The Sheila Variations

The Northern Dispensary

After my haircut ... I went downtown to meet up with Allison.

And we walked by the Northern Dispensary in the Village - You can read more about this mysterious abandoned empty building here - and another link - with a great photo here - it just sits there, prime real estate - and you can still see the old dentist equipment, rotting away through the windows - it's on a corner - so you can peek into the windows on one side and see straight through to the windows on the other side. There are some great stories behind the building - Allison told me some of them - but follow the links in that post above to read more. I used to have my appointments with my analyst in the building right behind the Dispensary in that photo - and i walked by it all the time, not really thinking about it - or wondering why this Willy Wonka's factory nobody-comes-in-or-goes-out building was just sitting there ... empty ... at the intersection of Waverley and Waverley.

It was a nice little pilgrimage, and dammitall I didn't have my camera with me (which ended up being an even bigger bummer because on my way home I inadvertently got trapped in a raucous parade of angry lesbians - marching and drumming and dancing - I could not get out of the throng, they were jammed into the narrow streets of the Village - and they had taken over the entire block - and I had no idea what they were protesting - but there was nothing to do but join them, so I marched along blissfully oblivious, my new haircut bouncing buoyantly in the night breeze, clapping my hands, dancing to their drumbeats - hoping the lesbians got whatever they wanted - but in the meantime, ahhh, that's a nice drumbeat, let me dance along to my train station since I cannot seem to escape ... laughing at the weirdness of my life) - so back to the Northern Dispensary: I settled on 2 shots with my crappy cell phone.

It's a haunting building. Allison kept saying, "What I wouldn't give to go in there and have a look around!"

Pampering

I went and got my 700 dollar cut and color yesterday. I seriously feel like I could write a 50 page essay about everything I observed and experienced in that salon - it was overwhelming! The decor is sleek, modern, and all black and white. The stylists wear all black - and there are glassed-in rooms where you can see bizarre experiments going on, with hair color, and makeover tints - and the stylists there wear white lab coats. The amenities of the salon are amazing. People stroll around offering you iced tea, or lemonade, or seltzer ... Other people stroll around carrying little trays of pastries ... Everyone who works there is drop-dead gorgeous. Everyone who GOES there is drop-dead gorgeous! I was intimidated but determined to not let it crush me. I just asked questions, and blatantly allowed myself to be in a fluster of confusion. I did not try to KNOW the system ... I was like: "Oh ... so ... where do I hang my coat?" "Take a left over there ... you can get changed in the rooms over there ..." Oh! Rooms! Changed! Got it! Then once I was over in the room-changing area - I again was in a bluster of confusion ... "Do I check my coat? How about my purse? Do I need to ... Oh, I go right over here ... thank you." (Thankfully, there are people who work there EVERYWHERE - and anyone who looks even mildly lost - for 2 seconds - is approached. "Can I help you?" "Do you need anything?" So, with a lot of hand-holding - I made my way through the maze of changing into the black gown thing - and checking my coat - and then they gave me a big plastic bag to keep my purse in - since I was getting my hair colored. Now that's nice. I suppose if you walk in there with a bag that costs 1500 bucks, you don't want to check it and you also don't want to risk having it stained. Got it). Bag in a plastic bag. Coat checked. Black gown on over my dress. And .... now what? Where do I go? Help me? Mummy? I was lost. Naturally, I was approached immediately by a staff member who asked if I needed anything ... "Yes ... I'm having my hair colored by ... Olivia?" "Okay - go up the stairs, take a right - and another right - she'll be at the window." Oh! Okay!

I mean, the whole day was like that. Baffled, confused, staring around ... like the most elementary things were beyond my comprehension: where is the bathroom? Could I have a glass of water? I needed help AT EVERY MOMENT. It was hysterical - but everyone was so nice and helpful that I felt perfectly comfortable being discombobbled. It was honest. If I had let myself HIDE how intimidated I felt - I would have been stressed out and paralyzed.

I got my color done first - Olivia rocked the house with the color - it's a coppery red - but she got rid of the grey, and also gave it some tints and shades throughout that look REALLY nice - natural. She pretty much colored my hair strand by strand.

I need to discuss my deep deep love for Mohammed, her assistant. I crushed on him the entire time I was there. First of all, the gorgeousness of the man is hard to even discuss - he looked like a young Marlon Brando. I mean: YUMMY. We talked about sky diving and bungee jumping. He said he always wanted to skydive - but his wife was expecting - and he didn't feel comfortable doing such a dangerous thing, now that he was about to be a father. We also talked about our shared love of Bloody Marys. Seriously. I am crushing on him so hard. He washed my hair - and gave me a head massage. Hence: my love for him. I have never felt anything so good in my life. I texted a friend of mine as I was sitting in the chair waiting for Mohammed to come back. "I am deeply in love with Mohammed, the assistant. I don't want this part of the day to end - because I'll have to say goodbye to him." She texted me back within 5 minutes: "I am so telling Dean!" (as in Stockwell. hahahahahaha)

But all love affairs must end. And once the coloring was done - Olivia passed me off to Rich - the guy who was going to cut my hair.

So much people-watching I don't even know what to say about it! Rich was running a bit behind because a gaggle of girls (yes, a gaggle) had come in to get their hair done for a wedding - and they were running him ragged. But I took one look at what he made this one girl's hair looked like, and thought: Holy shit, he is an artist. That is AMAZING. But I watched everyone, as I waited. I bonded with Bessa - who rinsed my hair out - we discussed the ins and outs of Britney's career for about half an hour. It was so fun. We discussed all of her VMA performances, the hits, the misses, how we both kinda love her, how we were horrified by the latest debacle ... We talked about the tragic loss of JT and how Britney went downhill from there ... we discussed our yearning for a big ol' awesome comeback - but how we are losing hope in that regard. It was hysterical - Bessa was very busy, moving around - assisting other stylists - being called over to hold hair as it was blow-dried or whatever ... but in between, she'd come back over to me, and say, "So how 'bout her reality show, huh?" It was great. People are people, wherever you find them.

If you can talk to me about Britney - and if you know what I'm referring to when I casually reference, "the python" or "her appearances on Star Search' - then we'll be able to hang.

Rich finally was ready for me and we had a long conversation about my hair - and I have to say - I don't think I've ever had such an incredible haircut. It's just full and kind of sexy - but it looks tousled and natural - He's incredible. Olivia popped over with Mohammed, my long-lost love - to see what it all looked like - blow-dried out, the color, the cut - and was so sweetly excited for me. Rich and I actually (it turns out) have some mutual friends (life is so weird) - he lives with his wife down on the Jersey shore - so his daily commute is 2 hours. But obviously it's worth it. He says, "It's hard to get a job here because stylists never want to leave. It's a great job." At one point - both he and Bessa were blow-drying sections of my hair - I have never felt so PAMPERED in all my life. It's not altogether a pleasant sensation ... I mean, it is - of course it is ... but it's also a bit embarrassing.

When I left, I was frightened about how to handle the tipping. I knew I would tip everyone who touched my hair - but ... do I wander around handing them wads of cash like a Mafia don??

A guardian angel appeared. I came back down the stairs, in my black gown - to the front desk area - The girl behind the desk - who had a short glamorous Louise Brooks bob - bright red hair - pale skin - just gorgeous - Anyway, she looked up, saw me, and said, "Oh my God - that haircut! You look so great!" (After all, she had seen what I looked like when I walked in. Not that I'm a Gila monster on the prowl - but you know ... It was a big transformation.) So to have her say that - scary girl at the front desk - was sooo nice - and it turns out she wasn't scary at all. We were talking about how wonderful the salon is - how much of a difference it makes to have a nice haircut - She said to me, "I'm an actress - I work in a preschool, too - but i work here one day a week so I can get my discount." I loved that! First of all, she was intimidatingly beautiful - she's the first thing you see when you get off the elevator- so naturally they're going to have BABES working the front desk, because it's the best advertisement for the salon within. So I was scared of her at first. But then she reveals that she's an actress, and a preschool teacher, and works reception one day a week ... so I was like: Oh. You're just like me. I love you now.

So I felt comfortable taking her into my neuroses and said, "How does one handle tipping in this environment?"

And she said, "Here are some envelopes - just put the tip for whoever into different envelopes - write their name on it - and then drop it off in that little dropbox over there. They'll get it at the end of the day."

Thank you, Redheaded Goddess! For walking me through the mysteries of salon life!! Easy-peasy! I'm SO GLAD I asked. I mean, it would have been fine if I had tramped back up the stairs and wandered around looking for Olivia, or Mohammed or whoever ... but it was so much more civilized to just put the bills in an envelope and pop them into the little drop-box.

I wrote on Bessa's envelope: "Go, Brit-Brit!"

Anyway, I'm really happy with it. It was a long afternoon - I was there for 4 hours - which is a bit much!! But what a generous gift ... and it turned out to be (as things usually are for me) kind of an adventure.

Blurry bad cell phone pic of the haircut - me in the PATH station later that night. You can't really see the gorgeousness of the haircut - and I'm eager to try to "do" it myself, later today. It was pretty simple - his styling of it (I had told him my low-maintenance lifestyle - and that very often I "air-dry" my hair. He was hugely approving of this.) ... But I am eager to try to make it look as good as he did - on my own.

I miss you, Mohammed.

Happy birthday, Truman Capote!

Today is the birthday of one of my favorite writers - Truman Capote.

Truman Capote has been one of my many life-long obsessions - so forgive my autuistic knowledge of this man - his life, and his work. Also - I just had to go out and find all the great photos of him, and post them here. People LOVED to photograph this man (at least in his early wunderkind days) - and all of them are online, which is so exciting. So I've found some of my favorites, to post them here for you.

Example:

Most of my generation only remembers Truman (his Public Persona, I mean), from his appearances on various talk shows, mainly Johnny Carson, when he was a bloated guy with a high lisping voice who was vaguely embarrassing to watch - At least I felt that way. He was obese, he had face lifts, he wore a white Panama hat, he was kind of grotesque. I didn't know that he was basically caricaturing himself by then - which is always death to an artist of any kind.

But he was stuck. He had horrendous writer's block at the very end - which tormented him. The end of his life was full of despair. It's wrenching to read about - you just want his suffering to stop.

But as a youngun? As the new writer in town? He was a golden boy. He was a creature like Thomas Mann had written about. The golden-haired child-man who led others to do naughty naughty things, and then pled innocence. Photographers lined up to capture this guy.

See what I mean?

Hard to realize just how provocative those photos were back then. Especially because he was openly gay. And not just "openly gay" - but openly PRISSY and gay - which some people find unforgivable. Fine, be gay ... but ... do you have to be so ... GAY about it?? Can't you just PRETEND to be straight so I don't have to feel so ... ikky? Truman, even back in the early 40s, didn't put on an act for the straight world. He didn't turn himself inside out to make people feel comfortable with his gayness. He just was who he was. If people felt uncomfortable, then that was THEIR problem. He was prissy, he lisped, he flounced about like a Southern belle - AND he happened to be a kick-ass writer with a literary voice that no one could forget.

I still remember the impact that The Grass Harp had on my heart when I first read it.

I was too young then to really understand regrets, or loss - the way I understand them now - but his elegaic writing in that story touched some deep universal chord in me - the part of me that is HUMAN, and not just an age on a timeline. There was a kind of soul-growth spurt that happened to me when I read that sad beautiful story. I still have a real fondness for it.

(Excerpt here)

His first book, published in 1948, was Other Voices, Other Rooms, and it took the literary world by storm. It was one of THOSE debuts. High level reviewers praised the book - in glowing terms - and it truly is a wonderful book. Not as good as his others, and CERTAINLY not as good as In Cold Blood (just saying the name of that book gives me a chill up my spine) - but you could tell that there was a real VOICE in that book.

Just to add to the controversy - here is the "author photo" that appeared sprawled across the back of the book:

hahahahaha Truman! Please! It caused an outrage. A stir. (Tennessee Williams, down in Key West, had heard about it - and wrote letters referencing it) People loved it. People hated it. People TALKED about it, and that was what Truman cared about. Truman had talent - yes - but he understood the whole 15 minutes of fame thing long before Andy Warhol came along. Truman wanted to be FAMOUS as well as being a good writer. He wasn't one of those writers who holed themselves up in their apartments (at least not until In Cold Blood when he disappeared off the face of the earth for almost 5 years - he said later that writing that book nearly killed him.) ... But before In Cold Blood he was out at every party, he hung out with the rich and famous (at least until the huge debacle at the end of his life when he alienated all of them in one fell swoop)

This photo is just ... kind of says it all, don't it?

Look at how he's holding her wrist!!! Like - hold her HAND, Truman. But also - look at how sweet she is. The two of them were actually very good friends and he wrote one of my favorite pieces about her, which appears in the gorgeous collection Music for Chameleons. The piece describes a day in New York when he and Marilyn attended a funeral of a mutual friend. I love that piece. It's called "A Beautiful Child", because that's what Truman saw her as. Not the sex goddess. But a beautiful child.

(Excerpt here)

He was the darling of New York. He wasn't just friends with celebrities - whose wealth is a rather transitory thing. He became friends with REAL rich people. The international tycoon types. The Onassis types. He was invited to all of the "society" parties.

And one day - he read a little snippet in the newspaper about an entire family who had been slaughtered in their own home ... and something sparked in him ... He spoke to the folks at The New Yorker - he wanted to do a piece on how such a brutal murder would affect the small town ... He went to Kansas - and basically did not emerge from that nightmare for another 5 or 6 years. The result, of course, was the great great In Cold Blood.

(Excerpt here)

More on In Cold Blood in a bit.

Once that book stopped taking up every second of his life (he was never really the same again, after writing it) ... he was ready to re-enter New York society, with a bang.

And he threw a party that is still famous. It was called The Black and White Ball, and he threw it for Katherine Graham - who he didn't even really know.

She wrote in her autobiography (which I've read): "I was truly baffled as to why I was the guest of honor. But it seemed really important to Truman ... so I said yes."

Odd. It was, many people say who care about this stuff, the "party of the century".

Everyone had to come wearing masks, and everyone had to dress in black and white. Truman had just finished In Cold Blood - or maybe he had just returned from Kansas - not sure - but he needed to let off steam, he needed to shake off In Cold Blood which had literally taken over his life. So he threw this party - where everyone who was anyone showed up.

Here's Candice Bergen at the party:

Here's Norman Mailer and his wife - hahahaha

Here's Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra- who had just gotten married:

People jostled to get invited. People sucked up to Truman. He was in his glory. But even then - he had the oddest mix of desire and contempt when it came to the rich. He wanted to hang out with them - but he had contempt for them as well. On some level, I think he knew that they would drop him like a hot potato the second his friendship became inconvenient. He knew that his friendships with these people were were pretty one-sided: Truman was there to entertain, to keep things light and amusing. The second he started falling on hard times later in life, they stopped tolerating his company.

Perhaps all those rich people just liked the cache of having a literary star at their parties - it made their parties seem more ... substantial. Maybe they really did like him. But I don't think so. And I don't think Truman liked them all that much, either. He saw right through them. Only he kept that to himself, and let the rich people think that he bought their game, that he was fooled, that he did not see the essential shallowness beneath their facade. When he finally came out and wrote about them and their pettiness, their stupidity - they could not and would not forgive him. One chapter of his book was published - and set off a shitstorm through the international rich set - all of whom had welcomed Capote into their midst.

(Excerpt here)

He never finished that book.

(By that point in his life, long after In Cold Blood, Truman had actually lost a lot of what had made him a success in the first place ... and that was his compassion for others. His ability to love his fellow man, and to try to step into their shoes and describe for us, the reader, what it is "like" to be that person. By the 1960s, drugs and drinking had taken hold ... and Truman was angry. He wrote about his former friends with bitchy - but spot-on - RAGE. He had NO compassion for THEM. He could find it in his heart to be compassionate for Dick Hickock and Perry Smtih even though they had committed such a heinous crime. But he was NOT compassionate for the fat Upper East Side cats. He unleashed his wrath on them, and it was like a bomb going off in international society.)

Truman Capote found himself bereft, and alone. He never recovered from that shattering of his world, even though he said over and over, "I'm a writer! What did they think I did in my spare time? I observed life - and I wrote about it!" They did not forgive him for telling the truth. Years later, when Gerald Clarke wrote his tremendous biography of Capote - there were people who refused to be interviewed for the book becaue they were STILL seething at Truman's "betrayal".

I'm going to post something I wrote a long time ago on this blog - which ended up being published elsewhere. It's called "Fairy on the Prairie", and it's about the writing of In Cold Blood which is pretty much on my Top 10 favorite books ever written. Certain books come and go on that list - titles get bumped off - moved on - but not In Cold Blood. There are a couple of others that never get bumped off - Harriet the Spy, Wrinkle in Time, Catch 22. These are great great books.

I'm proud of the piece I wrote on Truman.

Before we get to that, though, I would like to share my favorite photo of Truman Capote. It's done by the great photographer Irving Penn. I like it because - it's not the "carefree" look of his golden-boy self - which was a pose, to some degree. It's not the provocative just-got-out-of-bed look he sported as an early writer - which was also a pose. And it's not a photograph from his later years, which just really hurt me to see.

Irving Penn had photographed Spencer Tracy, famously, boxed up in a corner. (That was one of Penn's "things" - he put famous people into corners of rooms and photographed them. Strangely effective.)

Look. Amazing photo of Spencer. Look at the EXPRESSION on his face.

Penn took basically the same photograph of Truman - boxed him up in a corner. I looked for a larger version of the photo - a clearer one - but couldn't find it. This is the best I could get.

There is something about this photo that not only haunts me, but strikes me as deeply painfully TRUE. The oversized coat, it makes him look so small and frail. The cramped quarters, the walls pressing in. Now, I did not know Truman Capote, and it is not for me to say who is the "real" Truman Capote - but something about the look on his face in this photo, its flat blank-eyed stare, the gaze is a bit confronting, but also - so accepting of himself, of the soul behind those eyeballs - something about it lands for me. I feel that I am getting a glimpse not of a personality, a famous person ... but someone's soul. I feel the same way about the Spencer Tracy photograph - so I don't know what that's about, and I'm sure it has all to do with Irving Penn's gift. It's extraordinary to me.

And now. Onto In Cold Blood, and my old post about him. There may be some repeats of information here.

Happy happy birthday, dear dear Truman.

Truman Capote said later that if he had known what he was getting into, when he traveled down to Kansas ("a fairy down on the prairie - who'd have thought?") to write a piece on the murder for The New Yorker, then he never would have gone. He went to Kansas only 2 weeks after the murders took place. The killers had still not been found, the community was in an uproar of suspicion and paranoia. Capote's main interest was to do a long profile of the townspeople, how regular church-going farmers handled such a disaster. Little did he know what the book would eventually be! The project took up years of his life. He had to wait for the executions of the 2 murderers, in order to complete his book. So he waited, and waited. Appeal after appeal ...He was unable to write anything else. Nothing else interested him. He was a man obsessed, in the grip of his obsession for years. His health was ruined. His friends were sick of hearing about the Clutter family. He tried to take vacations with his long-time partner, and would just drink, and try to sleep, and have fits of despair. He thought those boys would never be executed, he thought he would be in limbo forever. Yet - the morbidness of his entire life being on hold because of commuted death-sentences in Kansas - the morbidness of trying to go on, when really all you want is for those 2 boys to be killed - so that YOU can go back to YOUR life ... This selfish attitude (necessary for the project) took a huge toll on him. It felt inhuman.

Finally - there were no more appeals and Capote traveled to Kansas, to watch the execution. Hickock and Smith had asked him to be there. In the intervening years, he had interviewed the 2 killers numerous times. Their first-person descriptions of their own sorry lives make up important parts of the book. Capote became their conduit to the outside world. Hickock would draw self-portraits of himself and send them to Capote. Capote was playing a double-edged game here. He became "the listener", the one who would sit and ask them questions, and nod understandingly. The 2 of them got addicted to his concern. Yet Capote was horrified by most of what he heard. He wasn't without pity for these men, who had pretty much been beaten like dogs from the second they were born - and yet Capote hadn't had an easy road either, and HE hadn't killed anyone in cold blood. He had grown up with alcoholics, he had been abandoned by his father, his parents were ashamed of having a "fairy" for a son, he was sent to military school - can you imagine how awful that must have been for him? Capote may have acted like a cream-puff but that man was cold and hard as steel inside. He had to be.

Capote needed quotes, he needed access, he needed to enter into the psychologies of these 2 men. He was able to paint the graphic picture of the Clutter family through interviews with people who knew and loved them. But the Clutters were no longer around to speak for themselves. Hickock and Smith were alive for a couple of years, so he visited them often. On his way out of Death Row, he would feel the urge to vomit. It would take him days to recover, emotionally, from these macabre "visits". And he said, later, that he never recovered from the "shattering" experience of watching the two men hang. The letters he wrote to friends afterwards are nearly incoherent. Watching how hard the hanging body clings to life, watching the kicking feet, the flailing, the letting-go of bodily functions ... Capote was really never the same man again.

And he then sat down and wrote the book like a bat out of hell.

Truman Capote always thought that he had a "great book" in him. This mythical "great book" haunted his dreams, he would lie awake at night aching with ambition, dreaming about this great book ... He didn't think In Cold Blood was his masterpiece. He looked back on the experience of researching that book and writing it as a grim one, an almost universally unpleasant and grueling experience. I've read all of Capote's books. I love that guy's writing style. I even read his unfinished work - the 2 chapters of the novel he was working on when he died. He claimed to have it almost finished, but the rest of it (if it even existed) was never found. The 2 chapters are okay - it's a gossipy bitchy look at high-class New York society. It's merciless. It's very funny. Nobody is spared. Human beings are seen in their worst lights. Everyone is selfish, cynical, out for themselves ... It is quite funny, but it's very very mean. He was nearing the end of his life, and he had been abandoned by most of his friends. His outlook was not good, he was addicted to drugs, filled with anxiety and loneliness ... The 2 chapter are his way of lashing out at all those people who left him, who tossed him out with the trash. Hence, the mean-ness.

The thing in the rest of Capote's writing that, for me, sets him apart is his undeniable love of humanity. His tenderness. His ability to SEE people, with all their flaws - and to see them as beautiful. Much of his best writing is all about nostalgia, wistfulness, yearning for childhood ... Yes, it is sentimental, but it also has a depth of sadness beneath it, a grief ... which elevates it from mawkishness.

In Cold Blood taps into something else. In Cold Blood doesn't fit into either of the Capote categories: the bitchy mean queen telling all the nasty secrets of his high-class friends, or the lonely sweet man filled with hurtful nostalgia for childhood.

It was something completely new. For him, and for us. I don't even know if I can describe it. All I can say is - he never accomplished such a thing again. His writing never seemed so effortless again. You read that book and you feel like if you cut ONE WORD, the entire thread will unravel. It is so tight.

The other thing I had forgotten from the biography is Capote's personal experience leaving his home-environment of ritzy New York City (where there were lots of "fairies"), and venturing into the Kansas prairies to investigate a murder. Capote was openly gay. He wasn't a macho gay, either. He didn't try to blend in, or act straight, or hide his gayness. He was a small rotund man, who wore wide white hats, spoke with a lisp, fluttered about like Blanche DuBois, and literally said things like, "I declare!"

He took one of his best friends, Harper Lee (yes - THAT Harper Lee) as a co-researcher. She was much more "normal"-acting, and was able to blend in a bit more. She could get people to talk to her, because she seemed like one of them.

But Truman Capote was so relentless, and not only so relentless, but so committed to justice, so committed to discovering what had happened in the Clutter household, that people started opening up. The people in the town started competing about who had had him over for dinner the most times. Alvin Dewey, the head of the investigation, a tough gruff 3 pack a day smoker, eventually counted Truman as a valued partner. Truman was there when Dewey got the call that the 2 murderers had been picked up in Las Vegas, AND that they were still wearing the boots with the distinctive soles (that had left footprints - If the 2 hadn't confessed, the boots alone would have convicted them). Truman was standing right there, with Dewey's wife, listening to Dewey hear the news.

The people of Kansas, who had never met a person like Capote in their lives, who were Bible-Belt ranchers and farmers, took him into their homes, their families, their hearts. Without them, the book would not have been written.

It is a massive accomplishment.

Truman Capote went to his grave thinking that his "great book" remained unwritten. I beg to differ.

The Books: "Bad Behavior" - 'Something Nice' (Mary Gaitskill)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Bad Behavior - by Mary Gaitskill - a short story collection - I'll excerpt from the third story today: 'Something Nice'.

Classic Gaitskill. This story is told from the point of view of the male - a kind of shlubby average guy - married - who frequents a certain house of prostitution in Manhattan about once a month. Gaitskill's rendering of what such places are like have such a stamp of reality that anything else pales in comparison. She KNOWS these places. We all have ideas about what prostitutes are, and who they are on their off-days - but Gaitskill actually KNOWS ... Then - the narrator's wife goes away for a month - and there is no longer a compulsion for him to go home - so he starts to go to the sex house every night. He's a veterinarian (although he lies to the prostitute, for some reason - and says he's a lawyer - very interesting: he's a sad guy - he makes me sad, anyway)- he's got money, so it's no issue. And he requests the same girl every time. The interesting thing about this story is that Jane - the prostitute that the narrator likes best, and requests over and over ... is, objectified by him - but not in the way that you would think. You don't get the sense that he goes to whores for the hot kinky sex that his wife won't do with him. You get the sense that he is lonely, and he feels protective towards this young girl who has sex with him once a month - and that he wants to talk to someone. A friend of mine was a prostitute and she said that that was overwhelmingly the case. That sometimes the guy would just want to talk. Be listened to. It's kind of pathetic, but again - Gaitskill doesn't overtly JUDGE this man ... but I gotta say: he's hauntingly awful. You just know he's living in a fantasy world - which turns the whole event on its ear. Our expectations of what prostitutes are like are not fulfilled by this sad pathetic little story. Jane, the prostitute, doesn't seem to have the hard edges yet - the true "professional" vibe - she's young, and still kind of fresh. Our narrator fantasizes about her - but not sexually - He is filled with yearning towards her, he wants to give her things, he wants to take her out to dinner (he'll pay for her time, of course) - he wants to know who she is (but then when she reveals things - like what she does on her days off - and it doesn't fit with his perception of her, he kind of doesn't know what to say). It is another way of objectifying a human being: to fall in love with an IDEA of them, and not really be able to deal with the reality. Gaitskill doesn't take the simplistic view, though. Jane is not an awesome sex goddess, in charge of what she's doing. And he is not a sad sack of a loser. Jane is rather unpleasant. Indifferent, event. She's a prostitute because she wants to go to art school. She's a painter. She's cut off so much from what she is actually doing that nothing matters to her. Not really. And she is baffled - and kind of cold - towards this lonely man who just wants to do something nice for her. It's a love story, in Gaitskill's universe. Based on ideals and misunderstanding. If we only see prostitutes as victims who need to be saved ... we are missing a vast WORLD of people who do it for all KINDS of reasons. (Same thing with porn stars and exotic dancers and all that stuff.) And it's very dangerous, anyway, to romanticize ANYONE out of their humanity. I've had it done to me. I can tell that whatever the dude is in love with - it's not really ME. It's an IDEA of me. He's made up his mind who I am, from the bat ... and that is what he goes for ... and anything that doesn't really fit in is treated with confusion - as opposed to interest. That's really what this story is all about. It's very very sad. And the ending is AWESOME. Jane disappears from the house o' prostitution. It is disorienting for the narrator. You really get, through Gaitskill's prose, how much space Jane took up in his mind. In a funny way, you ache for him. But it's a cold world out there - and you best not mess with prostitutes if you're looking for anything other than sexual release with no commitment. Know what you're doing before you start doing it. Anyway - months pass. Jane recedes from memory. And then one day - in a cafe in New York - he sees her sitting at a table with some friends. He is stunned to see her out of context. He eavesdrops - and it's obvious that she is now in art school, and her and her friends are sitting there gossiping (uncharitably) towards another friend. They're self-righteous, in the way that gossips can be about other people's "bad behavior". Anyway, I can't describe how Gaitskill does it in this last moment ... but you are left with the feeling of the lost-ness of everyone, that everyone is looking for ... something ... sometimes we intersect - and all along the narrator thought, sadly, that Jane might have looked up to him, or looked to him for protection. Like: he had a fantasy of himself that he was a "nice guy", as opposed to all the other assholes who go to prostitutes. But that's the big lie - that you are different, somehow unique - special.

It's a great story about loneliness and isolation. Here's an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Bad Behavior - by Mary Gaitskill - 'Something Nice'.

The minute she came into the room, he went to her and put his arms around her hips. "Hello, Jane."

"Hi."

"It was strange not seeing you out there waiting for me."

She looked puzzled.

"I guess I somehow got used to thinking of you as my own little girl. I didn't like the idea that you were with some other guy. Silly, huh?"

"Yes." She broke away and snapped the sheet out over the bed. "Do you say things like that because you think I like to hear them?"

"Maybe. Some of the girls do, you know."

He could feel the sarcasm of her silence.

He watched her pull her dress off over her head and drop it on the aluminum chair. "I guess it's only natural that you've begun to get jaded."

She snorted. "I wouldn't call it that."

"What would you call it?"

She didn't answer. She sat on the bed and bent to take off her heels, leaving her socks on. When she looked at him again she said, "Do you really think it's a good idea for you to come to see me every night? It's awfully expensive. I know lawyers make a lot of money, but still. Won't your wife wonder where it's going?"

He sat next to her and put his hand on her shoulder. "Don't you see how special you are? No other girl I've seen like this would ever have thought to say something like that. All they can think of is how to get more money out of me and here you are worrying about how much I'm spending. I'm not trying to flatter you, you are different."

"Aren't you worried about getting AIDS?"

"From a girl like you? C'mon, don't put yourself down."

She smiled, sad and strained, but sort of affectionate, and put her hands on his shoulders. She felt to him like one of his puppy patients embracing him as he carried it across the room for a shot.

"I'm sorry I'm being so shitty," she said. "I just hate this job and this place."

"Here," he said. "I'm going to buy two hours, so we can just relax and unwind. You just lie down and get snuggled up in the sheet." He got up and turned off the light. He found a romantic jazz station on the radio. He undressed and got under the sheet with her, wrapping them both in a ball. He held her neck and felt her forehead against his shoulder. Her limbs were nestled and docile, as if all her stiff, pony-trot energy had vanished. The dim light of the gurgling fish tank cast an orangy glow over the room. "This is so nice and glamorous," he said.

"When is your wife coming back?" asked a voice from the nuzzling bundle on his arm.

"In three days." He sighed and stared at the stupid, lovely slivers of fish darting around their ugly castle.

Brokeback 1776

hahahahahaha - hysterical parody of Brokeback Mountain using footage from the movie 1776 - I love when it gets all slo-mo and romantic. I practically know 1776 by heart ("But I burn, Mr. A!!" "So do I!") - so the clips they pick, out of context, work perfectly. Funny!!!

Found the video here, naturally - and he relates one of my favorite stories from the early days of the American Revolution - of John Adams and Benjamin Franklin sleeping in the same bed, and arguing about whether or not night air is good or bad for you. It's just such a funny image to me - these two Founding Fathers bickering through the darkness. (It's not as funny as Ben Franklin suggesting they fight the war using bows and arrows ... and the other dudes all being like, "Uhm, Ben? We have cannonballs and stuff now? Sooooo ... thanks for sharing ... but no." - but ALMOST as funny.)

Reading

A beautiful photo - on a site full of beautiful photos. One of my favorite sites on the web, period.

Sarah Vaughan

Woah - unbelievable video clip of her singing 'Send in the clowns' ... what she does on "my usual flair" (putting the "flair" of the lyric into her voice - but simply, perfectly) ... and then where her voice goes on "sure of my lines" in the next moment. GOOSEBUMPS.

Her voice has always pierced thru right to my very core.

(Alex. Yo. You ever gonna return my calls, woman????) tee hee I miss you.

Dean Stockwell's in Moscow

Or ... at least his photograph is. Dennis Hopper has a big show of his photography going on at Moscow's Museum of Photography. Here's a nice review of it. About 10 years ago, there was a great exhibit at the Whitney (I can't believe I'm saying those things in the same sentence: "great exhibit" and "Whitney" - there's a funny story about my dad and me going to the Whitney and we walked into one room where there was some light-and-color installation - with strobe lights and reflections - a big empty room, and my dad, an art connoisseur, saying loudly, "So. Where's the art?" hahahahaha But I digress!) Anyway, the Whitney did a whole "Beat generation" exhibit - and it was fanTASTIC. I literally wanted to EAT some of the art I saw. hahaha There were tons of photographs - of Ginsberg and all those dudes - doing readings at City Lights, stuff like that - Kerouac's typewriter and the long ROLL of the On the Road manuscript - it wasn't separate pages, it was a scroll - Dennis Hopper's work was everywhere throughout the exhibit - and if you've never seen his photographs, I suggest you look them up. They're wonderful - my kind of Americana. He's from Kansas - there's something in his eye that really understands space, and horizon, and small towns - little diners, and coffee shops, and floozy waitresses - I love all that stuff. Like this. (Love the title of that one too - it resonates) But then there's whimsical photos of his friends - like this one. hahahaha The photo of Stockwell that is included in the show is below. My question is: Guys, how much pot have you actually smoked? I mean, seriously!! It's 1964, and Dean Stockwell has a fried egg on his face, and he's shining a flashlight on it. Goofballs. Friends. Love it. And I'm glad Hopper's show got a nice review - his work certainly deserves it.

All Dean Stockwell stuff here

Going to do my best to re-cap Episode 3 of Quantum Leap this weekend - but I am not making any promises!

Grey Gardens

I loved reading this review of the documentary. It pretty much describes my first response to meeting Big and Little Edie.

The Books: "Bad Behavior" - 'A Romantic Weekend' (Mary Gaitskill)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Bad Behavior - by Mary Gaitskill - a short story collection - I'll excerpt from the second story today: 'A Romantic Weekend'. Gaitskill sets up expectations with the title of the story. We think we know what " a romantic weekend" means. She has other things in mind. The way she writes about sex can be frightening. She writes about women who either do NOT have the "fight or flight" instinct in them - or that instinct is there, only turned on its ear. Where other women would run away, Gaitskill's characters run toward. It's tough stuff. But it's real. It's the Gaitskill Voice. Beth is the lead in this story - she is going away on a romantic weekend with a man she has fallen in love with. He's married. I think he and Beth met at a party. Oh, and he is un-named in the story. He's just "he". The narration includes both of their thought processes - we're not just inside Beth's head. He's a sadist. And he senses the masochism in Beth. The first time they sleep together, he hurts her. She's frightened but she takes it. He tells her he won't give her any more pain than she can handle. There's something in this comment of his that seems so loving to Beth, so kind, that she falls head over heels for him. Even though on some level he terrifies her. They make a plan to go away for the weekend. The story is a dark pit. You need a strong stomach for some of it. You feel like this guy is a total lunatic. He hates women. But, as always with Gaitskill, she is uninterested in making judgments. She just describes what they do, and what they think - and Gaitskill never blinks! You wait for her to intervene - as a narrator, a writer - but she does not. Hard to explain - but it's startling stuff. Here's an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Bad Behavior - by Mary Gaitskill - 'A Romantic Weekend'.

They had more drinks on the plane. They were served a hunk of white-frosted raisin pastry in a red paper bag. He wasn't hungry, but the vulgar cake appealed to him so he stuck it in his baggage.

They had a brief discussion about shoes, from the point of view of expense and aesthetics. They talked about intelligence and art. There were large gaps of silence that were disheartening to both of them. She began talking about old people, and how nice they could be. He had a picture of her kneeling on the floor in black stockings and handcuffs. This picture became blurred, static-ridden, and then obscured by their conversation. He felt a ghastly sense of longing. He called back the picture, which no longer gave him any pleasure. He superimposed it upon a picture of himself standing in a nightclub the week before, holding a drink and talking to a rather combative girl who wanted his number.

"Some old people are beautiful in an unearthly way," she continued. "I saw this old lady in the drugstore the other day who must've been in her nineties. She was so fragile and pretty, she was like a little elf."

He looked at her and said, "Are you going to start being fun to be around or are you going to be a big drag?"

She didn't answer right away. She didn't see how this followed her comment about the old lady. "I don't know."

"I don't think you're very sexual," he said. "You're not the way I thought you were when I first met you."

She was so hurt by this that she had difficulty answering. Finally, she said, "I can be very sexual or unsexual depending on who I'm with an in what situation. It has to be the right kind of thing. I'm sort of a cerebral person. I think I respond to things in a cerebral way, mostly."

"That's what I mean."

She was struck dumb with frustration. She had obviously disappointed him in some fundamental way, which she felt was completely due to misunderstanding. If only she could think of the correct thing to say, she was sure she could clear it up. The blue puffball thing unfurled itself before her with sickening power. It was the same image of him holding her and gazing into her eyes with bone-dislodging intent, thinly veiling the many shattering events that she anticipated between them. The prospect made her disoriented with pleasure. The only problem was, this image seemed to have no connection with what was happening now. She tried to think back to the time they had spent in her apartment, when he had held her and said, "You're cute." What had happened between then and now to so disappoint him?

She hadn't yet noticed how much he had disappointed her.

He couldn't tell if he was disappointing her or not. She completely mystified him, especially after her abrupt speech on cerrebralism. It was now impossible to even have a clear picture of what he wanted to do to this unglamorous creature, who looked as though she bit her nails and read books at night. Dim, half-formed pictures of his wife, Sharon, Beth and a sixteen-year-old Chinese hooker he'd seen a month before crawled aimlessly over each other. He sat and brooded in a bad-natured and slightly drunken way.

She sat next to him, diminished and fretful, with idiot radio songs about sex in her head.

Had drinks last night ...

at a bar called "The Galway Hooker". (There is, of course, a nice double entendre in the name - Galway Hooker is a BOAT - but the immediate impression of "hooker" is not, shall we say, a boat!)

I was laughing later with my friend about it - about how offensive that really is, if you think about it in terms of "hooker" being "prostitute" - (and also how funny). We were laughing about it ...

"I mean, it would be like being in a foreign country and seeing a bar called New York Sluts. Or Cleveland Whores. 'Hey, want to meet up for a drink later?' 'Sure, let's go to Happy Hour at Chattanooga Bitch-Ass Losers.'"

The Body

Two beautiful posts by two separate people - I read them yesterday within an hour of each other ... and somehow they seemed to inform each other, talk to each other - add nuance and shade to the same beautiful message ... Both messages I really needed to hear right now.

Camera-Shy?

Penny for your thoughts, a nickel for your kiss, and a dime if you tell me that you love me.

Nostalgia

Man. I relate to this post. Chicago still, if I think about it too much, makes my heart ache with longing. I've been reading along Wendy's journey with getting ready to move ... so her final good-bye post, with the Chicago Reader really really got to me.

Lovely writer.

The Books: "Bad Behavior" - 'Daisy's Valentine' (Mary Gaitskill)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Bad Behavior - by Mary Gaitskill

Mary Gaitskill is what I would call a "scary-good" writer. She has been since her startling debut - with the short story collection Bad Behavior. I think she was 23 or 24 when it came out and the author photo on the back looks like it could have come out of a high school yearbook. She's tiny and young and ... well, she terrifies me, let's be honest. She's just so freakin' GOOD. The NY Times Book Review is excerpted on the front cover with the words: "Wise beyond her years, utterly unsentimental, Gaitskill is ... glorious." It's that "utterly unsentimental" part that is truly startling about her work - especially for such a young woman. Her stories are COLD. Her prose is spare, yet - deceptively simple. It is not easy to write the way Gaitskill writes. And believe me. I have tried. One of the nicest compliments I've ever received on this here blog was when Jon said that something I wrote reminded him of Gaitskill. I don't say that to brag - or hell, maybe I do. To be compared to her - especially in a piece that I wrote pretty much off the cuff - gave me a nice moment, and one of those encouraging feelings of: "Keep going. You can write. Just keep going." Her work is so so so good. What is it that makes her so good? To me, it is that "unsentimental" thing that stops me in my tracks. Gaitskill does not write about "nice" people. Many of them are assholes, actually. In the post I wrote about her on her birthday (lots of information about her there) I write:

I have to feel on pretty sturdy ground in order to be able to deal with Gaitskill. If I'm having a blue day ... or a blue month ... she's one of the writers I stay FAR away from. She doesn't wallow. She doesn't mope. None of her characters mope. That is what is so tragic about them. They survive. They are survivors. And there is something beautiful about survival but oh, there can be such sadness there too. When you have a consciousness of what you have lost along the way. Gaitskill writes about those moments ... those moments when you realize what you have lost.

I actually can't think of a writer to compare her to. Her idol is Nabokov - and I can definitely see his influence - there's KIND of a Margaret Atwood feel, at times - but not really. Atwood is also "utterly unsentimental" - which is why she's so great ... but Gaitskill - it's like she's living on a frozen ice-cap - It's not that she doesn't care about people, there is great compassion in her writing - just from how she observes things, she sees EVERYTHING. It's that she doesn't waste time psychologizing, or trying to understand WHY or give reasons for her characters behavior (their "bad behavior"). She just tells us what they do. Gaitskill was a runaway as a teenager. She lived on the street, and was a callgirl for a while. She's quite open about that period of her life. Many of her characters are prostitutes, strippers, drug addicts, runaways - and then there's the whole sex thing. Gaitskill writes about sex in a way that makes you (at times) want to run away screaming. These are not people who are yearning for intimacy, in the women's magazines definition of the word. To Gaitskill's characters, intimacy exists when someone punches you in the face as he's fucking you. Gaitskill does not pity such people, who yearn for pain, who only understand love when it hurts. She doesn't glorify them either. She is not interested in judging them in one way or another. She just tells us what they do. That's why I say: if I'm feeling shaky, or on the verge of a depression - Gaitskill is the last writer I will look to. She's not interested in comforting me. She's not interested in shocking me, either - this is not about shock-value.

The movie Secretary is based on a Gaitskill short story - and they definitely Hollywood-ed it up - but I was amazed how much they were able to get away with. (I love that movie, by the way. And I love that relationship. Read into that what you will!)

It's not so much her subject matter that I am drawn to - but the sheer virtuosity of her prose. She's as good as it gets. She just came out with a novel Veronica - it's her second novel ... In my opinion, her "milieu" is the short story - her two novels, while filled with unbelievable writing, didn't work as well for me as her short stories - where she knocks it out of the park, page after page after page.

I often wonder what it would be like to be able to write like Mary Gaitskill. I know I have my own gifts, my own style ... but I do wonder what it would be like to have something within me cauterized to such a severe degree, that I would be able to write about rape and rough sex and homeless runaways and drugs and users ... with such a cold clear unblinking eye. Gaitskill is terrifying. Terrifyingly good.

Bad Behavior like I said was her debut. And if you're gonna have a literary debut, then you want Gaitskill's literary debut. Because she writes so much about sex - and because it's not the kind of sex you normally hear about - she got a lot of attention for that. There are some parts of some of her stories that even I wince at. But Gaitskill doesn't. That's the power of it. She's not rubbing my face in shit, and saying, "LOOK! THESE ARE PEOPLE TOO!" or whatever - her interests as a writer are not: "Let me humanize a subversive group of people ..." She's not an evangelist. She's not polemical. She doesn't care if we've never heard of sex clubs and S&M joints and runaways who like to get punched in the face and look for men who will punch them in the face. She knows those people, she lived among those people, she probably IS one of those people - and so she, without blinking, writes about what they do.

I dislike writers who want to "shock" me (and, it's funny - 2 of the writers in the last 5 years who seemed interested in "shocking" me turned out to be frauds!!) Gaitskill is not a fraud. These are her people. Gaitskill, despite her subject matter, couldn't care less if I was shocked or not. She's still gonna keep writing about these people, and telling me what they do. The title of her book is a wonderful little wink - at those who would judge, at those who couldn't "take" such stories - because they would need a moral, or they would need SOME narrative voice to say, "This woman is abused and needs to be healed - her behavior right now is 'bad' - and she needs to get past it ..." or some other such Glamour mag sentiment. Gaitskill does not satisfy in this regard. She does not look at her characters as needing to go through 12 step programs to join regular society. She does not concede ground to those who would mutter, "Wow. That girl is so SICK."

Maybe that girl IS sick. Gaitskill, again, doesn't care about diagnosing her characters. She doesn't go for easy labels. There is nothing about Gaitskill that is easy. And, to be honest, I know a lot of these people. I've known "Gaitskill characters" in my life. Her observations are so clear, so RIGHT, that you yourself as a reader feel exposed by them.

She's one of the best writers alive today - certainly in America at the top of the heap.

The first story in Bad Behavior is called 'Daisy's Valentine'. Her stories don't really have "plots". At least not that would be interesting to relate. Suffice it to say: Joey and Daisy work in a second-hand bookstore in Manhattan together. They are dating. Joey is also living with a woman named Diane - his girlfriend of 8 years. Here's an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Bad Behavior - by Mary Gaitskill

When Joey first noticed Daisy, he wondered why this pretty young woman had chosen to work in a filthy, broken-down store amid unhappy homosexuals. As time went on, it seemed less and less inappropriate. She was comfortable in the typing pool. She was happy to listen to the boys talk about their adventures in leather bars, where men got blow jobs in onpen wooden booths or pissed on other men. She told jokes about Helen Keller and sex. She talked about her boyfriends and her painting. She was always crouching at Evelyn's desk, whispering and laughing about something, or looking at Evelyn's back issues of True Detective magazine. She wore T-shirts with pictures of cartoon characters on them, and bright-colored pants. Her brown hair was bobbed in a soft curve that ended on either side of her high cheekbones. When she walked, her shoulders and long neck were erect in a busy, almost ducklike way, but her hips and waist were fluid and gently mobile.

The heterosexual men were always coming to stand by her desk and talk to her about their poetry or political ideas while she looked at them and nodded. Even the gay men developed a certain bravado in her presence. Tommy kept on reassuring her that her prince was just around the corner. "I can feel it, Daisy," he would say exultantly. "You're on collision course with Mr. Right!"

"Do you really think so, Tom?"

"It's obvious! Aren't you excited?"

Then Ariel would get up from his desk and lumber over to her and, bending from the waist, would put his large fleshy arms around her sholuders. Joey could see her small white hand emerge on Ariel's broad flank as she patiently patted him.

And, as if it weren't enough to be the heartthrob of the basement crowd, she was kind to helpless, repulsive people. There was a grotesque old woman who would come into the store from time to time to seek out her kindness. The woman was at least sixty years old, and covered her face with heavy orange makeup. She bought horrible best-sellers and self-help books with lurid red covers. She'd stand by Daisy's desk for half an hour and talk to ther about how depressed she was. Daisy would turn off her typewriter and turn toward the woman with her chin in her hand. She'd listen gravely, agreeing sometimes, letting the woman give her small bags of hard candy and kiss her on the cheek. Everyone made rude comments about Daisy and "that crazy old dyke." But Daisy remained courteous and attentive to the distressed creature, even though she often made fun of her after she left.

Joey didn't think of having sex with Daisy, at least not in detail. It was more the idea of being near her, protecting her. She was obviously so confused. She looked everywhere for answers, for someone to tell her what to think. "I just want your perspective," she'd say.

There was a customer she called the "answer man" because he claimed that he could predict the future through "automatic handwriting". He was a handsome elderly man who wore expensive suits and looked as though he'd had at least one face lift. He had been coming into the store for years. Every time he came in, Daisy would walk him off into a corner and ask him questions. He would scrawl down answers in thin red ink and hand them to her with an imperious, terribly personal look. She would become either stricken or joyous. Later she would run around talking about what he'd said, examining the red-scrawled pieces of store stationery. "He says my painting is going to start being successful in a year and a half." "He says there are no worthwhile men around me and that there won't be for months." "He says David will move out next month."

"You don't take that stuff seriously, do you?" asked Joey.

"Oh, not really," she said. "But it's interesting." She went back to her desk and stuck the papers in her drawer and began typing, her face still glowing and upturned because someone who was possibly crazy had told her that she would eventually be a success.

Tennessee Williams!

Starting today and running through the 30th, up in Provincetown, is the yearly Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theatre Festival. This year's festival will focus on Williams' less-successful but no less interesting later work.

David Kaplan, the artistic curator of the festival, and author of Tennessee Williams in Provincetown, contacted me and asked me to write something on Camino Real for the festival catalog - which I happily did. (Speaking of favorite passages in literature - in the post below about Howards End - the Camino Real script has my favorite of all Williams' lines: "Make voyages -- attempt them! -- there's nothing else.")

I was thrilled to be asked to write something, and thrilled to be, in some small way, a part of the festival - which someday, dernit, I will get to!! Next year, perhaps!!

Check out the schedule of events this year! Drool! Best of luck to all the actors and directors and organizers - I am sure the festival will be a huge success!

"My emotionalism is much too great for my intellectual capacity, it is like having 16 cylinders in a jalopy. Ultimately this will lead to complete disaster, but let us hope that evil day is postponed until I have completed my stint of creative work in the world."

-- Tennessee Williams, letter to Lawrence Langner, August 22, 1940

Carlyle ...

An amazing letter from Margaret Fuller to Ralph Waldo Emerson - where she describes Thomas Carlyle.

I have been reading Carlyle's incredible history of the French Revolution for, oh, 2 years now, off and on ... I can only deal with a couple pages at a time, it's so dense - you can't even believe what you're reading ... you also can't even believe that his star of fame has set so decidedly - he was once one of the most famous writers in the world!! THE historian. There's definitely a feeling that that should not be the case - he should be read again - anyhoo, that's neither here nor there. He is not an EASY read - not one sentence is easy, as a matter of fact - and sounds like, from the letter, that he was not an easy man in real life as well. I know he had a strange and long unhappy marriage ... but perhaps a great brain such as himself could not really be happy amongst other human beings. Who knows. I love the glimpse we get of Carlyle here.

A blog I love

It's called The Art of Memory

I won't try to describe it. I visit the blog and I go into a zone ... almost like when I stroll around in a museum, and let the impressions wash over and through me. Beautiful beautiful stuff.

The Books: "Howards End" (E.M. Forster)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Howards End - by E.M. Forster

I wrote yesterday a bit about Howards End. This book feels like it becomes more relevant with each passing day. Aside from the intricacies of the characters lives - it's about England - city vs. country - and what faster transportation will mean - or do ... the divides between us, the misunderstandings - that have, at times, lasted centuries ... they are engrained. These larger themes of course are reflected in the lives of the characters - the two Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen - and their encounters with the Wilcox family. The Schlegels are intellectuals - on their own - they're "modernism" ... the Wilcoxes, ensconced on their estate in the country - are about tradition - but there's an elegiac feeling to them, as though this is their last decade of being on the top of the heap - and somewhere they know it. For them, life is about LAND, and possessions - the traditions of their family bound up in trees and houses, etc. These two strands of English life come together - there are multiple plots - spinning away on their own - until finally, they all start to merge. I'm not writing about the book brilliantly - but it is a brilliant book. One of the true greats.

Normally I try to find an excerpt that might be a little unexpected - I usually stay away from "openings" of books - and I certainly stay away from the endings!! In this case, I can't help myself - I'm posting the most famous passage from the book.

I read the book at a time of huge upheaval. I was heartbroken because of a man. I was falling in love with another man. But ... but ... I was young enough to be dismayed that the love for the NEW man didn't feel the same as the love for the other man! I wanted it to feel the same as that OTHER love. There was such a sadness in me then, such a loss - and Michael - who was not a day over 20 years old - tried to deal as best he could. And along comes Howards End, which I was reading at the time for the first time. (I had seen the movie, but that doesn't count.) And along comes this passage. I had probably heard it before - because it's one of THOSE passages - like "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times ..." Whether or not you have read Tale of 2 Cities you probably have heard of that. But in the blazing fall that I read this book - the passage came across to me not just as beautiful writing, or good philosophy ... It came across as something I NEEDED. RIGHT THEN. It was a message I needed in that very moment. You know how books can sometimes do that? And it comes out of nowhere - but you realize: this is what I have been looking for, this is what I have been missing ....

So normally I stay away from the most-famous passages - just because it's funner to find alternatives, flipping through the books, etc. But in this case I'll make an exception. Because I read it and I see the fiery autumn leaves, and I see me and Michael lying in the park, reading our books, drinking coffee, and I remember my struggle, my internal struggle ... The book helped me FRAME my own life in that autumn. This love with Michael is, as great as it is, PROSE. The other one was POETRY. But still. This PROSE is pretty nice. Not everything has to be poetry. Accept the prose. Accept the prose. That experience with the other man does not have to "disconnect" you from love forever ... or from other men ... only connect, only connect ... Integrate it somehow ... integrate it ... live with it ... Prose has its place. Prose has its place - no less than poetry ...

Only connect. Only connect.

It was a deeply profound thing for me - in that moment ... so. Here's the passage. Interestingly enough, it is a description of Margaret's feelings about love.

If I could pick one passage that describes how I want to live my life - in every aspect - it would be the "only connect" passage below.

EXCERPT FROM Howards End - by E.M. Forster

Margaret greeted her lord with peculiar tenderness on the morrow. Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the grey, sober against the fire. Happy the man who sees from either aspect the glory of these outspread wings. The roads of his soul lie clear, and he and his friends shall find easy going.

It was hard going in the road of Mr. Wilcox's soul. From boyhood he had neglected them. "I am not a fellow who bothers about my own inside." Outwardly he was cheerful, reliable, and brave; but within, all had reverted to chaos, ruled, so far as it was ruled at all, by an incomplete asceticism. Whether as boy, husband, or widower, he had always the sneaking belief that bodily passion is bad, a belief that is desirable only when held passionately. Religion had confirmed him. The words that were read aloud on Sunday to him and to other respectable men were the words that had once kindled the souls of St. Catharine and St. Francis into a white-hot hatred of the carnal. He could not be as the saints and love the Infinite with a seraphic ardour, but he could be a little ashamed of loving a wife. "Amabat, amare timebat." And it was here that Margaret hoped to help him.

It did not seem so difficult. She need trouble him with no gift of her own. She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

Nor was the message difficult to give. It need not take the form of a good "talking". By quiet indications the bridge would be built and span their lives with beauty.

But she failed. For there was one quality in Henry for which she was never prepared, however much she reminded herself of it: his obtuseness. He simply did not notice things, and there was no more to be said. He never noticed that Helen and Frieda were hostile, or that Tibby was not interested in currant plantations; he never noticed the lights and shades that exist in the greyest conversation, the finger-posts, the milestones, the collisions, the illimitable views. Once - on another occasion - she scolded him about it. He was puzzled, but replied with a laugh: "My motto is Concentrate. I've no intention of frittering away my strength on that sort of thing." "It isn't frittering away the strength," she protested. "It's enlarging the space in which you may be strong." He answered: "You're a clever little woman, but my motto's Concentrate." And this morning he concentrated with a vengeance.

Moonstruck

The moon is high and full and bright red tonight. Soaring ... just soaring over the glittering cityscape across the water ... She leaves a bright red moonpath in the Hudson ... bright red! I knew she would be there tonight when I came home from the city - last night had been a moonstruck night too, although there was a bit of a fuzzy edge to one side of her - so I knew she wasn't quite full. Tonight, as my ghetto bus emerged from the tunnel, and we swooped up on the highway made famous in the Sopranos opening credits - I peered out the window eagerly at the city - my city - across the way - looking for her. I knew she'd be there. The Hudson had a deep purplish tint to it, a startlingly weird color - very rare - and the buildings were alight - catching the dying glows of sunset. I love it when that happens: the Magic Hour of light. Gleaming shards of red glowed out of the walls of glass over there - but I was looking for something else. It's hot today, a muggy smudgy hot - so things don't have the clarity they normally do. The edges are blurred. It's hard to see things clearly on such nights. Dusk makes things fuzzy. It's not like a crisp wintry twilight, where the lights of the buildings frost up against the stark black of the sky, and you can see every corner clearly from a mile away. On a summery dusk, the river blends into the docks into the skyline into the sky, everything is charcoaled and smudged. So it took me a moment to find what I knew was there. A massive swollen glowing red moon, rising from up behind the new New York Times building - so huge that I could see the peaks on the moon mountains, and the shadows of the valleys. Oh my God, what a sight. She looked HUGE. The man I was sitting next to on the bus, a short squat man wearing a baseball cap who, I imagine, is fearful of immigration services tracking him down at every minute of his life (probably 99.9% of the passengers on my regular bus are in this category), noticed the moon at the same time and visibly started. He glanced at me and breathed, "Wow."

Wow, indeed.

I have spent the last 2 hours wandering up and down Boulevard East - right where Mr. Clooney and his ladyfriend had the crash (glad you're okay, bub! Let's remember - there's only one degree between you and me, George! It is just a matter of time before you're at a Thanksgiving dinner at some O'Malley home or other - so you should know I have your back - and I am glad you are okay! You crashed right near my house, bro - I probably heard it in my sleep it was that close!) Oh, where was I. The moon. I am moondrunk. I have been unable to come home until this moment. I watched her climb up through the sky - she lost the redness as she broke free of the city and the sunset - and now she beams with a brilliant light from high in the sky, unhinged, beyond reach. Her light will wake me up tonight, that's the brightness we're dealing with. I cannot get free of it - I walked up and down and up and down - for miles - staring up. I had some lemonade. I talked with the Trinidadian, briefly - he's leaving for Europe next week for a couple months. We looked at the moon together and talked about it, a couple of miles away from one another. We said stuff like, "Can you believe it??" Normally, you know ... I'm not into that kind of stuff. But with this moon?? Anything is possible. My feet ache from walking, I'm hungry and tired - but I couldn't go home before I got my fill! It was just a moonrise, no big deal, but I didn't want to miss a second of it.

"On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five Hardly a man is now alive Who remembers that famous day and year"

Are there more magical words in the world of literature than: "an earlier draft has been discovered"??

As in:

In Longfellow’s papers, Charlie found what appears to be the first complete draft of “Paul Revere’s Ride.”

?????

My love of Longfellow's famous poem is all over my dern blog. I post the poem every 18th of April (uhm - almost every April. Right, Ken?) I can recite huge chunks of it. I have grown up with it. And now - God bless America - my nephew is growing up with it too. I read an edited version of this piece about Cashel on the radio a couple years ago. (Let's just load up this post with links, shall we?)

Anyway, let's get back to the exciting matter at hand:

In Longfellow’s papers, Charlie found what appears to be the first complete draft of “Paul Revere’s Ride.”

Yo!!! More information here - on what was going on in that first draft, and speculations on why Longfellow left it out. (Lots of great links to follow over there as well. Terrific site.) How I wish I had been to that lecture! Fascinating thoughts.

And just because it pleases me, here is the entirety of Longfellow's poem.

Best read it out loud. You can hear the clattering of horse hooves on cobblestones in the rhythm. Goosebumps!

Paul Revere's Ride
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
He said to his friend, "If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,--
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm."

Then he said "Good-night!" and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man-of-war;
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon like a prison bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.

Meanwhile, his friend through alley and street
Wanders and watches, with eager ears,
Till in the silence around him he hears
The muster of men at the barrack door,
The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet,
And the measured tread of the grenadiers,
Marching down to their boats on the shore.

Then he climbed the tower of the Old North Church,
By the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,
To the belfry chamber overhead,
And startled the pigeons from their perch
On the sombre rafters, that round him made
Masses and moving shapes of shade,--
By the trembling ladder, steep and tall,
To the highest window in the wall,
Where he paused to listen and look down
A moment on the roofs of the town
And the moonlight flowing over all.

Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead,
In their night encampment on the hill,
Wrapped in silence so deep and still
That he could hear, like a sentinel's tread,
The watchful night-wind, as it went
Creeping along from tent to tent,
And seeming to whisper, "All is well!"
A moment only he feels the spell
Of the place and the hour, and the secret dread
Of the lonely belfry and the dead;
For suddenly all his thoughts are bent
On a shadowy something far away,
Where the river widens to meet the bay,--
A line of black that bends and floats
On the rising tide like a bridge of boats.

Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,
Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride
On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere.
Now he patted his horse's side,
Now he gazed at the landscape far and near,
Then, impetuous, stamped the earth,
And turned and tightened his saddle girth;
But mostly he watched with eager search
The belfry tower of the Old North Church,
As it rose above the graves on the hill,
Lonely and spectral and sombre and still.
And lo! as he looks, on the belfry's height
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight
A second lamp in the belfry burns.

A hurry of hoofs in a village street,
A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,
And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark
Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet;
That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.
He has left the village and mounted the steep,
And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep,
Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides;
And under the alders that skirt its edge,
Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge,
Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides.

It was twelve by the village clock
When he crossed the bridge into Medford town.
He heard the crowing of the cock,
And the barking of the farmer's dog,
And felt the damp of the river fog,
That rises after the sun goes down.

It was one by the village clock,
When he galloped into Lexington.
He saw the gilded weathercock
Swim in the moonlight as he passed,
And the meeting-house windows, black and bare,
Gaze at him with a spectral glare,
As if they already stood aghast
At the bloody work they would look upon.

It was two by the village clock,
When he came to the bridge in Concord town.
He heard the bleating of the flock,
And the twitter of birds among the trees,
And felt the breath of the morning breeze
Blowing over the meadow brown.
And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket ball.

You know the rest. In the books you have read
How the British Regulars fired and fled,---
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
>From behind each fence and farmyard wall,
Chasing the redcoats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load.

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,---
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo for evermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

The Books: "A Room with a View" (E.M. Forster)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

A Room with a View - by E.M. Forster

I saw the movie before I read the book - this is the case with all of Forster, actually. I came to Forster late - I read Howards End in the fall of 1994 - why I remember such things, I'll never know - but I was reading it when I was in Ithaca, doing a show, recovering from a horrible love-loss, and finding myself falling in love with Michael. And all we did together (besides ... you know ...) was sit around and read. He was reading the 5,000 page Brando biography and I was reading Howards End. I've re-read Howards End since and it's weird - because of the vividness of the time when I first read it, I still, when I pick it up, feel that blazing autumn of 1994 hovering around its pages. The atmosphere of the world I was living in when I read it - has somehow seeped into the pages. I LOVED that book - it's my favorite Forster - but I pick up Room with a view right now - and naturally I had to check the front page to see when I bought it (I do my little month/year thing on every book I buy). And there it is: Oct. 94. So I bought it while still in Ithaca - still enraptured by Howards End - and knowing I wanted to stay on the Forster kick a bit longer. That's why I write that little month/date ... it can trigger memories that I really want to hold onto.

I re-read Room with a View last year, I think - and had just as good a time wiht it as I did the first time. Howards End is his masterpiece, I think - it's almost like he somehow gets the entire history of England and humanity into one book - NO IDEA how he does it ... Room with a View is a bit more light, although it touches on many of the same issues.

Lucy Honeychurch is traveling with a babbling entourage through Italy. Much of Forster's work has to do with watching how English people deal with "the other". Meaning: anyone who is not English. The fad at the time was to take sweeping trips across Europe - with an entire staff to carry your 25 satchels behind you ... and yes, the point was to 'see' Italy - but Forster also shows how some people need to bring their home country with them wherever they go - they don't REALLY want an exotic experience, they don't REALLY want to be confronted with any scary "other". They want to say they've traveled, it's just what you do ... but they expect England to follow THEM. This makes for MUCH high comedy. Room with a view is a VERY funny book - all of those English people sitting around in the drawing room of the pension, being all British, and moaning about not "having a view" ... meanwhile: RIGHT OUTSIDE is Italy proper! Go out and see it!

Lucy - a lovely character - actually DOES want to have adventures, wants to see the "real" Italy. But she is a young lady, traveling with chaperones - and it's very hard to get any alone time whatsoever.

Her first moment of alone time (in excerpt below) ends in tragedy, fear, a dead faint, and a fateful encounter with George Emerson, another young British man in Italy. In his own way, EM Forster is quite quite radical. Lucy does not have "any system of revolt". A critique of an entire culture is in that line. And notice how often SPACE is mentioned here - the distances, George seeing her "across something" ... the "receding heavens", the "vast panoramas", etc. Lucy feels cramped - not just by her room without a view, but by her whole life. The way it's set up, the rules for women, etc. But the book is full of images of space, and air, and light ... It's like we are inside Lucy's head, in her spinning of airy castles, her yearning for unlimited space and freedom. It is not an accident that she first sees George "across something" ... it's like HE is her view. She doesn't know it yet - but it's all there in the language. It's so romantic!

It's a lovely read. Deep, funny, thoughtful, beautiful prose, great characters.

EXCERPT FROM A Room with a View - by E.M. Forster

Mr. Beebe was right. Lucy never knew her desires so clearly as after music. She had not really appreciated the clergyman's wit, nor the suggestive twitterings of Miss Alan. Conversation was tedious; she wanted something big, and she believed that it would have come to her on the wind-swept platform of an electric train.

This she might not attempt. It was unladylike. Why? Why were most big things unladylike? Charlotte had once explained to her why. It was not that ladies were inferior to men; it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself she would be first censured, then despised, and finally ignored. Poems had been written to illustrate this point.

There is much that is immortal in this medieval lady. The dragons have gone, and so have the knights, but still she lingers in our midst. She reigned in many an early Victorian castle, and was Queen of so much early Victorian song. It is sweet to protect her in the intervals of business, sweet to pay her honour when she has cooked our dinner well. But alas! the creature grows degenerate. In her heart also there are springing up strange desires. She too is enamoured of heavy winds, and vast panoramas, and green expanses of the sea. She has marked the kingdom of this world, how full it is of wealth, and beauty, and war - a radiant crust, built around the central fires, spinning towards the receding heavens. Men, declaring that she inspires them to it, move joyfully over the surface, having the most delightful meetings wiht other men, happy, not because they are masculine, but because they are alive. Before the show breaks up she would like to drop the august title of the Eternal Woman, and go there as her transitory self.

Lucy does not stand for the medieval lady, who was rather an ideal to which she was bidden to lift her eyes when feeling serious. Nor has she any system of revolt. Here and there a restriction annoyed her particularly, and she would trangress it, and perhaps be sorry that she had done so. This afternoon she was peculiarly restive. She would really like to do something of which her well-wishers disapproved. As she might not go on the electric tram, she went to Alinari's shop.

There she bought a photograph of Botticelli's "Birth of Venus". Venus, being a pity, spoilt the picture, otherwise so charming, and Miss Bartlett persuaded her to do without it. (A pity in art of course signified the nude.) Giorgione's "Tempesta," the "Idolino," some of the Sistine frescoes and the Apoxyomenos, were added to it. She felt a little calmer then, and bought Fra Angelico's "Coronation," Giotto's "Ascension of St. John," some Della Robba babies, and some Guido Reni Madonnas. For her taste was catholic, and she extended uncritical approval to every well-known name.

But thought she spent nearly seven lire, the gates of liberty seemed still unopened. She was conscious of her discontent; it was new to her to be conscious of it. "The world," she thought, "is certainly full of beautiful things, if only I could come across them." It was not surprising that Mrs. Honeychurch disapproved of music, declaring that it always left her daughter peevish, unpractical, and touchy.

"Nothing ever happens to me," she reflected, as she entered the Piazza Signoria and looked nonchalantly at its marvels, now fairly familiar to her. The great square was in shadow; the sunshine had come too late to strike it. Neptune was already unsubstantial in the twilight, half god, half ghost, and his fountains plashed dreamily to the men and satyrs who idled together on its marge. The Loggie showed as the triple entrance of a cave, wherein dwelt many a deity, shadowy, but immortal, looking forth upon the arrivals and departures of mankind. It was the hour of unreality - the hour, that is, when unfamiliar things are real. An older person at such an hour and in such a place might think that sufficient was happening to him, and rest content. Lucy desired more.

She fixed her eyes wistfully on the tower of the palace, which rose out of the lower darkness like a pillar of roughened gold. It seemed no loger a tower, no longer supported by earth, but some unattainable treasure throbbing in the tranquil sky. Its brightness mesmerized her, still dancing before her eyes when she bent them to the ground and started towards home.

Then something did happen.

Two Italians by the Loggia had been bickering about a debt. "Cinque lire," they had cried, "cinque lire!" They sparred at each other, and one of them was hit lightly upon the chest. He frowned; he bent towards Lucy with a look of interest, as if he had an important message for her. He opened his lips to deliver it, and a stream of red came out between them and trickled down his unshaven chin.

That was all. A crowd rose out of the dusk. It hid the extraordinary man from her, and bore him away to the fountain. Mr. George Emerson happened to be a few paces away, looking at her across the spot where the man had been. How very odd! Across something. Even as she caught sight of him he grew dim; the palace itself grew dim, swayed above her, fell on to her softly, slowly, noiselessly, and the sky fell with it.

She thought: "Oh, what have I done?"

"Oh what have I done?" she murmured, and opene dher eyes.

George Emerson still looked at her, but not across anything. She had complained of dullness, and lo! one man was stabbed, and another held her in his arms.

They were sitting on some steps in the Uffizi Arcade. He must have carried her. He rose when she spoke, and began to dust his knees. She repeated:

"Oh, what have I done?"

"You fainted."

"I - I am very sorry."

"How are you now?"

"Perfectly well - absolutely well." And she began to nod and smile.

"Then let us come home. There's no point in our stopping."

He held out his hand to pull her up. She pretended not to see it. the cries from the fountain - they had never ceased - rang emptily. The whole world seemed pale and void of its original meaning.

Quantum Leap: Season 1, Ep. 2: "Star-Crossed"

LEAP INTO: June 15 - 17, 1972 - Part 2 of re-cap!

Part 1

EPISODE 2: STAR-CROSSED

The next time we see Sam, he is fully ensconced in Dr. Bryant's digs - even down to wearing a silk kimono and a white scarf. He appears to be reading a book of poetry ... and what's on the television gives us a clue as to where and when we are. Sam comments in the voiceover that he used to care about politics ... but right now, all he can do is think about Donna. And what might have been. And what might still be to come. Sadly, he's going to have to wait a bit longer because Jamie Lee shows up at his window, dressed up as Guenivere, spouting romantic nonsense. At the same moment, Al appears. As Sam tries to diffuse Guenivere's passion, Al snarks off to the side, "You brought this one on yourself, Sam" - because instead of rejecting her firmly in the earlier scene he had said something along the lines of, "I'll see you again when the moon crests the towers of Camelot." hahahahahaha So here she is and it's payback time. She is all a flutter, twirling through the room in her dress and her crown. Al just stands back and watches. You can hear his inward chuckle. Like: would you get a load of this crazy broad? Jamie Lee wants to "play" Guenivere and Lancelot - and whaddya know - Dr. Bryant has an entire closet full of costumes just for the occasion. Jamie Lee brings out some chain mail - and Al is intrigued by what he can't see in the closet - so he strolls in. Through the rest of the exchange between an increasingly nervous Sam and an increasingly worked up Jamie Lee - we can hear Dean Stockwell's amazed voice emanating from out of the closet. "Sam! You gotta see this! There's some really kinky stuff in here! He's got rubber stuff in here!"

Sam tries to veer Jamie Lee off the track, tries to get her to think about Oscar, her boyfriend. Jamie Lee is SO not into Oscar, the meathead. He has no poetry in his soul!!! My favorite moment in this little scene is Stockwell's. He emerges from the kinky closet and stands between Sam and Jamie Lee. He has no lines, but he is completely involved - going back and forth between them like a tennis match.