The Sheila Variations

Roger O. Thornhill: "Now, what can a man do with his clothes off for twenty minutes?"

The following essay is about the emotional journey of Cary Grant's suit through North by Northwest.

The essay worked slowly on me. At first I resisted it, maybe it seemed too silly (although there was nothing silly about clothes to the impeccable Grant)? But I was wrong - I figured that out once I succumbed to the essay. It's a keeper. Well worth reading the entire thing.

I loved this bit:

In the suit are a number of subtle tools for Cary. It’s so well cut you can’t tell if he’s even carrying a wallet (turns out he is). Here’s what he’s got in that suit! He goes all the way from New York to Chicago to the face of Mount Rushmore with: a monogrammed book of matches, his wallet and some nickels, a pencil stub, a hanky, a newspaper clipping and his sunglasses — but these are shortly to be demolished when Eva Marie Saint folds him into the upper berth in her compartment. (Really this is a good thing, because Cary Grant in dark glasses looks appallingly GUILTY.) All this stuff fits into the pockets of the most wonderful suit in the world. Does the suit get crushed in the upper berth as his Ray-Bans are smashed? No. Cary keeps his jacket on in the make-out scene that follows. The suit defines him, he’s not going to take off that jacket. I know this feeling.

Beautiful (and surprisingly deep) essay. Well done.

How Alex and I met (by request)

Please realize. This is MY version. She may say something totally different. Although I'll kill her if she leaves out the kumquat. I say it was a gourd. She insists it was a kumquat. We'll leave it at that.

It's an episodic story. And YEARS pass in between encounters. It's truly insane to think of it - and I sometimes actually shiver to imagine that we might not have met. I shiver. And weirdly, with all of our friends in common, what brought us together was our blogs.

Well, and Mitchell, of course. Surprise surprise.

Praise Xenu it all lined up properly, putting us in each other's paths. Oh, and praise Xenu himself, that damned evil warlord, for REALLY bringing us close together. But I'll get to that.

We need to go back 16 years. My God. No. Is that right? Let me check my math. Yup. 16 years.

Sorry. I have just realized that I am actually a withered crone.

1.

I had just moved to Chicago. And Mitchell soon followed. I had very quickly gotten work as an actress in Chicago - and so had Mitchell. He became involved with StreetSigns' production of Right As Rain, about Anne Frank. I eventually was cast in that as well, in its touring company. So almost immediately we were thrust into a brand-new world, meeting a whole batch of new people - many of whom are still dear friends today (cough KATE cough). In 1992, StreetSigns did a production of Lorca's The Public, a bizarre piece of work ... and I thought was brilliantly done by StreetSigns. I still remember some of the staging of it. Derek Goldman (artistic director) is a master adapter (Google him, the guy is a phenom) - and he was always all about excavating the script for theatrical ways to tell the story - not just verbal or literal. Mitchell and David and I went to go see it, to see our new friends in action, and also to see our fellow colleagues at work, even though we weren't in it. And Alex was in it. She had a key part, THE key part, as kind of the emcee, a sort of omnipresent Joel Grey in Cabaret type person. I still remember seeing her in that show, which was the first time I laid eyes on Alex. She wore a blinding white pant suit. She had an air of unbelievable stillness. She watched over the action, quietly. We could only imagine what she was thinking. When she spoke, it was always in a soft voice, but nevertheless totally commanding. She had such focus onstage. I was riveted. Not to the mention the fact that I knew (everyone knew) she was transgendered. To me, at that time, it added such an air of mystery to her (I'm sure she's so sick of that kind of thing, so forgive me, Alex, for bringing it up now ... it's just a first impression kind of thing - and now that i know that she basically sits at home on a nightly basis in ratty pajamas playing with her kittens and talking with her wife Chrisanne about Abraham Lincoln and Bette Davis it seems even silly to mention it. I never even think of it now) ... but at the time, I couldn't help but stare at her, thinking, "Who IS this person??" Not to mention the fact that she was obviously a fucking actress. Girl had chops. She exuded it.

2.

2 may come before 3. I can't remember. I'll start here. Mitchell got a day job as a receptionist in a dentist's office that catered primarily to the gay and lesbian community in Chicago. Michelle and Maureen (Michelle was the dentist, and Maureen was her doctor girlfriend) became huge parts of our lives in Chicago, beloved friends - and I will never, and I mean NEVER, forget that Maureen made a house call - a HOUSE CALL - when I was gravely sick with a fever - to the point of hallucinating - and had no insurance. THAT'S a doctor. Anyway. I loved those two and I miss them both. And I knew, through Mitchell, that Alex was a patient of Michelle's. Mitchell didn't become friends with her immediately (which is shocking, knowing Mitchell's propensity for friendship) but they did become friendly. I never saw Alex at Michelle's office, and had no encounters with her ... but her name was everywhere at the time because of a crazy hit show she was doing, late night ... and she still held a kind of fascination for me. I'm not sure why. She seemed "other" ... by that I mean: I wanted to know her. I remember that feeling. Wanting to know her. But we're still in 1993 here, we didn't actually SPEAK - not really - until 2004. What?? Thank you, Xenu, for making sure it happened!!

3.

My time in Chicago (and for many years after) was taken up with a guy I call "M" on ye olde blog. I've written about him extensively. He's the lunatic who used to crawl through my window at 3 in the morning. Our beginning was no less unconventional. I realize I'm just writing about myself, but whatever. I love writing about myself (as, duh, should be obvious!!!) Anyhoo. I have no idea how ALEX would describe M., although I can imagine. He was a big obnoxious jock-gone-to-seed, a goofball, a self-described "right-wing sexist pig", one of the funniest people I have ever met, and pretty much insane. I also found him almost apocalyptically sexy and found it difficult to carry on a conversation with him in the first 3 months of knowing him. The perfect guy for me! I have to leap ahead now - years later, when Alex and I finally met - and we talked about M. - she was like, "Please. Please. Help me to understand him and help me to understand WHY YOU WERE WITH HIM." He was tough, I'll give him that. But for me, he was magic. And not only that, but I was pretty damaged when he met me. And something about the way he was with me helped me heal. Sounds goofy, but I swear it is the truth. He was never ever impatient with me. EVER. I was used to men being impatient with me. With my damaged-ness. He NEVER was. He accepted it, but he also wanted me to be better. He treated me in an egalitarian manner, and that was totally singular in my experience. It forced me to meet him halfway, and that was awesome. So. There's the M. factor.

Now. There was a show that opened around this time (it is now known as "the show that will never die") - and it was called Hamlet! The Musical. Notice the exclamation point. Very important. It was written by Jeff Richmond (now husband to Tina Fey - and actually, I believe they were dating at the time - M. ran with that crowd) and it was (is) hilarious. It began in a workshop theatre space at Improv Olympic, then moved to a bigger venue on Belmont (selling to soldout shows the entire time) - and finally made it to Navy Pier in a gigantic production - before coming to New York for an off-Broadway run. It was massive. In its first incarnation, M. was cast as Claudius, the conniving uncle ... and Alex was cast as his wife, the conniving Gertrude. At the time of the show (because, again, it's all about me) M. and I weren't seeing each other anymore (although it was a brief respite ... it always was) ... and he was dating someone else. No biggie. Sure, I had a haiku fit about it, but that's to be expected. (Ah, to be in my mid-20s again). But the thought of M. .... big gruff obnoxious M. ... singing and dancing and doing a freakin' box step was more than I could bear. I had to see it. I ended up seeing it probably 5 times - in its first incarnation. The audiences were RIOTOUS. Your stomach hurt at the end of the show. Ann Marie and I went one night (which will be known as "the night of the gourd" forevermore) ... and we STILL laugh about how funny that show was. It almost lost something when it moved to Navy Pier into that huge space ... because to see it in a 99 seat theatre at the 10 o'clock show (2 shows a night on weekends) on a crazy Friday night ... was something else. It was electric! And yes, seeing M. boxstep - in a cape and a CROWN - being all evil and twirling-moustachey - was an image that got me thru many a dark hour.

And there was Alex again. In a glittery mermaid dress, behaving like an absolute retard. She had a vampy number called "Mama Is a Boy's Best Friend", mkay? She is a force of nature onstage, seriously ... the humor that she finds in every moment is almost RUTHLESS and CRUEL and you want to beg for mercy! Just STOP for one goddamn SECOND and let me REST. Her Gertrude - was a Freudian nightmare. Poor Hamlet (played in the original incarnation by Jeff Richmond himself) kept trying to get through the "To be or not to be" speech, only to be interrupted by her knocks on the door.

I didn't know Alex, at this point - but as should be obvious, she had been peripheral for a couple of years now. Our paths had not yet crossed. I had seen her onstage - and that didn't really count ... and I had no inkling that we would one day become fast friends. Not yet.

Let's get back to the night of the gourd. (IT WAS NOT A KUMQUAT.) I actually posted it all out in a Diary Friday - and I just re-read that entry right now and found myself guffawing. I had started seeing Michael (kind of - after our first passionate love affair of all of 6 weeks) ... and he was, you know, 20 years old ... so things were not going well, even though I adored him (and still do.) So Michael blew me off for a date we had had, and I was at my wit's end - so I called Ann Marie and we decided to go see Hamlet! The Musical. I had not seen it yet. I was dying to see M. in action. I decided to send him something backstage - but flowers would not do ... too weird ... so I decided what WOULDN'T be weird, I decided what would be LESS weird - would be to take a little warted-up gourd, and write "Break a leg" on it - and send it backstage. Yes, I considered that to be NOT AS WEIRD AS FLOWERS.

The entire night became about the gourd (see link above for the full panoply of that night, which was epic). And yes, I did send the gourd backstage. All by itself, poor little thing.

I only learn this a bazillion years later when Alex and I have become friends - that she was there, in the cramped co-ed dressing room, when my gourd arrived. This is so insane!! I had put it in a paper bag, so M. would have had to open it up. He pulled out the gourd (Alex remembers it as a kumquat, but she's wrong) and said, in kind of a pleased tone, "Sheila sent me a gourd!" (Again. I am HOWLING with laughter as I type this.)

Alex, who had all kinds of opinions and thoughts about M. (wonderful onstage, kind of annoying off), wondered who was the RETARD who sent him a kumquat? "What kind of asinine bimbo would send this jagoff a kumquat backstage? Honest to GOD, people are assholes." She had all of these opinions about me ... the bimbo who sent the kumquat to the sexist pig sharing her dressing room ... like: there must be something WRONG with that person.

I am shaking with laughter.

Okay. So let's leave the gourd behind.

Years pass again.

4.

I move from Chicago and go to New York. I live there for years. "The show that will never die" continues on. And when it moves to Navy Pier, Mitchell is cast as Polonius. M. is no longer in it - but Alex, in all her Freudian spangled glory, remains. I fly back to Chicago for a vacation and go to see Mitchell in Hamlet! The Musical. I almost feel like this show has now been in my life for a decade. Yes, I am absolutely 100% peripheral ... but it still feels omnipresent. Navy Pier has a plush massive theatre, and the place is packed.

I wait for Mitchell in the palatial lobby afterwards, Lake Michigan gleaming out of the plate glass windows all around. And Mitchell walks out with Alex, who is in a sweatshirt, face scrubbed of makeup, and her arms are crossed over her chest. This is our first meeting. Mitchell introduces us. Alex un-crosses her arms, just long enough to shake my hand, and then crosses them again. I have all of these weird emotions about her - I guess how people feel about stars - it feels like you know them, even though you do not - and so you have an intimate response to a person, even though it is totally unwarranted.

"Hi, nice to meet you. Great show."
"Thanks. Nice to meet you."

Friendly, yes, but a little bit distant and cold. I wouldn't realize until much much later that Alex is actually shy. You would never guess it from her persona onstage. And I'm shy, too. Although you would never guess it from afar, I seem so dominant. So we were two shy people, being awkward, and distant. It just makes me LAUGH to remember it. I want to intervene. I want to lean into the action, from the future, and say, "Okay. Alex? Uncross your arms. Sheila? Stop the hero worship. See this person standing right in front of you? You are going to be FAST FRIENDS ... so cut. the. shit. NOW."

But it wasn't meant to be.

Mitchell and I went off on our way, and Alex went off on hers, and it would be years ... years ... before we would meet again.

5.

October, 2001. The smoking aftermath. Nothing is normal, nothing is even approaching normal.

And in the middle of all of that, I have a dream.

I dream of a nuclear holocaust, which affected only New Jersey and Manhattan. You just knew: It's over. I am going to die. But the bomb had already been dropped - and the sky was a heavy crayon-black. You knew you could not escape, but everyone was trying to anyway.

Everyone was trying to get to the ocean, everyone in Manhattan and in Jersey were trying to get onto the New Jersey turnpike, towards the Atlantic. But there were too many cars. It was like the roads were backed up from Cape May to lower Manhattan. You could not get out.

There was panic. People were running, and screaming, with their hair on fire, their clothes falling off. The bomb had already been dropped, that blackness in the sky was the fallout, and we were trapped - we could not get out.

I was alone in the dream. I was climbing down the cliffs from Jersey Heights down into Hoboken, looking at the blackened smoking skyline of Manhattan and seeing the roads below me, filled with cars, stalled cars as far as the eye could see.

And suddenly - climbing down the cliff with me - was Alex, who was hugely pregnant in my dream. Maybe 8 or 9 months along.

She was not panicked. Not at all. She knew what to do, she took me in hand, she knew a way out. She was on some other plane of thought, entirely.

"We're gonna get to the ocean," she said, as she climbed down the cliff, huge belly in front of her, moving gracefully and certainly. "I know the way."

I do not know why Alex showed up in my dream during that terrible time, I do not know why I would dream about her when I had had so little contact with her up until that point ... but for some reason, in my mind, and perhaps it was because of how caring and wonderful she had been to my friend Mitchell, she would be that person. That person who would know the way out of the nuclear fallout. Carrying new life with her.

I had not seen Alex since that moment in the lobby at Navy Pier, when we said hello to each other in distant guarded manners. Why on earth would she appear as a savior in my dream? I can't explain it. I know that I sensed something in her ... from the beginning. I don't want to make too big a thing out of it, because it ruins the special-ness of it ... but when I think of her, as a person, and who she eventually would be to me, I realize: Of course. Of course she would know the way. And of course, I had sensed it from moment one, when I saw her in that white pant suit as the emcee of The Public. It was there then. I knew it.

It is still odd to me that Alex would appear in my dream, while the smoke still rose from lower Manhattan ... but I choose not to question such things.

It would still be 3 more years before we actually spoke.

6.

Unbeknownst to one another, we both start blogs. Mitchell, however, is the key here. He is the connection. He had, meanwhile, become dear friends with Alex back in Chicago, and she started up her site and I started up mine ... and Mitchell read both ... and somehow he mentioned to Alex one day something about "my friend Sheila's blog". Alex secretly then began to read my site. She knew nothing about me, except that Mitchell loved me (and that's pretty much all I need to know about anyone!) It would not be until many years later that she and I would put our timeline together - who saw whom first, first impressions, paths almost crossed, etc. And it was Mitchell (the gossip!!) who told me, "Alex loves your blog, you know." What?? Alexandra Billings?? From Hamlet The musical? She reads me? What the hell??? This was in 2004. Mitchell has a way, too, of bringing people together. He loves to introduce people from 2 different sections of his life, and watch them hit it off. He is the personification of generaosity. Some people are stingy with their friends ... or they want to HOARD their friendships to themselves. Mitchell is the opposite. If Alex and I hit it off to such a degree that I end up traveling to Vegas with her to see Liza Minelli ... Mitchell is not jealous. Or, he's jealous that we're going to see Liza - but he's not jealous that Alex and I have hit it off. On the contrary. He basically jumps up and down in joy when something like that happens. I love that about Mitchell.

I hear that Alex reads my blog. I freak out. Privately. Mitchell tells me about Alex's blog. I begin to read it obsessively. Neither of us comment on each other's blogs yet.

We are stalking each other. I know she reads me, she knows I read her ... but neither of us break the silence yet. It's hysterical, in retrospect. I mean, we ended up storming the $cientomogy castle together in LA ... and here we are being shy and awkward??

Alex finally emails me. And basically declares her undying love.

I email her back. And declare my undying love.

Huge breakthrough: we begin to comment on each other's sites. It's like our intensity for one another can now be admitted, and is out in the open. I am passionate about Alex and she is passionate about me. I LOVE her. I haven't even met her! (Well, not really.) I haven't even mentioned the gourd yet! But it's like we know all we need to know about the other. We are hooked. That's it. We're friends. We haven't even spoken on the phone yet.

7.

In June of 2004, Alex is going to play Bella, in Victory Garden's production of Ulysses. As they begin rehearsal, Alex is like, "What the hell is going on with James Joyce." Oh - and forgot to mention - Mitchell, by this point, lives with Chrisanne and Alex. Mitchell says to her, "You know, Sheila knows a lot about Joyce - you should call her." Now let's remember. Alex is shy. So am I. Neither of us barge into relationships. We are cautious. Our friendships are particular and deep. We choose well! So Alex emails me, wondering if I could de-brief her on Joyce. I say of course! So we set up a date.

I am strangely nervous.

I am about to talk to Alex for the first time!! But ... it's weird ... I feel like I've known her for over a decade.

I call her. She picks up. There she is. There is her voice. We are both so nervous and so pumped to finally be speaking that all we can do is say stuff like, "What. the HELL. is happening ..." or "What. THE FUCK. is going on???" We go back and forth like that for about 15 minutes. We already love each other. It is so freakin' awesome.

And then she quizzes me relentlessly about Joyce. I answer her questions for over an hour. We go through the script, I have my copy of Ulysses with me - she asks questions, I do my best to explain ... we babble about James Joyce forever. In particular, we talk about the Night Town episode - since that's her scene. What is going on there? What is Joyce doing? What the hell is his point? I am obviously passionate about James Joyce, so the opportunity to talk about him like a maniac (and NOT have people roll their eyes) was really special for me.

I still wish I could have seen her do that part. Damn!!

8.

In October of 2004, my friend Kate marries Tim. I am asked to be in the wedding, and I feel very privileged about it. It is such a joyous occasion. Kate is one of my best friends, and Tim is a prince among men. I will be in Chicago for a week, since I'm wedding-party material ... and I am going to stay with Alex, Chrisanne and Mitchell. Now. It is Alex and Chrisanne's condo. Mitchell lives in the guest bedroom. Alex and Chrisanne are true homebodies ... I think if they COULD get away with never ever leaving the house (and still somehow managing to live their dreams?) they would. So to invite someone in - a stranger - even though beloved by Mitchell - and now Alex and I know each other through our blogs ... I know it's a big deal. I know it's not how they normally behave. And so I feel honored ... to be invited in. I am going to be the best guest ever.

I will never forget my moment of arrival. Ever. I'm probably embarrassing Alex with all of this, but whatevs. She can take it. I fly in to O'Hare. For some reason, that month in 2004, I am as broke as I have ever been. I had already bought the ticket ... and spent literally (LITERALLY) my last 100 bucks on the bridesmaid dress which I bought at Filene's Basement. I was concerned that it made me look like Bea Arthur at a Tony Awards ceremony in 1987 ... but I was assured that it did not. But I was scarily broke. Why? I was working ... I don't know ... I just remember being really afraid of being on vacation and having ZERO money. Of course, once I was there - all I did was sit on the couch with Alex and Mitchell (oh yes and Eric!! Eric was staying with them too! Dammit, i forgot to mention that) ... and watch Joan Crawford movies, and eat the sumptuous gourmet dinners that Chrisanne cooked for us. I spent no money. It was the best vacation I had ever had.

But that's a side note. Let me get back to the moment of arrival.

Now, because I'm a bit more financially solvent, I usually take cabs - especially if I am traveling. But in October of 2004, I couldn't. So I hauled ass, with my huge suitcases and duffel bags, to Chrisanne and Alex's, via the El and then the bus. Insane. I struggle down the sidewalk, I find their condo complex. I ring the buzzer. I am beside myself. Mitchell comes down to get me, and help me with my bags. We talk a mile a minute as we galumph up the stairs. I walk into the apartment, and Alex is standing there - in baggy sweatpants, a sweatshirt, a scrunchy on the top of her head - and we stare at each other for a long weird moment (are we going to just cross our arms at each other? And be polite and distant?) - and then suddenly we find ourselves embracing and jumping up and down, screaming and laughing.

Within 15 minutes we were watching Now Voyager.

That week cemented our friendship forever. We sat out on the porch and talked until 4 o'clock in the morning. We laughed so loudly that neighbors complained. We talked and talked and talked ... about movies and life and Liza (I did my imitation of Liza for her on that porch, for the first time) ... Eric was there, Mitchell was there, Chrisanne was there ... but when they went to bed, or were NOT there, Alex and I were ... and we could not stop talking.

A couple highlights:

-- Alex and I, for some reason, told Eric the entire story of the American Revolution, tag-team style. I have no idea how it happened, but it was absolutely brilliant. We should have a television show on the History Channel. It would be epic.

-- We discovered our shared obsession for all things Xenu. We went nuts, and we have never returned. At one point we had the following exchange. We were discussing the moment when Mr. Tom Crooze was squirted with a water gun on the red carpet. We had differing opinions about it. I thought he had handled himself well. Alex bulldozed over me with her own analysis. And here is what happened (and it cannot be explained - I could never explain why this was so funny, but here goes):
Me: "But what was going on with him at that time ---"
Alex: "It was manipulation AT ITS ZENITH!
Brief pause.
Me: (correcting her) "Xe-NU."

Guys? We laughed for (I am not kidding) 45 minutes. At one point, Alex began to crawl away from me, like a scene in Sybil, on her hands and knees, trying to get away from me. This was when the neighbors complained. We were literally HOWLING. HOWLING TO THE DAMN MOON. I cannot explain why the response "Xe-NU" was that funny -but it fucking was ... and it took us days to recover. Days.

Meanwhile, I got to know Chrisanne. She was someone I had gotten glimpses of from Alex's blog - and so I had a little bit of celebrity worship with her, too. I just wanted her to like me. And approve. And I didn't want to intrude or be a bad guest. All of that.

Chrisanne was not there when I first arrived ... but when she did come back, she was a little bit late, because she had stopped off at a second hand bookstore and couldn't stop herself from buying a couple of books about John and Abigail Adams.

Can you say kindred spirit? I know you can.

Chrisanne deserves her own post entirely - but I will respect her privacy and not go there. Suffice it to say, she's an amazing person - and just being in the presence of the two of them together is being in the presence of love un-hindered, openly expressed, no barriers. It's being with love at its purest. It's quite extraordinary.

And so during that week, I raved about Joan Crawford with Alex, and I talked about people like Patrick Henry and John Jay with Chrisanne.

Frankly, I was in heaven.

No going back.

Put a fork in Sheila. She's done.

I'm friends with Alex for life now. That's it.

Xe-NU.

We would go on to have multiple adventures - involving broken-down cars on freeways, e-meters on Hollywood Boulevard, driving across the desert to see Liza Minelli, watching Alex teach her acting class, meeting up with Emily at the race track (a wonderful memory - I'm so glad we did that), watching Liza with a Z with Mitchell and Alex in an apartment on 73rd Street, getting a private tour of the Elron Hubman Life Exhibit in LA (where we said stuff to our cult tour guide like, "So ... is this the thing that John Travolta is into? Wow!!! Okay - go on!" or "So Elron Hubman was the youngest Eagle Scout in the history of Eagle Scouts? Wow!!!" An unforgettable day.), coming across a dead body moments after he was murdered (good times! Alex hissing at me, as I tiptoed along near the bloody corpse in my platform shoes, "Get the FUCK over here!!") ... and then all of our conversations on the phone ... they're always marathons, hours long, and we have to set them up beforehand. I call her, and Alex always answers the phone like this, just like our first time, "What. the HELL. is going on."

I have no idea, but I love it.

Edvard Munch ...

A gorgeous and haunting post of images.

Edna O'Brien on The Country Girls

A terrific essay by Edna O'Brien about the publication of her first novel The Country Girls. Well worth reading but I'll pull out the two parts I liked especially:

The Country Girls took three weeks, or maybe less, to write. After I brought my sons Carlo and Sasha to the local school in Morden, I came home, sat by the windowsill of their bedroom and wrote and wrote. It was as if I was merely a medium for the words to flow. The emotional crux hinged on Ireland, the country I had left and wanted to leave, but now grieved for, with an inexplicable sorrow.

Images of roads and ditches and bog and bog lake assailed me, as did the voice of my mother, tender or chastising, and even her cough when she lay down at night. In the fields outside, the lonely plaint of cattle, dogs barking and, as I believed, ghosts. All the people I had encountered kept re-emerging with a vividness: Hickey our workman, whom I loved; my father, whom I feared; knackers; publicans; a travelling salesman by the name of Sacco, who sold spectacles and sets of dentures; and the tinkers who rapped on the door demanding money in exchange for mending tin pots. There was the embryo poet, an amateur historian and the blacksmith who claimed to have met the film director John Ford on the streets of Galway and was asked to appear in The Quiet Man, but declined out of filial duty. The lost landscape of childhood.

I'm going through something right now - some developments in my life - that have put a fire under me. I have a deadline. I have to get to work. Reading her essay really bolstered me up.

And then this lovely bit:

Where do words come from, I wondered. I still wonder. Because even without books or rather with only prayer books and bloodstock manuals in our house, I had conceived a love of words and assembled my own little crop of them. I believed they had magical associations and that something amazing could be done with them. I had, of course, the language of the Gospels, which to me seemed and seems perfect, and the marvelling narratives of Irish myths and fables. I learnt everything through Irish, except English itself, and I loved both tongues.

Here is my post on The Country Girls.

The Books: "The Bell Jar" (Sylvia Plath)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath. Like many high school girls, I went through a huge Plath phase when I was about 17. I didn't just read The Bell Jar, Plath's only novel, but I read all the poems, the diary, the letters home to her mother, the posthumously published collection of short stories, everything. Here's a gigantic post I wrote about Plath. Like many authors, I have now had almost a lifelong relationship with Sylvia Plath. I have gone through phases with her. There was the first feverish adolescent phase, when I idolized her, and she seemed to express some of the desolation and disorientation I felt as an adolescent girl. The Bell Jar is often just remembered as the autobiographical novel about her suicide attempt, but to me - in high school - it was about what it was like to be a girl. Now Plath was writing about the much more restrictive 1950s - and what those restrictions did to an unconventional (internally, I mean) female spirit. Plath was a perfectionist, and a high achiever. She did all the things she was supposed to. She was a genius at school, she published her poems, she got scholarships, she really had a wave of huge successes as a young woman. But there is a mania there, which can really be seen when you read her journals (not to mention her letters to her mother, which are truly disturbing). The whole sex thing, and the good girls don't thing ... absolutely trapped her. She knew what was going on, she looked around and saw how the social rules were different for boys, and it is my opinion that it is THAT that caused her to crack up in college, NOT the fact that she didn't get into the writer's workshop she wanted to get into and was forced to spend the summer at home. The Bell Jar makes that pretty clear. The social restrictions were unfair, and Plath questioned them. But life was a howling wilderness, it was pre-sexual revolution, and for someone like Plath - the pressure on being normal was enough to make her go nuts. It really was. She found herself split off from herself. There was the good girl and then ... the other girl. The real girl. Nobody can sustain a split for that long without either one or the other side winning. Plath, instead, cracked, tried to commit suicide and spent a year in a mental institution. So she fell into the own crack in her psyche. That's what The Bell Jar is about.

I have read The Bell Jar many times, and while I was captivated by it in high school, it doesn't really hold up as a whole, when I read it now. Her poems are another story altogether. But I'll get to those when I get to my poetry bookshelf, which, at this rate, should be sometimes in the year 2018. The Bell Jar is a kind of selfconscious work, stilted at times - and there is much that is quite wonderful about it - and there are set-piece scenes that I will remember forever. The entire intern staff getting food poisoning in the hotel. Breaking the thermometer in the hospital and playing with the mercury. Seeing the baby born. And the excerpt below. Not to mention the stunner of a first sentence:

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.

The writing is cold, and mean. Plath was not a "nice" person, and that was one of her biggest problems. Women are supposed to be "nice"! I think Plath found it very freeing in her writing when she stopped putting the pressure on herself to be nice. And when she started ignoring her mother's usually malevolent advice to be "nice". I actually don't think Aurelia Plath was well-intentioned. I think she had a lot of anger and jealousy towards her daughter - she was at the same time living vicariously and also trying to suppress her. Talk about being angry at the restrictions placed on women - I think Aurelia Plath's rage at her OWN life was titanic in nature. But she covered it up with a sickly sweet "nice"ness ... Now I'm seeing her thru Plath's eyes, it is true - but seriously - read her simpering defensive preface to Letters Home, and you'll see what I mean. What I hear in her words is rage. Plath eventually realized that the relationship with her mother was toxic and basically had to move to England, to put an ocean between them.

All that being said, I don't think The Bell Jar holds up very well. It seems to me to be MADE for adolescent girls, who want to be "deep", or who are relishing their own deep-ness. I went through that phase, and The Bell Jar was perfect for me at that time. But as a grownup, I read it and think, "Oh, come now, dear, I know it seems horrible now, but it'll pass. Just go out and get laid, don't worry so much about the rules, you'll be fine, dear ... just CHILLAX." And so the book loses its oomph if you think that our main character is, well, kind of over-reacting.

Again, the poems are completely another story altogether - I'm choosing now to just focus on The Bell Jar.

It is the story of Esther, a college student, who has won a prestigious summer internship at a ladies magazine in New York City. There are only 11 girls or something like that, and they are all put up in a women's hotel. Esther is an over-achiever, a scholarship girl, and is overwhelmed by New York City. She's kind of fragile, in some ways. She has internalized the "good girl" restrictions to such a degree that she has become rigid. But, tellingly enough, the other girl she befriends is a blowsy platinum blonde bombshell named Doreen, who doesn't seem to give a hoot about the world's restrictions, and she does whatever she wants. There's something freeing about being with Doreen. She's not portrayed as a slut, just as a woman of the world ... and Esther is envious, wishes she could be like that. Meanwhile, the Rosenbergs are going to be electrocuted, and Esther starts to obsess about it. Not about the case or the trial ... but about the fact of electrocution and what it must be like. (Later in the book, when she goes through electroshock treatment, she finds out). It upsets her.

The first third of the book takes place in New York. Then Esther goes home, bringing the second section of the book - hoping that she will receive the letter accepting her into the writer's workshop in Boston ... her mother picks her up at the station and tells her that she was rejected. So now the summer yawns before Esther - she has nothing to do, nothing to look forward to ... and she begins to spiral downward. Her mother wants her to take shorthand classes, just so she will have a backup career (until she gets married, of course). Esther begins to lose it. She begins to forget that she has any good qualities, that she can do anything well ... she feels trapped by the suburbs (Plath's evocation of that kind of claustrophobia is pretty damn great) ... and things get so bad that she is finally brought to see a psychiatrist. He recommends electroshock therapy on an outpatient basis. Good idea, bro! The therapy is brutal, handled awkwardly and unsensitively, and Esther comes out of it disoriented and upset. This goes on until she finally can't take it anymore, and tries to commit suicide.

The last third of the book takes place in the mental institution where Esther is in recovery. She's there for a long time. And she actually ends up getting a GOOD doctor, as opposed to the asswipe she saw earlier. This doctor is a woman, and there's something about her that Esther finds deeply encouraging ... not to mention the fact that the doctor seems to understand what the real problem is: the whole good girl/bad girl sex thing ... and basically gets Esther fitted for a diaphragm, and tells her not to worry so much about it. That she can be free, too. Just be safe. As Esther starts to recover, she is allowed "out" on short jaunts, and during one of those jaunts - she decides to lose her virginity. Let's get this thing OVER WITH so I can just MOVE ON. I can't remember now who she chooses - some guy she meets ... and the virginity-loss goes unbelievably badly (like 1 in a thousand badly) and she begins to hemorrhage. She has to go to the hospital. But somehow, in the chaos of all of that, Esther finds herself better. In the head. Her boyfriend from college Buddy comes to visit her in the hospital - and she no longer is tormented by the fact that Buddy seems to want to domesticate her (he says stuff to her, smugly, like, "When we get married, you won't feel like writing poetry anymore...") ... all of that stuff is still going on with Buddy, but Esther just laughs at it now. She doesn't care. Buddy can't "get" her, if she doesn't want to be gotten. She's free. Truly free. That is not to say that she is "back to normal" because that is just the point. "Normal" is too high a bar for some people. And trying to fit into "normalcy" is too much pressure for some people. I'm one of those people. I'm not a wack-job, but I'm not "normal" and I came to terms with that a long time ago. If I tried to "fit in", if I worried about the concerns of others and why don't those same things concern me?? ... I'd be crushed. I still struggle with it ... but I have pretty much won the battle as a whole. Esther is in no way, shape, or form, normal. There's one sentence in the book that suggests Esther has gone on to get married and have a baby - and it totally doesn't work for me. Plath has created a character (let's forget about the autobiographical elements for a minute) who seems like she will NEVER fit in with societal norms, and her journey is such to accept that. So it's inconceivable that she would go on to have some sort of domestic harmony!

One last thing and then I'll get to the excerpt:

I haveThe Bell Jar on tape - read by Frances McDormand - and I HIGHLY recommend it. It was given to me as a gift, years ago, and I remember one day I just put it on and cleaned my whole apartment, listening to it. And sometimes laughing out loud. I had forgotten how funny some of it is! Or - it was revealed to me, by McDormand's line readings, how FUNNY a lot of it is. It's mean humor, all of it is mean observational humor ... but it was great. This was recently, and so yet another level of that book was revealed to me. Like I said - it's a lifelong relationship.

Plath's major work is her poems. As a poet, she ranks among the best of her generation. As a novelist, not so much. It's the poems that really set her free.

And I can't let this post go by without providing a link to Cara Ellison - who read one of my Plath posts in 2006 - and went on a tear. She had never read her before. Cara took obsession to a whole other level, and it's been so fun to watch and read her stuff about Plath.

Here's the excerpt (and a bunch of Plath links right here):

EXCERPT FROM The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath.

"I'm so glad they're going to die."

Hilda arched her cat-limbs in a yawn, buried her head in her arms on the conference table and went back to sleep. A wisp of bilious green straw perched on her brow like a tropical bird.

Bile green. They were promoting it for fall, only Hilda, as usual, was half a year ahead of time. Bile green with black, bile green white white, bile green with nile green, its kissing cousin.

Fashion blurbs, silver and full of nothing, sent up their fishy bubbles in my brain. They surfaced with a hollow pop.

I'm so glad they're going to die.

I cursed the luck that had timed my arrival in the hotel cafeteria to coincide with Hilda's. After a late night I felt too dull to think up the excuse that would take me back to my room for the glove, the handkerchief, the umbrella, the notebook I forgot. My penalty was the long, dead walk from the frosted glass doors of the Amazon to the strawberry-marble slab of our entry on Madison Avenue.

Hilda moved like a mannequin the whole way.

"That's a lovely hat, did you make it?"

I half expected Hilda to turn on me and say, "You sound sick," but she only extended and then retracted her swanny neck.

"Yes."

The night before I'd seen a play where the heroine was possessed by a dybbuk, and when the dybbuk spoke from her mouth its voice sounded so cavernous and deep you couldn't tell whether it was a man or a woman. Well, Hilda's voice sounded just like the voice of that dybbuk.

She stared at her reflection in the glossed shop windows as if to make sure, moment by moment, that she continued to exist. The silence between us was so profound I thought part of it must be my fault.

So I said, "Isn't it awful about the Rosenbergs?"

The Rosenbergs were to be electrocuted late that night.

"Yes!" Hilda said, and at last I felt I had touched a human string in the cat's cradle of her heart. It was only as the two of us waited for the others in the tomblike morning gloom of the conference room that Hilda amplified that Yes of hers.

"It's awful such people should be alive."

She yawned then, and her pale orange mouth opened on a large darkness. Fascinated, I stared at the blind cave behind her face until the two lips met and moved and the dybbuk spoke out of its hiding place, "I'm so glad they're going to die."

"Come on, give us a smile."

I sat on the pink velvet loveseat in Jay Cee's office, holding a paper rose and facing the magazine photographer. I was the last of the twelve to have my picture taken. I had tried concealing myself in the powder room, but it didn't work. Betsy had spied my feet under the doors.

I didn't want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I'd cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.

This was the last round of photographs before the magazine went to press and we returned to Tulsa or Biloxi or Teaneck or Coos Bay or wherever we'd come from, and we were supposed to be photographed with props to show what we wanted to be.

Betsy held an ear of corn to show she wanted to be a farmer's wife, and Hilda held the bald, faceless head of a hatmaker's dummy to show she wanted to design hats, and Doreen held a gold-embroidered sari to show she wanted to be a social worker in India (she didn't really, she told me, she only wanted to get her hands on a sari).

When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.

"Oh sure you know," the photographer said.

"She wants," said Jay Cee wittily, "to be everything."

I said I wanted to be a poet.

Then they scouted about for something for me to hold.

Jay Cee suggested a book of poems, but the photographer said no, that was too obvious. It should be something that showed what inspired the poems. Finally Jay Cee unclipped the single, long-stemmed paper rose from her latest hat.

The photographer fiddled with his hot white lights. "Show us how happy it makes you to write a poem."

I stared through the frieze of rubber-plant leaves in Jay Cee's window to the blue sky beyond. A few stagey cloud puffs were traveling from right to left. I fixed my eyes on the largest cloud, as if, when it passed out of sigh, I might have the good luck to pass with it.

I felt it very important to keep the line of my mouth level.

"Give us a smile."

At last, obediently, like the mouth of a ventriloquist's dummy, my own mouth started to quirk up.

"Hey," the photographer protested, with sudden foreboding, "you look like you're going to cry."

I couldn't stop.

I buried my face in the pink velvet facade of Jay Cee's loveseat and with immense relief the salt tears and miserable noises that had been prowling around in me all morning burst out into the room.

When I lifted my head, the photographer had vanished. Jay Cee had vanished as well. I felt limp and betrayed, like the skin shed by a terrible animal. It was a relief to be free of the animal, but it seemed to have taken my spirit with it, and everything else it could lay its paws on.

Don't Bother To Knock; directed by Roy Baker

"I rather think that had she endured, had she come ten years later, maybe it would have been different. But at that time - I mean, she came in at the height of the Hollywood system - and she was not alone feeling debased by the whole thing. It was a common complaint. Like [the way] John Garfield was a terrific actor - yet he did nothing but scream and howl. There was some demeaning aspect to the whole thing. So most of them went with it. They simply adopted the contempt with which they were treated. I think that's what happened. Pretty hard to withstand - a culture of contempt. I think it helped destroy her." -- Arthur Miller on Marilyn Monroe

Seeing Monroe's performance in 1952's Don't Bother to Knock, as Nell, the psychologically shattered and borderline psychotic babysitter in a plush hotel, makes you wonder about all the roads not traveled. It makes you think of her courage in putting up with contemptuous projects like Let's Make Love or The Seven Year Itch (one of the meanest spirited movies she was ever in) ... and wonder what might have happened if she had been allowed to experiment. Now I'm not saying that her work, as it exists, in comedic gems such as Some Like It Hot is somehow lesser, or somehow lacking. I'm already rather annoyed that comedy often takes a backseat to drama with a capital D. It's why Cary Grant was stiffed in the Oscar department. You show me a better performance than what he did in His Girl Friday!

Billy Wilder said this about her (and it rambles a bit - this is a transcription of a conversation he had with Cameron Crowe):

She had a kind of elegant vulgarity about her. That, I think, was very important. And she automatically knew where the joke was. She did not discuss it. She came up for the first rehearsal, and she was absolutely perfect, when she remembered the line. She could do a 3-page dialogue scene perfectly, and then get stuck on a line like, "It's me, Sugar"... But if she showed up, she delivered, and if it took 80 takes, I lived with 80 takes, because the 81st was very good ... She had a feeling for and a fear of the camera. Fright. She was afraid of the camera, and that's why, I think, she muffed some lines. God knows how often. She also loved the camera. Whatever she did, wherever she stood, there was always that thing that comes through. She was not even aware of it.

We all have magic in us. But Marilyn Monroe had movie magic. And, like Wilder said, "...she automatically knew where the joke was." That kind of sensibility cannot be taught. And in the same way that it is rare to find a man as outrageously good-looking as Cary Grant who is also a comedic genius, it's rare to find a bombshell at the level of Marilyn Monroe who can nail jokes in the way she does (even when she is the butt of them)! But she is always the one who comes off smelling like a rose, even in nasty misogynistic pictures like The Seven Year Itch, which tries to make a joke out of her (and women's sexuality, in general). Watch that film and watch how she evades and eludes "capture" - meaning: she somehow, gently, subtly, by being totally innocent and guileless ... evades being the butt of the joke. That takes guts. That takes smarts. Because, believe me, she was being set up in that film. In many of her films, she was being set up.

So I love Marilyn's funniness, it's one of the most spontaneous things about her. But she always yearned to show more of herself, more of what she could do. Nobody wanted to see it. However, Don't Bother to Knock is early Monroe, or relatively early ... her stardom hadn't "hit" yet. So to watch her in this psychological drama (that has elements of a thriller) is astonishing.

Who knows what demons Monroe battled on a daily basis. All I know is that sadness and fear flickers across her face in Don't Bother to Knock in a neverending dance. She seems truly dangerous at times. She never seems to push the emotion, it seems to just happen to her. She (Nell) is not fully control of herself and neither is Marilyn. I don't know if Marilyn was "tapping into" her own wealth of miserable memories, or if it was her talent allowing her the ability to portray such fragility ... it doesn't matter "how" she got there. What matters is the end result. It's a stunning performance, and most often not even mentioned when Marilyn Monroe's career is brought up - which is a shame. She's riveting.

Marilyn Monroe often played either naive breathless girls, easily taken in, a bit dopey, or vaguely trashy showgirls, who somehow have managed to maintain their sweetness. She never played bitter. She never played a wisecracker. That was not her thing. And whatever "experiences" she had had in her life, it had not touched that diamond-bright innocence inside her. Nothing could kill it. You watch her films and it's truly amazing - how it is always there, even in projects that were not worthy of her. But she never played - except in Don't Bother To Knock - a truly damaged woman. I suppose a woman with a body like that and a face like that was made to be a fantasy for audiences and audiences don't really want to see their sex goddesses as damaged. Marilyn knew that better than anyone. She had a love-hate relationship with her beauty. It was her ticket to fame, she knew that, and she was truly grateful for it, and she knew how to use it. She was a master at creating her persona. But it was also what tormented her, and gave her such intense stage fright that she wouldn't come out of her dressing room for sometimes hours, staring at herself in the mirror. What was she looking for? How hard was it for her to drag up that sexy goddess on days when she didn't feel like it? I don't have much sympathy for those who respond to questions like that with, "Oh, boo hoo, cry me a river, she was famous, we all should have such problems!" I think it represents a truly ungenerous and stingy attitude, something that she faced daily, and struggled against. And so she would lock her door, and refuse to come out, terrified of the expectations placed on her, knowing that within her was an abyss of sadness that nobody wanted to see. It had to have been horrible. I can only imagine. I don't have that kind of beauty. I have no idea what that must be like. I think it's indicative that she was often very afraid of directors, who could get impatient with her constant bungling of lines (it is thought that she had undiagnosed dyslexia) ... but absolutely loved the crew, who loved her right back. They were her audience. They were not stingy. She would walk out of her dressing room, all dolled up, after having made everyone wait for hours, and the crew - hanging off their scaffolds - would catcall and whistle, and she ate it up. It was friendly. If you've ever experienced a friendly and appreciative catcall (which is something some people just can't imagine) then you know how nice it can be. It can totally brighten your day. I'm not talking about avoiding a certain block because there's a construction site there and you're fucking sick of having to walk through a goddamn gantlet (who knew?? I sure as hell didn't!), which forces you into a sexualized atmosphere at 9 a.m. when you're just trying to go get a coffee. That's harassment. But some dude calling out at you, "Girl, YOU PRETTY!" like happened to me once ... thank you, sir!! Marilyn was loved by those guys. Because they represented her fan base. Directors loved her too, in spite of themselves - they loved her because, like Billy Wilder said, even if it took 80 takes for her to get a line - if she nailed it on the 81st, it would be the best take ever, and it would be Marilyn Monroe, after all ... so that's why she was paid the big bucks, and that's why you sucked it up and tried not to mind having to wait around for her to get over her stage fright or whatever it was. But the love the crew had for her was simple and unhindered by concerns other than appreciation. Marilyn fed off of them. She played to them.

In Don't Bother to Knock, she plays a resolutely unglamorous part. It's not made into a big deal, like, "Oooh, look at the pretty movie star being plain-ed down" ... It's appropriate for the part. She wears a simple cotton dress, low heels, a little black beret - and when she gets on the elevator for the first time and we see her from behind, her dress is a little bit wrinkled. Like it would be for any woman who had just taken a long subway ride. It's touching. Alex told me last night (she read it in some Photoplay magazine she owns. The woman is insane) that Marilyn had bought the dress herself at a five and dime for the movie. She had seen it, and known that it was Nell's dress. I love the intelligence of that, the intelligence of her choice for the character. It's perfect.

Nell's backstory unfolds slowly. When we first see her come through the revolving doors, we see a pretty woman, who seems unsure. Her step is hesitating. She looks like a raw nerve, everything making an impression on her, like she hasn't been out in public for a long long time (this turns out to be true - but watch how Marilyn is playing it in the first scene, before we know anything about her. That's smart acting. That's building a character.) If we know the rest of Marilyn Monroe's work, we may be forgiven for thinking that Nell is just another one of her naive breathless creations. She meets up with the elevator man, who turns out to be her uncle, who has gotten her a job babysitting for a child of guests in the hotel. The uncle seems solicitous, perhaps overly so. He says, "You won't have any trouble babysitting, will you, Nell?" A bottomless look of sadness battling with fear comes over Marilyn's face. It's startling. This was my first clue that Nell was going to be a little different than Marilyn's other characters. She says, "Of course not. Why would I?" She's not defensive. But unbelievably sad that his question even needs to be asked. It seems to suggest that there might be something ... wrong with her. The movie is full of tiny eloquent moments like that.

Nell is brought into the hotel room, and meets the parents of Bunny, the little girl she will be babysitting. The parents swirl out, leaving simple instructions. Nell reads Bunny a fairy story before she goes to bed. There is something touching here, and also not quite right. Marilyn reads the story in almost a monotone, a dreamy uninflected voice, as though she is trying to imagine herself into the story she is reading. Bunny is riveted.

Once Bunny goes to bed, Nell is left alone in the apartment. She's aimless. When her face is in stasis, and when she is alone, all you see is her sadness. There's no peace on her face. In the introduction to the parents, and in her dealings with her uncle, she tries to keep it together, and put on a social happy expression. But once alone, the mask is off. Marilyn was so rarely without her mask, and so it's amazing to watch.

Another thing that is fascinating about this film, and also singular in Marilyn's career, is that she gets the opportunity to show anger. Rage. I can't think of another film where she truly gets angry, where she asserts herself in that way. It's terrifying.

Meanwhile, another story goes on in the film. Richard Widmark plays Jed, a cynical pilot, who's been dating Lynn, played by Anne Bancroft. Lyn is a lounge singer in the hotel, Jed flies in on the weekends. It's obviously a "friends with benefits" type situation, and Lyn has been okay with that, up until now. She's portrayed by Bancroft as an intelligent and compassionate woman, who is not above having harmless fun, and she's not the type to yearn for domesticity or put the pressure on him to commit. But there are qualities she senses in Jed that disturb her, and she finally has come to the decision that she can't be with him anymore. It's his coldness, the way he treats people ... everything is seen through a cynical snarky lens ... and any act of kindness is assigned a base motive. You can see it in how he treats Eddie, the elevator man, who tries to joke with him. You can see it in the contemptuous way he treats the woman who wants to take their photograph. Richard Widmark (ooomph, he's sexy in this film) only has a couple of specific moments where these qualities can be displayed, and he nails them. We can see Lyn's point. He makes fun of her. She says, "You lack what I need. You lack an understanding heart." They "wrangle" back and forth in the bar of the hotel, and she's pretty certain that she needs to walk away. He's the kind of guy who has a little black book of names, always in his back pocket, but there's something about this Lyn woman that has gotten under his skin. He can't admit it yet. He's too proud. But her calm and reasoned explanation leaves him restless, pissed.

Jed finds himself at loose ends back up in his hotel room, while he can hear the lovely strains of Lyn singing torch songs (or, to say it another way, Anne Bancroft lip syncing) through the radio on the wall, connected to the bar downstairs (a nice omnipresent touch). He pours a drink. He lies on the bed. He throws his black book on the floor. He's cranky. And then he catches a glimpse in the window across the way - of Nell, dressed up in a gown, dancing around. A private moment. It's a haunting image, and Jed is struck dumb. Eventually she notices him, and they begin a conversation across the space in-between. He figures out her room number from the floor plan on the back of the door, and calls her. They sit and talk on the phone, staring at each other from window to window.

Now one of the things that I really love about this film is Richard Widmark's journey through it, and how he treats Nell at first, and then adjusts to the reality before him. Here's the thing: Marilyn was really about 11 years old inside. I think that's one of the reasons why pairing her up with someone like, oh, John Wayne, wouldn't have worked. Wayne required a grown-up. The thing about Marilyn, the captivating and also complicated thing, is that she was a little innocent girl in that sex-bomb of a body. And Richard Widmark's Jed, a guy out for a good time, a guy looking, in this moment anyway, to fuck his loneliness away ... only sees the body at first. But don't we all? I can't judge him for that. It's quite a body. He looks at Nell, and sees ... well ... Marilyn Monroe ... and he thinks: I have hit the jackpot here. There's also a certain passivity in Nell (at first), a certain willingness ... and so Jed, who's not in the mood for a fight, thinks that it will be pretty easy to seduce this one. And that's what he wants right now. No more problems, for God's sake. But over the devastating course of their next couple of scenes, when he invites himself over to her room (not knowing, of course, that it is not her room at all), he begins to realize that something is not right. They kiss, they drink, they flirt ... and something opens up in Nell, something is unleashed. She projects onto him all of her hopes and dreams, which is alarming - and has a kind of Fatal Attraction feel to it. Jed gets that vibe. And instead of ignoring it, and taking what he thinks he deserves anyway (after all, she invited him over - she's in a negligee - she knows what he wants!), he turns her down. And in so doing, becomes a better man. He shows his "understanding heart". He doesn't realize that that is what is happening in the moment, he just knows that seducing this woman would be wrong. Kim Morgan, in her wonderful review of the film, writes:

In real life, most men wouldn't so sensitively resist.

That, to me, is the most moving part of the film: Widmark's growing realization that Nell is sick, and his decision to help her, rather than just add to the hurts she's experienced. I can't think of another film of Marilyn's where she is treated in quite the way that Widmark treats her. She's usually a bombshell, a friendly girlie bombshell, eager, open-eyed, innocent, and yet smokin'. There is never any concern for how she might feel, being treated like a walking-talking blow-up doll. It is assumed that she is on board with it - and, like I said, Marilyn, for the most part, was. She was a movie goddess. We don't want to know that movie goddesses might have contradictory opinions about being ogled over in film after film. Marilyn's power was in strolling through that kind of gantlet and coming out unscathed, and still glowing. She did it in film after film. But in Don't Bother To Knock, she is actually human, and Widmark, at first distracted by the boobs and the face, ends up seeing her as she really is: a damaged sad little girl, trapped in a pin-up model's body. It's incredibly moving to watch that transformation happen in Widmark's face. Marilyn has never been treated so, well, kindly, as she is in this film.

Don't Bother To Knock had a short shooting schedule, and Marilyn actually is not in a hell of a lot of it. It feels like she is, she dominates the film - but the scenes with Widmark and Bancroft take up quite a bit of time as well, and so Marilyn only really shot for 2 weeks. She was so enamored with Anne Bancroft's acting that she would show up on the set to watch Bancroft's scenes being filmed. Bancroft was a "real" actress, and this was at the point in Marilyn's life (with the encouragement of her good friend Shelley Winters) that Marilyn was starting to learn her craft, and taking acting classes at The Actors Studio. Bancroft represented the serious side of the business, the actresses, who got to act, rather than just show their awesome silhouettes, and giggle and simper and wear bathing suits, etc. Marilyn so wanted to be considered a real actress.

And you know, like I said in the beginning, I love her stuff in comedies, musicals, melodramas ... I'm a fan, regardless of the material. She's got "it". What she is able to do in Some Like It Hot is awesome - it's movie magic. And when Marilyn was put in projects like that, projects that were worthy of her talents, she was very happy. She hated some of the stuff she was forced to do (uhm, Let's Make Love, for example), and she hated that she wasn't able, most of the time, to show the full spectrum. Her idols were not other bombshells. Her idols were real actresses.

We are a couple of years away, in Don't Bother to Knock, from Marilyn's famous disappearing act, when she dropped off the face of the earth, and wasn't heard from for a month or so ... until she re-emerged in New York, having moved there to study with Lee Strasberg, and to develop her own projects. She formed a production company. She wanted to do The Brothers Karamazov. It was a hugely rebellious act, and was treated with disdain by the powers-that-be, but it was her way of saying, "I do not like the movies I am being put in. I am taking the reins of my own career." And how was she rewarded? By having a reporter ask her at a press conference, "Do you know how to spell Dostoevsky, Marilyn?"

The guts that woman had. To tolerate such condescension.

And Don't Bother to Knock, although a big flop at the time, and not well-remembered at all, is evidence of the many shades of Marilyn Monroe; it is a nuanced terrifying performance, and her crack-up at the end is shattering to watch. She walks across the hotel lobby, and her arms look stiff and un-usable, she is vaguely unsteady on her feet, as though she is learning to walk all over again, her face is wet with tears, and she blinks up at the lights of the lobby, alarmed, squinting at the glare. She goes down the steps, one step, two step, her body slack and yet also rigid, she cannot move easily. Her psychic pain emanates not just from her face, the ending is not done in closeup, it's a full-body shot ... and her physicality is eloquent. It tells the whole story. Her pain is in her pinky finger, her waist, her calves ... It surges through her and makes it difficult to even walk.

You know who plays a scene that well and with that much specificity and abandon?

A real actress does, that's who.

"Gauntlet" has been changed to "gantlet" throughout. You learn something new every day. Thanks, Kerry!

The Books: "1984" (George Orwell)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

1984, by George Orwell. I covered much of my thoughts about this book in my post yesterday about Animal Farm.

A bit more about Orwell the man (there's so much there): Orwell himself wrote about his youth:

I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts.

His entire life can be seen as a process of "facing" (something that Christopher Hitchens goes into in depth in his book Why Orwell Matters). What does it mean to "face"? To really face? Not just unpleasant facts about outer reality - but unpleasant facts about how you think about things, and where you might be wrong - or just too rigid? I mean, how many people do that? As in: Okay, I can feel I have a bias against such and such ... it's a strong bias ... Can I look at that bias and see where it might be really coming from? Is it just from "the way things are" and I am convinced I am right ... or am I missing something? Am I afraid of something? Am I wrong? Orwell's whole life was about asking such questions about himself. It is truly remarkable. He questioned Empire, racism, Stalinism, Communism, misogyny, anti-Semitism ... he recognized his biases in all of these areas. Some could not be overcome, some were not meant to be overcome, but ALL were "faced" ... and he did it through his writing. A straining questioning curious ruthless sensibility he had. No wonder he intimidates. No wonder he is seen as an enemy by many. Not just for his views (or, I don't think it's just because of his views) ... but because he shames those who refuse to question themselves. He shames the "people of the lie" - those who absolutely refuse to examine themselves, refuse. People have blinders on. People insist that SUCH AND SUCH IS TRUE ... you ask me why it is true? Well, that should be obvious - because I FEEL SO STRONGLY ABOUT IT. Strong feelings are not enough for Orwell. They are just the jumping-off point to ask the tough questions. He is not above having "strong feelings" ... but instead he wonders: Maybe such and such is NOT true ... you ask me why it is not true? Well, that should be obvious ... BECAUSE I feel so strongly about it ... I'm thinking of the raging (loud) homophobic folks - preachers, politicians, whatever - who inevitably are discovered paying some gigolo for gay sex and having a wide stance in a bathroom stall in the midwest somewhere. These people (as far as I know, I don't know them obviously) ... are not questioning themselves. They are not saying: "I have a violent reaction to homosexuals. Where is that coming from? Is it because I REALLY believe that it is wrong? Or is something else going on?" If you really believe it's wrong, that's one thing - I don't respect your position, but I see that it's a sincere belief. But these loudly homophobic anti-gay guys have been revealed, time and time again, as closet cases ... you know, an example of "he doth protest too much". Orwell had his blind-spots, just like everybody else on the planet. He worked at himself. He looked, he examined ... he was not afraid to break with the pack, and he was not afraid to show himself as in process - which I think many people find VERY threatening. I have found it in small doses on my blog - when I write a post that is mainly about questioning or contemplating, or NOT being positional ... overwhelmingly, people show up to tell me what to think, how to react, whatever. The very fact of NOT taking a position, or questioning one's own motives or thoughts ... is seen as contemptible by many. Or - not contemptible. I'm going to stay with the word "threatening". When I see these what seem to be kneejerk reactions to me being in process ... it always makes me think - I don't know ... people get threatened by that. They can't stand it. It makes them nuts.

Sometimes a violent anti-reaction to something is indicative of deeper issues. That's been my experience anyway. Not just in observing others but in observing myself. There have been times in my life (and I'm sure we've all experienced stuff like this) - where I will have a really bad reaction to somebody - like they just rub me the wrong way, they push my buttons ... I find it uncomfortable to be around them, etc. And usually I suffer through the situation, getting annoyed, ranting about it to my friends, writing in my journal, whatever ... But it's happened a couple of times that eventually I have a breakthrough in my thinking about this person. It happened with a woman in an acting class I was in a couple of years ago. She was what I could call an "emotional vampire" ... she was very talented, but her self-deprecating manner was overwhelming and eventually annoying. She would almost bow in front of me, like, "I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy" ... and it made it impossible to have a conversation with her. She latched onto me. She would glance at me during the notes given to her during a scene, seeing how I would respond. It made me so uncomfortable. I could feel she was giving me WAY too much power. Listen, babe, I'm struggling just like you, I'm in the shit just like you ... focus on your own damn self!! She took up a lot of brain space. Like - I thought about her a lot. I bitched about her. I was in a state of unconsciousness - I was just reacting. And I'm not sure what it was that snapped ... but eventually, after all of this, I finally asked myself the question, "Sheila. What is going on with YOU right now? Forget about her - what is happening with YOU?" It was not a comfortable moment. I was so certain that I was "right" in my opinion, I felt harassed by her - she hovered by my side, she over-complimented me, whatever - I felt "right". So to take a step back from that and say, "Wait a second ... why am I so invested in being RIGHT here? What is going on with you??" And I made some realizations. I saw myself in her. (Of course). It's not a part of myself that I am particularly proud of, and it is a part of myself that I work to suppress. The openly insecure person, the one who doesn't feel worthy to be in the same room with tremendously talented successful people, the one who is unable to take a compliment without brushing it off, the one who is so talented - but can't ever own it. Blah blah blah, the list goes on. My anti-reaction to this person was a reaction to those parts of myself that I am ashamed of. That she was just wearing on her sleeve. Jung talks about shadow sides ... the darker side of you, the things you can't admit or won't admit ... This woman was my shadow side. I'm suddenly moved. I'm not sure why. And as I made these realizations, all of my annoyance at her dissolved ... immediately. Never to return again, actually. I was so far removed from being all righteous and annoyed that it was like I was a different person. My birthday was that week, and I was having a huge party at a club in New York. Dear friends, family members, etc. And impulsively - without stopping to examine it - I called her - using the number on the class roster I had in my address book. She answered. When she heard it was me, she did this big "oh my god I can't believe you're calling me" thing - which would have driven me up the freakin' wall a week before - but now, I felt kind towards her. And in being kind towards her, I was being kind to myself. Forgiving of myself. I know that "Oh my God I can't believe you're calling me" feeling. And I invited her and her husband to come to my party. She had three grade-school age kids - so I knew it would be a long-shot that she could come out on a weeknight - but she was so thrilled to be asked - it made me want to cry. I had been withholding something from her, something that was good and kind and soft ... and I was so rewarded when I let go. She basically just wanted to be my friend, for God's sake! She and her husband got a babysitter and came to my party, and they were totally awesome, and we all had the best time. She was terrific! We played ridiculous games. For example, someone had brought a pack of Bubblicious - you know, the kind that has a fortune in the wrapper. And we would do dramatic readings of the fortunes ... or turn them into songs ... we were acting like total retards, and laughing so hard we were crying. It was an awesome night. She and her husband had a BALL. It wasn't the "beginning of a beautiful friendship" - she eventually left that class, and I never saw her again ... but it was a real learning moment for me. The "power of facing unpleasant facts" - not focusing on what was wrong with her, but focusing on what was it in me that was having such a strong negative reaction to her?? And maybe I was a bit "off"? That I was "off" BECAUSE I had such a strong negative reaction to her!

I have strayed far from my topic, but that felt really good to write. And it is relevant, in its way. I have written before about my problem with those who "relish their rightness" and I hope I was clear in my post - that one of my biggest problems with those kinds of people is that it reveals to me my OWN "relishing" of my OWN rightness - and it's a button I don't want pushed ... and I have a hard enough time NOT relishing my rightness ... so I have to actively avoid such people. It's my choice. I do not set myself above or beyond them. It is that I am in process ... and I am trying to NOT be that way anymore. I can certainly go there, and it doesn't mean not having strong opinions ... but there's a huge difference between having a strong opinion and relishing your own rightness. It's a line I walk, and those who do not question their own rightness, who are incapable of seeing that maybe THEY have a little bit of work to do ... I experience them as toxic. Actually toxic.

And so this is one of the main reasons why I find Orwell so, not just refreshing, but exhilarating. He shows me the way. He really does. Bless him!

Hitchens writes about this whole "facing unpleasant facts" thing:

A commissar who realizes that his five-year-plan is off-target and that the people detest him or laugh at him may be said, in a base manner, to be confronting an unpleasant fact. So, for that matter, may a priest with 'doubts'. The reaction of such people to unpleasant facts is rarely self-critical; they do not have the 'power of facing'. Their confrontation with the fact takes the form of evasion; the reaction to the unpleasant discovery is a redoubling of efforts to overcome the obvious. The 'unpleasant facts' that Orwell faced were usually the ones that put his own position or preference to the test.

And that's really the jist of it.

It's an interesting point. Stalinist tyranny required of the Party members to be "self-critical" - meaning: to examine their own thought processes and admit where they were "incorrect". Self-criticisms. But we can see how bogus that really is - that what that brand of "self-criticism" represents is a whittling away of independent thought. And not just independent thought but man's ability to know that he even does think independently. Mikhail Bulgakov has some amazing scenes in The Master and Margarita - where someone realizes, through coercion, double-think, double-speak, and intense psychological pressure, that what they REALLY saw (a huge black cat riding the streetcar, holding onto the rails as though he was a human being) was NOT what they really saw ... they were mistaken. Even though, in their hearts, they KNOW what they saw. (An excerpt from that great book illustrating this point here.) Stalinism required human beings to split themselves. And so with all the damage Stalin wrought - the aftermath of which we still live in today - the psychological damage was the most shattering.

And that's what Orwell addresses so brilliantly in 1984. I have so many favorite sections of this book - but I figured I'd go with the "newspeak" section because it is so chilling. (And highly relevant still.)

Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz (my post about him here) who grew up in Poland - suffering under the Nazis and then under increasingly Stalinist Communism, wrote this about 1984 in 1953:

A few have become acquainted with Orwell's 1984; because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party. Orwell fascinates them through his insight into details they know well, and through his use of Swiftian satire. Such a form of writing is forbidden by the New Faith because allegory, by nature manifold in meaning, would trespass beyond the prescriptions of socialist realism and the demands of the censor. Even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life.

What a compliment.

EXCERPT FROM 1984, by George Orwell.

"How is the dictionary getting on?" said Winston, raising his voice to overcome the noise.

"Slowly," said Syme. "I'm on the adjectives. It's fascinating."

He had brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak. He pushed his pannikin aside, took up his hunk of bread in one delicate hand and his cheese in the other, and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak without shouting.

"The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition," he said. "We're getting the language into its final shape - the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we've finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words - scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won't contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050."

He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of pedant's passion. His thin dark face had become animated, his eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown almost dreamy.

"It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take 'good', for instance. If you have a word like 'good', what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well - better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good', what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words - in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.'s idea originally, of course," he added as an afterthought.

A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston's face at the mention of Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.

"You haven't a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston," he said almost sadly. "Even when you write it you're still thinking in Oldspeak. I've read some of those pieces that you write in the Times occasionally. They're good enough, but they're translations. In your heart you'd prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useful shades of meaning. You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?"

Winston did know that, of course. He smiled sympathetically, he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit off another fragment of the dark-colored bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:

"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we're not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak," he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. "Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050-, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?"

"Except --" began Winston doubtfully, and then stopped.

It had been on the tip of his tongue to say "Except the proles," but he checked himself, not feeling fully certain that this remark was not in some way unorthodox. Syme, however, had divined what he was about to say.

"The proles are not human beings," he said carelessly. "By 2050 - earlier, probably - all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron - they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like 'freedom is slavery' when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."

One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face.

La Double Vie de Veronique

Ted writes beautifully about one of my favorite films of all time.

A while back, I wrote a post about it - which, in my editor's cap, I look at and want to re-write ... but whatevs ... here it is. A gorgeous film that has never quite left me.

The Books: "Animal Farm: A Fairy Story" (George Orwell)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Animal Farm: A Fairy Story , by George Orwell.

Nothing like starting off the weekend with a little Orwell. And I am of the mind that we should never forget why Orwell matters ... to borrow a phrase. (That's a wonderful book, by the way. We actually just brought it up yesterday in a conversation over at Jonathan's place. It's one of my favorite kind of blog conversations: it starts out at one place, someone brings something else up, a couple respond to that point, someone chimes in on the original point ... and how did we get from Armond White to Orwell? Who knows. But it's awesome.

Do they still have kids read Animal Farm in 8th grade? That's when I read it first. It's simply told, and if you don't get the allegory - which I probably didn't as an 8th grader - it doesn't really matter - because the story is clear, and tyranny is a concept that at least can be comprehended by an 8th grader. The Iran hostage situation was one of the formative events of my early adolescence - that and the hunger strikes in Belfast (well, and of course the miracle on ice too ... which seemed to encapsulate the entire WORLD at that time) - The hostages and the hunger strikes were the first couple of times that I was really aware of the news as something I could understand and was invested in. I prayed for the hostages. And I prayed for Bobby Sands. I know it sounds stupid, but I did. We were actually in Ireland while the hunger strikes were going on - so it made it even more palpable to me. It made it real. So in junior high I was beginning to understand that much of reality basically sucks for most of the people on the planet, and things happened that were unfair and totally not cool. A sort of elementary revelation to make - but whatever, I was 11. So I'm not saying I read Animal Farm and thought of the Ayatollah Khomeini - I didn't - but my understanding of world events was such that I do remember reading the book and knowing that "the fairy story" part of the title was extremely cynical ... this was no "fairy story" I had ever heard. Animal Farm is SCARY and I knew enough to be scared of it when I read it the first time.

I re-read the book in 2000 ... for the first time since I was an adolescent. This is different from Orwell's other book 1984 which we had to read in 11th grade - and it immediately hooked me in - it was one of those books I had to read that I loved immediately - like The Catcher in the Rye, A Tale of Two Cities (excerpt here), The Great Gatsby (excerpt here). Some of the books we were forced to read (Tess of the D'Urbervilles (excerpt here), Moby-Dick (excerpt here) I hated and saw the reading list as a kind of purgatory. But there were gems that got through - and 1984 was one of them. Also, the book was called 1984 and I read it in 1984 - so there was this whole creepy aspect to it - but also, I remember feeling relieved, like, "Well, Orwell was wrong - we've still got a COUPLE years to go before we have THAT kind of society ..." My American girl response. Because of course that society existed in many nations across the world at that time ... but it didn't exist in MY world, and it was 1984! Phew! Dodged a bullet!

Animal Farm languished on my shelves, however, for decades before I picked it up again. By 2000 I was already into my obsession with Stalin - and so a whole other level of the book revealed itself to me. It almost didn't read as allegory anymore - it almost just felt like journalism. Ha. I know that Trotsky was not, in actuality, a pig like Wilbur ... but all of the events of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath are laid out in no uncertain terms in Animal Farm. It's A to B. The overturning of the old guard. The looting of the farm (like the Bolsheviks looting the Winter Palace). The manifesto released. The intellectual insistence on accuracy of thought. No, you can't think THIS way anymore ... THIS is the correct way to think ... The workings of the farm - and how to pick up where the humans left off. And naturally, there is great waste. The cows are milked by the pigs - and the milk lies in the bucket, and is not distributed and then later when someone goes to get the milk - it's gone, it's been pilfered. Total anarchy.

The system doesn't work at first. And so by sheer force of will Napoleon and Snowball - the two main pigs - begin to re-educate all of the animals. If it doesn't fit with reality, then let's just change the words we say. For example, they come out with commandments at the beginning of the revolution - one of the commandments is: No animal shall sleep in a bed. Later in the book, when the pigs take over the farmhouse - naturally they want to sleep in the beds. But ... oops ... the manifesto - that THEY WROTE - says that No animal shall sleep in a bed. So how to deal with the PAST when it doesn't align with the present? Well, you just change the past then, and you convince everyone that your version of the past is the correct one. "No, no, the commandment said that No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets." A couple of the animals know that that was not really what was said ... but eventually it is agreed upon that it is okay to sleep in a bed as long as it doesn't have sheets.

So there's that kind of obliteration of the past - one of the main weapons in tyranny's arsenal. If you can dominate the past, if you can convince a large group of people to accept your version of the past (and even if they don't accept it - they are afraid to say so) - then you win. You are the alpha dog. Then of course there is Snowball's disappearance - and how he takes on mythical aspects to those left behind. Everything that goes wrong on the farm is blamed on Snowball. A convenient scapegoat, like Trotsky was. If things don't work then Snowball is to blame! He's a saboteur! How convenient, isn't it ... it's almost like it was scripted. If Trotsky hadn't existed, they would have had to invent him. And, essentially, they did. He was a real man, but he was re-invented as Enemy Number One, an omnipresent source of mischief and disaster ... trains crashed. Trotsky was behind it. Not enough grain. Trotsky sabotaged the harvest (even though he wasn't even in Russia at the time. He pulled the strings from abroad). In a way, without Trotsky - it is debatable how successful all of this would have been, at least in terms of dominating and terrorizing the population at large. They NEEDED him. Because for the first 10 years after the Revolution, all hell broke loose. Millions of people died. Millions upon millions. Famine, terror, gulags, exile -

And this is something I've said time and time again in response to those who want to excuse all of this (these are the same people who would NEVER excuse Hitler's actions) because they like the idea of Socialism and so they take the stance of "It was a good idea and who knows what would have happened if Stalin hadn't messed it all up!" (Then, of course, there were those in the West who loved Stalin and were swayed by him - Stalin called them "the useful idiots" - the Beatrice and Stanley Webbs of the world ... bought the lie. Funny thing - in the "witness" sections of the movie Reds, Rebecca West, in her big googly-eyed glasses, said, "You know who was an idiot? Beatrice Webb. She didn't know a thing." Ha! Go, Dame Rebecca!). But to the "it was a good idea messed up by Stalin" folks, I say: No. It's not that it was good idea messed up by Stalin. It was that it was a bad idea in the first place. And actually, I'm not even convinced that there were any "ideas" going on at all in the Russian Revolution - that all of that talk and theory wasn't just a smokescreen for a giant power grab. And Stalin won. That was always the point. (I am thinking now of the "secret book" in 1984 which basically admits that "secret": that it was never about equality, or workers paradise ... it was always about creating an atomized society where one man ruled supreme) You can only think that it was all a good idea if you believe that man himself can change his spots - that he can obliterate his own greed and selfishness. I happen to not believe this. And so I don't think any of that stuff is a good idea, because it doesn't factor in, you know, human nature - which has been in evidence since Eve ate the apple and Cain killed his brother for a totally asinine reason. People are selfish, curious, mischievous, and self-involved. This is and always shall be. (This is my beef, too, with the people who use nostalgia as a political weapon. The people who seem to believe that there was a Golden Age in the past - when everything was BETTER. Yeah, it was better if you were a white straight middle-class male - of course it was ... come on, peeps! Get a grip! Learn your history! There is no mythical perfect past. Maybe things were simpler - yes - but "simpler" often means that much of the ugliness and prejudice and unfairness which does exist was actively repressed. The definitions were "simpler" and sure that might have been comforting - but only if you were in the dominant group. And so no, I am not down with saying that such a time was BETTER. Sorry. You can count me out of your delusion. Thanks. I know this is a post full of links to my own blog but whatever, that is just evidence that I am self-involved and all is right with the world ... It occurs to me that I wrote a bit on this whole "nostalgia" question in my two competing movie reviews: of Pleasantville and Blast From the Past - the two sides of nostalgia, which is not, in and of itself a bad thing - it is when one group wants THEIR version of nostalgia to dominate: OUR version of the good-ness in the past is what everyone should accept! ) So you can blather about "wouldn't it be great if ..." all you want ... it still doesn't change the fact that there is going to be some MORON in your utopia who says, "I don't WANT my house to look like everyone else's ... I want it to be a little bit taller." A benign example, but that's the start of it. (Stephen King shows this in The Stand - excerpt here - with the "new society" created in Colorado ... but ... but ... not everybody cooperates with the rules ... not everybody is on board with the utopia ... and so what is to be done with THOSE folks? Brilliant.)

In the excerpt below, poor little Mollie - the mare - shows us that problem with the mindset, when applied to individuals. She is mainly concerned with the fact that there might be no sugar after the Revolution, and she also doesn't want to have to give up her pretty ribbons in her mane. I mean, she is painted as a ridiculous individual - they're trying to talk about upheaval and social change, and she worries about her sweet tooth. BUT THAT'S THE THING. That's human nature. If you can somehow create a human race who will never say, "But I like sugar - I want to have sugar as a treat every day ..." ... then maybe you can have your perfect society. You can count me out of it, though ... because I'm with Mollie. There are things I WANT, that have nothing to do with the "greater good" ... they are my interests, my individuality expressing itself. Yes, we clump up into packs - human beings are wired that way ... but the individual cannot be crushed. Greed, or ... just the experience of wanting more ... seems to be wired into us. Lots of people just don't LIKE that about the human race and say stuff like, "Wouldn't it be great if people were just satisfied with what they had and didn't want more?" Yeah, well, I think it would be great if I could have a pet centaur - and I would take him on walks past Alexander Hamilton's bust ... and then I would leap on his back and we could fly over the Manhattan skyline singing "Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-De-Ay" ... but I know that I can't. I don't waste too much time being sad about the fact that centaurs don't exist, and therefore I can't "have" one - because if I did - I think I would have a problem with, you know, reality. And reality is tough enough for me to accept and deal with ... without adding my own fantasy disappointments on top of it. Regardless, this is my view, and it's very hard for some to admit that - people who devoted their lives to defending the Soviet Union - at all costs ... because they believed in the idea. And you can turn yourself inside out, saying: that it was a bastardization of true socialism (which obviously is the case - just talking in terms of the stated ideas now - Orwell makes that point in Animal Farm, with the sort of give and take the animals have with the truth and with their original goals).

In the tyranny of Stalin, what eventually became clear (and Robert Conquest makes the point again and again in his books on Stalin, that the men surrounding Stalin - while brutes and murderers themselves - were not as beyond the pale as Stalin, in terms of conventional morality ... Conquest says, like a refrain: "They didn't understand Stalin yet"), was that the point was not to bring about Socialism. The point, for Stalin, was to never relax the terror ... or, perhaps he would allow it to relax for a couple of years, after big purges - but that would only be a lull, to make people lower their guards - so that he could then re-assert the terror. This kept people on edge. Psychologically, it was devastating. After everyone was dead, all of his comrades, the only guys left around him were the toadies, the sycophantic imbeciles, illiterates - who were brutal enough to do what was necessary and not question why. Kirov is a prime example of one of the higher-ups in the Party who had an independent mind. He and Stalin were good friends and they