The Sheila Variations

Movies and stuff

I got this list from Tracey ... I changed the rules, though. To me, there's an enormous difference between like and love - so I changed the rules and separated out "like" from "love".

THE RULES
Bold movies you have watched and liked.
Turn red movies you have watched and loved.
Italicize movies you saw and didn’t like.
Leave as is movies you haven’t seen.

No comments on this one. [UPDATE: comments opened now - thanks for the link House Next Door] You can email me your outrage or support, should you feel it necessary. (Okay, someone just emailed me with one word: "Support." It made me laugh out loud. Thank you!) I'm just fading fast today, and feel kind of anxious. And I have hours to go before I sleep. And a flight out of town tomorrow at the crack of doom (I believe Macbeth says that somewhere. Yes. He does.
'Why do you show me this? A fourth! Start, eyes!
What, will the line stretch out to the crack of doom?
Another yet! A seventh! I'll see no more.')

Anyway. Here's the list. Feel free to do ye olde meme if you want to.

Looking at this list all together it is clear that I am biased towards movies made before 1960. I just prefer them. Also some people go apeshit when they hear I don't like a particular movie. That's okay. I like Finnegans Wake and lots of people think I'm crazy, too.

The Godfather (1972)
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
The Godfather: Part II (1974)
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Schindler’s List (1993)
Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
Casablanca (1942)
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
Star Wars (1977)
12 Angry Men (1957)
Rear Window (1954)
No Country for Old Men (2007)
Goodfellas (1990)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
City of God (2002)
Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
The Usual Suspects (1995)
Psycho (1960)
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Citizen Kane (1941)
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
North by Northwest (1959)
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
Fight Club (1999)
Memento (2000)
Sunset Blvd. (1950)
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
The Matrix (1999)
Taxi Driver (1976)
Se7en (1995)
Apocalypse Now (1979)
American Beauty (1999)
Vertigo (1958)
Amélie (2001)
The Departed (2006)
Paths of Glory (1957)
American History X (1998)
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Chinatown (1974)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
The Third Man (1949)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
Alien (1979)
The Pianist (2002)
The Shining (1980)
Double Indemnity (1944)
L.A. Confidential (1997)
Leben der Anderen, Das [The Lives of Others] (2006)
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
Boot, Das (1981)
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Forrest Gump (1994) I wish there was a category for "deeply despised"
Metropolis (1927)
Aliens (1986)
Raging Bull (1980)
Rashômon (1950)
Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
Rebecca (1940)
Hotel Rwanda (2004)
Sin City (2005)
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
All About Eve (1950)
Modern Times (1936)
Some Like It Hot (1959)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
The Seventh Seal (1957)
The Great Escape (1963)
Amadeus (1984)
On the Waterfront (1954)
Touch of Evil (1958)
The Elephant Man (1980)
The Prestige (2006)
Vita è bella, La [Life Is Beautiful] (1997)
Jaws (1975)
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
The Sting (1973)
Strangers on a Train (1951)
Full Metal Jacket (1987)
The Apartment (1960)
City Lights (1931)
Braveheart (1995)
Cinema Paradiso (1988)
Batman Begins (2005)
The Big Sleep (1946)
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
Blade Runner (1982)
The Great Dictator (1940)
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Notorious (1946)
Salaire de la peur, Le [The Wages of Fear](1953)
High Noon (1952)
Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983)
Fargo (1996)
The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
Unforgiven (1992)
Back to the Future (1985)
Ran (1985)
Oldboy (2003)
Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Cool Hand Luke (1967)
Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)
Donnie Darko (2001)
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
The Green Mile (1999)
Annie Hall (1977)
Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
Gladiator (2000)
The Sixth Sense (1999)
Diaboliques, Les [The Devils] (1955)
Ben-Hur (1959)
It Happened One Night (1934)
The Deer Hunter (1978)
Life of Brian (1979)
Die Hard (1988)
The General (1927)
American Gangster (2007)
Platoon (1986)
V for Vendetta (2005)
Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
The Graduate (1967)
The Princess Bride (1987)
Crash (2004/I)
The Wild Bunch (1969)
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)
Heat (1995)
Gandhi (1982)
Harvey (1950)
The Night of the Hunter (1955)
The African Queen (1951)
Stand by Me (1986)
Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004)
Witness for the Prosecution (1957)
The Big Lebowski (1998)
The Conversation (1974)
Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
Wo hu cang long [Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ] (2000)
The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
Gone with the Wind (1939)
3:10 to Yuma (2007)
Cabinet des Dr. Caligari., Das [The Cabinet of Dr Caligari] (1920)
The Thing (1982)
Groundhog Day (1993)
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
Sleuth (1972)
Patton (1970)
Toy Story (1995)
Glory (1989)
Out of the Past (1947)
Twelve Monkeys (1995)
Ed Wood (1994)
Spartacus (1960)
The Terminator (1984)
In the Heat of the Night (1967)
The Philadelphia Story (1940)
The Exorcist (1973)
Frankenstein (1931)
Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
The Hustler (1961)
Toy Story 2 (1999)
The Lion King (1994)
Big Fish (2003)
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Young Frankenstein (1974)
Magnolia (1999)
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
In Cold Blood (1967)
Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
Dial M for Murder (1954)
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
Roman Holiday (1953)
A Christmas Story (1983)
Casino (1995)
Manhattan (1979)
Ying xiong [Hero] (2002)
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
Rope (1948)
Cinderella Man (2005)
The Searchers (1956)
Finding Neverland (2004)
Inherit the Wind (1960)
His Girl Friday (1940)
A Man for All Seasons (1966)
Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

The Books: "Amongst Women " (John McGahern)

Next book in my on my adult fiction shelves:

Amongst Women by John McGahern

This book is all tied up with my father. I will never look at this book or think about this book without thinking about my father. I don't even know what else to say about it, really. John McGahern, who passed away in 2006 (I wrote about him here), is the greatest contemporary Irish writer. Or ... he was. Rest in peace. In a recent interview with Anne Enright (that I linked to a couple days ago) - she says about McGahern: "I find being Irish quite a wearing thing. It takes so much work because it is a social construction. People think you are going to be this, this, and this. I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true. [Irish writer John McGahern, who died in 2006] was an immensely angry, dangerous, and subversive writer. But he was domesticated by the Irish academy incredibly fast. There's the idea of the 'authentic Irish' that he keys into."

McGahern writes "quiet" books - domestic interior dramas - but I'm with Enright. The wellspring underneath his work is volcanic. He is in no way, shape, or form SAFE. As a matter of fact, Amongst Women was one of those books that made my heart hurt. Literally. You know how sometimes you feel like there is an actual bruise on your actual heart? That's what this book did. I almost couldn't finish it. McGahern's work cuts way close to the bone, for me. And sometimes life is easier if you just ignore certain realities, sometimes it gets too intense. McGahern, in Amongst Women, in his quiet specific way - opens up the psychologies of that whole family to me, the reader ... and I get it ... He makes me get it. But Enright's point is also well-taken. Ireland has a way of pillorying and then celebrating their famous artistic sons. Joyce could tell you a bit about that. McGahern had similar experiences. McGahern doesn't write political books, not necessarily - but I suppose most everything is political in Ireland. At least on some level. There was an article in the UK Times about McGahern a year or so ago (link no longer available). An excerpt:

He was recognised as a master craftsman: a succession of awards and prizes confirmed that. But McGahern also came to be seen as something he never was, nor tried to be: a chronicler of Ireland's journey from the past and an explorer of Irish identity.

As he tried to explain in interviews, this way of looking at things held no attraction for him. It was not interesting; there was something childish in questing after the machinery of identity. He disliked the notion of the writer as romantic artist, a courageous solo swimmer in a sea of archetypes.

He wrote about the world he knew and the world his people had known for generations in rural Ireland. He came from the Catholic middle classes, and although he had left the faith behind, he refused to condemn it. It was part of what he was.

It has always been too easy to stereotype McGahern. When his second novel, The Dark, was banned in Ireland, and he was forced by the Catholic church to resign from his teaching job in Dublin, some wanted to use him as a cause celebre, a literary crusader against the old repression.

McGahern rejected the role. He noted that Samuel Beckett was one of the few to inquire after his personal opinion before agreeing to join an anti-censorship campaign. To others, it seemed that McGahern must have been so deeply brainwashed by Irish Catholicism that he refused to denounce it.

But he was no campaigner. If there was any denouncing to be done, it could be undertaken by the reader after engaging with the truth of his fiction. He did not want to dignify the ban by openly opposing it. Readers of his work could see what had angered the hierarchy: not just the frank sexuality, but a portrait of a religious institution without spirituality, devoted to secular power.

See what I mean? His books rattled the status quo. And yet he also was not an "issue" writer. He didn't do "issue" books. And he refused to fit into the little box that some elements wanted him to be in. He left the faith - but in my opinion, nobody writes about Irish Catholicism like John McGahern. And his "refusal to condemn in" sufficiently left many very upset. You know. People wanted to 'own" him. He refused to be owned.

I'm making him sound rather ponderous, and he is just the opposite. He's just a damn fine writer and Amongst Women and That They May Face The Rising Sun (or By the Lake in the US) are routinely listed on any list of the greatest Irish novels. He is a master at prose. I don't know how he does it.

Amongst Women is about, mainly, Michael Moran - father of 5 - widower - married again ... an old Irish Republican, who now is left without a war. It's a present-day novel, so Moran is bitter = oh God is this man bitter - about where Ireland is going now, and the "gangsters" running things. There is no place for Michael Moran in the new order, and yet he was one of the ones who fought for the country. He's very similar to "The Citizen" in James Joyce's Cyclops episode in Ulysses (excerpt here). It's like he's not domesticated. And yet he lives in a house, and has to submit to normal life again. But he bucks against it. And he takes out his own misery on the family - who spend the entirety of their lives, tiptoeing around him, trying to guess his moods, adjusting, disappearing, submitting. This book has to be the best examination of that whole Irish father-daughter dynamic - which can be so baffling to outsiders. I'm talking about tribal loyalty here. It goes beyond love, loyalty, duty, familial responsibilities. It's about tribe. Maggie, Sheila, and Mona are the three grown daughters - trying to live their own lives, and yet - they will never ever truly cut the cord. After they get married or go to college, they still come home every weekend. They tiptoe around their father, and have whispered conversations behind his back. The entire house revolves around Michael Moran's moods. He has his old IRA buddies over, to relive past glories - and they are grim evenings, Moran needing to dominate - always.

But here's where McGahern is a genius, and I have no idea how he does it. Michael Moran is not a character on a page - he is a living breathing man ... and while you may be glad that he is not your father ... you love him so much that you get that bruise-thing on your heart I mentioned earlier. His pain, his loss, the horribleness of getting old ... becoming useless ... and a man who cannot express himself, a man who cannot say, "Hey, I'm in pain here ..." or "I'm scared of how lonely I am" or whatever ... a man like that is always alone. His daughters sense this, so they hover around him, making sure he will never be alone. They may have their own feelings about how he treats them, how he treats everyone - but if anyone ever says a word against him - they would be cut off forever. Even the daughters' husbands. It is FORBIDDEN to talk against Michael Moran. The daughters can do so amongst themselves ... but no one else - not even intimate in-laws - can enter that territory. This is what TRIBE means.

God, I so get that.

My family feeling is tribal as well.

Michael Moran is one of the great literary characters. I will never forget him. And what a confusing experience it is getting to know him. You hate him sometimes. You roll your eyes at his exaggerated sense of himself as an Irish warrior. You wish he would soften up. You ACHE for him. God, do you ache.

I have tears in my eyes. This book means a lot to me.

Here's an excerpt. Michael Moran has re-married - a woman in the town, Rose (another wonderful character). She did not know him well when she married him. She married an unknown. A widower with 5 children. So there is much about him that frightens her. His moods, his sudden viciousness ... She's on uncertain ground. She loves him. Loves him dearly. But God can this guy be a son-of-a-bitch. Wonderful character. This excerpt starts from Rose's point of view ... but as you'll see, it's a gentle omniscent narrator - we flow from one person's POV to another..

EXCERPT FROM Amongst Women by John McGahern

Often when talking with the girls she had noticed that whenever Moran entered the room silence and deadness would fall on them; and if he was eating alone or working in the room - setting the teeth of a saw, putting a handle in a broken spade on a wet day, taking apart the lighting plant that never seemed to run properly for long - they always tried to slip away. If they had to stay they moved about the place like shadows. Only when they dropped or rattled something, the startled way they would look towards Moran, did the nervous tension of what it took to glide about so silently show. Rose had noticed this and she had put it down to the awe and respect in which the man she so loved was held, and she was loath to see differently now. She had chosen Moran, had married him against convention and her family. All her vanity was in question. The violence Moran had turned on her she chose to ignore, to let her own resentment drop and to join the girls as they stole about so that their presences would never challenge his.

He came in late, wary, watchful. The cheerfulness with which Rose greeted him he met with a deep reserve. She was unprepared for it and her nervousness increased tenfold as she bustled about to get his tea. Sheila and Mona were writing at side tables; Michael was kneeling at the big armchair, a book between his elbows, as if in prayer, a position he sometimes used for studying. All three looked up gravely to acknowledge their father's presence; but, ssensing his mood at once, they buried themselves again in their schoolwork.

'Where's Maggie?' he demanded.

'She went to visit some friends in the village.'

'She seems always to be on the tramp these days.'

'Shes going around mostly saying goodbye to people.'

'I'm sure she'll be missed,' he said acidly.

Rose poured him his tea. The table was covered with a spotless cloth. As he ate and drank she found herself chattering away to him out of nervousness, a stream of things that went through her head, the small happenings of a day. She talked out of confusion: fear, insecurity, love. Her instinct told her that she should not be talking but she could not stop. He made several brusque, impatient movements at the table but still she could not stop. Then he turned round the chair in a fit of hatred. The children were listening though they kept their eyes intently fixed on their school books.

'Did you ever listen carefully to yourself, Rose?' he said. 'If you listened a bit more carefully to yourself I think you might talk a lot less.'

She looked like someone who had been struck without warning but she did not try to run or cry out. She stood still for a long moment that seemed to the others to grow into an age. Then, abjectly, as if engaged in reflection that gave back only its own dullness, she completed the tasks she had been doing and, without saying a word to the expectant children, left the room.

'Where are you going, Rose?' he asked in a tone that told her that he knew he had gone too far but she continued on her way.

It galled him to have to sit impotently in silence; worse still, that it had been witnessed. They kept their heads down in their books though they had long ceased to study, unwilling to catch his eye or even to breathe loudly. All they had ever been able to do in the face of violence was to bend to it.

Moran sat for a long time. When he could stand the silence no longer he went briskly into the other room. 'I'm sorry, Rose,' they heard him say. They were able to hear clearly though he had closed the door. 'I'm sorry, Rose,' he had to say again. 'I lost my temper.' After a pause they thought would never end they heard, 'I want to be alone,' clear as a single bell note, free of all self-assertiveness. He stayed on in the room but there was nothing he could do but withdraw.

When he came back he sat beside the litter of his meal on the table among the three children not quite knowing what to do with himself. Then he took a pencil and paper and started to tot up all the monies he presently held against the expenses he had. He spent a long time over these calculations and they appeared to soothe him.

'We might as well say the Rosary now,' he announced when he put pencil and paper away, taking out his beads and letting them dangle loudly. They put away their exercises and took out their beads.

'Leave the doors open in case Rose wants to hear,' he said to the boy. Michael opened both doors to the room. He paused at the bedroom door but the vague shape amid the bedclothes did not speak or stir.

At the Second Glorious Mystery Moran paused. Sometimes if there was an illness in the house the sick person would join in the prayers through the open doors but when the silence was not broken he nodded to Mona and she took up Rose's Decade. After the Rosary, Mona and Sheila made tea and they all slipped away early.

Moran sat on alone in the room. He was so engrossed in himself that he was startled by the sound of the back door opening just after midnight. Maggie was even more startled to find him alone when she came in and instantly relieved that she hadn't allowed the boy who had seen her home from the village further than the road gate.

'You're very late,' he said.

'The concert wasn't over till after eleven.'

'Did you say your prayers on the way home?'

'No, Daddy. I'll say them as soon as I go upstairs.'

'Be careful not to wake the crowd that has to go to school in the morning.'

'I'll be careful. Good night, Daddy.' As on every night, she went up to him and kissed him on the lips.

He sat on alone all until all unease was lost in a luxury of self-absorption. The fire had died. He felt stiff when he got up from the chair and turned out the light and groped his way through the still open doorway to the bed, shedding his clothes on to the floor. When he got into bed he turned his back energetically to Rose.

She rose even earlier than usual next morning. Usually she enjoyed the tasks of morning but this morning she was grateful above all mornings for the constancy of the small demanding chores: to shake out the fire, scatter the ashes on the grass outside, to feel the stoked fire warm the room. She set the table and began breakfast. When the three appeared for school they were wary of her at first but she was able to summon sufficient energy to disguise her lack of it and they were completely at ease before they left for school. When Moran eventually appeared he did not speak but fussed excessively as he put on socks and boots. She did not help him.

'I suppose I should be sorry,' he said at length.

'It was very hard what you said.'

'I was upset over that telegram my beloved son sent. It was as if I didn't even exist.'

'I know, but what you said was still hard.'

'Well then, I'm sorry.'

It was all she demanded and immediately she brightened. 'It's all right, Michael. I know it's not easy.' She looked at him with love. Though they were alone they did not embrace or kiss. That belonged to the darkness and the night.

'Do you know what I think, Rose? We get too cooped up in here sometimes. Why don't we just go away for the day?'

'Where would we go?'

'We can drive anywhere we want to drive to. That's the great thing about having a car. All we have to do is back it out of the shed and go."

"Do you think you can spare the day?' She was still careful.

'It's bad if we can't take one day off,' he said laughingly. He was happy now, relieved, pleased with himself, ready to be indulgent.

He backed the Ford out of the shed and faced it to the road. Maggie had risen and was taking breakfast when he came in.

'Is there anything you want, Daddy?'

'Not a thing in the wide world, thanks be to God.' She was relieved to hear the tone. 'You'll have the whole place to yourself today. Rose and myself are going away for the day.'

'When do you think you'll be back, Daddy?'

Rose had left out his brown suit and shirt and tie and socks and he had started to dress.

'We'll be back when you see us. We'll be back before night anyhow,' he said as he tucked his shirt into his trousers, hoisting them round his hips.

'I'm holding everybody up,' Rose fussed self-effacingly. She looked well, even stylish in a discreet way, in her tweed suit and white blouse.

'Daddy looks wonderful. I hope I'm not too much of a disgrace,' she laughed nervously, moving her hands and features in one clear plea to please.

'I'm bound to be taken for the chauffeur,' he laughed out, mispronouncing the word with relish but he was not corrected as he hoped.

'There'd never be a fear of that,' she said wtih feeling.

They set off together in the small car, Rose's girlish smiles and waves only accentuating the picture of the happy couple going on a whole day's outing alone together. Maggie watched the car turn carefully out into the main road and then she went and closed the gate under the big yew tree.

Brooklyn Academy of Music: Macbeth

I saw Patrick Stewart do Macbeth tonight, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It was a lovely evening. It's freezing today and I trekked out there, and emerged into the utter chaos of Atlantic and Flatbush. A couple was having a screaming fight about a drug deal gone awry on the sidewalk. The girl shouted, "There's fuckin' police all around us right now. They're already curious about what we talkin' about - let's get the fuck outta here!" And then. The Scottish play! Perfect. It was like I had already seen the Flatbush Avenue version of "Unsex me here"! I had a glass of wine in the lobby, warming up, and people milled about, and it was a wonderful atmosphere. At intermission, a couple struck up a conversation with me about the play, and it was great fun. We were trying to figure out where the hell Banquo was going when he ran off before intermission. We missed a line of dialogue or something. I mean, I get that he knows he will be killed. But where the hell you going, bro? But it was fun. I liked them. They were wondering who MacDuff was - they hadn't caught his name. "Who was that man with the wife and kids?" "That was MacDuff - he's a noble who was really close with Duncan. And I hate to break it to you, but his whole family is dunzo in the next act." hahahaha

This production (highly acclaimed in England, and now here for a run) takes place in Stalinist Russia, which I loved. It had a more chilly quality than some other productions of it I've seen. The set was stark and bare, no scene changes. They used video projections during certain sections - which was QUITE effective, for the most part. Like the forest moving. That was projected. Things abstracted, becoming more and more fragmented - as Macbeth and his Lady wife slowly went mad. There were a couple of moments - just a couple - when I thought it was over-produced. The play itself, just as a work of literature, is terrifying. It's one of the most gruesome of all of Shakespeare's plays. I mean, the monologue that reports on the deaths of MacDuff's family - you just get the picture in your head of children screaming and being slaughtered. You really don't need to add TOO much to it. For the most part, I thought the video projections were awesome (the visions of enormous totalitarian armies marching, with Soviet-esque banners waving - very evocative) - but a couple times I was pulled out of it.

Patrick Stewart was incredible. His soliloquies ... God, he didn't hit a wrong note. I had a moment when he was doing the "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" monologue where I almost got disoriented and I didn't know what to focus on. First of all, his performance of it - quiet, bitter, underplayed - he just SAID it ... was marvelous. You just lost yourself in it. But because of that, I was suddenly struck by the words - yet again ... you know, it's easy to take Shakespeare for granted. And to hear it - really HEAR it ... to hear that language, to hear those words that are so well-known now, so damn famous ... and to realize, as though for the first time, just how damn brilliant Shakespeare is. It's like being in the actual presence of God. Or a higher power. Whatever you want to call it. It's beyond "good". It is an emanation of a deep and human truth, passed down through the ages ... and here it is. Before us. A man wrote this. A human being wrote this.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

It boggles the mind.

Kate Fleetwood played Lady Macbeth like Eva Peron. She thristed for power. She emasculates her husband like a pro. Patrick Stewart's body language in response to her "are you a man?" comments was wonderful. Subtle, and eloquent. He just kind of collapsed, a little bit. Not hugely. But he strutted in in their first scene together - and she embraced him, and they were kissing, and passionate - saying their opening lines - eating each other up, his hands all over her, her breasts, her thighs ... and then she starts going off on what she thinks needs to happen next, and she is so far beyond him at that point, she is so much further down the path ... that he is struck dumb, in response. A bit helpless. What is she asking me to do? He is wearing military garb, combat boots, he is the picture of a virile strutting man. But Lady Macbeth just unmasks him, disarms him ... He is helpless and she uses that against him. She was terrific.

I have seen so many terrible "Out damn'd spot" monologues ... you know, the actress uses it as an opportunity to become a gibbering gleaming-eyed maniac. Kate Fleetwood was real. And because it was real to her - she WAS out of her mind. Her hands writhed about, and I actually started feeling the sticky blood all over MY hands, just watching her. This was no kitchen-sink acting. She rose to the occasion. But without any fanfare. The play is horrifying. It's horrifying in its action, and the plot points. But even more so - it is horrifying psychologically. The two of them cannot stop their ambition, and for a moment - all seems possible. But to live with the repercussions, to walk through life knowing that murder got you there ... neither of them are up to that.

The relationship those two created was fantastic. You believed they were husband and wife. They played all the notes right. The chiding, the sex, the way they know what the other person is going to say even before the words are out ... They were marvelous together.

But my favorite part of the whole production - was how they handled the witches. SO GOOD. SO SO GOOD. Those witches are tough, man ... tough to play (and I should know, since I played one of them once, in a production so bad it still makes me shiver - post about it here, and photos here, here, here ... horrors. I heard some of my lines come back to me in the play at BAM and felt a shiver of shame. "Doubtless it stood ..." ACK!). It's so easy to go over the top. And how do you make "double double toil and trouble" scary?? It so easily can just be SILLY.

These witches were truly frightening. BRAVO. To the director and the production design, the costume design ... who came up with the theme for those witches. They were omnipresent. They weren't isolated out in a wild heath (the way I've seen it done in many productions) ... they weren't cackling and rubbing their hands over a froggy-filled fire. They all wore grey institutional dresses, with white aprons, and white veils on their heads. They were either nurses on the battlefield, or workers in the kitchen. They were in disguise. They took on many guises. They were all of the same physical type - young women, thin, probably 22, 23 years old. Little thin women. You couldn't tell them apart, they were identical. And they scared the SHIT out of me.

great work. I have never before seen a production of Macbeth where the witches were actually frightening. These girls were malevolent. They had the bodies of teenagers, but they were dressed as rigid identical matrons. Black tights, black shoes. They chopped up food in the kitchen, wielding knives, slashing at bread, and then carrying it to the table, holding the knife behind them in a clenched fist. The action went on around them, but they were always there. And occasionally - Patrick Stewart would glance up at one of them, and hesitate for a bit. It would give him a start. Do I know that girl? Have I seen her before? She ladles soup onto my plate ... but there's something about her ... she seems familiar ...

The witches were my favorite part of the show. Very innovative. I've never seen them handled so well.

The Books: "Atonement " (Ian McEwan)

Next book in my on my adult fiction shelves:

Excerpt from Atonement by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan is such a good writer that there were times, when reading this book, when I had to just put it down, and absorb it. I needed time to let it filter down. Not just the plot - which is devastating, inevitable, like a Greek freakin' tragedy - no way out ... but the writing itself. There were times when I was left almost baffled by how good he is. He's good in the big stuff, and he's also good in the minutia. Like, I know that I SEE things in this world, and I see things that are so specific, and so ... indicative of other things ... in the way that McEwan does ... but could I describe it?? I'm not being self-deprecating, I know I'm a good writer, but McEwan made me want to be better. But he's also so good that it seems daunting. For example (and this is just one of many in the book):

She should have changed her dress this morning. She thought how she should take more care of her appearance, like Lola. It was childish not to. But what an effort it was. The silence hissed in her ears and her vision was faintly distorted -- her hands in her lap appeared unusually large and at the same time remote, as though viewed across an immense distance. She raised one hand and flexed its fingers and wondered, as she had sometimes before, how this thing, this machine for gripping, this fleshy spider on the end of her arm, came to be hers, entirely at her command. Or did it have some little life of its own? She bent her finger and straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge. She brought her forefinger closer to her face and stared at it, urging it to move. It remained still because she was pretending, she was not entirely serious, and because willing it to move, or being about to move it, was not the same as actually moving it. And when she did crook it finally, the action seemed to start in the finger itself, not in some part of her mind. When did it know to move, when did she know to move it? There was no catching herself out. It was either-or. There was no stitching, no seam, and yet she knew that behind the smooth continuous fabric was the real self -- was it her soul? -- which took the decision to cease pretending, and gave the final command.

I know exactly the experience he describes so perfectly there. I have done that. I have wondered those things. But to put it into words like that ... Atonement took my breath away on nearly every page.

But it was also one of the most wrenching reading experiences I have ever had. The only book I can think of that RUINED me at its end in the same way was Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn (post about the book here). I burst into sobs at the end of that book. That's never happened before. And I remember where I was when I finished Atonement. I was living with Jen in Hoboken, and I was sitting on the floor of my room. My door was closed. I came to the last sentence, and it was like there was a tiny hiccup deep inside of me - which let loose the flood gates. If you've read Atonement then you know that up until almost the very last sentence you think things are one way ... and then you realize that no, things are not that way at all. They are this way. And any germ of hope you might have been hanging onto is shattered. I started sobbing - and it immediately became about my own losses in life, my own disappointments, the things I have lost that I can never get back, the love I had that I lost and had to find a way to go on living ... I was a mess. Poor Jen was doing yoga in her room or something and heard me start howling, and a soft knock came on the door ... "Sheila? You okay?" "Yup! I'm fine!" I sobbed in response. "Just finished Atonement, that's all!"

The book upset me so much that last year I picked it up to read it again, got through one page and then thought: Nope. Cannot put myself through it. Nope.

Written from many different points of view - which is essential to the book's success, I think. Because the book is about, in so many ways, how trapped we are in our own skins - how we look out of our own eyes and see the world one way, and we can never enter another's experience. We see things happening, and we may mis-interpret - but to us, it is reality. There is no overlap. There is no possibility of connection. Briony, the 13-year-old girl who is really the key to the whole book, the linchpin, is a fantasist, it is true. She writes stories and plays, and is deathly serious about all of it. She doesn't make things up, that's not Briony's fatal flaw. It's that she dramatizes life, she makes up narratives - and I guess all little kids do that, but Briony does it in this particular situation - and two lives are ruined. Well. More. I would say her life was ruined as well. Although she does turn it to her advantage much later in her life - her way of "atonement" - but seen in that light, the "atonement" of the title is horrifically ironic. It becomes a ghastly joke. How do you atone for something like that?

I remember as I was reading the book (and I knew nothing about it, I did not know which way it would go, or what would happen - I had avoided reviews with spoilers) - things were going so badly, like - so unbelievably badly - that you can sense the ruin approaching. It's horrible. You want to leap in and intervene - which, in my opinion, would mean, saying, "Everybody: Don't listen to a word that Briony says. She's a little fantasist and she doesn't know what she's talking about." I'm still mad at her. But anyway, I remember saying to my dad something like, "Well, I'm halfway through ... and things are going really bad ... but I'm hoping that the title ... well, the title is Atonement ... so hopefully that will mean something." My dad (who hadn't read the book) said, "I don't think it's a happy ending." "No, I know. I can feel it." It's awful, because you know you're approaching the end ... and you have already been through so much with the rest of the book - the terrible events of that weekend party ... and then you skip ahead in time, a couple of years ... and WWII has started ... and now we're in London ... and you hope ... you just hope that maybe things worked out in that little blank interim we had. Maybe McEwan is holding something out on us. Well, he sure is. And he releases it at the end, and shatters all your hopes and dreams. Thanks, bro!

I'm writing about this book as though I am afraid of it. I actually did feel fear for almost the entirety of the book. It tapped into a deep well inside of me, from almost the first page ... and I guess there's nothing worse (on a small level, and on a large level) than being completely misunderstood. Or when you hurt someone by accident ... and you SO didn't mean to hurt them!! ... but it happened anyway ... and oh God, what an awful awful feeling that is. A sense of urgency comes over me when I am in that situation. I must fix this IMMEDIATELY. It's terrible. And misunderstanding is at the heart of so much of the world's tragedies - and the misunderstanding that happens in Atonement is devastating. It seems small, at first. Briony saw something, and misinterpreted what she saw. That happens a lot. Especially with little kids when they encounter something in the adult world that they do not understand. No biggie, right? But the way McEwan writes about it ... you just start feeling this overwhelming sensation of dread. Like: oh God. No, Briony, what you saw is what you THINK you saw, and because you make up little stories you're making this one up, too - what you saw is NOT what you think you saw. You have made the whole thing up! But Briony is not one to let things lie (witness her play rehearsals ... she's obsessive, serious, and ... there's something rigid about her that makes you know she is headed for a huge fall - I recognized myself in Briony, I really did - which is why I think I had such a violent reaction to her.) ... Briony becomes fired up with her interpretation of what she saw. She casts herself as the Rescuer, the Savior. She will "save" her sister. Then everyone will know how special Briony is! What a heroine she is!

And so. Briony makes an accusation. And then, just watch how the events unfold. Inevitably. Doors clanging shut behind everyone involved, no way back, no way out.

You could live until you were 110. You could never atone for something like that.

I won't say anything more about the book. Obviously it's one of the most powerful books I have ever read. So powerful that I'm not sure I can ever go through it again. In fact, I dreaded today's excerpt. The book gives off a malevolent glow on my bookshelf, full of its terrible truths, its bleak death-knell of hope. But still: McEwan's writing is something else, man. He has written many books, but this is his masterpiece.

Here's an excerpt. It's from early on in the book. Before the shit goes down. But it's building here. Briony intercepts the note. The note that has that word in it. "Cunt". But the context it is in (it's a love note) is beyond her understanding, and she already has misinterpreted the moment by the fountain ... she feels the danger in the air, she senses the threat (even though she is totally wrong). She's gathering her forces. I know she's just a little girl, but her desire to be admired, to have attention, to elevate herself into visibility - is not only her downfall, but the downfall of the other two parties involved.

It makes me want to scold her. "Now, Briony, this is grown-up stuff, and you are just a little bratty girl, don't flatter yourself that you understand anything. Run away and play now, and let the grown-ups carry on with their grown-up lives. You are not a part of it yet. Don't flatter yourself." I would like to condescend to her within an inch of her life, I would like to crush her spirit, to see her crumble into insecurity - to have her KNOW that she doesn't know anything ... That's what the book brings up in me. It's devastating.

But ... and this is the most difficult level ... it's also a book about writing. Briony is NOT just a silly little girl who makes up stories. She is a writer. And her later life will play that out. She knew who she was ... even back then. She is a writer. Everything that happens to her, even as a small child, is grist for the mill (you can see it in the excerpt). I was like that as a child. I am like that now. Sometimes "the urge to be writing [is] stronger than any notion of what [I] had of what [I] might write." It's totally true. The writing-urge is within her. She's playing God, in a sense - and isn't that what writers do? Play God? Moving the characters around, unleashing tragedies upon them, seeing how they react? Briony does it in her little plays as a girl, she does it in her life - with brutal consequences - and she does, indeed, become a writer of some renown.

I also don't think it's an accident that it's a WORD that starts Briony on her terrible journey. It's the WORD that confirms her fears of what she saw at the fountain. A writer. Responding to the call of the word, however mistaken.

But again. There is no atonement. There is no taking back that devastating moment when she made that choice.

Great book.

Excerpt from Atonement by Ian McEwan

The very complexity of her feelings confirmed Briony in her view that she was entering an arena of adult emotion and dissembling from which her writing was bound to benefit. What fairy tale ever held so much by way of contradiction? A savage and thoughtless curiosity prompted her to rip the letter from its envelope - she read it in the hall after Polly had let her in - and though the shock of the message vindicated her completely, that did not prevent her from feeling guilty. It was wrong to open people's letters, but it was right, it was essential, for her to know everything. She had been delighted to see her brother again, but that did not prevent her from exaggerating her feelings to avoid her sister's accusing question. And afterward she had only pretended to be eagerly obedient to her mother's command by running up to her room; as well as wanting to escape Cecilia, she needed to be alone to consider Robbie afresh, and to frame the opening paragraph of a story shot through with real life. No more princesses! The scene by the fountain, its air of ugly threat, and at the end, when both had gone their separate ways, the luminous absence shimmering above the wetness on the gravel - all this would have to be reconsidered. With the letter, something elemental, brutal, perhaps even criminal had been introduced, some principle of darkness, and even in her excitement over the possibilities, she did not doubt that her sister was in some way threatened and would need her help.

The word: she tried to prevent it sounding in her thoughts, and yet it danced through them obscenely, a typographical demon, juggling vague, insinuating anagrams - an uncle and a nut, the Latin for next, an Old English king attempting to turn back the tide. Rhyming words took their form from children's books - the smallest pig in the litter, the hounds pursuing the fox, the flat-bottomed boats on the Cam by Grantchester meadow. Naturally, she had never heard the word spoken, or seen it in print, or come across it in asterisks. No one in her presence had ever referred to the word's existence, and what was more, no one, not even her mother, had ever referred to the existence of that part of her to which - Briony was certain - the word referred. She had no doubt that that was what it was. The context helped, but more than that, the word was at one with its meaning, and was almost onomatopoeic. The smooth-hollowed, partly enclosed forms of its first three letters were as clear as a set of anatomical drawings. Three figures huddling at the foot of the cross. That the word had been written by a man confessing to an image in his mind, confiding a lonely preoccupation, disgusted her profoundly.

She had read the note standing shamelessly in the center of the entrance hall, immediately sensing the danger contained by such crudity. Something irreducibly human, or male, threatened the order of their household, and Briony knew that unless she helped her sister, they would all suffer. It was also clear that she would have to be helped in a delicate, tactful manner. Otherwise, as Briony knew from experience, Cecilia would turn on her.

These thoughts preoccupied her as she washed her hands and face and chose a clean dress. The socks she wanted to wear were not to be found, but she wasted no time in hunting. She put on some others, strapped on her shoes and sat at her desk. Downstairs, they were drinking cocktails and she would have at least twenty minutes to herself. She could brush her hair on the way out. Outside her open window a cricket was singing. A sheaf of foolscap from her father's office was before her, the desk light threw down its comforting yellow patch, the fountain pen was in her hand. The orderly troupe of farm animals lined along the windowsill and the straitlaced dolls poised in the various rooms of their open-sided mansion waited for the gem of her first sentence. At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write. What she wanted was to be lost to the unfolding of an irresistible idea, to see the black thread spooling out from the end of her scratchy silver nib and coiling into words. But how to do justice to the changes that had made her into a real writer at last, and to her chaotic swarm of impressions, and to the disgust and fascination she felt? Order must be imposed. She should begin, as she had decided earlier, with a simple account of what she had seen at the fountain. But that episode in the sunlight was not quite so interesting as the dusk, the idle minutes on the bridge lost to daydreaming, and then Robbie appearing in the semidarkness, calling to her, holding in his hand the little white square that contained the letter that contained the word. And what did the word contain?

She wrote, "There was an old lady who swallowed a fly."

Surely it was not too childish to say there had to be a story; and this was the story of a man whom everybody liked, but about whom the heroine always had her doubts, and finally she was able to reveal that he was the incarnation of evil. But wasn't she - that was, Briony the writer - supposed to be so worldly now as to be above such nursery-tale ideas as good and evil? There must be some lofty, godlike place from which all people could be judged alike, not pitted against each other, as in some lifelong hockey match, but seen noisily jostling together in all their glorious imperfection. If such a place existed, she was not worthy of it. She could never forgive Robbie his disgusting mind.

Trapped between the urge to write a simple diary account of her day's experiences and the ambition to make something greater of them that would be polished, self-contained and obscure, she sat for many minutes frowning at her sheet of paper and its infantile quotation and did not write another word. Actions she thought she could describe well enough, and she had the hang of dialogue. She could do the woods in winter, and the grimness of a castle wall. But how to do feelings? All very well to write, She felt sad, or describe what a sad person might do, but what of sadness itself, how was that put across so it could be felt in all its lowering immediacy? Even harder was the threat, or the confusion of feeling contradictory things. Pen in hand, she stared across the room toward her hard-faced dolls, the estranged companions of a childhood she considered closed. It was a chilly sensation, growing up. She would never sit on Emily's or Cecilia's lap again, or only as a joke. Two summers ago, on her eleventh birthday, her parents, brother and sister and a fifth person she could not remember had taken her out onto the lawn and tossed her in a blanket eleven times, and then once for luck. Could she trust it now, the hilarious freedom of the upward flight, the blind trust in the kindly grip of adult wrists, when the fifth person could so easily have been Robbie?

Snowflakes

What a photo! Perfect!

All the photos on that blog of our recent snowfall in Manhattan are magical. It's an incredible site in general - I love it.

Thanks, Ms. Baroque, for linking to it.

I love this photograph

It's like some messed-up dark fairy tale. A difficult journey through a dark forest.

from V magazine

Richard Pryor: "Live on the Sunset Strip"

It's rare that someone is so brilliant that you start to cry, in response. Spontaneously. You just dissolve into tears, even though what the person is doing is comedic.

Richard Pryor's live concert in 1982 is one of those rare moments.

It's when you realize that what you are looking at is the damn truth, man. It's almost like the hairs on the back of your neck rise up. This is comedy, yes. So funny that even years after seeing it for the first time "Who you gonna believe? Me or your lyin' eyes?" still makes me lose it. I'm never READY for it, even though I KNOW it's coming ... and it is just as funny the 20th time as it is the first.

But, for me, what is amazing about this particular show, and my response to it .. is that I find myself getting frightened. Not because of what he is revealing to me about himself, although that is honest and beautifully so ... but because of how he forces me to be truthful about myself. There's no bullshitting here. There's no deflection here. TRY it. Just try it. Just try "relishing your rightness" in the presence of this man. See how far you get.

Do you want to be RIGHT? Or do you want to join the rest of us fuck-ups, and be honest?

It's a goosebump-making performance.

It's when you realize that you are in the presence of someone who is willing to go there. To look within. To take that which is weak and ugly within him ... and bring it out into the light ... so that we all can look at it, and recognize ourselves in it, and not be afraid or ashamed anymore ...

THAT is what Richard Pryor is doing in this concert.

He's untouchable.

Like the clip below - where he describes his last moment in Africa. It's funny, sure, but it also grips you at your throat. This is as good as it gets, my God. This is a man unmasked. He has unmasked himself, and in so doing, says to us, "It's okay. Just be honest. Stop protecting, stop defending ... you know you're human ... you're like this, too."

It is the greatest gift a performer can give to his audience.

"I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true."

WONDERFUL interview with Anne Enright, author of The Gathering, winner of the Man Booker Prize last year. I finished it near my birthday last year (post here) - and had mixed feelings about it, although the writing knocked me on my ass. I just LIKE her as a person, too - every interview I've read with her has been fascinating. Seems like a lady I'd like to have a pint with.

She says in the interview:

Q. Where does the idea of "authentic" Irishness come from?

A. From the diaspora. They dreamt about Ireland and reinvented it. Ireland is a series of stories that have been told to us, starting with the Irish Celtic national revival. I never believed in "Old Ireland." It has been made all of kitsch by the diaspora, looking back and deciding what Ireland is. Yes, it is green. Yes, it is friendly. I can't think of anything else for definite.

I read that, and thought of the piece I wrote "Road Works Ahead". I'm a writer. I read other people's thoughts and think of my own work. That's the way it goes. I still get emails about that "Road Works Ahead" piece. Irish people, Irish-American people - but mostly straight Irish. After I wrote that piece, an Irish newspaper linked to it, a big one, a national paper - and my piece was used as a launching-off place for an op-ed column - by an Irishman, who was worried about what had happened to that good old Irish hospitality. I felt a cringing within me when I saw that I had been referenced, I have a sensitivity towards how i come off ... i didn't want to seem like I was criticizing Ireland, or behaving like an obnoxious irish-American, pissed off that there were no more leprechauns. But the op-ed column was quite honest, and quite open ... it took my observations (made as an outsider, yes) and started to ask questions, based upon those observations. And the response I got was overwhelming. And also quite respectful and nice. It was great. Like I said, people still email me about that piece.

I am (a couple generations removed) a member of the diaspora and I recognize it in her words. I recognize it from the conversation I had with Eamon in the piece I wrote above. The whole Quiet Man thing, and the whole ambivalence about progress and change.

And I LOVED LOVED LOVED Anne Enright's thoughts on Joyce. I literally giggled with glee when I read them:

Q. Almost every review of an Irish writer's work makes comparisons to James Joyce. Is it hard to get away from him?

A. I don't want to get away from him. It's male writers who have a problem with Joyce; they're all "in the long shadow of Joyce, and who can step into his shoes?" I don't want any shoes, thank you very much. Joyce made everything possible; he opened all the doors and windows. Also, I have a very strong theory that he was actually a woman. He wrote endlessly introspective and domestic things, which is the accusation made about women writers - there's no action and nothing happens. Then you look at "Ulysses" and say, well, he was a girl, that was his secret.

Marvelous. I want to read that to my father. He will appreciate it.

Full interview here.

Delirium

Patrick and myself today:

"I liked the Twizzler dress."
"You just scared me. I had zoned out, and that was like a ZAP."

Later: "TWIZZLER."

"Quizmn! I'm working in Quizmn!"

"Oh for God's sake. It's a novel. Was he born on a cold dark day?"
"THE AIR IS THICK AND STILL."

"Wah wah wah, everything's harder for Sheila than it is for everybody else! I am so sorry. I'm being a baby."
"It's okay. I bitch sometimes, too."

"Damn, Gina!"

"I do not want to hear about the West Nile Virus when I am cooking a sausage."

"Oh FUCK why do you show me the font and the fucking HTML form information - I do not want that! DON'T SHOW IT TO ME. I AM NOT RETARDED."

"Don't mind me. It's just my ADD kicking in."
"I totally understand."

Unbelievable dance number

Fred Astaire said the following performance was "the greatest dance number ever filmed": The Nicholas Brothers - in Stormy Weather. Clip below the fold.

Speechless. Not just the technical brilliance - (it just keeps getting more and more amazing, with every passing second - and the big finish just knocks me out) - but also the sheer JOY of that dance. It's brought me to tears.

Enjoy!!

(thanks Bob at Eternal Sunshine ... watching that really brightened my rather dark day)

The Books: "Charming Billy " ( Alice McDermott)

Next book in my on my adult fiction shelves:

Charming Billy by Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott writes about Irish-American life and the Irish-American experience (straddling Vatican II into now) - like nobody's business. Charming Billy is almost creepy to me, because she just gets it all so right. It sounds right, the houses are right, the masses are right - the family stuff is right ... and her writing is not flowery, or sentimental - in many ways, she reminds me of Dennis Lehane (excerpt of Mystic River here), although she doesn't write crime books. It's the STYLE. It's the TYPE of person she writes about. The Irish-Americans - the folks from Southie in Boston - the third-generation people, with grandmothers and great-grandmothers who speak in brogues - you know, my peeps. McDermott doesn't write about it in a precious way - or a fetishizing way. It's just real.

Charming Billy won the National Book Award the year it came out, and I think that's pretty cool - because Charming Billy doesn't have a lot of sturm und drang - it's not about a politically hot topic - it's not focusing on mental illness or depression - it's not "important" at all. But God spare us from only reading "important" books. Charming Billy is the story of a family who gathers in a bar in the Bronx - after the funeral mass of their family member Billy - he's an uncle, a cousin, whatever - and the family sits around and talks about him, telling stories. Billy had a long life. He was a big drinker. He had a great lost love - Eva, an Irish girl. He had a new wife - Maeve - and she's relatively new to the family (but again, with the whole Irish tendency of not accepting newbies - the family doesn't quite know how to deal with her - she's not really "one of them" yet) - and everyone tells stories, and sometimes the narrator (who is a member of the family - it's a first-person book, although often it doesn't feel that way, because she is telling the stories of Billy's life, not her own) - anyway, sometimes the narrator will go back into the past, and share her memories of Billy, and the memories will come to life on the page. The whole thing takes place in one day, sitting around the bar in the Bronx, shooting the shit about their dearly departed Billy.

And who can say why this was such a lovely read? Having described "what happens", I can imagine it doesn't sound all that compelling.

But it's what I call a "soft" read. You can just sink into it. You can lose yourself. The writing is not insistent, or clever. It's just GOOD. It's good story-telling. And it has the breath of reality in it. I have been to more Irish wakes than I can count. We have a big family and my childhood was punctuated by truly tragic deaths, out of the blue deaths, dear dear family members dying young, horrible. And to me, McDermott just captures the vibe at the after-gatherings of such funerals. I mean, Irish wakes are a cliche - but there's much truth in cliches. I recognize myself in this book. I see my family. Alice McDermott has perfect pitch.

And I love the title of the book.

Billy is not always a pleasant man to get to know. He had a drinking problem. He was old-school Catholic boy. But yes. He was "charming". That word can have snotty connotations - like it has lost its meaning. What does it mean when someone REALLY has "charm"? What is charm? Billy had it. There is much to mourn.

Lovely book. I have all of Alice McDermott's other books, based just on my love of Charming Billy - but I have yet to read any of them. I love her writing.

Here's an excerpt. I love love love the bit about the waiter placing the ice cream on the table. And how Alice McDermott describes it perfectly. That's good writing.

EXCERPT FROM Charming Billy by Alice McDermott

"Well, he always drank," Kate said. "But for a very long time it seemed he drank harmlessly. I remember him feeling no pain when he was on leave, before he went overseas, but that was understandable. I remember the night he came home and told us that Eva had passed away. He went straight to bed afterwards and I called Dennis to see if I could learn anything more and Dennis said they'd both had quite a lot to drink the night before, which was understandable, too. It was probably as hard for Dennis to tell him as it was for Billy to hear the news."

His sister Rosemary said, "I remember he had one too many at Jill's christening. I was worried about him riding the subway home."

"But for years he never missed a day of work," Kate told us. "And he was there to open the shoe store every Saturday morning from the time he started into the early sixties, when Mr. Holtzman finally sold the place to Baker's. I don't think Mr. Holtzman ever knew he drank. Certainly no one at Edison knew until near the end."

But Mickey Quinn held up his hand. "They knew," he said wisely.

"But not until fairly recently," Kate said. "Maybe when he went into the hospital in '73, the same year my Kevin graduated from Regis."

But Mickey Quinn frowned and shook his head slightly apologetically, as if over something that was only slightly askew. "They knew," he said again. "We all knew. I left Irving Place in '68 and the fellows in the office knew Billy was a drinker even then. They covered for him, mostly in the afternoon. He'd go out on a call after lunch and not come back to the office and they'd cover for him. Everyone liked him. They were glad to do it."

"I think Smitty might have covered for him, too," his sister Rosemary said. "In the shoe store. Do you remember Smitty? Mr. Holtzman's assistant - the little bald man?" He was remembered. "I went in there one Saturday, we were looking for Betty's First Communion shoes, and Billy was just coming in from lunch. I had the feeling he'd had a few. I mean, he was fine, and the kids were always happy to see him, but I noticed Smitty did all the measuring and got out all the shoes. Billy mostly sat. Which wasn't like him. He was sucking a peppermint."

"When was this?" Kate asked as her wealthy husband, trained at Fordham Law, might do.

Rosemary paused to calculate. "Betty was in second grade. 1962." Almost in apology: "He was drinking in '62."

Dan Lynch raised his hands. "Well, what does it mean? He was drinking before that, too. Down at Quinlan's. Saturdays after work. Sunday evenings. Hell, I was always there, too, and my liver's fine."

"So when did it become a problem?" cousin Rosemary asked.

"He started AA in the late sixties," Kate told her. "And then again around '71 or '2."

"He took the pledge on that Ireland trip. That was '75."

"What good did it do?"

"I thought it would stick. Maeve did, too."

Dan Lynch was chuckling, his hand around his small glass. "I remember Billy saying that AA was a Protestant thing, when you came right down to it. Started by a bunch of Protestants. He said he didn't like the chummy way some of them were always calling Our Lord by his first name. I drove him to the first meeting and waited to take him home, 'cause Maeve didn't want him driving, and when he came out he said you could tell who the Catholics were because they'd all been bowing their heads every ten seconds while the Protestants bantered on about Jesus, Jesus, Jesus."

(And sure enough, up and down our stretch of table, heads bobbed at the name.)

Sister Rosemary said, "He didn't like them calling God a Higher Power, either - which I guess was the official AA term. Nondenominational, you know. He said it only proved that none of them had a sense of humor. He said you'd have to be God Himself to get higher than most of these guys had been."

There was a bit of low laughter. "Billy had an irreverent streak," MIckey Quinn said. "I liked that about him."

"The way Father Joyce explained it to me," Dan Lynch went on, "the pledge was the Catholic take on AA. He said it was like Holy Orders itself - you signed on and there was no going back. An unbreakable oath never to take another drink. Billy thought it was the real thing."

"But he broke it."

"There's plenty of priests that break their Holy Orders, too," Dan Lynch told them.

"Well, it got him over to Ireland, anyway," cousin Rosemary said. "I tried to talk him and Maeve into going over any number of times, but I never could do it."

"Maeve isn't one to travel," sister Rosemary said. "She's a homebody. Always has been."

Kate leaned toward us all, folding her hands on the table: a tasteful ring of diamonds, a gold bracelet, a professional manicure. "I often wondered," she said slowly. "I never had the heart to ask him, but I wondered if Billy went to visit the town Eva came from. While he was there."

Her sister shook her head. "Billy would have said so if he had. He wasn't one to keep things to himself."

Kate paused only a moment to consider this. "But he might not have wanted it to get back to Maeve, you know," she said. "He might have thought she wouldn't want to hear about a pilgrimage like that."

"Who would?"

"She knew about Eva?" Bridie said, whispering too, adding, "Thank you," as the waiter took her empty plate.

"I'm sure," Kate said. "Thank you." And then: "Actually, I don't know. I'd imagine she knew something about her."

"He must have told her something."

"Dennis would know," Mickey Quinn said. "They were always real close."

But Dan Lynch objected. "I was the best man at Billy's wedding," he said. "We were pretty close, too."

"Well, did he tell Maeve about the Irish girl?"

Dan waved his hand impatiently. "I'm sure he told her something. You know, it's not the sort of thing men talk about. And I'll say this for Billy, you never heard him mention that girl again, once he married Maeve."

"Ask Dennis," cousin Rosemary whispered.

The selected dessert was brought in: two scoops of vanilla ice cream in cold stainless-steel bowls. Hands in lamps to make the poor man's job easier as he reached between their shoulders. Thank you.

"I remember watching Maeve come down the aisle," Dan Lynch said, lifting his spoon, holding it like a scepter. "She was on her old man's arm, but it was clear as you watched her that she was shoring him up, you know, keeping him straight. She was smiling as sweetly as any bride, but there was a determination in the way she walked, you know, the way she held her shoulder up against his, like it was a wall about to topple. She took hold of his arm when they got to the first pew, I mean a good grip, right here." He demonstrated, taking hold of his own forearm, spoon and all. "The old man banged his foot against the kneeling bench - you could hear it all over the church - and for a minute it looked like he'd go down headfirst. But she got him in there and got him seated. She maneuvered him. By sheer force of will, I'd say. And then she gave a little nod, as if to say, Well, that's done, and came up the steps to marry Billy." He sipped his beer. "Ready to take him on, is what I remember thinking. She was a plain girl, but determined."

"Very quiet," Mickey Quinn said. "Go over there for dinner and Billy would do most of the talking."

"He was lucky to find her," sister Rosemary said. "My mother always siad there's nothing more pathetic than an old bachelor who's not a priest. That's what she thought Billy would be, after the Irish girl. An old bachelor. No offense, Danny."

And Dan Lynch laughed, blushed a little across his bald dome. Sipping his beer and shrugged. None taken - the story here being that Danny Lunch was such a connoisseur of beauty and behavior that no flawed wife could have pleased him and no flawless one could have been found.

"Did you ever meet her?" Bridie from the old neighborhood whispered. "The Irish girl?"

The two sisters exchanged a look across the table - the kind of look they might have exchanged had they been eyeing the last bite of a shared piece of cake. "She came to the apartment," Kate said, scooping it up. "It was just before she went back home. Billy borrowed Mr. Holtzman's car to go into the city to get her."

"She was very pretty," Rosemary added, taking a crumb. "Like Susan Hayward."

"Oh, I didn't think so," Kate said. "But she had nice hair, dark auburn. And big brown eyes. She wasn't very tall, even a little chubby. Billy brought her for Sunday dinner and then couldn't eat a bite himself. He was so - I don't know what - so delicate with her. The way he spoke to her, and watched her and listened to her. She did have a nice voice, you know, the poor girl" (a reminder to us all that she had died young), "with her brogue and all. My mother's brogue got thicker just listening to her. They were good-looking together, Eva and Billy. A handsome pair. Better looking together than singly, somehow. He was lovestruck, that's for sure. We kidded him when he got home, after he'd taken her back to the city. We put his plate out on the dining-room table when we heard him coming up. We'd saved it. He'd hardly eaten a bite. We said, 'What was wrong with your dinner, Billy?'" She began to laugh. "We said, 'How are you going to marry this poor girl if her mere presence takes your appetite away? Billy,' we said, 'she'll be at your dinner table every day, breakfast too, when are you going to eat? You'll starve. You'll waste away to nothing. You'll have to sneak over here just to calm down enough to have your dinner.' We gave him such a hard time."

"And do you remember what Momma said?" sister Rosemary asked. Kate swallowed her smile, looked blank. Professional makeup, too. "No."

Well pleased, Rosemary said to my end of the table, "You know my mother thought herself a kind of psychic." She was getting her share of the story, after all. "She read cards and had dreams. And she said after Billy left that when she touched the girl's hand she felt four quick pulses in her own stomach, like baby kicks, which meant they'd have four children."

"Or that your mother had indigestion," Mickey Quinn said.

"More likely," Kate said. "You know how my mother cooked."

"She wasn't a much better prophet."

But Bridie shook her head. "I don't know," she said. "It might have been true. I mean, you could say if the girl had lived, that's how many children they might have had."

Dan Lynch said solemnly, "Which would have made this a different day."

"It would have been a different life."

Mickey Quinn shook his head and leaned back in his chair, as if to avoid all such speculation. "I'll have that cup of coffee now, please, when you get the chance," he said to the waiter's back.

"A different life," Dan Lynch repeated, and raised his beer.

The light through the window behind Maeve had begun to change now. A trace of shadow coming between the dark trunks of the trees, the clouds breaking up, perhaps.

"I don't agree with that," sister Rosemary said softly. "I've done a lot of reading in this regard, with Billy the way he was. Alcoholism isn't a decision, it's a disease, and Billy would have had the disease whether he married the Irish girl or Maeve, whether he'd had kids or not. It wouldn't have been such a different life, believe me. Every alcoholic's life is pretty much the same."

"Now I don't agree," Dan Lynch said under his breath, and Kate added, "It's not always fatal."

"I say it's a matter of will," Dan Lynch said, speaking up, keeping Kate from running away with the talk once again. "I drank side by side with Billy LYnch for nearly forty years. My liver's fine. Billy never had the will to stop."

Sister Rosemary frowned, shaking her head. "That's not fair. When he went to Ireland, when he took the pledge, he was truly determined. He told me so. You know what faith Billy had. And you know how seriously he took that trip. He was truly determined that time. But the disease had him in its grip." She raised a fist, showing them.

Dan Lynch poured himself and Mickey Quinn another beer. "Well, let me tell you what he told me," he said. "Down at Quinlan's, maybe a year or two after the Irish girl died. He told me," he said, lifting his glass, pointing around it, "that after year was a weight on his shoulders. Every hour was, he said." He pointed to Kate. "Remember when you said he was like a man waiting for a bus, when he was waiting to get her back here? Well, when you said that I thought: It never changed. He was still waiting, years after she'd died. But she was waiting to go to her now. Ever since the night Dennis told him the news, he was waiting to die. I'm sure of it."

"But there was Maeve," Bridie from the neighborhood cried.

"That's not fair to Maeve," sister Rosemary said.

Dan Lynch shook his head. "I'm not saying a word against Maeve. She had a lot to handle, that's for sure. But if you ask me, Billy had a foot in the hereafter even before he met Maeve." He glanced up the table and then leaned forward, lowering his voice because the guests were beginning to thin out, Billy's friends and relatives getting up to have a few more words with Maeve, to go to the bathroom, or to get another drink before departing.

"We went to Mass together once. Feast of the Assumption. August 15. We'd both stopped into Quinlan's after work, a blazing hot day if there ever was one, hot as Hades, and both of us realized at the same time what the date was. We hightailed it over to 6:30 Mass at St. Sebastian's and, I don't know, I glanced at Billy, just after Communion. It struck me that it wasn't any thought of Our Lord or the Blessed Mother that put that look on his face. It was the girl. The Irish girl. When he turned his eyes to heaven, that's who he saw."

"Oh, nonsense," sister Rosemary whispered.

Mickey Quinn studied the ceiling. Down the table, a few heads turned, perhaps sensing a fight.

Dan Lynch took a sip of his beer, pursed his lips around the taste. "What's nonsense is all this disease business," he said. "Maybe for some people it's a disease. But maybe for some there are things that happen in their lives that they just can't live with. Things that take the sweetness out of everything. Maybe for some it's a sadness they can't get rid of or a disappointment that won't go away. And you know what I say to those people? I say good luck to those people." He raised his glass, raised his chin. "I say maybe they're not as smart and sensible and accepting as every one of us," indicating every one of us with a sweep of his beer, "but they're loyal. They're loyal to their own feelings. They're loyal to the first plans they made - just like Billy was loyal to Holtzman and the job he gave him. And like he would have been loyal to her if she had lived and come back here and they'd gotten married. Just like he was loyal to Maeve. Billy never breathed another word about that girl after he married Maeve. But the girl was first, and for Billy she would always be first. That's the kind of guy he was. Maeve couldn't change him."

"I think he went to her grave when he was in Ireland," Kate said suddenly. "I just have the feeling that sometime while he was over there he went to the town she was from and visited her grave. I think it was the whole reason he made the trip."

Rosemary shook her head, appealed to Mickey Quinn, who was intent on dissolving the sugar in his coffee. "He went with Father Ryan to take the pledge," she said patiently. "To make the retreat. To quit drinking."

But Kate said, "Oh, Rose, think about it. Ireland's not the only place that has retreats for alcoholics. He could have made one over here. Maybe he thought if he went to her grave he could put something to rest, finally. Put his feelings for her to rest so then he could quit drinking."

"But he couldn't," Dan Lynch said sadly, and poured another little beer.

"He couldn't," Kate agreed. "Which is why it didn't stick, as determined as he was."

But Rosemary's mouth was set. "No," she said firmly. "Look, there are faster and more pleasant ways of killing yourself. I tell you, I've read everything there is about this. Alcoholism is a disease, it's genetic. Our own father ruined his liver as well and probably would have died the same way if he hadn't gotten cancer. And Uncle John in Philadlephia was an alcoholic. And two of his sons - Chuck and Peter - go to AA. And Ted. And Mary Casey and Helen Lynch. And Dennis's father was no teetotaler either."

"Uncle Daniel died of cancer," Dan Lynch said indignantly. "He was no drunk." He turned to Bridie and Mickey Quinn. "He brought his six brothers and a sister over here and God knows how many other friends and relations. All on a motorman's salary."

"He was a saint," Bridie from the neighborhood said, nodding. "My mother always said so."

"Okay," Rosemary said. "God bless Uncle Daniel, but my point is that our family has what they call a genetic predisposition to both cancer and alcoholism. Billy had it in his genes."

"When he came back from Ireland," Kate said softly, stroking the stem of her glass. "June of '75 - I remember because my Daniel had just graduated from Fordham - he went straight out to Long Island. Out to the little house. Dennis was there, it wasn't long after he'd lost Claire. Remember how he used to rent the place back from his mother's tenant so he could spend his vacation? Well, Billy wasn't home for more than a day when he took the train out - and he hadn't been there in years."

"Meaning?" Rosemary asked coolly.

"Meaning he went back to the place he first met her. Eva. He was trying to work something out."

"Oh, honestly," Rosemary said. "It had been nearly thirty years. What was there to work out? It was a shame that she died, but Billy had thirty years of living since then. I mean, come on, name me anything that's going to stay with you that strongly for thirty years."

Which seemed to silence our end of the table for a moment, as if the thing we would mention had only momentarily slipped our minds.

Cousin Rosemary poked her swizzle stick into the remaining ice in her glass. "It's all water under the bridge," she said, as if water from under the bridge was the very thing the tall glass contained. "What's the point of even discussing all this now? Billy was here and now he's gone, and I for one just can't believe it. Despite his troubles." Tears now. "I'll miss him. I'll miss his voice over the phone. I'll miss his smiling face."

"Hear, hear," Mickey Quinn said.

But Dan Lynch raised his beer again. He was whispering, his voice fierce. "I just don't think it credits a man's life to say he was in the clutches of a disease and that's what ruined him. Say he was too loyal. Say he was disappointed. Say he made way too much of the Irish girl and afterwards couldn't look life square in the face. But give him some credit for feeling, for having a hand in his own fate. Don't say it was a disease that blindsided him and wiped out everything he was." He bit off a drink, his face flushed. "Do the man that favor, please."

Sorcerer

I watched Sorcerer last week - my own wee at-home tribute to the great Roy Scheider.

The film was pretty much dead on arrival when it opened in 1977. Friedkin had been riding a high wave with The French Connection and The Exorcist - the American auteur thing was spiralling out of control (but damn, it created some damn fine films in that decade) - and Friedkin was one of the biggest examples of the new trend. You see any picture of him in the 70s and he's wearing Ray Banz and a long silk scarf like he's some French aesthete strolling through Los Angeles. With Jeanne Moreau, his wife, on his arm.

Sorcerer was filmed on location - insanely. For example: less than 5 minutes of it takes place in Jerusalem - so dammit, they went to Israel. Unbelievable costs escalated. They filmed on location in the jungles of the Dominican Republic - as well as in the streets of New Jersey. There were 2 or 3 scenes that took place in Paris, so of course they all went to France. It was out of control. Also, to make matters worse for the money-men in Hollywood - there was only one "name" in it - Roy Scheider (who was at the top of his game in the 70s). The rest of the actors were foreigners - much of the film is in subtitles. What?? Every step of the way was a fight for Friedkin - who had complete creative control and went nuts with his power. Friedkin had won the Best Director Oscar for French Connection, surprising many - so he basically did what he wanted to do. Hang the budget. Hang the money guys. What do THEY know. The director was king.

Little did Friedkin know that yes, the director WAS king, but a very new kind of director was about to be born. At the very same time his crew was hurtling around the globe filming 2 minute scenes in one country, 3 minute scenes in another ... a little geeky dude nobody really thought much of - at least not in comparison to the bigwigs of the day (Peter Fonda, Coppola, Scorsese) - was making a movie up in the Bay Area about robots and some kind of intergalactic war or some such shit. Who knows. Who cares. Robots? Whatever.

Sorcerer was finally completed. Trailers were put together. The money-dudes and the powers-that-be still thought, when they looked at The Sorcerer - what the hell is this. Nobody is gonna want to see this. It rains for 90% of the picture. We have subtitles. No stars except for Scheider. It's bleak. It ends on a horribly inevitable note.

The little geek from the Bay Area had completed his movie as well, and it was decided to run the initial trailer for The Sorcerer during the first screenings. History was about to change.

In Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'N' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (marvelous book) - Biskind describes what happened during the first screenings of the stupid sci-fi robot movie:

The Sorcerer trailer Bud Smith cut played in front of Star Wars at the Chinese Theatre. Says Smith, "When our trailer faded to black, the curtains closed and opened again, and they kept opening and opening, and you started feeling this huge thing coming over your shoulder overwhelming you, and heard this noise, and you went right off into space. It made our film look like this little, amateurish piece of shit. I told Billy [Friedkin], 'We're fucking being blown off the screen. You've got to see this.'" ...

Friedkin went with his new wife, French actress Jeanne Moreau. Afterward, he fell into conversation with the manager of the theatre. Nodding his head toward the river of humanity cascading through the theater's doors, the man said, "This film's doing amazing business."

"Yeah, and my film's going in in a week," replied Billy nervously.

"Well, if it doesn't work, this one'll go back in again."

"Jesus!" Friedkin looked like he had been punched in the stomach. He turned to Moreau, said, "I dunno, little sweet robots and stuff, maybe we're on the wrong horse." A week later, Sorcerer did follow Star Wars into the Chinese. Dark and relentless, especially compared to Lucas's upbeat space opera, it played to an empty house, and was unceremoniously pulled to make room for the return of C3P0 et al.

"Maybe we're on the wrong horse ..."

They were. Sorcerer was an enormous bomb. It was barely seen at all. Star Wars mania swept away everything in its path. The monetary losses were astronomical for Sorcerer. It was over. It would take years for Friedkin to recover.

The thing about Sorcerer is: you must see it outside of that context. Or, it's interesting to know the context in which it opened - like: TOTALLY wrong time for a movie like that to open. 1972? It might have been a massive hit. But 1977? Not a chance. The pendulum was shifting.

But I happen to think - and I know I'm not alone - that Sorcerer is not only Billy Friedkin's masterpiece, but it's a masterpiece in general. Friedkin has a gift ( a GIFT, I tell you) of creating action sequences that feel so real they are almost disorienting. Action sequences just aren't done like that now. It's rare, anyway - there are exceptions. I am thinking of the famous car-chasing-train sequence in The French Connection (clip here). And even more astonishing to me - the car chase on the freeway - going the OPPOSITE direction of oncoming traffic - in To Live and Die in LA (you can see snippets of it in the teaser/trailer here) - that's gotta be one of the greatest action sequences I have ever seen. I find myself whirling into a tailspin when I watch it - thoughts coming fast and furious, making no sense .... "how on earth did they do this ... oh fucking SHIT look out ... is this really happening? how did they do it? AHHH, look out ..." It's exhilirating. You realize - when you see sequences like that - how much we miss when things are too computerized. I am not anti-technology - but to see that sequence in To Live and Die in LA puts every CGI experience I have had to shame. It's fucking AWESOME, is what it is.

Friedkin's sense of reality - however it was he created it - doesn't just apply to action sequences - although he really can't be topped in that regard. In general, when things happen in Friedkin's movies, it looks like they are really happening. For example, there's a scene in Sorcerer where the workers at the oil field in the nameless Latin American country start to riot - because of the explosion that had happened - and they start to storm one of the military trucks in the area. It is a terrifying scene - there aren't a lot of cuts - so you really feel like what you are looking at is actually happening. It's like the big crowd scenes outside the bank in Dog Day Afternoon (clip here). To me, those people don't feel like extras. They feel like a fucking CROWD. A crowd that could, at any moment, morph into something dangerous and violent. And it's done in lots of long shots, and helicopter shots ... it's not created in the editing room (or not entirely) - it feels like we are looking at an EVENT.

Sorcerer - even with its implausible moments - always feels like an EVENT. It's gripping. The acting is uniformly awesome. The action sequences are beyond reproach - so much so that a couple of them are nearly unwatchable. I get too nervous. Roy Scheider is amazing.

It's a masterpiece. It just came out in the wrong year.

It used to be very hard to find - but now with Netflix, you can get it easily. I can't recommend it highly enough if you haven't seen it.

The entire plot circles around 4 guys - on the run from crimes in other countries - who end up in this rainy jungly Latin American country - and they take a job where they have to transport 6 boxes of nitroglycerine through terrible terrain - seriously, if you hit a bump in the road (and there are barely any roads at all in the fictional country) - the whole thing will blow up. So the two trucks set out - to reach their destination ... and the journey of the nitro across the country - and all the obstacles and fear and problem-solving and desperation - make up the whole film.

I was watching it last week, and at one point I got up to get a drink or something - and I found myself tiptoeing into my kitchen. I did it without thinking - and tiptoed around getting my glass out of the cupboard and opening the fridge - and it suddenly occurred to me, 'Why the hell am I tiptoeing?"

And then I realized why: I didn't want the nitro to blow up.

You know, the nitro that doesn't really exist because it's only in a movie. Whatever - I TIPTOED, DAMMIT.

Below - you'll see not only the most stunning sequence in the film - but one of the most stunning action sequences in any film. EVER. It's up there with the crowd dragging the boat over the mountain in Fitzcarraldo - where you know you are watching something totally extraordinary, a once in a lifetime event (trailer here). In the scene from Sorcerer below, there are a couple of long shots where it convinces you: they are really doing this.

Basically it's a monsoon. They're in a truck. They come to a bridge. They need to cross it. Nitro is in the back of the truck. And just watch what happens - and watch how it is done. No fakery here. We're looking at something that is really happening. However they 'did it', however they made it occur - I don't know ... but the illusion is complete. Unbelievable.

"I Told You So, You Fucking Fools"

or ... that's what Robert Conquest reportedly wanted to call the new edition of his book The Great Terror when it came out with updated information - information which basically not only vindicated Conquest (who had been pilloried for years), but MORE than proved his case. In almost every situation, he had actually underestimated the number of millions killed by Stalin. Here's one of my posts on The Great Terror (and an excerpt from the book) - it's one of the most important books of the 20th century. And man, can that dude write!! He's a poet, too. Seriously, Robert Conquest is one of my intellectual idols.

Anyway, here's a lengthy awesome piece in The New Criterion about The Great Terror - great stuff.

I would totally pick up a book called I Told You So, You Fucking Fools.

Here's all my stuff on Stalin, for those of you so inclined.

"The shiny guy always worries."

Star Wars re-capped by a 3-year-old.

(thanks House Next Door)

Happy birthday to Christopher Marlowe

"The 26th day of February was christened Christofer the sonne of John Marlow." -- the register of St. George the Martyr, Canterbury

(So today is his baptism day, not his actual birthday, but whatever, it's close enough.)

(this 1585 portrait is widely thought to be of Marlowe)

I love Christopher Marlowe.

This is from Doctor Faustus - a famous excerpt:.

The Face that Launched a Thousand Ships

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss:
Her lips suck forth my soul, see where it flies:
And all is dross that is not Helena:
I will be Paris, and for love of thee,
Instead of Troy shall Wertenberg be sack'd,
And I will combat with weak Menelaus,
And wear thy colours on my plumed crest:
Yea I will wound Achillis in the heel,
And then return to Helen for a kiss.
O thou art fairer than the evening air,
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars,
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter,
When he appear'd to hapless Semele,
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa's azur'd arms,
And none but thou shalt be my paramour.

SOME QUOTES ON MARLOWE:

"No leaf he wrote on but was like a burning glass to set on fire all his readers." -- Thomas Nashe, a friend of Marlowe's

"His father lacked cash, always a grave trouble for the family. The chief cause of this lay not in John's imprudence, but in the fact that payments to shoemakers were often made by either bond or book, which meant that a cobbler often waited for cash while his tanning needs made matters worse. Still, if cash and credit's mysteries intrigued Christopher, his father's shop did not. In a juvenile play - which may be his apprentice work if it dates from about 1580 - the script refers, somewhat condescendingly, to Kent and cobblers. Certainly, throughout his writing career, Marlowe avoided his father's trade, and in this he was unlike the poet of Stratford. Whereas Shakespeare, as the son of a Midlands glover and processor of leather, readily alludes to a glover's implements or to animal skins, Marlowe, in his known work, never uses words such as shoe, shoemaker, sew, or sole (as for a shoe), but distances himself from his father's concerns. At various times, when he refers to leather, or boots, or even when he uses the word sell, the allusions are oddly repulsive:

Covetousness: begotten of an old Churl in a leather bag (Doctor Faustus (1616)

wormeaten leathern targets (His version of Lucan's Pharsalia)

As if he had meant to clean my Boots with his lips (The Jew of Malta)

our boots which lie foul upon our hands (Doctor Faustus, (1604)

You will not sell it [a sacred crown], would you? (Tamburlaine, Part One)

"Such lines may suggest hatred not of the cobbler but of his work, and we can be sure that he never envied John Marlowe's slavery." -- Park Honan, "Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy"

"The place and the value of Christopher Marlowe as a leader among English poets it would be almost impossible for historical criticism to over-estimate. To none of them all, perhaps, have so many of the greatest among them been so deep