The Sheila Variations

Acting Chekhov: a compilation of quotes.

All excerpts below from The Actor's Chekhov : Nikos Psacharopoulos and the Company of the Williamstown Theatre Festival, on the Plays of Anton Chekhov - a book I just adore. It's extensive interviews with all of the actors who were "regulars" at the Williamstown theatre festival (conceived by the fiery Greek Nikos Psacharopoulos) - they were known for their brilliant Chekhov interpretations - with actors such as Blythe Danner, Christopher Walken, Austin Pendleton, Olympia Dukakis - major heavy hitters. Blythe Danner and her daughter Gwyneth Paltrow actually did a production of The Seagull there about 10 years ago - before Paltrow really hit it huge - and Paltrow has talked about how she basically grew up at Williamstown, playing on the lawn while her mother rehearsed, moving her dolls around silently during rehearsal, etc. Kind of wild that she would get to go back there and perform with her mother. Lovely. It's a production I wish I had seen. Frank Langella was a big Williamstown actor - and it was like a family. They would go back summer after summer, sometimes doing the same plays - alternating roles, etc. Anyway, Nikos is now dead - and The Actor's Chekhov is a series of interviews with Nikos and also with all of his "regulars". It's a real actor's book for actors - but hopefully non-actors will get a lot out of it too.

Nikos was all about PROCESS.

Acting Chekhov: "long runs of plays"

Nikos Psacharopoulos:

Actors only ever go wrong in long runs of plays because they haven't found that unfinished part of themselves to filter through whatever role they're playing every night. Find that one unfinished thing in you, which is informed by the circumstances of the play, and you'll never go wrong.

Acting Chekhov: Plums

Interview with Olympia Dukakis:

Something very interesting happened the first time I did Paulina in The Sea Gull. She comes to them in the third act, and says, "Here are the plums for the journey." And when I was researching it I thought, why is she giving him plums for the journey? It always seemed like she was a batty person! And then I began reading what it was like to go on a journey then. There was a long time on the train, it was very difficult, the food was very bad, people would get diarrhea, constipation. And when I read that I knew what it was! Bowel movements! So, I mean, I could play that! That's something that's a private thing, you don't announce it to everyone. I mean, if I came up to you and you were going on a trip and I said, "Here's some Ex-Lax," I wouldn't make a big announcement! I would try to be confidential about it. So that helped me with how the moment should be acted. But even then, I thought the audience doesn't know this, they don't know that that's what plums are about. The line should be prunes! An audience will know prunes.

Now the word in the text is plums, there's no getting around it, the specific literal translation was "plums". At least that's what I was told again and again by Kevin McCarthy. Because Kevin had been in that production with Mira Rostova, he considered himself the big Chekhov expert among us. He didn't think it should be changed. As usual I didn't go up to Nikos and say, "Listen, I think we should change this, blah blah blah." I just did it one day in rehearsal. Nikos fell over with laughter! … Kevin was apoplectic. But I felt – it's not the specific word, that's true, but this is the spirit of it, this is what's intended, this is what Chekhov wants the audience to know the woman is doing …

Nikos waited till Kevin had given me my scolding and left the room and then he came over and said, "Keep it in."

Acting Chekhov: Intuition

Interview with AUSTIN PENDLETON

JEAN HACKETT: But playing Tusenbach in Three Sisters was different. You mentioned that with that role, you came to a real breakthrough in your work. What was that all about?

AUSTIN PENDLETON: Well, first of all – this was something I always thought Nikos (Psacharopoulos) was wonderful at with people he knew and loved and who loved him. When we did Three Sisters – that was a summer – it was the most painful summer, I think, of my life, so far. Emotionally speaking, I was an open wound walking around up there. Some very painful things in my life that summer. And of course Tusenbach is a character who is in perpetual pain.

And Nikos … Now let me try to find exactly the words for this, because it's a very exact, specific thing. Nikos, as I intuited at the time, knew everything, internally, that was going on with me. I intuited this, but then I much later found out, indirectly, that in fact he actually did know. But he never said a word about it. He just created a rehearsal atmosphere where you knew he wanted everything from you. He wanted you to bring in everything that was going on and he wanted it working in that rehearsal room. So, first of all, I came in with all this – woundedness – it was all with me, in the rehearsal room. And then Nikos immediately put me on to how active Tusenbach is. And what I saw – I say I "saw" but it wasn't really an intellectual process. The realization happened somewhere in the body, although I don't know where, but it happened. But what I saw was that Tusenbach was a person who converted his pain, he converted all of his great pain into – an appetite for joy.

I sat that, very early on, from the things that Nikos was guiding me to. And, as I said, on top of everything else, I knew that Nikos knew what was going on with me personally, although he never said a word about it. He had that with people he liked and trusted … He would never ever say anything, never presume really, to talk about your life with you, but you knew he knew. And you knew that you were not only being given permission to bring it into rehearsal, but you were being urged to. And through all of this, through all the spoken and unspoken things between us, he got me into the perception that Tusenbach turns his pain into an appetite for joy.

JEAN: And wouldn't you say that's the play too?

AUSTIN: Exactly. Once that alignment took place, I was incapable of not being in the moment in that play.

Acting Chekhov: "in mourning for my life"

Olympia Dukakis:

I remember my brother and I came to New York when I was in college and saw The Sea Gull with Maureen Stapleton as Masha. That was the one with Mira Rostova as Nina. And in this production, when Nina said to Trigorin, "Do you think I ought to be an actress," people in the audience, more than one, yelled, "No!" Unbelievable!

But in that production, Stapleton was, like, on the edge. I still remember the very first cross she made across the proscenium, trailed by Medvedenko, just barely enduring him, and finally he says the line, "Why do you always wear black?" And she says, "I'm in mourning for my life." She said this like: "Oh my God, I've got this creep following me, asking me questions!" You could see that it was funny, but underneath there was a motor running, the clock was running here. Time is running out on these people.

Acting Chekhov: efficiency

Nikos Psacharopoulos:

I think somebody must have told actors that being efficient is great. When they come into an audition they change shirts and open bags and move chairs and readjust – all these things that are totally unnecessary … I love somebody to come in and do it with a sense of … not a sense of efficiency, but a sense of proportion, to just stand up there and use themselves in the best possible way.

Acting Chekhov: courage

Interview with Roberta Maxwell:

I learned how to be very courageous from – Mr. Psacharopoulos. On the opening night – after the first preview of The Greeks, he said to me, "You didn't let that speech go." Big speech! "Let it go! Let it go!" I said, "I can't. I'm afraid." He said, "Let it go tomorrow night." I said, "I can't. there are going to be critics out front tomorrow night. I can't." He said, "If you're going to fail, fail trying to be successful. Don't fail because you're too scared to be successful."

Acting Chekhov: "smash something"

Interview with Laila Robins:

[Christopher Walken] did something wonderful in that scene [in Ivanov]. Sasha has a line: "Exactly, that's just what you need, to break something, smash something." And Chris did this brilliant thing where he then took a pencil and broke it in half. When she says "break something" I feel that Sasha means for him to throw a vase or a chair or something like that! But Chris just did this little, impotent gesture which was so hilarious. And then his next line is, "You're funny." I felt every night when Chris said, "You're funny," it was really heartfelt. It was like he was looking at my terror as an actress and saying, "You're funny!"

Acting Chekhov: Being moody ...

Nikos Psacharopoulos:

In a Greek play it's not that there is a peculiar kind of delivery, it is that somebody's pain is so great that they cry out: "Oooooooooooh!" rather than "Oh!" … The feeling should be exaggerated in order to meet the form. … Do not try to "show" what you think the play is all about by doing something with your acting that comments on the "form" of the material. Do not try to be poetic with Shakespeare, do not try to be lyrical with Williams, do not try to be expressionistic with Brecht and, please, do not try to be moody with Chekhov!

Acting Chekhov: "dramatically effective"

Anton Chekhov:

The demand is made that the hero and the heroine should be dramatically effective. But in life people do not shoot themselves, or hang themselves, or fall in love, or deliver themselves of clever sayings every minute. They spend most of their time eating, drinking, or running after woman or men, or talking nonsense. It is therefore necessary that this should be shown on the stage.

Acting Chekhov: "Don't be afraid to say you're wrong."

I think this is one of my favorite anecdotes of all time. I've posted it on my blog before, but it's too good to leave out now.

Interview with PETER HUNT:

When you hit your head on a wall, back up and go another direction. Don't be afraid to say you're wrong.

My favorite example of that is the Our Town story. Nikos [Psacharapolus] was directing, and Thornton Wilder himself was playing the Stage Manager. For some reason he and I struck up a friendship, and one day we were standing and talking, and Nikos burst out of the rehearsal room and came up to Thornton and said, "The scene isn't working." And Thornton Wilder said, "What? The scene isn't working?" Nikos said, "Yeah, George and Emily, they're on the ladder, doing the homework scene." And Thornton said, "What's wrong with it?" And Nikos said, "It doesn't work." And Thornton said, "What are you talking about, it's a Pulitzer-Prize winning play, it works!" And Nikos said, "It's not working. They're up there, I'm playing all the values, they're in love, he's in love with her, they want to get married – but it's not working." Thornton's jaw drops to the floor and he says, "My lord, what are you doing? It's very simple! He's stupid and she's smart, and if he doesn't get the algebra questions for tomorrow's homework, he's going to flunk. THAT'S IT." And Nikos said, "But Thornton, it's a love scene!" And Thornton said, "That's for the audience to decide." And Nikos said, "Got it!" And he rips open the door to the rehearsal room and yells, "Everything we worked on is off! You're dumb, you're smart! Play it!"

Acting Chekhov: "Imagine things."

Intreview with Nikos Psacharopoulos:

Imagine things. Imagine many more things. Imagine that the water you drink is awful, that the house is hot, imagine that the sheets are smelly, imagine that the house has an echo, imagine there's a big nail, your mother put it underneath, so that you can be stepping on nails all the time. You know? Deal sufficiently with the underlying imaginary circumstances. It's kind of interesting. In life, some people do it, they believe they're always persecuted. I think you should get persecuted on stage, or you should be wooed when you're on stage. … I think you have to allow that paranoia and program for paranoia. Create problems for yourself. … Make your own blocks. If you put a chair in front of the door, there will be something so interesting about opening that goddamn door. Have your props messed up so you can't really reach them. Get something on your hands and have nothing to wipe them with.

Acting Chekhov: Walken as Ivanov

Wish I had seen Walken do Ivanov.

JEAN HACKETT: What was the process with Ivanov?

CHRISTOPHER WALKEN: I loved doing that. I'd like to do that again, actually. It's a much better evening than it's given credit for.

JEAN: What happens with that man? It seems like he starts from a place of complete despair and then just goes lower and lower.

WALKEN: Yeah, but, I mean, he's so funny. There's a scene in it where I think he stands on stage and doesn't speak for about 15 minutes. The party scene in the second act. He says nothing, he just stands there and watches everybody. And I used to get a lot of laughs in that scene. He's so ridiculous!

I saw Walken in The Seagull in Central Park - and he was awesome. Small part - Kevin Kline played the real lead - but Walken wandered through the action, punctuating the scenes with lines - that always sounded thrown away ... not punchlines, but he ALWAYS got a laugh. He was great.

Hot, hot, hot

Two hot dudes. Bogarde's smile lines are melting my kneecaps. (Speaking of Night Porter and Charlotte Rampling ... )

Scenes from a sleepover

Tattooed goddesses getting ready for bed. Cameo by Checkerboard.

Checkerboard is a black and white cloth hippo who has been in our lives, as friends, since we were 10 years old. He originally was Betsy's. He says one thing: "BEP." And sometimes he intersperses "Bep" with his own name. As in: "BEP. CheckerboardBEP." With his huge red-cloth hippo mouth gaping wide. In the month following 9/11 - when all of my friends back in Rhode Island had considered airlifting themselves down into the city in order to extract me from the madness - Betsy decided that I shouldn't have to go it alone. So she gave me a freakin' care package the next time I saw her - a delicate gift bag, with tissue paper emanating from it in a girlie type manner ... I opened it carefully - got one glimpse of Checkerboard - lying in a bed of tissue paper - and nearly LOST it. I have had him ever since - but I think if one of my friends was in dire need I would have to pass Checkerboard along (and you know what, I am now thinking of the radiator that smashed Mere's toe ... and Beth's MS ... perhaps you two could have used a Checkerboard gift bag at that time?) My bad. I promise not to HOARD Checkerboard Bep to myself in the future. In tough times, we all could use a Checkerboard.

The Pan Am globe

The wonderful CW of the former No Such Blog (one of my faves) is back blogging again - and he's a Pan Am "geek" of the highest order (to me, that is the ultimate compliment. No pressure or anything, but I still think CW needs to write THE book on Pan Am. I've told him so myself. The guy is encyclopedic in his knowledge and curiosity on the topic - it's awesome!). Here's a post he just wrote on Juan Trippe's globe.

Will Ferrell: "James Joyce spent a lot of his life living outside of Ireland. I too have spent a lot of time living outside of Ireland."

Congrats to Will Ferrell - latest recipient of the James Joyce award. Now, honestly, you have to read the article - check out the OUTFIT he wore to accept the award. I'm howling!! And his comments on Joyce ("As I perused my leatherbound volumes of 'Ulysses,' 'Finnegans Wake,' 'Dubliners,' 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,' standing in my mahogany library, a lot of feelings ran across my mind. Like: 'Damn, I should have read these books.' ") have already made my day and it's not even 8 a.m. yet.

The Books: "It" (Stephen King)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

It by Stephen King

I consider It to be a masterpiece. Not just King's greatest book - but a great American novel, period. I've only read it once - it was such a workout that I feel I need to be ready to face it again. It was that powerful. The characters are emblazoned in my mind - and they live on - like all great fictional characters. You cannot tell me that Anne Shirley does not live, on some alternate plane. Or Jay Gatsby. Or Captain Ahab. These people have a life beyond the pages. They are larger than the authors who created them. I'm not putting It on the level of Moby Dick, but I am saying that those main characters - Beverly, Stanley, Richie, Bill, the others ... BREATHE. They do not feel like "creations". Many big important authors have beautiful writing - but cannot create people who LIVE. (To my mind, Don DeLillo is in this category. I think you would be hard pressed to find contemporary writing that is better than that in Underworld - excerpt here - but I can't remember one character from that book. I mean, I sort of can - but not in the same way as - the cousins in Kavalier and Clay, or the entire family in Geek Love. The specificity of personality - and the impression that these people are ALIVE - is very very difficult. And Stephen King, at his best, is better than almost anyone.)

The book is sweeping in its scope. Terrifying in its particulars. I actually read the main showdown in the sewer canals with a hand over my eyes, trying to block the pictures King was putting in my head. And I still can't block it. We all know the form that the monster takes, and frankly I do not want to discuss it any more. Not if I want to sleep tonight. It would test the strongest person to face something like that ... and the fact that it is these 6 misfit kids - and then later, these 6 misfit adults - who are "called" to conquer "It" ... it's a perfect scenario, a classic one from literature: the quest, the hero who is not "ready" - not prepared - and yet who must fight. King is not re-inventing the wheel here. He inhabits those ancient genres with a freshness and delight that makes them seem new. I love him for it. He's a hugely well-read man - at the end of his wonderful book On Writing, he lists books he thinks are essential - not just to writers, but to anyone. And the list runs the gamut. Sci-fi, classics, modern literature, noir-stuff ... It's a broad and beautiful look at the landscape of literature, its peaks and valleys, its many different forms. His understanding of what makes a good book is top-notch. In It he pulls out all the stops.

Why I love this book so much is that it works on every level it needs to work. There is no skimping. The horror is horrifying. It's one of the scariest books I've ever read. (Although I think "The Mist" is his scariest story of all). Pennywise the clown stalks my dreams. That kind of gleeful anarchist cruelty is what makes up totalitarian societies everywhere. There is not just a smile-less insistence on cruelty. There is a JOY in crushing your enemies. Pennywise, with his terrible puns, and his crooning focus on the children of Derry, is the worst possible enemy. Because he is inhuman. He does not "feel". There is no reasoning with such a monster. King gives "It" an eternal life. We see the land of the town, Derry - from a prehistoric standpoint - with pterodactyls flying, and ferns and bushes overrunning everything - and suddenly something plummets to the earth - from the atmosphere. It is "It". "It" has been there that long. Waiting, biding its time, gaining in strength ... and so King makes the case that the horrors of the world, the everyday horrors -murder, child abductions, racist persecution - come from "outside" us. "It" is behind it all.

But the book also works on the most personal human level. I wrote before in my post on "The Body" that King is a master at writing about childhood, and what it is LIKE, from that perspective. It is the ultimate in childhood-friendship novels. I mean, think of the last sentence of the book. Or - if you don't know it by heart, like I do - then go pick up your copy and look it up. I can barely think of it without getting a lump in my throat. It's a great great book - because of the friendships it describes, and how it (he) captures what it is like, to be 11 years old ... in the 1950s, hanging out with your friends ... and then, as so often happens ... losing touch ... not just with your friends, but losing touch with who you used to be - the best part of yourself ... What happens to us when our childhood friends disappear? Those friends we chose before we knew who we were. They're the ones who have the keys. They are the ones who really KNOW you. Your husband, wife, children ... know the adult you. They know you once life has gotten to you, beaten you down a bit, shaved off the rough edges, made you a bit more small. But those who knew you when you were 11 actually know YOU. This is the realm King is in here. And it's explicit. The horror these 6 faced when they were 11 has since subsided. They have moved on. They are all now adults. Many of them have blocked out completely what they experienced back then. They are married, some are famous, some are deeply unhappy ... the demons that haunted them as children (familial, and actual) have manifested itself in adult terms: addiction, spousal abuse, etc. And then one day. Mike - the only one who stayed behind in Derry - realizes that it's "starting up again". And so he starts to make some calls. To his old childhood friends. They must return, for the final battle. It is only THEY who can do it.

God, King is good here. Because he really captures what it is like to be unconscious - to be in a state of total forgetting - and then, in one fell swoop, to have all of the armor of oblivion ripped away ... leaving you standing cold and exposed, with no protective barrier between you and the past. Answering Mike's call will rock their worlds - affect their marriages, their careers ... they have no idea how long it will take. But they all (except one) answer the call.

It's a fucking great book.

And I agonized a bit over what to excerpt - there's so much that's good here. And decided, what the hell. Let's excerpt the beginning. Because I challenge anyone to read the following excerpt and NOT want to read on.

EXCERPT FROM It by Stephen King

The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years - if it ever did end - began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.

The boat bobbed, listed, righted itself again, dived bravely through treacherous whirlpools, and continued on its way down Witcham Street toward the traffic light which marked the intersection of Witcham and Jackson. The three vertical lenses on all sides of the traffic light were dark this afternoon in the fall of 1957, and the houses were all dark, too. There had been steady rain for a week now, and two days ago the winds had come as well. Most sections of Derry had lost their power then, and it was not back on yet.

A small boy in a yellow slicker and red galoshes ran cheerfully along beside the newspaper boat. The rain had not stopped, but it was finally slackening. It tapped on the yellow hood of the boy's slicker, sounding to his ears like rain on a shed roof ... a comfortable, almost cozy sound. The boy in the yellow slicker was George Denbrough. He was six. His brother William, known to most of the kids at Derry Elementary School (and even to the teachers, who would never have used the nickname to his face) as Stuttering Bill, was at home, hacking out the last of a nasty case of influenza. In that autumn of 1957, eight months before the real horrors began, and twenty-eight years before the final showdown, Stuttering Bill was ten years old.

Bill had made the boat beside which George now ran. He had made it sitting up in bed, his back propped against a pile of pillows, while their mother played Fur Elise on the piano in the parlor and rain swept restlessly against his bedroom window.

About three-quarters of the way down the block as one headed toward the intersection and the dead traffic light, Witcham Street was blocked to motor traffic by smudgepots and four orange sawhorses. Stencilled across each of the horses was DERRY DEPT. OF PUBLIC WORKS. Beyond them, the rain had spilled out of gutters clogged with branches and rocks and big sticky piles of autumn leaves. The water had first pried fingerholds in the paving and then snatched whole greedy handfuls - all of this by the third day of the rains. By noon of the fourth day, big chunks of the street's surface were boating through the intersection of Jackson and Witcham like miniature white-water rafts. By that time, many people in Derry had begun to make nervous jokes about arks. The Public Works Department had managed to keep Jackson Street open, but Witcham was impassable from the sawhorses all the way to the center of town.

But everyone agreed, the worst was over. The Kenduskeag Stream had crested just below its banks in the Barrens and bare inches below the concrete sides of the Canal which channelled it tightly as it passed through downtown. Right now a gang of men - Zack Denbrough, George's and Bill's father, among them - were removing the sandbags they had thrown up the day before with such panicky haste. Yesterday overflow and expensive flood damage had seemed almost inevitable. God knew it had happened before - the flooding in 1931 had been a disaster which had cost millions of dollars and almost two dozen lives. That was a long time ago, but there were still enough people around who remembered it to scare the rest. One of the flood victims had been found twenty-five miles east, in Bucksport. The fish had eaten this unfortunate gentleman's eyes, three of his fingers, his penis, and most of his left foot. Clutched in what remained of his hands had been a Ford steering wheel.

Now, though, the river was receding, and when the new Bangor Hydro dam went in upstream, the river would cease to be a threat. Or so said Zack Denbrough, who worked for Bangor Hydroelectric. As for the rest - well, future floods could take care of themselves. The thing was to get through this one, to get the power back on, and then to forget it. In Derry such forgetting of tragedy and disaster was allmost an art, as Bill Denbrough would come to discover in the course of time.

George paused just beyond the sawhorses at the edge of a deep ravine that had been cut through the tar surface of Witcham Street. This ravine ran on an almost exact diagonal. It ended on the far side of the street, roughly forty feet farther down the hill from where he now stood, on the right. He laughed aloud - the sound of solitary, childish glee a bright runner in that gray afternoon - as a vagary of the flowing water took his paper boat into a scale-model rapids which had been formed by the break in the tar. The urgent water had cut a channel which ran along the diagonal, and so his boat travelled from one side of Witcham Street to the other, the current carrying it so fast that George had to sprint to keep up with it. Water sprayed out from beneath his galoshes in muddy sheets. Their buckles made a jolly jingling as George Denbrough ran toward his strange death. And the feeling which filled him at that moment was clear and simple love for his brother Bill ... love and a touch of regret that Bill couldn't be here to see this and be a part of it. Of course he would try to describe it to Bill when he got home, but he knew he wouldn't be able to make him see it, the way Bill would have been able to make him see it if their positions had been reversed. Bill was good at reading and writing, but even at his age George was wise enough to know that wasn't the only reason why Bill got all A's on his report cards, or why his teachers liked his compositions so well. Telling was only part of it. Bill was good at seeing.

The boat nearly whistled along the diagonal channel, just a page torn from the Classified section of the Derry News, but now George imagined it as a PT boat in a war movie, like the ones he sometimes saw down at the Derry Theater with Bill at Saturday matinees. A war picture with John Wayne fighting the Japs. The prow of the newspaper boat threw sprays of water to either side as it rushed along, and then it reached the gutter on the left side of Witcham Street. A fresh streamlet rushed over the break in the tar at this point, creating a fairly large whirlpool, and it seemed to him that the boat must be swamped and capsize. It leaned alarmingly, and then George cheered as it righted itself, turned, and went racing on down toward the intersection. George sprinted to catch up. Over his head, a grim gust of October wind rattled the trees, now almost completely unburdened of their freight of colored leaves by the storm, which had been this year a reaper of the most ruthless sort.

Tough Day Tally

A mixture of things will happen this evening.

Let's tally it all up.

Reading a chapter of my Thomas Jefferson biography
+
listening to Robbie Williams' "Escapology" (love it love it love it)
+
sipping on scotch and soda
+
cooking my chicken goulash dish
+
watching my documentary about Apollo 13
+
downloading my new "Death Proof" soundtrack
+
writing erotica in my journal
+
doing 2 loads of laundry
=
Comfort Food.

I can barely wait. It sounds so prosaic. And it is. And I am ever so grateful to Allison for our sleepover last night - it was wonderful - JUST what the doctor ordered ... and now I feel ready to go home. I love my "plan". Heaven on earth.

Real Housewives of Orange County: a running commentary from last night

"I really like Lauri. She seems totally down to earth."
"I know! Me too! It's so weird, too, because she has had so much work done on her face - she LOOKS so fake - but she really seems the most REAL of all of them."
"I can't stand Quinn."
"She's a nightmare. If I were dating her, I would run the other way."
"I can't stand Billy."
"Yeah, me neither ... but still - he seems kind of smart ..."
"I liked how he handled Quinn during that religious conversation. He seemed like he has a good head on his shoulders."
"Tamra looks like shit. What the hell did she do to her face?"
"She used to have cheekbone contours - where did those go?"
"Vicki is nuts."
"I mean, the screaming ... it's like - hon, let Briana be happy about the car without screaming in her face about how happy she should be."
"I love Briana."
"Yeah, she seems normal."
"Can you imagine being a Playboy Playmate and then gaining 20 pounds and having your husband not talk to you anymore?"
"Colton is a serial killer in the making."
"I hope Lauri and George last forever."
"He seems, weirdly, like a really nice guy - doesn't he?"
"Yes! I think he really does love her."
"They hate Jo because she's young."
"Also, she's made it outside the gates."
"Wow, that speech was really trite."
"The crystals are a bit over the top."
"I mean, it's her third marriage - I think it's a bit much."
"I have to say: I'm taking Vicki's side on this one. If some weird fan of the show was living in my house - and he moved in while I was on vacation? I'd be a little creeped out."
"Well, let's remember. Even though Vicki is nuts - she is successful. She's an amazingly successful businesswoman. You gotta admire that."
"Slade is the biggest dick who ever walked the planet."
"I can't stand Slade."
"Her music is just awful."
"Look at her cleavage. I mean, honestly. Isn't that a bit much?"
"She's a nightmare."
"I love Lauri. There's something really real about her."
"The thing is - Lauri's not vulgar. All of those other women are vulgar - but she's not like that."
"She's the kind of woman who really needs to be married."
"Three times."
"I like Kara. She's kind of cute."
"She also seems like one of the only kids who actually has her act together. She was Valedictorian, she's going to college. All the rest are ... seriously, look at that platinum hair."
"I don't mind Tammy."
"Nah, she's okay."
"I hope Quinn doesn't come back next season."
"You can tell the other women don't like her. Look at how they're looking at her."
"Jeana makes me sad. I don't know - there's a real sadness there, a flatness to her voice."
"Tamra's son is just a fucking loser."
"What a mamma's boy, too!"
"Like he wants to start at the executive level in whatever job he has. He's so spoiled!"
"I do have hopes for Lauri."
"George seems like a good guy."
"I hope it works out for her."

Then. Lights out. We lay in bed, quietly. Darkness. No talking for about 10 minutes.

Then:

"I think it's sad that Jeana invited Frank into her life."

And then:

HOWLING laughter.

Relishing your rightness

This post is a must-read. Thank you SO much, Marisa, for linking to it.

My whole heart and soul just says YES to something like that, in response.

How inspirational, how difficult, how beautiful. It's a very challenging post ... and I love it for that reason.

To those who are new to me (and others, too, what the hell) some thoughts on the journey of my blog and those who "relish their own rightness" below:

I have lots of thoughts about it - that struggle has played itself out on my blog from time to time - since when I started my blog I was one who (for my own reasons - we all have our reasons) 'relished my rightness'. I started my blog in 2002, when I was very angry about a lot of things. Naturally, I attracted a lot of angry people as readers. Which was great at the time. It was energizing and validating.

I've got a terrible temper, and I'm a good writer. It can make for some explosive reading.

But I found it, eventually, to be not just an unpleasant way to live - but actually dangerous for my wellbeing. I use the word "toxic", and I mean it quite literally.

It soon became a huge problem - and it continues to this day - not as bad as it was before, since I regularly ban people now, delete comments, etc. - but it STILL is a problem. I don't see that kind of disconnect on other personal sites (that's key. My site is PERSONAL. I make no bones about it, and don't pretend to be an "important" blogger) So with other personal sites, it seems the readership reflects the blogger. You know, if there's a blogger who is some Carrie Bradshaw-type girl writing about her dates in Manhattan - she, in general, does not attract people who are in a rage at single city girls. She doesn't attract hordes of angry family-values types lecturing her on her slutty ways. She may get drivebys in that manner - if someone else links to her and she gets a bunch of newbies commenting - but in general, she will attract a readership of those who accept her way of life - maybe they are single, maybe they are not - but they love living vicariously through her, maybe they like her writing, they find her an interesting person to visit every day. What I'm trying to say is: She doesn't attract a readership who don't agree with the very basics of her life. She can just write, freely. But the majority of my readership at first - (it's much more balanced out now, thank God - but that was only because I worked to get a more balanced audience) thought actors were stupid - thought the books I talked about were "snooty" - they thought obsessing about the movies or the Oscars was stupid - they didn't agree with how I spent my free time, basically. Or I would write a post like this and have a misogynist (and he was a regular - not a driveby!) show up and rail at me about how stupid women are and how THAT POST is why I was single.

The hostility in his response took my breath away. Naturally, I deleted the comment. Lots of people disagree with that policy of mine, but I'm totally cool with it. He then emailed me, whining that someone had "stolen" his email and left that comment. What? Oh, really, big tough guy who thinks WOMEN are the stupid ones? Did someone STEAL your email? Now, on the flipside: I get that some people would have a strong reaction to a post like that. I really do. I get that people don't like emotionality, or hearing about someone who is upset and beside themselves with despair. But his immediate reaction of pointing-fingers at me - when I was just working something out in my head, trying to write down an experience that really changed me - showed that there was a huge disconnect between me and a lot of the folks who showed up every day. I knew my story had rocked him. I mean, I know that. He had read the whole thing, mind you. It takes about 20 minutes to read. And he stuck with it. And then felt the need to tell me how stupid I was, and how of COURSE I was single if I was that unstable. I get that people's buttons are pushed. But I am more interested in having readers who can say, "You know what ... my buttons were really pushed reading that ... I wonder why ... Maybe it's because - blah blah blah [share own personal story]". To some people, leaving a comment like that on a blog would be unheard of. Where is the position then? Where is the opinion, the STANCE?

And so this was not on the level of someone disagreeing with my opinion on Forrest Gump (although that happened, too) This was on the level of them not thinking that movies were worth discussing at all. You know, I'd write an "elegy" for Marlon Brando, and someone would show up and say, "Big Famous Politician/Statesman died last year and didn't get NEARLY this much press." But ... but ... I'm writing about Brando. I'm not "the media". I'm just one girl writing about what interests me. You are misunderstanding the entire point of my blog. This was on the level of them thinking that I was, basically, an irritating companion. And again, that's fine. I find lots of people irritating. I just don't read their blogs!

Something seriously had to change. A purge, if you will. I wasn't feeling "free" on my own blog - because the "relishing their rightness" crowd was too loud (they're always the loudest).

I can certainly go there, on occasion - meaning: oh hell yes, I have my "righteous" side. But I will not, I refuse to, LIVE there. (Reading Scott Peck's People of the Lie was a total revelation for me, in this regard. Wow. Highly recommended - almost frighteningly so. Speaking of which - it's funny - if you take a look at the comments to that post I just linked to, you'll get an idea of what I was dealing with at the time. Many of those people at the start of the thread no longer comment here - but once Bryan and CW and Chai-rista and David and peteb started taking over the conversation, later, we could actually TALK. We could actually DISCUSS the issues in a deep and personal way. Great conversation! But before then, it was a struggle with people who LED with their biases and opinions - you could barely get past the fact that the article I mentioned was in The New York Times - that IMMEDIATELY discounted it for these people - you can see it clearly. So they were actually proving Scott Peck's point better than I ever could, but we'll leave that for another day.)

And so it takes work for me to NOT go there. I have to be on point with myself, I have to really be vigilant. I have to be careful of what I let influence me, and who I let close to me. Not because I don't want to change - but because I'm sensitive, frankly. I personally can't hang around people who are negative all the time. Because the temptation is too great for me to wallow there with them ... and then the quality of life just plummets. I cannot afford that.

Because I could be the most righteous queen-bitch of them all. But what a miserable way to live. All I can do is keep writing the way I want to write - and write for the audience I want (rather than write defensively for the righteous crowd, anticipating what they will say and coming up with counter-arguments- which is what happened at first, and my writing suffered) ... and also protect my turf.

I wrote a post about plagiarism once - and two people immediately focused on my 4th grade teacher and what a moron she was for not recognizing the plagiarized words ... which comPLETELY missed the point of the post, the deeper point ... and it was because those were people who need to be right, who relish their rightness, who have a hard time just talking about things withOUT being positional, and black/white. It HAD to be someone's fault, SOMEONE had to be stupid ... and so by veering off into that tangent (which many people would never do - because they are, like myself, interested in another kind of conversation - more contemplative, more willing to discuss and listen - those are the readers I want) - but anyway, by veering off into that tangent, they missed the point - and any time I get the sense that someone is "relishing their rightness", I have to put a stop to it.

On the blog, as I switched the focus, back to who I really am - which is someone who loves to obsess about things, and celebrate things - once the rage crisis had passed - it became apparent that many people could not follow me. They were too into being "right" all the time. Or not even ... it was that "relishing their rightness" was WHO these people WERE. It's in them - it's not something they DO, it's just who they were. So even if I was chatting about the Oscars, or James Joyce - that same tone would come through in my comments section. It was so inappropriate for me, and who I am - and the people I choose to spend my time with. I remember Mental Multivitamin saying in one of her marvelous Shakespeare posts:

I'd rather discuss Hamlet than attempt to persuade someone of Shakespeare's value.

Amen. But I found myself in the bizarre position of not being able to write about what I wanted to write about - without having people question the VALUE of what I was talking about. I would rather discuss Marlon Brando than attempt to persuade someone of Marlon Brando's value.

I don't care if you disagree about my opinion on Forrest Gump. That's actually fun. But if you think it's a waste of time to even talk about movies in a serious way ... and if you condescend to the entire craft of it and those who revere it ... then no. There is no place for you here. I STILL get this, though - I STILL struggle with it. However, now I just delete the comments. I've had it. I've been getting more of the kind of readership I really want, so that's cool.

It is not so much that I never think I'm right - I obviously do ... but the kind of "rightness" she describes in that post - is what I'm talking about. People who do that - constantly (and it doesn't matter what the topic - these people show up on my blog, relishing their rightness - spouting their grievances, whatever it is - EVERYTHING brings up the same response in them) - people who do that actually occur to me as a virus. That's what it feels like. Talk about "wrongness". My spirit just does NOT want to let them in. I have boundaries. I have barriers up. Not so much because I am convinced that they are wrong and I am right ... but because I recognize myself in that posturing self-righteousness. I recnognize myself in their ranting/railing "everyone's stupid" monologues. I could go there.

I choose not to. And sometimes it takes all the strength that I have - and I certainly would have probably tried to claw that guy's eyes out at the ATM if he spoke to me like that.

But again: I think she's interested in making a deeper point, a point about how we live - how we encounter others - and how we struggle with our own feelings of being right, and not just being right - but RELISHING in the rightness.

That's what makes me uncomfortable, too - and why I can't give that mindset an inch on my site. Because it's not just a discussion of the mistakes of others - which I actually really like to do - Alex and Mitchell and I have had long interesting conversations about, say, Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears ... we're really interested in what the hell is going on with those girls ...

But no. What it usually becomes is a mob scene of people RELISHING their own rightness. Looking for someone to point the finger at - it's gotta be SOMEONE'S fault. And that, to me, has the ugliness of the crowd in "The Lottery", and nope, I ain't participating.

And so that post I linked to way up above - has really REALLY spoken to me today. I haven't written this post all that well - because I'm just trying to get my thoughts down as they come ... but it had a huge impact. I really needed to hear it.

Yes, yes, yes.

The Books: "Different Seasons" 'The Body' (Stephen King)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Different Seasons by Stephen King

"The Body" is the third novella in King's collection and, of course, it was made into Stand By Me (God bless you, River Phoenix! How you are missed!! DAMMIT) If people stay away from King because "they don't like horror novels" - I think that is such a shame - and I say that as a person who doesn't read horror novels, generally. But I read Carrie in high school (after seeing the film) and I was hooked - and I am so grateful. Because he is a wonderful writer. I think he's almost (not quite) but almost on the level of Mark Twain - in terms of writing about children - from THEIR level. It's not an easy feat- but King shines in that regard, above many of his peers. The way he evokes the rules of children, and how intense the friendships can be (especially little boys - like in "The Body") is absolutely exquisite. And another thing that King does here - that he does also in It, which I consider a masterpiece - is he writes from the perspective of an adult, looking back on childhood ... and yeah, lots of writers do that ... but without putting a keen of sadness and nostalgia in my heart, like King does. I read "The Body" and my heart literally aches. For youth, for summer vacation, for playing outside in the twilight, for being 4 feet tall, for the intensity of those times. Children have a three-dimensional experience, even though they are not adults yet. They have tough times, they grapple with universal themes, they struggle, they have moments of calm, they have insight ... but they are also 11 years old. King, when he writes about looking back, lets that sadness and loss flow through his writing, and it's just absolutely gorgeous. It is unbearable at points, because of this. Yes, there are monsters, and danger, and terror ... but the real heart of the thing (and it's in the last sentence of It) is remembering, with love, the friends you had before you knew who you were, the friends you made before life got to you ... the people you CHOSE as your companions when you were a kid. Those are important choices. And sometimes we never make such friends again. That's what "The Body" is all about, too.

Beautiful story. Four little boys - all misfits, for different reasons - hang out in their treehouse, playing cards, smoking cigarettes, fighting, talking. They hear a rumor - that out in the woods - there is a dead body. Nobody has discovered it yet. So they make a plan - to lie to their parents (those who have parents who care) and trek out into the woods to see the body. They will have to sleep in the woods one night. It will be an adventure.

How much of an adventure they could not know when they set out.

The narrator is writing the story - it's first person - and he's looking back on it, as an adult. He is now a writer. So the story is interspersed with his published works - so we can see how he has used the stuff of his life (the pie-eating contest, etc.) to create a career as a fiction writer. But this ... this story of "The Body" ... he has never written before. So there are times when the prose palpitates with emotionality, you'll see what I mean in the excerpt below - which is, hands down, some of my favorite writing of King's ever, in all of his books.

If you don't know what happens ... I beg you to read "The Body". Even if you've already seen Stand By Me. It's something else - a really special piece of work.

Here's an excerpt. I chose it because it stands out for me - in the whole of the story - as something singular, unconnected to other events ... and also because I have had similar moments in my life, nearly identical as a matter of fact - and King, who is known for writing about big gestures - running, killing, screaming - is PERFECT here - in the tiniest of moments. King understands that all of life can be encapsulated in such a moment. That often it is not the BIG things that stay in our mind ... it's the small. Like the time on the L platform in Chicago, when a thunderstorm was brewing, and there was purple lightning, and I know I was really really sad about something - although I can't remember what - and there were 2 little kids blowing bubbles nearby and so the translucent bubbles filled the air, gyrating around my head because of the wind. I don't remember the BIG things surrounding that moment ... but the sensory details are intact. And that means something to me. I don't discount the importance of such moments, even though they do not change the world.

That's what King is describing here. LOVE it.

EXCERPT FROM Different Seasons by Stephen King - The Body

The others slept heavily through the rest of the night. I was in and out, dozing, waking, dozing again. The night was far from silent; I heard the triumphant screech-squawk of a pouncing owl, the tiny cry of some small animal perhaps about to be eaten, a larger something blundering wildly through the undergrowth. Under all of this, a steady tone, were the crickets. There were no more screams. I doze and woke, woke and dozed, and I suppose if I had been discovered standing such a slipshod watch in Le Dio, I probably would have been courtmartialed and shot.

I snapped more solidly out of my last doze and became aware that something was different It took a moment or two to figure it out: although the moon was down, I could see my hands resting on my jeans. My watch said quarter to five. It was dawn.

I stood, hearing my spine crackle, walked two dozen feet away from the limped-together bodies of my friends, and pissed into a clump of sumac. I was starting to shake the night-willies; I could feel them sliding away. It was a fine feeling.

I scrambled up the cinders to the railroad tracks and sat on one of the rails, idly chucking cinders between my feet, in no hurry to wake the others. At that precise moment the new day felt too good to share.

Morning came on apace. The noise of the crickets began to drop, and the shadows under the trees and bushes evaporated like puddles after a shower. The air had that peculiar lack of taste that presages the latest hot day in a famous series of hot days. Birds that had maybe cowered all night just as we had done now began to twitter self-importantly. A wren landed on top of the deadfall from which we had taken our firewood, preened itself, and then flew off.

I don't know how long I sat there on the rail, watching the purple steal out of the sky as noiselessly as it had stolen in the evening before. Long enough for my butt to start complaining anyway. I was about to get up when I looked to my right and saw a deer standing in the railroad bed not ten yards from me.

My heart went up into my throat so high that I think I could have put my hand in my mouth and touched it. My stomach and genitals filled with a hot dry excitement. I didn't move. I couldn't have moved if I had wanted to. Her eyes weren't brown, but a dark, dusty black - the kind of velvet you see backgrounding jewelry displays. Her small ears were scuffed suede. She looked serenely at me, head slightly lowered in what I took for curiosity, seeing a kid with his hair in a sleep-scarecrow of whirls and many-tined cowlicks, wearing jeans with cuff and a brown khaki shirt with the elbows mended and the collar turned up in the hoody tradition of the day. What I was seeing was some sort of gift, something given with a carelessness that was appalling.

We looked at each other for a long time ... I think it was a long time. Then she turned and walked off to the other side of the tracks, white bobtail flipping insouciantly. She found grass and began to crop. I couldn't believe it. She had begun to crop. She didn't look back at me and didn't need to; I was frozen solid.

Then the rail started to thrum under my ass and bare seconds later the doe's head came up, cocked back toward Castle Rock. She stood there, her branch-black nose working on the air, coaxing it a little. Then she was gone in three gangling leaps, vanishing into the woods with no sound but one rotted branch, which broke with a sound like a track ref's starter-gun.

I sat there, looking mesmerized at the spot where she had been, until the actual sound of the freight came up through the stillness. Then I skidded back down the bank to where the others were sleeping.

The freighter's slow, loud passage woke them up, yawning and scratching. There was some funny, nervous talk about "the case of the screaming ghost," as Chris called it, but not as much as you might imagine. In daylight it seemed more foolish than interesting - almost embarrassing. Best forgotten.

It was on the tip of my tongue to tell them about the deer, but I ended up not doing it. That was one thing I kept to myself. I've never spoken or written of it until just now, today. And I have to tell you that it seems a lesser thing written down, damn near inconsequential. But for me it was the best part of that trip, the cleanest part, and it was a moment I found myself returning to, almost helplessly, when there was trouble in my life - my first day in the bush in Vietnam, and this fellow walked into the clearing where we were with his hand over his nose and when he took his hand away there was no nose there because it had been shot off; the time the doctor told us our youngest son might be hydrocephalic (he turned out just to have an oversized head, thank God); the long, crazy weeks before my mother died. I would find my thoughts turning back to that morning, the scuffed suede of her ears, the white flash of her tail. But eight hundred million Red Chinese don't give a shit, right? The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them. It's hard to make strangers care about the good things in your life.

"I have supp'd full with horrors; Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts Cannot once start me."

A wonderful article about Patrick Stewart, who is coming to New York in February and March - in a production of Macbeth which ran to sold-out houses last year on the West End (Kate - was this the production where you, in your ancien regime costume, and white curly powdered wig, tried to peek in on the rehearsal, only to be busted totally by the stage manager: "Uhm, yeah. You totally aren't allowed in here." I love that story) - Stewart's "Macbeth" got him some of the best reviews of his career.

But the article is an overview of his whole career. Terrific. The bit about him lecturing the cast of about being "more serious" is very charming ... and how the rest of the cast eventually broke him down. A different world for him, doing a television series, and he ended up being "the silliest" of all the cast members (having seen his brilliant little cameo in Extras, I am not surprised to hear that he is a silly silly man).

Lots of wonderful things in the essay though - the anecdote at the end - of him walking through the night, saying "the role" of Macbeth out loud to himself, making realizations, connections ... Goosebumps.

Patrick Stewart says, in regards to working on Shakespeare:

"And that is part of the greatness of this dramatist, that he taps into something which is entirely human. You feel him reaching out his hand and saying to you as an actor, ‘Come on, it’s easier than you think.’ ”

I have tickets to the production at the end of February - and I'm psyched to see it.

(Here's a link to the article again)

A montage of lovelies - and some words on Martha Vickers

God, the outfits and hair ... not to mention the cars and radiators and pianos of days gone by. I just love all that stuff.

I was very much taken by the beautiful shot of Martha Vickers (who was so damn unforgettable and creepy as the sociopathic thumb-sucking nymphomaniac - how on earth did THAT get by the censors?? - in The Big Sleep).

Speaking of Martha Vickers - there's a really cute story about her and the filming of The Big Sleep - I came across it first, I think, Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood. (I think I also came across it in a couple of Bogart biographies - the story was told by multiple people - all of whom witnessed it, so I guess we can assume that something along these lines occurred). I just love everyone involved in the following anecdote:

Hawks had an idea for one of the scenes - where Marlowe (Bogart) comes into the house, and finds her sitting, all dressed up in the empty house - drugged out, sexed up - He can immediately tell that obviously some kind of porno photo shoot had been going on. And Marlowe comes upon her, she is high on drugs, and completely out of it. Anyway, Hawks had an idea for this scene (which ended up not making it into the movie - no wonder, with the censorship of the day!): He wanted Vickers to simulate an orgasm, as she sat there, looking up at Bogart.

He asked her to do so. He gave her this piece of direction in front of Bogart, Regis Toomey (who plays the DA - wonderful stolid character actor), and a couple of other people, members of the crew, etc.

Hawks said, "Sweetheart, what we want here is for you to simulate that you're having an orgasm."

Martha Vickers asked, "What's an orgasm?"

Nobody spoke. Nobody knew what to do. They all just stood there, awkward as hell, stunned to silence. These three men, Hawks, Bogart, and Toomey - standing there with a teenage actress - who was asking them (in all innocence) what an orgasm was. Dead silence. Hawks called a 10-minute break, I mean - what else could you do - and pulled Toomey aside. He asked Toomey to please go and explain to "Miss Vickers" what an orgasm was.

Toomey, who apparently was a good-natured fellow, and also the product of a strict Irish Catholic upbringing, gamely went over to Martha and calmly explained to her what an orgasm was. (Wish I could have been a fly on the wall for that one.)

Toomey said later to Bogart, "The girl didn't know anything. I asked, 'Are you a virgin?' 'Uh yes.' 'Do you know what an orgasm is? Mr. Hawks wants you to be having an orgasm here.' 'No, I don't know what it is.' 'You don't know what an orgasm is?' 'No.' And so, dammit, I explained to her what an orgasm was. And she got the idea all right. Howard liked the scene very much."

After that, it became a huge joke. Hawks would say to Toomey, "If I ever have to explain an orgasm again to anyone, I am calling on you." And Bogie would laugh and laugh like a madman.

Clip from The Big Sleep below. Seriously: this young actress who led a protected innocent life - gives a HELL of a performance.

Today in History: January 28, 1939

William Butler Yeats died (thanks for the heads up, Ms. Baroque). And, of course, Yeats makes me think of my father. My first published piece in The Sewanee Review was about the Yeats-dad continuum.

From memory now! And when I hear this poem, in my head - I always hear the recitation from the Clancy Brothers Carnegie Hall album.

THE HOST OF THE AIR

O'Driscoll drove with a song
The wild duck and the drake
From the tall and the tufted reeds
Of the drear Heart Lake.

And he saw how the reeds grew dark
At the coming of night-tide,
And dreamed of the long dim hair
Of Bridget his bride.

He heard while he sang and dreamed
A piper piping away,
And never was piping so sad,
And never was piping so gay.

And he saw young men and young girls
Who danced on a level place,
And Bridget his bride among them,
With a sad and a gay face.

The dancers crowded about him
And many a sweet thing said,
And a young man brought him red wine
And a young girl white bread.

But Bridget drew him by the sleeve
Away from the merry bands,
To old men playing at cards
With a twinkling of ancient hands.

The bread and the wine had a doom,
For these were the host of the air;
He sat and played in a dream
Of her long dim hair.

He played with the merry old men
And thought not of evil chance,
Until one bore Bridget his bride
Away from the merry dance.

He bore her away in his arms,
The handsomest young man there,
And his neck and his breast and his arms
Were drowned in her long dim hair.

O'Driscoll scattered the cards
And out of his dream awoke:
Old men and young men and young girls
Were gone like a drifting smoke;

But he heard high up in the air
A piper piping away,
And never was piping so sad,
And never was piping so gay.

To those of you who know that Clancy Brothers album - you'll know the special-ness of that recording.

The O'Malley children were made to memorize Yeats' epitaph as part of our weekly allowance ritual. Say Yeats' epitaph, get a dime!! When we visited his grave in Ireland, as kids, we all felt kind of amazed that ... it was REAL. That the epitaph we had been rattling off since we were toddlers actually existed out in the world.

More in honor of this great poet - one of my favorites - below the jump. A couple years ago, I read his complete works - sitting backstage during the run of a play - when I wasn't onstage acting. I had about 40 minutes before my scene - came on, did my scene - and then there was another half-hour before curtain call. So I huddled backstage wearing my jeweled bifocals and my birkenstocks, and read Yeats. It was a fascinating experience - I know many of his big poems almost by heart, the famous ones - but it's nothing compared to reading his work - from beginning to end. You watch an artist burst forth at a certain point - almost fully formed. You've read his younger work, you've seen its beauty (but also its sentimentality - its Celtic twilight "twee" lament ... and nothing - NOTHING - can prepare you for the poet who would eventually write "Sailing to Byzantium" and "Among Schoolchildren").

Here's a biography of Yeats, Nobel prize winner in 1923.

Yeats, as a poet, has always been one of my favorites (even with the "cloud-pale eyelids" balderdash of his early stuff), but what truly inspires me is his work in Irish theatre, and the creation of the Abbey. An amazing story. His Nobel lecture was on the Irish Dramatic Movement. I wrote a big long post about his nurturing of John Synge, author of Playboy of the Western World. Synge, as a young man, was a floundering artist bohemian type - until Yeats got a hold of him, and told him to go stay on the Aran Islands for a while, to discover the real Irish people. The result? A revolution in Irish theatre.

Gabriel Fallon, an actor at the Abbey, describes the dress rehearsal of Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock in his book Sean O'Casey, The Man I Knew - a wonderful theatrical anecdote:

We could make nothing of the reading of Juno and the Paycock as it was called. It seemed to be a strange baffling mixture of comedy and tragedy; and none of us could say, with any certainty, whether or not it would stand up on the stage.

The dress rehearsal would be held at 5 p.m. on March 2, Sunday. I arrived at the theatre at 4:30 p.m., and found the author there before me looking rather glum and wondering if a rehearsal would take place ... Gradually the players filed in and went to their dressing-rooms. Lennox Robinson arrived shortly before 5 o'clock and was followed by Yeats and Lady Gregory. The curtain rose about 5:36 p.m. so far as I could see and hear while waiting for my cue in the wings the rehearsal seemed to be proceeding smoothly. As soon as I had finished my part of Bentham at the end of the second act I went down into the stalls and sat two seats behind the author. Here for the first time I had an opportunity of seeing something of the play from an objective point of view. I was stunned by the tragic quality of the third act which the magnificent playing of Sara Allgood made almost unbearable. But it was the blistering irony of the final scene which convinced me that this man sitting two seats in front of me was a dramatist of genius, one destined to be spoken of far beyond the confines of the Abbey Theatre ...

We watched the act move on, the furniture removers come and go, the ominous entry of the IRA men, the dragging of Johnny to summary execution, the stilted scene between Jerry Devine and Mary Boyle, and then as with the ensnaring slow impetus of a ninth great wave Allgood's tragic genius rose to an unforgettable climax and drowned the stage in sorrow. How surely was the very butt and sea-mark of tragedy! But suddenly the curtain rises again: are Fitzgerald and McCormick fooling, letting off steam after the strain of rehearsal? Nothing of the kind; for we in the stalls are suddenly made to freeze in our seats as a note beyond tragedy, a blistering flannel-mouthed irony sears its maudlin way across the stage and slowly drops an exhausted curtain on a world disintegrating in 'chassis'.

I sat there stunned. So, indeed, as far as I could see, did Robinson, Yeats, and Lady Gregory. Then Yeats ventured an opinion. He said that the play, particularly in the final scene, reminded him of a Dostoevsky novel. Lady Gregory turned to him and said, "You know, Willie, you never read a novel by Dostoevsky." And she promised to amend this deficiency by sending him a copy of The Idiot. I turned to O'Casey and found I could only say to him, "Magnificent, Sean, magnificent."

I had a conversation once with the doppelganger about "greatest poems of the 20th century" and we discussed Sailing to Byzantium, Among Schoolchildren, and The Second Coming. We said any list of "greatest poems of the 20th century" that DIDN'T include at least one of those poems was not a list to be taken seriously in the slightest. "The Second Coming" is quoted (and mis-appropriated, more often than not) and quoted again ... by people who want to use it for their own ends. It's a dark ominous crystal ball. The best "use" of it, to my mind, is in the deleted scene in Nixon, with Sam Waterston playing Dick Helms, director of the CIA. Written in 1919 - when the world had already become familiar with horror - a horror of a kind never before seen on earth - the poem predicts the chaos of the 20th century.

"The Second Coming"

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Jesusmaryandjoseph.

Seamus Heaney wrote a marvelous essay on Yeats a while back (the link no longer works, but I have the hard copy) - in which he wrote:

Conquest, difficulty, labour: these terms indicate the nature of Yeats's creative disposition. From the start, he was enamoured of Blake's conviction that energy is eternal delight, yet the development of his own thought brought him more and more to the conclusion that conflict was the inescapable condition of being human. So, as his art matured and the articulation of his beliefs became more clarified and forceful, Yeats's poems typically conveyed a sensation of certitude achieved by great effort and of contradictions quelled. Poems in which the defiant self is pitted against hostile or disabling conditions - "An Irish Airman Foresees his Death", "September 1913", "Meditations in Time of Civil War"- are complemented by poems that read like discharges of pure, self-possessed energy, poems from which the accidental circumstances have been excluded so that all that remains is the melody and stamina of resurgent spirit - "The Cold Heaven", "Byzantium", "Long-legged Fly".

Of course, there is also the Maud Gonne factor that must be considered. I read some funny quote somewhere (can't remember where) that said: "Any biography of Yeats would have to have in every chapter the following words: 'And he proposed marriage yet again to Maud Gonne'." What do you wanta bet that Maud Gonne had "cloud-pale eyelids"?

Heaney writes, in that same essay:

nd all the while, of course, there was Maud Gonne, "high and solitary and most stern" according to one of the poems about her, "foremost among those I would hear praised" according to another, and "the troubling of my life" according to a famous sentence in his Autobiographies. The passion she inspired - and as readers we experience it more as creative power than erotic need - made her a figure of primary poetic radiance, a Dublin Beatrice, an archetype as much as a daily presence. Nevertheless, Yeats's poetry, his politics and his involvement with the occult received an extra charge of intensity from her day to day reality in his life, and when she appeared in the title role of his subversive play Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), another kind of maturity was achieved.

Heartbreak. Enduring heartbreak and loss.

Some quotes from Mr. Yeats:

"I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth."

"Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top."

"The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober."

"Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses."

"Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking."

"And say my glory was I had such friends."

Yes. That last one really moves me - it's from one of his poems. I feel the same way about my life, and my friends.

Words to live by:

Never give all the heart

Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy. Kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.

I also love love LOVE his poem to Jonathan Swift where he writes: "Imitate him if you dare."

Swift's Epitaph

Swift has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-besotted traveller; he
Served human liberty.

Speaking of epitaphs, you can't get any better or more eloquent than Auden's stunning poem in memory of Yeats:

In Memory of W.B. Yeats
by Auden

I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

And lastly, a poem that has great personal meaning for me - especially today- a sad upsetting day for me:

The wild swans at Coole

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty Swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

SOME QUOTES

"My poetry is generally written out of despair. Like Balzac, I see increasing commonness everywhere, and like Balzac I know no one who shares the premises from which I work." -- Yeats

"On the third night Yeats addressed the audience before the curtain rose. If anyone had anything to say against the piece they would be welcomed at a debate which he would be glad to arrange in the theatre at some other time. He was interrupted several times. He asked the interrupters to at least listen to the play so that they would know what it was they were objecting to." -- Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh's description of Yeats trying to handle the riots that were happening in response to Synge's "Playboy of the Western World" - a play being put on at the Abbey Theatre

"In 1875 Yeats entered the Godolphin School in Hammersmith and visited Ireland during the longer school vacations, when he stayed with the Pollexfens in County Sligo. An early poetic impulse was to change the name of his toy yacht from Sunbeam to Moonbeam. It was a decisive act." -- Michael Schmidt, "Lives of the Poets

"I thought we might bring the halves together if we had a national literature that made Ireland beautiful in the memory, and yet had been freed of provincialism by an exacting criticism, a European pose." -- Yeats

"This is not the huge competence of Auden, at play in the toy shop of poetic form, but mastery, the possession of a unique rhetoric for use on a real but limited range of themes. It is a mastery so complete that it can occlude the genuinely problematic, ride over the potholes of nonsense without even sensing them. Late in life he recognizes the evasiveness of his symbols, the tendency of his verse to turn away or inward, and in the concentrated intensity of the late poems he tries to remedy this. But he has an imperfect sense of generality; he is willing to plump out a truism as truth. As his mastery increases, his art becomes less truthful. But his main concern is not - until the later poems, and even there in an attenuated spirit - truth, but the house of myth and legend, where he can become a principal tenant, where it is his voice we hear casting the spell, and where real men are reduced - or, in his mind, enlarged - to masks, figures and types useful to myth, regardless of the human reality they had." -- Michael Schmidt, "Lives of the Poets"

"All literature created out of a conscious political aim in the long run crates weakness by creating a habit of unthinking obedience. Literature created for its own sake, for some eternal spiritual need, can be used for politics. Dante is said to have unified Italy. The more unconscious the creation, the more powerful." -- Yeats

"Sex and death are the only things that can interest a serious mind." -- Yeats

"His mastery seems almost excessive." -- Richard Ellmann

"... a strained and unworkable allegory about a young man and a sphinx on a rock in the sea (how did they get there? what did they eat? and so on; people think such criticisms very prosaic, but common-sense is never out of place anywhere ...) but still containing fine lines and vivid imagery." - Gerard Manley Hopkins, after reading some of Yeats' first published verses

"Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top." -- Yeats

"Yeats's 'The Second Coming' has gained in prophetic power with each decade of the twentieth and now twenty-first century, from the rise of fascism and nuclear warfare to the proliferation of international terrorism. It expresses the melancholy realizatino that man, yearningly drawn to the divine, will never fully escape his bestial ancestry. The poem is modernistically unrhymed, though the first stanza plays with shadowy off-rhymes: 'gyre' / 'falconer' / 'everywhere'; 'hold' / 'world' / 'drowned'. It is structured instead by dramatic visuals and emblematic choreography. There are two main movements: a huge, expanding circle (the ascending falcon) and an arrowlike, linear track (the beast bound for Bethlehem). Then two smaller ones: a pendulum arc (the rocking cradle) and an exploding pinwheel (the reeling desert birds). Ideas have become design, starkly juxtaposed with the murky turbulence of elemental forces - storm, flood, drought. Hence the poem, with its horror movie finale, is as hybrid as the sphinx, who represents our buried impulses, vestiges of a past that keeps turning into the future." -- Camille Paglia, "Break, Blow, Burn"

"The heavy voluptuous splendour of much of his work has yet a ghostliness as of the palace made magically of leaves. Even his heroes and beautiful women are aware of this ... He never leaves us, any more than Crashaw, content with the glory alone. It calls our attention to a spirit behind and beyond, heaping high lovely, invisible things that it may show the greater beauty that can survive their crumbling into dust." -- Edward Thomas, 1909

"The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober." -- Yeats

"In London he was active in literature and politics. One particular event in 1889 proved crucial: he met and fell in love with the fiery Republican who haunted him for the rest of his days, Maud Gonne. His biography, from 1889 until Maud Gonne's marriage, is punctuated by the statement, 'Yeats proposed to Maud Gonne.'" -- Michael Schmidt, "Lives of the Poets"

"Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses." -- Yeats

" 'The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity': these famous lines are Yeats's anguished formulation of what seems to be an eternal principle of politics (7-8). When 'the center cannot hold,' neither consensus nor compromise is possible. Public debate shifts to the extremes or is overtaken by violence, which blocks incremental movement toward reciprocity and conciliation. Moderate views are 'drowned' out (as by the bloody tide) in strident partisanship or fanaticism. The phrase 'passionate intensity' suggests that, for the late Romantic Yeats, eros diverted from the personal to the political turns into a distorted lust for power. The second stanza opens in doubt and confusion: 'Surely some revelation is at hand; / Surely the Second Coming is at hand. / The Second Coming!'' (9-11). We are hearing either one voice echoing its own shocked phrases or many voices in public tumult. The book of Revelation lists the dreadful omens heralding doomsday, when Jesus will return and unlock the secrets of history. But in Yeats's poem, Christ's promised glory is overshadowed by a monstrous apparition from antiquity. The poet is seized by an electrifying vision: 'a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi / Troubles my sight'. It's a collective memory, crystallizing from the repository of world myths (12-13). ("Spiritus Mundi" is Yeats's mystical term for "soul of the universe".) We witness the resurrection of the pagan era, whose barbarism mirrors that of the war-torn twentieth century. Yeats sees no evidence of moral evolution over two millennia of Christianity." -- Camille Paglia, "Break, Blow, Burn"

"I once got Yeats down to bed-rock on these subjects and we talked for hours. He had been talking rather wildly about the after life. Finally I asked him: 'What do you believe happens to us immediately after death?' He replied, 'After a person dies, he does not realize that he is dead.' I: 'In what state is he?' W.B.Y.: 'In some half-conscious state.' I said: 'Like the period between waking and sleeping?' W.B.Y.: 'Yes.' I: 'How long does this state last?' W.B.Y.: 'Perhaps some twenty years.' 'And after that,' I asked, 'what happens next?' He replied, 'Again a period which is Purgaotry. The length of that period depends upon the sins of the man when he was upon this earth.' And then again I asked: 'And after that?' I do not remember his actual words, but he spoke of the return of the soul to God. I said, 'Well, it seems to me that you are hurrying us back into the great arms of the Roman Catholic Church.' He was of course an Irish Protestant. I was bold to ask him, but his only retort was his splendid laugh." -- Lady Dorothy Wellesley

"It is an entirely new thing -- neither what they eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time." -- Yeats on James Joyce's "Ulysses"

"For Yeats, there was something both enviable and exemplary about the enlargement of vision and the consequent histrionic equanimity which Shakespeare's heroes and heroines attain at the moment of their death, 'carried beyond feeling into the aboriginal ice.' He wanted people in real life to emulate or at least to internalize the fortitude and defiance thus manifested in tragic art." -- Seamus Heaney, 1990

"Give up Paris, you will never create anything by reading Racine, and Arthur Symons will always be a better critic of French literature. Go to the Arran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression." -- Yeats's advice to John Synge

"The first spectre of the new generation has appeared. His name is Joyce. I have suffered from him and I would like you to suffer." -- George Russell in a letter to Yeats, 1902

Cast a cold eye
On life on death
Horseman pass by
-- Yeats's epitaph

Imitate him if you dare.