The Sheila Variations

Free Jafar Panahi

News not looking good on the Jafar Panahi front. He was arrested on March 1, and has been in prison ever since. His wife has been quite vocal about his heart condition, and also that she has been denied access to him. The Iranian regime hopes to bully him into silence, through intimidation and incarceration. It is an outrage. Iranian film-makers and artists have been courageously calling for his release, and now a group of Western filmmakers have added their voices to the mix.

Read the petition here, with signatures.

I have written about Jafar Panahi quite a bit here, my love for his films, and my concern for his welfare since he has been arrested. I won't even get into my rage.

If you're on Facebook, there is a group called Free Jafar Panahi, and it's filled with links and up-to-date information, as well as suggestions of what you might be able to do to help. Publicity is essential. Bullies prefer to operate in private. Spotlights are essential to shaming those involved. Panahi originally was arrested for other "crimes", not having to do with his films (uh-huh, yeah, right - he shoplifted when he was a teenager? He cheated on his taxes? Uh-huh), and now apparently they've gone back and said, "Oh, yeah, we actually DID arrest him for the films he has made, and also the film he was ABOUT to make."

As Panahi did so wonderfully in Offside (my review here), there is a temptation to laugh at the small-minded fascist attitudes of those who have imprisoned him, but the situation really is too serious for that. These people aren't messing around.

A petition like this will not be the "Abracadabra" that Panahi needs, but it certainly doesn't hurt.

Memos from David O. Selznick

Excerpts from the phenomenally interesting and addictive Memo from David O. Selznick, part of the Modern Library "The Movies" series, and an absolute must-read for any film fan (or history-of-Hollywood fan). Selznick grew up in the fledgling movie business and started to work for his father early on (he headed up a department while he was still a teenager). He then, of course, went on to work for Paramount, RKO, MGM (he married Irene Mayer - daughter of Louis B. Mayer - so that was a bit of a contentious job for him, since it seemed like he only got it because he "married into it", something he took very much to heart) - and created his own production company Selznick International. He's responsible for some of the most successful films ever made, films that are now considered classics. He was an old-school producer, of the kind that you rarely find today. Nothing was too small a detail to escape his notice. He wrote an entire memo about Marlene Dietrich's hair and the problems thereof. He handled casting, script development, hiring, advertising ... He was much hated for his meddlesome ways (Michael Powell, in particular, is quite damning about Selznick in his fantastic autobiography), and yet he was also much sought after, due to his keen eye, efficient nature, and the fact that he did believe (to some degree) in giving directors and actors space to be individuals. He thought it was important. He was not infallible. He thought Stagecoach, for example, was a bad idea. Ford, of course, then went on to do Stagecoach elsewhere which was a big success and, among other things, helped create John Wayne, one of the most important American stars of the 20th century. Nobody's perfect. David O. Selznick communicated with everyone via memo. Even if he was going to be meeting with them in half an hour. He got into the habit of writing everything down early on in his career (when he was self-conscious about how young he was, and how perhaps he wouldn't be taken seriously - he felt that a memo would carry more authority) and never stopped. Apparently, after his death, when it was time to go through his papers, there were two thousand - yes TWO THOUSAND - BOXES of memos. The book here has obviously edited much of it out - it probably represents only two or three boxes of memos, in terms of the numbers - and editing must have been an incredibly challenging job. Kudos. Gone With the Wind is famous for many reasons, the least of which is (perhaps) the final film. The filming itself was tumultuous, difficult, with hirings and firings coming too quickly to count. I am now in the Gone With the Wind section which makes up the bulk of the book.

One of the things I am quite struck by in these memos is how literate Selznick is. He has read everything. He can talk about story in a way that makes you realize he knows story not because he has worked in the movies - but because HE READS. He can sit down and talk about what should be kept in Anna Karenina and what they could afford to lose - because he had read the damn book. He had respect for written material (especially if it was successful) and hesitated to muck about with things, because he knew the audience would be expecting such-and-such, since the book was so popular.

I haven't finished the book yet, but I've been reading it non-stop since I've been out in Los Angeles, and it's fun to read such a Hollywood book while I'm out here. I highly recommend it.

Here are some excerpts.

To Mr. Harry Rapf
October 15, 1926

It was my privilege a few months ago to be present at two private screenings of what is unquestionably one of the greatest motion pictures ever made, The Armored Cruiser Potemkin, made in Russia under the supervision of the Soviet Government. I shall not here discuss the commerical or political aspects of the picture, but simply say that regardless of what they may be, the film is a superb piece of craftsmanship. It possesses a technique entirely new to the screen, and I therefore suggest that it might be very advantageous to have the organization view it in the same way that a group of artists might view and study a Rubens or a Raphael.

To Mr. B.P. Schulberg
July 2, 1928

THE MORE WE WORK ON "DIRIGIBLE" THE MORE CONVINCED WE ARE THAT THE COOPERATION OF THE NAVY DEPARTMENT IS WITHOUT VALUE TO US AND IS INDEED A DETRIMENT INSTEAD. THE NAVY DEPARTMENT DEMANDS A STORY DEMONSTRATING THE SAFETY OF DIRIGIBLES WHEN IT IS APPARENT THAT OUR STORY DEPENDS FOR ITS MELODRAMATIC VALUES UPON THE DANGER OF DIRIGIBLES. EVEN IF WE STRUGGLE WITH THE NAVY'S DEMANDS AND SATISFY THEM ON EVERY STORY POINT, I DO NOT SEE WHAT THEY CAN GIVE US. THEY CERTAINLY WILL NOT ENDANGER A NAVY DIRIGIBLE, AND ANY SCENES OF VALUE WILL HAVE TO BE TRICKED IN ANY EVENT ... WE HEAR THAT HOWARD HUGHES HAS OBTAINED UNBELIEVABLY MAGNIFICENT DIRIGIBLE SCENES WITH THE USE OF A TWENTY-FIVE FOOT MINIATURE DIRIGIBLE. HAVE HAD DISCUSSION WITH [O.W.] ROBERTS OF EFFECT DEPARTMENT WHO IS CONFIDENT HE CAN GIVE US EVERYTHING WE NEED WITH DIRIGIBLES FLIGHT, IN DANGER AT NIGHT, EXPLODING, ETC., WHICH WE SURELY CANNOT GET WITH REAL DIRIGIBLE ...

To: Mr. B.P. Schulberg
July 18, 1930

We have an opportunity to secure Dashiell Hammett to do one story for us before he goes abroad in about three months. Hammett has recently created quite a stir in literary circles by his creation of two books for Knopf, The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest. I believe that he is another Van Dine - indeed, that he possesses more originality than Van Dine, and might very well prove to be the creator of something new and startlingly original for us.

To Mr. B.P. Schulberg
April 15, 1931
NOT SENT

I wish you would give another minute's thought to my suggestion that we do Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with [Emil] Jannings. Granted that Jannings is not the Englishman of the book, and granted also that he has not the beautiful physical appearance of Dr. Jekyll, there is certainly nobody else in the world that could give the magnificent dual performance that could be counted upon from Jannings. Any script of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde would almost certainly be a pretty free adaptation - and certainly the character could be molded to fit the versatile Jannings. When one thinks of the variety of roles he has played so sensationally, from the kindly professor to the lascivious Nero, from Louis XV to the trapeze artist of Variety, one realizes that he is an artist without nationality and without limitation. I am certain that he could overcome even the limitations of dialect. For purposes of a horror picture no one, I am certain, would criticize us for having the artist Jannings play a Teutonic Dr. Jekyll.

To: Mr. [Daniel] O'Shea
September 9, 1932

I hear rumors that Miss [Katharine] Hepburn is under twenty-one, which we should take immediate steps to confirm, to find out whether it is necessary to get the approval of the courts. I understand she is prone to exaggerate her age and likes to be thought much older than she is.

To: Mr. Siff
January 26, 1933

Please arrange for the executives, including Brock, to see the test of Fred Astaire. I am a little uncertain about the man, but I feel, in spite of his enormous ears and bad chin line, that his charm is so tremendous that it comes through even in this wretched test, and I would be perfectly willing to go ahead with him for the lead in the Brock musical.

To. Mr. [L.B]Mayer
September 6, 1933

I have arranged with Ben Hecht to do the final script of Viva Villa! ... On the quality we are protected not merely by Hecht's ability but by the clause that the work must be to my satisfaction. It may seem like a short space of time for a man to do a complete new script, but Hecht is famous for his speed, and did the entire job on Scarface in eleven days. I do not think we should take into consideration the fact that we are paying him a seemingly large sum of money for two weeks' work, because this would merely be penalizing him for doing in two weeks what it would take a lesser man to do, with certainly infinitely poorer results, in six or eight weeks.

To: Miss Greta Garbo
January 7, 1935

Fredric March will only do Anna Karenina if he is forced to by his employers, Twentieth Century Pictures. He has told me repeatedly that he is fed up on doing costume pictures, that he thinks it a mistake to do another; that he knows he is much better in modern subjectsand that all these reasons are aggravated by the fact that Anna Karenina would come close on the heels of the [actress] Anna Sten-[director Rouben] Mamoulian-[producer Samuel] Goldwyn picture, We Live Again, from Resurrection, a picture which has been a failure and in which March appeared in a role similar to that in Karenina. Mr. March is most anxious to do a modern piture and I consider his judgment about himself very sound.

Selznick's Notes on Anna Karenina (this is just a short excerpt from a long and fascinating document)
September 1935

Our first blow was a flat refusal by the Hays office [the office that made sure films followed the "code" of self-censorship] to permit the entire section of the story dealing with Anna's illegitimate child. This decision was so heartrending, especially as it meant the elmination of the marvelous bedside scenes between Anna, her husband and her lover, that we were sorely tempted to abandon the whole project - but even what remained of the personal story of Anna seemed so far superior to such inventions of writers of today as could be considered possibilities for Miss Garbo, that we went on with the job. There is no point in detailing the censorship problems beyond this. We had to eliminate everything that could even remotely be classified as a passionate love scene, and we had to make it perfectly clear that not merely did Anna suffer but that Vronsky suffered. But enough about censorship ...

Our next step in the adaptation was to decide which of the several stories that are told in the book we could tell on the screen without diverting the audience's interest from one line to another ... We retained only such of the story of Kitty and Levin as crossed the story of Anna and Vronsky. We naturally eliminated most of the discussions about the agricultural and economic problems of Russia of the day, considering these of little interest to the large part of our audience who came to see Greta Garbo as Anna Karenina and Fredric March as Vronsky.

From this point on, it became a matter of the careful selection and editing of Tolstoi's scenes, with a surprising little amount of original writing necessary ... I like to think that we retained the literary quality and the greater part of the poignant story of a woman torn between two equal loves and doomed to tragedy whichever one she chose.

To: Mrs Kate Corbaley
June 3, 1935 (an interesting context for this letter is Selznick's lifelong love of Charles Dickens, books he devoured as a child. He said later on in life that he could point out punctuation errors in new editions of Dickens' novels, so well did he know all of those books.)

It is amazing that Dickens had so many brilliant characters in David Copperfield and practically none in A Tale of Two Cities, and herein lies the difficulty. The book is sheer melodrama and when the scenes are put on the screen, minus Dickens's brilliant narrative passages, the mechanics of melodramtic construction are inclined to be more than apparent, and, in fact, to creak. Don't think that I am for a minute trying to run down one of the greatest books in the English language. I am simply trying to point out to you the difficulties of getting the Dickens feeling, within our limitations of being able to put on the screen only action and dialogue scenes, without Dickens's comments as narrator. I am still trying my hardest and think that when I get all through, the picture will be a job of which I will be proud - but it is and will be entirely different from David Copperfield.

My study of the book led me to what may seem strange choices for the writing an direction, but these strange choices were deliberate. Since the picture is melodrama, it must have pace and it must "pack a wallop". These, I think, Conway can give us as well as almost anyone I knew - as witnessed by his work on Viva Villa! Furthermore, I think he has a knack of bringing people to life on the screen, while the dialogue is on the stilted side. (I fought for many months to get the actual phrases out of David Copperfield into the picture, and I have been fighting similarly on Two Cities, but the difference is that the dialogue of the latter, if you will read it aloud, is not filled with nearly the humanity, or nearly the naturalness.

As to Sam Behrman, I think he is one of the best of American dialogue writers. Futhermore, he is an extremely literate and cultured man, with an appreciation of fine things and a respect for the integrity of a classic - more than ninety per cent more than all the writers I know. He can be counted upon to give me literacy that wiol match. On top of this, he is especially equipped, in my opinion, to give us the rather sardonic note in [Sidney] Carton.

Mr. Nicholas M. Schenck
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc.
October 3, 1935

I should like also to call to your attention the danger of treating this picture [Tale of Two Cities] as just another [Ronald] Colman starring vehicle. Granted that Colman is a big star; that any picture with him achieves a good gross; A Tale of Two Cities, even badly produced, would completely dwarf the importance of any star ... The picture is beautifully produced. If I do not say this, no one else in the organization will. It has been splendidly directed by Jack Conway; and Colman is at his very top. Further, bear in mind that the book of A Tale of two Cities would without Colman have a potential drawing power equaled only by David Copperfield, Little Women, and The Count of Monte Cristo among the films of recent years because only these books have an even comparable place in the affections of the reading public. This is no modern best seller of which one hundred thousand copies have been published, but a book that is revered by millions - yes, and tens of millions of people here and abroad.

To: Mr. Richard Boleslawski
[Director of The Garden of Allah]
April 14, 1936

I told [Marlene Dietrich] that my one other worry was about her performance - that she had demonstrated to the world that she was a beautiful woman, but that she had failed to demonstrate to the world, undoubtedly through lack of opportunity, that she was an emotional actress; that she had demonstrated very nicely in Desire that she was capable of an excellent comedy performance, but she had yet to make audiences cry. She said she had been wanting to prove this for years and certainly was anxious to make the attempt to show her stuff in this respect. I told her also, frankly, that I thought she worried most unnecessarily about her camera angles - that she was not Helen Hayes or Norma Shearer who had to worry about their faces, and that from any angle, it was impossible for her to be photographed as anything but beautiful and for God's sake and her own, she should forget about camera angles when it came to the playing of an emotional scene. She agreed with this also. Maybe I am just naive!

However, here again, I think you should go right ahead as though you were directing some newcomer, and not worry about any legend of Dietrich difficulties.

To: Mr. Richard Boleslawski
June 17, 1936

Would you please speak to Marlene about the fact that her hair is getting so much attention, and is being coiffed to such a degree that all reality is lost. Her hair is so well placed that at all times - when the wind is blowing, for instance - or when Marlene is on a balcony or walking through the streets - it remains perfectly smooth and unruffled; in fact, is so well placed that it could be nothing but a wig. The extreme in ridiculousness is the scene in bed. No woman in the world has ever had her hair appear as Marlene's does in this scene, and the entire scene becomes practically unusable because everything is so exatly in place that the whole effect of a harassed and troubled woman is lost ... Surely a little reality can't do a great beauty any harm.

To: Mr. Lowell V. Calvert
cc: Mr. Ginsberg
December 19, 1936

Concerning the tragic ending [of A Star is Born], this is the sort of comment about pictures that dates back twenty years, and that I didn't think any body seriously advanced today. I will be satisfied with a long line of pictures that do as well as Anna Karenina, in which Garbo threw herself under a railroad train, or A Tale of Two Cities, in which Mr. Colman had his head chopped off; and if anybody wants further examples, I will sit down and list about fifty sensational successes with tragic endings.

I make the flat statement that pictures have reached the stage where audiences demand the proper ending to a story, whether it be happy or unhappy. If there is anybody in the business that hasn't learned this, it is high time they did.

To: Mr. Bill Wellman
cc: Miss Keon
January 25, 1937

I have been thinking about my new idea for the end [of A Star is Born], and I believe that we can retain [Janet] Gaynor's entire approach up the aisle in front of the Chinese [Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood], simply retaking the reaction to the footprints, more or less as is; with her then pulling herself together' the announcer asking her if she will say a few words; [Adolphe] Menjoy saying something to the effect of "No, no - Miss Lester will not speak!"; Gaynor saying she will, advancing with all the pride in the world, throwing her head back, with tears in her eyes, and saying, "This is Mrs. Norman Maine speaking" - with an alternate take on "This is Vicki Lester speaking" ...

To: Mr. Fredric March
April 28, 1937

You must have heard from any number of people the most laudatory sort of opinoins on your performance in A Star is Born. Yet I fear that many of these statements may have seemed to you automatic flattery of a type you must be used to, and that perhaps you wonder which congratulations are on the level. It is for this reason that I thought I should send you this note to tell you that on all sides I have seldom heard such praise of any actor in any picture. In New York, as here, people are saying that your job is one of the most able and honest that has ever been done for the screen. That it will do a great deal for you, as it has for the picture and therefore for us, is a certainty.

May I add my congratulations (as well as my thanks) to the others? As to whether this is on the level, I remind you of what I told you about certain other performances.

At long last I salute you as I have wanted to through these years, with complete admiration and unstinted admiration ...

To: Miss Katharine Brown
August 30, 1937

This was one of my long-standing arguments with Max [Steiner, composer], and his point in turn was based upon something else which was the root of our decision to get a divorce, which was my objection to what I term "Mickey Mouse" scoring: an interpretation of each line of dialogue and each movement musically, so that the score tells with music exactly what is being done by the actors on the screen. It has long been my contention that this is ridiculous and that the purpose of a score is to unobtrusively help the mood of each scene without the audience being even aware that they are listening to music - and if I am right in this contention, why can't the score be prepared from the script even though cuts and rearrangements may be necessary after the picture is edited - for the basic selection of music and general arrangement would not be affected by these cuts.

To: Norman Taurog
January 8, 1938

The only criticism that we had in the preview cards [for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer] - and this appeared in a number of them - was that the cave sequence was somehow too horrible for children. This worried me, because we certainly want the picture to be for a family audience, and I made it my business both to study this criticism and to ask innumerable questions of many people. My conclusion was that this horror was not based upon the melodrama of this sequence, but upon two things: the bat sequence, because of the feeling of horror born of weird and flying animals, and upon what I had thought was your brilliant execution of my hysteria idea for Becky. I didn't like to lose the bat sequence entirely, so for tonight's preview I have left it in, simply trimming it - and if we get the same reaction we may have to cut it further.

Since I feel that the hysterical scene is one of the high spots of the picture, I studied this even more carefully and came to the conclusion that the offensive part was, hopefully, only the unusually horrible close-up of Becky in which she is laughing hysterically and in which her mind is obviously completely gone, and in which she looks like a little witch rather than like a little girl - her hysteria perhaps a shade too much that of a very ill woman, than that of a little girl. I found that all the women I spoke to about this close-up were of one mind on it, and hence I have dropped it with regrets.

To: Mr. Stradling
cc: Mr. Ratoff, Mr. Klune, Mr. Westmore
June 9, 1939

There is no single thing about the physical production of the picture [the American remake of the Swedish film Intermezzo, for which Selznick had brought Ingrid Bergman to America] including the photography, that even compares in importance with the photography of Miss [Ingrid] Bergman. Unlike Mr. Howard, and unlike almost any player of importance that I know of, the difference in her photography is the difference between great beauty and a complete lack of beauty. And unless we can bring off our photography so that she really looks divine, the whole picture can fall apart from a standpoint of audience effectiveness...

It is entirely possible that we haven't yet learned enough about her angles or about exactly how to light her.

(Selznick was not the only one to make this observation. Cameramen who understood Bergman's angles said that if you photographed her head on, she appeared plain - it has to do with the size of her forehead and how the planes of her face photographed. But at a slight profile, 3/4s or so, her beauty flowered forth. That is why you RARELY see a close-up of Bergman that is head-on, facing the camera. She is always turned slightly to the side. Of such details are great cameramen made. Movie actresses understand their faces better than anyone, and those cameramen who knew how to make them look "divine" were (and still are) in high demand.)

From the same letter, Selznick reiterates hisp oint:

I cannot tell you how strongly I feel about this matter or how important I feel it to be. I think it is the difference between a successful picture and an unsuccessful picture; the difference between a new star and a girl who will never make another picture here.... The curious charm that [Bergman] had in the Swedish version of Intermezzo - the cominbation of exciting beauty and fresh purity - certainly ought to be within our abilities to capture.

To: Mr. Gregory Ratoff
cc: Mr. Gregg Toland
June 22, 1939

The Toland tests of Miss Bergman prove indubitably what we have been saying since before the picture started - that more than with any other girl that I know of in pictures, the difference between a great photographic beauty and an ordinary girl with Miss Bergman lies in proper photography of her - and that this in turn depends not simply on avoiding the bad side of her face; keeping her head down as much as possible; giving her the proper hairdress, giving her the proper mouth make-up, avoiding long shots, so as not to make her look too big, and, even more importantly, but for the same reason, avoiding low cameras on her, as well as being careful to build people who work with her, such as Leslie Howard and Edna Best (as well, as of course, as the children, beside whom she looks titanic if the camera work isn't carefully studied); but most important of all, on shading her face and in invariably going for effect lightings on her. This means that there should not be a single sequence of the picture that is not staged for real effect lighting - whether it be morning, afternoon, or night. One might say with justification that almost any dramatic picture benefits from this sort of careful attention to lighting effects, but in the case of Intermezzo the mood of the picture is dependent upon it to an extent far greater than what is true of most pictures. Thus, in photographing Miss Bergman properly we will be benefiting the picture as a whole.

To: Mr. Birdwell
November 9, 1939

Ann Rutherford, whom I saw on the train, told me something which might be the basis of some excellent publicity [for Ingrid Bergman's American debut], which is that all the girls she knows are letting their eyebrows grow in as a result of Bergman's unplucked eyebrows, and that she herself now feels very strongly about unplucked eyebrows, not merely because of Miss Bergman but because of Miss [Vivien] Leigh, whom we also should have eyebrows au naturel. So apparently our decision about Miss Bergman's eyebrows, based upon this studio's feeling that the public was sick and tired of the monstrosities that had been inflicted on the public by most of Hollywood's glamour girls, is going to have a national reaction!

Two Wrongs, a new play by Scott Caan

Is there such a thing as too much self-knowledge? Is the pursuit of love helped by therapy, or hurt by it? There is a crazy and chaotic element to falling in love that perhaps does not fit into the "rules" of what mental health means in our self-help-focused society, but is that necessarily a trap? Scott Caan's new play, Two Wrongs, which opened last weekend at the Mineral Theatre Company's Lounge Theatre, produced by Mike O'Malley and directed by Missy Yager, examines the confluence of love and therapy, neurosis and happiness, and the play is a ride and a half. Well-written, observant, hilarious, and touching, Two Wrongs has, at its heart, a deep yearning for connection, for love, for finding that one, your mate.

Larry Clarke plays the therapist, and Bre Blair and Val Lauren play two of his clients. One day, due to an apparent scheduling mix-up, Blair and Lauren run into each other in the therapist's waiting room. She freaks out that someone else is there. Normally the room is empty because it is HER time. She doesn't want to be seen. Therapy should be confidential and anonymous. Security has been breached. All is lost! Lauren (a really funny and relaxed actor) tries to talk to her, tries to joke with her about the mix-up, but she is having NONE of it. Blair is hysterical, as she staunchly turns her back on the man sitting less than a foot away, insisting that this is HER time, not HIS time, and to please go away and come back when she is no longer there.

The dialogue zips and sparks. It's really fun stuff, especially because both of these people are DEEP into therapy, and so they try to be aware, sensitive, and yet they cannot hide their own neuroses. These never tip off into parody, or mockery, meaning: neither of them seem stereotypically "cray cray". They are people who are trying to work on themselves. They have problems. They are trying to do better for themselves.

Despite this inauspicious meeting, the man goes into his therapy session and he can't stop talking about that girl he met in the waiting room. There was something about her he liked. She was "pretty and smart", and that was what he liked about her. The therapist keeps trying to talk about deeper underlying issues, but the man is determined. He wants a date with that girl, and he wants the therapist to help him set it up.

The therapist reluctantly embarks on a journey of deception, using his therapy sessions with the two people to basically say, "He really likes you - do you like him? Check yes or no."

Bre Blair has to create a character here who is deeply unhappy, and yet really prefers being alone. There is always something wrong with every guy she dates, and she can't deal with it anymore. She has a hilarious monologue about one date she went on with a man she (and her therapist) now refer to as "the burping guy". He burped at the table, apparently, and then blew the burped-out air off to the side with his mouth, and it was such a gross moment that she can't get it out of her head. He may be her Prince Charming but the burp is something from which she will not recover. Scott Caan shows one of his many gifts as a writer here. This is an acute observation of a certain kind of perfectionist woman, and yet he never makes the mistake of labeling her as "high-maintenance", or judging her. Because this is a play about therapy, it's all about what is REALLY going on with these people. Maybe it is that she fears intimacy, and so therefore she focuses on the tiny foibles and flaws of her dates, so that she won't have to commit, and therefore risk getting hurt. It is totally clear that that is what is going on with her, and yet there she is, lying in the therapist's couch, ranting about the way this guy burped and how disgusting it was. The script is fantastic in that way: it operates on multiple levels simultaneously.

The man and the woman do begin to date. It's not like a normal date, where perhaps you want to put on your best face, and present a totally awesome persona to your prospective mate. Here, because they both know the other is in therapy, they can get to the truth much quicker. I loved that aspect of the script. Therapy is an easy target for mockery, but sometimes that mockery is TOO easy. Sure, therapy can be over-used or abused, but at the same time, there is nothing worse than a person who THINKS they are awesome, and yet project nothing but weirdness and hostility and unexamined issues. Two Wrongs doesn't point the finger at therapy as the problem. It actually is seen as a healthy pursuit, and helps these two lost somewhat damaged souls to connect. "So what's wrong with you?" she asks him, with the understanding that something must be, since he is in therapy. She gets it. Something is "wrong" with her as well.

Bre Blair has to start the show as a chatty neurotic, constantly second-guessing herself with her therapist, and struggling to find her own truth. Through the course of this show (which is not long), she has to blossom completely, bursting forth into full flower - the true goal of therapy, if you think about it - and Blair is superb in showing that transformation. She is funny, sweet, sometimes difficult, and it's exhilarating to watch her find her own power. She creates a character that is believable, relateable, and also flawed and perhaps dangerous. There's a twist in the script that requires us to believe that she could behave in an unpredictable and impulsive manner. Blair nails that dynamic. I buy it completely. Yup, I could totally see her blossoming a bit, and then realizing, "Holy shit, this is scary and new", and suddenly clamping back down into her old ways. Blair doesn't miss a beat throughout. She's wonderful.

Val Lauren, as the man, is terrific. I loved his energy on stage. He seemed like a practical character, a guy who had some issues and so was going to therapy to try to figure it out, but he wasn't passive in that process. He challenges the therapist from time to time - ("No, no, no, don't do that, don't get all professional on me, just talk to me ...") and he also challenges her. He is interested in her. He is interested in her in a way he has never been interested in a woman before. What is that about? It's all new territory for him, and Lauren manages to suggest this in subtle and really eloquent ways. He has a short monologue where he talks about her, and what she is to him - and he has one line where he says, "To me, you're perfect in every way." A simple line, right? But handled wrong, it could be deadly. Too sentimental, perhaps, or cliched. However: Love itself is a cliche. We're all different, but there are certain rituals everyone goes through in the terrifying process of falling in love, and in that moment, where he tells her she is perfect in every way, Lauren plays it as though he is discovering it for the first time. He clicks into the underbelly of the thing, the truth, the realization aspect of falling in love. It's not easy for some of us. Some of us have problems even just being with other human beings. Lauren, at the beginning of the play, wearing a T-shirt, jeans, slouched in his chair, twitchy, pesters her in the waiting room to look at him, joking with her about her paranoia. He reminded me (just go with it, please) of Rocky Balboa, in the early scenes of Rocky, where we see a man who, just by his physical gifts and presence, should (should) be completely at home in the world, and yet - there's something about Rocky that is just yearning for connection. He is isolated. And yet, tragically for him, he is a true extrovert. That extroverted side of him has been squashed down, put into sinister use by the loan shark and others ... but if you watch how he chats up Adrian in the fish store early on ... he keeps it light and jokey and friendly and non-threatening, and all I can sense in those early scenes is the loneliness of this man, his desire for friendship, to be listened to, to be taken into consideration. Val Lauren has all of that going on for him in the early scenes of Two Wrongs, and so when he confesses, "To me, you are perfect in every way," it comes out in a simple and true way that works. It just WORKS. I found myself invested in these two people, hoping they could work it out.

Larry Clarke, as the poor therapist caught in the middle, is hilarious. But look out for that sucker-punch, because it's coming. He has this way of listening, sitting back and staring at his clients, which make you wonder what the hell that guy is really thinking. He has no business meddling with the love lives of two of his clients, but that makes him funny and human as well. There are a lot of things to talk about in therapy: childhood, dreams, job issues, family problems ... but this therapist? All he talks about with his clients (at least all that we see in the play) is love and relationships. I don't think that's an accident. Scott Caan knows exactly what he is doing here.

There's loneliness keening on the edges of the play, and while so much of it is funny, I found myself really moved time and time again - not so much by the events in the play, but by the search itself. Everyone is searching. Everyone wants to find "that one". An intermediary is sometimes necessary. Sign up with an online dating service. Ask your friends to introduce you to new interesting people. Have a friend set you up on a blind date. In Two Wrongs, the matchmaker is a therapist. His actions border on the unethical, but the best part of the play is that the therapist is given his reasons as well. He has motivations. An objective. A life outside the world of the play. So many playwrights forget this. Or, if they don't forget it, they do not have the skill to make it live and breathe on stage. The characters remain wooden, or schticky. It is hard to imagine any of them, oh, going to a movie, or just having breakfast, doing things normal people do. The world of the play feels artificial. But Scott Caan gives everyone room here. Room to be human, flawed, genuine, cunning, baffled, lonely. And although the entire play takes place in the therapists' office (except for one brief scene on a bench placed downstage), I could feel the world, their lives, their concerns and interests, pressing in onto that isolated office. These were not people acting in isolation. They were struggling. The office is supposedly a safe place where you can come, drop the cares of the day, drop the persona, and say whatever you want to say.

This is a good thing.

Sometimes.

Here, however, everything goes haywire.

Director Missy Yager has done a superb job in creating the world in which these three characters must operate: The script is handled with sensitivity, finding the humor as well as the pathos. The set, with its Oriental rug, wall of books, and leather therapists' couch is simple and yet immediately tells us where we are. Clarity is key in a play like this one. I loved the music chosen to play between each scene (beautiful and appropriate - not too on-the-nose, emotional), I loved how each song served to guide me deeper and deeper into the play, without telling me specifically how I should be feeling about it.

It's been a couple of days now, and I am still thinking about all three of those characters, and that is a great tribute to Scott Caan's script, and the entire team.

It's a short run, and it's selling out quickly, so if you live in Los Angeles, call to buy your tickets now: (323) 960-1057.

Two Wrongs plays at the Lounge Theatre, at 6201 Santa Monica Blvd in Los Angeles.

Sick, by Erik Patterson: The Los Angeles Theatre Center

What a joy it was to attend the world premiere of Sick, award-winning playwright Erik Patterson's latest, playing at The Los Angeles Theatre Centre through May 16. It is funny, personal, brutal at times, and deeply profound. From the first scene, where we witness a married couple, Pamela and David (played by Vonessa Martin and Ramon de Ocampo) discuss her health issues, we know we are in the hands of an ensemble we can trust. The tone of the piece, set immediately by Patterson and the director, Diane Rodriguez, is confident, absurd, and unafraid of sentiment when the time comes. Not sentimentality, which is deadly, but true and honest sentiment. Sick is a terrific piece of work.

Pamela, in a panic, opens the play by breathlessly describing to her husband that "something is wrong" with her. The humor here is that her "symptoms" immediately take on a sketchy quality, as in: she does not appear to be a reliable narrator of her own body. She informs her husband, "My poop is weird." He tries to be patient and interested, but you can tell that this is a conversation they have had countless times over the years. She is convinced that the restaurant where she works is "giving her cancer". She needs to get a new job. Her "poop is weird". In her neurotic mind, everything is connected. As indeed it is. It's a small cast, and Sick lets us get to know them in pieces, the actors rotating through scenes with one another, and through this we get to know their relationships. Pamela and David have a young son Michael, played with beautiful sweetness and clarity and intelligence by 11 year old Quinton Lopez. Johnny Giacalone, in a fantastic performance, plays Gary, Pamela's out-of-control brother, who has been thrown out of the house by his newly-sober wife Carla (the night I saw the show, Carla was played by the understudy, Regan Metoyér - she was wonderful). Carla is now attending AA meetings, and has become a Christian, and cannot deal with her husband Gary, who is still drinking, smoking pot, and thinks if he promises to her that he will cut out "vodka and jello shots", that that will be enough. Carla is new to AA, and she finds help and inspiration from an old-timer, Jeannie, played by Anita Dashiell, in a really subtle and effective performance. She has all the steps down, she has been clean for 12 years, but she is not without her flaws (she is obviously addicted to coffee, and watch how she INHALES the half of that Krispy Kreme donut, terrifiied that the Overeaters Anonymous people will judge her), and shows that health (mental or otherwise) is a process. You are never DONE. Drunk Gary has moved in with his sister Pamela. Meanwhile, Pamela continues to think she is dying. She is perpetually sick. Something is wrong. In desperation, she goes to see her son's pediatrician, played by Brendan O'Malley, in a wonderfully sociopathic performance, and even though he insists that he is a PEDIATRICIAN, he does listen to her problems. She just knows that something is WRONG.

Well, yes. Something IS wrong. But not with Pamela. She's got it all wrong. In more ways than one.

Patterson has created a really personal piece of work here. There isn't one didactic moment. It's not politicized, even in this climate where healthcare reform is on everyone's lips. This is te story of one wacky family (but no wacky than any other family), and how they deal with sickness, imagined and real. Nobody is exempt. Perhaps hypochondriacs know this on a deeper level than other people, which causes them to obsess, and fixate, and spin their wheels. Everyone has an "end". It's out there, waiting for each of us. Hopefully, we can spend our time on this planet not worrying about it too much, and trying to have a good and meaningful life while we are here. But sickness can throw that balance out of wack. Everyone reacts differently to sickness, the specter of it, and Patterson examines all of the diverse ways that people respond. Some deny it entirely, some accept it, some become totally selfish, others can't help but empathize. I loved how much variety he was able to find in his script - the humor leavened by the seriousness, with the entire cast on the stage the whole time, with those not in whatever scene was happening, sitting in the background, reading magazines, and I really got that feeling of being in a hospital waiting room. The masses of people. Sitting, waiting, watching the clock ... maybe one person is waiting for a benign routine test, maybe one person is waiting to hear whether they have two months to live or not. Regardless, everyone sits together at the hospital, and there's a FEELING in those places ... unmistakable to anyone who has spent any time at all in a hospital. Sick nails it.

The acting is fantastic. I hesitate to say too much about each character, since each specific journey unfolds in a way that is individual and full of surprises (I did not know how it would go, the ending was not "telegraphed" to me in any way, which was very effective), but each actor was marvelous. Sick is about one specific family. And yes, the family has a lot of problems, and are in the midst of fighting with one another (Pamela and David fighting over her hypochondria and how to raise their son Michael, Gary and Carla about to split up over his drinking and her rigid sobriety) - but one of the things Sick so understands, and I found it deeply moving, was how families can come together. How they operate, when under duress. How things become clear, horribly so, when something bad happens. The people in the World Trade Center on 9/11 were like everyone else: maybe someone had left home having a fight with his wife, maybe someone else hadn't said "I'm sorry" to their kid for whatever reason, things left unsaid, unresolved - but what were the calls about coming from those towers on that day? "I love you." "I love you." "Just calling to say I love you." "I love you." I felt that the cast of Sick, every one of them, helped create a family. Sometimes, in plays, where "families" are supposed to be represented, you just never buy it. "No way are those two siblings." "Those two are cousins? Not a chance." Everyone seems like separate individuals. This happens in films, too. But here, I really felt this FAMILY operating as a FAMILY. This is a great compliment to Patterson's writing, and also to every actor on that stage.

Information and tickets for Sick here.

Two Wrongs, by Scott Caan - world premiere

A play with some good friends and family involved: The world premiere of Two Wrongs opens tonight here in Los Angeles at the Mineral Theatre Company. Information here (tickets, directions).

Directed by Missy Yager, recently seen off-Broadway in The Starry Messenger. and long-time O'Malley friend (additionally, she was the one who read the female part in an early draft of my script last year when we had a reading of it out here, which was a true highwater mark for me - she's a wonderful actress, I was so honored!), and produced by cousin Mike O'Malley, it also stars Larry Clarke, another honorary O'Malley, a fantastic actor from TV, movies (recently seen in The Informant) as well as theatre.

Written by Scott Caan, Two Wrongs opens tonight and runs through Sunday, May 9. It's a short run, so theatre-lovers in Los Angeles, and I know you're out there - make sure to check it out!

Very much looking forward to seeing it tomorrow night.

Ticket information here.

"family drama with a side of hypochondria and alcoholism": Sick, by Erik Patterson

Great review of Sick, the new play by Erik Patterson, which opened at the Los Angeles Theatre Center last weekend. It also got Critics' Pick from Back Stage West. My brother Brendan O'Malley is in the cast, and I am really looking forward to seeing it tonight.

Los Angelenos: Ticket information here.

I'm off to Los Angeles

All photos by yours truly

A little work, a little play, three shows to see, friends to reconnect with, family to hang out with, sentences ending with prepositions, my recent bureaucratic nightmare is over - after 4 long weeks of getting things straightened out, I thought it would never end - but now I can go with a clear conscience, a sleepover with Alex, time with Maria, hanging out with cousin Mike and Lisa and their brood of crazy kids, Allison in Malibu, my brother, Melody, Cashel playing cello. Hopefully I'll get some time on the e-meter as well. Life is good.

My favorite roof in Manhattan

Seen from the bar at the Hilton, on 42nd Street, in the first picture below. The Hilton bar is a couple stories up. Normally, my view of this spectacular roof is ground-level, peering up at it from 8th avenue - which is beautiful in its own way (the second picture below) - but to see it head-on really gives an idea of the scope of the thing.

I "visit" this roof as often as I can. It obsesses me.

Not like you need another reason to love Myrna Loy ...

But here you go, just in case.

Thanks, Siren. I have been re-watching all of the William Powell/Myrna Loy movies recently (my review of Love Crazy here), and I never fail to just fall in love with both of them, repeatedly, watching them act together. Myrna Loy, with her cool humorous approach to the insanity of her partner, in film after film, is a delight. I look forward to reading her autobiography, thanks for the recommendation and terrific excerpt.

In praise of Bruce McGill

Bruce McGill is one of my favorite actors of all time and he's one of those guys who would have fit in perfectly with the old studio system, embodying as he does a first-rate support player, a guy with major chops who can do anything: drama, comedy, farce - he can come from any region of the country, he can be sentimental, he can be sincere, funny, broad - there's nothing the guy can't do. He would have played all the parts that Thomas Mitchell played (another one of my favorites). He is, like most character actors, a far better actor than most established movie stars - at least in terms of scope and versatility - and any project he is in is better, automatically, because of his presence.

You never EVER catch this guy acting.

I have a special fondness for his performances in two episodes of Quantum Leap - the first episode as well as the emotional final episode. How wonderful that he was chosen to bookend that series.

If you remember the final episode of Quantum Leap, McGill plays the bartender who, in his own mysterious knowing way, shows that he is the key to the entire experiment. He has been there all along. But the way he plays his scenes with Scott Bakula is with just the right amount of kindness, opacity (he tells him nothing new), and a sort of individualistic tough love, smiling at Bakula's bafflement, but not cruelly. He gives him the space to figure it out for himself. It's really a wonderful piece of acting.

He makes other actors better. Just by standing next to them.

Al Pacino, in The Insider, does some terrific work - not as self-involved and egomaniacal as some of his more recent parts have been. His movie-star persona fits nicely with Lowell Bergman, the part he is playing. He can play to his strengths. He is a speech-maker, a bombastic guy (on occasion), he does his schtick where he talks quietly and deliberately and then suddenly explodes on one or two words ... and while I have been tired of that Pacino schtick for a decade or so now, here it is effective. It is in service to the story. It is not just Pacino trying to "make something happen in the scene".

But let me tell you: Nothing Pacino does in The Insider, nothing Russell Crowe does in The Insider, can come close to the power and electricity from Bruce McGill's one big moment in that courtroom: "Wipe that smirk off your face!"

Now Pacino and Crowe have other concerns. I don't mean to make an unfair comparison. They are carrying the picture, they have to modulate and gradate their performances, showing the slow transformations of these two guys. They do stellar jobs. But in a movie such as this one, with so many elements, so many different sections, you need these power-hitters in the smaller parts. In giant ensemble pictures, with a couple of mega-watt movie stars in lead roles, it is essential (and yet so many films do not realize this, and cast giant movie stars in EVERY part - whether it's appropriate casting or not) to fill in the second-and-third-tiers with talented and sometimes-anonymous character actors. The old studio system knew this well. The new Hollywood doesn't always realize this. They have forgotten. Character actors are there to add reality, depth, and power, to ground the movie stars in a world that we, the audience, can recognize. Character actors look like us. Their teeth aren't fixed, their hair isn't perfect, they're just regular people.

In a film such as The Insider, with so many terrific moments from the lead actors, it is heartening to see how much time and weight is given to these secondary characters. Not only is it heartening - it is really WHY the film works. Again, not to take away from what the three leads, Plummer, Pacino and Crowe - bring to the project - their contributions are substantial. But without Debi Mazar, Lindsay Crouse, Philip Baker Hall, Colm Feore, and the spectacular Bruce McGill, our beautiful movie stars would be acting in a vacuum.

Bruce McGill's contributions to a film like The Insider are not, in general, discussed or pointed out. They're appreciated, but in an invisible way. It's taken for granted. The blessing and the curse of the character actor. McGill wouldn't be nominated for an Oscar for The Insider. The part is too small. But if you want to see an actor tap into what my acting teacher in college called "the pulse of the playwright" - if you want to see an actor absolutely embody every single thematic element of the project without being didactic or boring, if you want to see an actor enter a film and - with one or two moments - dig deep and hard into the real guts of the script and almost stroll away with the entire picture - watch Bruce McGill in The Insider.

"Wipe that smirk off your face!"

Frankly, acting doesn't get any better than that.

Russell Crowe and Al Pacino should feel lucky that someone like Bruce McGill is in "their" movie.

The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Countee Cullen

Next book on my poetry shelf:

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O'Clair

Countee Cullen is another poet new to me, and I am so happy to have discovered his work. Another poet of the Harlem Renaissance, Melvin Tolson called Cullen and Langston Hughes (my post on him here) "antipodes" of that movement: "The former is a classicist and conservative; the latter, an experimentalist and radical". As I mentioned in the post on Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance was a diverse movement, producing many artists, and while they may have been grouped under the same heading, you would never read a Countee Cullen poem and mistake it for a Melvin Tolson poem, or a Langston Hughes poem. It is a rich and many-layered movement, and it's been really fun to read some of the other figures, the ones not so commonly anthologized (or taught in school). For example, I clearly remember reading Langston Hughes in my Humanities Class in high school, but I have no memory of Countee Cullen's work being studied. That's a shame. To study one poet of a movement, is only to peek through a crack in the slates. There's a big world in there, many voices, many styles.

Hughes took as his inspiration for his verse American forms, mainly black American forms: blues, jazz, spirituals. He was criticized for this at the time, mainly by other black writers and black columnists, who naturally had a vested interest in how they were being portrayed to the white world. Countee Cullen used strictly European forms. Old forms. Sonnets, ballads, he used rhyme schemes from the Elizabethans. (He wrote a poem to John Keats, a clear statement of his sense of his own tradition). He was ALSO criticized for this (you couldn't win, apparently). But he remained firm. He had a working philosophy, and felt strongly about why he did what he did. He called out to other Negro writers to do the same:

Negro poets, dependent as they are on the English language, may have more to gain from the rich background of English and American poetry than from any nebulous atavistic yearnings toward an African inheritance.

Provocative stuff, even more so today. His views, stated there, are probably the main reason that he is not more anthologized today, the politically-correct police on the prowl for "right" attitudes (Cullen says in one poem, "What is Africa to me?").

He wanted to wrap himself in tradition, the long tradition of European culture, he felt that that was his true inheritance. He was called a traitor, far and wide. I am sure he still is. Which is ridiculous, because his poems are WONDERFUL. Not every poet can write in the same way, regardless of their skin color, for God's sake.

However, his topics are that of a black man, living in America in the early years of the 20th century. He could not remove that context, because it was who he was. It was what he knew. It is that reason that some of his poems are so startling. Elegiac, formal, highly structured, with sometimes archaic language - but handling the subjects of racism and prejudice and oppression. It's great stuff. Heartbreaking. He was one poem about a waiter in Atlantic City (which, sadly, I have been unable to find online - although it is included in the Norton Anthology) that is sweeping in scope, devastating in its details, and manages - in four stanzas - to articulate the sadness of a man held down, by circumstances, racism, bigotry. ("For him to be humble who is proud / Needs colder artifice") - Damn, that is some good stuff.

Countee Cullen did not live long. He was born in 1903, died in 1946, but in his short life he accomplished a great deal. He married the daughter of W.E.B. Du Bois, but she left him a couple months later. He was probably gay. He published a ton. The man must never have stopped working. He got a Guggenheim Fellowship, he spent a year in Paris, he published 5 books of poetry, a novel - he translated Euripedes' Medea, and was a major figure at the time. His star fell in the coming years, due to his "incorrect" attitudes.

Here is a poem I read of his, again, while I was out on Block Island, and it has a perfection of rhythm that reminds me of Longfellow. And it packs a huge punch. There's a child-like quality to it, he "makes a point", but without even saying what the point is - he doesn't need to. It's a powerful poem.

Incident

Once riding in Old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "Nigger".

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.

Out of the Past: the battle of the under-actors

Excerpt from Lee Server's Robert Mitchum: Baby, I Don't Care:

Director and star proved to be ideally matched. In [Robert] Mitchum, [Jacques] Tourneur had found the most expressive embodiment of his own cinematic aesthetic of eloquent, subversive resistance and oneiric sensuality. Tourneur loved Mitchum's physical grace, the gliding, pantherlike movements, and his underplaying and powerful silences, his expressive quiescence thrilled the director whose films were among the quietest in the history of talking pictures. He savored Mitchum's ability to listen in a scene. "There are a large number of players who don't know how to listen," said Tourneur. "While one of their partners speaks to them, they simply think, I don't have anything to do during this; let's try not to let the scene get stolen from me. Mitchum can be silent and listen to a five-minute speech. You'll never lose sight of him and you'll understand that he takes in what is said to him, even if he doesn't do anything. That's how one judges good actors."

In Mitchum's opposite, the sort who tried "not to let the scene get stolen", Tourneur might possibly have been thinking of Kirk Douglas. With his explosive starring roles - Champion, Ace in the Hole, Detective Story - still a few years off, Douglas was becoming typed for intelligent, urbane characters, supporting parts. As Whit Sterling, certainly among the most well-spoken and civilized of ruthless racketeers, Douglas gave a brilliantly controlled and charismatic performance, but he could not have been thrilled by another second fiddle part - especially second fiddle to Mitchum, who had already taken from him the lead in Pursued. The two got along well enough off the set, but the rivalry would flare as soon as the cameras began to turn. Since Tourneur was not about to accept any obvious histrionics in his diminuendo world, Douglas was left to try and out-underact Mitchum, an exercise in futility, he discovered. He tried adding distracting bits of business during Mitchum's lines and came up with a coin trick, running it quickly between the tops of his fingers. Bob started staring at the fingers until Kirk started staring at the fingers and dropped the coin on the rug. He put the coin away. In another scene, Douglas brought a gold watch fob out of his coat pocket and twirled it around like a propeller. This time everybody stared.

"It was a hoot to watch them go at it," said Jane Greer. "They were two such different types. Kirk was something of a method actor. And Bob was Bob. You weren't going to catch him acting. But they both tried to get the advantage. At one point they were actually trying to upstage each other by who could sit the lowest. The one sitting the lowest had the best camera angle, I guess - I don't know what they were thinking. Bob sat on the couch, so Kirk sat on the table, then one sat on the footstool, and by the end I think they were both on the floor."

Tourneur, no martinet, liked to give his performers a lot of freedom and waited out the one-upmanship antics with a weary grace. "Quoi qu'il arrive, restez calme," he liked to say.

Actors were actors. One night he was screening the rushes of a scene with Mitchum and Douglas talking to each other on either side of the frame, and he was startled to see how Paul Valentine - placed in the background and without a line of dialogue - had craftily picked up a magazine and was flipping the pages with an altogether distracting intensity, hijacking the scene.

"Oh, Paul," he said to the actor, "now I have to keep an eye on you, too?"

iPod Shuffle, take me away

I walked all over the city yesterday on my various errands and also wandered through Central Park, because it was a beautiful day and I had 3 hours to kill, and all was right with the world. I didn't listen to music constantly, but when I did, had the old iPod on shuffle. Sometimes, as we iPod owners know, the Shuffle blows, and it makes it seem like you actually own no good songs. But then sometimes it throws up a bit of magic in your way. Yesterday was kind of like that. Not perfect end to end, but great walking music. As I said: I probably walked 7 miles yesterday, all told, and was outside, on the move, from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m. I ate lunch at Whole Foods, I did errands, I met a friend for coffee, then went over to a friend's house for dinner ... but here was yesterday's shuffle. Good enough that I might want to actually create it as its own Playlist.

As narcissistic as this is, I make no apology for it, because
1. The URL to my blog is not BigImportantTopics.blogspot.com, or DownWithTheMSM.org. It's sheilaomalley.com, so this entire thing is an exercise in narcissism.
2. I have enjoyed looking at other people's music collections - seeing where we intersect, where we divide - (Seriously: am I the only one who liked Garth Brooks's "Chris Gaines" debacle??) - and music is a fun topic to talk about.

So here's the Shuffle that accompanied me yesterday, with tiny fragments of commentary.

"Good Love Never Dies" - Liz Phair (love this one of hers - but then, I love all her stuff - it's rare that I don't like one of her songs)

"This Land Is Your Land" - Pete Seeger - live - really captures the energy of the moment

"The Deepest Blues are Black" - Foo Fighters (yum)

"I'm On My Way" - The Proclaimers - had forgotten about this song!!

"The Five-Fifteen (reprise)" - Christine Ebersole, from Broadway musical Grey Gardens, a performance that will go down in the annals of history

"Devil Inside" - INXS (this song reminds me so much of college, and making out on the beach with my hot boyfriend who liked to believe he was deep and tormented, when the reality was that he was a fun nerdy goofball. How did I see beneath his hot-tormented-deep surface to the nerd beneath? Because it takes one to know one. Great kisser, too)

"Roll Over Beethoven" - The Beatles

"Home Boys Home" - The Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem (a rousing song - I have so much Clancy Brothers in my collection that they come up all the time)

"Unsigned Letter" - Garth Brooks as Chris Gaines. I think I may be the only person on the planet who actually liked this weird narcissistic album

"You Better Believe" - The Gay Poppers - from my essential Stompin' at the Savoy collection - a great purchase

"(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace Love and Understanding?" - Elvis Costello. The sad truth is that I believe I have listened to Elvis too much. I have seen him in concert multiple times. Years ago, post-college, he was in constant rotation in my collection. And ... in the same way that I can no longer eat French dressing after over-indulging once when I was 10 years old - I have a hard time listening to Elvis now. But this, I believe, is a perfect song.

"Tymps (The Sick in the Head Song" - Fiona Apple - Love it when she gets whimsical. Dad loved her too. I remember him getting mad when I told her about the brou-haha with her record label, how they didn't want to release her new album because it "didn't have a single". Dad was personally pissed off about that. "That's so STUPID."

"Secretly Dainty" - Pat McCurdy. He's another one, like the Clancy Brothers. He literally haunts my Shuffle.

"Pallin' with Al" - Squirrel Nut Zippers - I prefer them when they are harder, with a rougher edge ("Soon" is my favorite of theirs) - don't like them as much when they get light and "jazzy".

"Resolve" - Foo Fighters. My fear is that someday I will have over-listened to the Foo Fighters to the extent that I over-listened to Elvis Costello, and will no longer be able to listen to them. I try to dole them out to myself in small bites. I love them so much.

"The Night that Goldman Spoke at Union Square" - from the Ragtime Broadway recording. I am in love with that musical. And the book.

"Ave Mary A" - Pink. I think she has a perfect rock and roll voice. Love her.

"Endgame #1" - From the Chess in Concert recording (starring Josh Groban, Idina Menzel, Adam Pascal) - it's really quite phenomenal, actually. I've loved that musical for decades, and always preferred the Broadway recording to the UK recording (I still stand by that) - but I am thrilled that this full show was done recently in concert - and some of the songs ("Anthem" in particular) are far superior than anything that was heard on previous soundtracks. Here he is performing it live. The song needs to be powerful, heartfelt, sincere - without being too earnest. It needs an open throat. It needs freedom of expression. He nails it.

"Calling in the Wind" - The Judds. Yawn. I really used to like them - they just seem way too soft to me now.

"Knock Things Over" - Pat McCurdy. Go away, Pat.

"L.A. Song" - Beth Hart - God, I love this chick. The VOICE.

"Galileo" - Indigo Girls. Ahhhh. Love this song.

"Let Me Be There" - Olivia Newton-John. Happy!!!

"Help Is On Its Way" - Little River Band. This, following on the heels of Olivia, has absolutely made my entire week.

"Don't Go" - Yaz. It is so rare that an iPod Shuffle gives you so many favorites in a row.

"Love Me" - The Phantom - this is from another great collection, Rockabilly Essential

"Justice" - again, from Ragtime - a heartbreaker of a song

"Mamma Mia" - Meryl Streep. Go, Meryl. I mean, HONESTLY.

"Pretty Mary K" - Elliott Smith. A very pretty song. I love him, but the horribleness of his death really hangs over this whole album for me.

"Different People" - No Doubt. There was a time in my life where not a day went by that I didn't listen to this song. Those days have passed, but I still like it.

"The Show Must Go On" - Queen. Oh, Queen. I have no words.

"Chim Chim Cher-ee" - Dick Van Dyke, from Mary Poppins. Strangely annoying when songs like this pop up, but in a way that's what the Shuffle is for. I'm not ever going to go, "Let me listen to the ENTIRETY of the Mary Poppins album" - just not my style, but it is fun to be reminded of songs like this one.

"Mind On Loving" - Little Danny. Awesomeness.

"Is Anybody There?" - William Daniels from 1776 - kind of heartbreaking.

"Difficult for Weirdos" - Robbie Williams. I will follow Robbie Williams to the ends of the earth. I buy all his albums. Boy is prolific. CHILLAX. Some songs suck, some songs are just okay, but there's always one or two on each album that I fall in love with. This, however, is not one of those songs. But it's fun anyway.

"Johnson's Motorcar" - The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. This is from their Carnegie Hall concert, an album I grew up with. I love how the audience claps at a specific point. Goosebumps.

"Let's Have Sex" - Pat McCurdy. No.

"All Apologies" - Sinéad O'Connor - I love her cover of Nirvana's song. Nirvana's version is awesome, but here, she makes it into a creepy stalker song. Like the girl singing it is someone you do not want to mess with, because boiled bunnies are going to start appearing on your stove.

"Hair of the Dog" - Mike Viola and the Candy Butchers. I honestly do not believe that Mike Viola is capable of writing a bad song, or a boring song, or a "filler" song. He is brilliant.

"Get Out the Map" - Indigo Girls. Okay, girls, okay, I'll get out the map. Stop bossing me around.

"She's Electric" - Oasis. I want to like Oasis more than I do. I LOVE his voice - it's a real anthem-rock voice, but their songs just don't do it for me. THIS one, however, is great. I've been overdosing on it for a couple of weeks now.

"The End" - My Chemical Romance. I hear their stuff and get in touch with my inner emo tween. And my older self wants to tell them, "Boys? Take a deep breath. Relax. And please. Please. Stop shouting. Everything is going to be okay, I promise."

"Hitchin' a Ride" - Green Day. Love this song. But then, I love all their songs. There are very few that don't catch my attention in some way. They sure know how to write a hook you could hang meat on.

"Summer and Lightning" - ELO. I just freakin' love ELO. Their Time album was the first album I bought with my own money - I was 12 years old - and seriously: I've never gotten sick of them since that day 5 million years ago.

"All I Want Is You" - U2. I am seriously so impressed with this Shuffle.

"Tiny Spark" - Brendan Benson. Are you familiar with Brendan Benson? He's my new favorite singer/songwriter. Check him out. This song is terrific. I love his voice, his lyrics, his sound, in general.

"You Really Got a Hold On Me" - The Beatles. Nice - I love the chaotic and improvisatory feel of the harmonizing going on in this recording. Makes you really feel that these are four HUMAN guys doing the music.

"Generator" - The Foo Fighters. Awesome. Great work-out song.

"To the Pirates' Cave" - Klaus Badelt - composer for Pirates of the Caribbean - I love the soundtrack. It's quite repetitive, but I love how huge and symphonic and bombastic it is. Ridiculous, really. Fun.

"Hotel California" - The Eagles (live). The live version is far better than the actual recording. It's hearing the crowd scream at the first sound of that guitar hook that really makes it.

"The Switch and the Spar" - The Raconteurs. They're sometimes a bit too self-conscious for me, "we are the hippest dudes ever" - but I do like some of their songs.

"The Climb" - No Doubt. Try to sing this song in karaoke one night, and you will have a new-found sense of respect for Gwen Stefani's voice and what she is able to do with it.

"Dancing Lessons" - Sinéad O'Connor - I love the opening of this song. Really happy and light music, very unlike the rest of her stuff. Pretty, pretty.

"Be Bop a Lula" - Gene Vincent. It never gets old.

"Just For a Thrill" - Ray Charles. Awesome makeout music.

"Party Girl" - U2 - on their "Live from Paris" album which I adore.

"Popular" - Kristen Chenoweth from Wicked. Delicious diva.

"Cad É Sin Don Té Sin" - The Cassidys. Look, it's nobody's business, mkay?

"Drivin' On" - The Breeders. Went through a huuuge Breeders phase. I can still see my battered little cassette tapes lining my bookshelf. Still love them.

"Serve Yourself" - Mark Hardwick from Pump Doys and Dinettes. Insane. Not all that enjoyable out of context. The iPod Shuffle loses its gleam for a moment.

"Heroin Girl" - Everclear. Ahhhh, we're back. Everclear is my current favorite band. Can't get enough.

"Drown In My Own Tears" - Ray Charles. It's those female back-up singers that make these songs ooze with sex. Well, and him, too.

"Rib Joint" - Sammy Price. Swing it!!

"Lida Rose & Will I Ever Tell You?" - The Buffalo Bills and Shirley Jones from The Music Man. I grew up with this. The counterpoint still satisfies.

"The Jolly Tinker" - The Clancy Brothers. Okay, y'know what, boys? Enough. (Although this song does make me laugh, with the silly ba-dum-ching joke of, "So when I was a tinker ...")

"Wednesday" - Tori Amos. I was "off" Tori for years. It's nice to be back on.

"Doctor Zhivago Suite" - Maurice Jarre - the love theme from Doctor Zhivago (this comes from the tribute concert to David Lean, conducted by Maurice Jarre - that I reviewed here). Beautiful.

RIP Dede Allen

Without exaggeration, I can say that Dede Allen changed my life (without me even knowing who she was), and contributed to me making the choices I did. I was always a movie fan, even as a kid, and always into acting and theatre, but Dog Day Afternoon, seen when I was 12 years old, babysitting (and far too young to see that movie, actually), blew the top of my head off, and I still, decades later, have been unable to find the pieces. Thank God. It's rare that you are shown something that tells you: Here. Here. This is what you want to do. This is what matters to you. Pursue it. In whatever fashion. This is important. This is not just what you love - but it is WHO YOU ARE.

It reminds me of the great quote from John Martin, the New York Times dance critic in the 50s, and his response to the Bolshoi Ballet, who first came to New York in 1959:

The impact of the Bolshoi has been overwhelming. And it will be something of a calamity if we ever allow ourselves to recover.

The effect of Dog Day Afternoon was overwhelming. And it would have been a calamity if I had allowed myself to recover.

Directed by Sidney Lumet, Dede Allen edited the film, and is responsible for so much of its power. Her career spanned decades. She worked right up to the end (check out her astonishing credits). She was a pioneer. She worked with everyone. She is responsible for the editing of some of my favorite movies of all time, and also responsible for giving us the look/energy/sense in certain scenes, that leave a deep impact for the rest of your life. The train scene in Reds, with Diane Keaton's slow agonized walk down the platform, and finally, the reveal of John Reed behind her. It's brilliant. I have studied that scene on a shot by shot basis, trying to understand its magic. Where do they cut? Where do they hold steady? Where do they look? Where do they choose to look? Much of why it is so fantastic has to do with the length of the scene, how long it goes on, how willing Beatty (and Allen) are to keep the suspense going. It feels like it should end sooner than it does, but that is only my own conventional attitude. It goes on longer. It keens like a violin string almost breaking. When Reed is revealed, he comes not where you think he should come from. You don't see him get off the train. He is blurry, in the background, and then, as she is following the passage of a stretcher going by, she turns, and, whoosh, there he is, he comes into focus, staring at Keaton. Film editing literally does not get any better than that. (Whole scene below the jump.)

But that is just one example in a career of many. She helped create moments that are indelible. The woman edited Slap Shot, for God's sake, and that alone makes me love her forever.

Please don't miss Matt Zoller Seitz's heartfelt appreciation of Dede Allen and her career in Salon. I really liked his observations on how, yes, she edited action like nobody's business. Dog Day Afternoon was a complicated film, shot on the streets of New York, with hundreds and hundreds of extras, and helicopter shots, and heat wave, and all of that needs to be made real and palpable to the audience. But I liked Seitz's words on how she also was a "performance editor":

But she was more often described as a "performance editor." That's high praise. It takes special intuition to cull raw footage of actors' performances and piece the best stuff together to create compelling, memorable characters -- ones you can imagine having lives beyond the edges of the screen. Allen had that intuition, that gift.

Her best work has a people watcher's sensibility: a rapt yet affectionate eye. Think of Communist revolutionary John Reed on his deathbed in "Reds," asking Louise Bryant to come to New York with him ("I've got a taxi waiting"), his voice buoyant, his eyes frightened; or private eye Harry Moseby in "Night Moves" confronting his wife and her boyfriend at home, but pausing beforehand to lounge on her couch, survey the lover's feast arrayed on the coffee table and help himself to a glass of wine; or Fast Eddie Felson in "The Hustler," going on a picnic with his girlfriend Sarah Packard and expounding on how "anything can be great"; or the assistant principal in "The Breakfast Club" interrogating the detention kids, hoping to learn which of them removed a screw from the library door.

Go read the whole thing. He has some great clips, too.

She will be much missed.

A true artist. A true storyteller.

Reds clip below the jump. It is nearly impossible not to get sucked into the story (another tribute to Allen) - and Diane Keaton's growing terror is so well done, there's one shot in particular where you can feel her understanding the reality, of what she has lost - and I have goosebumps just writing this sentence. But try to watch this and look only at the editing. Each shot chosen for a specific storytelling reason. Where Beatty chose to cut, and how Allen chose to piece the sequence together, what she chose to show (the stretchers, the cracked windows, the slow pan down the train ... cutting back and forth to Keaton's face as she walks ... the scene is totally from Keaton's point of view, the camera moving slowly and inevitably, following Keaton's eyes ... going down, to the stretchers, back up to the train ...)

It is a masterpiece of story, yes, and a masterful piece of acting. But it's the editing that makes it possible. How often are great moments left on the cutting room floor. How often do scenes NOT work because they are edited shoddily, or too obviously.

Here, in a very complicated sequence, Allen not only never makes a mistake, but she is the primary reason that the scene actually lands. There were hours and hours of footage for this one sequence. HOURS. She had to pick and choose, and she must have had to make agonizing choices, in order to make the moment happen. She would have tried different things, conferenced with Beatty about it, should we go back to Keaton again? Should we have more of the train? She would have collaged it, through mountains of footage, until she came up with ... this.

That's art.

The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Lorine Niedecker

Next book on my poetry shelf:

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O'Clair

I had not heard of Lorine Niedecker, until this past January, when I took the Norton Anthology out to Block Island with me, in the hopes that it would help me get back to reading again. Something big and varied, that wouldn't require a ton of concentration. Flip through it from time to time, read the poems, read the intros ... It did help me get back to reading. And it was fun to re-read things like "The Waste Land" and some of Pound's Cantos, things I know well - but haven't read in their entirety in a long time. And somehow, I came across Lorine Niedecker, who is anthologized. There is a brief introductory note for her - not a long one, since she lived in the same place her entire life - not many "events" to speak of - but her poems are incredible.

I am so glad I encountered her. She was born in 1903 in Wisconsin and spent her whole life on Black Hawk Island. She lived with her parents, and took care of them when they became elderly. She went to college briefly. She had many jobs, some menial, some not. Somewhere along in here, she started writing poetry. In 1931, she read Louis Zukofsky's "Objectivist" issue of Poetry magazine, and traveled to New York to meet him. They ended up carrying on a long correspondence. The "Objectivists" wanted to create poems that were not sentimental, or ornamental - simple, clean, clear. Lorine Niedecker is a classic example of an Objectivist poet. Her poems have no "needless words", they almost feel like haikus: miniature little sketches - and the way she used indentation and spaces makes them unmistakably hers.

She was obviously a well-read curious intellectual woman, and her poems are not about the flowers, and the leaves, and her emotions. She wrote poems about Darwin, the Chinese poet Li Po, the North American explorers - and in this way, she is an heir of Ezra Pound, whose poems have a collage effect, full of references to existing material.

While I was out on Block Island, I read all of her work anthologized - the first one being her long poem on Thomas Jefferson (bestill my heart) - and now I'm a fan forever. She's also not for dummies. She expects people to be familiar with the events of his life (or Darwin's life, or whoever), and the references come fast and furious. She doesn't slow down for morons. There are footnotes in the Norton Anthology, and with Niedecker, at times, you really need them. But don't let them slow you down. Keep going. Niedecker waits for no one.

Niedecker uses quotes and fragments from the letters of Thomas Jefferson in order to create the poem (if you've read his letters, you'll recognize a lot of this).

I think it's an extraordinary poem.

Thomas Jefferson

I
My wife is ill!
And I sit
waiting
for a quorum

II
Fast ride
his horse collapsed
Now he saddled walked

Borrowed a farmer’s
unbroken colt
To Richmond

Richmond How stop—
Arnold’s redcoats
there

III
Elk Hill destroyed—
Cornwallis
carried off 30 slaves

Jefferson:
Were it to give them freedom
he’d have done right

IV
Latin and Greek
my tools
to understand
humanity

I rode horse
away from a monarch
to an enchanting
philosophy

V
The South of France

Roman temple
“simple and sublime”

Maria Cosway
harpist
on his mind

white column
and arch

VI
To daughter Patsy: Read—
read Livy

No person full of work
was ever hysterical

Know music, history
dancing

(I calculate 14 to 1
in marriage
she will draw
a blockhead)

Science also
Patsy

VII
Agreed with Adams:
send spermaceti oil to Portugal
for their church candles

(light enough to banish mysteries?:
three are one and one is three
and yet the one not three
and the three not one)

and send slat fish
U.S. salt fish preferred
above all other

VIII
Jefferson of Patrick Henry
backwoods fiddler statesman:

“He spoke as Homer wrote”
Henry eyed our minister at Paris—

the Bill of Rights hassle—
“he remembers . . .

in splendor and dissipation
he thinks yet of bills of rights”

IX
True, French frills and lace
for Jefferson, sword and belt

but follow the Court to Fontainebleau
he could not—

house rent would have left him
nothing to eat

. . .

He bowed to everyone he met
and talked with arms folded

He could be trimmed
by a two-month migraine

and yet
stand up

X
Dear Polly:
I said No—no frost

in Virginia—the strawberries
were safe

I’d have heard—I’m in that kind
of correspondence

with a young daughter—
if they were not

Now I must retract
I shrink from it

XI
Political honors
“splendid torments”
“If one could establish
an absolute power
of silence over oneself”

When I set out for Monticello
(my grandchildren
will they know me?)

How are my young
chestnut trees—

XII
Hamilton and the bankers
would make my country Carthage

I am abandoning the rich—
their dinner parties—

I shall eat my simlins
with the class of science

or not at all
Next year the last of labors

among conflicting parties
Then my family

we shall sow our cabbages
together

XIII
Delicious flower
of the acacia

or rather

Mimosa Nilotica
from Mr. Lomax

XIV
Polly Jefferson, 8, had crossed
to father and sister in Paris

by way of London—Abigail
embraced her—Adams said

“in all my life I never saw
more charming child”

Death of Polly, 25,
Monticello

XV
My harpsichord
my alabaster vase
and bridle bit
bound for Alexandria
Virginia

The good sea weather
of retirement
The drift and suck
and die-down of life
but there is land

XVI
These were my passions:
Monticello and the villa-temples
I passed on to carpenters
bricklayers what I knew

and to an Italian sculptor
how to turn a volute
on a pillar

You may approach the campus rotunda
from lower to upper terrace
Cicero had levels

XVII
John Adams’ eyes
dimming
Tom Jefferson’s rheumatism
cantering

XVIII
Ah soon must Monticello be lost
to debts
and Jefferson himself
to death

XIX
Mind leaving, let body leave
Let dome live, spherical dome
and colonnade

Martha (Patsy) stay
“The Committee of Safety
must be warned”

Stay youth—Anne and Ellen
all my books, the bantams
and the seeds of the senega root

"‘Ulysses’ is going to make my place famous." - Sylvia Beach, 1921

And indeed it did.

I'm in heaven these days due to the recent publication of The Letters of Sylvia Beach, which I have not read yet, but it means that Sylvia Beach is all over the place right now. It's wonderful! It's wonderful to see her name everywhere. Naturally this means that Joyce's name is everywhere, too, so consider me thrilled.

Here is a review of the letters, which makes me drool to get my hands on a copy. This is all well-trod ground for me, having read many biographies of Joyce (and other literary giants of the day), where she plays a prominent role. But there's something about reading someone's letters ... the un-cleaned-up un-edited thought process and syntax revealed. Relationships made clear, without an editorial voice inserting itself. For example:

More and better literary gossip is spilled in Beach’s 1959 memoir, but these letters have tart moments on nearly every page. Beach introduced Sherwood Anderson to Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald to James Joyce, and knew everyone. She describes a reading in her bookstore, given by Hemingway and Stephen Spender, during which beer and whiskey were “displayed on the table in front of the boys, of which they were partaking freely.” The sight of this made Joyce stand up and leave. It “made him too thirsty,” she writes, “to stand it any longer.” Beach, a popular giver of dinner parties and a bohemian cult hero, was unpretentious. Inviting the writer Bryher to a reception, she wrote: “You know it won’t be at all formal, never is in our house, and people don’t dress up here. I never wear an evening gown no matter what they invite me too — haint got none.”

Go read the whole thing.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Not really, though.

A fantastic piece about A Woman's Face, the 1941 film starring Joan Crawford, Conrad Veidt and Melvyn Douglas. This is one of Joan Crawford's best performances, she shows something here she was rarely allowed to show: vulnerability, insecurity, sensitivity.

Never slipping entirely into the simple formula equating beauty with goodness and vice versa, the story suggests that the characters have a kind of security in the way they are perceived by others, based largely on their mien.

And watch for that scene where she slaps Osa Massen. There's one shot of Crawford's face during the fight which is as real as it can get. She's tops.

Here's my piece on A Woman's Face.

And here is The Siren's wonderful piece on this movie.

Werner Herzog interrupted

Wow: A not-to-be-missed two-part recap from Jim Emerson of the recent Conference on World Affairs screening of Werner Herzog's mad brilliant Aguirre, The Wrath of God. It was "Cinema Interruptus" - a screening where anyone in the audience could call out "stop", the film would be paused, and a question could be asked. Oh, how I wish I was there.

Part 1

Part 2

It's one of those movies where the "making of" is almost more extraordinary than the story being told in the film itself.

Roger Ebert was there as well (and he's the reason I first saw Aguirre, back in the dark ages of my life - it was his review that made me seek it out - he's also included it in his Great Movies Series), and here is his re-cap.

The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Stevie Smith

Next book on my poetry shelf:

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O'Clair

Born in 1902, in Hull, Yorkshire England, Stevie Smith was christened Florence Margaret, but was called "Stevie" by her friends. (She was a very petite woman, and
"Stevie" was the name of a famous jockey of the time.) Her first poems were published in 1935, and she was advised to write a novel, which she did. She wrote a couple of novels, all autobiographical, and her poetry took some time to gain the reputation it enjoys today. Smith, to me, is one of those "sucker-punch" poets. A poet with a sense of the dramatic, who takes you through their verse, and then, repeatedly, rips the rug out from under you, socks you in the gut. Her most famous poem is "Not waving but drowning", and I remember reading it in high school and finding it haunting and terrible. The sense of isolation, of being trapped, of calling out but no one will hear you - and even worse, even more terrible: being misunderstood. The man swims in the ocean. He waves. It is only later they realize that he was "not waving but drowning". A brutal case of missed communication, with fatal results. Smith was obsessed with death. Often she would illustrate her poems with creepy funny little caricatures (and she had a big publishing battle in the 50s with a publisher who did not want to include her drawings with her poetry), and because there's something whimsical about them, almost like the sketches I saw recently at the Tim Burton show at MoMA, it can make the poems seem funnier, lighter, than they really are. Perhaps that was Smith's point. Again, with the sucker-punch.

Stevie Smith was an isolated singular person. When asked whose contemporary poetry she read, she answered, "Why nobody's but my own." (This is similar to James Joyce's response to the question "who is the greatest living author who writes in English?": "Well, aside from myself, I don't know.") The family moved to a north London suburb when she was three, and that was the house she lived in for the rest of her life, with her aunt and her sister. She did not pal around with other poets. She did not identify herself with any poetic movement, or "school". For this reason (poetry can be very clicque-y), her stuff was either ignored at first, or not taken seriously. But that's one of its strengths: she is an individual, an original. In the late 50s, Poetry contributor David Wright wrote of Stevie Smith:

"... one of the most original women poets now writing, [Stevie Smith] seems to have missed most of the public accolades bestowed by critics and anthologists. One reason may be that not only does she belong to no 'school'—whether real or invented as they usually are—but her work is so completely different from anyone else's that it is all but impossible to discuss her poems in relation to those of her contemporaries.

She uses nursery rhyme rhythms, which make her poems even creepier (although, conversely, it also made them seem "lighter" - which also may have been an element in not taking her seriously) - and I find them all full of something like dread. She said she lived in an "age of unrest", which certainly puts her in line with the other modernist poets of the day, she was working with the same themes, the same landscape, she saw a lot of terrible things go down in the world, and her poetry was in response to that.

Michael Schmidt in Lives of the Poets writes:

Her verse is haunted by tributary rhythms which she incorporates into her various characters and voices. There is a formal residue of rhyme and runs of meter, but her anarchic approach will not allow her to follow a form through. There are fairy tales and actual stories seen from fairy-tale perspectives, and echoes of Poe, the Coleridge of "Christabel", "Kubla Khan" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Longfellow, the Tennyson of the Idylls and "The Lady of Shalott", Blake, Cowper, the hymn writers and many others sound. So do popular tunes like "Greensleeves," which provides the backing for a poem. It is a world of troubled innocence. Mother Goose, Alice, and also Struwelpeter. The way in which popular and deliberate echoes play through the poetry is unique.

Unique, indeed. If you have not encountered her stuff, or if you have seen some of it and were turned off by the little wacky drawings, or the nursery-school rhymes, do yourself a favor and check her out. She cloaks her rage in sing-song, and it's incredibly creepy: when she wants to be, she is totally direct. She despises God, and addresses him face to face many times. Her anger is huge. But again, all of it is sort of hidden beneath her rhythms, which are innocent-sounding, like something on a playground. "Ring around the rosie" is a terrifying poem, if you know the context of it. That's sort of the realm in which Stevie Smith works.

Michael Schmidt again:

Given the preponderance of Victorian and Edwradian models, a diction ruefully littered with "Oh" and "Alas", the painful rhymes, the doggerel, how does she evade banality? Not through irony but through a wit and tone that wrest sense from cliche and near nonsense. Her humor revives an outworn language. She makes a patchwork quilt of old rags of verse. It is not exactly new but it is bright, wise and silly.

Her life was turned into a play by playwright Hugh Whitemore, which was then turned into a movie, starring Glenda Jackson.

The following poem takes as its jumping-off point the famous story told by Samuel Taylor Coleridge about that mythical "man from Porlock" who interrupted the writing of "Kubla Khan". Coleridge was asleep, and the entire poem came to him in a dream. He woke up, excited, thrilled, and began to write it down. Then a knock came at the door. Coleridge writes:

On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!

"Kubla Khan" remained unfinished and the "man from Porlock" will forever be known as a metaphor for all of the things that interrupt artists, or get in the way of inspiration.

Listen to Stevie Smith here. I love her clarity and humor. Her willingness to blame ("Come on Coleridge, why did you open the door??") but also, her humanistic response: "Often we all do wrong.")

Thoughts about the Person from Porlock

Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
And ever after called him a curse,
Then why did he hurry to let him in?
He could have hid in the house.

It was not right of Coleridge in fact it was wrong
(But often we all do wrong)
As the truth is I think he was already stuck
With Kubla Khan.

He was weeping and wailing: I am finished, finished,
I shall never write another word of it,
When along comes the Person from Porlock
And takes the blame for it.

It was not right, it was wrong,
But often we all do wrong.

*

May we inquire the name of the Person from Porlock?
Why, Porson, didn’t you know?
He lived at the bottom of Porlock Hill
So had a long way to go,

He wasn’t much in the social sense
Though his grandmother was a Warlock,
One of the Rutlandshire ones I fancy
And nothing to do with Porlock,

And he lived at the bottom of the hill as I said
And had a cat named Flo,
And had a cat named Flo.

I long for the Person from Porlock
To bring my thoughts to an end,
I am becoming impatient to see him
I think of him as a friend,

Often I look out of the window
Often I run to the gate
I think, He will come this evening,
I think it is rather late.

I am hungry to be interrupted
For ever and ever amen
O Person from Porlock come quickly
And bring my thoughts to an end.

*

I felicitate the people who have a Person from Porlock
To break up everything and throw it away
Because then there will be nothing to keep them
And they need not stay.

*

Why do they grumble so much?
He comes like a benison
They should be glad he has not forgotten them
They might have had to go on.

*

These thoughts are depressing I know. They are depressing,
I wish I was more cheerful, it is more pleasant,
Also it is a duty, we should smile as well as submitting
To the purpose of One Above who is experimenting
With various mixtures of human character which goes best,
All is interesting for him it is exciting, but not for us.
There I go again. Smile, smile, and get some work to do
Then you will be practically unconscious without positively having to go.

Heroes For Sale (1933); Dir. William Wellmann

"It takes more than one sock in the jaw to lick 120 million people."

So says Tom Holmes, played by Richard Barthelmess, in William Wellmann's pre-Code drama Heroes for Sale, a terrific film, and included in TCM's Forbidden Hollywood Collection, Volume Three, a volume dedicated to the early works of Wellmann. The Hays Code was created in 1930, but wasn't really enforced until 1934, and the difference is startling. Not so much in the quality of movies made. Many of my favorite films of all time were from the 1930s, POST Code. But in the treatment of subject matter, in the willingness to present certain issues in a realistic manner, the lack of euphemism ... all of these things really mark the pre-Code films. There are those who have a nostalgia for the Code, but I imagine that those people, like myself, love the films made during the Code - and yet are not aware of what is actually IN the Code, and how vile it is. This is not just about keeping films "clean" and not showing sex or violence. This is about a moral mandate, institutionalized bigotry. Authority figures must not be questioned, religion must not be mocked, any mention of childbirth must be handled with "good taste", the Code goes on forever, trying to leave no stone unturned. It's a creepy document. For example, # 7 on the list beneath the heading Sex:

Miscegenation (sex relationships between the white and black races) is forbidden.

Lovely, isn't it?

So you may indulge yourself in nostalgia for the Code, but please at least realize what you are being nostalgic for. I read the Code, and I actually feel like taking a bath. It's funny: the Production Code was trying to regulate the morals of the nation, but in so doing, revealed themselves to have the dirtiest minds of all. Isn't that always the way. The Code states:

The treatment of bedrooms must be governed by good taste and delicacy.

Yeah, because all Americans at that time ONLY slept in their bedrooms. Nothing else went on there! Nothing that wasn't in "good taste".

I am not one to throw out the baby with the bathwater. I find all of this to be interesting, and, naturally, smart directors and writers found all kinds of pesky ways to get around the Code. You'd be hard-pressed to find a more "lustful" moment on film than the look on Cary Grant's face when he says to Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings: "Would you like to come up to my room?" You can't get more explicit than that.

But the pre-Code films continue to fascinate, giving a glimpse of that brief moment in time before the crack-down came, before it was decided what could and could not be shown, and also HOW things should be portrayed (dancing, crime, religion, alcohol, patriotism, etc.). Being so used to the post-Code movies with their artful sneakiness in handling certain issues can make some of these earlier films seem even more startling. Can they say that?? Is that allowed? A film without a clear moral? What is this world coming to? A film where the bad girl is not only NOT punished, but flourishes? And, uhm, a film where a woman is branded like a piece of cattle, and it's shown on film? (Interesting that the Code specifically mentions "branding" as off-limits ("Branding of people or animals" is listed under "REPELLENT SUBJECTS"). I wonder if that was a direct response to Tallulah Bankhead's horrifying animalistic shriek as the brand is pressed into her breast.

There will be spoilers here. I hope it doesn't deter you from seeing the film.

The original title for Heroes for Sale was Breadline, which takes a more documentary approach to the situation portrayed in the film, but look at the cynicism in the chosen title. These are WAR heroes. What happens when a soldier returns? It is not pretty. Heroes for Sale looks at the challenges facing these men, not only returning home wounded, or shattered psychologically (sometimes both), but also the upheaval of the society brought on by the Great Depression. Things are not black and white (one of the key features of the pre-Code films). Even a year later, Heroes For Sale would not have been possible.

Tom Holmes (played by the wonderful Richard Barthelmess) is a soldier fighting in WWI. The opening of the film shows war in a realistic chaotic way. The rain throttles down out of the sky. The trenches are terrifying. The enemy is faceless, but the sound they make roars through the air. The American soldiers know what they have to do, but they are scared. Their fear is showed openly, with no sneer at it (which would be par for the course later). Fear is human. It's certainly part of war. It doesn't mean the men are not heroic. Orders have come down, in the middle of a night-time battle, that their next mission is to advance forward, and this time, they are not expected to kill the enemy, but take him prisoner. A far more risky proposition. The men stand huddled in a tent. Wellmann films it with dark shadows, the sounds of explosions outside, the rain battering the tent. It's gloom placed on top of gloom. They all look at one another, and they know what this means. 9 out of 10 of them will die in the attempt. They know it. No one speaks it, but the knowledge is there, palpably. Men light their soggy cigarettes with shaking fingers. It's a tense scene, beautifully rendered by the actors, and the production design, which gives it all the sense of being a last (and perhaps) meaningless stand. It is the first scene in the movie. We don't even know who any of these people are yet. It throws us right into the middle of the action. The men begin their mission. The mud is like something out of a nightmare, it's dark, the rain pours down, and Wellmann shows the approach out of the trench, as one after the other is mowed down. It is slaughter. Beautiful work, by everyone.

Roger Winston (Gordon Westcott, in a terrific performance, he would be dead 2 years later after falling off his polo horse, exactly like Christopher Reeve) is the Sergeant. He and Tom are from the same town. They huddle in a trench, waiting for their turn to charge. They have the following exchange:

Tom: You scared, Roger?
Roger: Unofficially, yes.
Tom: Me too. Only you can make mine official.

Pretty honest. It is these subtleties that would be lost once the Code was enforced.

Yet, they do what they have to do. In a brutal scene, Tom comes face to face with a German soldier and shouts at him, through the rain, to surrender. The German does. At that moment, Tom is shot in the back and falls over the trench, screaming to Roger to "take him in, take him in". Roger, torn between helping his friend and completing his mission, takes the German soldier prisoner and struggles off through the mud, leaving Tom to die. But they knew this going in, that this was a possibility. Tough choices made by tough men.

Roger, back in the tent, is congratulated for his bravery. People crowd in to shake his hand. Roger, knowing that he did nothing but cower in the mud, that the heroism is all Tom's, out there dead in the mud, is devastated. Watch how Westcott shows this. He is a marvelous actor. He is truly pained. Ashamed. And yet, who wouldn't want to have everyone think you're a hero? He tries to come clean, but people keep interrupting him, telling him not to be modest. We learn later what kind of a world Roger comes from, he's a rich boy on a hill, his father is a prominent banker, status and image is very important to his family. It has weakened him, morally. Think of the radical notion of that. He knows he did wrong, he knows that Tom is probably dead out there, and he is now basking in someone else's glory, but he doesn't speak. This is not shown as a malicious or cunning choice. It is shown in all its complexity, accepting that men under pressure often do not behave in honorable ways. And they feel terrible about it. In a very serious way, the choice Roger makes in that wet tent in the middle of the trenches, ruins his life. He can never shake the haunting memory of what he has done, what he is capable of.

Because it turns out, that Tom did not die out there. He is seriously wounded, but he is rescued by a German Red Cross team. He spends the rest of the war in a German hospital, a prisoner of war essentially, but a very sick man. The Germans in the film are portrayed as realistically as the Americans. They are not some "other", they are not the enemy (TM). They're soldiers, just like the Americans. Another radical pre-Code touch, which would be lost in the intervening years. In the German hospital, Tom is given morphine for the pain.

By the time he leaves, he is a serious drug addict. There is only so much that can be done for his condition. He still has splinters of steel along his spine, which cannot be removed without serious injury or perhaps death. He will have to spend the rest of his life managing his pain. While Tom's morphine addiction is not presented as quite as harrowing as Mary's in Long Day's Journey Into Night (or, as an angry commenter recently informed me: a "DOWNER" - and that, for him, was a bad thing. People want to be entertained, he told me. So we always need to see the bright side, right? Even of morphine addiction? Maybe it shouldn't be shown at all! That would solve all the problems of these pesky artists writing all of these "downers". This commenter would have been a great official for the Hays Code!)

Speaking of the Code (and I'll try to stop beating that drum, but Heroes For Sale, not very well-known, certainly not as well-known as the films that really prompted the Code being enforced - Baby Face, Public Enemy, etc. - is a very good example of some of the subtlety that was legislated out of existence when that Code came down), the portrayal of drug addiction was strictly forbidden.

Illegal drug traffic must never be presented ... Because of its evil consequences, the drug traffic should not be presented in any form. The existence of the trade should not be brought to the attention of audiences.

Holmes's morphine addiction is treated with honesty. It happens. It's terrible. Not just for their loved ones, but for the person suffering. He returns home to America after the armistice is signed. On the boat back, he runs into Roger, who now is highly decorated because of his bravery. One of the best parts of Barthelmess' portrayal is that he is a realistic man, and also a compassionate man. It is Roger who suffers the consequences. It's almost worse that Tom is so understanding about the whole thing. It would be better if Tom hated him. Roger is a tormented man.

But Tom says to him, with a gentle sort of half-grin, "I am pretty sure I would have done the same thing." What a nice way to look at friendship. It's not simple all the time. And friends do forgive one another some pretty awful things.

Back in the States, things begin to play out in an inevitable fashion. Tom moves in with his mother. Roger is the toast of the town. Perhaps because of the guilt he feels, Roger gets Tom a job at his father's bank. We immediately can sense, however, that Tom is starting to fall apart. His need for morphine is running his life. He sits behind the bars at the bank (a perhaps too-obvious metaphor for the entrapment of drug addiction), drenched in sweat, worrying over the numbers he has to tally up, and he can't concentrate because he needs his fix. To address the Code and its idiocy: seeing a man in the throes of drug addiction does not make one want to become a drug addict. It has the opposite effect. Not only that, but it can actually intensify your compassion for those who suffer so. It would take a hard heart, indeed, to watch Barthelmess in these early scenes, and think scornfully of his weak character, how "bad" he is. That doesn't even come into play. All you can see is a man at the end of his rope. His doctor sympathizes but he warns Tom that he cannot fill any more prescriptions without reporting the case to the authorities. Tom stands at the door and shouts at the doctor, "What am I supposed to do?" There is true anguish in Barthelmess here. It's heart-rending. Tom goes to the streets. Tries to get drugs from shady characters in doorways, but they turn him down for this or that reason.

Finally, Tom is reported, and he is committed to the "Narcotic State Farm".

One of the problems with Heroes For Sale (and this is nitpicky, especially with a film as fine as this one, but I feel I should mention it) is that it has about eight full acts. It's too much. Wellmann keeps us on track, with calendar years flying by us, and effective editing (a sign showing "Narcotic State Farm", then a shot of a hand pulling out a file with Tom's name on it, and a doctor signing his name to admit Tom - then the next shot, same file pulled out, hand signing his name, and then stamping the file: CURED AND RELEASED - a year of time is handled in three shots. Ah, economy!) But it does try to do too much, and there are times when you feel like you are slogging from event to event, with no overarching purpose. However, this is not a fatal flaw, as it might have been with other films, because of the universal excellence of the acting (even the extras are fantastic), and the fact that everyone creates characters that are interesting, who have places to go, emotionally and otherwise. Heroes for Sale has scope. Maybe too much? I'll leave that for you to decide.

Tom moves to Chicago after being released from the hospital, to make a fresh start. He gets a room in a boarding house, run by Mary, a no-nonsense yet warm and funny human being, played by Aline MacMahon, in yet another exquisite performance from this wonderful character actress.

I love Heroes for Sale because it allows her to be human, too. She's not a caricature. She is allowed her own moments (including one absolutely killer closeup in a scene that moved me to tears the first time I saw it - when you see it, you'll know exactly the one I mean), her own personality. She's not just "support staff". There are only two other boarders in the boarding house - a German communist ("He's a Red," Mary tells Tom) named Mr. Brinker, played broadly (and rather annoyingly at times) by Robert Barrat, and a young working girl named Ruth, played by a glowingly beautiful Loretta Young. The second Tom lays eyes on Ruth, he's in love. His surroundings may be dreary, his room may look out on a brick wall, but suddenly he has hope. He might be able to make a life for himself, with this lovely girl at his side. In a touchingly old-school way, he asks her out immediately, letting his interest in her be known. She seems like a positive and warm person, and she likes him. A romance starts. She works in a laundry, and she gets him a job there as a driver.

Almost immediately, Tom shows an entrepreneurial ingenuity with his job, finding ways to increase the numbers of his laundry route. The higher-ups notice. Give him a promotion.

"The Red", Mr. Brinker, is an inventor. He is always emerging from his room in his long-johns, demanding of the other boarders if anyone has a chisel. The funniest thing about this portrayal is that Communism is seen as kind of amusing (see the fantastic Comrade X for another example), and ultimately corruptible - which, in this universe, is a HOPEFUL sign. No ideology is so rigid that it can resist the call of making money. Mr. Brinker rants and raves about the employers, and how the workers are "slaves", and sniffs at things like profit and bottom line, but when he invents a new kind of laundry-apparatus that would make things more efficient, and gets a patent for it, and suddenly starts raking in the dough, he becomes an unrepentant Capitalist. It doesn't have the paranoia about Communism that later films have. This is the early 30s, remember. Hitler was the enemy. Russia was the Great Unknown. I really liked that aspect of the character. He has no convictions, actually.

Tom teases him at one point: "You used to hate the capitalists!" Brinker replies emphatically, "Naturally! But that was before I had money!"

I love the observation of that, the social and political critique, leavened with humor.

The plot marches on. Tom and Ruth get married. They have a son. Tom has pitched the laundry-machine to his bosses, and says he will sell it to them ONLY IF it means actual human beings won't lose their jobs. They have an agreement. But then hard times come, and the laundry is bought by a larger consolidation. The agreement is broken, and 3/4s of the work force lose their jobs.

Wellmann uses two identical tracking shots to show the transformation: Early on in the film, the camera pans through the giant laundry, (and apparently many of the extras were actual employees at a laundry), showing people busy at work, folding and washing and drying, a hub of human activity. And then, later, same tracking shot, and we see the same space, empty of humans, with the machines busy at work. A bleak and realistic portrayal of what technology can do, a huge worry at that time. Will humans become obsolete?

Tom finds himself on the firing line for this. Angry mobs of men show up at his brownstone home, shouting at him about his betrayal. He tries to reason with them, tell them that he did his best, but they are having none of it. The mob decides to go to the laundry and break all the machines. Tom screams at them that this will do no good, they will only build more. But the mob charges off into the night.

The scenes of riot are filmed with a jagged sense of immediacy. You feel you are looking at a situation that is about to spin wildly out of control. It's frightening. Police advance on the crowd. Tear gas shots are fired. All hell breaks loose. Tom is in the middle of it, still trying to reason, but it's too late. Barthelmess's desperation here is heart-wrenching. Ruth, panicked, calls Mary to come watch her son, so she can run down to the laundry to be with her husband. In the riot, she is struck in the face with a rock, and she falls to the ground. Death, even a year later, would be cleaned up a lot in Hollywood movies, but here, her face is covered with blood, and her eyes are open, staring sightlessly up into the air. It is a memorable shot, unblinking in its willingness to show reality, and the moment is horrifying. Nothing up until this point has prepared us for THAT to happen. Barthelmess, being held down by two cops, is screaming, "THAT'S MY WIFE, THAT'S MY WIFE", but they won't release him to go to her. All around is the chaos of the mob.

There are at least two more acts to go in Heroes for Sale, gritty and terrible, but Wellmann does not tip his action over into melodrama. This is a drama, end-stop. It shows its characters, flaws and all, and follows them on their bumpy journey through life, and through a time of great upheaval in American history. 1918 to 1933 saw a lot of changes, and the worst was yet to come, but Heroes For Sale, while it could be seen as a piece of propaganda ("Can't we do better for ourselves? Can't we do better for our returning veterans? Can't we just treat people better?"), it is also an examination of the economics and transformations that went down during that time, all seen through the eyes of people we come to care about deeply.

Richard Barthelmess has a kind of stiffness to him at times, which works wonderfully when he is in the right material. It worked great in Only Angels Have Wings. He is a man who feels things intensely, but is quite embattled about letting those feelings show. Howard Hawks spoke of the difficulties Barthelmess had in crying onscreen, but there is a scene here, a goodbye scene with his young son (who is about 3 years old) which is heartbreaking, and Barthelmess is obviously moved, spontaneously. It's a beautiful moment of watching someone respond, in an organic way, to a completely imaginary situation, the definition of good acting. The son is portrayed in later scenes as a kid of 8 or 9, but he has more of the stilted child-actor precocity that is so annoying, and was even worse at that time in movies. Children are often appallingly sweet in "old" movies (see the little kid in Penny Serenade for a perfect example of how awful, how truly nauseating they were encouraged to be). But the little 3 year old in Heroes For Sale (he is not listed in the credits) gives an unbelievable performance in this one scene, totally uninhibited, even though he has some tough things to do. He has to scream and cry, "I don't want you to go, I don't want you to go" - and however this little boy was able to tap into those emotions (I don't even want to know), he nails it. Barthelmess holds him at one point, in tears, and the little boy sweetly reaches out and brushes his hand across his father's cheek, following the tracks of the tears. It's an extraordinary performance by a wee young thing. The scene would be maudlin otherwise. Here, in the hands of Wellmann, Barthelmess, and young unnamed boy, it is heartwrenching.

With moments of wit (so necessary with bleak material like this), Heroes For Sale attempts to examine the state of American life at that time, with "poor people" shuffling in a line outside soup kitchens, and huge signs on the edge of town stating:

This is how we lived then. Mr. Brinker, the Red turned capitalist, scoffs at the unemployed, calling them "moochers" and "loafers". We can see parallels to certain attitudes that persist today, in the portrayal of drug addiction (these people are seen as bad and weak, the boss at the bank rails at Tom for his "cowardly loathsome habit" and how disappointed his mother must be having raised her son to lead "a good Christian life") - and the contempt shown towards people who can't find work, they must be lazy, good-for-nothings, and they should be ashamed for accepting "handouts". (I am thinking of the recent moment at a rally where a man threw dollar bills at a guy suffering from Parkinson's. Disgusting.) Heroes For Sale pulls no punches in its portrayal of the lack of sympathy we so often show one another. But it makes its point: There are no "good" people, and there are no "bad" people. There are people who make choices. Choices that seem right at the time, and maybe are right, but there are always unintended consequences. How do we handle ourselves when the chips start to fall? How do we try to maintain human dignity when the world seems to be demanding of us that we fall to our knees?

Tom Holmes is an Everyman. He is not a "star", he's not extraordinary, he's like so many men at so many different times: he wants to have a good life, he wants to provide for his family, he wants to have work that doesn't demean him or anyone else. He does the best he can.

And so Tom's line, that opens this post, spoken at a moment when the Great Depression was at its most ravaging, becomes an optimistic patriotic message, a belief in the system, a belief in people in general, even when it has crushed him down to a powder.

The last scene of Heroes For Sale is unnecessary, and re-states its message too obviously, so Wellmann will be sure that we will "get it", in no uncertain terms, but it doesn't lessen the impact of the whole. We "got it" long before then, and that is a testament to Wellmann and, mainly, to Richard Barthelmess, whose impassioned, committed and specific performance represents the best that the industry has to offer.

Today in history: April 18-19, 1775: "I set off upon a very good Horse"

On the night of April 18, into April 19, in 1775, Paul Revere made his famous ride.

The spring of 1775 was a tense time. Prominent Bostonians were under constant threat of arrest from the British, and many of them - to avoid this - moved their families to outlying communities. However, two of the main patriotic leaders (Benjamin Church and Joseph Warren) stayed in Boston. Paul Revere did as well, and kept a close eye on British movements through that spring. Revere was trusted as a messenger, he knew everybody.

In mid-April, Revere started to notice some ominous signs: mainly that the British ships were taken out of the water, to be worked on, repaired. He could sense that something was coming. He felt the British were preparing for some kind of attack.

Revere went to Concord on April 16 (most of the weaponry was stored there) and warned the leaders of that community that the British were preparing something, they were up to something, and if they were going to strike, they would most definitely try to seize the weapons stash in Concord. So the people of Concord went to work, hiding their store of weapons in barns, cellars, swamps, etc. (Like I mentioned: Paul Revere was trusted. He knew everybody. If you're interested, read the excerpt I posted of Malcolm Gladwell's fascinating analysis of Paul Revere - and Gladwell's comparison with the far less successful messenger on that very same night - William Dawes.)

So. April 16. Revere returned to Boston from Concord, and met with other revolutionary leaders, and that is when they came up with the "one if by land, two if by sea" warning system. Revere knew they needed a way to have some advance warning about which route the British were going to take when they finally did attack.

By land? Or by sea?

So, Revere set up the system: Signal lanterns would be placed in the belfry of Old North Church (the steeple can be seen across the Charles River). If two lanterns were hung, then the British would be crossing the Charles by boat. If one lantern was hung, then the British would choose to attack using a land route.

"One if by land, two if by sea."

The plan was put in place just in time. On April 18, in the early evening, a stable boy came to Paul Revere, telling him that he had overheard some British soldiers discussing the upcoming attack, and that it was planned for early the next morning. The stable boy knew who to bring this information to, and that was Paul Revere. (Again, check out Gladwell's analysis of Paul Revere's personality. Really interesting.)

Revere, on receiving this urgent piece of information, knew he had to get the warning out (and that he especially had to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams who, at that time, were hiding out in Lexington).

So off he went on his now legendary ride (here's a cool map of the route he took). Revere took the water route out of Boston, rowed across the Charles, and galloped through the communities north of Boston sounding the alarm. (Medford, Charlestown, Lexington, Concord.) Because of Paul Revere, the British had completely lost the element of surprise. When they came to attack, they found the rebellious colonists waiting for them everywhere, ambushing them left and right, from behind stone walls, hiding behind trees ...

An interesting tidbit (this is why I love this time in American history - yeah, the events themselves are really cool ... but it's details like the following one that really have me hooked, like a crack addict):

In his hurry to depart, Revere forgot to bring along pieces of cloth to wrap the oars of his boat. The purpose of the cloth would be to muffle the sound of the oars cutting through the water. The Somerset (the British man-of-war) was at anchor, right there in the harbor. Paul Revere had to row right by them, and so any sound at all would have alerted the crew, and if Revere was busted, the whole jig would be up. Revere was in a bit of a pickle ... standing by his boat, trying to figure out how he could improvise ... could he take off his stockings? Tie them around the end of the oars?

One of the boatmen involved in helping Revere make this crossing came to the rescue. He ran to his girlfriend's house and asked her for her petticoat. One can only imagine her startled response to the nighttime demand at her door from her beau: "Please, dear. It's 10 pm, and I need you to take off your petticoat, give it to me, and don't ask me ANY questions about it!!" But apparently, this girl, whoever she was, complied - took off her petticoat, handed it over, and Revere used it to wrap up the ends of his oars.

I love that woman, whoever she is. You're part of this story, dear, even though your name has not been passed down through the ages.

So. In honor of this great moment in American history -here is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's celebrated poem "Paul Revere's Ride". And below that, I am posting an old essay I wrote about babysitting Cashel - which is relevant to this date in history. A couple years ago, I read the Cashel piece on a radio program, which was a pretty cool experience - and reading over the piece today makes me nostalgic for when Cashel was so little!!

But back to the poem: I know large swaths of it by heart ... I grew up hearing it. I'm an East Coast girl, most of my family is from Boston. So all of these places in the poem are places I had been to many times as a child, and not just a tourist ... but just because we lived near them. That piece of history felt very real to me. The poem is thrilling to me - because of the story it tells, of course, but also because of its rollicking perfect rhythm, you can feel the suspense, you can feel the urgency, the whole thing ends up sounding like the clatter of horses hooves galloping through the night. It's meant to be read out loud. Try it for yourself!! The last stanza is beyond compare. "For borne on the night-wind of the Past ..." I mean, come ON!! I love, too, how Longfellow includes the bit about the "muffled oar". These things pass on into folk tales at some point, a local mythology, and that's part of the reason why I love it.

April 18, 1775. A great day in American history. "The fate of a nation was riding that night." One of my personal favorite stories of the American revolution.

Paul Revere's Ride

Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
He said to his friend, "If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,--
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm."

Then he said "Good-night!" and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man-of-war;
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon like a prison bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.

Meanwhile, his friend through alley and street
Wanders and watches, with eager ears,
Till in the silence around him he hears
The muster of men at the barrack door,
The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet,
And the measured tread of the grenadiers,
Marching down to their boats on the shore.

Then he climbed the tower of the Old North Church,
By the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,
To the belfry chamber overhead,
And startled the pigeons from their perch
On the sombre rafters, that round him made
Masses and moving shapes of shade,--
By the trembling ladder, steep and tall,
To the highest window in the wall,
Where he paused to listen and look down
A moment on the roofs of the town
And the moonlight flowing over all.

Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead,
In their night encampment on the hill,
Wrapped in silence so deep and still
That he could hear, like a sentinel's tread,
The watchful night-wind, as it went
Creeping along from tent to tent,
And seeming to whisper, "All is well!"
A moment only he feels the spell
Of the place and the hour, and the secret dread
Of the lonely belfry and the dead;
For suddenly all his thoughts are bent
On a shadowy something far away,
Where the river widens to meet the bay,--
A line of black that bends and floats
On the rising tide like a bridge of boats.

Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,
Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride
On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere.
Now he patted his horse's side,
Now he gazed at the landscape far and near,
Then, impetuous, stamped the earth,
And turned and tightened his saddle girth;
But mostly he watched with eager search
The belfry tower of the Old North Church,
As it rose above the graves on the hill,
Lonely and spectral and sombre and still.
And lo! as he looks, on the belfry's height
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight
A second lamp in the belfry burns.

A hurry of hoofs in a village street,
A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,
And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark
Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet;
That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.
He has left the village and mounted the steep,
And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep,
Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides;
And under the alders that skirt its edge,
Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge,
Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides.

It was twelve by the village clock
When he crossed the bridge into Medford town.
He heard the crowing of the cock,
And the barking of the farmer's dog,
And felt the damp of the river fog,
That rises after the sun goes down.

It was one by the village clock,
When he galloped into Lexington.
He saw the gilded weathercock
Swim in the moonlight as he passed,
And the meeting-house windows, black and bare,
Gaze at him with a spectral glare,
As if they already stood aghast
At the bloody work they would look upon.

It was two by the village clock,
When he came to the bridge in Concord town.
He heard the bleating of the flock,
And the twitter of birds among the trees,
And felt the breath of the morning breeze
Blowing over the meadow brown.
And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket ball.

You know the rest. In the books you have read
How the British Regulars fired and fled,---
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
From behind each fence and farmyard wall,
Chasing the redcoats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load.

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,---
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo for evermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

Paul Revere himself wrote of that time (it's such a cliffhanger, with people threatening to "blow his brains out" every other second):

In the Fall of 1774 and Winter of 1775 I was one of upwards of thirty, cheifly mechanics, who formed our selves in to a Committee for the purpose of watching the Movements of the British Soldiers, and gaining every intelegence of the movements of the Tories.

We held our meetings at the Green-Dragon Tavern. We were so carefull that our meetings should be kept Secret; that every time we met, every person swore upon the Bible, that they would not discover any of our transactions, But to Messrs. HANCOCK, ADAMS, Doctors WARREN, CHURCH, and one or two more.

About November, when things began to grow Serious, a Gentleman who had Conections with the Tory party, but was a Whig at heart, acquainted me, that our meetings were discovered, and mentioned the identical words that were spoken among us the Night before. . . . We removed to another place, which we thought was more secure: but here we found that all our transactions were communicated to Governor Gage. (This came to me through the then Secretary Flucker; He told it to the Gentleman mentioned above). It was then a common opinion, that there was a Traytor in the provincial Congress, and that Gage was posessed of all their Secrets. (Church was a member of that Congress for Boston.) In the Winter, towards the Spring, we frequently took Turns, two and two, to Watch the Soldiers, By patroling the Streets all night. The Saturday Night preceding the 19th of April, about 12 oClock at Night, the Boats belonging to the Transports were all launched, and carried under the Sterns of the Men of War. (They had been previously hauld up and repaired). We likewise found that the Grenadiers and light Infantry were all taken off duty.

From these movements, we expected something serious was [to] be transacted. On Tuesday evening, the 18th, it was observed, that a number of Soldiers were marching towards the bottom of the Common. About 10 o'Clock, Dr. Warren Sent in great haste for me, and beged that I would imediately Set off for Lexington, where Messrs. Hancock and Adams were, and acquaint them of the Movement, and that it was thought they were the objets. When I got to Dr. Warren's house, I found he had sent an express by land to Lexington—a Mr. Wm. Daws. The Sunday before, by desire of Dr. Warren, I had been to Lexington, to Mess. Hancock and Adams, who were at the Rev. Mr. Clark's. I returned at Night thro Charlestown; there I agreed with a Col. Conant, and some other Gentlemen, that if the British went out by Water, we would shew two Lanthorns in the North Church Steeple; and if by Land, one, as a Signal; for we were aprehensive it would be dificult to Cross the Charles River, or git over Boston neck. I left Dr. Warrens, called upon a friend, and desired him to make the Signals. I then went Home, took my Boots and Surtout, and went to the North part of the Town, Where I had kept a Boat; two friends rowed me across Charles River, a little to the eastward where the Somerset Man of War lay. It was then young flood, the Ship was winding, and the moon was Rising. They landed me on Charlestown side. When I got into Town, I met Col. Conant, and several others; they said they had seen our signals. I told them what was Acting, and went to git me a Horse; I got a Horse of Deacon Larkin. While the Horse was preparing, Richard Devens, Esq. who was one of the Committee of Safty, came to me, and told me, that he came down the Road from Lexington, after Sundown, that evening; that He met ten British Officers, all well mounted, and armed, going up the Road.

I set off upon a very good Horse; it was then about 11 o'Clock, and very pleasant. After I had passed Charlestown Neck, and got nearly opposite where Mark was hung in chains, I saw two men on Horse back, under a Tree. When I got near them, I discovered they were British officer. One tryed to git a head of Me, and the other to take me. I turned my Horse very quick, and Galloped towards Charlestown neck, and then pushed for the Medford Road. The one who chased me, endeavoring to Cut me off, got into a Clay pond, near where the new Tavern is now built. I got clear of him, and went thro Medford, over the Bridge, and up to Menotomy. In Medford, I awaked the Captain of the Minute men; and after that, I alarmed almost every House, till I got to Lexington. I found Messrs. Hancock and Adams at the Rev. Mr. Clark's; I told them my errand, and inquired for Mr. Daws; they said he had not been there; I related the story of the two officers, and supposed that He must have been stopped, as he ought to have been there before me. After I had been there about half an Hour, Mr. Daws came; we refreshid our selves, and set off for Concord, to secure the Stores, &c. there. We were overtaken by a young Docter Prescot, whom we found to be a high Son of Liberty. I told them of the ten officers that Mr. Devens mett, and that it was probable we might be stoped before we got to Concord; for I supposed that after Night, they divided them selves, and that two of them had fixed themselves in such passages as were most likely to stop any intelegence going to Concord. I likewise mentioned, that we had better allarm all the Inhabitents till we got to Concord; the young Doctor much approved of it, and said, he would stop with either of us, for the people between that and Concord knew him, and would give the more credit to what we said. We had got nearly half way. Mr Daws and the Doctor stoped to allarm the people of a House: I was about one hundred Rod a head, when I saw two men, in nearly the same situation as those officer were, near Charlestown. I called for the Doctor and Daws to come up;—in an Instant I was surrounded by four;—they had placed themselves in a Straight Road, that inclined each way; they had taken down a pair of Barrs on the North side of the Road, and two of them were under a tree in the pasture. The Docter being foremost, he came up; and we tryed to git past them; but they being armed with pistols and swords, they forced us in to the pasture;—the Docter jumped his Horse over a low Stone wall, and got to Concord. I observed a Wood at a Small distance, and made for that. When I got there, out Started Six officers, on Horse back, and orderd me to dismount;—one of them, who appeared to have the command, examined me, where I came from, and what my Name Was? I told him. He asked me if I was an express? I answered in the afirmative. He demanded what time I left Boston? I told him; and aded, that their troops had catched aground in passing the River, and that There would be five hundred Americans there in a short time, for I had alarmed the Country all the way up. He imediately rode towards those who stoppd us, when all five of them came down upon a full gallop; one of them, whom I afterwards found to be Major Mitchel, of the 5th Regiment, Clapped his pistol to my head, called me by name, and told me he was going to ask me some questions, and if I did not give him true answers, he would blow my brains out. He then asked me similar questions to those above. He then orderd me to mount my Horse, after searching me for arms. He then orderd them to advance, and to lead me in front. When we got to the Road, they turned down towards Lexington. When we had got about one Mile, the Major Rode up to the officer that was leading me, and told him to give me to the Sergeant. As soon as he took me, the Major orderd him, if I attempted to run, or any body insulted them, to blow my brains out. We rode till we got near Lexington Meeting-house, when the Militia fired a Voley of Guns, which appeared to alarm them very much. The Major inquired of me how far it was to Cambridge, and if there were any other Road? After some consultation, the Major Rode up to the Sargent, and asked if his Horse was tired? He answered him, he was--(He was a Sargent of Grenadiers, and had a small Horse)—then, said He, take that man's Horse. I dismounted, and the Sargent mounted my Horse, when they all rode towards Lexington Meeting-House. I went across the Burying-ground, and some pastures, and came to the Revd. Mr. Clark's House, where I found Messrs. Hancok and Adams. I told them of my treatment, and they concluded to go from that House to wards Woburn. I went with them, and a Mr. Lowell, who was a Clerk to Mr. Hancock. When we got to the House where they intended to stop, Mr. Lowell and my self returned to Mr. Clark's, to find what was going on. When we got there, an elderly man came in; he said he had just come from the Tavern, that a Man had come from Boston, who said there were no British troops coming. Mr. Lowell and my self went towards the Tavern, when we met a Man on a full gallop, who told us the Troops were coming up the Rocks. We afterwards met another, who said they were close by. Mr. Lowell asked me to go to the Tavern with him, to git a Trunk of papers belonging to Mr. Hancock. We went up Chamber; and while we were giting the Trunk, we saw the British very near, upon a full March. We hurried to wards Mr. Clark's House. In our way, we passed through the Militia. There were about 50. When we had got about 100 Yards from the meeting-House the British Troops appeard on both Sides of the Meeting-House. In their Front was an Officer on Horse back. They made a Short Halt; when I saw, and heard, a Gun fired, which appeared to be a Pistol. Then I could distinguish two Guns, and then a Continual roar of Musquetry; When we made off with the Trunk.

As I have mentioned Dr. Church, perhaps it might not be disagreeable to mention some Matters of my own knowledge, respecting Him. He appeared to be a high son of Liberty. He frequented all the places where they met, Was incouraged by all the leaders of the Sons of Liberty, and it appeared he was respected by them, though I knew that Dr. Warren had not the greatest affection for him. He was esteemed a very capable writer, especially in verese; and as the Whig party needed every Strenght, they feared, as well as courted Him. Though it was known, that some of the Liberty Songs, which We composed, were parodized by him, in favor of the British, yet none dare charge him with it. I was a constant and critical observer of him, and I must say, that I never thought Him a man of Principle; and I doubted much in my own mind, wether He was a real Whig. I knew that He kept company with a Capt. Price, a half-pay British officer, and that He frequently dined with him, and Robinson, one of the Commissioners. I know that one of his intimate aquaintances asked him why he was so often with Robinson and Price? His answer was, that He kept Company with them on purpose to find out their plans. The day after the Battle of Lexington, I met him in Cambridge, when He shew me some blood on his stocking, which he said spirted on him from a Man who was killed near him, as he was urging the Militia on. I well remember, that I argued with my self, if a Man will risque his life in a Cause, he must be a Friend to that cause; and I never suspected him after, till He was charged with being a Traytor.

The full letter can be read here.

ONE IF BY LAND: An afternoon with Cashel
We colored for a while. As we waited for the pizza to arrive. Cashel commanded me to draw a house. So I did. Cashel was basically the architect and the interior designer. Telling me what he wanted to see.

"Put a playroom in the attic."

"But Auntie Sheila -- where are the stairs??"

I drew the bathroom, and the mere sight of the toilet caused Cashel to dissolve into mirth. Yes. Toilets are hilarious.

I drew a spiral staircase which blew Cashel away. "That's so COOL." Then I drew the living room. I said, "I think there needs to be a picture on the wall. Or a portrait. Whose picture should be on the wall, you think?"

Cashel said bluntly, "Einstein."

Okay, then. Einstein. So I drew this little cartoon of Einstein, with the crazy hair coming up, and Cashel said seriously, with all of his knowledge, "That really looks like Einstein."

We ate our pizza together, talking about stuff. Star Wars, Ben Franklin. Cashel informed me, "Ben Franklin discovered lightning."

Cashel is a wealth of information. Randomly, he told my parents that Vincent Van Gogh never sold a painting while he was alive, but that after he died, he became famous.

I read him a story. It was from the book of "Disney stories" which I had given him for his birthday. He loves it. He pulled it out of the bookshelf, and I said, "Oh! I gave that to you!" Cashel said, a little bit annoyed, "I know that."

He had me read the story of the little mouse who hung out with Ben Franklin, and basically (in the world of Disney) was the inspiration for all of Ben Franklin's famous moments. Cashel would shoot questions at me. "Why is Ben Franklin's hair white?" "Well ... he's old now. But also, in those days, men wore powdered wigs." Cashel's little serious face, listening, sponging this all up. Probably the next day he informed his friends that men in the olden days wore powdered wigs. He's that kind of listener, that kind of learner.

Then he put on his Obi Wan Kenobi costume which Grandma Peggy made him for Christmas. A long hooded brown cloak ... and he hooked his light saber into his waist, and galloped off down the hall. A mini Jedi knight.

I had him pick out three stories to read before bedtime. He sat beside me, curled up into me, looking at the pictures as I read to him. The last one we read was Longfellow's poem "Paul Revere's Ride". This poem was a favorite of ours, when we were kids. My dad would read it to us, and even now, when I read the words, I hear them in my father's voice. A magical poem. The way my dad read it to us (along with Longfellow's help) made us SEE it. The clock tower, the moon, the darkness ... the sense of anticipation, of secrecy, of urgency. It was thrilling. So I love that this is being passed on to Cashel! I've never read the poem outloud before, so I had one of those strange moments of the space-time continuum bending, me stepping into my father's shoes, Cashel 5 years old beside me, feeling the ghost of my own 5 year old self listening.

I also remember how Brendan and I used to chime in gleefully: "ONE IF BY LAND, TWO IF BY SEA!" And Cashel did the same thing. I paused before that moment in the poem, glanced down at him, and he screamed out, "ONE IF BY LAND, TWO IF BY SEA!"

There was also a subtlety of understanding in Cashel. For example, I read this part:

And lo! as he looks, on the belfry's height
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight
A second lamp in the belfry burns.

And Cashel exclaimed, in a sort of "Uh-oh" tone, "They're comin' by sea!!" Now the words don't actually SAY that, but he remembered the "one if by land two if by sea" signal, and puts it all together. That's my boy!

I remembered the first lines from memory:

Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

Again, those are just words on the page. But to me, they are filled with the echoes of my father's voice.

Cashel and I, as we went through the poem, had to stop many times for discussions.

There was one illustration of all the minute-men, hiding behind the stone walls, with a troop of Redcoats marching along, walking straight into the ambush. Cashel pointed at it, and stated firmly, "That's the civil war."

"Nope. Nope. That is actually a picture from the American Revolutionary War."

Cashel pondered this. Taking it in. Then: "The minute-men were in the civil war." But less certain. Glancing up at me for explanation.

"Nope. The minute-men were soldiers in the American Revolution. Do you know why they called them that?"

"Why?"

"Cause they were farmers, and regular people ... but they could be ready to go into battle in a minute."

Again, a long silence. Cashel filed this away for safekeeping. He forgets nothing.

"So ... Auntie Sheila ... what is the difference between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War?"

Woah. Okay. This will be a test. How to describe all of that in 5-year-old language. I mean, frankly, Cashel is not like a five-year-old at all. But still. Everything must be boiled down into its simplest components.

"Well. America used to be a part of England, and the American Revolutionary War was when America decided that it wanted to be free ... and Americans basically told the Brits to go home." Uh-oh. Brits? This is an inflammatory term. I corrected myself. "America told Great Britain that it wanted to be its own country. And the Civil War ... " Hmmm. How to begin ... what to say ... I know it was about more than slavery, but I decided to only focus on that one aspect. Economic theory and regional cultural differences would be too abstract. "In those days, Cashel, black people were slaves. And it was very very wrong. Can you understand that?"

He nodded. His little serious face.

"And the people in the South wanted to keep their slaves, and the people in the North said to the people in the South that they had to give up their slaves. And they ended up going to war. And eventually all the slaves were free."

Cashel accepted this explanation silently. Then he pointed back to the Paul Revere poem. "Read." he commanded.

Please do not disturb.

I am moved by this story.

The best in that thing called "community".

Today in history: April 17, 1897

American playwright Thornton Wilder was born.

A snarky funny anecdote about Wilder from Tennessee Williams's Memoirs:

Streetcar opened in New Haven in early November of 1947, and nobody seemed to know what the notices were or to be greatly concerned. After the New Haven opening night we were invited to the quarters of Mr. Thornton Wilder, who was in residence there. It was like having a papal audience. We all sat about this academic gentleman while he put the play down as if delivering a papal bull. He said that it was based upon a fatally mistaken premise. No female who had ever been a lady (he was referring to Stella) could possibly marry a vulgarian such as Stanley.

We sat there and listened to him politely. I thought, privately, This character has never had a good lay.

This one below is one of my favorite anecdotes of all time. It comes from the book The Actor's Chekhov, a compilation of interviews with actors who worked with famous director Nikos Psacharopoulos, artistic director of the Williamsburg Theatre Festival:

Interview with PETER HUNT:

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

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

If you have ever seen Our Town (and if you're an American, and you haven't, WTF?), and if that scene between George and Emily DOESN'T work in the production that you see, you can bet it is because they are trying to play "the love", rather than the objective, which is "can you help me with my homework?" It's a brilliant anecdote on so many levels. Love Nikos, a fiery temperamental opinionated man, realizing how wrong he was, and flinging open the door to the rehearsal room shouting, "EVERYTHING WE WORKED ON IS OFF."

My tribute piece to Paul Newman includes an analysis of one of his moments as The Stage Manager in Our Town, and how he said a certain line in a way I had never heard it before. A way that made beautiful horrible sense, and made me see that moment in a new light. A true tribute to the power of that American classic.

And finally. This:

What is that, you may ask? A page from Thornton Wilder's copy of Finnegans Wake, a book that obsessed Wilder for decades.

Thornton Wilder said:

"I am not interested in ... such subjects as the adulteries of dentists. I am interested in those things that repeat and repeat and repeat in the lives of the millions."

Happy birthday, sir.

Some actors you admire

Some actors you viscerally dislike

Some actors you can take or leave

Some actors you scorn, due to their lack of: talent/sensitivity/imagination

And some you just love.

Whatever they do, whereever they go, you love their mistakes, their embarrassments, their successes. You're in it for the long haul. I could give seminars on how to be a proper fan, how to keep the love alive even when their star has fallen a bit, and their movies become ridiculous, tedious, terrible.

This feeling goes beyond admiration. It is not intellectual. It's from the heart.

It can't be explained rationally.

All of this is to say, I saw some photos from an upcoming film, and felt a burst of excitement.

And also love. Like: Yay, look at him go. I love you, dude! No matter what you do, where you go, I'll be there. He always - ALWAYS - gives me SOMEthing good - (well, maybe not always - there are a couple of films there ... but MOST of the time - and you can't say that about a lot of actors.)

But like I said: the feelings I have for this actor transcend other concerns, which come into play when I "admire" other actors, as opposed to flat-out love them (i.e. Is the movie about something that interests me? Have I seen this actor do this type of role before? Who is the director?)

With this particular actor, I don't give a crap.

I love the guy. Whatever he does, I'll be there. He's led me down some pretty awful pathways, it's true, but that's the thing about being a fan. That's the thing about love. When you're in, you're in.

Upcoming travels.

Flights booked. Arrangements (kind of) made. I will barely be home for an entire month.

First:

Then:

These trips are only because I can't figure out a way to get to Iran at this point in time in order to personally bust Jafar Panahi out of the clink, but I am working on it.

Well, that's not the ONLY reason I am traveling. Almost every single person I know is either in a show, or producing a show, or directing a show - and they all seem to be happening in the next month, so what the hell, I'm going to them all.

The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Langston Hughes

Next book on my poetry shelf:

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O'Clair

Hughes, not just in his life, but in his work and the style of it, is one of the most American of poets. There were other poets of the Harlem Renaissance, and the amazing thing about that crowd of people is how diverse they were. They were part of a movement, yes, but, like any poets in any movement, they each went at it in their own way with their own concerns. There were other black poets who looked to Europe for their poetic forms, to the old masters, or who were really part of the modernist tradition, who wrapped themselves in the existing culture (by that I mean FORM, their poems sound like modernist poems), and yet wrote the experience of black America at that time. Langston Hughes was not one of those poets, and that is what makes him stand apart. He looked to black music at that time, the blues, jazz, Negro spirituals - homegrown American forms - instead of trying to write in "white" forms, and his poems reflect that. There were others like him. Melvin Tolson - although you would never mistake a Tolson poem for a Hughes poem. Tolson wrote long rollicking story-poems, full of characters and voices - he's more like Carl Sandburg (although Hughes counted Sandburg as a huge influence) - Hughes' poems strike me as simpler. More to the point.

Michael Schmidt in Lives of the Poets writes:

During the Harlem Renaissance, which centered on the vital musical culture, the novelists wrote some powerful, though conventional novels that included dialogue, but the narrative was generally in a standard form. What Langston Hughes set out to do was to use the cadences, the natural metaphors and dialect elements as the primary material for his verse and for his famous Jesse B. Semple letters. "Speak that I may see thee," said Ben Jonson. In Hughes's work a whole community is made visible.

Hughes wrote, about his influences:

The Blues always impressed me as being very sad, sadder even than the Spirituals, because their sadness is not softened with tears, but hardened with laughter ... of a sadness where there is no god to appeal to.

It may seem like a done deal now, that Hughes would rise to the top of that group of poets, and be anthologized still today, but it was not at all clear at the time. He got a lot of flak, mainly from the rising black middle class at that time, who wanted nothing to do with black forms, black influences - they thought it lacked dignity. One middle-class black newspaper referred to Hughes as a "sewer dweller". Those were tough times. I can't say I blame anyone involved. It's easy to sit in the present day and judge those for not having the foresight to recognize that it ALL is America ("I, too, am America", said Hughes) - but it certainly wasn't clear on the ground. Other black poets of the same generation criticized Hughes for his rhythms, his "black" sounding poems. These people wanted to advance in life. They thought that Hughes was a step backward. It was white writers who supported Hughes, who championed him. This was also a strike against him in certain black quarters, especially later in the century, the 50s and 60s, as "black power" was rising. He had the whole "house Negro" insult thrown at him, which is ridiculous, how insulting, but it happens all the time. He couldn't win, if you look at it one way - and yet, who's the last man standing?? He wasn't writing for an insulated audience - that's another thing about Hughes. Of course he knew blacks would be reading him, but he wrote for everyone. He was quite conscious about this.

Hughes kept doing what he wanted to do, and in his way, made the space larger. Meaning: his work said: "This is poetry too. This language can be included in poetry." It was a time of great upheaval - in the world, yes, politically and socially - but poetry too was going through some major changes. Hughes was a huge part of that. Those who come forward and say, "Let's change it up a bit" are rarely (if ever) congratulated and embraced immediately. People fear change. People resist change.

A very well-read man, he moved to New York in 1921 to attend Columbia. He went there for a year, then moved to Paris in 1924. He returned a couple of years later, and by that point, he was starting to get published. He wrote all kinds of things - novels, political writing - and in 1926 he published an essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain", which became "a manifesto for the Harlem Renaissance" (according to Norton). In it, he called for black artists to not deny their race. That they could create a literature out of their own home-grown forms. This was a message not immediately embraced, at least not by many, but it was a hugely influential essay, and an important document in the history of 20th century American cultural life.

Langston Hughes was the first black poet to make his living from poetry. He didn't need to have other jobs. He didn't have to hustle. What an amazing advancement. It was not easy for him. He experienced racism and prejudice of the most vicious kind. As a child, he witnessed lynchings (but that was par for the course at the time - many poets, white and black, wrote stories of what they saw, as children - and it's harrowing stuff).

His reputation has just grown. He influenced a generation of poets. The roots of his poetry was in black American music, not white European literature - and I would say, knowing that about him, you really can't even measure his influence. He is everywhere. He is definitive.

Michael Schmidt again:

Time has moved on, and Hughes's poems of protest, while they are still resonant, belong, as much protest poetry does, primarily to their moment in history. What makes them durable is their voice.

This is one of his later poems, late 40s, early 50s, and I really love it:

THEME FOR ENGLISH B

The instructor said,

Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you---
Then, it will be true.

I wonder if it's that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:

It's not easy to know what is true for you or me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I'm what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
hear you, hear me---we two---you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York too.) Me---who?
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records---Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn't make me NOT like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white---
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That's American.
Sometimes perhaps you don't want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that's true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me---
although you're older---and white---
and somewhat more free.

This is my page for English B.

"And never mind his crimes. I forgive him."

Johnny Depp reads a letter written to him by Hunter S. Thompson. Amazing. Make sure you click through to watch Parts 2 and 3. I especially liked their exchanges about Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (the movie), and Depp sending him the Polaroids of the wardrobe and hair choices, and Thompson's response to that.

I loved South Dakota

Although you would never know it from this picture.

Would it kill you to smile? Yes, it would have. It was cold, pouring rain (and had been so for days), and I had been camping in the Badlands for 3 days at this point, while in the process of breaking up with my boyfriend (who took the picture). I was also having a mild nervous breakdown, but what else is new.

But still. I loved South Dakota.

The Top of the Strand: "manage[s] to capture simultaneously an intimacy and an openness that is unusual in Manhattan"

A rooftop bar in midtown Manhattan designed by Lydia Marks, my cousin Liam's wife, and long-time O'Malley family member, mother of the amazing Cormac, is profiled in the Sunday Style's section of the NY Times. She's a brilliant set decorator and production designer (her stats here), and she has also been known, on occasion, to work magic with her cousin's New York apartments. Congrats, Lydia!

The house on the hill

Every morning, out on the Island, I would wake up at around 5 a.m., my typical morning ritual. It was still dark out. Freezing. My kitchen window faced north. There was a deep ravine in between my house and the next house, which sat isolated on its own little hill. At dusk, with the sunset light, I could see the lawn up there literally thronging with deer, cut-out in black-paper silhouette. The deer problem is pretty bad out there, but that sure was a beautiful sight. Every time I looked at the house, it seemed different. Perhaps because of its isolation - no trees around it, no other houses, on a little hill - it reflected its surroundings. On a windy day, it seemed valiant and strong. At sunset, it seemed like a little cottage from a fairy-tale. And before the sun rose, it loomed like a magical ship in the night. Quiet and shrouded in shadows. I miss seeing that house. I looked at it probably 150 times each day, just to see how it was doing. What's its mood now? How's it hanging? How's it holding up?

I think about it from time to time. It's still out there on that windy island!

Here it is at 5, 5:30 a.m. one freezing wintry dawn.

At last: Metropolis in my metropolis

I am beyond excited about this.

Is it May yet?

"because no voice can hold out over the brutalities of life without breaking"

Awesome: Djuna Barnes's profile of James Joyce for Vanity Fair in 1922. It's a PDF file. Ulysses was published in February, 1922, and was already running into trouble with censorship. It would be over 10 years before the United States (Judge Woolsey presiding) deemed the book to be "not obscene" and would allow Ulysses to come to America. But Barnes's profile is before that long long fight, although the harbingers of it were already present. This is fascinating stuff. It's a "portrait of the artist" just on the cusp of the typhoon he had unleashed. It is in this interview that he says one of my favorite quotes from him about Ulysses, and it's a quote that many people seem to have a problem with, or they assume he is being disingenuous with it:

The pity is, the public will demand and find a moral in my book - or worse they may take it some more serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.

It's my view that he is exaggerating to make a point. He is not lying. He is not being mock-naive. He is on the level. It is my view that while Ulysses obviously has some serious moments and takes on serious themes (infidelity, Irish history, Shakespeare, sex, life itself) - it is not at all a "serious" book. It has no ulterior motives. It does not want to SCHOOL you. It really does have no moral. It is not like any other book. Joyce wrote it because he was obsessed by it, and it was the only book he could write at that particular time. He said that again and again. It took him 7 years to write it. There were many moments during that time when he felt like he was drowning, being pulled down by his own book. He said:

The character of Ulysses always fascinated me ever since boyhood. I started writing it as a short story for Dubliners fifteen years ago but gave it up. For seven years I have been working at this book-- blast it!

So I believe what he says to Barnes. I knew of that quote when I read Ulysses for the first time and it (along with my Dad) helped keep me on track. It took the edge off of this book with the giant reputation. Yes, it has a giant reputation. So does Hamlet. But when you sit down to actually read the thing, you start to feel the nuts and bolts of it, how it works, and instead of being serious and solemn and "important", it feels, actually, rather ridiculous. In a good way. The whole book is ridiculous. Looking for "what it means" certainly diminishes the book. There is no meaning. If you tell the plot: a young Irishman and a middle-aged cuckolded Jew wander the streets of Dublin for 800 pages, and only meet near the end, and they get drunk and go to a brothel, and then walk home, taking time to stop and urinate in the garden ... Oh, and it all takes place on one day ... it sounds like nothing. And it IS nothing. The book is not about anything: its story, its narrative, its "events". It's about the language. And through the sometimes difficult language (but remember, Joyce said: "with me, the thought is always simple" - and this is 100% true. He is not an abstract man in the SLIGHTEST. He's Irish. Abstraction is not one of their strong suits), you get the characters, you get the setting, you get the "problems" each one has ... but if you see the language as a "barrier" to the "meaning", you are going to have a problem. As Samuel Beckett wrote about Finnegans Wake (and it applies to Ulysses as well):

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

Joyce was not concerned with story. He did not create characters. He wrote the people he knew. His protagonist is his alter ego (Stephen Dedalus), and he only wrote books that took place in Ireland. He didn't INVENT anything. He got the "plot" of Ulysses from the "plot" of Homer's epic. His concerns were elsewhere. He wanted to attempt to "describe" (not explain, but describe) what it felt like to live. All the sensations, feelings, urges (hunger, bodily functions, sex) - palpitating and pulsing through a human being, at all times, at strange times. You walk down the street on a bright morning and suddenly, out of nowhere, you are dying to fuck someone. The urge passes (unless you have no impulse control), and then you go into a bookstore to browse, and then suddenly, your stomach growls, and you realize, "Huh. Time for a snack." This is prosaic stuff, people, but nobody had attempted to describe life at this level. Because why would they want to, some critics would ask. That's a valid point. But it's somewhat irrelevant. JOYCE wanted to. And as a writer, he only did what he wanted to do. He wished, often, that he could write other types of books - and his wife, looking at one of the pages of Finnegans Wake lying on his desk, asked him, "Why can't you write books that people would want to read?" Of course, they did want to read them, but her point is also valid. Accessibility is not what Joyce was ever about. Not because he was obnoxious (although he could be that as well, from time to time), and wanted to be "cleverer than you" - but because he only wrote what he felt like writing. And Ulysses was what he felt like writing at the time. Then, 17 years later, came his next book, Finnegans Wake, nothing from him at all in the in-between years. This was a man who followed his own star. It was a lonely existence, certainly, although he found his lifelong companion, and always had his kids around him - but he wasn't the type of writer who hung out with other writers, reveling in competition and comparing notes. He was solitary.

I loved his comment on Oscar Wilde:

[Oscar Wilde] studied the Restoration through a microscope in the morning and repeated it through a telescope in the evening.

Recently we had a conversation here about whether or not Joyce had any opinions on Oscar Wilde. As so often happens, the second I start wondering about things, suddenly answers start coming - answers that were there all along, I just wasn't looking for them. Like learning a new word and suddenly you start hearing it everywhere.

Djuna Barnes is, of course, a marvelous writer herself, and the piece is not to be missed.

The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Hart Crane

Next book on my poetry shelf:

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O'Clair

Chief Justice Evans Hughes said of Lindbergh's flight over the Atlantic: "We measure heroes as we do ships, by their displacement. Colonel Lindbergh has displaced everything." The same could be said for poets. There are good poets. There are master poets. And then there are the ones who cause displacement. Walt Whitman caused displacement. T.S. Eliot caused displacement. Yeats did. And so, too, did Hart Crane, he of the very short life, but his influence can't be measured. It actually seems to just grow in intensity as the years pass. He was the inspiring force for a whole new generation of writers, who struggled to get out from under his shadow (as Crane openly struggled to get out of Eliot's shadow). Tennessee Williams was honest about his feeling of debt to Crane. He used Crane quotations as epigraphs in many of his plays, and dedicated many of them to him. He kept a picture of Hart Crane over his writing desk for decades. They did not know one another. Hart Crane killed himself in 1932. Or, at least, it is believed he killed himself, the events are still somewhat mysterious.

He realized the weight under which he worked, the legacies of Whitman and Eliot, he was a truly American poet, born and raised. Much of his work attempts to put America into words. Similar to e.e. cummings, and the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, but he was aiming at a larger high-flung universal vision, putting him in line with Whitman, a daunting prospect. He loved Eliot, but he felt the view was too pessimistic. However, he wasn't one of those arrogant younguns, who try to show the old folks how to do things, without having proper respect. He realized the impact of Eliot's work, but had serious philosophical disagreements with the outlook. He didn't "take on" Eliot lightly. He struggled. He studied Eliot exhaustively. His letters show that he was absolutely obsessed with T.S. Eliot. He wasn't looking for flaws, he was looking for a space within Eliot's vast landscape where he could make his own mark. That's what happens with those greats. Sometimes without even trying, sometimes just only to please themselves, they write a work that so dominates the landscape that nobody can get around it or through it. There were certainly other playwrights and poets in Shakespeare's day. You have to literally move Shakespeare bodily out of the damn way to get to them. Same with Eliot. Same with Joyce. Irish writers today still have to either pit themselves AGAINST Joyce, or try to work within his tradition. Crane, in letter after letter, shows how he was working WITH Eliot, all by himself, looking for a "way in".

He wrote to fellow poet Allen Tate on June 12, 1922:

I have been facing [Eliot] for four years, - and while I haven't discovered a weak spot yet in his armour, - I flatter myself a little lately that I have discovered a safe tangent to strike which, if I can possibly explain the position, - goes through him toward a different goal. You see it is such a fearful temptation to imitate him that at times I have been almost distracted ... In his own realm Eliot presents us with an absolute impasse, yet oddly enough, he can be utilized to lead us to, intelligently point to, other positions and 'pastures new'. Having absorbed him enough we can trust ourselves as never before, in the air or on the sea. I, for instance, would like to leave a few of his 'negations' behind me, risk the realm of the obvious more, in quest of new sensations, humeurs.

What is so interesting to me about this is that you hear poets after Crane talking about him in much the same way. Tennessee Williams blatantly stole from him, always making sure to give him a nod, but the influence was so great he couldn't separate himself. It was an homage.

In another letter to Tate, a couple months later, Crane writes:

I take Eliot as a point of departure toward an almost complete reverse of direction. His pessimism is amply justified, in his own case. But I would apply as much of his erudition and technique as I can absorb and assemble toward a more positive, or (if I must put it so in a sceptical age) ecstatic goal. I should not think of this if a kind of rhythm and ecstacy were not (at odd moments, and rare!) a very real thing to me. I feel that Eliot ignores certain spiritual events and possibilities as real and powerful now as, say in the time of Blake ... After this perfection of death - nothing is possible in motion but a resurrection of some kind.

Fascinating. Awesome.

Crane had a very unhappy childhood. Harrowing, actually. His mother had a nervous breakdown in 1908 (Crane was 9 years old), and his parents then divorced. Crane was torn between his parents. He was drawn to his mother, but she suffocated him with love. He finally severed all ties. He dropped out of high school and moved to New York City. He was overwhelmed by technology (much of his poetry has to do with the modern world and new technology) - and had an apocalyptic outlook, very typical of that time. It seemed like the end times. He was probably gay, although he had troubled romances with women as well. His important love affairs were all with men, one in particular (a sailor, Emil Opffer) - who was the inspiration for "Voyages", a series of love poems, called by the Norton Anthology "among the most significant love poems of the twentieth century". A troubled guy. Obsessed with writing. As he mentioned in the letter to Tate, Blake was a big deal to him. He felt that modern poets often ignored the sublime (and, it must be said, rightly so - what with the cataclysm of WWI) - but he was drawn to it. He was into visions, transcendence, dreams - his view of America somehow fit into that dreamscape, and he put himself the challenge of putting it into verse.

All of this is to say that I love Hart Crane. He is what I call one of the poets "of my heart". He's in there. I love his poem about Herman Melville. I love his poem about Charlie Chaplin (a man he revered). (Go check out Ted's post with a couple of Hart Crane poems, including "Chaplinesque"). Crane said about Chaplin: "Chaplin may be a sentimentalist, after all, but he carries the theme with such power and universal portent that sentimentality is made to transcend itself." This may be a case of seeing in your idol the very things you most want to have in yourself - but here, Crane was right on the money. There is a "sentimentality" to Crane's work, but its goal is to transcend, and in poem after poem, he does that.

Crane had no formal education. He was self-taught. His poems are not academic, although quite rigorous. He didn't have a bogus "let me give voice to the common man" thing that so many poets have - he was sincere, in all things. That's probably why Tennessee Williams loved him so much. He was unafraid of sentiment. He turned it into lyricism. There is an elegiac quality to most of it, although I'm not sure if it just seems that way to me because of Crane's early death, throwing himself off a ship into the Caribbean, and drowning. His poems feel, to me, like they are whispered down from a great height of space and time. He can see things, and see them whole. He determined that he would climb high enough to be able to see far, far into the past, the future, other dimensions.

What the hell, I'll post his most famous poem. It was written as an introduction, actually, to his long poem "The Bridge" - and it's called "To Brooklyn Bridge". It is what he is most known for today. It certainly calls to mind Whitman's brilliant emotional "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry", perhaps it's a response to it. Whitman's generation crossed the river by boat. Crane's generation crossed by bridge. Progress. American progress. A big big deal. The Brooklyn Bridge was a big deal. Crane had feelings about that. Conflicts. Perhaps, too, it is a response to London Bridge that shows up in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste land". A response to the rot of Europe, perhaps? Bridges are such symbols. But notice how he doesn't get stuck on the details. He flings himself up into the ether in order to write about these things. Transcendence is what he is after. Transformation.

A poet I adore. We know him by all that he displaced.

To Brooklyn Bridge

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty—

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
—Till elevators drop us from our day . . .

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;

And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,—
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn . . .
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon . . . Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,—

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path—condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .

O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

Belfast: Directions from Carrie

"Take a right when you see the chicks with the guns."

What on earth could she be talking about?

Oh.

Punch-Drunk Love in Japanese

I am in love with this poster. If you have seen the movie, you will understand the design elements, and I think it's perfect. The haunting bleeding melting colors that break up the "acts" of Punch-Drunk Love were created by Jeremy Blake, a successful artist, whose notorious recent suicide (a double-suicide apparently - he and his girlfriend both died) is a very strange story - he was being harassed by Scientologists, apparently? I haven't been following up with that story, but it sure was a strange one. More details here.

Thanks to The Auteur's Notebook for this image, and also other images in the same series.

It's a film I am not just fond of, but love intensely, so I was so interested to see other versions of the poster, that seemed to capture the emotionality and subjective dream-space that the film lives in.

"He begs to be excused accordingly."

Last night, I was talking with a friend about boundaries. How to set them, how to maintain them. If you feel taken advantage of (your time or your attention) often the response is an increasing sense of being TRAPPED - as opposed to a natural and intuitive re-setting of boundaries. It's hard to say "No" to someone. It's hard to realize, "I have reached my limit. Got no more to give at this present time. Need to re-boot. Handle your own damn problems." What can also be difficult is to say "No" to some request (for time, a listening ear) without letting that feeling of being TRAPPED enter into your tone, and making the whole thing a negative brou-haha. We were sharing stories about this from our lives, talking, listening, helping each other.

So I was so pleased, so happy, this morning to see this particular piece by Richard Oram on "The Decline Postcard." And here is a piece on "the best decline letter of all time". It really is awesome. I would love to see the Decline Postcard have a Renaissance. I suppose it's similar to automated email responses, like: "I'm out of the office. I'll get back to you at my earliest convenience." Or screening your calls. But the Decline Postcard has something else going on with it: It's an elegant and yet very firm way of saying, "You know what? NO." I love the Decline Postcards that are openly cranky, due to the fact that the writer has been bombarded with requests the entire time he has been successful. He has experienced all of the requests, and already knows, beforehand, what he will and will not do. And he is already annoyed. Not because he is naturally cranky (although sometimes he was that too), but because he has experienced all of these things time without number, and he feels harassed by them.

A comparison could be made with my Comment Policy here (and most other Comment Policy pages I've seen on personal sites - at least the ones that have a readership outside of close personal friends): Every single item on that list is something I have had to contend with repeatedly since I started the blog (or: since I switched from a political theme to an arts theme in 2004.) These were not just drive-by annoyances from random commenters: these were regular power-struggles that went on between me and my regular readers at the time, many of whom came from links I received from big political blogs and then stuck around. As I switched the focus, I already knew what the comments would be for many of my posts (I would write about Oscar night, and talk about J. Lo's dress and etc., and the majority of comments would be sneers about Hollywood liberals and how stupid and vain all actors are - and I realized - wow, I'm hanging out with the wrong crowd, they are no fun at all, and don't "get" what I'm doing here at all) - so I created that comment policy to nip things in the bud. I hadn't started out with a Comment Policy. I figured early on the kind of TONE I liked to have in the comments - light, respectful, intelligent - but I hadn't realized how obnoxious so many people are, and how consistently THE SAME all the comments would be. It was repetitive, those types of comments, and that was the worst part. The hostility towards the things I wanted to write about seemed to chase away the folks I wanted to be reading here: movie-lovers, people who love the arts, curious, intelligent, open, all that. People still come to my site and immediately violate my entire comment policy in their first comment - it's hysterical - so all I need to do is to provide a link to said policy, and say, "Here are my ground rules." It's a TIME SAVER, above all else. I don't need to even get into it. It's boundary-setting from the get-go. It is deciding to not be dominated by those who are strangely irritated by the main topic of a personal website, but it's also flat out refusing to give up your precious time to arguing the merits of things you hold dear. Not so much because I want to squelch anyone's self-expression (I mean: you can set up a blog for FREE, so you are free to go and rant about stupid Hollywood actors and stupid Oscar night and Hollywood liberals to your heart's content - although I certainly won't be reading your blog if that's your topic) - but because there are not enough hours in the day to deal with all of those fights, and frankly it no longer interests me. I'd rather talk about James Joyce than try to convince someone with a chip on his shoulder that James Joyce is worth talking about. My classic example (true story) is when I wrote some post back then about a book I had read or a movie I had seen, and someone commented, "Just wondering when you are going to weigh in on Abu Gharib." "Weigh in"? What am I, CNN? It was so weird. Would you go to a blog focused on crafts, or making your own jewelry, or cooking, and demand that the blogger "weigh in" on the situation in Darfur? Very strange. If you would like to hear my opinions on Abu Gharib, then I would certainly welcome a check from you for $100, and I'll go to town on the topic. Otherwise, I beg to be excused accordingly.

I was bored with all of this about a month in to the change-of-topic on my blog with those fights, and knew I wanted new readers. I want to protect myself from boredom most of all.

The Decline Postcard, cranky or otherwise, recognizes that one of the most precious thing on the planet is TIME. And it is up to YOU to police your own time. People will come to you with requests. Friends, or (if you're famous) strangers. To have to repeatedly say, "I don't work for free", or "No, sorry, I won't read your unpublished poetry chapbook" is tiresome and takes up too much TIME.

Hence: the Decline Postcard.

George Bernard Shaw's are the best. They are very angry. He is already angry.

Oram has collected Decline Postcards from many authors, wanting it to be its own genre, and he has some awesome examples. I liked this, because it does make the point that these Decline Postcards, unlike regular rejection letters, or form rejection letters, suggest a level of personal involvement from the author, showing that they have experienced ALL of these things in the past, and want to set their boundaries against such intrusions BEFOREhand. Some of them would edit their Decline Postcards, as new requests came in for things they hadn't even thought of. (Check out Shaw's emendations to one of his Decline Postcards, because he obviously realized that there were boundaries he hadn't even realized he had - and once they were trespassed he needed to re-draw the lines immediately.)

Oram writes:

Even more mild-mannered authors, such as Marianne Moore, could be driven to the use of decline postcards. Moore’s list* includes “recommend editors favorable to verse by children or work bequeathed for publication,” suggesting that she had received more than a few requests along this line.

Go read the whole thing - it's wonderful.

Storm on the beach

Not to brag or whatever, but I kind of can't believe I took this photo.

Actually, no reason to brag: All I did was point and shoot. This is what I actually saw that day.

Today in history: April 13, 1743

Thomas Jefferson was born.

James Parton:

A gentleman of 32 who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet, and play the violin.

From David McCullough's John Adams:

[Thomas] Jefferson was devoted to the ideal of improving mankind but had comparatively little interest in people in particular. [John] Adams was not inclined to believe mankind improvable, but was certain it was important that human nature be understood.

Thomas Jefferson, 1787:

The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it - The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances - if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is to be born to live and labor for another - or entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations proceeding from him - Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.

Excerpt from Paul Johnson's magnificent History of the American People:

In terms of all-round learning, gifts, sensibilities, and accomplishments, there has never been an American like him, and generations of educated Americans have rated him higher even than Washington and Lincoln…

We know a great deal about this remarkable man, or think we do. His Writings, on a bewildering variety of subjects, have been published in twenty volumes. In addition, twenty-five volumes of his papers have appeared so far, plus various collections of his correspondence, including three thick volumes of his letters to his follower and successor James Madison alone. In some ways he was a mass of contradictions. He thought slavery an evil institution, which corrupted the master even more than it oppressed the chattel. But he owned, bought, sold, and bred slaves all his adult life. He was a deist, possibly even a skeptic; yet he was also a 'closet theologian,' who read daily from a multilingual edition of the New Testament. He was an elitist in education – 'By this means twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually' – but he also complained bitterly of elites, 'those who, rising above the swinish multitude, always contrive to nestle themselves into places of power and profit'. He was a democrat, who said he would 'always have a jealous care of the right of election by the people.' Yet he opposed direct election of the Senate on the ground that 'a choice by the people themselves is not generally distinguished for its wisdom'. He could be an extremist, glorying in the violence of revolution: 'What country before ever existed a century and a half without rebellion?…The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.' Yet he said of Washington: 'The moderation and virtue of a single character has probably prevented this revolution from being closed, as most others have been, by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish.'

No one did more than he did to create the United States of America. Yet he referred to Virginia as 'my country' and to the Congress as 'a foreign legislature'. His favorite books were Don Quixote and Tristam Shandy. Yet he lacked a sense of humor. After the early death of his wife, he kept – it was alleged – a black mistress. Yet he was priggish, censorious of bawdy jokes and bad language, and cultivated a we-are-not-amused expression. He could use the most inflammatory language. Yet he always spoke with a quiet, low voice and despised oratory as such. His lifelong passion was books. He collected them in enormous quantity, beyond his means, and then had to sell them all to the Congress to raise money. He kept as detailed daily accounts as it is possible to conceive but failed to realize that he was running deeply and irreversibly into debt. He was a man of hyperbole. But he loved exactitude – he noted all figures, weights, distances, and quantities in minute detail; his carriage had a device to record the revolutions of its wheels; his house was crowded with barometers, rain-gauges, thermometers and anemometers. The motto of his seal-ring, chosen by himself, was 'Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.' Yet he shrank from violence and did not believe God existed.

Jefferson inherited 5,000 acres at fourteen from his father. He married a wealthy widow, Martha Wayles Skelton, and when her father died he acquired a further 11,000 acres. It was natural for this young patrician to enter Virginia's House of Burgesses, which he did in 1769, meeting Washington there. He had an extraordinarily godlike impact on the assembly from the start, by virtue of his presence, not his speeches. Abigail Adams later remarked that his appearance was 'not unworthy of a God'. A British officer said that 'if he was put besides any king in Europe, that king would appear to be his laquey.' His first hero was his fellow-Virginian Patrick Henry (1736-99), who seemed to be everything Jefferson was not: a firebrand, a man of extremes, a rabble-rouser, and an unreflective man of action. He had been a miserable failure as a planter and storekeeper, then found his metier in the law courts and politics. Jefferson was seventeen when he met him and he was presenting 1765 when Henry acquired instant fame for his flamboyant denunciation of the Stamp Act. Jefferson admired him no doubt for possessing the one gift he himself lacked – the power to rouse men's emotions by the spoken word.

Jefferson had a more important quality, however: the power to analyze a historic situation in depth, to propose a course of conduct, and present it in such a way as to shape the minds of a deliberative assembly. In the decade between the Stamp Act agitation and the Boston Tea Party, many able pens had set out constitutional solutions for America's dilemma. But it was Jefferson, in 1774, who encapsulated the entire debate in one brilliant treatise – Summary View of the Rights of British America. Like the works of his predecessors in the march to independence – James Otis' Rights of the British Colonists Asserted (1764), Richard Bland's An Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonists (1766), and Samuel Adams' A statement on the rights of the colonies (1772) – Jefferson relied heavily on Chapter Five of John Locke's Second Treatise on Government, which set out the virtues of a meritocracy, in which men rise by virtue, talent, and industry. Locke argued that the acquisition of wealth, even on a large scale, was neither unjust nor morally wrong, provided it was fairly acquired. So, he said, society is necessarily stratified, but by merit, not by birth. This doctrine of industry as opposed to idleness as the determining factoring a just society militated strongly against kings, against governments of nobles and their placement, and in favor of representative republicanism.

Jefferson's achievement, in his tract, as to graft onto Locke's meritocratic structure two themes which became the dominant leitmotifs of the Revolutionary struggle. The first was the primacy of individual rights: 'The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time: the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.' Equally important was the placing of these rights within the context of Jefferson's deep and in a sense more fundamental commitment to popular sovereignty: 'From the nature of things, every society must at all times possess within itself the sovereign powers of legislation.' It was Jefferson's linking of popular sovereignty with liberty, both rooted in a divine plan, and further legitimized by ancient practice and the English tradition, which gave the American colonists such a strong, clear, and plausible conceptual basis for their action. Neither the British government nor the American loyalists produced arguments which had a fraction of this power. They could appeal to the law as it stood, and duty as they saw it, but that was all. Just as the rebels won the media battle (in America) from the start, so they rapidly won the ideological battle too.

From David McCullough's John Adams:

[Jefferson] worked rapidly [on writing the Declaration of Independence] and, to judge by surviving drafts, with a sure command of his material. He had none of his books with him, nor needed any, he later claimed. It was not his objective to be original, he would explain, only "to place before mankind the common sense of the subject."

"Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion."

He borrowed readily from his own previous writing, particularly from a recent draft for a new Virginia constitution, but also from a declaration of rights for Virginia, which appeared in the Pennsylvania Evening Post on June 12. it had been drawn up by George Mason, who wrote that "all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural rights - among which are enjoyment of life and liberty." And there was a pamphlet written by the Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson, published in Philadelphia in 1774, that declared, "All men are, by nature equal and free: no one has a right to any authority over another without his consent: all lawful government is founded on the consent of those who are subject to it."
But then Mason, Wilson, and John Adams, no less than Jefferson, were, as they all appreciated, drawing on long familiarity with the seminal works of the English and Scottish writers John Locke, David Hume, Francis Hutcheson, and Henry St. John Bolinbroke, or such English poets as Defoe ("When kings the sword of justice first lay down,/They are no kings, though they possess the crown. / Titles are shadows, crowns are empty things, / The good of subjects is the end of kings"). Or, for that matter, Cicero ("The people's good is the highest law.")

Adams, in his earlier notes for an oration at Braintree, had written, "Nature throws us all into the world equal and alike - The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man to endanger public liberty."

What made Jefferson's work surpassing was the grace and eloquence of expression. Jefferson had done superbly and in minimum time.

"I was delighted with its high tone and flights of oratory with which it abounded [Adams would recall], especially that concerning Negro slavery, which, though I knew his southern brethren would never suffer to pass in Congress, I certainly would never oppose. There were other expressions which I would not have inserted, if I had drawn it up, particularly that which called the King tyrant - I thought the expression too passionate; and too much like scolding, for so grave and solemn a document; but as Franklin and Sherman were to inspect it afterwards, I thought it would not become me to strike it out. I consented to report it, and do not now remember that I made or suggested a single alteration."

A number of alterations were made, however, when Jefferson reviewed it with the committee, and several were by Adams. Possibly it was Franklin, or Jefferson himself, who made the small but inspired change in the second paragraph. Where, in the initial draft, certain "truths" were described as "sacred and undeniable", a simpler stronger "self-evident" was substituted.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

It was to be the eloquent lines of the second paragraph of the Declaration that would stand down the years, affecting the human spirit as neither Jefferson nor anyone could have foreseen. And however much was owed to the writing of others, as Jefferson acknowledged, or to such editorial refinements as those contributed by Franklin or Adams, they were, when all was said and done, his lines. It was Jefferson who had written them for all time:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

John Page to Thomas Jefferson, July 20, 1776, on the signing of the Declaration of Independence:

God preserve the United States. We know the Race is not to the Swift nor the Battle to the Strong. Do you not think an Angel rides in the Whirlwind and directs this Storm?

Abraham Lincoln, on the Declaration of Independence:

All honor to Jefferson, to the man who had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.

From Christopher Hitchens's Thomas Jefferson: Author of America (Eminent Lives):

It was partly as a result of a compromise that Jefferson was appointed to the committee charged with drawing up the Declaration. The author of the resolutions calling upon the thirteen colonies to announce independence, to form "a confederation and perpetual union," and to seek overseas recognition and military alliances was Richard Henry Lee, himself a Virginian. But he was needed at home, and Congress needed a Virginian just as it needed some New Englanders and some delegates from the middle colonies. John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, and Robert Livingston of New York comprised the rest of the drafting group.

There is no other example in history, apart from the composition of the King James version of the Bible, in which great words and concepts have been fused into poetic prose by the banal processes of a committee. And, as with the extraordinary convocation of religious scholars that met at Hampton Court under the direction of Lancelot Andrewes in 1604, and with the later gathering of polymaths and revolutionaries at Philadelphia in 1776, the explanation lies partly in the simultaneous emergence, under the pressure of a commonly understood moment of crisis and transition, of like-minded philosophers and men of action. Modesty deserves its tribute here, too: a determination to do the best that could be commonly wrought was a great corrective to vanity. Thomas Jefferson's modesty was sometimes of the false kind. We have too many instances of him protesting, throughout his political ascent, that the honor is too great, the burden too heavy, the eminence too high. (Rather as the Speaker of the House of Commons is still ceremonially dragged to his chair on his inauguration, as if being compelled to assume his commanding role.) However, someone had to pull together a first draft, and we have it on the word of his longtime rival John Adams that Jefferson's reticence in the matter was on this occasion fairly swiftly overcome. He was generally thought to be the better writer and the finer advocate: one might wish to have seen a Franklin version -- which might at least have contained one joke -- but it was not to be.

Several years were to elapse before Jefferson was acknowledged as the author of the Declaration, or until the words themselves had so to speak "sunk in" and begun to resonate as they still do. So it is further evidence of his amour propre, as well as of his sense of history and rhetoric, that he always resented the changes that the Congress made to his original. These are reproduced, as parallel text, in his own Autobiography, and have been as exhaustively scrutinized as the intellectual sources on which Jefferson called when he repaired to a modest boarding house for seventeen days, with only a slave valet named Jupiter, brought from Monticello, at his disposal.

The most potent works, observes the oppressed and haunted Winston Smith in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, where he's read the supposedly "secret" book of the forbidden opposition, are the ones that tell you what you already know. (And, in the "Dictionary of Newspeak" that closes that novel, a certain paragraph of prose is given as an example of something that could not be translated into "Newspeak" terms. The paragraph begins, "We hold these truths to be self-evident ...") Jefferson and Paine had this in common in that year of revolution; they had the gift of pithily summarizing what was already understood, and then of moving an already mobilized audience to follow an inexorable logic. But they also had to overcome an insecurity and indecision that is difficult for us, employing retrospect, to comprehend. Let not, in such circumstances, the trumpet give off an uncertain sound. So, after a deceptively modest and courteous paragraph that assumes the duty of making a full explanation and of manifesting "decent respect," the very first sentence of the actual declaration roundly states that certain truths are -- crucial words -- self-evident.

This style -- terse and pungent, yet fringed with elegance -- allied the plain language of Thomas Paine to the loftier expositions of John Locke, from whose 1690 Second Treatise on Civil Government some of the argument derived. (It is of interest that Locke, who wrote of slavery that it was "so vile and miserable an Estate of Man ... that 'tis hardly to be conceived that an Englishman, much less a Gentleman, should plead for it," was also the draftsman for an absolutist slaveholding "Fundamental Constitution" of the Carolinas in 1669.) Jefferson radicalized Locke by grounding human equality on the observable facts of nature and the common human condition. Having originally written that rights are derived 'from that equal creation," he amended the thought to say that men were "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights," thus perhaps attempting to forestall any conflict between Deists and Christians. And, where Locke had spoken of "life, liberty, and property" as being natural rights, Jefferson famously wrote "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." We differ still on whether this means seeking happiness of rather happiness itself as a pursuit, but given the advantageous social position occupied by most of the delegates at Philadelphia, it is very striking indeed that either notion should have taken precedence over property. The clear need of the hour was for inspiration (and property rights were to be restored to their customary throne when the Constitution came to be written), but "the pursuit of happiness" belongs to that limited group of lapidary phrases that has changed history, and it seems that the delegates realized this as soon as they heard it.

Thomas Jefferson, indeed, is one of the small handful of people to have his very name associated with a form of democracy. The word was not in common use at the time, and was not always employed positively in any case. (John Adams tended to say "democratical" when he meant unsound or subversive.) But the idea that government arose from the people and was not a gift to them or an imposition upon them, was perhaps the most radical element in the Declaration. Jefferson was later to compare government with clothing as "the badge of lost innocence," drawing from the myth of original nakedness and guilt in the Garden of Eden. Paine in his Common Sense had said, "Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness." As a compromise between government as a necessary evil - or an inevitable one - and in the course of a bill of complaint against a hereditary monarch, the Declaration proposed the idea of "the consent of the governed" and thus launched the experiment we call American, or sometimes Jeffersonian, democracy.

Thomas Jefferson on George Washington:

The moderation and virtue of a single character probably prevented this Revolution from being closed, as most others have been, by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Abigail Adams, 1787:

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.

From David McCullough's John Adams:

On Inauguration Day, Wednesday, March 4, 1801, John Adams made his exit from the President's House and the capital at four in the morning, traveling by public stage under clear skies lit by a quarter moon. He departed eight hours before Thomas Jefferson took the oath of office at the Capitol, and even more inconspicuously than he had arrived, rolling through empty streets past darkened houses.

To his political rivals and enemies Adams' predawn departure was another ill-advised act of a petulant old man. But admirers, too, expressed disappointment. A correspondent for the Massachusetts Spy observed in a letter from Washington that numbers of Adams' friends wished he had not departed so abruptly. "Sensible, moderate men of both parties would have been pleased had he tarried until after the installation of his successor. It certainly would have had good effect."

By his presence at the ceremony Adams could have set an example of grace in defeat, while at the same time paying homage to a system whereby power, according to a written constitution, is transferred peacefully. After so vicious a contest for the highest office, with party hatreds so near to igniting in violence, a peaceful transfer of power seemed little short of a miracle. If ever a system was proven to work under extremely adverse circumstances, it was at this inauguration of 1801, and it is regrettable that Adams was not present.

"We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists," Jefferson said famously in his inaugural address before a full Senate Chamber, his voice so soft many had difficulty hearing him. A passing tribute to Washington was made before he finished, but of Adams he said nothing.

THOMAS JEFFERSON, in a letter to the mayor of Washington, June 24, 1826, declining an invitation to the 4th of July celebration in Washington - (Jefferson died 10 days later):

May it be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government - All eyes are opened or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few, booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God. These are the grounds of hope for others; for ourselves, let the annual return to this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.

From Joseph Ellis's American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson:

Before editorial changes were made by the Continental Congress, Jefferson's early draft made it even clearer that his intention was to express a spiritual vision: ' We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & unalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty, & the pursuit of happiness." These are the core articles of faith in the American Creed. Jefferson's authorship of these words is the core of his seductive appeal across the ages, his central claim, on posterity's affection. What, then, do they mean? How do they make magic? Merely to ask the question is to risk being accused of some combination of treason and sacrilege, since self-evident truths are not meant to be analyzed; that is what being self-evident is all about. But when these words are stripped of the patriotic haze, read straightaway and literally, two monumental claims are being made here. The explicit claim is that the individual is the sovereign unit in society; his natural state is freedom from and equality with all other individuals; this is the natural order of things. The implicit claim is that all restrictions on this natural order are immoral transgressions, violations of what God intended; individuals liberated from such restrictions will interact with their fellows in a harmonious scheme requiring no external discipline and producing maximum human happiness.

This is a wildly idealistic message, the kind of good news simply too good to be true. It is, truth be told, a recipe for anarchy. Any national government that seriously attempted to operate in accord with these principles would be committing suicide. But, of course, the words were not intended to serve as an operational political blueprint. Jefferson was not a profound political thinker. He was, however, an utterly brilliant political rhetorician and visionary. The genius of his vision is to propose that our deepest yearnings for personal freedom are in fact attainable. The genius of his rhetoric is to articulate irreconcilable human urges at a sufficiently abstract level to mask their mutual exclusiveness. Jefferson guards the American Creed at this inspirational level, which is inherently immune to scholarly skepticism and a place where ordinary Americans can congregate to speak the magic words together. The Jeffersonian magic works because we permit it to function at a rarefied region where real-life choices do not have to be made.

Thomas Jefferson to his grandson:

When I hear another express an opinion which is not mine, I say to myself, he has a right to his opinion, as I to mine. Why should I question it. His error does me no injury, and shall I become a Don Quixote, to bring all men by force of argument to one opinion? Be a listener only, keep within yourself, and endeavor to establish with yourself the habit of silence, especially in politics.

Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, July 17, 1791:

That you and I differ in our ideas of the best form of government is well known to us both: but we have differed as friends should do, respecting the purity of each other's motives, and confining our difference of opinion to private conversation. And I can declare with truth in the presence of the almighty that nothing was further from my intention or expectation than to have had either my own or your name brought before the public on this occasion. The friendship and confidence which has so long existed between us required this explanation from me, and I know you too well to fear any misconstruction of the motives of it. Some people here who would wish me to be, or to be thought, fuilty of impropieties have suggested that I was Agricola, that I was Brutus etc etc. [Anonymous op-ed columns, attacking John Adams, signed under these names] I never did in my life, either by myself or by any other, have a sentence of mine inserted in a newspaper without putting my name to it; and I believe I never shall.

Excerpt from Paul Johnson's History of the American People:

Jefferson produced a superb draft, for which his 1774 pamphlet was a useful preparation. All kinds of philosophical and political influences went into it. They were all well-read men and Jefferson, despite his comparative youth, was the best read of all, and he made full use of the countless hours he had spent pouring over books of history, political theory, and government.

The Declaration is a powerful and wonderfully concise summary of the best Whig thought over several generations. Most of all, it has an electrifying beginning. It is hard to think of any way in which the first two paragraphs can be improved:

WHEN in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.

WE hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness -- That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

The first [paragraph], with its elegiac note of sadness at dissolving the union with Britain and its wish to show "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" by giving its reasons; the second, with its riveting first sentence, the kernel of the whole: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." After that sentence, the reader, any reader - even George III - is compelled to read on.

The Committee found it necessary to make few changes in Jefferson's draft. Franklin, the practical man, toned down Jefferson's grandiloquence - thus truths, from being "sacred and undeniable" became "self-evident", a masterly improvement. But in general the four others were delighted with Jefferson's work, as well they might be.

Congress was a different matter because at the heart of America's claim to liberty there was a black hole. What of the slaves? How could Congress say that "all men are created equal" when there were 600,000 blacks scattered through the colonies, and concentrated in some of them in huge numbers, who were by law treated as chattels and enjoyed no rights at all? Jefferson and the other members of the Committee tried to up-end this argument - rather dishonestly, one is bound to say - by blaming American slavery on the British and King George.

The original draft charged that the King had "waged a cruel war against human nature" by attacking a "distant people" and "captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere". But when the draft went before the full Congress, on June 28, the Southern delegates were not having this. Those from South Carolina, in particular, were not prepared to accept any admission that slavery was wrong and especially the acknowledgment that it violated the "most sacred rights of life and liberty". If the Declaration said that, then the logical consequence was to free all the slaves forthwith. So the slavery passage was removed, the first of many compromises over the issue during the next eighty years, until it was finally resolved inn an ocean of tears and blood. However, the word "equality" remained in the text, and the fact that it did so was, as it were, a constitutional guarantee that, eventually, the glaring anomaly behind the Declaration would be rectified.

The Congress debated the draft for three days. Paradoxically, delegates spent little time going over the fundamental principles it enshrined, because the bulk of the Declaration presented the specific and detailed case against Britain, and more particularly against the King. The Revolutionaries were determined to scrap the pretense that they distinguished between evil ministers and a king who "could do no wrong", and renounce their allegiance to the crown once and for all. So they fussed over the indictment of the King, to them the core of the document, and left its constitutional and ideological framework, apart from the slavery point, largely intact.

This was just as well. If Congress had chosen to argue over Jefferson's sweeping assumptions and propositions, and resolve their differences with verbal compromises, the magic wrought by his pen would surely have been exorcized, and the world would have been poorer in consequence.

As it was the text was approved on July 2, and on July 4 all the colonies formally adopted what was called, to give it its correct title, "The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America". At the time, and often since, Tom Paine was credited with its authorship, which did not help to endear it to the British, where he was (and still is) regarded with abhorrence. In fact he had nothing to do with it directly, but the term "United States" is certainly his.

On July 8 it was read publicly in the State House Yard and the Liberty Bell rung. The royal coat of arms was torn down and burned. On August 2 it was engrossed on parchment and signed by all the delegates. Whereupon (according to John Hancock) Franklin remarked: "Well, Gentlemen, we must now hang together, or we shall most assuredly hang separately."

Thomas Jefferson to Robert Skipwith, who had asked for a List of Books that would make up a "gentleman's library", Aug. 3, 1771

I sat down with a design of executing your request to form a catalogue of books to the amount of about 50 lib. sterl. But could by no means satisfy myself with any partial choice I could make. Thinking therefore it might be as agreeable to you I have framed such a general collection as I think you would wish and might in time find convenient to procure. Out of this you will chuse for yourself to the amount you mentioned for the present year and may hereafter as shall be convenient proceed in completing the whole. A view of the second column in this catalogue would I suppose extort a smile from the face of gravity. Peace to its wisdom! Let me not awaken it. A little attention however to the nature of the human mind evinces that the entertainments of fiction are useful as well as pleasant. That they are pleasant when well written every person feels who reads. But wherein is its utility asks the reverend sage, big with the notion that nothing can be useful but the learned lumber of Greek and Roman reading with which his head is stored?

I answer, everything is useful which contributes to fix in the principles and practices of virtue. When any original act of charity or of gratitude, for instance, is presented either to our sight or imagination, we are deeply impressed with its beauty and feel a strong desire in ourselves of doing charitable and grateful acts also. On the contrary when we see or read of any atrocious deed, we are disgusted with it's deformity, and conceive an abhorence of vice. Now every emotion of this kind is an exercise of our virtuous dispositions, and dispositions of the mind, like limbs of the body acquire strength by exercise. But exercise produces habit, and in the instance of which we speak the exercise being of the moral feelings produces a habit of thinking and acting virtuously. We never reflect whether the story we read be truth or fiction. If the painting be lively, and a tolerable picture of nature, we are thrown into a reverie, from which if we awaken it is the fault of the writer. I appeal to every reader of feeling and sentiment whether the fictitious murther of Duncan by Macbeth in Shakespeare does not excite in him as great a horror of villany, as the real one of Henry IV. by Ravaillac as related by Davila? And whether the fidelity of Nelson and generosity of Blandford in Marmontel do not dilate his breast and elevate his sentiments as much as any similar incident which real history can furnish? Does he not in fact feel himself a better man while reading them, and privately covenant to copy the fair example? We neither know nor care whether Lawrence Sterne really went to France, whether he was there accosted by the Franciscan, at first rebuked him unkindly, and then gave him a peace offering: or whether the whole be not fiction. In either case we equally are sorrowful at the rebuke, and secretly resolve we will never do so: we are pleased with the subsequent atonement, and view with emulation a soul candidly acknowleging it's fault and making a just reparation. Considering history as a moral exercise, her lessons would be too infrequent if confined to real life. Of those recorded by historians few incidents have been attended with such circumstances as to excite in any high degree this sympathetic emotion of virtue. We are therefore wisely framed to be as warmly interested for a fictitious as for a real personage. The field of imagination is thus laid open to our use and lessons may be formed to illustrate and carry home to the heart every moral rule of life. Thus a lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the dry volumes of ethics, and divinity that ever were written. This is my idea of well written Romance, of Tragedy, Comedy and Epic poetry. -- If you are fond of speculation the books under the head of Criticism will afford you much pleasure. Of Politics and Trade I have given you a few only of the best books, as you would probably chuse to be not unacquainted with those commercial principles which bring wealth into our country, and the constitutional security we have for the enjoiment ofthat wealth. In Law I mention a few systematical books, as a knowledge of the minutiae of that science is not neces-sary for a private gentleman. In Religion, History, Natural philosophy, I have followed the same plan in general, -- But whence the necessity of this collection? Come to the new Rowanty, from which you may reach your hand to a library formed on a more extensive plan. Separated from each other but a few paces the possessions of each would be open to the other. A spring centrically situated might be the scene of every evening's joy. There we should talk over the lessons of the day, or lose them in music, chess or the merriments of our family companions. The heart thus lightened our pillows would be soft, and health and long life would attend the happy scene. Come then and bring our dear Tibby with you, the first in your affections, and second in mine. Offer prayers for me too at that shrine to which tho' absent I pray continual devotions. In every scheme of happiness she is placed in the foreground of the picture, as the princi-pal figure. Take that away, and it is no picture for me. Bear my affections to Wintipock clothed in the warmest expressions of sincerity; and to yourself be every human felicity.

Adieu.

FINE ARTS.

Observations on gardening. Payne. 5/
Webb's essay on painting. 12mo 3/
Pope's Iliad. 18/
------- Odyssey. 15/
Dryden's Virgil. 12mo. 12/
Milton's works. 2 v. 8vo. Donaldson. Edinburgh 1762. 10/
Hoole's Tasso. 12mo. 5/
Ossian with Blair's criticisms. 2 v. 8vo. 10/
Telemachus by Dodsley. 6/
Capell's Shakespear. 12mo. 30/
Dryden's plays. 6v. 12mo. 18/
Addison's plays. 12mo. 3/
Otway's plays. 3 v. 12mo. 9/
Rowe's works. 2 v. 12mo. 6/
Thompson's works. 4 v. 12mo. 12/
Young's works. 4 v. 12mo. 12/
Home's plays. 12mo. 3/
Mallet's works. 3 v. 12mo. 9/
Mason's poetical works. 5/
Terence. Eng. 3/
Moliere. Eng. 15/
Farquhar's plays. 2 v. 12mo. 6/
Vanbrugh's plays. 2 v. 12mo. 6/
Steele's plays. 3/
Congreve's works. 3 v. 12mo. 9/
Garric's dramatic works. 2 v. 8vo. 10/
Foote's dramatic works. 2 v. 8vo. 10/
Rousseau's Eloisa. Eng. 4 v. 12mo. 12/
----- Emilius and Sophia. Eng. 4 v. 12mo. 12/
Marmontel's moral tales. Eng. 2 v. 12mo. 12/
Gil Blas. by Smollett. 6/
Don Quixot. by Smollett 4 v. 12mo. 12/
David Simple. 2 v. 12mo. 6/
Roderic Random. 2 v. 12mo. 6/ these are written by Smollett
Peregrine Pickle. 4 v. 12mo. 12/
Launcelot Graves. 6/
Adventures of a guinea. 2 v. 12mo. 6/
Pamela. 4 v. 12mo. 12/ these are by Richardson.
Clarissa. 8 v. 12mo. 24/
Grandison. 7 v. 12mo. 9/
Fool of quality. 3 v. 12mo. 9/
Feilding's works. 12 v. 12mo. pound 1.16
Constantia. 2 v. 12mo. 6/ by Langhorne.
Solyman and Almena. 12mo. 3/
Belle assemblee. 4 v. 12mo. 12/
Vicar of Wakefeild. 2 v. 12mo. 6/. by Dr. Goldsmith
Sidney Bidulph. 5 v. 12mo. 15/
Lady Julia Mandeville. 2 v. 12mo. 6/
Almoran and Hamet. 2 v. 12mo. 6/
Tristam Shandy. 9 v. 12mo. pound 1.7
Sentimental journey. 2 v. 12mo. 6/
Fragments of antient poetry. Edinburgh. 2/
Percy's Runic poems. 3/
Percy's reliques of antient English poetry. 3 v. 12mo. 9/
Percy's Han Kiou Chouan. 4 v. 12mo. 12/
Percy's Miscellaneous Chinese peices. 2 v. 12mo. 6/
Chaucer. 10/
Spencer. 6 v. 12mo. 15/
Waller's poems. 12mo. 3/
Dodsley's collection of poems. 6 v. 12mo. 18/
Pearch's collection of poems. 4 v. 12mo. 12/
Gray's works. 5/
Ogilvie's poems. 5/
Prior's poems. 2 v. 12mo. Foulis. 6/
Gay's works. 12mo. Foulis. 3/
Shenstone's works. 2 v. 12mo. 6/
Dryden's works. 4 v. 12mo. Foulis. 12/
Pope's works. by Warburton. 12mo. pound 1.4
Churchill's poems. 4 v. 12mo. 12/
Hudibrass. 3/
Swift's works. 21 v. small 8vo. pound 3.3
Swift's literary correspondence. 3 v. 9/
Spectator. 9 v. 12mo. pound 1.7
Tatler. 5 v. 12mo. 15/
Guardian. 2 v. 12mo. 6/
Freeholder. 12mo. 3/
Ld. Lyttleton's Persian letters. 12mo. 3/

CRITICISM ON THE FINE ARTS.

Ld. Kaim's elements of criticism. 2 v. 8vo. 10/
Burke on the sublime and beautiful. 8vo. 5/
Hogarth's analysis of beauty. 4to. pound 1.1
Reid on the human mind. 8vo. 5/
Smith's theory of moral sentiments. 8vo. 5/
Johnson's dictionary. 2 v. fol. pound 3
Capell's prolusions. 12mo. 3/

POLITICKS, TRADE.

Montesquieu's spirit of the laws. 2 v. 12mo. 6/
Locke on government. 8vo. 5/
Sidney on government. 4to. 15/
Marmontel's Belisarius. 12mo. Eng. 3/
Ld. Bolingbroke's political works. 5 v. 8vo. pound 1.5
Montesquieu's rise & fall of the Roman governmt. 12mo. 3/
Steuart's Political oeconomy. 2 v. 4to. pound 1.10
Petty's Political arithmetic. 8vo. 5/

RELIGION.

Locke's conduct of the mind in search of truth. 12mo. 3/
Xenophon's memoirs of Socrates. by Feilding. 8vo. 5/
Epictetus. by Mrs. Carter. 2 v. 12mo. 6/
Antoninus by Collins. 3/
Seneca. by L'Estrange. 8vo. 5/
Cicero's Offices. by Guthrie. 8vo. 5/
Cicero's Tusculan questions. Eng. 3/
Ld. Bolingbroke's Philosophical works. 5 v. 8vo. pound 1.5
Hume's essays. 4 v. 12mo. 12/
Ld. Kaim's Natural religion. 8vo. 6/
Philosophical survey of Nature. 3/
Oeconomy of human life. 2/
Sterne's sermons. 7 v. 12mo. pound 1.1
Sherlock on death. 8vo. 5/
Sherlock on a future state. 5/

LAW.

Ld. Kaim's Principles of equity. fol. pound 1.1
Blackstone's Commentaries. 4 v. 4to. pound 4.4
Cuningham's Law dictionary. 2 v. fol. pound 3

HISTORY. ANTIENT.

Bible. 6/
Rollin's Antient history. Eng. 13 v. 12mo. pound 1.19
Stanyan's Graecian history. 2 v. 8vo. 10/
Livy. (the late translation). 12/
Sallust by Gordon. 12mo. 12/
Tacitus by Gordon. 12mo. 15/
Caesar by Bladen. 8vo. 5/
Josephus. Eng. 1.0
Vertot's Revolutions of Rome. Eng. 9/
Plutarch's lives. by Langhorne. 6 v. 8vo. pound 1.10
Bayle's Dictionary. 5 v. fol. pound 7.10.
Jeffery's Historical & Chronological chart. 15/

HISTORY. MODERN.

Robertson's History of Charles the Vth. 3 v. 4to. pound 3.3
Bossuet's history of France. 4 v. 12mo. 12/
Davila. by Farneworth. 2 v. 4to. pound 1.10.
Hume's history of England. 8 v. 8vo. pound 2.8.
Clarendon's history of the rebellion. 6 v. 8vo. pound 1.10.
Robertson's history of Scotland. 2 v. 8vo. 12/
Keith's history of Virginia. 4to. 12/
Stith's history of Virginia. 6/

NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. NATURAL HISTORY &c.

Nature displayed. Eng. 7 v. 12mo.
Franklin on Electricity. 4to. 10/
Macqueer's elements of Chemistry. 2 v. 8vo. 10/
Home's principles of agriculture. 8vo. 5/
Tull's horse-hoeing husbandry. 8vo. 5/
Duhamel's husbandry. 4to. 15/
Millar's Gardener's diet. fol. pound 2.10.
Buffon's natural history. Eng. pound 2.10.
A compendium of Physic & Surgery. Nourse. 12mo. 1765. 3/
Addison's travels. 12mo. 3/
Anson's voiage. 8vo. 6/
Thompson's travels. 2 v. 12mo. 6/
Lady M. W. Montague's letters. 3 v. 12mo. 9/

MISCELLANEOUS.

Ld. Lyttleton's dialogues of the dead. 8vo. 5/
Fenelon's dialogues of the dead. Eng. 12mo. 3/
Voltaire's works. Eng. pound 4.
Locke on Education. 12mo. 3/
Owen's Dict. of arts & sciences 4 v. 8vo. pound 2.

I am not sure if mere words can express how much I love that list.

Thomas Jefferson to John Adams:

"I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid; and I find myself much the happier."

One of the funniest things about this man, funny meaning fascinating, is that his epitaph (written by him) reads:

"Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, Author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia."

Not a word about being President.

He died on July 4, 1826. On the same day that John Adams died. These old colleagues and rivals died within hours of one another. On July 4th no less. Separated by distance, John Adams's last words were something about Jefferson - either "Jefferson still lives" or " Jefferson survives" - he was unaware, of course, that Jefferson had died a couple hours earlier. Incredible. That that would be what Adams went out with. A mystery wrapped in an enigma.

According to Robley Dunglison, the attending physician, Jefferson dozed through the day on July 3rd, and woke up in the early evening, saying as he awoke, "Is it the Fourth?" This gives me a lump in my throat.) Dunglison said to him that it soon would be. Nicholas Trist, married to Jefferson's granddaughter, remembers it this way: Jefferson woke and said, "This is the Fourth?" Trist remembers pretending not to hear the question, because he didn't want to tell Jefferson that it was still only the 3rd of July. But Jefferson asked again, "This is the Fourth?" Trist caved, and nodded - and he felt very bad about his lie. Virginia Randolph, his granddaughter, remembers it differently. She remembers him waking and saying, clearly, "This is the Fourth." No question. A statement. Jefferson faded out after that, and the next day, the Fourth, he called out for help at one point - and someone remembers him saying, at one point, "No, doctor. Nothing more." But it is his question/statement about what the date was that has passed down through the years as Jefferson's final words. In the end, it doesn't really matter, of course, although the story itself is one I treasure, in all its different details.

Did he wait? When he found out it was still just the Third, did he wait? To die on the Fourth? I wouldn't put it past him, he always loved symmetry.

Under-rated Movies #18: Murder by Numbers

So under-rated as to be almost completely invisible, and never mentioned in this past Oscar season, when Sandra Bullock was so much discussed - Murder by Numbers has some truly stupid elements, a boring title, and a terrible ending (badly shot, among other things which I will get into), but why I love it (and yes, I do love it), is its insistence on keeping focused on character, despite the bossy plot, and the "thriller" demands. At the center of this movie is a well-drawn specific portrait of a homicide detective, and how they do what they do. Bullock is terrific in the part, managing to suggest that the character is scarred somewhere, something is "wrong" with her socially, but she also gets to be really good at her job. She is driven by personal demons, as a lot of people are, but she keeps it all under a tightly-closed lid, which saves the character from the Freudian-slash-Oprah direction it keeps wanting to go in. It's a very controlled performance. You really believe she is an excellent cop. The character is not in the writing, which can be pretty on-the-nose, even annoyingly so, but in Bullock's performance. One of the most amazing things here is how consistently she dodges the bullets. Not from the criminals she is tracking, but from the pitfalls of the script. Bullock underplays, keeps her cool, stays hard, is willing to be unpleasant (she is not at all likeable, although you end up feeling for her), and doesn't care about protecting her character. By that I mean, she isn't telling the audience from the get-go: "I'm wounded, like me, feel sorry for me ... it'll pay off". Lesser actresses do this all the time. Not Bullock. She doesn't give a shit if you like her or not. Perfect for the role, and one of the reasons why the movie flat out works. Rent it to watch HER, and you'll see why this film is under-rated.

The acting is good all around (and sometimes actually great) with Michael Pitt and Ryan Gosling playing a modern-day Leopold and Loeb. They are teenagers, one is a brainiac, the other the class clown, and they make a big pretense of not knowing one another (all part of their dastardly plan), when in acutality they are enmeshed, and spend all their free time in a big abandoned house on a cliff, reading Nietzsche and drinking absinthe and playing Russian Roulette. They dream of the perfect murder. Just like Leopold and Loeb, they want to prove to themselves that they are real men, better men than others, because they could conceive of something so perfect, so airtight, that they would never be caught. They read forensic books, learning everything they can about DNA analysis and fiber analysis, so that they will not mess up. The best part is: the murder must be totally random. They must have no connection with the person. Only then, will it be perfect.

Pretty cliched stuff, I know, but what elevates Murder by Numbers is the quality of the acting. There is some top-notch stuff going on here. Michael Pitt is a gloomy puffy-faced kid who skulks around, but he is hiding something: he is hiding his own dreams of grandeur and domination. He plays the victim, because it is a perfect cover. And Ryan Gosling is fantastic as the "dumb" one. The rich kid who wears a red leather jacket, who seems to have everything fall into his lap, but who is missing something in his personality. Empathy, certainly, but maybe that just comes because he's never had to work for anything in his life. Gosling suggests all kinds of things going on, even though the character is never given an explanatory monologue about who he is. He keeps it in the air, and when the mask comes off in an interrogation room, it is, I am not ashamed to say, a brilliant moment. Unforced. Compulsively watchable. He works every moment as though it is a battle of the wills and he must come out on top. You can see how he would snow everyone: teachers, parents, guidance counselors. He turns on the charm, and people fall like ninepins. He is fully aware of himself at every moment, a true narcissist. He has grown up believing he is untouchable, due to his wealth, his good looks, and he has the cocky swagger of someone who has no idea what it means to want anything. But he has a secret, too. Their crime depends on them sticking together, following the plan. They must not be broken apart. They must get their stories straight. The plan has been in the works for a couple of years. It is not clear how these two met, but they have been keeping up the charade that they don't like each other (Gosling makes fun of Pitt in the hallways, snickers at Pitt in class), so that when the day comes that they commit their crime, nobody would ever dream of suspecting them, or even know that there was a connection between them in the first place.

Both of them are true sociopaths, and the young actors are chilling in portraying their roles.

But the star here is Sandra Bullock. She plays Cassie Mayweather (first of all: the name is a problem. That is not a real name, script writer.), a homicide detective. She has been assigned a new cop to train who has transferred over from Vice (he is played by Ben Chaplin, who is actually given quite a lot to do here, unlike many of his other parts - and he's great), and a murdered girl is found in a ravine, so she takes him with her to the crime scene, walking him through the process. Early on, this is the scene that lets us know what kind of thriller this is going to be. It's not a "gotcha" thriller, it's not going to be gory or violent: it is going to be an intellectual thriller, one that focuses on forensics, and also how crime scenes are analyzed and handled. How investigations move forward. How criminal profiles are used by police departments, and how they rule out certain aspects. Is the killer "organized" or "disorganized"? Having just read Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI , by Robert Ressler (a top FBI profiler), I had a lot of fun seeing Murder by Numbers again, watching cops standing at white-boards, with "characteristics" of specific profiles written out, and trying to decide if the killer here qualified. This is how it's done. At least according to Ressler. It's not a magic wand: check this box, and you'll find your killer - but the guideposts are there, and Murder by Numbers has done its homework.

Cassie and her new partner (Chaplin) argue about the profile. Chaplin says he's "disorganized", meaning he feels that, based on the evidence, the killing was random. Something doesn't sit right with Cassie about that. The body was found in a ravine, yes, but it was on the other side of a creek, far away from the road, and footprints were found in the mud, which meant, among other things, that the killer had to have picked this spot for its remoteness, and also had to have somehow dragged the body down the hill, through the creek, and across to the other side. A "disorganized" killer (thank you, Mr. Ressler) usually dumps bodies wherever they feel like it, they panic, they freak out, they don't cover their tracks. Arguments erupt between Bullock and her partner. "He's spontaneous AND he plans? Come on, guys, this doesn't make sense!"

Ressler talks about how important it is to learn how to analyze crime scenes, and that 9 times out of 10, everything you need to know will be at that primary site. Not just in terms of evidence left behind, but in subtler clues, clues which let you know who the person is. Is there blood everywhere? Are there missing limbs? Was an attempt made to cover the body up? All of these things are indicators (or, possible indicators).

I knew a homicide detective once, and I grilled him about all of this, because I feel like I missed my calling in many ways, although I would have a hard time being around murdered bodies all the time. But I asked him every question I could think of, and he was fascinating, I wish I had tape recorded it. He handled all of my questions with good humor, patience, and a deep animal intelligence, which actually bordered on something almost spiritual. Like a genius can't describe how he plays the violin like he does, or how he can calculate columns of numbers in his head with lightning speed, this homicide detective could not speak specifically (at first, but believe me, I wore him down) about how he did what he did. If you start to listen to these cops, (and I watch every forensic show known to man) many of them say stuff like, "I don't know, something didn't feel right." "I walked into that crime scene, and just knew something was off." "Something's not right about that guy."

Now you cannot convict someone on these vague "something's not right" feelings, but a good homicide detective always trusts his gut. He understands information, and he can process things very quickly. He knows what a random crime scene looks like, so he can instantly tell if one has been "staged". But often he cannot immediately point the finger at what is "wrong". It's a gut feeling. Hard to quantify.

Bullock plays a cop like that. She nails it. She and her partner kneel over the dead body and discuss what they see. The film has made him a trainee, which is a convenient way to "show" that she knows her job, because she is showing him the ropes, asking him to analyze the scene. It seems that the stab wounds on the victim's chest are tentative. They barely break the skin. That is information. The victim is missing a finger. Chaplin glances at Bullock and asks, "Trophy?" Bullock never takes her eyes off the victim. She murmurs, "Maybe ..."

Murder by Numbers has two separate stories: the two sociopath teenagers, and the local investigation closing in on them (even though they thought they had planned it perfectly) - and while it's perhaps not the tensest thriller of all time (we know from the start that the two boys did it), what I like about it is its patience with the boring nitty-gritty that is so much of cop-work. Filing paperwork, autopsies, waiting for fiber analysis, sitting around in the office and talking about the case ... In those scenes, Murder by Numbers knows exactly what it is, isn't trying to be anything else, and does it very very well. It's fun and engaging to watch people figure things out, especially when the plot is twisty enough to not reveal all right away. However (and this, for me, is key): the plot really comes down to personalities.

Who ARE these two boys? What is their dynamic? How did they do it? And above all, why?

Slowly, Cassie becomes obsessed with the case, and she seems especially obsessed by Ryan Gosling. She has a visceral dislike to the kid, and it seems over-the-top, it seems to be about something else. She is reprimanded repeatedly for this, but she continues to insist, "Something's not right with that kid ... something's not right."

To add to all of this, Murder by Numbers has given Sandra Bullock a really interesting person to play, outside of her important job and her skill at it. She lives in isolation on a houseboat. She sits around on her days off, in a bathrobe, watching Matlock. She is notorious for sleeping with everyone. The other cops call her "hyena" and her new partner wonders why. She says to him, casually, as she opens the gate to the dock leading to her houseboat, "Female hyenas have protruding mock penises." She doesn't seem particularly bothered by her own behavior. It's something to dull the pain. She sleeps with Chaplin almost instantly, before he realizes that she has done this to everyone in the department, as well as the assistant DA, and when they're done having sex, she kicks him out of bed. Literally. Shoves him off to the side. "I gotta get up in the morning. Go."

Bullock, who radiates niceness, I think, and humor, and good companionship - is bringing something else in her personality to the foreground here. The wounded coldness that can be the result of loneliness and fear. She plays none of this literally, however. Cassie Mayweather (sorry. Not a real name) is not particularly self-aware. She doesn't feel she needs to be, because her whole life is her job. And THERE, she knows who she is. Who cares if she sleeps with everybody? Who cares if she sits in a bathrobe for days at a time? Why on earth does it matter, as long as she shows up to work and kicks ass? Bullock, with brief flickers, lets us in on her sadness, which is even more heartbreaking because of the effort she has put in to hiding it. Pain hurts her more, because she resists it.

She has a secret, too.

The ending of the film is a betrayal of all that has come before, a showdown at the house on the cliff, which, unfortunately, puts Cassie Mayweather, the best cop on the force, into a damsel in distress situation, where she must be saved at the last minute. Too bad. The film didn't have the courage of its convictions, and it is difficult to imagine an ending of a film where the lead cop is male, and suddenly, when confronted with the killers face to face, crumples and must be saved by his female partner. Not to mention the fact that it's a very action-packed ending, with some giant occurrences involving architecture and falling bodies and the special effects look pretty shlocky. Silly, actually.

To see Cassie Mayweather (have I mentioned how I feel about her name), a woman we have come to know over the course of the film, as no-nonsense, fearless, willing to go in first to any frightening situation, ballsy, annoying, headstrong, suddenly reduced to a screaming female tied to the railroad tracks, is a bummer of the highest order.

Nevertheless: The acting here is why you should see it, and Bullocks' work throughout packs a strange punch for me. This is one of those movies where no matter when it is on, or what I am doing, I have to sit and watch the rest of it. The silliness is undeniable, but weed through that, and you have the four leads: Bullock, Chaplin, Gosling and PItt - creating really really interesting characters who all, cops and criminals, have flaws, fears and secrets, secrets from each other, of course, but also secrets they keep from themselves, and, in the end, the film is about intelligence. I love it for that reason alone. It is about watching people think. It is about watching Bullock look around her, at the ravine, the creek, the mud, the piles of leaves, and murmur to herself, "Something's not right here ..."

More in my Under-rated Movies Series:

This post covers 5: Ball of Fire, Only Angels Have Wings, Dogfight, Zero Effect and Manhattan Murder Mystery

Four Daughters

In a Lonely Place

Searching For Bobby Fischer

Joe vs. the Volcano

Something's Gotta Give

Truly, Madly, Deeply

Mr. Lucky

Eye of God

Love and Basketball

Kwik Stop

The Rapture

Waking the Dead

The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Basil Bunting

Next book on my poetry shelf:

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O'Clair

By all accounts, Basil Bunting was some kind of genius prodigy. He also was Iran correspondent for the London Times for a bit, and was very interested in Persia and Persian poetry, so I love him for that. Born in 1900 and died in 1985 (God, that generation - what they saw), he grew up in the north of England. A sort of Ezra Pound type, didactic and bossy (when he was a teenager he apparently "edited" Shakespeare's sonnets, because he thought they needed a bit of work - hahaha) he embraced modernism and all of its themes wholeheartedly.

Michael Schmidt in Lives of the Poets writes:

[Bunting] may have spent several years in Persia, on the edge of a real desert, yet the poetic landscapes he created are greener, often English - the England of his native Northumberland, with its history. "I hear Aneurin number the dead, his nipped voice," he writes. Voice again, and "nipped", suggesting Objectivist concision. But Bunting as an English poet could lend himself to a movement only in part. The rest of him was empirical, pragmatic; he trusted himself more than he trusted dos and don'ts. He might sit at Pound's feet, but he never merely imitates Pound. Attending to the mature mastery of another writer, he sets out to find his own.

In the early 1950s, he was sent to Iran as a correspondent. As a youth, he had taught himself Persian, so that he could read Persian poetry. Aha. So he was one of THOSE. Like Joyce, as a college student, teaching himself Norwegian so he could read Ibsen in the original. Bunting was in Iran during a time of enormous upheaval, the CIA-engineered coup against Mossadeq, the Prime Minister, a defining event for Iran as a country. It made CERTAIN that 1979 and the hostage-situation would occur. (Here's some excerpts about "Old Mossy"). Bunting was in Iran at that time, and things got nuts, and his life was threatened repeatedly, and he finally was tossed out of the country.

Bunting, like the rest of his generation - Pound, Williams, Eliot, Yeats - really thought about and wrestled with poetry. It wasn't enough to do your own thing. You had to tell others how to do it as well. You had to have opinions about poetry itself, what it should be, what its purpose was. I love all of the different struggles of this period, in poetry - the titanic arguments between giants - all about POETRY. Humankind is a beautiful thing. Because if we can't argue about poetry, in the same way we can argue about politics and war, then we are nothing.

Bunting wrote something called "I Suggest", which is a list of tips for poets - which gives a good idea of who he was, his concerns, his sensibility, and to my mind, he followed all of these "suggestions". Good tips for writers of any genre:

I SUGGEST

1. Compose aloud; poetry is a sound.
2. Vary rhythm enough to stir the emotion you want but not so as to lose impetus.
3. Use spoken words and syntax.
4. Fear adjective; they bleed nouns. Hate the passive.
5. Jettison ornament gaily but keep shape

Put your poem away till you forget it, then:
6. Cut out every word you dare.
7. Do it again a week later, and again.

Never explain - your reader is as smart as you.

I don't know all of his work, but I do know that there is a rough immediacy to the things I have read, a grappling with reality - as it comes across in objects - that is original and fresh. He wrote Odes, that's one of the things he is most known for, and also a long poem called Briggflatts, his master work, I suppose - but a poem is included in the Norton Anthology that I'll post here as the excerpt of the day. Bunting was big on "voice" - as he wrote in "I Suggest". He thought poems should be like music, and he also felt that everyday speech should not be jettisoned from poetry. I love this poem, because it is an indictment of populist thinking, and also a perfect example of the kind of sneer that artists encounter, every day, all day, for their entire lives, by people who honestly believe that they should "get a real job". The arrogance of the ignorant. It's all spoken in the voice of the "chairman", a self-righteous "man of the people" (look out for those "everyday folk" - they often seethe with resentment, as we can see everywhere today, towards anyone who does anything different, or learned, or in any way tries to separate from the pack). The poem is called "What the Chairman Told Tom". "Tom" is modeled on Tom Pickard, a British poet who studied with Basil Bunting, so perhaps there is a grain of truth in this encounter.

What the Chairman Told Tom

Poetry? It's a hobby.
I run model trains.
Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons.

It's not work. You don't sweat.
Nobody pays for it.
You could advertise soap.

Art, that's opera; or repertory -
The Desert Song.
Nancy was in the chorus.

But to ask for twelve pounds a week -
married, aren't you? -
you've got a nerve.

How could I look a bus conductor
in the face
if I paid you twelve pounds?

Who says it's poetry, anyhow?
My ten year old
can do it and rhyme.

I get three thousand and expenses,
a car, vouchers,
but I'm an accountant.

They do what I tell them,
my company.
What do you do?

Nasty little words, nasty long words,
it's unhealthy.
I want to wash when I meet a poet.

They're Reds, addicts,
all delinquents.
What you write is rot.

Mr Hines says so, and he's a schoolteacher,
he ought to know.
Go and find work.

R.I.P. Dixie Carter

I always loved her. She may have SEEMED to be the most "together" on Designing Women, but when she lost it, she lost it bigger than anyone, in a way that had you wanting to cheer and also fall off the couch. Her timing was impeccable. I loved that character, she was my favorite on the show. There is something so wonderful about seeing such a dignified together woman repeatedly LOSE it. She is so hot-tempered and loyal, she just cannot help herself. I have been unable to find my favorite moment of hers from the show on Youtube: it has to do with her stalling before the crowd at a wedding (who's getting married? One of the other women?), and for some reason there is a delay, so she goes out there to make a speech, but then she finds herself suddenly singing "This Little Light of Mine" - does anyone remember this episode? I am laughing just thinking about it - the baffled guests at the wedding, like: "why isn't the wedding starting, and who is this crazy woman turning it into a cabaret act?" - but I loved this piece on Entertainment Weekly:

Dixie Carter's 5 best 'Designing Women' moments. Clips are included, so enjoy.

My condolences to her husband, Hal Holbrooke, and rest in peace, Miss Dixie Carter. Thanks for the laughs.

What the radio sees: Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love

There were a couple of shots in Shutter Island (I am thinking of one in particular in Ben Kingsley's office) that made me ache for directors who know what to do with the camera. It was so specific, so emotionally charged - attention-getting, yes, but in service to the story. A beautiful sweep from one face to the other. Typical Scorsese (with, naturally, a little help from cinematographer Robert Richardson)- I feel like I could pick his camera shots out of a lineup. The camera moves are highly editorial, but not in the jagged-jumpcuts-handheld tradition which has overtaken every movie, whether it is appropriate or not. An elegantly moving camera is something I prize, and it is only when you see a shot like the one in Kingsley's office in Shutter Island when you realize that it is practically a lost art.

Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love is a master-class in how to move the camera. Every shot is full of interest and mystery, the frame crammed with details that threaten to overwhelm the viewer. You can't look at it closely enough. It DEMANDS attention, but not in a way that seems bossy or clever: it demands attention because it is an element in telling the story. Film is a visual medium. How things are framed, looked at, seen are (or should be) an important part of the story-teller's tools.

The two characters in In the Mood for Love (Mrs. Chan, played by Maggie Cheung and Mr. Chow, played by Tony Leung) are not openly emotional or expressive as human beings. Their feelings are buried, and it is a film of great longing and yearning. The camera, moving slowly, deliberately, sweeping from one side to the other, reflects that. So, too, does the sense that you get that the camera is peeking at the two characters. It peeks over the backs of booths at a restaurant, peers down dark narrow hallways to the glimpses you get in the room at the end, it peeks through mirrors, and grates, and in every single shot there is some sort of interference.

When they ride in a cab, they are seen through the outside window, so the reflections of neon swoop up over their faces. Even in simple shots (Mrs. Chan at work, doing her regular duties), she is seen through the glass of the office, or seen only in part, around a corner. A head-on clear shot is very rare in In the Mood for Love, so when you see one you know it means something. It is not just a film-maker using it to be efficient. It is saying: "This is different from all the other shots. Pay attention."

Shots double back on themselves, and repeat, sometimes in reverse. The dark stairway of the apartment building is seen with people going up, going down, and sometimes we get shots of empty spaces: hallways with doorbells, long corridors, with no people in the shot - and for me this helped create the sense that the two main characters, married, are surrounded by a cramped world of gossip and people listening behind closed doors. Even empty spaces are potent traps. Nowhere is safe. Sometimes Wong Kar-Wai will use the same setting, but in different times and moods, so that you cannot believe you are looking at the same window frame, the same kitchen, the same stairwell.

It is rare that the camera is static in In the Mood for Love, but it doesn't have the frenetic "let me just keep cutting back and forth to try to create the story in the editing room" feeling that so many films now have. He already HAS the story. The word "mood" is in the title. That's key. This is certainly a mood piece, and the gorgeous top-notch soundtrack is essential to the film's impact. But so, too, is that slowly moving nosy camera, stalking the characters through alleys, peeking at them from behind corners, never seeing them wholly, just their parts, fragments.

Part of the fragmentary approach also means that we don't see them entirely, and much of the angles are at mid-riff level, so what we get is shot after shot after shot of people's middles: when they stand up, their heads leave the frame, and we watch their torsos interact. It's strangely gorgeous. It worked on me in multiple ways.

One was: In the Mood for Love is about the music (the soundtrack is superb. as I mentioned), and it takes place in the 1960s, so the radio was paramount. There are multiple shots of radios, in every space, every setting, and it's rare that there is not music in the background. This may be me going out on a limb, but one thought that occurred to me was that the entire film was from the RADIO'S point of view. We saw what the radio saw. If it was placed in the living room, and people were talking down the hall in the kitchen, then the camera was placed in the dark living room and we peeked down into the lighted room in the distance. When people stood up, the camera didn't move, because the RADIO doesn't move. We are at the radio's level, which is around the waist-line. The radio is omnipresent in the film (although subtle, it works ON you, rather than presenting itself blatantly), so I wondered if the entire thing was seen from within that box of music in every space. I haven't read reviews of In the Mood for Love, or critical analysis pieces, so I may totally be stating the obvious here, and people may think, "Duh, of COURSE the film is from the point of view of the radio - that's the whole point!" - and if so, then Yay! I feel very smart!

The other thought I had was about love itself. The movie is about love. Yearning and longing. Unrequited feelings, and being unable to act upon them. When you love intensely, and then you lose that love, often when you look back upon that person, you do not remember them "whole". You remember how they smelled. Or you remember what their mouth was like. Their wrists. You remember that dress she wore that day. Or how he crossed his legs. They come to you in fragments. That is how memory works. Emotions often come to us through the senses, not through narrative, and so In the Mood for Love sees its main characters as their parts, without (somehow) seeming like all the camera is doing is objectifying their bodies. The camera lingers and pans and passes back and forth, the "eye" capturing the perfection of Cheung's curves, or the brooding handsomeness of Leung's face, and the overall effect is that we are seeing them as they saw one another. Epitomes of beauty. Of what they most desire. This is a difficult feat to pull off. Camera moves like that can end up de-personalizing the human beings in the frame. In the Mood for Love is top-heavy with unexpressed emotion, and the camera shows that. The characters ache. We ache with them.

Along with that, when you are in love, what is more powerful than the telephone? Wanting your love to call, waiting for the call, receiving the call, aching for the call ... Phones are filmed with that kind of resonance here, and they dominate. They never just look like themselves. A simple practical object. They look like stand-ins for something else, emotion, love, hopes. The worst possible object to have in your vicinity when you are madly in love with someone is a phone that is VEHEMENTLY not ringing.

There is a distancing narrative device at the start and finish of the film, with white words on a black page, as though the entire thing has just been a story. As indeed it is. There are no "I"s in this narrative. Only "she" and "he". This, to me, also dovetails with the experience one has in looking back on a great lost love. It helps to try to distance yourself from the fresh pain of it, to look at it as a story, like any other, and not a defining event of loss which shaped you forever. The words on the page say that "he", when looking back on the past, saw the events as "blurred and indistinct", the comforting oblivion of time passing. Not healing all wounds, but softening the edges, putting them in the past, not the present. In the Mood for Love, throughout, sees the characters with "something in the way", at all times, even if it is just another passerby, or a house-plant - because memory often acts in this manner, and this film is one of the most nostalgic films of all time. Nostalgia is tough. If you lay it on too thick, your audience will gag on the syrup. But if you are honest with it, and come at it from a place of pain and understanding, it can be a slam-dunk. In the Mood for Love has almost no sentiment in it (or I should say "sentimentality"), and the emotion is held back, agonizingly, leaving space for us, the viewers out in the dark, to feel FOR them.

Collage of screengrabs below the jump, illustrating some of the things described here, although if you haven't seen the film, you really must. It is a work of art.

Look for the repeats of certain images. Look for the dreamy use of color (totally specific - nothing in the frame is an accident). Look for the radio's POV, seeing people's waists, heads cut off. Look for mirrors, fracturing the images. Look for the fragments, the shadows in the foreground, and the way objects are filmed in a talismanic way, investing them with all kinds of significance. Look for all the interference. We rarely see them clearly. We want to peek through curtains, pull back the drapes, crawl out from under the bed at one point, to get a full look at what is going on. It is a perfect example of content dictating form. Or at least informing form. There is emotion here, but it is not intellectual. It is felt, viscerally, from the wonderful performances of the Bogart and Bacall of China, Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, but also from how that camera follows them around, incessantly, sneakily, aching to get the full picture.

More of William Powell in Love Crazy

(I need it after getting my heart broken into a million pieces last night by In the Mood for Love.)

My review of Love Crazy (and other "marriage comedies") here.

Powell is hiding in the shower of his now-married ex-girlfriend (played awesomely by Gail Patrick). They are NOT guilty of infidelity but it would look very bad if he were found there. He is also escaped from a lunatic asylum and the police are after him. The ex-girlfriend's husband is going to take a shower, and the ex-girlfriend stalls him. They stand there, right outside the shower, talking about how he shouldn't take a shower right now. The husband is baffled. What is her problem? The fact that we know William Powell is right behind the curtain makes the scene hilarious. Without looking into the shower, the husband reaches in and turns on the water. The look on Gail Patrick's face, knowing what Powell is going through at that moment, is laugh-out-loud funny. The husband mutters how he likes the water to be "scalding", so he reaches in again and turns the knob. Steam blasts out of the shower, and poor William Powell is bombarded by scalding hot water, and he cannot scream, or make a sound. Tears streamed down my face as I watched him writhe, his mouth jammed open in a silent prolonged shriek, like Edvard Munch's painting.

The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Louise Bogan

Next book on my poetry shelf:

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O'Clair

I don't know that much about Louise Bogan, but I do know I love her poems, even though they are a little bit scary to me. Scary in that she seems cold, clear, and brutal in her observations. She doesn't "fuss" about things. She doesn't go on and on about things. She boils things down to their essences. She liked other poets to do the same (she was poetry editor of The New Yorker for years, so she was responsible, at the time, for setting the standard for the poetry selected - The New Yorker could use her now!!) She is not ever sentimental. She can't afford it. She had a bunch of nervous breakdowns through her life, yet still managed to be productive in her life, not an invalid. But she certainly couldn't afford to "dwell" on her feelings. Her interest was in carving out all the extraneous elements of things like fear of death, womanhood, nightmares, pain - and seeing what was left. At least that's my impression of her from her tight formal poems. Yet she was not a prude, or some kind of reactionary. She was glad that the 19th century, and its accepted assumptions and lies, was over - she was glad there was such a thing as psychoanalysis - and she was glad to see things progress. In 1951, she wrote that it was good to open up "fresh sources of moral, as well as of aesthetic courage", and she felt poetry could certainly handle "subconscious and irrational processes".

She loved Rilke, and Yeats.

She was born in 1897. Her parents were Irish, but she was born in Maine. She was married, had a child, went to Boston University. I am not sure what her clinical diagnosis was, but she did have many breakdowns.

If you are not familiar with the work of Louise Bogan, you should really check her out.

"Women" is perhaps her best-known poem. There is a deep keening sense of irony here. Because, after all, Louise Bogan is a woman. This is not just an unsisterly sentiment. It reads to me as a wish-fulfillment, a yearning. She looks at other women and wishes she had less "wilderness" in her. Wilderness meaning: madness, chaos, griefs, confusion. Someone said they admired my intensity recently, and it was a very sweet comment, but my response is: I'm not sure such intensity is actually healthy or good, although it certainly just is the way I am built. It is nothing to be romantic about. It is actually quite terrible. Or - it can be.

Like an exchange from Men in Black that I referenced yesterday on Twitter, it's been a bit on my mind lately:

Jay says: "You know what they say. It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."

Kay replies: "Try it."

My view is definitely Kay's. It's not an intellectual standpoint. I come to this view from experience. You can only come to that view through experience.

So I read Louise Bogan's "Women", and I certainly feel her separateness, from her gender - how isolated she feels - how different - but the poem isn't smug. It's brutal. And like I said, although it sounds quite critical, I feel a bit of wistfulness in Bogan here. Like, she may be saying, "God, your life is so dull" - but after a time, you get sick of "excitement" and would like a little "dullness". Only maybe by that point you are no longer capable of it.

WOMEN

Women have no wilderness in them,
They are provident instead.
Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts
To eat dusty bread.

They do not see cattle cropping red winter grass,
They do not hear
Snow water going down under culverts
Shallow and clear.

They wait, when they should turn to journeys,
They stiffen, when they should bend.
They use against themselves that benevolence
To which no man is friend.

They cannot think of so many crops to a field
Or of clean wood cleft by an axe.
Their love is an eager meaninglessness
Too tense, or too lax.

They hear in every whisper that speaks to them
A shout and a cry.
As like as not, when they take life over their door-sills
They should let it go by.

Liberating Mary

Mary Wollstonecraft, by John Opie, circa 1797

A wonderful essay by Bob Lamm about his crusade to get the famous portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft back on the walls at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

An important figure, certainly, in the history of feminism, education for women and equal rights (her major work is A Vindication of the Rights of Woman), she also was a journalist, writing on all the major social topics of the day, and was present in Paris during the fiery heights/depths of the French Revolution. She was there when Louis XIV was guillotined. The story of her time in France is enough to make anyone's blood run cold, and she died at a very young age, she wasn't even 40, just 10 days after giving birth to her daughter (you know. Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein).

Vindication: A Novel, by Frances Sherwood, is a historical novel, based on the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, and I am surprised it is not more well-known. With beautiful writing, and visceral details, it gives you a real sense of the woman, her times, the wars and revolutions she witnessed, social upheaval, politics, her loves (failed and otherwise), and her sometimes irascible personality. She was a fighter. Her reputation has not been solid for centuries. She is either reviled and ignored, or praised and celebrated, depending on the moment. There is a reason her portrait was stuck in the basement, and not up on the wall with the rest of her famous family, in the National Portrait Gallery.

Her life, and the events thereof, were so scandalous at times, so off the charts interesting, that IT often has taken center stage, instead of her writing, and her philosophies. And that's a shame. Because that's what she was: one of the great philosophers of the Enlightenment, deserving her rightful place in that pantheon.

If you haven't read Vindication, by Frances Sherwood, I highly recommend it, but Mary Wollstonecraft's books should be read as well. Her history of the French Revolution has something that Thomas Carlyle's more famous book does not: immediacy. She was there. It is a good companion piece to Edmund Burke's magnificent Reflections on the Revolution in France - my thoughts on that work here (Mary Wollstonecraft had a long-standing feud with Burke, and many of her books were replies to his works).

So Bob Lamm has done all of us a great service, by pushing the powers-that-be at the National Portrait Gallery, to unearth the famous portrait from the basement, so that all can enjoy it. She has a place in history too. Let her stand on her own with the rest of them. It is what she would expect and demand.

Go read Lamm's piece. Wonderful stuff. Congratulations, Mr. Lamm, and thank you!

"What you get with Banville is the result of concentration. What you get with Black is the result of spontaneity."

Yet another great article about John Banville and his alter ego Benjamin Black. I just can't get enough of this guy, and I am especially taken by when he discusses his alter ego (and himself) in the third person. "Banville would never be able to do what Black does ..." You can sense the fun he has, mixing it up, creating serious craftsman-like novels as John Banville, and atmospheric tense noir thrillers as Benjamin Black. He's obviously a great interview. I read everything about the man I can get my hands on, and I have not read a boring interview with him yet. He's a detailed thinker, obviously, but with a sense of humor I love. He's so Irish, and so honest about being Irish (his Benjamin Black novels are about many of the dirty little secrets of the Emerald Isle, collective guilt, collective shame), and I get the sense that the fact that he is writing under a pseudonym, even though everyone knows it is him, gives him a sense of freedom that he DOESN'T have as Banville - he is quite honest about this, and I love him for it. I love him for having fun, open FUN, as a writer, even as he tackles terrible subjects.)

In the interview, he talks about atmosphere:

"I can only write here.” He points through the window to a rain-filled, platinum sky. “Isn’t that absolutely beautiful. That’s the colour inside my mind.”

He alternates books. A Banville book, then a Black book - and I anticipate all of them eagerly. I am quite behind in my Banville/Black reading, due to 2009 being a total wash, in terms of reading. Lorrie Moore, one of my favorite living writers, came out with a new novel - which is a rarity so notable that it was treated like a second star over Bethlehem - and Annie Proulx has a new collection of "Wyoming stories" out (well, it's a couple years old by now, but I had been moving away from fiction already and it's been sitting on my shelf since then), and Mary Gaitskill has a new book out, not to mention A.S. Byatt's latest, and God knows who else, but those are the ones I'm itching to read. Still haven't got my fiction legs under me. I'm busy now reading Rebecca West's book about the Nuremberg Trials, and I think my next book will be her book about treason, which I am very much looking forward to - but when I read articles like the one about Banville, I start to burn with the desire to pick up fiction again.

One of the other things I love about Banville is he directly attacks (just through being himself, AND being Benjamin Black) the notion that serious literature is somehow elitist, and popular literature is somehow "easy". He resists all of those labels. I don't happen to think "elitist" is an insult, anyway. At least not in the way it is thrown about now by the sneering hordes, when they use it to mean "well-read, has a good vocabulary, includes references that I might need to look up". "Elitist", when said by the anti-intellectuals, is something I cop to gladly. Naturally, I don't like it when it is meant "exclusive", like a country club that doesn't allow women, Jews, minorities, or artificial barriers between people meant to keep a certain class or group OUT - but a good vocabulary is elitist? We've come to that? Really? Well, alrighty then, I'm an elitist. At least I'm in good company.

Banville is a perfectionist, famously so. His sentences are crafted within an inch of their lives, and that does not come easily. He works at it. But as Benjamin Black, he lets it all go. I read the Benjamin Black books with great delight - they are awesome Irish who-dun-its, with dark terrible underbellies of corruption and decay - but the prose is easy, free, confident. I love how much Banville understands what Black has done for him, how openly he talks about it. No other writer today is so open and honest about the craft of writing. Perhaps he felt a bit trapped by "Banville the great artist" and had to create "Black, the crime thriller writer" to take the edge off. Seems that way. But still: the Benjamin Black books are not what I would call "easy". They just have a totally different feel and energy to them, with well-drawn characters you can't forget, and plots that ache to be told.

Banville, again, seems to rub people the wrong way - (the interview I link to is all about that) - but for me, the reasons he rubs people the wrong way (like, duh, maybe you should pick up a dictionary from time to time) is the reason I love him. Being smart is fun. Knowing words for things is fun. I was called "elitist" once on my blog for using the word "epistolary". I use it a lot. It happens to be one of my favorite words, just to say, I love the sound of it, and then also: I love it because it is accurate. I could certainly say "letter-writing relationship", or "relationship based on writing letters" - but those are three and four words when there is actually ONE word that will suit: EPISTOLARY. I love that. If that makes me elitist, then I sure am guilty as charged, and happy about it. I would be sad if I didn't know the word "epistolary", and I also would be sad if I encountered words I didn't understand and felt ANGRY and RESENTFUL about it, instead of thinking, "Holy shit, what the hell is that word, let me look that up."

Banville says in the interview, answering to the charge that sometimes he is an "intellectual bully" in his writing (ie: you're gonna sit there, and you're gonna take what I dish out):

“Well, sometimes it’s good to be bullied like that. What I’ve always tried to do is give my prose the same denseness and weight of poetry, and you cannot read a poem and do your knitting at the same time, or think about sex, or what you’re going to have for dinner. You have to read a poem or not read a poem. I want my books to be the same. You read them, or you don’t. If you don’t, that’s fine.”

Love him for his honesty. He is a breath of fresh air. I still have not read The Infinities (the new Banville), and can't wait to read Elegy for April: A Novel (the new Benjamin Black).

I love how this experiment/project (writing as two separate writers) seems to be continuing. He's committed to it. He's into it. He hasn't dropped it, it's not a pose. I read Christine Falls: A Novel, the first Benjamin Black novel (and Banville never tried to hide his second identity) in one sitting, when I was stranded in O'Hare. Even if I hadn't been stuck in an airport, I probably would have finished that book in a weekend at the most. Once you start it, you can't put it down. The main character, the alcoholic pathologist Quirke, in 1950s Dublin, is a fantastic noir creation, and the feeling of that time - the time of Banville's childhood - lives and leaps off the page. But besides all of that, there is a plot of intrigue and mystery, involving parlors with muffled curtains, and dingy cold-water flats, and secrets about orphanages and Magdalene Laundries, and all the rest. If you haven't read Christine Falls, I can't recommend it highly enough - and the follow-up Benjamin Black novels are also "Quirke" novels. A series. Like Sherlock Holmes. Or Nancy Drew. What a delight. Even just reading the first one, Quirke was so awesome, so compelling, that I knew I wouldn't be done with him when I finished the book. How fun that there are more.

Once again: Interview with John Banville about Benjamin Black and other topics.

More of my posts about Banville/Black:

John Banville/Benjamin Black

The Sea, by John Banville

More on The Sea, by John Banville

John Banville's alter ego

"My goodness, these are very deep questions you're asking ..."

The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Dorothy Parker

Next book on my poetry shelf:

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O'Clair

Dorothy Parker was famous for her wit, her sharp tongue, and her incisive (sometimes brutal) opinions. After seeing a young Katharine Hepburn in one of Hepburn's first Broadway roles, Parker wrote, "She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B." But that is just one of too many examples to count. You wonder if the woman ever said anything that WASN'T quotable. I have read interviews with her, and she seems the same in person as she does in print, which is extraordinary - it was just how her mind worked: fast, caustic, always having to win (I wouldn't get into a battle of wits with her), lethal - LETHAL. There are so many anecdotes about her, and who knows if they are all true, but I prefer to believe they are true, because somehow, strangely, it makes me believe in the possibility of WINNING. Of crushing an opponent, with only words. It may not be a lovable quality, but it is certainly a theatrical and literary quality. One of the most famous anecdotes is the story of Dorothy Parker and actress Clare Booth Luce approaching a narrow doorway. They both stopped, not being able to walk through it side by side. Clare Booth Luce, trying to be witty, said, gesturing for Parker to go first, "Age before beauty." Parker swept through the door first, retorting, "Pearls before swine."

Mean. She was mean mean mean. But why I love her so much (well, I love her for her mean-ness too - I think mean-ness of that kind is highly under-rated) is that her wit was not empty, or facile. It was a true expression of her sensibility (one aspect of it anyway), and it was always funny, which is not an easy task.

Another reason why I love her is that you do get the sense that there is so much more there. That perhaps she "fell into" something that she was really really good at, better than anyone, but there is also a sadness, that she was pigeon-holed. What about her sadness? Her losses? Her fears? Those are evident in some of her poems as well, but it certainly wasn't how the public saw her. There was sadness for her in that. Here she is, during an interview with The Paris Review in 1956:

Like everybody was then, I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers. My verses are no damn good. Let's face it, honey, my verse is terribly dated - as anything once fashionable is dreadful now. I gave it up, knowing it wasn't getting any better, but nobody seemed to notice my magnificent gesture.

Bitter. But making bitterness funny ("magnificent gesture"). A real survival skill, so so useful to writers.

Another quote from the same interview:

I don't want to be classed as a humorist. It makes me feel guilty. I've never read a good tough quotable female humorist, and I never was one myself. I couldn't do it. A "smartcracker" they called me, and that makes me sick and unhappy. There's a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.

This was her main struggle as a writer. I may be reading into it, but I actually feel her "sick"-ness and "unhappiness" IN her writing, which gives it some of its oomph. She's not a shallow person, as "wits" are often supposed to be. Quite the opposite. She's devastated by phoniness, cruelty, bad writing. It hurts her.

She says in the Paris Review interview:

Mailer's The Naked and the Dead is a great book. And I thought William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness an extraordinary thing. The start of it took your heart and flung it over there. He writes like a god. But for most of my reading I go back to the old ones - for comfort. As you get older you go much farther back. I read Vanity Fair about a dozen times a year. I was a woman of eleven when I first read it - the thrill of that line "George Osborne lay dead with a bullet through his heart." Sometimes I read, as an elegant friend of mine calls them, "who-did-its". I love Sherlock Holmes. My life is so untidy and he's so neat. But as for living novelists, I suppose E.M. Forster is the best, not knowing that that is, but at least he's a semifinalist, wouldn't you think?

She said once that humor needed "a disciplined eye and a wild mind". To me, that perfectly describes her verses, which are tight as a drum, the rhyme schemes and rhythms almost a throwback to Longfellow, who writes rhymes and rhythms so perfect, that they must be read out loud for the sheer joy of them. There are, perhaps, verses more famous than the one I'm excerpting here today (her poem about suicide - "razors pain you", her poem about "one perfect rose") - but her four-line stunner about Oscar Wilde is one of my favorites.

Obviously, Wilde was a huge influence on Dorothy Parker. He had the same brutal eye, the same caustic perfection of thought encapsulated in his epigrams - and I would say that Parker, here, is "disciplined" and yet also very "wild". It takes a wild broad mind to write something like this, but she has reined it all in to something perfect and cool and self-contained. One of her biggest gifts.

I love that crazy mean dame.

Oscar Wilde

If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.

Mother (2009); Dir. Bong Joon-Ho

Get rid of your expectations.

From the trailer, it looks like Mother is the story of a mother's quest to clear her son's name of murder. It is that. But it is so much more. This is one of those great and rare movies that has a byzantine plot full of surprises, but is also a powerful character study of a bizarre and driven woman. Any preconceived notions of martyr-mothers, and Eleni-style theatrics will be dashed here. Mothers can be awesome. They can also be monstrous. This one is both. She is played by Hye-ja Kim in what is, honestly, one of the most amazing performances I have ever seen. Certainly more raw and honest than any of the Best Actress nominees from this year. I struggle to come up with comparisons.

The only thing I came up with was when I saw Beauty Queen of Leenane, first on Broadway, and then in Chapel Hill, where my brother was in a production of it. When the Martin McDonagh juggernaut began, it was rather startling because while we have some wonderful writers here in America, many of them are not writing plays with big surprise elements or character excavations. I do not want to paint with too wide a brush. John Patrick Shanley continues to write plays with great characters and good stories, but many of our plays now are about their THEMES and IDEAS, which is all well and good, but if I want to read a pamphlet, then I'll, you know, read a pamphlet. How about some intrigue? How about some bombs being dropped in the second act, so we can watch the fall-out in the third? How about some good old-fashioned story-making? This is one of the reasons why God of Carnage (my review here) was so exhilarating. It was unafraid. Unafraid to go big. The Irish, at the time of Beauty Queen, were at the forefront, once again, in writing plays that weren't ABOUT anything, per se, no social consciousness or political agenda, but in-depth portrayals of the characters in those moments in time, giving us the chance to sits back and watch the horrible and wonderful things that they did. People with secrets and hatreds and losses that burned like fire. In Beauty Queen, McDonagh gives us Mag, the mother, a truly horrific personality, out of a Greek tragedy. She is hilariously funny, off her rocker, and truly cruel in a way that takes your breath away. You think you have a line on her, you think you will be allowed to pity her, but then she is so terrible you turn around and judge her. You, the audience, are in conflict about your own reactions. Great playwriting. The Greeks talked about catharsis. An event that brings about a "purging". Not of any random emotion, but of pity or terror. The Greeks knew what they were about. And so does Martin McDonagh, whose play owes much to the Greeks. Should we pity Mag? Or should be filled with terror? The play leaves this unresolved, as all great plays do, and she is a character that becomes rooted in your mind, like Blanche Dubois, or Macbeth. Our feelings about her are meant to remain unresolved, and you could argue about her with your friends after the production: was she a victim? A monster? How should we FEEL about this woman? Plays that always attempt to tell the audience how to feel (telegraphing: "this is a bad guy - hate him" or "this is an innocent victim - weep for him") are pandering, soulless. But in Beauty Queen of Leenane, we are given a character we can sink our teeth into. Something that is so much missing in today's drama. Character. How many modern-day playwrights give us characters that live on in the memory?

There is a bit of Mag in the "Mother" in Mother, and to say more would be to give it away.

Bong Joon-Ho (my review of his excellent Memories of Murder here) is working at full throttle in Mother, from the getgo, when we are thrust into the action. The film begins with a wide shot of a field of waving yellow grass, and we see Hye-ja Kim, in the distance, walking through the grass. She seems completely ordinary. She is an older woman, dressed modestly, and while she seems distracted, lost in thought, there is nothing extraordinary about her or the state she is in. She stands in the grass, in closeup, looking around her.

What happens next is so unexpected that I would never dream of giving it away, but within 30 seconds, Bong has launched us into a world where we should know, right off the bat, that we can't ever know everything. We think we know someone. Just from looking at them for the first time. And then they behave like THAT. Forget it. No more expectations. My primal response to that first 30 seconds of film was, quite literally, WHO. IS. THIS. WOMAN????

The best part of Mother is that I still do not have the answer.

Mother lives with her son Yoon Do-joon (played by Bin Won), a man in his 20s, and he is obviously mentally deficient in some indefinable way, he certainly cannot make it on his own. There is no father. Mother and son live in a bell jar of intimacy, even sleeping in the same bed.

Do-Joon hangs out primarily with Jin-Tae (played beautifully by Ku Jin), a guy who was probably his childhood friend, and now keeps hanging out with his friend, even though he's a bit "off". Jin-Tae is a cool dude, with a hot little girlfriend, and he is set up in the film, early on, as vaguely suspicious. You wonder what he's up to. Part of the fun of Mother (and I say "fun" meaning: "dawning horror and realization") is realizing that your first impressions of people are more often than not totally wrong. The entire film is from Mother's point of view. What she knows, we know. Nothing more. There is zero objectivity here. She fears for her son's well-being, and naturally Jin-Tae becomes her first target. But that is only because her intimacy with her son is so cloying that she cannot see the truth. The film is her journey, relentless and brutal, towards the truth.

Do-Joon and Jin-Tae are involved in a mild hit-and-run accident. A Mercedes clocks Do-Joon on the street and speeds away. Jin-Tae becomes hellbent on revenge, so they follow the car to a local golf course. Jin-Tae smashes the mirror of the Mercedes. They ambush the golf cart and have a brawling fight with the men in the sand. The police get involved. Mother is horrified.

This is one of the tricks of Mother, which manages to startle and surprise without feeling tricky or clever. It seems that the film may be about the boys getting their revenge on the guys who ran them down. Mother follows that path. Then takes a turn.

A local high school girl is murdered. Her body is hung over the railing on a roof, for the populace to find the next morning. It is a small community, not used to such violence, and everyone is shocked. Do-Joon was the last to see her (he has followed her through the narrow streets after a night out with Jin-Tae), and so he is arrested for murder.

Mother knows he didn't do it. The police are convinced they have their man. Mother launches her own investigation. She, at first, focuses on Jin-Tae, the "bad seed" influence on her innocent son. There is an absolute masterpiece of a sequence, reminiscent of Sudden Fear, when Mother goes to Jin-Tae's flimsy abode, and searches his closet for clues. She finds a golf club with a red stain on it that looks like blood. During her search, Jin-Tae returns home, with his girlfriend, and she hides in the closet. There are shots where you see Hye-ja Kim's terrified eyes peeking through the curtains, calling to mind every film noir ever made (or a shaft of light falling across Joan Crawford's face in Sudden Fear). Bong Joon-Ho knows how to build suspense. He chooses his shots very carefully. We see through the closet-curtains, getting glimpses of Jin-Tae and his girlfriend making love. We are then out in the apartment, and in the foreground we see the making love going on, but in the background, we can see the gleaming eyeballs peering out through the curtain. It is a nervewrackingly unbearable sequence. After sex, Jin-Tae and his girlfriend pass out, and Mother takes her chance to escape. She has the incriminating golf club in her hand, and she tiptoes through the room, at a deadly slow pace (the floor squeaks), and at any moment she could be discovered. At one point, her foot knocks over a bottle of water, and it spills, the gurgling sound filling the room. Jin-Tae does not wake up. We see Mother's face, looking down in horror, and we then see what she sees: a small pool of water, spreading outwards, moving towards Jin-Tae's dangling fingers. Bong Joon-Ho, in true Hitchcockian suspense style, closes in on the approach of that water to the fingers, which will most certainly wake him up. We are at ground-level, the fingers enormous in the frame, with a thin glimmering line of water approaching in the distance.

This is solid filmmaking. This is a director in charge of his effects, who understands what audiences need. There's fun in his shot-choices, creativity, but it is all means to an end. He doesn't set up shots to call attention to themselves unless it is necessary (similar to the giant crane shot in Notorious, with the camera coming down from the balcony into microscopic closeup on Ingrid Bergman's hand: a shot that demands to be noticed, a stunner - but it is only because the STORY demands it at that point, not that Hitchcock was psyched to show his own cleverness). The creep of the water in Mother, coming towards the giant fingers in the foreground, is an attention-getter, but is is also emotional: it shows the horror of Mother's point of view. What will happen if Jae Tin wakes up? All is lost, all is lost ... her panicked mindset is IN that shot. It is one of Bong's many gifts as a director.

Mother is a film about a private investigation (Bong Joon-Ho covering, as he did in Memories of Murder the territory of police procedures and forensic evidence), headed by a single citizen, and the majority of the film shows Mother interviewing people who knew the dead girl, putting together a timeline of the night before, trying to build up a character study of the dead girl - because (as all good homicide detectives know) it is often the personality and lifestyle of the victim that holds the clue to who killed her. Mother follows every lead. She pays the kids at the high school who knew the dead girl to gossip about her, giving them coins to continue. She finds an important ally in Jae-Tin (once she gets over her suspicion).

The deceptions in the plot are part of the great joy of Mother, and the sucker-punches it provides (which are never in the realm of cheap "Gotcha" moments) is indicative of the fact that Bong Joon-Ho not only respects his audience, and expects that we want to be surprised and challenged, but also that he wants, above all else, to give us a great great ride. He does not disappoint.

And Hye-ja Kim, relentless, fearless, a bludgeoning force against the injustices of the system (but to what end? that is the question), turns in a performance for the ages. I was so frightened during one scene that my natural instinct was to shut my eyes to spare myself having to see what was coming. But then there was a moment of conscious decision: No, Sheila. Keep your eyes open. You are not going to want to miss her acting here.

And you won't want to miss it either.

In that moment, or in the film entire.

Nothing like old old friends

Today is my friend Jackie's birthday. We have known each other since college. We have had many MANY adventures together. We're getting together for lunch today, with Brooke - another old friend from college. I wrote of her here. We have planned this lunch for a month and a half. It's been rescheduled multiple times. They both came to my reading back in October, which was awesome, but we haven't all been in the same place at the same time since.

Two photos below the jump. One is rather famous in my group of friends.

Here is one of the strangest photos ever taken in the history of the medium. Me, Mitchell, Jackie, and Bill and Lee - somehow we crashed a big formal party of a Christian youth group that was happening at the Marriott in Providence. We had ZERO business being there. We all got dressed up. We danced on a crazy dance floor surrounded by gyrating Christians. We messed with people's minds. Everyone asked, "So who do you know?" We would make shit up. We were not supposed to be there.

Guys. Go home. You weren't invited.

And here is a potluck supper we had at the theatre department. I was a freshman. Jackie was a sophomore and I believe Brooke was, too - or maybe a junior. I was on the road to being friends with Brooke, although Rimers (a couple of months in the future) hadn't happened yet. But Jackie I didn't know at all. We had been in the Christmas show together, but we literally never spoke to one another. Not that hard to do, since it was a cast of thousands, with live animals and children on stage, and every scene a crowd scene. I am in the green sweater over to the left. Brooke is standing, over to the right, returning from the buffet table. And Jackie sits sort of behind me. She remembers that day. She didn't really know anyone, and felt really left out, and ended up sitting with someone who was perfectly nice, but not at all who she wanted to be sitting with. She wanted to be sitting with US. It's a tragic photo, in a way. Jackie and I re-enacted it many years later, with Jackie staring longingly at my table, like, "Can I sit with you guys? I'm cool too!!" Every time I look at this photo, I want to tell my younger self to turn around and talk to the blonde girl sitting RIGHT BEHIND YOU. I want to shout, "She is going to be a REALLY IMPORTANT FRIEND, Sheila - so why don't you start now?? You won't regret it!"

By the next year, there would be no way on earth that Jackie and I would NOT be sitting together. Miracles do happen and people DO find each other!

The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Austin Clarke

Next book on my poetry shelf:

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O'Clair

In case you are wondering, the Norton Anthology is organized chronologically, by birth date of poet. I am not including every poet that shows up here, because many I am either not familiar with, OR I have separate volumes devoted only to that poet - and I'll do excerpts from those books, rather than this one.

Austin Clarke was a poet Dublin-born, and is the leading Irish poet in the generation after W.B. Yeats. John Montague (another poet I love) called Clarke "the first completely Irish poet to write in English." He was born in 1896, and had similar journeys to other Irishmen at that time. 1916 radicalized him (he was in college at the time), although the pump was already primed, his parents being nationalists. He went to University College, Dublin - and I think ended up teaching there. He is a very Irish poet, his topics are Irish, his language and phrasing recognizably Irish - but it just goes to show you that there are a million ways to be Irish. He sounds nothing like Yeats - at least not once he found his own way. He imitated him quite a bit in the beginning, before setting himself free. Yeats has a grand and mystical lyricism, which Clarke doesn't share at all. He is much more grim. Thomas Kinsella, who was a great supporter and advocate of Clarke wrote:

The diction of his last poems is a vivid, particular voice, rich and supple; nothing is unsayable. But it is no natural voice.

He liked limitations. He used assonance a lot. He wrote:

Assonance is more elaborate in Gaelic than in Spanish poetry. In the simplest forms the tonic word at the end of the line is supported by an assonance in the middle of the next line. The use of internal pattern of assonance in English, though more limited in its possible range, changes the pivotal movement of the lyric stanza. In some forms of the early syllabic Gaelic metres only one part of a double syllable is used in assonance ... and this can be a guide to experiment in partial rhyming or assonance and muting. For example, rhyme or assonance on or off accent, stopped rhyme (e.g. window: thin: horn: morning), harmonic rhyme (e/g/ hero: window), cross-rhyme, in which the separate syllables are in assonance or rhyme. The use, therefore, of polysyllabic words at the end of the lyric line makes capable a movement common in continental languages such as Italian or Spanish.

Michael Schmidt (my go-to guy for additional context) in Lives of the Poets writes:

Yeats cast a long shadow. The endless debate about what constitutes Irishness in art and literature, continued, as it had for Joyce in his self-imposed exile and for Samuel Beckett. Readers were reluctant, given the achievement of Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh's accessibility, to accept Clarke on his own terms. It can't have been easy, as he emerged, to reconcile personal vocation, deep learning, a time of historic change, and an indifferent or hostile milieu.

He wrote a lot. He wrote plays, editorials, book reviews (he could be quite caustic) - and also novels. He got into trouble repeatedly with the censors in Ireland, a powerful force. He had a nervous breakdown later in life, and in the 60s published a book of verse about it.

Schmidt writes (and this is very interesting to me):

He gains much from being rooted in Ireland in ways Yeats was unable to be. Impoverishment comes from having to acknowledge and define that rootedness, to manifest it in prose and verse. History would not allow him to take his country of origin for granted. Tomlinson insists that Clarke's nationalism is not "the inertia of chauvinism, but a labour of recovery". Clarke adapted elements from a tradition alien to the English, working toward a separate Irish, not Anglo-Irish, poetry. It was for him a project, a required labor added on to his primary vocation, and it is responsible for peaks and troughs in his work. Yeats assimilates the Irish struggle into a preexistent rhetorical tradition. Clarke introduces the struggle, preserved in a language long suppressed, into the rhetoric itself, to forge a new poetic idiom.

I love his stuff, as I love most Irish literature, in all its complexity and diversity. His is another kind of voice, contemporary to the great early 20th century giants, but somehow still managing to do his own thing.

Schmidt writes about his "place" in Irish literature:

The uncompromising force of his best satires, the vividness of his love lyrics and visions, and the cool candor of his "confessions" set him apart. He cleared a non-Yeatsian space in which an Irish poet might build a confident poetry in English for which the term "Anglo-Irish" is meaningless.

That is a big big deal.

Here is one from 1928. I love it because you can feel an oral tradition in it ("They say ... Men that had seen her ...") You can feel the gossip of small towns, and also the long memories of a people who have lived in the same place for generations. The Norton Anthology has a footnote to the poem which I will include, since it's by Austin Clarke himself, his own note to this haunting poem. It's a footnote that gives really important context to what we are reading here. The language is simple, but as with a lot of Irish stuff, there are buried meanings and symbols that everyone there at that time would get - but are lost to us now.

The Planter's Daughter¹

When night stirred at sea
And the fire brought a crowd in,
They say that her beauty
Was music in mouth
And few in the candlelight
Thought her too proud,
For the house of the planter
Is known by the trees.

Men that had seen her
Drank deep and were silent,
The women were speaking
Wherever she went -
As a bell that is rung
Or a wonder told shyly,
And O she was the Sunday
In every week.

¹ "In barren Donegal, trees around a farmstead still denote an owner of Planter stock [that is, a Protestant], for in the past no native could improve his stone's-throw of land" [Clarke's note].

Love Crazy (1941); Dir. John Conroy

I miss marriage comedies. The 30s and 40s were full of them, and they shimmer with light and fun and crazy shenanigans, as two people who once loved each other enough to MARRY, tailspin into misunderstanding and hijinx. The Awful Truth, My Favorite Wife, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, all of the Thin Man movies - These are not the movies of the 1950s, where marriage is captured in all its domestic claustrophobia (although it's presented as a given that it is GOOD). This is marriage on the verge of catastrophic collapse, yet it's handled always with humor and mania. These movies make marriage seem fun. It's totally not the trend now, at all, to focus on a married couple, at least not in the way these old films did. If the plot of a movie involves a married couple, it is more often than not dealing with serious issues of infidelity, long-buried secrets, a body in the basement - Marriage is now serious serious business. Leading UP to marriage isn't, which is why we still have "romantic comedies" by the truck-load (although I rarely find modern romantic comedies funny at all - they've lost the touch) - but once you get married, boom, things get serious.

Not so in the 30s and 40s when we had Cary Grant and Irene Dunne battling it out in movie after movie, and Myrna Loy and William Powell, shimmering and laughing at one another. These movies are true advertisements for marriage, actually. Who doesn't want to be part of those couples? With their fabulous apartments and Manhattans before dinner, and going out to crazy whirling nightclubs? A fantasy, yes, but there are times when I prefer the fantasy. This is not Tracy and Hepburn. Their marriage-movies often deal with the fact that Hepburn needs to be tamed in some way, tamped down. Tracy is usually right in those films, and Hepburn needs to be taught some lessons. Enjoyable as all of that may be, they stand apart from the other "marriage comedies" with a more screwball aspect. Irene Dunne showing up unannounced at her husband's family gathering? Pretending to be someone else, dressed in a flapper dress, and then accusing one of the snooty people there of stealing her purse? All of this just to embarrass her husband, Cary Grant? If Hepburn pulled a stunt like that with Tracy, it would backfire. But Cary Grant, so dignified, so proper, so soulless in the beginning of Awful Truth, is putty in her hands. He splutters with embarrassment and anger, and she laughs in his face. Human relationships are NUTS. "Calming down" and "settling down" may be a worthy goal, but try to make Carole Lombard or Cary Grant or Irene Dunne "settle down". Not an easy task.

That's the spark in marriage comedies. Because the couple are already together, we assume a level of intimacy between them, it's already present. They've slept together, fought, they brush teeth next to each other ... it is that casual everyday intimacy that creates the tension in these movies, a strange combo, but a killer one at that.

The modern Mr. and Mrs. Smith, famous now, I suppose, for breaking up Jennifer Aniston's happy home, is a bit of a throwback, one of the reasons why I think it's such a blast. The couple SPARS. Literally, but also linguistically. They love each other, are hot for each other, but they also drive each other insane. Typical 1930s married-couple behavior. Marriage is a sacred institution, my ass. That's part of the problem. Lighten up, Francis. Let's have some FUN with the institution. The couple, who drift apart in the marriage comedies, always come back together, usually in the very last SECOND of the film, so that we don't see the reconciliation, the credits roll, and our imaginations fly off the handle, gloriously. So yes, marriage is once again triumphant - (this is not always the case in the pre-Code movies which are much darker) - but you can feel the filmmakers and screenwriters putting off the inevitable as long as possible. Domestic bliss may be lovely for those who live it, but there's nothing more boring to WATCH onscreen.

A little-seen modern movie that is a "marriage comedy" of the true old school is Nadine, starring Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger. Now if we lived in a righteous world where things happened as they are supposed to happen, then the Hollywood powers-that-be would have realized what they had in that pairing, and put them in movie after movie together. They finally worked again in Door in the Floor, a terrific film, and they are both great in it, but it's an example of a MODERN marriage movie - all unhappiness and torment and broken dreams. Not that there's anything wrong with that, in and of itself, but watch those two spar and kiss and break up and make up in Nadine, and you will realize what a lost opportunity it was. They are married, but separated. She is a bombshell in a red dress with a Southern accent. He is a vaguely dumb good ol' boy who doesn't want to grow up. She had some erotic photos taken of her, because she's an idiot, and they get into the wrong hands, and suddenly the two of them, enraged at their marriage breaking up, find themselves on the run. The plot is just an excuse, though. An excuse to revel in the chemistry and humor of the two leads. Because they once were married, it gives the film a different feeling - than if they were two single people thrown into these circumstances. Scenes are filled with more import and backstory automatically. They're basically hiding from criminals, and they can't stop bickering about "You ALWAYS do this ..." "Why do you ALWAYS do this ..." as bullets fly over their heads, and they escape from a dilapidated building by crawling across a ladder 5 stories up. Nadine may have come out in 1987, but it feels like it came out in 1939. Highly recommended.

The reigning King and Queen of marriage comedies were Myrna Loy and William Powell, and they were first paired in Manhattan Melodrama (so famously featured in Michael Mann's Public Enemies - it was the movie Dillinger went to before biting the dust in the alley next to the Biograph), which was exactly what it said it was: a melodrama, a three-hanky weepie (I dare you to watch that final scene without feeling a little something-something gathering in your eyeball), and while there was obviously chemistry between Loy and Powell, having Clark Gable there as the vibrant third guy complicated their essential bond.

Obviously, the studio knew what it had in Loy and Powell, so they were put in film after film after film together - it is one of the greatest acting teams of all time. They always play essentially the same people, but if it ain't broke, why fix it? One of the things I absolutely adore about watching them together (and this was present in Manhattan Melodrama as well) is how much they seem to enjoy each other. Not all men enjoy the company of women. They need to deal with them, because they are attracted to them, but they don't like hanging out with them. Clark Gable has a bit of that. It makes him a devastating leading man, because when he finally falls in love, it hits him harder than other men, because he resists it more. But Cary Grant, as gorgeous as he was, always seemed like a good companion - like he actually enjoyed women, even when they were driving him batshit crazy. He didn't have contempt for them, or if he did, he used it very subtly and specifically (his contempt in Only Angels Have Wings comes from having been hurt in the past - it's not generalized contempt, like Clark Gable often has - or Spencer Tracy). But William Powell is the pal to end all pals. The way he is with Myrna Loy in Manhattan Melodrama ... from the second they meet, you can feel him thinking, "Wow. This girl is a hoot. Who is she?" She cracks him up. He enjoys her presence. And yet he is not an un-sexual man. He's not neutered. Watch him in My Man Godfrey, and you'll see a valid and hot leading man.

He's not AS improbable a leading man (surface-wise) as Humphrey Bogart, who was short, balding, and LISPED, for God's sake, but Powell was not an obvious choice either for leads in romantic films. I mean, look at him. He's handsome in kind of a dapper way, but he looks strictly middle-aged (even as a young man he did), with phony teeth, and thinning hair, and maybe starting to get a bit portly round the middle. He's not Clark Gable. He's not Cary Grant. He got his start playing villains. Naturally. Because people who aren't classically good-looking are obviously evil to the core. Humphrey Bogart had the same trajectory, even though he came from a pretty chi-chi background, full of art and tennis courts and tea services. But he LOOKED kind of ... off. So he always played a bad guy. It would take a couple of imaginative casting choices to give these men the chance to show their stuff, as leading men. The risks clearly paid off tenfold.

These guys are valid leading men. Who knew? I love careers like theirs because there is an element of luck and accident to it. Someone had to look at them and think, "Hm. Wouldn't it be interesting to put Bogart with Ingrid Bergman in a romance?" Where he doesn't play a criminal or the Peter Lorre part - but the LEAD. That's a leap. It seems so obvious now, so inevitable, but it certainly wasn't at the time.

Same with William Powell. But watch his first encounter with Myrna Loy in Manhattan Melodrama, and you can see the sparks just flying. These are not just sexual sparks, but intellectual-kinship sparks, sense of humor sparks - They are so much fun to watch together because of this dynamic, which cannot be faked or pretended. William Powell, in his real life, had some pretty babealicious girlfriends (and wives) - Jean Harlow and Carole Lombard, to name a few - and he's one of those people who just gets more and more attractive the more you look at him. He was probably a blast. These were funny funny women, and he exudes the qualities of a man who loves funny women. Not every man does, you know.

Love Crazy, from 1941, is a marriage comedy that has, at its center, the craziness of marriage, its precarious nature, even when you love each other - and what do you do when circumstances beyond your control (a busybody mother, an old girlfriend, the cops, no less) enter into your marriage? What happens when trust is destroyed? It may all be based on a misunderstanding, but while you're in that maelstrom you can't see that. William Powell and Myrna Loy play Steve and Susan Ireland, a couple about to celebrate their 4th year of wedded bliss. They have a big ritual planned, something they do every year, where they re-live the night they got married, and it involves a 4 mile walk, and a row on the river, and then dinner at midnight, and then .... lights out. They plan everything down to the minute, and have their maid (because, you know, these two always have a maid) ready to serve them dinner at midnight on the dot. It's all a little bit OCD and their opening scene with one another, as they get ready for their night out, is so fun and whimsical. They are still hot for one another. She sits at her dressing table, getting ready, and he attacks her and they end up lying on the floor, laughing and kissing. It's beautiful, their dynamic is so fresh. At one point, she stands in the window, looking out, and he says to her, "It should be against the law for you to stand in the moonlight like that."

But the course of true love never runs smoothly, even when you've got wedding rings on your fingers. Susan's nosy annoying mother (played by the great Florence Bates, great-grandmother to my good friend Rachel) shows up, completely oblivious to the fact that they want to be alone on their anniversary. She sends Steve down to the lobby on a quick errand.

As he returns to the apartment via elevator, he runs into an old flame, Isabel Grayson (played by Gail Patrick, an actress I love, she who was so funny and good in My Man Godfrey), and she seems a bit, well, forward. She's married now too, to a painter, but her marriage doesn't seem to have "taken". She happens to have moved into the apartment just below Steve's. They ooh and ahh over the coincidence, and then tragedy strikes. The elevator jams between floors. The doorman struggles to fix it. Steve begins to panic. What will his wife think?

It all begins with that damn elevator getting stuck. The three of them (Steve, Isabel, and the doorman) climb up through the roof of the elevator, and attempt to pry open the door to the floor. Steve hangs there, his chin on the floor, and then suddenly, the door closes - and at the same moment, the elevator shifts back into gear and plummets down through the shaft, leaving him hanging there, as the doorman and Isabel crouch on the roof of the elevator. It's an incredible shot. You look down the shaft and see the elevator disappearing, with two figures standing on top of it, as William Powell hangs there, his HEAD caught between the door. So if you were on that floor, and you walked by, you would see a man's head ONLY, sticking out between the elevator doors. This is a visual gag, hard to describe, but it is so well-conceived, so well-done, that I was howling watching it. The elevator suddenly returns, and Steve, his head still caught, is moved up, and then back down, and up and then back down, his head careening up and down through the slot in the elevator doors. He is terrified. He has no idea what is happening. He is panicked. I am laughing out loud as I type this.

Love Crazy is so funny, so consistently, that I actually did a spit-take alone in my apartment last night, just THINKING about one of the moments.

So this begins the long journey of Steve's anniversary night. It is the first error. Steve's second error is that Isabel takes him into her apartment to recover from his terrible ordeal, hanging in the elevator shaft, and she turns on the hots for him. He resists, but he is already, to some degree, a broken man, due to the craziness of what had just happened. He tries to get away from her. She starts to tickle him. William Powell, a frayed mess of a man, rolls around on the couch, laughing uproariously as she tickles him, but it is a terrible and desperate sound. He finally gets away.

He returns to his apartment to find Myrna Loy dressed for dinner and wondering where the hell he has been.

To describe more of this hilarious movie would be to ruin it. Suffice it to say, there are some belly laughs of the kind you really don't see nowadays in modern movies. The elevator scene, for one - who the hell thought that up - and then to make it not only clear, it is totally obvious what is going on at all times, and it's a very complicated sequence, but also funny? It works so well. Then there is a new rug placed in the slippery foyer of their apartment, and one by one, people wipe out when they walk on it. Pratfalls. Give me more pratfalls in modern movies. People falling on their ass for no other reason than it is funny to watch people fall. I would find myself forgetting about the rug for a while, (and of course they never just say, "This is crazy", and roll up the dangerous rug) and then, once again, someone would step one foot onto it, and go flying into the air, and I would erupt into laughter yet again. A pratfall is not a tough sell. I would like more of them, please.

Myrna Loy finds herself truly distrusting her husband. It looks really really bad. It looks like he spent the evening in Isabel Grayson's apartment. It also looks like he is lying about it. This is devastating news for her. Powell pleads with her that this is all "circumstantial evidence" that doesn't tell the whole story, but his wife is firm. She won't be conned. She has no idea how she will ever trust him again.

Divorce proceedings begin. And Powell is advised that if he "acts crazy", the divorce settlement will have to be put off, because he is not in his right mind. So begins the second act of the film, just as hilarious as the first, with Powell behaving in a lunatic manner, eating his tie as though it is a piece of pizza, and at one point, he is wrapped in a sheet like a toga, trying to chase a cockatoo out onto a branch, and the sheet falls off and he plummets, stark naked, into the middle of a garden party below.

Most of these visual gags are handled with surgical specificity and perfect timing, which is just what is needed for this kind of stuff. Anything extraneous, or too messy, and you wouldn't get the joke.

Steve has an appointment with the "Lunacy Commission", hired to weigh in on his sanity. I loved the big sign on the door: LUNACY COMMISSION, which, to me, is a metaphor for the entire world portrayed in Love Crazy. The experts (who all have German accents, of course) decide, merely from the shape of his cranial lobes, that he is schizophrenic, so he is placed in a mental institution.

There is also a "world class bow and arrow man", named Ward Willoughby, played by Jack Carson, in a very very funny performance, who also lives in the Ireland's apartment building, and spends most of the film in his T-shirt because he "needs his torso free when he shoots his arrows". I mean, come on.

Through a very funny scene of mistaken identity and incorrect assumptions, Ward gets roped into the Ireland's marital mess. He has the funniest line in the film. "WERE THEY PYGMIES?" he shouts at William Powell (only he doesn't know it's William Powell, because by that point, William Powell is dressed in drag, and posing as his own "sister").

With a consistently laugh-out-loud funny script by William Ludwig, Charles Lederer and David Hertz, Love Crazy is not just its gags, although the gags come fast and furious, with people tangled up in nets hanging from trees, with people falling into swimming pools, and forgetting, repeatedly, that the rug in the foyer is slippery, so down they all keep going like ninepins - the script is also razor-sharp, smart, and witty. In an early scene, Steve is trying to reassure Susan about Isabel, that she is now married, and no threat to their marriage. But Susan knows about Isabel, and her wiles, and is having none of it. Steve says, "Susan, she has a husband!" and Susan coos, "Oh! Whose husband has she got?"

Of course, Myrna Loy and William Powell must end up together. It is the only thing that will right the world on its already wacko axis. As long as they are apart, nothing, but nothing, will make any sense.

Everyone in this movie starts out relatively normal, and everyone, by the end, is stark staring mad.

Because that's what love does to us all. That's what marriage is. A crazy-making proposition. It drives people out of their gourds.

And not one of us would pass a test given by the LUNACY COMMISSION when we are in the throes of love. Not one of us. And thank God for that.

The elevator scene (it comes at around the 4 minute mark):

The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - E.E. Cummings

Next book on my poetry shelf:

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O'Clair

E.E. Cummings was one of the few poets I responded to emotionally and viscerally when I first had to read his stuff in high school. I just LOVED him. I didn't know what it was all about, but I loved his weird syntax, I loved how the poems looked on the page - they became like little jigsaw puzzle pieces - where you get fragments of meaning. The words seem to make sense, but lots of times they are not in the right order. And I wondered about that. Why did he do that? I just loved him.

I think the poems I read back then were "next to of course god america i" - that one I very much remember reading early on. The last line: "He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water" freaked me out a little bit. It seemed so bureaucratic, so PTA meeting. I think we read "anyone lived in a pretty how town" too - but the "next to of course god america i" is the one I really remember from back then.

He shows up a lot, if you pay attention. Perhaps the most famous example is how "somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond" is woven into the plot and emotional themes of Woody Allen's Hannah and her Sisters. I know a lot of people who count that as one of their favorite poems of all time, and I would certainly rank it with some of Shakespeare's sonnets as one of the best love poems ever written.

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

That is a killer poem. I have a personal association with it as well. A guy I was madly in love with, early on, sent it to me in an email once, with no explanation, no note from him. Just the poem. I already know it well, and it is such a naked open expression of love and desire that naturally I thought: Well, you have to be sending this to me for a REASON - you're not sending it to me because you like the rhyme scheme. It's the SENTIMENT you want to express - and cummings expressed it better than anyone. "nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands". Perfection. Heart cracks open every time I read it. It's a dangerous poem. It should be used only wisely and well.

Cummings was doing stuff that yes, had been done before - Gertrude Stein and others had been obsessed with how things LOOKED on the page - but he went at it in his own very very specific way. Even in his own generation, he really stands apart. Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry magazine back then, and midwife to lots of the modernists, loved Cummings's stuff, but she did say, "Beware his imitators!" - which is very good advice. He is easy to imitate - but hard to capture.

Michael Schmidt in Lives of the Poets writes:

He split himself between Paris and Greenwich Village, and later in life between the Village and his New Hampshire farm. He died in 1962. Never happy in a single form, cummings dabbled in painting and drawing, based a satirical ballet on Uncle Tom's Cabin, wrote plays, and a travel diary about his trip to the Soviet Union, Eimi (1933), because he was fascinated with the human experiment of communism. Poems were his primary activity, but set against those of Moore and Loy, Williams and Stevens, his verse is soft-centered. It is often said that dialect poetry, translated into standard English, can prove standard-sentimental, the charm imparted only by the distortions of language: cummings is a dialect poet in this sense. His belief in the Individual, the sacred unit, the anarchic "I" in tension or conflict with the world and its institutions, issues in inventive distortions of language, but not the radical vision of a Loy or the bleakness of Jeffers. The experimentalist and iconoclast takes his place in the Elysian Fields among the conservatives.

That, to me, seems quite insightful. (But then, Schmidt always is.)

If you read some of cummings's lesser known poems, not just the anthologized ones, and if you read a bunch of them in succession, you start to get the impression ... the feeling ... of the philosophy behind all this. I suppose he had a philosophy about language, sure he did, he liked mucking it up, but it seems to me that what I sense as one of the driving engines of his poetry is a hatred of phoniness, officiousness, pettiness - he is brutal when it comes to bureaucrats, anyone who seems outside of the real thrust of life. He can be very very judgmental. There are those who "get it", and that is a small number, according to cummings, and outside of that charmed circle, is a vast ignorant populace. He wants no part of convention. He is of that generation (born in 1894, died in 1962) who saw two World Wars overtake the entire world like a flu virus. It changed how writers dealt with language. He was, in his own way, grappling with the same issues as TS Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound - the giants - but unlike them: you can recognize an e.e. cummings poem just by looking at it. It is not MANNERED, though. It's not a trick. His poems end up feeling incredibly organic and true, full of very real feeling. The forms he chooses, the way he reverses word order, ends up feeling like a vehicle for all of his strong emotions - that's the only way he could get it out.

But I think Harriet Monroe is right. Beware his imitators for they are a plague! They have the mannerisms, but not the heart.

I love the poem below. He's one of the few poets of this period who are truly funny.

may i feel said he

may i feel said he
(i'll squeal said she
just once said he)
it's fun said she

(may i touch said he
how much said she
a lot said he)
why not said she

(let's go said he
not too far said she
what's too far said he
where you are said she)

may i stay said he
(which way said she
like this said he
if you kiss said she

may i move said he
is it love said she)
if you're willing said he
(but you're killing said she

but it's life said he
but your wife said she
now said he)
ow said she

(tiptop said he
don't stop said she
oh no said he)
go slow said she

(cccome? said he
ummm said she)
you're divine! said he
(you are Mine said she)

In conjunction with

the review of Love Before Breakfast below this post:

Check out the Walker Evans picture that Tracey found.

Love Before Breakfast (1936); Dir. Walter Lang

Carole Lombard plays ditzy and impulsive, but she doesn't play dumb. One of her greatest gifts as a comedienne is her craftiness, how well she creates cunning selfish women, heedless, manipulative, who do not know their own minds (or, to put it more accurately, lead from the mind, and ignore the heart). It's most fun to watch her do battle with herself, expressions of annoyance and panic and "A-ha!" moments flicking across her beautiful face. She was un-tameable. Lombard was able to hit her stride in her short career, finding her rightful place in the world of screwball, but there were certainly some bumps along the way. She is so stunningly beautiful, a perfect face, really, blonde and porcelain skin and huge eyes ... But when she was cast as "the beautiful girl", as she inevitably was early on, her performances often feel artificial. She doesn't know who she is in conventional material. It put a lid on her. She suffers more under unimaginative direction than other actresses do. It was Howard Hawks (and others) who helped take that lid off and release that zany girl, who realized that she needed to be always on the verge of either a panic attack, a temper tantrum, or some horribly crafty scheme to get what she wants. Traditional female roles were not for her. One other thing about Lombard, and my only evidence for this is watching her performances: she is incapable of phoniness. When she's in a bad project, not right for her, she is bad too. She can't "pretend". She can't stoop down to bad material. She goes down with the ship. Either she was totally natural as her crazy self, or she was almost invisible, stilted, unsure of where to put her energy.

Garson Kanin in his gossipy book Hollywood writes:

Has there every been such a laugh? It had the joyous sound of pealing bells. She would bend over, slap her perfect calf, or the floor, or a piece of furniture. She would sink into a chair or to the ground. She would throw her head back. And you would be riveted by that neck. That throat.

Lombard, more than other actresses, really needed a vehicle. Her talent was very specific. Of course every actress needs a break of some kind, to be seen in a project that heightens her visibility, but that's not really what I'm talking about here. It could have gone one of two ways with Lombard: She could have been pigeonholed as a pretty young starlet, and she would have had a short career, placed in weepy melodramas, merely because she was so beautiful to look at. Or, it could have gone the way it actually went. There was no in-between with her. She could have been in the biggest picture in the world, but if it didn't "get" her, it wouldn't have been a "vehicle". Not every actress is so specific, so in NEED of the right type of part, and director, and script. It's really actually quite precarious when you think about it. I think Julia Roberts is a similar type of actress, in the fact that she needed a vehicle. She could not be strapped down in conventional parts. She needed to be let GO, which Garry Marshall did in the highly improvisational Pretty Woman. Think about it: Before Pretty Woman came out, she was making Sleeping With the Enemy, and before that, she had been in ensemble dramas, where she was fine, often good, but no doubt about it: she had to be a giant star. She just doesn't fit in otherwise. My impression of the difference is in someone like Gwyneth Paltrow, who had stardom thrust upon her, by the Weinstein Brothers, basically - but who had been in independent films up until then, and could have had a very satisfying career as a character actress, or even a stage actress (following in her mother's footsteps). As a matter of fact, I think Paltrow would be more suited to that kind of career, she would seem more comfortable in her own skin than she does now. But Roberts? No. If Pretty Woman hadn't happened, (or something similar), she would have been stuck in a nothing career. This is my sense of her, anyway. Carole Lombard is a similar case. Without the screwballs, nobody would remember her name, as talented and wonderful as she is. She is not limited. She could do dramatic parts as well. But she is a persona, a natural STAR, and she needed the vehicle, she needed to be steered into the limelight, and once she was there, it was so obvious that she should never leave.

Love Before Breakfast, from 1936, is quite uneven, with two uninteresting men in the lead roles (Preston Foster and Cesar Romero), who play rivals for Lombard's affections. Lombard was so feisty and strong, so individual, that she needed to be man-handled a bit, that's part of the fun of it, but these are not the guys to do it.

Preston Foster plays Scott Miller, a successful businessman (so successful that he can buy the oil company of his rival for Lombard's heart, just so he can send the rival off to Japan), who hangs out with a snooty silly Countess in his spare time, but really has the hots for Kay Colby (Carole Lombard). He pursues Lombard like crazy, even though she is already engaged to Bill Wadsworth (Cesar Romero, better than Foster here, in his part). Bill is sent off to Japan, leaving Kay unmoored, so Scott moves in for the kill, following her around town, buying her drinks, popping up everywhere. There's something missing in their dynamic, as actors, although Lombard does her best. She is torn between two loves, and very funny in how much WORK she puts in to her own denial. She loves BILL, not SCOTT, she is sure of it. She finds Bill amusing, but she is only interested in his money, or so she says, and she jumps through great fiery hoops to keep up her attitude of scorn and condescension. Preston Foster is a bit stuffy, he doesn't have the right arrogant attitude for Scott, a man with such grand presumptions that he moves people around like chess pieces, and expects to be thanked for it. Clark Gable would have been maddeningly good in the role. You would have wanted to wring his neck. It also would have been sizzling hot, as these screwballs always should be. You should be dying for the two to leap into the sack.

In one scene in a nightclub, a fight breaks out between every male patron there, and Lombard gets stuck in the middle of it. The lights are low, and the melee is insane, and in the midst of it all, Scott punches Lombard in the eye, giving her a shiner. Oh, the comedic possibilities in this, that sadly do not come to fruition. It is automatically amusing to see Lombard staring at herself in the mirror with an enormous black eye. It is also funny to think of the man she loves socking her one. But it's a thread that isn't really followed, or maxed to its potential. It's sort of left there. Obviously it's a good enough image that it made it to the poster (a poster I now have on my wall), but what a lost opportunity. She goes to the beauty parlor to have her eye covered up, she wears a hat tilted over her face, and that's the end of it. A true screwball would have realized what it had in that situation and milked the sucker until we were falling off the couch.

There are a couple of great scenes where Lombard gets to show her stuff. One is a costume ball (her costume below the jump. She does the entire scene in that get-up, and it gets funnier and funnier the more you look at it), where she sets up Scott to dance with a visiting Southern belle, and she tells both of them (secretly) that the other one is deaf and "you have to shout" at them to be heard. So poor Scott and the visiting Southern woman needlessly shout banalities at one another on the dance floor, as Lombard, in that crazy costume, laughs until she almost falls down on the sidelines. Kanin was right. She laughs, and we laugh. It is irresistible. Especially in that totally outrageous outfit.

Kay and her mother have a Japanese maid named Yuki, and there's a very funny scene when Yuki reads the tea leaves for Kay. Kay, still convinced she's in love with Bill, not Scott, hovers over Yuki, asking her anxious questions about who she sees, who is her date, is there a man beside her ... and Lombard, always funniest when she is most serious, listens with an urgency that is very comedic, her face showing the roller-coaster of her emotions, second by second. When she doesn't get the answer she wants to hear, she becomes dejected and cynical and Yuki tries to cheer her up. Yuki tells Kay that it is obvious she is "in love with Mr. Miller". Kay balks at this. Yuki says in her Japanese accent, "In Japan, when a Japanese girl loves a Japanese man, she says to him, 'I love you, Mr. Miller', and everything right away fine." Lombard says, disgruntled, "Yeah. Everything right away great. The Japanese girl is shoved around for the rest of her life." The comedy is in the disgruntled manner in which Lombard says "everything right away great", which is, for me, the funniest moment in the movie.

There's also a very well-written proposal scene, between Scott and Kay, where he presents her with three enormous engagement rings. Kay is beleaguered by now, beaten down, and she accepts the proposal, but listen to this dialogue:

Scott: You'll be sorry to hear my feelings haven't changed. I'm still going to marry you.
Kay: You'd better be careful. One of these days I might take you up on that.
Scott: Couldn't make it today, could you?
Kay: If I did it would only be for your money.
Scott: I never look a gift horse in the mouth.
Kay: You want me anyway?
Scott: Definitely.
Kay: All right. But this isn't going to be any Taming of the Shrew, you know. I'm not going to come crawling after you've broken my spirit.
Scott: I'll take my chance.
Kay: It's a long one.
Scott: I like 'em that way.
Kay: I guess that settles it.
Scott: Oh, no, there should be a kiss to seal the bargain.
Kay: Is that necessary?
Scott: It's pretty standard.
Kay: All right.
Scott: Can you spare it?
Kay: I think so.
They kiss.
Kay: Well, goodbye.
Scott: Oh, no, there's one more detail.
Kay: What happens now?
Scott: Come on, I'll show you.
Kay: I warn you, I won't sign anything without a lawyer.
Scott: You won't have to sign a thing. Just one minute.
He takes out a small box.
Kay: What's this?
Scott: The customary engagement ring.
Kay: Oh, you were all prepared.
Scott: Oh, yes, yes, indeed. Well prepared.
He takes out two more boxes.
Kay: When did you get these?
Scott: The day after you turned me down.
Kay: Sure of yourself, weren't you.
Scott: Just a gambler.
Kay: A gambler who knew he'd win. The fact that I don't love you doesn't spoil your victory. Well, I'm glad we understand each other. Which one of these little knick-knacks would you like me to wear?
Scott: Oh, they're all for you. I thought you might like to change off.
Kay: How romantic.
Scott: Now that we're engaged, I hope we'll see each other occasionally.
Kay: Whatever is customary, Mr. Miller.

Lombard plays that great dialogue with the perfect amount of exhaustion and annoyance, but imagining Scott's dialogue in the mouth of Clark Gable, as opposed to Preston Foster, makes me ache to see THAT scene. It falls a bit flat, as is. Again, she is funny, and specific, but without the right scene partner, she doesn't have anything to buck up against.

But her talent is always operating. She's on a sailboat with Bill, her ex-fiance who has returned from Japan, and she is annoyed because Scott is on a boat across the bay, and naturally, things are not going as she wants them to go. Lombard is perpetually cranky throughout this film, she feels dominated, and afraid of more domination - she senses that Scott would demand something more of her than she would have to give (like her heart, like love), and she wriggles out of those chains the second they are on her. Bill (Cesar Romero) is not a bad guy, but he's had it with being used as a pawn in the love-game between the other two. At one point, during the argument on the sailboat, Carole lies on a couch below-deck, annoyed, and he pops a cork out of a champagne bottle, and it startles her. It's one of those subtle sometimes unnoticed pieces of behavior that Lombard does like nobody else. It's not even made into a "bit" - she doesn't scream, there is no dialogue referencing it - it's just Lombard, her comedic sensibility tuned in, ALWAYS, to the potential in every moment - and the slight jump she gives, startling her out of her depression, is hysterical: it is these moments that I treasure most from Lombard. It never stops with her. She is a runaway freight train. Hurtling into the reality of every moment, all pistons going, and she vibrates with life and feeling and responsiveness.

Other actresses would have missed the cork-pop, it wouldn't even have occurred to them to decide to be scared of the sound - and that's what separates the men from the boys in an acting career. The women from the girls. Lombard from everyone else.

Block Island

I miss being out there. Here is the frozen pond up by the North Light. It's sunset. Snow coats the ice on the pond. The reeds in the foreground, the silhouetted house - I really saw some amazing things at that pond, which seemed to go through 100 moods in the short month I was out there. Here it is in a quiet contemplative mood. A moody mood.

The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Hugh MacDiarmid

Next book on my poetry shelf:

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O'Clair

All I know is is that Hugh MacDiarmid (born Christopher Murray Grieve) is one of the best known Scottish poets of the 20th century - although I think he was seen as a local poet, mainly, due to his focus on Scottish language and Scottish nationalism. He was highly political, as most oppressed people are - and was determined to restore the Scottish tradition (its language and rhythms), after being battered down by British domination. Similar to the Irish Revival going on at the very same time, in the early years of the 20th century, with Gaelic Leagues popping up, and a real effort made to restore the Irish language, Hugh MacDiarmid took it as his mission to revive the Scottish language, its pride and separateness. He was a man of his convictions, a communist and nationalist, and abhorred any half-measures, seeing them as the cowardly cop-outs that they so often are. He writes from a place of titanic anger.

I don't know much about him, but I do know that (like Joyce, another writer-in-exile-in-his-own-country), he looked to "the continent" for his inspiration (as well as in his own nation), finding kindred spirits in the French Symbolists and all those decadent guys like Mallarme, et al. He said that he felt it was his mission to be a "cat-fish that vitalizes the other torpid denizens of the aquarium". English is obviously the language of Shakespeare and Milton and Keats, but it was not the native language for those in Ireland, Wales and Scotland - and it was an explosive issue, highly political. Their languages had been systematically discouraged and snuffed out. So much of 20th century literature is from former colonies of the British Empire, world-wide, finding their legs again, their voice, their own traditions. Much of that stuff is terrible, granted - I find most modern poetry of this kind basically unreadable and unmemorable. Identity-politics and nationalism do not necessarily make great poetry. But MacDiarmid's stuff is rich and funny and when seen in the context of the time - quite courageous. Now, it might seem quaint. Or a throwback. Like a sign that says "Candy Shoppe", or some other ridiculous archaism. But no. This is political poetry, even if politics is never mentioned. This is angry, raging stuff. Speaking in your "native tongue", even if it was just to say "How are you this morning" was a political act. Remember the moment in James Joyce's The Dead when Miss Ivors, the Irish nationalist, leaves the party, she calls out to the crowd, "Beannacht libh!" - a benign farewell statement, but seen as aggressive and almost hostile to that particular crowd, an indictment of their total acceptance of British domination. "I'M speaking Irish, because I AM Irish." is her angry subtext.

MacDiarmid writes from that place. He had a lot of enemies, a lot of naysayers, whom he slayed left and right in prose, like William Wallace of yore. He loved a fight. He was Scottish, after all. He found most Scottish poetry to be unacceptable, and he wasn't one of those people who just "does his own thing". Most of these nationalistic poets, ones who live in an oppressed or dominated land, can't just "do their own thing". It needs to be a movement. Other poets must be encouraged to embrace their Scottishness, to look back to their roots, pre-British, and write from THERE.

Michael Schmidt in Lives of the Poets writes:

Because many of MacDiarmid's best poems are in a language heightened by his own invention (called Lallans, Synthetic Scots, or Vernacular Scots) based on the vernacular of the Borders and Scottish Lowlands, not on standard English, he seems at first as linguistically difficult as his forebears Dunbar and Douglas (he lacks the repose of Henryson).

MacDiarmid found Joyce's Finnegans Wake to be a revolutionary work (as indeed it is), and thought it was an exciting example of the future. Language is a big BIG deal to MacDiarmid. As it was to Joyce. Perhaps someone born in England proper could not understand this. But Joyce was always aware that the language he spoke, the language he grew up speaking, had been IMPOSED on his people. It gives you a different relationship to language, there are fewer assumptions, fewer unexamined elements. MacDiarmid wrote a long poem for James Joyce called "In Memoriam James Joyce", which was a celebration of Joyce's supra-national, intra-national, extra-terrestrial, whatever you want to call it, relationship to language. An example to everyone.

Seamus Heaney writes of MacDiarmid:

The recorded words and expressions ... stretch[ed] a trip wire in the path of Grieve's auditory imagination so that he was pitched headlong into his linguistic unconscious, into a network of emotional and linguistic systems that had been in place since childhood.

He had some monstrous political views (thought Stalin was a great guy), although understandable seen from his perspective. He was listed in Who's Who, naturally, and when asked to name his favorite recreation, he wrote: "Anglophobia".

Michael Schmidt again writes (and he's so good at providing connections, references, influences):

[MacDiarmid's] was an inclusive talent like Lawrence's or Whitman's, only more austere and particular, more Presbyterian, less subjective. It is intellectual, satirical, deliberately inelegant, yet at the same time prophetic... Like another great Scot, Thomas Carlyle, he knew his own arrogance and could make fun of it. Hard on others, he could be hard on himself. The romantic and mystical impulses that trip up his materialist mission are part and parcel of his achievement and his shortcomings, all of which he exposed in In Memoriam James Joyce, particularly in the section that in extract is called "The Task". The poem is filled with hostages to fortune. It calls his paradoxical, antinomian structures to account and finds them wonderfully wanting. Paradoxical choices are evident throughout, even in the choice of Scots, an act at once reactionary and revolutionary, articulating as it does against the broad complacent nationalism of Britain a narrow, redefining and positive nationalism of Scotland. MacDiarmid's nationalism is not triumphalist or at any point complacent. Its intention is recuperative; he is wresting something out of the past and out of the present, an area of distinct identity, independent value. He explores this theme inexhaustibly in prose, not least in his richly eccentric study Scottish Eccentrics. Scots is not a regional dialect but the reconstruction of a national language. The project may be doomed, but it is heroic, and in making the new - or remaking the old - language, he creates some of the greatest poetry of the century.

I like to read his stuff out loud, especially the really Scottish-sounding ones, because - like with Chaucer, or Finnegans Wake - these things are meant to be heard. They LOOK nonsensical on the page, but once you open your mouth and start to muddle through, they make beautiful sense. You don't even need a glossary.

T.S. Eliot wrote of MacDiarmid:

It will eventually be admitted that he has done ... more for English poetry by committing some of his finest verse to Scots, than if he had elected to write exclusively in the Southern dialect.

Here are two of his poems - one is obviously written in a Scottish dialect, the other not. The second one is a great example of how Hugh MacDiarmid ARGUED with people through his writing. The second poem is a response to A.E. Housman's poem "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries". MacDiarmid couldn't let it pass, had to respond. As you can tell from the first line, he never ever held his punches.

Cloudburst and Soaring Moon

Cloodburst an' soarin' mune
And 'twixt the twa a taed
That loupit oot upon me
As doon the loan I gaed.

Noo I gang white an' lanely
But hoo I'm wishin', faith,
And clood aine mair cam' owre me
Wi' Jock the byreman's braith.

Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries

It is a God-damned lie to say that these
Saved, or knew, anything worth any man's pride.
They were professional murderers and they took
Their blood money and impious risks and died.
In spite of all their kind some elements of worth
With difficulty persist here and there on earth.

"Contrary to what we'd all come to believe, Dennis Hopper is not immortal. Let's appreciate him now."

So writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the introduction to his stunning video collage on Dennis Hopper.

It's not short. So take the time. Do not miss this one.

Angel Baby (1995); Dir. Michael Rymer

From the first moment Harry sets eyes on Kate, he is in love. She is intense, with dark eye-pencil lining her eyes, and strawberry blonde hair. Harry tells his brother later, "I worship her." But he hasn't spoken to her yet. He's shy. Also, small detail: they are both schizophrenics, and their first meeting is at one of the group sessions they have to attend at the clinic where they are both outpatients. Kate lives in a youth hostel, and Harry is staying with his brother and his brother's family.

One day, Kate gets on a bus, carrying a big bag. Harry follows her. Kate realizes she is being followed, and moves to the front of the bus. Harry follows her. The bus comes to a stop, and Kate suddenly flees out the back door. Harry races after her. He chases her through a park and she finally stops and confronts him, "What are you doing? Why are you following me?" He is too shy to answer. She urgently needs to get back on a bus. She races back to the sidewalk, and the bus has just left. She panics, dropping her bag, and screaming at Harry. "I needed to be on that bus. I need a television!!!" He, madly in love with this strange girl, grabs her hand and pulls her off with him. They run across a bridge towards the city. It is dusk. Harry has a plan. He takes her to a store with TVs on in the windows. Wheel of Fortune has just come on. Kate crouches on the sidewalk, taking out her journal, and she starts to watch the show, and write things down. She tells him that she gets messages from Wheel of Fortune from "Astral", her "guardian angel." Kate glances up at Harry and barks, "And don't you dare laugh at me." He shakes his head, he won't, he won't laugh. And he doesn't.

Movies about mental illness are very difficult to get right. Often I sense the ghoulish delight the actors have, in getting to play someone "crazy", and that's insulting and not at all what I want to watch. Or the problem is with the script. Scripts often choose mental illness as some kind of metaphor - for enlightenment, sensitivity, a poetic connection with the spheres of humanity - and that's equally as insulting, to anyone who has struggled with mental illness (enlightenment? are you cracked?) or who knows someone who has struggled. It's a sickness, not a poetic sensitivity, although I do realize the lines are sometimes blurred. Denial is very powerful, and nobody wants to admit they are sick. James Joyce's daughter was schizophrenic, and he was in denial for years about it. He tried to see her as "poetic", and "in touch", and truly gifted - but he finally had to admit that she was just a very very sick girl. Now that is an interesting phenomenon, and quite common when you are dealing with mental illness - denial, not wanting to believe, etc., and also confusion as in: How on earth do you fix what is happening in my head? What will happen to me when you put me on meds? Will I vanish? But far too often, scripts do not deal honestly with that dilemma. A Beautiful Mind tried to make John Nash's delusions manifest, so that we are in his world, we see everything through his eyes. That was the only part of that movie that worked for me. The rest was a manifesto on how love can cure schizophrenia. Uh-huh. Sure it can.

Angel Baby makes none of these errors, and the result is a beautiful and harrowing film about two people in love, who struggle openly with their illnesses, and who try to make a go of it as a couple, against the advice of everyone in their lives.

Written and directed by Michael Rymer, Angel Baby may sound, on the face of it, like a made-for-television movie, but it's not. It's a powerful film, featuring two spectacular performances by John Lynch (a favorite of mine) as Harry and Jacqueline McKenzie as Kate. Both actors won the plum prizes that year from the Australian Film Institute. The actors surrounding this couple is awesome as well, especially Colin Friels as Morris, Harry's brother, and Deborah-Lee Furness as Louise, Morris' wife. Angel Baby really gets the ravages of mental illness, and how it impacts entire families, the tragedy of it, the fear of it, how it tests everyone.

Harry was once a software programmer with IBM, but his illness has made him incapable of work. He has tried to commit suicide. He lives with his brother and his brother's family, and there are beautiful scenes of him interacting with Sam, his nephew who is about 5 years old. Sam is afraid of the monsters that are in his room. His parents try to talk him out of the reality of monsters, but Harry understands being afraid. He understands that monsters can SEEM so real that it doesn't matter if they are ACTUALLY real or not. He takes Sam up to bed, and writes a "magic circle" around Sam's bed with a piece of chalk, and tells Sam that as long as that circle is there, he will be safe from all monsters.

Harry and Kate's love affair heats up immediately. They devour one another in scenes passionate and raw. Harry has Kate over for dinner at his brother's house. She is overdressed, in a skimpy orange dress. She nervously smokes. She refuses to use a fork, and tries to cut her meat with a spoon. For reasons only known to her. McKenzie is so damn good, because she manages to portray an obsessive person, a person who must do things in a certain way, and in a certain order, in order to maintain her already fragile equilibrium. Morris' wife asks Kate how things are going with Harry, and Kate replies, freely, "He's the best lover I've ever had. He's got a sideways move that rocks my world."

Angel Baby is a love story, with a tragic underbelly to it, a ticking time bomb of illness, that gives the entire thing an almost unbearable tension, so even the happy scenes take on a fatalistic "this is how it once was" feeling. The colors in the early part of the film are warm and glowing, golds and reds and oranges, and slowly, as the film goes on, the colors start to bleach out. There are white-outs between scenes, not black dissolves, but the screen bleaching to white, which suggests, horribly, the fractured mentality of the two leads, as they begin to lose themselves in their delusions. None of this would work if the romance were portrayed as anything other than an intense love story. If Harry and Kate were played as an amalgamation of twitches and obsessions, it would be condescending. They cling to one another - literally and symbolically - knowing the sword of Damocles hangs over their union - but they are so happy together, so in sync ... shouldn't that make a difference?

It does and it doesn't.

They move in together, and there are funny scenes where they look through apartments at the realtors and add up the numbers of the addresses and apartment numbers, and reject places because they are not numerically calming. Lynch and McKenzie glance at one another, and you can see their eyes adding up columns of numbers silently. "Apartment 11 - so that's 2 - and what's the floor again? It's on the 6th floor? So that's not good ..." Their numerical system is not made explicit, but it works on them repeatedly, and causes much anxiety, limiting their movement. Bus numbers, dates, apartment numbers - there is a vast interconnected system out there, and if they can just align themselves correctly with the messages they are being given, from Astral, they will be safe.

Kate becomes pregnant. She decides to go off her anti-psychotics, for the safety of the baby. Harry, in an act of solidarity, goes off his as well, and they sit over the toilet, flushing them down, the bright green pills whirling down the drain, reminiscent of the image of the wheel of fortune on TV, incessantly spinning, colors over colors, telling them the future. The inevitable occurs. They both begin to lose it. Things begin to spiral.

John Lynch, always good, is outstanding here. His transformation, from shy bumbling ill man at the beginning, to passionate funny loving partner, is breathtaking. It gives him so far to fall, and you feel the loss of that happy self, the same way he must feel the loss in his lucid moments. He has one scene in a public bathroom that is so powerful it roars out of the middle of the film a howl of loss and pain so unforgettable and wrenching it will leave you out of breath. He pounds at the side of his head, screaming to the ceiling, wanting to kill that illness inside of him, wanting to kill it forever. It is an incredible moment, burned on my head in indelible ink. Acting as good as it gets.

Jacqueline McKenzie has been doing superb work for a couple of decades now, and this is the role of a lifetime. She is heartbreaking, a beautiful funny spirit, knowing in her bones how to cheer up her boyfriend (she stands on the edge of a bridge, flapping her arms in imitation of the gulls overhead, cawing at the top of her lungs), and she understands her own illness intimately. She knows what will happen when she goes off her meds. But the baby must be safe and free from complications. If it means she loses it for a bit, she is willing to take that risk. Illness of this sort, however, is a Leviathan from the deep, and it will take you DOWN. McKenzie charts this progression in a masterful way. There is a scene in a dark mall, when she has a bad episode, and she crouches in an abandoned restaurant. Harry finds her there, and takes her in his arms. She doesn't just hold him back. She clings, almost trying to climb up onto him, merge with him totally. However close he is holding her, it is not enough. She knows it. She knows what is coming. When the madness has finally overcome her like a tsunami, it is as though the very contours of her face have changed. The soul is no longer in the eyes. Only the madness. It has co-opted her completely.

Michael Rymer has created a beautiful romantic mood here, shot through with whimsy and humor - their apartment is like a big playpen, with collages of words and numbers pasted on the wall, little shrines, and banks of candles, and colorful clothes hanging up inside - and the omnipresent Wheel of Fortune on in the background of every scene. The movie is funny. There is hope. While the hope is mainly embodied by the two main characters, who know who they are, and know they are in love, Harry's brother (played by Colin Friels) is such an important element of the story. He knows how this will all probably end. He has lived with his brother for a long time. But he hopes. He hopes it will be okay. He is kind to Kate, even with her social awkwardness and sudden bursts of aggression. He is an old hand at dealing with a psychotic person. He is terrific, and his character here is a potent and poignant reminder of how much is lost with an illness such as schizophrenia. Harry and Kate do not (no matter how much they try) live in a bubble where only they exist. They have people who care for them, who hope for them too. The tension between Harry's brother and his wife comes from this sense of loyalty towards his brother. How much longer will they have to put their own lives on hold to deal with the tailspinning illness of his brother? But when do you say "No more"? How can you?

Love is about embracing the unknown, illness or no. It requires trust in the future, an acceptance of uncertainty. Are you the one? I don't know ... are YOU the one? Not knowing how it will all turn out, and yet acting anyway, is an essential part of falling in love. Harry and Kate already accept that much is out of their control. They did not choose to be mentally ill. They hate the drugs, but accept the domination, knowing the consequences. Here, falling in love is the wild card it is for all of us. How will it turn out? Will we be okay? Will my heart get broken? Are you the one? Are you the one? Angel Baby understands this on a level more intensely than other movies that cover the same territory.

Harry and Kate stand on the edge of the bridge, in the golden light of sunset, fearful of what will happen with their baby, fearful of how they will survive, afraid of the madness coming again ... knowing what that is, what that will mean ... and they flap their arms like the birds, cawing, cawing, cawing ... reaching out to one another to grasp hands, worried, you can see it in their eyes, but also laughing. Laughing not because they are happy. But laughing because all they have is the moment. The right now.

Everything else is a leap of faith.

Unfortunately, Angel Baby is not on DVD. I had to buy a used VHS copy off of Amazon. I saw it during its original theatrical release.

Angel Baby was one of the best films of 1995.

The Killer That Stalked New York (1950)

The blonde dame carries a gun. And .... she carries something even more deadly.

See my review of The Killer That Stalked New York at the indispensable Noir of the Week.

Happy birthday, Bette Davis

A tribute post like only Kim Morgan can write.

And let us not forget this. One of her final roles.

Alice through the ages

A really fun and interesting post about Alice in Wonderland, and the fanfic it generates, and the different interpretations Lewis Carroll's book has engendered. I especially liked this bit:

The Tea Party Is Mad, Not the Hatter. Well, he might be crazy, it’s just that Lewis Carroll never called him the Mad Hatter, in all the pages of Alice in Wonderland, just the Hatter. The name of the chapter is The Mad Tea Party, but it’s popular usage that elided the “Mad” to oft-referred to character, with a back story of its own. “Mad as a hatter” is an old expression, derived from the mercury used to cure hatbands. It’s just not an association that is Carroll’s. The Disney movie posters got it wrong, but Woolverton had that detail right: Depp is only called “the Hatter.”

“Really, now you ask me, “ said Alice, very much confused, “l don’t think—“

“Then you shouldn’t talk,” said the Hatter.

“It’s the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life.”

Go read the whole thing.

Here's a piece I wrote about Johnny Depp as the Hatter.

Thanks to James Wolcott for the link.

The O'Malley boys

Something about their outfits here just kill me. From left to right: Uncle Tony, Dad, Uncle Jimmy. Again: they all look pretty much the same here as they did when they were adults. It's amazing. Love these O'Malley men.

The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Edith Sitwell

I am going to get back into my Daily Book Excerpt thing that I haven't done in over a year, for various reasons. The main one being my inability to read last year, and outside events that impacted my desire to write, or blog, or anything else. When I left off, I was on my poetry shelf, so I will pick up from there. If I keep going, I would (of course, because I am OCD), go back and go through all the shelves again - doing posts and excerpts on all of the books in the various genres that I have read SINCE I started doing the Excerpt thing. In a way, it's a fun cataloguing exercise, and I am the daughter of one of the great all-time cataloguers. With poetry, I have a lot of anthologies, so I was going through them, and picking out poets that I felt I had something to say about. That, to me, seems fair. So, in the case of poetry (as well as short story collections), I would do multiple excerpts from one book. This was an executive decision I made, and I will stick to it. Picking up where we left off ....

Next book on my poetry shelf:

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O'Clair

Edith Sitwell is one of those people whose name is known to me - it's woven into the poetry-conversation, and she does command her own spot, her place seems secure - but I was not all that familiar with her work. I don't remember her being "read" in my poetry class in college, and I don't remember her being covered in my English or Humanities classes in high school. She doesn't seem to be one of the "big ones" anymore, although it may just be that I have not been paying proper attention. I'm not a scholar. More of a casual fan, so sometimes I miss the signs.

Edith Sitwell reminds me a little bit of Martha Graham. Graham had a strict classical ballet background, and then veered off into "modern" dance, although it wasn't called that at the time. For the most part it was called: "WTF is she doing???" Arching the pelvis, legs bent, she broke down classical ballet and found the underbelly of it, going for the mythical and sexual themes. But her background was strong and traditional, and the dancers in her troupe were known as some of the best ballet dancers in the world, in terms of technique. She pushed them in other ways. But if you didn't have that strong background in the mainstream tradition, you wouldn't have lasted a day with Martha Graham. Edith Sitwell has a similar reactionary attitude. Not reactionary, in terms of politics, but reactionary in terms of trying to define herself against all that had come before. She is not quite modern, but also not quite traditional. She's on the divide. The thing about her that is also interesting is that she seems quite bohemian (check out photos of her!), but she lived in a huge ancestral house, surrounded by the heavy tradition of family and riches and a long long family tree. A strange dichotomy.

She was (like so many other poets of the day) blown away by T.S. Eliot's Prufrock. It validated her own experiments, and helped her push farther in that direction. The past was dead. Move forward into the new.

She wrote:

At the time I began to write, a change in the direction, imagery and rhythms in poetry had become necessary, owing to the rhythmical flaccidity, the verbal deadness, the dead and expected patterns, of some of the poetry immediately preceding us.

Dame Edith didn't pull her punches. She was inspired by Baudelaire and Mallarme (putting her in line with Oscar Wilde and his aesthetes), and wanted, above all else, to find language that was appropriate to the new modern age, its technology, its danger, the bleak catastrophe of World War I - it was an amazing time for literature. How to put it into words? The 19th century forms flat out would not do. Sitwell wrote:

The great quality of the modern masters is an explosive energy, the separating up of the molecules, exploring the possibilities of the atom.

You can feel the entire upheaval of the 20th century in that sentence. After the first atomic bombs were dropped, she wrote some incredible poems about it, the main one being "Three Poems of the Atomic Bomb".

She would do readings of her poems that were actually elaborate performance-art pieces. People were annoyed by her, as people are often annoyed by pretentious over-seriousness. Sitwell experimented with sound and repetition, and she was also very tall (her mother had been so disappointed in what her daughter ended up looking like - Edith wasn't really a loved child, by either parent) - so she made quite a striking impression. Perhaps the fact that she was so rich, with old OLD money - had something to do with her ability to just not give a crap, and do whatever she wanted to do. She never had to work for a living. She did her own thing. She was editor of a literary review in the years leading up to World War I. She published Wilfred Owen's war poetry, she published poems by her brothers (also poets), and her own stuff. The Sitwells were representative of a lot of things the British found disgusting: privilege, class, money, isolation - so she had a lot going against her to be taken seriously.

Michael Schmidt in Lives of the Poets writes:

In England reinvention took many forms, but none quite so eccentric as Edith Sitwell's. She exerts a fascination - not the fascination of Poe, whose wild music and tragic life are part of the birth of something substantial, but the fascination of a languid social and cultural tradition coming to an end in a falling chandelier of metrical sententiousness. The surprise here is that the social type she represents survived so long, that her writing can be so funny when it least means to be, so flat when humor is her intention. She might seem to embody, more than Wilde ever did, what we now know as camp. But camp involves self-conscious projection. There is no reason to believe that the heavily ringed, heavily rouged poet ever took herself anything less than seriously.

That, to me, seems quite accurate.

But she was a fighter. She was a great hater. She loved attacking her attackers, and continuing on to just do whatever the hell she wanted to do. Coming from a baronial mansion in the countryside, she was determinedly avant-garde, in outlook and practice. The funniest thing is that eventually she did become part of the establishment - she was made a "Dame" of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth - and went on huge reading tours around England and America - a big crowd-pleaser.

Schmidt again writes:

For one who flouted convention, she surrounded herself in later years with rituals that required strict observance: a monster of whim and self-importance, she also sometimes had a magical way with words.

I am not familiar with a lot of her work, but here's one poem I do know and like. It's about the Battle of Britain, 1940 - when the Germans carried out bombing raids, from the air, over England. It's also appropriate because it was just Easter.

Still Falls the Rain
The Raids, 1940. Night and Dawn

Still falls the Rain---
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss---
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross.

Still falls the Rain
With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer-beat
In the Potter's Field, and the sound of the impious feet

On the Tomb:
Still falls the Rain

In the Field of Blood where the small hopes breed and the human brain
Nurtures its greed, that worm with the brow of Cain.

Still falls the Rain
At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross.
Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us---
On Dives and on Lazarus:
Under the Rain the sore and the gold are as one.

Still falls the Rain---
Still falls the Blood from the Starved Man's wounded Side:
He bears in His Heart all wounds,---those of the light that died,
The last faint spark
In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark,
The wounds of the baited bear---
The blind and weeping bear whom the keepers beat
On his helpless flesh... the tears of the hunted hare.

Still falls the Rain---
Then--- O Ile leape up to my God: who pulles me doune---
See, see where Christ's blood streames in the firmament:
It flows from the Brow we nailed upon the tree

Deep to the dying, to the thirsting heart
That holds the fires of the world,---dark-smirched with pain
As Caesar's laurel crown.

Then sounds the voice of One who like the heart of man
Was once a child who among beasts has lain---
"Still do I love, still shed my innocent light, my Blood, for thee."

Red Sox. Finally.

Longest off-season ever.

Here I am, holding our cat Widdy, in our backyard. Wearing a Red Sox T shirt. This stuff is engrained in the DNA. I don't like spring, in general, or summer. I prefer the fall and the winter. But one good thing about the spring is baseball is back. There are always compensations.

A glimpse on the horizon

A pirate ship? A haunted ghost ship? Aubrey and Maturin coming in to port? Whatever it is, it is magical.

Starman

Chinatown: frames and lenses

An awesome compilation of images from Roman Polanski's Chinatown put together by the always-interesting Jim Emerson.

Seriously. Not to be missed. As Jim wrote:

(Only for those who know their way around "Chinatown.")

One of the reasons I love John Lahr

... son of Bert Lahr, as well as long-time theatre critic for The New Yorker (his profiles have been compiled into a wonderful book: Show and Tell: New Yorker Profiles) is because of paragraphs like this one, in his recent review of what sounds like a misguided Glass Menagerie at the Long Wharf:

Direct address suggests that the audience is being let in on a secret. In Edelstein’s production, we are, instead, let in on a documentary. In the opening four minutes of the play, a long time in the theatre, Tom (Patch Darragh) enters, puts on a record, loosens his tie, and readies himself to write—a preparation that includes swigging from a bottle of Bourbon (though drinking as an aid to writing was a habit that Williams didn’t acquire until nearly a decade later)—and, after much flimflammery, starts to type. When Tom finally gets around to speaking the play’s first words, he talks to himself, as if sounding out lines hot off his typewriter. We don’t enter into memory; we’re outside it, watching it take place. This is a huge shift in narrative tone, dramatically speaking—like switching from first to third person. To members of the audience who don’t know the masterpiece, it may come as a surprise to learn that none of what they’re seeing was written by Williams. To those who are familiar with the play, it’s an outrageous piece of intellectual impertinence from a director who is trying to claim co-authorship of a play that he imperfectly understands. At a stroke, Williams’s purpose and his meaning are skewed and screwed.

I have always felt that a theatre critic's job is not just to say, "This was good", or "This was bad", but to understand the context and try to make it relevant and clear to the reader (and potential audience member). Not only does he describe accurately this imposed "device" in the new production but he is able to analyze why, exactly, it doesn't work. He does this because he knows Williams's work so well, and knows what has been lost in the transfer.

I love John Lahr's work.

1947: The O'Malleys

Uncle Tom sent this photo on and I haven't been able to stop looking at it for two days. We all are emailing each other about it. "Terry's wearing glasses! What dog is that? Look at Pop! How old is Mummy Gina here?" And so on. Mummy Gina and Pop were my grandparents (my father's parents). Here there are in 1947 with their five boys. Two more children were to come in the future, a girl and a boy (now my uncle Tom and my aunt Regina).

My dapper grandfather is holding my uncle Joe on his lap. Joe was a glamorous-looking baby and an even more glamorous good-looking young man. He died of leukemia when he was 29 years old. I have very few memories of my grandfather (Pop), he was very sick by the time I could remember him. But I do remember reciting poetry for him when I was a wee thing, and him sitting there and enjoying it. I love how he looks here. What a gentleman.

My uncle Tony (the oldest) is sitting far over to the left. Singular, set apart - as so many oldest kids are. Tony is the one who sent me a care package of Dunkin Donuts coffee to Block Island. There's something so Seamus-esque about him (one of his grandkids).

Next to Tony sits Ginger, the dog. When we were little kids, my dad would regale us all with funny dog stories from his childhood, and all of the dogs live on, to this day, because of those stories: their personalities, their time with the family, their breed - Skipper, Peanuts ... This particular dog is Ginger. Of course she is!!

On the other side of Ginger sits my uncle Jimmy - my godfather - star of many many many crazy stories in my family (this being one of them.) A one of a kind type of guy, always in trouble, but always forgiven - I love how here, he's looking off, contemplating his upcoming plan of worldwide domination or destruction. I love this picture - of Jimmy and my Dad.

My dad sits on the ground, and holds onto his brother Joe's foot, which is just so sweet to me. To my eye, my dad looks pretty much exactly the same as he always did. Handsome. And look at that brotherly touch there. Uncle Joe, pudgy and curious, is glancing down to see "who the heck is touching me right now? What is happening??"

Mummy Gina holds my uncle Terry. You can see why I think that Tallulah Bankhead has a Mummy Gina-ish quality. Cousin Mike says that Patricia Neal reminds him of Mummy Gina. Similar types. Slender slim-ankled sloop-shouldered women, raspy voices, and very pretty. You can tell she's wearing heels. This is a woman who baked a couple of cakes a day. A woman with a giant laugh, a great sense of humor, lover of the theatre and arts (both my grandparents were). I love to see pictures of her as a young woman.

Uncle Terry is also noticeably recognizable to me here, he looks very similar to the man he is now,the way his cheeks and mouth are - and if you look closely, you can see him wearing glasses. The other boys would blame Terry for everything any time they got in trouble ("Terry did it"....) - even if Terry wasn't anywhere near the scene of the crime. Terry has a bemused patient and very very funny air about pretty much everything to this day.

These are people I love. My uncles. My father. In the side yard in Natick, posing for a photograph. And only Tony, my dad and Terry are really looking at the camera. Everyone else is a bit preoccupied, which gives the photo its candid beautiful air.

A time gone by, but with us still.

Thanks, Uncle Tom.

Plot

"Aristotle says that plot is the most important factor of a play but I'd rather have a bad plot with interesting characters than a good one with a bunch of stooges."

-- Tennessee Williams, college paper

Trains ....

Do you read The Art of Memory? You really should, if you don't. It's a lovely and haunting site, mostly images, and works almost like a dream. The blogger does an ongoing series called Trains in Cinema - something I am fascinated by as well. Capturing the romance and beauty of traveling via train. Here is his latest. Beautiful.

"I firmly believe in trying out your supposed opposite not only because (as they say) 'opposites attract,' but because you never know if you've actually found your twin."

In honor of Bud Cort's birthday, Kim Morgan has a beautiful piece up celebrating Harold and Maude.

I came to Harold and Maude late (compared to other fans): I was in my mid-20s, although I do remember hearing my parents talking and laughing about it once. My father loved the opening sequence of attempted suicides, and would start to laugh every time he even started talking about it. I think he felt the movie went downhill after that point, but boy did he love that first scene, with the dangling legs, etc. But it was one of those movies I just never got around to seeing in my teens. I just missed it, somehow.

I arrived in Chicago, and right around that time Harold and Maude was playing in a double feature at the Music Box with Play It Again, Sam. Ted was a new acquaintance, a theatre director, and he heard I had never seen it, so we made plans to go. He was so excited to "show me" Harold and Maude (you will find that to be true about fans of this film - they ACHE that you haven't seen it). I have told the story of that night many times, in many different contexts. We went to go see the two films with a guy I was dating (full story here - with Harold and Maude section included). It was the three of us. What ended up happening, over the course of the night, was that Ted and I became friends (I actually date the night we went to see Harold and Maude together as the birth of our friendship), and somewhere inside of me, that same night, I made the realization I would have to break up with the dude I was with.

It all happened because of my response to Harold and Maude, which was enormous, and LOUD. Everyone at the theatre was a fanatic of the film. There was cult-like atmosphere, and I was clearly the only newbie. I started laughing so hard at one point (the soldier with the one arm) and it got so out of hand that I had to get up and leave the theatre. I could not breathe. At the same time, I remember tears streaming down my face through most of the film, pain, love, grief, regret, gratitude.... Unforgettable night. Unforgettable movie.

Yes, a romance ended that night (sorry, sir - you should never "shush" a grown adult when she is laughing spontaneously at something that gives her joy. Especially not if you want to be kissing her later.) - but a friendship was born (Ted and I are still great friends today) - and Harold and Maude wove itself into the fabric of my life, for good.

Please go read Kim's piece.

And happy (belated) birthday, Mr. Cort.

"Oh yes, he broke the mold."

The Self-Styled Siren watches a movie with her mother. As always, don't miss the comments section over there, which is a lot of the fun of her site.

In the comments, Siren reports a conversation she just had with her mother:

Me, ten minutes ago: Mom, did you know Tab Hunter was gay?
Mom: It does not come as a shock.

Go read the whole thing.

"Why I do theatre"

An extraordinary clip posted by Alex, of part of a lecture on theatre given by Patsy Rodenburg. Not to be missed. See the whole thing.

Ex Libris

Alex Beam, a wonderful writer, writes about "the psychology of the bookplate" in Yale Alumni magazine. My father's collection of books had some very nice bookplates (I actually would love to get some custom-made bookplates, in line with my retro way of thinking), and he would explain what the bookplate represented, and who the people were. (The copy of Ulysses that he gave to me is a prime example, with an absolutely gorgeous bookplate.)

Yale has a big collection of bookplates, which you can see here in a slideshow. Wait til you see what Charles de Gaulle had made as a bookplate. Wow! I find this stuff very emotional. I love it because I love artifacts, things where you can actually sense the person who owned them (the whole point of a bookplate in the first place - you put that bookplate in there and say: This is MINE.) - and I also love it because it reminds me of my father. These bookplates now act as relics - of a bygone age, certainly - when books had more value as objects - but also of the people who lived in other times. If you click through that Yale slideshow, you see there are as many types of bookplates as there are people. Some are graphic masterpieces, they could be posters - others feature poems that warn against "stealing" the book - The bookplate acts as a marker, a claim of ownership, so look out, thieves!

When I was little, really little, maybe 4 years old, my parents gave me some bookplates for me to put in my books. I wouldn't even remember this, except that I have one of the books, with that bookplate still in it, and my attempt at writing my own name on the plate.

The book is Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter. It is a hard cover, and is literally falling apart. The cover is no longer attached to the rest, but I have somehow kept it together through all the years. It has been with me since I first left home, decades ago, and have kept track of it through my various treks around the country. It's been in all of my apartments.

The bookplate gives me a strange feeling, not altogether pleasant. I don't truck with nostalgia much these days, at least not as far as my former selves are concerned, and so I am sure there is some discomfort because of that. But I look at my handwriting, and I have to admit, I get a sort of vast sensation inside.

A sense of continuity. The hand that wrote that name in the bookplate is the hand that is typing right now. Again, not altogether pleasant, but certainly interesting and I would say - valuable. It's good to feel a sense of continuity through your life, all your different times and selves.

It's also good to know that some things never change. These days I write my name and the date of purchase in every single book I own. It's a ritual. I have been doing this for years, so I can glance at a book and see immediately "where I was at" when I bought it. But that impulse to leave my mark, to say "this is mine", was there from the beginning, of course encouraged by my father, who was the same way.

Thanks, Alex Beam, for the reminder.