her game here. She's at the top of anyone's game, frankly. She has written extensively about how she wanted to create almost a Victorian melodrama - the scene at the grave at the very end has all of the "props" - thrashing trees, driving rain, flickering lanterns, dirt - and yet we also have the gleam and bustle of modern-day London, and the postmodern world of academia - (her labeling the book "A Romance" is indicative of what she is trying to do ... it's a bit of a distancing technique). Two modern-day literature scholars - one a feminist, a women's studies professor - and one, a kind of aimless and yet passionate graduate student - end up tripping over a cache of letters between two Victorian poets - Randolph Ash and Christabel laMotte - love letters - and it was never before known that these two even knew each other. As a matter of fact, there is a bit of hostility in the LaMotte camp towards Randolph Ash - he's seen as a "soft-core misogynist" - LaMotte was a lesbian, apparently - she lived with a woman for many years - and all of the LaMotte scholarship since then has slowly and yet inevitably been erected around the sexual politics of the situation. Her work MEANS something to lesbians ... it validates THEIR life in the modern-day world. And now ... to discover ... that she actually had a tormented love affair with ... Randolph Ash?? Randolph Ash is apparently a sort of Tennyson-esque poet - he is part of the edifice of British culture. He was celebrated in his day (the same way Tennyson was) - and he lived an exemplary life, married, never unfaithful (as far as scholarship knows) - he was also a man of his time - inquiring, curious, controversial in some of his beliefs (about religion, for example) ... LaMotte is seen as a minor poet, and the Ash folks kind of pooh-pooh her. She didn't publish as much - a book of fairy tales, a limited edition of an epic about a fairy ... she didn't make her mark in the same way that Ash did. Byatt's depiction of modern-day scholarship is spot ON. She includes "excerpts" from scholarly papers and books which show the absolute opacity of lit-crit writing ... and makes the point that life will always be between the lines. There are things a biographer can NEVER know (the whole section about Ellen Ash at her husband's death bed is a perfect example) ... and Roland and Maud (the two modern-day scholars) have to go through quite a lot to, first of all, understand each other ... and second of all, to understand Randolph Ash and Christabel LaMotte. Both of them are so-called EXPERTS in their field. There is nothing about Christabel that Maud doesn't know.

And so the discovery of this huge correspondence rocks their world. They know they are sitting on a gold-mine. This will change the face of scholarship. Other forces become involved. Ash scholars, LaMotte scholars ... all of them start closing in ... everyone wants a piece of this new discovery.

Imagine if it was discovered that Tennyson and Emily Dickinson actually had a passionate and unrequited love affair. THAT'S the kind of bombshell we're talking about here. It would change everything.

Byatt's a genius. She acts as a sort of medium here. We get to read Randolph Ash's poetry. And also LaMotte's. And as the book goes on ... we start to see how they influenced one another. It was a meeting of the minds, man.

The book has everything. It's a detective story. At the end, it basically becomes a melodrama. It's a whodunit. It's a romance. The romance, for me, is startlingly effective. I burst into tears at the last sentence of the book. BURST into tears. Noooooooooooo!!!! was my main response.

It works.

Here's an excerpt. Now ... let me just say something about Byatt's writing. There is something here (and you'll see it in the excerpt) where she pulls back her lens a bit ... to comment on the action. It's not like we, the reader, are completely IN Maud and Roland's world ... no. She pulls back from THEM as well. (This goes back to her title of the book: Possession: A Romance) Even though we are peering back through time at the correspondence between Ash and LaMotte - trying to figure out what happened ... we are not QUITE in the present-moment completely either. Byatt is really making the whole point of the book in this section. In the movie (which I liked - I'll write about that at some other time - I was nervous about it, because of my feelings for the book - but I was very pleased with the result. Not 100% pleased, but almost so). Anyway, in the movie - they added a scene - which is kind of a compilation of many different scenes (including, sort of, the excerpt below). Maud and Roland lie in bed, they are in Yorkshire, trying to track down the Victorian poets ... and they have a prickly professional relationship. Yet they're warming up to each other. No romance yet. They lie in bed (they were given one room) ... and it's not awkward, they're just lying there, with books around them ... talking about their search, and about Ash and LaMotte. It starts to get personal. Roland asks Maud why she always wears her hair back (this is also in the book). They start to talk about it. And it segues into a talk about love and relationships. Is Roland seeing someone? How about Maud? They talk. At one point, Roland says something about his desire to stay free and independent, or whatever ... and Gwyneth glances at him, grins, and says, "Aren't we so modern." She's not saying it in a bitchy way. It's perfect, the way she says it. (And it's not in the book. But the FEELING of that moment is in the book - and in this excerpt today. But the movie puts it into language. Wonderful adaptation). The point here is that ... Ash and LaMotte conducted their romance in what may be seen as a simpler time. They didn't have to contend with gender politics, sexual politics, labeling - at least not the way we do in our "modern" era - the "isms" of modern day life. The hyphenated classifications of every human being. When Ash and LaMotte say the word "love" they actually mean something different than a modern person. Roland and Maud are discovering that. Are they falling "in love"? But ... what does that mean now? What have we lost, in being so modern? Gwyneth's little kind grin in that scene where she teases, "Aren't we so modern" says it all.

The funny thing is, and this is Byatt's kind of trickiness in this book (a trickiness that works): below, Roland starts to think about plots, and ... what if THEIR plot, in the modern-day was mirroring the plot of the Victorian poets. But then ... what WAS the plot? How could they know the plot if they don't know the ending? Byatt goes on to talk about the mistrust of "love" in the modern generation - and so ... beautifully ... by calling the book Possession: A Romance ... and by having Roland worry about what plot he is in ... and by explaining that he and Maud do not trust romantic love ... the title of the book answers Roland's question. He may not like that answer, he may be afraid of it ... but it's right there, plain as the nose on his face.

Here's the excerpt.

Excerpt from Possession: A Romance - by A.S. Byatt. I

They had been in Brittany three weeks. They had supposed, when they made their precipitate flight, that they would spend such timem as they stole, decorously in the university library at Nantes. Instead, they found themselves, owing to the closure of the library and the absence of Ariane Le Minier, on holiday, on holiday together, and for the second time that summer. They had separate rooms - with the requisite white beds - but there was no doubt that there was a marital or honeymooning aspect to their lingering. Both of them were profoundly confused and very ambivalent about this. Someone like Fergus Wolff would have known how to take advantage of this state of affairs, and would have assumed that it was natural for, indeed incumbent upon, him to take advantage. But Maud would not again willingly have gone anywhere with Fergus. And she had more than willingly set out with Roland. They had run away together, and were sharply aware of the usual connotations of this act. They spoke peacefully, and with a kind of parody of ancient married agreement of "we" or "us". "Shall we go to Pont-Aven?" one would placidly ask, and the other would answer, "We might try to see the crucifix that was the original of Gauguin's Christ Jaune." They did now, however, discuss this use of the pronoun, although both thought about it.

Somewhere in the locked-away letters, Ash had referred to the plot of fate that seemed to hold or drive the dead lovers. Roland thought, partly with precise postmodernist pleasure, that he and Maud were being driven by a plot of fate that seemed, at least possibly, to be not their plot or fate but that of those others. He tried to extend this apercu. Might there not, he professionally asked himself, be an element of superstitious dread in any self-reflexive, inturned postmodernist mirror-game or plot-coil that recognises that it has got out of hand? That recognises that connections proliferate apparently at random, apparently in response to some ferocious ordering principle, which would, of course, being a good postmodernist principle, require the aleatory or the multivalent or the "free", but structuring, but controlling, but driving, to some - to what? - end. Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable. "Falling in love", characteristically, combs the appearances of the world, and of the particular lover's history, out of a random tangle and into a coherent plot. Roland was troubled by the idea that the opposite might be true. Finding themselves in a plot, they ight suppose it approrpriate to behave as though it was that sort of plot. And that would be to compromise some kind of integrity they had set out with.

So they continued to discuss, almost exclusively, the problems of those dead. They sat over buckwheat pancakes in Pont-Aven, and drank cider from cool earthenware pitchers and asked the difficult questions.

What became of the child?

How or why, in what state of ignorance or knowledge, had Blanche been abandoned? How had Ash and LaMotte parted? Did he know of the possible child?

The letter returning the letters to Christabel was undated. When had that been sent? Had there been more contact? A long affair, an immediate rupture?

Maud was muted and saddened by the poems Ariane had enclosed. She interpreted the second to mean that the child had been born dead, and the "spilt milk" poem to be an evidence of a terrible guilt, on Christabel's part, at the fate, whatever it was, of the infant.

"Milk hurts," Maud said. "A woman with milk who can't feed a child, is in pain."

In terms of Christabel, she too discussed the parodying of plots.

"She wrote a lot about Goethe's Faust round about then. It's a regular motif, the innocent infanticide, in European literature at that time. Gretchen, Hetty Sorrel, Wordsworth's Martha in 'The Thorn.' Despairing women with dead babies."

"We don't know it was dead."

"I can't help thinking, if it was not destined to die, why did she run away? She had gone there for sanctuary. Why didn't she stay where she was safe?"

"She meant no one to know what happened."

"There's an ancient taboo on seeing childbirth. Early versions of the Melusina myth have childbirth instead of the bath."

"Repeating patterns. Again."

They discussed also the future of the project, that is, of the research, without knowing where to go next. Back to Nantes was an obvious step, and they condoned their lingering, on this ground. Maud said Christabel had stayed with friends in London in the early 1860s - she was unaware of the connection with the Vestal Lights. Roland remembered a glancing reference to the Pointe du Raz in Ash -- "tristis usque ad mortem," Ash had said it was - but that was no guarantee he had come there.

Beyond the future of the project, Roland was worried about his own future. He would have been in a panic if he had allowed himself to think, but the dreamy days, the pearly light alternating with the hot blue, and something else, made it possible to leave thinking in abeyance. Things did not look good. He had simply walked out on Blackadder. He had done the same to Val, who was, he considered, unforgiving and dependent in equal proportion - he would have to go back to be berated, and then how could he leave, where would he go, how should he live?

Things had changed between them nevertheless. They were children of a time and culture that mistrusted love, "in love", romantic love, romance in toto, and which nevertheless in revenge proliferated sexual language, linguistic sexuality, analysis, dissection, deconstruction, exposure. They were theoretically knowing: they knew about phallocracy and penisneid, punctuation, puncturing and penetration, about pollymorphous and polysemous perversity, orality, good and bad breasts, clitoral tumescence, vesicle persecution, the fluids, the solids, the metaphors for these, the systems of desire and damage, infantile greed and oppression and transgression, the iconography of the cervix and the imagery of the expanding and contracting Body, desired, attacked, consumed, feared.

They took to silence. They touched each other without comment and without progression. A hand on a hand, a clothed arm, resting on an arm. An ankle overlapping an ankle, as they sat on a beach, and not removed.

One night they fell asleep, side by side, on Maud's bed, where they had been sharing a glass of Calvados. He slept curled against her back, a dark comma against her pale elegant phrase.

They did not speak of this, but silently negotiated another such night. It was important to both of them that the touching should not proceed to any kind of fierceness or deliberate embrace. They felt that in some way this stately peacefulness of unacknowledged contact gave back their sense of their separate lives inside their separate skins Speech, the kind of speech they knew, would have undone it. On days when the sea-mist closed them in a sudden milk-white cocoon with no perspectives they lay lazily together all day behind heavy white lace curtains on the white bed, not stirring, not speaking.

Neither was sure how much, or what, all this meant to the other.

Neither dared ask.

In honor of the Duke:

Some excerpts from Kate Hepburn's autobiography Me:

He is so tall a tree that the sun must shine on him whatever the tangle in the jungle below.

From head to toe he is all of a piece. Big head. Wide blue eyes. Sandy hair. Rugged skin - lined by living and fun and character. Not by just rotting away. A nose not too big, not too small. Good teeth. A face alive with humor. Good humor I should say, and a sharp wit. Dangerous when roused. His shoulders are broad - very. His chest massive - very. When I leaned against him (which I did as often as possible, I must confess - I am reduced to such innoncent pleasures), thrilling. It was like leaning against a great tree. His hands so big. Mine, which are big too, seemed to disappear. Good legs. No seat. A real man's body.

And the base of this incredible creation. A pair of small sensitive feet. Carrying his huge frame as though it were a feather. Light of tread. Springy. Dancing. Pretty feet.

Very observing. Very aware. Listens. Concentrates. Witty slant. Ready to laugh. To be laughed at. To answer. To stick his neck out. Funny. Outrageous. Spoiled. Self-indulgent. Tough. Full of charm. Knows it. Uses it. Disregards it. With an alarming accuracy. Not much gets past him.

He was always on time. Always knew the scene. Always full of notions about what should be done. Tough on a director who had not done his homework. Considerate to his fellow actors. Very impatient with anyone who was inefficient. And did not bother to cover it up.

More:

Life has dealt Wayne some severe blows. He can take them. He has shown it. He doesn't lack self-discipline. He dares to walk by himself. Run. Dance. Skip. Walk. Crawl through life. He has done it all. Don't pity me, please.

And with all this he has a most gentle and respectful gratitude toward people who he feels have contributed very firmly to his success. His admirers. He is meticulous in answering fan mail. Realistic in allowing the press to come on the set. Uncomplicated in his reaction to praise and admiration. Delighted to be the recipient of this or that award - reward. A simple man. None of that complicated Self-Self-Self which seems to torment myself and others who shall be nameless when they are confronted with the Prize for good performance. I often wonder whether we behave so ungraciously because we really think that we should have been given a prize for every performance. And are therefore sort of sore to begin wtih. Well, as I began - he is a simple and decent man. Considerate to the people who rush him in a sort of wild enthusiasm. Simple in his enjoyment of his own success. Like Bogie. He really appreciates the praise heaped upon him. A wonderful childlike, naive open spirit.

And lastly:

As an actor, he has an extraordinary gift. A unique naturalness. Developed by movie actors who just happen to become actors. Gary Cooper had it. An unselfconsciousness. An ability to think and feel. Seeming to woo the camera. A very subtle capacity to think and express and caress the camera - the audience. With no apparent effort. A secret between them. Through the years these real movie actors seem to develop a technique similar to that of a well-trained actor from the theatre. They seem to arrive at the same point from an entirely different beginning. One must unlearn - the other learns. A total reality of performance. So that the audience does not feel that they are watching. But feel a real part of what is going on. The acting does not appear acting. Wayne has a wonderful gift of natural speed. Of arrested motion. Of going suddenly off on a new tack. Try something totally unrehearsed with him. He takes the ball and runs and throws with a freedom and wit and gaiety which is great fun. As powerful as is his personality, so too is his acting capacity powerful. He is a very very good actor in the most highbrow sense of the word. You don't catch him at it.

When you buy a cotton shirt - you want to get a cotton shirt. Not nylon. It stays clean, but it makes you sweat. Not drip-dry, which you don't have to press but you should. Just cotton. Good simple long-lasting cotton. No synthetics. That's what you get when you get John Wayne.

IMDB ...

I feel so lonely.

Ah ... that's better.

Much better!

The Books: "Still Life" (A.S. Byatt)

Next up in my Daily Book Excerpt ... Adult fiction shelves:

Still Life - by A.S. Byatt.

This is the second of the "Potter family" books and man, I love this book. Her big themes continue from Virgin in the Garden: intellect vs. body, marriage vs. independence, madness vs. creativity. Interspersed throughout the book are long fascinating excerpts from the letters of Theo and Vincent van Gogh - so the book has an intellectual rigor to it (as all her books do). It's not straight narrative. We get into the nitty-gritty of the characters' lives - and then switch back to treatises, by an omniscent narrator, on the van Goghs, and art, and trying to capture light and color. Frederica - the prickly "star" of this book - escapes Yorkshire and goes to Cambridge. She falls in with a rowdy group of men (who continue on as characters in the subsequent books). Frederica is the kind of woman who flourishes in platonic male friendship. It's not that she doesn't like women - but it's one of her struggles - to remain a woman, while at the same time being a serious academic, and being taken seriously in her work. Stephanie has married Daniel, a vicar - and you can see how she begins to lose her fight in this regard almost immediately. But because it's AS Byatt writing it - it's not a simplistic struggle. It's just that ... at the time (and even now, to some extent) - marriage is seen as a structure that has a specific form, and you must adhere to that form - or it's not a marriage. Wives should be a certain way. Stephanie is not rebellious, by nature - but she has a moment in this book, when she's going into labor, and she knows she's going to be in the hospital for some time - and she is desperate for someone to go home and bring her her books. This request is not understood. She is seen as being difficult, weird. Why does a new mother need her complete Wordsworth by her side? Again, this isn't said explicitlly - but it's there - and you really feel for Stephanie, trapped in a life that she thought maybe would free her up (it is the 50s, after all - you can't be single for TOO long ... marriage was seen as the truly freeing thing). But what really interests me about this book is the back and forth between the spectacular letters of Theo and Vincent - and the Potter family. It's such a nice device. I found it to be hugely effective. Marcus, the brother, has had a nervous breakdown - and has been convalescing in a hospital for some time. His "madness" has to do with how he perceives light. Light comes across to him as a mathematical theorem - he can SEE it - breaking apart, coming together - lines, angles, parabolas - it is something he cannot control. There is a genius in Marcus, a mathematical genius - but he becomes overwhelmed by the very FACT of light's existence, he can't bear it. This, of course, is very similar to Vincent van Gogh's madness ... after all, Vincent never saw his famous painting "Starry Night" as impressionistic, or abstract in any way. This is actually how the stars appeared to him. Is that madness? Does it even matter?

Here's an excerpt from the book. I love her writing, man. There's a distance to it - as there is in all the Potter books. It's almost like a treatise, a sociological examination - you'll see what I mean. This is from Frederica's time at Cambridge. There's something about Byatt's specific excavation of Frederica's motives and actions during this time that reminds me of this time in my life. I was very very Frederica-esque then. Byatt could be describing me. It's odd, and cool, isn't it ... when you see yourself in a book? It's like: but ... but ... that's so private ... how could Byatt know that??

Excerpt from Still Life - by A.S. Byatt.

She had too tough and inflexible a sense of her identity to be as good a chameleon as Alan Melville. She did not intend, as she began to suspect he did, to make a career of it. She tried, in a small way. She said "darling" and "love" to the theater people. She tried to adjust her clothes to the preconceptions of sweet Freddie, though some things cannot be done without money. (He was shocked by a pair of elbow-length nylon gloves she had, which he had supposed might be old lace.) She talked about "value" to the poetry friends and slickly and cynically to Tony and Alan. But only in bed - or on sofas, or in punts, or hand in hand on the Backs - did she truly practice being a chameleon. She gave back as much - or more often as little - as was offered or expected. Her greed did not express itself in bed as it did in conversation. She copied and followed, she did not demand. She was unaware that this was all she did. She awoke once from a dream in which she was a grass meadow, held to the earth by myriad grass roots through her hair, fibrils painlessly incorporating her skin in turf, a Gulliver being absorbed by Lilliput, and over the meadow leaped, slowly, exhaustedly, rhythmically, similarly, a procession of pale yellow frogs, long legged, mostly flaccid, a spurt, a heavy-breathing rest, a floppy spurt, one after the other after the other ...

This may seem to be a chill and cynical account of a time that was, was perceived as, rich, confusing, full of emotion. The language with which I mgiht try to order Frederica's hectic and somewhat varied sexual life in 1954-55 was not available to Frederica then. She had the phsycial and intellectually classifying adjectives, but she did not believe herself to be primarily conducting research but looking for love, trust, "someone who would want her for what she was". And she had thought very little about the feelings or expectations of clever boys or clever young men. There were many things, however many beds she hopped in and out of, however many cheeks she demurely brushed, that she was not fitted to understand. She came, after all, not in utter nakedness but cocooned by her culture in a web of amatory, social, and tribal expectations that was not even coherent and unitary.

She believed unquestioningly, with part of herself, for instance, that a woman was unfulfilled without marriage, that marriage was the end of every good story. She was looking for a husband, partly because she was afraid no one might want her, partly because she couldn't decide what to do with herself until that problem was solved, partly because everyone else was looking for a husband. (It is curious, but true, that the offers she received in no way changed her fixed feeling that the sort of woman she was was essentially not wanted as a wife.)

She believed, with a mixture of "realism" and resignation, that women were much more preoccupied with love than men were, more vulnerable, more in pain. There were imposing tags in her mind. "Man's love is of man's life a thing apart / 'Tis woman's whole existence." "He for God only, she for God in him." "I claim only this privilege for my sex - you need not covet it ... this distinction of loving longest when life, when hope is gone." She was conditioned to desire to be abject. This desire was reinforced by the behavior of Rosamond Lehmann's heroines and of Ursula Brangwen (whom some other part of Frederica was ready to despise heartily.) And there was the knowledge gleaned from agony columns, where abject women asked for help with the indifferent, the unfaithful, the only-wanting-one-thing, the other women's husbands.

The Frederica who had fled to Scarborough with Wilke rather than go to bed with Alexander might be described as instinctively in revolt against "whole" (overwhelming) love, though she would have said she was afraid of failure, embarrassment, bloodshed. The Frederica who conducted experiments in sex in Cambridge was looking for an ideal lover. At one level. At another, she was considering a battle with the whole male sex. She often said, "I like men," as one might say, "I like strong cheese," or "I like bitter chocolate," or "I like red wine." Sghe came to pronounce that each realationship was what it was - dancing, sex, talk, friendship - as many as there were men. This was true, and she believed it, but it was not the whole truth. Her behavior was more dictated by generalizations aout men, or Men, than she was at first aware.

Men had their group behavior. Together they talked about girls as they might about motorcars or beer, joking about breast measurements and legs, planning campaigns of seduction like army or teenage gang maneuvers. For these men women were better or worse, easier or more rarified sex. Simply. Frederica did the same, at first half-consciously, then with deliberation. She judged and categorized men. Quality of skin, size of backside, texture of hair, skill. Men discussed whether girls would or wouldn't. Frederica furiously categorized those men who could and couldn't. If men wanted "only" one thing, so could, and would, and did, Frederica Potter. She took some pride in the fact that there was no one who could feel able to refer to her as his girlfriend. She preempted the planned, staged, purchased 9with curry, with films, with wine) seductions by immediate acquiescence or unusually direct and candid rejection. These habits took some learning and there were moments when she lost her nerve, even wondered if she were cheap, or a tart. (Fast would have been a good word for her but came from another decade.)

There were men who wanted her, or seemed to, who sent letters quoting "the not-impossible She", who asked delicately if she saw them as perhaps special. Here Frederica's confusion was at its height. She believed that she wanted to solve the marriage problem. To find a true mind, with the rest of course added. But she also wanted not to be like her mother's generation, free and powerful only during this brief artificial period before concession and possession. She felt contempt for the suitors, which protected her from taking them seriously, or allowed her to remain abject - in her own mind - before the not-impossible unknown. She prevaricated and cheated, shared them with other women and neither felt nor appeared to feel jealousy. (This was owing to egocentricity: she simply could not imagine men in the company of other women.)

It shouould by now be clear that Frederica was more than once both cruel and destructive. In extenuation it can be argued that she had not been led by custom or by cultural mythology to suppose that men had feelings. Men were deceivers ever, the bad ones, and masterful, the good ones. The world was their world and what she wanted was to live in that world, not to be sought out as a refuge from or adjunct to it.

She might have been instructed by literature. She had read endless descriptions of the shyness and desperation of male first love. But whereas she recognized the humiliation of Charlotte Bronte's Lucy Snowe, of Rosamond Lehmann's brave, doomed girls, and the death of the heart, from some fund of ancient knowledge, she did not recognize, or believe in, the professional coquettes or pure young girls, or mysterious animal presences of the male novels. None of these were anything to do with Frederica Potter, who was brisk, businesslike, interested in but not obsessed by sex, and wanted to make friends of the creatures if they would have it. Women in male novels were unreal and it was beyond Frederica's comprehension that young men might suppose she was any or all of these characters. So they battled, the men to be hopelessly devoted, Frederica to be abject and/or free, and were puzzled and hurt. Frederica was shocked and startled when one young man burst uninvited into a tea she was making for another and smashed a teacup with a poker. She categorized long and deeply considered love letters as parts of a campaign and ignored them. When one desperate man whom she found unexciting, apart from an encyclopedic knowledge of Thomas Mann, burst into tears and said she was mcking him, she could only stare, become wholly silent, and go home.

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My favorite road sign in Ireland (and I love the accompanying prop below) - it's just so hysterical. (More on Irish signs here)

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I haven't touched up this photo at all. This is actually what I saw. This is the view from the end of my street. It is dawn. I mean, can you believe it??

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Flock of birds.

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He's lecturing me about something, chowing down on a stack of French toast.

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Hi, everybody! I am SO EXCITED. I mean, just check out my pants ... wouldn't YOU be excited if YOU were wearing such pants? Also ... it is just SO FUNNY to be perched at the top of the bulkhead. Like ... I cannot get over HOW FUNNY it is to be up so high in my plaid pants!

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Welcome to Belfast! Carrie gave us directions, involving the phrase, "Take a left when you see the mural of the chicks with the guns ..." You know, as though she were saying, "Turn left when you see the Dunkin Donuts ..." We did the whole mural tour with Carrie. I mean, you just gotta. Our tour guide said stuff like, "And over der is da pub where me girlfriend's da got his leg blown off ..."

This one is actually not on the side of a private home - like all the other ones are - this is on the side of the Sinn Fein office. Gerry Adams was inside - and you can see the television truck antenna in the foreground. Lots of TV journalists hanging out, waiting, smoking, drinking coffee. We talked to them for a bit.

Hi! Welcome to the neighborhood!

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I think wearing some kind of sailor-middy type dress should be compulsory for little girls.

Who ... me?

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A gleam of gold.

This was on my way out to Block Island one wintry day. Heavy grey clouds, dark icy ocean - with this gleam of gold at the horizon. Truly spectacular - heart-stoppingly so.

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Long-time regular readers of my blog will recognize this one right away. And for those of you who are new ...

Still has the potential to get me all choked up.

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I found this photo in my big hatbox this morning - I was looking for something else and instead floated off down memory lane. This photo is what happens when you live with one of your best friends, and you have the same sense of humor, and you take a joke and you run with it. I am drunk (obviously) and Mitchell said to me, "You know - in that get-up you somehow look like a disaffected member of some defunct royal family - like a Hapsburg princess on vacation in the Alps or something."

What? But that became the joke. That I was a coked-up princess deprived of her throne - being all bitter and glamourous in some Alpine nightclub. There are a number of other photos in this series. I loved living with Mitchell, we were always doing crap like that.

The Books: "The Virgin in the Garden" (A.S. Byatt)

Next up in my Daily Book Excerpt ... Adult fiction shelves:

The Virgin in the Garden - by A.S. Byatt.

This is Byatt's third novel - and actually, she has gone on to write three more books about this particular family, so there was obviously something here that gripped her. You can tell in the writing, too. The book takes place in 1952, in England - the time of Elizabeth's coronation - seen as "the new Elizabethan age". This is AS Byatt's explicit topic. A young playwright/academic has written a new play, in honor of the occasion of the coronation - and if I recall correctly it's in verse, and it's about Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen. Drawing parallels between that age and the "new" age. The play is to be put on at a private school - and the headmaster and his family (3 kids) are the main characters of Byatt's book. The chapters alternate points of view. We follow Bill (the father), and Stephanie, Frederica and Marcus (the children) through their lives - but all the time, they are grappling with big questions and issues. What is it to be English? What is culture? Is it something to be inherited? Is how we speak directly influenced by, say, Chaucer? Shakespeare? Byatt revisits these themes again and again in her books (Possession is all about that). Virgin in the Garden is really ABOUT England. England at a particular time. There is a cynicism in the era - a kind of dichotomy between the brou-haha of the upcoming coronation (and all its sincerity - you know, there's no ironic distance in a coronation, no wink-wink at the audience), and all of the shining expectations of what this new age will bring for the British Empire - and the snarkiness going on below in the populace. Another one of Byatt's main themes (this, I believe, is the thing I found most piercingly wonderful in Possession, the thing that spoke to me the most) is the split between the cerebral and the earthy. Body and mind. In a funny way, nobody writes about sex like AS Byatt. At least, to my taste and sensibilities. She writes about cerebral people, intellectuals, to some extent cut off from their own bodies - this is her topic. Sex is not always easy, or grasp-able to certain types - although the desire is usually present in every human. So there's Frederica and Stephanie - the two daughters in this book - both kind of cerebral in their own way. Frederica is sharp-minded, no-nonsense, not always likeable, unlike other girls - not gushy or mushy at all - and then there's Stephanie, a charcter I find truly fascinating. A quiet placid girl, a teacher ... I don't know, she's a mystery to me. With all her quiet placid-ness, I never knew what she was going to do next. Anyway, the lushness of Elizabethan drama, juxtaposed with the dry academic setting in 1950s England - the national hysteria over the coronation - juxtaposed with Stephanies' lectures to her students - on Keats, Ovid, Chaucer ... The book is kind of patchwork, no real plot - (unlike Possession, which is all plot) - but what you are left with is ... the image of a nation on the brink of some big changes. 1950s England. What is it to be English? What is it to be an artist? How does one feel about Shakespeare, if one is English? How does he inform the present? What is culture? A construct? Or something more organic? Byatt knows what's coming - because this book was published in 1976, I believe. Byatt knows that England, like many other countries, is headed for some decades of self-doubt, cynicism, and rebellion against old forms. The prologue of Virgin in the Garden takes place in 1968 - so in some sense, by doing that, Byatt is placing the book in its decade, purposefully. There is some retrospect. What do the 1950s look like, from the end of the 1960s? It's almost like it was a different world entirely.

I love this book. I should go back and read it again.

Here's an excerpt. I didn't know what to pick - the book is so rich, and there are so many parts I love - the family watching the coronation on television, and having all kinds of differing responses to it - the discussions of the new play, rehearsals - but I like this one. I wanted to pick an excerpt having to do with quiet deep Stephanie. Here she is, in the classroom where she teaches. She's gotta be about 20? Can't remember. She, unlike her sister Frederica, isn't a difficult character to like. But she is difficult to understand. There seems to be some melancholy there, and also - perhaps she represents a kind of old order. Meaning: look at the poem she is teaching to her students. A 'revolution' in the culture is coming. In the 60s and 70s, lit crit and multicultural concerns are going to re-make "English" classes into something entirely different. How would Stephanie have fared in that new landscape? It's not that she's a purist. No, not exactly. But her reading - and the way Byatt talks about her reading - is personal. I can't imagine that politicized readings of the classics would appeal to her at all.

Byatt doesn't really get into all of that in this book (she saves that for later books in this same series, and takes it as her main subject for Possession) - but it is there, nonetheless.

Excerpt from The Virgin in the Garden - by A.S. Byatt.

Stephanie sat in a chill brown classroom, whitened over with chalk dust, and taught the Ode on a Grecian Urn to those girls who had not gone to Blesford Ride. Good teaching is a mystery and takes many forms Stephanie's idea of good teaching was simple and limited: it was the induced, shared, contemplation of a work, an object, an artefact. It was not the encouragement of self-expression, self-analysis, or what were to be called interpersonal relations. Indeed, she saw a good reading of the Ode on a Grecian Urn as a welcome chance to avoid these activities.

She had never had trouble with discipline, although she never raised her voice. She exacted quietness, biologically and morally. Girls came in from outside, buzzing, crashing, laughing. Barbara, Gillian, Zelda, Valerie, Susan, Juliet, Grace. Valerie had a disfiguring boil and Barbara an acute curse pain. Zelda's father was dying, this month or next, and Juliet had been shocked by a strange boy who had thrust his fist up her skirt and crooked an elbow around her throat in a Blesford ginnel. Gillian was very clever and required a key, mnemonics and an analytic blueprint of the Grecian Urn for exam purposes. Susan was in love with Stephanie whom she tried to please by straining her attention. Grace wanted only to have a florist's shop, was held at school in a vice of parental ambition, biding her time.

Stephanie's mind was clear of all this information, and she required that their minds should become so. She made them keep still, by keeping unnaturally still herself, as tamers of wild birds and animals keep still, she had read in childhood, so that the creatures become either mesmerized or fearless or both, she was not sure which.

She required also that her mind at least should be clear of the curious clutter of mnemonics that represented the poem at ordinary times, when the attention was not concentrated upon it. In her case: a partial visual memory of its shape on the page, composed, in fact, of several super-imposed patterns from different editions, the gestalt clear, but shifting in size: a sense of the movement of the rhythm of the langauge which was biological, not verbal or visual, and not to be retrieved without calling whole strings of words to the mind's eye and ear again: some words, the very abstract ones, form, thought, eternity, beauty, truth, the very concrete words, unheard, sweeter, green, marble, warm, cold, desolate. A run of grammatical and punctuational pointers: the lift of frozen unasnwered questions in the first stanza, the apparently undisciplined rush of repeated epithets in the third. Visual images, neither seen, in the mind's eye, nor unseen. White forms of arrested movement under dark formal boughs. Trouble with how to "see" the trodden weed. John Keats on his death-bed, requesting the removal of books, even of Shakespeare. Herself at Cambridge, looking out through glass library walls into green boughs, committing to memory, what? Asking what, why?

She read the poem out quietly, as expressionless as possible, a ditty with no tone. And then again. The ideal was to come to it with a mind momentarily open and empty, as though for the first time. They must all hear the words equally, not pounce, or tear, or manipulate. She asked them chilly, "Well?" prolonging the difficult moment when they must just stare, finding speech difficult and judgment unavoidable.

She sat there, looking into inner emptiness, waiting for the thing to rise into form and saw nothing, nothing and then involuntarily flying specks and airy clumps of froth or foam on a strongly running grey sea. Foam not pure white, brown and gold-stained herre and there, blowing together, centripetal, a form cocooned in crusts and swathes of adhesive matter. Not relevant, her judgment said, the other poem, damn it, the foam of perilous seas. The thing had a remembered look, not pleasant, and she grimaced, as she saw it. Venus de Milo, Venus Anadyomene. The foam-born, foam from the castrated genitals of Kronos. Not a bad image, if you wanted one, of the coming to form from shapelessness, but not what she had meant to call up.

"Well," she said to the girls, "well, what do you see?"

They began to talk about when Keats required his reader to see an urn and when a landscape, what colours he called up and what he left to chocie, and moved from there to the nature of the difficulty of seeing what is formed to be
"seen" by language alone, marble men and maidents, the heifer and altar, a burning forehead and a parching tongue, cold pastoral.

Herad melodies are sweet but those unheard
Are sweeter,

said Stephanie. Clever Gillian commented that the word desolate was the centre of the poem, almost allowing one to be taken out of it, like the word forlorn in the Nightingale. They talked about beauty is truth, truth beauty. They talked, as Stephanie had meant them to, about a verbal thing, made of words so sensual and words not sensual at all, like beauty and truth. She talked about what it could mean, that the turn should "tease us out of thought As doth eternity". It is a funeral urn, said Zelda. That is not enough to say, said Susan, staring at Stephanie.

Things moved in the classroom, amongst eight closed minds, one urn, eight urns, nine urns, half realised, unreal, white figures whose faces and limbs could be sensed but not precisely described, bright white, the dark, the words, moving, in ones, in groups, in clusters, in and out of whatever cells held their separate and communal visual, aural or intellectual memories. Stephanie talked them out of the vocabulary she was supposed to be teaching them and left them with none, darlkling. Gillian, who was enjoying the process, reflected that words could be quickly enough snatched back, when the occasion required it. Stephanie reflected that this poem was the poem she most cared for, saying ambivalently that you could not do, and need not attempt, what it required you to do, see the unseen, realise the unreal, speak what was not, and that yet it did it so that unheard melodies seemed infinitely preferable to any one might ever hope to hear. Human beings, she had thought, even as a very small child faced with The Lady of Shalott, might so easily never have hit on the accidental idea of making unreal verbal forms, they might have just lived, and dreamed, and tried to tell the truth. She had kept asking Bill, why did he write it, and the answers had been so many and so voluble and so irrelevant to the central problem, that she closed her mind to them, even whilst effortlessly committing them to memory for future use, as Gillian now must and would.

The bell rang. They came out blinking, like owls into the bright daylight. Stephanie, gathering her books, allowed herself to wonder whether the irrelevant flying foam she had seen had come from the Nightingale, or from her own intellect, making Freudian associations all too tidily between marble maidens, the Venus and the subconscious knowledge she had of the nature of that foam. It was not very nice foam.

Photo category

I created a new category for photos. Just cuz.

I have a lot of writing to get done this weekend, and I also have Witness for the Prosecution to watch and there's a massage to get and lots of cleaning to get done. The last couple of weeks have been so busy (although you'd never know it from what I share on the blog! ha) that I feel like I haven't had a chance to breathe. Today I will breathe! After I get to work on my writing, that is.

The Books: "The Game" (A.S. Byatt)

Next up in my Daily Book Excerpt ... Adult fiction shelves:

The Game - by A.S. Byatt.

This is AS Byatt's second novel, published in 1967. She had quite a long writing life before she finally hit the jackpoet with Possession - she did a lot of critical writing, studies of Iris Murdoch, she taught, she wrote, but she didn't have, for many many years, fame. I like that about her. I like that she didn't make a splash with her first book, or her second, or her third. Or her fourth ... etc etc. I like the long-percolating aspect of her career. I read these earlier books of Byatt's and she, as a writer - the voice, the concerns, the themes - is clearly in evidence. I totally recognize the writer of Possession here. It's just that the subject matter isn't yet BIG enough for her particular gifts. She's a very detailed writer - but she's also a writer who truly THINKS about things - trends, generations, movements, etc. - She thinks about these things not in a dilettanteish way - she doesn't use these things as plot points ... these are truly her concerns. (Like the whole "lit crit theory" trend - which is the jumping off place for Possession)

The Game - I can't remember much about it. I know it's about two estranged sisters. They had a troubled upbringing and created a fantasy world together when they were little - a sort of Knights of the Round Table world - that reminds me a bit of the two girls in Heavenly Creatures and that claymation world they would escape to. Uhm ... and that's all I remember. I know that now, when the book starts, the two sisters are grown women, married - estranged ... and somehow they are drawn back together again. There's a sort of "evil" guy named Simon - has he had affairs with them both? How does he factor in? No memory. But he, predictably, is some sort of specialist on snakes (see - Byatt hasn't quite figured out yet how to hide her themes more gracefully) - he has a television program about snakes, and the two sisters are kind of haunted by seeing him everywhere. They have known Simon since they were young girls - and ... somehow ... well. He's the snake in the garden. The book is supposed to be really psychologically ominous - but as you can tell, none of it has remained in my memory.

I flipped thru it just now, and some of it came back to me - but only some.

There are long sections of Cassandra's journal (Byatt is very into doing that - she likes that device, a very Jane Austen-y device - of printing letters, memos, journals - that's the whole point of Possession - She likes giving you, the reader, the feeling that you are rifling through someone else's papers.) So anyhoo - here's an excerpt involving the teenage Cassandra's journals.

Like I wrote elsewhere: I totally recognize AS Byatt here. It's 1967, it's years before she hit it with Possession - but the voice is already there. I love that.

Excerpt from The Game - by A.S. Byatt.

Cassandra's Journal. Easter 1944.

Today he showed me the snakes. I hoped he might, as I imagine he would not show them to most people. He says he has 'for some reason' always kept them a secret. So I was very flattered, but could not comment as intelligently or enthusiastically as I would have liked to. I hoped to feel we were sharing something, but he was a bit schoolmasterish - more letting me be there than wanting me. I refine too much on what he says. I said, 'Is there anything I can do?' He said, 'Just sit there and keep me company.' I was absurdly pleased by this. (Must watch myself, no lies, no lies.) One must never ask for more than is offered - not out of virtue, but because if one does one loses what one has.

Snakes are strange things. Not evil-looking, as I had supposed, not anything much, just little heaps like coils of rope or something one might have dropped. He keeps them hidden in this cave. In glass tanks. He has earth on the bottom, and odd stones, and dishes of water for them to swim in. None were swimming. I would make it all look much better, but he clearly doesn't care how it looks. There is water running down the back wall; the stone is stained, silver and gold and olive; there are minute ferns growing in crevices. One could perhaps grow ferns all round, put in a few shelves.

It is strange to me to think anyone could love those snakes - stranger than before I saw them - but in some way he clearly does. He has ten grass-snakes, three smooth-snakes and two adders he caught in the heather. He has a collection of skins, wrapped in oilskin, in a metal box, and a book full of observations. There are no thoughts, only notes on how they excrete, how and when they cast their skins, how they swallow, how long they go iwthout food, what they will and won't eat. They have no names, although he knows them all apart. He told me they were beautiful, which I suppose is a kind of thought. I expected to find them beautiful myself - I am the sort of person you would think would - but I didn't. There was a dryness and nothingness about them. I was somehow surprised they were alive. They were nothing, really, just accidental tubular shapes of things. He says spring is late so they are torpid; they are inert, as though the step from life to death was insignificant to them. Snakes have no lids to their eyes, and so look plainly out at you; this makes them seem not so much fascinating as stupid.

I like watching him watch them. One of the things about knowing him is the excitement of mapping out all the directions in which there are things to learn I shall never know more of than that they are there. (Prose!!) I really don't want to know more than he voluntarily tells me, partly because I am shy. I stand around in a waiting silence much of the time but he doesn't seem to mind too much. I hope my waiting doesn't oppress him. God knows I don't mean it to. He said last week I was censorious, but oh, Simon, not with you, ever.

We had for lunch spam, tomatoes from his greenhouse, half a hard-boiled egg each and an apple.

We had another argument about the Incarnation. I was trying to say I didn't see it was necessary for Christ to have been God or to have died. It seems to have made, proportionately to what is claimed for it, so little difference - historically, that is - it hasn't changed war or murder or cruelty, most people still know nothing about it. I said I didn't want God to have been made flesh, as far as I was concerned if there was any point in the idea of God it was precisely that He was not flesh, he was something else, something other. He said might we not then feel God was inaccessible, and I said that individually, for myself, that was how I did feel. I see the flaw in my argument here.

He said, surely I saw something was wrong with the world - 'something horribly twisted' was how he put it. He said some twisting back on a really grand scale was needed, some 're-wrenching', not done by us, to counteract this.

I said, something was certainly horribly wrong, but it seemed to me likely that it had always been wrong and had not at one point in time 'gone wrong'. I said we have no right to think this re-wrenching actually took place just because we think it ought to have. He said the point about the Crucifixion was that it was the moment when the eternal was involved in history - thus its effects were eternal (we are now forever able to be saved) and historical (it has to be worked out). I said this was too metaphorical. I was angry because he didn't see that if the 'going wrong' wasn't historical, the atonement needn't be. He was angry with me; he wants me to believe.

I told him that what I found saving was the order and structure one could see in things, smooth-running, meaningful. The growth of plants, the circulation of the blood, networks of working muscles, veins on leaves, movements of planets and shoals of fish. A harmony one could see. This is what we are for, to pay attention to this beautiful network of designed movement that we and our tragedies are held in. He said that suffering and sin were rents in this network, and that Christ was a guarantee that they could be mended, the fabric could be restored. I said I thought the need for Christ was a need to simplify, to reduce to terms of human suffering something that is neutral, not loving, inhuman, not human.

We were angry with each other. I wish I didn't have to win arguments, especially with him. It doesn't do me much good. Moreover, about concrete suffering at least, he knows more than I do. Mine is all in the head. But he knows. I feel he is always on edge and menaced. I don't know why. I speculate about how he lives in that house; going into it is unthinkable. He must do normal things, brush his hair and teeth, sit by the fire ... He doesn't talk about his family. I don't ask.

Soho grafitti

... on a spring night. Before meeting a friend last night for Thai food.

Remaining quotes

Okay, so I just have to say to everyone who showed up today: you are all so awesome. Beautiful. The guesses, the slow load-time of comments, the feeding frenzy atmosphere ... the beautiful stabs in the dark (sometimes the guesses are so illuminating, so intelligent - even if they were wrong) - the pondering, the worrying over certain quotes ... Seriously, it's on days like this that I'm really proud of this blog, and the fact that you people show up on a daily basis. I love it. Thank you for playing and playing so hard! It makes it all so fun.

Time to point out the quotes left unguessed - and I'll give a clue for each one.

This one has been giving folks a LOT of trouble. I guess I thought it was more obvious than it was! So here's the clue: the American dream gone horribly awry.

This one. Not one guess!! Here's a clue: bounty hunter

This one We've narrowed it down to a Woody Allen film. Here's a clue: ee cummings

This one. Here's a clue: Africa

This one Some awesome and very logical guesses. Here's a clue: vaudeville

This one I put a clue in the comments section there. It's truly terrifying.

This one Here's a clue: encyclopedia

This one DBW? Where are you?? Let's see - here's a clue: Scar

This one Here's a clue: a lost bumblebee

This one Clue: funhouse mirror

This one Clue: planetarium

This one Clue: "We're Texicans"

Movie quote

"Do we look like the kind of store that sells 'I Just Called to Say I Love You'?? Go to the mall."

Movie quote

"Come on, all the long distance lines are down? What about satellite? Is it snowing in space? Don't you keep open a line for emergencies or for celebrities? I'm both. I'm a celebrity in an emergency."

Movie quote

"It's such a fine line between stupid, and clever. "

Movie quote

"Jean Louise. Jean Louise, stand up. Your father's passing. "

Movie quote

"For what we are about to see next, we must enter quietly into the realm of genius."

Movie quote

"Forty years I been asking permission to piss. I can't squeeze a drop without say-so. "

Movie quote

"You want the word on that brother-and-sister act, Hansel's a fag and Gretel's got the hots for herself, so who cares, right? Load up on the salami. "

Movie quote

"Tell mama... tell mama all."

Movie quote

"Amputate a man's leg and he can still feel it tickling. Tell me, mum, when your little girl is on the slab, where will it tickle you?"

Movie quote

"I'm villifying you for God's sake - pay attention! "

Movie quote

"Don't forget: stay out of the adult bookstore. "
"Adult bookstore. Why? "
"Poison gas. Invisible. "

Movie quote

"With all due respect, sir, I believe this is gonna be our finest hour. "

Movie quote

"Please pass the salt. "
"And what do we say? "
"NOW. "

Movie quote

"Step on it, Velma! Step on it, Velma! Step on it, Velma. Step on it, Velma. Velma, step on it, Velma! "

Movie quote

"You got a lot of nerve. You come in here, you lick my wife's armpit."

Movie quote

"You shoulda looked out for me a little bit. You shoulda taken care of me just a little bit so I wouldn't have to take them dives for the short-end money."

Movie quote

"Sorry I'm late. I was taking a crap."

Movie quote

"Those two yellow zinnias at the end, they're shorter now. Now since when do flowers grow shorter over the course of two weeks? Something's buried there."

Movie quote

"I like your outfit too, except when I dress up as a frigid bitch, I try not to look so constipated."

Movie quote

"Perhaps you're interested in how a man undresses. You know, it's a funny thing about that. Quite a study in psychology. No two men do it alike. You know, I once knew a man who kept his hat on until he was completely undressed. Yeah, now he made a picture. Years later, his secret came out. He wore a toupee. Yeah. You know, I have a method all my own. If you notice, the coat came first, then the tie, then the shirt. Now, uh, according to Hoyle, after that, the, uh, pants should be next. There's where I'm different... I go for the shoes next. First the right, then the left. After that it's, uh, every man for himself. "

Movie quote

"You were diagnosed with something called a brain cloud and didn't ask for a second opinion?"

Movie quote

"You don't ask me things like that, do you? No! You never ask me what's on the flip side."
"No! Because I don't give a shit. Shrevie, who cares about what's on the flip side about the record?"

Movie quote

"That's what I thought. You're a gutless turd. "

Movie quote

"What do you think you are, for Chrissake, crazy or somethin'? Well you're not! You're not! You're no crazier than the average asshole out walkin' around on the streets and that's it."

Movie quote

"It adds up that you got yourselves the wrong guy. Because, I'm telling you, the krauts wouldn't plant two stoolies in one barracks. And whatever you do to me, you're gonna have to do all over again when you find the right guy. "

Movie quote

"Ever had sex with an animal, Jack? "
"No, but I saw some tasty-looking chickens back at that barn over there. "

Movie quote

"Has anyone seen my wife? "
"She's still at school. She has cheerleading practice. "

Movie quote

"I don't like when somebody comes up to me the next day and says, 'Hey, man, I saw your play. It touched me; I cried.' I like it when a guy comes up to me a week later and says, 'Hey, man, I saw your play... what happened?' "

Movie quote

" I like the way I feel. I like thinking about the red dress and the television and you and your father. Now when I get the sun, I smile. "

Movie quote

"He treats me like a woman. "
"Oh he does, does he? Mm-hm... how did I treat you? Like a water buffalo? "

Movie quote

"In order to find his equal, an Irishman is forced to talk to God. "

Movie quote

"I think I'm going to be unwell. "
"Ladies are unwell, Stone. Gentlemen vomit. "

Movie quote

"When you pull on that jersey, the name on the front is a hell of alot more important than the one on the back. "

Movie quote

"I don't know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They're more important than sex. "
"Ah, come on. Nothing's more important than sex. "
"Oh yeah? Ever gone a week without a rationalization? "

Movie quote

"Are you a nice girl or are you a cunt? "
"Can't I be both? "
"No. It's a decision a girl's gotta make early in life, if she's gonna be a nice girl or a cunt. "

Movie quote

"We aren't married yet."
"Congratulations."
"But we will be soon."
"Condolences."

Movie quote

"I don't believe this! I've got a trig midterm tomorrow, and I'm being chased by Guido the killer pimp. "

Movie quote

"Don't you think that idea is a little half-baked? "
"Oh no, Dad, it's completely baked. "

Movie quote

"It's called 'Charlie Chan In London'. It's a detective story. "
"Set in London? "
"Well, not really."

Movie quote

"Where did you learn to drive? "
"I took a correspondence course. "

Movie quote

"You know, at one time, I used to break into pet shops to liberate the canaries. But I decided that was an idea way before its time. Zoos are full, prisons are overflowing... oh my, how the world still dearly loves a cage. "

Movie quote

"Son, if I'd only gotten to be a doctor for five minutes... now that would have been a tragedy. "

Movie quote

"Just going to the kitchen to get some food, then I'm going to tell you a story that will make your balls shrink to the size of raisins. "

Movie quote

"This is a really volcanic ensemble you're wearing, it's really marvelous! "

Movie quote

"I'm a murderer. "
"No, you're not. "
"I'm a murderess. I'm gonna go to the pen. My poor kids. I'm gonna lose my job."
"Violet, stop this. "
"I'm no fool. I've killed the boss, you think they're not gonna fire me for a thing like that? "

Movie quote

"And Nietzsche, with his theory of eternal recurrence. He said that the life we lived we're gonna live over again the exact same way for eternity. Great. That means I'll have to sit through the Ice Capades again. "

Movie quote

"If I could only have one food for the rest of my life? That's easy, Pez, cherry-flavored Pez. No question about it. "

Movie quote

"Someday - and that day may never come - I'll call upon you to do a service for me. But until that day, accept this justice as gift on my daughter's wedding day. "

Movie quote

" Mother, you're a scream, really you are. The next thing I know you'll be knitting little garments. "
"I don't see anything so ridiculous about that. "
" If I were you, I'd save myself the trouble."

Movie quote

"Meet me... in Montauk... "

Movie quote

"You know what I think? I think that we're all in our private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out. We scratch and we claw, but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it, we never budge an inch. "
"Sometimes, we deliberately step into those traps. "
"I was born into mine. I don't mind it anymore. "

Movie quote

"Because I've got my weight in my hip, weight in my hip. "

Movie quote

"So, she's a dog... "

Movie quote

"She said you came to the place where they buried her. Asked her a question? She said the answer is...'Every day.' What did you ask? "
"Do... Do I make her proud? "

Movie quote

"Who's the brains in this outfit? "
"Uh... "
"My point exactly. "

Movie quote

"Gretchen, I'm sorry I laughed at you that time you got diarrhea at Barnes & Nobles ... And I'm sorry for telling everyone ... And I'm sorry for repeating it just now. "

Movie quote

"Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. "

Movie quote

"It's quiet. Only three days left. Plenty of time to read my Bible and look for a loophole. "

Movie quote

"YOU CALL THIS A HONEYMOON???"

Movie quote

"What was she like, anyway? "
"Who? "
" That girl that made you act the way you do. "
"A whole lot like you. Just as nice, almost as smart. "
"Chorus girl? "
"Only by temperament. "

Movie quote

"Then, on the fourth day, he roped himself a couple of sea turtles, lashed 'em together and made a raft. "
"He roped a couple of sea turtles. "
"Aye. Sea turtles. "
"What did he use for rope? "
"Human hair. [pause] From my back. "

Movie quote

"What happened? "
" She ate from her own plate. She ate with a spoon. Herself. And she folded her napkin. "
" Folded her napkin? "
"The dining room's a wreck, but her napkin is folded."

Movie quote

"All my life I've had this strange feeling that there's something big and sinister going on in the world. "
"No, that's perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the universe gets that. "

Movie quote

"It's just that nosy Mrs. Bates going on about your picture last night."
"Oh really did she like it? "
"Oh really did she like it?... She liked it! "