“Music, at its essence, is what gives us memories. And the longer a song has existed in our lives, the more memories we have of it.” — Stevie Wonder

It’s his birthday today.

I love that quote because I have so many memories “attached” to Stevie Wonder’s songs, so attached that they don’t feel “attached” at all. The song IS the memory. And more than a memory, really: these songs, which have been in my life for what feels like always, call forth eras, times, feelings, sense memory … the inchoate amorphous sense of an entire time. He was on heavy HEAVY rotation among my group of friends in college, and so his songs call forth college: hungover hilarious breakfasts, making out on a beach, late night tech rehearsals, driving home with the windows open, the whole glorious intense chaos of being a theatre major surrounded by best friends and boyfriends, working on creative things, trying hard, enjoying triumphs, striving, dreaming … Summer vacations. Going to the movies. Going through the drivethru for iced coffee and headed to the beach. Stevie Wonder blasting from the car speakers, from the boom boxes, played in the dressing rooms as we got ready for dress rehearsal. It’s a MOOD, it’s a VIBE. He’s hard to talk about, because of that. (I also love Wonder’s perspective on Elvis, how Elvis represented – embodied – without even knowing it, just by standing there – racial reconciliation and healing and how people cannot deal with it. He called him “a Caucasian brother” in an interview.)

If I HAD to choose my favorite, it’d probably “Signed Sealed Delivered”. It’s a seratonin-blast.

My brother Brendan included Stevie Wonder’s classic album Innervisions on his Best Albums list. It’s a really good read.

 
 
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“I was a sinister child, lazy and cynical.” — Eve Babitz

“What I wanted, although at the time I didn’t understand what the thing was because no one ever tells you anything until you already know it, was everything. Or as much as I could get with what I had to work with. I wanted, mainly, a certain kind of song.
Like scents, certain songs just throw me. And I wanted to be thrown into that moment of perfume when everything was gone except for the dazzle. It doesn’t last long, but in order to have everything you must have those moments of such unrelated importance that time ripples away like a frame of water. Without those moments, your own heaven party can die of thirst. They’re like booster shots, they make you stronger. You know it’s worth the twinge of envy when you’ve recovered from the dazzle because the mystery of life fades when death, people having fun without you, is forgotten. Time escapes unnoticed and time is all you get.
If you live in L.A., to reckon time is a trick since there are no winters. There are just earthquakes, parties and certain people. And songs.”
— Eve Babitz, Eve’s Hollywood

It’s her birthday today.

Eve Babitz, nobody else like her. Discovering her writing was like discovering a part of myself. Or at least seeing it in print written by someone else… and written so beautifully … was a revelation. Outlaw is the word I use. She was a swashbuckling romantic It-Girl outlaw. I wrote about her a lot, but here’s a big piece I wrote on my Substack.

I will leave you with this. In 1963, 18-year-old Eve Babitz was looking for a publisher for a novel she wrote. (It would take her 10 more years to get a book published). So she wrote to Joseph Heller, looking for help. All fine, all ambitious, good for teenage Eve. But here is how she introduced herself:

Dear Joseph Heller,

I am a stacked eighteen-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard.

I am also a writer.

Eve Babitz

Unbelievable. I just have to observe: If those two sentences were reversed, the note wouldn’t have nearly the same effect. She knew.

 
 
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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Available for pre-order: Frankenstein!

Now that it’s “out there” for pre-order, I think it’s okay to mention what I have been working on for the past year and change: a book on Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming film adaptation of Frankenstein. I had to sign an NDA with Netflix so I really couldn’t say anything about anything, even when I “randomly” went to Scotland last fall for a “vacation”. I actually went to join up with the film being shot in Dundee/Arbroath/Edinburgh, and had to carefully share only the photos which didn’t reveal the gigantic movie crew all around me. Once the whole thing is out, movie and book, I’ll write up a little travel diary of it, because it really was so fun. Watching a movie of this size being filmed – with Netflix money – was a new experience! There’s a reason I saw almost nothing of Scotland while I was there (except for the Elvis Shakespeare bookshop, which I sought out on my one day off.)

My book features interviews with all of the participants: Guillermo, the actors (ahem), all of the department heads – production designer Tamra Deverell, costume designer Kate Hawley, makeup department head Jordan Samuel – cinematographer Dan Laustsen, plus special effects design team, sound design, concept artist Guy Davis, and the genius who designed the creature, Mike Hill. So many more people! Meeting these brilliant artists has enriched my life and I am so grateful they made time in their schedules to be interviewed, sometimes multiple times (including follow-up questions over email). Every single one of them is a master at their craft and I absolutely loved learning about their process. Huge thanks to producer Miles Dale, who facilitated everything for me in Scotland, sending out mass emails for everyone to come find me to talk (they all did), as well as moving me out of the out-of-the-way Airbnb into the hotel where they all were staying. “Oh, no, you need to be with us,” he said. He was so generous and his assistant Ashley was incredible, and so CHILL, considering how non-stop busy her job was. Everyone was, to a person, nice and kind and generous. And then of course there is Guillermo, who requested me for this project, an honor of which I am FULLY aware. He allowed me access to everything, he brought me into the mobile editing lab so I could watch him put together sequences, and we spent hours discussing the film and the book and Mary Shelley and everything else under the sun.

The book will be published October 14, 2025.

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“I don’t care how afraid I may be inside — I do what I think I should.” — Katharine Hepburn

Barbara Walters: “Kate, you always wear pants. Do you even own a skirt?”
Katharine Hepburn: “I have one, Miss Walters. I’ll wear it to your funeral.”

Dan and I discussed her, in my interview with him about his new book. He is very concerned about how the public sees her now, at least judging from the snarky comments left on Facebook posts when he put up images of her through her career. Dan said:

I was upset by the reaction to Hepburn on Facebook. If she was alive now, she’d know how to fix this perception of her. She’s not alive anymore, so we need to try to fix it for her. What needs to be done is that she needs to be recouped as a subversive figure. I feel like people are against her now because they feel like she lied to us. She was basically a lesbian, so they kind of have a point. There’s a kind of false quality to how she was promoted, particularly when she was an old lady.

This is trickier though. When I put up posts about Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando on Facebook, people went wild for them, and I feel like it’s partly because they’re so good-looking and sexy. I feel like the problem with Katharine Hepburn is a sex problem, and that was the case for her in the beginning too. People aren’t embracing her because she doesn’t care about sex on screen.

So I will do my part in trying to fix it for her. Here are some of the things I have written about her:

— For Capital New York back in the day, I wrote about the restoration of The African Queen.

— A long-ago “5 for the Day” on Slant about Hepburn, and I decided to focus on her work ethic and her appetite for taking risks. Really, it’s a piece about her ability as an actress – even as a giant star (which is rarer) for “taking an adjustment.” That’s an actor term. You play a scene a certain way. A director, if he/she is good, gives you “an adjustment.” “Play it more like this.” “Okay, try it again, but do it this way. Add a little more of this. Take away a little of that.” Often in audition situations, the casting director or director will give you an adjustment – not because you’re doing it wrong, but because they want to see how well you take direction. Hepburn was a master at “taking adjustments.” She knew, even as a great star, that she wasn’t perfect, and that when she needed help – she would take it. 5 for the Day: Katharine Hepburn

— And finally: I wrote the booklet essay for the Criterion release of Bringing Up Baby! I know that movie by heart, and yet I have never written at length about it, so it was a blast working on that.

Happy birthday, Miss Kate.

 
 
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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“I think a fear of portraying something negatively ends up creating more stereotypes.” — Sophia Takal

It’s Sophia Takal’s birthday today.

“You probably can’t tell this from “Green,” but I actually think that art should have a sense of humor about itself. Art is very important and it can change lives, but it doesn’t actually save lives. So I think it’s important for art to have a sense of humor about itself and not be super-snobby. Artists shouldn’t think that they’re better than everyone else. Fluxus really plays with the idea of what an artist really is and what art means. That’s how I interpreted it, at least, and that’s what I really responded to. I had this idea that art should be repeatable and it shouldn’t just be for the elite and I feel that that’s true.” — Sophia Takal

I’ll just say this up front: I did not like Takal’s re-make of the cult classic Black Christmas, which got a lot of scathingly negative attention at the time of its release (the negativity seemed REALLY out-sized to me. Like, calm DOWN, everybody.) I think it’s important to be honest when things work and/or don’t work. Too much “stan” culture is not good for criticism. HOWEVER: I had been paying attention to Sophia Takal for years, and I was excited for Black Christmas, and bummed out when it didn’t highlight her special qualities as a filmmaker. (Takal’s husband, Lawrence Michael Levine, is also interesting – they collaborate on most everything. His most recent film, Black Bear, is dedicated to Takal. I get into their artistic partnership in my review.)


Always Shine (2016)

What really turned me on to Takal was her 2016 film Always Shine. I reviewed for Ebert. It wears its influences (Persona, Mulholland Drive, Three Women) on its sleeve – but it also shows Takal’s specific sensibility (or, what I would come to know as her sensibility, once I watched the rest of her work). I REALLY love Always Shine.

As the hype for Black Christmas ratcheted up, making me feel uncomfortable – there was something about it that felt off – not necessarily Takal’s fault, but the marketing – I felt this weird urgent sense that I needed to write about Takal’s work as a whole, because I feared what was coming – a bunch of newbies trashing her new film, without having seen the rest of it. This is a new and young female filmmaker, who has been making films for over 10 years at this point. Let’s put this shit into perspective.


Green (2011)

So I wrote about Takal’s work for Film Comment, and really zeroed in on what I think makes her special and for sure someone to watch. Listen, you direct a film like Always Shine, it’s gonna take a lot more than one bad film to turn me away. I’m not a stan, but I am an admirer, and I look forward to seeing whatever it is she does next. Sophia Takal is the real deal.


Always Shine (2016)

 
 
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“My dear child, I’m sure we shall be allowed to laugh in Heaven!” — Edward Lear

Edward Lear (the “father of nonsense”) was born on this day in 1812 in London.

I could recite from memory a lot of his stuff when I was pretty close to the age I was in the “candid” photo above. The Big Golden Book Of Poetry was so read in our family that the cover faded completely, the binding fell apart, and I can still see all of the illustrations, and where they were placed on the page. (My mother still has the book.)

When I read those poems now, I hear in my father’s gravelly voice.

“The Owl and the Pussy-cat” is still a favorite. The verse rocks and sings.

The Owl and the Pussy-cat
by Edward Lear

I
The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
‘O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!’

II
Pussy said to the Owl, ‘You elegant fowl!
How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married! too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?’
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-tree grows
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.

III
‘Dear pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?’ Said the Piggy, ‘I will.’
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

QUOTES:

Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets writes that Lear, and Lewis Carroll (Lear’s younger peer) wrote “nonsense verse” which

“[Lear] strays into the musical zones that Longfellow mapped with his self-propelling meters.”

Was Edward Lear the inventor of the term “snail mail” in this whimsical letter to Evelyn Baring? The letter itself reads, along the twists of the snail shell:

Feb. 19. 1864 Dear Baring Please give the enclosed noat to Sir Henry – (which I had just written:-& say that I shall have great pleasure in coming on Sunday. I have sent your 2 vols of Hood to Wade Brown. Many thanks for lending them to me – which they have delighted me eggstreamly Yours sincerely

Harold Bloom, The Best Poems of the English Language:

Lear’s masterwork is his first volume, A Book of Nonsense (1846), replete with his unique limericks and his mysterious lyrics of visionary nonsense that fuse Shelley and Tennyson in quest-poems that are at once laments for lost love and yet weirdly boisterous.

Robert Lowell, letter to Elizabeth Bishop, November 24, 1965:

The great Victorians for me are Tennyson, Browning, Lear, Fitzgerald, Arnold and Hopkins.

William Pitt:

“Don’t tell me of a man’s being able to talk sense; every one can talk sense. Can he talk nonsense?”

Carolyn Wells:

In regard to his verses, Lear asserted that “nonsense, pure and absolute,” was his aim throughout; and remarked, further, that to have been the means of administering innocent mirth to thousands was surely a just excuse for satisfaction. He pursued his aim with scrupulous consistency, and his absurd conceits are fantastic and ridiculous, but never cheaply or vulgarly funny.

George Orwell, “Funny But Not Vulgar”:

However, there are subtler methods of debunking than throwing custard pies. There is also the humour of pure fantasy, which assaults man’s notion of himself as not only a dignified but a rational being. Lewis Carroll’s humour consists essentially in making fun of logic, and Edward Lear’s in a sort of poltergeist interference with common sense. When the Red Queen remarks, “I’ve seen hills compared with which you’d call that one a valley”, she is in her way attacking the bases of society as violently as Swift or Voltaire. Comic verse, as in Lear’s poem “The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo”, often depends on building up a fantastic universe which is just similar enough to the real universe to rob it of its dignity. But more often it depends on anticlimax — that is, on starting out with a high-flown language and then suddenly coming down with a bump.

From Michael Sala, Lear’s Nonsense:

Edward Lear, a skillful illustrator of science books (botany, zoology), started his literary career by chance. As a matter of fact, “most of Lear’s limericks were not written with publication in mind, but rather as gifts for specific children” (Rieder 1998: 50). He was persuaded toward their publication by the enthusiastic reaction of his young audience.

There was an old person of Rimini
Who said, “Gracious! Goodness! O Gimini!
When they said, “Please be still!” she ran down a hill
And was never once heard of at Rimini.

There was an old person of Sestri
Who sat himself down in the vestry,
When they said “You are wrong!” – he merely said “Bong!”
That repulsive old person of Sestri.

This is a typical example of Lear’s limericks, and a perfect example of what is intended by nonsense, that is to say, “language lifted out of context, language turning on itself [a] language made hermetic, opaque” (Stewars 1979: 3), language that “resists contextualization, so that it refers to ‘nothing’ instead of to the word’s commonsense designation [and] refusing to work as conventional communication ” (Rieder 1998: 49). In other words, what happened to the old person of Rimini? What is wrong with the person of Sestri? It is impossible to answer, because, despite the perfectly grammatical use of the words, they don’t tell much. They are just bizarrely arranged so as to sound appealing. If there is a shadow of a story, usually it is nothing more than that: only a shadow of a story (without causes or consequences). In Lear’s limericks, words introduce “a number of possibilities, including dangerous and violent ones, and at the same time disconnect those possibilities from the real world, that is, from what goes on after the game is over” (Rieder 1996: 49).

Vivien Noakes:

In the limericks [. . .] to an extent difficult for us now to imagine, Lear offered children the liberation of unaffected high spirits [. . .]. Here are grown-ups doing silly things, the kind of things grown-ups never do [. . .]. for all their incongruity, there is in the limericks a truth which is lacking in the improving literature of the time. In an age when children were loaded with shame, Lear attempted to free them from it.

Robert Lowell, letter to Elizabeth Bishop, January 4, 1960:

Your poem [“Brazil, January 1, 1502”] is one of your most beautiful, I think–wonderful description, the jungle turning into a picture, then into history and the jungle again, with a practical, absurd, sad, amused and frightened tone for the Christians. I have been re-reading [Edward] Lear whom you like so much. I guess it would be far-fetched to find his hand here; yet I think he would have enjoyed your feeling, your disciplined gorgeousness, your drawing, your sadness, your amusement.

Susan Chitty on Lear’s ballads:

Like the limericks, they celebrate the outsider. Their principal characters are socially unacceptable.

Sir Edward Strachey:

Mr. Lear was delighted when I showed to him that this couple [the Owl and the Pussy-cat] were reviving the old law of Solon, that the Athenian bride and bridegroom eat a quince together at their wedding.

More information on Edward Lear here.

 
 
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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“I know that for myself, what is deeper than I understand is often the most pertinent to me and the most lasting.” — Lorine Niedecker

It’s her birthday today.

I had not heard of Lorine Niedecker, until 2010, when I took the Norton Anthology out to Block Island with me, in the hopes it would help me get back to reading again. It worked. And it was fun to re-read things like “The Waste Land” and also struggle through some of Pound’s Cantos, stuff like that. It was a tough time for me and so I needed tough stuff to read. And somehow, I came across Lorine Niedecker. There is a brief introductory note for her, not a long one, since she lived in the same place her entire life, not many “events” to speak of, but her poems are incredible.

I am so glad I encountered her.

She was born in 1903 in Wisconsin and spent her whole life on Black Hawk Island. She lived with her parents, and took care of them when they became elderly. She went to college briefly. She had many jobs, some menial, some not. Somewhere along in here, she started writing poetry. In 1931, she read Louis Zukofsky’s “Objectivist” issue of Poetry magazine, and traveled to New York to meet him. They ended up carrying on a long correspondence. The “Objectivists” wanted to create poems that were not sentimental or ornamental – simple, clean, clear. Lorine Niedecker is a classic example of an Objectivist poet, although she had some ambivalent feelings about the movement became so associated with. Her poems have no “needless words”, they almost feel like haikus: miniature little sketches, with minimum subjectivity. There were a couple of Objectivist anthologies published in the 30s, and her work was not included. Her first volume was published in the 1940s.

“Condensery.” — Lorine Niedecker’s term for poetry

There was another side to her, though, a surrealist side, an expressionist side, where she experimented with language, with what it could do and express. She admired Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein. She was pulled towards their experiments, how reality itself broke down in the language, attempting to express something else beyond the literal surface of things, of OBJECTS, again. How about the inner life of objects? Gertrude Stein wrote a whole book attempting to do that (Tender Buttons: Objects).

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

While I was out on Block Island, I read all of her work anthologized, the first one being her long poem on Thomas Jefferson. To get into Niedecker, you need at least a baseline knowledge, reference points in history. She expects people to be familiar with the events of Jefferson’s life (or Darwin’s life, or whoever), and her references come fast and furious. She doesn’t slow down for people who didn’t pay attention in school. There are footnotes in the Norton Anthology: with Niedecker, at times, you really need them.

But Niedecker waits for no one.

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

Thomas Jefferson

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

II
Fast ride
his horse collapsed
Now he saddled walked

Borrowed a farmer’€™s
unbroken colt
To Richmond

Richmond How stop
Arnold’s redcoats
there

III
Elk Hill destroyed—
Cornwallis
carried off 30 slaves

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

IV
Latin and Greek
my tools
to understand
humanity

I rode horse
away from a monarch
to an enchanting
philosophy

V
The South of France

Roman temple
€œsimple and sublime

Maria Cosway
harpist
on his mind

white column
and arch

VI
To daughter Patsy: Read—
read Livy

No person full of work
was ever hysterical

Know music, history
dancing

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

Science also
Patsy

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

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

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

VIII
Jefferson of Patrick Henry
backwoods fiddler statesman:

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

the Bill of Rights hassle—
he remembers . . .

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

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

but follow the Court to Fontainebleau
he could not

house rent would have left him
nothing to eat

. . .

He bowed to everyone he met
and talked with arms folded

He could be trimmed
by a two-month migraine

and yet
stand up

X
Dear Polly:
I said No no frost

in Virginia—the strawberries
were safe

I’d have heard €”I’m in that kind
of correspondence

with a young daughter
if they were not

Now I must retract
I shrink from it

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

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

How are my young
chestnut trees—

XII
Hamilton and the bankers
would make my country Carthage

I am abandoning the rich—
their dinner parties—

I shall eat my simlins
with the class of science

or not at all
Next year the last of labors

among conflicting parties
Then my family

we shall sow our cabbages
together

XIII
Delicious flower
of the acacia

or rather

Mimosa Nilotica
from Mr. Lomax

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

by way of London—Abigail
embraced her—Adams said

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

Death of Polly, 25,
Monticello

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Martha (Patsy) stay
The Committee of Safety
must be warned€

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

QUOTES:

Lorine Niedecker to Cid Corman, 1960s:

You and Jonathan have thrown off the shackles of the sentence and the wide melody. For me the sentence lies in wait — all those prepositions and connectives — like an early spring flood. A good thing my follow-up feeling has always been condense, condense.

Lorine Niedecker, letter to Mary Hoard:

I had spoken about Louis Zukofsky and the Objectivist Movement…Objects, objects. Why are people, artists above all, so terrifically afraid of themselves? Thank god for the Surrealist tendency running side by side with objectivism.

Mary Oppen:

New York was overwhelming, and she was alone, a tiny, timid, small-town girl. She escaped the city and returned to Wisconsin. Years later we began to see her poems, poems which decribed her life; she chose a way of hard physical work, and her poetry emerged from a tiny life. From Wisconsin came perfect small gems of poetry written out of her survival, from the crevices of her life, that seeped into poems.

Introduction to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

It is one of the great ironies of modern literary history that Pound, an anti-Semite, living in and supporting Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, inspired the left-wing Objectivist American Jews–Oppen, Zukofsky, and Charles Reznikoff–as well as Bunting, the one prominent British member of the Objectivist group, and the American Lorine Niedecker, the only woman.

Carl Rakosi:

With her the external world, the object is primary, it is most out front, and the subjective is most subsumed, so Objectivist is appropriate for her.

Louis Zukofsky, letter to Lorine Niedecker:

Don’t read French Surrealistes, nor Carroll, nor etc — lemme tell you. Read the newspaper, talk more to people.

Introduction to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Niedecker did not appear in [Louis] Zukofsky’s 1931 issue of Poetry, but when she read it, she traveled to meet him in New York. Niedecker’s free verse, like Oppen’s, exhibits precision and compression, silence and riddling ellipses. Some of her crystalline poems are about nature, while others are made up of “found” materials–collagelike sequences that fit together quotations from historical figures such as Thomas Jefferson and Charles Darwin.

Lorine Niedecker, letter to Harriet Monroe:

Certain words of a sentence — prepositions, connectives, pronouns — belong up toward full consciousness, while strange and unused words appear only in subconscious…in dream the simple and familiar words like prepositions, connectives, etc. are not absent, in fact, noticeably present to show illogical absurdity, discontinuity, parody of sanity.

Lorine Niedecker, to Clayton Eshleman, 1960s:

I know that my cry all these years has been into – into – and under — close your eyes and let the music carry you — And what have I done? — cut — cut — too many words…

Lorine Niedecker, note to herself:

I’m going back to the Imagists, to the wordy ones and the strange rhythms, I have suppressed myself too long.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Niedecker is a second-generation modernist whose aesthetic can be traced back through Objectivism to Ezra Pound’s Imagism, and beyond that to the wit and cryptic asceticism of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Like other Objectivists, she aims at precision, compression, and hard, clean images–images unclouded by authorial sentiment.

Lorine Niedecker, letter to Mary Hoard:

I have said to Z that the most important part of memory is its non-expressive, unconscious part…We remember. A nerve sense, a vibration, a colour, a rhythm.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Sometimes abandoning the sentence, she juxtaposes images, phrases, and words in parataxis. Like Imagist poems and East Asian haiku, Niedecker’s poems are exercises in miniature, whether at the level of poem or of strophe.

Lorine Niedecker:

There must be an art . . . somewhere, somehow entirely precious, abstract, dehumanized, and intense because of these [qualities].

 
 
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 you are going to do good work, you have to risk failing badly.” — Natasha Richardson

It’s Natasha Richardson’s birthday.

I have seen a couple of live performances I will never forget, performances where I think as they are happening: I am so lucky to have witnessed this.. It’s rare. Natasha Richardson, in Cabaret, gave one of those performances.

In all my life, I have never seen such a performance. Before or since. I feel so fortunate I went to see it with my friend Brooke, and we got such amazing seats, right up front (this was in its earliest run, when you sat at little tables like you were at the Kit Kat Club).

I wrote about Richardson’s performance of Sally Bowles on House Next Door, as a tribute, a couple of days after she died, tragically, way too young.

Two clips of Richardson’s performance below:

 
 
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.

Posted in Actors, On This Day, Theatre | Tagged , | 9 Comments

A Rock Star, His Mother, and His Underwear. 1956.

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For Mother’s Day. Elvis Presley, Gladys Presley, 1956. Memphis. Photo by Alfred Wertheimer.

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“To me, Martha Graham is one of America’s few authentic geniuses.” – Bette Davis

For Martha Graham’s Birthday:

First: Joan Acocella wrote a wonderful profile of Graham for The New Yorker. I discussed it – and Graham – here. In researching this post, I came across a beautiful piece about the time Helen Keller visited Martha Graham’s studio, and joined the dancers at the barre.


Helen Keller visits Martha Graham’s studio. (1954)

Bette Davis studied with Martha Graham when she was a teenager attending the Robert Milton-John Murray Anderson School of the Theatre. In her first memoir, The Lonely Life: An Autobiography, she wrote about Graham, and Graham’s influence on her work. Well worth quoting in full:

Our instructress for dancing was Martha Graham. Her job was to teach us how to use our bodies properly.

“To act is to dance!”

I worshiped her. She was all tension – lightning! Her burning dedication gave her spare body the power of ten men. If Roshanara was a mystic curve, Miss Graham was a straight line – a divining rod. Both were great, and both were aware of the universal. But Miss Graham was the true modern.

I had already learned that the body via the dance could send a message. Now I was taught a syntax with which to articulate the subtleties fully. She would with a single thrust of her weight convey anguish. Then in an anchored lift that made her ten feet tall, she became all joy. One after the other. Hatred, ecstasy, age, compassion! There was no end, once the body was disciplined.

What at first seemed grotesque to the eye, developed into a beautiful release for both dancer and beholder. To me, Martha Graham is one of America’s few authentic geniuses. I was lucky enough to study with her.

A mutual friend recently repeated this great woman’s happy observation that amongst dramatic actors, I have always expressed an emotion with full body – as a dancer does. If this be so, I would like to remind her that it was she who made it possible. Every time I climbed a flight of stairs in films – and I spent half my life on them – it was Graham step by step.

Bless the soul who put this together:

And finally: anyone who has gone into the performing arts can probably quote verbatim what Martha Graham once said to Agnes de Mille, when de Mille was feeling dispirited about her career and the reception to her work. This was around the time de Mille choreographed Oklahoma!, a major breakthrough in the American musical. De Mille recounts the conversation in her autobiography. It is often referred to as a “letter” Martha Gram wrote to De Mille but it was actually said in one fell swoop.

I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be.

Martha said to me, very quietly: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. As for you, Agnes, you have so far used about one-third of your talent.”

“But,” I said, “when I see my work I take for granted what other people value in it. I see only its ineptitude, inorganic flaws, and crudities. I am not pleased or satisfied.”

“No artist is pleased.”

“But then there is no satisfaction?”

“No satisfaction whatever at any time,” she cried out passionately. “There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

Ask any artist where the phrase “divine dissatisfaction” comes from and they will probably be able to tell you.

At the 1:40 mark in this long clip, Meryl Streep reads Graham’s words, accompanied by Yo Yo Ma.

 
 
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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