The Sheila Variations

"Davey Jones be damned"

Boy did I need this today. The annual Bulwer-Lytton prize for bad writing has been awarded. It's one of my favorite times of the year (I also love the "bad sex writing" award - another fave). People are invited to submit opening lines to imaginary bad books (in honor of Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton - a longtime favorite of Lucy Maud Montgomery, who once was famous and beloved, and now is mainly known for his purple prose and perhaps the most famous opening line in history: "It was a dark and stormy night".)

This year's winner (David McKenzie) goes off the damn deep end with so many truncated "ing's" that you want to punch someone in the throat. It's killing me, the ridiculousness of it, and the beauty of the insane mind who would think it up. Bravo.

"Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the "Ellie May," a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests."

You can read the list of winners here (they have a ton of different categories).

For example, here's the winner for "Historical Fiction":

The Cunard "Carinthia" glided through the starry waters of the Bering Sea, 843 passengers aboard, including Harriet Dobbs, resignedly single for over a decade, while a nautical mile due west slunk the K-18 submarine, under the command of lonely Ukrainian Captain First Rank Nikolai Shevchenko: ships that passed in the night (although the second technically a boat).

Others I love:

"I want you to follow my husband," said my newest client, the enigmatic Mrs Yogi, estranged wife of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

I don't know why that is so funny but it is.

Or this:

There were earthquakes in this land, terrible tsunamis that swirled flooding torrents of water throughout, and constant near-blizzard conditions, and not for the first time, Horatio Jones wished he did not live inside a snow globe.

And then this:

Lady Rowena, fresh from her bath, knew she had time to be ready to meet the Prince at 6:00 o'clock even though the mantle clock was striking six, because the brass escapement lever mechanism that engages the teeth of the large gear which drives the smaller gears that send the hour and minute hands on their circular paths, was worn.

And here is one that made me laugh out loud. A true gift on this mainly rotten day.

Category? Western.

He was the desert nightmare whose name no one dared breathe, this deadly gun-slinger Garth Tedder, whose face struck terror in the hearts of man and beast, its macabre, round, maroon cheeks almost exactly like the pickled beets that farmers' wives force-fed their horrified families.

I have read that 10 times and I love it more each time.

List of winners and runners-up here.

Alex, The Grand Marshall

My dear friend Alex was asked to be the Grand Marshall of the Gay Pride Parade in Chicago this year. She is there teaching for the summer. It was a huge deal to be asked, extremely exciting - and I really regret not being able to be there to celebrate with her, and all the gays I know and love.

Alex had an amazing experience - which she writes about here. Don't miss it. Her ability to see through to the heart of things - not just the reality around her, but who she is being in those moments is unparalleled - and one of the reasons why we are friends. I'm highly bored with people who cannot take responsibility for themselves, and who project their anger out onto others, and feel justified 100% of the time (you know, the whole "I relish how right I am" crowd). None of us are perfect, but you know those who operate on that level and those who don't. It's clear. And sometimes, sometimes, when you are faced with hatred, coldness, fear, contempt ... you can come back with love. It does happen, if you are not so bound to the fact that you must be so RIGHT all the time. In such moments there is the possibility of grace. True grace. It could not happen otherwise.

I had such a moment recently. It was a bitter pill to swallow and frankly I am still choking on it. But better to show the person grace and compassion, in the face of indifference and cruelty, than insisting on my own righteousness. I don't know WHY this is the case, and it certainly isn't always the case ... and I struggle mightily with this, because I have been hurt. Blindsided, really. I want to punish the person who hurt me. Natural response. But on further reflection, I just couldn't. That kind of energy is short-lived, it has no shelf life. It is a flash, where you feel better for maybe two seconds - but you don't EVEN feel better. Not really. What it does is deepen the grooves within you, of anger and bitterness, and you get to nod your head contemptuously over how right you are and how stupid everyone else is ... and if you LIVE in that state, then you are a poisonous individual. Not only to yourself but to those around you.

Like I said: not easy. It means I have to give up on the idea of having the last word. Of winning the argument. I have to give that up. I have. Bitter pill. But one I have to swallow.

Alex has often shown me the way in this regard (although when someone requires a bitch-slap, there's nobody like Alex to give it ...) and it is not in the moments when all is good and perfect that you are really "allowed" to be great and awesome. It is in those other moments, when confronted with cruelty, indifference, blindsided by rejection. Can you show someone grace then?

Can you, as my cousin Mike wrote, make a choice to not contribute to someone else's hurt, "even if you think they deserve it"?

This is a lifetime journey. The desire to WIN (especially when you have been hurt and want to lash out) is ferocious. And here's the other thing: You are rarely thanked for showing people who have hurt you grace. It has to be done for its own sake. That's hard, too, because you have to let go of expectations. You have to let go of being right. Of clinging to your hurt and making a badge out of it. And you have to do all of this knowing and understanding that you probably will get nothing in return. There is no reward. Or, not an immediate palpable reward. More often than not, you are mocked for being weak. Or, you get no response whatsoever. It goes out into the void and you get nada back. (This post I wrote about a beautiful moment my friend Wade had with a hostile stranger is an example of what I am talking about - except that Wade's behavior ended up turning the encounter around. Scan the comments there and look for the angry guy who could not tolerate the way the conversation had turned. Could. Not. Do. It. His own sense of how right he was, and how wrong it seemed to show someone gentleness when they are a jackass - was rock-solid, an edifice that could not be cracked. He just couldn't "go there". It was like we were speaking two entirely different languages. Now that's just some random commenter on the Internet. Whatever. And even in that moment I can see, "Okay, that guy obviously has been hurt and rejected and feels angry about that." Again, a natural response. But he is not trying to go deeper. He has stayed in his hurt - made a badge of it. He LIVES there.) So again, it comes down to a choice. Who do I want to be?

Alex, in all her complexity and humanness, lives in that place. That's a conversation she has with herself every day. Even in moments of triumph, even in moments of loss.

Go read the whole thing. I love you, dear.

In light of recent amazing developments in a certain area (or should I say "sector") of which I have intense interest (as does Alex), I thought it might be fun to look back on two of our many wacky experiences together. No, it's not the time we drove through the immediate aftermath of a gang killing, and I tiptoed in my high-heeled sandals past a dead and bloody body on the sidewalk as Alex hissed at me to "RUN! RUN!" towards her out of the crossfire ... No, it's not that time. It's not the time we danced around doing jazz hands in a garage full of Armenians. Nope. Not that time either. Nor is it the time we drove to Vegas to see Liza Minelli.

The two experiences are related, as you will see.

Getting clear on Hollywood Boulevard ...

Our private tour of the Life Exhibit of a certain individual ...

Michael Jackson, the dancer

A really thoughtful analysis in the NY Times. Here's just an excerpt, but I highly recommend you read the whole thing:

There are few popular dancers today who keep drawing your attention to footwork: He was always one of them. Here in “Billie Jean” he turns the feet in and out; he raises right and left feet in alternation; he isolates the action of one leg and then the other; he goes rhythmically knock-kneed: It’s riveting. Later, when he jumps and stamps, those moves are dance effects, always part of the rhythm. And meanwhile, until late in the song, he never stops mouthing the lyrics. He’s always intense, and still occasionally vulnerable. The spring he can get out of those feet is very exciting: you can see how much impetus he gets out of them — turning in and out, they sometimes propel him backward — which is just a foretaste of what’s to follow.

Clip below the jump of Michael Jackson performing "Billie Jean" in 1983 at Motown 25. I remember seeing that show. I remember everyone talking about the moonwalk at school the next day, gobsmacked, "did you see that??" - people trying it in the corner of the cafeteria. Hard to imagine yourself back into that time, what with who Michael Jackson eventually became, not to imagine how much the moonwalk is imitated, mocked, whatever. But it is an electrifying performance - if you just watch what the hell he is doing with his body, in every second.

Receding

Never thought you'd be alone this far down the line

But I know what's been on your mind
You're afraid it's all been wasted time.

The Eagles, "Wasted Time":

receiving

Clifford Odets, journal entry, January 17, 1940

Much of love for me is in giving. Unfortunately, I am not one of the receivers in life. I receive badly, restlessly, shamefully.

Icon

The only tribute you need to read.

1905 Coney Island

An awe-inspiring photo.

Make sure you click on it to enlarge. You can get lost in the details.

In the mirror

For one semester in college, Mitchell and I did not speak to one another. There was a Cold War going on between us, and we now refer to it as "the Bad Time". We were BEST friends, and yet we did not speak for 4 months.

We were doing a show, and once, before rehearsal, he and I found ourselves alone in the men's dressing room, which was a long concrete room, with showers, lockers, and a line of makeup mirrors down the middle. Nobody else was around. Everyone left us alone at this point - the tension so huge you could smell it in the air, like ozone. We were FURIOUS with each other. But really what was going on was that we were so sad, we were so sad that we were in a fight, and that we couldn't apparently be friends. I cried myself to sleep every night. I MISSED him. But I couldn't give in. I just couldn't.

And so he and I sat there in the now-emptied gray dressing room, tensely, quietly, not knowing what to say. Mitchell, to break the mood, turned on the boom box. We were all very into Michael Jackson's album "Bad" at the time. It was all we listened to. You got that? IT WAS ALL WE LISTENED TO. I am unable to listen to that album now without immediately being transported back in time, specifically to that very time in my life, that one semester in college, when Bad was on constant rotation and I was in an awful silent fight with my best friend.

So Mitchell put on Bad and "Man in the Mirror" came on.

And without discussing it, without a word between us, without a noticeable thawing in the air or anything, Mitchell and I started dancing to that song, separately - not together - We remained stridently separate - but we kept dancing, dancing until we were completely lost in it. It was one of those times when you become completely unself-conscious. You completely lose awareness of yourself as a body taking up space. It is like you become your spirit. That was what that 3 minutes was like for us, in the dressing room. We danced separately from one another, he on one side of the line of makeup mirrors, me on the other side. The music was transcendent, that chorus bursting forth at the end, the glimmering line of mirrors, his reflection dancing, mine ...

When the song ended, we turned the tape deck off, realizing that we both had kind of "been" somewhere. We were no longer really in the same emotional place.

The frozen silence between us had broken. There would be no more "bad time". Somehow, through those weird separate dances, Mitchell and I forgave each other. Without saying a word. We found joy again. Joy in being together. Through the course of the song, all bitterness disappeared into thin air. Dissolved into the mirrors, never really to return. We would still need to have conversations about our argument, we would need to apologize and let go, and talk about it ... but the real forgiveness began with no words, barely any eye contact even, dancing around to "Man in the Mirror" in the men's dressing room. Lost in it.

I cherish that memory with my friend, dancing like mirror-image whirling dervishes, looking at our reflections, forgiving each other.

Unbelievable live performance of "Man in the Mirror" below the jump from the 1988 Grammys. He "goes" somewhere by the end, he's off-course, he's improvising, it's an extraordinary moment.

Every time I hear that song, every time, I think of that dressing room, the echoey grey walls, blue lockers, the endless reflections, and Mitchell.

Remembered Kindnesses #2

Four days ago I drove home from the grocery store. It was torrential rain. A bad gloomy morning all around.

I live on a street (not for long!) where a huge group of Harley Davidson dudes reside, so my dead-end street is always populated with parked motorcycles that can make the rest of us have a difficult time. I'm a good parallel parker, anyway - I rarely have to pull out for a second try - but the Harleys scare the shit out of me, I won't lie. They are gleaming awesome machines, obviously precious and beloved, and ... well. There have been times when I have driven a block away so that I don't have to deal with parking amongst those motorcycles. Easier to just walk the block to my house.

The rain was letting up a bit as I pulled onto my street. It was only 11 in the morning and I already wondered how the hell I was going to get through the whole day. I was so tired, so sad.

My street was sprinkled with gleaming Harleys. There were places in between them, but that would require me parallel parking between two of them, something I have successfully avoided the entire time I have lived here.

Like I said, I live on a dead-end street - and two of the Harley owners were out in their front yard as I pulled up. They were putting some furniture out on the sidewalk so they sort of stopped, glanced at me, waiting to see what I would do. Worst possible scenario. To have the owners of said gleaming motorcycles WATCH as I park between them.

But I had had it. I had had it with all of life at that moment. I am no longer going to get out of the goddamn way of other people. No more. I am going to take MY space and I am sick of being a good fucking sport about getting out of the way. No. No more.

The dudes were watching. I had on sunglasses.

I pulled up beside one of the Harleys. I grit my teeth, and - in one smooth motion - backed in between the two bikes, perfectly positioning myself, not scraping anything, not hitting the curb - with inches to spare between the two bikes. I am telling you, that parking job was a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

And it might have stopped there. I would have had a grim proud moment to myself, all alone, but it would have had a "fuck you" feeling to it, as in: "Fuck you, Harley dudes, I am sick of having to navigate around your bikes, and I just beat the system, so SCREW YOU." There is, of course, a certain amount of joy in "winning" - and I would have felt triumphant regardless - because that was a tough parking job, not to mention being eyeballed by two scary-looking bald dudes right across the street.

So it might have stopped there. But as I took the key out of the ignition, grabbed my iPod, whatever, I became aware of a dim sound. My windows were rolled up, due to the rain, so I wasn't immediately conscious of it - and certainly not aware that it was for me. It finally caught my attention - was it cheering? Clapping? I looked up and the two Harley dudes were clapping, and giving me a thumbs up sign.

When I got out of the car, one of the dudes called across the street to me, "That is, hands down, the best parallel parking job I've ever seen!"

Other dude was clapping and laughing out loud. "You looked so PISSED OFF and then - zip zip zip - you just backed the fuck into that spot - it was so awesome!"

What was really cool about this interaction was that they had sensed where I was at - emotionally - and that I refused to be pushed off of my own street. I might have become a creature of snickering fun to them if I had had to laboriously parallel park, pulling out, trying again, going at it a different angle - but the fact that I got it right in one try, with almost one gentle swoop of the wheel, made them love me to death. Love me so much that they clapped and cheered.

Didn't make the day shorter or better, but it is another moment for the stockpile.

It put a glow through my heart, and made me laugh. I walked into my house, pretending to bow at them as I opened my door, and I still heard them laughing about me as I walked inside, laughing about my angry grim face and how I would not be deterred.

Remembered Kindnesses #1

I can't really remember why I was so upset. It all seems pretty Gothic to me now. Like, wow, Sheila, I get that you are sad, but is that any reason to turn yourself into a weeping dybbuk?

It had to do with a man, of course, we shall refer to him as the "baby boomer" - but then there was also Michael, lying on the couch downstairs - and was I upset about Michael, too? I don't think so. I was never upset about Michael. He stands alone in the pantheon.

But I remember it was our last night in Ithaca and for some reason, the whole cast had to stay in one house our last night there (our temporaray lodgings no longer available?). For the run of the show, two of the boys had stayed in one apartment our whole time there, and the two girls stayed in a house - and during the course of our time in Ithaca we all had basically coupled up, two and two, so it worked out great. One couple would stay at the apartment, one would stay at the house, then we'd switch (neither spot was ideal, and everybody basically wanted to be in the house, a better deal, so every night after the show would involve the two sets of couples standing around negotiating who got to fuck where. "Look, we'll let you have the house for the weekend if you just take the apartment for tonight ..." etc.) - but basically how it all worked out was that wherever each couple ended up, we had the whole joint to ourselves. Absolutely perfect for new-romance shenanigans, of which there were many.

But that last night, we all had to cram into the one house - and there weren't enough beds, and I ended up having to take a single bed upstairs, in a room full of stuffed animals and rainbow stickers - and Michael slept on the couch downstairs - and my God, it was like a Sophie's Choice moment for me. It was like families being ripped apart due to a tuberculosis quarantine. My reaction to being separated from him was absolutely out of proportion - but then everything with me is out of proportion - but I actually have come to a new understanding of what is kindly called my "intensity' - and maybe I'll write about that later. It has to do with the knowledge of the soul. My response to things is actually NOT "out of proportion". It is, on the contrary, completely appropriate - my soul knew what was ahead. From when I was a very wee girl, it knew what was ahead. Michael slept on the couch downstairs, I climbed into the single bed surrounded by My Pretty Ponies, and I felt as though I was being shoved into some quarantined sick-tent by dudes wearing Hazmat suits, diagnosed with Ebola, ripped apart from my loved one, screaming in agony as we were separated. There was more going on though, and I guess I can remember some of it, although the details are murky and I am not quite sure why I was such a maniac.

I was in love with someone else, it hadn't worked out and I was fresh in the aftermath of that when I met Michael, who was a strapping youth of 20 years old. I robbed the cradle, happily, and basically snuck Michael into bars with me, I was there when he had his first sip of wine, I cooked for him, took care of him in a way, and while that all may sound condescending - it was one of the best relationships I've ever had. And Michael, a newbie in the ways of life, was - underage nonsense notwithstanding - an awesome boyfriend, he had the knowledge of the ages in his DNA, knew how to court, pursue, and, well, you know. All that OTHER stuff he was awesome at, too. And I, unlike in any other relationship I've had before or since, got to be a domestic hearth-mama. It was great. My heart was taken up with the heartbreak from the baby boomer, but boy did I love hanging out with my Gen X boyfriend. There's an essay here. The generational differences. This was not a situation either where I felt, "Okay, CLEARLY I can NEVER be serious about this 20 year old ... so let me just USE him as a distraction." I've had those romances and they're kind of ikky. Because inevitably the guy would get serious about me, and I knew in my heart, "what is your problem, dude? You HAVE to know this won't ever last." The thing with Michael was not that (obviously, if you look at our relationship now and through the years). The man asked me to marry him and I said YES, mkay? I hadn't seen him in three years when he proposed, via phone, leaving the proposal as a message on my damn answering machine, and I thought about it and said back to him, "You know what? Yes. I will marry you." Hijinx ensued and obviously we did not marry, but we had a profound bond (still do). This was not a bond that started AFTER we broke up, as often happens with men and women - who sometimes become better friends post-relationship. We hit the ground running. He was not just a distraction from what I had left behind. He was the real deal.

If I try to imagine myself back into that night surrounded by Barbies and dollhouses in the dark room, with my heart screaming in agony at being forcibly and CRUELLY separated from my boyfriend who was just downstairs, I know that I was afraid of leaving my dream-world of being in a show out of town behind. Going back to Chicago meant facing the music of life without the baby boomer, and I was terrified of that. The thing with the baby boomer had ended a mere week or so before I left town, and so I had always felt like my time away had been more like a criminal getaway than a professional opportunity. Going back, I suddenly knew that all of that would be waiting for me. I hadn't escaped. Or, I had momentarily, but it was a respite. Not a new beginning. It was just a breather before going back into the real shit. It's so long ago that the emotions are not at my fingertips, but I do remember lying in that stupid single bed and everything around my heart just burned. It literally burned. But I don't think I knew who I was sad about. Baby Boomer? Gen X-er downstairs? My empty life I would be returning to?

It was probably a mix but in that dark moment in that little girl's room, with the leaf shadows trembling on the wall, crouched against the wall, being encroached upon by dolls and teddy bears, all I was aware of was how far away Michael was downstairs, and how much I wanted to be with him. I ached! I burned for him! I yearned to get out of Ebola quarantine. I was out of my mind!! It seemed so unfair, globally unfair, like THERE WAS A CONSPIRACY AGAINST ME that we couldn't be alone with each other on our last night, I couldn't get over it, I burned, I ached, I was out of my mind! I wanted to be held so badly it was like a primitive imperative. Biological in nature. The fact that I was lying in the bed of a little girl just added to the sensation.

There's a funny moment in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind when Jim Carrey has suddenly become himself as a four year old. He stands in the oversized kitchen in his jammies and he says, "I want to be held!" Then, to himself, a flash of his old adult consciousness, "It's amazing how strong that need is!!"

For some of us, that need remains palpably strong, trembling on the surface of our interactions with each other. Others are better able to sublimate. Or, you know, they actually find a real person to hold them, and they share their bed with that person for many years, and so the yawning need is not so apparent. Because it's been fulfilled. Whatever. But for me, the need is, at times, unbearable. Obviously I BEAR it but that does not change the fact.

This is probably scarcity talking.

It's embarrassing to admit to it. It's embarrassing to admit to it, in general, and it's REALLY embarrassing to admit to it to a boyfriend (of the new variety). You might seem insane. Too "needy". Codependent. (The next time I hear the word "codependent", I'm taking out my crossbow. I've had it with that effing label. It is just a smokescreen for those who fear intimacy, a convenient label to put on people who have the balls to say the words, "You know what, I need this from you ..." You are under no obligation to fulfill that need, by the way, so YOU are the one who are "codependent". You are perfectly free to say, "I can't fulfill that need right now ..." but the mere act of ASKING for something is not codependent. Seriously, I'm taking out my crossbow right now thinking about how this word is over-used by those who are not qualified to understand basically anything.) But the thing about it is, I have internalized that anxiety. I fear being seen to be needy. Or "too much". I have been told openly I am "too much". Now, granted, not by the people who really matter. My friends, the men who have really gotten me ... I'm never "too much" for them. But it can't be denied that I am aware of my own "intensity" (kind term), and I have, on occasion, been punished for it. Meaning, rejected. I don't take rejection lightly. It hurts like a motherfucker. Of course. I am not alone in that. I fear abandonment. When it comes, when I am abandoned, the response is primal.

And that was what was going on in that dark room, with Michael downstairs. Michael was not abandoning me. But he might as well have been. That is what that separation felt like to me. The tide pulling back, inevitable, nothing will stop it, all I could see was the wreckage and lost hopes and dreams (wrapped up in the Baby Boomer), and now my dream-world was ending, and I was going to lose Michael, and I felt abandoned.

This is the stuff I never share. I protect everyone from this side of myself. It's too bleak, it makes people too worried, and nobody knows what to do. The cat is out of the bag right now, and this is where I LIVE now, it can't be hidden ... but at the time, in my night in quarantine, I struggled mightily with my own needs, which were so strong that the repression of those needs caused the burning in my chest area. That is what was happening. I just needed to be held. I wanted comfort. I wanted something to take the edge off. The edge would be waiting for me, make no mistake, I am not a dreamer, not really, and I understand that reality is rough. But sometimes, when things are really hard, it's nice to just have someone hold you and say, "It's going to be okay."

To me, this is the primary thing that relationships (good ones) can give. I have just been through a ruthless year. I have tons of support from family and friends, a posse of people circling the wagons, but that one-on-one thing, of coming home after a rough day, with a long night ahead of you, and having someone to, oh, watch TV with, go out to dinner with, get naked and comfort one another, or even have a snippy argument about car payments ... I have not had. Scarcity makes all of this even more stark.

I was a young woman when I was in Ithaca, burning with need and abandonment in that little girl's room. But I understand the rough road ahead. If I didn't understand it with my brain, my soul knew. Its worst fears have come true. It knew. It knew.

All I wanted to do was go downstairs and be with Michael. There was nothing else in my mind. Why was that so difficult? Our relationship was still relatively new, I had only known him a couple of months at that point. But our time in Ithaca had been a condensed and intimate affair. We saw each other every day, every night, we were together 24/7. We had nothing else to do, no other lives. We did the show at night, we made out all night, we went out to breakfast, we read in the park, we went to get ice cream, we went on hikes - there was no one else to hang out with, no distractions, we had no day jobs, no other obligations. It was surprisingly easy. Michael didn't play the "hot/cold" game. He didn't play games, in general. He was "hot", all the time. He wanted to be with me. He didn't manipulate my affections or take advantage of my obvious liking of him. He didn't act aloof, or over it, to make me crazy. Why would he do that? He liked me too. 20 year old boy but he understood that if you like someone, then, uhm, you do your best to be with them. You don't pull the exact opposite. I felt safe. I don't do well with games. My fear of abandonment is so acute that at the first sign of it - the first flapping of the wings of it on the horizon - I am outta there. Nope. And my instincts have rarely been wrong. I have been told, "Sheila, you are over-reacting," or "I think you're being premature" more times than I can count. I have been talked out of my certainty that something has happened, abandonment is coming ... and gotta say it: I have never been wrong yet. I am sensitive to shifts. Emotional shifts. I have always been so. I know when something has changed, even if nothing is said about it yet. The shoe may not have dropped yet, but it's coming. With Michael, I never felt some ominous shoe dropping on the horizon. He was into me. So yay, I got to be into him too. We do not operate in vacuums. It's a dance-step. I vet you, you vet me, we lay the groundwork saying, "It's okay to come out, it's safe ..." and you test each other, you show a bit more, "Is this okay? What do you think of this side of me?", and either the person shows up and shows you it's okay or they don't. You need to keep your bearings. I am very good at that. I am terrible at the aftermath, but I am very good at keeping my bearings during those opening salvos. So with Michael, I felt safe, and I got to dote on him, and take care of him, I got to roll around in the grass with him, I got to fight with him, and I got to lie in bed with him curled up in a pigpile until we went to sleep. It was awesome.

I didn't know why I couldn't just go downstairs. What was holding me back? I wanted to be with him. I was so sad. Monumentally sad. I had Ebola and I was being separated from those I love forever.

It is insane how sad I was, in looking back I can see that I was having a meltdown obviously but sometimes human beings melt down, where is the shame in that? I'm not a headcase, in general, but in that moment I was. I needed help. I needed a little bit of comfort. I needed a committed friend to hold me and say, "Hey, shhhh, it's going to be okay." I fear my own humanness is basically what this is all about. And for good reason, at times, I might add. I have been rejected. I have been brushed off, put aside, rejected - for the very qualities that I am treasured for by others. This is hurtful. Like I said, we do not operate in a vacuum. Or, NORMAL people don't anyway. Those who walk around always knowing that they "deserve" things, they "deserve" the best, their self-esteem is unshakably high about what they "deserve" are, in general, socially inept d-bags. A little self-doubt is sometimes not just good for relationships, but also accurate. It is the ability to look at oneself accurately, and that is the most attractive quality of all. We've all had the experience of talking to someone who truly believes that he or she is the funniest person on the planet. And they are not. (Like Mitchell says about those people, "Leave the comedy to the professionals, mkay?") Or those who feel that reciting South Park episodes mean that they themselves are HILARIOUS. I am not exempting myself from these foibles, we all have them, we do not always know who we are, we under- or over-estimate our abilities, etc., but when it becomes endemic to a personality, when the entire artifice of a personality is constructed to hide the truth about the person from himself ... that's when things get scary. Again, this is just an instinct with me. Maybe it's like being a human metal detector, only I can sense sociopaths and d-bags. Not sure. It's a sensitivity to lying. Not lying like, "I'm 35" when you actually are 62. Those are lies we all can understand. But lying like, "I am THIS kind of person - can we all just agree that I am THIS kind of person?" when it is so obvious that you are NOT that kind of person, not in the slightest. To me, that kind of lying (while understandable - we all want to be loved and successful and perceived to be terrific well-liked people) is the toxic kind. Perhaps because I feel like I could "go there" myself.

So of course I would love to be "the kind of person" who doesn't ache to be hugged from time to time, and coddled, and told "everything is going to be okay". I would also love, by the way, to be the kind of person who doesn't feel that those very human needs are neurotic and must be hidden from others. That is really what I would love and that was the battle going on with me in my quarantine.

Finally, though, I crossed some rubicon (I was sobbing openly by this point, mortifying!), and decided, "this is retarded. I need to go be with Michael right fucking now." And I did. My major breakthrough was not "getting myself together" before I went downstairs. This may seem pathetic to some people - those who have a tendency to call displays of emotion of any kind "whining" - but I live in a different world, thankfully, where emotion has its place. This also may seem like a version of "arrested development" to others, who could find it confusing that I was so embarrassed by my own emotions. It's a valid point. I am not incredibly mature. I have a lot of neurotic notions about things, and also, I operate from scarcity. It does something to you. Makes you a bit ka-ka. Cray-cray. My desire now is to be KIND to that part of myself, as opposed to brutal. To give her some goddamn room to BREATHE.

Like my cousin Mike said to me recently, "Stop calling yourself crazy. You are not crazy. You love deeply, you care deeply, that is not crazy."

It is, on the contrary, the best part of myself. To abandon that part of myself, to demonize it, to believe in my heart the judgment of the world that I am "too much" would be a tragedy.

I staggered down the stairs, in my T-shirt and boxer shorts, glasses on, tears streaming down my face. I was a spectre from the black lagoon of grief upstairs, infiltrating Michael's quiet space downstairs. He lay on the couch, with a light on, and he was deeply engrossed in the Peter Manso biography of Brando. He heard me coming, glanced up, saw me, and in an instant, the book was down, he was off the couch, and taking me in my arms. Baffled, yes - because we were not in the same place. We had been in the same place for our relationship - but on that last night, we actually DID separate. Again, my instinct about this was not wrong. He was ready to move on, to go back to 'real life' - I was not. But instead of judging me for holding onto it, instead of judging me for feeling the loss, he had nothing but sympathy and love for me. I have not had much kindness in those moments. I have from friends, but not from the man in question. He has already moved on. Faucet on, faucet now off. He is not the one I can go to anymore, and yeah, there's something right about that, that is why one has a posse, but it is still hard. This moment with Michael stands alone in my experience, and he - a 20 year old kid - was up to the task. He brought me over to the couch, and held me as I cried, and he was saying things to me like, "What is it? What is it?? Can you talk about it?" I couldn't. Then he said, "You don't want to go home, do you?"

I had already been crying but at his words, I became like this:

Instead of withdrawing, or judging, or all of the other things I have experienced in such moments (and again, I'm not a neurotic headcase, but when I get sad, I go there, man) - Michael coddled me and upped the tenderness. When I burst into a higher level of sobbing, he almost started laughing - the way you do when a little kid freaks the fuck OUT because he dropped his popsicle on the ground - you recognize the reality of the intense GRIEF being expressed, but on some level, you know: Okay, okay, this is kind of funny, because she is flipping OUT. The laughter was warm and soft in my ears, as he held me tighter, sympathetic but also somehow distant, and he said, "I know ... I know you don't want to go home ..." He did not give me platitudes, like: "I want to stay here, too" (because I knew and he knew that that was not true). He did not reassure me inappropriately, ie: "We'll still be together when we get back to Chicago", because we both knew we probably wouldn't. He just heard me, did not belittle me, held me tight, and said, "I know. I know you don't want to go home. It's okay, Sheila. You're going to be okay."

I was pretty much at the "boo-hoo" stage of my crying jag. I think I was actually making actual "boo hoo" noises. Michael laughed to himself (but kindly, always kindly), and lay me back on the couch with him - the two of us struggling to fit there together. Half of my body was falling off into midair, but he held onto me, putting my head on his chest, and let me boo-hoo about my own life - much of which did not have to do with him - deep into the night. Half the time I was crying about another man! Good Lord! Michael knew about the "baby boomer" (as a matter of fact, he was the one who christened him "the baby boomer", and his voice always dripped with the contempt of the Gen X-er when he said it. Remember: I'm Gen X too. I mean, look at our outfits. We were poster children and we didn't even know it.) - and we didn't talk much about it, I didn't go around talking to my new boyfriend about my old love - we were too taken up with getting Ben & Jerry's and having ridiculous fights about how I crossed the street and how crazy that made him - and doing our show, and having a blast. We were in the present.

That "boo-hoo" moment on the couch was also me being in the present. It was not me holding onto the past, not really. It was me moving into another present. It was a letting go. It is hard for me to let go. I wanted to stay in Ithaca forever.

Words cannot express the damage that has been done to me when I have experienced contempt or coldness during such times. It makes you shrivel back into yourself, recoil completely. It is an over-correction, which I have talked about before. You feel horror at what you have revealed, you feel horror that it is now being judged and you are seen as somehow lacking, or weak, or codependent - you are "that girl" that everyone rolls their eyes at - and so the doors clamp shut, you over-correct in your next relationship, and it is sometimes years before all that shit is untangled. The damage done by the over-correction is often way worse than the original hurt.

But I was not damaged in that moment with Michael. I went to him in my sadness, and he comforted me. Not just like a friend should, but like a man should. He is a real man. He was an underage kid at that point, but he knew how to be a man. We both had our times of "checking out" during our relationship - he had some insane freakouts which are amusing to me in retrospect, although they were tremendously serious at the time. I made the enormous error of getting into a huge conversation with another cast member, a guy, about Henry Miller - and Michael, who loves Henry Miller, freaked OUT on me later. He could not BELIEVE that I would share with ANOTHER PERSON my thoughts on Henry Miller without even ACKNOWLEDGING that MICHAEL LOVED HIM TOO. Michael was screaming at me on the sidewalk at 2 in the morning. "You KNOW I love Henry Miller - you didn't even fucking LOOK at me when you were talking to Pat about him - it's like you just wiped me out - like I don't even count!" I blustered around, trying to protest my innocence - "I didn't realize - Henry Miller just came up - I didn't think - " and Michael was having none of it - and we both just spiralled down into this huge fight and I finally felt so attacked that I shouted back, "FINE. FINE. I wanted to talk to HIM about it, not YOU - is that what you want to hear? What - you OWN Henry Miller? Do you OWN HENRY MILLER, MICHAEL?" I am laughing out loud as I type this. Finally, I got it. I understood what was happening. Michael felt rejected, abandoned in that moment, and it pissed him off. He just wanted to be included. Oh. Okay. And I hadn't included him. Whoops. Once I "got it", I was able to apologize - and appropriately. I totally knew where he was coming from, and it was okay that he flipped out on me. Of course he did.

In a funny way, him flipping out like that made me feel safe. I hated it when he flipped out, it made us both insane, but at the same time - it showed me: this guy gives a shit. Try to be sensitive to that, Sheila. You are not alone in this.

That's what I mean when I say Michael was "hot", all the time. It was high-maintenance, I had never been used to a man who could just openly admit he was jealous - I found it thrilling, but that was kind of unfair because jealousy was a torture to Michael. Anyway, my point is: we had both had times when we "checked out", and freaked out. That last night was my time.

I was suffering. For all kinds of reasons. Some had to do with him, others not. There was much going on with me that I had not shared. He knew that.

But when I remember him glancing up to see me approaching down the stairs, when I remember him putting the book down immediatley and standing up in one fell swoop, when I remember him dragging me into his arms and holding me, until I fell asleep, what I am grateful for is his kindness.

Kindness like that is not a small thing.

Perhaps the scarcity from which I operate is a sort of blessing, although I am not ready yet to say "thank you" for it. But it does help clarify things. Everything is so stripped away, so scarce, that needs and wants and desires become acutely apparent. And the best part of all (although again, it is a mixed blessing) is that one does not forget.

Operating from scarcity gives you a long long memory. You need it. That drop of water you received from the oasis 300 miles away has to last.

And it does.

It also helps to be able to write about it.

Memory, in and of itself, is a sort of oasis. A place where abundance can be stored, measured out, given back, doled out.

There are many reasons why Michael and I are still such good friends. It remains "hot", not as in romantic - but like all my friendships - it is still engaged, still in process, still at work. We are not done.

I fell asleep that night with my head on his chest. At some point during the night, he took my glasses off for me. He told me later that he read all night, holding the book up in the air, with me sleeping on his chest.

The next day, we all woke up and piled into our caravan of cars and drove back to Chicago.

All of my fears about returning were soon realized, and I was catapulted into a ruthless wilderness which eventually ended with me picking up and moving to New York. That was the end result. I no longer could bear it, Chicago itself became too much for me, and I had to leave. It was about a year later that I made the move, but the bad-ness really began for me when I got back to Chi-town.

But as the years have passed, my memory of Michael's kindness to me that night have remained, and, to be honest, it's a small moment. Right? Other people who may have had tons of experience with dating and many many boyfriends and even husbands may not hold onto such moments, or even remember them at all. Things become diluted, it is easy to forget the poignancy of those moments of connection. But not when you have so little. When you have so little, things remain clear. Awfully so, at times, I wish for less clarity, a little softness and forgetfulness, but that seems to be a hopeless wish. At least for someone such as myself.

I was never in love with Michael, and he never broke my heart. Our bond remains unclassifiable and outside of normal explanations and it was operating at full level that night I had Ebola. We knew each other, what, 7 weeks at that point? But the entelechy of it was already there. It was there from the beginning, and in my experience that is so rare as to be almost unheard of.

That memory matters to me. I call upon it. It reminds me of softness, of gentleness, of being understood and cared for when you are weak and worn down, of not just the possibility of kindness, but its actuality.

I think of him reading his book over my sleeping head. I think of him gently removing my glasses so that I wouldn't wake up. I wasn't "there" in those moments, I was asleep, but it makes me think of my favorite passage from LM Montgomery's Emily's Quest:

And even though he knew it not, surely such love would hover around him all his life like an invisible benediction, not understood but dimly felt, guarding him from ill and keeping from him all things of harm and evil.

When I think of that night, that's what comes to mind.

Mikalojus Konstantinas čiurlionis:

Amazing stuff. Like from a dream. I want to be in that dream.

Second units

I have no idea the percentage, but I would imagine that many of my "favorite shots" from favorite films have come from the second units. Just a wild guess.

It is those second unit shots that (ideally, anyway) show atmosphere, mood - create a world (not just an actual world but an emotional world), or serve a function to slow things down, the sudden stillness in the middle of action, whatever it might be. Second units - underpraised indeed. So I loved to read this post from Arbogast, about the second unit shots of Dawn of the Dead.

It seems almost a backhanded compliment to say that these compositions are European in their aesthetic. And yet, there it is. A layering, stripped of irony. There's a fullness here, a sense of life conspicuous in its absence.

Yup. Yup.

There are some pretty funny (horrifying) stories in The Devil's Candy about how the second unit was basically a renegade outfit, completely beyond the bounds of control (although bringing in some brilliant shots - many of which did not end up in the movie, millions down the drain) - and it's a really good look at what NOT to do with your second unit.

Boxing

Genius writer Katherine Dunn talks about her new book on boxing (which she has reported on for decades) in this recent interview. Her honesty is, of course, startling, raw, and refreshing. She's brilliant. She makes the rest of the goddamn world just seem so insufferably POLITE. Well, the rest of the world can have their little social interactions that keeps everyone safe and secure, they can have their little acceptable lies they tell one another - about the world and about themselves. Count me out.

I love her thoughts on ... well, everything.

I love that she acknowledges brokenness as not just part of the human condition, but its very essence. Brokenness is not the end. Brokenness is just the way things are. Like Auden wrote, "You shall love your crooked neighbor with your crooked heart."

That's all we can do. Yearning for straightness and wholeness (after a certain point, I mean) is a weakness. It is the desire for utopia, which is a delusion.

Geek Love has, in its title, its message. It is love, pure and simple. Crooked bodies and crooked hearts and what it means to love. For the most part, love given will not be received. At least not received in full by the one it is given to. It will be rejected, or brushed off, or ignored, or laughed at. Or, worst of all, not understood to be as deep and true as it is. But love should be given anyway. And that's what makes a wreckage of life, and yet that is also what makes it most worth living. But please. Let's not just skip over that whole "wreckage" part and try to pretend that these are two equal halves. They are not. Katherine Dunn understands that. She understands that heartwrenching struggle. It is that which breaks us. Geek Love was all about that, but what I find really interesting is her perspective on boxing, and how many of us need that hard tough persona. It is undervalued today, especially in certain sectors. But it has its uses. It is one of the most important survival skills we can practice. Yes, the risk is that the hardness of the outer shell will go deep into the core. Oh well. There are risks in everything.

Wishing that we were not "geeks" (ie: broken) is a waste of time.

I love her for getting that. And putting it into words like nobody else.

Here are my thoughts on Geek Love.

Her new book is called One Ring Circus: Dispatches from the World of Boxing. Can't wait to read it.

Do you ever think of me? You're so considerate.

That pretty much sums it up.

Foo Fighters: "Let It Die".

The quiet of a shutout

Josh Beckett pitched a shutout game last night against the Atlanta Braves, and it felt like the fastest most uneventful baseball game I have ever attended. Ellsbury, my favorite hottie of the moment, made a kickass catch, sliding into the green monster - and that was really the play of the game, although we did get to see a thrilling double play at the end (with Beckett catching the ball on the bounce from the plate) - but other than that, not a hell of a lot happened. We got to see Youkilis throw a little hissy fit about some ump's call (surprise surprise), he stood and stared off into space, exuding annoyance and passive-aggressive huffing and puffing, and it was hysterical. We got to watch Josh Beckett do his little OCD step-step through the white lines on the first base line - so delicate!! What'll happen, Josh, if you don't do your little ritual? Will the world fall off its axis? I love that he does that, and that he does it in as macho a manner as possible. "Look. I'm a tough sonofabitch but I must tiptoe delicately with both my feet in between the white lines, or I will totally lose my concentration and fuck you for making fun of it. I deliver, don't I?"

No huge hits - a couple doubles - no homers, nothing exciting really.

Because of a massive car pileup on 95 we missed almost two innings. We didn't miss much. The game was over by, what, 9:30?

That's what happens when you have good pitching. Nothing happens. It's actually quite amazing.

Quiet, yes, but along the way you start to realize: "Hm. This is a pretty awesome game." BECAUSE it is quiet.

Derek Lowe, back on the mound at Fenway for the first time since 2004, was in fine form - and it was strangely emotional to 'see' him again. I've missed that big lanky emotional rosy-cheeked headcase with the huge swinging-to-the-side leg. He pitched a good game, and kept it just as quiet as Beckett did - it was a battle of the pitchers, most definitely. He had been interviewed the day before about what it would be like to be back at Fenway, and what did he expect from the fans. His answer was along the lines of, "I am sure they will be polite, welcome me back and all that - but after that, they'll treat me like any other pitcher on any opposing team. That's to be expected."

Not quite, D. Lowe.

When he left the mound for the last time in the bottom of the 7th, Fenway Park stood, as one, and gave him an ovation. It was pretty amazing. An opposing team's pitcher. Well, well, we remember.

The best part of all was the stoic little tip of the hat he did to the crowd.

It was classy.

We love D. Lowe!

At one point we thought we saw Papelbon warming up in the bullpen. Hmmm. All quiet on the Fenway front. Then we thought it was Okajima. But by the 9th, there was no more action in the bullpen. Nobody warming up. Beckett still on the mound, still dominant, pitch count still very low.

He finished the game. It was his first complete game of the season.

Guess that little tip-toe dance you do along the first baseline pays off, huh tough guy?

We were home by 11 p.m. What the hell.

A shutout is a quiet kind of a game. There isn't much action and there isn't much that is actually visible. Important to keep in mind, though, that "l'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux."

Baseball is, as always, an apt metaphor for almost anything.

Being shutout is a quiet experience indeed. But the reverb is deafening.

Evidence

why should I rush to prove that I can break my heart all over?

Duets written for two women are rare. This isn't really a duet - it's one song, followed by another song, and then briefly they merge together. This is the best I could find on Youtube. It's rather a raw video, but I like the performances of the two women very much. They're both very relaxed and open.

It's from a killer duet from the "yuppie" Maltby/Shire musical Closer Than Ever: "It's Never That Easy / I've Been Here Before".

I also love the song because of the support and the love the women show one another, in the lyrics - they are talking TO each other, sharing experiences, and saying, "I know ... I know ..." That is what good friends do. It is nice to see women being kind to one another. Because that is MY experience of my female friends, not a catty one in the bunch. One of them calls the other "darling" during her singing, and by the end, they are talking TO each other. One takes the words from the other song and sings, "You're fine alone ..." which is a terrible thought, but comforting as well.

You ARE fine alone.

You are more than fine. You are alone, and you are enough. You, you, darling, ARE ENOUGH.

It's when they switch - at the very end ... when they switch songs ... the one with the new love starts to sing "it's never that easy", and the more wise one, who's been through it all, starts to sing "I've been here before" - that I lose it. Like clockwork.

Because that is how it is.

Nobody escapes this life without going through that transformation. It's never not wrenching, and it never feels fair or right, but it just IS. The worst part of it is when you feel "I've been here before". It is the familiarity that is the killer.

I first got into Closer Than Ever when I was in college. I thought I understood so much of it. Ha. My affection for the musical has waxed and waned since then, and only a couple of songs from it really have stood the test of time (for me). This is certainly one of them.

Again, raw footage. Beautiful song.

This song has been on my mind lately.

It's never that easy. I've been here before.

Dear Ann Marie:

It was great running into you on the street corner this afternoon.

I am not sure why you dyed your hair blue, I decided not to ask.

Funny thing, a camera caught our interaction. Check it out.

Zero Meridian

Zero Meridian
by Deborah Warren

It's here beneath us, as invisible
as zero; but although there's nothing there,
although it's an abstraction - purely notion -
nonetheless, they drew a line in air
and based the world on it.
And you could say
in the grand scheme of things it matters more
than my October maples, or the ocean
throwing the waves like sapphires at the shore.
or even your mouth and eyes --
and I'd reply:
Maybe you're right. To take the measure of
anything that matters, we rely
on nothing - things like longitude and love.

Geography

I just found out that I move in a week and a half. I got the final confirmation yesterday.

So let's see. I have to break my lease, find someone to take over my lease, pack up all my stuff (3,000 books and counting), interview movers, schedule the move, all in a week and a half.

Because of what just happened to me (and yes, it happened TO me - it's been like being hit by a giant wave. No, not a BLACK WAVE, dear worried friends, just a big wave, hard as concrete) - the move is taking on the feeling of a hurried criminal getaway. In the dead of night. Tires screeching on lonely pavement, dust swirling up in the wake.

I'm gone, baby, gone.

I know in my heart because I have been through this before that geography solves nothing. A move does not mean you leave your problems and heartache in the former location. I know. It all will follow me.

But the whirlwind begins today. I limp forward, regardless. The cat's out of the bag. Nothing will stop the juggernaut.

I have lived in this apartment since 2003. I have experienced two of the biggest changes possible in life in this apartment. One was a gain, one was a loss (and no, I'm not talking about the loss I just experienced, which is of your garden-variety "goddammit, THIS AGAIN??" loss - no less excruciating, but certainly familiar). I will be grateful for these four walls because of the gain I experienced in their midst. It was truly a miracle. I still can't believe it. That was NEVER going to happen. I lived for 15 years thinking that that was NEVER gonna happen. And in September, 2006, it happened. So now I live in a different world because of it. Not an exaggeration. Where I live obviously did not MAKE it happen ... but I will associate this place with that breakthrough. I can't help it. I am suggestible that way. I wrote my book while living here. That's amazing. I wrote it under the most challenging circumstances ever imagined. It took me two years. It's done now, and trying to live out in the world. I still can't believe it. I have accumulated a lot of stuff. Now I look around at all of it and all I can see is how many boxes I will need. There will be a shedding, I am sure. Things I have that I will be able to let go. Objects I have kept that maybe it's time to release. Not sure yet what the fallout will be.

I know one thing. The thought of saying goodbye to my view is intensely painful. It's not just what I see at the end of my street. It's part of the meditative start of my day. It's a checkin, a daily checkin, and to say I "love" it is not even right. It's more than that. It's a living entity to me. I will ache for it in the months to come.

I have a week and a half to say goodbye, along with all the other crap I have to get done.

full of grace ....

It has always seemed wrong to me to buy your own rosary. Rosaries should be passed down. From grandmothers to mothers to daughters. I have wanted to buy one over the last year, felt the need, and have even gone shopping a couple of times, but have hesitated on putting money down because of this strange feeling inside that no ... no ... a rosary should not be bought. It needs to be given.

The rain pours down today, and I am sick as a dog. On the mend, but flu-ridden and heartsick. Periodically out of my mind. I spent the day recovering, lying in bed, and then there was a two-hour phone conversation with my dear friend Jen, about something she is going through. Well, we spent one hour on HER life, and then one hour on mine. It was difficult, with my raw flu-sore throat, to talk that much, but I needed it. It keeps me connected and it keeps me talking.

I went to take down my recyclables into the basement and saw a package lying on the floor underneath my mailbox. I glanced closely at it and saw it was for me. It was a handwritten label, which was strange, because it looked like the monthly box of Moodstar Essential Oils I get (please do not judge, although I realize that might be difficult), but my monthly stash comes with a typewritten label.

Now the interesting thing was that the handwriting on the box today was as familiar to me as my own, although I have not seen said handwriting in, what, almost 30 years? She is a friend from my past, my high school friend, and naturally I grew up in the days before texting and email, so I am very familiar with everybody's handwriting from my past. At a certain point in my life, I stopped knowing what my friends' handwriting looks like, a very interesting phenomenon, I think. Like, Allison. Allison is one of my best friends on the planet but I could not pick her handwriting out of a lineup because I met her after I had email. But my childhood friends, my family, my Chicago boyfriends ... these people have handwriting I know in my DNA.

The handwriting on this box was an echo from my distant past. One of my dearest friends in high school. We are now Facebook friends, and we are not in touch as we used to be, but my memory of her is fond and dear. I was not even aware that she had my current address.

I've been hearing from a lot of random people these last four or five months, of course - so, curious, I took the box back into my apartment and opened it up.

There was a card from her, and a brief note - again, in that handwriting that I know so well, the rounded neat edges, the kind of squat openings in the letters - the writing that says to me, in no uncertain terms, HER. It is a fingerprint. We would write notes in class to each other. We would pass notes in the hallway. I have some of them still. Handwriting changes, sure, but not all that much. There SHE was. Again.

Her note was sweet and short, and she said she had been looking for something that had "Mother Mary" on it to send to me ... which immediately brought up emotion in my throat - I've never written about Mary, and I probably never will. Those feelings are so mine and should never be shared. But I felt the emotion start, and after I finished reading her note, I reached into the box, through the bubble wrap, and pulled out a small wrapped box, invisible in the layers of bubble wrap. I unwrapped it, and saw a clear-plastic box, with a rosary in it. A beautiful rosary.

I am beyond words. Beyond words. One word.

hailMaryfullofgracetheLordiswiththee
blessedartthouamongwomenandblessedisthefruitofthywombJesus
holyMarymotherofGodprayforussinners
nowandatthehourofourdeathamen

Things You Already Know, by Mike O'Malley

A beautiful and profound essay by my cousin Mike O'Malley.

Great work. I'm proud to call you a friend.

"I have so much to tell you!!!!"

It was 12:30 a.m. My head buzzed with the events of the past couple of hours, the exhilaration, fear, and personal triumph, of hearing my words read out loud for the first time, around the table. I stood on the stone patio outside my guest house, pacing around like a caged tiger, unable to go to sleep yet, the darkness of Los Angeles around me, and, unthinkingly I picked up my blackberry and texted him, crazily, "I have so much to tell you!!!!"

It had been a long intense night. About eight scripts were on the table that night - there were nine or so people there, all writers and actors - some good friends, others completely new to me. It had been nervewracking at first, I would get huge jolts in my stomach every time I heard another knock on the door. My social anxiety coming to the fore, but also my nerves about how the reading would go. I was also acting in something Mike had written, a script I had been given earlier that afternoon, and I was a bit nervous about that, too. The acting bug coming alive again. It is a voracious feeling, nearly unpleasant, but I so get off on that unpleasantness that it was really nice to feel it vibrating through me again. My brother was there, Melody, Larry, people I know well, but then there were others, people I had only met once or twice, or seen on TV and heard of, but never met. I was sort of the wild card, the unknown element, a "visitor", the visiting cousin from the East Coast. (After my script was read, Liz - the one who said the funniest thing to me that night - fired at me across the table, in a tone of incomprehension and almost scorn, "So you're just visiting??" I can't describe why the way she said it was so funny, but everyone just burst out laughing. Like: who the hell are you, you visitor from not-even-New-York-but-NEW JERSEY??)

"I have so much to tell you!!!!"

A lot happened that night, much of which I will not share. Rehearsals like that are meant to be private, and people have moments of personal revelation or breakthroughs/downs in the process of working that need to be protected, I have seen it happen time and time again ... It's a sacred space, a process like that. Suffice it to say, that we all were in the zone that night. A zone of work, a safe space - where things were discussed, hashed out, responded to - all of us sitting around the table, watching the actors read whatever script it was, and it was a humorous and fun environment, not judgey at all: huge bursts of laughter when something was funny, but then a sudden swoop of silence as things got serious. It felt like college again. Where the WORK was sacrosanct in and of itself, something that could be reveled in with or without monetary gain. We are all grownups now. Many of the people at that table make a really nice living at the very thing they were dying to do in their college, high school, grade school years. But it was surely a nice and beautiful reminder, that night, of WHY we do what we do. And WHY we strive. The whole business side of things, while essential, can make you lose sight of it. That was what a lot of people were talking about as the night wound down. "God, I just forget sometimes how much I love this ... " or "It's so easy to sort of internalize the demands of a television structure - you know, straight line, pause, joke, wait for laugh - as though that is the only way a script can possibly be a success ..." Lots of great conversation along those lines. A beautiful bunch. I loved them all.

"So you're just visiting???"

Maybe, maybe not.

It had taken a lot of preparation to get to the point of that reading. My first draft came flowing out of me in three hours. It was a one-take draft, pretty much. Mike liked it, didn't have too many comments. Those would come later, after the reading. He was immediately on board with it, and the ball started rolling from there.

A month or so later, he (you know. He. The invisible yet felt presence on my site for a while - if you're a discerning reader, you've picked up on him, he's everywhere) asked if he could read it. I sent it on. A brainstorming session then commenced, the exhilaration of which I remember with pain today. His comments were insightful, right-on-the-money, and yet he never forgot that it was MY piece, and said to me at one point "you will always know more about it than I do." He got suspicious if I took too many of his comments in a submissive manner - he wanted more fight from me - and there were things I fought him on, but for the most part, I had sent it to him in a spirit of openness and availability. I was not wedded to any of it. I had written the damn thing in three hours. If it had been one of my essays, I might have fought more. I told him there were a couple of essays I've written that I would literally go to the mat over a comma change. But this? Bring it on. We rearranged things, and chopped it up, and while by the end of it (the session lasted for six hours) I still recognized the script as my own - nothing substantive had changed, not the voice, or the event - the beginning, at least, was much better (I thought), not so theatrical, and we had also gotten really clear on a lot of the issues being dramatized - and I got clear on some of the places where I WASN'T clear. It was awesome.

By end of May, plans for the reading were being finalized, and I booked my flight to go out to Los Angeles for it. I stayed in the guest house at Mike's, which was (have to say) a sweet situation. I had my own iMac, and TV, and I stepped outside and there was a pool. Yes, I could not figure out the child-proof gate to save my life, had to email Mike from the guest house - up in the main house at 8 am my first morning there ("uhm, help??") and Mike's pipsqueak of a daughter had to come out and show me how to do it ... but it was wonderful. I'd sit at the table outside in the strange windy dawn, with the palm trees swaying heavily above in the grey, and work on my script. Or do nothing. Zone out. I was in the zone. Where I have always always longed to be.

"I have so much to tell you!!!!"

The freedom in those exclamation points is startling to me now. Who was that girl? Was that just a little under two weeks ago? How on earth is that possible.

How quickly things are lost.

Not everything. Not everything. But "things".

The reading of my script was (as I told the actress who read the lead female role) a "highwater mark for me" in my life, whatever happens with it. It was an honor to be there. It was a privilege to be part of such a group. The integrity, the kindness, the SMARTS, and the generosity.

I have been thinking a lot about generosity lately.

It is difficult for me, because I experience the world as quite stingy. It withholds. This sounds ungrateful, and it is ungrateful. I have a great family, a true posse of people who care about me, I have talents, I know what I love to do, I do it, and seriously, I know that I am blessed. But when the one thing you want, the ultimate thing, is denied to you, the world is a desert. I relate to it with my friends who have "dreams deferred" (and I am one of them). Those who had dreams of being a great and famous actor, and who have not achieved that. They have made sense of it, or tried to, they have gone on, found compensation in other areas ... but they are haunted by that "dream deferred". Or there are those who are unable to have children, and it is a dream that will die hard, it is something that must be accepted, with as much grace as is humanly possible - but acceptance is not an easy thing, it takes sweat, tears, your own fucking blood spilt as you give up that dream, you rage at God, the universe, the cosmic plan that seems to have gone awry. If you boil it all down, if you strip all else away, what is it that I REALLY want? I know what I REALLY want, the one thing that haunts me (literally. I am a haunted woman, ghost-ridden), and so I find ways to navigate, negotiate, survive. Many of my coping mechanisms, things I have generated as a way to survive my pain and loss, have become highly involved artistic pursuits which have generated a lot of success for me. These are not quiet hobbies done in the solitude of my home. These are things that can be pointed at, out in the world, and said to exist. I am a survivor. I find ways to wrench my disappointed narrative into something that either serves me, or serves others. I don't always succeed. I am often left without words. All evidence to the contrary (my whole damn blog), I have had no words for where I have "gone" in the last three months. Not to mention what I went through in the year before those three months. Those experiences lie in the ineffable, the ether, the spaces between the words. I struggle with that.

As long as I have my words, I feel like I will be okay.

And in that dark moment, with the rustling sound of palm trees in the night sky above me, the words I had were, "I have so much to tell you!!!!"

There was only one person I wanted to tell everything to, in that particular moment. I would tell other people the story, at other times, my posse, my friends and family. They all wanted to hear about it too. But in the first flush of excitement, my thoughts, my heart, went to him. He was who I wanted to share it with first. And I knew, like you know your own face when you see it in the mirror, that he was dying to hear.

After all, during the reading, I could hear my blackberry buzzing from time to time in my bag in the other room. During a break, I went and checked it, knowing (again, like I would know my own face) who all those messages were from. There they were.

"I know you can't answer hahahahahaha you are doing the reading right now! hope it's going great - can't wait to hear ..."

"what's happening right now, I wonder? has yours happened yet? thinking about you ..."

An eager heart, open and available, excited, and with me, in my high watermark moment. Vicariously. Not present, but there in spirit.

It is the zone I have always dreamt of.

"I have so much to tell you!!!!"

Standing alone by the dark pool, in the shadows, my blackberry buzzed five minutes after I fired off my exclamation-point-ridden message. There he was, quick-fire typing away in response. "can't wait to hear - you will tell me all about it in person tomorrow!"

And I did.

A couple of days later, Mike and I were talking about my script, fleshing it out, riffing, not really setting anything, but going off on the ideas brought forth from the reading. Where could it go? What was I missing? What needed to be fleshed out? Could it be expanded? We were talking about breakups, and what it is like when we are left behind. The pain of that. My script is all about the legacy of one particular breakup. Mike said, "I think that one of the worst things is that you get used to having this person inside of you. They're not outside, they're not just your boyfriend or girlfriend. There is a huge space inside of you reserved for that person - everything you want to tell them and share - and so when they are gone, you still have that space there. And all you want to do is fill it. It seems so wrong, so wrong, that you are left with that huge empty space."

I still have so much to tell you.

Summer of '84: wax on wax off

A really moving personal essay mixed with a review about The Karate Kid. One of the best things I've read in a long time.

Life raft.

THE MORE LOVING ONE
by W.H. Auden

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

Metallica: "Enter Sandman" (with San Francisco Symphony)

It's just one of those concerts I wish I saw: Metallica joining up with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. I try to imagine all those metal-heads filing into the symphony hall and I feel despair that I wasn't there. Great double-album from that concert, with an enormous symphonic sound - the Metallica songs are truly arranged here. The strings and horns and all of that are not just hovering in the background - the songs have been re-thought and re-imagined so that the symphony is not just support-staff, but enormous and integral parts of what Metallica is doing. It's thrilling.

Here is "Enter Sandman" from that concert, and it's really the strings-section that stands out for me, although there's a hell of a lot going on in that arrangement. And yet, our fearless boys are never lost in the shuffle. It's a perfect balance.

And it's what starts to happen at around the 4:40 mark - to around the 5:10 mark - that is truly goosebump-material, because there is nothing that sounds like that on the original, and it's not hugely complex, it's basically just a shivering of strings, repeating, with pauses in between, the tension building, etc. - but it takes a re-imagining of the song, introducing the possibility of giant orchestration - that can make something like that happen.

Love it. Love the call and response thing, too. How thrilling it must have been for those symphony musicians to suddenly be playing for that kind of crowd. The liner notes for the double-album are fantastic, and the conductor (responsible for the entire event - it was his brainchild) - mentions that the string section had to actually change their shirts at the break, they were as drenched in sweat as if they had run a marathon. They were all kind of blown away by that, like: Uhm, wow, I must go change my shirt. This is certainly a different kind of symphonic evening.

"Enter Sandman" below.

If you say so

My horoscope for today:

You are direct and no-nonsense and it is more appreciated than you know.

Rain on that empty chair

6:30 a.m. New York City.

"I don't want to ... die a virgin ...."

I love The Divine Comedy - love his voice, love his lyrics - and my latest favorite is his song "To Die a Virgin".

Here he is performing it live.

The only god is a god of carnage.

God of Carnage, Yasmina Reza's Tony-award winning play, is a four-character symphony that is playing like a bat out of hell on Broadway right now, and I consider it a must-see. If you live in the area, or if you are visiting, do not miss it - and if you can, see it with the original four actors - James Gandolfini, Marcia Gay Harden (winner of this year's Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play), Hope Davis, and Jeff Daniels. It runs about 90 minutes without an intermission - which is great, because to step out of the momentum of the play would kill it. It requires that nobody (not the characters, nor the audience) gets to take a breath. It shows an evening that starts out one way and then goes south, and then after going south, it plummets to the deepest hot core of the earth, where all civilization is stripped away, and people basically lose their fucking minds. It reminded me a bit of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, except that George and Martha are rather on the edge from the beginning, eager to play "party games" with their hapless guests, and it is the two unwitting guests who end up being stripped not just of their civilized behavior, but their entire personality structures and ideals and values system. In God of Carnage, all four characters begin with the veneer. Nobody is conscious of what is going on underneath - in the group dynamic or in themselves. It seems as though they are truly having a discussion (very funnily written) about a playground fight between their two sons. We in the audience can sense the undercurrents but the characters can't yet do so. There is a wonderful tension in those opening scenes.

To describe how things go south, and what the various triggers are, would be to ruin the exhilaration of seeing it for the first time. I went into it not knowing much about it, except for being familiar with Reza's other plays, and also knowing it just won some Tonys. There is no surprise in the plot, akin to the surprise of George and Martha's child (their "secret") in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but the surprise (and the delight) comes in watching these four spectacular actors create this EVENT - from wholecloth. The end of the play has to be IN THEM from the beginning, but in the beginning there are zero clues as to where we will be going. What a ride. What an exhilarating ride.

It's another one of those rare theatrical events where everything is in perfect balance. No one is clearly having a "star turn", they each get equal play, they each have their "moment", but like I said in the beginning - it is a symphony. To take out one part to analyze it would wreck the fabric of the whole. These four actors are creating this organic event TOGETHER, and God, there were moments where I found myself laughing, clapping, and saying stuff like, "Holy crap" out loud (and I was not alone) - not because it was fun or funny or a hoot, but because what I was seeing up on that stage was so out of hand, and yet so truthful, that I couldn't believe my eyes.

I didn't have time to think or analyze or step back. My eyes raced from one person to the other to the other, thinking, "Oh, how will she take that ..." "Oh shit, forgot about him over there ... what's going on with him ..." "My God, look at Marcia Gay - WHAT IS SHE DOING??"

One of the things that was so incredible about the acting of Gandolfini, Harden, Daniels and Davis is that eventually it becomes one of the most physical of plays. People run around screaming. People throw things. People wrestle. But when the lights go up, we see four characters sitting politely on two couches, and everyone is talking in a nice low manner, all civilized and "Oh yes, we understand how it is on the playground ... but our boy lost a tooth ... what can we do about it?" "It is so wonderful how understanding you are being ..." ... and by the end the four of them are wrecked shells of who they used to be. And somehow it is all hysterical AND heart-wrenching at the same time. Nothing is played just for laughs.

Its interesting, I would like to read the script just as a document and see how it reads. There are some terrific lines, and all of the characters are clear and well-written, but in my opinion it's the acting that makes it transcend. Again, I'd have to read it to see what I think. To be clear, when you sit down and read a play like Streetcar Named Desire or Long Day's Journey Into Night, they are fantastic pieces of literature all on their own. Yes, an actor can make it live, can leave an indelible impression (phone call for Marlon Brando) - but the scripts can be read on their own. I am not sure if that is the case with God of Carnage - I'll have to read it. But it seems to me that there might be something a bit thin at the heart of it, a bit too clever ... but no matter, no matter. The four actors in question (and the direction) delve as deeply into this event as they can possibly go, and you forget you're watching a play, you forget you're watching four big stars go at it up there ... You are gripped by the throat and you are never allowed out of it until the lights go down 90 minutes later.

There is a staggered quality to the journeys of the characters. Some are harder nuts to crack (Marcia Gay's character, for example - but boy, when she lets loose, you feel like, "Uhm, this woman is going to be in Bellevue in a matter of moments if someone doesn't DO SOMETHING"), but when things start falling apart, boom boom boom, down they all go, like ninepins. They are inextricably linked. They aren't even good friends. This is not like a Big Chill scenario, where all the chaos and sexual shenanigans and drunkenness come out of the fact that this is a big group of friends with a long history, and they all know WAY too much about one another, and there is nowhere to hide. No, God of Carnage is about the meeting of two couples, for the first time. They have been brought together because the son of Hope Davis and Jeff Daniels has "attacked" the son of Jim Gandolfini and Marcia Gay Harden with a stick. So to watch these two couples unravel is astonishing, because I couldn't help but think, "Holy crap, these people are gonna wake up tomorrow morning and be like ... was that ME last night? What the hell happened??"

I have "favorite" moments in my head for each actor, the take-aways of these four great performances:

1. Gandolfini is so funny, so so good here - true and real and ugly and funny, and there isn't a moment he doesn't nail. But you don't feel him cashing in on his giant Sopranos success (although he is perfectly perfectly cast here), he's not winking at the audience or anything like that. Like I said, there are no star turns here. Nobody is "slumming". These are actors at the top of their collective game, and it was so much fun to see him just let loose in the midst of this new environment. At one crucial crazy point, he suddenly gets up and walks across the stage, taking off his shirt. He is taking off his shirt because he is out of his mind and he's fed up with playing polite, and fed up with the insinuations about his character, and the best part about the gesture is that it feels like a surprise, it feels like a grizzly bear suddenly standing up. The best thing to do when you see something like that is to either lie down and play dead, or whip out your crossbow and take that ferocious beast down. It'll be you or him. That's what it feels like. (phone call for Timothy Treadwell). This is a man who has been domesticated, and almost fully. But suddenly, no more, no more. He's had it. But the way Gandolfini sort of staggers across the stage, taking off his shirt, is so hilarious, so real, that when I saw it the audience erupted into excited laughter. The laughter of recognition, fear, and also just the thrill of being in the presence of an actor who has actually been driven out of his mind to such a degree that he has to start whipping off his clothes.

2. Jeff Daniels is so damn good that I had a difficult time not just tracking HIM and what he was doing. I had to remind myself that there were three other people on the stage. What he is up to is subtle, and subversive, and many times he has very difficult moments where he's on his cell phone in the background and he has to make his voice go low, to let the other actors be heard, and then he has to surge back into the focus, with one beat - and there's a ba-dum-ching quality to what is going on, and he nails it, every single time. It was fabulous. Because that takes technique, that takes an understanding of being on stage and an understanding of ensemble acting. Now of course I am not surprised that Jeff Daniels has all of these things. But it was so exciting to see it in such high gear, and to see him operating at such a high level of consciousness. He created a character - a kind of cool distant lawyer, always on his cell phone, a bit annoyed that he has been roped into this bogus "meeting" about something he finds hard to take seriously in the first place ... but he also has to have a three-dimensional awareness of what everyone else is doing on that stage at all times, since his "moment in the sun" doesn't really come until very late. He is the counterpoint to the other three lunatics. He paces around, barking orders into his phone, eating the carefully prepared food with a fork, while standing up, and it's so damn hilarious and rude. You never ever catch Daniels "acting", but make no mistake: this is not just a guy "listening and talking" up there, or behaving, or doing something that is wholly natural. He has to have the timing of the entire piece in his DNA, because he is not the driving force, he is on the support team - until the very end, when he emerges as the one who will speak the title of the play and make it explicit for us. Of course it would be HIS character who understands that God is a "god of carnage". Jeff Daniels makes everything look easy and that is why I couldn't take my eyes off of him.

3. Hope Davis is so off-the-charts with her acting (no surprise there) that it is her unraveling that really becomes the focus of the entire thing - until, of course, Marcia Gay takes over, and then Gandolfini takes over, and finally Daniels takes over. But she's the one who takes the fall first. She seems the most fragile, but in the end we realize she's in touch with something much deeper than the rest: her own rage, her own sense of alienation and meaninglessness - which was trembling there with her in the civilized beginning. She has the most transparent of masks, so of course that's why she goes down first. Very early on in the play, she gets physically ill. I was sitting in the third row, so I could see everything: how Gandolfini's face literally got beet-red when he screamed into the phone at his mother, the food spitting out of Daniels' mouth as he inhaled it while talking on his cell phone ... and I swear I watched Hope Davis' face literally go a sickly green color, directly before she got sick. This actress is beyond good. I wanted the play to go on for another hour so I could just watch what kept rolling across her face. It's a tour de force.

4. And Marcia Gay Harden. I have seen her onstage before, but never in a role of this magnitude. She's the one with the toughest ego, in a way, the one who has a vested interest in the "role" she has given herself to play in the world. She has art books stacked on her coffee table, she is committed to the problems in Africa, she is a do-gooder (something that Jeff Daniels totally clocks her for in a devastating observation - "Women like you, custodians of the world, depress men."), and she speaks in a soft modulated voice, all calm and caring and "reasonable". That's why her disintegration of personality is so hilarious and so disturbing. She had one moment, when she is so far gone, so furious, so out of control, and she's leaning over to pick something up off the floor - and Gandolfini, her husband, embarrassed for her, says something to her like, "Honey, you're making a scene -" but he barely gets any words out before Marcia Gay, bent over at the waist, kind of cocks her ass right at him, as though she's firing a gun off, doesn't straighten up the rest of her body, still hunched over, and screams up at him on the diagonal, in a horrifying screech, "IDON'TGIVEASHIT." I nearly could not recover from that moment - it was such a funny and AWFUL moment of unleashed rage, and her physicality was so specific, but it didn't feel like a "bit", or that she had planned it out beforehand. She has become a beast of the field, and all bets are off from that point on.

I am not sure if I would say that this is a great play, in and of itself. But I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that what is going on right now at the Bernard Jacobs Theatre on 45th Street is an EVENT of the highest order.

Don't miss it.

The eventual boomerang

We sat outside on a bench. It was a chilly night. There were black clouds in the sky smudging across the big white moon. We looked up at the moon.

I said, "It's a full moon."

He said, "Is it?"

I said, looking closer, "Now I'm not so sure."

He said, "Yeah, I think that maybe ..."

I said, "Maybe the left-hand side is a bit fuzzy - maybe it was full yesterday."

He said, "Yeah."

We lapsed into silence. The silence went on for a bit. We kept looking up at the moon.

He said, "When I look at the moon, I see it in 3-D."

I said, "What do you mean?"

He said, "I don't see it as a flat sphere. I see it as an actual ball in the sky."

I said, "That's really cool."

We lapsed into silence. It went on and on and on. Nobody spoke. We just kept looking up at the moon. Nothing else was happening. It seemed that nothing else was supposed to be happening. What was happening was that we were sitting on a bench on a chilly night looking up at the moon.

Suddenly, it was as though the air deflated out of him, all at once. His shoulders relaxed, his head kind of sank back, and he said, in a tone of wonder and surprise, "God, I am so mellow right now."

I didn't speak for a while and then I (the least mellow person on the planet) said, "Me too." and I meant it.

Perspective requires distance. Something I do not have right now. But I think of that moment of utter relaxation and nothingness on that bench, and at the time I had had a moment of consciousness and awareness, of thinking, how extraordinary ... that we would be so relaxed right now.... that we would be so mellow ... here, now ... it is rather unusual ....

But things never mean what you think they mean.

Now I can see that that moment would be the eventual boomerang.

Incongruous. Beautiful.

Palm trees. Cloudy grey dawn. Raindrops.

Frozen

One of those rare moments. Captured. Some of those birds look like my tattoo, phoenix rising, inked upon the cloudy sky.

Bye bye.

It is only when I spend 24 straight hours with Hope that I realize ...

... just how much that damn cat sleeps.

What a difference a week makes

I am now in a whole new landscape. Passing through a crucible. It will inevitably leave me "lesser than", I know that much from life, and it can't be helped. Can't be gone around, must be gone through. For now, all feels "flat, stale and unprofitable", which is a byproduct of losing magic and leaving the dreamspace - which only gets more wrenching the older I get - but this part too must be gone through, not skipped over.

Trying to read again. Not easy! I had to put down Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up - I had brought it with me to LA, and tried to read it, but it's too much for me right now. My mind kept skipping away from it.

My comment on "operating from scarcity" in this post brought forth a beautiful comment from "Mark" in this post which gave me goosebumps, and made me pull out Wind, Sand and Stars again, a book I last read in high school, when I was in my Richard Bach-airplane-writing-soulmate-search phase.

But now, it is as though I never read it. It is occurring to me as something totally new and fresh.

My attention span is not what it once was, but I'll stick it out and see how far I get. Still only in the first chapter, but I came across the following extraordinary passage:

And yet we have all known flights when of a sudden, each for himself, it has seemed to us that we have crossed the border of the world of reality; when, only a couple of hours from port, we have felt ourselves more distant from it than we should feel if we were in India; when there has come a premonition of an incursion into a forbidden world whence it was going to be infinitely difficult to return.

Thus, when Mermoz first crossed the South Atlantic in a hydroplane, as day was dying he ran foul of the Black Hole region, off Africa. Straight ahead of him were the tails of tornadoes rising minute by minute gradually higher, rising as a wall is built; and then the night came down upon these preliminaries and swallowed them up; and when, an hour later, he slipped under the clouds, he came out into a fantastic kingdom.

Great black waterspouts had reared themselves seemingly in the immobility of temple pillars. Swollen at their tops, they were supporting the squat and lowering arch of the tempest, but through the rifts in the arch there fell slabs of light and the full moon sent her radiant beams between the pillars down upon the frozen tiles of the sea. Through these uninhabited ruins Mermoz made his way, gliding slantwise from one channel of light to the next, circling round those giant pillars in which there must have rumbled the upsurge of the sea, flying for four hours through these corridors of moonlight toward the exit from the temple. And this spectacle was so overwhelming that only after he had got through the Black Hole did Mermoz awaken to the fact that he had not been afraid.

Wow.

Quotes from Jen, while watching Grizzly Man with her last night

"Dude, it's SHIT. It's not 'number two'. Who is your audience here? Channel 13? It's SHIT. The bear 'goes to the bathroom'? No - the bear takes a shit. What the hell is his problem?"

"That woman ... I hate to say it, but she needs to be in a war zone. A war zone'd straighten her right out."

"See, the thing is is that I think Timothy Treadwell was ..." (long profound pause, as she thought about her next comment. Then she reached out for her glass of wine, and said ...) "... was just a guy ..." (then she took a big swig of wine with an air of finality, like that was her big statement for the night. I burst out laughing which then caused Jen to do a spittake. That's all you got, Jen? That potent pregnant pause was for that? He was "just a guy"?? GUFFAWING.)

One more test just how much can I take?

This is a performance I remember and I'm so happy it's on Youtube (video below the jump): Foo Fighters performing "The One" (one of my favorites of theirs) - on the big stage during the Salt Lake City winter Olympics. They're so cold and so into it they're almost out of breath. It's not about the perfection of the vocals or the sound - neither are perfect in this venue. It's about the energy, and the feel of the show itself. The crowd is out of hand. I love the shot of the people dancing around wrapped in American flags. I love it when Dave Grohl screams.

Everyone makes one mistake
One more time for old times sake
One more time before the feeling fades

One that's born of memories
One more bruise you gave to me
One more test just how much can I take?

You're not the one,
but you're the only one who can make me feel like this,
You're not the one,
but you're the only one who can make me feel like shit,

Something never meant to be
Everything you meant to me
Wake me when this punishment is done

Those who try and get away
From the one who gets away
Someone's always someone else's one

You're not the one,
but you're the only one who can make me feel like this,
You're not the one,
but you're the only one who can make me feel like shit,
You're not the one,
but you're the only one who can make me feel like this,
You're not the one,
but you're the only one who can makes me feel like shit,

Until the end of time,
In another life,
Until the day I die,
Just save it up for one more try,
Save it for the last goodbye,
We go on again off again on again off,

You're not the one,
but you're the only one who can make me feel like this
You're not the one
but you're the only one who can make me feel like shit
You're not the one,
but you're the only one who can make me feel like this
You're not the one
but you're the only one who can make me feel like shit
You're not the one,
but you're the only one who can make me feel like this
You're not the one
but you're the only one who makes me feel like...oh, shit!

Awesome

What an awesome poster.

It was the question mark that did it

A respite. Calm descending. Cool, quiet nothingness, an exhaustion. Temporary. I knew it was temporary, but then everything is temporary.

This is supposed to be an amusing story, although perhaps only those who know me will get it. I told it to Allison on Friday night and she howled with laughter. I suppose those who know what it's like to cry for four days straight and how ridiculous it eventually becomes and yet how you cannot stop despite the absurdity of your own behavior will also see the humor in this.

I was sitting at my desk, wiped out, cried out. All feeling washed away, the tide pulled back, for the moment.

An email came in. It was an Evite from my friend Chris. I opened it. He was inviting me to a birthday party he is throwing for his wife. I was excited. It hadn't been a done deal that this party was going to happen, and my group of friends (and myself) put the pressure on Janine (the birthday girl in question) to come on, go for it, have a party, we'll all be there, do it!! So I was happy to see that the plans had commenced.

There were the names of all my friends on the invite. All of them are couples, so they were all supposed to respond as one, which they were doing. Leaving messages, "We'll be there!" "We saved the date - can't wait!" Etc. I was fine, nothing was happening, no emotional triggers, getting ready to RSVP with "hell yes, I'll be there" - when I saw my name on the invite.

It said: "Sheila O (and guest?)"

It was the question mark that did it. I was normal, and then suddenly I was like this:

The uncertainty implicit in the question mark had deep resonance, because with me, you never know. Some people ALWAYS "have guests". It may be a different "guest" with every event, but you wouldn't put a question mark there, because a guest is a done deal with certain people. But with me?

We need that question mark. Because you never know.

Everyone knows that there's always a big question mark next to that specific part of Sheila's life, and there it was, in an innocent Evite.

The tide rolled back in with a flood (Fundy Bay) and I was down for the count for the next hour, pacing around my apartment, wringing my hands like a character in a book (yes, people do actually wring their hands! New discovery!), saying over and over, "And guest?? AND GUEST????" repeating it to myself like a crazy person, over and over, "The question mark!!! The question mark!!! And guest?? And guest????" (My repeating of "And guest??" started to feel very much like Paul Dooley's freakout in Breaking Away where he can't stop saying the words, "REfund?? REFUND? Refund???")

"AND GUEST? And guest??? And GUEST??"

Later, talking to Allison, we staggered down 7th Avenue South, howling with laughter about it, she totally got it.

One minute, you're calm.

Next minute you see a question mark.

And in the next minute you're like this.

Punctuation's a killer.

You gotta be careful with that shit.

Happy (belated) birthday, William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats was born yesterday, in 1865. Yeats is a great poet and all that, but I grew up pretty much "over" him because he was kind of omnipresent in our household. We were made to memorize his epitaph in order to receive 25 cents for our allowance. ("Cast a cold eye / On life on death / Horseman pass by"). We knew his "Host of the Air" by heart, because it was on the Clancy Brothers at Carnegie Hall album. He was everywhere. It's not that we had a reverence for him - just the opposite. I knew what he looked like, in the same way I knew what George Washington looked like, because he was on our currency. Yeats? Oh, HIM again? Cast a cold eye ... yeah, I know, I know.

Yeats makes me think of my father. My first published piece in The Sewanee Review was about the Yeats-dad continuum.

From memory now!

THE HOST OF THE AIR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When we visited his grave in Ireland, as kids, we all felt kind of amazed that ... it was REAL. That the epitaph we had been rattling off since we were toddlers actually existed out in the world, and had some meaning beyond the 25 cents in our pockets.

A couple years ago, I read his complete works in chronological order. It was a fascinating experience - I know many of his big poems almost by heart, the famous ones - but it's nothing compared to reading his work - from beginning to end. You watch an artist burst forth at a certain point - almost fully formed. You've read his younger work, you've seen its beauty (but also its sentimentality - its Celtic twilight "twee" lament ... it's actually quite awful in a way... and so nothing - NOTHING - can prepare you for the poet who would eventually write "Sailing to Byzantium" and "Among Schoolchildren" Where the hell did THAT come from?)

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

Gabriel Fallon, an actor at the Abbey, describes the dress rehearsal of Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock
in his book Sean Ocasey the Man I Knew - a wonderful theatrical anecdote, I love how Lady Gregory talks to Yeats here:

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

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

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

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

"The Second Coming" is quoted (and mis-appropriated, more often than not) and quoted again ... by people who want to use it for their own ends. It's a dark ominous crystal ball. The best "use" of it, to my mind, is in the deleted scene in Nixon, with Sam Waterston playing Dick Helms, director of the CIA. Written in 1919 - when the world had already become familiar with horror - a horror of a kind never before seen on earth - the poem predicts the chaos of the 20th century. Try to disentangle it from all of the movies (and Sopranos episodes) that has used it ... and just read it, clear and simple, as a poem. On its own. It's one of the greatest poems of the 20th century.

"The Second Coming"

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

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

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

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

Of course, there is also the Maud Gonne factor that must be considered. Here's a post I wrote about her. What do you wanta bet that Maud Gonne had "cloud-pale eyelids"? Anne wrote a wonderful post about Maud Gonne MacBride. Fascinating woman. Poor Yeats. But at least she was his muse, and he got 100s of poems out of his unrequited love for her.

Never give all the heart

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

Heaney writes, in that same essay:

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

Yeats is one of those poets who was not a solitary creature, writing in isolation. He wanted to start a "movement", and he did. He helped a young James Joyce in the beginning of HIS career. He advised Synge. He headed up the Abbey Theatre. He really looked at his own country - an insular priest-ridden culture at that time - and sensed a need, tried to create something different. It's hard to look with clear eyes on your own home, your own nation. Joyce did it, but that's only because he LEFT. Yeats, at first, went back into the Irish past in his work - and some of his early stuff is so quaint that it might as well be cross-stitched and hanging on the door of some Kountry Kraft Shoppe. I suppose it was his way of re-claiming the Irish past, its true inheritance. It was a phase, his beginning phase as a writer - how he found his "voice". And he was concerned about the rest of his countrymen, calling out to them:

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

Yeats was Anglo-Irish, but his feelings were that Irish-ness was a cultural thing, not a religious thing (forgive me for boiling it down so awkwardly) - and that the Irish could be united, regardless of religion - through writing, myths, poetry. He was a true nationalist.

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

Swift's Epitaph

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

WH Auden wrote, in his unbelievable poem to Yeats:

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

And lastly, a poem that has great personal meaning for me:

The wild swans at Coole

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

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

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

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

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

SOME QUOTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imitate him if you dare.

It is what it is. Nothing more.

Funny thing. I took the red-eye back from Los Angeles on Monday night. Got into JFK on a rainy dawn Tuesday morning, 5:20 a.m. Had to be somewhere at 8 a.m., which made it awkward timing, because I couldn't go home, drop off my bags, and then come back into Manhattan. So I grabbed a taxi in the surreal dawn and hauled ass into the city. The morning was bleak and chill. Just like I like it. But maybe on this particular morning I felt something else. Maybe. A hint of the soul-chill that was to come? I think so. I hadn't been able to grab a coffee at the airport before getting the cab, so I was really only half-human during that surreal drive. My body jittered with withdrawal. I had slept on the plane from start to finish, so I was well-rested. Although when I finally did get home that night at around 6 p.m., I lay down on my bed fully-clothed and slept a straight 12 hours. Obviously I was working some shit out. We hit some traffic on the way into the city, but not too bad. I got to my final destination at about 6:30 in the morning.

You have to be really strong and sure in your own place in the world to face New York on a rainy dawn. You have to know who you are, and know in your heart that you are loved, and that you can say the words "It's going to be okay" to yourself and it might be true. Because otherwise, it will crush you. New York on a rainy dawn can have a washed-away quality that can make it seem like all your hopes, all your dreams, everything you have ever held in your heart, the best part of you, are all for naught, of course they are, and weren't you silly to even think otherwise. The cabs careen by, empty, prowling, sending sprays of dark water up from the puddles, and nobody is up but the vendors, the mailmen, and the hookers. It's easy to get lost in a rainy New York dawn.

I needed coffee. That was my first priority. I had two hours to kill. The rain was not pouring anymore, but everything was wet, there was dampness in the air, and if the sun was up it sure wasn't giving it away. I had my huge rolling suitcase with me with my 20 goddamn outfits inside, not to mention my Velcro curlers, and I awkwardly navigated myself to an open deli and got a steaming hot cup of coffee.

Then I went to the park. The park I go to on sunny days and cloudy, to sit and commune and take a breath, in the middle of my busy days. I sit on the green wrought iron benches, sink into them, iPod on, and lose myself. Sometimes I can only afford to do so for 15 minutes, but it rejuvenates me. It has kept me in the dreamspace, where I have lived for the last three months (to the day, yesterday), kept me in the game, kept me in touch with myself, not an easy thing to do for me in my best hour. But this past year has been shattering. To talk about picking up the pieces is ridiculous in this particular context because there are no pieces to pick up. Shattering does not leave anything behind to salvage. Just wait for the dust to settle, wait to see who you are in the aftermath, and then take your first step forward. My times in the park have helped me to do that.

I have never been to the park at 6:30 a.m. on a rainy New York dawn. There was one homeless man wrapped up in plastic across the way, but other than him, I had the place to myself. The benches were soaked. I took a plastic bag that I had and spread it on the bench, perching on it, sipping (or inhaling) that hot coffee. I started to enter my body again. Enter my life. Here. The here and the now. Not the potential futures unfurling before me, or what I hoped for, the dream-castles erecting themselves in my head - but here. Now. In this particular moment.

A movie crew, with all their trailers, was on the opposite street, bustling with dawn-time activities, blocking off the street with yellow cones, talking into walkie-talkies, a beehive of movement and purpose. I found their presence comforting. And I started to let LA go. Like little droplets of water flicking off my skin. I started my re-entry process. Never an easy thing - I'm not a particularly facile traveler at any time. I don't just go to another place. I am transported.

I have no regrets.

And suddenly, I noticed that across from me was an empty chair.

Recently, I wrote a post about sitting in that very same park, and looking at an empty chair, and what that meant to me. It seemed to mean something. It seemed to have some import. Perhaps a prediction? Oh, but no, I am too chastened by experience to believe in predictions, and you say "everything happens for a reason" to me at your own peril. It wasn't a prediction. It was more a sense, a hunch. It was so clear to me on that day, all full with the experience I was in, and not being able to write about any of it, not just for reasons of being discreet, although that was at play as well, but because I could not yet put it into words. I also had (and still have) a superstition about writing things down before I know the ending. This was not always the case, as my voluminous diary entries from the past show. I used to be perfectly willing to put down in my journal every up and down, every nuance, of any experience as it was unfolding. I have lost the taste for that now. But I remember so clearly sitting on my bench, a mere month and a couple of days ago, and looking at that empty chair and glancing at my empty journal, and wondering if something was going to happen. Something I couldn't see yet. I felt like something was going to happen.

Well, something has indeed happened. There are many facets to life, and the point seems to be (to me) to figure out how to not recoil in ALL areas of your life, just because you have experienced a disappointment in ONE area. My friend David made me see, yesterday, that that is, in essence, what my script is about. Sometimes in life, we over-correct ourselves, after a bad rejection, professionally or personally. We take a huge swerve in the other direction and then have to go about undoing all the damage done by that swerve. My recoil instinct is not intellectual, at this point. I am a grown woman with years of experience. I am not an idiot. I am not overdramatic (although I am dramatic - there is a difference). And so when I recoil, I pay attention. This is not the reaction of a silly young teenager to her first disappointment. This is an awareness of true danger. It is touching a hot stove. You don't have to tell me twice.

In a funny way, I feel comforted by that. I do not live, primarily, in a Groundhog Day universe, where I keep making terrible choices and wonder why the hell I am so miserable. That is not my life story - or (word of the year) my narrative. My narrative is something else, and I am still trying to figure out what it is.

Not so much so that I can understand it and nail it down, but so that I can write about it.

The dawn was rainy and wet, and the coffee was hot, and I looked at that empty green wrought-iron chair, identical to the one I had looked at not so long ago, and I found myself struck by the difference in perspective over what is a relatively short period of time. How quickly things are lost. I suppose that could be seen as tragic, but I am not willing to put that label on it. Not yet.

I may operate from scarcity but I still, somewhere, believe in the possibility of abundance.

I looked at that empty chair, and saw an empty chair. It was not trembling with potential, or a clue, or a possible ending to the unfolding narrative.

It was just an empty chair. That's all.

"Alibi Bye", Siobhan O'Malley

Alibi Bye is the second album from Siobhan O'Malley (my beautiful younger sister). Permanent Markers was her first (self-produced) album - and a marvel it was, honest, emotional, and this new one, a couple years in the making, has a bigger sound - with intricate orchestration, and high production values - involving studio musicians, multiple tracks, banjos, accordions, and I am not even sure what else..

One of the things I love about the sound of this album in particular is how diverse it is. Each song is its own complete world, you don't feel a sense of same-ness, like you're just hearing the same song tricked up over and over again. And it all feels completely right, when heard together. It works as a whole.

Here are some of my thoughts on the songs on this album:

"Give me the Creeps" is so infectious that I dare you to listen to it only once. There is such a happiness to the music itself, but the lyrics belie the joy. This is one of Siobhan's gifts. She doesn't make the mistake that so many artists do - what I call "blue on blue". Meaning: on the nose. Like a film where there's a shot of rain falling on a window and the song playing at that moment is about rain falling on a window. So that's why I listen to a song like "Give Me the Creeps", and find my foot tapping - and yet my heart is aching. That's a good songwriter.

Video below the jump. I can't even describe how much I love it. An increasingly insane and neurotic Siobhan, an abashed and bumbling Nate, hovering creepy waitresses, and a zombie dance in Riverside Park.

"Science Can't Be Coy". Ouch. Again, one of Siobhan's real strengths is in her lyrics, which are biting, intelligent, and heartfelt. I mean, the song starts with this line: " 'She's like the Doppler effect,' he said", mkay? And in Siobhan's lyric-universe, this is not a random "quirky" detail. This is a thematic element, this is how she will structure her song. Characters emerge through the course of the song, funny details, glimpses ... but again and again, that first line keeps resonating, reappearing, on different frequencies maybe ... but that's the context of the whole song.

"I Might Deal Drugs In Order to Afford to Live in This City". Here she goes all funky, and urban - a funny (and yet sincere) song about the ridiculous amount of money it costs to just live in New York City, and how insane it can make, well, everyone.

"Heartland, Heartburn". This song seems to be for anyone who has ever yearned to "get away", move on, get a change of scenery. Not just because you want to switch it up, but because you start to wonder: what else is out there for me? Is this all there is? This is a very common thing with New Yorkers, obviously, bound as we are by pavement, etc. But one of the things I love about this song from Siobhan is that she does not lose herself in romantic notions about what it would be like to live "out there". Or maybe she does, but then she has to make fun of herself in the next moment and dream of a place "where she can shuck fuckin' corn for nourishment". That line always makes me laugh out loud. Yes, she wants to escape. But she also makes fun of herself in the middle of it. (Side note: she uses the word "dyspeptic" in the song. I find this thrilling.)

"It's Not Yesterday". I cannot write anything rational about this song. I have tears in my eyes as I type this out.

"Brilliant Petty Crime". Siobhan's voice on this melancholy song is hauntingly beautiful. There's almost a whisper at the back of it. It's soulful. But then I love how the bridge of "Brilliant Petty Crime" goes to a completely different place, where she sings over and over again, "I ain't gonna lie - I'm more than willing to lie lie lie lie lie." Great line, man. I ain't gonna lie, I'm more than willing to lie.

"A Future Me". Siobhan sings here of her childhood love for Jean, her older sister, her partner in crime as a youngster. It's really a love song. "And I got me an angel / She's me from an angle." Killer. This song is killer. (Great vocals here, too. Really rich and happy and sweet.)

"The Reminder". This is one of my favorites on the album (and I love it when she plays it live too.) Something about the "reminder" aspect of the song cuts deep to my core - and how I try to live my life. How I feel the need to hang onto things, save them up for a cold tomorrow, because everything is ephemeral and nothing lasts.

A rubber band's a reminder wrapped around my wrist
Keep on snapping it to make sure I don't miss
The things I know I'll cherish at a later date

"Squinting Optometrist". To quote my brother in his review: "I mean, just look at the title. Do I even need to say anything else?" What's so wonderful about Siobhan's images (like a squinting optometrist, and an eye-chart) is that she digs deep into what those images could actually mean, or say - what message we can impart from them. So here we are with a "squinting optometrist" in our head, and we can't help but follow that path, with Siobhan leading the way: What does it mean to see? What does it mean to have things "in the way"? Can we ever really see each other? And she manages to do all of this without being top-heavy or self-conscious. What happens is: her intelligence and intellect lead her time and again to a deeply emotional place. So satisfying as a listener.

"Fundy Bay Forecast". One of her best songs, I think. It's heart-crushing.

"In With the Old". ROCKIN'!!!! Pissed off, but funny, too - with its Dr. Seuss theme of that damn cat coming back and back. Rockin' song. Seriously. It's been one of her songs I've had on eternal repeat.

"There, There". This is one of Siobhan's best tunes in terms of the melody, the arrangement, the chord progression ... It's perfect. It's one of those songs that gets under your skin, just by what it sounds like. I am not sure if I can express this well. The lyrics add to the journey, of course, the lyrics tell the tale. But the music already catapults you, immediately, into an emotional place. This is the best example of hers that I can think of. From the opening chords, I'm THERE. Before I've even heard one word. Love this song.

"Avenue C'd". Siobhan's voice is gentle and sweet here, and giving. It's a song about one of those relationships where you pour your heart out for someone who is too lost, too far gone, to really accept your gifts, to really understand how blessed he really is. But you can't help but keep giving, because you love him. Sometimes that happens. The fact that this song takes place in a certain block of Manhattan (on Avenue C, trying to get to Avenue B, wishing to God you were 4th Avenue) just anchors it in such a gritty reality that runs counter to Siobhan's sweet wistful voice. I live here. I know the neighborhood she's describing. I know what it's like there at 3 a.m. There is no way to escape it, if you are in a certain mindset, or life stage ... and Siobhan sings about that with love, forgiveness, and deep sadness. The ultimate gift we can give to someone else. It's a kickass song. Heartbreaking.

Alibi Bye is available for purchase on iTunes.

You can also buy it here.

My brother's beautiful review (that made me cry) can be found here.

L.A. snapshots. No context.

"It's a quasi-dystopian universe."

"The leader of the group then tried to hug him into submission and he shrank into a fat Mexican."

"Say goodbye to cousin Sheila, Seamus!"
"BREAK A LEG!"

"My needs as a woman are simple and biological. I would like to have a penis on a regular basis and perhaps a child."

"Big Papi's losin' it."

"There's a hegemony."
"A what, Cash?"
"Everything is one."
"Oh, Okay."

"Nobody holds hands anymore. And everyone has Brazilians. I just don't fit in."

"You drove the Volvo yesterday, right?"
"The black one?"
Long pause full of scorn.

"I'm at the point where I don't want to know what anyone does. Like, don't tell me you use anal beads on your wife, okay? I don't want to hear it."

"You have to know it has taken an act of superhuman strength for me not to write about all of this."
"Really?"
"Dude, are you kidding me? Do you have any idea who you are dealing with?"
"Really?"

"Please tell me you're not a tax accountant."

"Meanwhile you're just pissed off that you don't have a hickey."

"I really like Star Trek, but I don't want to be a Trekkie. I am going to try really hard to not go down that path."
"It's okay, Cash. You have a family who loves you. We won't let you."

"You literally cannot stump Seamus with Simon Says. It's amazing." (it really was.)

"Julio Lugo is spending way too much time at his tango academy. We warned him that this could be a problem."

"No. We do not put stickers on each other's private parts." (this is akin to Jean Kerr's dictum "please don't eat the daisies")

"Can you just drop me off at Pavilions?"
"What? No, we'll wait and drive you home."
"Oh, please, I know I'm so weird, but no, please just drop me off."
"Uhm ... okay ..."
"I just want to stroll the aisles and get Chex Mix and Ginger Ale in peace."
"Wow. Okay."
"Please?"

"Hi, Uncle Sheila!"

When I need to escape

... and I often need to escape ...

it's comforting to know there's a movie I can turn to that is, at all times, a slam-dunk in that respect.

One of the greatest of all time. Doesn't matter how many times I have seen it. It gets me there every time. Meaning: out of my own life. Into another.

More rage

Because there's never enough rage.

That shit is a bottomless pool.

Time for a little rage.

"East Jesus Nowhere" is currently my favorite track on Green Day's latest - but this live version is blowing me away.

They're playing the song just a tiny bit faster than they do on the album, which makes it sound even more furious. Thrilling. Absolutely thrilling. And the connection with the crowd just heightens what is already a high-powered intense song.

The second I heard the song for the first time, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and it just gets better with each listen.

Seeing it live is a whole other experience. I'm blown away by this performance.

Softness and openness is all well and good. But I need my rage, too. Sometimes it's the only thing I've got, and I thank God for it.

Take it away, boys.

Funniest thing said to me ...

... after the reading of my script on Friday night at Mike's house.

Liz, across the table to me: "So are you just miserable??"

Everyone was guffawing.

That's a positive response, I think, to a sad story I wrote. "God, are you ALL RIGHT??"

Frankly, no. I operate from scarcity, remember? But hopefully I can make something out of my own misery. You know, like something artistic and stuff.

It was just so funny that she said it. Others may think it, but she said it. It was brill! I love it when people are honest. It was a great night.

The gulf between desire and certainty

JesusMaryandJoseph, this is a good post.

Los Angeles montage

Part three.

Los Angeles montage

Part two

Los Angeles montage

Part one.

Virgin America

The future is now.

Slowly, slowly through the fields ...

One of my favorite songs of all time. It suits every mood. It reminds me of what matters in low moments. It reflects my ecstasy in high moments. It tells me to hang on. It validates the intensity of my joy. It allows me to go there. Whatever I need. It's never the same song. It's been there for me ... for years. It's here for me right now.

Midnight madness

I said to Mike and Lisa: "It is important for people to understand that I operate from complete scarcity."

Mike was like, "Holy shit. You operate from scarcity?? WHAT?"

It is nice to find the right words.

I went off. "Imagine you're in the desert for a decade. You got no green trees, no water, no nothing. Then you're presented with a DROP of water. You're gonna have a very different response to that drop of water than if you lived in a place where there was tons of water. And that's me. I OPERATE FROM TOTAL SCARCITY. It is CRAY-CRAY."

Close on the heels of this, all hell broke loose in Mike and Lisa's kitchen and it ended up with Mike making me and Lisa laugh so hard that we finally were completely undone by our own hysterics, and we both lay down on the benches by the table, weeping, out of control. For example, I did a spit take at one point, merlot spraying out of my mouth in an alarming fashion, mascara was streaming down our faces, and our mad wild shrieking laughter naturally just made Mike continue with the ridiculous pantomime he was doing - and it got bigger and crazier and louder and funnier - and it felt like it would NEVER END. Lisa and I were begging for mercy. We were limp dishrags of human beings by the end of it. Mike became an ape at one point, hurling himself around the kitchen, we were DYING, I am dying as I type this, he became a sniveling moron in a conversation with a Godfather-type character - doing both sides of the exchange and then finally he became an old doddering geezer with a cane going on and on about "the Wells Fargo wagon ..." and sometimes he went back and forth between the pantomimes. I don't know. I was laughing so hard I lost track of what was actually going on. Not only of what Mike was doing, but who I actually WAS.

It was literally pandemonium at midnight. Absolute uproarious chaos.

During the wind-down (which took forever, because that hilarity was a runaway train, man) - Mike said, "You know why this is happening? I had two cups of Starbucks at 10 o'clock. I never do that."

So the caffeine had caused Mike to go apeshit crazy, egged on by the GUFFAWS of his wife and his cousin - we were seriously writhing about on the benches by the kitchen table. I could see Lisa on the opposite bench from underneath the table - this was when we had both felt obliged to LIE DOWN because we were so out of control ... and Lisa was shaking with laughter, as the juggernaut that was Mike's spontaneous outburst of humor went on and on and on ...

Mike, later: "Sheila, seriously, you need to write about scarcity. Do it. You operate from scarcity. Write it now."

To paraphrase Harriet the spy: "Scarcity. Think about this."

I will. Creative juices flowing. This is my opening salvo.

Talking about scarcity leads to laughter like that. Of course it does. It's all part of the Los Angeles O'Malley experience.

I went to bed later and my stomach literally hurt from laughing so hard for so long. It felt like certain nights in college, high watermarks of humor, where you laugh for, what, three hours straight. I was wiped OUT. I am actually still laughing today.

About Mike turning into an uncivilized ape-boy galumphing around the kitchen and then morphing into a wheezing geezer talking about the good old days when "you could buy things off a SHELF... or you would wait for your delivery from the Wells Fargo wagon ..." and then into an angry impatient Godfather bitch-slapping a sniveling idiot who can't figure out his cable bill and doesn't know how to properly knot his tie.

"He ain't here. This could be a bust."

My brother recounts his experience of going to an Inside the Actors Studio taping - guest? Mickey Rourke.

Tells you where I'm at

-- Got together with Jen last night. Gorgeous summery Hoboken night. We went out for a glass of wine. I drew her costume sketches in my notebook. We talked like magpies for a couple of hours. Then I went to catch a cab, and she came with. Stopped off at a bank to get some cash. The foyer with the ATMs was echoey and empty. I stood at the ATM, going through the process, getting some money. The ATM was beeping repeatedly - you know, every time I pushed a button ("withdrawal", "yes", whatever), there would be a beep. Then when it came time for money to come out, it beeped three times in succession a couple of times. All on one tone. This is so not going to be easy to describe, but Jen, hanging out over to the side, imitated the sound of the three beeps. Then she imitated it again, getting more into it. I was totally not paying attention - I was busy waiting for my money. Jen and I used to be roommates - we share space really well. Jen imitated the beeps again, amusing herself - and finally it caught my attention and I glanced up just in time to see Jen, yet again, do the three beeps, but this time she was kind of performing it, swinging her head around to the side, as though she was looking out at the audience. I can't explain why it was so hilarious - maybe because it was such a "caught" moment, she was in a private space - maybe because the whole thing was so unbelievably stupid: Jen, you are imitating the beeps of an ATM. Repeatedly. What is wrong with you?? - maybe because it had been going on for a bit before I even noticed. Jen could have been going "beep beep beep" in her beautiful soprano for five minutes before I ever said, "Hey man, what the hell are you doing?" Stuff like that used to go down all the time when we lived together. Anyway, it was when I glanced over at her, "beeping" away, and glancing out and around at the empty foyer, as though it were a full concert hall - when we both suddenly LOST IT. We were then staggering down the street, tears streaming down our faces, and we KEPT imitating the beeps ... especially her last version of the beeps, which had almost a jazzy cadence to it ... she was musically interpreting the beeps from an ATM for an invisible audience - all right as I was standing there ... we were CRYING.

-- Came home and watched the final episode of the last season of Quantum Leap, and found myself sobbing. Uncontrollably. I curled up in bed and sobbed like a small child, Hope tiptoeing around my head, licking me nervously. Oh, it was awesome to cry. I cried and cried and cried and cried. Lost loves, growing hopes, disappointments, sadness, loss, fear ... WAHHHHHHHHHH. Then, it was over. Got up, washed my face, brushed my teeth, and went to sleep. Peacefully. No problem whatsoever.

What the eff.

Tears of laughter, tears of grief ... all within a two-hour period ... and I feel purged and relaxed today.

Everything's going to be fine.

A.S. Byatt

She's got a new giant novel coming out - it's been a while for her - recently it's been mainly short stories - and I am beyond excited. Now that I hear what it's about, I am even more excited.

There are only a couple of writers out there where I wait, with baited breath, to see what they will do next.

J.D. Salinger is one. Dude, I'm still waiting.

But the others are John Banville, Annie Proulx, Nancy Lemann, Michael Chabon, Jeanette Winterson - and, above all else, A.S. Byatt. Her books aren't just good - they thrill me. They create worlds in my head, and not only that but - unlike most other writers today (although Annie Proulx comes close) - they tell me that love, with all its disappointments and griefs, is worth it. Not only is it worth it, but it is the only thing on this planet that actually lasts. That has any value. Love for anything. Writing, family, a mate ... Her books sometimes have an intellectual overlay (sometimes??) that may make that message not as palpable - at least not to certain types of people. For me, a cerebral intellectual person (I say it with pride) - her vision of love is tremendously validating. I have felt (and I still feel, although, to quote Joan Armatrading, "I am open to persuasion ....") that my cerebral bent will make this love thing too arduous for me, too difficult. It's not "for me". And, hell, there's been a lot of evidence for that. But Byatt doesn't write about people who live in their subjective experience of life. She writes about academics and writers and research assistants - whose "love" for life is expressed through their driving obsession for whatever topic - people who spend their whole lives researching one minor female Victorian poet ... and any real love that comes into the life of a person like that will either have to take a back seat, OR somehow inform and deepen that other obsession. This is something I understand in my bone marrow. I was just talking with a friend about that last night. Many people fall in love with a person qua person. ("Nekulturny hordes"?) They love his face, his kindness, his brain, his sense of family, his stand-up-guy-ness, whatever. They fall in love with the actual person. But many of us (ahem) fall in love, primarily, with the WORK someone does. The work comes first. This may sound like a fine-line distinction but it really isn't. Work, for many, is what you do to make a living, support your family, and there is obviously nothing wrong with that, and it is quite noble, in and of itself. But for many of us work is a passion, an activity fraught with financial despair and the dreams of childhood ... and nobody, not even the great love of your life, could compete with it - and that is good and right. I grew up with a father who had, along with his love for my mother, an overriding passion for something else. Not a hobby, not a sport, not a "free time activity" - but a passion, an ongoing intellectual study of something. He never was not that way. And we all had to somehow fit into that, that pre-existing passion, and of course we all did. He was not a monk in a cloister with his passions - they were shared with us. So I understand that dynamic and not only do I understand it, but I live it. The men I have loved have always had a lot of shit going on, and all of them, to a man, have been artists - people who have a passion and drive for something that pre-dates me, that I could never supplant, nor would I want to. I'm the same way. Whoever steps into my world as my mate, will have to fit himself into what is already there - not just in terms of life experience, but my passions and obsessions, which I am not just doing to kill time until my mate shows up (often these things are looked at in this way, and sometimes married people, not realizing they are being insulting, will say to me, "God, I wish I had the time to read so much ..." or whatever it may be. Look, if you want to do something, you make the time. And that's final. I know married pregnant women who still read voraciously. Obviously it is a priority for them.) Life itself, and our intellectual pursuits, do not STOP just because love shows up. Although often movies, and sometimes books, treats it that way. Sometimes people in movies seem to have no lives outside of the main driving force of the plot, which is the romance. They don't read books or read the newspaper. They have no outside interests. Maybe they cook sometimes, and drink a glass of wine, but they're always thinking about love, love, love, love. I love movies that show people who have other things going on, and love shows up - and instead of being welcome - it kind of messes up the entire thing. I am thinking of Broadcast News. Or, the most obvious one: Moonstruck, with Nicolas Cage's great monologue on this very topic. Only Angels Have Wings is another one. Bonnie's entire journey throughout that film is learning how to live with the passion of the man she loves. Not for her, but for flying. If she tries to tone him down, or make him stop, she will lose him altogether. Now. Not everyone in this world is obsessed with something like that. But for those of us who are (I call us "obsessives"), it is hugely comforting to see our experiences reflected from time to time.

To me, A.S. Byatt writes in this realm like no one's business. She is the heir of George Eliot (someone she openly emulates). Life is BIG, and important - and it is not just our personal lives that give it resonance - but our passions, obsessions, intellectual pursuits and the wider culture and how it informs how we live. That makes her sound didactic or top-heavy. She is neither of those things. She is passionate.

Her work is vibrant, alive, and it strikes a deep chord in me.

Not only that, but she, the woman - the writer hidden behind her work (you rarely see pictures of her, she's not a publicity-hound - she doesn't need to be - similar to Annie Proulx, whose work totally speaks for itself) - moves me. Her thought process, her process of work ... her interest in ventriloquism (which you can see at work in almost all of her novels, writing AS other people -she loves that epistolary style) ... where she creates worlds within worlds, until you the reader get a bit disoriented and forget which way is the way out. Alice and the fawn, anyone? There is no way out. We are all, for our whole lives, in the wood where things have no name. The feeling that we are in control of events is an illusion. Byatt writes about love that comes as a supreme disorientation of the senses ... which is often how we cerebral types experience anything that has to do with the flesh. How do I interpret this, how do I explain it, how do I put this ineffable experience into words? We worry about such things. We can be a bit much for people who aren't like that. "Just chill out. What's the big deal?" Can't answer that. I just know that it is.

Here's a fascinating profile of A.S. Byatt which made me even more excited for her new novel.

The older I get, the more I think human beings have a deep need for something to go right.

Ain't it the truth. That's the other thing I love about her books. They are not without their tragedy (the last scene of Possession! Ouch!), but sometimes ... sometimes ... things do "go right". And often, if you have been in the wilderness for a long time, things "going right" is not always a blessing. It can be awful. This seems ridiculous and ungrateful, but again: it is the truth, and Byatt knows of what she speaks. Life, the longer you live it, is a thing of deep compromise and buried old dreams. We do what we need to survive. It's not an easy thing. Life is made up of loss, little losses and big ones. So things "going right" (when you are older, anyway) sometimes has a tremulous and fragile feeling to it. You don't want to believe. You have been so chastened by life itself, so disheartened.

F. Scott Fitzgerald writes about this a bit in his essay on "early success" and what it is like to "hit it huge" on your first try. It is a blessing and a curse. One of the things I was fascinated by in the essay is his thought that when you become successful early - you feel (quite naturally) that you have been in charge of it, that your star is somehow a lucky one, that providence will continue to provide for you in the same manner. You yourself have had something to do with your own good fortune. But a person who becomes successful in their forties has a very different outlook. They have a greater understanding of the concept of WILL, and how much your WILL has to do with your success. It is a long hard road. Nothing is given, nothing comes easy. The young man who is an "early success" has to learn the hard lessons later in life ... as he tries to either re-create his early success, or capitalize on what he has already done, or - worse - struggle to keep growing and changing, even if the audience doesn't want that from him.

A.S. Byatt was not an early success. Her success (a phenomenal one) came later. In her early 50s. To say that I find this comforting is a total understatement. Unbelievable - and rare. George Eliot was the same way.

These women had percolated through decades, following their passions and obsessions, living life, still working, but not "hitting it" yet. Through those early years, it is the WILL that helps you keep going. Belief in luck is for kids. I have had a bit of a brou-haha with a friend of mine recently, who said to me - about everything that's been happening lately - "God, you're so lucky." I am so insulted by that. The years of struggle and hardship and heartbreak and fucking nightmarish lack of belief in myself ... and now I get some good fortune, and suddenly I'm "lucky"? How dare you. This is similar to the "If I only had time, I'd read more" comment, or - even more insulting, "I know I have a novel in me, if I just had the time." Oh. Is it TIME that is the issue? Dickens wrote all those books because he had the time? Not because he had the WILL to create? My acting mentor said to me once, "Those who are the most successful are not the most talented. They are the ones who are the most fanatical about success." The older I get, the more I see the truth in that.

To know that A.S. Byatt didn't really hit upon "her" story until her early 50s is amazing to me - she had written quite a few books before Possession (and they're all quite good, of course they are) ... but she wrote Possession when she was ready to write it. It is not the book of a young woman, or a woman in her 30s.

She's in her 70s now. Still going. Still capable of being delighted and surprised by things (I love the anecdote about Paul Muldoon in that article) - and yes, her books (and stories) have always given me hope. That a person like me can find happiness. It will be a strange happiness, and it will be my own version of it ... but spinsterhood is not a done deal, even though it seems that way at times. Her people could be spinsters. Some are. But there is a blessing in spending your life devoted to a passion OTHER than personal happiness. Or: work brings happiness, of course it does, but anyone who is an artist knows that that is not really why you do it. It's part of it ... but who can explain the journey of a Christabel Lamotte, in Possession, who - in almost total obscurity - continues to write her poems and fairy tales in a world that doesn't want any of it from her? That's what I'm talking about. Byatt understands that. I understand her characters and to me they stand alone in literature, in who they are, and how they are portrayed.

I have never felt more "named" by a book than I felt by Possession. Okay, maybe Mating, by Norman Rush - another book about strong-willed passionate people who have grand interests in life - not just for a happy personal life, but for other things: theoretical, abstract, intellectual. What's love like for THOSE people?

I can't wait to read Byatt's latest. Hopefully by the time I get it, I'll be back in reading-mode.

"Almost eighty years after the picture was made, that grapefruit half smashing into Mae Clarke's face still makes most of us wince."

Totally.

A great post by The Siren about Mae Clarke and that grapefruit scene in The Public Enemy.

The still you always see of Cagney smushing the grapefruit into Clarke's face - the one that is usually used to represent the scene - has a static quality to it (obviously - it's a still) - it looks almost posed - and cannot convey the nastiness, contempt and sudden violence that his gesture has in it.

I'd rather someone slap me than do what he does with that grapefruit. Amazing moment - and fascinating backstory about it over at The Siren's (follow the links.)

Marilyn

Never-used negatives from a photo shoot (by Life photographer Ed Clark) of yesterday's birthday girl, Marilyn Monroe, have just been discovered. She was only 24 years old when the pictures were taken, a hopeful starlet, and she already obviously had that magic "thing" with the camera.

Here is the gallery on the Life website.

I like this one in particular, but they're all rather adorable. I always liked Marilyn Monroe best when she was frolicking around outside.

found via Gawker

Snapshots

-- I have never made so many lists in my life. I cannot live without my lists. I keep everything on the same To-Do List, so that "buy nail polish" lives side by side with "Get a life".

-- Lucy is growing so fast and I feel like I'm missing out! At least I get pictures on almost a daily basis.

-- I'm not renewing my lease. Let the adventures begin. The great unknown. Leap of faith.

-- Green Day's new album is a bit of a revelation. I was almost tentative, going in, because I loved "American Idiot" so much. I was afraid "21st Century Breakdown" would fall short. Well, no. It hasn't. Funny thing is - and this is mainly because of my iPod and how I listen to music now - it was a while before I listened to the whole album, start to finish. I clued in on one or two songs ("East Jesus Nowhere" and "Horseshoes and Hand grenades" primarily) - but then a couple of days ago I listened to the whole thing, start to finish, and my God, they have done it again. A perfect modulation of rage and nostalgia and sweetness and cynicism - each song leading into the next - nothing standing out as "not fitting". I'm going through phases. I mean, I just bought the album last week, so it's early yet - but first I clicked in to "East Jesus Nowhere". Couldn't stop listening to it. Then it was "Vive la Gloria" - couldn't stop listening to that one. I had a couple of hours where "Last of the American Girls" became THE song for me ... and now I am deeply embedded in "21 Guns", and listen to it on eternal repeat and it shows no sign of stopping any time soon. LOVE the album. I'm thrilled.

-- Too much to do in too little time. Hence: the lists. Oh well, whether or not I get it all done, the rest of this week WILL happen. Time WILL move forward and I will move along with it. Hard to see that, though, as I scurry around "buying nail polish" and "getting a life".

-- ME: "So what should we do? Saturday night? Friday? What's your schedule? Are you free? Should we nail down a time? Am I able to chill out? Seriously not sure. Talk to me. Pick a place, pick a time. Where should we go?"

HE: "Everything's going to be fine."

"or were you just being kind?"

Those are the saddest lines Stephen Sondheim wrote. Amazing live rendition of it below the clip (just the recording, sadly) - Tim Curry performing it. I've heard a ton of versions of this song, it's one of my favorites in the entire Sondheim catalog - I find it devastating - but boy do I love Tim Curry's rendition. Wow.

"Losing My Mind" - from Follies

The sun comes up
I think about you
The coffee cup
I think about you
I want you so
It's like I'm losing my mind

The morning ends
I think about you
I talk to friends
I think about you
And do they know
It's like I'm losing my mind

All afternoon doing every little chore
The thought of you stays bright
Sometimes I stand in the middle of the floor
Not going left
Not going right

I dim the lights
And think about you
Spend sleepless nights
To think about you
You said you loved me
Or were you just being kind?
Or am I losing my mind?

All afternoon doing every little chore
The thought of you stays bright
Sometimes I stand in the middle of the floor
Not going left
Not going right

I dim the lights
And think about you
Spend sleepless nights
To think about you
You said you loved me
Or were you just being kind?
Or am I losing my mind?

Hours of fun

The OEDILF - the Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form - a dictionary (in the works) where all definitions are reader-submitted limericks.

The more I browse, the funnier it gets. The more awesome every single person who submits a limerick seems. Tears are streaming down my face.

Now the limericks in the dictionary are obviously more lofty and are meant to define every word under the sun. I still need to say that perhaps my favorite limerick ever is:

There was a young woman from Dallas
Who used Dynamite for a phallus
They found her Vagina
In North Carolina
And her arse was in Buckingham Palace

But let's move on to the Dictionary. It is so fun to just keep clicking through ... I can't stop.

Here is the limerick definition for "basophilia".

A colorful thing's basophilia.
It brings out minute sensibilia.
Apply basic dyes.
What a splendid surprise!
You can really see all of the cilia.

I love you.

And this one, for the word "calculus":

The calculus, children — forsooth!
Mathematical shortcut to truth!
And yet I have heard
(From a dentist) this word
As a term for the gunk on a tooth.

And this gem, for the word "apodization"

Interferograms, in application,
Are processed with apodization;
A tapering function,
When used in conjunction,
Enhances a sharp transformation.

Don't you love these people?

Here's the definition for "arboriculturist"

Sir Bernard would oft plant a tree;
An arboriculturist he.
As his dish sweeps the sky,
Ancient quasars to spy,
His trees grow arboreally.

The best thing is that the Limerick Dictionary fills in the blanks for you - should you not know them - about Sir Bernard, or whatever else, so you can see how really clever and funny the people who submit limericks are.

Or "astrolabe"

To tell pretty well where you are,
Take an astrolabe-fix on a star.
As Hipparchus devised,
This brass disk was incised
Using skills that approach the bizarre.

I like the ones that purport to "define" technological terms, scientific, technology, mathematic, biological - so so funny. Some of them really border on the brilliant.

Example: The definition for "Apoapsis":

In descriptions of orbits generic,
"Apoapsis" sounds too esoteric.
To advise, "Fly this high
Or you'll crash, burn, and die!"
Means the same, but makes crewmen hysteric.

or this: definition for "corpora cavernosa": Hilarious:

Your twin corpora cavernosa are fine;
If you want them enlarged, let's entwine.
Yes, I'm being discreet,
Unlike spammers who greet
You with "Inches you'll add — eight or nine!"

And then look at this gorgeousness - here is the definition for "algebra":

x2 + 2y = 1
–a × 13,000,000
√c
7i – b
My goodness, ain't algebra fun!

I LOVE THE PEOPLE WHO SUBMIT THESE.

Like I said. Hours of fun to be had.

Literary quips

I loved reading through Maud Newton's recent series of literary quips and quotations. I love stuff like that. Commonplace book-ish. There are times when I feel a validating sort of recognition when I read a quote ("Oh! I do that too!") or I feel a sense of distance and curiosity ("Hm. I don't know what that one is like.") - regardless, it's a feast for the intellect. And something I really am living with now, in the process of my own writing, and revising and working on new things.

I particularly loved this one from Joan Didion:

In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions — with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating — but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.

Fascinating - and it really illustrates (in a far more eloquent way) what I was getting at in this post about narrative, and how competitive it can be (I have always sensed). I love that it was Joan Didion's quote. Of course it was.

I have sensed that "secret bully" dynamic from my own experience - because if you are the one writing down "the story" (whatever it may be), then you "lay claim" to it. It becomes yours. And even if other people were part of that original story, then they now must deal with how YOU put it down. You took that ground. In a way that is quite sneaky and "secret". You don't fight over the narrative in the open. You quietly put it down, and once it's on paper - you own it. You have won.

I never really was conscious of that before the last couple of months, in finishing up my book, and also suddenly becoming embroiled in a narrative that I want desperately to own, dominate, I already want to tell it, I want it to be MINE already - even if that would mean it would have to end.

I have always preferred the pretend world to the real.

But the lines are getting a bit blurred now.

Anyway, the always-wonderful Maud Newton compiles an awesome list of quotes that I've been thinking about all day.

Thank you, Mr. Wolcott

Not only for linking to my piece about F. Scott Fitzgerald, but for doing so in such a thoughtful way, and for including me in the same breath with Anne Enright.

Happy birthday Marilyn Monroe!

On June 1, 1926 Norma Jean Mortensen was born.

Objectified while alive, Marilyn Monroe has become the ultimate object in death. The image has become the reality ... the multitudinous icons and posters, her face and body standing in for the whole thing, standing in for the life force.

Her desire to be a good actress, to not just play bimbos or sex objects, is what still complicates our response to her, long after her death. Many people who are unaware of her gifts as an actress are frankly shocked by how natural she is, when they encounter her in films. It's like the Object has won the war, but Marilyn Monroe the person, the actress, continues to win battles. To see her in Some Like It Hot is to encounter true giggly effervescent movie MAGIC, and then to see her in Don't Bother to Knock(my review here) is to understand that this woman had talent as a dramatic actress as well. Not just talent, but a gift. I don't quite buy into the whole Marilyn Monroe as Ultimate Victim thing, although I do know that her demons were huge and loud, and caused her much grief in her life. She was a chronic insomniac. She was a loner. If you trust the reports of some of her confidantes and the private notes of her psychiatrist, she was frigid sexually. But nobody wanted to hear about any of that stuff from Marilyn ... that was not what we loved her for. She was famous and adored, but ultimately alone. She could not be saved. Arthur Miller tried. Many tried. She brought out a protective impulse in people. And, in my opinion, that is part of her movie magic. She was not a sassy sex symbol who "owned" her sexuality, and flaunted it (at least not overtly). There was always the wide-eyed innocence there, in spite of the body made for lovin' - and that somehow engendered a protective response in audiences ... male AND female - so she was one of those very rare movie creatures: a sex symbol whom men loved and desired, but also whom women respected and looked up to ... and I think it had something to do with that fragmented innocence peering out of her radiant face. She seemed unaware of the responses she brought up in men, and she never seemed out for sex - the Marilyn Monroe persona was all about finding love. Her gifts as an actress and comedienne are obvious - but her appeal is still rather complicated, which, I suppose, is why people still obsess over her, and talk about her, and pick her apart.

So while I can ache for Marilyn Monroe and what it had to be like, at times, to be her, with an abyss of sadness inside her that nobody - nobody - wanted to see ... what I am ultimately left with, in her case, is admiration for the act of WILL it took for her to put that persona together on a daily basis, and BE that fantasy. It had to have given her great joy. There's that great quote (included below) where someone asked her what it was like for her doing a photo shoot - and she said, "It's like being screwed by a thousand guys and you can't get pregnant."

Marilyn Monroe was 100% aware of what she was doing when she was in front of the camera. That, I believe, is the greatest misperception about her - and also the problem when you become an Object - especially posthumously. Everything hardens, solidifies, and certain aspects of the narrative win out over others. The narrative that "won" was that she was a victim of circumstance and whim, totally used and abused and objectified, and she barely had any consciousness about what she was actually doing. That was the "story". So Marilyn the poor victimized starlet (or Marilyn the drugged-out diva) won the battle in the narrative wars for a couple of decades. That was the filter through which most people (people who are not cinephiles anyway) saw Monroe.

Thankfully, there's a bit more nuance out there now, in regards to how we talk about Monroe - and regular old popcorn-buying audiences, anyway, always knew the truth: Marilyn Monroe was magic, they loved her. They maybe felt protective of her, because of the wide-eyed innocence of her parts ... but there is obviously something about her that made her "stand out". When the nude calendar photos came out, and Marilyn Monroe was forced to apologize by the studio, her apology wasn't really an apology. Just a flat out, "I was behind in my rent, I needed the money." The studio was furious about this - but then they were bombarded by supportive fan mail, thousands and thousands of letters - from men, women, everyone, saying how much they loved her for her honesty.

Not every young starlet has that kind of massive spontaneous cross-gendered support. It is extraordinary and rare, to this day.

Marilyn Monroe did not have an accidental kind of career, where her beauty and maybe a couple of breaks made her. She was a starlet, like any other. Except that this starlet had ambition, and not just that: she had nowhere else to go, no other goals, no other dreams. There was no family, no one to either put the pressure on, to judge her harshly, or, conversely, to cheer her on. There was never any place for Marilyn to go home to. The ultimate orphan. No plan B. Having to survive by her wits. Befriending powerful men who could help her, protect her. She thanked God for her beauty, even if it didn't make any difference to her, in terms of battling with her demons and all that. But her beauty was eye-catching, even in her early brunette days, and she submitted to the humiliations of the starlet-life, always keeping her eye on the ball, so that when the time came, and an actual part came her way, she'd be ready.

I love her performance in All About Eve. She was cast to be the impossibly gorgeous young actress, and all she needed to do was stand next to Bette Davis, and you got the message. I mean, you might as well throw in the towel if you're a 40-something actress and THAT chick in the white dress is coming down the pike. But Marilyn has a couple of lines in the film, comedic lines, showing her gift at comedy - her absolutely perfect pitch (Watch how she delivers the line: "Well, I can't yell 'Oh butler!', can I? Maybe somebody's name is Butler." To which Addison DeWitt replies; "You have a point. An idiotic one, but a point." But it's HER delivery of that line that is funny. Here's the clip.) and again, I am struck by the act of WILL it had to have taken, to just keep going, through the sneers and catcalls, to make something of herself.

She also was smart, and worked on her acting - with a series of coaches through her life ... wanting to go deeper into her craft, and improve herself. Watch her slam-dunk performance in Don't Bother to Knock to encounter a Marilyn Monroe you might never have seen before. She's fantastic.

One of my favorite off-screen stories involving Monroe is told by Billy Wilder, who, famously, had a very tempestuous relationship with her, because of her behavior on the set. Not coming out of her dressing room, showing up hours late, and bumbling her lines so badly that entire days of shooting were spent on Monroe trying to get the line, "Where's the bourbon?" right. But, as Billy Wilder joked: "As I've said before, I've got an old aunt in Vienna who would say every line perfectly. But who would see such a picture." Anyway, here's a bit from the book-length interview between Cameron Crowe and Billy Wilder, and here, Crowe is asking him about filming on location on the beach in Some Like It Hot. I love it because it shows the powerful two-way current between Marilyn Monroe and her audiences.

CC: One of the reasons you've said that Marilyn enjoyed the Hotel del Coronado sequences in Some Like It Hot is that she had an audience there on the beach watching her. Is that true? Were there, again, a lot of people lined up, watching the filming?

BW: She had an audience. She always had thousands in New York, but at the beach there, hundreds. Yeah, she's a show-off.

CC: So they would be cheering and screaming and yelling?

BW: Screaming and yelling. But then when I wanted it quiet I had her say "Shhhh." They listened to her.

That's a movie star.

Kim Morgan has a great piece up about Monroe and I loved her comments on Monroe as a singer:

And though people love to discuss Marilyn Monroe the underrated actress (which is true -- she was a great comedienne), rarely do they argue about MM the underrated singer. As proven in Some Like it Hot, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, River of No Return, Bus Stop (oh lord...her sexy, warbled, scared, ripped fishnet version of "That Old Black Magic"...so brilliant) and the less classic Let's Make Love (where her rendition of "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" is one of the best versions of that song ever recorded), the woman had distinct pipes.

My favorite musical number of hers is one that isn't often mentioned in the list of great Monroe songs, but I adore it. It's "File My Claim" from River of No Return - delicious clip below (along with a million quotes about Monroe and from Monroe).

Perfection!

Now, in honor of our lovely Norma Jean, let's get to the quotes:

(That's a photo by Sam Shaw - his photos of her are my favorites. Natural light, an innocence to them ... candid-feeling ... just beautiful.)

Marilyn Monroe:

People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of a person. They didn't see me, they saw their own lewd thoughts, then they white-masked themselves by calling me the lewd one.

That's Monroe and photographer Eve Arnold

Billy Wilder:

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.

Eve Arnold:

If an editor wanted her, he had to agree to her terms. She knew how she wanted to be seen, and if her cooperation was sought, she reserved the right of veto.

She knew she was superlative at creating still pictures and she loved doing it.

She had learned the trick of moving infinitesimally to stay in range, so that the photographer need not refocus but could easily follow movements that were endlessly changing.

At first I thought it was surface technique, but it went beyond technique. It didn't always work, and sometimes she would tire and it was as though her radar had failed; but when it did work, it was magic. With her it was never a formula; it was her will, her improvisation.

Peter Bogdonavich:

The fact is that Marilyn was in bad trouble from the day she was born as Norma Jean Mortenson on June 1, 1926, in the city of angels and movies, a poor bastard angel child who rose to be queen of a town and a way of life that nevertheless held her in contempt. That she died a martyr to pictures at the same time as the original studio star system -- through which she had risen -- finally collapsed and went also to its death seems too obviously symbolic not to note. Indeed, the coincidence of the two passing together is why I chose to end this long book about movie stars with Marilyn Monroe.

What I saw so briefly in my glimpse of Marilyn at the very peak of her stardom (and the start of my career) -- that fervent, still remarkably naive look of all-consuming passion for learning about her craft and art -- haunts me still. She is the most touching, strangely innocent -- despite all the emphasis on sex -- sacrifice to the twentieth-century art of cinematic mythology, with real people as gods and goddesses. While Lillian Gish had been film's first hearth goddess, Marilyn was the last love goddess of the screen, the final Venus or Aphrodite. The minute she was gone, we started to miss her and that sense of loss has grown, never to be replaced. In death, of course, she triumphed at last, her spirit being imperishable, and keenly to be felt in the images she left behind to mark her brief visit among us.

Elia Kazan:

Relieve your mind now of the images you have of this person. When I met her, she was a simple, eager young woman who rode a bike to the classes she was taking, a decent-hearted kid whom Hollywood brought down, legs parted. She had a thin skin and a soul that hungered for acceptance by people she might look up to ...

The girl had little education and no knowledge except the knowledge of her own experience; of that she had a great deal, and for an actor, that is the important kind of knowledge. For her, I found, everything was either completely meaningless or completely personal. She had no interest in abstract, formal, or impersonal concepts but was passionately devoted to her own life's experiences. What she needed above all was to have her sense of worth confirmed. Born out of wedlock, abandoned by her parents, kicked around, scorned by the men she'd been with until Johnny, she wanted more than anything else approval from men she could respect. Comparing her with many of the wives I got to know in that community, I thought her the honest one, them the "chumps". But there was a fatal contradiction in Marilyn. She deeply wanted reassurance of her worth, yet she respected the men who scorned her, because their estimate of her was her own.

Marilyn Monroe:

Being a most serious actress is not something God has removed from my destiny as He chooses to destroy my chances of being a mother. It’s therefore my perogative to make the dream of creative fulfillment come true for me. That is what I believe God is saying to me and is the answer to my prayers.

Marilyn Monroe:

Well-behaved women rarely make history.

John Strasberg (son of Lee Strasberg, Marilyn's acting teacher):

I think I was talking about cars to Mother and Father. You know how I loved cars. I'd just come home and it was going to be my eighteenth birthday. I'd wanted to come for that.

Mother and Father hadn't wanted me to come. "Why don't you wait till the end of the year?" Well, i'd already been kicked out of college. They didn't know yet.

When I'd gone off at the airport, I'd turned to Mother and said, "For two cents, I won't go." Nobody gave me the two cents, but I'd meant it. What I'd wanted to do was work. I'd wanted to work from the time I was fifteen, and they were always against any effort on my part to be strong or independent. I remember how much I resented it. "You don't have to work, we'll take care of everything," undermining me.

So I was talking about cars, no one was listening, and Marilyn was there and out of the blue said, "Why don't you take my car, Johnny?"

I thought I hadn't heard her right, and I said, "What?" She had remembered the summer before, in California, I'd had that Chevy I'd rented. God, I loved that car, a '57 Bel Air silver Chevy, and she had the Thunderbird.

She continued, "I've got the Ford Mustang the corporation gave me, and Arthur and I have a car. That one's just sitting in the garage, we don't use it."

I was stunned. I couldn't believe she meant it.

Mother and Father were horrified; they didn't like it at all. I don't know if it felt like too much to give me or if they were worried about my driving in my state of mind, but they objected strenuously. "He's too young. Maybe later, Marilyn. You don't have to. It's impossible, he can't afford it, it could be dangerous."

Marilyn just said, "Well, don't worry about any of that, it's in the corporation's name, so I'll take care of the insurance."

I'll never forget that ... There were so few, so very few people who were generous like that. Especially to me, who couldn't do anything for her.

I think that car saved my life.

Billy Wilder:

I never knew what Marilyn was going to do, how she was going to play a scene. I had to talk her out of it, or I had to underline it and say, "That's very good" or "Do it this way." But I never knew anybody who ... except for a dress that blows up and she's standing there ... I don't know why she became so popular. I never knew. She was really kind of ... She was a star. Every time you saw her, she was something. Even when she was angry, it was just a remarkable person. A remarkable person, and in spades when she was on the screen. She was much better on the screen than not on the screen.

Marilyn Monroe:

Some people have been unkind. If I say I want to grow as an actress, they look at my figure. If I say I want to develop, to learn my craft, they laugh. Somehow they don't expect me to be serious about my work.

Billy Wilder:

It's very difficult to talk seriously about Monroe, because she was so glitzy, you know. She escaped the seriousness somehow; she changed the subject. Except that she was very tough to work with. But what you had, by hook or crook, once you saw it on the screen, it was just amazing. Amazing, the radiation that came out. And she was, believe it or not, an excellent dialogue actress. She knew where the laugh was. She knew.

Marilyn Monroe:

"For breakfast, I have two raw beaten eggs in a glass of hot milk. I never eat dessert. My nail polish is transparent. I never wear stockings or underclothes because I think it is important to breathe freely. I wash my hair everyday and I am always brushing it. Every morning I walk across my apartment rolling an empty soda bottle between my ankles, in order to preserve my balance."

Eve Arnold:

I never knew anyone who even came close to Marilyn in natural ability to use both photographer and still camera. She was special in this, and for me there has been no one like her before or after. She has remained the measuring rod by which I have -- unconsciously -- judged other subjects.

Marilyn Monroe:

It's not true that I had nothing on. I had the radio on.

Ernest Cunningham (photographer):

I worked with Marilyn Monroe. A rather dull person. But when I said "Now!" she lit up. Suddenly, something unbelievable came across. The minute she heard the click of the camera, she was down again. It was over. I said, "What is it between you and the camera that doesn't show at any other time?" She said, "It's like being screwed by a thousand guys and you can't get pregnant."

Peter Bogdonavich:

More than forty years have passed since Marilyn's mysterious death, but her legend and persona have survived. This is all the more remarkable because she actually made very few films, and even fewer that were any good. But there was a reality to her artifice -- she believed in the characters she played, even if they were inherently unbelievable. "Everything she did," [Arthur] Miller said to me, "she played realistically. I don't think she knew any other way to play anything -- only to tell you the truth. She was always psychologically committed to that person as a person, no matter what the hell it was, rather than a stock figure. Because the parts she got could easily have been stock figures, which had no other dimension. But she wouldn't have known how to do that. In other words, she did not have the usual technique for doing something as a stock figure ... She was even that way when [director] John Huston used her the first time [in a memorable walk-on bit] in The Asphalt Jungle [1950]."

This went for every picture she did in her surprisingly, painfully short career as a star, barely a decade, little more than a dozen pictures. Though she managed to work with quite a number of major directors, it was not necessarily always in their best efforts; but still they were Fritz Lang, Howard Hawks (twice), Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder (twice), George Cukor (twice, if you count her last unfinished one), John Huston (twice), Laurence Olivier, Joshua Logan, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (bit part in 1950's classic All About Eve). In my conversation with Miller, he said, "I thought she had the potential for being a great performer if she were given the right stuff to do. And if you look at the stuff she did do, it's amazing that she created any impression at all because most of it was very primitive. And the fact that people remember these parts from these films is amazing ... She was comitted to these parts as though they were real people, not cardboard cutouts. Even though the director and author and the rest might have thought they were cutouts and would deal with them that way. The way the two men [Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon] in Some Like It Hot felt with their parts, or George Raft with his part. She was real. And therefore she had the potential of being a great comedienne." (Norman Mailer, in his book on Monroe -- he never met her -- wrote that starting with 1953's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, she was a great comedienne.)

Marilyn Monroe:

I'd prefer not to analyze it [acting] ... it's subjective; rather, I want to remain subjective while I'm doing it. Rather than do much talking I'd rather act. When it's on the screen, that's when you'll know who Roslyn [her character in The Misfits] is. I don't want to water down my own feeling ... Goethe says a career is developed in public but talent is developed in private, or silence. It's true for the actor. To really say what's in my heart, I'd rather show than to say. Even though I want people to understand, I'd much rather they understand on the screen. If I don't do that, I'm on the wrong track, or in the wrong profession.... Nobody would have heard of me if it hadn't been for John Huston. When we started Asphalt Jungle, my first picture, I was very nervous, but John said, 'Look at Calhern [the late Louis Calhern, a veteran actor], see how he's shaking. If you're not nervous, you might as well give up.' John has meant a great deal in my life. It's sort of a coincidence to be with him ten years later.

John Strasberg:

The first time I met her I remember she came out of the living room and Pop said, "This is my son," and my first impression of her was that she was different from most of the people who came to the house. I'd watch all these people trading their most human qualities, betraying themselves for success at all costs, to become rich and famous, and afterward, when it was too late, they'd realize they had lost the best part of themselves along the way, but she, she was like me. When I looked into her eyes, it was like looking into my own, they were like a child's eyes. I was still a child. You know how children just look at you. My feeling was she had less ego or was less narcissistic than most of the actors who never really bothered with me. She was just another person to me, another one from that world I felt cut off, excluded, from. She was nicer, real simple, no makeup, and she really looked at me as if she saw me. It wasn't that I wanted people to look at me, but I knew the difference when she did. I knew everyone said she was the sexiest, most sensual woman in the world. Not to me. I thought there was something wrong with me for not feeling that from her. I'd felt it from other women who came to the house. I was pretty sexually frustrated then. She was so open, so loose, and her sensuality as such was so totally innocent, nothing dirty in it at all, and the first time it was just like talking to an ordinary person, only realer than most who came into the house in those days. She was quiet, too, I remember, like an animal is quiet, and I was like that too, survival tactics. She seemed smart, but not in an educated way, instinctively smart, nobody's fool.

Couldn't resist:

Marilyn Monroe:

"I am a failure as a woman. My men expect so much of me because of the image they have made of me and that I have made of myself, as a sex symbol. Men expect so much and I can't live up to it. They expect bells to ring and whistles to whistle, but my anatomy's the same as any other woman's. I can't live up to it."

Marilyn Monroe:

My illusions didn't have anything to do with being a fine actress. I knew how third rate I was. I could actually feel my lack of talent, as if it were cheap clothes I was wearing inside. But, my God, how I wanted to learn, to change, to improve!

Arthur Miller:

She was a whirling light to me then, all paradox and enticing mystery, street-tough one moment, then lifted by a lyrical and poetic sensitivity that few retain past early adolescence. Sometimes she seemed to see all men as boys, children with immeidate needs that it was her place in nature to fulfill; meanwhile her adult self stood aside observingt he game. Men were their need, imperious and somehow sacred. She might tell about being held down at a party by two of the guests in a rape attempt from which she said she had escaped, but the truth of the account was far less important than its strange remoteness from her personally. And ultimately something nearly godlike would emerge from this depersonalization. She was at this point incapable of condemning or even of judging people who had damaged her, and to be with her was to be accepted, like moving out into a kind of sanctifying light from a life where suspicions was common sense. She had no common sense, but what she did have was something holier, a long-reaching vision of which she herself was only fitfully aware: humans were all need, all wound. What she wanted most was not to be judged but to win recognition from a sentimentally cruel profession, and from men blinded to her humanity by her perfect beauty. She was part queen, part waif, sometimes on her knees before her own body and sometimes despairing because of it -- "Oh, there's lots of beautiful girls," she would say to some expression of awed amazement, as though her beauty betrayed her quest for a more enduring acceptance.

Peter Bogdonavich:

The year before her much-speculated-over death at thirty-six (rumors of presidential involvement, etc.), playwright Clifford Odets told me that she used to come over to his house and talk, but that the only times she seemed to him really comfortable were when she was with his two young children and their large poodle. She relaxed with them, felt no threat. With everyone else, Odets said, she seemed nervous, intimidated, frightened. When I repeated to Miller this remark about her with children and animals, he said, "Well, they didn't sneer at her."

Burt Glinn (photographer):

She had no bone structure -- the face was a Polish flat plate. Not photogenic in the accepted sense, the features were not memorable or special; what she had was the ability to project.

Billy Wilder:

Marilyn was not interested in costumes. She was not a clotheshose. You could put anything on her you wanted. If it showed something, then she accepted it. As long as it showed a little something.

Henri Cartier Bresson (photographer):

She's American and it's very clear that she is - she's very good that way - one has to be very local to be universal.

Here's the mega-post I wrote about the making of The Misfits

Marilyn Monroe:

Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.

Marilyn Monroe:

Being a sex symbol is a heavy load to carry, especially when one is tired, hurt and bewildered.

Marilyn Monroe:

Acting isn't something you do. Instead of doing it, it occurs. If you're going to start with logic, you might as well give up. You can have conscious preparation, but you have unconscious results.

Arthur Miller:

To have survived, she would have had to be either more cynical or even further from reality than she was. Instead, she was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.

Marilyn Monroe:

I'm not interested in money. I just want to be wonderful.

Marilyn Monroe (this is what she pleaded at the end of the last interview she gave):

What I really want to say: That what the world really needs is a real feeling of kinship. Everybody: stars, laborers, Negroes, Jews, Arabs. We are all brothers.

Please don't make me a joke. End the interview with what I believe.