“It’s just one of the mysteries of filmmaking that sometimes you do something that you don’t even think it’s important, then it turns out to be.” — Lili Horvát

Posted on April 13, 2026 by sheila

Today is Hungarian director Lili Horvát’s birthday. The timing is fortuitous. I am overjoyed for the people of Hungary today, and also thinking of the theatre artistswho have been resisting within increasingly rigid and risky parameters. Back in November, during the Hearth gathering, my friend Derek and I were discussing the whole vibrant underground rebellious theatre scene in Hungary. In fact, I told him to watch THIS movie. So the timing is fortuitous to celebrate one of Hungary’s artists.

I believe I made clear my love for Horvát’s Preparations To Be Together For An Unknown Period of Time, in a lengthy piece on my Substack.

It’s been a while since a film has grabbed me so deeply. I felt shaken up by it. I watched it three times in a week.

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“Ballet taught me to stay close to style and tone. Literature taught me to be concerned about the moral life.” — Joan Acocella

Posted on April 13, 2026 by sheila

Joan Acocella, longtime dance critic for The New Yorker, and regular contributor to the New York Review of Books died in 2024 at the age of 78, and I did not mark her passing. It’s her birthday today. Acocella brought a lot of great things into my life. I love dance, but I’m not at all learned in the subject. I would check out her columns to see what was going on. She was also a very elegant and pleasing writer. Her prose flows, and it’s filled with information, spiky with criticism (beautifully phrased). I come out of any Acocella essay better-informed. I am so glad I discovered her work.

I read a couple of things of hers before I put it together who she was. She wrote an enormous profile of Mikhail Baryshnikov for The New Yorker called “The Soloist”, where she accompanied him on his first trip back to the Soviet Union. I inhaled it.

Years later, I read an article about a biography of James Joyce’s daughter Lucia. I read the biography and believe I bitched about it here somewhere. This would be back in the early 2000s. Acocella went after the very concept of this biography, validating my own feelings about it. I don’t think I put together that “Joan Acocella” was the same one who also wrote the huge piece on Baryshnikov.

But then, somehow, I put it all together. Joan Acocella is a dance writer, primarily, and has written about almost every major figure in American dance in the 20th century, but she also has written many in-depth essays and book reviews, as well as introductions to re-issues of novels (like Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity). Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, a collection of all these articles, is essential reading. I give it my highest recommendation possible. It gives the full picture of Acocella’s power as a writer and thinker.

Her focus overall seemeed to be on writers in the early decades of the 20th century, particularly Austrian writers writing from the final days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and others. Once the Empire was gone, the Jews were on the run, no longer protected. In Acocella’s work on artists in general, the same themes emerge: where does genius come from? What does context add to our understanding of someone like Jerome Robbins? What does it mean to be an innovator? Her taste is eclectic, but with a motivating principle behind all of it. Perhaps all of her work will be collected in one volume. There’s so much of it.

She wrote about M.F.K. Fisher. Balanchine. Bob Fosse. She wrote about famous cases of writer’s block. She wrote about Martha Graham, Mark Morris, Suzanne Farrell. Stefan Zweig. Primo Levi. She wrote a book on the Victorian phenomenon of “hysteria”. All beautifully written. I learned so much from her.

Some excerpts after the jump:

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“I trust contrariness. I simply rebelled at being commanded.” — Seamus Heaney

Posted on April 13, 2026 by sheila

heaney_seamus

It’s his birthday today.

For the winter issue of Liberties, I wrote about books, my father, and Seamus Heaney’s poem on Clonmacnoise.

Every collection of Seamus Heaney’s work that I own, the poems, the essays, were given to me by my father. When I read Heaney’s poems, I hear Dad’s voice.

One of his most powerful poems:

Casualty

I

He would drink by himself
And raise a weathered thumb
Towards the high shelf,
Calling another rum
And blackcurrant, without
Having to raise his voice,
Or order a quick stout
By a lifting of the eyes
And a discreet dumb-show
Of pulling off the top;
At closing time would go
In waders and peaked cap
Into the showery dark,
A dole-kept breadwinner
But a natural for work.
I loved his whole manner,
Sure-footed but too sly,
His deadpan sidling tact,
His fisherman’s quick eye
And turned observant back.

Incomprehensible
To him, my other life.
Sometimes, on the high stool,
Too busy with his knife
At a tobacco plug
And not meeting my eye,
In the pause after a slug
He mentioned poetry.
We would be on our own
And, always politic
And shy of condescension,
I would manage by some trick
To switch the talk to eels
Or lore of the horse and cart
Or the Provisionals.

But my tentative art
His turned back watches too:
He was blown to bits
Out drinking in a curfew
Others obeyed, three nights
After they shot dead
The thirteen men in Derry.
PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said,
BOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday
Everyone held
His breath and trembled.

II

It was a day of cold
Raw silence, wind-blown
surplice and soutane:
Rained-on, flower-laden
Coffin after coffin
Seemed to float from the door
Of the packed cathedral
Like blossoms on slow water.
The common funeral
Unrolled its swaddling band,
Lapping, tightening
Till we were braced and bound
Like brothers in a ring.

But he would not be held
At home by his own crowd
Whatever threats were phoned,
Whatever black flags waved.
I see him as he turned
In that bombed offending place,
Remorse fused with terror
In his still knowable face,
His cornered outfaced stare
Blinding in the flash.

He had gone miles away
For he drank like a fish
Nightly, naturally
Swimming towards the lure
Of warm lit-up places,
The blurred mesh and murmur
Drifting among glasses
In the gregarious smoke.
How culpable was he
That last night when he broke
Our tribe’s complicity?
‘Now, you’re supposed to be
An educated man,’
I hear him say. ‘Puzzle me
The right answer to that one.’

III

I missed his funeral,
Those quiet walkers
And sideways talkers
Shoaling out of his lane
To the respectable
Purring of the hearse…
They move in equal pace
With the habitual
Slow consolation
Of a dawdling engine,
The line lifted, hand
Over fist, cold sunshine
On the water, the land
Banked under fog: that morning
I was taken in his boat,
The Screw purling, turning
Indolent fathoms white,
I tasted freedom with him.
To get out early, haul
Steadily off the bottom,
Dispraise the catch, and smile
As you find a rhythm
Working you, slow mile by mile,
Into your proper haunt
Somewhere, well out, beyond…

Dawn-sniffing revenant,
Plodder through midnight rain,
Question me again.

I love this piece by Sven Birkets, written when Heaney died:

Auden wrote of the moment of Yeats’s death that ‘he became his admirers’, and I had the strongest feeling just then of what he meant. I conjured all at once, if this is possible, the idea, the emotional image, of all of those who knew and loved Seamus, or knew and loved his work — or both — and I felt inside the ghostly trace of a circuitry. That in this one moment all over the world, and of course most densely in Ireland, in Dublin, and most overwhelmingly on his own home ground in Sandymount, this same shock of incomprehension — not yet bereavement — was being registered. I pictured one person after another, dozens perhaps, and these were only the people who I knew who had a connection. Of course there were hundreds, many hundreds more.

When I drove down to the general store the next morning to get The New York Times and The Boston Globe, that sense was confirmed. There was massive front-page coverage everywhere — the biggest I’d ever seen for the death of a writer.

Here is Heaney’s first major poem: a declaration of self, of independence. The words shiver with importance and newness, the radical feeling of a young man carving out his own path. There’s danger here, for reasons emotional, familial, cultural, political.

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground.
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

I went and heard Heaney read at NYU once. It was part of a poetry seminar, not a huge public lecture. I sat in the back. Amazingly, there weren’t that many people there. Mostly students and a couple of outsiders like me. He stood there, white hair a wild nimbus around his head. The way he spoke – his cadences but also his use of language – so careful, so striking – his storytelling gifts, his sense of seriousness but not SELF-seriousness, always a sense of humor … Afterwards I approached him and had him sign my copy of Opened Ground.

If you haven’t read it, take a moment – take 20 minutes – unplug – and read Heaney’s Nobel Prize Lecture.

Here are some of the things I’ve written about him:

On his collection Death of a Naturalist.

On his collection Door Into the Dark.

On his collection Wintering Out.

On his collection North.

On his collection Oopened Ground.

I wrote a series of essays too, about his GORGEOUS essay collection The Redress of Poetry.

“I wanted to deliver a work that could be read universally as the-thing-in-itself but that would also sustain those extensions of meaning that our disastrously complicated local predicament made both urgent and desirable.” — Seamus Heaney

 
 
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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2026 Shakespeare Reading Project: The Merry Wives of Windsor

Posted on April 12, 2026 by sheila

My progress:
Shakespeare Reading Project
Henry VI, parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus
The Comedy of Errors
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Romeo & Juliet
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Richard II
King John
The Merchant of Venice
Henry IV, Part 1
Henry IV, Part 2

The Merry Wives of Windsor

People get so so mad about this one, particularly the Falstaff fanboys. They refuse to accept its existence as a play, they are irritated that Merry Wives is one of the most regularly performed of the plays. they refuse to accept this Falstaff is THEIR Falstaff. Honestly, I get it. Falstaff means a lot. Falstaff is a towering figure in the Western canon. Yes. But … he wasn’t at the time Shakespeare wrote the play. Falstaff was (is) a crowd-pleaser. His “role” was done after Henry IV Part 2, even though Shakespeare wasn’t “done” with him. His absence haunts Henry V. I still remember how Branagh handled Falstaff in his Henry V, establishing his presence even in his absence.

Harold Bloom, in the quotes below, splutters in outrage at what has been done to his Falstaff in Merry Wives. Auden dismisses the play so completely he didn’t even do a complete lecture on the play (all the Auden quotes are from his celebrated 1946/47 lectures on Shakespeare, published in book form). The general critical consensus is: How could Shakespeare do this to Falstaff!! WHERE is Falstaff? THIS isn’t Falstaff.

Fair. Totally fair. The Falstaff in Merry Wives is not the Falstaff of the two Henrys. (Neither is Mistress Quickly herself and the other holdouts from Henry IV Part 2.) Falstaff here is a buffoon, a creature of fun, used and abused, mocked … thrown into a laundry basket with dirty linen, etc. He’s Falstaff with all the wit and self-awareness taken out.

So. If you can just accept that this Falstaff is not the other Falstaff, maybe you can just enjoy the play for what it is? Maybe not? Okay!

The speculation is that Merry Wives came about because Queen Elizabeth so loved Falstaff in the Henriad she asked Shakespeare personally to write a play where Falstaff was in love.

There’s also an interesting theory that the play was commissioned for a Knight of the Garter ceremony – and since John Falstaff was a knight, albeit a “fallen” and disreputable knight, the subject matter would be appropriate for such an event, at least as a cautionary tale. I mean, we’re just writing fanfic at this point.

I just don’t think these plays were looked at as precious objects then, not by Shakespeare or anyone. Nothing is sacred. They were entertainers, their theatres were constantly burning down or closing down because of the plague, they were living in an absolute monarchy after centuries of basically civil war, the Puritans were always trying to get them shut down, and so … being ALLOWED to practice their trade – at the whim of a monarch – was just the reality of the world then. Falstaff is great, but that’s even more reason to put him in another play, right? Everyone loved him, it might draw people to come see him in something else. It just seems to me like not that big a deal – or a huge betrayal of something – to “do this” to Falstaff. These plays were here today, gone tomorrow. Of course people wanted to be a success, wanted to secure their legacy. The author of the Sonnets mentions this all the time. But … I just can’t believe anyone involved in these theatrical ventures were thinking, “Ah, four and a half centuries from now some academic at a place called Yale University will be FUMING at what you have done to Falstaff.” Publishing was different then, archiving was different, it’s a miracle we have these documents at all.

Reading it on the page, and seeing it, makes it clear that the play is really about language and being understood. There’s a Frenchman, a Welshman, there are multiple languages spoken onstage, and dialogue is written in thick accents. There’s a very contemporary feeling – this is the world as the audience knew it then. At one point the Welshman starts to recite Marlowe’s poem “Come with me and be my love …” an extremely current reference and everyone would have understood. Verisimilitude. Plus a Tower of Babel, which also makes sense in Elizabethan England, as the empire coalesced, and yet not everyone spoke English.

A couple years ago, my sister and I went to an outdoor production of Merry Wives at the local community theatre (we go to their plays every summer). I’d never seen Merry Wives live before and it plays GREAT. The audience was howling with laughter for almost the whole entire thing. The fact that this slight comedy, so different from his other comedies, viewed as “lesser” by almost every critic, etc. etc. … is so popular with audiences, confounds the critics, who think audiences shouldn’t be allowed to like what they so obviously like. I see this occasionally in my own line of work, a weird resentment from critics when a film emerges from out of nowhere and becomes a huge hit with audiences, even though they all gave it bad reviews. This happened with The Greatest Showman, in the theatre for months. It happened with Elvis too, although Elvis got better reviews than Showman, with the typical “Oh God here goes BAZ again.” (spare me). Elvis was in theatres for three months: I went over 10 times during the summer of 2022 and the theatre was packed each time. Elvis packs them in, even in the summer of Top Gun. I remember critics being totally SHOCKED at what was going on with Greatest Showman, in theatres for months on end, making money. I thought, “Telling people what they should and should not like is not your job description. Your job is telling audiences what YOU like.”

Merry Wives is a hit despite the critics, even though the play has nothing elevated or nuanced and the stakes are extremely low. Merry Wives of Windsor is often called a farce, and it reads like a farce, but when I finally saw it up on its feet, performed by this riotous talented cast – I finally understood. Merry Wives of Windsor is an episode of Three’s Company. I could totally see John Ritter having to hide in a laundry basket underneath his roommates’ underwear, so he could be smuggled out of the apartment for whatever ridiculous reason.

In my research I learned a new word: fabliau! Originated in France in the 13th century or thereabouts. Described in Wikipedia as: “They are generally characterized by sexual and scatological obscenity, and by a set of contrary attitudes generally critical or mocking of the church and nobility.” This genre/style would have been totally familiar to Elizabethan audiences.

The two husbands are convinced their wives are being unfaithful. They are so outrageous about it they are basically going to force their wives’ hands if they’re not careful. In the production we saw, over the course of the show the husbands’ mental states – and wardrobes – visibly deteriorated. By the end, they were total wrecks. Every entrance they seemed more out of their minds, and their outfits got more and more skimpy as they shed layers, almost like” “I can’t even deal with wearing a SHIRT anymore.” When one of the husbands staggered onto the stage, wearing little beach shorts and an open Hawaiian shirt, Jean and I lost it. Where are your clothes?? The actor who played the French doctor-suitor is also the high school librarian (bestill my heart) and he was seriously out of his mind. Like Kenneth Mars out of his mind. We were DYING. Obsessed with him. He’s in all their plays and he’s basically a celebrity to us at this point.

Here’s a pic I took from that production: it was a hot summer night, we were spraying ourselves with Off!, and this magical ridiculous play unfolded at the little platform by the river. Here is Falstaff wearing his horns in between the two wives.

I’ve seen these people in multiple shows now, and I love that part of community theatre.

Much Ado About Nothing is up next. A major masterpiece and one of my faves.

Quotes on the play

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“I don’t think you go to a play to forget, or to a movie to be distracted. I think life generally is a distraction and that going to a movie is a way to get back, not go away.” — Tom Noonan

Posted on April 12, 2026 by sheila

It’s Tom Noonan’s birthday. He just died last year, a huge loss.

Most well-known for playing supernatural-style “heavies” in movies such as Manhunter and Robocop 2, he got his start in the 1960s experimental theatre scene in New York City, and in many ways he never really left that scene. He established his theatre company in 1983, and it continued to the present day, where he developed projects, produced plays, had workshops, etc. His theatre company is the background for his first feature film, a two-hander called What Happened Was… First developed and produced as a play at his theatre company, where he and Karen Sillas played the two roles, he shot it very soon after. What Happened Was… is one of the great films about loneliness and one of the great films of the 1990s.

If you’ve been around here you know the story of me and What Happened Was … It played out here, and in real time.

What Happened Was… came out in 1994, won some big awards (at Sundance and elsewhere) and then sank like a stone into obscurity. It was released on DVD, but that was in 1996, when DVDs really took over, and the film was never released on DVD. And so for almost two decades it was un-seeable. I never forgot it, never forgot its impact. Years later, 2019, I wrote about What Happened Was … for my Film Comment column. I wrote that piece when the film was unavailable anywhere except for a grainy version on Amazon (it was amazing it was even there, since in the years before I’d periodically troll YouTube looking for it.)

I wrote the essay which isn’t just about the film, it’s about loneliness and Edward Hopper and living in a city. The way the light slants on the walls. I put up a link to my essay on Twitter (when Twitter was still a thing), and someone tagged Scott Macauley, who was one of the producers of the film back in 1994. He retweeted to his very large audience, which led to a flurry of activity. Many went to watch this film on Amazon because of my piece. “Watching that felt like a nervous breakdown,” one guy Tweeted at me. “I can’t believe I’ve never seen this,” he said. But I also had a long fascinating conversation with Macauley about it. The details I was always curious about. I didn’t realize that this event – my essay finding its way to Macauley – started the ball rolling.

Cut to … two years later. 2021. The news broke: What Happened Was … was being restored by Oscilloscope, and coming finally to DVD. The film would also be released into theatres again. The film showed up on streaming platforms like Criteron, etc. Oscilloscope asked me to write the booklet essay which I was thrilled to do. So. Clearly people involved in the film were “aware” of my essay. (No shit, Sheila. I’m slow to understand things sometimes.) You can purchase the film here.

The DVD release brought a lot of attention to this forgotten film. For the short run at Film Forum in 2021, the programming director invited me to interview both Noonan and the brilliant Karen Sillas on Zoom (it was still Covid-ish times). This was a major moment.

I was living upstairs at my friend’s house, and all my stuff was in storage. A very in-between and stressful time. I set up my laptop to sign on and as I got ready for the interview, I thought about me as a young woman staggering out of Facets or the Music Box in Chicago, wherever I saw it in the theatre. My reaction to the film wasn’t “that movie was good”. I honestly felt like I got a glimpse of the future. My future. The vision was not comforting, and it shook me. (I was right to be shaken. What Happened Was … is what happened. My script – July and Half of August – was, in a lot of ways, inspired by What Happened Was …). Maybe it was a self-fulfilling prophecy but at this point who cares. It happened.) So my relationship with the film has lasted for decades now …

And there I was, meeting Tom Noonan and Karen Sillas over Zoom, doing what would have been incomprehensible to me back in the 90s, getting to participate a little bit in the long overdue release. When the three of us were chatting before the official Zoom started, I said something like, “The timing of this is so wild! I just wrote about this film a year and a half ago – and now it’s being released!” As though it was this huge coincidence. (I’m smart in some ways but dumb in others.)

Tom said, like it was nothing, totally casual, “Well, your essay got the ball rolling. It’s because of your piece that all this happened.”

He didn’t make a big deal of it. He was too dry for that. But he made sure to let me know my Film Comment piece was the spark.

How often do you get that as a writer?

How often do you get confirmation FROM the filmmaker?

Here’s our conversation on Zoom:

One lesson I learned from this experience: I don’t really write about topical news-peggy NOW subjects. Because of this I am often “left out” of the discourse. I am in my own lane. And I learned – again – because I am just this way ANYway – to just not give a shit or worry about what everyone else is doing. I don’t feel a need to weigh in on the big subjects of the current day. So what that’s what everyone else is doing?

Celebrate the art you want to celebrate, even if whatever it is is unavailable to be seen. It exists. Like Linda Loman says, “Attention must be paid.”

“Attention must be paid” is basically my credo – although I didn’t set out consciously to do that.

Tom Noonan’s What Happened Was … remains a peak movie-going experience for me and one of my favorite films ever. It reached me when I needed it, but I also feared it (rightly) and the vision of loneliness it communicated. I love art that can do this. Opening Night did the same thing and around the same time, which I wrote about for Liberties. Films that challenge, provoke, and make you look at things you don’t really want to look at or deal with. The art forces the confrontation.

This is one of the goals of art. What Noonan did with What Happened Was … – what Sillas and Noonan did together – will live forever for me as one of the best examples of it.

I am thankful for Noonan’s artistry, not to mention his lifelong commitment to downtown NY theatre, for What Happened Was… and for making sure I understand the role I played in the story of its resurrection.

The trailer back in 1994 made it look like a romantic comedy/erotic thriller – total category error. Oscilloscope’s new trailer is better:

 
 
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 don’t see the book you want on the shelves, write it.” — Beverly Cleary

Posted on April 12, 2026 by sheila

“I think children want to read about normal, everyday kids. That’s what I wanted to read about when I was growing up. I wanted to read about the sort of boys and girls that I knew in my neighborhood and in my school. And in my childhood, many years ago, children’s books seemed to be about English children, or pioneer children. And that wasn’t what I wanted to read. And I think children like to find themselves in books.” — Beverly Cleary

Beverly Cleary, beloved children’s author, died in 2021 at the venerable age of 104.

Like so many other children, then and now, Beverly Cleary’s books were huge to me growing up. I read all the “Ramona” books, and also all the “Henry” books. My favorite was Ramona Forever (I still remember that moment with the mirror – haven’t read the book since I was a child). It’s so touching to me to see my nieces and nephews also falling in love with her books.

The obit on NPR is really good and this part struck me:

In her autobiography, A Girl From Yamhill, she wrote about clamping around on tin can stilts and yelling “pieface!” at the neighbor. She was an only child, who grew up in Portland during the Depression and still remembered when her father lost his job.

“I was embarrassed,” she recalled. “I didn’t know how to talk to my father. I know he felt so terrible at that time that I just — I guess I felt equally terrible. And I think adults sometimes don’t think about how children are feeling about the adult problems.”

Cleary used her crystal-clear recall to capture the tribulations of young children exquisitely in her books.

What a fascinating and complicated memory, a child understanding the pain of her father, and absorbing the pain, but not knowing how to say “I know you’re hurting, Dad” because you are a child.

Cleary’s books are filled with insightful moments like that. In fact, when you read them as an older person, outside the realm of childhood, the adults start to take on more shape. You begin to see that THEY are having complicated full lives too.



One of the interesting things is the cross-generational aspect of this, at least in my family, but considering the tributes I’ve seen it’s true for others. She started publishing books for children in 1950. Long before I even arrived on the planet. But the Ramona and “Beezus” series were a staple of my childhood, and then down the line: I’d outgrow reading them and then my younger brother and sister would start them up and then they’d outgrow them and my youngest sister would start… Almost like a rite of passage. And now THEIR children love these books!

And now it’s so funny when my nieces start explaining Ramona to me, as though the books were published yesterday … I want to say “Believe me, kiddo, I know all about Ramona.” But of course I don’t because everyone has to discover those books for themselves.

Beverly Cleary started out as a librarian (so many writers begin this way and as a librarian’s daughter I am HERE for it), and she noticed a trend: little boys kept asking her where they could find books about boys – regular boys like themselves. There weren’t many out there (see the quote above), and so she decided to write one. She wrote Henry Huggins, which was published in 1950 and was an instant hit. People are still discovering this series and the Ramona series. It doesn’t matter that it takes place “back then”, because for a child it’s all the same stuff. Parents … friends … worries … problems … school … all seen through the perspectives of children trying to understand – or rebel against – the often incomprehensible behavior of adults. An eternal subject.

Cleary’s books have never gone out of print.

My niece is named Beatrice. Her little brother calls her “Beezus”. Beverly Cleary’s is a living legacy.

 
 
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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“For I am of the seed of the WELCH WOMAN and speak the truth from my heart.” — Christopher Smart

Posted on April 11, 2026 by sheila

“For in my nature I quested for beauty, but God, God hath sent me to sea for pearls.”
— Christopher Smart, from “Jubilate Agno”

Christopher Smart, born on this day in 1722, spent over 10 years of his life locked up in mental institutions (a kind term for what such establishments were back then). He seemed to suffer from some sort of religious ecstasy (although “suffering” is not the right word at all). He was overcome by the love of God. It made him tremble with happiness. To quote my Dad, “I see no problem.”

Smart was born in Kent. His father died when he was 11, and he was taken under the wing of the Vane family (his father was a steward at their home). The Vanes made sure he went to college, Pembroke. He became friends with Alexander Pope, and also somehow became acquainted with Dr. Johnson. He had problems right off the bat with drinking and money, being irresponsible with both. He was arrested in 1747 for not paying his debts. He moved to London. He worked as an editor. He got married. In 1756 he was sent to an insane asylum and stayed locked up until 1763. His wife left him during his incarceration, but in general he had not alienated his friends, and most stood by him, trying to help him out, financially or otherwise (he had two children by this point).

While Smart was in the asylum, he wrote A Song to David. It was published the year of his release. You can see in it Smart’s essential qualities, one of which is a love of lists. Lists/outlines seemed to organize his high-flying rapturous thought processes. He couldn’t BEAR how much he had to say about David, and so he tried to break it down, break David down into essences, which takes the form of a list. Exhibit A, Exhibit B, and so on. Smart’s language is startling, right off the bat. There is energy in the language. He was not lost in quiet contemplation. He was right up against it: he needed URGENTLY to speak.

Christopher Smart died in 1771.

His life was chaotic, but his confinement was almost a blessing in that it allowed him the space to write without the pressure of having to make a living (a struggle for most writers). I am hesitant of making a blessing out of madness, even when some good art comes out of it. Anyone who has experienced madness to any degree will know that nobody would ever choose it. (I think of David Lynch’s comments on Vincent van Gogh in his book Catching the Big Fish:

Right here people might bring up Vincent van Gogh as an example of a painter who did great work in spite of—-or because of—-his suffering. I like to think that van Gogh would have been even more prolific and even greater if he wasn’t so restricted by the things tormenting him. I don’t think it was pain that made him so great—-I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had.

In his most famous poem, the one most often quoted today, Christopher Smart sat and watched his cat Jeoffry stretching and playing in the sun, and became overwhelmed by God’s nearness and presence, obvious in every ripple of muscle in the cat’s body. The resulting poem is one of my favorites of all time: “Jubilate Agno, Fragment B [For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry]”.

Christopher Smart’s influence was local during his own time, but he has easily crossed the centuries following his death, and new generations of readers continue to discover his wonderful work. Allen Ginsberg spoke of him as a huge influence. In Smart’s poem about his cat Jeoffry, you can almost feel Christopher Smart “rapping” about the cat, riffing … a la the Beats of the 40s and 50s, with complete confidence in what Ginsberg, centuries later, would call “first thought best thought”. I don’t believe first thought is always best thought. Sometimes “first thought” needs to go through an editing process. But Smart’s sound – a voice murmuring over and over, turning around and around the same topic – can be heard in poets centuries later.

Smart’s lines don’t look like other poet’s lines (at least not in the 18th century). His lines look like the lines from poets in the mid-20th century. He often begins all lines with the same word, giving the verse an incantatory feel. His lines are long and conversational, they look like the lines of “Howl”.

And about his “cat poem”:

First of all, check out this gorgeous post.

Second of all: Hope was the living embodiment of Christopher Smart’s lines. Of course this is true of most cats. I’d just sit and watch Hope do her thing, enjoying witnessing her mind and body working to accomplish a goal, conquer a foe, get her needs met, whatever. And she’d do something, and I’d immediately think of this or that line from Smart’s poem. A continuum between Hope and Jeoffry. The world changes. Technology changes. Cats do not change.

I put together this post years ago when I started commemorating people’s birthdays. I used photos of Hope to illustrate. I miss her so much. She was the best. I love you, Hope.

For she can creep
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For every family had one cat at least in the bag.

For she is tenacious of her point.

For every house is incomplete without her and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.

For she purrs in thankfulness, when God tells her she’s a good Cat

For she is the tribe of the Tiger

For she can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation.
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For she counteracts the powers of darkness by her electrical skin and glaring eyes.
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UPDATE: and of course now Frankie has come into my life! Who, like Hope, evokes Jeoffry, in all his creepy-creeping ness, his stretching, his “wreathing his body seven times round”, the way he curls up in a perfect circle, the way he has a “witching hour” at around 6 pm when he goes absolutely BERSERK for a straight HOUR before curling up next to me … It’s also perfect that he is in love with what I call “Hope’s blanket”, made for me by my friend Maria, which Hope totally co-opted. Frankie took one look at it – probably smelled the whiff of Hope around it – and chose it.

A home isn’t really a home without a cat in it. Or, better put: “For every house is incomplete without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.”

For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having consider’d God and himself he will consider his neighbour.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
For when his day’s work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses.
For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation.
For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he’s a good Cat.
For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.
For every house is incomplete without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.
For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt.
For every family had one cat at least in the bag.
For the English Cats are the best in Europe.
For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped.
For the dexterity of his defence is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly.
For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.
For he is tenacious of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.
For he is of the Lord’s poor and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually–Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat.
For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better.
For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat.
For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in music.
For he is docile and can learn certain things.
For he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation.
For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment.
For he can jump over a stick which is patience upon proof positive.
For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command.
For he can jump from an eminence into his master’s bosom.
For he can catch the cork and toss it again.
For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.
For the former is afraid of detection.
For the latter refuses the charge.
For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business.
For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly.
For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services.
For he killed the Ichneumon-rat very pernicious by land.
For his ears are so acute that they sting again.
For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.
For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.
For I perceived God’s light about him both wax and fire.
For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.

QUOTES:

Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, 1948 bebop collaboration:

“When I think of death
I get a goofy feeling
Then I catch my breath
Zero is appealing
Appearances are hazy
Smart went crazy
Smart went crazy.”

Dr. Johnson:

“I do not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as anyone else. Another charge was that he did not love clean linen, and I have no passion for it.”

Robert Graves:

[He] wrote A Song to David in a lunatic asylum, and when his collected poems were published in 1791, it was omitted as ‘not acceptable to the reader.’ This poem is formally addressed to David – Smart knew that he was no madder than King David had been, and a tradition survives that he scrabbled the versese with a key on the wall of his cell.

Christopher Smart:

The beauty, force and vehemence of Impression…[is] a talent or gift of Almighty God, by which a Genius is impowered to throw an emphasis upon a word or sentence in such wise, that it cannot escape any reader of sheer good sense or true critical sagacity.

Michael Schmidt, in Lives of the Poets, writes:

However [Song to David] was written, they remain a wonder and a mystery, begotten of the Bible, of broad and deep learning, and of some catalyst that made a confusion that poet resolved, against chaos as it were, to put in some sort of order.

For the word of God is a sword on my side – no matter what other weapon a stick or a straw.
For I have adventured myself in the name of the Lord, and he hath marked me for his own.
For I bless God the Postmaster general & all conveyancers of letters under his care especially Allen & Shelvock.
For my grounds in New Canaan shall infinitely compensate for the flats & maynes of Staindrop Moore.
For the praise of God can give to a mute faith the notes of a nightingale.

Is it nonsense? Yes. Is it nonsense? No.

Northrop Frye:

“[Alexander] Pope’s ‘Messiah’ is not musical, but Smart’s ‘Song to David’, with its pounding thematic words and the fortissimo explosion of its coda, is a musical tour de force.”

Peter Porter:

The purest case of man’s vision prevailing over the spirit of his times.

Richard Rolt, Westminster Journal, 1751, reviewing Smart’s Poems on Several Occasions:

[The poems have] all the glowing fire … that can enrapture the Soul of Poetry, and enliven the Heart of the Reader.

Thomas Percy, letter to Edmond Malone, October 17, 1786:

Poor Smart the mad poet.

Robert Graves:

It is not impossible that when Smart is judged over the whole range of his various productions – conventional in form as well as unconventional, light and even ribald as well as devotional, urbane or tender as well as sublime – he will be thought of as the greatest English poet between Pope and Wordsworth.

Harold Bloom, Best Poems in the English Language:

Of the significant poets of the later eighteenth century, sometimes termed the Age of Sensibility to distinguish it from the Augustan Age of Pope and Swift, a high proportion went mad. Like William Collins and William Cowpoer, Christopher Smart is rarely discussed without reference to his clinical insanity.

Fanny Burney, journal entry, September 12, 1768:

[Smart sent] a most affecting Epistle to papa, to entreat him to lend him 1/2 a guinea…How great a pity so clever, so ingenious a man should be reduced to such shocking circumstances. He is extremely grave, and has still great wildness in his manner, looks and voice–’tis impossible to see him and think of his works, without feeling the utmost pity and concern for him.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, letter to T. Hall Caine:

A Song to David [is] the only accomplished poem of the last century.

Marcus Walsh:

Smart’s Hymns are imaginative poetry, hymns only in name, making too few of the inevitable practical compromises to be acceptable in popular congregational use.

Christopher Hunter, Smart’s nephew:

[He was friendly, affectionate, and liberal to excess.

Michael Schmidt:

Smart’s originality is the product not of a candid, puzzled, anxious personality like William Cowper’s, nor the lucid, nostalgic and humane sensibility of a Goldsmith. It’s the product of a distinctly poetic imagination, using that term in a classical sense. Smart seldom composes verse: he is a poet rare in any age, most rare in the eighteenth century, a spiritual enthusiast and a consummate verbal artist. He might resemble Blake, only he has greater formal tact, a better ear, a better (that is, a less didactic) nature. His poems exist to celebrate God, not to cajole, instruct and persuade us.

Christopher Smart, on his time being locked up:

“For they work me with their harping-irons, which is a barbarous instrument, because I am more unguarded than others.”

From “With Christopher Smart”
By Robert Browning
Armed with this instance, have I diagnosed
Your case, my Christopher? The man was sound
And sane at starting: all at once the ground
Gave way beneath his step, a certain smoke
Curled up and caught him, or perhaps down broke
A fireball wrapping flesh and spirit both
In conflagration. Then—as heaven were loth
To linger—let earth understand too well
How heaven at need can operate—off fell
The flame-robe, and the untransfigured man
Resumed sobriety,—as he began,
So did he end nor alter pace, not he!
(full poem here)

John Butt on A Song to David:

The poem is unique amongst the lyrical poems of the century in its expression of religious ecstasy within the confines of the strictest formality.

Donald Davie:

The greatest English poet between Pope and Wordsworth.

Dr. John Hawkesworth, on visiting Smart after his release:

He replied very quick, ‘I cannot afford to be idle;’ I said he might employ his mind as well in the country as the town, at which he only shook his head.

Allen Ginsberg to students in a “Basic Poetics,” class, May 26, 1980:

“The reason I want to lay Smart on you now is (that) his line is basically the same line I used for Howl. I didn’t get the Howl line from Whitman and I didn’t get it from Robinson Jeffers or Kenneth Fearing, who are the American precursors of long line, nor from the 19th century British poet Edward Carpenter, who was also as a student of Walt Whitman, writing long lines – but from Christopher Smart. Kerouac’s long line comes somewhat out of Christopher Smart also. Smart is smarter than anybody else around. His language is smarter than Pope or Dryden. Their’s is very stiff, compared to the liquidity and intelligence and humor (of Smart), as well as classical scholarship involved, as well as a pure vernacular improvisation and contemporary quotidian reverence.”

Dr. Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, on Smart’s Universal Visiter, stopped because of his insanity:

I wrote for some months in ‘The Universal Visitor,’ for poor Smart, while he was mad, not then knowing the terms on which he was engaged to write, and thinking I was doing him good. I hoped his wits would soon return to him. Mine returned to me, and I wrote in ‘The Universal Visitor’ no longer.

Harold Bloom, Best Poems in the English Language:

Smart never could escape the stigma of madness, which prevented A Song to David and other later works from receiving the esteem they deserved. He died in debtor’s prison, a melancholy end that haunts me whenever I reread Jubilate Agno and A Song to David.

Christopher Smart, on gardening at St. Luke’s, October, 1762:

“Let Pink, house of Pink rejoice with Trigonum a herb used in garlands–the Lord succeed my pink borders.”

John Kempe, Gentleman’s Magazine (1823), remembering when Smart visited their home as a child, to listen to John play the flute:

I have often soothed the wanderings of his melancholy by some favorite air; he would shed tears when I played, and generally wrote some lines afterwards.

Michael Schmidt:

We readily assume that he wrote in madness, that what he wrote, in its forms and themes, partakes of his derangement. Or we divide the work into sane and “insane” and judge the parts by distinct criteria. But his madness can be seen not so much as a disorder as alternative order, his religious vision not as eccentric but as direct, comprehensive. To say an artist is “mad” is to say very little. What matters is what he makes of language. Smart makes passionate poetry.

He is not an imitator even in his translations, which hold the original in a form and language that make no concessions. He feels and conveys the force of the poetry he admires. His intution is attuned to a broad tradition, not caught in the rut of convention. Marcus Walsh calls Smart’s mature style “mannered, religiose and self-conscious” – and each becomes a positive critical term, for together they produce a “homogenous” style that “unifies” – the crucial word – “a number of divergent influences”. It is the paradoxical combination of influences, biblical and classical, and the disruptions his imagination registers, that make him outstanding and eccentric. Learning and accidents of biography delver him from the bondage of Augustan convention into the sometimes anarchic, vertiginous freedom of Jubliate Agno and the originality of the Song to David. He has few heirs.

Christopher Hunter, on his uncle’s breakdown:

Though the fortune as well as constitution of Mr. Smart required the utmost care, he was equally negligent in the management of both, and his various and repeated embarrassments acting upon an imagination uncommonly fervid, produced temporary alienations of mind; which at last were attended with paroxysms so violent and continued as to render confinement necessary.

Fanny Burney, Memoirs of Dr. Burney (1832)

[Smart alternated between] partial aberration of intellect, and bacchanalian forgetfulness of misfortune…[He was pious] though fanatical rather than rational.

Christopher Smart on Horace:

The lucky risk of the Horatian boldness…Horace is not so much an original in respect to his matter and sentiments … as to that unrivalled peculiarity of expression, which has excited the admiration of all succeeding ages.

Harold Bloom, Best Poems in the English Language, on “Jubilate Ago”:

The great chant from the Jubilate, “For I Will Consider my Cat Jeoffrey,” is superbly poignant, as it celebrates Smart’s asylum companion. At certain moments, here and elsewhere in Jubilate Agno, Smart becomes a precursor of William Blake.

Marcus Walsh, Christopher Smart: Selected Poems (1979):

[In Smart’s poems] every creature worships God simply by being itself, through its peculiar actions and properties…. The well-known lines on Smart’s cat Jeoffry, far from exemplifying a childlike naivety of vision, are an elaborate demonstration of how each closely observed act may be taken as part of the cat’s divine ritual of praise.

Donald Greene:

[Smart is] the earliest of the outright rebels against Newtonian and Lockean ‘rationalism’.

Christopher Smart:

“For there is no invention but the gift of God, and no grace but the grace of gratitude.”

Christopher Hunter, June 25, 1771, a month after his uncle’s death:

I trust he is now at peace; it was not his portion 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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Review: Hamlet (2026)

Posted on April 10, 2026 by sheila

Perfect timing, what with my Shakespeare reading project and all. Riz Ahmed plays Hamlet in a new – and streamlined – version of the script, taking place in present-day London among the South Asian community. I reviewed for Ebert.

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“Those evils that inflame the imagination and make the heart sick, ought not to leave the head cool.” — William Hazlitt

Posted on April 10, 2026 by sheila

Self-portrait by William Hazlitt, who was born on this day in 1778.

“We are cold to others only when we are dull in ourselves, and have neither thoughts nor feelings to impart to them. Give a man a topic in his head, a throb of pleasure in his heart, and he will be glad to share it with the first person he meets.:
— William Hazlitt, “The Fight”

Hazlitt was born into a time of revolution, first the American Revolution and then the French Revolution, two seismic events which would form his mind and his philosophy. His father was a Unitarian minister. It was expected he would go into the clergy as well, and sent to a Unitarian seminary. Although he didn’t end up being a minster, the seminary changed Hazlitt’s life. He only went for two years but it was enough to launch him as a thinker and a philosopher. The writers he was introduced to, all those dissenters, of which the Unitarians had many, seasoned with the overriding idea that man was an individual, and that the rights of man were paramount in the field of human life… all of this swirled through the entirety of his work.

He was a fierce believer in human liberty. He read John Locke, David Hume, Rousseau was huge for him. He believed man was inherently good, and if his mind was activated, if he was learned enough in the sciences and the arts, his worst tendencies would be quelled naturally. (Hazlitt had a difficult life, with much hardship, and his philosophy would develop and change over the years.) His studies were so rigorous and in-depth that he basically lost his faith in God in the process, one of the reasons why he left the seminary. His belief was in Man, not God. Hazlitt was forward-thinking but very much of his day and age.

Much much more after the jump:

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“I prefer a national film to an international film.” — Jean-Paul Belmondo

Posted on April 9, 2026 by sheila

It’s his birthday today. I wrote about him on my Substack.

 
 
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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