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.

The dark side of celebrity crushes

I'm so psyched that my friend Ted finally saw Scorsese's King of Comedy. I had been raving about it to Ted a couple weeks ago ... so I was very interested to hear his response. Excruciating is a pretty good descriptor, I think.

The Books: "Different Seasons" 'Apt Pupil' (Stephen King)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Different Seasons by Stephen King

The second novella in this collection is called "Apt Pupil" and it was also made into a film (rest in peace, Brad Renfro - always thought he was a nice young actor, sad). A young kid becomes overwhelmingly convinced that his elderly next-door neighbor is a Nazi war criminal in hiding. The kid has become obsessed with the Holocaust - it haunts his dreams, he can't stop thinking about it ... it grabs hold of him and never lets go. I remember my first encounter with the Holocaust - and how difficult it was to get my mind around it. The sheer numbers stun you - because you don't even know what "6 million" even looks like - it's hard to picture that many people all at once. The kid befriends his next-door neighbor - but it's more like he insinuates himself into his life, because he wants to get closer to the Holocaust, and he believes this man was one of the perpetrators against the crime of humanity. Some of the details of the story are lost to me, it's been a long time - but basically, the kid goes off the deep end. He becomes convinced that the homeless people lying around their city, under bridges, etc., - need to be killed. The riff-raff of the world ... the world needs a cleansing. So he begins his mission. Like a one-man wrecking ball. I can't remember much else about it ... but I remember being captivated by it when I first read it ... and King just has this way of describing the "series of events" that leads up to a catharsis/confrontation ... so that there is no doubt in your mind the horror that is underneath it all. He just takes you through it step by step (and yeah, sometimes his "steps" could be edited down - he takes 3 pages for what could be one paragraph) ... but I don't mind that so much. I definitely don't mind it if the person is a good writer - and King is great. To me, the best thing about him is (because I'm not into genre fiction, not in the slightest) - his interest is always in what happens to a person when he or she is confronted with horror. Whether it be a crazy clown in the sewer ... or the fact of the Holocaust ... King is interested primarily in the psychological. And so am I. That's why I find him not just fun to read ... but a bit addictive. I want to get inside other people's psychologies as well. And King is all about that.

I remember the following excerpt - parts of it almost word for word, it made that much of an impression on me when I first read it.

Watch how King powerfully sets up the kid's obsession. How the obsession leads to murder and madness will have to wait ... but here King is setting the stage. He's so so good that way.

EXCERPT FROM Different Seasons by Stephen King - Apt Pupil

He remembered in the fifth grade, before Careers Day, how Mrs. Anderson (all the kids called her Bugs because of her big front teeth) had talked to them about what she called finding YOUR GREAT INTEREST.

'It comes all at once," Bugs Anderson had rhapsodized. You see something for the first time, and right away you know you have found YOUR GREAT INTEREST. It's like a key turning in a lock. Or falling in love for the first time. That's why Careers Day is so important, children - it may be the day on which you find YOUR GREAT INTEREST." And she had gone on to tell them about her own GREAT INTEREST, which turned out not to be teaching fifth grade but collecting nineteenth-century postcards.

Todd had thought Mrs. Anderson was full of bullshit at the time, but that day in Foxy's garage, he remembered what she had said and wondered if maybe she hadn't been right after all.

The Santa Anas had been blowing that day, and to the east there were brush-fires. He remembered the smell of burning, hot and greasy. He remembered Foxy's crewcut, and the flakes of Butch Wax clinging to the front of it. He remembered everything.

"I know there's comics here someplace," Foxy had said. His mother had a hangover and had kicked them out of the house for making too much noise. "Neat ones. They're Westerns mostly, but there's some Turok, Son of Stone and --"

"What are those?" Todd asked, pointing at the bulging cardboard cartons under the stairs.

"Ah, they're no good," Foxy said. "True war stories, mostly. Boring."

"Can I look at some?"

"Sure. I'll find the comics."

But by the time fat Foxy Pegler found them, Todd no longer wanted to read comics. He was lost. Utterly lost.

It's like a key turning in a lock. Or falling in love for the first time.

It had been like that. He had known about the war, of course - not the stupid one going on now, where the Americans had gotten the shit kicked out of them by a bunch of gooks in black pajamas - but World War II. He knew that the Americans wore round helmets with net on them and the krauts wore sort of square ones. He knew that the Americans won most of the battles and that the Germans had invented rockets near the end and shot them from Germany onto London. He had even known something about the concentration camps.

The difference between all of that and what he found in the magazines under the stairs in Foxy's garage was like the difference between being told about germs and then actually seeing them in a microscope, squirming around and alive.

Here was Ilse Koch. Here were crematoriums with thick doors standing open on their soot-clotted hinges. Here were officers in SS uniforms and prisoners in striped uniforms. The smell of the old pulp magazines was like the smell of the brush-fires burning out of control on the east of Santa Donato, and he could feel the old paper crumbling against the pads of his fingers, and he turned the pages, no longer in Foxy's garage but caught somewhere crosswire in time, trying to cope with the idea that they had really done those things, that somebody had really done those things, and that somebody had let them do those things, and his hand began to ache with a mixture of revulsion and excitement, and his eyes were hot and strained, but he read on, and from a column of print beneath a picture of tangled bodies at a place called Dachau, this figure jumped out at him:

6,000,000.

And he thought: Somebody goofed there, somebody added a zero or two, that's twice as many people as there are in L.A.! But then, in another magazine (the cover of this one showed a woman chained to a wall while a guy in a Nazi uniform approached her with a poker in his hand and a grin on his face), he saw it again:

6,000,000.

His headache got worse. His mouth went dry. Dimly, from some distance, he heard Foxy saying he had to go in for supper. Todd asked Foxy if he could stay here in the garage and read while Foxy ate. Foxy gave him a look of mild puzzlement, shrugged, and said sure. And Todd read, hunched over the boxes of the old true war magazines, until his mother called and asked if he was ever going to go home.

Like a key turning in a lock.

All the magazines said it was bad, what had happened. But all the stories were continued at the back of the book, and when you turned to those pages, the words saying it was bad were surrounded by ads, and these ads sold German knives and belts and helmets as well as Magic Trusses and Guaranteed Hair Restorer. These ads sold German flags emblazoned with swastikas and Nazi Lugers and a game called Panzer Attack as well as correspondence lessons and offers to make you rich selling elevator shoes to short men. They said it was bad, but it seemed like a lot of people must not mind.

Like falling in love.

Oh yes, he remembered that day very well. He remembered everything about it - a yellowing pin-up calendar for a defunct year on the back wall, the oil-stain on the cement floor, the way the magazines had been tied together with orange twine. He remembered how his headache had gotten a little worse each time he thought of that incredible number,

6,000,000.

He remembered thinking: I want to know about everything that happened in those places. Everything. And I want to know which is more true - the words, or the ads they put beside the words.

He remembered Bugs Anderson as he at last pushed the boxes back under the stairs and thought: She was right. I've found my GREAT INTEREST.

What did we do this weekend?

You know, the usual. Spent 5 hours in a tattoo parlor on St. Mark's Place. Tattoos received by all (well, not by me, but then I already have one. Actually, Betsy already has three - but she got another one). I was there for moral support. The rest of the time was spent involving various alcoholic beverages, much conversation, so many blow-up mattresses in my apartment that we could have been airborne with a single gust of wind, my overflowing toilet and Michele suddenly becoming McGyver (in a velvet jacket and silk scarf) fixing it ... and also peeling off the various bandages to stare at and take photos of all of the tattooes.

Oh, and we also partook in a ukelele festival.

So yeah. It was a well-rounded weekend. Thanks, Beans - thanks, Liz - for your awesome tattoo artistry!

Mere being worked on by "Beans". We loved Beans. He was fascinated by Meredith's half-amputated toe and a little bit in love with it. "This might sound really weird - but can I touch it?" She laughed and said sure, so he gently touched her stub, marveling at it. They had a humorous discussion about painting a fake nail on the "stub" ... and he made her promise that should she ever decide to do it, she would let HIM do it. "Seriously, I would give you a huge deal on the price ... just promise me you'll let me do it." Mere said, "You could add it to your portfolio." "Absolutely!" We loved Beans.

Oh, and Beans - respectfully, declined to do Betsy's tattoo. For the funniest reason!! We were all guffawing about it. "Yeah, Liz can do that one," he said. See if you can guess which one he wouldn't do.

Browsing. Michele's feet.

Beth, browsing.

All my friends belly-up to the counter, browsing.

Beth getting worked on by Liz. We were like, "How ya doin' Beth?" Beth responds, "It's not as bad as childbirth!" Also, we were reminding each other, "Yeah, so, Beth has MS. I think she can handle a little tattoo needle!!"

Michele, browsing.

The walls.

The results! And I've thrown in my almost 20 year old one for good measure:

The Books: "Different Seasons" 'Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption' (Stephen King)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Different Seasons by Stephen King

A book of four novellas, Different Seasons contains some of my favorite of all of Stephen King's writing (and I'm a huge fan). Each novella represents a different season, and some of these stories pack such a huge punch. None of them are "horror" stories, although there is most certainly psychological horror at times. The first story in the collection comes under the heading "Hope Springs Eternal" - and that is, most definitely, the them of "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" - adapted into the film Shawshank Redemption, probably the most successful (in terms of long-lasting impact) of all of the adaptations of King's work. Shawshank Redemption will be watched by generations to come, long after the rest of us are dust. It's just that kind of movie. And not to be a snot, but whatever - wouldn't be the first time - I prefer the written story. It's just how King describes stuff ... it's the way he can rise goosebumps on my flesh without ever having a zombie emerge, or an evil dog, or monsters in the sewers. He's great there as well - but in my opinion, he is at the top of his game (and anyone else's game) with "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" - the now well-known (thanks for the movie) story of Andy Dufresne - wrongly accused murderer and accountant - who spends decades of his life in jail - decades - digging a secret tunnel out, using his Rita Hayworth poster as a cover-up. It's not just the story of "hope springs eternal" that is so moving - it's the characters King introduces to us ... the way he describes prison life, not just from a phyical standpoint but - way more important - from the psychological standpoint. What happens to hope when a man becomes an "institutional man". What happens to free will, and thinking for oneself? Andy Dufresne knows he cannot beat the system. It has already beaten him. But - unlike most of his counterparts - he never ever becomes "institutionalized" - and that, to me, is King's main interest in the story. King, even with all the horror and dark imaginings, is - at his very core- an optimist. He loves people. He loves the human race, and what it is capable of at its very best. Ultimately, he sees the good. But we are only at our very best when faced with extraordinary obstacles. Andy Dufresne is not a Rambo-type guy. He's an accountant. A quiet stealthy man, with a great poker face ... who never ever stops thinking, thinking, thinking ... and not just thinking ... but saving the very part of himself, the uninstitutionalized part, the part that has dreams and plans for the future - to himself. Nobody can get in there with him, and nobody - for the most part - even knows that it is there. Everyone can sense, from the warden on down, that Andy Dufresne is an interesting character. But nobody could ever have guessed that all those long years - from the 50s to the 70s - when he was in his cell, with his chess pieces, that he was not just planning his escape in his mind - but working on it practically, inch by inch. When he breaks out, everyone is blown away. Andy? That guy?? But when you look back on it - as our beautiful narrator does - it all makes sense. Of course someone like that - methodical, anal, quiet, cards held close to his chest - would construct the perfect escape. And never ever let on what he was up to. The man had nerves of steel. Ice water in his veins. And THATS what interests Stephen King: who IS that? What kind of guy could endure in such silence? Taking such enormous risks? Dufresne could have lost all. Many many times. But - and here a little bit of luck comes into play - his cell was never searched unexpectedly - he was never busted ... but besides the luck factor, Dufresne just kept going. And perhaps we will never know what it was like for him. Where his mind went, those long long nights, as he chipped away at the rock walls of the prison. Dufresne was in the zone. The practical zone. Not a pipe dream. No. But an actual plan. It's an awesome story, and I never get sick of it.

One of the best parts of the story is that it is NOT told by an omniscent narrator - who can tell us: "And here's how it REALLY went." And it is NOT told by Dufresne, who can inform us, "Here is what it was like for me." It's told by his fellow inmate - Red. Who cannot give us the whole story - much of it is only speculation: "here is what it must have been like ... I bet that THIS is how it happened ..." and it adds such a goosebump factor to the entire novella, because, in the end, we really can't know. All we know is: one day Andy Dufresne was in his cell, and the next day - he had vanished into thin air.

The uncertainty of Red's voice here, the way it sounds as though he is working it out for himself, pondering Andy's experience - without really knowing the answer ... is part of the success of the book. It's that tone - and if you've read it, you will know what I mean. Morgan Freeman embodied it perfectly (so much of the movie is in voiceover - and thank God. It's just right for that particular film) ... but here you can see how it is written. To my ear, it couldn't be better.

Here's an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Different Seasons by Stephen King - 'Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption

Then one day, very late in the spring - perhaps around October of 1987 - the long-time hobby suddenly turned into something else. One night while he was in the hole up to his waist with Raquel Welch hanging down over his ass, the pick end of his rock-hammer must have suddenly sunk into concrete past the hilt.

He would have dragged some chunks of concrete back, but maybe he heard others falling down into that shaft, bouncing back and forth, clinking off that standpipe. Did he know by then that he was going to come upon that shaft, or was he totally surprised? I don't know. He might have seen the prison blueprints by then or he might not have. If not, you can be damned sure he found a way to look at them not long after.

All at once he must have realized that, instead of just playing a game, he was playing for high stakes ... in terms of his own life and his own future, the highest. Even then he couldn't have known for sure, but he must have had a pretty good idea because it was right around then that he talked to me about Zihuatenejo for the first time. All of a sudden, instead of just being a toy, that stupid hole in the wall became his master - if he knew about the sewer-pipe at the bottom, and that it led under the outer wall, it did, anyway.

He'd had the key under the rock in Buxton to worry about for years. Bow he had to worry that some eager-beaver new guard would look behind his poster and expose the whole thing, or that he would get another cellmate, or that he would, after all those years, suddenly be transferred. He had all those things on his mind for the next eight years. All I can say is that he must have been one of the coolest men who ever lived. I would have gone completely nuts after a while, living with all that uncertainty. But Andy just went on playing the game.

He had to carry the probability of discovery for another eight years - the probability of it, you might say, because no matter how carefully he stacked the cards in his favor, as an inmate of a state prison, he just didn't have that many to stack ... and the gods had been kind of him for a very long time; some nineteen years.

The most ghostly irony I can think of would have been if he had been offered a parole. Can you imagine it? Three days before the parolee is actually released, he is transferred into the light security wing to undergo a complete physical and a battery of vocational tests. While he's there, his old cell is completely cleaned out. Instead of getting his parole, Andy would have gotten a long turn downstairs in solitary, followed by some more time upstairs ... but in a different cell.

If he broke into the shaft in 1967, how come he didn't escape until 1975?

I don't know for sure - but I can advance some pretty good guesses.

First, he would have become more careful than ever. He was too smart to just push ahead at flank speed and try to get out in eight months, or even in eighteen. He must have gone on widening the opening on the crawlspace a little at a time. A hole as big as a teacup by the time he took his New Year's Eve drink that year. A hole as big as a dinner-plate by the time he took his birthday drink in 1968. As big as a serving-tray by the time the 1969 baseball season opened.

For a time I thought it should have gone much faster than it apparently did - after he broke through, I mean. It seemed to me that, instead of having to pulverize the crap and take it out of his cell in the cheater gadgets I have described, he could simply let it drop down the shaft. The length of time he took makes me believe that he didn't dare do that. He might have decided that the noise would arouse someone's suspicions. Or, if he knew about the sewer-pipe, as I believe he must have, he would have been afraid that a falling chunk of concrete would break it before he was ready, screwing up the cellblock sewage system and leading to an investigation. And an investigation, needless to say, would lead to ruin.

Still and all, I'd guess that, by the time Nixon was sworn in for his second term, the hole would have been wide enough for him to wriggle through ... and probably sooner than that. Andy was a small guy.

Why didn't he go then?

That's where my educated guesses run out, folks; from this point they become progressively wilder. One possibility is that the crawlspace itself was clogged with crap and he had to clear it out. But that wouldn't account for all the time. So what was it?

I think that maybe Andy got scared.

I've told you as well as I can how it is to be an institutional man. At first you can't stand those four walls, then you get so you can abide them, then you get so you accept them ... and then, as your body and your mind and your spirit adjust to life on an HO scale, you get to love them. You are told when to eat, when you can write letters, when you can smoke. If you're at work in the laundry or the plate-shop, you're assigned five minutes of each hour when you can go to the bathroom. For thirty-five years, my time was twenty-five minutes after the hour, and after thirty-five years, that's the only time I ever felt the need to take a piss or have a crap: twenty-five minutes past the hour. And if for some reason I couldn't go, the need would pass at thirty after, and come back at twenty-five past the next hour.

I think Andy may have been wrestling with that tiger - that institutional syndrome - and also with the bulking fears that all of it might have been for nothing.

How many nights must he have lain awake under his poster, thinking about that sewer line, knowing that the one chance was all he'd ever get? The blueprints might have told him how big the pipe's bore was, but a blueprint couldn't tell him what it would be like inside that pipe - if he would be able to breathe without choking, if the rats were big enough and mean enough to fight instead of retreating ... and a blueprint couldn't've told him what he'd find at the end of the pipe, when and if he got there. Here's a joke even funnier than the parole would have been: Andy breaks into the sewer-line, crawls through five hundred yards of choking, shit-smelling darkness, and comes up against a heavy-gauge mesh screen at the end of it all. Ha, ha, very funny.

That would have been on his mind. And if the long shot actually came in and he was able to get out, would he be able to get some civilian clothes and get away from the vicinity of the prison undetected? Last of all, suppose he got out of the pipe, got away from Shawshank before the alarm was raised, got to Buxton, overturned the right rock ... and found nothing beneath? Not necessarily something so dramatic as arriving at the right field and discovering that a highrise apartment building had been erected on the spot, or that it had been turned into a supermarket parking lot. It could have been that some little kid who liked rocks noticed that piece of volcanic glass, turned it over, saw the deposit-box key, and took both it and the rock back to his room as souvenirs. Maybe a November hunter kicked the rock, left the key exposed, and a squirrel or a crow with a liking for bright shiny things had taken it away. Maybe there had been spring floods one year, breaching the wall, washing the key away. Maybe anything.

So I think - wild guess or not - that Andy just froze in place for a while. After all, you can't lose if you don't bet. What did he have to lose, you ask? His library, for one thing. The poison peace of institutional life, for another. Any future chance to grab his safe identity.

But he finally did it, just as I have told you. He tried ... and, my! Didn't he succeed in spectacular fashion? You tell me.

But did he get away, you ask? What happened after? What happened when he got to that meadow and turned over that rock ... always assuming the rock was still there?

I can't describe that scene for you, because this institutional man is still in this institution, and expects to be for years to come.

But I'll tell you this. Very late in the summer of 1975, on September 15th, to be exact, I got a postcard which had been mailed from the tiny town of McNary, texas. That town is on the American side of the border, directly across from El Porvenir. The message side of the card was totally blank. But I know. I know it in my heart as surely as I know that we're all going to die somebody.

McNary was where he crossed. McNary, Texas.

The Books: "Up the Down Staircase" (Bel Kaufman)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman.

I read this laugh-out-loud funny book about a woman who goes to teach in an inner city school when I was a kid. I read it because my cousin Susan, who was a year older than myself, and basically the coolest and most admirable person alive to me was reading it (and yes, if she had jumped off a bridge, I would have too) - her guffaws of laughter made me intrigued. She had to be about 13, so I was 12. I remember reading it and there was one section, in particular, which made me laugh so hard that I still remember it, years later, almost word for word. The book is not written with a narrative. There are series of conversations with her students, where she tries to get them under control (no small feat) - they refer to her as 'teach', they speak many languages, none of them very well, they are ghetto kids, and full of mischief and bullshit. The book also shows, beautifully, the overwhelming bureaucracy of high schools - all of the inter-office memos are printed (some of them are hilarious) - and the notes passed back and forth between teachers - Sylvia Barrett (our lead character's name) trying to get her sea legs in this new environment, which feels more like a correctional facility than a high school. We get to know the students through their compositions that they write for her (and one of these was the thing that made me laugh so loud I had to stop reading the book, just to give myself a break). There's a side plot where a young girl student falls in love with a male teacher - and writes him a passionate badly-spelled illiterate love letter. He doesn't know what to do, so he gives it back to her - with all of her mistakes corrected, as though it's just a regular paper. She responds by throwing herself out the window. She doesn't die, but much brou-haha ensues. I love the structure of the book - it almost feels like you are rifling through a teacher's desk drawers, at the end of a school year. Baffled notes go out by Sylvia ... who is trying to learn the system, as well as teach these kids (and you just fall in love with these kids, even the criminals-in-the-making - they're just all awesome) ... and you watch (through these "found objects") how Sylvia, over the course of the year, with much hard work, gains the kids' respect ... and figures out how to teach them.

An awesome book - if you haven't read it, all I can say is - do yourself a favor. It's got it all. Oh, and if you're a teacher - you REALLY have to read it!! You seriously will snort with laughter, and there are moments that are so poignant (I love teacher stories anyway) where you feel like you might cry. The breakthroughs are small ... it's not like Sylvia discovers a Dominican Einstein in her rowdy class ... but she does figure out how not just to talk to them on their level, but to raise them up as well. To hear their responses to, say, Huck Finn, in their essays - seriously, you have to read it. You will CRY with laughter.

Wonderful book.

Here are some of the students essays, from early on in the year. She has an anonymous drop-box in her room ... and she will assign the kids a question to be answered ... sometimes it's general, like, "How do you like my teaching? What can I do to improve?" to more specific, like the following excerpt. I chose this excerpt because I think it's a nice segue from all of the Ulysses posts I've been doing. (And the comment involving "the round person" makes me laugh out loud)

EXCERPT FROM Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman

ENGLISH 33 SS
ANSWER BRIEFLY:
WHY DO WE STUDY THE MYTHS AND THE ODYSSEY?

Because we want to talk like cultured people. At a party would you like it if some one mentioned a Greek God and you didn't know him. You would be embarrased.

_______________________________

We study myths like Orpheum & his girl friend because it takes place in the Greek Underground. We want to know how our civilization got that way.

_______________________________

Myths are everywhere. Many everyday things like thunder are based on myths. It helps increase our vocabulery in words like Volcanno and By Jove! and to gain experience for future behavior.

_______________________________

The reason we study it is because it shows the kind of writing they went in for in days of Yore. If this isn't the right answer well I don't know.

_______________________________

The Odessye I've just read helped me an awful lot in my life.

_______________________________

We study myths to learn what it was like to live in the golden age with all the killings.

_______________________________

I'm sure there are many reasons why we study these things but I missed it due to absence. I brought a note.

_______________________________

We study myths so we may comprehend in a superior fashion the origines of many idiocyncracies of our language throughout the decades, constant references to mythologic occurances have spawned such sparking gems as Jumping Jupiter. By acquaintance with sundry gods and their female counterparts one might discover the birthplaces of such phrases of which we speak.

_______________________________

Diana ruled the moon and fell in love once with a mortal and because of its outcome she never again did so.

_______________________________

If it wasnt for Myths where would Shakesper be today?

_______________________________

Well, for students going to colledge even if they don't go to colledge everybody needs a certain amount of literature in their background.

_______________________________

To me the "Odyssey" was just another Ethan Frome or Silas Marner.

_______________________________

It's hard to avoid reading because every wheres we go reading is there.

_______________________________

My own opinion is that I hated the Odessey.

_______________________________

I dont know why we read them but I can tell about it. Pyramid and Thisbe are next door neighbors who like Romeo and Juliette were caused to die by their parents. They saw each other thru a hole in the wall. After a while they couldnt stand it and decided not to meet by the hole any more. So they met by a tree. Thisbe runs away at the sight of a lady lion who's mouth is dripping blood. She dropped a clothe which the lady liion only picked up and thats all. Pyramid walks over and sees the clothe full of blood. He became agrieved and slewed himself. She then walks over and seeing her lover laying on the ground she couldnt stand the sight of him and likewise slewed herself. The blood of them both joined and changed the white flower to purple. How beautiful is love.

_______________________________

It develops our
(not finished)

_______________________________

We dove deeply into the Odessey to get what we can out of it. I think it's valuable to us. It's very difficult to understand the English of before.

_______________________________

Mythology is studied in the school system because most of us come from it.

_______________________________

My opinion about the Oddysey is ridiculous. I don't want to hear about some one's troubles.

_______________________________

The reason we study mythology is to gain tolerance for others even if they don't deserve it.

_______________________________

I didn't know we'd have a quizz on it so didn't study for it, but I imagine we read it to be a round person.

_______________________________

What you may call it felt that the people of the earth should have fire and he stole it from Olympus and took it to earth. He was then punished by being tied to a mountain top and have his liver eaten out every day by a Vultur.

_______________________________

Once a person studies myth's they look on life a little different. I know I do.

_______________________________

Why do we study the Odyssy? Because everybody in high school at one time or another read it and now we have to read it because it's our turn.

_______________________________

The Trojan horse was used as a spy of today. Gods were used as dictators and Penelpe still walks the streets of modern society.

_______________________________

If the odessy is of no value to me its probably because I didnt put myself into it to begin with.

_______________________________

Just about all myths are based on Love and that is why.

_______________________________

We read myths for learning about the gods and godesses and their affairs.

_______________________________

We read it because it's a classicle.

"Dredl dredl dredl ...."

An unbelievable performance of Christmas songs by an a capella group.

Speaking of Molly Bloom

(oh were we? Well, actually, yes we were - haven't you been paying attention? Oh wait ... yes - Nightfly was listening!! Yay!) ... and speaking of the famous last passage of Ulysses:

yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes

I was walking in my neighborhood on a chill bright morning and saw a sign in a window and wondered: "Hmmm. Does Molly Bloom live there?"

I think I met my husband today.

I just spoke to him on the phone, and it was a business call, but the rapport was startling, and so was his Irish accent. My research has begun. I need to enlist spies (which I have already done) to find out his situation and to also report back to me on the essentials. Like, what he looks like, and if he has a ring on his finger. If he's in any way, shape or form blurpy (blurpy addendum here) - and if I find out that he plays soccer on the weekends in Central Park, then the man can just consider himself tagged by my stun-gun and give up any possibility of escape.

Let the madness begin.

I love my husband!!!!

Diary Friday

Here's an excerpt from my travel journal, of our time in Ireland as a family. I am 13 years old. I find this first excerpt hysterical. I am in IRELAND, and here is what I choose to write about. Look at how I launch right in to my main concerns. I am in a foreign land for the first time, and I obviously have my priorities straight.

WESTPORT, IRELAND

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

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

ACHILL ISLAND, IRELAND

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

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

Later:

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

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

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

Just thinking about living on this island makes me sick. [My God, Sheila!! Up till now you've seemed enthusiastic! Why the change?.] No t.v., one school, not knowing about fashions. [This from a girl wearing saddle shoes in the early 1980s. I am so sorry, lovely people of Achill Island, for my judgment.] All they have here is Irish knit sweaters and skirts. I mean, clothes aren't everything but I want to know something about what is in and what isn't. [This is awful. I considered not posting that last paragraph, due to my mortification]

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

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

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

ACHILL ISLAND, THURSDAY

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

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

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

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

Tomorrow we're going to church.

I should have brought my curling iron.

Flashes of light

A cool montage of movie stills. What a great idea! I have a couple moments that come immediately to mind - mainly a moment near the end of Fearless, when the plane is going down.

Go, S. Epatha Merkerson!!!

"I'm 53 years old ... and this is the first time I have ever been offered a lead role." -- from S. Epatha Merkerson's Golden Globe speech for Lackawanna Blues.

I am thrilled to see that she has come back to Broadway in William Inge's haunting play Come Back, Little Sheba ... and I was almost nervous for her. I get weird like that. I get invested in someone's career, as though I am their personal agent or manager. I just think she's so good, and I love her. And imagining her in that part!!! How fascinating! The childlike sad little woman, living in her fantasy world ... what a tragic piece of work. I read the play when I was a teenager, and almost resisted it. I resisted the hopelessness, the unbelievable sadness of that world, that woman. So to picture S. Epatha Merkerson - such a strong woman, an intelligent woman - in that role gave me goosebumps. I was filled with hope ... that she would be fantastic.

The review of Little Sheba just came out and I have cried all the way thru reading it. I must see it. And thankfully, it's in New York City - not Kathmandu, so I can actually see it!

The review opens with:

Sometimes, when she stops the restless chatter with which she fills her days and lets the silence take over, Lola Delaney seems to be staring at nothing in the deeply felt revival of “Come Back, Little Sheba,” which opened Thursday night at the Biltmore Theater. Yet as S. Epatha Merkerson portrays this housebound wife of an alcoholic, in a performance that stops the heart, her gaze is anything but empty.

In those moments Ms. Merkerson’s face is devoid of expression, except for her eyes. In them you read, with a clarity that scalds, thoughts that Lola would never admit she is thinking. Because if she did, there would really be no reason for her to keep on living.

The marvel of Ms. Merkerson’s performance in this revitalizing production of a play often dismissed as a soggy period piece is how completely and starkly she allows us to see what Lola sees. Conveying everything while seeming to do nothing is no mean feat — a rare accomplishment expected, perhaps, from seasoned stage stars like Vanessa Redgrave (in “The Year of Magical Thinking”) or Lois Smith (in the recent revival of “The Trip to Bountiful”).

This is so so exciting.

I just mentioned over on Marisa's post about community theatre that Broadway sometimes lags behind community and local theatre - in its resistance to inter-racial casting. In college departments or small towns, it is normal to see blacks playing siblings of whites, etc. - because it's a small pool of actors and everyone must be cast. It gives a nice egalitarian feel to it. Professional opera has gone that route - so if you have the voice, you get the part - regardless of race. But you still don't see that much on Broadway. You get all-black casts of classic white scripts ... but you rarely see that kind of creative casting. Recently, I saw 110 In the Shade, with the marvelous Audra McDonald in the lead role. It's written for a white woman, but again, that doesn't matter. And the character has 2 brothers, and a father. One brother was black, one was white, and the father was played by the fantastic John Cullum (who is white). And it wasn't mentioned, or lingered over - it wasn't a "gimmick" - it was just accepted. I found that SO refreshing. It's about time!! Come Back Little Sheba has gone that route as well, and I'm very pleased to hear it. There is no reason why Romeo couldn't be played by a black man, or Stanley Kowalski being black to a white Blanche or vice versa ... The fact that the marriage in Little Sheba is an inter-racial marriage (and Doc is played by Kevin Anderson - a fine actor) definitely adds some oomph to the script - some layers that might not otherwise be there, although if you know the story - it would TOTALLY make sense. Again, it just makes me happy to see that kind of imaginative production, not limiting itself in terms of its casting. Good for them.

And listen to this excerpt from the review:

[Kevin Anderson's] scalpel-edged viciousness in that scene means that Doc wounds Lola with surgical exactness. And Ms. Merkerson responds with an abjectness that makes you want to rush the stage and intervene. All through the play, Lola has had the air of someone expecting to be rebuffed, put down, hit or sent packing, whether cozying up to Doc or making nice with her supremely competent neighbor (Brenda Wehle, excellent).

Her compulsive chattiness on all subjects — including Little Sheba, the dog that disappeared from her life as completely and inexplicably as her youth — is obviously for keeping at bay the fears that steal up on her when it’s quiet. Ms. Merkerson and this production make sure that even when Lola is talking a blue streak, we also always hear the unspeakable gray silence that lies beneath.

Wow.

And Ms. Merkerson responds with an abjectness that makes you want to rush the stage and intervene.

God. If only all plays could make us respond in such visceral ways. I love it when I want to leap into the middle of the action, and try to save/divert/help ... That's the mark of a damn good play, and some awesome performances.

Go, S. Epatha Merkerson. Here's the review again. I'm so there.

The Books: "Finnegans Wake" (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.

Joseph Campbell wrote, in regards to Finnegans Wake, "If our society should go to smash tomorrow (which, as Joyce implies, it may) one could find all the pieces, together with the forces that broke them, in Finnegans Wake." James Joyce worked on this, his last book, for 17 years. For many years during that time it was just known as Work in Progress. Because of the atomic bomb of Ulysses, people were, naturally, anxious to the point of apoplexy to see what Joyce would come up with next. The book cannot be said to be written in English - not strictly - although it's amazing how much sense it does make, if you surrender to it. The entire book is made up of puns, word association games, interweaving webs of connections - He said that since Ulysses, except for that last episode, was a "daytime" book, this one was going to be "nocturnal". It takes on the qualities of a dream. Where things can be nonsensical and yet logical at the same time. The entire thing is, apparently, a dream of our lead - if you can call him that - Earwicker. Joyce incorporated over 70 languages into the book - and, naturally, there are great "keys" out there, that track down all of Joyce's influences. There are sections in Polynesian, Dutch, Lithuanian - and many many more. Joyce's interest (obsession) in language was the main driving force here. I'm not sure that he felt this, specifically, but to me, one of the feelings I get from this extraordinary book (that starts mid-sentence, and also ends mid-sentence) is that we are all one. All languages come from the same pot. We all influence one another. There are no barriers. They may seem real (the barriers) ... but if you poke holes in them, you'll start to see the back and forth flow. This also goes along wtih the river imagery that makes up such a huge part of the book. The book is not strictly about anything - in the same way that you can't really point to the "plot" of Ulysses. Joyce was never into the usual structures. He wrote the book from 1922 to 1939 - a very rough patch in his life. His eyesight got worse, he had numerous operations - and there were times when he lost his sight completely. Hard to imagine. But I think it makes so much sense that his books, his mature books anyway - have so much to do with the SOUND of things, rather than the LOOK. Finnegans Wake is musical. It's actually a lot of fun, once you let go of your normal expectations. And that's what Joyce requires. It's like a big puzzle ... you feel like a rock star when you understand a paragraph, and can recognize 2 or 3 of the references. There's a little something for everyone here: ancient history, modern literature, psychoanalysis, Irish politics - it is truly a "catholic" book, in many respects.

I can't remember where I found this, I think it was on the auction block last year - Thornton Wilder's personal copy of Finnegans Wake - here is just one of the pages:

Joyce corresponded with Swiss writer Jacques Mercanton during the writing of the book and in one of his letters he says:

You are not Irish ... and the meaning of some passages will perhaps escape you. But you are Catholic, so you will recognize this or that allusion. You don't play cricket; this word may mean nothing to you. But you are a musician, so you will feel at ease in this passage. When my Irish friends come to visit me in Paris, it is not the philosophical subtleties of the book that amuse them, but my recollection of O'Connell's top hat.

Finnegans Wake is definitely the most consciously crafted book of the 20th century. There are stories of final drafts being sent back to Joyce from the printer, and him huddling over them, marking them up. Someone asked him, "What are you doing??" Joyce answered, "Removing commas."

The thing about a genius - like Van Gogh or Mozart - is that they must do what they must do. They must follow their genius - IT leads THEM. For the most part, it is not comprehensible to us mere mortals why they do what they must do. We reap the rewards in the results they come up with - although often we are still faced with incomprehension: like; WHY? Joyce himself said, mid-way through the writing of Finnegans Wake, "I confess that it is an extremely tiresome book but it is the only book which I am able to write at present." I am in awe of such certainty. Nora, his wife, looking at the gibberish pages, the ciphers, the codes, said, "Why don't you write books people can read?"

Now this type of work may not seem to be for everybody - although Joyce felt it was his most accessible work. Of course the general public was better educated back then - and you could assume certain things about what people knew. People knew about Waterloo, people knew about Brutus and Caesar - etc. That's not so much the case now. But still: Finnegans Wake is actually a lot of fun, even though it's a challenge. I read much of it out loud when I first read it - and that definitely helps. Again, nothing happens - although characters, of a sort, do emerge. Anna Livia Plurabelle, Earwicker - their sons. But the point is not literal. It is a dream-space, and Joyce was interested in re-creating a dream-space. Associations flowing, the mind let off the hook of consciousness. The characters do not remain static - they morph, transform, become animals, parabolae, rivers, whatever ... like Ovid's Metamorphosis. Nothing is stuck. Everything flows into everything else. A truly Joycean point of view.

The flipside to Nora's humorous comment I mentioned earlier is that years later, after Joyce's death, Nora was often interviewed about her famous husband, and all of the questions were usually about Ulysses. Nora was not a big reader, she liked romance novels, basically - which is so perfect that she would be married to Jimmy. Not a literary woman, at all. But one of her comments in these interviews shows that there was a deeply insightful person in there - someone who knew her husband was up to something that nobody else was. She said, "What's all this talk about Ulysses? Finnegans Wake is the important book."

I think the rough Galway girl might be onto something.

My favorite comment about Finnegans Wake comes from Samuel Beckett:

You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself.

Here's an excerpt from the 8th chapter - the "Anna Livia Plurabelle" chapter - which is woven through with the names of almost every river on the planet (sometimes written in such puns that you have to untwist the language to see what he means).

EXCERPT FROM Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.

Well, you know or don’t you kennet or haven’t I told you every telling has a taling and that’s the he and the she of it. Look, look, the dusk is growing! My branches lofty are taking root. And my cold cher’s gone ashley. Fieluhr? Filou! What age is at? It saon is late. ’Tis endless now senne eye or erewone last saw Waterhouse’s clogh. They took it asunder, I hurd thum sigh. When will they reassemble it? O, my back, my back, my bach! I’d want to go to Aches-les-Pains. Pingpong! There’s the Belle for Sexaloitez! And Concepta de Send-us-pray! Pang! Wring out the clothes! Wring in the dew! Godavari, vert the showers! And grant thaya grace! Aman. Will we spread them here now? Ay, we will. Flip! Spread on your bank and I’ll spread mine on mine. Flep! It’s what I’m doing. Spread! It’s churning chill. Der went is rising. I’ll lay a few stones on the hostel sheets. A man and his bride embraced between them. Else I’d have sprinkled and folded them only. And I’ll tie my butcher’s apron here. It’s suety yet. The strollers will pass it by. Six shifts, ten kerchiefs, nine to hold to the fire and this for the code, the convent napkins, twelve, one baby’s shawl. Good mother Jossiph knows, she said. Whose head? Mutter snores? Deataceas! Wharnow are alle her childer, say? In kingdome gone or power to come or gloria be to them farther? Allalivial, allalluvial! Some here, more no more, more again lost alla stranger. I’ve heard tell that same brooch of the Shannons was married into a family in Spain. And all the Dunders de Dunnes in Markland’s Vineland beyond Brendan’s herring pool takes number nine in yangsee’s hats. And one of Biddy’s beads went bobbing till she rounded up lost histereve with a marigold and a cobbler’s candle in a side strain of a main drain of a manzinahurries off Bachelor’s Walk. But all that’s left to the last of the Meaghers in the loup of the years prefixed and between is one kneebuckle and two hooks in the front. Do you tell me. that now? I do in troth. Orara por Orbe and poor Las Animas! Ussa, Ulla, we’re umbas all! Mezha, didn’t you hear it a deluge of times, ufer and ufer, respund to spond? You deed, you deed! I need, I need! It’s that irrawaddyng I’ve stoke in my aars. It all but husheth the lethest zswound. Oronoko! What’s your trouble? Is that the great Finnleader himself in his joakimono on his statue riding the high hone there forehengist? Father of Otters, it is himself! Yonne there! Isset that? On Fallareen Common? You’re thinking of Astley’s Amphitheayter where the bobby restrained you making sugarstuck pouts to the ghostwhite horse of the Peppers. Throw the cobwebs from your eyes, woman, and spread your washing proper! It’s well I know your sort of slop. Flap! Ireland sober is Ireland stiff Lord help you, Maria, full of grease, the load is with me! Your prayers. I sonht zo! Madammangut! Were you lifting your elbow, tell us, glazy cheeks, in Conway’s Carrigacurra canteen? Was I what, hobbledyhips? Flop! Your rere gait’s creakorheuman bitts your butts disagrees. Amn’t I up since the damp tawn, marthared mary allacook, with Corrigan’s pulse and varicoarse veins, my pramaxle smashed, Alice Jane in decline and my oneeyed mongrel twice run over, soaking and bleaching boiler rags, and sweating cold, a widow like me, for to deck my tennis champion son, the laundryman with the lavandier flannels? You won your limpopo limp fron the husky hussars when Collars and Cuffs was heir to the town and your slur gave the stink to Carlow. Holy Scamander, I sar it again! Near the golden falls. Icis on us! Seints of light! Zezere! Subdue your noise, you hamble creature! What is it but a blackburry growth or the dwyergray ass them four old codgers owns. Are you meanam Tarpey and Lyons and Gregory? I meyne now, thank all, the four of them, and the roar of them, that draves that stray in the mist and old Johnny MacDougal along with them. Is that the Poolbeg flasher beyant, pharphar, or a fireboat coasting nyar the Kishtna or a glow I behold within a hedge or my Garry come back from the Indes? Wait till the honeying of the lune, love! Die eve, little eve, die! We see that wonder in your eye. We’ll meet again, we’ll part once more. The spot I’ll seek if the hour you’ll find. My chart shines high where the blue milk’s upset. Forgivemequick, I’m going! Bubye! And you, pluck your watch, forgetmenot. Your evenlode. So save to jurna’s end! My sights are swimming thicker on me by the shadows to this place. I sow home slowly now by own way, moyvalley way. Towy I too, rathmine.

Ah, but she was the queer old skeowsha anyhow, Anna Livia, trinkettoes! And sure he was the quare old buntz too, Dear Dirty Dumpling, foostherfather of fingalls and dotthergills. Gammer and gaffer we’re all their gangsters. Hadn’t he seven dams to wive him? And every dam had her seven crutches. And every crutch had its seven hues. And each hue had a differing cry. Sudds for me and supper for you and the doctor’s bill for Joe John. Befor! Bifur! He married his markets, cheap by foul, I know, like any Etrurian Catholic Heathen, in their pinky limony creamy birnies and their turkiss indienne mauves. But at milkidmass who was the spouse? Then all that was was fair. Tys Elvenland! Teems of times and happy returns. The seim anew. Ordovico or viricordo. Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be. Northmen’s thing made southfolk’s place but howmulty plurators made eachone in person? Latin me that, my trinity scholard, out of eure sanscreed into oure eryan! Hircus Civis Eblanensis! He had buckgoat paps on him, soft ones for orphans. Ho, Lord! Twins of his bosom. Lord save us! And ho! Hey? What all men. Hot? His tittering daughters of. Whawk?

Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice bawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Thom Malone? Can’t hear with bawk of bats, all thim liffeying waters of. Ho, talk save us! My foos won’t moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia’s daughtersons. Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of John or Shaun? Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!

Charlotte Rampling

I think I first saw Charlotte Rampling in Angel Heart, her one hauntingly weird scene, with the piano keys, her quiet intense voice, the clinking of her spoon against the side of the cup. Her eyes, man. Her eyes. They can be creepy, or sad, but always intense.

She's my kind of actress. Fearless. Un-pin-down-able. A survivor. Doesn't seem to give a fuck.

Still resisting classification and limitations.

But it was 1974's The Night Porter (with Dirk Bogarde opposite) that cemented my belief that she - along with Gena Rowlands - was the scariest, the most unpredictable, most courageous actress of her generation. You don't cuddle up to Charlotte Rampling. You don't warm to Gena Rowlands. Actresses like those two are scary. Raw meat, on display. Flayed, whipped, beaten by life. Clinging with ripped fingernails to some ledge, laughing hysterically and wildly as they hang over the abyss. Their cover-ups are jagged, incomplete, their pain long-lasting, inseparable from the look behind their eyes.

All can do as an audience member is sit back, shut the hell up, stop judging, stop wondering why they are so DIFFERENT from other actresses (where is the clean-up, where is the resolution, where is the "moral"??), and let yourself be overwhelmed by them. Frightened by them. "Holeeee shit."

Still from The Night Porter, below - and a clip of its most famous (and, actually, least controversial) scene:

Strangely beautiful

A lovely post - I totally agree. And look at the light in that picture! I have driven through that area myself on many many occasions - and found it "strangely beautiful" in an industrialized dehumanized almost De Chirico way ... especially at dawn or sunset, when the light is stark, clear, and long.

"a magnificent, soulful talent"

Heath Ledger in "Lords of Dogtown"

Kim Morgan has a tribute post up - she's such a good writer. Excerpt:

After his boss [in Lords of Dogtown] orders him to finish a surfboard for some kid, the past lord dutifully, but bitterly, complies. Glumly sitting down, Skip [Ledger] slowly perks up to the lovely opening of Rod Stewart's "Maggie May." Pounding to that infectious double drum beat preceding Stewart's passionate "Wake up, Maggie, I think I got something to say to you," Skip, in a flash of understated joy and release, turns up the radio and sings along. Ledger is so in the moment and so naturally bittersweet that in mere seconds, he makes one remember just how much those little things in life can affect you -- those times or sensations that either make you crash hard or for one wonderful, ephemeral moment, lift you higher.

I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around this one, I really am.

The Books: "Ulysses" - the Penelope episode (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Ulysses - by James Joyce.

So here's where we are at so far:

1. (TELEMACHIA)
Episode 1: The Telemachus Episode
Episode 2: The Nestor Episode
Episode 3: The Proteus episode

2. (THE ODYSSEY)
Episode 4: The Calypso Episode
Episode 5: The Lotus Eaters Episode
Episode 6: The Hades Episode
Episode 7: The Aeolus Episode
Episode 8: The Lestrygonians Episode
Episode 9: The Scylla and Charybdis Episode
Episode 10: The Wandering Rocks Episode
Episode 11: The Sirens Episode
Episode 12: The Cyclops Episode
Episode 13: The Nausicaa Episode
Episode 14: The Oxen of the Sun Episode
Episode 15: The Circe Episode

3. (THE NOSTOS)
Episode 16: The Eumaeus Episode
Episode 17: The Ithaca Episode

TS Eliot wrote, of Ulysses, and this episode (the last in the book) in particular: "How could anyone write again after achieving the immense prodigy of the last chapter?"

I want to take a second to talk about Joyce's impetus for writing the book, not to mention the fact that he chose to place the events of the one day in the book on June 16, 1904. Richard Ellmann in his biography of James Joyce describes what happened to Joyce himself on June 16, 1904:

The experience of love was almost new to him in fact, though he had often considered it in imagination. A transitory interest in his cousin Katsy Murray had been followed by the stronger, but unexpressed and unrequited, interest in Mary Sheehy. He shocked Stanlislaus [Joyce's brother] a little by quoting with approval a remark of a Dublin wit, 'Woman is an animal that micturates once a day, defecates once a week, menstruates once a month and parturiates once a year.' Yet tenderness was as natural to him as coarseness, and secretly he dreamed of falling in love with someone he did not know, a gentle lady, the flower of many generations, to whom he should speak in the ceremonious accents of Chamber Music.

Instead, on June 10, 1904, Joyce was walking down Nassau Street in Dublin when he caught sight of a tall, good-looking young woman, auburn-haired, walking with a proud stride. When he spoke to her she answered pertly enough to allow the conversation to continue. She took him, with his yachting cap, for a sailor, and from his blue eyes thought for a moment he might be Swedish.

Joyce found she was employed at Finn's Hotel, a slightly exalted rooming house, and her lilting speech confessed that she was from Galway City. She had been born there, to parents who lived in Sullivan's Lane, on March 21, 1884. Her name was a little comic, Nora Barnacle, but this too might be an omen of felicitous adhesion. (As Joyce's father was to say when he heard much later her last name was Barnacle, 'She'll never leave him.') After some talk it was agreed they should meet in front of Sir William Wilde's house at the turning of Merrion Square on June 14. But Nora Barnacle failed to appear, and Joyce sent her a note in some dejection:

60 Shelbourne Road

I may be blind. I looked for a long time at a head of reddish-brown hair and decided it was not yours. I went home quite dejected. I would like to make an appointment but it might not suit you. I hope you will be kind enough to make one with me -- if you have not forgotten me!

James A. Joyce 15 June 1904

The appointment was made, and for the evening of June 16, when they went walking at Ringsend, and then arranged to meet again.

To set Ulysses on this date was Joyce's most eloquent if indirect tribute to Nora, a recognition of the determining effect upon his life of his attachment to her. On June 16, as he would afterwards realize, he entered into relation with the world around him and left behind him the loneliness he had felt since his mother's death. He would tell her later, "You made me a man." June 16 was the sacred day that divided Stephen Dedalus, the insurgent youth, from Leopold Bloom, the complaisant husband.

Many many years later, after Joyce's death, Nora - his wife and partner since that day in 1904, was asked by a reporter what other writers she thought were good. Her reply: "Sure, if you've been married to the greatest writer in the world, you don't remember all the little fellows."

Joyce and Nora had their first "date" on June 16, 1904 - a date which consisted of walking around Dublin (it wasn't a time when men and women really dated - certainly not in Ireland) - and there was probably some kind of sexual encounter between them (Joyce references it obliquely, from time to time.) A couple of months passed, the relationship intensifying - and Joyce began to grow desperate to leave Ireland. He applied for a job in Europe -with the Berlitz school - and began to be convinced that Nora had to come with him. They had to be together. They could not live freely in Ireland. On September 16, 1904 - shortly before his departure date, he wrote a letter to Nora which still, for me, trembles with passion as I read it:

"When I was waiting for you last night I was even more restless. It seemed to me that I was fighting a battle with every religious and social force in Ireland for you and that I had nothing to rely on but myself. There is no life here -- no naturalness or honesty. People live together in the same houses all their lives and at the end they are as far apart as ever ... The fact that you can choose to stand beside me in this way in my hazardous life fills me with great pride and joy ... Allow me, dearest Nora, to tell you how much I desire that you should share any happiness that may be mine and to assure you of my great respect for that love of yours which it is my wish to deserve and to answer."

When it came time for him to leave, she jumped ship with him. They left a wake of scandal and debt behind them - Yeats bailed him out financially, Joyce's brother was trying to sell his books for more cash ... and of course, he and Nora did not get married ... so it was an unbelievable scandal. James and Nora did eventually get married - in 1930 - and that was long after they had had two kids, and had spent almost 20 years together as a couple. It's a great love story. Chaotic, and very much their own. Joyce was a jealous man ... and jealous of Nora's affections for other men. He wondered if he were distinct to her. One of the things that really bothered him was her use of pronouns. She would say "he" and that "he" could mean anyone - him, another man, her father, a man from her past ... It made him feel like men all blended together into one being, for her ... that nobody "stood out", nobody was "named". Joyce uses this in Molly's monologue in this last episode - where sometimes it is a struggle to figure out which person she is talking about. She refers to her husband, Leopold, as "Poldy" - but more often than not, he's just "he". And Blazes Boylan is also just "he". She does not distinguish. She does in her heart - she's comparing and contrasting the two constantly ... but her language remains opaque. Joyce found this fascinating, infuriating, and very very female. So he used it. After the book came out, Nora was asked if she were the model for Molly Bloom. Her answer was blunt: "I'm not -- she was much fatter."

How much do I love Nora Joyce.

The Penelope episode is 40 pages long, and I think it only has 5 sentences in it. I actually went through once, trying to locate the periods. For the most part, it is a run-on sentence. Molly lies in bed, Leopold lies next to her - and she thinks out loud. About her life, her men, her rendesvous with her lover, her dead son ... but more than that: it is the ruminations of an insomniac, frayed by sleep, letting her mind off the hook that it needs to be on during the conscious daytime ... and going from topic to topic ... memories coming up, receding ... Molly is hugely witty. She has a healthy contempt for people ... she's not at all a romantic. She thinks men are rather silly. She thinks women are silly, too - but the silliness of men affects her more personally. She compares Boylan's fucking to Bloom's fucking ... you know, Joyce's worst nightmare (many men's worst nightmare) ... but she's not a vicious person. She's just truthful. The chapter is the only time in the book when a character is alone ... with herself ... and the darkness. The rest of the book is highly social - interactions with the human race left and right. But here, now, 3 a.m. ... it is dark, and Molly lies in the dark, unselfconsciously being with herself and her thoughts. It's a shockingly open look at womanhood - taking it off its pedestal, certainly. She muses in an annoyed way about how chamber pots are obviously created with men in mind ... because they're not convenient for women. She muses about her period (which has at that moment). The cramps, etc. You know ... this kind of stuff was just not talked about back then! And Joyce isn't talking about it in a grossed-out way, or anything ... It's just simple and truthful. In the same way that a man, lying in a tub, looks down at his penis, and contemplates it ... and other men would understand that, and know they have done such things ... the mystique of the genitalia does not exist in such casual moments. We deal with our private parts on a daily basis, it's not big deal. It's a big deal when we want to SHARE ye olde private parts ... but when you're taking a bath, or strolling around naked in a non-sexual context ... it's just another body part. Well, the same is true for women as well - and Joyce shows that, by putting us inside Molly's head. This is rather revolutionary, if you look at the literature of the time. And because there is no narrator in the Penelope episode - we are 100% inside Molly's head - Joyce makes a demand on us, the reader: If you judge Molly, or if you say "Ewwww", even to yourself, at some of the things she thinks about - then you are missing so much. You are missing not just her humanity, but your own.

Joyce said he wanted to end the book with the most positive word in the English language - which gives you some idea of his thoughts on the book as a whole. It's a comedy.

And Molly - who has been unseen and yet omnipresent thru the entire book - suddenly takes center stage. We have been totally on Bloom's side throughout ... why is she cheating on him? Why is she making him a cuckold? She is shaming him! Is she a whore? I don't LIKE her.

But then. She takes over the book. Joyce lets HER end the book - which seriously, is so amazing when you think about it. The ascendancy of the female ... the real female: not the whore of The Circe episode, not the sweet virgin of The Nausicaa episode ... but the wife. The human being. The flawed human being ... who loves Leopold Bloom, and whose heart has broken since he distanced himself from her following the death of their son. She is a vibrant funny philosophical woman, with much forgiveness towards menfolk (even with her sharp observations about how unfair much of life is for women) - she lies in bed, and aches for her marriage. Aches for the Bloom who had made love to her on the hills at Howth (a memory that he has already shared with us, the reader) ... She remembers how his mouth felt, and her breasts, and the way the rhododendrons were ... It is the sweetest most loving memory she has.

I don't want to really say anymore - because the episode is, in a weird way, even with all its bathroom humor, bodily functions, casual marriage-bed behavior ... it's quite delicate. It's a run-on sentence. You have to work hard to make sense of it and find the punctuation on your own. I've read it out loud ... and it's much much easier when you read it aloud. The sentences, even without periods and commas, just fall into place.

In The Odyssey, Odysseus has returned home and has killed all of Penelope's suitors. And at first, Penelope does not even recognize her husband. She only believes it is him when he describes their bed to her.

The voice of Molly, in this chapter, is not rambling, or incoherent. But it has something in it of a doubling-back, a word-assocation - puns leading to other thoughts, jokes made to herself ... sudden swoops of romanticism, punctuated by menstrual cramps. So: she is everything. She becomes - oddly enough - the entire human race, in all its messiness, beauty, pettiness, and physical limitations. But her voice itself is hypnotic, almost scary at first ... we are so deeply inside her, and up until this point in the book we have only heard things about her, and judged her behavior ... and Joyce does not prepare us for what happens in the last episode. He does not set us up carefully so we will be 'ready'. He throws us in. here: swim.

Joyce felt that women were, essentially, wild. Their bodies were wild ... way more out of control than men's - they bled, they had babies, their bellies swelled and fell ... Men were much more static, linear. Women ebbed and flowed. That was why 'they" could not use proper punctuation. Their thoughts did not line up neatly, into grammatical structures.

Molly is most commonly compared to Chaucer's Wife of Bath, with her great mix of sadness and laughter. Joyce, by letting her end the book, gives the Blooms, in a way, their only shot at saving their marriage. Bloom, with his idiosyncrasies, his insecurities, is a tough man to live with. Molly knows that well. But she accepts them, even if she makes fun behind his back or to herself - because that's what marriage is all about. He sleeps with his head at the foot of the bed, so his feet are beisde her face. That's weird. But that's what he likes. He's almost kicked her teeth out in his sleep ... but she accepts it, even though he's a weirdo. There are numerous examples in her long speech, of moments like that ... where we see Bloom in a completely different light ... because it's her perspective. She reminsices about making love with him - and thru the book we have just read, he's seemed so passive, and ... impotent, basically. So to have her raving in her memory about their great fucking in the past ... redeems Bloom so much. We realize (and it's one of the most important realizations a human being can ever have) that we have under-estimated Bloom. We have judged him on too little information. In the same way that Molly now needs to be taken into consideration in a differnt way. We have had all kinds of opinions about her, and about women who cheat on their husbands. This needs to be re-examined.

But Joyce doesn't stop to intellectualize any of this - mainly because Molly never would.

We just lie there, in bed with her, and follow the torrent of her thoughts.

I just can't bring myself to excerpt the final and famous last paragraph ... it really needs to be saved, for when it is in context with the whole.

But here's an excerpt from earlier in her monologue.

James Joyce wrote, in a letter to his brother Stanislaus:

Don't you think there is a certain resemblance betwen the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying ... to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own ... for their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift.

And so you have, Jimmy. And thanks. Thanks to everyone who has read these excerpts, and commented and emailed me about them.

EXCERPT FROM Ulysses - by James Joyce - the Penelope episode

yes because he couldnt possibly do without it that long so he must do it somewhere and the last time he came on my bottom when was it the night Boylan gave my hand a great squeeze going along by the Tolka in my hand there steals another I just pressed the back of his like that with my thumb to squeeze back singing the young May Moon shes beaming love because he has an idea about him and me hes not such a fool he said Im dining out and going to the Gaiety though Im not going to give him the satisfaction in any case God knows hes change in a way not to be always and ever wearing the same old hat unless] paid some nicelooking boy to do it since I cant do it myself a young boy would like me Id confuse him a little alone with him if we were Id let him see my garters the new ones and make him turn red looking at him seduce him I know what boys feel with that down on their cheek doing that frigging drawing out the thing by the hour question and answer would you do this that and the other with the coalman yes with a bishop yes I would because I told him about some Dean or Bishop was sitting beside me in the jews Temples gardens when I was knitting that woollen thing a stranger to Dublin what place was it and so on about the monuments and he tired me out with statues encouraging him making him worse than he is who is in your mind now tell me who are you thinking of who is it tell me his name who tell me who the German Emperor is it yes imagine Im him think of him can you feel him trying to make a whore of me what he never will he ought to give it up now at this age of his life simply ruination for any woman and no satisfaction in it pretending to like it till ( he comes and then finish it off myself anyway and it makes your lips pale anyhow its done now once and for all with all the talk of the world about it people make its only the first time after that its just the ordinary do it and think no more about it why cant you kiss a man without going and marrying him first you sometimes love to wildly when you feel that way so nice all over you you cant help yourself I wish some man or other would take me sometime when hes there and kiss me in his arms theres nothing like a kiss long and hot down to your soul almost paralyses you then I hate that confession when I used to go to Father Corrigan he touched me father and what harm if he did where and I said on the canal bank like a fool but whereabouts on your person my child on the leg behind high up was it yes rather high up was it where you sit down yes O Lord couldnt he say bottom right out and have done with it what has that got to do with it and did you whatever way he put it I forget no father and I always think of the real father what did he want to know for when I already confessed it to God he had a nice fat hand the palm moist always I wouldnt mind feeling it neither would he Id say by the bullneck in his horsecollar I wonder did he know me in the box I could see his face he couldnt see mine of course hed never turn or let on still his eyes were red when his father died theyre lost for a woman of course must be terrible when a man cries let alone them Id like to be embraced by one in his vestments and the smell of incense off him like the pope besides theres no danger with a priest if youre married hes too careful about himself then give something to H H the pope for a penance I wonder was he satisfied with me one thing I didnt like his slapping me behind going away so familiarly in the hall though I laughed Im not a horse or an ass am I I suppose he was thinking of his father I wonder is he awake thinking of me or dreaming am I in it who gave him that flower he said he bought he smelt of some kind of drink not whisky or stout or perhaps the sweety kind of paste they stick their bills up with some liquor Id like to sip those richlooking green and yellow expensive drinks those stagedoor johnnies drink with the opera hats I tasted one with my finger dipped out of that American that had the squirrel talking stamps with father he had all he could do to keep himself from falling asleep after the last time we took the port and potted meat it had a fine salty taste yes because I felt lovely and tired myself and fell asleep as sound as a top the moment I popped straight into bed till that thunder woke me up as if the world was coming to an end God be merciful to us I thought the heavens were coming down about us to punish when I blessed myself and said a Hail Mary like those awful thunderbolts in Gibraltar and they come and tell you theres no God what could you do if it was running and rushing about nothing only make an act of contrition the candle I lit that evening in Whitefriars street chapel for the month of May see it brought its luck though hed scoff if he heard because he never goes to church mass or meeting he says your soul you have no soul inside only grey matter because he doesnt know what it is to have one yes when I lit the lamp yes because he must have come 3 or 4 times with that tremendous big red brute of a thing he has I thought the vein or whatever the dickens they call it was going to burst though his nose is not so big after I took off all my things with the blinds down after my hours dressing and perfuming and combing it like iron or some kind of a thick crowbar standing all the time he must have eaten oysters I think a few dozen he was in great singing voice no I never in all my life felt anyone had one the size of that to make you feel full up he must have eaten a whole sheep after whats the idea making us like that with a big hole in the middle of us like a Stallion driving it up into you because thats all they want out of you with that determined vicious look in his eye I had to halfshut my eyes still he hasnt such a tremendous amount of spunk in him when I made him pull it out and do it on me considering how big it is so much the better in case any of it wasnt washed out properly the last time I let him finish it in me nice invention they made for women for him to get all the pleasure but if someone gave them a touch of it themselves theyd know what I went through with Milly nobody would believe cutting her teeth too and Mina Purefoys husband give us a swing out of your whiskers filling her up with a child or twins once a year as regular as the clock always with a smell of children off her the one they called budgers or something like a nigger with a shock of hair on it Jesusjack the child is a black the last time I was there a squad of them falling over one another and bawling you couldnt hear your ear supposed to be healthy not satisfied till they have us swollen out like elephants or I dont know what supposing I risked having another not off him though still if he was married I m sure hed have a fine strong child but I dont know Poldy has more spunk in him yes thatd be awfully jolly

Book questions!

I got this from Ted!

Which book do you irrationally cringe away from reading, despite seeing only positive reviews?

Strangely enough, I cringed from reading Harry Potter. Chalk it up to my contrarian nature. If there is a unanimous clarion call about anything, I usually get suspicious ... and many times it is warranted. Tuesdays with Morrie is the most obvious and infuriating example. But I finally caved, and read Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone (a couple years after it came out) and immediately went out and bought the rest of the series, and read it all the way thru. Loved it.

Oh, and I still haven't read any of Zadie Smith's books, despite the universally awesome reviews. I have been told repeatedly by literally everyone on the planet that I HAVE to read them, and I suppose I will - but on my own good time, thankyouverymuch. Not because there was a 2 page spread in every newspaper from here to Timbuktu, featuring her gorgeous mug. I know I'm being unfair, but that's the nature of the question, which uses the word "irrational".

And weirdly (and this one gives me a shiver, at the thought of not reading it) - everyone and their mother, including Jesus Christ our Lord, begged me to read The Shipping News when it first came out. My mom and dad would barely ask me, "How are you?" on our weekly phone calls (I was living in Chicago at the time) - before demanding feverishly, "Have you read The Shipping News yet???" They were not the only ones. People who knew me seemed to have a vested interest in me reading that book. So I, contrarian, refused. It got to be almost comedic when Great Lost Love told me the book he had read on his vacation: The Shipping News. We were in a dingy hallway in the basement of some club, and he couldn't stop talking about the book. "Have you read it?" I was already annoyed. "No," I said, flatly. And by this point, we were, frankly, telepathic, so we said the following two sentences at the same time. I said, mockingly, "I know! I have to read it!!!" as he said, "You have to read it!!" That shut him up a bit, he got nervous, and then said awkwardly, "Well. You do. It really reminds me of you. But I won't tell you why. I sat on the beach in Florida thru my whole vacation reading that book, thinking of you." Well, now I'm REALLY not going to read it!! The saddest thing was - when everything fell apart between us - that was the first book I turned to. I needed to know ... why did he think of me when he read it? Would it somehow illuminate why this had gone so spectacularly wrong? Of course it didn't. And I cried the entire way thru the book. My copy still has crinkly pages (I am not exaggerating) from where my tears fell. It is now one of my favorite books ever written. A book that belongs to my HEART.

And I still don't know why it reminded him of me. By the time I read it, it was too late to ask.

If you could bring three characters to life for a social event (afternoon tea, a night of clubbing, perhaps a world cruise), who would they be and what would the event be?

There may be some problems with the following event, due to inviting three alpha males, but I will take my chances:

I would like to sit in a quiet pub with Nelson Denoon (from Mating), Claude Collier (from Lives of the Saints) and Sydney Carton (from Tale of Two Cities) and talk like maniacs - about history, sex, philosophy, politics ... Nelson and Sydney, I believe, would be awesome in this regard. Claude Collier probably couldn't care less - and would busy himself trying to feel me up under the table and feeding quarters into the jukebox. He would spill his drink in Carton's lap and apologize profusely for the rest of the night. He would smoke 2 packs of cigarettes. Nelson and Sydney would busy themselves with conversation, and I would participate FULLY ... yet still I would enjoy Claude trying to hold my hand under the table, or him nuzzling my neck as I make some important point about socialism to the other two.

And I would probably end up sleeping with all three. They;'re all so alpha, they wouldn't have a problem with that. Or maybe they would LATER, but they wouldn't have any passive-aggressive whiny-boy nonsense in the moment.

(Borrowing shamelessly from the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde): you are told you can’t die until you read the most boring novel on the planet. While this immortality is great for awhile, eventually you realise it’s past time to die. Which book would you expect to get you a nice grave?

I'd pick up any book by Nicholas Sparks, read one paragraph, and immediately keel over. Dead.

Come on, we’ve all been there. Which book have you pretended, or at least hinted, that you’ve read, when in fact you’ve been nowhere near it?

I was in an argument once, and yes, I was drunk, so? But I didn't just "hint" that I had read Das Kapital, I stated it FIRMLY. And I totally won the argument. Yes, flying under false colors, but who cares when you need to WIN?

As an addition to the last question, has there been a book that you really thought you had read, only to realise when you read a review about it/go to ‘reread’ it that you haven’t? Which book?

For 20 years, I knew I had read Moby Dick because I remember it being assigned for summer reading before my sophomore years. But nothing stuck. I re-read it in 2003, had remembered almost none of it - and now it's one of my favorite books of all time.

But that's not really the question. I actually can't think of a situation where I THOUGHT I had read a book when I actually hadn't. I keep copious notes on what I read, you know.

You’re interviewing for the post of Official Book Advisor to some VIP (who’s not a big reader). What’s the first book you’d recommend and why? (if you feel like you’d have to know the person, go ahead of personalise the VIP)
The World According to Garp. No question.

A good fairy comes and grants you one wish: you will have perfect reading comprehension in the foreign language of your choice. Which language do you go with?

This is very hard. My first choice is Russian, for many reasons. Many of my favorite books are by Russian authors, but I can only read them in translation.

But second choice would have to be Arabic. I learned a little bit of Arabic for a play I was involved in - I played Gertrude Bell - I took some of my lines to my local deli in midtown - run by guys from Lebanon - they knew me, they knew how I liked my coffee, and they liked me. I showed them my lines in Arabic - and they taught it to me. I put them on tape. It was brilliant. Morning rush-hour, everyone jostling to get their breakfast sandwich - and I have Ahmed in the back corner, having him read me my script, in Arabic, into my tape recorder. I love those guys! It's a very weird language, and has no relationship to anything even coming CLOSE to a "romance language" - and it's like you have to develop another muscle to even speak it ... but I loved it. There is great poetry in Arabic, and I would love to read many of their great works of literature in the original.

Third choice would be Farsi. I love Persian poetry dearly ... but again, I know I'm not getting the full effect reading it in translation. I went to a Persian poetry reading once at the Bowery Poetry Club - one of my favorite nights I've ever had in this fair city - and all of these people were leaping up and declaiming their favorite poems - BY HEART - in Farsi, and the responses of the crowd, the unanimous applause - sometimes the entire crowd (I was the only non-Iranian there - a bunch of my Iranian friends brought me) would start to chant out the words together. It reminded me of Bloomsday celebrations I've gone to where readings from Ulysses are done - and the last "paragraph" of Molly's monologue is known by heart by every Irishman/woman there - and they all start to shout it out, together.

A mischievious fairy comes and says that you must choose one book that you will reread one a year for the rest of your life (you can read other books as well). Which book would you pick?

Probably Hopeful Monsters, by Nicholas Mosley. I will never. EVER. get to the bottom of that book. God help me when I reach it in my daily book excerpt series. I don't even know what to say about that book.

I know that the book blogging community, and its various challenges, have pushed my reading borders. What’s one bookish thing you ‘discovered’ from book blogging (maybe a new genre, or author, or new appreciation for cover art-anything)?

In the last week, I have finally (FINALLY) picked up Shirley Jacksons We Have Always Lived In The Castle - thanks, mainly, to Annie at Superfast Reader. I had heard much about this before - but the only Jackson I have read is the one we all have read "The Lottery" - and I am not kidding: within one paragraph of We Have Always Lived In the Castle I experienced something which is quite familiar to me when I start to read something absolutely awesome: I start to get nervous. I spoke out loud (and I was on the bus): "Oh God. This is so good." It was Annie's numerous mentions of this book (and Jackson) which made me pick it up.

That good fairy is back for one final visit. Now, she’s granting you your dream library! Describe it. Is everything leatherbound? Is it full of first edition hardcovers? Pristine trade paperbacks? Perhaps a few favourite authors have inscribed their works? Go ahead-let your imagination run free.

First of all: the bookshelves are in the walls themselves. That is very important. It is ALREADY a library - just from the structure of the room. Not one I have had to make myself. And there is more than enough space for all my books. I have room to spare. It's not overly neat - I'm not into that - I like a bit of clutter: books piled up on tables, etc. It's cozy. There is a fireplace. There is an enormous upholstered chair, cozy and huge, where I can curl up, my feet under me. There is a huge wooden table - NOT a desk - but a table like you would find in a French country-house - or in a monastery - plain and wide and long - where I can spread out all my books, if I'm working on something. Nothing to impede me, no barriers to where I can go. Long heavy velvet curtains on the window. NO television. And the main thing is: the shelves go to the ceiling - I need a stepladder to reach the top ... and all of the shelves are dark wood, and are built into the walls. Books everywhere you look.

Consider yourselves tagged (but with absolutely no pressure):
Annie
Lisa
Marisa
Tracey
Ricki
Jonathan - maybe on one of your non-film blogs?? But again: no pressure.
Cara

Reviewing community theatre

For some reason, this marvelous essay by John Barry, a freelance writer in Baltimore, about reviewing local community theatre has brought tears to my eyes!! But it goes on a journey first - and I found myself laughing out loud, too - in recognition - and appreciation. And by the end, it really packs a punch. Yes, yes, yes.

And I loved this part, too:

The people on stage were policemen, computer programmers, starry-eyed sophomores, retired schoolteachers. The plays weren't classics, but they weren't exactly cutting-edge: Broadway standbys (Art), comic dramas (Fuddy Meers), zany madcap farces (Lend Me a Tenor!), and musicals, musicals, musicals. And Sondheim.

My readership changed. I was no longer writing for potential theatergoers, people looking for my advice on whether to shell out for tickets. I wasn't even being read by the actors in the plays. I was being read by their best friends and close relatives. And they knew who I was. They knew where I lived. And they knew when I screwed up the names: Thanks for the review and glad you found the show enjoyable. Just a couple of little points...The "stern taskmaster" you describe is actually Florindo, played by Chris Hickle.

hahahahaha God, that is so right ON. But Barry is after a deeper truth, a deeper experience - and it's (for me) at the moment when he recalls a bad review he got 20 years ago ... that I realized: Wow. This essay is not going where I thought it would. Wonderful. (Here's the link to it again) It's one of the best essays I have read in a long long time.

Update:

Marisa's great post on this topic.

Inside Bókin

An essay about the bookstore in Reykjavik where Bobby Fischer hung out during the last years of his life.

The Books: "Ulysses" - the Ithaca episode (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Ulysses - by James Joyce.

So here's where we are at so far:

1. (TELEMACHIA)
Episode 1: The Telemachus Episode
Episode 2: The Nestor Episode
Episode 3: The Proteus episode

2. (THE ODYSSEY)
Episode 4: The Calypso Episode
Episode 5: The Lotus Eaters Episode
Episode 6: The Hades Episode
Episode 7: The Aeolus Episode
Episode 8: The Lestrygonians Episode
Episode 9: The Scylla and Charybdis Episode
Episode 10: The Wandering Rocks Episode
Episode 11: The Sirens Episode
Episode 12: The Cyclops Episode
Episode 13: The Nausicaa Episode
Episode 14: The Oxen of the Sun Episode
Episode 15: The Circe Episode
Episode 16: The Eumaeus Episode

This episode, the Ithaca episode, was Joyce's favorite in the whole book - and I find that very illuminating. Kinda like how "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" was his favorite story in Dubliners. Not the obvious one ... but the one that many people, to this day, find confusing, difficult ... and yet ultimately so rewarding once you crack the code. The Ithaca episode is as though we, the reader, are suddenly circling the earth - in a satellite - listening in on a conversation from thousands and thousands of miles below. It's omniscent. Or kind of like an inter-galactic lecture hour. At first it's tough-going, reading the episode ... but once I got the hang of it, it became one of my favorites in the book, too. One of the things that is often missed about Joyce, because of his reputation as the most important author of the 20th century, is how funny and ultimately silly he is. He's not interested in big world-shaking moments. There's not a ONE in any of his books. He's not interested in making a statement about "How We Live Now". He couldn't be less interested in the generalized "we" of the human race. He's more microscopic than that. There is great wit in Joyce. Great silliness. And it can be seen most clearly in this chapter, where we are catapulted out into space, staring down, way way down, on Bloom and Dedalus, stumbling home to Bloom's house at 2 in the morning. Because wouldn't any conversation seem a bit silly if you were out in the cold reaches of space, listening in on it?

What is happening here is that Joyce is cataloging what is said - in an omniscent professor-ish tone ... and cataloging the similiarities and differences between Bloom and Dedalus, our two heroes. Or anti-heroes, as the case may be.

And the omniscent voice asks questions. And another omniscent voice answers. And it's as detailed as it can be - as minute as it can be ... and yet we never stop having the sense that we're on a space station, or on a far-away star ... staring down at earth, at the puny humans doing their thing, wandering, drinking, eating, talking ... what on EARTH are those pipsqueaks going on about? You'll see what I mean when you read the excerpt.

Bloom takes him inside and makes him a cup of cocoa. They sit in the kitchen talking about ... God, every topic in the book.

It's hypnotic, the language ... and extremely technical, almost like you're in a physics lecture, or a biology lecture ... something scientific. Yet what is being discussed is the human animal and the ups and downs on a specific conversation taking place at 2 a.m. on June 17, 1904. The omniscent lecturing voice - cataloging all of the topics covered, summing up the relationship being formed down on earth - gives us an odd sense of how important we are. It's that thing that you can get when you try to contemplate the vastness of space. Sometimes it makes you feel infinitesimally small. And sometimes it can make you feel transcendent, and miraculous ... that life has even formed, and flourished. Jodie Foster, in her monologue at the end of Contact expresses that perfectly:

I had an experience. I can't prove it, I can't even explain it, but everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real! I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever. A vision ... of the universe, that tells us, undeniably, how tiny, and insignificant and how ... rare, and precious we all are! A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater then ourselves, that we are *not*, that none of us are alone! I wish... I could share that... I wish, that everybody, if only for one... moment, could feel... that awe, and humility, and hope. But... That continues to be my wish.

Tiny and insignificant and also rare and precious.

That's the realm we are in in the Ithaca episode.

The Ithaca episode in The Odyssey involves Odysseus' return home to Ithaca - where he slays all of Penelope's suitors. Hmmm. So Bloom has returned. After a long day. Molly has had a rendesvous with a lover. But we are no longer back in ancient Greece, where the rules are clear. Bloom does not kill Blazes Boylan. He passively thinks about divorce, maybe he'll have to go that route ... we're in the 20th century now. The rules are different. Bloom also is the kind of guy who can't help but see the other side of things. And so, in a weird way, he even understands why Molly has strayed. He sees her point. Bloom is (and has been) passive. He is sad, yes, he loves Molly ... but no suitors will be slayed. He will figure out what to do later. In the meantime, there is Dedalus to consider. Maybe he could sleep on the couch ... would Molly mind?

But it's not to be. Dedalus, after his cocoa, does end up leaving, and making his way home ... and Bloom reluctantly crawls upstairs and gets into bed with Molly. There is an imprint of a man;s body in the sheets - showing where Blazes Boyland had lain that day. Bloom and Molly sleep head to feet ... Bloom puts his head at the foot of the bed, next to Molly's feet (in the next chapter, Molly ruminates ruefully about how he has almost kicked her teeth out on occasion, in his sleep).

A couple of more notes on the language:

Not only is it like a question and answer session - but it's even more reminiscent (to Catholics, anyway) of the catechism - and Joyce loads the episode with religious language. It's just a conversation between two drunk men. But in Joyce's world view - even with his contempt of organized religion - it is THERE that God can be seen, felt, experienced. Joyce was a humanist. A Renaissance man. Man is the center. God is in man. Anyone who looks elsewhere is just an ignorant sheep.

There's another level here, too: Of all the episodes in the book, this is the one that could be called "objective". We're looking thru a telescope AND a microscope - at the same time. Bloom is about to face the pain of getting in bed with his wife, whom he fears he has lost (we realize in the next episode that all is NOT lost - but Bloom doesn't know that). So the objective language reminds me of the painful scene in Taxi Driver when Travis Bickle (Robert Deniro) calls up Cybill Shepherd and asks her out on another date, after their tragic one - where he takes her to a porno movie. She obviously doesn't want anything to do with him anymore, so in this phone conversation - and we only hear his side of it - she turns him down. But Scorsese does an interesting thing with his camera as Travis hears the news that she has said "No". He slowly pulls back, down the corridor, away from Travis, at the pay phone ... until Travis is quite small ... and then Scorsese pulls his camera around a corner, so we can't even see Travis anymore. We hear his voice, soft and solemn, but we no longer see him. The effect on me, the audience member, is even more acute than if we were in deep closeup seeing Travis' rejected face. It's almost like the pain Travis feels is so deep that Scorsese needs to give him privacy ... let him be, let him be. So the objective voice in Ithaca, is almost a protective measure against Bloom's devastation. It is the only way he (and we) can face the pain of the destruction of his marriage. Bloom is so upset that Joyce gives him his privacy, and pulls his "camera" way way way back ... to make him small, to leave him alone ... It's a fascinating device and works extremely well, I think. We have Bloom's memories of the death of his son here as well - a tragedy. But the quiet omniscent voice just keeps asking questions: "What was his first response to the death of Rudolph Bloom?" The equally omniscent voice answers - in a cataloging scientific way ... which is a shield against the devastation. Don't we do that sometimes when we are truly grieving? Joan Didion, in her marvelous book The Year of Magical Thinking, about her year following the death of her husband, is all about that sort of nonsensical cataloging and overly rational thinking that can follow in the wake of true and eternal loss. I have to do this, this, this and this ... and I will be safe. Well, no you won't. We are never safe. But grief is not rational. It is, in a horrible way, "magical".

Joyce even goes intergalactic - at the point that Dedalus departs. Dedalus leaves and there are stars above - 'celestial signs' - it is almost as though Stephen leaves, via a pathway of stars. As he departs, the church bells ring - another indication of Joyce's religious outlook. The entire episode has the feeling of a Latin mass. The intoned questions, the intoned answering of the flock ... only here we are with just two men, on Eccles Street in Dublin, talking about food, and drink, and life ... urinating together in the garden ... a sort of communion.

It is only now that Bloom is really ready to be home. To go upstairs to his Penelope (Molly), and let the day - the long long day he has just had - recede.

Who knows what tomorrow will bring.

Here's an excerpt. Have fun with it. It's not normal language, but what he describes is quite prosaic, as you will see. But to Joyce, nothing was prosaic. That is one of the reasons why I love him so much, why he is such (to me) an emotional writer, passionate and beautiful, with a love of his fellow man that is unparalleled in modern literature.

Just so you can decipher what is going on here: Bloom takes Dedalus into his kitchen. He lights a candle (like the beginning of a mass). He fills the kettle with water, and puts it on to boil. It is 2, 3 in the morning.

And not to sway you one way or another, but I think Joyce's long description of water in the following excerpt is one of the most brilliant passages in the whole book. And the last line of the excerpt I have chosen shows Bloom's ultimate humanism, something that is difficult for many of us to LIVE, let alone comprehend. To not live in bitterness, to not hold grudges, to "be the better person" - and for REAL - without looking for anything in return ... Perhaps Bloom, earlier in the day, would not have perceived this in himself. But now he does, ministering to Stephen. He does, because it's so late, and he's near-sleep - and certain things, certain uglinesses fall away, when we are so close to unconsciousness. The Ithaca episode could only happen in the middle of the night.

EXCERPT FROM Ulysses - by James Joyce - the Ithaca episode

Did the man reappear elsewhere?
Alter a lapse of four minutes the glimmer of his candle was discernible through the semitransparent semicircular glass fanlight over the halldoor. The halldoor turned gradually on its hinges. In the open space of the doorway the man reappeared without his hat, with his candle.

Did Stephen obey his sign?
Yes, entering softly, he helped to close and chain the door and followed softly along the hallway the man's back and listed feet and lighted candle past a lighted crevice of doorway on the left and carefully down a turning staircase of more than five steps into the kitchen of Bloom's house.

What did Bloom do?
He extinguished the candle by a sharp expiration of breath upon its flame, drew two spoonseat deal chairs to the hearthstone, one for Stephen with its back to the area window, the other for himself when necessary, knelt on one knee, composed in the grate a pyre of crosslaid resintipped sticks and various coloured papers and irregular polygons of best Abram coal at twentyone shillings a ton from the yard of Messrs Flower and M'Donald of 14 D'Olier street, kindled it at three projecting points of paper with one ignited lucifer match, thereby releasing the potential energy contained in the fuel by allowing its carbon and hydrogen elements to enter into free union with the oxygen of the air.

Of what similar apparitions did Stephen think?
Of others elsewhere in other times who, kneeling on one knee or on two, had kindled fires for him, of Brother Michael in the infirmary of the college of the Society of Jesus at Clongowes Wood, Sallins, in the county of Kildare: of his father, Simon Dedalus, in an unfurnished room of his first residence in Dublin, number thirteen Fitzgibbon street: of his godmother Miss Kate Morkan in the house of her dying sister Miss Julia Morkan at 15 Usher's Island: of his mother Mary, wife of Simon Dedalus, in the kitchen of number twelve North Richmond street on the morning of the feast of Saint Francis-Xavier 1898: of the dean of studies, Father Butt, in the physics' theatre of university College, 16 Stephen's green, north: of his sister Dilly (Delia) in his father's house in Cabra.

What did Stephen see on raising his gaze to the height of a yard from the fire towards the opposite wall?
Under a row of five coiled spring housebells a curvilinear rope, stretched between two holdfasts athwart across the recess beside the chimney pier, from which hung four smallsized square handkerchiefs folded unattached consecutively in adjacent rectangles and one pair of ladies' grey hose with lisle suspendertops and feet in their habitual position clamped by three erect wooden pegs two at their outer extremities and the third at their point of junction.

What did Bloom see on the range?
On the right (smaller) hob a blue enamelled saucepan: on the left (larger) hob a black iron kettle.

What did Bloom do at the range?
He removed the saucepan to the left hob, rose and carried the iron kettle to the sink in order to tap the current by turning the faucet to let it flow.

Did it flow?
Yes. From Roundwood reservoir in county Wicklow of a cubic capacity of 2,400 million gallons, percolating through a subterranean aqueduct of filter mains of single and double pipeage constructed at an initial plant cost of #5 per linear yard by way of the Dargle, Rathdown, Glen of the Downs and Callowhill to the 26 acre reservoir at Stillorgan, a distance of 22 statute miles, and thence, through a system of relieving tanks, by a gradient of 250 feet to the city boundary at Eustace bridge, upper Leeson street, though from prolonged summer drouth and daily supply of 12 1/2 million gallons the water had fallen below the sill of the overflow weir for which reason the borough surveyor and waterworks engineer, Mr Spencer Harty, C.E., on the instructions of the waterworks committee, had prohibited the use of municipal water for purposes other than those of consumption (envisaging the possibility of recourse being had to the importable water of the Grand and Royal canals as in 1893) particularly as the South Dublin Guardians, notwithstanding their ration of 15 gallons per day per pauper supplied through a 6 inch meter, had been convicted of a wastage of 20,000 gallons per night by a reading of their meter on the affirmation of the law agent of the corporation, Mr Ignatius Rice, solicitor, thereby acting to the detriment of another section of the public, selfsupporting taxpayers, solvent, sound.

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?
Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its umplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: Its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including billions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

Having set the halffilled kettle on the now burning coals, why did he return to the stillflowing tap?
To wash his soiled hands with a partially consumed tablet of Barrington's lemonflavoured soap, to which paper still adhered (bought thirteen hours previously for fourpence and still unpaid for), in fresh cold neverchanging everchanging water and dry them, face and hands, in a long redbordered holland cloth passed over a wooden revolving roller.

What reason did Stephen give for declining Bloom's offer?
That he was hydrophobe, hating partial contact by immersion or total by submersion in cold water (his last bath having taken place in the month of October of the preceding year), disliking the aqueous substances of glass and crystal, distrusting aquacities of thought and language.

What impeded Bloom from giving Stephen counsels of hygiene and prophylactic to which should be added suggestions concerning a preliminary wetting of the head and contraction of the muscles with rapid splashing of the face and neck and thoracic and epigastric region in case of sea or river bathing, the parts of the human anatomy most sensitive to cold being the nape, stomach, and thenar or sole of foot?
The incompatibility of aquacity with the erratic originality of genius.

What additional didactic counsels did he similarly repress?
Dietary: concerning the respective percentage of protein and caloric energy in bacon, salt ling and butter, the absence of the former in the lastnamed and the abundance of the latter in the firstnamed.

Which seemed to the host to be the predominant qualities of his guest?
Confidence in himself, an equal and opposite power of abandonment and recuperation.

What concomitant phenomenon took place in the vessel of liquid by the agency of fire?
The phenomenon of ebullition. Fanned by a constant updraught of ventilation between the kitchen and the chimneyflue, ignition was communicated from the faggots of precombustible fuel to polyhedral masses of bituminous coal, containing in compressed mineral form the foliated fossilised decidua of primeval forests which had in turn derived their vegetative existence from the sun, primal source of heat (radiant), transmitted through omnipresent luminiferous diathermanous ether. Heat (convected), a mode of motion developed by such combustion, was constantly and increasingly conveyed from the source of calorification to the liquid contained in the vessel, being radiated through the uneven unpolished dark surface of the metal iron, in part reflected, in part absorbed, in part transmitted, gradually raising the temperature of the water from normal to boiling point, a rise in temperature expressible as the result of an expenditure of 72 thermal units needed to raise I pound of water from 50° to 212° Fahrenheit.

What announced the accomplishment of this rise in temperature?
A double falciform ejection of water vapour from under the kettlelid at both sides simultaneously.

For what personal purpose could Bloom have applied the water so boiled?
To shave himself.

What advantages attended shaving by night?
A softer beard: a softer brush if intentionally allowed to remain from shave to shave in its agglutinated lather: a softer skin if unexpectedly encountering female acquaintances in remote places at incustomary hours: quiet reflections upon the course of the day: a cleaner sensation when awaking after a fresher sleep since matutinal noises, premonitions and perturbations, a clattered milkcan, a postman's double knock, a paper read, reread while lathering, relathering the same spot, a shock, a shoot, with thought of aught he sought though fraught with nought might cause a faster rate of shaving and a nick on which incision plaster with precision cut and humected and applied adhered which was to be done.

Why did absence of light disturb him less than presence of noises?
Because of the surety of the sense of touch in his firm full masculine feminine passive active hand.

What quality did it (his hand) possess but with what counteracting influence?
The operative surgical quality but that he was reluctant to shed human blood even when the end justified the means, preferring in their natural order, heliotherapy, psychophysicotherapeutics, osteopathic surgery.

What lay under exposure on the lower middle and upper shelves of the kitchen dresser opened by Bloom?
On the lower shelf five vertical breakfast plates, six horizontal breakfast saucers on which rested inverted breakfast cups, a moustachecup, uninverted, and saucer of Crown Derby, four white goldrimmed eggcups, and open shammy purse displaying coins, mostly copper, and a phial of aromatic violet comfits. On the middle shelf a chipped eggcup containing pepper, a drum of table salt, four conglomerated black olives in oleaginous paper, an empty pot of Plumtree's potted meat, an oval wicker basket bedded with fibre and containing one Jersey pear, a halfempty bottle of William Gilbey and Co's white invalid port, half disrobed of its swathe of coralpink tissue paper, a packet of Epps's soluble cocoa, five ounces of Anne Lynch's choice tea at 2/- per lb. in a crinkled leadpaper bag, a cylindrical canister containing the best crystallised lump sugar, two onions, one the larger, Spanish, entire, the other, smaller, Irish, bisected with augmented surface and more redolent, a jar of Irish Model Dairy's cream, a jug of brown crockery containing a noggin and a quarter of soured adulterated milk, converted by heat into water, acidulous serum and semisolidified curds, which added to the quantity subtracted for Mr Bloom's and Mrs Fleming's breakfasts made one imperial pint, the total quantity originally delivered, two cloves, a halfpenny and a small dish containing a slice of fresh ribsteak. On the upper shelf a battery of jamjars of various sizes and proveniences.

What attracted his attention lying on the apron of the dresser?
Four polygonal fragments of two lacerated scarlet betting tickets, numbered 887, 886.

What reminiscences temporarily corrugated his brow?
Reminiscences of coincidences, truth stranger than fiction, preindicative of the result of the Gold Cup flat handicap, the official and definitive result of which he had read in the Evening Telegraph, late pink edition, in the cabman's shelter, at Butt bridge.

Where had previous intimations of the result, effected or projected, been received by him?
In Bernard Kiernan's licensed premises 8, 9 and 10 Little Britain street: in David Byrne's licensed premises, 14 Duke street: in O'Connell street lower, outside Graham Lemon's when a dark man had placed in his hand a throwaway (subsequently thrown away), advertising Elijah, restorer of the church in Zion: in Lincoln place outside the premises of F. W. Sweny and Co (Limited) dispensing chemists, when, when Frederick M. (Bantam) Lyons had rapidly and successively requested, perused and restituted the copy of the current issue of the Freeman's Journal and National Press which he had been about to throw away (subsequently thrown away), he had proceeded towards the oriental edifice of the Turkish and Warm Baths, 11 Leinster street, with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the secret of the race, graven in the language of prediction.

What qualifying considerations allayed his perturbations?
The difficulties of interpretation since the significance of any event followed its occurrence as variably as the acoustic report followed the electrical discharge and of counterestimating against an actual loss by failure to interpret the total sum of possible losses proceeding originally from a successful interpretation.

His mood?
He had not risked, he did not expect, he had not been disappointed, he was satisfied.

What satisfied him?
To have sustained no positive loss. To have brought a positive gain to others. Light to the gentiles.

Heath Ledger, 1979 - 2008

I thought his performance in Brokeback Mountain was an iconic performance - strong, silent, a real throwback to another kind of male character (Josh Brolin in No Country For Old Men is a more recent example). The silent stoic Marlboro Man, with hidden depths. When he let it out, it was raw, jagged, ugly. Not because the emotions themselves were ugly, but because he was so unused to expressing that side of him that it came out like an explosion, messy and heart-cracking. The way he kissed Gyllenhaal against the wall during their reunion is an example. It was so violent and ferocious, you couldn't tell if it was a punch and a kiss.

It is one of the more visceral performances of recent memory. You could smell the nicotine on the edges of his fingers, you could smell his sweat. This was not a man who spoke much, felt comfortable speaking ... and any time he did open his mouth to speak, it was as though the vocal cords took a while to realize: "Oh ... we're doing this now? We're talking?"

Gyllenhaal was good - but there were times when I remembered he was an actor, and it pulled me out of it a bit.

I never ever had that thought with Ledger. And I remember, too, his couple of scenes in Monster's Ball, another deeply portrayed kind of awkward guy, not used to speaking much - and given the right circumstances that character would probably be an awesome husband, partner ... But as it was, he was relegated to isolation, stoic silence.

A quiet (maybe shy) tough silent guy, a throwback perhaps, bulked up against feeling or vulnerability, meeting life with a clenched fist ... but oh, if you could just pry that hand open, what a generous soul you would find. That, to me, is who Ledger was onscreen. But then you would see him in interviews, and he seemed so slight physically - there were times I wouldn't even know that that was the same guy - he had such a presence when he was acting, he always looked totally different on the red carpet, or in interviews. His physicality in real life looked delicate, slim, slender, almost Orlando Bloom-ish. He was a sensitive guy, with lovely manners.

It made me realize that, yeah, he was acting in Brokeback. He did a helluva job.

Watch him sit and think in Brokeback. It's my favorite kind of film performance - spare, clear, emotional, visual, it's all in the eyes.

I'm really shocked and sad.

Rest in peace.

Share your thoughts about him at House Next Door.

And here at Edward's.

Alex has a post up.

Jim Emerson has a very moving tribute up. It begins:

Rare is the performance that can honestly be called a "revelation," but that's what it felt like to watch Heath Ledger in "Brokeback Mountain." Not only did he bring iconic life and nuance to the existential loneliness of Ennis Del Mar, a taciturn but complex (and conflicted) character, but for such mature work to spring from the teen-idol star of "10 Things I Hate About You" and "A Knight's Tale" was... well, revelatory itself -- the astonishing revelation of a suddenly, fully developed actor who, in the superficial juvenile parts he'd played previously, had given little indication he was capable of such moving depth and clarity. Ledger emerged as if from a cocoon, gleaming with promise and flexing his wings.

Brendon at My Five Year Plan has a post which brought tears to my eyes.

Marisa shares her thoughts. That's one of my favorite moments in the film, too Marisa. Ouch.

Robbie at Reverseblog has a post up about Brokeback, and why that performance was so crucial.

If Brokeback’s pain proved exquisite for some and unbearably raw for others, odds are it was all because of Ennis’s internalized anguish, his disparity between how he felt and how he was told to act opening up a chasm within him too great to bridge.

I just re-watched Brokeback Mountain. I'm really sad about this one.

Bogart in "In a Lonely Place"

In a Lonely Place has been coming up quite a bit lately - here's one of the posts - and now Kim Morgan has written a typically insightful review of the film (and my favorite Bogart performance). It's Peter Bogdonavich's favorite as well (one of the best portrayals of Hollywood screenwriters and the challenges they face that I can think of - it's up there with Sunset Boulevard. It feels realler than Sunset Boulevard, which takes on a Gothic melodramatic aspect - quite appropriate to the film). But In a Lonely Place is raw, with a couple of scenes that border on intensely uncomfortable for the viewer. Realistic in its portrayal of the isolation and bitterness of the writer - and it's equally astonishing because it's Bogart playing the guy. He's never been so intense.

Here's an excerpt from Morgan's review:

Ray, whose pictures like Rebel Without a Cause, Bigger Than Life, and On Dangerous Ground all contemplate a man's lonely, often horrifying position in his world, is in archetypal mode with In a Lonely Place. Much like the protagonists in Ray's other films, Dixon is not a loser (like so many characters in noir), but rather a talent who would be productive if not for the obstacles in his way, including his own neurotic, repressed, enraged self.

I can be kind of evangelical about the movie. Here's what I wrote about it. I just have such high regard for it, and Bogart's work in particular.

Anyway, go read Kim Morgan's review.

having a camera ...

... at times can make you really open your eyes. For example, I walk by a particular building almost every day. It's almost a block long, and kind of falling apart - there's a garage door entrance where I think you can buy used car parts every other Thursday or something like that - but other than that, it's just a big concrete wall, an old warehouse I thought.

But then I noticed an image/carving on the side of the buildng - and realized what the building was, once upon a time. I LOVE moments like that!! Ghosts.

(Photo below.)

Quelle Chanson, Non? - by Brendan O'Malley

NOTE FROM SHEILA: I asked my brother Brendan, who is a wonderful writer, to recount in words an experience he had in France - something I remember him telling me, in vivid detail at the time (it was years ago) ... and I have never forgotten it. Not just because it's a great story, but because of how Brendan told it. He made me feel like I was there. And beyond that: I could get the importance of the moment - not just because I was a huge fan of the band in question as well, but because I knew Brendan, and I knew his journey with music, which was always quite singular and his own (up until this point, I mean). Brendan covered a bit of that in the essay he wrote about The Replacements. Anyway, I was going to tell the following story myself - but then thought: no no no, have Bren write it. So I asked him. And a couple days later I received the essay, which I have since read no less than 10 times. And I still feel the hugeness of the moment, for my brother.

And more than that: I just love how he tells the damn story. (I mean: "two-headed hydra of searing punk rock, The Replacements and Husker Du")? Come on. It's just awesome. Also I love his description of one band: "took on ‘important’ issues like racism, sexism, and ‘the-world-doesn’t-understand-our-mohawks-ism’." hahahaha

Enjoy. Whether or not you feel the same passion for the bands Brendan mentions is irrelevant. That's not what this is about. I think we all can relate to such a story as the one below, those of us who are passionate about art, music, writing, movies - whatever ... those moments when the top of your head blows off as you realize what has not just become possible, but what already IS possible because it's already happened.

My brother describes just such a moment as that.

Quelle Chanson, Non?

by Brendan O'Malley

My fifth year of college (!) was spent abroad in Orleans, France at L’Universite d’Orleans. Up until that point, I’d lived in Rhode Island all my life. From the time I was 15 until that year my main contact with the world outside of Little Rhody was through various punk rock bands.

This is what ’83 to ’91 looked like for me…

7Seconds were from out West and toured relentlessly, singing melodic breakneck hardcore punk that thematically took on ‘important’ issues like racism, sexism, and ‘the-world-doesn’t-understand-our-mohawks-ism’.

Minor Threat were from D.C. and not as upbeat as 7Seconds. They were more attuned to the forces that lay behind the ills of society and therefore less inclined to sing passionately about being able to change it. They later morphed into Fugazi, another of my all-time favs.

The Midwest was represented by a two-headed hydra of searing punk rock, The Replacements and Husker Du. The Replacements were the ill-advised Thursday night booze-off before a big test and Husker Du was the all-night study session for a political science exam that devolves into a meth-fueled rage against some machine.

All these bands were connected to other lesser lights. Before the internet, there was DIY (Do It Yourself) punk rock. They started their own record labels, they printed their own LP’s, they drew their own posters. They toured the country in vans sleeping on the couches of their biggest fans.

Rolling Stone didn’t write about them, radio wouldn’t touch them with an any length foot pole, MTV was already in the business of creating megastars, and the majority of the public winced at anything that was LOUD. I vividly remember playing a Replacements song for a friend of mine in high school. This guy was a musician, a guitar player who liked heavy metal for Pete’s sake, but he simply COULD NOT HEAR THE SONG. All he heard was noise.

This scene would be replayed throughout the late ‘80’s for me, both in high school and in my first few years in college. I had my circle of like-minded friends. There were four of us. Tom, Justin, Joe, moi. We were occasionally a band, but more often than not we were intense spectators. To be a fan of this music meant a certain level of danger. Concerts were rag-tag affairs in which the crowd threw itself against itself as ferociously as possible. There were violent elements who were attracted to this kind of freedom and we often found ourselves rescuing punk maidens from slam-dance circles and avenging uncalled for elbows with punches. Skinheads, completely missing the point, weren’t dancing so much as they were trolling for conflict. Depending on our mood, we either gave it to them or didn’t.

Outside the shows this underground element would collide with ‘normal’ American life. The leeriness of capitalism was astounding. The feeling of ‘us vs. them’ was overwhelming. Restaurants would refuse to serve you. Store owners would deny you their products. Business owners would REFUSE YOUR MONEY. I could romanticize that whole aspect as having added some level of enjoyment, but to be honest, it just sucked. I had thousands of ‘what is the deal with THAT’ conversations with my co-conspirators. The justifications we concocted on behalf of our oppressors could never quite be pinned down into any certain set of criteria. Suffice it to say, we were, by definition, outsiders.

Did this status affect my view of said mainstream? In other words, was I as much of a douchebag to the world as the world was a douchebag to me? Of course not. I bought ‘Thriller’ like everyone else. I rocked out to Van Halen’s ‘Runnin’ With The Devil’. I lusted over Sade. I never cared for Madonna, but I didn’t SPIT at people who did. I even had some classic rock in the collection. My tastes ran towards punk rock but I could appreciate Duran Duran, perhaps the weirdest boy band ever. And Prince was from Minneapolis like my other two favorite bands. What wasn’t there to like about Prince?

But my open-mindedness was definitely not reciprocated. For some reason the music that meant the most to me was not just disliked, it was seen as a threat.

So, college happened in there somewhere. In between punk rock concerts, I did a ton of plays at the wonderful University of Rhode Island theater department. I had a series of disastrous relationships and abused alcohol. I HAD A BLAST.

I kept three majors. Theater, English, and French. My youthful enjoyment of Inspector Clouseau had improbably turned into a major. Thus everything about my French studies seemed vaguely comedic to me. The opportunity to live in France for a year was going to be a laugh riot. I’d completed 4 full years of college and only needed 9 credits to graduate. 5 classes per semester equals 15 credits, so you do the math. Over the course of my two semesters in France, I only needed to do less than one semester of work. France was in trouble, people.

That summer wasn’t exactly a victory lap of an exit. I got Lyme’s Disease and went through a horrific breakup. I left the country an emotional wreck and very unhealthy. In fact, I took the last of my antibiotics right before I got on the plane, hoping they’d done their work. I invested in an expensive CD Walkman and a small set of speakers. I brought two notebooks of CD’s with me, perhaps 20 of my favorites.

My first couple of months in France were primarily recuperative. I went to classes with my other Foreign Exchange students, I ate pleasant dinners with my host family, I went to every movie in town to get used to listening to French when I didn’t have to respond. I read in my little dorm room. I ate the same meal twice a day at the cafeteria. Slowly the language unfurled itself to me and social situations became bearable.

Two of my American friends had joined a local American football team and made some French friends. This was what I was after. Instead of hanging out with my classmates, other non-French speaking foreigners, I began hanging out primarily with French people. But America was about to reach out to me.

The campus of L’Universite d’Orleans is a 20 minute bus ride outside of the city of Orleans. We all began to spend far more time in the city and very little on campus. On one of these excursions, we stopped in at FNAC. FNAC (said as one word by the French, hilarious) was the French version of Tower Records. In a ‘holy shit I feel old’ side note, Tower recently disappeared off of the face of the planet.

I’d been in France a couple of months and I’d yet to buy any music, preferring instead to start smoking. So I wasn’t all that into going to FNAC, to be honest. I loitered, looking at French chicks.

And then a song came on over the in-store stereo system.

I AM NOT EXAGGERATING ANYTHING THAT FOLLOWS.

My memory of this moment is like one of those long unbroken movie shots…the camera starts up in the very highest corner of the store. The song begins and slowly the camera begins to swoop, capturing the silly French fashions, the funny haircuts, the multi colored crazily buttoned jackets, the pointy shoes, late ‘80’s American culture reappropriated back to Europe and funneled inappropriately into Mass Appeal. The focus of the shot narrows in on the face of an obviously American post-teen. As the music builds, the camera nears his face as his mouth opens, his toes tap, his head bounces. He is obviously AMAZED at this sound. The sound obliterates everything else.

The camera stays in close up. The song ends. The next voice you hear you have to try to imagine a little bit. Do you remember the morning rock DJ in your town? Do you remember the inherent utter hyperbole in their speech? Now cross that with Inspector Clouseau…

‘Eh, mes amis, quelle chanson, non? C’etait le Number One des Etats Unis, la nouvelle son de…”

Interjection: Did I just hear him say that was the Number One song in the United States? When I flew out of Logan Airport, the number one song was ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It for You’ by Bryan Adams. It had just replaced ‘Rush Rush’ by Paula Abdul. Those were the big hits of the summer. Think about that for a second.

Cut back to gape-mouthed post-teen…

“…la nouvelle son de Nirvana! Smells Like Teen Spirit de l’album Nevermind.”

Dropping the camera metaphor, I could barely believe what I’d been hearing. I tore over to the Rock section and found Nirvana. Sold out. I had heard of them after they put out their ‘Bleach’ album in 1989 but I hadn’t bought the album and knew very little about them. I was almost angry. That song was Number One??? What the hell was going on back there???? I turn my back for one second and all of a sudden everyone can handle loud music??? Not only can they handle it, but it is THE MOST POPULAR SONG IN THE COUNTRY????

I seriously thought about getting on a plane and flying back to the States.

Imagine you work for a political candidate, Mr. So-and-so. You’ve been tirelessly campaigning for years. You’ve poured your heart and soul into a race that people seem ambivalent about at best. By some fluke, you are on a deserted island when the actual voting takes place. Your isolation makes you wonder what ever compelled you to get involved in politics in the first place. A plane flies overhead. Instead of rescuing you, it drops a newspaper on your head. The headline says, “So-and-So Elected in a Landslide!”

I’d spent the better part of ten years catching flak for how loud and out of control my tastes were, how what I liked was actually an affront to decent American consumerism, and that such a horrific assault on art and sound was everything that was wrong with the youth of today.

Bryan Adams was considered a ROCK STAR. Huey Lewis (god love ‘im) was a ROCK STAR. Now, I have nothing against either of these guys, but…come on. ROCK STARS? I don’t think so. Rock stars scare people. David Bowie is a ROCK STAR. Mick Jagger is a ROCK STAR. They scared people! They might even have slept together just to show the world they could do whatever they wanted! ROCK STARS change how people view the world.

I have never felt such a sensation of vertigo as I did that day in that French record store. One listen of that song and I knew that NOTHING would be the same when I got back to America. Name another song that could truthfully make such a claim.

One final note. I only got 8 credits and had to take another class when I got back Stateside. C’est la vie!

Being mean to Rocky Balboa

Freezing cold twilight. I was waiting for the bus. I was alone. A guy was also in the area, and he was in the process of painting a sign up on the wall of a new Thai restaurant. As I approached the busstop, I saw him take notice of me, and watch me. I rolled my eyes internally. I am a "crazy magnet" - David and I have talked about this before, and my absolute impatience with crazies who try to involve themselves in my life. I am mean, blunt, and dead-eyed. This is from my long experience - since I was a little kid - of having the crazies be attracted to me. My visits to New York as a child always involved bums - walking right up TO ME - personally - even though I was with my aunt and her friends ... and trying to talk to me, or - in one case - showing me his penis. Hey, thanks, you fucking lunatic! I'm 10 years old! Thanks for scarring me for life, douchebag. So. I am not forgiving or kind to such people, because for some reason - they are drawn to me, and I have to draw the line. David laughs at me when this happens when we're together. One dude recently, when we were out together, dropped his cane near us - and he was obviously a drunk, and he dropped his cane - looked up at us - and I just knew we would never be rid of the guy if I let it go any further. I looked away, and kept talking to David - as David (nicer man that he is) picked up the drunk's cane and handed it back to him. David was howling later - because as he handed the guy his cane, he could feel (as you can) that the guy wanted to join us ... he was looking for his "in" - and my blatant unfriendliness turned him off. You gotta be brutal with these people, especially in a city like this - where they are EVERYWHERE. It may sound cold, and it is. But crazies love me. They gravitate towards me, and if I didn't keep my barrier up - they'd never leave me alone.

So, as I walked to the busstop I saw the crazy guy immediately decide that I was his new best friend. He started dancing on the sidewalk ... grinning at me, hoping I would be amused. I was like: GodDAMMIT, crazy. No. I'm just waiting for the goddamn bus. Don't involve me in your bullshit.

You get accosted by enough crazies, you lose your compassion. Let somebody else be compassionate. I'm no Mother Teresa. I'm just trying to catch the bus.

He started talking to me, as I stood there. He was a lean hard muscular guy, with a handsome brutal face - big obviously once-broken nose - and a huge smile. He didn't seem harmful, but you know. I don't walk around looking for conversation. I'm minding my own business.

His monologue to me went as follows:

"What are the chances of us meeting ever again? There's no chance! Because I'm never here! I'm just here to paint the wall ... so it's really weird, don't you think? That you and me would meet like this? You're probably married, right? No, don't tell me. Don't tell me. Let me keep my dreams, okay? What's your name? You can even LIE to me ... just give me a name ... anything! What's your name?"

I tried to stave him off, and I was openly annoyed.

"Why?" I said. "Why do you want my name? I'm just waiting for the bus."

"Come on! You can give me a name ... even if it's not real. I can tell by your eyes that you're a good person. Pretty green eyes."

The guy had Tourette's of the emotions.

And to be honest, I could tell by HIS eyes that he was not a bad person. Just a bit insistent, and ... I just get sick of the crazies, that's all. But as he kept rambling like that, I found it hard to be as mean as I wanted to be. I did say at one point, "What do you WANT from me?" and he recoiled physically - holding out his hands at me - like: "I mean no harm ... I mean no harm ..."

"I'm just waiting for the bus," I said, exhausted ... not just from this encounter but from ALL encounters with people who accost me, for no reason. It happens all the time. And more than once they have said it's because of my eyes. Well, I can't help my eyes!! My EYES may be nice (although I think that is debatable), but I am NOT.

But he kept talking. "What do you think my name is? Come on, guess. You can guess - I'd love to hear what you think ..."

Something in me caved - and I realized that he seemed vaguely familiar. Who does he remind me of? That kind of chatter, friendly chatter ... not picking up on 'stay away' cues ... but continuing on?

So I finally answered him. "Is your name Rocky Balboa?"

He burst out laughing and then began to dance around me, boxing, throwing punches at me, playfully. The guy was a nut. But he obviously liked my name for him.

"I'm Rocky Balboa!" he said.

I said, still keeping up that barrier - because honestly, the guy was pushy - can't give these people an inch, not if you're me with my eyes ... they'll never ever leave you alone then - so I said, "You remind me of Rocky Balboa. And ..." I suddenly realized something, and it had to do with his smile, and his ultimate friendliness - however annoying it was - and so I added, "It's a compliment. Rocky Balboa is a great character."

He put his cold hand over his nose, self-consciously - "Is it because of my nose?"

"No, no, it's not because of your nose."

"So come on. Come on. What's your name. Do you live around here? Are you married? Don't answer that. You think we could ever see each other again?"

Now that I had clocked him as Rocky Balboa, I could not see him as anything else. And I thought of Rocky, and someone being mean to Rocky ... Nope. Maybe YOU could be mean to Rocky Balboa, but I do not have the heart for it. I can't do it. The guy obviously had a good heart. He was using himself in a comedic way ... and yes, he was invading my space - but not too much. At one point - he stepped about 3 feet away from me and said, "Okay - look. I ain't getting too close. Are you comfortable with me being over here?"

I succumbed completely. "Yes. Just stay right there. I'm comfortable now."

"Good, good. So come on - gimme a name."

James Joyce floated thru my mind. "Molly," I replied.

He knew I was lying and gave me a shrewd yet pleased look. "Molly, huh?"

"Yeah. Molly."

"You know, I know that's not your name ... but I really like it. I'm horrible with names ... but I will remember that name. I'll remember you, Molly. That's a nice name."

"It is a nice name."

"I'm never lonely, do you know that?"

It came out of nowhere. But I can see that a guy like that, a guy like Rocky Balboa, would never be lonely - because he talks to himself and he amuses himself. He is, ultimately, a positive human being, with a humanist approach to his fellow man.

I AM lonely. So I said, "You're really lucky."

"Yeah! You know? I just talk to people, and I do my stuff - and I'm just not lonely. Hey, you wanna see what i'm working on? This is a new restaurant - you know, some Chinese food or shit - and I have to paint over that old sign - and put up a new one ... I guess it'll look good, I don't know ... The weird thing is - I'll probably never see you again. I am NEVER here ... this is the first time ... you live around here, Molly?"

The bus was coming. He stood back even further from me - to give me my space (again) - his jeans covered in paint, his hands cold and red, his nose big and beautiful and crooked ... and he said, "I hope you have a nice day, Molly. You've got some pretty eyes."

I was totally disarmed. This never happens. It doesn't even happen with my boyfriends, let alone total crazy strangers. But he was Rocky Balboa.

I said, "Nice to meet you."

And weirdly, I meant it.

I got on the bus, paid my fare, and sat down. As the bus pulled away, I saw Rocky Balboa, alone on the twilit sidewalk, grinning up at me, and dancing around like a crazy person, throwing punches at an imaginary punching bag. It was his way of saying good-bye.

I smiled the rest of the ride.

I still maintain that the crazies of the world must be kept at bay, since they seem to have an unnatural attraction to me.

But if you meet Rocky Balboa on a deserted freezing sidewalk, it will be YOUR loss if you don't give him the time of day.

The Books: "Ulysses" - the Eumaeus episode (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Ulysses - by James Joyce.

So here's where we are at so far:

1. (TELEMACHIA)
Episode 1: The Telemachus Episode
Episode 2: The Nestor Episode
Episode 3: The Proteus episode

2. (THE ODYSSEY)
Episode 4: The Calypso Episode
Episode 5: The Lotus Eaters Episode
Episode 6: The Hades Episode
Episode 7: The Aeolus Episode
Episode 8: The Lestrygonians Episode
Episode 9: The Scylla and Charybdis Episode
Episode 10: The Wandering Rocks Episode
Episode 11: The Sirens Episode
Episode 12: The Cyclops Episode
Episode 13: The Nausicaa Episode
Episode 14: The Oxen of the Sun Episode
Episode 15: The Circe Episode

As I mentioned in the last post - Circe is the final episode of the "Odyssey" section of the book. Its hallucinogenic Jean Genet-esque style - of role-playing, transformation, descendence into bestiality, sexual fantasy, unsure of what is real and what is not - is where the Odyssey itself ends. Bloom and Dedalus must go through that - in order to be allowed to return. Because, of course, in Homer's epic - the "odyssey" is just a series of challenges, thrown into the path of Odysseus ... on his way home. Whirlpools, monsters, shipwrecks ... It is the ultimate story of eternal return. What is one thing we all, as a human race, have in common? Well, we're all human, of course - and that is no small thing. It may SEEM like other people are from a different species altogether, due to cultural differences, language differences - but that is just a problem of perception on our end, a fear of what is different or strange. We are all human. So there's that. And then: what is one of the driving forces of humanity - a force that expresses itself sometimes in great horrors like war, genocide, refugee camps? The need for a HOME. Fighting for your home, trying to get home, trying to clear an entire country of people so you can make it home ... whatever. Great tragedies and great triumphs are all under this umbrella. Homer's epic expresses this human drive, and taps into what is most ... uhm ... human. About all of us. Times change, eras move on, progress occurs ... but throughout history, people have loved, and strived, and missed their loved ones, and yearned for the quiet home surrounded by family. Even the galloping Mongol hordes probably had a nice matted-haired wife at home, in an animal-skin yurt, keeping the goat milk warm. And men (because historically, it's the men who go off, and the women who stay) need to either earn the right to go home, or fight for their lives in order to remove obstacles to home. It's never easy. We all have our "whirlpools" to struggle against, on whatever journey we are on. Even if we already live at home, and do not gallop with a Mongol horde ... we have these obstacles to ease, comfort, a feeling of belonging. The journey does not have to be far. The journey can be internal as well.

No wonder Joyce - with his themes of exile, and separation - was so obsessed with The Odyssey. It was his life. He had to leave Ireland in order to live the kind of life he wanted. But his gaze was always turned back to the homeland. He was a "continental", through and through. He spoke many languages, he lived in Trieste, Paris, elsewhere ... moving his family from place to place. He only returned to Ireland once or twice after the original departure. Amazing. But it wasn't like he left and never looked back. All he did was look back. Not one of his stories or novels takes place in any other nation than Ireland. He did not write of the ex-pat community on the Left Bank, or the multi-lingual world he lived in in Trieste. It was Ireland. And only Ireland.

All of this is to say: The final section of Ulysses is a three-episode section - a mirror-image of The Telemachia - the 3-section part that opens the book. In The Telemachia, we follow Stephen Dedalus through his morning ... from home to the beach ... getting ready to begin the journey of the day. And now, in The Nostos (or "return") - the final 3-part section - Bloom and Dedalus are now together, it is 1, 2 o'clock in the morning ... and it is time to slowly make their way home. Bloom to his sleeping wife - and Dedalus to the tower on the outskirts of London where he lives with his dissipated buddies.

The Eumaeus episode, which we are now in, takes place after the psychedelic visit to the brothel, described in the encyclopedic Circe episode. Bloom has rescued Dedalus from the whores, Dedalus has cut his hand - and he had a freak-out at the brothel, where he saw his dead mother's face in the ceiling, and tried to crash down the chandelier. Bloom intervened on his behalf. All of Dedalus' friends have disappeared ... so now Bloom and Dedalus are together. It's late late at night - 1 a.m. Instead of going straight home - or saying goodbye to one another and separating ... they decide to go take the edge off of their drunken states of mind - and get a cup of coffee, a bite to eat. They go to a cabman's shelter in Dublin - which also doubles as a coffeehouse, an all-night venue (which, even today, is rare in Dublin. It's not a 24-hour kind of town). The coffeehouse is full of "cabmen" off-duty. Bloom and Dedalus sit there, amongst the cabmen, and talk. For the first time, really.

One thing to make clear: Joyce, in a funny way, is not a romantic. Even though he was obviously a positive person. For example, in regards to Molly's famous run-on sentence that ends the book -he said, "I wanted to end the book on the positive word in the English language." ("Yes.") But the meeting of Bloom and Dedalus is NOT about kindred spirits, or finally finding someone who understands ... it is pretty clear that after this particular day, Bloom and Dedalus will go their separate ways. They will not become lifelong friends. There is too much of a gap between them. Joyce does not make them merge. Which is fascinating - because, in a way, that is what we, the readers, are looking for. After all that, after that whole day ... shouldn't they have a sense of recognition towards one another? Like: "you are what I have been searching for"? Joyce does not go that way, at least not explicitly. The Eumaeus episode is NOT about "mutual understanding" - as a matter of fact, it is just the opposite. It is about MISunderstanding. The language of the episode is fractured, fragmentary, lots of run-on sentences that trail off with no resolution. This is a brilliant mode for this episode which happens at 1 in the morning, when everyone is exhausted, still drunk, and yet unwilling to go home yet. The sharpness of thought in, say, the Scylla and Charybdis episode, is not in evidence at all here. Bloom and Dedalus talk, but exhaustion threatens to fog up the clarity. They discuss religion, different languages ... and in each case, Bloom and Dedalus are not on the same page. Ironically, Bloom sees Dedalus as an orthodox Catholic, whether he believes in the dogma of the church or not. We have seen Dedalus' disdain for organized religion - but regardless: Bloom's perception is that Dedalus is devout. Dedalus tries to talk about his ideas of God and simplicity to Bloom - but Bloom is not an intellectual. He is also not an artist. He just can't understand what Dedalus is talking about. And that would be a huge gulf between the two men. Bloom deals much more with reality - and what is right in front of his nose. Dedalus, with his broken glasses, and his bad eyesight - cannot, physically, even SEE what is right in front of his nose. So his mind is unleashed, far-flying, Icarus with his wings. Bloom is earthbound. It's a gulf that will not be crossed.

Bloom and Dedalus talk about politics and Ireland. Bloom is a socialist, and dreams of an Ireland where the workers are paramount. He does not realize that in saying so he is excluding the intellectual non-worker Dedalus from the new world order. Or at least he doesn't realize it immediately. Bloom (as we have seen in other episodes - primarily The Cyclops episode) can be a bit of a know-it-all. He pontificates on the way things should be, he knows the answers ... he lectures others, without realizing that blanket statements are fine if they remain ideas - but when you try to put them into practice, you'll run into trouble, like despotism, dictatorship, bigotry. Bloom realizes his mistake and tries to reassure Dedalus that "poets" would also be considered workers in his dream Socialist state. But it's too late. Again, that is a gulf between them that cannot be crossed. Dedalus doesn't care about politics - at least not in a practical way - and he doesn't care about the fate of Ireland. Or, let's say: he is not personally invested in Ireland - since he feels that Ireland is not personally invested in him.

At the start of the episode, as Bloom and Dedalus approach the coffeehouse, they run into Corley - a drunken mess of a man (who is one of the "stars" in Joyce's story "Two Gallants" from Dubliners - that's another thing: Ulysses is full of the same characters we met in Dubliners and Portrait - which is indicative of how claustrophobic Joyce found Irish society - where everyone knows everyone. You can't get away with ANYthing in Ireland. Reinvention is impossible). Anyway, they run into Corley - and chat with him - and Dedalus mentions to him that there is a position open at Deasy's school - and maybe Corley would like the job. We realize, even though he did not give notice in The Nestor episode - that Stephen will be leaving that job. He has already decided to decamp. He's done. Again, we don't know at one point during the day Dedalus made that decision - but by 1 a.m., it's final.

Bloom, meanwhile, has no idea of this - and begins to almost fantasize about how Dedalus will fit into his life. It's a bit self-serving (but that's okay - we're all self-serving). He thinks that maybe Dedalus could help him get published. Dedalus is also a tenor (just like Joyce was) - and Bloom has a dream of starting an opera company in Dublin (perhaps to impress Molly, perhaps to stick it to Molly's lover Blazes Boylan) - and perhaps Dedalus could be of help in that venture.

So again: misunderstanding is the key to the Eumaeus episode. And not bitter misunderstanding, as we saw in the Cyclops episode - it's more of a common human failing. We see what we want to see. We assume that other human beings will be on the same page as us ... and when they behave in ways that do not "fit" with our preconceptions - we are baffled. But that is OUR failing, not the other person's. Bloom thinks the friendship with Stephen will continue past June 16-17. It obviously will not.

In the meantime, though, they are together. Bloom thinks he will take Stephen home with him, at least just for the night. It's so late, and Bloom is concerned at the thought of drunken cut-hand Stephen trying to make his way back out to Sandymount, where he lives. Bloom worries that maybe Molly will not like having a houseguest. Bloom feels protective of Stephen - at the same time that he feels Stephen will be of use to him. Again, very human.

The connection with The Odyssey is: Odysseus meets Eumaeus, a swineherd - in his return to Ithaca. And then, first order of the day, Odysseus joins up with Telemachus to kill all of Penelope's suitors - who have clustered around her during his absence. An obvious parallel with Bloom's anxiety about Molly's unfaithfulness. Can he slay Blazes Boylan?

Oh, another really really interesting thing they talk about in this episode is Parnell - the man who haunts Ireland (almost to this day). The great hope ... who was murdered ... and discredited because of an extramarital affair. For years, the rumor was that Parnell had NOT died and that the coffin said to be carrying him was full of rocks. This goes along with the Christ-like feeling that you get when Parnell is discussed. Will Parnell "return"? Ireland waits. The void left by Parnell was never filled. They are still waiting for him, for a savior. Now we know, from the first chapter of Portrait how Parnell's death affected Stephen. We also remember Joyce's story "Ivy Day in the Committee Room", from Dubliners - a vision of post-Parnell Irish politics, and their hollow cynical quality. Parnell is the key to so much. He's not only one of the keys to understanding Dedalus, but he's also crucial to our understanding of Bloom. Bloom, as we know, feels impotent when it comes to his wife. It wasn't always that way, and he has wonderful memories of their intimacy in their early courtship and marriage. But that has long since passed. Parnell, who risked all to have an affair with the married Kitty O'Shea (wife of a Captain) - is seen as a virile reckless sexual hero. Kinda akin to Alexander Hamilton, who had the same risk-taking masculine energy, when it came to politics and when it came to sex. So Bloom, in talking of Parnell, has an uneasy feeling ... as though Parnell somehow threatens him ... who could resist a Parnell? What woman would turn that down? Blazes Boylan, her lover, is also seen as a virile stallion. Bloom cannot compete. Captain O'Shea decided to ignore his wife's infidelity - and stay with her ... and Kitty O'Shea agreed to denounce Parnell ... leaving Parnell undefended. The parallels are clear. Bloom, as much as he wishes to be a sexual athlete, is not. He is Captain O'Shea, a man willing to look the other way as his wife screws someone else.

The cabman's shelter is full of noise and talk ... the kind of conversations you hear between drunk men (no women) at around 1 a.m. They argue, but they are too tired to fight. So the arguments are fine, because it will never go too far. But there's a leftover hallucinatory feel here - the kind of surreal vision you get when you are over-tired. Another important character here is the sailor in the shelter - who has not been home in 7 years, I think - and he is nervous that his wife will not recognize him, or that she will have completely moved on in his absence.

Dublin, in the Eumaeus episode, seems frayed, unconnected to reality, and intensely depressing.

It's time for Bloom and Dedalus to move on, to the final leg of their journey.

Here's an excerpt from the Eumaeus episode. The sailor is pontificating on the glory of Ireland, and how Irish men should stay home and develop their country. Stephen, naturally, has his own feelings about that. It is as though his consciousness has already departed. Anyway, watch how the episode meanders ... it's intellectually rigorous, but everyone's exhausted, and nerves are frayed. (Just had to get that in there ... because the Eumaeus episode is the "nervous system", in Joyce's iconography. We have been moving throughout the body, for the entire novel - each episode representing another function, or system - and now, at the very end of the day ... we are in the nerves themselves. It's not relaxing. Synapses fire - sometimes misfire ... it's all connected.)

The excerpt ends with one of my favorite lines in the whole book.

EXCERPT FROM Ulysses - by James Joyce - The Eumaeus episode

Skin-the-Goat, assuming he was he, evidently with an axe to grind, was airing his grievances in a forcible-feeble philippic anent the natural resources of Ireland, or something of that sort, which he described in his lengthy dissertation as the richest country bar none on the face of God's earth, far and away superior to England, with coal in large quantities, six million pounds' worth of pork exported every year, ten millions between butter and eggs, and all the riches drained out of it by England levying taxes on the poor people that paid through the nose always, and gobbling up the best meat in the market, and a lot more surplus steam in the same vein. Their conversation accordingly became general and all agreed that that was a fact. You could grow any mortal thing in Irish soil, he stated, and there was Colonel Everard down there in Cavan growing tobacco. Where would you find anywhere the like of Irish bacon? But a day of reckoning, he stated crescendo with no uncertain voice - thoroughly monopolising all the conversation - was in store for mighty England, despite her power of pelf on account of her crimes. There would be a fall and the greatest fall in history. The Germans and the Japs were going to have their little lookin, he affirmed. The Boers were the beginning of the end. Brummagem England was toppling already and her downfall would be Ireland, her Achilles heel, which he explained to them about the vulnerable point of Achilles, the Greek hero - a point his auditors at once seized as he completely gripped their attention by showing the tendon referred to on his boot. His advice to every Irishman was: stay in the land of your birth and work for Ireland and live for Ireland. Ireland, Parnell said, could not spare a single one of her sons.

Silence all round marked the termination of his finale. The impervious navigator heard these lurid tidings undismayed.

-- Take a bit of doing, boss, retaliated that rough diamond palpably a bit peeved in response to the foregoing truism.

To which cold douche, referring to downfall and so on, the keeper concurred but nevertheless held to his main view.

-- Who's the best troops in the army? the grizzled old veteran irately interrogated. And the best jumpers and racers? And the best admirals and generals we've got? Tell me that.

-- The Irish for choice, retorted the cabby like Campbell, facial blemishes apart.

-- That's right, the old tarpaulin corroborated. The Irish catholic peasant. He's the backbone of our empire. You know Jem Mullins?

While allowing him his individual opinions, as every man, the keeper added he cared nothing for any empire, ours or his, and considered no Irishman worthy of his salt that served it. Then they began to have a few irascible words, when it waxed hotter, both, needless to say, appealing to the listeners who followed the passage of arms with interest so long as they didn't indulge in recriminations and come to blows.

From inside information extending over a series of years Mr Bloom was rather inclined to poohpooh the suggestion as egregious balderdash for, pending that consummation devoutly to be or not to be wished for, he was fully cognisant of the fact that their neighbours across the channel, unless they were much bigger fools than he took them for, rather concealed their strength than the opposite. It was quite on a par with the quixotic idea in certain quarters that in a hundred million years the coal seam of the sister island would be played out and if, as time went On, that turned Out to be how the cat jumped all he could personally say on the matter was that as a host of contingencies, equally relevant to the issue, might occur ere then it was highly advisable in the interim to try to make the most of both countries, even though poles apart. Another little interesting point, the amours of whores and chummies, to put it in common parlance, reminded him Irish soldiers had as often fought for England as against her, more so, in fact. And now, why? So the scene between the pair of them, the licensee of the place, rumoured to be or have been Fitzharris, the famous invincible, and the other, obviously bogus, reminded him forcibly as being on all fours with the confidence trick, supposing, that is, it was prearranged, as the lookeron, a student of the human soul, if anything, the others seeing least of the game. And as for the lessee or keeper, who probably wasn't the other person at all, he (Bloom) couldn't help feeling, and most properly, it was better to give people like that the goby unless you were a blithering idiot altogether and refuse to have anything to do with them as a golden rule in private life and their felonsetting, there always being the offchance of a Dannyman coming forward and turning queen's evidence - or king's now - like Denis or Peter Carey, an idea he utterly repudiated. Quite apart from that, he disliked those careers of wrongdoing and crime on principle. Yet, though such criminal propensities had never been an inmate of his bosom in any shape or form, he certainly did feel, and no denying it (while inwardly remaining what he was), a certain kind of admiration for a man who had actually brandished a knife, cold steel, with the courage of his political convictions though, personally, he would never be a party to any such thing, off the same bat as those love vendettas of the south - have her or swing for her - when the husband frequently, after some words passed between the two concerning her relations with the other lucky mortal (the man having had the pair watched), inflicted fatal injuries on his adored one as a result of an alternative postnuptial liaison by plunging his knife into her until it just struck him that Fitz, nicknamed Skin-the-Goat, merely drove the car for the actual perpetrators of the outrage and so was not, if he was reliably informed, actually party to the ambush which, in point of fact, was the plea some legal luminary saved his skin on. In any case that was very ancient history by now and as for our friend, the pseudo Skin-the-etcetera, he had transparently outlived his welcome. He ought to have either died naturally or on the scaffold high. Like actresses, always farewell - positively last performance then come up smiling again. Generous to a fault, of course, temperamental, no economising or any idea of the sort, always snapping at the bone for the shadow. So similarly he had a very shrewd suspicion that Mr Johnny Lever got rid of some #. s. d. in the course of his perambulations round the docks in the congenial atmosphere of the Old Ireland tavern, come back to Erin and so on. Then as for the others, he had heard not so long before the same identical lingo, as he told Stephen how he simply but effectually silenced the offender.

He took umbrage at something or other, that much injured but on the whole eventempered person declared, I let slip. He called me a jew, and in a heated fashion, offensively. So I, without deviating from plain facts in the least, told him his God, I mean Christ, was a jew too, and all his family, like me, though in reality I'm not. That was one for him. A soft answer turns away wrath. He hadn't a word to say for himself as everyone saw. Am I not right?

He turned a long you are wrong gaze on Stephen of timorous dark pride at the soft impeachment, with a glance also of entreaty for he seemed to glean in a kind of a way that it wasn't all exactly .

-- Ex quibus, Stephen mumbled in a noncommittal accent, their two or four eyes conversing, Christus or Bloom his name is, or, after all, any other, secundum carnem.

-- Of course, Mr Bloom proceeded to stipulate, you must look at both sides of the question. It is hard to lay down any hard and fast rules as to right and wrong but room for improvement all round there certainly is though every country, they say, our own distressful included, has the government it deserves. But with a little goodwill all round. It's all very fine to boast of mutual superiority but what about mutual equality? I resent violence or intolerance in any shape or form. It never reaches anything or stops anything. A revolution must come on the due instalments plan. It's a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate people because they live round the corner and speak another vernacular, so to speak.

-- Memorable bloody bridge battle and seven minutes' war, Stephen assented, between Skinner's alley and Ormond market.

-- Yes, Mr Bloom thoroughly agreed, entirely endorsing the remark, that was overwhelmingly right and the whole world was overwhelmingly full of that sort of thing.

-- You just took the words out of my mouth, he said. A hocuspocus of conflicting evidence that candidly you couldn't remotely.

All those wretched quarrels, in his humble opinion, stirring up bad blood - bump of combativeness or gland of some kind, erroneously supposed to be about a punctilio of honour and a flag - were very largely a question of the money question which was at the back of everything, greed and jealousy, people never knowing when to stop.

-- They accuse - remarked he audibly. He turned away from the others, who probably... and spoke nearer to, so as the others... in case they...

-- Jews, he softly imparted in an aside in Stephen's ear, are accused of ruining. Not a vestige of truth in it, I can safely say. History - would you be surprised to learn? - proves up to' the hilt Spain decayed when the Inquisition hounded the jews out and England prospered when Cromwell, an uncommonly able ruffian, who, in other respects, has much to answer for, imported them. Why? Because they are practical and are proved to be so. I don't want to indulge in any... because you know the standard works on the subject, and then, orthodox as you are... But in the economic, not touching religion, domain, the priest spells poverty. Spain again, you saw in the war, compared with goahead America. Turks, it's in the dogma. Because if they didn't believe they'd go straight to heaven when they die they'd try to live better - at least, so I think. That's the juggle on which the p.p.'s raise the wind on false pretences. I'm, he resumed, with dramatic force, as good an Irishman as that rude person I told you about at the outset and I want to see everyone, concluded he, all creeds and classes pro rata having a comfortable tidysized income, in no niggard fashion either, something in the neighbourhood of #300 per annum. That's the vital issue at stake and it's feasible and would be provocative of friendlier intercourse between man and man. At least that's my idea for what it's worth. I call that patriotism. Ubi patria, as we learned a small smattering of in our classical day in Alma Mater, vita bene. Where you can live well, the sense is, if you work.

Over his untasteable apology for a cup of coffee, listening to this synopsis of things in general, Stephen stared at nothing in particular. He could hear, of course, all kinds of words changing colour like those crabs about Ringsend in the morning, burrowing quickly into all colours of different sorts of the same sand where they had a home somewhere beneath or seemed to. Then he looked up and saw the eyes that said or didn't say the words the voice he heard said - if you work.

-- Count me out, he managed to remark, meaning to work.

The eyes were surprised at this observation, because as he, the person who owned them pro. tem. observed, or rather, his voice speaking did: All must work, have to, together.

-- I mean, of course, the other hastened to affirm, work in the widest possible sense. Also literary labour, not merely for the kudos of the thing. Writing for the newspapers which is the readiest channel nowadays. That's work too. Important work. After all, from the little I know of you, after all the money expended on your education, you are entitled to recoup yourself and command your price. You have every bit as much right to live by your pen in pursuit of your philosophy as the peasant has. What? You both belong to Ireland, the brain and the brawn. Each is equally important.

-- You suspect, Stephen retorted with a sort of a half laugh, that I may be important because I belong to the faubourg Saint Patrice called Ireland for short.

-- I would go a step farther, Mr Bloom insinuated.

-- But I suspect, Stephen interrupted, that Ireland must be important because it belongs to me.

-- What belongs? queried Mr Bloom, bending, fancying he was perhaps under some misapprehension. Excuse me. Unfortunately I didn't catch the latter portion. What was it you?...

Stephen, patently crosstempered, repeated and shoved aside his mug of coffee, Or whatever you like to call it, none too politely, adding:

-- We can't change the country. Let us change the subject.

Music and the brain

Ted - neuroscientist, opera director/teacher, theatre director, voracious reader, and my dear friend of many years - reviews Oliver Sacks' latest book. Fascinating! I'm excited to hear more.

Anyone want to lend me a private jet ...

... so I can get to London ASAP and see these two productions? It actually hurts not to be able to see the productions in person. I can feel the excitement of them thru the reviewer's prose.

First we have Othello, with current theatrical superstar Chiwetel Ejiofor as Othello and Ewan McGregor as Iago.

It hurts just thinking about it.

Ejiofor made a huge splash in The Seagull last year, with Kristin Scott Thomas - which was yet another production where I moaned how much it hurt to not be able to see it - not that I could have gotten tickets anyway.

On Ejiofor as Othello:

His intensely human Othello is a major achievement. It ranks among the handful of truly great Shakespearean performances I’ve seen.

Ache.

Under these conditions Mr. Ejiofor takes us to a realm we too rarely visit at the theater: the innermost recesses of the human heart, in this case a heart torn apart by despair and rage. The beauty of Othello’s great speeches and the grandeur of the role’s conception can seduce actors into stultifying oratory or empty posturing. But there is not a single hollow or grandiose note in Mr. Ejiofor’s performance.

GodDAMMIT.

Mr. McGregor’s fine Iago has been somewhat overshadowed by Mr. Ejiofor’s achievement — some critics have dismissed it as a shallow interpretation — but this Iago too is scaled to the close dimensions of the theater. Here he is not a figure of glistening intellect and Machiavellian complexity but simply an ambitious, offended man subject to the same base instincts many are heir to: envy, a taste for mischief and malice, and the same sexual jealousy he recognizes in Othello.

Mr. McGregor’s piercing blue eyes glint like lit-up jewels in the crepuscular dimness of the production. His magnetism and charm match up terrifically with Mr. Ejiofor’s. For once the amity and trust Othello extends to this deceptive figure does not seem a gaping character flaw but a natural affinity.

I am in tears of rage right now that I will not see this production.

Not to mention the Much Ado that is also going on right now - one of my favorites of all of Shakespeare's plays.

On the unusual choice of casting middle-aged actors ( Simon Russell Beale and Zoë Wanamaker) as Beatrice and Benedick:

Love, it would seem, has long since passed these two by. Has their acid humor caused the opposite sex to give them a wide berth? Or has the pride born of years of solitude carved hardness into their hearts and sharpened the edges of their wits?

If nothing else, it has left both with a fondness for the consolations of drink. In the early scenes of the production, insightfully directed by Nicholas Hytner, the National’s artistic director, Ms. Wanamaker’s Beatrice grows looser of tongue and feistier of spirit under the influence of an ever-present goblet of red wine. But her quicksilver mood swings also descend into sad reflection...

The hallmark of both Mr. Russell Beale’s and Ms. Wanamaker’s performances is a limpid human truth that it requires an assured technique to achieve in Shakespeare. As opera singers must train rigorously to forget the little folds in their throats and disappear into a character onstage, so great Shakespearean actors have behind them years of repertory work and scholarly attention to the intricacy of Shakespeare’s language.

Marvelous. And yet horrible because an ocean is between me and IT.

Here's the review, again, in The Times.

More reviews:

Here is John Lahr's review of Othello in "The New Yorker"

Moor or less perfect - the review of Othello in The Daily Mail

Review of Much Ado in The Independent: "These two actors bring a fantastic, unforced chemistry to the sparring, emotionally defensive relationship between Shakespeare's witty, reluctant lovers. Looking like soulmates as if by natural selection, both of them are unconventionally attractive, dumpy, highly intelligent, and verbally gifted oddballs. And they're at an age where they can show that the pair no longer have all the time in the world. Making waspish wisecracks, Wanamaker's Beatrice has become the family comedienne to hide the melancholy which it is clear they haven't even noticed."

Fantastic interpretation.

I will live it vicariously. And resentfully. Because geographical distance should be made illegal.

Meeting of the minds

A still (below the fold) from the filmed interview of Kurt Russell and Herb Brooks, in preparation for the film Miracle - the story of the 1980 Olympic hockey team, which of course - as all my regulars (I sound like an old whore) all know - is a story of which I never tire. I mean, good Lord, obviously!! Russell (along with Gavin O'Connor, the director, and others) were in a hotel conference room in Los Angeles, asking Herb Brooks a bazillion questions. The interview can be seen in the DVD extras, and is a must-see, as far as I'm concerned. Not just the film - but all of the extras as well.

But I'm also of the mindset that Kurt Russell's portrayal of Herb Brooks was one of the most under-sung under-praised over-looked unfairly ignored all-time GREAT performances of the last 20, 30 years. I don't use the term "great" lightly. What Russell did in that film qualifies, 100 times over.

BraVO.

February 22, 1980

Re-creation of February 22, 1980

Unbelievable performance. Impeccably meticulous, and yet emotional in a primal way. A combination like that (meticulous and primal) is as rare as they come (think Brando, think Streep, think Wayne) ... that's the level Kurt Russell was at in his portrayal of Herb Brooks. (More of my thoughts on his performance here.)

RIP Bobby Fischer

"When you play Bobby, it is not a question of whether you win or lose. It is a question of whether you survive."
-- Boris Spassky

“It was Bobby Fischer who had, single-handedly, made the world recognize that chess on its highest level was as competitive as football, as thrilling as a duel to the death, as aesthetically satisfying as a fine work of art, as intellectually demanding as any form of human activity." - Harold C. Schonberg

Memories and reflections from those who knew him.

The last anecdote - told by Edward Rothstein - is my favorite.

I held out for about 30 moves, and when I resigned, it was with flags flying and bands playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” I went down with honors. The game took about 15 minutes, of which 14 were mine.

Here's Fischer playing Fidel Castro:

A couple years ago, I read Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time , the story of his famous chess match against Spassky which took on (like the 1980 hockey game in the Olympics) the feeling of the entire Cold War, being fought on another kind of battlefield.

Here's an excerpt (I highly recommend the book):

The most interesting phenomenon about Fischer, however, is not the effect chess had on him, but the effect chess had on his opponents, destroying their morale, making them feel that they were in the grip of an alien hostile force to his powers there was no earthly answer ... Fischer appeared to his opponents to function like a micro-chip driven automaton. He analyzed positions with amazing rapidity; his opponent always lagged behind on the clock...Nor did Fischer appear to be governed by any psychologically predetermined system or technique. Take just one example, the twenty-second move of game seven against Tigran Petrosian in the 1971 Candidates match. Who else but Fischer would have exchanged his knight for the bishop? To give up an active knight for a weak bishop was inconceivable; it seemed to violate a basic axiom of the game, to defy all experience. Yet, as Fischer proved, it was absolutely the right decision, transforming an edge into another ultimately winning advantage.

Human chess players can often feel insecure in open, complex positions because a part of them dreads the unknown. Thus they avoid exposing their king because they worry that, like a general trapped in no-man's-land, this most vital of pieces will inevitably be caught in the crossfire. Common sense and knowledge born of history tells them that this is so. An innate pessimism harries them, nagging away, warning them off the potentially hazardous move. Not Fischer. If he believed his opponent could not capitalize on an unshielded king, if he could foresee no danger, then he would permit it to stand brazenly, provocatively unguarded.

Faced with Fischer's extraordinary coolness, his opponents assurance would begin to disintegrate. A Fischer move, which at first glance looked weak, would be reassessed. It must have a deep master plan behind it, undetectable by mere mortals (more often than not, they were right, it did). The US grandmaster Robert Byrne labeled the phenomenon "Fischer-fear". Grandmasters would wilt, their suits would crumple, sweat would glisten on their brows, panic would overwhelm their nervous systems. Errors would creep in. Calculations would go awry. There was talk among grandmasters that Fischer hypnotized his opponents, that he undermined their intellectual powers with a dark, mystic, insidious force. Time after time, in long matches, Fischer's opponents would suffer a psychosomatic collapse. Fischer managed to induce migraines, the common cold, flu, high blood pressure, and exhaustion, to which he himself was mostly resistant. He liked to joke that he had never beaten a healthy opponent...

In Reykjavik to cover the match, the novelist Arthur Koestler famously coined the neologism "mimophant" to describe Fischer. "A mimophant is a hybrid species: a cross between a mimosa and an elephant. A member of this species is sensitive like a mimosa where his own feelings are concerned and thick-skinned like an elephant trampling over the feelings of others."

There is no doubt that, like a psychopath, Fischer enjoyed that feeling of complete power over his opponent. Like a psychopath, he had no moral compunction about using his power.

Here is a lengthy obit in the New York Times. Well worth reading.

Excerpt:

The 1964 tournament also produced another of his legendary games, this one against the grandmaster Robert Byrne.

“It was one of his brilliant counterattacks,” recalled Mr. Byrne, who would go on to become the chess columnist for The New York Times. “He was playing Black, and he made a deep sacrifice, so deep that I did not understand it. It was a very profound combination, very beautiful.”

Mr. Byrne ended up resigning the game while he was still materially ahead. The result was so unusual that it confounded grandmasters analyzing the games for spectators.

Frank Brady, Fischer's biographer, wrote:

[Fischer] empathizes with the position of the moment with such intensity that one feels that a defect in his game, such as a backward pawn or an ill-placed knight, causes him almost physical, and certainly psychical pain. Fischer would become the pawn if he could, or if it would help his position, marching himself rank-by-rank to the ultimate promotion square. In these moments at the board, Fischer is chess.

"I don't believe in psychology. I believe in good moves," said Bobby Fischer to The Washington Post, on the eve of the Spassky match - when he was asked if it were true that he was "on edge".

Here's a photo from the Boris Spassky / Bobby Fischer match, 1972.

Here's an excerpt from Bobby Fischer Goes to War, describing a moment in the first game of the Spassky/Fischer match in Iceland:

Then, on move twenty-nine, Fischer did the unthinkable Picking up the remaining black bishop in the long fingers of his right hand, balancing it with his thumb, index, and middle fingers, he stretched out his arm and in one movement plucked off the rook pawn with his two smaller fingers while installing the bishop in its place.

This was inexplicable. In playing Bxh2 - bishop takes the king rook pawn - Fischer had fallen into a standard trap. At first glance, the undefended white rook pawn looks as though it can be safely pinched by the black bishop. At second glance, one sees that if the pawn is taken, white's knight's pawn will be advanced one square, leaving the black bishop helplessly stranded. White can capture it with nonchalant ease. Even for the average club player, the recognition of such a danger is instinctive.

Fischer was the chess machine who did not commit errors. That was part of his aura, part of the "Bobby Fischer" legend, a key to his success. Newspapers reported a gasp of surprise spreading through the auditorium. Spassky, who had trained himself not to betray emotion, looked momentarily startled. Those who have analyzed the match were equally dumbfounded. "When I saw Bobby play the move," wrote Golombek, "I could hardly believe my eyes. He had played so sensibly and competently up to now that I first of all thought there was something deep I had overlooked; but no matter how I stared at the board I could find no way out." Nor could Robert Byrne and Ivo Nei, who analyze the game in their book on the match: "This move must be stamped as an outright blunder." The British chess player and writer C.H. O'D. Alexander's verdict is similar: "Unbelievable. By accurate play Fischer had established an obviously drawn position ... now he makes a beginner's blunder." A television pundit on the US Channel 13 reckoned it would go down as one of the great gaffes of all time. The Los Angeles Times thought it could be explained only as a "rare miscalculation by the American genius." In Moscow, the correspondent for the Soviet state newspaper Izvestia, Yuri Ponomarenko, located the move's source in sheer greed. Bondarevskii commented that the move was "a vivid example to smash the myth of [Fischer] as a computer." Anatoli Karpov, the twenty-one-year-old Soviet star in the making, had a psychological theory involving both players: Spassky was afraid of the American and had sought to prove to himself that he could always draw with the white pieces. Fischer, annoyed, attempted to disprove this. "So he sacrificed a piece without rhyme or reason."

Years later, in twenty pages of exhaustive analysis, British grandmaster Jonathan Speelman concluded that even after Fischer captured the h pawn, totally accurate play could have earned him a draw. And to be charitable to Fischer, perhaps he recognized this intuitively. But that is hardly an explanation. For such a gambit had only a downside, offering no chance of victory. At best, with extreme care, it gave him the same result - a draw - that he could have achieved without any effort at all - indeed, probably simply by asking for one.

The game was adjourned after five hours, with Fischer's position in a hopeless mess.

Given this description of just one move during the match, it is not surprising that Arthur Koestler (blistering critic of Stalinist Russia - although once a Communist himself - journalist, novelist, all-around brilliant Orwellian thinker) - who covered the Spassky/Fischer match - wrote of his experience: "Funny to be a war correspondent again after all these years."

Miguel Najdorf, Argentianian grandmaster, said of Fischer: "Fischer wants to enter history alone."

And so he has.

A fascinating complex infuriating individual. Rest in peace.

More:

Jeff shares his memories of 1972, and what that match meant to him and his friends.

The Books: "Ulysses" - the Circe episode (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Ulysses - by James Joyce.

So here's where we are at so far:

1. (TELEMACHIA)
Episode 1: The Telemachus Episode
Episode 2: The Nestor Episode
Episode 3: The Proteus episode

2. (THE ODYSSEY)
Episode 4: The Calypso Episode
Episode 5: The Lotus Eaters Episode
Episode 6: The Hades Episode
Episode 7: The Aeolus Episode
Episode 8: The Lestrygonians Episode
Episode 9: The Scylla and Charybdis Episode
Episode 10: The Wandering Rocks Episode
Episode 11: The Sirens Episode
Episode 12: The Cyclops Episode
Episode 13: The Nausicaa Episode
Episode 14: The Oxen of the Sun Episode

Circe casts a spell over Odyseeus' crew and turns them all into pigs (Odysseus is not there - the crew have been invited to her home for dinner, and she poisons their meal and then waves her magic wand: Oink Oink). Circe's dad is Helios, the son god (which is obviously connected to the Oxen of the Sun episode) ... she lives on the island of Aeaea. Her home is surrounded by lions and other fierce animals, and she has the ability to turn her enemies into something else. She's also an expert on herbs, drugs of every kind (which could possibly explain the acid-trip energy of the Circe chapter!) One of the men had escaped, because he suspected all was not right in the state of Denmark - and ran off to tell Odysseus what had happened. Hermes gives Odysseus some advice before he tries to charge the castle to rescue his men: he gave him an herb to help him resist the potion Circe had given all the other men. He also told him to draw his sword as though he wanted to fight Circe. Circe would then want to sleep with him - because she was just that kinda gal. Hermes told Odysseus to always be wary of her, even if they did become lovers (which they did) - and to always be on his guard - because she could take his manhood away, she was that potentially awful. But Circe ends up, after a year of them living together as lovers, helping him on his journey home.

You can KIND of see the connection with the Circe episode - there's one point (if I recall correctly) that Bloom is tranformed into a pig, and I am sure there are many others. The episode begins after the men's time at the maternity hospital - and they all head over to "Nighttown", the red-light district. They go to Bella's brothel, on Tyrone Street, en masse. Dedalus, at this point, is not strictly aware of the fact that Bloom is now following him, to keep an eye on him.

But before I go further, I have to just mention the style of this particular episode, because it can't be denied - and it's hard to talk about the writing without acknowledging the extraordinary crazy style it's written in. It's written like a play. We get stage directions in italics (sometimes the stage directions go on for over a page) - and we get dialogue. Nothing internal. Because the form is in a play, a performance of some kind - all kinds of supposedly unreal things can (and do) happen. Kisses take the form of birds. Clocks actually talk and have lines. People from the past appear as literal apparitions. Paddy Dignam (dead, as we know) has a role. The climax of the episode is when Stephen's dead mother appears to him in the ceiling - and he goes batshit crazy, swinging his walking stick at the chandelier, trying to banish the image. It is not clear what is real, what is unreal. It's all one. It's like a drug trip. If you do hallucinogenic drugs, it's not LIKE the walls are breathing in and out. The walls are ACTUALLY breathing in and out. That's the world we are in here. Bloom is on a mission to save Stephen. He can sense Stephen's pain - and he also knows Stephen is wasted, so therefore he is vulnerable to the treachery of the whores, who could steal his money, etc. Bloom tries to make it clear that he is not there for himself. But it ends up not mattering. Bella (or Bello - as she is also called) is the mistress of the house, the main whore. It's her joint. So she emerges ... and hones in on Bloom (when you read the book, look for all the references to pigs and hogs. They're everywhere). She begins to break Bloom down - psychologically, bringing forth all of his sexual fantasies. They become real. It is all about debasement, Bloom groveling on the floor before the female, licking her boots, etc. It's shocking, all of it. Bloom has been so (pun intended) buttoned up for the whole book - except for his confrontation with the Citizen ... so to see him completely undone and transformed into a sniveling masochistic slave-boy - is totally disorienting, and it's meant to be so.

The connection with the Circe episode in The Odyssey seems clear - although perhaps once removed. There is a fear that un-leashed sexuality will turn us into animals. Literally. Not metaphorically. And so the human race has a great investment in limiting the expression of sex, so that it never goes as far as that. Keep it domesticated, keep it in marriage, keep it safe. We are NOT animals. We are above them. Joyce, in the Circe episode, shows the foolishness of such thinking, however understandable. Sex is, by definition, animalistic. And fantasies shows us who we are. Dreams show us who we are. Joyce needed to show Bloom's inner life - in a way that Bloom could never do himself. So he placed Bloom in this phantasmagorical brothel, where he's under a spell, where inanimate objects have voices, where nymphs sing in a chorus, etc. - so that we can see his inner life, his deepest desires. Masochistic, he yearns for a sadist. He has a vague sense of guilt about everything (perhaps dating back to the death of his son) - and so sexually, he wants to grovel, and beg and plead for forgiveness. Bella, like all good whores, knows how to bring it out of him. She sees it, senses it, and goes for it. There is a catharsis in being debased - and again, if you don't have that sexual proclivity you might find this utterly baffling. And maybe even threatening or gross. Perhaps in Bloom's conscious mind, he is grossed out by himself, that he wants these things, that debasement brings sexual satisfaction. That is certainly not a socially acceptable position to take, and the powers-that-be who want to domesticate sex - will never ever go for such a thing. So the Circe episode (which, I think, might be the longest in the entire book) - brings that which is socially feared - out into the open. It's almost scary, because nothing here is really real. For example, at one point - one of the whores refers to Mr. Bloom as "ma'amsir". A blend of the two sexes. I don't even have to tell you the response many have to such "blending". (I'm sure Alex could fill you in! Ironically, and perfectly - Alex played Bella in a production of Ulysses in Chicago - and our very first conversation - outside of our blogs, I mean - was a phone converstaion where she grilled me about Ulysses, in preparation for playing her role. It's one of my sadnesses that I did not get to see that production!! I'm sure she was brilliant!) But Joyce, in his imagination, and his heart - feels that we are all a bit of both sexes. The fear of merging is intense with some people ... they assert "this is what woman is", "this is what man is" ... and sadly (for them, I mean - since they;'re the ones who seem tormented by the thought that people are having sex in ways which they do not approve) many of us do not live by those rules.

And so we think we know Bloom. But then we realize: Wow. We don't know him at all. (This is a great point to make, though. The judgmental attitude towards other people's sex lives and what form it takes- needs to always be confronted, and at least questioned. Because we all do it - judge, I mean. Much of it comes from fear. Some of it comes from blatant incomprehension, like: 'Wow. You're into that?? That doesn't appeal to me at ALL.' And that's cool - as long as you have the humility to realize that your way is not the only way ... But at some point, on our journey thru life - as we grow older, and gain experience - we realize that you just never know what goes on behind closed doors ...you realize that those two 50 year old prim and proper American Gothic-looking people may have the hottest most subversive sex behind closed doors ... and you just never know. So lose the superior attitude. Lose the judgment. Lose all of it.)

We know Bloom's thoughts, his dietary likes and dislikes, the way he kisses, the way he walks, we know his speech patterns now, we know he's a bit clumsy ... we know he has hidden depths of strength and anger ... but we don't know everything. We realize in this chapter how important fantasy is ... and how human beings are made of their fantasies, wishes, desires, unfulfilled longings, haunting memories ... all of those ephemeral things that can take on a reality even more solid than that which is actually real. The last moment of the Circe episode is horrifying, since we have already been prepared for it. Bloom, after his catharsis of sexual debasement with Bella, gets a vision of his dead son Rudy. Is that a dagger I see before me. It is a hallucination, but it is, at the same time, completely real.

It's devastating. It echoes Stephen's devastation at seeing his mother's face in the ceiling of the brothel. That which remains unresolved in our psyches, will come back to haunt us, in greater and more hallucinatory forms. Man, I've experienced that in my own life, with various things. Things I have not dealt with, or healed (however uncompletely) will morph into ... almost a movie-monster in my head, something to be battled, or just flat out feared. Run!! Run!!

The Circe episode - which is a romp and a half, I tell you ... ends with a fight out on the sidewalk. Bloom has rescued Stephen from the clutches of the whores, and has also rescued him from the damage he did to the chandelier. Bloom has also exorcised a couple of demons - which is not a pleasant experience, all in all ... but groveling around in front of Bella for nigh on 15 pages. You feel like you need to take a break after the Circe episode, with its acid-trip images, its fantastical settings, its insistence that nothing is real. You yearn for something solid, something known and set in stone ... it's disorienting. Sex, I suppose, is also disorienting. Or has the potential to be so. Especially if, like Bloom, the main fantasies are never expressed. I'm not just talking about sexual fantasies - although Joyce was big on that ... but the grief over his son's death, the horror of guilt he feels ... all of that has been pushed so far down that when it emerges, here, it takes on dreadful proportions.

Circe is also a very funny chapter, even with its dark underbelly. The language reminds me a bit of Jean Genet's plays - with their violent imagery, the precise articulation of horrors and desire, the feeling of explosiveness running thru everything ... and also just a general subversive milieu. People in Genet's plays are the so-called freaks of the world: the sadists, the masochists, the sex slaves, the dominatrix-es, the whipping boys, the drug addicts and street urchins. There is a level of society where fantasies are meant to be acted out. There are a bazillion websites devoted to such things. But then when you read, oh, Glamour magazine, or some un-subversive magazine - the emotionally tortured questions like, "My husband wants me to dress up as a French maid ... Is that okay? Or is it weird that he would want that? What's the matter with me as myself?" Now, I am NOT making fun of people who find fantasies threatening or scary. They ARE threatening and scary. Because they require of us a dissolution of our everyday and well-known public personality. And that is, in general, terrifying. A common question in women's magazines is: "I have a fantasy of being raped. I'm really disturbed by that ... does it mean I want to be raped?" There is a discomfort with blending the fantasy world with the real world. And rightly so - because those who cannot disconnect the fantasy from the real are called mentally ill. HOWEVER. "Acting out" fantasies can be quite cathartic and awesome. And yes, scary, at the same time. So - there are those who want to delve into that stuff, and act stuff out, and dress up, and whatever ... this kind of lifestyle will probably never be socially acceptable to what is known as the "vanilla" crowd (and that's okay by me. What's the fun of being subversive if the mainstream gives its stamp of approval?) ... So Bloom, who is full of sexual anxiety about his wife - can he satisfy her, can he live up to Blazes Boylan ... wants to give up all of that power, wants to surrender completely to the female ... that is his how his sexuality truly expresses itself (but it can only come out under the influence of the whorehouse. What Bloom goes through in the Circe episode is probably 100% new to him. Which is why it's so disorienting and potentially terrifying.)

Joyce was not at all a libertine. He was a one-woman man, and stayed with the same woman for, what, 40 years or something like that. He was quite conservative in many ways, and was a family man. Granted, an insane-genius family man perpetually in mounds of debt ... but you know, there are stories of all the ex-pats in Paris, whooping it up at some table - drinking, going nuts, having affairs, etc. ... and over in the corner sat the Joyce family - mom, dad, 2 little kids - having dinner (that they couldn't afford), and drinking white wine. In a funny way, Joyce - who was the biggest rebel of them all, to the point that he couldn't even live in Ireland - was more conventional than all the other writers living in Europe at that time. BUT. And this is important. Because we know of James' and Nora's "dirty letters" (as they are referred to) - we know the vibrancy and activity of their sex life - as well as Joyce's fantasies, and what was desirable to him, etc. I'm not saying this to gross out the TMI set (although, Jesus, anyone who chirps "TMI" at the least provocation is going to have a helluva time with Joyce, who didn't have a TMI bone in his body) ... But anyway, I'm only referring to the "dirty letters" to point out that James and Nora were quite domesticated (in their ex-pat living-on-nothing way) - they were a pair, they traveled together, they had 2 kids, they were messy housekeepers. All relatively normal compared to the experiences of other writers living abroad at that time. James and Nora weren't rolling around in a garret, having 20 lovers and menage a trois experiences every other weekend. But behind closed doors? James and Nora were filthy!! They were open, sexy, dirty, sharing fantasies, Nora sent him her underwear thru the mail - you know, your basic stuff. But to look at them? You'd never guess. Joyce could never have been a husband to a woman who judged that side of him, the dirty-minded side. And who knows, maybe Nora did find him nuts on some level ... and found his fantasies boring or tiresome. But she played along. She did not get snippety, prissy, or judge-y about what he wanted in the sack. I can't imagine Joyce being able to deal with a neat ladylike little lady, domesticated in her DNA. Nope. Nora was a bit wild. And really, you never can guess about another human being. You would probably be wrong. In the same way we have been wrong about Bloom.

Joyce is the ultimate humanist.

Here's an excerpt. This is from the beginning of the incredibly long encounter between Bloom and Bella (or Bello - she is known as both). Bella sets out to dominate him, break him down. He transforms from male to female, from human to animal ... Under her spell. Bloom - Leopold Bloom - the man we feel we know - is suddenly female, and submissive - like he's the narrator in Story of O or something. Or he's Sleeping Beauty in Anne Rice's erotic trilogy - a slave on display, sexually, in the middle of the market square. It's wild! Also: there's the sense that he - Bloom - is on trial (Bello says to him, at one point, referencing Blazes Boylan: "He's no eunuch." Ouch!). This is an ongoing theme through the chapter: Bloom's guilt and shame about all kinds of things - coming to the surface - and being put before the world in a court of law. So human, I have felt that way myself. Oh, and look for the pig references.

Oh and notice the random reference to the "secondbest bed" - a wonderful looping back to the theme of Shakespeare, Hamlet, and fatherlessness - which is, in reality, the TRUE driving force of this scene. Bloom has come to the brothel to save Stephen from being taken advantage of. And Bloom gets caught in Circe's (Bella's) spell ... and his catharsis is enormous, the debasement and humiliation he has felt all day pouring forth in a sexual fantasy which is really quite gross ... but it's his ... and it serves his purpose ... And Stephen, drunk, is confronted by the ghost of his mother ... and goes so apeshit that he is thrown out of the brothel. Bloom follows. He is a guardian angel. He is the father to the son. He assumes that role - as he becomes fully Man again.

Wild stuff.

Ack, sorry - one last thing: The Circe episode - which is almost 200 pages long - is the last episode in the Odyssey section of the book (see breakdown above). After this, we are in the Nostos ("return") section - the mirror-image of the Telemachia at the beginning ... The Nostos is also 3 episodes long, and involves Bloom's return home. Finally.

But it isn't until Bloom has turned himself inside out in the hallucinatory world of the brothel ... that he is ready to head home to his wife, to his life, to himself. He must "go there" first, before he can return.

EXCERPT FROM Ulysses - by James Joyce - the Circe episode

(Bella raises her gown slightly and, steadying her pose, lifts to the edge of a chair a plump buskined hoof and a full pastern, silksocked. Bloom, stifflegged ageing, bends over her hoof and with gentle fingers draws out and in her laces.)

BLOOM (Murmurs lovingly.) To be a shoefitter in Mansfield's was my love's young dream, the darling joys of sweet buttonhooking, to lace up crisscrossed to kneelength the dressy kid footwear satinlined, so incredibly small, of Clyde Road ladies. Even their wax model Raymonde I visited daily to admire her cobweb hose and stick of rhubarb toe, as worn in Paris. THE HOOF Smell my hot goathide. Feel my royal weight. BLOOM (Crosslacing.) Too tight? THE HOOF If you bungle, Handy Andy, I'll kick your football for you. BLOOM Not to lace the wrong eyelet as I did the night of the bazaar dance. Bad luck. Nook in wrong tache of her... person you mentioned. That night she met... Now!

(He knots the lace. Bella places her foot on the floor. Bloom raises his head. Her heavy face, her eyes strike him in mid-brow. His eyes grow dull, darker and pouched, his nose thickens.)

BLOOM (Mumbles.) Awaiting your further orders, we remain, gentlemen. BELLO (With a hard basilisk stare, in a baritone voice.) Hound of dishonour! BLOOM (Infatuated.) Empress! BELLO (His heavy cheekchops sagging.) Adorer of the adulterous rump! BLOOM (Plaintively.) Hugeness! BELLO Dungdevourer! BLOOM (With sinews semiflexed.) Magnificence. BELLO Down! (He taps her on the shoulder with his fan.) Incline feet forward! Slide left foot one pace back. You will fall. You are falling. On the hands down! BLOOM (Her eyes upturned in the sign of admiration, closing.) Truffles!

(With a piercing epileptic cry she sinks on all fours, grunting, snuffling, rooting at his feet, then lies, shamming dead with eyes shut tight, trembling eyelids, bowed upon the ground in the attitude of most excellent master.)

BELLO (With bobbed hair purple gills, fat moustache rings round his shaven mouth, in mountaineer's puttees, green silverbuttoned coat, sport skirt and alpine hat with moor cock's feather, his hands stuck deep in his breeches pockets, places his heel on her neck and grinds it in.) Feel my entire weight. Bow, bondslave, before the throne of your despot's glorious heels, so glistening in their proud erectness. BLOOM (Enthralled, bleats.) I promise never to disobey. BELLO (Laughs loudly.) Holy smoke! You little know what's in store for you. I'm the tartar to settle your little lot and break you in! I'll bet Kentucky cocktails all round I shame it out of you, old son. Cheek me, I dare you. If you do tremble in anticipation of heel discipline to be inflicted in gym costume.

(Bloom creeps under the sofa and peers out through the fringe.)

ZOE (Widening her slip to screen her.) She's not here. BLOOM (Closing her eyes.) She's not here. FLORRY (Hiding her with her gown.) She didn't mean it, Mr Bello. She'll be good, sir. KITTY Don't be too hard on her, Mr Bello. Sure you won't, ma'amsir. BELLO (Coaxingly.) Come, ducky dear. I want a word with you, darling, just to administer correction. Just a little heart to heart talk, sweety. (Bloom puts out her timid head.) There's a good girly now. (Bello grabs her hair violently and drags her forward.) I only want to correct you for your own good on a soft safe spot. How's that tender behind? O, ever so gently, pet. Begin to get ready. BLOOM (Fainting.) Don't tear my. BELLO (Savagely.) The nosering, the pliers, the bastinado, the hanging hook, the knout I'll make you kiss while the flutes play like the Nubian slave of old. You're in for it this time. I'll make you remember me for the balance of your natural life. (His forehead veins swollen, his face congested.) I shall sit on your ottoman saddleback every morning after my thumping good breakfast of Matterson's fat ham rashers and a bottle of Guinness's porter. (He belches.) And suck my thumping good Stock Exchange cigar while I read the Licensed Victualler's Gazette. Very possibly I shall have you slaughtered and skewered in my stables and enjoy a slice Of you with crisp crackling from the baking tin basted and baked like sucking pig with rice and lemon or currant sauce. It will hurt you.

(He twists her arm. Bloom squeaks, turning turtle.)

BLOOM Don't be cruel, nurse! Don't! BELLO (Twisting.) Another! BLOOM (Screams.) O, it's hell itself! Every nerve in my body aches like mad! BELLO (Shouts.) Good, by the rumping jumping general! That's the best bit of news I heard these six weeks. Here, don't keep me waiting, damn you. (He slaps her face.) BLOOM (Whimpers.) You're after hitting me. I'll tell... BELLO Hold him down, girls, till I squat on him. ZOE Yes. Walk on him! I will. FLORRY I will. Don't be greedy. KITTY No, me. Lend him to me.

(The brothel cook, Mrs Keogh, wrinkled, greybearded, in a greasy bib, men's grey and green socks and brogues, flour-smeared, a rollingpin stuck with raw pastry in her bare red arm and hand, appears at the door.)

MRS KEOGH (Ferociously.) Can I help? (They hold and pinion Bloom.) BELLO (Squats, with a grunt, on Bloom's upturned face, puffing cigar-smoke, nursing a fat leg.) I see Keating Clay is elected chairman of the Richmond Asylum and bytheby Guinness's preference shares are at sixteen three quarters. Curse me for a fool that I didn't buy that lot Craig and Gardner told me about. Just my infernal luck, curse it. And that Goddamned outsider Throwaway at twenty to one. (He quenches his cigar angrily on Bloom's ear.) Where's that Goddamned cursed ashtray? BLOOM (Goaded, buttocksmothered.) O! O! Monsters! Cruel one! BELLO Ask for that every ten minutes. Beg, pray for it as you never prayed before. (He thrusts out a figged fist and foul cigar.) Here, kiss that. Both. Kiss. (He throws a leg astride and, pressing with horseman's knees, calls in a hard voice.) Gee up! A cockhorse to Banbury cross. I'll ride him for the Eclipse stakes. (He bends sideways and squeezes his mount's testicles roughly, shouting.) Ho! off we pop! I'll nurse you in proper fashion. (He horserides cockhorse, leaping in the saddle.) The lady goes a pace a pace and the coachman goes a trot a trot and the gentleman goes a gallop a gallop a gallop a gallop. FLORRY (Pulls at Bello.) Let me on him now. You had enough. I asked before you. ZOE (Pulling at Florry.) Me. Me. Are you not finished with him yet, suckeress? BLOOM (Stifling.) Can't. BELLO Well, I'm not. Wait. (He holds in his breath.) Curse it. Here. This bung's about burst. (He uncorks himself behind: then, contorting his features, farts loudly.) Take that! (He recorks himself) Yes, by Jingo, sixteen three quarters. BLOOM (A sweat breaking out over him.) Not man. (He sniffs.) Woman. BELLO (Stands up.) No more blow hot and cold. What you longed for has come to pass. Henceforth you are unmanned and mine in earnest, a thing under the yoke. Now for your punishment frock. You will shed your male garments, you understand, Ruby Cohen? and don the shot silk luxuriously rustling over head and shoulders and quickly too. BLOOM (Shrinks.) Silk, mistress said! O crinkly! scrapy! Must I tip-touch it with my nails? BELLO (Points to his whores.) As they are now, so will you be, wigged, singed, perfumesprayed, ricepowdered, with smoothshaven armpits. Tape measurements will be taken next your skin. You will be laced with cruel force into vicelike corsets of soft dove coutille, with whalebone busk, to the diamond trimmed pelvis, the absolute outside edge, while your figure, plumper than when at large, will be restrained in nettight frocks, pretty two ounce petticoats and fringes and things stamped, of course, with my houseflag, creations of lovely lingerie for Alice and nice scent for Alice. Alice will feel the pullpull. Martha and Mary will be a little chilly at first in such delicate thighcasing but the frilly flimsiness of lace round your bare knees will remind you... BLOOM (A chafing soubrette with dauby cheeks, mustard hair and lace male hands and nose, leering mouth.) I tried her things on only once, a small prank, in Holles street. When we were hardup I washed them to save the laundry bill. My own shirts I turned. It was the purest thrift. BELLO (Jeers.) Little jobs that make mother pleased, eh! and showed off coquettishly in your domino at the mirror behind close-drawn blinds your unskirted thighs and hegoat's udders, in various poses of surrender, eh? Ho! Ho! I have to laugh! That secondhand black operatop shift and short trunk leg naughties all split up the stitches at her last rape that Mrs Miriam Dandrade sold you from the Shelbourne Hotel, eh? BLOOM Miriam, Black. Demimondaine. BELLO (Guffaws.) Christ Almighty, it's too tickling, this! You were a nicelooking Miriam when you clipped off your backgate hairs and lay swooning in the thing across the bed as Mrs Dandrade, about to be violated by Lieutenant Smythe Smythe, Mr Philip Augustus Blockwell, M.P., Signor Laci Daremo, the robust tenor, blueeyed Bert, the liftboy, Henry Fleury of Gordon Bennett fame, Sheridan, the quadroon Cr&Aelig;sus, the varsity wetbob eight from old Trinity, Ponto, her splendid Newfoundland and Bobs, dowager duchess of Manorhamilton. (He guffaws again.) Christ, wouldn't it make a Siamese cat laugh? BLOOM (Her hands and features working.) It was Gerald converted me to be a true corsetlover when I was female impersonator in the High School play Vice Versa. It was dear Gerald. He got that kink, fascinated by sister's stays. Now dearest Gerald uses pinky greasepaint and gilds his eyelids. Cult of the beautiful. BELLO (With wicked glee.) Beautiful! Give us a breather! When you took your seat with womanish care, lifting your billowy flounces, on the smoothworn throne. BLOOM Science. To compare the various joys we each enjoy. (Earnestly.) And really it's better the position... because often I used to wet. BELLO (Sternly.) No insubordination. The sawdust is there in the corner for you. I gave you strict instructions, didn't I? Do it standing, sir! I'll teach you to behave like a jinkleman! If I catch a trace on your swaddles. Aha! By the ass of the Dorans you'll find I'm a martinet. The sins of your past are rising against you. Many. Hundreds. THE SINS OF THE PAST (In a medley of voices.) He went through a form of clandestine marriage with at least one woman in the shadow of the Black Church. Unspeakable messages he telephoned mentally to Miss Dunn at an address in d'Olier Street while he presented himself indecently to the instrument in the callbox. By word and deed he encouraged a nocturnal strumpet to deposit fecal and other matter in an unsanitary outhouse attached to empty premises. In five public conveniences he wrote pencilled messages offering his nuptial partner to all strongmembered males. And by the offensively smelling vitriol works did he not pass night after night by loving courting couples to see if and what and how much he could see? Did he not lie in bed, the gross boar, gloating over a nauseous fragment of wellused toilet paper presented to him by a nasty harlot, stimulated by gingerbread and a postal order? BELLO (Whistles loudly.) Say! What was the most revolting piece of obscenity in all your career of crime? Go the whole hog. Puke it out. Be candid for once.

(Mute inhuman faces throng forward, leering, vanishing, gibbering, Eooloohoom. Poldy Hock, Bootlaces a penny, cassidy's hag, blind stripling, Larry Rhinoceros, the girl, the woman, the whore, the other the... )

BLOOM Don't ask me. Our mutual faith. Pleasants street. I only thought the half of the... I swear on my sacred oath... BELLO (Peremptorily.) Answer. Repugnant wretch! I insist on knowing. Tell me something to amuse me, smut or a bloody good-ghoststory or a line of poetry, quick, quick, quick! Where? How? What time? With how many? I give you just three seconds. One! Two! Thr... ! BLOOM (Docile, gurgles.) I rererepugnosed in rerererepugnant... BELLO (Imperiously.) O get out, you skunk! Hold your tongue! Speak when you're spoken to. BLOOM (Bows.) Master! Mistress! Mantamer!

(He lifts his arms. His bangle bracelets fall.)

BELLO (Satirically.) By day you will souse and bat our smelling underclothes, also when we ladies are unwell, and swab out our latrines with dress pinned up and a dishclout tied to your tail. Won't that be nice? (He places a ruby ring on her finger.) And there now! With this ring I thee own. Say, thank you, mistress. BLOOM Thank you, mistress. BELLO You will make the beds, get my tub ready, empty the pisspots in the different rooms, including old Mrs Keogh's the cook's, a sandy one. Ay, and rinse the seven of them well, mind, or lap it up like champagne. Drink me piping hot. Hop! you will dance attendance or I'll lecture you on your misdeeds, Miss Ruby, and spank your bare bot right well, miss, with the hairbrush. You'll be taught the error of your ways. At night your wellcreamed braceleted hands will wear fortythreebutton gloves newpowdered with talc and having delicately scented fingertips. For such favours knights of old laid down their lives. (He chuckles.) My boys will be no end charmed to see you so ladylike, the colonel, above all. When they come here the night before the wedding to fondle my new attraction in gilded heels. First, I'll have a go at you myself. A man I know on the turf named Charles Alberta Marsh (I was in bed with him just now and another gentleman out of the Hanaper and Petty Bag office) is on the lookout for a maid of all work at a short knock. Swell the bust. Smile. Droop shoulders. What offers? (He points.) For that lot trained by owner to fetch and carry, basket in mouth. (He bares his arm and plunges it elbowdeep in Bloom's vulva.) There's fine depth for you! What, boys? That give you a hardon? (He shoves his arm in a bidder's face.) Here, wet the deck and wipe it round! A BIDDER A florin!

(Dillon's lacquey rings his handbell.)

A VOICE One and eightpence too much. THE LACQUEY Barang! CHARLES ALBERTA MARSH Must be virgin. Good breath. Clean. BELLO (Gives a rap with his gavel.) Two bar. Rockbottom figure and cheap at the price. Fourteen hands high. Touch and examine his points. Handle him. This downy skin, these soft muscles, this tender flesh. If I had only my gold piercer here! And quite easy to milk. Three newlaid gallons a day. A pure stock getter, due to lay within the hour. His sire's milk record was a thousand gallons of whole milk in forty weeks. Whoa, my jewel! Beg up! Whoa! (He brands his initial Con Bloom's croup.) So! Warranted Cohen! What advance on two bob, gentlemen? A DARKVISAGED MAN (In disguised accent.) Hoondert punt sterlink. VOICES (Subdued.) For the Caliph Haroun Al Raschid. BELLO (Gaily.) Right. Let them all come. The scanty, daringly short skirt, riding up at the knee to show a peep of white pantalette, is a potent weapon and transparent stockings, emeraldgartered, with the long straight seam trailing up beyond the knee, appeal to the better instincts of the blasé man about town. Learn the smooth mincing walk on four inch Louis XV heels, the Grecian bend with provoking croup, the thighs fluescent, knees modestly kissing. Bring all your power of fascination to bear on them. Pander to their Gomorrahan vices. BLOOM (Bends his blushing face into his armpit and simpers with forefinger in mouth.) O, I know what you're hinting at now. BELLO What else are you good for, an impotent thing like you? (He stoops and, peering, pokes with his fan rudely under the fat suetfolds of Bloom's haunches.) Up! Up! Manx cat! What have we here? Where's your curly teapot gone to or who docked it on you, cockyolly? Sing, birdy, sing. It's as limp as a boy of six's doing his pooly behind a cart. Buy a bucket or sell your pump. (Loudly.) Can you do a man's job? BLOOM Eccles Street. BELLO (Sarcastically.) I wouldn't hurt your feelings for the world but there's a man of brawn in possession there. The tables are turned, my gay young fellow! He is something like a fullgrown outdoor man. Well for you, you muff, if you had that weapon with knobs and lumps and warts all over it. He shot his bolt, I can tell you! Foot to foot, knee to knee, belly to belly, bubs to breast! He's no eunuch. A shock of red hair he has sticking out of him behind like a furzebush! Wait for nine months, my lad! Holy ginger, it's kicking and coughing up and down in her guts already! That makes you wild, don't it? Touches the spot? (He spits in contempt.) Spittoon! BLOOM I was indecently treated, I... inform the police. Hundred pounds. Unmentionable. I. BELLO Would if you could, lame duck. A downpour we want, not your drizzle. BLOOM To drive me mad! Moll! I forgot! Forgive! Moll!... We... Still... BELLO (Ruthlessly.) No, Leopold Bloom, all is changed by woman's will since you slept horizontal in Sleepy Hollow your night of twenty years. Return and see.

(Old Sleepy Hollow calls over the wold.)

SLEEPY HOLLOW Rip Van Winkle! Rip Van Winkle! BLOOM (In tattered moccasins with a rusty fowlingpiece, tip toeing, fingertipping, his haggard bony bearded face peering through the diamond panes, cries out.) I see her! It's she! The first night at Mat Dillon's! But that dress, the green! And her hair is dyed gold and he. BELLO (Laughs mockingly.) That's your daughter, you owl, with a Mullingar student.

(Milly Bloom, fairhaired, greenvested, slimsandalled, her bluescab in the seawind simply swirling, breaks from the arms of her lover and calls, her young eyes wonderwide.)

MILLY My! It's Papli! But. O Papli, how old you've grown! BELLO Changed, eh? Our whatnot, our writing table where we never wrote, Aunt Hegarty's armchair, our classic reprints of old masters. A man and his men friends are living there in clover. The Cuckoos' Rest! Why not? How many women had you, say? Following them up dark streets, flatfoot, exciting them by your smothered grunts. What, you male prostitute? Blameless dames with parcels of groceries. Turn about. Sauce for the goose, my gander, O. BLOOM They... I... BELLO (Cuttingly.) Their heelmarks will stamp the Brusselette carpet you bought at Wren's auction. In their horseplay with Moll the romp to find the buck flea in her breeches they will deface the little statue you carried home in the rain for art for art's sake. They will violate the secrets of your bottom drawer. Pages will be torn from your handbook of astronomy to make them pipespills. And they will spit in your ten shilling brass fender from Hampton Leedom's. BLOOM Ten and six. The act of low scoundrels. Let me go. I will return. I will prove... A VOICE Swear!

(Bloom clenches his fists and crawls forward, a bowie knife between his teeth.)

BELLO As a paying guest or a kept man? Too late. You have made your secondbest bed and others must lie in it. Your epitaph is written. You are down and out and don't you forget it, old bean. BLOOM Justice! All Ireland versus one! Has nobody... ?

(He bites his thumb.)

BELLO Die and be damned to you if you have any sense of decency or grace about you. I can give you a rare old wine that'll send you skipping to hell and back. Sign a will and leave us any coin you have. If you have none see you damn well get it, steal it, rob it! We'll bury you in our shrubbery jakes where you'll be dead and dirty with old Cuck Cohen, my stepnephew I married, the bloody old gouty procurator and sodomite with a crick in his neck, and my other ten or eleven husbands, what ever the buggers' names were, suffocated in the one cess pool. (He explodes in a loud phlegmy laugh.) We'll manure you, Mr Flower! (He pipes scoffingly.) Byby, Poldy! Byby, Papli! BLOOM (Clasps his head.) My will power! Memory! I have sinned! I have suff...

(He weeps tearlessly.)

BELLO (Sneers.) Crybabby! Crocodile tears!

(Bloom, broken, closely veiled for the sacrifice, sobs, his face to the earth. The passing bell is heard. Darkshawled figures of the circumcised, in sackcloth and ashes, stand by the wailing wall. M. Shulomowitz, Joseph Goldwater Moses Herzog, Harris Rosenberg, M. Moisel, J. Citron, Minnie Watchman, 0. Mastiansky, the Reverend Leopold Abramovitz, Chazen. With swaying arms they wail in pneuma over the recreant Bloom.)

THE CIRCUMCISED (In a dark guttural chant as they cast dead sea fruit upon him, no flowers.) Shema Israel Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echad. VOICES (Sighing.) So he's gone. Ah, yes. Yes, indeed. Bloom? Never heard of him. No? Queer kind of chap. There's the widow. That so? Ah, yes.

(From the suttee pyre the flame of gum camphire ascends. The pall of incense smoke screens and disperses. Out of her oak frame a nymph with hair unbound, lightly clad in teabrown art colours, descends from her grotto and passing under interlacing yews, stands over Bloom.)

THE YEWS (Their leaves whispering.) Sister. Our sister. Ssh. THE NYMPH (Softly.) Mortal! (Kindly.) Nay, dost not weepest! BLOOM (Crawls jellily forward under the boughs, streaked by sunlight, with dignity.) This position. I felt it was expected of me. Force of habit.

Happy birthday, Archie Leach!

Today is Cary Grant's birthday. So unfurling below are a ton of quotes, anecdotes, excerpts - about my favorite actor of all time!

Archie Leach day: Cary Grant's streetcar

Cary Grant and Peter Bogdonavich were very good friends, despite the age difference, and also their wildly different ways of handling celebrity status.

Cary Grant kept as low a profile as he possibly could, and did his best to avoid scandal and bad publicity. He kept his personal life as hidden as he was able, although inevitably people were interested in his marriages, divorces, etc. But he never willingly opened up his personal life to the tabloids.

Peter Bogdonavich, while certainly an incredible director, kind of went off the deep end with the personal publicity- and he courted it (during his romance to Cybill Shepherd). Shepherd broke up his marriage (to his long-time creative partner - many people credited much of his success to her - so it wasn't just an anonymous wife he dumped. She was a part of the industry, people knew her, respected her, worked with her ... Bogdonavich made a lot of enemies when he dumped her). So Cybill Shepherd (barely out of her teenage years) had an aura of "the other woman" around her through the whole thing, and scandal swirled about the pair, and there they were - out at every party, at every awards show, grinning, and gushing, and laughing at the camera.

Cary Grant, with his sense of propriety, etc., thought it was unseemly. While Bogdonavich and Shepherd were doing the talk-show circuit, and flaunting their happiness, Cary Grant pulled Bogdonavich aside and said something like: "Peter, nobody cares that you are happy. Stop telling everyone how in love you are and how happy you are. It will make people hate you, because in general, people are NOT in love and people are NOT happy." And very soon, that publicity onslaught crashed, and inverted, and Bogdonavich sunk down into a morass of his own making, when the circumstances of his life went catastrophically bad. (The whole Dorothy Stratten thing. Awful.)

Bogdonavich related this story much later in his life, saying that only with time passing could he realize how right Grant was. Grant always held stuff back from the public, knowing how fickle the public was, and how easily tired the public got. Grant was completely open and available in his acting, and then was reserved and withdrawn about his private life.

Cary Grant stuck by Bogdonavich through his troubles, and at one point, Grant shared with Bogdonavich an analogy he came up with for how Hollywood operated. I love it. And I also love the very end of it. Typical Cary Grant humility.

Check it out:

Becoming a movie star is something like getting on a streetcar. Actors and actresses are packed in like sardines.

When I arrived in Hollywood, Carole Lombard, Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, Warner Baxter, Greta Garbo, Fred Astaire, and others were crammed onto the car. A few stood, holding tightly to leather straps to avoid being pushed aside. Others were firmly seated in the center of the car. They were the big stars. At the front, new actors and actresses pushed and shoved to get aboard. Some made it and slowly moved toward the center.

When a new "star" came aboard, an old one had to be edged out the rear exit. The crowd was so big you were pushed right off. There was room for only so many and no more.

One well-known star, Adolphe Menjou, was constantly being pushed off the rear. He would pick himself up, brush himself off, and run to the front to fight his way aboard again. In a short time he was back in the center only to be pushed off once more. This went on for years. He never did get to sit down.

It took me quite a while to reach the center. When I did make it, I remained standing. I held on to that leather strap for dear life. Then Warner Baxter fell out the back, and I got to sit down.

When Gregory Peck got on, it was Ronald Colman who fell off.

The only man who refused to budge was Gary Cooper. Gary was firmly seated in the center of the car. He just leaned back, stuck those long legs of his out in the aisle, and tripped everyone who came along.

When Joan Fontaine got on, she stood right in front of me and held on to one of those leather straps. I naturally got to my feet, giving her my seat. Joan sat down and got an Academy Award!

HA!

Archie Leach day: the Howard Hawks woman

Howard Hawks directed Only Angels Have Wings in 1939, and To Have and Have Not in 1944. In between he directed His Girl Friday, Sergeant York, Ball of Fire, and Air Force. In these films, he was still working on the male-female dynamic, what he saw, what he looked for, what he loved about women, the kind of men he admired ... searching for the perfect woman. His tastes were very specific, and now we can even call them "Hawksian".

Many of the ideas about all of this were touched upon in Only Angels Have Wings - but in To Have and Have Not - all of that stuff takes center stage. Hawks has gotten clearer about what he wants, and clearer about how to EXPRESS all of it.

Only Angels Have Wings feels a little bit like a rough draft of To Have and Have Not.

In both films, Hawks has the lead female character say to the lead male character:

"I'm hard to get. All you have to do is ask me."

Same exact line. The line is deceptively simple. There's a lot going on there. It seems, at first, that what it SHOULD say is: "I'm not hard to get. All you have to do is ask me." But it doesn't, it says "I'm hard to get." Which makes a much deeper kind of sense.

Jean Arthur (as Bonnie Lee in Only Angels Have Wings) finds herself in love with the Cary Grant character (Geoff Carter) - but he's so independent, so macho, and he says over and over, like a mantra: "I'd never ask a woman to do anything!" that Jean Arthur is left twisting in the wind. He's obviously interested in her, they kiss a couple of times, they have major sexual tension ... but he makes a big point of showing her:- You are free to come and go at any time. I will never ask you to do ANYTHING! Which is all well and good, but Jean Arthur is tormented trying to play by his rules, trying to hold herself back, trying to be all tough-guy and nonchalant about him ... when she's obviously crazy about the guy. Finally, by the end of the film, Bonnie has practically fallen apart (in a comedic way, though - Jean Arthur is beautiful!! So funny!) and she decides: "Fine. If he won't point-blank ASK me to stay on here with him, then I am GONE. I will take the next boat out." When Cary Grant finds out she's leaving, he gets - of course - kind of cranky about it - like: I didn't think she'd actually BEHAVE that freely!! Very funny. After all his boasting and bragging ("I'd never ask a woman to do anything!!") - he looks suspiciously crestfallen when Jean Arthur decides to leave, and he says something to her, tentatively, like, "Why don't we flip a coin to see if you stay or not?"

By that point, she has had it. Here's the tension of the moment, captured:

She throws her head back and says, angry, but with tears: "I'm hard to get, Geoff. All you have to do is ask me."

He ignores this, it's a hurried scene, people pulling him every which way ... he's about to run off and fly the mail-plane ... so he needs to go ... He ignores her tears, takes out a coin, says, "Heads you stay, tails you go!" - flips it, looks at it, exclaims happily, "It's Heads! You stay!!" He hands her the coin, gives her a huge juicy kiss on the mouth, orders her: "Keep that coffee warm!" (his way of saying: "Don't get on that boat, I want you to be here when I get back") and dashes out the door, leaving her stunned, and HURT.

Until she looks down at the coin. The coin has a head on both sides. No tails. So no matter which way it fell, she would be staying. That is the closest Geoff Carter will ever come to asking anything of anyone. This huge goofy happy grin breaks across Jean Arthur's face ... it's very funny. Moving too, in a weird way.

There is an almost identical situation in To Have and Have Not, only with different characters. Steve and Slim (Bogie and Bacall) have this INSANE sexual tension ("You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow..." Mmmmmm) ... but Steve is very independent (in a typical Bogart "I stick my neck out for nobody" way) - and, finally, in this film, Howard Hawks had found a heroine to match his hero. A woman AS independent and AS free as the man.

In Only Angels Have Wings, Jean Arthur has to learn the ropes the hard way, she has to get burnt, she has to lose the guy, she has to realize, the hard way, that typical female games will not work with him.

But in To Have and Have Not, from the second Lauren Bacall appears ("Anybody got a match?") - we can see that this is a different kind of woman altogether. Her voice is low, and un-girlish, she never seems perturbed, she's got that insolent little grin on her face - the same way Bogie does. Slim would never crumple into a million pieces because of the imperturbability of Geoff Carter. Geoff Carter would be mince-meat in her insolent hands. What Carter is really looking for is not total independence, but a woman who can really "handle" it, a woman who can really go the distance with him. Slim appears, beats Bogart at his own game, Bogart has met his match.

Slim is stuck in Martinique, with no money to get out. (Similar situation to Bonnie being stranded down in Peru, or wherever it was that Angels took place)

Steve (Bogart) - perhaps afraid that he will fall in love with this woman - buys her a plane ticket out of there. Both of these men push these women away, not because they don't need them, but because they fear they need them too much. (Hence, the red-hot sexiness of the performances. It's sexy because everyone's fighting with themselves about their own desires ... I don't know why that is sexy, but it is. Perhaps it's only when human beings are faced with obstacles, either inner or outer, can they truly come alive. And that's sexy.)

Slim, during their conversation about whether or not she should leave, is trying to get a sense of where Steve is coming from. Slim is no dumb girlie-girl woman. She's talking to him - she keeps asking him - "Do you want me to go? Do you want me to stay?" (But not in a needy way, of course. She's calmer than that.)

Finally, Slim says, flat-out, "I'm hard to get, Steve. All you have to do is ask me."

Funny - the way Bacall says it gives it a bit of a different spin. There's a bit more self-knowledge behind it, perhaps. Jean Arthur is saying it out of hurt, and out of self-protection, although it is sincere enough. Like: "I am not gonna sit around panting at your heel, Mister. I'm hard to get. All you have to do is ask me."

Slim says it more like - she's giving Steve a helpful tip on how to seduce her.

Like - "You want to get into my skivvies? Here's the deal. I'm hard to get. All you have to do is ask me."

I think, too, that these women are looking for these men to step up to the plate and state their intentions. Worthy sparring partner.

Because Geoff Carter and Steve are who they are, it's not that simple. Something in them resists declaring themselves. Also, something in them so believes in man's essential freedom, that they yearn for a woman equally as free. Make your OWN choice, sister, why are you waiting for me to do all the work??

So there they are - the male, the female - across a divide - sparring about all of this - beautifully - and at the ends of these films, these issues are STILL unresolved, to some degree.

Carter DOESN'T ask Bonnie to stay. Slim tricks Steve and "misses" her flight out of Martinique ... she refuses to disappear. The men and women still circle each other, warily, but with desire as well. Always with desire.

Hence: Drama. Sexual tension. People NOT getting what they want (which is always far more interesting to watch than people getting what they want).

"I'm hard to get. All you have to do is ask me."

Much to ponder in that one simple line. Obviously Howard Hawks thought so, too - otherwise why would he have used it twice?

Only Angels Have Wings is my favorite of all of Grant's movies. He has never been better.

Archie Leach day: Billy Wilder's fantasy movie

Billy Wilder had a fantasy of the ultimate movie he wanted to do, starring Cary Grant (he and Grant never worked together - even though Wilder never gave up hope. They were friends. Grant seems made for Wilder pictures ... but it never happened). Wilder had the entire fantasy-movie shot in his head. And Cary Grant, because he was Cary Grant, never would have grown out of the part, even though he was 60 years old. He was always a leading man.

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

-- It takes place during the Crusades.

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

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

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

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

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

Archie Leach day: 5 favorite moments

Here are 5 of my favorite Cary Grant acting moments in films: This list is in no way definitive:

1. Bringing Up Baby - The nightclub scene - when he slips on the olive dropped by Katherine Hepburn and his feet fly out from under him, and down he goes, crushing his top hat under his ass. I guffaw every time I see it.

2. Philadelphia Story - the great 2-way scene between Grant and Jimmy Stewart when Stewart shows up at his house wasted in the middle of the night. I especially love when Jimmy Stewart hiccups, and Cary Grant says, "Excuse me." That moment was improvised.

3. Notorious - the last scene (my post about it here). Cary Grant's acting has never been better. Especially the look on his face when he holds her and says, "I was a fat-headed guy full of pain." Such understatement, but so pained.

4. Holiday - er ... practically the whole movie. It's one of my favorites. I love his lonely little one-on-one scene with Hepburn up in that attic room, when they dance, and banter, and skirt around the sexual tension ... Beautiful work. He's beautiful in that movie.

5. Only Angels Have Wings - the first scene when he and Jean Arthur are alone, in the empty juke joint, at 1 in the morning. The sexual tension and repartee in that scene are out of this world. Out of context it might not read as well as seeing it - but they have the following exchange. She says, as he pours her a drink, "When are you going to get some sleep?" He says, "After your boat sails." (It has already been established that her boat is sailing at 4 a.m.) Cary Grant makes "after your boat sails" sound positively primal.

Ack! But where's His Girl Friday?? And North by Northwest? So much more!!

Archie Leach day: "Me jujitsu too!"

The Awful Truth has been described as a "tuning fork" for other comedies, and it's obvious why. The tone of this film is so light, so crazed, so assured - the laughs come like clockwork - you know you are in great hands.

You can see the set-ups for disaster and comedy a mile away, but instead of the plot feeling predictable, you just start to get excited, like: "Oh God, this is gonna be bad ... how are they gonna get out of this one??" You watch with ghoulish delight as other people's lives fall apart spectacularly.

Apparently, Cary Grant and Irene Dunne both wanted to walk off the picture. They had no script. Leo McCarey, the director, would walk onto the set every morning, and say stuff like, "Okay, so you come through that door, call the dog, and .... just stand over there ... and we'll see how it goes." They had no script. Cary Grant wrote an 8-page letter to the head of production at Columia, Harry Cohn, and he entitled it: "WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE".

But eventually - Cary Grant saw that McCarey had a method to his madness, that his approach WASN'T random, and that he was asking the actors to trust the craziness of the situation, rather than trying to control it. Grant and Dunne, after commiserating with one another miserably about how insecure they felt, finally succumbed to the process - and thank God they did.

Half of the film is improvised. Which is so amazing, because it is so freakin' funny. Like - laugh-out-loud funny. And it's subtle behavioral humor for the most part:

-- Irene Dunne playing piano as Ralph Bellamy sings "Home on the Range" very very very badly. Her FACE.

-- Cary Grant's little mannerisms, that go on throughout EVERY SCENE, in a private running commentary. His "tsk tsk tsk", and "Hmm", he always seems to be muttering to himself about the events around him. It's hilarious. Even when he's not the focus of the scene, he has 5,000 things going on with him.

-- When Irene Dunne breaks into laughter during a recital where she is singing - she sees Cary Grant fall off his chair in the back of the room - she's singing - and ... hard to explain ... but she laughs ... ON KEY ... and then somehow finishes the song. For me, it was the funniest moment in the movie (clip below - the fall comes about 3 minutes in. And just watch Irene Dunne laughing ... on key. I adore it so much!)

-- The woman who played Irene Dunne's Aunt Patsy ... This woman was a comedic genius. She hit a home-run with every one of her jokes. "Here's your diploma." I still can't stop laughing about her deadpan reading of that line.

The Awful Truth is about a married couple, who are obviously crazy about each other, but who fight all the time. He's suspicious that she's cheating on him, she's suspicious he's cheating on her. She seems to have more reason to be suspicious than he does. (After all, the first scene is Cary Grant lying underneath a sunlamp at his athletic club, trying to get a tan quickly, in order to convince his wife he had actually been in Florida for the past week like he told her - he says to his buddy, "Of course I lie to her - I don't want her to be embarrassed!").

He has a lot of "broad-minded" ideas about marriage - that the couples should keep having separate fun, not be so conventional, not get all caught up in having to be together all the time - (he has a big monologue about it: "The road to Reno is paved with suspicion...") However, he can't actually LIVE with a "broad-minded" marriage, and actually - HE just wants to have fun, but SHE can't start gallivanting about with other men - THAT isn't cool with him, and so when he thinks she's having an affair, due to some screwball misunderstanding, he flips OUT.

They decide to get divorced. They begin to fight for custody of their dog, Mr. Smith (the same dog Cary Grant chased around in Bringing up Baby). Both get involved with other people. And both start campaigns to mess up the new romances of the other.

Hilarity ensues.

Cary Grant has one pratfall (in the clip) which is one of the funniest things I have ever seen. You KNOW it's coming, but you still are not fully prepared for the funny. He falls once, and then the fall just keeps going and going and going ... and of course, he is in a situation where he is supposed to be very very quiet. It's riotous. You just LOVE him. I LOVE him for giving me joy like that.

And the last scene is rightly famous. They are (for various and sundry lunatic reasons, involving a crashed car, a busted-up dinner party, and rides on motorcycles) stuck out at her Aunt Patsy's house in the country, and their divorce is going to be final at midnight. She goes to bed in one room, he goes to bed in another room - both of them wearing borrowed pajamas. The sexual tension is huge. You are dying for them to make up, to kiss, something!!

A couple of screwball things happen - and he finally stands there in her doorway, staring at her - she's lying in bed, he looks ridiculous in his borrowed nightshirt - and they start to try to talk about their marriage, and where it went wrong, but basically what is REALLY going on, is that he is trying to figure out a way to say to her: "Can I get in that bed with you?"

It's even more amazing to look at the dialogue in this last scene, knowing that most of it is improvised. No wonder the two of them loved to work together so well. They're so in tune with one another. It's like a dance.

Here's a snippet of that exchange. The entire thing is done with desperate seriousness. That's why it's so funny:

Jerry: I told you we'd have trouble with this...In a half an hour, we'll no longer be 'Mr. and Mrs.' Funny, isn't it?

Lucy: Yes, it's funny that everything's the way it is on account of the way you feel.

Jerry: Huh?

Lucy: Well, I mean if you didn't feel the way you do, things wouldn't be the way they are, would they? Well, I mean things could be the same if things were different.

Jerry: But things are the way you made them.

Lucy: Oh no. No, things are the way you think I made them. I didn't make them that way at all. Things are just the same as they always were, only you're the same as you were, too, so I guess things will never be the same again...You're all confused, aren't you?

Jerry: Uh-huh. Aren't you?

Lucy: No.

Jerry: Well, you should be, because you're wrong about things being different because they're not the same. Things are different, except in a different way. You're still the same, only I've been a fool. Well, I'm not now. So, as long as I'm different, don't you think that, well, maybe things could be the same again? Only a little different, huh?

(I believe the spirit of this confusing conversation is also the inspiration for another one of the exchanges in What's Up Doc. She says glumly to him, "I know I'm different, I know. But from now on, I'm gonna try to be the same." He asks, "Same as what?" She says, "Same as people who aren't different.")

What started out as an annoyance to Cary Grant (the fact that there was no script, not really) ended up being the thing, the element, that shot him (and his career) off into the stratosphere. It was after The Awful Truth that Cary Grant became "important".

It's interesting: sometimes the things we resist most ferociously (in this case, improvisation) is EXACTLY what we need to do in order to succeed, fulfill our destinies, etc.

Other actors freeze up, or start to behave in highly conventional (read: BORING) ways when they don't know what they're doing, when they don't have a script. Their imaginations aren't fluid, they're too afraid that they're going to look foolish. Well, as we know, Cary Grant had no fear of looking foolish - that was part of his appeal. Improvisation is a gift and Cary Grant had it. He was, obviously, not just a funny man because the SCRIPTS he got were funny - he obviously was a funny man in real life, he had a relatively comedic outlook on things, and this was the first film where he really got to let that loose.

His fear at the beginning of the shoot ended up being a blessing: He just had to leap off that cliff, and stop trying to control everything.

Miracles of comedy followed. Zany, wacko, and still funny today.

Amazingly - everyone was nominated for Oscars except for Cary Grant. This is the price he paid for making it look so easy!!

Watch this movie and then watch Notorious and you'll realize: damn, this guy is without peers.

Archie Leach day: improvising with Jimmy Stewart

I love this story.

Jimmy Stewart says in re: Philadelphia Story:

I play a writer who falls in love with Katharine Hepburn. The night before her wedding I have a little too much to drink. This gives me the courage to go and talk to Cary, who's playing her ex-husband. So I go to Cary's house and knock on the door. It's obvious I've had too much to drink, but he lets me in.

It was time to do the scene, and Cary said, "George, why don't we just go ahead? If you don't like it, we'll do it again." So, without a rehearsal or anything, we started the scene. As I was talking, it hit me that I'd had too much to drink. So, as I explained things to Cary, I hiccuped. In answer to the hiccup, Cary said -- out of the clear blue sky -- "Excuse me." Well, I sort of said, "Ummm?" It was very difficult for me to keep a straight face, because his ad-libbed response had been so beautifully done ... Cary had an almost perfect humor.

Watch that scene again. It's the first take. You can almost see Jimmy Stewart lose it at Grant's improvisation - but he keeps it together. Brilliant acting, from both of them.

Archie Leach day: The Awful Truth

That's a scene from The Awful Truth. Sylvia Scarlett was the first inkling of the success that was to come - but the movie itself was a flop. The Awful Truth was an enormous success and it made Cary Grant a huge star.

Garson Kanin says:

The Awful Truth was enormously successful, and the studio was eager to come up with a second picture for Cary and Irene [Dunne]. Leo McCarey had a contract with the studio but, for complicated business reasons, did not want to direct. He asked me if I would like to do it. And of course, I was delighted. They were both big stars, very able, and full of personality. They had developed instinctively a fascinating team rapport -- something that cannot be directed, written, or inspired.

Irene Dunne said:

I loved working with Cary -- every minute of it. Between takes he was so amusing with his cockney stories. I was his best audience. I laughed and laughed and laughed. The more I laughed, the more he went on.

Garson Kanin remembers the My Favorite Wife shoot:

Cary was not one of those movie stars who gets out there just because he's handsome and has a flair for playing one key or another. He worked very hard. I remember that indelibly. Almost more than any other quality was his seriousness about his work. He was always prepared; he always knew his part, his lines, and the scene. And he related very well to the other players. He took not only his own part seriously; he took the whole picture seriously. He'd come and look at the rushes every evening. No matter how carefree and easygoing he seemed in the performance, in reality he was a serious man, an exceptionally concentrated man. And extremely intelligent, too. Still, he played far more on instinct than he did on intellect. I don't recall him ever intellectually discussing a role or a scene or a picture or a part. He trusted his own instincts, which had worked for him so well. He just polished that up and used it.

Archie Leach day: "You must be laughed at."

Cary Grant said:

Comedy holds the greatest risk for an actor, and laughter is the reward. You must be laughed at. You know right away that you're a flop if no one laughs. An actor in a drama doesn't get that kind of immediate feedback. Unless it's a great tearjerker, you can't tell how you're doing. People think it's easy to get a laugh. It's not. There's a story about a dying actor who was asked how it felt to die, and he said, "Dying's easy; comedy's hard."

I liked making comedy films even though there was little flexibility. Your timing had to be modified for the screen. Since a laugh rolling up the aisles of a big city movie theatre took longer than one bouncing off the walls of a tiny rural vaudeville house, you had to time what you thought would please all audiences. And you had to think about theatre audiences because the film crews don't laugh. They are too busy doing their own jobs."

Archie Leach day: "He suddenly seemed liberated."

That's Cary Grant in his breakthrough part - Monkley the Cockney con-artist in George Cukor's Sylvia Scarlett.

Random quotes about this weird little film which was a flop - but which changed Cary Grant's life:

Katharine Hepburn: "That was really the beginning for Cary. George Cukor had seen him and thought he was wonderful. George told me, 'We're going to have this unknown fella, but he's absolutely great. Cary was grateful to George for that."

Cary Grant: "Sylvia Scarlett was my breakthrough. It permitted me to play a character I knew. Thanks to George Cukor. He let me play it the way I thought it should be played because he didn't know who the character was."

Hepburn, again: "He was the only reason to see Sylvia Scarlett. It was a terrible picture but he was wonderful in it. He was very secure in his work. And God, he was fun. He had a tremendous vitality. He was heavier and huskier then. I liked the way he looked when he had that chunky, slightly pudgy face."

George Cukor, director: "Sylvia Scarlett was the first time Cary felt the ground under his feet as an actor. He suddenly seemed liberated. It was very exhilarating to see."

Wonderful film. It's not awful - sorry, Hepburn - you're wrong. Grant is, indeed, the reason to see it - but as a whole: I find the film haunting, bizarre, unclassifiable, and completely ahead of its time.

It's also GREAT to see Cary Grant so unplugged.

Archie Leach day: "Bowlegged."

The Fox talent scout saw Archie Leach's screen test and was distinctly unimpressed. Wrote on the sheet of paper:

"Bowlegged. Neck is too thick."

This is right up there with the notes written on Fred Astaire's first screen test: "Bald. Can't act. Can dance a little."

Archie Leach day: Playing himself

Here are Cary Grant's words on "playing himself" (I find it annoying how critics - and people who aren't actors and know nothing about acting - seem to think that's an insult. "He's just playing himself!") Yeah? So?

"Playing yourself" truthfully is one of the most difficult things an actor can do. Many of them canNOT do it - and that's fine, it's not a skill every actor needs to have. But the ones who do have it? The John Waynes? The Clark Gables? The Humphrey Bogarts? You mean to tell me you think there's something "less" about those guys because they played themselves? You're ignorant and you don't know what you're talking about. If I tried to pontificate with expertise on topics about which I know nothing, like hedge funds or genetics or brain surgery, then you can bet that I would be called on my bullshit. "Playing yourself" is not an insult, nor is it easy.

Here's Grant:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amazing.

Archie Leach day: on being the straight man in comedy

Cary Grant met George Burns back in his vaudeville days, when he would go on tour as an acrobat, or with stand-up comedians. He said that one of the greatest influences on him was George Burns. Cary Grant would stand backstage and study what it was that made George funny, how he did it. It was quite technical. Grant studied timing, the way laughs came, how you had to pause, etc.

Cary Grant reminisced about George and Gracie:

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

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

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

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

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

Cary Grant had more to say about Burns.

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

George Burns read Cary Grant's words on being a "straight man" and he had this to say:

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

Archie Leach day: "the fine art of pantomime"

Here is Cary Grant's description of what he learned touring the English provinces with the tumbling troupe, when he was 13, 14.

He learned lessons that he used in his acting - years later, when he was a huge star. And of course, he was always famous for his acrobatics.

Touring the English provinces with the troupe, I grew to appreciate the fine art of pantomime. No dialogue was used in our act and each day, on a bare stage, we learned not only dancing, tumbling, and stilt-walking under the expert tuition of Bob Pender, but also how to convey a mood or meaning without words. How to establish communication silently with an audience, using the minimum of movement and expression; how best immediately and precisely to effect an emotional response -- a laugh or, sometimes, a tear. The greatest pantomimists of our day have been able to induce both at once. Charles Chaplin, Cantinflas, Marcel Marceau, Jacques Tati, Fernandel, and England's Richard Herne. And in bygone years, Grock, the Lupino family, Bobby Clark, and the unforgettable tramp cyclist Joe Jackson; and currently Danny Kaye, Red Skelton, Sid Caesar, and even Jack Benny with his slow, calculated reactions.

Surprisingly, Hitchcock is one of the most subtle pantomimists of them all.

Archie Leach day: the Hippodrome

Cary Grant describes being a little kid (named Archie Leach) and having his chemistry teacher (a sort of mentor to him) take him to see the acts at the Bristol Hippodrome. This was a revelation to the young Archie Leach. He lived a poverty-struck narrow life, in the slums of Bristol. But when he went "backstage" - he saw another world entirely - a world where class distinctions blurred (something very attractive to him until the end of his life):

The Saturday matinee was in full swing when I arrived backstage; and there I suddenly found my inarticulate self in a dazzling land of smiling, jostling people wearing and not wearing all sorts of costumes and doing all sorts of clever things. And that's when I knew! What other life could there be but that of an actor? They happily traveled and toured. They were classless, cheerful, and carefree. They gaily laughed, lived, and loved.

Archie Leach day: Grant's mother

From Evenings with Cary Grant - the story of Grant's mother, which obviously had an enormous and long-lasting impact on Grant:

In 1913 Grant's mother disappeared. One day she was there squabbling as usual with Elias. The next day she was gone. When she didn't return, he naturally asked why. He was told his mother had gone for a rest at a nearby resort. Grant thought this unusual but accepted it. As the weeks went by, however, he realized that she was not coming back at all. There was no further discussion of her absence. Henry Gris describes Grant's bewilderment: "Cary told me it wasn't until many years later that he realized the depth of his guilt complex about his mother's disappearance. He believed he was the subject of his parents' many bitter quarrels."

By the time he learned his mother had been committed to a sanitorium for the mentally ill, following a nervous breakdown, Grant was an adult.

Cary Grant: I was not to see my mother again for more than twenty years, by which time my name was changed and I was a full-grown man living in America, thousands of miles away in California. I was known to most people of the world by sight and by name, yet not to my mother.

Archie Leach day: Archie Leach

From Evenings with Cary Grant:

His parents named him Archibald Alexander. Vicar EW Oakden baptized the child in the Episcopal faith on February 8, 1904, in the Horfield parish church. His baptismal certificate (which Grant said was lost in a Bristol fire during World War I) identified it as Alexander. Nonetheless, it was a child called Archie Leach who would become a man known as Cary Grant and achieve international fame.

Possibly because Grant himself had a lasting affection for his original appellation (he even named one of his dogs, a Sealyham terrier, Archie Leach), the public has long been aware that Cary Grant started out life as Archie. When he ad-libbed lines in His Girl Friday and Gunga Din referring to Archie Leach, they were inside jokes the audience understood. And when John Cleese played "Archie Leach" in A Fish Called Wanda, it was an homage to a beloved thespian.

Archie Leach day: warm sun ....

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

-- Cary Grant

Picture above: Archie Leach at five years of age.

The Books: "Ulysses" - the Oxen of the Sun episode (James Joyce)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Ulysses - by James Joyce.

So here's where we are at so far:

1. (TELEMACHIA)
Episode 1: The Telemachus Episode
Episode 2: The Nestor Episode
Episode 3: The Proteus episode

2. (The Odyssey)
Episode 4: The Calypso Episode
Episode 5: The Lotus Eaters Episode
Episode 6: The Hades Episode
Episode 7: The Aeolus Episode
Episode 8: The Lestrygonians Episode
Episode 9: The Scylla and Charybdis Episode
Episode 10: The Wandering Rocks Episode
Episode 11: The Sirens Episode
Episode 12: The Cyclops Episode
Episode 13: The Nausicaa Episode

Gotta be honest. The Oxen of the Sun episode is the only episode in the chapter that I actually don't feel qualified to read. It seems beyond me. Like much of Finnegans Wake is beyond me, just because I am not a (cunning) linguist - and I do not know the derivations of words (or, not ALL of them anyway!) ... and I feel like if I DID, maybe I would "see" more. The Oxen of the Sun is tough. It is hard. I had to force myself to keep going. Eventually, a vague "plot" emerged - but the language itself was such a barrier, for me ... to even see what was going on on the simplest level. (Naturally, that is Joyce's whole point - which I'll get to in a minute) Very early on in Oxen of the Sun, I realized: Nope. 98% of this is going over my head. No idea. My dad gave me some clues as to what Joyce was up to (which, again, I'll talk about it a minute) ... and, to me, knowing what Joyce was up to has NEVER been more crucial than with Oxen of the Sun. But still: I still didn't feel "qualified" ... I knew that most of Joyce's cleverness was way over my head on this one.

I'll just tell the bare bones of the plot of this chapter - because seriously, the plot is the least important thing going on in Oxen of the Sun.

Leopold Bloom has thought, a couple times through his day, about Mina Purefoy - the wife of a friend, who has been in labor at the National Maternity Hospital for three days. Bloom is concerned about her, wonders how on earth she is bearing it, amazed at the ferocity and animal-like endurance of women. It's now about 10 o'clock at night ... Bloom has finished his walk on the beach, and now heads back to the center of town. He plans on stopping by the hospital - where he knows his friend will be - to see how he (and she, of course) are doing. When he arrives, he sees that he was not the only one with that idea, and the waiting room is full of many of the characters we have seen throughout the day. And: Stephen Dedalus is one of them. At last: the two are in the same space. Dedalus has been out drinking with his buddies, and they are all rowdy, and loud - making jokes about everything, puns, whatever - being kind of annoying, actually. Bloom realizes, somehow, that Dedalus is a bit lost - there's a recognition thing that goes on for Bloom here, even though he does not really know Stephen (his eavesdropping on Stephen's "lecture" about Shakespeare in the library notwithstanding). He thinks Stephen's hanging out with the wrong crowd, basically - and needs some guidance. He decides to join Stephen's group - in order to keep an eye on him. A very fatherly thing to do. And Bloom would know, since he knows Simon Dedalus (Stephen's father) - as well as having overheard Stephen's discourse on Hamlet, the fatherless prince of Denmark - that Stephen really needs a father. Mulligan and Stephen get into some kind of scuffle - and Stephen hurts his hand. The baby is born. All is well. Bloom and Dedalus walk out onto the street (all of Stephen's friends have headed off to "Nighttown" - the red light district of Dublin ... and there's a thunderstorm. Stephen literally cowers in fear. (Joyce was immobilized by thunderstorms, hiding, trembling - they completely undid him.) Stephen, who made a big show of not believing in God earlier in the book - seems to suddenly fear the wrath of God (Stephen, too, throughout the book, is haunted by the fact that he refused to pray at his dying mother's bedside. He would not get on his knees before a God he did not believe. But that choice haunts him. Mulligan teases him about it. It's obviously something Stephen cannot forgive himself for.)

Okay. So that's what happens. But man, the FORM Joyce chooses is the most challenging in the book. More than any other episode, it predicts where he will go in Finnegans Wake.

Let's look at it.

Because it takes place in a maternity hospital (and Dublin, at that time, had awesome facilities for women giving birth ... for such a poor country, their maternity hospitals were excellent): we can probably guess what bodily function correlates to this episode. So because of that: he has structured the episode in nine sections. You can feel how the language changes from section to section. The nine months of gestation for a human baby. The development of the fetus into a baby. Things fusing, merging, separating ... that whole speeded-up film you saw in Health class of development: that's what Joyce is doing in the language here. It begins on the simplest level and grows more and more complex (naturally. This makes sense.) So keep that in mind when you read the episode. Even if you're like: "DUDE. This is gibberish!" It's actually not.

But the OTHER thing Joyce is doing ... (since the development of the baby moves it from unthinking tiny amoeba to a being with consciousness and the potential for great complex thinking ... ) is - along with the 9 months of human pregnancy - moving us through the 9 phases/developments of the English language. Another kind of gestation. Joyce was obsessed with language (obviously). You have to be able to make it through the kind of Beowulf-ish sections ... and then suddenly segue into a Gothic melodrama language ... It's tough going. Just saying. And because I am not familiar with how the English language developed - I mean, I basically know: Chaucer! Shakespeare! ... I could only guess at what he was doing half the time. The beginning of the episode is written in what almost sounds like Latin. It's English, but it doesn't sound like English. Then there's Old English. And language imitating John Bunyan. Language imitating Charles Lamb (who wrote essays about childhood: so Joyce uses him as the model for Bloom's going back into the past, thinking about his childhood, and other things). Again, you'd have to even know who the hell Charles Lamb WAS to get what Joyce is up to. (I looked all this up as I read the chapter. And thankfully, my own personal library is extensive enough - with poetry going back to medieval times, that I could look stuff up if I needed to. And, uhm, yeah. I did.) And then ... moving on thru the episode ... we go through an Arthurian section, a sort of Guinevere and Lancelot-type language - courtly, formal, we see knights and forests, etc. (But we're always still in the Maternity hospital - let's not forget that. Joyce turns Bloom into a knight, basically ... showing up on a courtly visit. Etc.) Once the baby is born, we move into sentimental cooing language, reminiscent of some of Dickens. The mother and babe, idealized, perfect, happy (unrealistic), etc. So we're getting at least closer to our own age, the language is getting a bit more recognizable. No more of this Beowulf Everyman shit!! Joyce is making fun of the idealized view of women and childbirth - he knew it was a lot of work, and blood, and howling, and sometimes horror. So the "oh, the baby coos at the mother's breast" language of the 1800s is his way of making fun of it. Then, later, we move into the 19th century Gothic melodrama style - Mulligan telling the story of Haines and the black panther (which will be a recurring image for Joyce - it shows up again in Finnegans Wake. As Mulligan talks - listen to the language: "Which of us did not feel his flesh creep?" "In vain! His spectre stalks me. Dope is my only hope ... Ah! Destruction! The black panther!" Melodrama. Late 19th century - moving towards the 20th century now. And the episode ends - with all the men heading off to Nighttown - and the language at the end of the episode is all Dublin slang, nearly incomprehensible. Like Cockney slang. It is English, but it is another language entirely. The modern day: with its fracturing, its messiness ... the grand sweep of the history of the English language being lost in the shuffle. Joyce was obsessed with derivations. Tracing puns/jokes/words back into antiquity - trying to dig deeper meaning out of everything. You know ... when you know that the word "disaster" has, as its Latin derivation, the two words: "dis" meaning "separation from" and "aster" meaning "stars" ... it gives you a whole new understanding of what disaster really means. Joyce took stuff like that to a whole other level, twisting and turning himself down into the ground, looking for more, grubbing around for more meaning, tracing slang back to Beowulf. What is this English language? What is it? The slang at the end of Oxen of the Sun, in a way, is prophetic. The breakdown of culture and language that has continued apace through the 20th century. The connection to the past severed, leaving the Dublin youths rambling around, talking in ugly slang.

Anyway, it's a rigorous episode. Don't give up.

Just know that Joyce is doing three things:
1. Describing Bloom and Dedalus' meeting, at last.
2. Taking us thru the 9 months of pregnancy
3. Taking us thru the 9 phases of development in the English language - past to present

Oh, and actually: he's doing 4 things. Because he's also making connections, of course, with The Odyssey. In The Oxen of the Sun episode in The Odyssey - Odysseus' men kill the cattle of the sun god Helios. (The first couple paragraphs of "Oxen of the Sun" calls upon the sun god, in numerous puns. Look for them.) Helios is pissed and kills them all, except for Odysseus. In Ulysses we know (because lots of people have been talking about it all day) - that the cattle in Ireland are suffering from foot and mouth disease. The cows are going to be slaughtered in England. Lots of brou-haha about this.

On even another level (sorry, it's just endless): Joyce uses this episode to contemplate life and death. Birth. The process of birth. The forming of life. The episode takes place in a hospital, a sterile environment. Dedalus and his buddies make ribald jokes about sex, which Bloom does not appreciate. Buck Mulligan, especially, seems to trumpet the joys of sex without love, or commitment. Casual sex, I guess you'd say. Joyce didn't "believe" in birth control - he didn't think you should get in the way of life. So Mulligan's joking is seen as in poor taste (Joyce has been gunning for Mulligan from the beginning) - and there are tons of jokes/puns about condoms (look for all of them! Even in the Beowulf sections! Condoms are everywhere in this chapter about birth. And let's not forget: Ireland is a Catholic country. Birth control is a huge hot-topic there - and continues to be so.) Preventing life was against nature, Joyce thought. He had complex feelings about masturbation, too - which we saw in the last episode - and it comes up again here. Bloom "wasted" his seed on himself ... seen as (also) a big no-no. Jesus, you can't please any of these people, can you.

Nobody's the lead in Oxen of the Sun. There is no "point of view" - we aren't with Bloom, or with Stephen. We are somewhere else. We follow the development in the womb, and we also follow the development of the English language - from something simple and rough to something overwrought and complex - to something fracturing apart into slang.

And that's what's happening here. It's rigorous, make no mistake. And most of it, like I said, I wasn't even qualified to understand. Brilliant, though - you can feel the brilliance. Joyce is so far beyond any of his contemporaries in what he is attempting here ... it is not wholly successful, but that matters not at all. Because the attempt is STILL so far beyond what anyone has ever accomplished before or since. It's breathtaking. It's like listening to The Goldberg Variations. At first the theme is clear, you can hear it. Then it disappears ... but no, it doesn't. It is still there. Just in reverse. Or a third down. Or in the left hand. Until finally ... it re-emerges as what we recognize from the start. It has gone through a morphing process - and only a very very good ear (one who knows what to look for) could hear it, as it changes. "Oh ... that's the theme ... there it is. It sounds nothing like it did in the beginning ... but that's it."

Joyce is on that level here.

Okay, so here's an excerpt. I'm gonna choose an excerpt that starts in Joyce's Old English - and we can watch as it morphs into the chivalrous medieval English.

EXCERPT FROM Ulysses - by James Joyce - the Oxen of the Sun episode

Before born babe bliss had. Within womb won he worship. Whatever in that one case done commodiously done was. A couch by midwives attended with wholesome food reposeful cleanest swaddles as though forthbringing were now done and by wise foresight set: but to this no less of what drugs there is need and surgical implements which are pertaining to her case not omitting aspect of all very distracting spectacles in various latitudes by our terrestrial orb offered together with images, divine and human, the cogitation of which by sejunct females is to tumescence conducive or eases issue in the high sunbright wellbuilt fair home of mothers when, ostensibly far gone and reproductitive, it is come by her thereto to lie in, her term up.

Some man that wayfaring was stood by housedoor at night's oncoming. Of Israel's folk was that man that on earth wandering far had fared. Stark ruth of man his errand that him lone led till that house.

Of that house A. Horne is lord. Seventy beds keeps he there teeming mothers are wont that they lie for to thole and bring forth bairns hale so God's angel to Mary quoth. Watchers they there walk, white sisters in ward sleepless. Smarts they still sickness soothing: in twelve moons thrice an hundred. Truest bedthanes they twain are, for Horne holding wariest ward.

In ward wary the watcher hearing come that man mild-hearted eft rising with swire ywimpled to him her gate wide undid. Lo, levin leaping lightens in eyeblink Ireland's westward welkin! Full she dread that God the Wreaker all mankind would fordo with water for his evil sins. Christ's rood made she on breastbone and him drew that he would rathe infare under her thatch. That man her will wotting worthful went in Horne's house.

Loth to irk in Horne's hall hat holding the seeker stood. On her stow he ere was living with dear wife and lovesome daughter that then over land and seafloor nine year had long outwandered. Once her in townhithe meeting he to her bow had not doffed. Her to forgive now he craved with good ground of her allowed that that of him swiftseen face, hers, so young then had looked. Light swift her eyes kindled, bloom of blushes his word winning.

As her eyes then ongot his weeds swart therefor sorrow she feared. Glad after she was that ere adread was. Her he asked if O'Hare Doctor tidings sent from far coast and she with grameful sigh him answered that O'Hare Doctor in heaven was. Sad was the man that word to hear that him so heavied in bowels ruthful. All she there told him, ruing death for friend so young, algate sore unwilling God's rightwiseness to withsay. She said that he had a fair sweet death through God His goodness with masspriest to be shriven, holy housel and sick men's oil to his limbs. The man then right earnest asked the nun of which death the dead man was died and the nun answered him and said that he was died in Mona island through bellycrab three year agone come Childermas and she prayed to God the Allruthful to have his dear soul in his undeathliness. He heard her sad words, in held hat sad staring. So stood they there both awhile in wanhope, sorrowing one with other.

Therefore, everyman, look to that last end that is thy death and the dust that gripeth on every man that is born of woman for as he came naked forth from his mother's womb so naked shall he wend him at the last for to go as he came.

The man that was come into the house then spoke to the nursingwoman and he asked her how it fared with the woman that lay there in childbed. The nursingwoman answered him and said that that woman was in throes now full three days and that it would be a hard birth unneth to bear but that now in a little it would be. She said thereto that she had seen many births of women but never was none so hard as was that woman's birth. Then she set it forth all to him that time was had lived nigh that house. The man hearkened to her words for he felt with wonder women's woe in the travail that they have of motherhood and he wondered to look on her face that was a young face for any man to see but yet was she left after long years a handmaid. Nine twelve bloodflows chiding her childless.

And whiles they spake the door of the castle was opened and there nighed them a mickle noise as of many that sat there at meat. And there came against the place as they stood a young learning knight yclept Dixon. And the traveller Leopold was couth to him sithen it had happed that they had had ado each with other in the house of misericord where this learning knight lay by cause the traveller Leopold came there to be healed for he was sore wounded in his breast by a spear wherewith a horrible and dreadful dragon was smitten him for which he did do make a salve of volatile salt and chrism as much as he might suffice. And he said now that he should go into that castle for to make merry with them that were there. And the traveller Leopold said that he should go otherwhither for he was a man of cautels and a subtle. Also the lady was of his avis and reproved the learning knight though she trowed well that the traveller had said thing that was false for his subtility. But the learning knight would not hear say nay nor do her mandement ne have him in aught contrarious to his list and he said how it was a marvellous castle. And the traveller Leopold went into the castle for to rest him for a space being sore of limb after many marches environing in divers lands and sometimes venery.

And in the castle was set a board that was of the birchwood of Finlandy and it was upheld by four dwarfmen of that country but they durst not move for enchantment. And on this board were frightful swords and knives that are made in a great cavern by swinking demons out of white flames that they fix in the horns of buffalos and stags that there abound marvellously. And there were vessels that are wrought by magic of Mahound out of seasand and the air by a warlock with his breath that he blares into them like to bubbles. And full fair cheer and rich was on the board that no wight could devise a fuller ne richer. And there was a vat of silver that was moved by craft to open in the which lay strange fishes withouten heads though misbelieving men nie that this be possible thing without they see it natheless they are so. And these fishes lie in an oily water brought there from Portugal land because of the fatness that therein is like to the juices of the olive press. And also it was marvel to see in that castle how by magic they make a compost out of fecund wheat kidneys out of Chaldee that by aid of certain angry spirits that they do into it swells up wondrously like to a vast mountain. And they teach the serpents there to entwine themselves up on long sticks out of the ground and of the scales of these serpents they brew out a brewage like to mead.

And the learning knight let pour for childe Leopold a draught and halp thereto the while all they that were there drank every each. And childe Leopold did up his beaver for to pleasure him and took apertly somewhat in amity for he never drank no manner of mead which he then put by and anon full privily he voided the more part in his neighbour glass and his neighbour wist not of his wile. And he sat down in that castle with them for to rest him there awhile. Thanked be Almighty God.

This meanwhile this good sister stood by the door and begged them at the reverence of Jesu our alther liege lord to leave their wassailing for there was above one quick with child a gentle dame, whose time hied fast. Sir Leopold heard on the upfloor cry on high and he wondered what cry that it was whether of child or woman and I marvel, said he, that it be not come or now. Meseems it dureth overlong. And he was ware and saw a franklin that hight Lenehan on that side the table that was older than any of the tother and for that they both were knights virtuous in the one emprise and eke by cause that he was elder he spoke to him full gently. But, said he, or it be long too she will bring forth by God His bounty and have joy of her childing for she hath waited marvellous long. And the franklin that had drunken said, Expecting each moment to be her next. Also he took the cup that stood tofore him for him needed never none asking nor desiring of him to drink and, Now drink, said he, fully delectably, and he quaffed as far as he might to their both's health for he was a passing good man of his lustiness. And sir Leopold that was the goodliest guest that ever sat in scholars' hall and that was the meekest man and the kindest that ever laid husbandly hand under hen and that was the very truest knight of the world one that ever did minion service to lady gentle pledged him courtly in the cup. Woman's woe with wonder pondering.

Strangely moving

Not just the photo - which is certainly extraordinary - but the comment thread (comments on that site go from bottom to top - so start at the bottom). I feel close to tears for some reason, reading Alex's polite query and the equally polite responses.