Happy Birthday, Rhode Island’s first poet laureate, Michael Harper

“My poems are rhythmic rather than metric; the pulse is jazz; the tradition generally oral; my major influences musical; my debts, mostly to the musicians who taught me to see about experience, pain and love, and who made it artful and archetypal.” – Michael Harper

It’s Michael Harper’s birthday, Rhode Island’s first poet laureate 1988-1993! That link is to the obituary in The Providence Journal and it gives a wonderful portrait of the man, his status in Rhode Island, and what he was all about as a poet. Here’s the obituary in the New York Times as well. He won many awards in his lifetime, including the prestigious Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Society of America.. Read that Providence Journal piece too to get a sense of who he was as a teacher, the accolades pouring in from students who were lucky enough to study with him (the girl who wrote the poem about her grandfather’s suicide is especially touching). He was born in Brooklyn, went to college in California, got his MFA in Iowa, and ended up in Rhode Island. He traveled widely, in America and elsewhere, accumulating a wealth of knowledge and experience which broadened his perspective. His poetic rhythms were, famously, influenced by jazz.

He was deeply interested in history, and many of his poems feature real historical figures, like John Coltrane, Jackie Robinson, Frederick Douglass and Roger Williams (the founder of the State of Rhode Island …and Providence Plantations. Littlest state in the Union, longest name). He focused on “kinship”, the dovetailing of narratives crossing cultures.

Harper got his start by submitting a poem (“Dear John, Dear Coltraine” – listed below) to a contest judged by Robert Penn Warren, Denise Levertov and Gwendolyn Brooks. He didn’t win the prize, but Gwendolyn Brooks (my post about her here) was so impressed she helped arrange the publication of his first collection of his poetry, Dear John, Dear Coltrane in 1970. It was nominated for the National Book Award. In college, he studied poetry under Christopher Isherwood, and through Isherwood met Auden and Stephen Spender – the great trifecta of ex-pat poets at that time. Simultaneously, Harper’s deep immersion in Keats and the Romantics made him feel that poetry was a thing he could actually devote himself to. (Can you even BE a poet if you don’t go through a Keats phase? It seems required). He got his degree, got his MFA, and began a very successful teaching career – in many different universities before he ended up at Brown University in Providence, where he taught until his death.

Rhode Islanders are proud to claim him.

Here are three of his poems below, two to John Coltrane, and one to Roger Williams.

Dear John, Dear Coltrane

a love supreme, a love supreme
a love supreme, a love supreme

Sex fingers toes
in the marketplace
near your father’s church
in Hamlet, North Carolina—
witness to this love
in this calm fallow
of these minds,
there is no substitute for pain:
genitals gone or going,
seed burned out,
you tuck the roots in the earth,
turn back, and move
by river through the swamps,
singing: a love supreme, a love supreme;
what does it all mean?
Loss, so great each black
woman expects your failure
in mute change, the seed gone.
You plod up into the electric city—
your song now crystal and
the blues. You pick up the horn
with some will and blow
into the freezing night:
a love supreme, a love supreme

Dawn comes and you cook
up the thick sin ‘tween
impotence and death, fuel
the tenor sax cannibal
heart, genitals, and sweat
that makes you clean—
a love supreme, a love supreme

Why you so black?
cause I am
why you so funky?
cause I am
why you so black?
cause I am
why you so sweet?
cause I am
why you so black?
cause I am
a love supreme, a love supreme
:

So sick
you couldn’t play Naima,
so flat we ached
for song you’d concealed
with your own blood,
your diseased liver gave
out its purity,
the inflated heart
pumps out, the tenor kiss,
tenor love:
a love supreme, a love supreme—
a love supreme, a love supreme

Here Where Coltrane Is

Soul and race
are private dominions,
memories and modal
songs, a tenor blossoming,
which would paint suffering
a clear color but is not in
this Victorian house
without oil in zero degree
weather and a forty-mile-an-hour wind;
it is all a well-knit family:
a love supreme.
Oak leaves pile up on walkway
and steps, catholic as apples
in a special mist of clear white
children who love my children.
I play “Alabama”
on a warped record player
skipping the scratches
on your faces over the fibrous
conical hairs of plastic
under the wooden floors.

Dreaming on a train from New York
to Philly, you hand out six
notes which become an anthem
to our memories of you:
oak, birch, maple,
apple, cocoa, rubber.
For this reason Martin is dead;
for this reason Malcolm is dead;
for this reason Coltrane is dead;
in the eyes of my first son are the browns
of these men and their music.

History as Apple Tree

Cocumscussoc is my village,
the western arm of Narragansett
Bay; Canonicus chief sachem;
black men scape into his tribe.

How does patent not breed heresy?
Williams came to my chief
for his tract of land,
hunted by mad Puritans,
founded Providence Plantation;
Seekonk where he lost
first harvest, building, plant,
then the bay from these natives:
he set up trade.
With Winthrop he bought
an island, Prudence;
two others, Hope and Patience
he named, though small.
His trading post at the cove;
Smith’s at another close by.
We walk the Pequot trail
as artery or spring.

Wampanoags, Cowesets,
Nipmucks, Niantics
came by canoe for the games;
matted bats, a goal line,
a deerskin filled with moss:
lacrosse. They danced;
we are told they gambled their souls.

In your apple orchard
legend conjures Williams’ name;
he was an apple tree.
Buried on his own lot
off Benefit Street
a giant apple tree grew;
two hundred years later,
when the grave was opened,
dust and root grew
in his human skeleton:
bones became apple tree.

As black man I steal away
in the night to the apple tree,
place my arm in the rich grave,
black sachem on a family plot,
take up a chunk of apple foot,
let it become my skeleton,
become my own myth:
my arm the historical branch,
my name the bruised fruit,
Black human photograph: apple tree.

QUOTES:

Michael Harper:

“[My travels] to Mexico and Europe where those landscapes broadened my scope and interest in poetry and culture of other countries while I searched my own family and racial history for folklore, history, and myth for themes that would give my writing the tradition and context where I could find my own voice. My travels made me look closely at the wealth of human materials in my own life, its ethnic richness, complexity of language and stylization, the tension between stated moral idealism and brutal historical realities, and I investigated the inner reality of those struggles to find the lyrical expression of their secrets in my own voice.”

Keith Leonard:

“[Harper’s] best poems about personal pain, about historical figures like Frederick Douglass, or about musicians and writers and, therefore, about artistry, his chiseled, forbidding poetics effectively suggest the harrowing unity between vision and memory, Western and non-Western, pain and beauty, by which Harper defines black identity and resists literary convention.”

Don Share, editor of Poetry magazine:

“He brought voices, traditions, and convictions into poetry that hadn’t been part of it before. His vast experience expanded American literature, and though he will be missed, his words will carry on resoundingly.”

Scholar Michael G. Cooke elaborated on Harper’s use of “kinship”:

Kinship means social bonding, a recognition of likeness in context, concern, need, liability, value. It is humanistic, a cross between consanguinity and technical organization… [Harper’s] approach to kinship is a radiant one, reaching out across time, across space, even across race.

Michael Harper, 1978, interview with The Washington Post:

“I’ve been called a black poet, revolutionary poet, a black aesthetic poet, an academic poet, an ameliorating poet — you name it. I’ve never made any attempt to qualify out the black content in my poetry. I’ve written poems about a good many things. I’ve tried to keep my range of experience as wide as possible.”

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“If it hadn’t been for the videocassette, I may not have had a career at all.” — Kurt Russell

It’s his birthday today. How I love him. I grew up with him. The Computer Who Wore Tennis Shoes. I remember that being screened for us in grade school in what they called “the multi-purpose room” (lol: gym, cafeteria, theatre). And I loved him, I loved his face. I didn’t think “handsome” because I was 10, but there was something in him I related to. This continues to be the case. He reaches out to audiences, and you’re on his side. It’s that simple.

But that’s the thing: It’s NOT simple. What Kurt Russell has naturally, other actors try to acquire. But you can’t really acquire it. It doesn’t work if you have to work at it. Personal charisma can’t be taught.

I love that one of his earliest roles was in It Happened at the World’s Fair, an Elvis movie, where he kicks Elvis in the shins – at Elvis’ bidding, because Elvis wants an excuse to go visit a hot nurse he just saw walking by. He pays the little whippersnapper and the kid hauls off and kicks him in the shins.

It’s surreal, almost, that just over 15 years later, Kurt Russell would PLAY Elvis, in the 1979 John Carpenter-directed television movie, the first movie to “deal with” Elvis after Elvis passed away.

He’s fantastic as Elvis. It’s a thoughtful and deeply empathetic performance, and his “imitation” is fantastic. Elvis is easy to imitate and/or mock, but very hard to embody. Try to do an imitation of Elvis and do it seriously, organically. It’s not as easy as it looks. I wrote about the movie here.

Russell’s career has had many different phases, and there have been certain moments when he surged forward into an obviously new phase, but in general there has been no fallow periods. He’s never fallen so off the radar that he needs to climb his way back. Slow and steady wins the race. He’s been a star since he was a child. He has a very practical attitude. He’s not straining for the brass ring, and it shows. This is a compliment. Oscars are worthless. I mean, they’re fun and all, but it wasn’t until I started hanging out with film critics that I realized … wow, people take them this seriously? Actors and show folk of course are interested in the awards, and even get invested in their faves – it makes it all fun – but … they know that an Oscar doesn’t equal actual WORTH. I get that Oscars are important, in terms of careers and representation and opportunities. But still: none of it has to do with WORTH.

Kurt Russell is one of the best actors we’ve got and he’s not “in the conversation” of the Oscars – at all – and he doesn’t run his career trying to get that statue. This is more a comment on the Oscars than on him. Cary Grant never got a “competitive” Oscar. It’s amazing people put so much value on these awards, like, they honestly believe they mean something, that someone can ACTUALLY win. Kurt Russell may never win an Oscar. He’s never been nominated. If I were in charge of the world, and if Oscars actually meant what was worthy, he would have been nominated for Best Supporting in Silkwood, he would have been nominated for Best Actor in Miracle.

Silkwood came out in 1983, and his performance will never “date”. It’s one of his very best. He makes it look easy. He doesn’t linger or belabor over things. You don’t feel like he’s slumming, the way you sometimes feel when actors play working-class. He’s casual about things, casual meaning: he doesn’t make a huge deal out of himself, because it’s not ABOUT him. It’s about: what story is being told? How does my character help tell this story? What can I do to help this story be told? This type of thing doesn’t have to do with talent. It has to do with where he focuses his talent. Because he’s casual with his talent, because he doesn’t make a big deal out of it, because he doesn’t seem to need our approval … or even our attention … we DO pay attention. We are in a relationship with him.

Maybe because he focuses on story rather than on self, he’s not positional about his career: none of it appears over-planned. The biggest segue he had to go through was from being a child star, associated with Disney, to a young man, free of all that. First he did the Elvis movie, which began the process. Then, in 1980 and 1981, he made Used Cars and Escape from New York, and that was that. If you want to kill your Disney child-star past, then that’s the way to do it. He didn’t tiptoe his way into adult stardom. He took a blowtorch to any Disney expectations, by appearing in the most cynical American comedy ever made, and then as the badass-iest badass ever onscreen, eyepatch and all.

This focus on story – on “this script sounds good, let’s do it” – leads him down more interesting paths than he might take otherwise. I think it’s the main reason that he’s been in a number of movies that have gone on to be stone-cold cult favorites. Directors are smart. They trust him. They WANT him. He’s a movie star. He’s a great actor. He’s fearless and funny. He’s sexy. He can be very VERY dark. He can also be a clown. When he’s allowed to express his cynicism and pessimism, he’s electric and unpredictable. He’s got an EDGE. A steely EDGE – this is not something you associate with former Disney child stars.

In my opinion, he can do anything. Oscars Shmoscars.

For my column at Film Comment, I wrote about two movies starring Kurt Russell:

Last year was the 40th anniversary of the “miracle on ice”, so I wrote about the 2004 movie Miracle (and other hockey-related films), and Kurt Russell’s amazing performance as coach Herb Brooks.

The second piece for Film Comment was something I had been wanting to write about for years: a piece on Robert Zemeckis’ Used Cars.

The movie was a flop. But it helped wrench Kurt Russell as far away from Disney as possible. It’s one of my faves. Russell got to be charming, but he got to use his charm in service of something calculating, cunning, and dishonest. A sweet spot! He may very well be the Last of the Great Rakes. I love a good RAKE and it’s a character type quickly vanishing from the earth … and we will miss them when they all go.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“A pas de deux is a dialogue of love. How can there be conversation if one partner is dumb?” — Rudolf Nureyev

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Joan Acocella, dance critic for The New Yorker:

Almost everyone who describes Nureyev eventually compares him to an animal. They bore you to death with this, but it was true.


Rudolf Nureyev’s solo debut on American TV, 1963

All quotes below come from Nureyev, by Julie Kavanagh, a wonderful biography.

But first: Here was MY introduction to Nureyev.

Excerpt from Kavanagh’s book:

We have to remember what Rudolf looked like back then on a staid British stage,” says writer and photographer Keith Money: “The bare midriff and all that glitzy Soviet campery were to some the absolute height of bad taste.” Most people, however, were transported by the sight of this exquisite youth yearning up toward Margot as the curtain fell, his fingers splayed, his back arched and pelvis thrust forward – “like a great Moslem whore”. And it was not only his passion and animality that were so stirring, but the speculation their union prompted about the ballerina’s own sexual depths. It made Verdy think of the King Kong legend – a “scene of seduction and cruelty … like the whole thing really was a bedroom … and you were watching through the keyhole.”

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Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn

“They seemed aware of each other even when their backs were turned. When their eye met, a message was passed.” — Alexander Bland

“Combine the smolder, the mystery, the dynamic presence, the great streaks of vivid movement which Nureyev gives us with the beauty, the radiance, the womanliness, the queenliness and the shining movements of Dame Margot…” — Walter Terry, ballet critic, on Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn

margot-fonteyn-rudolf-nureyev-great-ballet-partnerships-2
Nureyev and Fonteyn

“My husband called [the partnership] a celestial accident. To probe into its componenets is like trying to analyze a moonbeam.” — Maude Gosling, (ballerina wife of writer Nigel Gosling – good friends of Nureyev – and the two wrote a dance column together, under a joint pseudonym, Alexander Bland, see first quote above)

“Emotionally, technically, physically – in every way. They were just meant to meet on this earth and dance together.” — Ninette de Valois


Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn, “Romeo and Juliet,” 1966

“We become one body. One soul. We moved in one way. It was very complementary, every arm movement, every head movement. There were no more cultural gaps; age difference; we’ve been absorbed in characterization. We became the part. And public was enthralled.” — Rudolf Nureyev

“He was transfigured when he danced. I’d never seen such unearthly beauty. He seemed unreal; not of this world – like an archangel.” — Ballet fan on Nureyev

2006ah5584_rudolf_nureyev_in_the_nutcracker

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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Sláinte! Metallica “Whiskey in the Jar,” Dublin, 2006: “Hear Dublin Roar!”

An exhilarating performance of the unofficial Irish national anthem.

For St. Paddy’s Day. Not “Patty’s”, you philistines.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“The Greeks already understood that there was more interest in portraying an unusual character than a usual character – that is the purpose of films and theatre.” — Isabelle Huppert

It’s her birthday today.

Nobody like her. She’s almost in her own category. Her work is mysterious. It feels like she gives the wheel over totally to her subconscious. You never feel the puppet-strings of the actress. She never even seems to be “giving a performance”. It’s something ELSE, whatever it is she is doing. She can go deep – as deep as the Mariana Trench – but she can also present the surface – an equally important skill. Not every performance requires in-depth backstory. For example: La Ceremonie, the chilling film by Claude Chabrol, which is my favorite Chabrol, and one of Huppert’s best – most eerie performances. (She is often VERY eerie.). In La Ceremonie, she is all surface. And this is by design. Jeanne is shallow. The way psychopaths are shallow. She is what she seems to be. A perky mischievous young woman. Free-spirited and impulsive. Fun. Huppert doesn’t add anything to it.

Same with Sandrine Bonnaire, her extraordinary co-star. She is what she seems to be, too, a submissive easily-flattered lonely young woman, a bit dazzled by her new friend, pleased to have someone so glamorous and fun be interested in her. The two meet, and then flit along on the surface, having coffee, watching television, talking about nothing (again: seemingly: when you watch it again, you can practically HEAR the subterranean level of inchoate communication going on). Nothing seems to be happening, for most of it. You pick up on undercurrents, but nothing comes to the surface. Nothing is verbalized.

There isn’t even a conversation about deeper subjects, their resentments, their feelings of being stuck or wanting more, all the things you FEEL but they never say. They don’t say ANYthing and the terrifying final scene emerges almost like it’s a whim. It could not be scarier, since … it makes you realize: this is probably how events like this often go.

But that’s the thing about Huppert, and why she is unlike anybody else: you don’t NEED those conversations to occur, you don’t NEED to lead the audience by the hand. Besides, when you’re talking about psychopathy – which is what La Ceremonie is all about – psychology really doesn’t come into it. That’s why people are fascinated. What is it like to have … no depth? Huppert shows you.

But she can show you the opposite, too. Like Charlotte Rampling, like Theresa Russell, like Bibi Andersson – all actresses whom I consider to be in a similar category – if you can even categorize it – they don’t work IN the moment. They work way way WAY out on the far EDGE of any given moment, pushing it as far as it can go, so much so that they’re out in outer space, without oxygen. Their work is not literal in that way … they don’t work in easily-verbalized labels, they don’t take traditional routes, they don’t think traditionally. They go so much deeper “into character” that you are forced to lean forward, in awe, wondering: How … HOW … are they doing what they’re doing?

The eeriest thing about Isabelle Huppert is she doesn’t make a big deal of ANY of it. She came to Ebertfest for the screening of Elle, and during the QA following it was obvious how different she was from most other actresses. Actors want you to know how much work they’ve done. They list their research. They detail their process. This is not to say that process isn’t important and/or fascinating. If you know me, you know I love process. But Huppert … what IS her process? It doesn’t seem to exist at all. All that exists is the truth of the moment. And her ability to play make-believe within the moment. If I had to boil it down, I would say: she senses what is needed in any given script, and she devotes herself fully to that which is needed. She has no trouble excluding the things that AREN’T necessary (see, again, La Ceremonie. She is ALL surface in that. It’s why she is so tremendously frightening in it). She doesn’t worry about making herself understandable to an audience.

Think of her performance in The Piano Teacher. Now I love Meryl Streep, but it’s hard to picture her going where Huppert goes in that performance. Huppert is adorable and glamorous, and she can often be hilarious. She is very “realistic” – you never feel her “acting”. But she has zero fear about the ugliness of this world. She’s almost unwatchable in The Piano Teacher, the pain is so titanic and yet Huppert herself – the actress – breezes out of whatever role she plays un-touched. It’s like Gena Rowlands. Off-screen, Rowlands is a stable woman. She raised kids, she was supportive of her husband, she kept the house, she was responsible. But the roles Cassavetes gave her allowed her to let the panther out, the panther of her understanding of madness. Something similar happens with Huppert.

The woman I saw at Ebertfest saw Elle as a lark. That movie erupted a controversy – does the film endorse or condone rape? – one of those tiresome controversies it’s hard to avoid. I don’t mean to criticize those who hated the film. If you hated it, that’s of course fine. But I can think of nothing more tiresome than worrying over whether or not a movie condones bad behavior. I prefer to leave that to PTA groups and Christian family values organizations. I want no part of that. For such an upsetting movie, with such a bizarre central character (played by Huppert), the way Huppert discussed it really struck me. She had fun doing it.

She understood Paul Verhoeven. She understood that the film was not meant to be realistic AND that she wasn’t playing a strictly realistic character. “You’re not going to meet this person on the subway,” said Huppert.

And so she didn’t sweat it.

This is the thing I find so amazing about Huppert’s work, which is amazingly consistent in its excellence, and it’s just gotten more and more interesting as the years have gone by.

Some of the things I’ve written about Huppert:

I was going to write about La Ceremonie for my column at Film Comment (sob), but the movie was somewhat hard to find a couple of years ago. It’s now streaming on the Criterion Channel. Huzzah! I wrote about “folie a deux” films recently on my Substack, and of course, wrote about La Ceremonie, among other films.

Then there was Elle, which I adored. And to all the female film critics on Twitter who said things like, “No one who has been assaulted could like Elle“: How about you come up with an actual argument for why you didn’t like the film? You know, like, do your job, instead of attacking the women who did love the film – and there were many of us – in such a DISGUSTING way. I’ve been assaulted and I loved Elle. How DARE you. Only women do this to each other, by the way. I’ve been dealing with it since I was in high school. They draw lines, set up borders, police each other: You’re the RIGHT kind of woman, you’re one of us, and you’re the WRONG kind of woman, and so we don’t include you in our charmed circle. I think the film is brilliant on the concept of consent. I got into that in my Ebert review.

I also reviewed Mia Hansen-Løve’s wonderful film Things to Come (more on Hansen-Love here), which came out on the heels of Elle, and together they can be a master-class in why she is so unique. Things to Come is the epitome of down to earth and realistic. Elle is extremely stylized.

She can do both. Without breaking a sweat.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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Review: Club Zero (2024)

A creepy unnerving movie about fanaticism and … eating disorders, basically. Jessica Hausner’s films are really interesting. Definitely recommend this one, as difficult as it sometimes is. I reviewed for Ebert.

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“I hate greenery. I think trees are nowhere, and grass is about as dull as it can get. To tell you the honest truth, I wouldn’t mind if the whole world was paved.” — Max Shulman

It’s Max Shulman’s birthday. Who the hell is Max Shulman, you may ask? Or some of you may ask? He was one of the most popular humorists of his day, who reached his peak of popularity in the 1950s. He’s the guy who created the Dobie Gillis character, featured in a series of short stories and a couple novels – which was then turned into a popular TV series, with accompanying comic books to boot.

Shulman was very successful – a star, really – and is now almost forgotten. Why? Maybe because satire doesn’t time-travel all that well? I don’t know. It baffles me. I think his stuff is hilarious. He had a syndicated humor column, which appeared in 300 newspapers. Shulman’s work was extremely popular on college campuses. He was also a regular contributor to Mad Magazine, which was established in 1952. Surprise surprise. You’d recognize that snarky anarchic style anywhere.

I like to pay tribute to the random figures who have come into my world – particularly very early on – before I was aware of what was supposed to be good or important or whatever. The stuff that wasn’t assigned in school, books I basically tripped over (more often than not in my first after-school job as a page at the local library). I was around 14 when I discovered Max Shulman.

The funniest thing though in retrospect is that, of course, my PARENTS knew who Max Shulman was, he was at his peak in THEIR high school years – and suddenly their teenage daughter asks, “Have you ever heard of Max Shulman?” it must have been surreal. Uhm, yeah. We’ve heard of him. Recently, my 12-year-old nephew referenced Eminem, and started to explain to me who he was. Like, kid, you don’t even KNOW. I’ve seen the man in concert. I was there WHEN IT ALL BEGAN.

But this is the great thing about art. It exists in an eternal present. It’s THERE to be picked up and discovered. I think Peter Bogdonovich said smething like “There isn’t any such thing as ‘old movies’. There are just movies you haven’t seen yet.”

So I was reading a book published in 1956 but it felt like it was about what was happening right then in my own adolescence. All the high school stuff: totally current. The humor? didn’t date. The book needed no translation. I read the book outside of its time, but as far as I was concerned, it was published last week.

Shulman was a Cold War satirist, a Mad Magazine contributor, and he hacked at Eisenhower-era conformity with glee, lampooning it, creating space around it.

Growing up before the internet, growing up before algorithms catered to your personal taste – you had to basically find your own fun and sometimes that fun was totally accidental. You just happen to pick up a book because you like the cover and you read it and it becomes a lifelong fave. The accidental part of it, I think, is what pleases me the most, and what I miss the most. Because you really felt like you were discovering something all on your own. Even if you were discovering something 30 years after the fact. But it’s never too late. I wasn’t even ALIVE when Max Shulman was writing, but I’m discovering it NOW. Everyone has to watch Citizen Kane or Rules of the Game for the first time.

I somehow tripped over Shulman’s I Was A Teen-age Dwarf when I was a teenager myself. It is the chronicle of Dobie Gillis’ “woman”izing when he was in high school (he was the shortest boy in town. Hence – the title.) Dobie Gillis was quite the lady killer, or so he aspired to be.

I came across the book in my high school library. I have no idea why I would have picked it up: it’s kind of an old-fashioned looking book. Maybe something in the 1950s-ish cover appealed to me. I was very into the ’50s. Happy Days was a hit. The Stray Cats were on the rise. Boomer nostalgia was everywhere.

Once I brought the book home I learned my parents LOVED Max Shulman. They recognized his name immediately, both started laughing, and told me: “You HAVE to read Rally Round the Flag Boys!!

I remember vividly my mother TRYING to tell me the name of one of the lead characters in one of Shulman’s books (The Zebra Derby), and she was completely incapacitated by laughter and couldn’t get the words out. The character’s name was Lodestone O’Toole. Even now – just typing those two words – I start laughing.

More memories of I Was a Teen-age Dwarf:

I was asked to leave my high school library because it was study period, and I was reading Teenage Dwarf, and I started laughing so loudly I could not control myself. I GUFFAWED into the studious silence. Tears streamed down my face. I was being “Sh”ed left and right. I finally had to just gather up my book bag and stagger out into the hall, where I stood, and literally HOWLED with laughter, by myself, for a good 5 minutes. I was a weird kid, perhaps. Hopelessly laughing about a book published in 1959.

I can count the writers on one hand who are that funny.

Some years back, it became my mission in life to find all of his old books again so I could own them. Many of them are long out of print, and hard to find (at least were hard to find. Amazon has now made it easy). I find it strange that his reputation has not survived, except among the lucky few like myself who tripped over them.

Member the famous Christmas pageant scene in A Prayer for Owen Meany? If you don’t, or if you haven’t read it: CATCH UP. Max Shulman’s books are that funny all the way through. The Strand sometimes had copies of his books. I always checked whenever I was there. I got some of his lesser known titles but the holy grail (I Was a Teenage Dwarf) eluded me. I was dying to know if the book would be as funny to me as an adult as it was when I was a kid. I let my dad know, librarian that he is, what I was looking for so he could keep his eyes open if he came across copies.

Eventually, a box arrived on my doorstep, with my dad’s handwriting on the label. I opened it. And took out two books: Rally Round the Flag, Boys and I Was a Teenage Dwarf. This was who my father was. He had read these books when he was a kid. Now he was sending them to his daughter. I was younger then. I didn’t consider what it must have felt like to him.

I immediately took Teenage Dwarf up to my roof, with a thermos of coffee, and sat there in the autumn sun, tearing through my old childhood favorite. I finished it in a couple of hours.

And for the record? It was even funnier than I remembered. I was older then. My sense of humor had developed, along with my experience in romance. The book is way MEANER than I remembered. It’s biting, bitchy, merciless. I sat up there on my roof, the memories just flooded back, and I was howling.

Dobie Gillis at one point has a girlfriend who is a tomboy. She is constantly playing stickball and climbing trees and falling down. She always has cuts on her knees. Hence, her nickname: Red Knees. RED KNEES. Her PARENTS call her “Red Knees”. Dobie Gillis, kissing her on the couch, whispers lovingly into her ear, “Ohhh, Red Knees …”

A mind who thinks something like that up is sick and perverse, and my kind of person.

RED KNEES???

Here’s an excerpt from the Red Knees chapter. I love Red Knees.

I hate Red Knees like poison, but I’ll tell you a funny thing: sometimes I kind of like her. I mean sometimes I can’t help it, she’s so cuckoo. She’s got the biggest braces on her teeth of any girl I ever saw, and her hair is a million laughs because she keeps cutting it with a nail clippers. Sometimes when I look at that comical hair and the braces and the red knees which she keeps skinning because she is always running and falling down, I can’t help myself, I just have to bust out laughing. This gets her pretty sore, which I let her do for a little while and then I grab her and hug her to calm her down. That’s the only time Red Knees is really quiet – when I am hugging her.

Here’s an excerpt from another one of Dobie’s romances, with a girl named Tuckie Webb. (Shulman is excellent at naming characters).

Last spring at John Marshall Junior High, after my reprieve from military academy, Tuckie and I had a romance that warmed the heart of the entire school. I mean Alma Gristede had been just a feeble flicker by comparison. Every time we walked down the hall holding hands everybody would smile and say, “Here comes Tuckie and Dobie walking down the hall holding hands.” Even Mr. Knabe, the tin shop teacher, would say it, and he hated me like poison because I once used up fourteen feet of sheet brass trying to make a charm for Tuckie’s charm bracelet.

Tuckie and I were together all the time. We came to school together every morning. We went to classes together. After school we got on our bikes and went to the Sweet Shoppe together for a lime Coke, Dutch treat. Every Wednesday night we went to the early show at the Bijou, Dutch treat, Saturday mornings I picked her up at ten and we played tennis, or went to the beach. Saturday night there was always a party at one of the kids’ houses, and we ate little tiny sandwiches and looked at television and kissed each other. Tuckie only let me kiss her on Saturday night, which was all right with me because kissing really takes it out of a guy.

The DETAIL.

Then there’s Rally Round the Flag, Boys! First of all, let’s consider the title and that it was published smack-dab in the middle of the Eisenhower years, with the ramping-up of the Cold War and the beefing-up of the military-industrial complex – completely changing the landscape of America (and creating many jobs too, part of America’s new-found “prosperity”. Blue-collar workers could suddenly afford houses. Returning GIs went to college on the GI Bill. Or at least the white ones did, an important distinction). The lampoon of Shulman’s novels came out of the Pleasantville-esque stifling conformity of the post-War years. Also: with all that prosperity, teenagers suddenly rose in importance. Teenagers suddenly had tons of free time that they didn’t have before that: adolescence lasted longer. Teenagers had money to burn. Rally Round the Flag, Boys! was made into a movie, starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. In it, there is a spoof of the “commuter lifestyle,” which had become de rigeur with the explosion of that little thing called THE SUBURBS. We are moving into Mad Men territory here. This is some bleak and brutal shit.

EXCEPRT FROM Rally Round the Flag, Boys!

Living in Putnam’s Landing was a blessing not entirely unmixed.For one thing, it cost more money than Harry was making. For another, it required more hours than there were in a day.

Once, on a dullish afternoon at the office, Harry set down a time-table of a typical day in his life. It looked like this:

6:30 a.m. Rise, shave, shower, breakfast.
7:00 Wake Grace to drive me to station.
7:10 Wake Grace again.
7:16 Grace starts driving me to station.
7:20 Grace scrapes fender on milk truck.
7:36 Arrive station.
7:37 Board train for New York.
8:45 Arrive Grand Central.
9:00 Arrive New Yorker Magazine.
5:18 P.M. Leave New Yorker Magazine.
5:29 Board train to Putnam’s Landing.
6:32 Arrive Putnam’s Landing. Grace waiting at station.
6:51 Traffic jam at station untangles. We start home.
6:52 Grace tells me sump pump broken.
6:56 I ask Grace what is sump pump.
6:57 Grace tells me sump pump is pump that pumps sump.
6:58 I say Oh.
7:00 Grace tells me Bud swallowed penny.
7:02 Grace tells me Dan called his teacher an “old poop”.
7:04 Grace tells me Peter is allergic to the mailman.
7:06 Grace tells me she signed me up to work all day Saturday in Bingo tent at Womans Club Bazaar.
7:12 Arrive home.
7:13 Dan, aged 8, Bud, aged 6, and Peter, aged 4, looking at television. Dan and Bud want to look at Looney Tunes. Peter wants to look at John Cameron Swayze. (?) Grace rules in favor of Peter. Bud swallows another penny.
7:30 Grace puts children to bed. I go out on lawn to pick up toys.
7:38 Dinner.
8:01 Mrs. Epperson, baby sitter, rings doorbell. I ask Grace what we need with baby sitter. Grace says tonight is PTA meeting. I remind Grace we just went to PTA meeting three days ago. Grace says that was regular meeting, tonight is special emergency protest meeting. We go to special emergency protest meeting.
8:32 Arrive special emergency protest meeting. Special emergency protest seems to be about a hole in the school playground. Chairman of Board of Education, a conservative Yankee type, says no appropriation in budget for fixing hole. Grace rises and demands special appropriation. Chairman of Board calls this creeping socialism. I doze off.
9:51 Grace jams elbow in my ribs, wakes me to vote on motion to refer hole to Special Committee to Study Hole in Playground. Motion carried.
9:52 Meeting adjourned.
9:53 Grace and I go to Fatso’s Diner with O’Sheels and Steinbergs, fellow PTA members. Women discuss hole further. Men yawn.
10:48 Leave Fatso’s Diner.
11:25 Arrive home. Grace asks Mrs. Epperson, baby sitter, if everything all right. Mrs. Epperson says Bud woke up once and started crying but she gave him some pennies and he went back to sleep.
11:58 Grace and I go to bed.
12:04 Grace says she hears animals around garbage can. I go out.
12:05 Grace is right. There are animals around garbage can. I go back in.
12:53 Animals finish garbage.
1:10 I sleep.

And so passed the days of Harry Bannerman’s years. If it wasn’t a meeting, a caucus, a rally, or a lecture, then it was a quiet evening at home licking envelopes. Or else it was a party where you ate cubes of cheese on toothpicks and talked about plywood, mortgages, mulches, and children. Or it was amateur theatricals. Or ringing doorbells for worthy causes. Or umpiring Little League games. Or setting tulip bulbs. Or sticking decals on cribs. Or trimming hedges. Or reading Dr. Spock. Or barbecuing hamburgers. Or increasing your life insurance. Or doing anything in the whole wide world except sitting on a pouf with a soft and loving girl and listening to Rodgers and Hart.

It was more and more on Harry’s mind – the pouf, the phonograph records, the long, languorous nights. He would look at Grace in a nubby tweed skirt and a cardigan with the sleeves pushed up, rushing about dispensing civic virtue, wisps of hair coming loose, her seams crooked – and he would remember another Grace in pink velvet lounging pajamas, curled up like a kitten next to him on the pouf, in one hand a cigarette lazily trailing smoke, the other hand doing talented things to the back of his neck.

He would look at his house – the leaks, the squeaks, the chips, the cracks, the things that had to be repaired, recovered, rewired, replaced, remodeled – and he would recall the days when all you did when something went wrong was phone the landlord.

He would look at his children. He would watch them devouring sides of beef and crates of eggs; poking toes through stockings and elbows through sweaters; littering the yard with balls, bats, bicycles, tricycles, scooters, blocks, crayons, paints, tops, hoops, marbles, bows, arrows, darts, guns, and key bits of jigsaw puzzles; trailing mud on the rugs; breaking off the corners of playing cards; eating watermelon in bed; nailing pictures of athletes to walls; leaving black rings in the tub; getting carsick – he would observe this arresting pageant and he would think, “Yes, they are fine children, they are normal, I love them very much, and I will guard and keep them always … But, oh, how sweet and satisfactory those golden days on the pouf!”

“arresting pageant”

See, stuff like that is why I think he is so funny. And so subversive.

Shulman completely destroys the gaga-eyed “American ideal” of the idyllic white-picket-fence domestic life, so stifling at that time it was basically State-run propaganda.

Max Shulman: a witty madcap satirist with a ridiculous and yet very HUMAN sense of humor. He saw the hypocrisies. He saw the dangers of convention and consensus. His work is a “rallying cry” against the stifling sense of duty, mindless patriotism, “settling down”.

It’s still a valuable lesson. I feel the same conformity and LOVE of consensus forming today in very alarming ways. What you can say, how you are “allowed” to say it, humorlessness and literalism, distrust of the silly, the invented, the romantic, the not-for-any-other-reason-but-to-have-fun-ness of life. I have always distrusted consensus, except for things like “The Nazis were bad and needed to be destroyed.” (Now, though, it appears there ISN’T a consensus on that, never mind the World War we fought.) At any rate: Shulman’s voice was a welcome breath of fresh air then – and it should be one now too. We are in an age when satire can barely exist, not when maniacs burst into a newspaper office and kill everyone there because of satirical cartoons. And so-called tolerant people actually say, “Well, maybe they shouldn’t have published the cartoons …” You think it’s okay to kill someone because of a satirical cartoon? What are you defending here? Some woman on Twitter said (not about the cartoons, but about something else): “There’s a time and place for satire.” She is a writer and cultural critic. A “time and place” for satire? Do you even know the purpose of satire? You do not know what you are talking about. Satire has always been dangerous. Satire attacks the status quo, and satire goes after power. In times of trouble and strife, satire is needed more than ever. The powers that be have ALWAYS tried to shut down satire. The people EXCUSING a bunch of murdered cartoonists should not be so complacent, should not presume that this kind of silencing – as in: FINAL silencing – won’t eventually come around to THEM, and how would they like it THEN? Defend free speech, even speech you don’t like, because eventually the culture will boomerang – it ALWAYS does – and then YOU’LL be in the firing line. There are always lines over which you must not cross – speech that civilization must not tolerate. We fight these battles. These are battles that should be fought. But be very careful with how far you are willing to go to silence others. Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot.

Shulman made jokes about things that many Americans took very very seriously. Considered sacred, even.

Good.

We need voices who take NONE of it seriously, consider NOTHING sacred.

His fans were, once upon a time, legion.

Posted in Books, On This Day, writers | Tagged | 10 Comments

“I couldn’t keep a dog and a James Joyce and a bookshop.” — Sylvia Beach

It’s her birthday today.

Sylvia Beach is one of my heroes due to her influential bookshop in Paris (Shakespeare & Co.), and her nurturing of the writers of that time. You know, minor writers like James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. When nobody would publish Joyce’s Ulysses because it was deemed obscene, far too hot to handle, she decided that Shakespeare & Co. would put the book out (her first foray into publishing – not too shabby, to start with Ulysses). She got in big trouble for that, as books were confiscated at customs houses in England and America, and obscenity trials heated up over the next decade. This small unassuming woman, born in Baltimore, grew up in New Jersey, was at the center of the literary event of the century.

I’ve written a lot about Sylvia Beach, and I have known about her from my reading on all of the literary giants of the day. She’s a huge figure in all of their memoirs. She’s everywhere. She intersected with everyone.

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Shakespeare & Co. reunion: James Jones, Sylvia Beach, Thornton Wilder, Alice B. Toklas

She was the daughter of a minister, and during WWI, she served with the Red Cross in Serbia. Afterwards, her mother helped her finance a little bookshop in Paris, which had always been Beach’s dream, and over the next 2 decades, the shop became a smashing success, and a hub for all of the famous literary ex-pats in Paris at that time. Oh, for a time machine. My #1 destination would be Shakespeare & Co. in Paris in, oh, 1925. That’s where I want to go, please. When the Nazis marched into Paris, Beach repeatedly refused to leave her books, although she was ordered to.

James Campbell, at the Times Literary Supplement (link no longer working), calls Sylvia Beach the “midwife of Modernism”, a wonderful turn-of-phrase. The events of Sylvia Beach’s life are fascinating in and of themselves (who WAS this woman?), and I mainly know her through her intersections with the literary giants of the day. A couple of years ago a collection of her letters was published, The Letters of Sylvia Beach (amazing that they hadn’t already been published in full), and it was quite an event. It’s a lovely volume.

In Campbell’s essay, he shares a really interesting anecdote (which gives you some background of just ONE aspect of her life, and, of course, of course, James Joyce is peripherally involved):

When the Nazis entered Paris, Beach, who had lately made a visit home to the United States where she underwent a hysterectomy (she was also “knocked out by headaches”€ all her life), declined to leave rue de l’Odeon a second time. In her memoir, she told the almost too-cinematic story of how a “€œhigh-ranking German officer”€ entered her shop one day and, “€œspeaking perfect English”€, asked to buy the single copy of Finnegans Wake (published by Faber and Faber) displayed in the window. Beach told him it was not for sale, and duly removed it.

A fortnight later, the same officer strode into the bookshop. Where was Finnegans Wake? I had put it away. Fairly trembling with rage, he said, “€œWe’re coming to confiscate all your goods today.”€ “All right.”€ He drove off.

Within a few hours, she had boxed up the stock, removed the sign and painted over the patron’€™s name. The Germans did not get Finnegans Wake, but they did get Beach. She spent six months in an internment camp at Vittel, alongside Jewish prisoners who would later be removed to Auschwitz.

There’s another great anecdote about Ernest Hemingway, who was with the Allied army when they liberated Paris – and Hemingway went PERSONALLY to “liberate” Shakespeare & Co.

All of this can be read about in Beach’s own memoir (Shakespeare and Company) – but in the collection of her letters, edited by Keri Walsh, we actually get to hear Beach’s unedited voice.

That was one of the best things about the volume: getting to know her unselfconscious in-the-moment voice, the voice one uses when dashing off a letter (as opposed to something more official or formal). I always knew that Beach was a homey regular kind of person, not an obvious intellectual, but more of a can-do fix-it “I’ve got a barn, let’s do a show” kind of person. She was part of a family of daughters, and all of them were strong autonomous interesting women. None of them seemed to have a sense that there was anything they couldn’t do, being women. Sylvia Beach, who loved books, had a dream of opening a bookshop. That’s all. She didn’t have a dream of attaching herself to a writer, or publishing books, or being a writer herself. She wanted to create a gathering-place for book lovers. She happened to be in the right place at the right time, AND she was a canny businesswoman who knew how to make important connections (and, judging from her correspondence, KEEP those connections). She was, to use a well-trod phrase, a “people person”. She was not embarrassed to ask for things. She often needed help, either financial or otherwise, and she, like all talented people of business, knew who to go to to get things done, and knew to ask at the right time.

The publication of Ulysses obviously put her on the map (for better and worse), and she had an awareness of that at the time, writing to her sister, “Ulysses is going to make my place famous.”

As I got to know her chatty friendly voice, full of misspellings and multiple exclamation marks, I fell in love with her. She was so enthusiastic, such a champion. Let the artists do their work, let them be eccentric and strange, she was there to usher them into the limelight where they belonged.

Sylvia Beach had a lifelong relationship with Adrienne Monnier, a French book-store owner. They were business partners and life partners.

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Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier

The relationship was so much just a fact of Beach’s life that it is barely mentioned in her letters, and the acceptance of it (by her friends, family, and colleagues) is one of those things that makes you realize that life on the ground is often very different from how it is up in the stratosphere where ideologues argue things out on an abstract level. There is no feeling at all that Beach had to hide her sexual orientation. None whatsoever. She lived with Adrienne Monnier for decades. When Monnier committed suicide, people from all over the world sent Beach consolation letters. Beach was now a widow, regardless of the “legality” of her relationship.

Beach goes about her life with very little fanfare, ironic considering how famous (and infamous) she became for publishing a “dirty book”.

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

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

Sylvia Beach wrote of her first meeting with James Joyce in her memoirs. He walked into Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, and:

He stepped into my bookshop . . . he inspected my two photographs of Oscar Wilde. Then he sat down beside my table.

I wonder what he was thinking.

Sylvia said of Joyce: “As for Joyce, he treated people invariably as his equals, whether they were writers, children, waiters, princesses, or charladies. What anybody had to say interested him; he told me that he had never met a bore.”

(This is one of my favorite comments about Joyce. He never met a bore. Have you ever met anyone like that? Of COURSE he didn’t find anyone boring. It shows in his writing.)

When she met James Joyce, he had already finished Ulysses (or as finished as any Joycean manuscript ever would be) but essentially unpublishable. It had already been deemed “obscene”. The funny thing about all of this is that – as Joyce said later, “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.”

But Sylvia Beach – who had never published a book before – took a risk and said that Shakespeare & Co. would put out the book. This was an act of courage. 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 moved forward boldly.

And the shit hit the fan.

Once it was published, the obscenity controversies heated up, the book was banned (Joyce said later, “I have come to the conclusion that I cannot write without offending people.”) everybody was talking about it, who had actually read it? – you could be arrested for trying to smuggle it into certain countries – and there were a couple of years where the only place on the planet you could get a copy of Ulysses was through Beach’s bookshop in Paris. And so the orders flew in from folks around the world. People who were book readers, people who were collectors, people who sensed the historic moment and just wanted a copy.

Joyce and Sylvia Beach

The comments of other great writers on this book are, of course, great interest to me. They run the gamut of disgust, elation, despair, awe, humility, and I love it, too, that Yeats (an early supporter of Joyce) changed his mind. His first response on reading it? “A mad book!” Then later, as it percolated, Yeats said: “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 had this to say (or shout): “I feel like shouting EUREKA! Easily the epic of the age.”

George Bernard Shaw was disturbed by Ulysses, and its view of Ireland – so much so that it tormented him a bit. He saw it as an indictment (and, in a way, it was). He said, however: “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.”

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?” And also – this quote really touches me, because as a writer, Eliot wasn’t half-bad himself: “I wish, for my own sake, that I had not read it.” And lastly (and I think this pretty much gets at the root of what was so disturbing to Eliot): “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.”

And here is the lady who first made this “epic of the age” available to the world, at great financial and personal risk:

Joyce eventually moved to another publisher – for later editions – which left Beach financially stranded (along with the Great Depression which really hit Shakespeare & Co. hard.) But Beach had rich influential literary friends – many of whom came to her rescue during this difficult time. Famous writers did readings at Shakespeare & Co., admission was charged, people paid subscription fees – and in this way the bookstore made it through. Beach died in 1962. She is widely revered for her courageous independent move to publish Ulysses – the book that T.S. Eliot said “destroyed the 19th century”.

She said:

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.

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Sylvia Beach and James Joyce, in the doorway of Shakespeare & Co.

In 1962, Sylvia Beach went to Ireland for a James Joyce celebration, and was interviewed about her relationship to Joyce. Fascinating:

 
 
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Posted in Books, James Joyce, On This Day | Tagged , , , | 17 Comments

“Make the most of what you have and enjoy being female; enjoy being you.” — Bunny Yeager

“I want to show off how beautiful my subjects are, whether its a cheetah or a live girl or two of them together.”
— Bunny Yeager

It’s the birthday of model and pin-up photographer Bunny Yeager. She is most famous for her photographs of Bettie Page, and was instrumental in getting Bettie Page the 1955 Playboy cover. There weren’t too many women running around taking nude pin-up photos. There also weren’t too many pin-up models who also were photographers. It was Yeager’s lifestyle, her mission, her reason for being, her passion. Nude pin-up photography was the Wild West already, and Yeager’s work stands out from the pack. Bettie Page has moved into a category beyond stardom or even “notoriety”. There are as many – if not more – photographs of Bettie Page as of Marilyn Monroe. (Here’s my review of the recent documentary Bettie Page Reveals All.)

Bunny Yeager was born Linnea Eleanor Yeager in 1929, and renamed herself “Bunny” after Lana Turner’s character in Weekend at the Waldorf. Her family moved to Florida when she was a kid, and she thrived in the sun, she loved the beach culture. And the beach culture loved her too. She had a classic pin-up figure, she wore bikinis, she got a lot of attention, which she loved. Her first job as a model was a small gig for a local bakery … so she got her start – literally – in “cheesecake” photography. She wanted to be good at modeling. She felt the best way to learn was to experiment in photographing herself. These weren’t early versions of the “selfie.” They were rigorously self-directed photo shoots. During these experiments with her own image, she became a photographer.

She said, “If you don’t study yourself, you’re not getting a true idea of how you look.”

Through this process, she found her way. She had a knack for it. She would approach women she thought looked promising. On the beach, at a busstop, at a breakfast counter, wherever she found them. She would ask them if they were up for a photo shoot. Male photographers have been doing this since photography was invented. Sometimes their intentions are honorable, sometimes not. Bunny Yeager was a model who understood the appeal of the pin-up world, its eroticism, its tease and promise. Yeager liked to photograph her subjects outside, at the beach, in the trees, with animals.

In a 2012 interview with Youri Mevs at the Miami International Book Fair, there was the following exchange:

Mevs: “In your book there’s a statement … where you confirm that it would be a very boring place if all women looked alike –”

Bunny: “Our Maker was very clever about this — because sometimes that’s the little tweak we see in another person and fall in love with, perhaps – the thing that’s wrong with them.”

In this context, objectification was a good thing, a healthy and a fun thing (if everyone’s consenting). There is nothing dirty about sex: nothing dirty about wanting it, about wanting to look at beautiful girls in bikinis, about being a beautiful girl in a bikini, there is nothing dirty about desire. Society has turned these healthy positive things against us (women in particular suffer, although men suffer too). During the time when Yeager was working, you could be arrested for this stuff. There were raids on photographers’ studios. People were arrested. (There’s a great story about Bettie Page being arrested for “indecent exposure” during one of her photo shoots. She protested. Not by saying “They forced me to do this!” or “I needed money for rent!” She protested the word itself: “indecent.” To her, there was nothing “indecent” about being naked. Like, THAT was her beef with the arrest.) This is sex positivity that has almost gone by the wayside, except in burlesque circles – and those are good circles to be in, with their spirit of playfulness and generosity.

Yeager said in 2013, “I’m not doing it to titillate anybody’s interests. I want to show off how beautiful my subjects are, whether it’s a cheetah or a live girl or two of them together. That’s more important to me than anything.”

When she finally met Bettie Page, she found her soulmate and muse.

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Bunny Yeager, Bettie Page, cheetahs

Yeager said of Bettie Page, “She was the best model because she not only had perfect facial features, but a great body and wasn’t ashamed to show it. It was impossible to take a bad photo of her. Bettie Page was always ready for the camera’s eye.”

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Yeager could bring things out in models that other photographers couldn’t. Perhaps it was because she was a woman. The models could relax in her presence, be themselves, let out their playful funny sides. When sex is a two-way street, it’s so much better. In fact, sex that isn’t a two-way street should be abolished. What’s the point, then? Yeager worked right up until the end. She was planning her next shoot when she died.

While she will always be known for her collaboration with Bettie Page , her work encompasses much more than that. She worked out of South Florida and her photos were often drenched in sun and natural light.

You look at her photos and you can hear the laughter that must have been going on, in front of and behind the camera, you can hear the waves crashing, the seagulls calling. There is life there in the frame. Lightning captured in a bottle.

A true pioneer.

She died in 2014 at the age of 85.

“I was just confident my work was good.” — Bunny Yeater

 
 
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“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.” — Jack Kerouac

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It’s his birthday today.

In Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe paints a pretty brutal picture of Jack Kerouac, at a party in New York, when the Hippie Bus rolled into town. (Robert Stone was also at that party. He describes it below.) Kerouac was cranky, sat on the couch, and drank beer. He just wasn’t into this “scene,” a scene he had helped … create? There was a wavering line from “The Beats” to the hippies, but something was lost in translation. (There’s home movie footage of this particular party, showing Kerouac on the couch, a thundercloud over his head.)

Reading On the Road, it is difficult for me sometimes to understand or “grok” the seismic impact it had on a generation.


“On the Road”, 1957, first edition

Please don’t misunderstand me. My words have nothing to do with the book, really. Or they do, inasmuch as it is a book so of its era – hell, it CREATED the era – that context in this case is decisive. And I need help with the context. I squinted at the book’s pages, trying to understand. I didn’t need to squint at the next-generation version, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. That existed with or without said context.

My dad talked about On the Road to me. He gave me his perspective of someone who grooved to the book as a young man. And I trusted my father’s words. In the book, Kerouac gave an indelible image of a capable young man, saying “No” to what was expected of him, and in the Eisenhower-conformist era, much was expected. Post-War America was extremely conventional, as the country was solidified into a superpower, its wealth unimaginable, wealth that everyone felt, almost everyone’s standard of living was raised enormously. And with that came a Status Quo. What does it mean to say “No” to all that comfort? And go “on the road” and hang out with eccentrics and train-jumpers and the underclass, those who were also outside the mainstream? It was a CHOICE for Kerouac, who was a prep-school boy. And having it be a CHOICE as opposed to a NECESSITY is what gives the book its weird tone (at least in my opinion). There is a love affair with “the road”, that can only come from an outsider, who has a “way back” to the suburbs if he wanted it. The encounter with Dean Moriarty (i.e. Neal Cassady, the Muse to a generation … hell, two generations … he was ON the damn Hippie Bus) was a galvanizing homoerotic experience. Here was a man who walked the walk, who COULDN’T “fit in” if he tried. So there’s all that.


Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac

Some of the adventures and parties in the book feel totally random, a privileged boy on an extended bender – but my father’s words and context helped me “get it.” The book went off like a BOMB in the culture. There’s one moment when Kerouac waxes poetic about the revelatory moment when he ate ice cream with his hands. I mean, this is … like … so what, dude? BUT: to maintain a sense of childlike playfulness in the era of The Man with the Grey Suit was, again, a revelation, and it showed a generation “the way”. Say “no” to the confines of career/wife/marriage/conformity. DON’T grow up. My father said that if he could have done it all over again, he would have taken some time off to bum around like Kerouac and his friends did. I never forgot him saying that. It was the only time my father said that maybe he had other worlds and lifetimes in his head.

And so I understand the impact, even though for me I can’t feel it. For me, books like this are important: books like this shift conversations, create entire scenes, and unintended consequences – like the Summer of Love for example – unfurl from its pages. There’s also the fact that all this opting-out is being done by a man, a man with the keys to the castle, a man who is within the citadel, saying NO to it. THAT’S powerful, particularly for men, who are basically encouraged to never have emotions, or express things, or daydream, or loll about, or do any of the things that make life worth living. These things cannot be dismissed, and it’s why I find all of those poorly written hot takes about why such-and-such is overrated to be STUPID. You – with your freedoms, your options, your taking-things-for-granted that other people had to fight for – have benefited from books like On the Road. Whether you like it or not. It helped blast open the wall, it provided alternatives. It was a road map (literally) on how to opt OUT of the great prosperity of the most successful nation on earth.

But the story, to me, on a larger scale is a sad one. Kerouac couldn’t go the distance. He was strictly about youth. He couldn’t tolerate middle age. He was the coolest dude to ever walk the earth for a brief shining period. When all those hippies showed up in New York, rolling into town in their hand-painted bus, getting naked en masse, doing acid, shaking tambourines … he withdrew into himself, he felt old, he felt out of touch. He hated everything. He did not live long after that.

From novelist James Salter’s gorgeous memoir Burning the Days: Recollection. Both Kerouac and Salter attended Horace Mann Preparatory School. Lowell was a glamorous untouchable upperclassman. Salter remembered him as a “swaggering Lowell boy”.

It was the field on which I recall Kerouac, in shoulder pads and cleats, stocky and hard-running in games against Peddie and Blair. In football uniform, short-legged, he seemed a kind of thug. He would drop back to handle punts and, catching them, go like the wind… Kerouac was only one of the postgraduate students, “ringers,” brought in every year to man the school teams. Older, less fine, with faces already showing the shadows of manhood, they were the heroes of the school and at the same time outsiders. I never spoke to any of them; there was nothing to say. A year or two ahead of us, they drank beer, carried their books carelessly in one hand, and knew how to drive. Kerouac astonished us by submitting stories to the literary magazine, for a ringer an utterly unconventional act. He never came to the magazine’s offices, however. That would have been too out of character…

Among those schoolmates who achieved some notoriety there is Julian Beck … I met Beck several times afterwards but the level was superficial; in a real sense he declined to talk. He had stepped over me and was unwilling to be confronted on the same level.

With Kerouac, though I never saw him again, it was the same. I recognized his photograph, sensitive down-turned face, in a bookstore window on the jacket of a thick first novel. It was THE TOWN AND THE CITY. I read reviews of it after, filled with praise. By then I had tried to write a novel myself and failed. His was lyrical and repetitive and, to me, crushing. What he had done staggered me.

In an interview read later I saw the side of him that had been so unsuspected. He was asked about haiku and enthusiastically said, Yes! Then, before one’s eyes, he proceeded, like a man peeling an apple in one unbroken strip of skin, to compress an incident – a leaf blown onto the back of a tiny sparrow in a storm – into three succinct lines through trial and error, crossing out words in midair, so to speak.

Author Robert Stone said:

I was in the right place at the right time to see that [the Beats]. It started out with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road when I was still in the navy. My mother recommended the book to me. I am probably the only person who had On the Road recommended to him by his mother. It is very hard to go back and think about what on the Road was saying to me. I pick it up now and all I can see is Neal Cassady. I got to know him. It was a wonderful rendering of him, but I don’t see much else in it Now it just reminds me of someboody writing on speed. That may be uncharitable, but frankly I find it very sentimental. As I say, I am not sure now what it was that moved me. I suppose there was that tradition of the American road. I can almost rmemeber what that was like… I didn’t know [Kerouac] well. And I didn’t travel on the bus. I saw the bus off and greeted the bus when it arrived on Riverside Drive. We went to a party where Kerouac and Ginsberg and Orlovsky and those guys were, and Kerouac was at his drunken worst. He was also very jealous of Neal, who had shifted his allegiance to Kesey. But Neal was pretty exhausted too. I saw some films taken on the bus – Neal looked like he was tired from trying to keep up with the limitless energy of all those kids. Anyway … Kerouac at that party was drunk and pissed off, a situation I understand very well. The first thing I ever said to him was, Hey, Jack, have you got a cigarette? And he said, I ain’t gonna give you no fucking cigarette, man, there’s a drugstore on the corner, you can go down there and buy a fucking pack of cigarettes, don’t ask me for cigarettes. That’s my Kerouac story.

In Rolling Thunder Revue, there’s a touching scene where Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg visit Kerouac’s grave, sit in the grass, and read poetry. Paying tribute to a man who had meant so much to both of them.

And here’s my review of Big Sur, the so-so film adaptation of Kerouac’s psychologically terrifying book, which sounds like it was written in the throes of delirium tremens.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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