The Sheila Variations

Some changes round these here parts

I am finally leaving Movable Type and going over to Word Press. I have multiple problems with Movable Type and much of it may have to do with my own lack of technological ability. That's fine. I need to have a site that is:
1. easily navigable
2. simple
3. easy on the eye

Right now, none of these things are true. I have categories but nobody can find them. I can't label posts with "tags" that will then take you to all the other posts in that category. If you're a reader, then you have to know where to find things ... and that's not a good experience. Hell, even I can't find things on my own site and often Google a post I'm looking for in order to find it. Not a good system.

Also, I'm tired of all of the Gibson Girls. I adored them back in 2003 when I started up on Movable Type, but I'm over them now. Buh-bye, girls. Charles Dana's girls, and also me AS a Gibson Girl. They have served their purpose, and I've been loyal, but it is time to move on.

I want a clean simple homepage, with a big banner, and easily find-able links on the side. That's it.

My friend Mark is doing the export (he's the best) and I am quite frightened but I know that I am in capable hands.

It might be a bit awkward around here for a bit, as I work out glitches and things like that, and my Permalinks will change (a scary prospect, seeing as I have so many links on IMDB and other places), but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

Posting will be light over the next couple of days.

In the back of the tattoo parlor ...

... on St. Mark's Place.

Happy birthday, Alice McDermott

From an interview with novelist Alice McDermott:

It’s been said that, to some extent, every novelist writes the same book over and over. Many reviewers have noted how much your novels share: middle-class Irish Catholic characters, and that Long Island setting... Do you ever worry that you are indeed writing the same book again and again?

No. I think the question doesn’t apply to fiction... More southerners, Miss Welty? More Russian émigrés, Mr. Nabokov? Have you considered using your imagination, Mr. Garcia Marquez, and maybe setting your next novel in Finland? We’ve forgotten how to read literature (or even what literature is for) if we confuse the meaning of a piece with its subject...

I love that. I love that because I love her books, and I love that because it gives me courage as a writer. I think she's right.

It's her birthday today.

I read Charming Billy when it first came out, and was captivated by its practical prose, sparked with poetry, her weaving together of the past and the present, and her depiction of a large Irish-American family so like my own.

It would take an act of will to picture him now as he was then: to put aside every image that had come in between, including that dark, stiffly bloated remnant of his face that was Billy in death, and remember him clearly: thin and handsome in those days, the dipped brim of his fedora over the blue eyes and the rimless glasses, a nick of dried blood on his smooth cheek, a red blush from the cold. A lingering scent of the church he had just come from on his overcoat, and a taste of the Eucharist still on his breath as they stood together in the crowded subway car, hand over hand on the same white pole, exchanging shouted bits of news or falling into silence as the train rattled and screeched and tried to knock them off their feet. As glad for each other's company as if they'd long been deprived of it.

That is so good. One of the memorable things about the book is that it takes place during a wake for the death of Uncle Billy, and many family members share memories of him, and that is how Billy comes to life for us. This is how things work in families. This is how stories are passed down. "Charming Billy" is as alive as any fictional character I've ever met, but I see him through the filter of different family members, as they share anecdotes and memories. To me, the book feels how life is. A family like that is a blessing, no doubt, I'm in one of them so I should know, but it has its challenges too. When you are dealing with a vast swarm of about 70 people, all of whom knew you since you were conceived, sometimes it is hard to remember or maintain your own identity. You want to break free. But never completely. To break free completely would mean you have banished yourself to the lower depths. You need your family. They remind you of who you are, even if it's the worst possible definition. It's not easy. And so often when someone passes away, the narrative about that person gets "set", very early on, by those left behind. Charming Billy is about a family groping for their own narrative in the wake of a great loss.

McDermott writes about Irish-American life at a particular time in history: the generation that straddles Vatican II. These are my relatives. I wrote a piece for a writing class once about that generation of Irish-Americans, my parents' generation, and this is Alice McDermott's landscape. Charming Billy is almost creepy to me, because she gets it so right. It sounds right, the houses are right, the masses are right, the family stuff is right ... Her writing is not flowery, or sentimental. In many ways, she reminds me of Dennis Lehane (excerpt of Mystic River here), although she doesn't write crime books. It's the STYLE. It's the TYPE of person she writes about. The Irish-Americans, the third-generation people, with grandmothers who speak in brogues. Basically, my peeps. McDermott doesn't write about it in a precious way - or a fetishizing way, like many Irish-Americans do. This is a community of people, with specific ways and traditions, and she gets it like no other.

Charming Billy won the National Book Award the year it came out, and I think that's pretty cool, because Charming Billy doesn't have a lot of sturm und drang, it's not about a politically hot topic, it's not focusing on mental illness or depression, it's not "important" or topical at all. But God spare us from only reading "important" books. Charming Billy is the story of a family who gathers in a bar in the Bronx after the funeral mass of their family member Billy. He's an uncle, a cousin, whatever the association, it's different for all of them - and the family sits around and talks about him, telling stories. Billy had a long life. He was a big drinker. He had a great lost love: Eva, an Irish girl. He had a new wife, Maeve, and she's relatively new to the family (but again, with the whole Irish tendency of not accepting newbies, the family doesn't quite know how to deal with her, she's not really "one of them" yet). Speaking of that, when my family and I were in Ireland when I was a kid, we stayed out on Achill Island, a beautiful wild island off the western coast of Ireland. It was a place of sheep and wool sweaters and weekly dances at the rectory, and impromptu soccer games in rocky fields. It blew my mind. We stayed with a family who had lived there for, no lie, 30 years. The couple had moved there after they were married, and had lived there for thirty years. And what did the other Achill Islanders refer to them as? "The blow-ins". I remember that making a huge impression on me (I was 14), and everyone thought it was very funny. Even if you've lived there for an entire generation, if you didn't start OUT there, and if you can't trace your roots there back to 1562, then you're a "blow-in". Maeve had been married to Charming Billy for a bit, but the family still holds her at arm's length. The jury is still out. Why? Because she's a bad person? No. She's just a "blow-in" and you can't be sure of those people right away. Tribal Irish stuff. It's real.

Everyone tells stories, and sometimes the narrator (who is a member of the family. It's a first-person book, although often it doesn't feel that way, because she is telling the stories of Billy's life, not her own) will go back into the past, and share her memories of Billy, and the memories will come to life on the page. The whole thing takes place in one day, sitting around the bar in the Bronx, shooting the shit about their dearly departed Billy.

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

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

Billy is not always a pleasant man to get to know. He had a drinking problem. He was an old-school Catholic boy. A wild man who never missed mass. But yes. He was "charming". That word can have snotty connotations. It has lost its meaning. What does it mean when someone REALLY has "charm"? What is charm? Billy had it.

And so there is much to mourn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What good did it do?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But he broke it."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Who would?"

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

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

"He must have told her something."

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

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

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

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

"Ask Dennis," cousin Rosemary whispered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"She wasn't a much better prophet."

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

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

"It would have been a different life."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, nonsense," sister Rosemary whispered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Meaning?" Rosemary asked coolly.

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

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

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

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

"Hear, hear," Mickey Quinn said.

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

Another book of McDermott's that I have read is That Night.

Again, like Charming Billy, this book is told from the point of view of an innocent bystander, a member of a huge sprawling family of the Irish Catholic variety. In such families, even if you were not a first-hand witness to an event, it doesn't matter. Stories take on legendary glows. You repeat them. You tell them to the younger generation. You maybe add some details. You forget others. This is your family. You're allowed to do that with family. In my family, you tell the story of Uncle Jimmy (my crazy godfather) driving the car over the wall as though you were there. Stories are passed down, solidifying into narrative. McDermott is so good at getting that feeling of Boston Irish Catholic diaspora. I can't think of anyone who comes close to "getting it right", without being twee, or sentimental, or full of "oh, I long for the leprechauns of the auld country" like so many Irish-American writers succumb to. It's nauseating. McDermott writes about families who still have the breath of peat turf around them, they're only one generation removed. The church is strong with these people. But compromises must be made. I think she's full of truth.

That Night takes place in what would seem to be a stultifying suburb atmosphere, early 60s, cusp of Vatican II 60s, and kids roam the streets (the book is told in retrospect by a little girl, now a grown woman, who was peripheral to the main events), and the mothers chat over the fences, and the fathers come home smelling of cigarettes, with slicked down hair. (I love the fathers. Man, does Alice McDermott "get" that kind of father. It's hard to describe. You just know it when you see it. I recognize my entire family, the Buddy Holly glasses, the cigarettes, the little kids leaping through sprinklers, all the Polaroids from my childhood, yes - even this one - in her descriptions of fathers. It's poignant. A world gone away.)

A while back, I was writing about something, it must have had to do with "openings" of books: how they start, and how challenging they are to write. And Jon, a friend of mine and a writer, made a comment that once, in a writing class, a teacher had given That Night as an example of a first-rate beginning.

Here it is. Hard to not keep reading after something like this. It is a stunner of an opening.

That night when he came to claim her, he stood on the short lawn before her house, his knees bent, his fists driven into his thighs, and bellowed her name with such passion that even the friends who surrounded him, who had come to support him, to drag her from the house, to murder her family if they had to, let the chains they carried go limp in their hands. Even the men from our neighborhood, in Bermuda shorts or chinos, white T-shirts and gray suit-pants, with baseball bats and snow shovels held before them like rifles, even they paused in their rush to protect her: the good and the bad - the black-jacketed boys and the fathers in their light summer clothes - startled for that one moment before the fighting began by the terrible, piercing sound of his call.

This is serious, my own father remembered thinking at that moment. This is insane.

I remember only that my ten-year-old heart was stopped by the beauty of it all.

Sheryl was her name, but he cried, "Sherry," drawing out the word, keening it, his voice both strong and desperate. There was a history of dark nights in the sound, something lovely, something dangerous.

One of the children had already begun to cry.

It was high summer, the early 1960s. The sky was a bright navy above the pitched roofs and the thick suburban trees. I hesitate to say that only Venus was bright, but there it was. I had noticed it earlier, when the three cars that were now in Sheryl's driveway and up on her lawn had made their first pass through our neighborhood. Add a thin, rising moon if the symbolism troubles you: Venus was there.

Across the street, a sprinkler shot weak sprays of water, white in the growing darkness. Behind the idling motors of the boys' cars you could still hear the collective gurgle of filters in backyard pools. Sheryl's mother had already been pulled from the house, and she crouched on the grass by the front steps saying over and over again, "She's not here. She's gone." The odor of their engines was like a gash across the ordinary summer air.

He called her again, doubled over now, crying, I think. Then he pitched forward, his boot slipping on the grass, so it seemed for a second he'd be frustrated even in this, and once again ran toward the house. Sheryl's mother cowered. The men and the boys met awkwardly on the square lawn.

Until then, I had thought all violence was swift and sure-footed, somehow sleek, even elegant. I was surprised to see how poor it really was, how laborious and hulking. I saw one of the men bend under the blow of what seemed a slow-moving chain, and then, just as gracelessly, swing his son's baseball bat into a teenager's ear. I saw the men and the boys leap on one another like obese, short-legged children, sliding and falling, raising chains that seemed to crumble backward onto their shoulders, moving bats and hoes and wide rakes that seemed as unwieldy as trees. There were no clever D'Artagnan mid-air meetings of chain and snow-shovel, no eye-to-eye throat grippings, no witty retorts and well-timed dodges, no winners. Only, in the growing darkness, a hundred dumb, unrhythmical movements, only blow after artless blow.

I was standing in the road before our neighbor's house, frozen, as were all the other children scattered across the road and the sidewalk and the curbs as if in some wide-ranging game of statues. I was certain, as were all the others, that my father would die.

Behind us, one of the mothers began to call her husband's name, and then the others, touching their throats or their thighs, one by one began to follow. Their thin voices were plaintive, even angry, as if this clumsy battle were the last disappointment they would bear, or as if, it seems to me now, they had begun to echo, even take up, that lovesick boy's bitter cry.

There are still Alice McDermott books I haven't read, and that is something I want to rectify.

"Listen now, you corpses ..." Filming A Bridge Too Far

William Goldman, screenwriter, recounts in his book Adventures in the Screen Trade a funny crazy story of the filming of a crucial scene in Richard Attenborough's A Bridge Too Far. They had permission to film on Nijmegen Bridge in Holland for one hour only. If they didn't get what they needed in that hour, then they would have to reschedule for a week later, which meant paying everyone (and it was a cast with a ton of big stars, including Robert Redford) for another week, which would end up costing them a million dollars (probably more). This one scene became known, to the cast and crew, as The Million Dollar Hour. Goldman was also making the point of just how on top of things a director has to be, just how difficult the job can be. I love the bit about shouting into a megaphone at the corpses. Ah, this crazy business of making movies. Deadly serious and absurd, all at the same time.

Eight o’clock is coming nearer and nearer and things seem as if they’re starting to break. Everything’s got to work because there’s no time to go back and do things over but the weather seems as if it’s going to be clear enough to shoot and now Redford’s in position and the stunt men portraying German soldiers are climbing high in the girders of Nijmegen Bridge, roping themselves in, not for safety but because that’s what the Germans did there in their final defense, and then the signal comes that all the stunt men are secured and you can begin to see the confidence flowing into [Richard] Attenborough, because there can’t be anything wrong on this shot, he’s thought so much about it, covered it from every angle the mind of man can come up with, and as crew members come running up to him with last-minute questions he’s snapping back the answers crisp and fast, “Is the machine gun nest all right like that?” and “Yes, fine” from Attenborough without a pause, and this questioner runs off while another comes up, going, “Will you see the sentry box emplacement in this shot?” and the immediate “We will, thank you,” takes care of that and “Have the Sherman tanks been positioned properly?” and Attenborough quick takes a look, and says, “The Sherman tanks are splendid as you have them,” and now an assistant director comes up behind with, “The corpses, Sir Richard,” and even though that’s not a complete question, Attenborough knows precisely what to say and he says it, “The corpses must keep their eyes shut at all times, all corpses will be visible in this shot,” and that cry echoes along the bridge as the assistant takes a megaphone and shouts to the extras playing dead Germans, “Corpses – listen now, you corpses – all corpses will keep eyes shut at all times while the cameras are rolling – you got that? – not one bloody blink from one bloody corpse and that’s final!” and shooting time is almost on us now, and the rain is going to hold off, and now another assistant runs up, asking, “What about the smoke pots?” and Attenborough, on top of his game, replies, “You may start the smoke pots now, thank you very much,” and right then, this trusted aide comes roaring up, excitedly saying, “What about the jeeps in the orchard, sir?”

I was standing by Attenborough and for a moment his eyes glazed over and he had to be thinking that suddenly the world had gone mad or was the world sane and the mistake his – had he forgotten – forgotten something vital? He was standing on a freezing bridge – what orchard? what jeeps? Was there some part of the shot that he’d neglected, something involving an orchard and jeeps, and here he was, with smoke pots going and, high in girders, guys hanging and a star ready to shoot and 275 people waiting but this question must be answered because what if it ruins the shot and if the shot’s lost a million dollars are lost and –

-then he smiles very sweetly to his aide and said, “We will not require jeeps in the orchard at all, thank you so much for reminding me.” This, it turns out, referring to the last half of a later scene to be shot afterward, the first half having been shot the day before, all this in another location, and what this trusted aide had done was pick this particular moment to inquire if Attenborough’s camera angle for this future sequence would require the placement of jeeps in the distant background in order to match what had been done before.

The weather held, the shooting on the bridge went quickly, the last major disaster had been averted. As we left the bridge, there was a genuine feeling of exultation.

Attenborough was cheery as usual, no more whistling needed that day. Later, perhaps, but not then. There are always “laters” lurking in the lives of film directors, jeeps in the orchard that need tending to.

She asks, "What else do you do, besides shoot?"

He replies, "It's been enough so far."

Link roundup

Link "roundups" are so 2003, but here are some things I've read in the last week that I love.

Of the Father of my Children and the Orphans We Carry. This is one of the finest pieces of writing I've read on the Web in a long long time. Lisa Rosman starts out interviewing director Mia Hansen-Løve, and then it becomes a tribute to her mentor. Phenomenal writing.

Zoom, Zoom. Jim Emerson on the "gratuitous zoom".

Transcendental style in the cinema of John Ford by Glenn Kenny. Don't miss it. And also, don't miss the comments. Kenny says o" the moment at the end of The Searchers between John Wayne and Natalie Wood: "For the first time, Edwards' lifting and drawing in of Debbie struck me as a transcendent moment, transcendent in the Schraderian sense. The whole point being that it doesn't parse in any rational way, and it's not meant to. It is an unabashed and matter of fact depiction of the mysterious workings of grace in the same fashion that the finale of Bresson's Pickpocket is." Not to be missed, the whole thing, post and comments.

I am so psyched that Greg hates me.

The terrifying motion picture from the terrifying No. 1 bestseller. One of my new favorite blogs, this is another one of his posts about Jaws, a movie he obviously feels very strongly about. Watch the clips. Follow the links. Guy knows his stuff. It's fascinating.

Two Black Belt Cakes. This past weekend, my friend Mere got her 2nd degree black belt, and I was up in RI to go to the big ceremony. Her sister Jayne, also an excellent friend of mine, baked two cakes for the after-party. Woman is an artist, and that's all I have to say.

It was Billy Wilder's birthday yesterday, and the incomparable Kim Morgan discusses two of his films: The Lost Weekend and Sunset Boulevard.

Titty Tales. Kelly Oxford skewers Kim Kardashian being grossed out by breastfeeding in public.

Movie poster art by Jack Davis, by Flickhead. Instantly recognizable, and it fills me with nostalgia in our current movie-poster heyday of Photoshopped floating giant heads.

A beautiful post at Allure about the early films of Bette Davis.

More John Ford: a moving post from The Siren for Father's Day.

I love this post from Edward Copeland, about the devaluation of history and culture. He has some modest proposals to rectify the situation. Great comments, too.

Egyptian film critic Wael Khairy gives a shot-by-shot commentary of Hitchcock's Psycho. Not to be missed. "In probably the most famous, and well edited scene in all of cinema, also known as the shower scene, Hitchcock uses editing and sound as cinematic manipulation to create a carefully thought out horrific murder scene. Perfection is the result. In less than one minute, we witness a combination of 78 shots, in relation to the sound of a knife slashing against skin. We never actually see the knife enter the woman’s flesh, yet we’re convince we do through the sight of stabbing (hand motion), sound effects, the musical score (horrible animalistic screeching), and of course the careful editing. Celluloid cuts replace flesh cuts. When Hitchcock told Francois Truffaut that “Psycho” belongs to filmmakers, he wasn’t joking."

I love Ed Howard's thoughts on Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The wonderful Ali Arikan analyzes Psycho. I loved this bit: "The power of the scene also emanates from the murder’s mundane setting. Hitchcock taps into the audiences’ inherent insecurities about the shower, in which we are not just restricted, but also completely defenseless. So, naked, not just literally, but also figuratively. For the women in the audience, the murder is the breakdown of all personal barriers, and represents total vulnerability and the consummation of their basest fears. And for the men, who’ve been ogling Leigh since her first appearance, half naked and lustful, on a seedy motel bed, it is a perverse wish-fulfilment fantasy. Only, instead of rewarding them with vicarious fornication (also a rape, of sorts), Hitchcock makes the men complacent in the crime. “If you were happy peeping at Marion when Norman did, then you’ll have to be there for the money shot, too,” he implies."

Jason Bellamy outdoes himself, if possible, in his review of The Two Escobars, the latest documentary in ESPN's 30 for 30 series. If you haven't been reading Jason's essays on 30 for 30, you are seriously missing out.

My friend Patrick just put up a video called "City Slickers Pumping Gas". It's hilarious. I particularly love the music Patrick chose as accompaniment.

Dennis Cozzalio has a great tribute post up for the 40th anniversary of National Lampoon, lots of links to follow too.

On staged readings

Max Sparber has a great post with advice for playwrights when having staged readings of their work.

Last year, I had two readings of the script I've written, one relatively informal, and one formal, and his words really ring true. I have been involved in more staged readings than I can count as an actress, and I have also participated in the Playwright/Directing Unit at the Actors Studio (a tedious task at times, but unbelievably useful for the playwright) and all of this prepared me, to some degree, to how it would feel being on the other side of the process. My concerns were different. As an actress in a staged reading, my only responsibility is to the playwright, to speak the words clearly (staged readings are usually about having the script be heard, it's a work in progress), and to commit to what is going on in the script to the best of my ability while holding script in hand. I am off the hook in a staged reading, as an actress. That's part of why they can be so fun. But when it was MY work being read, I paced in the back of the small performance space like a tiger, listening carefully to audience reaction, trying to FEEL what was happening between the molecules in the room: did that joke land? If it didn't get a laugh, why? There are many reasons why, and you have to take them all into account. Maybe the actor, who is reading, after all, bumbled the line a bit. Or maybe the line isn't funny. All bets are off at that point. You have to consider everything. You have to be at the very same moment: detached and attached.

It was exhilarating, and nervewracking, and I was so happy when it was over. It was illuminating, too: we had a QA afterwards, pretty informal, but what ended up happening was so helpful for me in moving forwards with my writing. I got the same comment from multiple people about the female character. There were questions. People were intrigued, don't get me wrong, but there was a sense that there might be a lack of clarity there somewhere. I also have a dreaded fear of being too obvious, which can keep me from saying what I mean, and this is something I need to work on. I have been reading Streetcar Named Desire and Long Day's Journey Into Night over and over these days, basically to remind myself how it is done, and although there are still mysteries in the characters, and I could talk about Blanche and Mitch and Stanley and Mary Tyrone all day long, there is never any doubt that the playwright knows what story he is telling. Tennessee Williams is not afraid to be clear. The last scene of Streetcar is a masterpiece. If you had held out any hope at all that Blanche could be saved, Williams disabuses you of those fantasies in a scene that is, what, 2 pages long? That's economy, that's clarity. It helps me to read those scenes again, those climactic scenes that work, to remind myself to not be afraid to put it all out there, to say, in no uncertain terms, what I mean. So when I got numerous comments about the female character, all along the same lines, I do remember thinking, "Okay, gotta look at that section ... something's not working there." An example of being both detached and attached. I am still amazed at myself that I was able to be in that space, because all I felt, inside, was ATTACHED.

As Max writes:

Ignore individual answers, as there are audience members out there who manage to get bewildered by The Family Circus, but pay attention to the answers as an aggregate. If there are areas of the play that confuses a number of people, it's probably actually confusing.

Yup. You have to know what to take in and what not to take in, but at the moment of the staged reading, it is best to keep your mouth shut and listen to everything. Do not defend. Do not defend. State what you were going for, and then shut up and hear people respond whether they got it or not.

One great thing that came out of it was that I had written into the script the Pauses I wanted the actors to take. I guess I think I'm Harold Pinter or something. David (the actor) asked me if I wanted them to follow the Pauses to the letter, and I said, "For this purpose, yes. Let's see how it plays. And don't add more pauses. Just do the ones I wrote." WELL. Within about 15 minutes of the reading, I thought, "I can lose about 50% of these pauses." I had over-paused, basically. It was immediately apparent that I could lose most of them. Too many. It made the script sag. Pinter can do it, but that's because he's a genius. I went nutso with the pauses, and now need to pull back, and let the dialogue just play. That was a great thing that came out of the reading, something that nobody even commented on, but it was just a Note to Self. ENOUGH with the pregnant pauses! That's what a reading is for. You have to put it out there, without second-guessing, and be willing to take a good hard look at what doesn't work. In front of people. Not for the faint-hearted.

Over the weeks following the second reading, I had email conversations and actual conversations with people who had been there, who fleshed out for me some of their thoughts about the script, and again, that was so helpful, because first of all it helped me see that in some cases I was actually onto something, and then, in other cases, it helped me see where I was 100% NOT clear about what I was trying to say. And, in some cases, it helped me actually see that I didn't know what the hell I WAS trying to say, and I needed to get clear MYSELF.

If you find yourself talking too much, if you find yourself going on and on about what is "going on" in a certain scene, that that is a pretty sure sign that you have no idea what actually is going on. You should be able to boil it down and sum it up in a sentence. You can boil down Act III, scene 1 in Hamlet into a sentence and that scene is one of the greatest achievements in Western literature. The theme, the objective, is clear, in almost every line. It's not muddy or complex. You don't need to talk and talk about it. "Do I want to live or do I want to die?" Hamlet wonders. That's it. I'm talking as an actress and a member of the show-trash community here, NOT academia, an important distinction. People can write theme papers on it to their heart's delight, but in terms of drama, the action of the scene is as simple as can be. So any time I found myself babbling on and on about this or that moment, I knew that I didn't know what the hell was going on.

Most of my friends are actors, so they speak in actor-terms, and I found their comments to be the most intuitive, the most clicked-in. They weren't jargony or academic (as mentioned by Sparber), but emotionally based. If something doesn't make sense emotionally, then an actor will be the one to tell you why. Because that is their business. They truck in emotions. This is not about being obvious or literal. Usually it is the more academic types who want something more literal. After all, there are moments in Women Under the Influence where Gena Rowlands doesn't behave in a way that makes sense, perhaps, dramaturgically, it might look weird on the page, but on a deeper level, a soul-level, it makes more sense than any performance before or since. That is part of what I was going for with some of my transitions, and so I really needed to listen, and listen closely, to those who said they didn't get it, or those who said they got it completely. Again, you have to be able to listen. And then decide what to do.

Max writes:

Once you have had a few responses that are really useful, though, you'll start to recognize them. They tend to produce a sort of "Aha!" moment. They make instant, intuitive sense, and may actually cause you to see your own writing in an utterly new way. They tend to take the form of a very specific comment about the script you wrote, such as, "It seems like the main character of your play is actually ..." or "For me, the moment of the greatest dramatic interest was ..." You hear these comments, and think, My God, that at actually is the main character, and that actually is the dramatic climax of the play!

I had mentioned in the QA that the scene I had been most concerned about, the one I had worked on the most, was the climax to the first "act" (although it's really more of a big SCENE, made up of little fragmentary other scenes), which I called "the Baby on Board Scene". I was tormented by that scene. I had a clear idea in my head of how it had to PLAY, but then that means that it must, it must, exist like that on the page. I worked it to death. But it wasn't until I heard the two wonderful actors read it that I could really get a sense if I had succeeded or not. One of the people there said to me afterwards, "It was in the Baby on Board scene that I suddenly started not liking her. I started feeling worried for HIM, and like he should cut his losses and get out. I was with her up until that point, and then I turned on her."

I thought to myself: "YES!"

And this was a woman making that comment, which had been another concern of mine. One of my explicit (unstated) goals in that scene was to have women, who might have been "rooting" for the female character, abandon her to her own demons, and switch sides. I hadn't said that out loud in the QA session, I hadn't told anyone, but when I got that comment, about one of the most re-written and edited scenes in the piece thus far, I knew I had done what I had wanted to do, and knew I didn't need to edit at least THAT scene anymore.

I haven't touched it since.

I won't be shy and tell you that the scene played like a bat out of hell. It killed. It was the most successful scene of the entire second reading, the one that that generated the most organic response. I don't know what it was like for the actors, but it felt, to me, watching, that all they had to do was say the lines, and the thing landed. Standing in the back, I was gauging the energy of the room the entire time like a crazy barometer. I had been so worried about the scene that there was a hunkering-down feeling in me, like: "Okay. Don't just listen to the words. Be totally present, 100% right now, so you can see how this damn thing plays." I had a specific idea in my mind of the arc of the scene, which comes out of the scene before. The scene before ends on a hopeful note, a moment of conciliation, where the female concedes ground, and the two have a loving moment. The next scene (the scene in question) opens mid-argument. The argument goes, without let-up, until the very end of the scene, when he (I hoped) demolishes her with a monologue about what is wrong with her. My hope for it was: the audience would already be invested in the couple, rooting for them, and the scene before leaves them hopeful, hopeful that this nice man will make it work with this weird prickly OCD woman. I wanted to start mid-argument to dash the audience's hopes INSTANTLY. The two argue for a bit, and then it becomes clear what they are arguing about. The Baby on Board signs. (It all makes sense in the context of my female character, who lives life like it is an ideological war on all fronts). I wanted that to be funny, hilariously funny. I wanted to set it up that the audience thinks they are arguing, at first, about something that might be reasonable for a young new couple to be arguing about: she flirted with someone else, or he didn't call when he said he would ... but then, when it becomes apparent, that they are in a rageful argument about the Baby on Board signs - I wanted that to be funny. Get a huge laugh, basically. (This was my main #1 fear: that it wouldn't get a laugh.) I wanted the argument to rollick along, and I wanted the audience to find it all funny - almost like they are relieved. "Oh, they're just arguing about that ... that's kind of silly ... I can relax ..." But then, at a specific point, I wanted the audience to go: "Uh-oh." By that point, there are only 2 pages left in the scene. I didn't want to dwell on it, or hammer it home 10 times. I wanted there to be a feeling of dread, and of incomprehension, that she would be so unreasonable, that she would be willing to throw away this romance because of a disagreement about the Baby on Board sign, of all things ... and then, boom, it's over. He's had it. He's done. She has revealed herself to be an unworthy mate over the course of the scene, and he's out of there.

So. That's a lot to get into one scene, and that's some pretty subtle maneuvering that has to take place. I only write about this at length because it is a moment I am quite proud of, and it is important, in times of difficult work and struggle, to remember the moments that worked. It helps me (to quote Lorna in Golden Boy), "stiffen the space between my shoulder blades". You need that when you are trying to work. As you can see, I had a specific experience I wanted to create, and if it was great on the page but didn't play that way for the audience, I'd have to re-work. And literally, every transition I just mentioned above is what I could feel happening in that audience. They rode the wave. The actors were more like conductors. They played the shit out of the scene. They played it real, they played it heartbreaking, and the result, out in the dark seats, was tense silence at first, dismayed, then HOWLS of laughter that continued on for a couple of pages, just waves and waves of guffaws, every time my female character said the words "Baby on Board sign", the laughter would get more intense. And then, at the moment I had planned (and this is credit to the actors, too, who just went there, talented geniuses that they are), I could feel the energy shift. People stopped laughing. People pulled back. They realized that a disaster was unfolding. It was funny and then .... it was not.

We weren't out of the woods yet. We still had the whole second act to go through, but that "Baby on Board" scene had been my main concern. If you don't get THAT, then you don't get any of it. The rest will NOT follow. Because then it will seem like he has over-reacted and fled into the night over a stupid trivial argument. But that was not the story I was telling. You need to finish that scene thinking, "Well, that sucks, but I think he did need to escape that. He clearly couldn't have dealt with that." If you end that scene thinking, "Boy, did he over-react", then I have failed.

There is nothing like the thrill, quiet and sure, when you know ... you KNOW ... you have succeeded.

The comments I got at the QA confirmed my feelings about that scene, and also deepened my understanding of what I hadn't done in some of the other scenes. There were issues I needed to take seriously. "Why does he call her and ask her out to dinner?" That was a big one. I am still not sure I have handled that one appropriately, and I am still working on it. What does he want from her? If my answer requires me to talk for 15 minutes, then it's not a good answer. Objectives need to be short and to the point.

To quote my acting mentor Sam Schacht:

Every scene is either Fight or Fuck. If you're ever stuck and you don't know how to play something, then just make a choice, either way, and see how it goes. Fight or Fuck. See if it gets you anywhere.

It might be possible to count just how many times I think of his words in my life when I'm trying to create something, but I doubt it. It comes up for me constantly. There are, naturally, subtleties ... but when you're stuck? Trying something subtle is never the way to go. William James wrote:

To change your life: start immediately; do it flamboyantly; no exceptions.

The same is true with acting, with writing. If I'm stuck, the last thing I need to do is try to make a subtle measured change. Fight or Fuck, man. Fight or Fuck. Choose.

Try something unexpected, something sudden, as sometimes happens in real life. People are surprising. See how your characters would react to a surprise. Don't assume you know. Those people on the page might surprise you if you just let them.

I am talking to myself right now. It helps. Don't assume you know, Sheila. Let them surprise you. See what happens.

Oh. And don't be afraid to say what you mean. Ever.

"I was always a cartoonist in my mind. But then something happened." An interview with director Ben Barnes:

When I was in LA, I went to a screening of God Damn King Kong, a short film directed by LA-based director Ben Barnes. It starred my brother Brendan O'Malley, who also wrote the script. It's a beautiful and absurd piece of work, funny and haunting. It stayed with me. With the voiceover, and the images of a lonely man walking the streets of Los Angeles, it called to mind James Ellroy, and the noir world his characters inhabit, the alienation mixed with the surrounding beauty of the waving palm trees and the deep neon lights on the strip. It's tough work getting over a dame.

Ben Barnes was kind enough to submit to some questions from me about his process as a director.

SOM: Can you tell me a little bit about your background? How did you get started as a filmmaker?

BB: I was a cartoonist from an early age. I did some political cartooning in high school and switched over to strip cartooning my senior year. I went to college and had a daily strip for two years called Despot Theatre. I even self-published a book of them, with a run of something like 500. They sold at the campus bookstore. I think it sold out in about two weeks. But around that same time I was getting tired of being limited by what I could draw. I always wanted to create more than my capabilities as an illustrator.

But right up until the end of my sophomore year I'd never even thought of being a filmmaker. I never saw myself as that. I was always a cartoonist in my mind. But then something happened and I took time off from college and enrolled in some classes at Pittsburgh Filmmakers. I made a few 8mm films and thought there was something there, so I finished my degree back at Kent State and shoveled out a small fortune for a masters in film production at the University of Miami. Then I drove out to LA.

SOM: Your Fish Out of Water series is so funny, so well-done. [Clips: Joyride, The Nightmare, Movie Night.] You take a serious realistic tone to what is an absurd situation: a young man whose best bud is basically a PUPPET of a fish. Can you talk about that project and its successes?

BB: Don't let Joyride fool you. The guy in the backseat is also a lead, and the story is of both of them and fish as friends and roommates.

There have been a lot of near successes with Fish; a lot of attention from the cartoon network and Adult Swim, plenty of near-deals, etc. But for the most part, it's just what Joel Huggins and I have done on our own with the series, that's what you see. There was also an online journal years ago, with pictures and lots of writing. It's been around for years.

SOM: Your video for "Why" is amazing. Who is the man with the arrows? Was he involved in the car wreck? He is obviously in a distraught state already as he approaches the accident. I loved how mysterious it was, violent, tragic.

BB: It was just an image that popped in my head; and the nice things about music videos is that they don't have to be elaborated upon too much. The budget probably wouldn't have allowed for much more elaboration anyway. I just loved the actor, John Walcutt, and thought it would be something I wanted to do with him. As far as the meaning or concept, it really just had to do with what I was going through emotionally at the time in my life.

SOM: How did you get that effect with the arrows? His performance is terrific.

BB: The arrow effect is by Garett Zunt, my production designer on the last two WHY? videos. He made an apparatus that fit under the man's jacket.

SOM: What is the process for shooting music videos? Do you have a relationship with certain bands, where they come to you for new projects?

BB: I shot some performances for WHY? back in early '08 for dublab, then Yoni got in touch with me about doing a video after seeing my other work. That led to the Shoeing Horses video and that went well, so they asked to work with me again when their next album came out. They are one of my favorite bands ever, so it was exciting to be able to work with them. I don't think a lot of people get to make videos for their favorite bands, so for all the other creative things that have been a struggle, I try to keep small, awesome things like that in mind.

SOM: How did God Damn King Kong develop?

BB: Brendan and I met at Jeffrey Tambor's workshop back in 2008. He really liked the first piece I went up with, about the first porn magazine I ever stole, and introduced himself then. Some time later he went up with a bizarre Tennessee Williams-like piece that at the time people either dug or were roundly confused by, which is often a sign of quality. Brendan had asked me to make a music video with him, which I didn't want to do at all, so I countered by asking if he'd want to make a film based on that piece. I think we originally called it "Squirrels". That was a year ago. We set out to rewrite it and work it into something to film. The original piece was written in direct address to a woman presumably in the room, but we eventually changed it to be a letter to an ex, dictated to camera. We tried not to look at the lines head-on, if that makes any sense, but we'd add or subtract lines based on some sort of off-angle gut reaction. We did little to no improv, from what I remember. What was on the page is on the screen.

SOM: The look of the film reminded me a lot of the noir-ish nighttime quality of Barbet Schroeder's Barfly, something about the light. There's a loneliness there, and I wondered how you thought about that, going into the project. Could you talk a little bit about how you achieved that look?

BB: My longtime DP Mathew Rudenberg split duties. He shot the more complicated scenes like the bar and I shot most of the simpler scenes, like the kitchen. We shot and re-shot this thing so piecemeal, it was often just me and Brendan. I kind of feel like there's a dog's breakfast of film looks in this piece, so it's a relief that you aren't horrified. The filming was protracted over a 9-month period and shot with two different cameras, two different DPs, which I think augments the disjointed nature of the writing. but it was more by circumstance than intention. We had no money, so we had to shoot with what was available when we could. I think the loneliness is what holds each scene together, more than consistent cinematography.

SOM: What camera did you use? Was there any artificial lighting?

BB: We shot on the Canon 5D Mark II and the RED; and we did use lights for any interiors and the occasional exterior.

SOM: What was your process as a director for filming the picture? Did you rehearse? Did things develop as you went along, in terms of what you wanted to shoot, or did you have a gameplan from the get-go?

BB: I usually had specific shots or images for each scene, which then changed depending on the location. The idea was to have one shot for each scene/location, which we started to futz around with the more we started shooting. Since the shoot took place over such a long time period, things like the car wash and the last shot with the cereal would pop in my head as the film took shape. With this film, it was a lot harder to know when the right take happened. There was the oblique angle approach as I mentioned, and we shot almost every take eight or nine times. The one time we got it in the first take, when Brendan is crying, the camera was out of focus! So we had to reshoot that later on. Brendan and I are big fans, if we aren't always the biggest practitioners, of "cutting deep" a concept from the workshop: the deeper the cut, the more risked, the better a performance will be.

SOM: Could you explain what "cutting deep" is?

BB: "Cutting deep" in acting, or even just creating, tends to mean making a choice that has more riding on it, puts you out of your comfort zone, a deeper investment and connection. Sometimes Jeffrey [Tambor] will even liken it to the the childhood add-on "...and I mean it!" It also has elements of cutting through what's holding you up, making you hesitate.

Brendan and I were working on that scene with the lines like "We were going to set fire to the bottom of the ocean and all that" and were having trouble getting it right; the first way we'd shot it he's reserved, or it was in voice over or something. And we were figuring out what was wrong. Brendan asked what acting style I hated, and I replied, "Showy, overly emotional" or something to that effect and we immediately were like, "That's it!" And later we added an insert shot with that drawing to motivate the piece of paper. It was a real mish-mash.

SOM: How'd you come up with the title?

BB: The title is the last two words in the stage piece that Brendan performed. "God Damn" really loud, then softly to himself, "King Kong." That and that alone sold the entire performance for me. We got rid of it once it became a letter, but then when we were brainstorming what the piece of paper says in that scene, Melody Garren, who plays Annette, proposed "God Damn King Kong". And then it just took off from there.

SOM: The inclusion of the woman in the film, the one being addressed, is interesting, and adds a dream-like quality to the whole thing. I liked how haunted he was by her, and how that was made manifest by her presence. Did you go into it knowing you wanted her there, or did it originally start out as just the man talking, to himself and to us, all the way through?

BB: It was only after we'd shot a lot of the direct-address stuff that I started really wanting to see a lot more of what Brendan was describing, so we threw in a couple shots, first a memory with the inflatable mattress and then later examples of her continued haunting of his life. Of course, through that process we ended up with the emotional climax of the film and one of my favorite shots I've ever done in that fire helmet roof shot.

SOM: How much footage did you end up having? How do you decide what to keep, what to lose? Did you edit as you went?

BB: We shot a few more things than are in there, and we shot some scenes that we ended up reshooting, but for the most part we kept every scene in that we shot. I basically picked each take I liked the most, and if I like parts of one and parts of another, I found coverage to splice the two together. We had a scene of him at a storage locker looking at old photos that just had things wrong with them, like very subjective memories which we ended up not filming. Here's the only one I got done before I scrapped that idea.

SOM: The one shot of the man on the roof, at night, with the green lights blurry in the background, is gorgeous. Where did you film that?

BB: I filmed it on my garage roof with just a light panel to front-light it. Behind Brendan is sunset blvd right by the stadium entrance. The fire is rubber cement in terra cotta pots.

SOM: Who would you count as your main influences?

BB: One of my favorite films from my obsessive film phase was Woody Allen's Stardust Memories, which was his 8 1/2. I love that film, and it's kind of fun to have an unpopular film or one that's overlooked as one of your favorites. There's no posters of that film in any dorms to make you feel less special. Anyway, as far as God Damn King Kong is concerned, I think there's a pretty solid connection in retrospect.

In general, I would say Bloom County has a huge influence on me. Films like Eraserhead, Jesus' Son... Don Herzfeldt's recent work has been overwhelming. It's hard to say what you love and what influences you. I obscenely love almost everything the Coen Brothers have ever done but I don't see it popping up in my work.

Ben Barnes's short film God Damn King Kong:

God Damn King Kong from Ben Barnes on Vimeo.

Ben Barnes started out as an award-winning cartoonist, before moving on to directing. His shorts have screened at the South by Southwest film festival in 2008, 2009 and 2010, and also at the Montreal Just for Laughs festival in 2009. He's a well-known director of music videos, working with Peter Bjorn & John, Busdriver and Coheed & Cambria. His latest video, for WHY?, was recently written up in the LA Weekly. The LA screening series A Dublab Labrat Matinee often features his work, as does Pitchfork, Stereogum, Les InRocks, the RES Screening Series, Derek Waters’ LOL at the UCB Theater, and MTV. Ben belongs to the production collective The Masses. You can read more about Ben, and see more clips of his work, at his website.

A Thousand Women Like Me (2000); Director: Reza Karimi

Reza Karimi, director of the Iranian film A Thousand Women Like Me, wrote:

A Thousand Women Like Me was a personal assertion. Cinema is basically the product of experience, and A Thousand Women Like Me is the product of thought, experience and an index of my capabilities up to this moment. Maybe there are flaws in the film, but I have decidedly overcome the shortcomings of the previous film. If I were to make a film one day that did not represent a step forward, that day would surely signal the end of my career.

Starring Niki Karimi, an international star from Iran (and a director herself), A Thousand Women Like Me tells the story of Sharzad (Karimi), a divorce attorney in Tehran who loses custody of her son following her divorce. The film is an indictment of the patriarchal custody laws in Iran, and ups the ante by having the main female character be a divorce attorney herself. She spends her days in court, fighting for her women clients to get access to their children. She now finds herself in the same situation, and experiences, first-hand, the unfairness, the helplessness, the absurdity of what her clients go through. Her son is 8 years old and is a diabetic. The father (played by the wonderful fox-faced Fariburz Arabnia) is lackadaisical about giving their son insulin shots, and refuses to admit that he is ever at fault, even when the son collapses in the schoolyard. Sharzad is allowed to see her son once a week, and her relationship with her ex-husband is still prickly and full of resentment. She shows up at his house, and ends up doing laundry for him, as he follows her around, giving her a hard time.

Sharzad, familiar with the loopholes in the law, starts to fight her own case before judges and intermediaries. If a father can be declared "incompetent", then, and only then, will custody be granted to the mother. She documents her son's illness, the hospital visits, the emergency room runs ... to no avail. The court remains immovable. She becomes desperate. She fears for her son's well-being. Her ex-husband is angry that she divorced him in the first place. He wants her to come home. Her family puts the pressure on her. She starts to see no way out. She kidnaps her son. They then are on the run. Police are looking for them. They sleep in her car. They hang out aimlessly in playgrounds. Her son cries that he misses his father. There are no villains here. Or, perhaps the villain is the culture itself, that devalues women to such a degree that it leaves them no recourse but to take the law into their own hands.

This is serious business. This is a movie about people's lives. Sharzad is an angry woman, even more angry as she gets nowhere with the legal system, and she refuses to play by rules that she thinks are unfair or dangerous. Her family freak out. They cannot get behind her latest choice. She ends up crashing with a friend, while she is on the run, and there are long scenes of the two of them talking, trying to figure out what she should do. These are quiet human scenes, well-written and well-played.

Was she right to take her son? Probably not. Not really. She pays for that choice. Maybe she was right, in an idealistic way, but we cannot live our ideals, at least not without consequences. She is not alone in the world. She has an ex-husband, she has sisters and a mother, all of whom are worried about her. She has abandoned her lucrative and important business. Her son is traumatized by being kidnapped. He loves his mother, but he is the real victim here. He loves his father, too. Director Reza Karimi does not make the mistake of painting everyone with a black-and-white brush. Besides, when you're talking about cultural and social issues with Iran, there really is no such thing as melodrama. Even in a simple film about adultery like Hemlock (my review here - another movie with Fariburz Arabnia as the male lead), the pressures of the culture at large elevate the sometimes shlocky material with true horror. It is difficult to not try to imagine yourself in such a situation, and how you would handle it. The best of Iran's films show the price paid by all members of society living under such an authoritarian regime. The husband is baffled by the course his life has taken. He is not a bad man, although careless with his son. He punishes his ex-wife by refusing access to their son. And perhaps he has some resentment that their son is a bit high-maintenance, being diabetic. All of that is in the script and in the performances.

Karimi is riveting. She has a face the camera loves, with big glimmering eyes, but her performance goes deeper than that. She operates at an increasing fever pitch of desperation and fear throughout the film, and it is to Karimi's credit that none of it goes "over the top". Instead, it is harrowing. You ache for her, for what she has lost, and what she is willing to give up.

Arabnia, the husband, also manages to portray levels of subtlety here that a lesser actor would have missed. Watch the scene where the two make their son's bed together. Filmed with cut-away shots of their hands, tucking in corners of the sheets, it calls to mind all of the everyday domesticity that both of them have forfeited and perhaps now miss. He is a cold man, kind of uncaring, but when push comes to shove, he does not want to harm anyone. Not for good, anyway. Divorce sucks, in any culture. She left HIM. He is pissed off and ashamed. But watch the scenes where he plays with his son, or chats with him on the phone. His situation is heartbreaking as well.

It's a ruthless film, willing to follow events to their logical conclusions to put the final nail in the coffin to the conversation about divorce and custody in Iran. The fantastic 1998 documentary Divorce, Iranian Style was groundbreaking in that regard. Divorce is very easy to receive in Iran, if you are a man. Islamic law declares that a man can divorce his wife at any time, merely by declaring it. She has no equivalent rights. She cannot do the same. The burden of proof is all on the woman, should she want a divorce, and custody is almost never granted to the woman. A Thousand Women Like Me, from 2000, is a good companion piece to Divorce, Iranian Style, with its intimate look at what goes on in Iranian divorce courts.

The subtitles in A Thousand Women Like Me are extremely annoying and very poorly done. White subtitles against white background, completely unreadable. It gets a bit better as the film goes on, but the first 20 minutes are terrible. You have to pick up on what is going on from the behavior alone, because the subtitles are invisible. It actually was a little bit interesting, once I realized the subtitles were a lost cause. Yes, it was annoying, but I accepted the situation and stuck with it, thinking, "Okay. Let me see how much I can 'get' just from watching behavior and body language."

The acting is good enough, the story clear enough, with or without subtitles. I reiterate that the subtitle situation does improve about 20 minutes in, but you have to put up with that first 20 minutes.

A Thousand Women Like Me is worth it.

20 most surprising performances

Here are the 20 most surprising female performances I have chosen: Part 1 and Part 2.

Don't worry, those of you who like symmetry: I'm working on the 20 most surprising male performances. It'll come next week.

First slide: Burt Hummel (Mike O'Malley)

Friend Matt Zoller Seitz has a great slideshow up in Salon right now called "Great Dads in Pop Culture Not Named Atticus Finch". First slide of the bunch? Cousin Mike. Naturally. The man is everywhere right now.

Matt writes:

Burt Hummel, the father of the effeminate, flamboyant musical prodigy Kurt on Fox's "Glee," is the most psychologically credible father of a gay son ever seen on network television. You believe him because of longtime sitcom star Mike O'Malley's subtle yet emotionally direct performance, and because series creator Ryan Murphy and his writers have taken the trouble to make Burt a real person. He's not a symbol of intolerance or enlightenment or anything else; he's just a working-class straight man who loves his boy and wants him to be happy, even though a lifetime of conditioning makes him uncomfortable with everything Kurt is about.

To me, that captures what is going on perfectly in that character which has become a sort of phenomenon, and I agree with Matt: It's never been seen before in quite this particular light. My favorite moment so far is from the episode when Burt (Mike) starts to bond with Finn (his gay son's crush) about football and other things, and his son freaks out, feeling left out. They have a conversation about it, and BOTH sides come to the table with good points. Burt says to his son, "I liked having someone I could talk about guy stuff with ..." and Kurt replies, devastated, "I'm a guy", a revolutionary moment if ever there was one. It shames anyone who thinks they know what they are talking about when they declare "that's a REAL man" about, oh, John Wayne, or a WWII vet or something, not realizing that yes, they are men, and great men, but they are just one example of manliness in a tapestry of many variables, and by pointing at ONE quality and saying "That is a REAL man", these people are purposefully excluding vast millions of people who do not "qualify" in their narrow definition. The same is done by people who say stuff like, "REAL women have curves", thinking that they're celebrating something, but what they are doing is narrowing the definition. Oh, so Shelley Duvall isn't a REAL woman? How dare you make that statement? How dare you? How dare you declare women who don't have the body type that you think most attractive aren't REAL women? This is insidious stuff, make no mistake. If you don't think little girls (or little boys, such as Kurt on Glee), absorb these messages, and come to horrible conclusions about themselves that can have a lifelong effect, then you're wrong.

And here, in that episode in Glee, with Kurt's ferocious, and yet very hurt statement, "I'm a guy.", he put the nail in the coffin of that argument, as far as I'm concerned. I was amazed by it. You don't need to do too much to get your point across. And instead of having the show be a constant refrain of Kurt's unenlightened dad having to learn gay lessons, it's more about creating a relationship, in fits and starts, two men alone in the house, without a mother, trying to find their way. My favorite moment of Burt's comes in that episode when he says to his son, "Hey, listen. We had a deal. I don't try to change you ... and you don't try to change me."

We've had enough of shaming people for "incorrect" attitudes. How about cutting each other a little slack. How about trying to realize that everyone, good or bad, is just doing their best? How about trying to form a relationship with someone that is different from you, rather than just labeling that person as "other". All of this is muddied naturally when it is your own child, and the script handles this like no other.

Obviously, I'm proud of my cousin Mike; he's been instrumental in pushing forward the project I've been working on this year. He deserves all the good things that come to him.

And because I never like to pass up an opportunity to link to this: Mike wrote a piece last year for the Sports, Leadership & Life series in New England, that I think is terrific. It's called Things You Already Know.

Please, go read Matt's piece.

There are many surprises on the list. Two I found very gratifying (besides my own cousin, I mean): the struggling lower-class father in the Iranian film Children of Heaven, and the great Paul Wingfield as the father in Sounder, certainly one of the most moving portrayals of a father in American cinema.

"Talk About the Movie: A Bug's Life and Up"

In honor of the opening of Toy Story 3 (I haven't seen it yet, loved Glenn Kenny's thoughts about it, and am very much looking forward), here is a link to the piece I wrote for Pixar Week last year about A Bug's Life and Up.

In October, when I wrote that Pixar piece, I was starting to come out of the maelstrom I had been in in the summer (and, honestly, for months before that as well), and that piece was the most personal thing I've written yet about last year. I was asked to contribute and I immediately knew what I wanted to do and say, and hoped a more personal essay would be welcome to the mix, instead of a straight review or an examination of Pixar as a company (nothing wrong with those things, I just knew the direction I, personally, wanted to go). Todd Van Der Werf, the organizer, was open to whatever I wanted to add, thank you, sir, and he started off the week with my essay.

All of the pieces from Pixar Week were fantastic, and I was proud to be a part of it. I took a risk with that piece. Any time you are open and honest, you are vulnerable to attack. I was also the only woman who contributed to Pixar Week. I knew, too, that that could leave me open for attack. "Here's a woman writing a drippy story about her life - why do I want to read this?" It was a tiny test for me. Yes, people may have thought that. Who knows. But it was the truth, and I had some serious shit to SAY about those two movies, and I was glad (and afraid) to put it out there. The comments over there are some of the warmest and most human I have ever received. I wrote about myself, and two movies, and in the comments section people started sharing about themselves. Amazing. A tribute to movies and what they can provide.

Here's the link: "Talk About the Movie!"

Bloomsday 2010

Therese and I arrived, books in hand, at the pub where the Bloomsday celebration was being held. Colum McCann was the emcee, and we both were a bit starstruck, although both of us have met him before, on separate occasions. He just won the National Book Award, which is very exciting. He has been emceeing this particular event for 7 years (I was at the very first one!), and he pulls out the big guns, and gets great people to participate in the readings. This was the first year without Frank McCourt attending, so the entire event started with everyone raising a glass to McCourt. The pub has two entrances, a front and a back, and the back entrance goes out into a winding cobblestone alley, with picnic tables placed. It doesn't feel like New York. It feels like Europe. It was threatening to rain all day, and there were times when a great wind came galloping down that concrete canyon, but not a drop fell. We stayed outside the whole time. Therese and I were there early enough that we were alone at our picnic table (although that wouldn't last long.) There was complementary gorgonzola and burgundy (naturally). I recognized a lot of people from other Bloomsday celebrations, most notably the Symphony Space one I went to a couple years back. We had about an hour before the readings started, so we just enjoyed ourselves, and compared our different copies of Ulysses. Everyone who was there had a book on the table in front of them. There were a couple of guys in straw boaters.

Then, at one point, suddenly Colum McCann was at our table, holding a notebook, and said, "Do you girls want to read?" (Meaning: participate in the readings. The way it works is each person gets up and reads a section - most of them are no longer than 5 minutes long). But McCann had obviously got the literati out in force, so we were shocked and befuddled when he asked us, and we stuttered and stammered and looked at each other, but what: we're gonna say No to such a request? We're gonna turn down Colum McCann? We said "Yes, sure, yes ..." And he asked for our names, writing them down, and said, "Pick out a short section - just not Molly, okay?" "Okay." And he left us in a whirlwind of panic and adrenaline, as we flipped feverishly through our books looking for something we wanted to read. "What have we gotten ourselves into ..." I murmured. I immediately turned to the Ithaca section, one of my favorites in the book, thinking of the long water monologue (which is actually included in that excerpt) and which I find hilarious. I thought I could make something funny of it. Okay, fine. I'll do that. I skimmed it like a madwoman, looking for words I might not know, things I might trip over. Oh, and I forgot, before Colum McCann left our table, he said to us, "Make sure you read good now!" You got it, Mr. McCann. No pressure or anything.

Suddenly I saw an old friend, Aedin Moloney, who always reads sections of the Molly monologue throughout the celebration, and the entire thing ends with her reading the last 4 pages of the book. She's an actress, a musician, a great person, and I haven't seen her in years. We have many mutual friends, and I keep missing her, like ships in the night. We did a show together years ago, we played Irish sisters, and it was a crazy and great experience. We were two peas in a pod. I saw her arrive, and then we saw each other, it was great to finally re-connect.

Meanwhile, the place was filling up. An elderly gentleman named Bob sat at our table with us, he had a hardcover copy of Ulysses, and by the end of the day, we were all fast friends. He was terrific. Really interesting, friendly, funny, and loved James Joyce. It was great luck that he sat with us.

There was a microphone and podium set up, under a couple of giant umbrellas (which were eventually removed), and Colum McCann started off with a speech, and then read the opening couple of pages of the book. People were following along in their own copies, or just listening. There was a festive atmosphere. It is strange: to hear voices booming out through the financial district: "Stately plump Buck Mulligan ..." Like some sort of weird political rally.

McCann would introduce each reader, and it appeared that it was up to that person to choose whatever section they liked. There was a great mix. McCann and another guy read a bit from the Circe episode, which of course is written like a play. Once you hear this stuff read out loud, by witty people, it becomes totally apparent how hysterical this book is, something that might be missed if you get bogged down in the language. It is absurd, it is breathlessly ridiculous, it is a big showoffy book, it is filled, end to end, with jokes. What a delight. I should have written down everyone's names, so I could properly attribute their readings, but I was too involved in the moment.

Readings heard:

-- a guy named Seamus read the whole "cat" section of the Calypso episode, and at the "Meow" sections, the entire audience started Meow-ing back.

-- Eilin O'Dea, just off the plane from Ireland to go to Symphony Space, dropped by and did a bit of Molly's monologue (a bit? How about 7 or 8 pages) by heart. She was amazing.

-- Larry Kirwan (from Black 47) was there, beer in hand, and I can't remember which episode he read from [Update: I remember, it was from the Nausicaa episode], and it had to do with religion and sex, and he said beforehand, "This is for all the Catholics present." A cheer went up and down the alley. When he finished the reading, which was quite sexy, as much of Ulysses is, a white-haired woman in the front row (obviously a friend of Larry's) got up and whispered something to him and he then said into the microphone, "She just told me that that reading was better than her vibrator." I am sure she loved having what she whispered to him privately BROADCAST into a microphone through the financial district. Everyone burst into laughter (including the white-haired woman), and people cheered. Let's all cheer for vibrators and James Joyce. It's only 3 o'clock in the afternoon, why not.

-- Two guys got up - one Irish and one from Lancashire - and read from the Ithaca episode (not MY part, though), and it was like a Laurel and Hardy routine. Seriously: that episode can seem so ponderous, because of all of the lists and scientific vocabulary - but that's the joke of it. The answers so outweigh the questions (which usually are prosaic like, "Where?" and "What next?") that the entire thing becomes an exercise in absurdity. Hilarious.

-- A guy got up who was one of Colum McCann's writing students. McCann gave him a glowing introduction: "It's rare that you find a writer who can assert his voice in only three words." He's a writer and a Marine, who said before he started reading (from the Proteus episode), that he took Ulysses with him to Iraq and would read the Proteus episode over and over again, he said it helped give him a perspective on mind and body that he felt he needed while in the middle of a war zone.

-- One guy got up and read from Judge Woolsey's decision, declaring Ulysses NOT obscene and admitting it into the United States in 1934. I know I'm with my own kind when the name "Judge Woolsey" arouses spontaneous applause.

-- An Irish guy named Ned (ubiquitous at this function and others, I've seen him around) sat behind us. He also did a reading, and judging from his commentary behind me, knows most of the book by heart. He arrived a bit late, and sat down, just as one of the readers said the famous line, "The snot green sea. The scrotum tightening sea." and Ned called out, "Ah, snotgreen, it's a luvely color." This is not a crowd where you stand on ceremony. There's a lot of talk-back. It's awesome.

-- One gentleman (so sorry I do not remember his name) wearing a floppy little fishing hat got up and read a long hilarious section of Leopold Bloom's innermost thoughts, and it had to be over 10 pages long, and he had it memorized. I think he glanced at the page once. This was not a rote performance, he wasn't rattling off words he had just memorized - he knew it, he performed it, he embodied it. He was so funny, so great.

-- Tragedy struck. A woman got up and read the section from Ithaca I had been planning to read. PANIC. I barely listened to her reading, unfortunately, because I was frantically pawing through the book looking for another reading. Never count on Plan A. So far, no one had read from the Scylla and Charybdis episode (the one where Stephen discourses on Hamlet in the library), so I chose a brief section from that, hoping no one else would steal my thunder in the meantime. FEAR. PANIC.

-- Overheard: A young hot guy in a hoodie with an Irish accent, holding a Guinness, and saying into his cellphone, "I've been down here for hours. I'm wasted."

-- One of the things that surprised me was that no one read the list of names, which is usually a huge crowd-pleaser. Therese knew exactly what I was talking about, and we both forgot which episode it was from (and I have now forgotten it again) but we flipped through our books looking for it. It is one of those things that is immediately recognizable just from the LOOK of it, because it is a page consisting entirely of a list of names, so it's peppered with capital letters. We were laughing at ourselves as we looked for it, since we both knew what we were looking for, and how fun it was to be with a person who knew what the "list of names" was.

-- Finally, Colum came over to our table and said, "You two are up next - you can go and stand off to the side." We obeyed. Despite our nerves. We stood off to the side, and the wind at that point was huge, whipping the Irish flag off to the side. Rain seemed imminent. As I stood there, looking out at the huge listening rapt crowd, faces of all ages, I suddenly felt very happy to be myself, and to be exactly where I was at that moment in time. Ulysses, as I mentioned, is all tied up with my father, and I miss him very much, and I felt him with me right then. I felt happy that I am in my tradition, that I have embraced it, that I have taken his cues in my own insane way. I wished he had been there.

-- Therese read from the Hades section, the ending of it, and it has one of my favorite bits, chilling and simple:

The gates glimmered in front: still open. Back to the world again. Enough of this place. Brings you a bit nearer every time.

It sure does.

-- I loved looking out at all the faces, watching, and listening, books open to the section Therese was reading. I was weirdly proud of the two of us for saying, despite our fear and sense of pressure, "Yes" to Colum McCann. It was such a treat!

-- While Therese was reading, Colum came over to me and said he was afraid it was going to start raining so if I could read something short, that would be great. I showed him what I wanted to read, and then said, "How about if I just do this paragraph?" and he said, "That would be great." He was keeping things moving, man. NOT an easy task. He had to get all of the readings done before the Happy Hour proper commenced, and he had to make sure to leave enough time for the big finale, which was Aedin's reading of the last 4 pages of the book.

-- I was pleased, because mine was the only reading the whole day from Scylla and Charybdis. Every other episode was represented, so I was happy to fill out the day. It is a chapter I love.

-- My turn. Stepped up to the microphone and said, "Let's talk about Shakespeare, shall we?" and I heard a couple of cheers from people who knew where I was going. I love geeks. I chose a section where Stephen talks about adultery in Shakespeare, and betrayal, to bolster up his theory that everyone in every play that Shakespeare wrote is Shakespeare himself. As he says later, "The boy of act one is the mature man of act five." It was so strange and funny and singular, to speak into that mike, and hear my voice booming through the concrete canyons. I felt like Hal Phillip Walker for a moment. I read:

-- Why? Stephen answered himself. Because the theme of the false or the usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one is to Shakespeare, what the poor is not, always with him. The note of banishment, banishment from the heart, banishment from home, sounds uninterruptedly from The Two Gentlemen of Verona onward till Prospero breaks his staff, buries it certain fathoms in the earth and drowns his book. It doubles itself in the middle of his life, reflects itself in another, repeats itself, protasis, epitasis, catastasis, catastrophe. It repeats itself again when he is near the grave, when his married daughter Susan, chip of the old block, is accused of adultery. But it was the original sin that darkened his understanding, weakened his will and left in him a strong inclination to evil. The words are those of my lords bishops of Maynooth: an original sin and, like original sin, committed by another in whose sin he too has sinned. It is between the lines of his last written words, it is petrified on his tombstone under which her four bones are not to be laid. Age has not withered it. Beauty and peace have not done it away. It is in infinite variety everywhere in the world he has created, in Much Ado about Nothing, twice in As you like It, in The Tempest, in Hamlet, in Measure for Measure, and in all the other plays which I have not read.

A beautiful and thought-provoking section, but best part is the last line (the last phrase of the last line, I should say). Stephen is going on and on with his theories, browbeating his friends into submission, and he hasn't even read all of the plays - yet he KNOWS that his theory is true, even in the "other plays which I have not read." I haven't acted in a long time. I got a laugh on the last line, a big laugh, and you will forgive me if I admit that it thrilled and satisfied me, remembering the unbelievable feeling you get when you are onstage, and there's that sudden two-way current of communication open: You communicate, the response comes back loud and clear. Nothing like that feeling on earth. I don't take all the credit, naturally. Joyce wrote the damn thing. That's a funny line. But I suppose a personal moment, of remembering that feeling, that feeling of being in command onstage, was a beautiful rush for me. Thanks, Jimmy.

-- Perhaps my favorite moment of the day was as I walked back to my seat, a red-faced drunken Irishman held his hand out to me and shouted, "WELL DONE."

-- Therese and I, now drinking Guinness, had a private happy moment of self-congratulation for getting through it, for saying Yes, and for being a part of the entire celebration. "That was so cool - wasn't that so cool???"

-- Aedin had been reading parts of Molly's section throughout the day, at intervals, leaving the best for last. Her voice is eloquent, in and of itself, her accent thick and beautiful. Her sense of humor is undeniable, she knows where all the jokes are, and she is able to ride the waves of Molly's stream-of-consciousness with total ease, you never feel her jerking from one section to the next. But it was her reading of the last 4 pages that blew the top of the roof off of this event. There was so much emotion floating around that alley, for me, and for others, and I imagine that it was different for everyone. We all have associations, baggage we bring - to this book. Maybe it's our families, maybe it's memories of childhood, maybe it's about living in America now and missing Ireland ... who knows. It's a big book, it can take all of those associations. Aedin, in that intuitive way she has, spoke right into that space, the vast space of people's own associations ... and clicked into it in a way that was primal and, as one man said afterwards, tears in his eyes, "Transcendent." She started off the last section with a personal story. She plucked the book off the shelf when she was 10 years old and read it straight through. She found it easy and fun. She didn't know what it was, or that it was important, and kind of just fell into it. "I think you should start reading Ulysses when you're young, because a child can absorb so much, you have no idea how much." The next time she read it she was 14 years old, and the Molly section "exploded in my head". Why? "It was my mother. It was myself. It was all women. I recognized it all. This isn't just a woman - this is an Irish woman." And then she began. The last four pages of the book are a slow build, with a million tangents. Molly tries to fall asleep, but her mind keeps wandering. Sometimes it's funny and irrelevant, sometimes it's full of longing, a sudden sharp memory of burying her son, and reliving her relationship with her husband up to that point. And then, about a page and a half before the end, the thing takes a turn. The "Yes" refrain begins, and while what is happening is sexual, obviously, seen in the context of the rest of it, it becomes tragic, beautiful, loving, longing, a cry of pain in a world that has moved on, a cry of bliss in the face of disconnection, a re-imagining of herself as a wife, going back into the past, pushing herself into the future ... Even just describing it doesn't do what goes on in those pages justice. Aedin's performance was so insistent, so moving, so controlled, and so perfect that by the last "paragraph" people had started to spontaneously cry in the audience. Myself included. She pulled it out of us. She didn't emote. She just connected, and there was a groundswell of emotion charging through that alley that had a FEEL, it had a TASTE, it had SUBSTANCE. I glanced around wildly at one point, and saw a little old man holding his hat over his face, his shoulders shaking with sobs. He was embarrassed about crying. No need, sir. You were not alone. That is what Molly's monologue is all about, ultimately. None of us are alone. Even alone in our beds, trying to connect, to ourselves, to our husbands, to our sexual fantasies, even, none of us are alone. It is the most human of passages in the 20th century, and listening to Aedin's phenomenal reading, I had this strange disoriented thought: "Someone wrote this??" (Here's a clip of Aedin reading it at another function.) I've read the thing a million times. But at that moment, it was like I first really heard it. It should be heard rather than read to get its true power.

When she finished, the alley ERUPTED. People stood, screaming, and roaring, clapping, and crying. Again, the noise had a feel, a substance to it, you could feel your ear drums contracting.

We had been there for hours, most of us. The celebration ended on a clarion call for affirmation, for love, for acceptance (of oneself and others), for forgiveness (of oneself and others), and for saying, always, for saying YES.

Anthony Mann's New York

On my way down to the Bloomsday celebration I was attending with Therese (and it was one for the books, more later) I found myself wandering the streets of the Financial District, an area of town I rarely go to, and the streets down there truly are canyons. They are thin, curving, and the buildings tower up on either side, piling on top of one another, filling up the horizon. I love being a movie fan because my immediate thought, looking at the landscape, was of Anthony Mann's terrific film noir Side Street (I reviewed it for Noir of the Week here.) New York is one of those cities where it is difficult to remove it from all of the stories told about it, and it depends on your filter, and although New York has changed so much and it is difficult to find the New York of Midnight Cowboy anymore, it's still there, at some points on 8th Avenue, if you're looking for it. The canyons yawn down in Wall Street, with only geometrical glimpses of the sky above, and my vision went flying up into the sky, looking down on what those streets must look like from far above, as Mann showed during the amazing car chase that closes the film. I even walked by the Sub Treasury building where the final standoff takes place. Anthony Mann's New York is alive and well and living on Wall Street.

Rejoyce. It's Bloomsday.

Notes in my copy of Ulysses

On June 15, 1904, young James Joyce sent a note to Nora Barnacle, on June 15, 1904. She was a waitress at Finn's Hotel, a girl from Galway who had moved to Dublin. They had had a chance encounter on the street, where she had wondered aloud if he was Swedish, because of his eyes. When she told him her name, he said something about Ibsen (his inspiration and guiding star as an artist). Nora did not know who Ibsen was but she knew she liked this Jimmy with the blue eyes. He had asked her "out" - which, in Dublin, in those days, meant going for a walk. She had blown him off. He sat in the park waiting. She never showed up. So on June 15, 1904, he sent her this note:

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

James A. Joyce 15 June 1904

And apparently they went out the next night - June 16, 1904. They took a walk. It's not 100% certain what happened on that walk, although from various comments both of them made, it is clear that something sexual happened. James Joyce's main experience with women at that point was with prostitutes. In Nora, he met his match, his mate. He told Nora later that on that day, June 16, 1904, he became a man. No longer isolated. A couple of months later, he got a job in Europe through the Berlitz School, and she came with him. They fled Ireland together, an unmarried couple, leaving a wake of debt and scandal behind them. They had two kids together - Giorgio and Lucia - and were not officially married until 1930. They lived abroad their entire lives together, and were rarely parted from one another, maybe a couple months in that entire time was spent outside of one another's presence. She was the only woman for him. They were not a romantic pair, not at all (just read their "dirty letters" to one another! the early 20th century version of phone sex) but whatever it was that was between them was profound. They both clicked into place. Nora was an uneducated wild girl from Galway, with a tragic failed romance in her past (which James Joyce would use to spectacular effect in 'The Dead' - excerpt here). He was a struggling writer, frustrated and claustrophobic in Ireland, a country he found provincial, prudish, and stifling.

Years later, Joyce would pay tribute to the walk he took through the streets of Dublin with Nora, and what it meant to him, by setting the entire book of Ulysses on that one day: June 16 1904.

Richard Ellmann, in his biography on James Joyce, a highwater mark for biographies in the 20th century:

Several aspects of Joyce's life converge upon June 16, 1904, the day he afterwards chose for the action of Ulysses. It was on that day, or at least during the month of June, that he began to work out his theory that Shakespeare was not prince Hamlet but Hamlet's father, betrayed by his queen with his brother as Shakespeare was -- Joyce thought -- betrayed by Anne Hathaway with his brother. Joyce was at his search for distinguished victims -- Parnell, Christ, himself. Instead of making the artist Shakespeare an avenging hero, he preferred to think of him as a cuckold. Joyce developed the theory with excitement ... He was not yet living at the famous Martello tower at Sandycove, as Ulysses would suggest. On June 15 the McKernans, with whom he had his room, encouraged him to leave until he could pay his rent, and he went to his friends James and Gretta Cousins and asked them to take him in. They hospitably turned over the spare room in their tiny house on the sea's edge at Ballsbridge. After dinner on June 15 the Espositos came to call. Michele Esposito was an accomplished teacher of music who had brought his family, including his two attractive daughters Vera and Bianca, to Ireland several years before. Vera noted in her diary later that Joyce was very quiet and scarcely opened his mouth except to sing, to his own piano accompaniment, Henry VIII's 'Pastime with good companee, I love, and shall until I dee,' and the ballad of 'Turpin Hero'. These he followed with two sentimental songs, 'Love, could I only tell thee' and 'It is not mine to sing the stately grace.' The Esposito girls also sang. They and their father were impressed by Joyce and suggested he call on them. But for two reasons this visit never took place. One was that he offended the Esposito girls, the other that he began to fall in love.

The best part of the whole story is a comment from Nora in one of her letters to James Joyce, 1940:

Well, Jim I haven't read any of your books but I'll have to someday because they must be good considering how well they sell.

Nora exaggerated - she had read the books, although they were not her thing at all - and after his death, when every reporter was hounding her, asking her about Ulysses, she complained, with an insight that should be startling to anyone who underestimates her as some dumb silly woman (and believe me, there are those people out there):

"What's all this talk about Ulysses? Finnegans Wake is the important book."

Additionally, there is this comment from Nora (a most quotable woman). After her husband's death, she was asked what current writers she liked, and her reply was:

"Sure, if you've been married to the greatest writer in the world, you don't remember all the little fellows."

Here are my long posts on each chapter in Ulysses, which, if you haven't read the book, are a good guide. It's good to have a guide, although you don't need one.

One of the things that people don't get about Ulysses (by that I mean, the people who haven't read it, and yet still maintain some hostile opinion about it) and one of the most important things to remember about the book is that it is not about anything. It is not "important", in any self-conscious way - although it is an extremely self-conscious book (Joyce was one of the most self-conscious of all writers; I don't mean shy or unsure, I mean acutely aware of himself). It is not trying to make a point, it doesn't care about the world at large, it's not taking on "issues" of the day (at least not in any pamphleteering type way - although the book deals with Irish issues, and politics, and education, and sex and religion) - but Joyce didn't narrow anything down. He excludes nothing. It does not illuminate for us the subtext of a giant world war, or revolution, it is not political. It is a "day in the life" and that's pretty much it.

Something that Joyce said about his own work which I found really helpful to keep in mind was that: "With me, the thought is always simple." It should be a mantra for those wanting to read Ulysses for the first time. It is not a complex book, although the structure is highly intricate, and you could spend your entire life trying to unravel it, and understand it. It's a detailed web of references and styles and language clues - but the thought itself behind all of it is never ever complicated or opaque. The thought is always simple.

I want to belong.
I love my wife.
What does it mean to be a man?
What does it mean to be Irish?
What does it mean to be a Jew?
I wish I fit in.
I love music.
I wish I was like everyone else.
I wish my wife loved me more.
I wish my husband loved me more.
Doesn't this beer taste good?

These are the thoughts that make up the book. Joyce makes you work for it, though - he sure as hell does ... but once it is revealed to you, once you open that magic door ... you are never the same again. There are sections of that book that will be with me forever.

So much of Ulysses is tied up, for me, in my father, who was my tutor and mentor when I first read the book. One of the things I got from my dad was to just go easy with the book, don't work too hard, but make sure you try to get into his mindset (which changes from chapter to chapter). My favorite example of my father helping me do this is when I was struggling, desperately, over the first pages of what I now know is the Cyclops episode. Every "episode" in the book has a different style - dictated by an internal list of cues in Joyce's head which is what makes the book so fun - figuring out what the hell he is doing. And the chapters are not helpfully labeled "This is the Cyclops episode", "This is the Lestrygonians episode" - you have to figure it out yourself. It's helpful to have a copy of Homer's epic nearby, it really is. So this new chapter starts, and it's a whole new voice: it's a first person narration but it is obvious that it is not Leopold Bloom speaking ... who the heck is this person? And this new narrator is regaling his friends with a story of what happened earlier, an altercation in a pub between a man known as The Citizen, a crotchety Irish patriot, a bigot, who eventually turns his sights on Leopold Bloom, also in the pub, with an anti-Semitic rage. Bloom is Jewish but he is also Irish. The Citizen is having NONE of that bullshit. But it's not The Citizen who narrates, it's some other guy. He tells his story, and one of the things he always says is in his narration is: "says I". He's telling a story where he was a main player, so the refrain is "says I":

There he is, says I, in his gloryhole, with his cruiskeen lawn and his load of papers, working for the cause.

Just one example of many. I was completely LOST reading it. I got caught up in looking for the meaning in an intellectual way. The writing itself is not unclear - but I needed to get into Joyce's motivations ... or I would never "get it". I said to my dad, "I have no idea what the hell is going on here." I handed him the book. He looked at the page. He didn't read any of it, just looked at the page itself, and said, handing the book back to me, "Oh, that's the Cyclops episode."

What?? "How can you tell that just by looking at the page? You didn't even read it!"

Dad said, "Look at how many times the letter 'I' is on that page."

I glanced down again, and that was the key, that was the abracadabra: All I could see on the page suddenly was:

I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I

"I" meaning "eye" meaning "Cyclops".

The clue was right in front of my face, I just needed a bit of a push to "see" it. That's another thing: Ulysses is one of the few books that you can identify just by the LOOK of the words on the page. And once you know the book, you can tell the episode you're in - by how the words LOOK on the page. The Molly episode, with its 40 page runon sentence, and almost no paragraph breaks, doesn't look like anything else. The Sirens episode, with its choppy musical beats, its short phrasing, doesn't look like anything else. And the Cyclops episode is slashed with the letter "I". The Citizen IS the Cyclops - and the one eye of the Cyclops is IN the language. You can SEE it. It's right there.

That's the fun of James Joyce.

James Joyce had already written a collection of short stories (Dubliners - excerpt here) and a novel (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - excerpt here) - as well as many poems and a play (Exiles). Joyce said at one point that he had realized that he "could not write without offending people". Dubliners was controversial in its time, with its honest portrayal of the wandering aimlessness of Dublin men and the domination of the Catholic Church in his country (which he saw as a terrible thing). Portrait of the Artist was also controversial. It covers such topics as religion, politics, the Irish question, nationalism, masturbation, Parnell, and other light subjects such as those. It was the launching-off point for Ulysses.

It took James Joyce seven years to write Ulysses. Later, he would joke, when faced with criticism that the book was just too damn big - "I spent seven years writing it. People could at least spend seven years reading it."

His next book was Finnegans Wake (excerpt here) and that took him seventeen years to write.

Boy marched to the beat of his own drummer.

The history of the publication of Ulysses is a book in and of itself.

James and Nora lived in Trieste for 10 years, having children (two of them), not getting married just to spite tradition - although they referred to one another as "husband" and "wife", and living below the poverty line. Meanwhile, Joyce was working on Dubliners, which was a struggle. He could not find anyone willing to publish it. Dubliners was eventually published in 1914. He had already been working on it for years. Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man was published (in serial form) in 1914 and finally brought out as a book in 1916. It had been serialized in the highly influential The Egoist. Around this time, James Joyce was taken under the wing of Ezra Pound (what a shock. Pound was everywhere).

James Joyce had been interested in the plight of the Jews for a long time. Especially as a man living in perpetual exile, country-less, yet always looking "homeward". He felt that there was an affinity between the Jews and the Irish, and he thought it was something to explore. He had considered writing a story along these lines for Dubliners but it didn't end up happening. However, the idea percolated. It ended up being one of the main ideas in the book Ulysses, based, of course, on Homer's epic, but Joyce, with his obsessive tendencies, was the kind of man who saw connections everywhere. Exile, journey, what does "home" mean, where is it? These were questions of great relevance to the Jews, but also to himself, who felt he could never live in Ireland again (and he never did). Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses is a Jew, living in Ireland. Stephen Dedalus (Joyce's alter ego, the "star" of Portrait of the Artist as well) is one of the aimless men Ireland is so fond of creating, a man looking for a father figure, a guide. Through their mutual wanderings through the city of Dublin, on June 16, 1904, they eventually cross paths. It is not that a kindred spirit is revealed, not really. They do not connect, or heal, or grow, or become empowered. None of those pat concepts are at work in Ulysses. It is more that it is a meeting of the minds. A realization of the connection between them, but also that such connection is transitory. At the end of the book they go their separate ways.

Joyce wrote:

Ulysses is the epic of two races (Israel - Ireland) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life). 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!

What was such a big deal about Ulysses? A book where nothing, let's be honest, really happens?

Much of the brou-haha (at least in the literary set) was about the writing itself, a deepening and broadening of the landscape he had explored in Portrait: what is existence really like? What is it like to live, moment to moment?

James Joyce wrote once:

Why all this fuss and bother about the mystery of the unconscious? What about the mystery of the conscious? What do they know about that?

Joyce did not delve into the psychologies of his characters so much, although we get to know Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus better than we even know our best friends through reading Ulysses. Joyce goes behind closed doors. He goes inside the body. Circulation, digestion, sex drive, the splitting of cells ... all of that is going on in his writing, because the book - as well as being an homage to Homer's Odyssey - as well as being set up in a complicated structure, mirroring Homer's work - as well as having colors associated with each episode, and a different writing style for each episode ... it is also, chapter by chapter, a dissection of the human body. The Cyclops chapter, as I mentioned) is the "eye" chapter. But instead of going for obvious symbolism, working in things about vision and color and landscape - Joyce hides his meaning completely. So if you are looking for literal eyes there in the obvious places, you will not find it. Joyce involves the reader in his game like no other writer. One chapter is the stomach chapter. One chapter is the sex organs chapter. And etc. None of this is explicit. There is no guide. You have to know what you're looking for. You have to get into HIS mode when reading the book, and let your OWN mode go. This is why many people were (and are) annoyed by Joyce. But geniuses have always annoyed people. As William Blake famously wrote:

The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.

Crows don't like it when you point that out. But eagles, in general, shouldn't worry about what crows think of them. They need to just keep being eagles.

James Joyce probably wouldn't have thought of it like that. His defenders (like myself) say stuff like that all the time, but Joyce (perhaps disingenuously) really didn't see what the big deal was. He wrote what he wrote because it amused and fascinated him. He wrote only what he could write. Ulysses is one of the most "clever" books ever written, and that can be annoying if you don't like cleverness. But I think the whole thing is a hoot. It's a game, a romp, a puzzle, something to be decoded. That's the fun of it. He loved puns and language and hidden connections. He realized that he was ahead of his time, he really did, but he wasn't trying to be so, as many of his literary contemporaries were. There was a great shift going on, in general, in the world at that time, and it affected all genres of art. Painters. Architects. Dance was going through a revolution. The past being shuffled off, or at least an attempt being made to, to quote Ezra Pound, "make it new". How much of our language is really ours, and how much of it is inherited? Joyce, as an Irishman, found this to be a personal and volatile issue, something he shared with Yeats. But across the board, artists were looking to each other, to push one another on, to not look BACK, to not try to imitate Tennyson, which had been the style for a generation or so, but to find new forms to express the new world in which they lived.

This was the generation that grew up traveling by horse-and-carriage, and when they died, airplanes were flying across the ocean. The change in psychology was astronomical. Everyone struggled with it in different ways. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, William Carlos Williams ... World War I (or The Great War) was a shattering experience, leaving Europe in ruins. The struggle of the artist: how can anything I do ever comment on the actual experience around me? There is a great anxiety in the work of the modernists, a fracturing of the CERTAIN. There was no certainty anymore. Einstein's theory was published. The Russian Revolution exploded forth. The work of Freud and Jung made people look differently at themselves, at their motivations and dreams and personalities. Painters went more and more abstract, breaking apart that which is known and understood, into colors, shapes, incoherence. A valid response to a crazy world. James Joyce was a part of all of this, mostly by osmosis. Ezra Pound said, when he first read the work of William Carlos Williams, that he had "become modern all on his own." Perhaps a shock to Pound, who was so at the center of things at that time, pushing writers forward, helping TS Eliot to piece together "The Waste Land", promoting people, bullying editors into publishing new work, etc. William Carlos Williams did not live in Paris and never did. He was a doctor. And yet, the change ... was in the atmosphere. He became modern "all on his own". There were those (like Amy Lowell) who felt they had to be at the center of things, so they moved to Paris, separating themselves from any hint of bourgeois existence. It worked well for many of these people. But it wasn't necessary. James Joyce did live in Paris, but he had been doing his thing from the isolated Trieste for decades. That decade - 1910 - 1920 - saw a massive shift on every level of life, the world surging into a new era, bloody, technological, Freudian, and writers struggled with forms to describe it, react to it. There is nothing comparable today, when technology is so much a part of our lives that we take it for granted. Not so then.

"The Waste Land" was published in 1922 as well. "The Waste Land" and Ulysses coming out the same year? Evidence enough of the upheaval, anxiety and change rupturing the modern world.

Joyce wrote Ulysses not to make a big splash, not to stick it to the censors, not to show lesser writers how it's REALLY done (although all of these things were results) ... he wrote it because he liked it. He found it funny. Engaging. He wrote that way because he couldn't write any other way.

He said (and this may be perhaps my favorite Joyce quote, and it is something to keep in mind should you pick up Ulysses for the first time - it's a clue in HOW to read it):

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

I believe him. We must take his words with a grain of salt (because, remember, he also said: "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality." Ha!), but I think it is important to keep his words in mind, and if the book is not read in that manner, if it is read in the way you would read any other socially conscious novel or novel that is attempting to shed light on a pressing issue, or any other "hard" book, if you try to read Ulysses in the same way, it will become impenetrable. It will refuse to unlock its secrets.

My advice to those who want to take it on: Just pick it up and start. Don't look for meaning. The book is not about its meaning. It is about the WORDS.

Surrender to the language - because that, after all, is what Joyce is all about - the sound (I am sure this is partly because of how blind he was, his books are so musical, not visual at all) - and the book opens all of its secrets to you. It does not withhold. It does not stand like some snotty barrier written by a pretentious modernist. It is a rollick. A ridiculous romp through the streets of Dublin by human beings who worry, laugh, eat, fart, have fights, think about things, argue, masturbate, chat ... It has NO point. It is not meant to have a point.

Samuel Beckett's wonderful quote in regards to Finnegans Wake is also applicable to Ulysses:

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.

And THAT is why Joyce is such a big deal. THAT is why the book went off like a bomb throughout the literary world. THAT is why people like T.S. Eliot, no slouch himself, said, "I wish, for my own sake, that I had not read it." James Joyce lived in a world of giants. Hemingway, Proust, Virginia Woolf, Pound, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot ... the modernists. He was part of his time, but he went so much further than any of his contemporaries that many of them never quite recovered from the Ulysses juggernaut. The comments of other writers about Ulysses are absolutely marvelous, because they all recognized what has come. They all realized what had happened. The 20th century had arrived. They had all been working towards it, trying to wrestle the 19th century out of existence, bringing new forms to light. And it's not that any of these people failed. But Ulysses was the "star". Ulysses was the death-knell.

T.S. Eliot put it perfectly when he said that Ulysses "killed the 19th century".

James Joyce hadn't set out to "kill the 19th century", but his sensibility - contrarian, sensitive, angry, loving - led him to a form that couldn't help but do so.

Quiet little Trieste ended up being a major crossroads in WWI, changing hands, and Joyce and his family moved to Paris.

Now let me talk about the actual publication of the book.

Into our story now steps Sylvia Beach. Born in Maryland, the daughter of a pastor, as an adult she became a major force in the literary ex-pat community in Paris. She served in World War I with the Red Cross in Serbia, and after the war settled in Paris, where she opened up a bookshop - the enormously influential Shakespeare & Co.. Shakespeare & Co. became the hub-bub, the vortex of them all. Oh, for a time machine, to go hang out at that place in the 1920s, where Hemingway would stop by, Fitzgerald would browse, Joyce would sneak in and out, Gertrude Stein would bitch and moan (haha) ... and Pound would negotiate with all of them, trying to help them all out and promote his favorites ... they ALL were there. In WWII, when the Nazis invaded Paris, Sylvia Beach had refused to leave, against all advice, because she couldn't abandon her library. Now you see why I love this woman. She hid the library away just in time, and then was captured by the Nazis and put in an internment camp. Most of the people in that camp were eventually sent to Auschwitz. Beach was released, and returned to her bookshop. When Hemingway himself came to liberate Paris, the first place he chose to "liberate" was Shakespeare & Co. There is a photo of him, in his military uniform, standing on a chair in the bookshop, the conquering hero. Shakespeare & Co. never re-opened. The economy was shattered, and Beach couldn't keep things running anymore. But the memory of that place remains to this day.

Here is a cartoon of Joyce sitting at a table with all of his friends in Paris (try to find Joyce - isn't that hysterical?? He doesn't even have a body! That was how he was seen - just a big floating brain with enormous glasses!).

Who was the cartoonist?

F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In this vibrant world of literary rivals and giants struggling for the stage, Sylvia Beach played an important role. She had good taste, first of all, she liked the "good" ones, and didn't waste her time with the crows. She also had courage (as we shall see).

When Beach met James Joyce, he had already written Ulysses, and it was a finished manuscript by that point (or as finished as any Joycean manuscript ever would be) - but essentially unpublishable, due to its being deemed "obscene". You have to get into the mindset of the censors, as unpleasant an experience as that is. What on earth is "obscene" about Ulysses? Ultimately, the book expresses love. You cannot deny it, you cannot escape from it. It is love. Leopold Bloom, throughout his long long day, is only thinking about his wife Molly, and how much he loves her, and how afraid he is that she is being unfaithful. There is only one woman for him. In the same way that there was only one woman for Joyce. Love, it is love that drags us home after our long journey. Only love. But Joyce did not shy away from the more unsavory aspects of life (and let's remember his comment about the "mystery of the conscious" - that's so so important: he did not, as Proust did, or Woolf did, or some of the other modern writers - delve into psychology and the workings of the subconscious. He did not look at motivations and childhood repression. As I mentioned, Freud changed everything, for good and ill. A revolution in the understanding of the workings of humanity. Whether or not you agree with Freud, and whether or not you think Freud is over-rated is irrelevant. I am talking about the time and place from which Joyce wrote.) But Joyce, unlike Proust, did not explore how memory works, and how the senses trigger thoughts and feelings and entire narratives from our lives. He was much more prosaic. Blunt. He presented man in the most honest manner possible. Leopold Bloom takes a dump, for example. He sits on the toilet after breakfast, and thinks about things, worrying about things, as he goes to the bathroom. Now, this is one of the most human of experiences. Anyone who says they haven't sat on the toilet, pondering their day, and what they are worried about, is lying. But to put that in a book?? What are you, cracked?

There are those who feel that while such things may be 'real', they have no place in literature. Now we're getting into the realm of the censors, who wanted to control what could be shown. It's the same as people nowadays who seem to feel that saying "TMI" is the be-all and end-all of human interaction. Never mind if you're struggling with grief, loss, having a personal struggle, some people shun intimacy in any way, shape or form. (And then they wonder why they are miserable.) I despise the "TMI" trend. I despise it in its surface form and I despise what it represents. There is a reason for it, as there is a reason for all trends. It is a reaction, perhaps, to our world of reality television, and tell-all books, where everyone seems to feel that talking about themselves and their issues is a holy and sacred act. So I get it. But reactions tend to be too extreme and I resist extremes. Besides, "TMI" is nothing new. There have always been those who really DON'T want to know you, who really DON'T want the truth when they ask "How are you?" There is such a thing as "over-sharing", but I'm not really talking about that. I am talking about something far more insidious. It has been going on for as long as human beings have been in contact with one another. There is a shying away from real experience of one another. Of course. Because if you allow yourself to experience what it is like for another person, then that might mean you might have compassion for them, or empathy, or you might have a sense of recognition, an awareness of the universal: "Yes, I do that, too!" Many people do not want to be shaken out of their selves like that. The first response for many, to some demand for connection, or understanding, is to batton down the hatches, draw the line in the sand, and say, "Nope. Nope. That's YOU, that's not ME."

People like that, powerful though they may be in certain sections of society, will always be on the wrong side of history. Forward motion, always has, at its core, an examination of motivation, of meaning, of, to quote Mike Nichols, "what is this REALLY like?" (He says that when he sits down to film any scene, of any event, that is his first question: "what is this REALLY like?") If you are so busy crowing "TMI" at every revelation of character and story around you, you will never move forward. You will be stuck, like a fly drowned in amber.

Joyce does not let the reader off the hook. If you insist on insisting, "That's YOU, not ME", then Ulysses will be a terribly confronting book. Joyce, above all else, was a humanist, although his cynicism and rage were titanic. That's what The Dead (excerpt here), with its final revelation of connection and love in the last four paragraphs, is all about. I have said it before: Without The Dead, The Dubliners would be merely a bitchy gossipy excavation of a modern-day city. Yes, with some good writing and memorable scenes, but it would be, essentially, a cynical book, and cynical books usually do not outlast their own time. With The Dead, in the last four paragraphs, Joyce rises up. If you only read the other stories, you might presume that Joyce despised his fellow man. His eye is excruciatingly honest. He is brutal. Who would ever have suspected that in the last story of the collection, Joyce would pull such a hat-trick, and say, essentially, "You think you know me. You do not. You think all I feel is anger. I do not. My anger comes from grief and loss. And right now, all I feel is love." If you read the book from beginning to end, The Dead, no matter that you know its coming, always comes as a surprise. Nothing in the book before that story prepares you for it. Gabriel realizes, as he watches his wife sleep, that he loves her, and yet that he has never really known her. And in that realization, his consciousness rises up and up, until he is looking down on the snowy landscape, on all of Ireland ... and he, for the first time, feels connected to life, because of his experience of heartbreak. He feels connected not just to all mankind, but also to all of the "shades", all of those people who have gone before.

The irony of all of this is that Joyce was one of the most isolated of beings, although not melancholy or a downer or any of that. He wasn't a tortured artist. He was not bohemian in the slightest. He was rather old-fashioned, believe it or not, totally bourgeois, a family man, who had dinner every night with Nora and his kids and that was that. There is no scandal about Joyce. He didn't sleep with every woman in Paris. He didn't experiment with free love. Yes, he lived in sin for 30 years before tying the knot, but he was faithful to Nora. He wasn't a big socializer. He was a big drinker, but everyone was then. He wasn't dancing in fountains like F. Scott Fitzgerald was, and cheering as his wife did a jig on the table showing her knickers. He was rather conventional. That's the shocker.

Additionally, there is a tremendous self-consciousness in his books (which I mentioned earlier). He can ONLY write from his own life. He was not an "inventor". He did not make up characters, and devise complicated plots. He did not write one standard novel. It was all self self self self self. I truly believe that you MUST be a genius in order to only focus on self. (Oscar Wilde said something similar, after reading his friend Andre Gide's novel, which I haven't read, but which Wilde was not impressed with. He said, "In order to be an Egotist, one must first have an Ego." Ouch. This is similar to Blake's comment mentioned earlier. Crows trying to be eagles always give themselves away. Only a genius can only focus on Self, and get away with it.) The memoir-trend in publishing today proves that, in my mind. There are very few good ones out there, very few stories worth telling ... the thing that elevates one memoir over another is, of course, the writing style ... If you're not a good writer then nobody cares that your mama locked you in a closet and your papa couldn't put down the whiskey. Angela's Ashes was such a phenomenal success because of McCourt's writing. You write that same story without McCourt's voice and you'd want to vomit. I know that there are folks in Limerick, especially, who already want to vomit when reading McCourt's book - but that just goes to show you that you can never please everybody.

Ulysses picked up where Portrait left off. As Portrait comes to a close, the traditional narrative voice breaks down, leaving us only with Stephen Dedalus' journal entries. There is no more voice outside the "I". Joyce has abandoned the traditional narrator. Dedalus will now take over. We are inside experience, as opposed to looking on. In the third episode in Ulysses Stephen Dedalus takes a walk on the beach. We learned in the first chapter that he had broken his glasses. This fact is mentioned only once in the entire 800 page book, but we are meant to remember it. In the third chapter, during his walk on the beach, sans glasses ... the experiences come at him through a vague impression of colors and sounds. If you somehow missed that he has no glasses, and this episode is told from the perspective of someone who can't see, then you might not know what the hell is going on. At one point:

The dog's bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back again.

As someone who needs her glasses, I can say that that image is just just right. When I have been stranded without glasses, it is as though sounds "run towards" me ... It is not the DOG running at Dedalus, it is its BARK. Sound before vision.

Perhaps now it seems obvious, or perhaps now it seems like everyone tries to write in this subjective manner. But that's only because Joyce did it first.

All of this made Ulysses a tough sell to publishers, not even counting the bowel movements, and penises, and the evening in "Nighttown" (Dublin's red-light district) and Molly Bloom's long 40 page run-on sentence that closes the book, full of farts and menstruation and masturbation. But also, please, let us not forget, that it is some of the most beautiful writing in the English language. Joyce said he wanted to end the book with "the most positive word in the English language" - and that is one of the things I think is so important to get about Joyce, whose reputation precedes him, making him seem all top-heavy and serious, and that is all well and good, I am personally pleased that Joyce was not a "forgotten genius", or that his work suffered in obscurity until some academic rescued it in the 1950s, but that top-heaviness is really not appropriate for who the man actually was. The man loved life, he loved white wine, he loved his wife and kids, he loved music (he had almost gone on to a singing career), he even loved Ireland. He was not nihilistic in his outlook at all. He was not depressed. He is one of the great humanists of our age. So, here's Molly Bloom, center stage now, closing out the book, in her declamation of positivity, of affirmation, of love and life:

the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Read it out loud. It becomes apparent what she is doing immediately. While there may be a prurient aspect to this, and it was certainly seen that way by the censors, in another light it can be seen as this: Sex is the ultimate in connection. Even when we have sex with ourselves. Sex is not dirty, sex is nothing to be ashamed of. One of the reasons Joyce felt he could not live in Ireland with Nora was that the attitudes towards sex were so prudish, the country was so priest-ridden, that the people couldn't "touch one another". It was a lonely place. Here, he shows his cards, here, in Molly's monologue, he tips his hand for us and shows us what he is really about. And, fascinatingly, he puts it in the mouth of the woman, the female character everyone has been talking about for the entire book, whom we have not met yet. Here she is, in bed, yearning for her husband, and going off into fantasy. This is not dirty. This is the stuff that makes the world go round, that makes life, which can be a bit of a drag, worth living.

Brings me to tears every time.

And ... it's everywhere in my life. Even ...

... at the gym.

And here is Exhibit B, a T-shirt worn by my brother:

Here is my brother's post on Ulysses.

Someone had suggested that Marilyn Monroe work on Molly Bloom's section of the book as a monologue, perhaps at the Actors Studio. I love this photo, because, while it may be posed, she is clearly reading the end of the book, Molly Bloom's part of it. And Molly, with her earthy sexiness and romantic nature, would have been very interesting for Monroe to tackle.

The book was a bomb waiting to go off. No one would touch it. It was this project everyone was waiting for, but everyone also had a sense that it would cause lots of problems, in terms of censorship. Pound had arranged for some excerpts to be published and that was the start of it. The controversy had begun before the book had even been published.

But Sylvia Beach - who had never published a book before - took a risk and said that Shakespeare & Co. would put out the book. She would publish it herself. She knew what she was doing, and she knew what the repercussions could be. It was an act of courage. She wrote to her sister in 1921:

"‘Ulysses’ is going to make my place famous."

Perhaps she went into it recklessly, thinking that giving a space for genius would be its own reward - perhaps she went into it knowing the eventual fallout that would crash down upon her head - But whatever her interior process, she published it. On February 2, 1922.

I was on the platform, my heart going like the locomotive, as the train from Dijon came slowly to a standstill and I saw the conductor getting off, holding a parcel and looking around for someone -- me. In a few minutes, I was ringing the doorbell at the Joyces' and handing them Copy No. 1 of Ulysses. It was February 2, 1922. -- Sylvia Beach

And the shit hit the fan.

Nora Tully describes it thus:

The response to Ulysses was immediate and extreme. Writer and literary critic Malcolm Cowley described it using the metaphor of a stone dropped into water: there was a moment of silence, the stone was dropped, "then all the frogs who inhabited the pool began to talk at once".

Once it was published, the obscenity controversies heated up, the book was banned everywhere - Ireland, America - everybody was talking about it, but who had actually read it? The first edition was only 1000 copies! You couldn't get the book anywhere. Additionally, you could be arrested for trying to smuggle it into certain countries - so there were a couple of years where the only place on the planet that you could get a copy of Ulysses was at Beach's bookshop in Paris. And so the orders flew in from folks around the world. People who were book readers, other writers, people who were collectors, people who sensed the historic moment and just wanted a copy.

Here is a copy of Peggy Guggenheim's urgent order-form, sent to Sylvia Beach:

Imagine you are dying to read the book. Imagine you can't get it anywhere. Imagine that it is illegal to smuggle it back into the United States. Imagine the frenzy. You can see it in Guggeinheim's writing, can't you?

Harriet Shaw Weaver, who had supported Joyce financially for years (at Pound's insistence) also arranged for another edition to be published by The Egoist press. She also arranged for them to be shipped to the United States, but they were seized by the customs officials. In 1923, John Rodker, through The Egoist again, arranged for a small printing of the book, but these were burned by English customs officials. In 1924, Shakespeare & Co., a small outfit really, and not set up to handle the demand, brought out another small printing.

Extraordinary.

Eventually, as the controversy died down, Joyce ended up going with another publisher, which left Beach bereft financially. She already had suffered as a consequence of taking the risk to publish Ulysses. She was hounded by the police, by the censors ... so although Joyce really did need to move on, to a publisher who could handle his stardom, Beach was the first. Beach was the pioneer. Amazing woman.

Meanwhile, the comments from people who had actually read it were pouring in. This went on for years. You could read it in Europe, but America had declared it obscene, and would not allow it to arrive on its shores.

Finally, on August 7, 1934, over 10 years after its first publication by little Sylvia Beach and her little Shakespeare & Co. - a far-seeing and open-minded US Court of Appeals judge, Judge John Woolsey, declared that Ulysses was NOT obscene and could be admitted into the United States.

Here's what the first American edition of that book looked like:

Morris L. Ernst, counsel for Random House - who successfully defended the book against obscenity charges in 1933-34 - wrote in his foreward to the 1934 edition:

It would be difficult to underestimate the importance of Judge Woolsey's decision. For decades the censors have fought to emasculate literature. They have tried to set up the sensibilities of the prudery-ridden as a criterion for society, have sought to reduce the reading matter of adults to the level of adolescents and subnormal persons, and have nurtured evasions and sanctimonies.

Here is Judge Woolsey's decision in its entirety, it's a masterpiece of its kind. It's long, but don't let that fool you. Not only is it an important legal decision, but it is an acutely sensitive analysis of the book itself.

United States Discrict Court, Southern District of New York, Opinion A. 110-59

December 6, 1933

On cross motions for a decree in a libel of confiscation, supplemented by a stipulation -- hereinafter described -- brought by the United States against the book "Ulysses" by James Joyce, under Section 305 of the Tariff Act of 1930, Title 19 United States Code, Section 1305, on the ground that the book is obscene within the meaning of that Section, and, hence, is not importable into the United States, but is subject to seizure, forfeiture and confiscation and destruction.

United States Attorney -- by Samuel C. Coleman, Esq., and Nicholas Atlas, Esq., of counsel -- for the United States, in support of motion for a decree of forfeiture, and in opposition to motion for a decree dismissing the libel.

Messrs. Greenbaum, Wolff and Ernst, -- by Morris L. Ernst, Esq., and Alexander Lindey, Esq., of counsel -- attorneys for claimant Random House, Inc., in support of motion for a decree dismissing the libel, and in opposition to a motion for a decree of forfeiture.

WOOLSEY, J:
The motion for a decree dismissing the libel herein is granted, and, consequently, of course, the Government's motion for a decree of forfeiture and destruction is denied.

Accordingly a decree dismissing the libel without costs may be entered herein.

1. The practice followed in this case is in accordance with the suggestion made by me in the case of United States v. One Book Entitled "Contraception", 51 F. (2d) 525, and is as follows:

After issue was joined by the filing of the claimant's answer to the libel for forfeiture against "Ulysses", a stipulation was made between the United States Attorney's office and the attorneys for the claimant providing:

1. That the book "Ulysses" should be deemed to have been annexed to and to have become part of the libel just as if it had been incorporated in its entirety therein.
2. That the parties waived their right to a trial by jury.
3. That each party agreed to move for decree in its favor.
4. That on such cross motions the Court might decide all the questions of law and fact involved and render a general finding thereon.
5. That on the decision of such motions the decree of the Court might be entered as if it were a decree after trial.

It seems to me that a procedure of this kind is highly appropriate in libels for the confiscation of books such as this. It is an especially advantageous procedure in the instant case because on account of the length of "Ulysses" and the difficulty of reading it, a jury trial would have been an extremely unsatisfactory, if not an almost impossible, method of dealing with it.

2. I have read "Ulysses" once in its entirety and I have read those passages of which the Government particularly complains several times. In fact, for many weeks, my spare time has been devoted to the consideration of the decision which my duty would require me to make in this matter.

"Ulysses" is not an easy book to read or to understand. But there has been much written about it, and in order properly to approach the consideration of it it is advisable to read a number of other books which have now become its satellites. The study of "Ulysses" is, therefore, a heavy task.

3. The reputation of "Ulysses" in the literary world, however, warranted my taking such time as was necessary to enable me to satisfy myself as to the intent with which the book was written, for, of course, in any case where a book is claimed to be obscene it must first be determined, whether the intent with which it was written was what is called, according to the usual phrase, pornographic, -- that is, written for the purpose of exploiting obscenity.

If the conclusion is that the book is pornographic that is the end of the inquiry and forfeiture must follow.

But in "Ulysses", in spite of its unusual frankness, I do not detect anywhere the leer of the sensualist. I hold, therefore, that it is not pornographic.

4. In writing "Ulysses", Joyce sought to make a serious experiment in a new, if not wholly novel, literary genre. He takes persons of the lower middle class living in Dublin in 1904 and seeks not only to describe what they did on a certain day early in June of that year as they went about the City bent on their usual occupations, but also to tell what many of them thought about the while.

Joyce has attempted -- it seems to me, with astonishing success -- to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man's observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious. He shows how each of these impressions affects the life and behavior of the character which he is describing.

What he seeks to get is not unlike the result of a double or, if that is possible, a multiple exposure on a cinema film which would give a clear foreground with a background visible but somewhat blurred and out of focus in varying degrees.

To convey by words an effect which obviously lends itself more appropriately to a graphic technique, accounts, it seems to me, for much of the obscurity which meets a reader of "Ulysses". And it also explains another aspect of the book, which I have further to consider, namely, Joyce's sincerity and his honest effort to show exactly how the minds of his characters operate.

If Joyce did not attempt to be honest in developing the technique which he has adopted in "Ulysses" the result would be psychologically misleading and thus unfaithful to his chosen technique. Such an attitude would be artistically inexcusable.

It is because Joyce has been loyal to his technique and has not funked its necessary implications, but has honestly attempted to tell fully what his characters think about, that he has been the subject of so many attacks and that his purpose has been so often misunderstood and misrepresented. For his attempt sincerely and honestly to realize his objective has required him incidentally to use certain words which are generally considered dirty words and has led at times to what many think is a too poignant preoccupation with sex in the thoughts of his characters.

The words which are criticized as dirty are old Saxon words known to almost all men and, I venture, to many women, and are such words as would be naturally and habitually used, I believe by the types of folk whose life, physical and mental, Joyce is seeking to describe. In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of his characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season Spring.

Whether or not one enjoys such a technique as Joyce uses is a matter of taste on which disagreement or argument is futile, but to subject that technique to the standards of some other technique seems to me to be little short of absurd.

Accordingly, I hold that "Ulysses" is a sincere and honest book and I think that the criticisms of it are entirely disposed of by its rationale.

5. Furthermore, "Ulysses" is an amazing tour de force when one considers the success which has been in the main achieved with such a difficult objective as Joyce set for himself. As I have stated, "Ulysses" is not an easy book to read. It is brilliant and dull, intelligible and obscure by turns. In many places it seems to me to be disgusting, but although it contains, as I have mentioned above, many words usually considered dirty, I have not found anything that I consider to be dirt for dirt's sake. Each word of the book contributes like a bit of mosaic to the detail of the picture which Joyce is seeking to construct for his readers.

If one does not wish to associate with such folk as Joyce describes, that is one's own choice. In order to avoid indirect contact with them one may not wish to read "Ulysses"; that is quite understandable. But when such a real artist in words, as Joyce undoubtedly is, seeks to draw a true picture of the lower middle class in a European city, ought it to be impossible for the American public legally to see that picture?

To answer this question it is not sufficient merely to find, as I have found above, that Joyce did not write "Ulysses" with what is commonly called pornographic intent, I must endeavor to apply a more objective standard to his book in order to determine its effect in the result, irrespective of the intent with which it was written.

6. The statute under which the libel is filed only denounces, in so far as we are here concerned, the importation into the United States from any foreign country of "any obscene book". Section 305 of the Tariff Act of 1930, Title 19 United States Code, Section 1305. It does not marshal against books the spectrum of condemnatory adjectives found, commonly, in laws dealing with matters of this kind. I am, therefore, only required to determine whether "Ulysses" is obscene within the legal definition of that word.

The meaning of the word "obscene" as legally defined by the Courts is: tending to stir the sex impulses or to lead to sexually impure and lustful thoughts. Dunlop v. United States, 165 U.S. 486, 501; United States v. One Book Entitled "Contraception", 51 F. (2d) 525, 528; and compare Dysart v. United States, 272 U.S. 655, 657; Swearingen v. United States 151 U.S. 446, 450; United States v. Dennett, 39 F. (2d) 564, 568 (C.C.A. 2); People v. Wendling, 258 N.Y. 451, 453.

Whether a particular book would tend to excite such impulses and thoughts must be tested by the Court's opinion as to its effect on a person with average sex instincts -- what the French would call l'homme moyen sensuel -- who plays, in this branch of legal inquiry, the same role of hypothetical reagent as does the "reasonable man" in the law of torts and "the man learned in the art" on questions of invention in patent law.

The risk involved in the use of such a reagent arises from the inherent tendency of the trier of facts, however fair he may intend to be, to make his reagent too much subservient to his own idiosyncrasies. Here, I have attempted to avoid this, if possible, and to make my reagent herein more objective than he might otherwise be, by adopting the following course:

After I had made my decision in regard to the aspect of "Ulysses", now under consideration, I checked my impressions with two friends of mine who in my opinion answered to the above stated requirement for my reagent.

These literary assessors -- as I might properly describe them -- were called on separately, and neither knew that I was consulting the other. They are men whose opinion on literature and on life I value most highly. They had both read "Ulysses", and, of course, were wholly unconnected with this cause.

Without letting either of my assessors know what my decision was, I gave to each of them the legal definition of obscene and asked each whether in his opinion "Ulysses" was obscene within that definition.

I was interested to find that they both agreed with my opinion: that reading "Ulysses" in its entirety, as a book must be read on such a test as this, did not tend to excite sexual impulses or lustful thoughts but that its net effect on them was only that of a somewhat tragic and very powerful commentary on the inner lives of men and women.

It is only with the normal person that the law is concerned. Such a test as I have described, therefore, is the only proper test of obscenity in the case of a book like "Ulysses" which is a sincere and serious attempt to devise a new literary method for the observation and description of mankind.

I am quite aware that owing to some of its scenes "Ulysses" is a rather strong draught to ask some sensitive, though normal, persons to take. But my considered opinion, after long reflection, is that whilst in many places the effect of "Ulysses" on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.

"Ulysses" may, therefore, be admitted into the United States.

JOHN M. WOOLSEY
United States District Judge

Joyce heard of the decision and replied:

Thus one half of the English speaking world surrenders. The other half will follow ... And Ireland 1,000 years hence.

The comments of other great writers, Joyce's contemporaries, on this book are of great interest to me. The responses run the gamut from disgust, elation, despair, awe, humility ... but whatever the response, the only emotion you will NOT find is indifference.

The 19th century was certainly ready to be killed, and there were legions of artists who hacked away at it, but it took a nearly-blind perpetually-broke Irishman-in-exile, with his wife and two kids in tow, to finish the job.

Yeats (an early champion of Joyce) had this as his first response on reading Ulysses: "A mad book!"

Then later, as he let the book percolate, Yeats corrected himself: "I have made a terrible mistake. It is a work perhaps of genius. I now perceive its coherence ... It is an entirely new thing -- neither what the eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time."

Hart Crane said: "I feel like shouting EUREKA! Easily the epic of the age."

George Bernard Shaw was disturbed by Ulysses, he took it personally, he did not like what it revealed - about man, about Irish men, about the life of Ireland, but he grappled with the implications in an honest way: "If a man holds up a mirror to your nature and shows you that it needs washing -- not whitewashing -- it is no use breaking the mirror. Go for soap and water."

The great Stefan Zweig on meeting Joyce, and the "meteor" of Ulysses:

"He was inclined to be testy, and I believe that just that irritation produced the power for his inner turmoil and productivity. His resentment against Dublin, against England, against particular persons became converted into dynamic energy and actually found release only in literary creation. But he seemed fond of his own asperity; I never saw him laugh or show high spirits. He always made the impression of a compact, somber force and when I saw him on the street, his thin lips pressed tightly together, always walking rapidly as if heading for a definite objective, I sensed the defensive, the inner isolation of his being even more positively than in our talks. It failed to astonish me when I later learned that just this man had written the most solitary, the least affined work -- meteor-like in its introduction to the world of our time."

T.S. Eliot was especially devastated by the book, and his comments on it are numerous. Examples: "How could anyone write again after achieving the immense prodigy of the last chapter?"

John Banville, who has written a bit about Joyce, and how Irish writers get fed up with trying to struggle out from under his shadow:

Ulysses is not mainstream, nor was it ever meant to be. When people claim Joyce had his eye on posterity, that is true, but it was intellectual posterity he was after, not mass approval.

T.S. Eliot again: "I hold Ulysses to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape."

Edmund Wilson wrote of it:

The more we read Ulysses, the more we are convinced of its psychological truth, and the more we are amazed at Joyce's genius in mastering and in presenting, not through analysis or generalization, but by the complete recreation of life in the process of being lived, the relations of human beings to their environment and to each other; the nature of their perception of what goes on about them and of what goes on within themselves; and the interdependence of their intellectual, their physical, their professional and their emotional lives. To have traced all these interdependences, to have given each of these elements its value, yet never to have lost sight of the moral through preoccuptation with the physical, nor to have forgotten the general in the particular; to have exhibited ordinary humanity without either satirizing it or sentimentalizing it - this would already have been sufficiently remarkable; but to have subdued all this material to the uses of a supremely finished and disciplined work of art is a feat which has hardly been equalled in the literature of our time.

Carlos Fuentes wrote:

That James Joyce is indeed a black Irishman, wreaking a vengeance, even wilder than the I.R.A.'s, on the English language from within, invading the territory of its sanitary ego-presumptions with a flood of impure, dark languages flowing from the damned up sources of collective speech, savagely drowning the ego of the traditional speaker and depositing the property of words in everybody, in the total human community of those who speak and have spoken and shall speak.

Edmund Wilson also wrote:

Yet for all its appalling longeurs, Ulysses is a work of high genius. Its importance seems to me to lie, not so much in its opening new doors to knowledge -- unless in setting an example to Anglo-Saxon writers of putting down everything without compunction -- or in inventing new literary forms -- Joyce's formula is really, as I have indicated, nearly seventy-five years old -- as in its once more setting the standard of the novel so high that it need not be ashamed to take its place beside poetry and drama. Ulysses has the effect at once of making everything else look brassy."

Carl Jung read the book and wrote Joyce a rather extraordinary letter:

Dear Sir, Your Ulysses has presented the world such an upsetting psychological problem, that repeatedly I have been called in as a supposed authority on psychological matters.

Ulysses proved to be an exceedingly hard nut and it has forced my mind not only to most unusual efforts, but also to rather extravagant peregrinations (speaking from the standpoint of a scientist). Your book as a whole has given me no end of trouble and I was brooding over it for about three years until I succeeded to put myself into it. But I must tell you that I'm profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it. I shall probably never be quite sure whether I did enjoy it, because it meant too much grinding of nerves and of grey matter. I also don't know whether you will enjoy what I have written about Ulysses because I couldn't help telling the world how much I was bored, how I grumbled, how I cursed and how I admired. The 40 pages of non stop run at the end is a string of veritable psychological peaches. I suppose the devil's grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman, I didn't.

Well I just try to recommend my little essay to you, as an amusing attempt of a perfect stranger that went astray in the labyrinth of your Ulysses and happened to get out of it again by sheer good luck. At all events you may gather from my article what Ulysses has done to a supposedly balanced psychologist.

With the expression of my deepest appreciation, I remain, dear Sir,

Yours faithfully,
C.G. Jung

Joyce was very proud of this letter and would read it out loud to guests in his house. Nora would snort at the end, "Jimmy knows nothin' about women!"

Friend Oliver St. John Gogarty wrote of Joyce's earlier years:

Looking back, there was something uncanny in his certainty, which he had more than any other writer I have ever known, that he would one day be famous. It was more than mere wishful thinking. It gocerned all his attitudes to his compatriots and accounts for what many referred to as his arrogance. He was never really arrogant, but seemed to have a curious sense of his own powers and wouldn't tolerate anyone who didn't really appreciate his work.

Katherine Mansfield wrote in a letter about having Joyce over to meet her and her usband:

"Joyce was rather ... difficile. I had no idea until then of his view of Ulysses -- no idea how closely it was modelled on the Greek story, how absolutely necessary it was to know the one through and through to be able to discuss the other. I've read the Odyssey and am more or less familiar with it but Murry [Mansfield's husband] and Joyce simply sailed out of my depth. I felt almost stupefied. It's absolutely impossible that other people should understand Ulysses as Joyce understands it. It's almost revolting to hear him discuss its difficulties. It contains code words that must be picked up in each paragraph and so on. The Question and Answer part can be read astronomically or from the geologic standpoint or -- oh, I don't know!"

The most humorous part of this is that Joyce said, after meeting Katherine and her husband:

"Mrs. Murry understood the book better than her husband."

Henry Miller wrote:

Endowed with a Rableaisian ability for word invention, embittered by the domination of a church for which his intellect had no use, harassed by the lack of understanding on the part of family and friends, obsessed by theparental image against which he vainly rebels, Joyce has been seeking escape in the erection of a fortress composed of meaningless verbiage. His language is a ferocious masturbation carried on in fourteen tongues.

George Moore, another Irish writer, wrote:

"Ulysses is hopeless; it is absurd to imagine that any good end can be served by trying to record every single thought and sensation of any human being. That's not art, it's like trying to copy the London Directory."

Hemingway wrote in a letter to Sherwood Anderson:

"Joyce has a most goddamn wonderful book. It'll probably reach you in time. Meantime the report is that he and all his family are starving but you can find the whole celtic crew of them every night in Michaud's where Binney and I can only afford to go about once a week...The damned Irish, they have to moan about something or other..."

Wyndham Lewis wrote:

But on the purely personal side, Joyce possesses a good deal of the intolerant arrogance of the dominie, veiled with an elaborate decency beneath the formal calm of the Jesuit, left over as a handy property from his early years of catholic romance -- of that Irish variety that is so English that it seems stranger to a continental almost than its English protestant counterpart.

Gertrude Stein wrote:

"Joyce is good. He is a good writer. People like him because he is incomprehensible and anybody can understand him. But who came first, Gertrude Stein or James Joyce? Do not forget that my first great book, Three Lives, was published in 1908. That was long before Ulysses. But Joyce has done something. His influence, however, is local. Like Synge, another Irish writer, he has had his day."

Joyce heard what Stein wrote, thought about it, and said, "I hate intellectual women."

George Bernard Shaw again:

"I have read several fragments of Ulysses ... It is a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilization; but it is a truthful one; and I should like to put a cordon round Dublin; round up every male person in it between the ages of 15 and 30; force them to read it; and ask them whether on reflection they could see anything amusing in all that foul mouthed foul minded derision and obscenity...It is, however, some consolation to find that at last somebody has felt deeply enough about it to face the horror of writing it all down and using his literary genius to force people to face it. In Ireland they try to make a cat cleanly by rubbing its nose in its own filth. Mr. Joyce has tried the same treatment on the human subject."

Ezra Pound said:

"Joyce -- pleasing; after the first shell of cantankerous Irishman, I got the impression that the real man is the author of Chamber Music, the sensitive. The rest is the genius; the registration of realities on the temperament, the delicate temperament of the early poems. A concentration and absorption passing Yeats' -- Yeats has never taken on anything requiring the condensation of Ulysses."

Frank McCourt wrote:

Look! Ulysses is more than a book. It's an event -- and that upsets purists, but who's stopping them from retiring to quiet places for an orgy of textual analysis?... Joyce's work has liberated many an artist while his life stands as a lesson for all of us. He suffered greatly: the growing failure of his eyes, the growing madness of his daughter. All his days he skirmished for pennies and fought pitched battles for his art. He was a family man, fiercely tribal, and we must not forget he was driven by love.

Did he love Ireland? As the squirrel loves the nut.

Did he love Catholicism? Imagine his work without it.

William Carlos Williams wrote (echoing what many of Joyce's contemporaries felt):

"Joyce is too near for me to want to do less than he did in Ulysses, in looseness of spirit, and honesty of heart -- at least."

E.M. Forster wrote:

"Perhaps the most interesting literary experiment of our day."

Dr. Joseph Collins reviewed "Ulysses" in The New York Times and wrote:

Ulysses will immortalize its author with the same certainty that Gargantua and Pantagruel immortalized Rabelais and The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky ... It comes nearer to being the perfect revelation of a personality than any book in existence.

Hart Crane, who had totally lost his head about the book, wrote:

"The sharp beauty and sensitivity of the thing! The matchless details! His book is steeped in the Elizabethans, his early love, and Latin Church, and some Greek ... It is my opinion that some fanatic will kill Joyce sometime soon for the wonderful things said in Ulysses."

Edna O'Brien wrote:

To call this man angry is too temperate a word, he was volcanic.

Ford Madox Ford wrote:

"For myself then, the pleasure -- the very great pleasure -- that I get from going through the sentences of Mr. Joyce is that given me simply by the cadence of his prose, and I fancy that the greatest and highest enjoyment that can be got from any writing is simply that given by the cadence of the prose."

William Faulkner wrote:

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote:

Ulysses, of course, is a divine work of art and will live on despite the academic nonentities who turn it into a collection of symbols or Greek myths. I once gave a student a C-minus, or perhaps a D-plus, just for applying to its chapters the titles borrowed from Homer while not even noticing the comings and goings of the man in the brown mackintosh. He didn't even know who the man in the brown mackintosh was. Oh, yes, let people compare me to Joyce by all means, but my English is pat ball to Joyce's champion game.

That's a drawing by Guy Davenport, entitled "Joyce Writing a Sentence".

My father gave me his treasured and rare copy of Ulysses - part of the 1924 printing of Shakespeare & Co. The book is falling apart. The pages are thin and rustly, and little bits of them drop off if you pick it up. It is enclosed in a box, to protect it - which has on the spine: ULYSSES - PARIS, 1924.

Every page has something of interest on it. There is a sticker on the first page - stamped with the personal imprint of the couple who had bought the book (my father, naturally, knew everything about them). The copyright page is amazing. First of all, it lists all of the controversial editions that had gone before ... 500 copies burned, etc. And to see the legendary "Shakespeare & Co.", in print, signing its name, so to speak, to the book, bravely putting it out again, knowing what will happen to their small operation ... It's just something that makes me feel humble, awed, and proud that I am aware that such people existed.

My copy of the book is not one that I will take out and read. It is too fragile.

But it is now my most prized possession, and I do take it out sometimes, to flip through the pages, looking for my favorite parts (the conversation about Shakespeare in the library is my favorite section), and reveling in the feel of the pages, their soft fragility, the print on the page showing its indent. Ulysses is so wrapped up in my father (I read it for the first time and basically called him every other day to get tips - "what the hell is going on HERE?") that it cannot be separated out. Each page resonates with some tidbit from my father, some explication, or biographical detail of all of the names that show up in Joyce's book.

I took some photos of this gift from my father. They are below.

The last photo has a framed picture of my dad in the background, standing by Yeats' grave. That was not deliberate. I did not consciously place the framed photo in the frame. It's just that everywhere in my apartment that you look you will see evidence of my heritage, my family, my inheritance.

My father taught us well.

According to Eva Joyce, James Joyce's sister:

His last words were, 'Does nobody understand?' -- and I'm afraid that's what none of us did -- understand him.

Maybe we can try now.

Joyce wrote:

I'd like a language which is above all languages, a language to which all will do service. I cannot express myself in English without enclosing myself in a tradition.

And lastly, Nora, Joyce's lifetime companion and wife, said:

I don't know whether or not my husband is a genius, but I'm sure of one thing, there is no one like him.

"Last November a young woman tried to snatch my purse on the street. I punched her out until the cavalry arrived. Most fun I’ve had in years."

An excerpt from an interview with Katherine Dunn in The Paris Review. She has a new short story in this edition of The Paris Review, and if you follow Dunn's career, then you know this is a huge event. People have been Twittering and Facebook-ing about it for days. A short story! Light from the caves! We are members of a strange intense cult, Katherine Dunn fans. There's an excerpt of the story on the Paris Review site, but I refuse to read a word until I buy the issue and can read the whole thing.

Here is what I wrote, a while back, about Geek Love, her second novel, published in 1989, which brought her the fame that lasts till this day.

Geek Love - by Katherine Dunn

The less said about this book the better.

All I can do is tell you to read it. But don't ever say that I didn't warn you.

I read it years ago when I was living in Philadelphia and quietly having a nervous breakdown that didn't show to the outside world. I was sitting on my front porch when I finished Geek Love. We lived in Mt. Airy, surrounded by forest preserves and mountain bike trails, a lushness of green only twenty minutes outside the city proper. Trees overhung the porch, the trees pressed up against our house from all sides, the street was misty and quiet. I had a big mug of cold coffee next to me. The coffee had been hot when I came out onto the porch but I was near the end of the book and so I sat there reading, struck dumb and still by the ending, not taking one sip from the cup next to me. At the last sentence of the book, I burst into tears. That's only happened to me a couple of times at the end of a book. Sometimes I'll mist up ... get moved in an intellectual way ... but a bursting into sobs is something that has rarely happened. Geek Love pierced through the armor I had erected to shield me from how depressed I was, how sad, how lonely, and it wasn't just about me, and what I was going through ... it was about Olympia and Arturo and the unforgettable cast of characters in the book. To me, Geek Love is a book about love (obviously, with that title), but it's also about flaws, and freaks (literal and emotional), and emotional blackmail that can twist a soul already hardened by the world's rejection. Our outer surface so rarely reflect our inner worlds. What does it mean to be ugly? Empirically ugly? As in, you make your living as a freak in a freak show? What does love mean then? Inside we may be pure and clean. But outside we present a horrifying visage to the world. Beneath all of this, keens love. Love eternal, love good, love that burns so hot that it is indistinguishable from pain. My boyfriend came home from his run and found me lying on the wicker couch on the front porch, drenched in tears. I don't think I stopped crying, not really, for a good 2 days after finishing that book. I have never picked it up since.

It's like a strange little club - those of us who have read the book. It's a bit of a litmus test. If someone says, "I loved Geek Love" ... I am immediately drawn to that person, like a moth to the flame ... who are you, it says something about you that THAT would be your favorite ... One of the falling-in-love moments I had with the great love of my life was during a "what books do you love" conversation. I said, casually, "I don't think I've ever cried harder when a book ended than when I finished Geek Love." He looked at me as though I had struck him. He seriously did a double-take. But then didn't say anything for a while. He wasn't a big "let me share with you every thought that goes through my head" type of guy. He was a bit shyer than that. The conversation went on. I had noticed his response but didn't really "get" it ... and later, a couple of people came over and joined us, interrupting our tete a tete - and he said to me, privately, underneath the chatter of the other people, "I don't think I've ever met anyone who also has read that book."

It meant something to him that I had read it and loved it. It meant something about who I am.

It's that kind of book.

One of the most assaultive books I have ever read. With prose you could cut with a knife. A truly original voice.

I can't even bring myself to give a plot summary.

Here's an excerpt from the beginning of the book.

EXCERPT FROM Geek Love - by Katherine Dunn

Now Crystal Lil holds the phone receiver clenched against her long flat tit while she howls up the stairwell, "Forty-one!", meaning that the red-haired, zit-skinned, defrocked Benedictine in room Number 41 has another phone call and should come running down the three flights of stairs and take this intruding burden off Lil's confused mind. She puts a patented plastic amplifier against the earpiece when she answers the phone and turns the knob on her hearing aid to high and screams, "What! What!" into the mouthpiece until she gets a number back. That number she will shriek up the mildewed staircase until someone comes down or she gets tired.

I am never sure how deaf she is. She always hears the ring of the pay phone in the hall but she may pick up its vibration in her slipper heels. She is also blind. Her thick, pink plastic glasses project huge filmy eyes. The blurred red spurts across her whites like a bad egg.

Forty-one rattles down the stairs and grabs the receiver. He is in constant communication with acquaintances on the edge of the clergy, cultivating them in hopes of slinking back into his collar. His anxious muttering into the phone begins as Crystal Lil careens back into her room. She leaves the door open to the hallway.

Her window looks onto the sidewalk in front of the building. Her television is on with the volume high. She sits on the backless kitchen chair, feels around for the large magnifying glass until she finds it on top of the TV, and then leans close, her nose scant inches from the screen, pumping the lens in and out before her eyes in a constant struggle to focus an image around the dots. When i come through the hall I can see the grey light flickering through the lens onto the eager blindness of her face.

Being called "Manager" explains, for Crystal Lil, why no bills come to her, why her room is free, and why the small check arrives for her each month. She is adamant in her duties as rent collector and enfeebled watchdog. The phone is part of the deal.

When Crystal Lil howls, "Twenty-one!", which is my room number, I stop by my door to grab the goat wig from its nail and jam it onto my bald pate before I take the single flight of stairs in a series of one-legged hops that is hard on my knees and ankles but disguises my usual shuffle. I pitch my voice high and loud, an octave into the falsetto. "Thank you!" I shriek at her gaping mouth. Her gums are knnobby and a faintly iridescent green - shiny where the teeth were. I wear the same wig when I go out. I don't trust Lil's blindness or her deafness to disguise me completely. I am, after all, her daughter. She might harbor some decayed hormonal recognition of my rhythms that could penetrate even the wall of refusal her body has thrown up against the world.

When Lil calls, "Thirty-five!" up the stairwell, I wobble over to the door and stare one-eyed through the hole drilled next to the lock. When "Thirty-five" comes hurtling down the staircase, I get an instant glimpse of her long legs, sometimes flashing bare through the slits in her startling green kimono. I lean my head against the door and listen to her strong young voice shouting at Lil and then dropping to its normal urgency on the phone. Number Thirty-five is my daughter, Miranda. Miranda is a popular girl, tall and well shaped. She gets phone calls every evening before she leaves for work. Miranda does not try to disguise herself from her grandmother. She believes herself to be an orphan named Barker. And Crystal Lil herself must imagine that Miranda is just one more of the gaudy females who trail their sex like slug slime over the rooms for a month at a time before moving on. Perhaps the fact that Miranda has lived here in the big apartment for three years has never penetrated to Lil. How would she notice that the same "Thirty-five" always answers the call? They have no bridge to each other. I am the only link between them, and neither of them knows me. Miranda, though, has far less reason to remember me than the old woman does.

This is my selfish pleasure, to watch unseen. It wouldn't give them pleasure to know me for who I am. It could kill Lily, bringing back all the rot of the old pain. Or she might hate me for surviving when all her other treasures have sunk into mold. As for Miranda, I can't be sure what it would do to her to know her real mother. I imagine her bright spine cringing and slumping and staying that way. She makes a gallant orphan.

We are all three Binewskis, though only Lily claims the name. I am just "Number Twenty-one" to Crystal Lil. Or "McGurk, the cripple in Twenty-one". Miranda is more colorful. I've heard her whispering to friends as they pass my door, "The dwarf in Twenty-one," or "The old albino hunchback in Twenty-one."

I rarely need to speak to either of them. Lil puts the rent checks in a basket just inside her open door and I reach to get them. On Thursdays I take out the garbage and Lily thinks nothing of it.

Miranda says hello in the hall. I nod. Occasionally she tries to chat me up on the stairs. I am distant and brief and escape as quickly as possible with my heart pounding like a burglar's.

Lily chose to forget me and I choose not to remind her, but I am terrified of seeing shame or disgust in my daughter's face. It would kill me. So I stalk and tend them both secretly, like a midnight gardener.

20 most surprising female performances (Part 2)

Here is Part 1 of the series, great conversation going on in the comments. Join in!

HEDY LAMARR, Comrade X

Hedy Lamarr, is, without a doubt, one of the most beautiful women in the history of cinema. Cameramen fell all over themselves to do closeups of that perfect face. Her beauty can be almost otherworldly. She made a big splash, in the nude, no less, in Ecstasy (some of my thoughts here), a film that was edited within an inch of its life, due to the nudity and the orgasm and everything else, but it brought her to Louis B. Mayer's attention and he made her change her name and brought her to the United States. Cast mostly as mysterious and seductive (no wonder, look at that face), her role as the devout Communist Golubka in King Vidor's Comrade X is a total delight, and shows what a gifted comedienne she was, a talent that was never utilized fully. Her film career was relatively short, unfortunately. I suppose if you are the most beautiful woman in the world, you have a naturally short shelf-life, but to see her in Comrade X makes you realize all the roads not taken by this gorgeous FUNNY young woman. Clark Gable plays "Mac", an American journalist, stationed in Communist Moscow, and he is blackmailed by a local Russian into smuggling his daughter (Golubka) out of the country. Naturally, Gable falls for her. Comrade X comes at an interesting time in Soviet/American relations. Russia was still an ally in the fight against Hitler. Communists were treated in film with humor and mockery as opposed to the paranoia that would come during the Cold War and after. Hedy Lamarr is a True Believer in Comrade X. The character doesn't understand humor, irony, sarcasm, or jokes of any kind. She is 100% literal-minded. Gable, who plays the part he always played, tries to get her to loosen up. She recites one of Marx's books to him, verbatim, during a long night of walking. We hear her declare through the darkness, "CHAPTER THREE" and then start to rattle off the prose. It's hilarious. She has a couple of moments that are laugh-out-loud funny, putting her in a realm with Carole Lombard, or Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth, women who knew, instinctively, where the jokes were. On their wedding night, she emerges from the bathroom in a nightgown that is a giant HUGE triangle-shaped garment. She stands there, unaware that perhaps she should have put on something more sexy for such an occasion. She is blunt-eyed and serious. Lamarr the actress knows how funny she looks in that get-up, but the character is not in on the joke whatsoever (a very hard line to walk, which she does brilliantly throughout.) Gable orders her out of the room to put on something more comfortable, and she immediately exits, stating loudly, "Comrade, I am obeying you blindly." I don't think she smiles once in the entire film, and yet the end result is hilarious. She spouts her Communist propaganda with unthinking seriousness, leaving Gable to ponder the absurdity of her very presence, how lovable she is, how strange. Lamarr is so at home in this type of broad material I am shocked it wasn't more successful for her. At the end of the film, she ends up driving a tank, with Gable huddled beside her (another hilarious sequence), and she is explaining to him the chain of command in the Soviet system, again in her rat-a-tat monotone that she uses throughout the film. "First, there is co-pilot. Then there is co-co-pilot. Then there is co-co-co-pilot." Gable interrupts, "Stop stuttering." His line is the CHING of the ba-dum-ching joke, but without her insistent humorless monotone, used from beginning to end of the film, none of the other jokes would work. I was accustomed to seeing Hedy Lamarr in beautiful gowns, in exquisite closeup, and as marvelous as she was, I only saw Comrade X recently, and was blown away by her funniness. This isn't the sort of humor that brings about mere chuckles and gives you time to ponder to yourself, "Oh, isn't that funny." Hedy Lamarr here brings upon belly laughs that make you miss the next 2 lines of dialogue.

PATRICIA CLARKSON, High Art

I suppose now nothing this actress does is surprising. But back then, she was relatively unknown, and certainly hadn't reached a critical mass of fame yet. She was Kevin Costner's wife in The Untouchables, a nothing part, and then came years of bit parts in movies and recurring roles on television. Law and Order and others. She was at a certain level. I know that High Art was the big risk for her, it was her moment of saying, "Is the career I have right now acceptable to me? And if not, then what the hell do I do about it?" But none of that backstory was known to me at the time. I went to High Art (in case others are confused, that's her in a state of undress beneath Ally Sheedy) basically to see what the fuss was about in terms of Ally Sheedy acting again, and instead found myself so drawn to the actress playing Greta that I lost my bearings completely. Greta is German, she is addicted to heroin, she is a lesbian, and she seems to live in a drugged-out dreamworld where she is the reincarnation of Lola Lola in The Blue Angel. Always in an incapacitated state, she can barely button up her blouse when she is in public, and drawls her lines in a tired German cadence, so completely real that I would never have guessed that this actress wasn't exactly what she seemed: a drugged-out performance artist on the Lower East Side. My friend Mitchell had the same response. Again, Clarkson did not have much fame then, or recognizability, so as her name became more known over the years, High Art would come up again and again between us, and as she continued to show her range, her portrayal of Greta becomes even more unbelievable to behold. The only way I can say it is: Clarkson is not herself. It is such a convincing performance that Mitchell and I both thought that the director had found this eccentric dead-eyed German woman in a nightclub somewhere, or maybe a midnight burlesque show, and got her to be in the movie somehow. It's not acting going on here. Clarkson appears to be participating in a documentary.

CATHERINE DENEUVE, Repulsion

One of the most harrowing portrayals of psychosis in all of cinema. And yet, like all great portrayals of psychosis, it has such truth in it, such sanity, that it starts to seem like she is the only sane person in a totally insane and insensitive world. Too many actors love to "play crazy" because it's a good career opportunity, and they get to "lose it", and oh, isn't that fun for an actor? It's condescending to anyone who suffers from depression or madness, and shows a lack of understanding of what it is REALLY like. Deneuve's is a terrifying performance, because it is told completely from her point of view, so whatever outside-influence, a friend who might be able to say to her, "Now, listen, dear, the hands coming out of the apartment walls are not real", is rendered mute and useless. However, as anyone who has been through it knows, psychosis like that is the ultimate in reality, and Deneuve is fearless in going on the journey that this young woman goes on. Not once does she tip her hand. Not once does she let us know that she knows that none of this is real. Fantasies are powerful things, and do not always make "sense". The character she plays here is meek, submissive, and underfed. Her revulsion towards food points towards anorexia, although that is way too easy a diagnosis. Underneath that meek blonde surface is a world of rage (watch the scary moment when she knocks her sister's boyfriend's toothbrush into the wastebasket). As she is left alone for a weekend in her sister's apartment, things start to unravel, and Deneuve starts to shatter, psychically. How easy it is for some of us to slip off the rails. I would even say that the contours of her beautiful face even change, over the course of the film, as she descends deeper and deeper into her world of fantasy. Deneuve was completely in charge of that transformation. One of the most beautiful women in the world, clearly, her roles often utilize that beauty in interesting ways. She knew who she was. She didn't seem to feel that she had to "ugly" herself up to get respect from the acting community. She is on another plane entirely, and in Repulsion, early in her career, she shows the cracks that open up in a person when left to her own devices, when deprived of sleep, of sex, of food. Her fantasies are violent and involve being raped on a nightly basis by a leering intruder. To someone who is always in control, such a moment would of course be the ultimate in freedom. Whatever work Deneuve has done (and the commentary track is fascinating, because it shows how meticulous she is in her process as an actress) is entirely invisible. This is one of her greatest performances, certainly, and one of my favorites given by a female in the history of cinema.

MAGGIE CHEUNG, Centre Stage

This one is a bit of a cheat, and I am admitting it up front. Now that I know who Maggie Cheung is, I am not in the least "surprised" by anything she does. But I saw this film - which also is known as Actress and also known as Yuen Ling-yuk - at the Music Box in Chicago years ago, when it first came out (I have always known the film as Actress), with my friend Ted, and I had no idea who Maggie Cheung was, and it was such a melancholy beautiful intelligent masterpiece that we went out for Chinese food afterwards and were pretty much speechless. It was my introduction to Maggie Cheung, and for that, I can say that I was, indeed, "surprised". I know it's obnoxious to discover someone late and then act as though you are the first person to discover that actress, so please forgive me, those of you who knew for years what a revelation Cheung is. I just had to include her, and this performance specifically, which rocked me to the core. It tells the story of Ruan Lingyu, the big silent film star in China, known as "the Chinese Garbo". She had a short crazy life, and she committed suicide at the age of 24. Stanley Kwan directed, and it's an amazing film, mixing real footage of the silent films of Ruan Lingyu, with current-day production meetings (Stanley Kwan including himself in the film, giving it a documentary aspect, along the lines of French Lieutenant's Woman), and then amazing scenes of Maggie Cheung re-creating Ruan Lingyu's scenes, so that they are spliced together: we see Ruan Lingyu, the actual footage, and then we segue to Maggie Cheung doing the same scene, and to say that this actress is "channeling" something may be a turnoff to those not into New Age views (and I'm not into New Age views, either) but channeling seems to me to be the only appropriate word for what is happening here. Going into it I did not know Ruan Lingyu's horrible end, I was not surprised when it came, due to the passion and intensity Cheung brought to the part. A suicide like that, awful as it is, begins to seem inevitable. While something like Centre Stage could easily have turned into a typical biopic, it doesn't, it most definitely doesn't. It is an examination of art, and what art is, and how an actress melds with her roles, and the toll that places on sensitive people. It takes balls to go toe to toe with a national icon. Cate Blanchett did her best in The Aviator, with mixed results, but remember: Blanchett wasn't asked, in that part, to re-create the ACTING of Hepburn - just her personality and mannerisms. Imagine if Blanchett had had to re-create a scene from Bringing Up Baby, side by side with the real footage. That's what Cheung is asked to do in Centre Stage, and she is extraordinary. Imagine the courage of Cheung, having to face that task.

FAYE DUNAWAY, Arizona Dream

Oh, how I adore this nutty movie, and oh how sad I am that if you rent it (at least in the US), you will be seeing an edited version. I saw it in its original US release, at its full length, and it is a stunner of a picture. It is wacky and insane, and by that I mean it includes Jerry Lewis as well as Paulina Porizkova in the cast. Johnny Depp and Lily Taylor star, and Vincent Gallo is brilliant (especially the scene where he re-creates the crop-duster sequence from North by Northwest at a local open-mike night) and I've seen the edited version and believe me, it suffers. I live in hope that one day it will get a proper DVD release, because this film is a gem. Faye Dunaway plays Lily Taylor's mother, living in an isolated crazy house in the middle of an Arizona desert, obsessed with flying machines (and flying, in general), and she is a complete and utter LUNATIC. She did a workshop at my grad school and I asked her about the script, and if any of their group scenes (particularly a manic dinner scene, with turtles crawling around the table, and Lily Taylor threatening to hang herself from the balcony) were improvised. I was so happy when Dunaway replied to my question (and she got sort of lit-up and excited, like a little girl - how many people ask her about Arizona Dream, of all things?), and she said, "Every word of that scene as we played it onscreen was in the script." So that makes it an even more glorious accomplishment. Wow. Dunaway has always been "over the top" in many of her best roles, she has a theatricality to her that is melodramatic and intense, and here, where she gets to play openly NUTS, she is hysterical and awesome. It's got the same Dunaway trademarks: she's gorgeous, and intense, and she is a woman who keeps her eye on the ball, even if it means ignoring her suicidal daughter, Lily Taylor, who strolls around the house playing her accordion in a lugubrious manner. There are scenes of piercing beauty (one, where she flies through the air, and her face, upon being airborne, is enough to make you want to cry), and then scenes of total madness, with Dunaway pushing wandering turtles away from her food, and babbling on about Papua New Guinea, which she is obsessed with. Her daughter begs her to stop talking about Papua New Guinea, because it is driving her mad, and Dunaway, a woman determined to live her life the way she sees fit, wearing aviator goggles at the dinner table, continues to push on, saying the words "Papua New Guinea" with increased ferocity, until Lily Taylor can bear it no longer and screams, "YOU ARE SO EVIL, MOTHER." My description here perhaps does not do the movie (or the performance) justice, but that is only because Arizona Dream, in its original release, is exactly what I look for from cinema. An individual viewpoint, a philosophy, the courage of its convictions, and a visual look and feel that is unmistakably its own. Dunaway is manic, obsessed, sexy and lost to reason for the entirety of the film. While Faye Dunaway plays a monstrous character in Arizona Dream, no doubt about it, I dare you to watch the expression on her face as she slowly floats through the air, and not be moved. Brave. To my mind, this is one of her bravest performances. She really took risks here.

MERYL STREEP, Death Becomes Her

It is a beautiful coincidence that I would choose Death Becomes Her for my "surprise" performance from Streep in the same week that Nathaniel R. profiled the film in his Streep at 60 series. I love his perception here:

One of the most endearing things about Death Becomes Her from a retrospective vantage is the way it follows so closely on the heels of Postcards From the Edge, forming a prismatic, self-mocking double feature. The subject is an aging actress in career crisis, one who just happens to have an absurdly amazing singing voice; Postcards ends with a big gorgeous musical performance as career redemption and Death begins with its inversion, a big gawdy one as career killer. So this early 90s double offered audiences two potential futures for fictional "Meryl Streep." Or the same future, if you could predict the coming of Mamma Mia! -- it would look exactly like a huge gawdy career killer but be a mammoth hit in actuality!

Yes! I've always felt that Streep is more of a gifted comedienne than a great tragedienne, and that her talent, when it is allowed to come out in its most organic form, runs towards the comedic. I saw her play The Seagull in Central Park, and I know it is hard to believe but the woman got a laugh on almost every line. This was not "tricks", or an actress trying to "fall back on" what is "easy" for her, or any other such situation. This was Streep sensing the comedy inherent in the sheer terribleness of that character, her unbelievable insensitivity (speaking outloud during her son's awful play, murmuring things to herself in a completely audible voice, totally clueless that her son might feel bad), and Streep made it all seem completely natural, showing up people like Philip Seymour Hoffman who was so busy "doing Chekhov" that he forgot to create a living breathing human being onstage. And he's a good actor. But look out. Streep is a powerhouse. Death Becomes Her has what I think is Streep's funniest performance (although there is so much there to choose from), and it is over-the-top, self-referential, and positively RIDICULOUS. She has a way of slanting her eyes almost shut and then moving her pupils off to the side which is one of the most comedic and eloquent pantomimes of "I am so annoyed I barely know what to say" I have ever seen, and she used it in Postcards (her "eye work" is so good in Postcards, I don't even know what else to call it), but here it becomes a psychological gesture, a tip-off that this woman is a snotty terrible piece of work. And again, Streep gets a laugh on every line, every gesture, every word. Not to mention the huge overblown musical number that starts the entire picture. I love it when Streep is silly. Her boobs lift up due to a magical potion, and she stares at herself, enraptured, and states, "I'm a girl!" (Clip below the jump) She has never ever been sillier than here, and it's a performance that still makes me clap my hands in delight when I see it.

JUDY DAVIS, Husbands and Wives

This is a performance worthy of Bette Davis. It's that dramatic, that specific, that loud, and, ultimately, that heartbreaking. It's hard for me to talk about Judy Davis in Husbands and Wives because it is a performance that is so dear to me, and all I can do is just recite her lines and then say, "God, she is so great." Judy Davis plays Sally, and she is married to Sydney Pollack (in one of his best performances, although I find it hard to choose - "So she can't quote Sartre. I love her!"), and in the first scene Sally and Jack announce to Judy (Mia Farrow) and Gabe (Woody Allen) that they are getting separated, and it's all very adult and civilized, and they want everyone to be happy for them, and they're so "evolved" about it, so calm, that it throws Gabe and Judy's marriage into a tailspin. But of course, things are not calm with Sally and Jack, and Sally, single for the first time in her life, suddenly has to deal with things like dating and sex, and she is so uptight and so cerebral that she has a very hard time with it. She goes on a date with this poor guy who tells her he got tickets to Don Juan, and she replies, with an arched eyebrow, "Don Juan?" Pause. Then: "Fucking Don Juans." He protests a bit, and she shouts in his face, 'DON'T DEFEND YOUR SEX." I had been aware of Judy Davis for a long time, and loved her in her breakout part My Brilliant Career, she of the wild frizzy hair and freckled beautiful face. But nothing she had ever done could prepare me for the sheer bravado she brings to the prickly Sally. This is a pretty bleak movie (I love it), and she is so funny right in the midst of her tragic loneliness. Liam Neeson, a lovely man she starts to date, is going down on her in one particular scene, and the camera remains on her face, as she ponders in voiceover, that all people in the world can be broken down into hedgehogs and foxes, and she starts to list all the people she knows: "Judy? Fox. Gabe? Hedgehog." And on and on, a truly perverse scene, as Neeson is trying to pleasure her, and that is what is going on in her head. She stalks through rooms, holding a wine glass, shivering with electric energy, her jaw juts and chomps, and sometimes her eyes go tiny and calculating. You would never know that Davis was from Australia. This is a character who has barely left the state of New York in her entire life. My favorite detail of this character? How obsessed she has become with the "series of breakins" that have gone on in her neighborhood in Westchester. She mentions it to everyone. And then when people are appropriately frightened for her, she murmurs, "It's really really scary." She is a powerhouse woman, who has dominated and frightened everyone in her path, and yet she has this strange investment in insisting that she is "really really scared" about the breakins, and she needs everyone, everyone, to agree that she is vulnerable. I watch the movie and I'm like, "But you're really not scared, Sally. You're just lonely and you miss having a man around!" Yet she continues to insist, in every single scene, "Have you heard about the series of breakins?" Every moment is chiseled to a fine edge, every look, every glance, every slight smile, is part of the masterpiece of acting that is going on here. It's hilarious, it's heartwrenching, it's angry, it's intelligent - one of my favorite performances of the 90s.

MARILYN MONROE, Don't Bother to Knock

Relieve your mind now of the images you have of this person. When I met her, she was a simple, eager young woman who rode a bike to the classes she was taking, a decent-hearted kid whom Hollywood brought down, legs parted. She had a thin skin and a soul that hungered for acceptance by people she might look up to ... The girl had little education and no knowledge except the knowledge of her own experience; of that she had a great deal, and for an actor, that is the important kind of knowledge. For her, I found, everything was either completely meaningless or completely personal. She had no interest in abstract, formal, or impersonal concepts but was passionately devoted to her own life's experiences.

So wrote Elia Kazan of Marilyn Monroe in his gigantic autobiography Elia Kazan: A Life. There is a lot that is in the way with Marilyn Monroe, hard to get past the icon status to see what was really there, and Don't Bother to Knock, from 1952, a couple of years before Niagara and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which made her into a giant star, is one of the most interesting and surprising performances in my entire list here and yesterday. She plays Nell, a babysitter working in a hotel, who has mental problems, and becomes obsessed with a guy named Jed, played by Richard Widmark. Nell has recently gotten out of a mental institution and lives in fear of having to "go back there". She is expected to be a good little girl, and behave herself, but it's not that easy to do when you are mentally ill. Don't Bother to Knock stands alone in her career (I wrote about the movie here), in terms of the emotions that Marilyn Monroe was asked to convey: confusion, hurt, fear, danger, and rage. She often played lost souls and waifs, showgirls who managed to keep their innocence, big-eyed goddesses who seemed confused at times of the fuss men made over her. But she was never again (until the very end, with The Misfits) so damaged. And even in The Misfits, it wasn't quite the same kind of damage. Nell is barely a woman at all. She is a little girl, beaten and bludgeoned by the world around her, in a state of arrested development, trapped in the body of a pinup model. There are times when she is almost in a state of "fatal attraction", and you want to tell Widmark to run for his life, and to certainly take away the child she is caring for. She seems completely unsafe. And yet Monroe manages, with subtle glances and flickers in the eyes, to show how ... strange it is for this character, how outside of reality she feels ... how much she yearns to get on the inside. If you have not seen Monroe in Don't Bother to Knock, then all I can do is reiterate the words of Elia Kazan: "Relieve your mind now of the images you have of this person." They're all wrong.

BIBI ANDERSSON, Persona

T.S. Eliot, after reading James Joyce's Ulysses, said, "I wish for my own sake that I hadn't read it." William Carlos Williams, after reading Ulysses, said, "Joyce is too near for me to want to do less than he did in Ulysses, in looseness of spirit, and honesty of heart -- at least." I have only pulled out the examples having to do with Ulysses because they are at my fingertips, but the question of artistic intimidation is an interesting one, and writers know the situation well. (I wrote about it here.) If you are trying to write something, there are certain writers who inspire you to push on, and then there are others who manage to silence you completely. William Carlos Williams felt threatened by Ulysses, it threatened to silence him. When I went out to Block Island to write, I thought carefully about what I wanted to read out there. There are writers who make me itch to take up my pen, and there are writers who make me feel like putting my pen down forever in despair. I hold my hands up helplessly in the face of them, like William Carlos Williams and T.S. Eliot (no slouches themselves) did with Joyce. It's not about "classic" literature, either, it's probably different for everyone. The writer who silences ME might not silence YOU. For example, Annie Proulx silences me. I couldn't bring her latest collection with me to Block Island.

All of this is to say: Bibi Andersson's performance in Persona is such that after I saw it in college (when I was studying acting), I knew I couldn't see it again, at least not any time soon, because it threatened to silence me, and weaken my will. I didn't know if I would have the courage to go on in my own pursuit in the face of work like THAT. I refused to see it again, until I felt I could "handle" it. I didn't see the film for almost 20 years after that first viewing. Andersson's monologue, blurted out at night to Liv Ullmann lying in bed, is one of the best pieces of acting ever captured on screen, but why is that? Who can say? It cannot be described. It grips you at the throat, and by the end, when it lets you go, you are changed. It's as simple as that. I knew it when I saw it at age 18. I finished the film and thought, "Well. Nothing will be the same for me ever again, my very molecules have been rearranged, and I certainly can't watch THAT again." I'll let David Thomson finish up this entry for me, because, once again, I feel Bibi Andersson silencing me. You think I'm kidding? I'm not. There are some performances so essential to... see, I don't even have the word for it ... that it's best to just not think about them too much. Enough to know that they exist, that they have been captured, once and for all time. In a way, what happens to Bibi Andersson in the film is the opposite of the effect her performance had on me. In the face of the silent (and silencing) presence of Elizabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann), Bibi Andersson suddenly, desperately, cannot stop talking.

Here's Thomson:

Persona is about vampirism and the power of one personality over another; it is about acting and being; it is about performance and silence. And it is what we had for films once upon a time. It is beside the point to say that Ullmann and Andersson are good in the picture. Rather, they are an event of primary importance: No one should be allowed to act professionally without seeing Persona. Of course, in life one cannot impose those rules. All I know is that with students - not just of film, but of every subject - I have shown Persona and had the conversation that followed go on and on until natural darkness overtook us. It could not be more complicated, or less lucid. It is as if Elizabeth Vogler fell silent in Electra because of her own memory of the film. We are in performance: It is a religious condition.

REESE WITHERSPOON, Election

You know you've tapped into some zeitgeist moment when the name of a character you play becomes a reference point, meaningful in and of itself. Recently, I mentioned on Facebook that I was reading a biography of Michael Ovitz, and he "reminded me of Tracy Flick" and everyone knew what I was talking about. Tracy Flick. She stalks the nation. She is everything we should fear. The subversive nature of Election is its strongest asset: that Tracy Flick does not get the comeuppance she so deserves is how life works, especially in politics, where things like ambition + mediocrity rises. And fast. I had seen Man in the Moon with Sam Waterston, Tess Harper, and a pre-teen Reese Witherspoon in an extraordinary film debut. She plays a tomboy, not yet an adolescent yet, and this young actress has a heavy load to carry in that film, and she more than showed her capability. I knew we would be seeing more of her. Time passed. She was terrific, again, in Freeway, and Pleasantville, as a slutty girl who finds redemption through .... reading, a fact that made me love that script forever.

But she bursts into terrible full-form as Tracy Flick in 1999's Election, the girl determined to be President of her class, and nothing will stop her. Tracy Flick is a girl who brings out the worst in others, most notably her civics teacher, played by Matthew Broderick, who sees the evil that she represents, even though she is just a teenage girl, and becomes hellbent on bringing her down.

There are two scenes which elevate her performance into something iconic, something that has something to say, about ambition and politics. One night she is alone in the school, finishing up some work for the upcoming election, and she comes across a hallway lined with posters of her rival. She stares up the hallway, she stares down. She looks dimunitive and fragile. And then, in a burst of hideous energy, she tears down all the posters. She rips them apart. Her legs flail about in her efforts, her face turns into an Edvard Munch scream, her arms wildly gyrate, she is awkward, she is ferocious, it is the underbelly of every single politician in existence, no matter how smiling and slick. Tracy Flick, as seen through the eyes of her civics teacher, is a prissy know-it-all, barreling down the hallways handing out campaign buttons. But here, we see her alone. We do not see her through Broderick's eyes anymore. We get a glimpse of what it is really like for her. It is rage so unbridled that it's almost thrilling, because the movie is a satire, and satire is out-of-sync in these oh-so-literal times, and so I feared that the movie wouldn't be willing to go there. In that scene, the movie says to me, "O ye of little faith. How do ya like THEM apples?" The second scene, which I think is the best work Witherspoon has ever done is when she has lost the election, and there is a quick cut from the victory-triumph at school to her sobbing in bed at home. Again, this is one of a handful of scenes when we don't see her character through Broderick's eyes. In her sobbing is not just sadness that she lost, but outrage that she was cheated out of the win. And you know what? Here's the most subversive thing: she's right. This isn't quiet pretty crying. This is a howl of pain and rage worthy of Oedipus. It's mortifying to watch. It's ugly. It is the ugliest part of us as humans, mixed with the best of us (because doesn't Tracy, after all, have a point?), and it is a scene that stands alone in Witherspoon's career. She has yet to top it.

20 most surprising female performances (Part 1)

Alex had a series going on of 20 Most Surprising Female Performances (Here is Part 1 and Part 2). Please please go check out her choices, and also her brief descriptions of why she chose each one. Great stuff, thought-provoking. Alex writes:

These are performances that, for me, were either the first time I saw a side of these actors that truly surprised me, or the first time something connected with me on a very visceral level. Some of these are leading performances, and some are mere minutes of footage. Screen time’s never been a big deal to me. When a performance jumps out at me, there’s never a time limit. I’m always amazed when I remember that Anthony Hopkins time on screen in “Silence of the Lambs” runs about 11 minutes total. He’s that much of a force.

Certainly all these women are versatile in their skill and their many, many gifts, but these particular performances still haunt me, and to this day, are ones I still reference when I speak about limitations.

They also brought me great joy and reminded me of the true definition of Fearlessness.

One note: It's so annoying when you put up a list like this and someone inevitably says, "Don't forget to include So and So." I didn't "forget". I already know I didn't "forget". If I wrote such a list tomorrow, I might pick 20 different performances. To those of you who want to play along. Perhaps we overlap. Let's talk about that. Perhaps you disagree with some of my choices. I'd love to hear more. But please don't tell me I "forgot" to include something, okay?

These are performances that surprised me. That surprised me on first viewing, and surprise me still.

So. Here we go.

20 MOST SURPRISING FEMALE PERFORMANCES (Part 1)

ROSIE PEREZ, Fearless

Nothing the hot gyrating dancer from Soul Train and In Living Color had done could prepare us for what she revealed in Peter Weir's 1993 film Fearless, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. Spike Lee had picked her out of the crowd (not hard to do), and put her in Do the Right Thing, but here, in Fearless, she got to show what she can really do. This is a heavy-hitting dramatic actress. Her character is damaged beyond repair, weak with grief, and Perez holds nothing back in portraying any of it. She is not always likable. She has flaws. When she is pulled from the wreckage of the plane, her screams and writhing body are not "acted", they are experienced - this is an actress in the ZONE - and it makes all other such scenes pale in comparison. It is a harrowing performance. But the levels she shows: the shyness, the grief, the anger, the dim sparks of humor - This isn't just an emotional attitude (Grieving Mother), this is a fully developed woman, with a life, and a personality, and Perez is totally in charge here, of her talent and instrument, handling the demands of the script. Perez has done a lot of interesting stage work but nowhere on film has she been allowed to be this three-dimensional. There is a scene in the car where Perez feverishly prays the Hail Mary, over and over and over, lost to the world, perhaps forever, as Bridges looks on, horrified, and I sometimes imagine that what I see on his face is he, the actor, thinking, "Holy shitballs, is she good."

BETTY BUCKLEY, Another Woman

In less than 5 minutes of screen time, Betty Buckley almost walks away with Woody Allen's fantastic film Another Woman. She plays the wronged ex-wife of Ian Holm, and she shows up at the engagement party of her ex-husband and his new wife (played by Gena Rowlands) uninvited, and it is a scene so painful, so embarrassing, that I find it nearly unwatchable. She literally vibrates with rage and pain. That's how you do a cameo, folks. She starts off with an embarrassed fumbling, she's there to pick up some of her stuff (oh, really? On that day?), and then picks Rowlands out of the crowd. Ian Holm intervenes, and then all hell breaks loose. When she says the word "ovaries" (she has had a hysterectomy), the event shatters into something else. It is a trainwreck. The wreck of a marriage, the wreck of a life. No one recovers from such an event. Buckley disappears from the film, but she haunts the rest of it. Rowlands can no longer be complacent about her new marriage. She must remember Buckley, and her spitting rage and humiliation, and think to herself: "There. I helped do that. This is the cost of me getting what I want." Betty Buckley is a celebrated actress, of stage mostly, her singing voice bringing her fame and fortune, but here she shows what she is truly capable of. Look out.

HOLLY HUNTER, Living Out Loud

Piano Shmiano, this is Holly Hunter's best performance. She plays Judith Moore, a divorcee who obviously got a great settlement package from her wealthy doctor ex-husband, because she lives in luxury on Park Avenue, but her life seems to have no ... substance. Who is this woman? She gets dressed up at night and goes to a nightclub to watch a singer she loves (played by Queen Latifah), and one night, late night, she befriends (sort of) her elevator man (played by Danny Devito - again, one of his best performances). This is a film that takes place primarily at night, the early hours of the day, when the tide rushes back, and shows you the wreckage of what you have hoped for. Friendships do form, but is it too late? Holly Hunter, who usually plays women of great will and determination (whether they speak or not, a la The Piano), and here, she plays Loneliness with a capital L. To me, this is one of the most acute portraits of loneliness in American cinema. She aches with it. Her skin aches. But this is not a woman accustomed to introspection. She lives totally in a fantasy in her own mind. She sits at the table at the nightclub, ordering martinis (she drinks to dull the pain, Hunter is a great drunk, who knew?), and there are closeups of her face where you can tell that she is not actually there. Or, she IS there, but she's also in her fantasy land, where she sits with a fabulous date at that very same table, a man who will take her home later and make love to her, the wonderful life of connection and relationship that we all dream of. Hunter does this only with her face. She does not live in reality, she lives in that dreamspace. The "substance of things hoped for". There are scenes where she sits alone in her gigantic gleaming kitchen, still dressed up from her night out by herself, wasted from the three or four martinis she had drunk, and she eats a sandwich, and talks to herself. But this is not "movie" talking-to-yourself. All we hear are fragments, brief statements, she is fully in the dreamworld where she is in the midst of a conversation with someone ... we don't know who ... who should be there. These talking-to-yourself scenes are some of the best work she has ever done. They are shockingly vulnerable. Most of us talk to ourselves from time to time. But I've rarely seen a film get it right, what it's like to be that lonely, to have had a "date" with yourself, to sit alone at 3 in the morning, and chat about the day with someone who is not there.

KATHARINE HEPBURN, Bringing Up Baby

Hepburn made her name in films as a dramatic actress. She hit the ground running with A Bill of Divorcement, and then won an Oscar one year later for her tragic portrayal of a haughty pretentious (and yet talented) aspiring actress in Morning Glory. Then came Little Women, where she tore up the screen as Jo March, a literary feisty tomboy. She was a huge star in a very short amount of time. In 1936 came the wonderful Alice Adams, where she was again nominated for an Oscar. After that began her fall from grace, now seen in a completely different light because of her giant life-long success, but in the late 30s that was not at all a done deal for Hepburn. Sylvia Scarlett, her first pairing with Cary Grant, was a flop, and she actually is not all that good in the picture (something she admitted freely). She seemed to stop knowing who she was around this time, at least as an actress. Her stock-in-trade was a heightened sense of drama and emotion, her characters were usually a bit stuck-up. Perhaps the audience tired of seeing her be RIGHT all the time. Then came Bringing Up Baby. A box-office flop at the time, it is now regarded as one of the funniest movies ever made, and an American classic. If you watch Hepburn's films in chronological order, from A Bill of Divorcement to Bringing Up Baby, which I have done, it is nothing less than breathtaking the risks she is taking here, the complete departure her goofy headstrong heiress Susan Vance is. Where did she get the guts? She is hilarious, lovable, clumsy, fearless, and overwhelmingly in love with Cary Grant from the first moment she lays eyes on him. She must have him. In my 5 for the day: Katharine Hepburn piece over at House Next Door, I related the stories of how difficult it was for Hepburn to "get" that part. This makes her success in the role even more amazing, because you can't see the effort at ALL. You would think that this was an actress BORN to play screwball comedy. Unfortunately, it flopped, which was the nail in the coffin for Hepburn's career (so much for current-day assessments of what will and will not last), and she went back to Broadway to do Philadelphia Story, which resurrected her career for all time. But Bringing Up Baby was the real break. She knew, because she was smart, "Okay, the audience is tiring of seeing me play stuck-up prissy characters ... That time is done ... I need to try something else now." A fearless performance, seen in light of her career - and Hepburn was nothing if not a staunch careerist. But she was always more interested in the WORK than the fame. Susan Vance will live on in history, and watching Hepburn run through the dark fields and vales, carrying an enormous butterfly net, calling out in a crazy sing-song voice, "BABY! OH, BABY! COME HERE, BABY! BABY!!!!" is a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

MADELINE KAHN, What's Up, Doc?

This has to go down, along with Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not, as the most amazing female debut of all time. I can recite this movie by heart ("Can you fix a hifi?" "No, sir." "Then SHADDUP.") and Kahn's portrayal of Eunice Burns is one of the funniest performances I have ever seen in my life. She is put-upon, bossy, humorless, the butt of all the jokes, and yet she has a moment where she sits in her hotel room, devastated, crushed, and the door slams on her, and we hear her say, through the closed door, in a bitter crazy voice, "What more can they do to me." as though she's in a high melodrama. To be introduced to Madeline Kahn through this role and not some other more realistic part, means we, as the audience say, "Well. Clearly this woman can do anything." And she can. Eunice Burns experiences every emotion under the sun: fear ("snakes, as you know, have a mortal fear of .... tile"), annoyance ("Pull the door open"), jealousy ("DON'T YOU KNOW THE MEANING OF PROPRIETY?"), sexual terror ("They tried to molest me." "That's .... unbelievable."), outraged pride ("I am not A Eunice Burns, I am THE Eunice Burns"), confusion ("What on earth are you doing with Howard Bannister's rocks??"), devastation (the one shot of her tossing and turning in her sleep, mumbling in horror and outrage), and uncertainty (knocking on the door of 459 Dirella Street: "Hello? Uhm ... hel-lo? Hello?? hello, hello ... uhm ..."). Madeline Kahn IS comedy in this film, from the tip of her crazy red wig to the points of her ridiculous blue shoes.

LEOPOLDINE KONSTANTIN, Notorious

She is first seen in long shot, at the top of the stairway that will prove so crucial to the gripping finale of Hitchcock's Notorious. There is something eerie about how she appears. She halts at the top of the stairs. We cannot see her face, but across that long echoey space, her figure is creepily eloquent, somehow ominous. This is an actress who clearly has stage training, understanding that acting should be a full-body expression, that you mustn't just wait for your close-up to do the heavy work. Slowly, she walks down the stairs, all in one take. We are seeing her from Ingrid Bergman's point of view and obviously Bergman cannot look away. There is something dreadful about her approach. She never takes her eyes off Bergman and then ... she walks right into her closeup. She is an elderly woman, with silver hair in braids on the top of her head. And there is a look in her eyes that could make your blood run cold. I saw Notorious on the big screen at the Film Forum here in New York, and Konstantin's character was a crowd-pleaser. It surprised me, because I had only seen Notorious in the privacy of my own home, and she always seemed quite scary. While that scariness remained, her moments of relish, of sheer ice-eyed evil ("We are protected by the enormity of your stupidity, for a time."), were even more effective on the big screen. She sits up in bed, greeted by her son Claude Rains, who says that he has something horrible to share, something about his wife Alicia. Konstantin sits up, her eyes on fire with glee, righteousness, and relish, and, in one movement, reaches out to the bedside table and swipes out a cigarette from a gleaming box, saying, as she does so, "I have expected this." Actually, she doesn't just say that line. She hisses it. I have seen that scene a million times, but seeing it in a packed movie house, the audience erupted into laughter. Not making fun of it, but because it is so damn good, it is a moment that is perfectly realized. Let's not forget: The line is: "I have expected this." A simple line, which could have been said in a number of cliched ways, but Konstantin, with her gestures and use of props and fluidity of movement, like some sort of coiled serpent, makes it into a symphony of rage and contempt. Konstantin was an Austrian actress, with a long stage career, who got her start in silent movies. This was her moment, her biggest role and opportunity. She has created an indelible character that lives on in the mind long after the film is over.

NICOLE KIDMAN, The Others

I didn't take Nicole Kidman all that seriously as an actress until I saw To Die For, a brilliant portrayal of a sociopath, one for the books, really. Her marriage to Tom Cruise led her to career choices that fell a bit flat, for me. She had been good before (Dead Calm in particular), but the stardom she received, merely as his wife, seemed a bit top-heavy, and seemed to value the wrong things. But then, the marriage ended, and things started to get very very interesting. The Others is an effective film, in and of itself, but without her chilling tightly-controlled masterpiece of a performance, it wouldn't work at all. It is a thriller, but it needs psychological horror behind the actual horror, and that job rests in her capable hands. She is creating a character here, not just trading on her beauty (which I don't blame her for doing, by the way - she's a star, she's beautiful, of course she will "use" her assets), and her work manages to be both meticulous and raw at the very same time. No easy feat. This is a woman with secrets. The biggest being the one she keeps from herself. Kidman walks briskly, fearsomely, tightly, leaving out all of the warmth that she was able to bring to Moulin Rouge. Not an ingratiating character, Kidman is beyond the concerns of being loved here. The terror of not being known to oneself flickers through her eyes from time to time, and over the course of the film, although I disliked her and was glad I didn't know that woman in real life, I was also afraid for her. Such rigidity cannot last. When she walks through a dark room, jerking the huge heavy curtains closed, as closed as they can possibly be, she manages to turn a moment of casual housewifery business into a deep psychological revelation. Her face is stern, chilly, and so the grief she shows at the end, the terror as the memories come piling back in upon her, is truly heartbreaking.

BARBARA STANWYCK, Ball of Fire

David Thomson observed that her specialty was playing "creatively two-faced characters", and while her deadly femme fatale in Double Indemnity is a classic, I find her portrayal of Sugarpuss O'Shea in Ball of Fire to be a real surprise, evidence of her enormous flexibility. It's a comedic spin on her gun-moll dames, softened up a bit, and humorized. She's a tough gal, a nightclub singer who pals around with a gangster named Joe Lilac (played by Dana Andrews in a very funny performance), and hooks up with stuffy professor Gary Cooper, who is working on an encyclopedia and has come to the section on "slang" and he needs her help translating American slang into something comprehensible to this academician in his ivory tower. Naturally, sparks fly. But she's a woman of the world with shady connections. In Double Indemnity she plays a woman with no moral center. She is like an animal, going after what she wants, regardless of who will get hurt. Here, in Ball of Fire, there is a moment when her treachery is revealed, and the sadness on Stanwyck's face, when she says to herself, "I know what I am... a tramp" is devastating, a moment of self-awareness that cuts to the core. She has never been better. The scene where we first see Sugarpuss O'Shea, performing in a nightclub with Gene Krupa and his Orchestra, is enough to show what Stanwyck is bringing to this part: ease, humor, toughness, an ability to take charge, and a sort of delicious lovability that would make any man go weak in the knees. (Clip below the jump.) At the end of the film, after a disastrous and hysterical aborted wedding ceremony with Joe Lilac, she is asked to defend herself, and she says, of Gary Cooper's Professor:

"I love him because he's the kind of guy who gets drunk on a glass of buttermilk, and I love the way he blushes right up over his ears. I love him because he doesn't know how to kiss, the jerk!"

All you have to do is watch how she says that line to see why she is one of the greatest of American actresses, and why her portrayal of Sugarpuss O'Shea is so moving. His very innocence shames her. Yet she loves him. She loves his innocence. However, there's that epithet at the end, "the jerk"! She's got an edge. She's feeling as mushy as she's ever gonna feel, and that pisses her off. He doesn't know how to kiss, the jerk! That's as open as she's gonna get. She never gives it all up. Holds her cards close to her chest, that dame.

KELLY MCGILLIS, Witness

Kelly McGillis never quite found her way in Hollywood, although she got some good leading-lady parts, and her talent doesn't really show up well in projects like Top Gun and The Accused. She seems uncomfortable in her own skin. Not so in Witness, where she plays Rachel Lapp, an Amish woman embroiled in a crime her son witnessed in the restroom of 30th Street Station in Philadelphia. Here, she lands. By that I mean, she has never seemed so comfortable, so present, so essential, so real. Never before and never since. I am interested in the fact that McGillis said she felt totally at sea during filming. She felt outside of the process, and Harrison Ford barely spoke to her, leaving her a bit disoriented. I think Ford was keeping his distance in order to keep their relationship formal and professional, so that the sparks could fly on camera in a way that was startling and new. Some of that chemistry might have been diluted if they had palled around on the set. Regardless of the reasons, McGillis has said she felt totally awkward and out-of-it during the filming of Witness, which makes her accomplishment here even more amazing. It's evidence that being "in control" is not always the best thing for actors. Sometimes a feeling of disorientation can yield astonishing results. The character of Rachel Lapp could have been a cliche, but McGillis is full of surprises here (a good script). But aside from any scenework she does, any of the subtleties she manages to get into the character, what amazes me here is her presence. Ford has great presence, too: watch how Lapp watches him as he gulps down the lemonade. But her presence here is something to be studied and marveled at, mainly because McGillis has pretty much disappeared from the screen by now, and it shows what a good part can do for an actress a bit lost in the career shuffle. Even the way she walks, a sort of plain hearty walk, arms swinging, gives you a sense of the blood pumping through this woman's veins, her heart beating, the beads of sweat on the back of her neck. I find her life here to be palpable, it achieves a certain tangibility rare in movies, and hard to pinpoint or define. Liv Ullmann has that kind of presence. All I can say is, when she is in that kitchen, I smell the coffee brewing, I feel the grains of flour on the tips of her fingers, I can smell the glaze on her cinnamon-rolls bubbling in the oven. I can smell the clean crisp cotton of the sheets, and when she places her hands over Harrison Ford's hot and infected gunshot wound in the middle of the night, the heat emanates from him, and you can feel the cool healing properties of her roughened hands. It's a sexy performance, highly erotic, and that's not because we see her nude at one point. It's because of her presence, her eyes and how they look, the sense that sometimes her breath is coming from high in her throat, the way she gulps, and smiles, and becomes suddenly haughty and forbidding. She vibrates with life, you can almost feel her pulse, keening and thrumming through every scene. So perhaps it's no loss that Kelly McGillis did not go on to become an A-list actress. She seems like a happy person, content with doing stage productions, and also managing a second active career as a drug-abuse counselor. Not everyone has one great performance in them. Some actresses slog along, doing the best they can, without ever landing, without ever capturing life, in its essence, the way McGillis does as Rachel Lapp.

JUDY GARLAND, The Clock

Garland was obviously a phenom in many ways, but The Clock, directed by future husband Vincent Minnelli, was her first adult part, and also the first time where she was the lead in a movie where she didn't sing. It was jarring to many, and she was eventually swayed towards her more traditional successes, but The Clock, and her work in it specifically, is amazing, and really shows just how talented this "phenom" really was. She plays a young working girl in New York City who meets a young soldier on leave (played by Robert Walker), and over the course of a long night, they fall in love. He is only in town for 24 hours, before shipping off to Europe and WWII. They meet-cute, they wander the Park, they go to a museum, they lose track of one another on the subway, they befriend a milkman and go with him on his rounds ... the movie is a delight, full of unforgettable characters (I love Keenan Wynn's railing drunk in the diner who accidentally punches Garland in the face with a wild gesture, in a laugh-out-loud funny moment), and Garland is so good here. She is charming, natural (watch her behavior with the bottle-opener in her apartment, she makes "business" look so easy), sexy, funny, and you totally believe that Robert Walker would fall in love with her instantly. She puts a lot of specificity into her characterization, she's not a gaga-eyed young romantic, there's a bit of weariness to her. Not that she's been around the block, but she's navigating life by herself, and she knows that a girl has to look out for her OWN interests. So she tries to keep Walker at bay, from time to time, reminding him to slow down, boy, slow. When they lose one another on the subway, Garland is desperate. She doesn't even know his last name. On a crazy gamble, she goes to a nearby USO office and tries to explain the situation, that she is looking for someone ... but she doesn't know his last name ... and he looks like this ... and I don't know where I can find him ... and please ... could you help me? The USO worker is appropriately confused, can't help her without a last name, and as Garland slowly backs out of the office, the realization that she has lost this man ... she has lost him ... no way to find him ... sinks in, all of a sudden, and she says, in a spontaneous moment of panic, "What am I going to do?" In the next second, she realizes that she is falling apart in public, in front of a stranger, and she does her best to halt the flood that is coming, but it is already too late, so she hastens to the door to flee, to be alone with her sadness. It is a brilliant moment, of unforced feeling that appears to be happening TO her, the character, rather than orchestrated BY her, the actress. Garland is marvelous in musicals. I don't discount that part of her talent. If your only conception of Garland is her as a musical actress, see The Clock and get ready for the surprise of your life.

"Tarkovsky for me is the greatest [director], the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream." - Ingmar Bergman

From a beautiful post about the Polaroids of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky.

He was inspired by European, American and Japanese directors, especially the Japanese filming scenes showing of the value of the everyday. And I think that that's something that comes out in these photos that I personally find so appealing. Tarkovsky has also expressed interest in the art of Haiku and its ability to create "images in such a way that they mean nothing beyond themselves." These beautiful Polaroids are kind of like that, they create the illusion that stops flight of time, causing a kind of inner reflection and thoughtfulness.

Go read the whole thing.

To get the conversation going, here is my review of what I consider to be Tarkovsky's greatest film, Stalker.

In Clifford Odets' journal, he describes a conversation he had with Lee Strasberg, colleague, director, acting teacher:

[Strasberg] spoke of what he called "the blight of Ibsen", saying that Ibsen had taught most writers after him how to think undramatically. He illustrated this by an example. A man has been used to living in luxury finds he is broke and unable to face life -- he goes home and puts a bullet in his head. That, Lee said, any fair theatre person can lay out into a play. But it is not essentially a dramatic view of life. Chekhov is dramatic, he said, for this is how he treats related material: a man earns a million rubles and goes home and lies down on them and puts a bullet in his head.

The Russians are deeply concerned in their art about the state of a man's soul, and Strasberg's point (while a bit of a generalization) rings very true when you look at their greatest works. Dostoevsky, in the Grand Inquisitor scene in The Brothers Karamazov delineates the struggle of how to lead a moral life better than anyone has done before or since. That scene rivals Paradise Lost in its excavation of man's fear before God, and also his fear before himself. The psychological aspect of things like boredom, money, love, family, are seen through a very specific cultural filter, where man's spiritual life, his spiritual peace, is paramount. Yet nearly impossible to achieve in this lifetime. That's the Russian torment.

It is impossible to speak of Andrei Tarkovsky's films without talking about his philosophy of life. The two are inextricably linked. He did not make all that many films, and while he died quite young, he was able to formulate, through his art, an entire philosophical system that had to do with the struggle of modern man to have a meaningful existence. Tarkovsky is hopeful, as many religious people are, that there will be redemption, but he also seems skeptical about the possibilities of it occurring any time soon. Either way, he knows it will not be easy. Tarkovsky is worried, truly worried, about the spiritual state of modern man, and nowhere is that more clear than in his 1979 masterwork Stalker.

Tarkovsky is an interesting case. He came into his career in the post-Stalin years in Russia, but the Cold War was at its apex when he was making his greatest films. He was able to work with the authorities, to stay within the system, but they gave him a hard time over the years until it got so bad that he defected. He died a year or so later. I believe it broke his heart to leave Russia. He wasn't a provincial man, he read widely, one of his dreams was to film Hamlet (and what I wouldn't give to have seen that!), and he didn't feel that he needed to be in Russia to be an artist; however, Russia was his home. His wellspring. His life.

His film Andrei Rublev (my review here) catapulted him into worldwide fame, and it is a great film. I suppose you could see it as a metaphor for what it was like for the modern-day Soviet, but Tarkovsky didn't look at it that way. Andrei Rublev was a 15th century monk in Russia who did giant triptychs, most of which were destroyed. Only one remains intact. Nothing is known about him as a man. Tarkovsky wanted to examine what kind of man would devote his life to painting pictures of religious exaltation and eternal peace in the midst of a time of great chaos.

As we all know, the Bolsheviks "got rid of religion" (or so they thought, by turning cathedrals into pool halls and Museums of Atheism) but you would never know that from watching Tarkovsky's films, perhaps the most subversive thing about him. He is a deeply religious man. It is a rare talent who can put his feelings for God on the screen. It is also amazing that he was able to "get away with" as much as he did, in that environment. One of the reasons why I think Tarkovsky was able to operate freely for so long ("freely" being relative) is that he stayed away from politics entirely. You could read into his films, you could see them as grand allegories for current-day themes, but the films would suffer as a result. It's similar to many of the great films coming out of Iran right now. You could see in Children of Heaven a buried message, involving the hardships of life in Iran, the ridiculous pressures put on the citizenry (a brother and sister having to share a pair of shoes?), the class divide which is so intense in Tehran - that is definitely all there, but if you only see it as the allegory, you take away much of its magic. These directors, working under these conditions of censorship and oppression, have to be very very tricky, and the good ones always focus on story. The story they are actually telling. Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev is a clarion call for spirituality, for what happens to a society when God is left out. His context there is 15th century Russia, but you can see the parallels.

Tarkovsky was a fan of science fiction, and his 1972 film Solyaris was his first foray into that area. He returns to that territory again in Stalker. He goes even deeper into his life-long concerns about the atrophy of man's spirit in the modern world. He was an anti-materialist, definitely, and his ultimate question about events always was: Will this make man happier? Better? Will this bring him closer to his spirit? Or will this separate him even further? Ironically, Tarkovsky ended his life as an exile - but his films all along, made within Russia, have to do with man being exiled from himself and from God.

Stalker was based on the novella Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, but Tarkovsky made it his own, as he explains here in a 1979 interview:

I had recommended a short novel Picnic on the Roadside, to my friend, the filmmaker Giorgi Kalatozishvili, thinking he might adapt it to film. Afterwards, I don't know why, Giorgi could not obtain the rights from the authors of the novel, the Strugatsky brothers, and he abandoned the idea of this film. The idea began to turn in my head, at first from time to time, and then more and more often. It seemed to me that this novel could be made into a film with a unity of location, time, and action. This classic unity - Aristotelian in my view - permits us to approach truly authentic filmmaking, which for me is not action film, outwardly dynamic. I must say, too, that the script of Stalker has nothing in common with the novel ... except for the two words, "Stalker" and "Zone". So you see the history of the origins of my film is deceptive.

In Stalker, there has been some sort of apocalyptic event. It is thought that a meteorite had crashed into "our small country" (the country is never named), but the meteorite was never found. Troops were sent to investigate the destroyed area, and they never returned. It became clear to the nameless authorities that the area had to be cordoned off, and it is known as The Zone. A great mystery surrounds the Zone. Nobody knows the truth of it. What is it? There is a rumor that in the center of the Zone, there is a Room, and in that Room, man's greatest wish (whatever it may be) can come true. But how to get into the Zone, which is surrounded by electrical fences and barbed wire, and armed outposts?

This is where The Stalker comes in. The Stalker acts as a guide. People pay him money to take them into the Zone. It is a dangerous prospect. Not just getting past the guards, but once in the Zone, all bets are off. It is a place that changes, constantly - the laws of physics do not apply. It is as though the land itself is alive, and it recognizes when strangers have arrived, so it starts to shift, throwing traps and pitfalls in their way.

The Stalker lives in a dreary cottage with his unhappy wife and daughter, who has something wrong with her legs. She is "a child of the Zone", which suggests to me that some Chernobyl event may have occurred. The landscape outside the Stalker's cottage is terrifying and industrial. Huge nuclear power plants loom in the distance, and it appears that the entire world is an abandoned construction site.

At the beginning of the film, the Stalker meets up with two men who want to go to the Zone. Money changes hands. They stand in a dingy bar and talk over how it will go.

The two men who enlist the Stalker's help are known as "Writer" and "Professor". Everyone has their own reasons to want to go to the Zone. It is only what YOU think of it that matters. The Writer is cynical, and he feels he has lost his inspiration. When we first see him, he is having a conversation with a woman in a fur coat (who also wants to go to the Zone, but the Stalker sends her packing), and she is wondering about the mystery of it all, she references the Bermuda Triangle. The Writer scoffs at this. There is no mystery. There are no UFOs, no invisible forces - he is a realist. And yet here he is, about to embark on a journey into the unknown. The Professor teaches physics at a university, and because of his life's work examining things like atoms and protons he is more willing to accept that the invisible and mysterious are also real, but his desire to go to the Zone comes from his yearning to make tangible the intangible. He needs proof. The Stalker, a weary tormented man, has his doubts about both of these men, but they start on their journey.

The opening sequence, with the three men in a massive roofless jeep, driving around through decaying warehouses, is a masterpiece of style. The setting is extraordinary, and you wonder where the hell they were filming. These do not look like sets. The sound of dripping water is paramount (a very Tarkovskyian sound - it appears in most of his films), and the three men drive around in circles, hiding from the guards patrolling the main gate. It becomes clear that a train comes to the outpost, and this will be their way in. The gates open for the train, momentarily, and they will drive in behind the train. The Stalker explains to the other two that while it is dangerous, the guards do not want to go further into the Zone, everyone is afraid of it. The interlopers have that fear on their side.

Tarkovsky drives his point home by filming the early sections of the film in a saturated black-and-white. It looks like a daguerrotype. Like we are looking at a world long gone away. Tarkovsky preferred to film in black and white, he felt it was a more realistic cinematic language, but here he chose to film the scenes in the Zone itself in vibrant color, to perhaps suggest that the Zone is what everyone thinks it is: a magical place where dreams can come true.

The journey through the Zone is filmed methodically. I think Tarkovsky's point about Aristotelian unities is one of the strengths of this film which could, if you think about it, have seemed rather silly. A magical land where dreams come true? But the journey is shown, step by step, and as they travel, they talk. The philosophical differences of the men become clear. Arguments break out. Both the Writer and the Professor have a hard time just doing what the Stalker says, even though he begs them to follow his instructions exactly - the Zone is dangerous, like a predator, it will eat you up if you don't follow the rules. That is why they hired him.

Stalker is a dialogue-heavy script, unlike Andrei Rublev which is told mainly through images. I loved the dialogue. It wrestles with the issues, as opposed to presenting them clearly. It is obvious that these three men have different contexts and concerns, but above all else, you worry for them. The Zone, as filmed by Tarkovsky, calls to mind Planet of the Apes, an eerily familiar landscape, but it is a place where a civilization has died. Enormous telephone poles stand tipped over to the side. Buildings lie in ruin. In the earlier scenes, nature is almost nonexistent. There is no grass. The only water in the film appears in a glass on the bedside table, and dripping from the various ceilings, a sure sign of decay. But in the Zone, there is a rushing river. The sound of the water, roaring by, is a tumultuous sound of life - but it's also somewhat ominous, as the entire Zone is. Beneath the water (in a stunning tracking shot, my favorite shot of the film), you can see debris from the world gone by. Fragments of newspaper, syringes, old coins, a religious postcard ... Tarkovsky slowly trains the camera to pan over these objects, seen through the distorted waviness of water.

It is difficult to not see in all of this a criticism of the Soviet Union's rapacious attitude towards the environment. The world is one of the means of production, to be used as such. Used up and left behind. Tarkovsky and his crew were exposed to toxic chemicals during the shooting of the film, and Tarkovsky probably already had the cancer that would eventually kill him. His evocation of the environment (all environments) in Stalker has to be seen to be believed. The Stalker, the Writer, and the Professor, walk cautiously through an overgrown field, towards some unknown destination, having to trust in fate, having to let their innermost wishes come to the surface, because that is the only reason they are there, and the only way they will survive.

As the three men get closer and closer to the mythical "Room" at the center of the Zone, they all start to grapple more openly with what it is they are seeking. What would it be like to have your dreams come true? Again, I go back to the anecdote I started this essay with: Lee Strasberg's conception of what was dramatic, and why Chekhov was the primary example. What is dramatic about a man losing his money and killing himself? Isn't that what we expect? But how about a man becoming rich and then killing himself?

Why I thought of this anecdote when I sat down to write this essay was not just that it seemed to have something to say about Russian artists, but also that the Stalker's predecessor, the one who trained him and taught him to be a Stalker, was known as the Porcupine. And he came back from the Zone one time and found himself fabulously rich. The next week he hung himself. The specter of this hangs over our current-day Stalker - because there is something terrible about dreams, and wishes ... and one of the things he tries to make clear about the Room, is that your wish must be something from your deepest heart - not a selfish or worldly short-term wish.

This is a true Tarkovskyian warning. Man has been made corrupt by money. Tarkovsky made no bones about his feelings about the West, and while he enjoyed time in Italy and England, etc., he felt that the West had abandoned spirituality in pursuit of worldly goods, and the toll of this cannot even be measured. By abandoning God, Man has abandoned himself. Tarkovsky worried about this (meaning, worked on it) in film after film. Man must look to God, to deeper and higher truths, for what he wants out of life. The Stalker repeatedly warns the Writer and the Professor about this, but it's one of the trials of the human condition. How many of us really can "let go" of the world like that? Tarkovsky insists that it is the only way.

An eerie frightening film, Stalker makes use of spectacular natural locations: empty dark tunnels, mossy overgrown buildings, a quiet reflective river - but there is also one fantastical sequence when they find themselves in a giant inner room in the Zone, with mounds of cylindrical sand on the floor, and two flying cawing birds, the only sign of life so far (except for an ominous black dog who seems to stalk the periphery of the three men's journey). This space is not the Room, but it is the threshold to the Room, and everything starts to break down there. The men, so close to the truth (the yearning of all mankind when looking up at the stars and wondering what the hell is up there?) begin to resist, begin to fight against what is to come.

The last scene of the film (which I wouldn't dream of revealing) packs such an enormous punch (visually, thematically - it is different from all that came before) - that it acts as a catalyst in the viewer. It tells us something we have not yet learned. It suggests that things really ARE not what they seem, that they are far more mysterious than anyone had ever dreamed. Not even the Stalker knows the real truth.

To quote Tarkovsky's favorite play:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

"He tried to get into the Brat Pack, but he wanted to change it to The Smile Bunch."

So says Molly Ringwald about Ralph Macchio. His "niceness" was what held him back, apparently.

Not anymore. No more Mr. Nice Guy.

A gripping new documentary about his struggle back to superstardom: Wax On, F*** Off.

(Note from me: I have written before about how one episode of Eight is Enough changed my life. Nothing has made me happier than the fact that someone put this video together. I am literally smiling from ear to ear right now.)

"This time give us a little awe."

Excerpt from Bradford Dillman's book Are you Somebody? An Actor's Life:

In The Greatest Story Ever Told [John] Wayne was cast as a Roman captain who visits the scene of the Crucifixion and says, standing at the feet of Christ, "Truly this was the son of God."

Director George Stevens was riding a crane when the actor stepped in for a take.

Wayne said, "TrulythiswasthesonaGod."

"Cut. Duke, let's remember you're talking about Jesus here. You might want to take the speech a bit slower."

"You got it, George."

Take Two. The Centurion says, "Truly. ThiswasthesonaGod."

"Cut. Duke, not reverent enough. Let's try it again, and this time give us a little awe."

"You got it, George."

Take Three. The superstar says, "Aw, truly. ThiswasthesonaGod."

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

I've moved on from the "Modern" volume, and am now in the "Contemporary" volume. The two volumes are organized by birth-date of poet.

Ted Hughes makes people angry. His name was repeatedly defaced off of Plath's grave by Plath fanatics, who live their lives in a state of mania and rage at this man who "caused" the death of their goddess. No. He didn't cause it. The man had an affair. He didn't invade a small country, he didn't kill a puppy, he had an affair. Lots of people have affairs. It sucks, but it's not a crime on the level of genocide or something. His affair did have an unbelievably tragic and horrifying aftermath, something which he obviously could not foresee at the time. Plath had a history of mental illness and had tried to commit suicide before. They had two children, Frieda and Nicholas (Nicholas recently killed himself, and I am so emotionally involved with this entire group of people that I remember thinking, "I am so glad that his father did not live to see this" and also, "Poor Frieda." Just a tragedy.) Hughes was the executor of Plath's estate, a situation which enraged the Plath-ians, because he was the Devil, don't you understand. But he, a world-famous poet himself, went along with the sad job of editing her Collected Poems, editing her last volume Ariel, and also editing her journals (his most controversial job ever). I suppose he could never have pleased anyone. He made decisions in the editing which still rankle. I get that Plath was his wife, but she was also a public figure, and my view is: her work belongs to me more than it belongs to him.

Frieda Hughes, daughter of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, wrote an article, on the re-publication of Ariel in its original order (Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement (P.S.)) - its first posthumous publication, under Ted Hughes's editorship, was ironed out into a chronological order:

Criticism of my father was even levelled at his ownership of my mother's copyright, which fell to him on her death and which he used to directly benefit my brother and me. Through the legacy of her poetry my mother still cared for us, and it was strange to me that anyone would wish it otherwise.

After my mother's suicide and the publication of Ariel, many cruel things were written about my father that bore no resemblance to the man who quietly and lovingly (if a little strictly and being sometimes fallible) brought me up - later with the help of my stepmother. All the time, he kept alive the memory of the mother who had left me, so I felt as if she were watching over me, a constant presence in my life.

It appeared to me that my father's editing of Ariel was seen to "interfere" with the sanctity of my mother's suicide, as if, like some deity, everything associated with her must be enshrined and preserved as miraculous. For me, as her daughter, everything associated with her was miraculous, but that was because my father made it appear so, even playing me a record of my mother reading her poetry so I could hear her voice again. It was many years before I discovered my mother had a ferocious temper and a jealous streak, in contrast to my father's more temperate and optimistic nature, and that she had on two occasions destroyed my father's work, once by ripping it up and once by burning it. I'd been aghast that my perfect image of her, attached to my last memories, was so unbalanced. But my mother, inasmuch as she was an exceptional poet, was also a human being and I found comfort in restoring the balance; it made sense of her for me. The outbursts were the exception, not the rule. Life at home was generally quiet, and my parents' relationship was hardworking and companionable. However, as her daughter, I needed to know the truth of my mother 's nature - as I did my father's - since it was to help me understand my own.

Frieda Hughes's voice is a welcome change to the usual dialogue about Hughes. She is quite a good writer herself.

Hughes supposedly destroyed the last two years of Plath's journal, because they were too painful for him to look at. While I understand where he is coming from, I still wish that I could read those last two years. About 10 years ago, the "unabridged" version of Plath's journals came out, but those two years were still not listed, so please: don't call them "unabridged" then. Yes, there was a lot more in this volume than what was in the volume before, which I read until it fell apart. But those two final journals remain missing. I still have hopes that they will turn up. That they actually were not destroyed. That his witch-sister Olwyn (now she really is the Devil, I declare it) had hidden them away, because she saw herself as the gatekeeper of the Hughes honor, and she had never liked Sylvia anyway. A couple of months ago, my friend Cara, another Plath fan, wrote an awesome international-thriller piece, starring myself, Cara, and Tracey, and - well, you'll just have to read it for yourself.

Following Plath's suicide in 1963, Hughes moved in with Assia Wevill, the woman with whom he had had an affair during his marriage to Plath. He must have been crazy at that time. My heart goes out to him. Assia took care of Frieda and Nicholas, who were only babies at that time. She was pregnant herself, with Hughes's child, and in 1965 she gave birth to a little girl they named Shura. No one can know what goes on behind closed doors, although there's plenty of nasty speculation, something I have no interest in. I'm basically on Hughes's side in all of this, or let's say I can see his side. No one has an affair thinking, "Hopefully my wife will kill herself from her grief." To assign that sort of malevolent motive to this man, who obviously was a bit wild, is unfair to the nth degree (I mean, Sylvia knew that from the start - their "meeting" wasn't going out for Cherry Cokes at the drivein - they met wasted at a literary party and made out within minutes of meeting each other, and Plath bit his cheek. They were married 4 months later. So the signs were there. These were both volatile intense people.) I also don't believe in judging him harshly. So he liked crazy women. That's obvious. So? Should the man be burned on a pyre of hate for all time because he was drawn to crazy women? Horrifyingly, Assia imitated Plath's suicide in 1969, only she upped the ante, killing their young daughter along herself. I do not blame Hughes for that. I blame Assia. Hughes must have ... I have no idea. Such an experience is so outside of normal life, I can't imagine how he bore it.

Ted Hughes, in a heartwrenching letter to Lucas Myers, on September 29, 1984, referred to those terrible years:

I keep writing this and that, but it seems painfully little for the time I spend pursuing it. I wonder sometimes if things might have gone differently without the events of 63 & 69. I have an idea of those two episodes as steel doors shutting down over great parts of myself, leaving me that much less, just what was left, to live on. No doubt a more resolute artist would have penetrated the steel doors - but I believe big physical changes happen at these times, big self-anaesthesias. Maybe life isn't long enough to wake up from them.

That just breaks my heart. That's from the recent publication of Letters of Ted Hughes, a book I have yet to read, unfortunately. It's been on my Must-Read list ever since it came out.

Okay. Now let's talk about his poetry, shall we? I just had to get all of the personal stuff out of the way. Hughes has always been a controversial figure, not just because of his horrible and famous personal life, but because of his poetry, which is fierce, violent, bloody, and very much out of the tenor of his particular time. You read the work of his contemporaries (especially in the 50s, when he was becoming famous), and you can feel the difference. His poems are frightening. There is a primal energy at work, nature being red in tooth and claw and all that. Hughes is all about that red in tooth and claw.

Calvin Bedient wrote, in re: Hughes:

His weakness is not violence but the absolute egotism of survival. It is the victor he loves, not war.

It was one of the things that drew Plath to him. You can feel his influence in her poetry at that time. She was such a cerebral thing, so mannered and precocious, not to mention self-centered (which is one of the best parts of her poetry). But after meeting him, she suddenly starts writing about owls and rabbits and bogs ... perhaps trying to turn her glance outwards a bit. It's some of her nicest work. There is a symbiosis at work here, and you can feel her influence on him as well.

Michael Schmidt, in Lives of the Poets, writes:

She [Plath] is the deliberate poet, she devises strategies, she competes for space and attention. She is experimental, setting herself exercises. She is an ironist. If the energies of their language at times seem comparable, they flow from different sources and it was more than their human proximity than a sense of common poetic objectives that make them seem so close in their marked differences, their incompatabilities.

But enough about Plath. I'll get to her later on my Poetry Bookshelf. Oh, you can bet I will.

The Norton Anthology introduction to Hughes says:

When he looked at nature, he found predators and victims; when he showed nature looking at humanity, as in "Crow's First Lesson," the same dynamic appeared. The poet's imagination whirls with increasing wildness, until some readers long for modulations of this baleful glare. Such ferocity, however, is so rare in English poetry, and Hughes was so effective as its exponent, that he gripped a considerable audience. He could not have done so by subject alone: his compression, his daring vocabulary, and his jarring rhythms all contributed. In contrast to the rational lucidity and buttoned-up form of his English contemporaries in the Movement such as Philip Larkin and Donald Davie, Hughes fashions a mythical consciousness in his poems, embodied in violent metaphors, blunt syntax, harsh alliterative clusters, bunched stresses, incantatory repetitions, insistent assonances, and a dark, brooding tone.

It's powerful stuff. I love it. He's one of the few poets who can actually take my breath away when reading some of his work. And yes, sometimes it's TOO intense. You need a break from it. But imagine what it must have been like for HIM. Hughes was a craftsman of the highest order, and he had great discipline (at least in his working habits). He was prolific, and determined. He worked HARD.

Here is Michael Schmidt, again:

A writer of many parts, he was never content to stop with poetry. He wrote stories, children's poetry, stage pieces. He invented a "talking without words," Orghast. He translated from the poets of Eastern Europe and, triumphantly in 1996, from Ovid. He was a powerful advocate, especially of Emily Dickinson and Keith Douglas. He was drawn to manifestations of power and to those creatures (some of them human) who manage to survive the excesses of power. Singularity, the "single mind sized skull," intrigued him; in Shakespeare's tragedies how a single human displaces the more complex elements of character and compels human action much as instinct compels animal action. His poem "Thrushes" is an alarming statement of this interest, seeming to celebrate pure instinct. Here is another kind of candor, a poetic commitment to theme that does not reflect on morality but on essential energy, which is not "considered speech" in Davie's sense but "authentic speech" (some of it hard to speak aloud), the language of Heathcliff rather than Linton. Humanism is alluring but inadequate, the old symbols bankrupt.

There's a lot in Dickinson that calls to mind Hughes: the violent imagery, the sudden pricks and cuts that pepper her work, as though life itself is an assault on her. Hughes' animal poems are amazing. He does not anthropomorphize like D.H. Lawrence did. He observes. His poems on owls and pikes and jaguars are stunning examples of how poets often can teach us how to see. If we let them. Hughes was fascinated by the other-ness of animals, and had been from his earliest years. He was born in Yorkshire, in a wild woolly area, and grew up hunting, fishing, tramping through bogs. In a way, his poetry can be seen as a tribute to his own father, and the life his father lived, so different from the urban and academic bustle that Hughes became ensconced in. He went to Cambridge, and majored in anthropology and archaeology, another thing that set him apart from his contemporaries. While he was already well-known in literary circles when he met Plath in 1956, it wasn't until the late 60s and early 70s that his fame became worldwide. He had other works in circulation, but he published two volumes of poetry then - Wodwo in 1967 and Crow in 1970, which brought him fame, renown, and controversy. He was always a lightning rod for controversy, and not just because of his association with Plath. His work is confrontational. Some of it is hard to take. The moral implications are sometimes dodgy, if you care about that sort of thing. What is Hughes actually saying? He was Poet Laureate. He wrote odes for the Queen Mum and Princess Diana. He was establishment. But there was always this cloud of something else over him, people didn't know how to feel about him. He kept his counsel. It must have been difficult, as the Plath cult heated up, to not defend himself from all of the accusations. But he never said a word. Until 1998, when, right before he died, he published, to much media frenzy, Birthday Letters: Poems, a volume of poetry addressed entirely to Sylvia Plath (except for, I think, two poems. All the rest are addressed to "you", meaning Plath). It was unbelievable, to read that book for the first time, to hear Hughes's "version" of events (this goes along with my comments about Red Cliff, strangely enough). He knew, at that point, that he was dying. He had some things to get off his chest, before he went. Let them pick apart his corpse once he's gone. The volume got mixed reviews, at least in terms of the poetry, but it is a fascinating and illuminating volume, and there are lines there that are heart-cracking. I actually didn't find it defensive, as some others did, and even if he was defensive, who the hell could blame the guy? You put up with being Enemy #1 for thirty years and see how calm and placid YOU are able to remain. I found the poems to be personal, raw, honest, and complex. Life is not always simple. People don't always behave honorably. He had suffered enough for his sins in 1962. This was a direct address to a woman he obviously had loved dearly, despite his extramarital shenanigans, a woman he thought he could save (I think he had that "savior" complex that some men have, being drawn to messed-up women they can help), a woman who was the mother of his two beloved children, and the shocking thing about the volume is that direct-address format. It's almost unbearably intimate at times. The poems don't feel "worked on". They seem pretty much dashed-off, which is a total change from Hughes's taut style in all the rest of his work. They are jarring. Totally.

Schmidt writes:

[The Birthday Letters] is a partial triumph, lacing in intimacy, a confession that must assert and reassert its sincerity, a candor that wants to be believed. At the root of the poems is love, of course, but also a complex set of angers that, in order to keep them under control, Hughes had to convey in a largely matter-of-fact prosody, writing against his cadential instincts. It is a fascinating experiment, a candor that is cold, calculated and only marginally vulnerable, the ultimate in his poetry of survival, counting the cost and discounting (obliquely) the lies that have grown around the story of two young poets and their marriage.

While, on some level, he will always be "married" to Plath, in readers' minds, his work stands apart, and in order to get clear on his identity as a poet, it is sometimes necessary to try to get Plath out of the way, not an easy task. There are those who only read Hughes looking for "clues" as to what he was ACTUALLY saying about Plath, a tremendously boring way to look at his poetry, in my opinion. I am not saying I always succeed. I am a Plath fan from the time I was 16 years old, and I have had a lifelong relationship with her work (it grows, morphs, changes, it is never one thing), and I came to Hughes way later, although he was a huge figure to me in my mind because of his marriage to Plath. I was never one of those who thought that Hughes was the devil incarnate. He was a man. He effed up his marriage. But let's be honest: Plath was no angel, and she cannot have been easy to live with. She felt intimidated by her husband's work, she had demons from her childhood which gave her agonizing sometimes years-long bouts with writer's block, and her competitive relationship with her husband was something that she could barely acknowledge. At the same time, Hughes was baffled by what was happening: He had married a POET, why was she so obsessed with housewifery? Couldn't they just keep on being bohemian and not worry about that domestic stuff? He didn't understand. He openly admits that in Birthday Letters. He had married her after knowing her 4 months. There was much he didn't know. So in many ways, Plath forced him away, she needed him to be a monster, because that was the male-female dynamic she understood. Her father died when she was a child. After that, she needed men to leave her, it was essential that she keep playing out that earlier drama. She probably was not aware of all of this on a conscious level, although her poems are brutally honest about it. Hughes can't have had an easy time of it, with her as a wife. There were two victims in that marriage. Nobody "won" here.

The poem I chose today to go along with this post is "Horses", written in 1957. A strange connection (and sorry, but Plath can't seem to keep herself out of this) is Plath's famous poem "Ariel", also about a horse at dawn, and written in the terrible autumn of 1962, after Hughes left her, and only a couple of months before she killed herself. "Ariel" has some similar elements to Hughes's poem here, the whole "horizon" aspect - with Plath flinging herself at the horizon, with the rising sun - into the "cauldron of morning".

But let us let Hughes's poem speak for itself. It may not be his most famous, but it is one of my favorites of his. It really shows his power of language, his energy of image, and the strange visionary aspect of how he sees things.

Horses

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,

Not a leaf, not a bird -
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.
But the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the moorline - blackening dregs of the brightening grey -
Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:

Huge in the dense grey - ten together -
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,

with draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.

I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.
Grey silent fragments

Of a grey silent world.

I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.
The curlew's tear turned its edge on the silence.

Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted

Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showed blue,

And the big planets hanging -
I turned

Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

And came to the horses.
There, still they stood,
But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,

Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves
Stirring under a thaw while all around them

The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.
Not one snorted or stamped,

Their hung heads patient as the horizons,
High over valleys in the red levelling rays -

In din of crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing the curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.

Red Cliff (2008); Directed by John Woo

John Woo's epic Red Cliff was butchered for its American release, cut down from its over-four-hour length to two hours. I have read of what was cut, and it actually makes me wince. Things like character motivation, small moments (the tiger hunt for example), set-ups of the historical situation, a voiceover was added at the beginning ... Just a mess. It was released in Asia in two parts, and now, through Netflix, you can see the whole thing. I couldn't recommend it more highly if I tried. Superlatives won't even do. Only a cliche will express what I mean: Red Cliff, in its full version, is a must-see. A giant hit in Asia (one of the most successful highest-grossing films of all time), it is a universal epic, and yet one of its strengths is how rooted it remains in the culture of the land from which the movie sprung. Its eyes are not on the West, it doesn't care about us, it is not pandering to us, its eyes are in its own past. This is history writ large, the tale of the Battle of the Red Cliffs, in 208-209 A.D.

One of my side obsessions (I have to kind of pick and choose which I let become the major obsessions, because there are only so many hours in the day) is military strategy through the ages. I love John Keegan's work (what I've read of it anyway), and I tore through Victor Davis Hanson's Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power, trying to follow the moves of cavalry and flanking and pincer formations and all that jazz. I could tell you almost every strategic military move in the Battle of Bunker Hill. It's part of the history of the region where I grew up, and also my country. The Battle of Red Cliffs is unfamiliar to me, and part of the joys of the film is opening up my mind and my curiosity to that part of Chinese history. It was the end of the Han Dynasty, and alliances were formed to combat the Prime Minister Cao Cao, run amok on his own grandiose power-grab. As with most famous historical stories, there are many versions: the accepted version, the romantic version, the post-modern version, if you will. Wherein does truth lie? Remember: it is those who write the history books who have the final say. At least until someone comes along to examine it again and say, "Now wait just a cotton-pickin' minute ..." For almost a century, John Adams' and Thomas Jefferson's "version" of Alexander Hamilton was the accepted version. And Hamilton died young, so he wasn't around to defend himself, or exonerate himself. It has taken modern-day historians in the last couple of decades to re-examine this historical figure, strip away some of the accumulated prejudices (many of them unexamined) and look at him freshly. Here's how I like to think about it: To John Adams, Alexander Hamilton was a dangerous individual. He had to be stopped and destroyed. That's John Adams's view, and it was very true to him. There was a grandiose self-destructive tyrannical streak in Hamilton. So although I admire Alexander Hamilton immensely (uhm, obviously), I find it interesting to remove myself from partisanship, or a defensive stance and take in what everyone else had to say about him. The battle over Alexander Hamilton continues. Beware those who want to have the last word. They want conversations to END, not continue.

And with Red Cliff, I was in military strategy HEAVEN. Give me outnumbered troops, surrounded on all sides, and have them figure a way out of it, through cleverness, wilyness and sheer trickery (Washington having troops parade past a certain field, looping around to parade again, to give the illusion that there were more soldiers there than there really were) - and I am a happy camper. For example, my favorite scene in Master and Commander, in a film full of great scenes, is the one where they disguise their ship to be other than what it is, a feint, a camouflage, like the bugs who can disguise themselves as twigs. Imagine an entire movie with scenes like that. Imagine an entire movie that immerses you in the minutia of military strategy, in the 3rd century, and you'll get an idea of the sheer joy of Red Cliff.

But it doesn't skimp on character, either, which is why it is essential to see it in its unedited version, as John Woo meant it to be seen.

To be honest, I didn't get all of the names straight, but I'll do my best with what I have. Red Cliff takes place at the end of the Han Dynasty, when the young untried emperor Sun Quan (played by Zhao Wei, seen in the first stunner of a scene sitting in a giant room in front of his cranky advisors, wearing a fey dangley crown, and he seems soft, like a typical useless monarch, more interested in playing with birds than fighting war) finds himself in a confrontation with a general named Cao Cao (played by Zhang Fengyi in a fantastic performance) over suppressing the upstart warlords in the south. The king resists. But he is not respected by anyone. His word carries no weight (and his transformation from that soft oblivious bird-lover in the first scene to a ferocious and focused warrior is one of the pleasures of this movie). Cao Cao easily sees his chance, and goes off on his own, with a giant army in tow to "pacify" (a terrifying word in military parlance, along the lines of "cleanse") the South. The empire is thrown into chaos. Divide and conquer, right? A couple of far-seeing men realize that it would be far better to form an alliance than to continue to war with one another, which would weaken them in the face of Cao Cao's onslaught. Previously warring factions join together. It is tense. The enemy of my enemy is my friend and all that. But who to trust? How will the alliance last? They are outnumbered. Cao Cao has the force of the Empire behind him.

Takeshi Kaneshiro plays Zhuge Liang, a military advisor to the new alliance, a crucial player, who stares at clouds, and wind patterns, based on his experience as a farmer, and comes up with brilliant plans to conquer Cao Cao's army. It is a marvelous performance, moving and mysterious. Who is this man? We never know the whole story. Does he have a wife? It isn't known. He is a skilled military tactician, and yet he admits freely that he battles anxiety, which is why he carries a giant bird-feather fan at all times. It relaxes him to fan himself. What an amazing character detail. Never explained. I love a script that has confidence like that. We are left to imagine what it is he is anxious about. He is not pathologized. Nothing like that. On the contrary, we admire him tremendously. He stands by the river. Cao Cao's forces are massed across the river. It seems that all is lost. He notices that a small turtle is sweating. That means that fog is coming in the next day, which will give them a huge advantage. He is a marvelous character. I love his face. It is a kind and intelligent face.

Zhou Yu (played by Tony Leung) is a veteran warrior who has holed himself up with his ragtag band of men (many of whom are not more than boys), training them relentlessly. He is in service to the Emperor, and yet, what will that mean for him? It is complicated a bit for him because Cao Cao once upon a time fell in love with his wife (played ravishingly by Chi-Ling Lin), and Zhou Yu knows this, so all along the question persists: Did Cao Cao start this war to "capture" his wife? It turns out that this is not just a neurotic question.

Zhou Yu and Zhuge Liang would be fierce foes in any other time, but in this specific time, they become important friends. It is a beautiful and complex portrait of male friendship. There is a scene where they meet, and, after dinner, they play music together, on two different instruments, an intense and competitive duet, the two of them looking to outdo the other, by the sheer virtuosity of their playing. It's a sexual scene. Sex is an important part of war, maybe the most important part, although rarely acknowledged. How much of war is one guy insisting that his dick is bigger than the other guy's? And here, in this sensitive and exciting scene, of duelling zithers (or whatever it is they are playing), you feel that these men, without language, have bonded, one to the other. They have said to each other: "You. You are the one. I trust no one. Remember that. But here, in this moment, I trust you. You. You are the one." It makes all other "buddy movies" pale in comparison, Tony Leung and Takeshi Kaneshiro playing with passion and also one-upmanship, glancing at each other through the scene, a clear sign of intent and desire. Their alliance is not formed with words or a binding contract. It is formed playing music together. Zhou Yu's wife says to her husband, after their guest leaves, "Zhuge Liang is ready for war." She could tell. From how he played music. Don't discount women's intuition, how it senses the subcurrent. She was right.

THAT is an "action script".

Preparations for war begin. One of the leaders of a Southern province has his own army (he's played by Sun Quan, a man of deep convictions, but caution as well), and they are seen early on fighting, and trying to protect the fleeing refugees at the same time. A choice is to be made. A faction of the army is devoted to protecting the refugees, and it becomes clear they will lose the battle if they do not remove those troops to go to the frontlines. But that will leave the refugees unprotected. Sun Quan says to Zhuge Liang, "These are Han people. If we do not protect them, then what is this war for?"

It is a deep and pertinent point, one of the backbones of the script. What is war for? I believe that sometimes you just have to fight. There is a greater good. Stand up and be counted. War is hell, as the saying goes, but so is tyranny. Tyranny is a life of living dead. Better to die for the cause than go down passively under the black boot of a despot. Jafar Panahi is an example of that. As is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Ryzsard Kapusinski, Vaclav Havel, the men I consider to be my intellectual and spiritual idols. They knew how to fight. But is there such a thing as an honorable war? I believe there is, obviously, but these are not easy questions, especially not when you are on a battlefield. Red Cliff, in its length and scope, grapples with that issue. Honestly, I think, although obviously we are meant to sympathize with the Tony Leung side of the fight, Cao Cao is not a faceless sneering comic-book villain. John Woo is smart. Cao Cao, too, is operating from a set of assumptions, and his own belief in right and wrong. It is just that his version of right and wrong clashes with Zhou Yu's version. Who is right? Well, the history books tell us that the victor is right. Right? Not so fast. There are scenes when Cao Cao uses dirty tactics, to terrorize his enemy's morale. Typhoid is raging amongst his soldiers, hundreds of them have died. Instead of cremating them, as per the sanitary customs of the day, instead he sets the dead free on barges, to float over to the enemy camp, where they will then be handled and touched by Zhou Yu's forces, not knowing that the bodies are infected and contagious. To Zhou Yu, this is not in the rule-book. The rule-book of an "honorable" war. It is important to him to fight with honor. But make no mistake: he wants to crush his enemy. Red Cliff handles these complex issues of warfare with finesse. It's not so much that we see both sides. It's that we see that war is brutal. You do what you have to do. And it is best when warriors remember what it is they are fighting for. All of that can be lost in the chaos of the battle. A good commander knows that, and prepares his troops accordingly. Training is key. Watching these men fight, the organization, the shields all coming down, as one, to buttress against the flying arrows, is nothing less than absolutely thrilling. It is brilliant war-time filmmaking. Every scene tops the former. It's hard to believe that's true, in a 4-plus hour film, but it's true.

Zhao Wei (an awesome actress) plays the emperor's tomboy sister, an accomplished equestrienne and archer, and a woman unwilling to play her assigned role as a woman. She becomes an effective spy, infiltrating Cao Cao's forces, impersonating a boy, calling to mind Shakespeare's many heroines in drag, Viola, Rosalind, Portia. How many women have seen such a chance to make a difference, in history, and taken it? Their names are not known to us, but they existed. She is the first over the wall. She has no fear. She is a patriot. Yet John Woo gives her room to be a woman, too, susceptible to things like softness, connection, a possibility of love, in the wrong camp. I have to admit I was afraid for her character. Not so much in terms of what would happen to her, but in how the script would treat her. Would she be used as a gimmick? Would her femaleness be used as a plot point, something to garner cheap sympathy? By that I mean: I was afraid that her womanhood would be revealed, and she would be on the verge of being gang-raped, and she would then be saved by her special friend in the enemy camp. If you think I'm exaggerating, then just picture how such women are usually treated in action movies, from A to Z, and how their "courage" in being "manly" is usually punished in the most female of ways. Red Cliff did not disappoint me, and I take such things very very seriously. I care about how women are portrayed on film. I don't think they should be always good, or victorious, no. On the contrary. But when womanhood is used cheaply, to bring up primal protective patriarchal responses in the audience, that's when I get my back up. It's similar to filmmakers who use the Holocaust as a plot-point, a cheap shortcut to getting the audience on its side. I'm looking at you, Swing Kids. (As my friend Mitchell said, "Swing Kids appears to be about how, despite the Holocaust, a bunch of German teenagers managed to have a good time during the war.") But Red Cliff didn't go that way. It's a stronger film for it. It did not betray her character. It did not betray me, the audience member rooting for her. Things do not "work out" for her, but the film didn't go the typical route which most by-the-book films do, which can't seem to figure out how to deal with womanhood. They want to thrill the audience with a fierce female, fighting alongside the men, but then, they don't know what to do next with her, and, essentially, "put her in her place" by creating a situation of sexual violence from which she must be rescued. You can almost imagine the fevered all-male script conferences that go on: "I know! Let's have her take a bath in the enemy camp, all afraid she will be discovered - and then - I know! We'll have a shot of her breasts, close-up, make it really hot, and then we'll see a soldier peek in on her ... and then ... I know, let's have him be shocked, and then let's have her cover her breasts ... and oh, this'll be great, a bunch of guys will burst in on her, naked ... and then, her friend will bust in like Rambo and save her!" To the men who always say that women are being too sensitive about such issues, I reply: Be careful. Be careful what you defend. Especially if you care about art, art that is for all of us. In Red Cliff, Zhao Wei is a force to be reckoned with, even the men she fights alongside of have to admit that. Her maps are beyond brilliant. She helps them win the war. And yet, her heart opens to a friend she makes in the enemy camp. He thinks she's a boy, he punches her in the stomach at one point, in a fond way, shocking her, and her heart opens up. Tomboys across the world will understand her pain. "Yes ... I'm good at kickball ... but ... I'm also a girl ... I want love, too... Can't I have both??" I've rarely seen this strange dynamic portrayed so beautifully, outside of Shakespeare (who did it best).

There are so many scenes to treasure. Too many to count. A couple of my favorites:

-- A fight scene early on with a general from Sun Quan's army. Dammit, I wish I knew his character's name, and I am sure he is totally famous with Asian audiences, so please, Asian film fans, fill me in: This man saves a baby, a crucial baby, a baby who will continue on the line, and then this man fights off all of the opposing forces with the baby strapped to his back. He is fierce. He is unstoppable. He is an incredible athlete. And yet it never becomes just a stunt-scene. What it is is a fight to the death. The baby must live. That is what this actor is playing, in all of his unbelievable fight sequences. I am so sorry I do not know this man's name, or character's name, because this man is so phenomenal, so incredible in his martial arts ability, first of all, but second of all, in his ability to inject worlds of emotion into his fighting. He spars with swords and arrows, in a fight scene that will have you on the edge of your seats, and all you are thinking is DID THE BABY MAKE IT?? This is a testament to his power as an action star. UnbeLIEVable scene.

-- A show-stopping scene involving arrows and boats. Zhou Yu's forces are better on the water, but Cao Cao has more boats. However, Cao Cao's forces are nervous people, unused to the water. They don't understand naval strategy. It has already been set up that Zhou Yu's side don't have enough arrows. They have 20,000 arrows compared to the 100,000 arrows on the other side. Zhuge Liang comes up with a plan, involving scarecrows, and floating their boats up to within shooting range of the massive enemy, in a scene that has to be seen to be believed. I am not lying when I say that I started clapping when I realized what he was up to, saying out loud, "THIS IS BRILLIANT." It all dovetails with my obsession with military strategies. Absolutely unbelievable scene, from beginning to end.

-- Early on in the film, early in the alliance between Zhou Yu and Zhuge Liang, a horse is giving birth. It is a breech birth. A frightening situation, dangerous to both mother and child. Zhou Yu's wife lies over the horse, stroking it, commanding people to keep their voices down, because the panicked tones will disturb the birthing mother. It is this scene, and no other, that made me fall in love with the film. It brought tears to my eyes. I entered into THEIR world, and totally left my own.

-- Cao Cao's forces are drawn into a trap, laid for them by the opposition, who don't have the numbers to win, but who are tricky enough that it just might work. The commander shouts at one point: "FLIP THE SHIELDS." When they "flip the shields", well, all I can say is, goosebumps erupted over my flesh, and you'll just have to see it to see what I am talking about.

-- Tony Leung's first entrance, which is textbook "Entrance of Huge Honking Movie Star", and satisfies the audience at such a deep level, who have been waiting for him to appear for an hour or so. When we finally see his face (and it is prolonged, John Woo makes us wait), we feel a swansong of relief, "Ohhhh, there he is", and it is my favorite kind of star entrance.

-- The final battle with the fire-boats ramming the banked boats. If I described it, I wouldn't do it justice.

In the end, what makes Red Cliff special, is its willingness to let us sit in the philosophical implications of the business of war, in a way that calls to mind Apocalypse Now and Kurosawa's films. You may think that your "version" of history is correct. It must be nice to be so certain.

John Woo has been making flashy and important action films for decades. Red Cliff is his dream project. His most personal film. It shows.

Peggy Cummins in "Gun Crazy"

Being looked at like that can make your blood run cold.

Chicago: July, 1995

We just had a 5-day humid stretch here in New York City that got pretty unbearable, with every day threatening rain, to no avail. The heat has finally broken, and today is beautiful and breezy, but it made me think of this old piece I wrote, about the notorious heat wave of 1995 in Chicago (a book was even written about that heat wave, and what a giant fail it was, in terms of the city's response), and what it was like. I post it again now.

Chicago: July, 1995

The beginning of July of that year was relatively normal summer weather, 70s and 80s. The temperature chart of that month, though, goes cock-eye, and is as follows:

July 7 81
July 8 84
July 9 85
July 10 90
July 11 90
July 12 98
July 13 106
July 14 102
July 15 99
July 16 94
July 17 89

The thermometer just kept going up and up and up...

A lot was going on for me during the summer of 1995. I was doing a production of James Agee's A Death in the Family, an award-winning production. I was having a great time with it.

I also was preparing myself to leave Chicago at the end of August. I had gotten into graduate school in New York City and so I was getting ready to say good-bye to the city of my heart. I loved Chicago. I had a real life there. I had a ton of friends. A real community. I was leaving all of that, and I was dreading it. Even though going to grad school is a good thing, I knew that my life in NYC would not have the same feel as my life in Chicago. I was right.

I was a bit of an emotional mess. Random crying as I looked at Lake Michigan, doing pilgrimages to all my favorite places, taking a ton of pictures, trying to download the specificity of the place in my mind for safekeeping.

It was a blessing to be doing such a good solid show, going out with a bang, so to speak. I had performed in some crap during my time in Chicago (some of those bombs are described here), and while being in a bomb definitely has its comedic element and is enjoyable in a kind of masochistic way (especially if the rest of the cast knows it's a bomb, too, and you can all make fun of it, collectively), it can't hold a candle to being in something that people love, that gets good reviews. We played to full houses every night.

I was living on Wayne Street with my friend Mitchell and another friend, Ken. I loved that apartment. It was a couple blocks away from Wrigley Field, but on a quiet side street, and right behind the beautiful Music Box movie theatre on Southport. Mitchell and I would go see midnight shows of Casablanca and stuff like that.

It was a great apartment but it had no air conditioning.

I was also working as a temp at a HUGE international company down in the Loop. The building was right on the Chicago river, across from the Opera House.

The heat started getting a bit out of control. Everyone started talking about it. The record-breaking heat also was accompanied by very high levels of humidity. So everything started becoming semi-unbearable. The theatre where I was working was, obviously, air-conditioned, as was my job, but at home we were screwed. I took cold baths and then sat directly in front of a fan in my room. Sometimes I would take 3 baths in one night.

On the couple of hottest days, things started raging out of control.

Rumors started flying: we heard that a couple of guys on construction crews had died, because their bosses made them continue to work, outside. What? They died? Hearty burly guys? Dying?

I would emerge from my job, the Opera House hazy across the sluggish green Chicago river, and the heat was not just a temperature-thing, it was as though it was a heavy hot blanket, draping over my limbs, my face. The second you stepped outside, it became hard to breathe. You had to concentrate on it. Okay ... breathe in ... take it slow ...

I don't know on which of the hottest days the entire city of Chicago lost power. Everyone obviously turned on their air-conditioning units at the same time, and the city was plunged into blackness.

I can't remember where I was when the power went out, but I wasn't home. Someone drove me home, through blackened streets, and it looked and felt like the apocalypse had arrived. The streets were packed with people, people trying to get a little relief, looking for that one breath of cool air, somewhere, anywhere. People went to the Lake, sitting on the shore all through the night, hoping for at least the air to MOVE. Ambulances were EVERYWHERE that night, their sirens lighting up the darkness, but they had to drive extremely slowly and cautiously because there were no street lights, no stop lights. There was a backlog. Lines of stalled ambulances, sirens shrieking, lights flashing ... nothing going anywhere.

People started dying.

It was mostly the poor and elderly people who died.

I remember the air being filled with the sound of sirens during the days after the temperature dropped (to a balmy 101 degrees). 739 people died over a 5 day period.

Because of this heat wave in 1995, Chicago put into place a volunteer task force who, when it becomes very hot, knock on people's doors to explain the dangers of the heat and take them to air-conditioned community centers.

Chicago became a mad-house. A morgue in motion. I remember the lines of refrigerated trucks alongside Lake Shore Drive, filled with bodies. Ambulances everywhere you looked.

I would walk down Halsted to do my show. I felt as though I were swimming, as though the air had become tangible, fluid. The atmosphere pressed on the lungs.

The air itself burned.

One of those nights when we had no power, I turned onto my street to come home to my black hot apartment. The street was lined with cars and I noticed something odd: all the motors were running. It sounded like it was the parking lot after a wedding reception or something. As I walked to my door, I glanced in the cars and they were all filled with people, just hanging out in their air-conditioned vehicles. I saw couples having picnics. I saw entire families sprawled out throughout their cars. People doing crosswords, I saw wine bottles, I heard faint music.

Can I tell you how much I wanted to knock on one of their car doors and say, "Got room for one more?"

No electricity, no air-conditioning, shrieking sirens filling through the air. All I could do was draw another freezing cold bath and sit in the tub sponging myself off.

Heat like that was another animal. Again, I'm from RI so I know all about humidity and its evils. But humidity coupled with 106 degree weather is a torment. You cannot even THINK with conditions like that.

Finally, the temperature dipped down and things became normal again, weather-wise - but the city was traumatized. We could not believe how many people had died. It was incomprehensible. I heard the numbers and didn't believe it. I also had kind of not taken it all that seriously - so I don't have air-conditioning, so what? People in Africa don't have air-conditioning! Why did so many people perish?

And promptly after the thermometer dropped to a freezing 89 degrees I got sicker than I have ever been in my life, before or since. It is still rather mysterious what it was that was wrong with me. I am convinced that some of it was psychosomatic - a reaction to the impending Good-byes. My doctor actually made a house call. That's how sick I was.

My temperature rose to 103 degrees, which is an experience that is hard to explain. Everything ceased being real. There was no reality. I would lie on the couches in my living room, immovable, feeling like my body had dissolved - and I remember one frightening day when I started having fever-induced hallucinations about ice bergs. Huge blue ice bergs bearing down on me, over a dark cold sea.

I was in a panic about leaving Chicago. I called my boyfriend at the time. He and I were not going to continue on, once I left - it seemed better for both of us - but I adored that guy, and the good-byes were approaching for us as well, and I was panicked. In the middle of my sickest day, I called him up - FREAKED OUT - but in a very dulled and spacy way. When your temperature is 103, you can't really get too worked up about anything, although you can still feel emotions like panic and sadness, but it's more like you are just receiving dull blurry echoes from the bottom of the ocean. Anyway, I called him and began expressing my utter panic that I would never ever get better, and the days were ticking by, and soon I was going to have to leave, and if I didn't get better soon, he and I wouldn't be able to have any time together before my departure. I kept saying, in my spacy panicked way, "I am going to be robbed of seeing you. I just know it. I am going to be ROBBED." He knew that he was not dealing with a rational human being at that point. He was very calm, very detached. "We'll see each other. Just get better, and we'll see each other." I kept repeating like a lunatic, "No. No. I am going to be ROBBED of the chance to say Good-bye to you." Later, when I was normal again, we laughed about this, and he did an imitation of me during that phone call. Stating in a firm weepy voice, "I am going to be ROBBED." No matter WHAT comforting thing he said, I ignored it, and continued to state, "I am going to be ROBBED."

You try being rational when you are looking at what you KNOW are fever-induced ice bergs yet they are real enough to touch.

Anyway, he was right. I did feel better, eventually, and we did get to hang out a lot in the last month before I took off.

A weird coda to this, which always seems connected: During the week that I was sick, I decided, randomly, to get a tattoo. Getting a tattoo when you have a fever of 103 is on par with getting a tattoo when you are wasted. Best to wait until you are thinking clearly. But, it all seemed very important. Symbolic, even. While I was sick, I had drawn a picture in my journal of a phoenix, because I felt like I was going to burn up into ashes. I only hoped that everything would regenerate. I was excited about starting a new life in New York - but I dreaded leaving. I was burning up my life in Chicago, and what would arise in New York? I hoped that there would be life after the fiery death. So. Determined, I made my way to Belmont Tattoo in the middle of the day. I still couldn't really feel my body because I was so sick, and it was also about 90 degrees outside (which felt downright cold after what had just happened.) The place was empty and I showed the tattoo artist the drawing of the phoenix. It was very simple, and done in almost one single line. "Could you put that on my shoulder, please?" He initially didn't want to do it, because he, like my boyfriend, realized that he was not dealing with a rational human being. I said, "No, no, I'm serious. I really want it. Will you do it?"

He did. I've never regretted it.

The phoenix is on my back. It's been there for years now. If I think about it, it reminds me, ultimately, of that crazy summer of 1995, the summer of good-byes, the summer of endings and new beginnings.

In my memory, that entire summer stays in my mind as one of heat: Heat out in the world, and heat in my own head. Transparent terrifying ice bergs, crowding up against my aching eyeballs, as I lay on my green velvet couch. Taking icy-cold baths, rubbing ice cubes over my limbs. The entire city dark and chaotic with frustrated sirens screaming, and lines of ambulances stuck in traffic. Heat like a heavy lead blanket laid over the world.

Christine Lavin: "Ballad of a Ballgame"

Well, we're in full on baseball season now, which means that all is right with the world. Come January or February I start to feel a bit ... "off" ... and sometimes it takes a while for me to locate what is wrong. It always hits me: No baseball. Walking by bars in New York City, it just doesn't seem RIGHT if the big-screen TVs aren't showing baseball.

Someone on Facebook today mentioned Janis Ian, which then made me think of this wonderful song by Christine Lavin, based on a true story from her life, when she played softball in Central Park. The song starts with the lyrics:

"Do you remember that song by Janis Ian?
The one about not getting chosen for the basketball team?"

I found a clip of Lavin playing her "Ballad of a Ballgame" live, and just had to share it. It's not a short song, so just settle in. It's funny, touching, and - I was more than thrilled to find that in this live clip she dedicates the song to the Boston Red Sox. Atta girl.

I've been lucky enough to see Lavin perform a number of times, and "Ballad of a Ballgame" is one of my favorites of her monologue-songs.

The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Frank O'Hara

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've moved on from the "Modern" volume, and am now in the "Contemporary" volume. The two volumes are organized by birth-date of poet.

Poets are often fascinating in their approach to language and their work, and I can love their work, and all that, but how many would I want to hang around with? How many seem FUN? Well, there are a few, but not many. Frank O'Hara is a beautiful character, a man with wide interests and a joyous approach to life. His "then I did this, then I did that" poems, roaming the streets of New York City, are so accessible, so fun, that all I want to do is tag along. His interests are wide and deep. He worked for the Museum of Modern Art, and a lot of his poems were inspired by the modern artists of the day - de Kooning and others. He was in New York at a vital and exciting time. How much would I love to have been alive in the 1950s and hang around with the artists and bohemians and Beats of that time. O'Hara published a couple of volumes of poetry, but they weren't major events, like the volumes of his friends. They were with small presses, and seemed personal and perhaps ... a bit trivial. Time has been very kind to Frank O'Hara, kinder than some of his contemporaries, and I think it has to do with the conversational tone of his poems, and also the fact that they don't just seem to be ABOUT life, they ARE his life. There is no separation between poet and language. He wrote his poems on scraps of paper in his spare time (and he didn't have much spare time, his job and position in the art world was quite prominent), and he died quite young. He was hit by a dune buggy on the beach at Fire Island, a freak accident, horrible. He left behind shoeboxes filled with poems, never before seen or published, a huge body of work (he was the Emily Dickinson of the 50s), and his friends (important people, big poets) ushered them into the public eye.

There's an element of camp, I suppose, in some of his poems, but to only look at it through that filter would be to miss the wider scope of it. One of the things I love about Frank O'Hara is his unabashed love for the entertainers and writers and painters who moved him. He is a "fan". He wrote poems for them. This is the kind of thing that "serious" people pooh-pooh, like it's not a topic worthy of consideration (I've gotten it on my blog from time to time; these are the "aren't there more serious things to discuss in the world than the career of Dean Stockwell?" Sure there are. There are many sites devoted to such topics. Go find them. HOWEVER: my point is: On some level, I can't think of something MORE worthy of discussion than the artists who touch us. Art is one of the things that keeps us together, connects us, opens up conversation, and admits such beautiful emotions as "enthusiasm", "joy", "happiness" - or even things that are thought-provoking and difficult. Who says Lana Turner isn't a worthy topic for a poem? Shame on you, dumbass!)

O'Hara wrote:

Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don't give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and [Hart] Crane and [William Carlos] Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies.

There's something about Frank O'Hara's poems, its listings of places and names and street intersections and automats and delis that remind me of Joseph Cornell's work, and makes me wonder if they knew one another. They were in New York at the same time. Cornell never left New York, except for one trip as a kid to the Jersey Shore. Literally. He never left the city. He stayed in Queens, and took care of his brother who had severe cerebral palsy, and in his spare time, scoured the junk shops on Second Avenue for books and movie postcards and objects - all of which he used in making his magical boxes. Joseph Cornell cannot be separated from New York City. His boxes exude that entire landscape: movie palaces, museums, second-hand book stores, Edward Hopper's lonely nights ... it is 100% urban, and so is Frank O'Hara. I can think of few poets of his generation who are so connected to a specific place.

Michael Schmidt, in his Lives of the Poets, makes the interesting point:

His casual attitude to his poems tells us much about him and them: it's not that he didn't value them, but he didn't worry much about them after they were written. He was not especially interested in a final permanent text ... He preferred to work with galleries, as though the poems were entries in an exhibition catalog, an exhibition made of his daily life.

Schmidt also writes, comparing him to the Beats, who were his contemporaries:

O'Hara begins with a rather witty, spoken simplicity, the poems in the language he used with his friends, wry, light, a little naughty, but without the scatalogical grittiness of the Beats. Ginsberg may have affected some of his poems, "Second Avenue" in particular, but while Ginsberg is always comfortably unwashed and hairy of face, O'Hara is cleanshaven and unobtrusive, keeping his own rather than everyone else's counsel. There is a reticence about the man and the poems. In many ways he is closer to Whitman than Ginsberg ever gets; and to Lorca and Mayakovsky because he understands Futurism and Surrealism, and when his poetry surrealizes it is with a knowledge of what he wants the surreal to do for the poem. He doesn't blunder and risk like Crane, or rant like Ginsberg. His poems are busy in the world; they haven't the time to stand back and preach or invent monstrous forms. He is the most New York of the New York poets.

If you haven't encountered Frank O'Hara's work, all I can say is: do yourself a favor ...

The wonderful Joan Acocella wrote an essay about O'Hara called "Perfectly Frank", included in the compilation Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints. She writes:

In the doomed-poet drama that has been retrospectively read into O'Hara's story, this poem ['A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island'] has been taken as a premonition of death. But to me the most remarkable thing about it is O'Hara's sense of blessedness, an emotion that surfaces again and again in his verse. Indeed, it is one of the things ("gay, glancing") held against him by those who feel that he was not a serious person. This, in turn, has led some of his defenders to overstress the sadness - presumably a warranty of seriousness - that can sometimes be detected in his poetry. The light tread of his lyrics, Geoff Ward says, "is only a step away from the grave." It is true that O'Hara had the Irish sense of life, but the note of grief would be far less persuasive if it were not accompanied, as it almost always is, by the keenest possible responsiveness to life's goodness. Even at his most depressed, when his romance with Vincent Warren is falling apart, O'Hara is witty. ("I walk in / sit down and / face the frigidaire" - presumably Vincent.) When, on the other hand, that relationship is going well, even bad things seem good to him: "Even the stabbings are helping the population explosion."

Boyfriends aside, he finds a thousand things to like. Ballet dancers fly through his verse. Taxi drivers tell him funny things. Zinka Milanov sings, the fountains splash. The city honks at him and he honks back. This willingness to be happy is one of the things for which O'Hara is most loved, and rightly so. It is a fundamental aspect of his moral life, and the motor of his poetry.

I love that. A "willingness to be happy". That really really captures O'Hara for me.

Here a couple of posts by my friend Ted about O'Hara:

New York as muse

Because too much was never enough for him

Here is a poem that O'Hara wrote in 1964 about the day Billie Holiday died. (Mal Waldron, referenced in the poem, was Holiday's pianist from 1957 until her death. All the other references? You're on your own.)

The Day Lady Died

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don't know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
in Ghana are doing these days I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

Quotes on acting 12: Minnie Maddern Fiske

"Genius is the great unknown quantity. Technique supplies a constant for the problem. Fluency, flexibility, technique, precision, virtuosity, science - call it what you will. Why call it anything? Watch Pavlova dance, and there you have it. She knows her business. She has carried this mastery to such perfection that there is really no need of watching her at all. You know it will be all right. One glance at her and you are sure. On most of our players one keeps an apprehensive eye, filled with dark suspicions and forebodings - forebodings based on sad experience. But I told Gabrielle Rejane once that a performance of hers would no sooner begin than I would feel perfectly free to go out of the theatre and take a walk. I knew she could be trusted. It would be all right. There was no need to stay and watch."

-- Minnie Maddern Fiske, famous American actress of the late 19th and early 20th centuries

Quotes on acting 11: Pauline Kael on Marlon Brando

"We all know that movie actors often merge with their roles in a way that stage actors don't, quite, but Brando did it even on the stage. I was in New York when he played his famous small role in Truckline Cafe in 1946; arriving late at a performance, and seated in the center of the second row, I looked up and saw what I thought was an actor having a seizure onstage. Embarrassed for him, I lowered my eyes, and it wasn't until the young man who'd brought me grabbed my arm and said, 'Watch this guy!' that I realized he was acting."

-- Pauline Kael

Quotes on acting 10: Sidney Lumet on Ingrid Bergman

"In Murder on the Orient Express, I wanted Ingrid Bergman to play the Russian Princess Dragomiroff. She wanted to play the retarded Swedish maid. I wanted Ingrid Bergman. I let her play the maid. She won an Academy Award. I bring this up because self-knowledge is so important in so many ways to an actor."

-- Sidney Lmet
Making Movies

Quotes on acting 9: George Bernard Shaw on Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree

I love this because it shows Beerbohm's inability to be in anything BUT the moment. Rather amusing. I love descriptions of performances that we, in the modern age, actually cannot see. They only existed on the stage, in the performance at that moment. I have tons of these anecdotes, and I adore them.

Now if I were to say that [Sir Herbert Beerbohm] Tree foresaw nothing and considered nobody, I should suggest that he was a much less amiable man than he was...

Of the foresight which foresees and faces entirely uninteresting facts, and the consideration which considers entirely uninteresting persons, he had as little as a man can have without being run over in the street. When his feelings were engaged, he was human and even shrewd and tenacious. But you really could not lodge an indifferent fact in his mind. This disability of his was carried to such a degree that he could not remember the passages in a play which did not belong or bear directly upon his own conception of his own part: even the longest run did not mitigate his surprise when they recurred. Thus he never fell into the commonest fault of the actor: the betrayal to the audience that he knows what his interlocutor is going to say, and is waiting for his cue instead of conversing with him. Tree always seemed to have heard the lines of the other performers for the first time, and even to be a little taken aback by them.

Let me give an extreme instance of this.

In Pygmalion the heroine, in a rage, throws the hero's slippers in his face. When we rehearsed this for the first time, I had taken care to have a very soft pair of velvet slippers provided; for I knew that Mrs. Patrick Campbell was very dexterous, very strong, and a dead shot. And sure enough, when we reached this passage, Tree got the slippers well and truly delivered with unerring aim bang in his face. The effect was appalling. He had totally forgotten that there was any such incident in the play, and it seemed to him that Mrs. Campbell, suddenly giving way to an impulse of diabolical wrath and hatred, had committed and unprovoked and brutal assault on him. The physical impact was nothing; but the wound to his feelings was terrible. He collapsed on the nearest chair, and left me staring in amazement, whilst the entire personnel of the theatre crowded solicitously round him, explaining that the incident was part of the play, and even exhibiting the prompt-book to prove their words. But his morale was so shattered that it took quite a long time, and a good deal of skillful rallying and coaxing from Mrs. Campbell, before he was in a condition to resume the rehearsal.

The worst of it was that as it was quite evident that he would be just as surprised and wounded next time, Mrs. Campbell took care that the slippers should never hit him again, and the incident was consequently one of the least convincing in the performance.

George Bernard Shaw
Herbert Beerbohm Tree: Some Memories Of Him And Of His Art (1920)

Hahahaha

Quotes on acting 8: Stella Adler on playing Ibsen

You have to learn the size of Ibsen. The size of the conflict. The size of the land and how it stuck out into the sea. The size of the darkness. The snowfalls and the sparkling glaciers. The mountains. Surrounded by water, oceans, the largest ice floes in the world. The sea is so deep you could take the tallest building and sink it without leaving a ripple on the surface. The rocks, the sea, the crags, the waterfalls. Do not play it small. You play too local, too little. Stretch it, because that is what is in the mind of the playwright... In most of Norway, there are only two real months of daylight. People live without the sun - seventeen hours of night. This affects their temperaments, how their houses are lit. How do you light your house when it's dark outside all day? That is up to you to find out. Ibsen says the lines should sound different depending on whether they are said in the morning or evening. You must know whether your scene is taking place in day or night. Otherwise you will just walk in, out of - and into - nowhere. An actor who gets up to act without knowing when and where he is is insane. Everybody is somewhere. Except an actor, often. He's the only one who can be somewhere and not know where.

Navigation in Norway is very dangerous. It is continuously stormy. The nervousness of the weather affects the personality of the people, dating back to the Vikings. They are dominated by darkness and blackness. There are very few musical comedies that come out of Norway. What does "twenty miles south of Oslo" mean? I could say, get fifteen books on Oslo, on the Vikings, on the history of the royalty there. I'll give you this free of charge. But for Christ's sake, learn where you are going to do your acting. Be interested in the fact that Norway has the largest ice fields in the world and that it's very difficult to travel except by sleigh. I like that. I like knowing that Nora comes home by sleigh. People pass each other on the narrow road. I know that a sleigh has bells and that sleigh bells have a kind of gaiety in them. If it is dark eight months of the year, they must give themselves something to make them happy. They recognize each other's sleigh bells. Twilight is at noon. That affects you, if night lasts seenteen hours. If you know this, it will affect your acting. It will make you understand certain things you need to understand. They have hailstones of a size we can't imagine. These hailstones will be used in the last act of Enemy of the People. People throw them at Dr. Stockmann's house. You have to know such things. You must not be so much with you. Whatever is left of my me, you can have. I do not give a goddamn about my me, only what I can give you. That is what is important. That is why my life has been important. I am interested in acting, not 'being a professional'.

When you look out your stage window, you must see water - fjords and water running along the streets. It's 1880, but it's not an 1880 street. It's a 1780 street with planks. The water runs along these planked streets. You can only cross them a certain way. It is not easy going. You can go by horse or maybe by stagecoach. You come home late because you had to catch the coach. If you're late just because the words say so, you are in trouble. But not if you know that it's because there was too much baggage to put on the coach. Don't act from the words. Act from knowing whether you arrive by coach or whether you have money enough to hire a sleigh.

The fjords are very threatening. They are black and contain bodies that have been disintegrating slowly for years because the water is so cold. It is a country with a great many psychological problems. Everybody is in trouble. The churches date from the twelfth century. The twelfth century in this crazy Scandinavia produced a very special kind of architecture. It's a big thing about the churches there. Look them up. They have great gargoyles. Do not think of your own pretty little church in East Hampton. You have to see that church people go to with the gargoyles and the frightening things inside it.

Their unique landscape is unduplicated anywhere on earth. What made Ibsen so great is that he used this unusual place to give him such great truths. So when you think of this space, think of it not as your space. Think of the mountains, the water. It must inspire awe in you, so when you get to a difficult scene you will have the help of the landscape. So that if you get to a scene where someone has to flee, you will see the waterfalls, the difficulties.

All of a sudden, now, I want to cry ... Why should I tell you everything? When you are a teacher, you have to give everything away. When you are not a teacher, keep it all secret. Give nothing away. Keep it for yourself. It is not your job to share it; it is to keep it. I have a right to tell you because I am a teacher. You have a right to tell nobody because you are not a teacher: The landscape has to inspire you with awe!

The fingers of water reach seventy miles into the land from the sea. That makes quite an obstacle if you are thinking of leaving Norway. To cross the sea from the north and come south means that you have risked death to get there, and when you arrive you must arrive with death in you. In Mrs. Linde's entrance, when she says, 'I have just arrived from the North,' and somebody says, 'How did you do it?' - it does not mean by what conveyance. It means, 'How did you survive?'

-- Transcription of one of the many lectures actress and acting teacher Stella Adler gave to her class on the plays of Ibsen
Stella Adler on Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov

Quotes on acting 7: Bette Davis

"I was thought to be 'stuck up'. I wasn't. I was just sure of myself. This is and always has been an unforgivable quality to the unsure."

-- Bette Davis

Quotes on acting 6: Sidney Lumet

"[During the rehearsal period] I'm finding out things about the actors. What stimulates them, what triggers their emotions? What annoys them? How's their concentration? Do they have a technique? What method of acting do they use? The 'Method' made famous at the Actors Studio, based on the teachings of Stanislavsky, is not the only one. Ralph Richardson, whom I saw give at least three great performances, in theatre and film, used a completely auditory, musical system. During rehearsals of Long Day's Journey Into Night, he asked a simple question. Forty-five minutes later I finished my answer. Ralph paused a moment and then sonorously said, 'I see what you mean, dear boy: a little more cello, a little less flute.'"

-- Sidney Lumet
Making Movies

Quotes on acting 5: Barbra Streisand

I had Barbra Streisand audition a couple of times for shows and the reaction was: 'She sings great, but what can we do with a girl who looks like that?' Along came I Can Get It For You Wholesale. I thought the role of Miss Marmelstein might just fit Miss Streisand.

I scheduled her last on the day of auditions. She arrived late, rushed onstage in her raccoon coat, explaining she was late because she'd seen the most marvelous shoes in a thrift shop window and just had to go in to get them. Only one of each pair fit, but she loved them anyhow and didn't we think they were wonderful? She was wearing two unmatched shoes. She started to sing and then stopped after two notes, chewing gum all through this rapid-fire monologue, saying she must have a stool, could anyone find a stool for her, please? By this time the auditors were muttering to me, 'Where did you find this nut?' She sang the first two notes of her song, then stopped again. This time to take the gum from her mouth and squash it on the underside of the stool. THEN she sang. She mesmerized 'em. They asked her to sing two more. After that, they converged on the stage to explore their new discovery up close.

David Merrick, who was the producer, took me to the back of the house alone.

'I thought I told you,' he said, 'that I don't want ugly girls in my shows!"

'I know, David, but she's so talented.'

'Talented, shmalented. I don't want ugly girls in my shows.'

'But --'

'There's no buts! Look at them, swarming all over her. They love her! What am I going to do now? I'll never get rid of her!'

Then - when Miss Streisand and all the others had gone, Mr. Laurents called me back. He was alone, sitting onstage on the stool Miss Streisand had commandeered.

'Look at this.' Arthur Laurents said to me. 'Run your hand over the bottom of this stool.'

I did. There was no gum. She hadn't recovered her gum. Arthur had been watching to see if she would. There had never been any gum.

'My God,' said Arthur. 'What have we got on our hands here?'

It was the first inkling of what an incredible actress this young singer was: an adventuress who at 18 had her shit together so strong, she took the risk of putting on an act about a raccoon coat, shoes that didn't match, a stool, and a piece of imaginary gum.

It wasn't long after that, Mr. Merrick was paying her $5,000 a week to do Funny Girl and she was the biggest star on Broadway.

-- Michael Shurleff
Audition: Everything an Actor Needs to Know to Get the Part

Quotes on acting 4: Laurette Taylor

"The student of acting sits before her performance [as Amanda Wingfield in Glass Menagerie] and marvels at the series of constant surprises with which she rewards him. Her phrasing and accent of a line is so often unexpected, her movement so unanticipated. But each surprise is confirmed and justified by its inevitability. To traffic in the unexpected for its own sake is dangerous; when Miss Taylor offers the unexpected, you say, 'Of course. That is the only way it should have been done.' There is not a single cliche in her performance from beginning to end. That is why you sit so breathless to see what this woman will do next."

-- Norris Houghton on Laurette Taylor

Quotes on acting 3: Eleonora Duse

"I feel that I have never known nor shall I ever know how to act! Those poor women in my plays have entered so totally into my heart and head, that while I am striving as best I can to make the audience understand them, I almost feel like comforting them ... but it is they who, little by little, end up by comforting me! How - and why, and at what point - this affectionate, inexplicable, and undeniable "exchange" takes place between those women and me ... it would take too long and be too difficult to relate precisely. The fact remains that, while everybody else is suspicious of the women, I get along beautifully with them! I pay no attention if they have lied, if they have betrayed, if they have sinned, if they were born crooked, as long as I feel that they have wept, that they have suffered as a result of lying or betraying or loving."

-- Legendary Italian actress Eleonora Duse

Quotes on acting 2: Michael Caine

"As I get older, I'm also a lot more interested in the circumstances under which a film will be shot. Will it be a little shoestring picture that will have us sitting in mud huts in Tanzania? Or are we going to be put up in the George V in Paris? I never used to look at that side of making a film. I once spent 26 weeks in a Philippine jungle which, looking back, could just as well have been the tropical garden at Kew, for all the difference it made to the picture. We lived for 26 weeks in an unfinished brothel. The rooms were expected to be used for twenty minutes at a time and were furnished accordingly. 26 weeks in rooms like that. And there wasn't a girl in any of them. After that experience, I did The Magus without ever reading the script because the weather in England is lousy in January and I'd get a few weeks in the South of France out of it. That choice was a bit of a mistake on some ground, but in terms of climate, I had a winner. I close a script quickly if it starts: 'Alaska: our hero is stumbling through a blizzard...' "

-- Michael Caine
Acting in Film: An Actor's Take on Movie Making

Quotes on acting 1: Anton Chekhov

"Describe at least one rehearsal of Three Sisters for me. Isn't there anything which needs adding or subtracting? Are you acting well, my darling? But watch out now! Don't pull a sad face in the first act. Serious, yes, but not sad. People who had long carried a grief within themselves and have become accustomed to it only whistle and frequently withdraw into themselves. So you can often be thoughtfully withdrawn on stage during conversations. Do you see?"

-- Anton Chekhov, letter to Olga Knipper
January 2, 1901

The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Allen Ginsberg

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've moved on from the "Modern" volume, and am now in the "Contemporary" volume. The two volumes are organized by birth-date of poet.

"First thought, best thought" was Allen Ginsberg's motto, despite the fact that he edited his pieces relentlessly. He saw himself in a line with Whitman and Blake, big prophetic transcendent poets, and even his line-lengths, long and rambling, but with a serious internal structure - LOOK like Whitman's and Blake's poems. He uses repetition in an incantatory way, piling the same word through long poems, so that the drum-beat becomes relentless. Ginsberg always makes me think of Mitchell, who played him in a well-known production in Chicago, and also of my father, who loved the Beats. He said to me once (and he was not a man to live in regret - this was the only time he ever said to me that he had other dreams) that if he could have lived two lives, he would also have loved to be a Beat, and live the kinds of lives they lived at that time. An interesting insight into my father. Dad recognized balderdash for what it is, but it was their seeking questioning outlook, their lack of concern for convention, their total immersion in art, that he admired. I won't say envied, because I don't think that's what Dad meant. He tells a funny story of meeting William S. Burroughs once at the Arts Club here in New York, some literary gathering of book collectors, dealers, editors, publishers. Burroughs showed up, and by that point he was an old man, in his customary garb, instantly recognizable, and he had two young boys in tow, in their early 20s, who were dressed in an identical manner. Burroughs made his way through the crowd, and the two boys followed him, and Dad said the three of them reminded him of a "school of fish". Burroughs the leader, darting this way, the two boys darting quickly to follow, then that way, the two boys in tow.

The fact that Ginsberg and Burroughs didn't die from their excesses in the 60s is something rather extraordinary, in and of itself.

The Anthology introduction to Ginsberg states:

For some, the publication of Ginsberg's "Howl" and Other Poems (1956) was the beginning of a mindless and mercifully short-lived poetic fad, a cult of slovenly verse that encouraged dangerously slovenly behavior. For others, it was a fortunate and revolutionary change in the direction of American poetry. Like all poetic innovators, Ginsberg seemed to claim for poetry new areas of experience and new cultural situations. "Howl" is a panoramic vision of the dark side of the complacent Eisenhower years; it discovered for literature an anticommunity of waifs and strays, drug addicts and homosexual drifters. Ginsberg's poetry presented an alternative to the tightly organized, well-mannered poetry written under the influence of the New Criticism; it was emotionally explosive, unashamedly self-preoccupied and metrically expansive, and it helped create in the 1960s an audience for influential books of psychic rebellion and revelation, such as Robert Lowell's Life Studies, Norman Mailer's Advertisements for Myself, and Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death.

Some of Ginsberg's stuff is embarrassing to read, as it is meant to be, I believe, and not all of it works, but as a whole it is a powerful document of a long journey: he was born in 1926 and died in 1997. And unlike many of "the best minds of [his] generation" who were "destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix", Ginsberg made it through alive, and became more famous as an old man than he was a young man. He was a Poet Emeritus for America in his final years, a familiar face, involved in the causes he believed in, but also teaching and lecturing and holding workshops, and answering voluminous correspondence with young poets looking for a way to break through. Despite the fact that he was highly educated, he was not an academic. Part of his poetry was about shuffling off the dryness of academia and looking for direct experience. Of whatever it was: poetry, the sky, love, sex. He experimented with drugs, as most of his crowd did, but he wasn't as out of control with it as were his contemporaries. He used it as a path to enlightenment, and many of his poems were written under that influence. Later on, however, he came to see that much of that behavior was a way to remain separate from his fellow man - it isolates people - and he came to see, through his travels, his meetings with wise men in monasteries and all that Eastern stuff - that the only reason we are here, on this planet, is to try to connect to one another. Taking hallucinogens helped him connect with the nonhuman: the spiritual subtext of things, the ancient sky, nature ... Once he made that connection, after traveling through India (what is it about India?), he gave up the drugs and became a dedicated advocate of meditation. It helped him to "inhabit the human form" (his words).

Peter Balakian, in his harrowing memoir (also an investigation of the Armenian genocide) Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir, tells of a reading he helped sponsor at Bucknell University, where he was a student. He brought Allen Ginsberg to the school. Balakian wrote:

I've come to see poetry as the chain of language linking lands and events, people and places that make up our family story. Poetry has been a deep well of thought and feeling and language lushness that the Balakians have lived by.

So it's 1970, Balakian is a senior, writing poetry, and trying to deal with his family (it's an absolutely amazing book if you haven't read it - the Armenian family wanting to forget the past, never mentioning the genocide, and Peter growing up in an atmosphere where he knows that something bad happened back there, but nobody speaks of it - they are American now, no more of this Armenian nonsense), and he gets Ginsberg to come to the school. It's a huge event. And Balakian's mother shows up at the reading unannounced. By this point in the book, we know enough to be a bit nervous about this. His mother is strict, ladylike, and the boss of the family. She has high standards for behavior. So ... how on earth will she deal with listening to Ginsberg reading "Howl" and "Kaddish", with his lover Peter Orlovsky in tow, and everyone sitting around on the floor smoking dope? Balakian then provides an incredibly moving account of that day. It brings tears to my eyes:

With his beard and hair brushing at the sides of his balding head and his horn-rimmed glasses, Ginsberg looked serious and vulnerable as he hobbled onto the porch of 208 South Seventh Street with a broken leg in a walking cast under his blue-jean overalls, accompanied by his friend Peter Orlovsky, whose biceps bulged from a tee shirt with a huge American flag on the front. They arrived at 4:30 and I wasn't surprised when my mother drove up a few minutes later in our Vista Cruiser station wagon. She told me on the phone the night before that she was thinking about making a visit to her alma mater and that this seemed like the perfect excuse, and she said she would bring dinner. I must have been expecting her, because all I had on hand was an aluminum bowl of Lipton's instant soup onion dip, some potato chips, and a couple of gallons of cheap wine. She walked into my college apartment bright and cheery as some friends were passing joints and Ginsberg and Orlovsky were holding forth with teachers and students. My mother: in a blue suit and suede pumps, carrying two trays of lasagna covered with aluminum foil, some French bread in white bags, plastic bags of lettuce, and a jar of her own salad dressing.

Before I could introduce her, she broke into the circle around Ginsberg and Orlovsky: "Allen, I'm Arax Balakian, Peter's mother; your father taught my sister at Paterson High in '33; he was her favorite teacher." My mother and Allen Ginsberg began exchanging Paterson High gossip, town gossip, northern Jersey gossip, and my mother, who had dug up the titles of a few of Louis Ginsberg's poems my aunt liked, began praising them. Ginsberg seemed so delightedly caught off-guard that he now turned his sole attention to my mother, leaving the professors and students to themselves.

Still chatting with Ginsberg, my mother began dishing up lasagna, imploring everyone to eat because the reading was in less than an hour. As she darted around the kitchen, trying to consolidate our motley collection of silverware, plates, and half-cleaned glasses, she turned to Ginsberg and said, as if she were asking him if he wanted some croutons with his salad: "Allen, would you like to see the review Helen Vendler wrote of The Fall of America? The Times Book Review is giving it the front page next Sunday." Before I could protectively nudge my mother back to the lasagna, convinced that she was making a fool of herself, she pulled out of her purse the galley proofs my aunt Nona had given her with the review of Ginsberg's new book.

I realized my mother had come with this document uncannily timed to establish her relationship to the poet and his work, to words and texts, in a way that quite frankly blew my mind. Did she wish to show me that literature was a territory she too could navigate? Faculty and students stared at her in disbelief, and Allen stared for a second and then said, "Arax, may I see that?" The bond between them now was unbreakable, and I watched as students and teachers closed in around them.

"Allen, it's not a bad review," my mother went on, as if she were a literary critic. "I hope you're not disappointed," she said, sounding motherly. Now in the inner circle with Ginsberg, she was enjoying herself immensely, and I stood there sipping some cheap wine, astonished and wondering, had my mother really read The Fall of America?"

Marvelous. He wanted real connection. She provided it. She was not like the sycophants circled around him, which must be a huge problem when you become famous. Al Pacino told a great story about how he realized he was famous when he was at a party once and everyone laughed uproariously at every joke he told. It made him uneasy. He stopped having to work hard. It was strangely isolating. It's good to have people around you who treat you normal. Mrs. Balakian, scooping out lasagna, as the pot-smoke drifts in from her son's living room, calling Allen Ginsberg "Allen", and insisting that they be friends. They were.

Now, to put some context into this: Arax Balakian's entire family was wiped out in 1915. The family tree Balakian puts at the beginning of the book is a chilling reminder of what genocide looks like. The date "1915" is the end-stop of that entire generation. Arax Balakian has never discussed the genocide, no one in the family has ever discussed it - Peter Balakian grew up not even knowing that there was a genocide. He senses something is ... off ... but it takes him years to put it together, and his final act of commemoration and memory is the writing of Black Dog of Fate, where he tells his family's incredible and harrowing story. This is where Balakian's mother is coming from, even with her judgmental stance on Peter's girlfriends, and certain types of Armenians, and her uptight insistence that her family is AMERICAN, not Armenian. Balakian then goes on to describe the reading. Orlovsky read a poem, too, about jerking off Allen, and Balakian was mortified, glancing over at his mother to see if she were horrified or outraged. She sat there, impassive, no response. Peter, however, wanted to sink through the floor. Ginsberg read for a couple of hours, people drifted in and out, smoking pot, and the crowd thinned a bit, and then:

After three hours, only a handful of people were left and I wished the whole thing were over. I was on the verge of signaling Ginsberg to wind it up, when out of nowhere, he began to recite in a beautiful, resonant voice: "Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while / I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village, / downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up / all night ... listening to Ray Charles blues about blind on the phonograph." It was "Kaddish", his epic poem about his mother. A poem that I loved.

Into the tired, nearly emptied littered hall the rush of images began to flood. I sat staring at the old linoleum floor in the slightly blue light coming from the '40s fluorescent fixtures above. I watched my mother sitting cross-legged in the middle of the near-empty room, intent and poised as a young student.

Nor your memory of your mother, 1915 tears in silent movies weeks and weeks - forgetting, aggrieve watching Marie Dressler address humanity, Chaplin dance in youth, ...
Or back at Normal School in Newark, studying up on America in a black skirt - winter on the street without lunch - a penny a pickle - home at night to take care of Eleanor in the bedroom -
First nervous breakdown was 1919 - she stayed home from school and lay in a dark room for three weeks - something bad - never said what - every noise hurt - dreams of the creaks of Wall Street

As Ginsberg's words echoed in the cavernous dining hall, I buried my head in my hands and began to weep.

Ginsberg and Orlovsky slept at Peter Balakian's that night. Here is the ending of the story:

When my mother barged into my room quite early the next morning, I don't know what she expected to find. Charlene and me? Or me under the covers, alone in pajamas? She found neither, because I had neglected to tell her that I had given my room to Allen and Peter, and that I was staying at Charlene's. What she witnessed exactly - that is, the precise details - I've never been able to find out, but my apartment mates who lived in abutting rooms said they heard her scream and run down the hallway and the stairs, and from their windows, watched her get in her car and drive away. Ginsberg and Orlovsky were in bed. Ginsberg had a walking cast on. The rest remains between Peter and Allen and my mother and it seemed clear that Peter and Allen were unruffled by the intrusion.

When my mother called the next day, she was effusive with the afterglow of the occasion. "It's amazing," she said, "how much Jews and Armenians have in common. I felt so at home with Allen. Please tell him and Peter that they must come to dinner the next time they're in Jersey."

"I will, Mom," I said sullenly. "Thanks for everything."

"And one other thing," she said. "That poem 'Kaddish', I want to get a couple copies of it; can you find it in your bookstore?"

"Yeah," I said, and then there was silence.

"You know," she went on, "that poem, I can relate to it."

"You can?" I said reluctantly.

"In some way it's about Armenia, too."

Still hurting from what had happened over Charlene, I did not feel like talking with my mother at this moment, when she seemed to want to say something serious about herself to me.

"That's good," I said. "See you at graduation."

I hung up the phone feeling ambivalent. I did not want the poem, the evening, Ginsberg, to be a bridge between us, not just then, because I was sunk in my own spite. I did not tell my mother that I had wept listening to "Kaddish" in Larison Dining Hall, did not want her to know how much the poem affected me. But I was also sorry I could not talk to her just then.

An amazing anecdote, I think, and speaks to the strange deep power of Ginsberg's best work. His stuff is so personal, so specific, and yet here is an example of how it crosses over into the universal. I don't think that is true of all of his stuff, and I am not fond of his later poems, which seem coy to me. I like Ginsberg loud, messy, in a rage, on the edge, and howling his pain and fear up into the universe at the top of his lungs. "Kaddish" is a hell of a poem.

Ginsberg was notorious early on, because of the controversies surrounding "Howl" (similar to what James Joyce went through with Ulysses), and it put him (and his friends) on the map.

Michael Schmidt, in Lives of the Poets, talks about the famous story of how Ginsberg came to write "Howl", a story that Ginsberg told again and again, as the moment of inspiration:

In America in the late 1940s, Allen Ginsberg, interested in Supreme Reality, alone and suffering a "dark night of the soul sort of," his lover Neal Cassady having sloped off, and having himself just masturbated, with a volume of [William] Blake before him - "I wasn't even reading, my eye was idling over the page of 'Ah, Sun-flower,' and it suddenly appeared - the poem I'd read a lot of times before." He began to understand the poem and "suddenly, simultaneously with understanding it," he "heard a very deep earthen grave voice in the room, which I immediately assumed, I didn't think twice, was Blake's voice." This "apparitional voice" became his guiding spirit: "It was like God had a human voice, with all the infinite tenderness and anciency and mortal gravity of a living Creator speaking to his son." On Ginsberg this "anciency" fathered Howl, though the Blake simulacrum was aided by the hallucinogens popular at the time, the recipe for Part II of the poem including peyote, just as for Kaddish he was assisted by amphetamine injections. "The amphetamine gives a peculiar metaphysical tinge to things, also. Space-outs." Blake managed his visions without substance abuse. Ginsberg's appropriation of the poet of innocence and experience did much to promote Blake to the alternative culture of the 1950s and 1960s.

William Carlos Williams (another Paterson, New Jersey poet) wrote the introduction to Howl, an event duly noted by everyone that something new and powerful had arrived. What on earth is the connection between those two poets, except geography? But they had a long correspondence, and Williams was important to Ginsberg, in helping him find his own voice and stop blatantly imitating others. Ginsberg is still a big steal-er, he steals from everyone he meets, it seems, but Williams had pushed him gently towards his own path.

Ginsberg remains controversial to this day. What exactly IS his poetry? How can it be classified? Does it work, separated from him the man? Or was it his readings and performances of his poems that really helped them LAND? I suppose the jury is still out, but it is an interesting thing to think about.

Michael Schmidt has a lot of criticism of Ginsberg's poetry alongside his admiration (and his memories of seeing him perform and how insane it was, how hypnotic and powerful) and really gets a line on some of the conflicts here:

Ginsberg could be the priest of holy madness, anti-authoritarian, a man of generosity, a voice of the future; but he signed the papers to have his mother lobotomized, supported authoritarian individuals and regimes as long as they were ranged against his primary foe, the United States, was ungenerous to fellow poets if they were not of his camp and promoted himself at the expense of those around him, even after he had shaved off his beard and assumed the quiet demeanor of an almost dapper professor. The big days were in the 1950s, and his last four decades fed off the fat of the huge and unexpected pop-star success of his setting out. He remained a compelling performer, even of the awful later poems. Self-projection was his incomparable skill and it proved fatal to the work in the end: the voice could imbue a shopping list with transcendent significance.

Schmidt accurately describes Ginsberg's impact as "drop[ping] on American poetry like a bomb."

So this was a long entry. There's still a lot to talk about when we talk about Allen Ginsberg. Charlatan or muse, sell-out or prophet? Depends on where you are standing. We have Balakian's view of Ginsberg, we have Schmidt's, we have Ginsberg's view of himself, and William Carlos Williams's view. Everyone has an opinion.

And the beat goes on.

Here's a poem of Ginsberg's that I do love, a tribute to one of his two muses, Walt Whitman:

A Supermarket in California

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked
down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking
at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon
fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at
night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!
--and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking
among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?
What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you,
and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy
tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the
cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour.
Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and
feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade
to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automo-
biles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America
did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a
smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of
Lethe?

A couple of clips below the jump, of Johnny Depp talking about meeting Ginsberg - really funny interesting stuff:

The Big Combo (1955); Director: Joseph Lewis

Director Joseph Lewis, perhaps known mostly as "king of the Bs", worked at fast and furious paces on his films (not so out of the ordinary at the time), but the quality he managed to achieve in the midst of those breakneck cheaply-made productions, not just in the performances of his actors, but also in the look and feel of his films, is quite extraordinary. One of the things I love about Lewis as a director (in his finished products, and also how he comes across in interviews) is his obvious sheer love for the crazy pursuit, and the bravado it takes to get anything done, and how he seemed to relish the entire experience. Peter Bogdanovich interviewed him near the end of his life and Lewis's joy still comes across. He didn't take himself too seriously, but he sure took what he was doing seriously. I'm on a Joseph Lewis kick these days, and The Big Combo, from 1955, is one of his most well-loved film noirs. Gun Crazy is obviously his most famous (and rightly so - I'll talk about that later), but there's always something in all of his films to sink your teeth into, visually, or character-wise. The Big Combo looks awesome, every shot seething with atmosphere and emotion. Joseph Lewis got his start doing Westerns, and any time a scene was boring to him, he would shoot it through wagon wheels, to give the frame some interest, thereby garnering for himself the nickname "Wagon Wheel Joe". Producers would shout, "Oh Jesus, take those wagon wheels away from him, goddammit, not another wagon-wheel scene." You can see Lewis's intelligence and passion in how he frames each shot, the point being to keep things vital and good-looking, so that each scene is not just interesting because of its plot points, but because of how it looks. The acting is terrific, even down to characters who only have one line, and the script is great. What could have been your basic gangster film ends up being so much more. It's a psychological study of obsession. Everyone here is obsessed with something.

I think Joseph Lewis, like all the great directors (and he rarely is spoken in the same breath as people like John Ford, Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, but I'm putting him in that lexicon for the moment) understood obsession. He made it his primary subject matter. Gun Crazy is a primal example of it, but Big Combo is there too. Mr. Brown, the gangster, (played by Richard Conte, in a suave slightly ominous performance that reminded me of some of Burt Lancaster's roles) is obsessed with status, and being at the top of the heap. Leonard Diamond, the cop (played by Cornel Wilde) is obsessed with Mr. Brown, first of all, and has thrown the entire police force into a manhunt, against the advice of the commissioners and everyone else. But he is like a man with a bone. Through his pursuit of Brown, he has come to fall in love with Brown's gun-moll girlfriend Susan (played by Wilde's real-life wife Jean Wallace). Susan used to be a society girl, and something of a prodigy at the piano, but she has given all that up, and thrown in her lot with her gangster boyfriend, much to the bafflement of the world she has left behind. Why would she leave polite society and hang around with this thug? Ahhhh, but that's because Susan is obsessed with something, too: the kind of sex she has with her gangster boyfriend. It's dirty, it's passionate, it's fierce. Like Stella Kowalski, another society-girl tied to a man beneath her station because she's addicted to how he fucks and how he gets those red lights flashing, Susan hates herself for being trapped, but she is putty in his hands. Mr. Brown knows how to push her buttons, and he does. Susan is a sour-faced girl by now, broken down by disappointment and loneliness, but when he touches her, even casually, she goes into a private realm of sex and pleasure that leaves her helpless. Mr. Diamond tries to lure Susan away from Mr. Brown, not only because he needs a witness against him, but because he has fallen in love with her. But could Cornel Wilde, with his slightly earnest look, serious and tense, ever please her the way her boyfriend pleases her? This is not spoken in the script, at least not overtly, but it's there - in every look, every touch, every glance.

Big Combo also has the honor of being the first American film to at least suggest that oral sex is occurring. Ecstasy did it before then, way before, and was much more graphic, Hedy Lemarr having her first orgasm onscreen, in closeup. But that wasn't an American film. Joseph Lewis said to Jean Wallace, trying to loosen her up for the scene (and Wilde was a producer on the film, which added to her insecurity): "Your boyfriend doesn't stop when he kisses your earlobe. He doesn't stop when he kisses your neck. He doesn't stop when he kisses your tummy. He covers you all." Wallace apparently said, "I cannot believe you are talking to me this way, but fine, I understand what you mean, I'll do it, just make sure Cornel isn't on the set that day, please?" Susan and Mr. Brown are having a fight, and he tries to calm her down. He kisses her roughly. She submits, then resists. He moves up behind her, she is facing us, and he starts kissing her on the neck, saying things like, "I want to give you everything ... I'll give you all ..." You can see her sexual helplessness all over her face in that moment, she's almost climaxing if you want to know the truth.

I loved how Joseph Lewis described this scene to Bogdanovich:

I actually wanted to show - again by impression only - a man making love to a girl in this delightfully unique fashion that we have all dreamt about or experienced. Now, how do you show it on film? Well, I had an idea: as you saw the two of them, mixed with kissing her on the lips and then on the ear, the camera moved closer and closer and closer and, as you came into a huge closeup of Nick Conte and Jean Wallace, gradually Nick's head disappeared: first kissing her neck, then lower and lower and then, at the precise moment, Jean, who was icy - I think she was afraid to betray herself for fear Cornel would raise hell with her - but at that precise moment I envisioned, I went 'uh-uh-uh' off-scene, and that was recorded. Cornel never forgave me for it.

The scene is as graphic as you can get, even more so because you don't see it actually happen. You don't need to.

Joseph Lewis got in trouble with the censors because of it. One of the things his movies do is push back at the Code, which had been in place since the 1930s. Gun Crazy breaks boundaries all over the place, and Big Combo does, too. Lewis told Bogdanovich that one of the censors said to him angrily, "I can't believe you have put this filth into the movie of a man going down on a woman." Lewis protested innocence. "That is entirely your projection. I didn't show it. You have supplied all of the emotion of the scene, as an audience is supposed to do. So don't tell me I'm a filthy director." The scene stayed.

Lee Van Cleef and Earl Holliman play two of Mr. Brown's goons. The heavies who do the dirty work. There isn't a scene that they aren't together. They are on stakeouts, they share salami sandwiches, they start to realize that they are being set up here, somehow, by their boss ... only they aren't sure how yet. Granted, they are not the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree. But their dynamic is set up to such a strong degree, that you actually like these guys, as horrible as some of their actions are, and when they finally are ambushed, and one of them doesn't make it (Van Cleef), Holliman, lying on a stretcher, begins to weep with the loss of his friend, and the scene works, it works so well. His grief is real. He is nothing without his partner. He can barely speak coherently. Earl Holliman does a terrific job with a "nothing" part, realizing the opportunity here for creating a real character, with a backstory, and relationships. So many actors and scripts miss this. But here: everyone is allowed to be human.

The script sparks and glides, with lines like, "Joe, the man has reason to hate me. His salary is $96.50 a week. The busboys in my hotels make better money than that.”

Obsession drives the three leads forward. Other characters move into the action. There is a great cameo by Helen Walker, who plays Mr. Brown's wife, whom he has had incarcerated in a mental institution to get her out of the way. Mr. Diamond tracks her down, and she has been living in an asylum for 10 years, tending to the garden, and wants nothing to do with her past life. She is afraid. She tells Mr. Diamond: "I'd rather be insane and alive, than sane and dead." In Frances, Frances Farmer says, in the interview at the end of the film that if you are "treated as if you are sick ... well, I guess you can become sick." Helen Walker embodies that. She is a wreck of a woman. Her obsession is her flowers. It is the only thing that makes sense, and throughout her interrogation she keeps yearning to get back to them.

Obsession keeps us alive. Or it kills us. Either one. Let the chips fall where they may.

With a great climactic battle, involving Susan shining a spotlight on the side of the car into the dark warehouse to illuminate her trapped lover, and a final moment which is a complete steal from Casablanca, Big Combo is a great popcorn-movie, and shows what a movie looks like when it's made by a man who is obsessed with the process itself.

RIP Rue McClanahan

"No hokum, nothing but truth."

So wrote Edith Oliver on Rue McClanahan's performance in the 1969 production of Who's Happy Now?

Rue McClanahan died this past week at the age of 76. Betty White is now the sole surviving "Golden Girl".

Rue McClanahan on Broadway with Dustin Hoffman in "Jimmy Shine"

There always was something about McClanahan, whose razor-sharp comic timing and brilliant character work as "Blanche", on Golden Girls, her most memorable role, that suggested that: There was no hokum there, nothing but truth. It's one of the reasons why she was so funny. Why that show was (and still is) so damn funny. It's like watching four expert athletes compete at the same time. There was no dead weight. The writing is still surprising, still fresh, and if you haven't seen the show (first of all, if that's true, do you live in Chad or something?) and you have some conception that it's about four sweet little old ladies, think again. Golden Girls had the dirtiest mind in television (there's one example of the dialogue in the NY Times obit which is a great example), and much of it was done in innuendo, and slam-dunk pauses, which would unleash pictures of the most filthy kind floating through the audience's head. These women are all comic geniuses, and I do not use that term lightly. All Bea Arthur had to do was look at someone, and her reaction shots are 100% funny 100% of the time. Stuff like this cannot be created in the editing room, it has to exist already. It's a great example of an ensemble piece, and watching them all spar and joke and create ... with such a sense of fun and specificity - is still a joy.

Rue McClanahan (like all the other actresses on the show) had a long and successful career, on Broadway and elsewhere, before finally hitting the big time (in terms of fame and recognition, yes, but also in terms of salary and residuals, which had to be through the roof), with Golden Girls. The show was a huge hit, and is still on eternal loop in syndication and will be for the foreseeable future.

Tennessee Williams sent Rue McClanahan a note, after seeing her as Caitlin Thomas, Dylan Thomas's wife, in a production of Dylan. Willians wrote: "Your work is that rare combination of earthiness and lapidary polish, that quality being utterly common and utterly noble. Frippery combined with fierceness.” McClanahan wrote in her autobiography My First Five Husbands..And the Ones Who Got Away that receiving that letter was one of her proudest moments.

Utterly common and utterly noble.

No hokum. Nothing but truth.

It was true throughout her career.

Rest in peace, Rue McClanahan.

Fun interview with Rue McClanahan about how she got the part of Blanche on Golden Girls:

Snapshots

-- Finished Shirley Jackson's collected short stories. They are so unsettling that it is fair to say that it ruined my day yesterday. Although there are other factors in play. Wow. She is so effective. If all you have read is The Lottery, which is required reading for American 9th graders, then all I can do is beg you to read her other short stories. And also We Have Lived in the Castle.

-- Watched Part 1 of John Woo's 4-hour epic Red Cliff and all I can say is: Holy shitballs. Part 2 hasn't arrived yet and I am dying to get my filthy paws on it. Wow. Don't watch it in its truncated American version. That would be a travesty. It's one of those movies where you can't imagine WHAT could be cut, without serious damage to the story - even though it is so long. There's one CGI shot that bugs me, so far, it's phony, but one thing that bugs me is not enough to throw the baby out with the bathwater. This is an astonishing accomplishment and I haven't even seen Part 2 yet. Tony Leung is THE. MAN. (No surprise there.) More to come. So far, I am blown away by the picture. Must see.

-- My feeling is that Lucy (my niece, 1 year old) now knows who I am, in her lexicon of humanity. She's getting there. To her, I am "she-she", and I do wonder how she is putting it all together in her adorable brain. Somehow I am connected with her parents. But before language, how do we figure it all out? It's beautiful to watch.

-- My brother and I had two three-hour drives recently and all we talked about was books and movies and music. I wish I had tape recorded it. It was an incredible conversation. At the end of the drive, we were like, "So how are you doing in your life? Okay? Things going good?" Typical O'Malley behavior. You walk in the door, and before you even have your coat off, someone asks you, "So ... what are you reading?" I love my family.

-- Working on my script.

-- Recently, the ex-boyfriends have (respectively) been driving me crazy. I'm in actual fights with two of them, which is so tiresome and stupid I don't even want to get into it. I'm glad we're in fights, actually. It's about time. And then there's Michael (he of Kwik Stop fame). Our correspondence isn't constant, that's fine, we've gone years without speaking, but when we do, it is heartfelt and very much appreciated. I dated him for 6 weeks, and yet we are friends for life. I'm grateful. It's hard to remember to be grateful, but I am. We are actors, we are now writers, we are into what the other is doing, we remember who we were, we accept who we are now, and we are excited to see what the other is going to do next.

-- More traveling coming up. Seattle, perhaps. My family trip to New Hampshire.

-- Put together a new bookcase the other day, on the hottest day so far in this muggy awful patch. There was a moment when I thought - oh shit, I need to call in the boys for help on this (after all, it wouldn't be the first time), but I stuck it out, with my tools and my diagram, and put it together successfully, and felt like a very butch rock star when it was all complete. For someone like me, with a library that rivals the Library of Congress, and yet living in a 2 bedroom apartment - the arrangement of books is key. My clothes could be in a pile in the corner, I couldn't give a shit, but if my books are out of order, then I stop knowing who I am. I feel scattered. And so having a bookcase arrangement where I have space to spare, as I do now, places to expand, is hugely calming. I don't mind doubling up on shelves, and placing books on top of other books. I am not precious with my library. But it is nice to know that there actually IS space if I need it.

-- Going to the theatre tonight. Have no idea what I am about to see, and I love that.

-- When will Part 2 of John Woo's Red Cliff arrive? I can't bear it.

-- Speaking of John Woo, I love Face/Off - had a conversation today with my cousin Liam about that movie. Liam called to ask me if there was a specific version of Ulysses he should buy, and if he should get an annotated version. Have I mentioned I love my family? So we talked about Ulysses (Me: "Nah, don't get an annotated version. It's a dumb book. No plot. It's stupid. Just read it for the language. That's what Dad said."), and Alexandre Dumas and the Beatles and our families, and then somehow we segued into John Woo - because, of course, that's what you do when you talk with your cousin. You segue from James Joyce to John Woo. Liam and I were raving about Face/Off. What a RIDICULOUS film. What an EFFECTIVE film. I saw that movie at a small theatre in Greenwich Village (no longer with us, unfortunately) - with my friend Rebecca, and we bought sushi beforehand and brought it in with us, eating with chopsticks as we watched the film. It was that kind of movie theatre. What I love about that movie is that yes, you have incredible action sequences, and a speedboat chase that makes you scream out loud as you watch it, and you have a finale with doves flying around (typical John Woo), and ominous dudes strolling into a church for a showdown, but what it is REALLY about is identity. It has deep themes, Philip K. Dick themes. What is identity? Are we our faces? If I had a different face, would I be a different person? Where does identity come from? What makes us what we are? And yet it's all packaged in this ridiculous and awesome device, where John Travolta is playing Nic Cage and Nic Cage is playing John Travolta, and it's campy (like John Woo movies often can be), but without betraying that deeper subject. I love Face/Off, it's been years since I've seen it, but after talking with Liam today I think I need to own it. And seriously: where is that Postman with Part 2??

Crimson Gold (2003); Director: Jafar Panahi

Crimson Gold opens with a stick-up at a jewelry store. The camera is placed inside the dark store, and through its point of view we can see out onto the sunny street beyond. We see the little old jeweler come to unlock the door from the outside, we see the dark figure running up behind him, we see the flash of the gun as the jeweler is shoved inside, and then follows the stick-up, where the camera doesn't move once. The jeweler is pleading and fighting, the thief telling him to shut up and get the jewels, but half the time they are out of frame. They crash around, things fall down, we hear their dialogue, and occasionally they pass by the camera, but most often, they are not seen. As the theft plays out, a group of curious people gather outside on the sidewalk. A chic woman in a blue headscarf had tried to get into the jewelry store, found it locked, and, peeking in, saw what was going on and began to freak out, calling for help. People gather. A shot is fired from within. Chaos erupts on the street. Everyone knows the jeweler, they start to call out for him by name. The thief never says a word. He remains a dark lumbering presence, and it isn't until the final shot of the opening sequence when he, trapped in a situation he has started, stands with his back against the gate, his back against the crowd on the sidewalk, and holds the gun up to his temple.

It's an outstanding opening, and one of the best parts of it is that it sets up an expectation of what kind of movie we are about to see (jewelry heists, down-on-his-luck guy trying to make one big score, all the cliches), and while some of those cliches are in place, because it's Jafar Panahi directing (and the script is by Abbas Kiarostami) things don't quite look or feel the way they are "supposed" to. I love a movie that can do that, without being too clever or pleased with itself. Criminson Gold is not messing with convention. It has no opinion about the conventions of jewelry-heist movies. Or if it does, it's certainly not front and center.

One of the dangers in talking about Jafar Panahi's films is that you (the writer) can make it sound too earnest, missing entirely the feel and energy of the film. He's serious, sure, but not too serious. He's interested in other things entirely. So if I said: Crimson Gold is about the gap between the haves and have-nots in Tehran, you would be forgiven for suppressing a yawn and deciding to see another movie instead. But Panahi and Kiarostami, film geeks essentially, understand that cinema is a language, it is visual, and it is what one does with the pictures that tells the story.

And Crimson Gold is full of beautiful and strange pictures.

Hussein (the thief) is played by Hossain Emadeddin, a non-actor (this is his only credit), and Ebert mentions in his review that Emadeddin, in real life, is a paranoid schizophrenic. He doesn't play one here, but there is something dead and abstract about his face that is compelling, making you wonder all along if something might be wrong with this guy. He is mainly wordless. He rides around Tehran on his motorbike. He lives in a dingy one-room apartment. He delivers pizzas. And, on the side, he is a pickpocket with his friend Ali (played by Kamyar Sheisi), and they strategize on how to pick women who clearly have money in their purses. There is a whole psychology behind it. Not that Hussein seems interested in psychology. He is engaged to be married to Ali's sister. Ali is relieved. He was worried about his sister's chances of finding a husband.

All of this information is revealed in the early stages of the film, when it becomes clear that we are working backwards, to find out how it is that Hussein would end up with a gun to his head in a jewelry store. The two sit in a cafe talking, and an old man comes up to them and joins them. He gives them advice on thievery, a line he runs in too, and says that the best thiefs are the most honest. Don't knock someone over for pocket change, or the thrill of it. The motivation behind your robbery is what separates the men from the boys.

My expectations were still that we were about to see a movie about robbery. Maybe the old man will become a mentor ... maybe we will see the trial runs of big robberies ... maybe one will be busted ...

Crimson Gold doesn't go any of these predictable ways, and as the film meanders on, we submit to its pace, we submit to its journey. We give up our own. So much of life is about giving up your idea of what it should be, and accepting the reality before you. This is true of the characters in Crimson Gold (everyone: from the girlfriend, to the old guy in the cafe, to the people Hussein meets along the way) and it is true of the audience as well.

There are two standout scenes. They are long. They are complex, with many elements, many characters. Kiarostami's wicked wit and intelligence is here in spades. Throw out the rule-book. The opening jewelry-heist becomes a distant memory, and instead, we follow Hussein around on his delivery route, meeting different people along the way, and getting sucked into their various dramas.

The first standout scene takes place at a big fancy apartment building, and Hussein pulls up, with three pizzas to be delivered to the third floor. He is stopped at the front door by a cop, who tells him to go no further. Hussein lumpily argues. He is stubborn. "But I have pizzas to deliver." "That's none of your business. Just stand over there." It turns out there is a stakeout on the street, with plainclothes policemen and soldiers hanging out in all the bushes, and waiting in parked cars. There is a party going on on the third floor, you can hear the music pounding from above, and the cops are waiting for the partygoers to emerge, so they can haul them off to jail one by one. The cops won't let Hussein leave. He is now a witness, and may be important later. He is forced to stand against a wall and wait.

The scene unfolds, and each time you think it might be over, it unfolds some more. It takes surprising dips and alleys, it arrives at dead-ends, and then backs up and tried another way. The street is dark and shadowed, and the buildings have a greenish tinge from the streetlamps. It is beautifully shot, with Panahi's detailed eye for urban settings and strange beauty found in ordinary things. Kiarostami's script is incredible, too. A veiled woman drives up and tries to enter the building. The police stop her. She says that her daughter had called for her to come pick her up. The police try to make her phone up there on her cell phone and tell her daughter to come down. She refuses. She is told to sit in her car and wait. A couple drive up and get out, and the cops swarm around them. They haven't even said where they are going, perhaps they live on a different floor of the building, but the cops pull on them, demanding to know what they are doing. The couple fights back. (Everyone in the movie fights back, a little nod to the resilience of the Iranian people in the face of such nonsense.) "We haven't even gone in yet ..." The woman exclaims, "We're married!" A cop snorts, "What kind of a man goes out with his wife?" This is not said ironically, or as a joke. This is a serious sentiment, and opens up worlds of understanding of the sexual and moral culture of the place (explored in other Iranian films about marriage, like Hemlock, and Fireworks Wednesday, and The Day I Became a Woman.) These two HAVE to be up to no good, because what kind of a man goes out with his wife to a party? Kiarostami doesn't linger on this, though. All of this is shot from Hussein's point of view, waiting across the street, and looking on. Two young girls, chattering on their cell phones, emerge from the party and are hauled off to the waiting police van. The scene has to be about 20 minutes long.

Hussein doesn't have much to say during all of this, but he does strike up a conversation with a young soldier standing nearby. The soldier barely looks like he shaves yet. Hussein notices this and asks him how old he is. The soldier confesses he is 15. His brother died in "the war" (there's only one war to this generation of Iranians). We already know that Hussein is a veteran of that war, and he takes some kind of medication, it is never said what, but it has made him heavy and sluggish. The war hangs over this scene, its long memory, its reach. Hussein looks up at the window where the party is going on. The curtains are drawn, but you can see people dancing and whooping it up behind. The music is techno-pop with an Iranian flair. One woman who emerges and is immediately hauled off, protests: "There was a wedding - this is a family gathering." No matter. Men, women, dancing together? Alcohol probably? Hussein and the young soldier stare up at the gyrating silhouettes. Hussein asks the young boy, "Have you ever danced with a girl?" The young boy shakes his head no.

The streets are in shadow, long and green and murky, with one blinding red neon sign at the end of the alley. It is startlingly beautiful, yet disturbing as well. It has the feel of a hospital, or a prison, those institutional colors. Hussein knows he is going to be in trouble with his job, but he has three pizzas on the back of his motorbike, and it would be a shame to let them go to waste, so he offers a piece to the young soldier. The soldier refuses. Hussein thinks a bit, silently, and then walks over to the parked car where the police sergeant, walkie-talkie in hand, sits, and he offers him a piece of pizza. The sergeant tells him to go back against the wall like he is told. Hussein insists. "The pizza will go to waste. If you have a piece, then the others won't be afraid to have a piece. Come on." It is the most he has said in the entire film.

The sergeant gives in, he's hungry, and grabs some slices of pizza, which then embolden the others, who will probably be on this stakeout until dawn. Even the waiting veiled mother in the car takes a slice.

I have just described the action of the scene, but that can't begin to convey the slow creeping effectiveness of it, the dark colors, the sudden spurts of alarmed dialogue as the cops arrest yet another person, and above it all, the throbbing pounding Western music, seen as so threatening and yet so enticing.

The second standout scene is when Hussein delivers pizza to a penthouse apartment. A young slick guy in a tie answers the door. He is played by Pourang Nakhael, and it's rather amazing to me that this is his only credit, another testament to Jafar Panahi's well-known gift of working with non-actors. The slick guy is annoyed. He had ordered the pizzas because he had a girl over, he informed Hussein, but now the girl (and her tagalong friend) is gone, and he has no use for the pizzas anymore. He's more annoyed that he has been blown off by this girl. Hussein is impervious to such sophisticated problems. His character reminded me a lot of Victor, played by Pruitt Taylor Vince, in James Mangold's underrated film Heavy. Dominated and underestimated by others, mainly because of his weight, he has learned to suppress his desires, and his more unsavory feelings, like rage or insecurity. He seems passive. As Victor seems passive, overrun by his unbearable mother (played awesomely by Shelley Winters), and hopelessly in love with the beautiful new girl at the pizza place where he works (another interesting parallel with Crimson Gold). Both characters, Victor and Hussein, are in service jobs. They have to bite down their pride and their feeling that they deserve more ... because, perhaps, they have been mocked their whole lives. For being ugly, for being weird, whatever. And nobody wants to know that their pizza delivery guy has feelings, or a life.

Again, Kiarostami messes with our expectations of what the scene will be. We are led to think that it will be a short scene, a quick glimpse into an unheard-of world of echoey penthouses and guys with money to burn and girls who come over to ... do what, exactly? The slick rich guy doesn't want to pay for the pizzas, because it was the girls' idea anyway, but Hussein remains immovable, a dark stolid force, and so the rich guy goes to get the money. Hussein slowly peeks through the door. We see a wide white staircase, like the one in Notorious. We see gold leaf. We see Greek statues in little niches in the walls. Up until this point in the film, we are obviously aware that rich people exist, but since we are only in Hussein's small circle, we don't actually see how the better half lives. So the short glimpse we get, the wide black windows high high up, staring out at the glittering vast sprawl of Tehran, has a deep impact. It's devastating, actually.

One of the most boring things to do in life is to bitch and complain about not having enough money. It is not rich people's fault that they are fortunate. As a matter of fact, more often than not, their wealth comes from hard work and commitment. They have earned it. However, we are all only human, and by that point in the story of Crimson Gold, we feel that Hussein has perhaps earned the right to at least have a moment of thinking, "Dang. It's so unfair."

But that's just a projection. We don't know what Hussein thinks. We don't need to. Panahi, with the slow pan across that astounding room, tells us all we need to know.

Then: the scene takes a turn. The rich guy invites Hussein to come in and share the pizzas with him. Why not? The whole evening was a bust anyway. He had obviously hoped to get laid, or at least get something, and now what was he going to do? Hussein resists at first, but the rich guy is insistent, and finally, Hussein enters. What follows, a long scene between the two men, is not at all what you would imagine or conceive of - only Kiarostami could do it - and as they eat and talk, and the rich guy (who is about Hussein's age) complains about how "crazy" the country is (he grew up in the States and then got homesick, coming back to inhabit his parents' insanely palatial apartment), and offers Hussein liquor, and complains about the girl who came over, and complains about a lot of things, actually. There are many indictments of Iranian culture here, but since it is put into the mouth of this vaguely unsavory poor-little-rich-boy, the edge is taken off. Maybe he's complaining too much, I thought. But the knife of criticism is there, and yet another reason why Panahi so often gets into trouble.

The penthouse apartment that Panahi found is one of the most incredible sets I've ever seen in an Iranian film. It's three or four floors, with a huge roof-deck, a crazy swimming pool with posing black Greek statues, a grand piano, a strange empty room filled with red-and-white striped plush chairs (it looks like a conference room in a hotel), a full gym with weight machines and treadmills, a stainless steel giant refrigerator filled to the gills with liquor, a huge empty room containing only a Persian rug and a flat-screen TV as large as a cineplex movie screen ... It is a creepy empty house, screaming "nouveau riche", with no taste, no personality, just an accumulation of objects, unused, there for show.

It is alienating to the extreme. Hussein and the rich guy sit at the table, eating pizza, and smoking. The girl who had just left had apparently gotten her period in the rich guy's bathroom, leaving some blood splattered on the floor (calling to mind the horrifying scene from Neal Labute's Your Friends and Neighbors, with Jason Patrick freaking out on this girl because she dared to bleed on his sheets - awful. Awful.), and the rich guy is incensed at the blood on his pristine floor. It seems to him indicative of how "insane" Iran is. "You people don't know how to deal with a simple biological problem..." he fumes as he cleans it up.

Part of the joy of this film is, as I mentioned, succumbing to where IT wants to go, and letting go of the feeling that "shouldn't we be moving on now?" Sometimes, yes, it is good to "move on", but Crimson Gold is not about its plot. It is about the lonely people you meet in the night, the sudden moments of connection (or disconnection), and the vast abyss between what you want and what you have. The rich guy, naturally, has no respect for his wealth, although he uses it for all its worth. But he thinks Iran is crazy, and all the men there are crazy, and the women even crazier, and why can't people just relax and have a nice glass of wine without all this ... this ... craziness?

It reminded me of the section in Marjane Satrapi's graphic autobiographical novel Persepolis, when she returns to Iran in her late teens, after having lived abroad for a bit, and how strange it was, how alienating ... to have been free (even unsafely so, with sex and drugs and all of the "freedoms" of the West), and then to come back to a place that is obsessed with sex, to an unhealthy degree, OBSESSED ... which creates a warped culture where relationship and "ambiance" (as the rich guy says to Hussein) are impossible. "I don't drink to get drunk, like all you Iranian lunatics," says the rich guy - "I need ambiance, a sense of occasion ..."

Kiarostami is quite pointed here. It gives the scene real bite.

Hussein wanders through the house, touching things, staring at the excess, and even jumps in the pool at one point, fully clothed.

So how is it then that Hussein, lumpy pizza delivery guy, ends up in the jewelry store holding a gun to his own head?

The strange sneaking power of Crimson Gold is that its structure moves you quickly away from that violent opening, so that you are lulled into forgetting it. Panahi's signature shots of cars zipping through the freeways around Tehran, Hussein and Ali on his motorbike, careening in and out of traffic, carry us far far away, immediately, from what we know the outcome of the picture will be.

Context is key. By the end of the film, it is not that we know why he did it. We can guess why. The reasons and motivations are all there. It is that we have spent enough time with this man that we feel the loss. The loss of this good man. 3/4 of the way through, I remembered where we were going in Crimson Gold, I remembered that opener, and because the pace of the film, after that fevered beginning, is so slow and deliberate, we have time to mourn. We have time to realize a loss. This is Panahi's true gift. None of this is accidental.

I don't even know why I love Hussein, he is not a particularly lovable character, although I suspect it has something to do with the fact that he made the sergeant eat the piece of pizza first.

Don't Bother to Knock (1952); Director: Roy Ward Baker

Yesterday, June 1, was Marilyn Monroe's birthday. Here is a look at an under-rated performance, that of the babysitter in "Don't Bother to Knock", co-starring Richard Widmark.

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

Seeing Monroe's performance in 1952's Don't Bother to Knock, as Nell, the psychologically shattered and borderline psychotic babysitter in a plush hotel, makes you wonder about roads not traveled. It makes you think of her courage in putting up with contemptuous projects like Let's Make Love or The Seven Year Itch (one of the meanest spirited movies she was ever in) and wonder what might have happened if she had been allowed to experiment. Now I'm not saying that her work, as it exists, in comedic gems such as Some Like It Hot is somehow lesser, or somehow lacking. But Don't Bother to Knock hints at another kind of career that this woman could have had. Who knows, maybe she wouldn't have wanted it. She wanted the love of the audience, she needed that love, it had to happen. I still wonder, though.

Billy Wilder said this about Monroe (this is a transcription of a conversation he had with Cameron Crowe):

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

We all have magic in us. But Marilyn Monroe had movie magic. And, like Wilder said, "...she automatically knew where the joke was." That kind of sensibility cannot be taught. And in the same way that it is rare to find a man as outrageously good-looking as Cary Grant who is also a comedic genius, it's rare to find a bombshell who can nail jokes in the way she does (even when she is the butt of them)! But she is always the one who comes off smelling like a rose, even in nasty pictures like The Seven Year Itch, which tries to make a joke out of her, and fails.

So I love Marilyn's funniness, it's one of the most spontaneous things about her. However, she always yearned to show more of herself, more of what she could do (especially as she got more serious about acting as a craft). Don't Bother to Knock is early Monroe. Her stardom hadn't "hit" yet.

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

Marilyn Monroe often played either naive breathless girls, easily taken in, a bit dopey, or vaguely trashy showgirls, who somehow have managed to maintain their sweetness. She never played bitter. She never played a wisecracker. That was not her thing. And whatever "experiences" she had had in her life, it had not touched that diamond-bright innocence inside her. Nothing could kill it. But she never played - except in Don't Bother To Knock - a truly damaged woman. I suppose a woman with a body like that and a face like that was made to be a fantasy for audiences and audiences don't really want to see their sex goddesses as damaged. Marilyn knew that better than anyone. She had a love-hate relationship with her beauty. It was her ticket to fame, she knew that, and she was grateful for it, and she knew how to use it. She was a master at creating her persona (and she knew how to turn it on and off). But it was also what tormented her, and gave her such intense stage fright that she wouldn't come out of her dressing room for sometimes hours, staring at herself in the mirror. What was she looking for? How hard was it for her to drag up that sexy goddess on days when she didn't feel like it? There are those who respond to such questions with, "Oh, boo hoo, cry me a river, she was famous, we all should have such problems!" I think it represents a truly ungenerous and stingy attitude, not to mention a lack of understanding of "what it takes" to be "on". And not just "on", but the most beautiful woman in the world, etc. ad nauseum. Monroe would lock her dressing room door, and refuse to come out, knowing that within her was an abyss of sadness that nobody wanted to see. It had to have been horrible. I can only imagine. I don't have that kind of beauty. I have no idea what that must be like. She was often very afraid of directors, who could get impatient with her constant bungling of lines (most likely the result of undiagnosed dyslexia) ... but (and this is important) she absolutely loved the crew, who loved her right back. They were her audience. They were not stingy. She would walk out of her dressing room, all dolled up, after having made everyone wait for hours, and the crew - hanging off their scaffolds - would catcall and whistle, and she ate it up. It was friendly. Marilyn was loved by those guys; they represented her fan base. Directors loved her too, in spite of themselves. They loved her because, like Billy Wilder said, even if it took 80 takes for her to get a line, she was Marilyn Monroe, after all ... so that's why she was paid the big bucks, and that's why you sucked it up and tried not to mind having to wait around for her to get over her stage fright or whatever it was. I see both sides. I can see why a director would tear his hair out with her shenanigans. But this is a post about Marilyn Monroe, and there were certainly demons there, demons that sometimes took over. In Don't Bother to Knock, she was asked to reveal some of that stuff.

Monroe plays a resolutely unglamorous part. She lives with her parents. She is recently out of an institution (we learn this later). Her uncle has gotten her a job babysitting in the hotel where he is a doorman. She shows up on her first day, wearing a simple cotton dress, low heels, a little black beret - and when she gets on the elevator for the first time and we see her from behind, her dress is a little bit wrinkled, like it would be for any woman who had just taken a long subway ride. It's touching. Alex told me that she read in some Photoplay magazine she owns that Monroe had bought the dress herself at a five and dime for the movie. Monroe had seen it, and known that it was "Nell's dress". It shows her intelligence of her choice for the character, as well as a lack of vanity.

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

Nell is brought into the hotel room, and meets the parents of Bunny, the little girl she will be babysitting. The parents swirl out, leaving simple instructions. Nell reads Bunny a fairy story before she goes to bed. There is something touching here, and also not quite right. Marilyn reads the story in almost a monotone, a dreamy uninflected voice, as though she is trying to imagine herself into the story she is reading. She's cut off. From the sweetness of the experience, and also from her self. We can't even guess what she's thinking. Bunny, however, is riveted.

Once Bunny goes to bed, Nell is left alone in the apartment. She's aimless. When her face is in stasis, and when she is alone, all you see is the sadness. And, more than that, more disturbing, the restlessness. In the introduction to the parents, and in her dealings with her uncle, she tries to keep it together, and put on a social happy expression. But once alone, the mask is off.

Marilyn was so rarely without her mask, and so it's amazing to watch.

Another thing that is fascinating about this film, and also singular in Marilyn's career, is that she gets the opportunity to show anger. Real rage. I can't think of another film where she gets angry in a similar way, where she pushes back, where the helplessness suddenly pushes OUT, lashing out in fury at those who try to contain her. It's terrifying.

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

Jed finds himself at loose ends back up in his hotel room, while he can hear the lovely strains of Lyn singing torch songs (or, to say it another way, Anne Bancroft lip syncing) through the radio on the wall, connected to the bar downstairs (a nice omnipresent touch). He pours a drink. He sprawls on the bed. He throws his black book on the floor. He's cranky. He thought he would be getting laid, and now he won't be. He then catches a glimpse in the window across the way, of Nell, dressed up in a gown, dancing around by herself. A private moment. Jed is struck dumb. Eventually she notices him, and they begin a conversation across the space in-between. He figures out her room number from the floor plan on the back of the door, and calls her. They sit and talk on the phone, staring at each other from window to window. It's hot. There's an ache to the scene, in their separation, the mystery of the connection.

Now one of the things that I really love about this film is Richard Widmark's journey through it, and how he treats Nell at first, and then watching him adjust to the reality before him.

Here's the thing: Marilyn had an aura about her that clued you in to the fact that inside, she was about 11 years old. She had a woman's body but a child's mind. I think that's one of the reasons why pairing her up with someone like John Wayne wouldn't have worked. Wayne required a grown-up, and his best romantic pairings were when he was somehow equally matched. No kid's stuff for Wayne. Only grown-up dames need apply. The thing about Marilyn, the captivating and also complicated thing, is that she was a little innocent girl in that sex-bomb of a body. And here, in Don't Bother to Knock, Richard Widmark's Jed, a guy out for a good time, a guy looking (in this moment anyway) to fuck his loneliness away, only sees the body at first. But don't we all? I can't judge him for that. It's quite a body. He looks at Nell, and sees ... well ... Marilyn Monroe ... and he thinks: I have hit the jackpot. There's also a certain passivity in Nell (at first), a certain willingness, that makes you think she would be "easy". Monroe had that. She was soft, she would yield. And so Jed, who's not in the mood for a fight, or even a seduction, thinks that it will be pretty easy to capture this woman for the night. And that's what he wants right now. No more problems, for God's sake.

But over the devastating course of their next couple of scenes, when he invites himself over to her room (not knowing, of course, that it is not her room at all), he begins to realize that something is not right. They flirt, they drink, they kiss ... and through their interactions, something opens up in Nell, a ferocious need is unleashed. She projects onto him all of her hopes and dreams, which is alarming, so early in the game, and calls to mind Fatal Attraction, except perhaps with more subtlety. She needs too much. She loves him immediately. She clutches and clings. But instead of ignoring the red flags and taking what he thinks he deserves anyway (after all, she invited him over, she's in a negligee, she knows exactly what he wants!), he turns her down. And in so doing, Jed becomes a better man. He shows his "understanding heart". He doesn't realize that that is what is happening in the moment, he just knows that seducing this woman would be wrong. Kim Morgan, in her wonderful review of the film, writes:

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

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

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

Like I said in the beginning, I love her comedic stuff ("Maybe somebody's name is Butler..." - her worried line from All About Eve that makes me laugh every time I see the movie). I love her musical numbers ("File my Claim" from River of No Return is my favorite). I'm a fan, regardless of the material. She's got "it". When Monroe was put in projects like Some Like It Hot, projects that were worthy of her talents, she was very happy. She hated some of the stuff she was forced to do (Let's Make Love, for example), and she hated that she wasn't able, most of the time, to show the full spectrum of her emotions. Her idols were not other bombshells. Her idols were real actresses.

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

The guts that woman had. To tolerate such condescension. Monroe laughed at the question, however, and said, "Have you read the book? There's a wonderful part in it for me, a real seductress."

She was right, not only in her belief that there was a part for her in any version of Brothers Karamazov that would come to the screen (Grushenka, naturally), but also in how she handled the snotty remark from the reporter, who probably hadn't even read the book, or if he had, he certainly didn't remember it clearly.

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

The glass has shattered. The character is in pieces. Her psyche has fragmented, parts of herself trailing behind her as she crosses the lobby. Her sorrow and fear is in her pinky finger, her waist, her calves, her posture ... It surges through her and makes it difficult to even walk.

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

A real actress does, that's who.