Anderson Cooper’s “grief” series has been going on for years now, really, and I always find them so soothing, so comforting, just … the quietness of two people listening and talking, sharing, opening up the space to share thoughts on grief. There’s something weirdly healing about these conversations. Maybe healing isn’t the word. Maybe being in the “presence” of an honest conversation about what’s really going on … helps me to drop in to what’s really going on. Cooper creates a little oasis around himself and his guest. Grief is so personal and yet so universal. Grief takes many forms. There is no right (or wrong) way. But there’s no way you could even know this unless people TALKED about grief, which we don’t in this culture. At all.
I love Eric Church so much – I saw him at Outlaw Fest back in 2017! with Willie freakin’ Nelson! – and here he joins Anderson to talk about grief. I was aware of many of these events – the embolism that nearly killed him, the Las Vegas shooting – but I guess I was unaware about his brother’s death. Church’s brother – who co-wrote a couple songs with Eric – died by suicide in 2018. Anderson Cooper’s brother also died by suicide, 40 years ago, but things like this don’t get easier, they just change. So the two men talk about all of this with a disarming openness – nobody “has this”. Nobody does grief right. A conversation like this is almost like: How are YOU doing with all this? How do YOU cope with this? Because here’s how I’M trying to cope.
I’ve watched all of Anderson’s videos about grief – I always “get” something out of them, but also there’s something so lovely in just sitting and listening. I really love that he’s doing this. This one hits pretty deep.
It’s Max Shulman’s birthday. Who the hell is Max Shulman, some of you may ask? He was one of the most popular humorists of his day, who reached his peak of popularity in the 1950s. He’s the guy who created the Dobie Gillis character, featured in a series of short stories and a couple novels – turned into a popular TV series, with accompanying comic books to boot.
Shulman was very successful – a star, really – and is now almost forgotten. Why? Maybe because satire doesn’t time-travel all that well? It baffles me. His syndicated humor column appeared in 300 newspapers, he was extremely popular on college campuses, he was a regular contributor to Mad Magazine, established in 1952. Shulman was a Cold War satirist hacking at Eisenhower-era conformity with glee, lampooning it, creating space around it. In his own comedic way, he was deeply radical.
I like to pay tribute to the random figures who have come into my world – particularly very early on – before I was aware of what was supposed to be good or important or whatever, the stuff that wasn’t assigned in school, books I basically tripped over (more often than not in my first after-school job as a page at the local library), books which ended up shaping me. In this random way, I developed my own taste, without even knowing I was doing so. This is what it was like before an algorithm told you what you already knew, or recommended things you already were into. I miss the sheer accidental part of this type of discovery. When you discover something all on your own, even if you were discovering something 30 years after the fact, you really OWN it. You’ve claimed it for yourself. Nobody gave it to you. You CHOSE. I wasn’t even ALIVE when Max Shulman was writing, but I was discovering it now. It might as well have been published yesterday. It’s never too late to discover and claim something as “your own”. Everyone has to watch Citizen Kane or Rules of the Game or read Midsummer Night’s Dream or Jane Eyre for the first time.
I somehow tripped over Shulman’s I Was A Teen-age Dwarf when I was a teenager myself, 15 or 16, browsing in the high school library. I have no idea why I would have picked it up: it was an old-fashioned looking book, a cartoon on the front. Maybe something in the 1950s-ish cover appealed to me. We were in a 1950s nostalgia boom. Happy Days was a hit. The Stray Cats were on the rise. Boomer nostalgia was everywhere. I Was a Teenage Dwarf is the chronicle of Dobie Gillis’ high school “woman”-izing.
I started to read it. The first two pages made me laugh so hard I was “sh”ed angrily and then asked by the librarian to please step out of the library. I could not control myself. There was a bit with a swan, and a bit with a water fountain, and tears streamed down my face. I staggered out into the hall, HOWLING with laughter, by myself. I was a weird kid, perhaps, but I can count the writers on one hand who are that funny.
Once I brought the book home I learned my parents LOVED Max Shulman. They recognized his name immediately, of course, and both started laughing, telling me: “You HAVE to read Rally Round the Flag Boys!!”
I remember vividly my mother TRYING to tell me the name of one of the lead characters in a Shulman books (The Zebra Derby), and she was incapacitated by laughter and couldn’t get the words out. The character’s name was Lodestone O’Toole.
Max Shulman was at his peak during my parents’ high school years, and suddenly their teenage daughter is asking, “Have you ever heard of Max Shulman?” Recently, my middle-school-age nephew started to explain Eminem to me. Kid, you don’t even KNOW. I’ve seen him in concert. I was there WHEN IT ALL BEGAN.
This is the great thing about art, though. It exists in an eternal present. It’s THERE to be discovered. I think Peter Bogdonovich said something like “There isn’t any such thing as ‘old movies’. There are just movies you haven’t seen yet.”
Many years ago, it became my mission in life to find all of his old books so I could own them. This was before Amazon, this was during the time when I had to frequent second-hand bookstores and immediately go to the “S” section in fiction to check. Many of the books are long out of print, and hard to find. I find it strange that his fame has not translated – like, at ALL – except among the lucky few like myself who tripped over him. The Strand sometimes had copies. I always checked whenever I was there. I got some of his lesser known titles but the holy grail (I Was a Teenage Dwarf) eluded me. I was dying to know if the book would be as funny to me as an adult as it was when I was a kid. I mentioned my search to my dad. A librarian and rare book collector.
Eventually, a box arrived on my doorstep, with my dad’s handwriting on the label. I opened it. And took out two books: Rally Round the Flag, Boys and I Was a Teenage Dwarf. This was who Dad was. He read these books when he was a kid. Now he was sending them to his daughter. I was younger then. I didn’t consider what it must have felt like to him.
I immediately took Teenage Dwarf up to my roof, with a thermos of coffee, and sat there in the autumn sun, tearing through my old childhood favorite. I finished it in a couple of hours.
And for the record? It was even funnier than I remembered. My sense of humor had developed, along with my experience in romance. The book is way MEANER than I remembered! It’s merciless.
Dobie Gillis at one point has a tomboy girlfriend. She is constantly playing stickball and climbing trees and falling down. She always has cuts on her knees. Hence, her nickname: Red Knees. RED KNEES. Her PARENTS call her “Red Knees”. Dobie, kissing her on the couch, whispers lovingly, “Ohhh, Red Knees …”
RED KNEES??? This will never not be funny to me.
Here’s an excerpt from the Red Knees chapter. I love Red Knees.
I hate Red Knees like poison, but I’ll tell you a funny thing: sometimes I kind of like her. I mean sometimes I can’t help it, she’s so cuckoo. She’s got the biggest braces on her teeth of any girl I ever saw, and her hair is a million laughs because she keeps cutting it with a nail clippers. Sometimes when I look at that comical hair and the braces and the red knees which she keeps skinning because she is always running and falling down, I can’t help myself, I just have to bust out laughing. This gets her pretty sore, which I let her do for a little while and then I grab her and hug her to calm her down. That’s the only time Red Knees is really quiet – when I am hugging her.
Here’s an excerpt from another one of Dobie’s romances, with a girl named Tuckie Webb. (Shulman is excellent at naming characters).
Last spring at John Marshall Junior High, after my reprieve from military academy, Tuckie and I had a romance that warmed the heart of the entire school. I mean Alma Gristede had been just a feeble flicker by comparison. Every time we walked down the hall holding hands everybody would smile and say, “Here comes Tuckie and Dobie walking down the hall holding hands.” Even Mr. Knabe, the tin shop teacher, would say it, and he hated me like poison because I once used up fourteen feet of sheet brass trying to make a charm for Tuckie’s charm bracelet.
Tuckie and I were together all the time. We came to school together every morning. We went to classes together. After school we got on our bikes and went to the Sweet Shoppe together for a lime Coke, Dutch treat. Every Wednesday night we went to the early show at the Bijou, Dutch treat, Saturday mornings I picked her up at ten and we played tennis, or went to the beach. Saturday night there was always a party at one of the kids’ houses, and we ate little tiny sandwiches and looked at television and kissed each other. Tuckie only let me kiss her on Saturday night, which was all right with me because kissing really takes it out of a guy.
The DETAIL.
Then there’s Rally Round the Flag, Boys! First of all, let’s consider the title and that it was published smack-dab in the middle of the Eisenhower years, with the ramping-up of the Cold War and the beefing-up of the military-industrial complex – completely changing the landscape of America (and creating many jobs too, part of America’s new-found “prosperity”. Blue-collar workers could suddenly afford houses. Returning GIs went to college on the GI Bill. Or at least the white ones did). The lampoon of Shulman’s novels came out of the Pleasantville-esque stifling conformity of the post-War years. Also: with all that prosperity, teenagers suddenly rose in importance. Adolescence lasted longer than it did a generation before. They had more free time, they actually had money, too. Rally Round the Flag, Boys! includes a spoof of the “commuter lifestyle,” suddenly a status symbol with the explosion of that little thing called THE SUBURBS in the 50s. We are in Mad Men territory here. This is some bleak shit.
EXCEPRT FROM Rally Round the Flag, Boys!
Living in Putnam’s Landing was a blessing not entirely unmixed.For one thing, it cost more money than Harry was making. For another, it required more hours than there were in a day.
Once, on a dullish afternoon at the office, Harry set down a time-table of a typical day in his life. It looked like this:
6:30 a.m. Rise, shave, shower, breakfast.
7:00 Wake Grace to drive me to station.
7:10 Wake Grace again.
7:16 Grace starts driving me to station.
7:20 Grace scrapes fender on milk truck.
7:36 Arrive station.
7:37 Board train for New York.
8:45 Arrive Grand Central.
9:00 Arrive New Yorker Magazine.
5:18 P.M. Leave New Yorker Magazine.
5:29 Board train to Putnam’s Landing.
6:32 Arrive Putnam’s Landing. Grace waiting at station.
6:51 Traffic jam at station untangles. We start home.
6:52 Grace tells me sump pump broken.
6:56 I ask Grace what is sump pump.
6:57 Grace tells me sump pump is pump that pumps sump.
6:58 I say Oh.
7:00 Grace tells me Bud swallowed penny.
7:02 Grace tells me Dan called his teacher an “old poop”.
7:04 Grace tells me Peter is allergic to the mailman.
7:06 Grace tells me she signed me up to work all day Saturday in Bingo tent at Womans Club Bazaar.
7:12 Arrive home.
7:13 Dan, aged 8, Bud, aged 6, and Peter, aged 4, looking at television. Dan and Bud want to look at Looney Tunes. Peter wants to look at John Cameron Swayze. (?) Grace rules in favor of Peter. Bud swallows another penny.
7:30 Grace puts children to bed. I go out on lawn to pick up toys.
7:38 Dinner.
8:01 Mrs. Epperson, baby sitter, rings doorbell. I ask Grace what we need with baby sitter. Grace says tonight is PTA meeting. I remind Grace we just went to PTA meeting three days ago. Grace says that was regular meeting, tonight is special emergency protest meeting. We go to special emergency protest meeting.
8:32 Arrive special emergency protest meeting. Special emergency protest seems to be about a hole in the school playground. Chairman of Board of Education, a conservative Yankee type, says no appropriation in budget for fixing hole. Grace rises and demands special appropriation. Chairman of Board calls this creeping socialism. I doze off.
9:51 Grace jams elbow in my ribs, wakes me to vote on motion to refer hole to Special Committee to Study Hole in Playground. Motion carried.
9:52 Meeting adjourned.
9:53 Grace and I go to Fatso’s Diner with O’Sheels and Steinbergs, fellow PTA members. Women discuss hole further. Men yawn.
10:48 Leave Fatso’s Diner.
11:25 Arrive home. Grace asks Mrs. Epperson, baby sitter, if everything all right. Mrs. Epperson says Bud woke up once and started crying but she gave him some pennies and he went back to sleep.
11:58 Grace and I go to bed.
12:04 Grace says she hears animals around garbage can. I go out.
12:05 Grace is right. There are animals around garbage can. I go back in.
12:53 Animals finish garbage.
1:10 I sleep.
And so passed the days of Harry Bannerman’s years. If it wasn’t a meeting, a caucus, a rally, or a lecture, then it was a quiet evening at home licking envelopes. Or else it was a party where you ate cubes of cheese on toothpicks and talked about plywood, mortgages, mulches, and children. Or it was amateur theatricals. Or ringing doorbells for worthy causes. Or umpiring Little League games. Or setting tulip bulbs. Or sticking decals on cribs. Or trimming hedges. Or reading Dr. Spock. Or barbecuing hamburgers. Or increasing your life insurance. Or doing anything in the whole wide world except sitting on a pouf with a soft and loving girl and listening to Rodgers and Hart.
It was more and more on Harry’s mind – the pouf, the phonograph records, the long, languorous nights. He would look at Grace in a nubby tweed skirt and a cardigan with the sleeves pushed up, rushing about dispensing civic virtue, wisps of hair coming loose, her seams crooked – and he would remember another Grace in pink velvet lounging pajamas, curled up like a kitten next to him on the pouf, in one hand a cigarette lazily trailing smoke, the other hand doing talented things to the back of his neck.
He would look at his house – the leaks, the squeaks, the chips, the cracks, the things that had to be repaired, recovered, rewired, replaced, remodeled – and he would recall the days when all you did when something went wrong was phone the landlord.
He would look at his children. He would watch them devouring sides of beef and crates of eggs; poking toes through stockings and elbows through sweaters; littering the yard with balls, bats, bicycles, tricycles, scooters, blocks, crayons, paints, tops, hoops, marbles, bows, arrows, darts, guns, and key bits of jigsaw puzzles; trailing mud on the rugs; breaking off the corners of playing cards; eating watermelon in bed; nailing pictures of athletes to walls; leaving black rings in the tub; getting carsick – he would observe this arresting pageant and he would think, “Yes, they are fine children, they are normal, I love them very much, and I will guard and keep them always … But, oh, how sweet and satisfactory those golden days on the pouf!”
“arresting pageant”
Max Shulman, with precision and a subversive mindset, destroys the gaga-eyed “American ideal” of the idyllic white-picket-fence domestic life, so stifling it was basically State-run propaganda. Shulman saw the hypocrisies and absurdities of American life. He saw the dangers of convention and consensus. His work is a “rallying cry” against the duty, mindless patriotism, and “settling down”.
It’s still a valuable lesson. I’m always alert to demands for conformity. Finding a sense of “belonging” is important, but I want to CHOOSE the sense of belonging. You can’t DEMAND belonging. What you can say, how you are “allowed” to say it, distrust of the silly, the invented, the romantic, the not-for-any-other-reason-but-to-have-fun-ness, the puritanical vibe … it’s all deeply antithetical to everything I am. I have always distrusted consensus, except for things like “The Nazis were bad and needed to be destroyed.” (Now, though, it appears there ISN’T a consensus on that, never mind the World War we fought.) At any rate: Shulman’s voice was a welcome breath of fresh air – and it should be one now too. We are in an age when satire can barely exist, not when maniacs burst into a newspaper office and kill everyone there because of satirical cartoons. And so-called tolerant people actually say, “Well, maybe they shouldn’t have published the cartoons …” This is wild to me. Some woman on Twitter said (not about the cartoons, but something else): “There’s a time and place for satire. This is not the time.” She is a writer and cultural critic. A “time and place” for satire? Do you even know the purpose of satire? Satire has always been dangerous. Satire attacks the status quo, satire goes after power. In times of trouble and strife, satire is needed more than ever. The Onion … yes, it might go after your “sacred cow”, but it goes after ALL “sacred cows”. The Onion has been on fire lately. I mean … The powers that be have always tried to shut down satire, just like they try to silence artists. A tyrant is intolerant of many things, but what he can’t stand above all else is to be made fun of. We should not presume that silencing – as in: FINAL silencing – won’t eventually come around to us – and indeed it has. Defend free speech as an important principle for all, because eventually the culture will boomerang – like it ALWAYS does – and then you’ll be in the firing line and you won’t like it all. There is always speech that civilization must not tolerate, not if you want to call yourself “civilized”. This is something the current “free speech warriors” don’t understand at all. Having to say this over and over again gets tiresome but apparently it must be done.
Shulman made jokes about things that many Americans took very very seriously, things they considered sacred.
Good.
We need voices who consider NOTHING sacred. Because once you don’t consider it sacred, you stop taking it for granted, and you realize you actually need to fight for it to keep existing. Freedom can always be lost. Stay ready.
Max Shulman’s fans were, once upon a time, legion.
Sylvia Beach is one of my heroes due to her influential bookshop in Paris (Shakespeare & Co.), and her nurturing of the writers of that time. You know, minor writers like James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. When nobody would publish Joyce’s Ulysses because it was deemed obscene, far too hot to handle, she decided that Shakespeare & Co. would put the book out (her first foray into publishing – not too shabby, to start with Ulysses). She got in big trouble for that, as books were confiscated at customs houses in England and America, and obscenity trials heated up over the next decade. This small unassuming woman, born in Baltimore, grew up in New Jersey, was at the center of the literary event of the century.
I’ve written a lot about Sylvia Beach, and I have known about her from my reading on all of the literary giants of the day. She’s a huge figure in all of their memoirs. She’s everywhere. She intersected with everyone.
Shakespeare & Co. reunion: James Jones, Sylvia Beach, Thornton Wilder, Alice B. Toklas
She was the daughter of a minister, and during WWI, she served with the Red Cross in Serbia. Afterwards, her mother helped her finance a little bookshop in Paris, which had always been Beach’s dream, and over the next 2 decades, the shop became a hub for all of the famous literary ex-pats in Paris at that time. Oh, for a time machine. My #1 destination would be Shakespeare & Co. in Paris in, oh, 1925. That’s where I want to go, please. When the Nazis marched into Paris, Beach repeatedly refused to leave her books, although she was ordered to.
James Campbell, at the Times Literary Supplement (link no longer working), calls Sylvia Beach the “midwife of Modernism”, a wonderful turn-of-phrase. The events of Sylvia Beach’s life are fascinating in and of themselves (who WAS this woman?), and I mainly know her through her intersections with the literary giants of the day. A couple of years ago a collection of her letters was published, The Letters of Sylvia Beach (amazing that they hadn’t already been published in full), and it was quite an event. It’s a lovely volume.
In Campbell’s essay, he shares a really interesting anecdote (which gives you some background of just ONE aspect of her life, and, of course, of course, James Joyce is peripherally involved):
When the Nazis entered Paris, Beach, who had lately made a visit home to the United States where she underwent a hysterectomy (she was also “knocked out by headaches” all her life), declined to leave rue de l’Odeon a second time. In her memoir, she told the almost too-cinematic story of how a “high-ranking German officer” entered her shop one day and, “speaking perfect English”, asked to buy the single copy of Finnegans Wake (published by Faber and Faber) displayed in the window. Beach told him it was not for sale, and duly removed it.
A fortnight later, the same officer strode into the bookshop. Where was Finnegans Wake? I had put it away. Fairly trembling with rage, he said, “We’re coming to confiscate all your goods today.” “All right.” He drove off.
Within a few hours, she had boxed up the stock, removed the sign and painted over the patron’s name. The Germans did not get Finnegans Wake, but they did get Beach. She spent six months in an internment camp at Vittel, alongside Jewish prisoners who would later be removed to Auschwitz.
There’s another great anecdote about Ernest Hemingway, who was with the Allied army when they liberated Paris – and Hemingway went PERSONALLY to “liberate” Shakespeare & Co.
All of this can be read about in Beach’s own memoir (Shakespeare and Company) – but in the collection of her letters, edited by Keri Walsh, we actually get to hear Beach’s unedited voice.
That was one of the best things about the volume: getting to know her unselfconscious in-the-moment voice, the voice one uses when dashing off a letter (as opposed to something more official or formal). I always knew that Beach was a homey regular kind of person, not an obvious intellectual, but more of a can-do fix-it “I’ve got a barn, let’s do a show” kind of person. She was part of a family of daughters, and all of them were strong autonomous interesting women. None of them seemed to have a sense that there was anything they couldn’t do, being women. Sylvia Beach, who loved books, had a dream of opening a bookshop. That’s all. She didn’t have a dream of attaching herself to a writer, or publishing books, or being a writer herself. She wanted to create a gathering-place for book lovers. She happened to be in the right place at the right time, AND she was a canny businesswoman who knew how to make important connections (and, judging from her correspondence, KEEP those connections). She was, to use a well-trod phrase, a “people person”. She was not embarrassed to ask for things. She often needed help, either financial or otherwise, and she, like all talented people of business, knew who to go to to get things done, and knew to ask at the right time.
The publication of Ulysses obviously put her on the map (for better and worse), and she had an awareness of that at the time, writing to her sister, “Ulysses is going to make my place famous.”
As I got to know her chatty friendly voice, full of misspellings and multiple exclamation marks, I fell in love with her. She was so enthusiastic, such a champion. Let the artists do their work, let them be eccentric and strange, she was there to usher them into the limelight where they belonged.
Sylvia Beach had a lifelong relationship with Adrienne Monnier, a French book-store owner. They were business partners and life partners.
Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier
The relationship was so much just a fact of Beach’s life that it is barely mentioned in her letters, and the acceptance of it (by her friends, family, and colleagues) is one of those things that makes you realize that life on the ground is often very different from how it is up in the stratosphere where ideologues argue things out on an abstract level. There is no feeling at all that Beach had to hide her sexual orientation. She lived with Adrienne Monnier for decades. When Monnier tragically committed suicide, people from all over the world sent Beach consolation letters.
Beach went about her life with very little fanfare, ironic considering how famous (and infamous) she became for publishing a “dirty book”.
Here is a review of the letters. This is all well-trod ground for me, having read many biographies of Joyce (and other literary giants of the day), where she plays a prominent role. But there’s something about reading someone’s letters … the un-cleaned-up un-edited thought process and syntax revealed. Relationships made clear, without an editorial voice inserting itself. For example:
More and better literary gossip is spilled in Beach’s 1959 memoir, but these letters have tart moments on nearly every page. Beach introduced Sherwood Anderson to Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald to James Joyce, and knew everyone. She describes a reading in her bookstore, given by Hemingway and Stephen Spender, during which beer and whiskey were âdisplayed on the table in front of the boys, of which they were partaking freely.The sight of this made Joyce stand up and leave. It “made him too thirsty,” she writes, “to stand it any longer.” Beach, a popular giver of dinner parties and a bohemian cult hero, was unpretentious. Inviting the writer Bryher to a reception, she wrote: “You know it won’t be at all formal, never is in our house, and people don’t dress up here. I never wear an evening gown no matter what they invite me too – haint got none.”
Sylvia Beach wrote of her first meeting with James Joyce in her memoirs. He walked into Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, and:
He stepped into my bookshop … he inspected my two photographs of Oscar Wilde. Then he sat down beside my table.
I wonder what he was thinking.
Sylvia said of Joyce: “As for Joyce, he treated people invariably as his equals, whether they were writers, children, waiters, princesses, or charladies. What anybody had to say interested him; he told me that he had never met a bore.”
(This is one of my favorite comments about Joyce.)
When she met James Joyce, he had already finished Ulysses (or as finished as any Joycean manuscript ever would be) but essentially unpublishable. It had already been deemed “obscene”. The funny thing about all of this is that – as Joyce said later, “The pity is that the public will demand and find a moral in my book, or worse they may take it in some serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious word in it.”
But Sylvia Beach – who had never published a book before – took a risk and said that Shakespeare & Co. would put out the book. This was an act of courage. Perhaps she went into it recklessly, thinking that giving a space for genius would be its own reward – perhaps she went into it knowing the eventual fallout that would crash down upon her head – But whatever her interior process, she moved forward boldly.
And the shit hit the fan.
Once it was published, the obscenity controversies heated up, the book was banned (Joyce said later, “I have come to the conclusion that I cannot write without offending people.”) everybody was talking about it, who had actually read it? – you could be arrested for trying to smuggle it into certain countries – and there were a couple of years where the only place on the planet you could get a copy of Ulysses was through Beach’s bookshop in Paris. And so the orders flew in from folks around the world. People who were book readers, people who were collectors, people who sensed the historic moment and just wanted a copy.
The comments of other great writers on this book are, of course, great interest to me. They run the gamut of disgust, elation, despair, awe, humility, and I love it, too, that Yeats (an early supporter of Joyce) changed his mind. His first response on reading it? “A mad book!” Then later, as it percolated, Yeats said: “I have made a terrible mistake. It is a work perhaps of genius. I now perceive its coherence … It is an entirely new thing — neither what the eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time.”
Hart Crane had this to say (or shout): “I feel like shouting EUREKA! Easily the epic of the age.”
George Bernard Shaw was disturbed by Ulysses, and its view of Ireland – so much so that it tormented him a bit. He saw it as an indictment (and, in a way, it was). He said, however: “If a man holds up a mirror to your nature and shows you that it needs washing — not whitewashing — it is no use breaking the mirror. Go for soap and water.”
T.S. Eliot was especially devastated by the book, and his comments on it are numerous. Examples: “How could anyone write again after achieving the immense prodigy of the last chapter?” And also – this quote really touches me, because as a writer, Eliot wasn’t half-bad himself: “I wish, for my own sake, that I had not read it.” And lastly (this pretty much gets at the root of what was so disturbing to Eliot): “I hold Ulysses to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.”
And here is the lady who first made this “epic of the age” available to the world, at great financial and personal risk:
Joyce eventually moved to another publisher – for later editions – which left Beach financially stranded (along with the Great Depression which really hit Shakespeare & Co. hard.) But Beach had rich influential literary friends – many of whom came to her rescue during this difficult time. Famous writers did readings at Shakespeare & Co., admission was charged, people paid subscription fees – and in this way the bookstore made it through. Beach died in 1962. She is widely revered for her courageous independent move to publish Ulysses – the book that T.S. Eliot said “destroyed the 19th century”.
She said:
I was on the platform, my heart going like the locomotive, as the train from Dijon came slowly to a standstill and I saw the conductor getting off, holding a parcel and looking around for someone — me. In a few minutes, I was ringing the doorbell at the Joyces’ and handing them Copy No. 1 of Ulysses. It was February 2, 1922.
Sylvia Beach and James Joyce, in the doorway of Shakespeare & Co.
In 1962, Sylvia Beach went to Ireland for a James Joyce celebration, and was interviewed about her relationship to Joyce.
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.
Midsummer is one of Shakespeare’s from court-to-woods-back-to-court comedies. Everyone flees to the forest to escape the restrictions of court life, or a death penalty (like poor Hermia here), or mean parents forbidding you to marry the one you love, etc. Everyone finds freedom in the woods, the shackles of society broken. All kinds of transgressive things happen in the woods, including transformation: women dress like men, Bottom not only turns into an ass, but a queen falls in love with him! Transformation is great but there’s anxiety too. What if you can’t turn back? What if you are stuck forever in your transformed state? Being transformed is only okay when you can find the pathway back to yourself. People come back to court, then, with more self-knowledge and a sense of being able to freely choose their fate. You can’t STAY in the woods. Unfortunately.
So this is one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. I know for a fact it was the first Shakespeare play I ever sat down and read, start to finish. I might have seen the movie on TV, the one with Mickey Rooney, but why I read it – because these are the bread crumbs to culture, how you follow them where they lead you: Ballet Shoes, by Noel Streatfield, was not just a beloved book when I was a kid. It was an organizing principle. I was 9 or 10 when I read it, and the image of these three orphan !! girls, going to a dramatic arts school was captivating. Plus they were British! British orphan actors? Are you kidding me?? And the drama school put on two productions, that I can remember: Maurice Maeterlink’s The Bluebird and Midsummer Night’s Dream. Same as it ever was, I immediately sought out both plays to read. Both literary works seemed real to me already because I went through the rehearsal process with the three sisters in Ballet Shoes. They weren’t words on a page. They were part of a theatrical process. I was already doing drama stuff, and had my first “hit” at age 10 playing a cranky over-it looking-glass in Alice in Wonderland. I still remember getting my first laugh. The feeling was like CRACK.
It took me a second, but I knew I had a picture of it somewhere.
In other words, this is where I was at – physically – when I was digging into the works of Maurice Maeterlinck and Shakespeare. I was just following in the footsteps of the orphan girls in Ballet Shoes and every kid actor everywhere. Oh, and I made that costume.
I was a very imaginative child and swept away by descriptions of natural beauty, which I credit almost solely to Anne Shirley, who nearly fainted in her opening scene in Anne of Green Gables when she saw a corridor of white-blossomed cherry trees, and said rapturously she would call it “the White Way of Delight”. I remember consciously thinking, “I have never in my life reacted to a tree this way. I need to pay more attention to nature”, lol.
Well! Midsummer Night’s Dream is all about nature. I can’t think of another play by Shakespeare where nature so predominates, although nature makes an appearance in all of his best. Maybe the storm in King Lear but that’s just one scene. The rest of the play isn’t stormy. But all of Midsummer takes place outside, on a dewy moonlit night, and the whole atmosphere is saturated with moonshine and glimmering water and shining dew-drops. Everything is liquid and gleams silver. The moon’s light is “wat’ry”. (Member Romeo and Juliet where silver = good and Ggld = bad. Midsummer is an even more extreme version.) My little Anne-Shirley-influenced soul shivered at all the descriptive language. I could SEE it.
In my teenage years I discovered the rest of the plays, working on them in acting classes, etc. I played the Nurse. I played Rosalind. I learned about these plays by working on them, and also going to see productions, which … I just feel like is the best way to learn them, although I realize most people don’t do it that way. The Nurse is a whole other THING when you try to PLAY her.
Midsummer has been under-estimated by scholars, mainly because … it seems like fluff, maybe? Fairies and stuff? But it’s so not fluff. It’s a statement of purpose, practically. Theatrical purpose: imagination and transformation, two of the essential things you need to make theatre. There’s even a play-within-a-play, the riotous Pyramus and Thisby play we see in rehearsal throughout before finally getting to to see the production itself in Act V. Pyramus and Thisby is heckled by the crowd, and yet … not with viciousness. Everyone gets into the spirit of it, even as they murmur asides to each other. Nobody is mad the play is bad. It’s a perfect entertainment for a joyous occasion and everyone has a good time.
You have to really TRY to mess up Midsummer. Puck can sometimes be a problem. He’s a mischievous fairy, first of all, so how does one pick the appropriate tone to play him? Puck can be stiflingly twee if you’re not careful. Puck is an old old word, pre-dating the play, meaning kind of a hobgoblin/spirit – and cousin to Mercutio’s Queen Mab … “What fools these mortals be!” is not really a “twee” sentiment. He likes making fools of us. The best Pucks have an EDGE.
Famously, Midsummer doesn’t really have a source, or at least not one as easily identifiable as with the history plays. It’s very English-based, the language evokes the English countryside, not Venice or Athens or whatever. Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queen came out around this time, or maybe a couple years before, and Shakespeare would have known it. Queen Elizabeth was on the throne. There was a fear about succession, because she – again, famously – was not married, was never going to BE married, and was known as “the virgin queen”, even though she probably wasn’t a virgin. The anxiety about succession is here in the play – which features not one but TWO Queens. And Hippolyta’s story is rather alarming when you really think about it, even though Hippolyta seems fairly chill with it. She was taken prisoner by Theseus, who considered her a prize. She is being trafficked, basically. But again, she’s pretty okay with it? She was Queen of the Amazons, another “nickname” for Queen Elizabeth.
Bottom is not the only character who transforms, although his is the most dramatic. The love potion Oberon wants to use, with “ingredients” gathered by Puck, brings out an emotional transformation, where the young Athenian lovers – four of them – wake up and their affections have transferred. Hermia loves Lysander, but her father has forbidden the match: she must marry Demetrius. (The humorous thing is there is literally no difference between Lysander and Demetrius. It’s not like in Romeo & Juliet, where the match is taboo because of the family feud. Here … what the hell does it matter? The men are literally the same person.) Hermia and Lysander decide to run away together, and Hermia confides in her best friend Helena. To repeat: there is literally no difference between Helena and Hermia, and they even grew up together as basically one person. So whether or not Hermia loves Lysander or Demetrius, or Helena loves Demetrius, or Lysander loves Helena … whichever way it shakes out … nobody is distinct. Nobody is obviously the right choice. You could mix and match them endlessly. Which is what happens with the love potion: Puck sprinkles it on the wrong lovers’ eyelids. He also sprinkles it on Titania’s eyelids, and so when she wakes up she will love the first “person” she sees. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) when she wakes up the first thing she sees is Bottom – transferred into a donkey – staggering towards her. She falls madly in love.
Love is totally random, in other words. There’s no rhyme or reason. The lovers are not star-cross’d. They are just victims of mischief, and since nobody has distinguishing characteristics anyway … who cares?
A local theatre company in my town puts on Shakespeare plays in the summer in the little park behind the theatre building. (I had my first kiss nearby back in high school. But never mind.) We’ve seen them do Merry Wives of Windsor, Twelfth Night, and – last summer – Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was magical, and funny, and playful – I was so impressed! Watching this particular play outside – on a hot summer night – is obviously the best way to experience it. My favorite part of that night was, occasionally I’d hear this periodic long low tone – I thought it might be a sound effect or maybe someone’s car alarm? It had no rhyme or reason – and my niece Lucy whispered, “The bullfrog.” We were giggling every time we heard his throaty low cry. This play is in progress, and right over there, next to the river, in the darkness, a little bullfrog was doing his thing, adding to the music of the play. He was so much a part of it! He just could NOT stay silent!
From last summer: Titania and her train of little fairies – who were adorable – dancing around the sleeping ass-headed Bottom.
I find it endlessly interesting that Bottom is the only character who sees and interacts with the fairies. The fairies are right there, they are life-size, for the most part, and none of the humans perceive them. But Bottom does. This calls to mind Bottom’s famous re-counting of the dream he (thinks?) he had. He says he wants to turn it into a ballad (or … play maybe?) And he will call it Bottom’s Dream. So we’re looping around here into a fractal. It will never stop dividing and sub-dividing. Because … who actually is the dreamer here? Is it Bottom all along? The four lovers say to each other upon awaking that they all had weird dreams. Are we the dreamer?
Everyone thinks Bottom is a clown and of course he is, in a way. But clowns are often very very wise. They can interact freely with the world, maybe because the world underestimates them. Bottom is the only human person in the cast who can actually SEE the magic.
So let’s get to it.
A word on the quotes I’ve been compiling: I am including basically everything I come across, whether I agree with it or not. Maybe this isn’t a wise choice, especially with Shakespeare or with online “discourse” in general, where literally everything you say (or don’t say) is evidence of “endorsement”. I just feel like with over 400 years of near-constant chatter, it might be interesting to sort of toss together what I personally have in my own library. Including the expansive Harold Bloom … who is undeniably unbelievably obnoxious. I wrestled with it because he makes too large claims, and even the title of his Shakespeare book – The Invention of the Human – is just … ridiculous. His Falstaff commentary borders on fanfic. One could say Harold Bloom had a parasocial relationship with Falstaff. However, I have gotten a lot from the two books of his I have, and so I separate the good stuff out from the eyerolling over-statement. I get it in some ways. You need to make big claims if you stroll into a field as crowded as Shakespeare scholarship. I felt this way a little bit when I strolled into Elvis-Land and disagreed with the accepted parts of the narrative around him. I wasn’t doing this cynically, it came from a genuine place: I didn’t LIKE how a lot of these things were talked about and so I wanted to provide a counter-narrative. I DID get attention for this. But saying Shakespeare basically invented what it means to be human … I mean, come on. Maybe in literature? He invented living breathing humans in literature? I don’t know. Shakespeare is great, you don’t have to DO that, Harold. Yes, now we can say “he’s like Hamlet” and everyone knows we mean self-consciousness (in the literal sense of being constantly in touch with his own interiority). We have a reference – for all time. But did Shakespeare INVENT awareness of self? Or was he just DESCRIBING it? It’s a rhetorical question with – to me – an obvious answer. No. He did not INVENT awareness but his presenTAtion of it onstage represented not just “a” breakthrough but THE breakthrough.
Like I said, I wrestled with including Bloom but I’ve actually been having fun reading Inventing the Human, even with all the hot-air-puffery.
“I want to show off how beautiful my subjects are, whether its a cheetah or a live girl or two of them together.”
— Bunny Yeager
It’s the birthday of model and pin-up photographer Bunny Yeager. She is most famous for her photographs of Bettie Page, and was instrumental in getting Bettie Page the 1955 Playboy cover. There weren’t too many women running around taking nude pin-up photos. There also weren’t too many pin-up models who also were photographers. It was Yeager’s lifestyle, her mission, her reason for being, her passion. Nude pin-up photography was the Wild West already, and Yeager’s work stands out from the pack. Bettie Page has moved into a category beyond stardom or even “notoriety”. There are as many – if not more – photographs of Bettie Page as of Marilyn Monroe. (Here’s my review of the recent documentary Bettie Page Reveals All.)
Bunny Yeager was born Linnea Eleanor Yeager in 1929, and renamed herself “Bunny” after Lana Turner’s character in Weekend at the Waldorf. Her family moved to Florida when she was a kid, and she thrived in the sun, she loved the beach culture. And the beach culture loved her too. She had a classic pin-up figure, she wore bikinis, she got a lot of attention, which she loved. Her first job as a model was a small gig for a local bakery … so she got her start – literally – in “cheesecake” photography. She wanted to be good at modeling. She felt the best way to learn was to experiment in photographing herself. These weren’t early versions of the “selfie.” They were rigorously self-directed photo shoots. During these experiments with her own image, she became a photographer.
She said, “If you don’t study yourself, you’re not getting a true idea of how you look.”
Through this process, she found her way. She had a knack for it. She would approach women she thought looked promising. On the beach, at a busstop, at a breakfast counter, wherever she found them. She would ask them if they were up for a photo shoot. Male photographers have been doing this since photography was invented. Sometimes their intentions are honorable, sometimes not. Bunny Yeager was a model who understood the appeal of the pin-up world, its eroticism, its tease and promise. Yeager liked to photograph her subjects outside, at the beach, in the trees, with animals.
In a 2012 interview with Youri Mevs at the Miami International Book Fair, there was the following exchange:
Mevs: “In your book there’s a statement … where you confirm that it would be a very boring place if all women looked alike –”
Bunny: “Our Maker was very clever about this — because sometimes that’s the little tweak we see in another person and fall in love with, perhaps – the thing that’s wrong with them.”
In this context, objectification was a good thing, a healthy and a fun thing (if everyone’s consenting). There is nothing dirty about sex: nothing dirty about wanting it, about wanting to look at beautiful girls in bikinis, about being a beautiful girl in a bikini, there is nothing dirty about desire. Society has turned these healthy positive things against us (women in particular suffer, although men suffer too). During the time when Yeager was working, you could be arrested for this stuff. There were raids on photographers’ studios. People were arrested. (There’s a great story about Bettie Page being arrested for “indecent exposure” during one of her photo shoots. She protested. Not by saying “They forced me to do this!” or “I needed money for rent!” She protested the word itself: “indecent.” To her, there was nothing “indecent” about being naked. Like, THAT was her beef with the arrest.) This is sex positivity that has almost gone by the wayside, except in burlesque circles – and those are good circles to be in, with their spirit of playfulness and generosity.
Yeager said in 2013, “I’m not doing it to titillate anybody’s interests. I want to show off how beautiful my subjects are, whether it’s a cheetah or a live girl or two of them together. That’s more important to me than anything.”
When she finally met Bettie Page, she found her soulmate and muse.
Bunny Yeager, Bettie Page, cheetahs
Yeager said of Bettie Page, “She was the best model because she not only had perfect facial features, but a great body and wasn’t ashamed to show it. It was impossible to take a bad photo of her. Bettie Page was always ready for the camera’s eye.”
Yeager could bring things out in models that other photographers couldn’t. Perhaps it was because she was a woman. The models could relax in her presence, be themselves, let out their playful funny sides. When sex is a two-way street, it’s so much better. In fact, sex that isn’t a two-way street should be abolished. What’s the point, then? Yeager worked right up until the end. She was planning her next shoot when she died.
While she will always be known for her collaboration with Bettie Page , her work encompasses much more than that. She worked out of South Florida and her photos were often drenched in sun and natural light.
You look at her photos and you can hear the laughter that must have been going on, in front of and behind the camera, you can hear the waves crashing, the seagulls calling. There is life there in the frame. Lightning captured in a bottle.
A true pioneer.
She died in 2014 at the age of 85.
“I was just confident my work was good.” — Bunny Yeater
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.
Years ago, my friend Alex, her friend Shannon and I drove through the desert from Los Angeles, blasting Liza Minnelli the whole way. We were headed to see Liza Minnelli live in Las Vegas. Alex was the genesis of the trip: “Liza’s playing. Sheila, fly out, and let’s drive to Vegas.” I’m going to say no to that? Alex drove us the whole way, playing a Liza mix-tape. She walked us through her career, playing different tracks to illustrate this or that point. I remember Shannon – who is so awesome – being a little bit like, “… Can we please listen to something else?” “No!” said Alex. There will be a coda to this anecdote. I forgot Alex had written about our girls’ trip on her Live Journal – God, those were the days, the Live Journal days. She walks you through the hilarity of the entire weekend. I had forgotten her description of the three of us going out to dinner before the show. Alex wore a sweatshirt with Liza’s huuuuge face covering the front. We were roasting her but she was like, “Fuck you guys I’ve had this for years and I am wearing it.” Here is how she described us as a trio:
Shannon, all tall and lanky with her fabulous shoulder length hair, and draped in her glamorous lime green, cap sleeved top and jeans, and Sheila, creamy skinned, curvy and voluptuous, bouncng and behaving in her low cut black boob top. I was dressed as their nonsensical, lower middle class Liza Phile step sister from the local trailer park.
We rode the roller coaster. Screaming and exhilarated. Alex and I laughed so hard at one point we were basically quiet for 15 minutes, nearly dying from lack of oxygen. We all slept in the same hotel room. I remember for some reason at this point, I was putting Ben Gay on my shoulders – I had knots in my back? Alex and I slept in the same bed, and I crawled in next to her and she was like, “Jesus Christ, Sheila, what’s with the Ben Gay.” I reeked. I think Shannon snuck off to the blackjack table after the show.
There were moments on the drive, during the Liza mix-tape, when Shannon said something like, “I get Liza is great, but it’s just not my thing.”
Cut to: later that night: Liza was doing her 3rd encore. The crowd was on their feet. Shannon, next to me, was sobbing openly, clapping ferociously, and screaming at the top of her lungs: “BRAVA. BRAVA.”
I am laughing out loud as I type this. Such a turnaround! That’s Liza. She WILL win you over. Alex and I were losing it.
But I too didn’t FULLY understand the Liza THING until I saw her live. I’ve never seen anything like it. The nakedness of her love for her audience, but also the WELLS of energy she draws on. And this with not one but two hip replacements!
I reviewed the 2025 documentary, Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story, which is – yes, carefully curated by her friends – and I guess if you’re not into Liza you might find this obnoxious. But … this is meant to celebrate her and her career. Because people need to KNOW.
In Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe paints a pretty brutal picture of Jack Kerouac, at a party in New York, when the Hippie Bus rolled into town. (Robert Stone was also at that party. He describes it below.) Kerouac was cranky, sat on the couch, and drank beer. He just wasn’t into this “scene,” a scene he had helped … create? There was a wavering line from “The Beats” to the hippies, but something was lost in translation. (There’s home movie footage of this particular party, showing Kerouac on the couch, a thundercloud over his head.)
Reading On the Road, it is difficult for me sometimes to understand or “grok” the seismic impact it had on a generation.
“On the Road”, 1957, first edition
Please don’t misunderstand me. My words have nothing to do with the book, really. Or they do, inasmuch as it is a book so of its era – hell, it CREATED the era – that context in this case is decisive. And I need help with the context. I squinted at the book’s pages, trying to understand. I didn’t need to squint at the next-generation version, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. That existed with or without said context.
My dad talked about On the Road to me. He gave me his perspective of someone who grooved to the book as a young man. And I trusted my father’s words. In the book, Kerouac gave an indelible image of a capable young man, saying “No” to what was expected of him, and in the Eisenhower-conformist era, much was expected. Post-War America was extremely conventional, as the country was solidified into a superpower, its wealth unimaginable, wealth that everyone felt, almost everyone’s standard of living was raised enormously. And with that came a Status Quo. What does it mean to say “No” to all that comfort? And go “on the road” and hang out with eccentrics and train-jumpers and the underclass, those who were also outside the mainstream? It was a CHOICE for Kerouac, who was a prep-school boy. And having it be a CHOICE as opposed to a NECESSITY is what gives the book its weird tone (at least in my opinion). There is a love affair with “the road”, that can only come from an outsider, who has a “way back” to the suburbs if he wanted it. The encounter with Dean Moriarty (i.e. Neal Cassady, the Muse to a generation … hell, two generations … he was ON the damn Hippie Bus) was a galvanizing homoerotic experience. Here was a man who walked the walk, who COULDN’T “fit in” if he tried. So there’s all that.
Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac
Some of the adventures and parties in the book feel totally random, a privileged boy on an extended bender – but my father’s words and context helped me “get it.” The book went off like a BOMB in the culture. There’s one moment when Kerouac waxes poetic about the revelatory moment when he ate ice cream with his hands. I mean, this is … like … so what, dude? BUT: to maintain a sense of childlike playfulness in the era of The Man with the Grey Suit was, again, a revelation, and it showed a generation “the way”. Say “no” to the confines of career/wife/marriage/conformity. DON’T grow up. My father said that if he could have done it all over again, he would have taken some time off to bum around like Kerouac and his friends did. I never forgot him saying that. It was the only time my father said that maybe he had other worlds and lifetimes in his head.
And so I understand the impact, even though for me I can’t feel it. For me, books like this are important: books like this shift conversations, create entire scenes, and unintended consequences – like the Summer of Love for example – unfurl from its pages. There’s also the fact that all this opting-out is being done by a man, a man with the keys to the castle, a man who is within the citadel, saying NO to it. THAT’S powerful, particularly for men, who are basically encouraged to never have emotions, or express things, or daydream, or loll about, or do any of the things that make life worth living. These things cannot be dismissed, and it’s why I find all of those poorly written hot takes about why such-and-such is overrated to be STUPID. You – with your freedoms, your options, your taking-things-for-granted that other people had to fight for – have benefited from books like On the Road. Whether you like it or not. It helped blast open the wall, it provided alternatives. It was a road map (literally) on how to opt OUT of the great prosperity of the most successful nation on earth.
But the story, to me, on a larger scale is a sad one. Kerouac couldn’t go the distance. He was strictly about youth. He couldn’t tolerate middle age. He was the coolest dude to ever walk the earth for a brief shining period. When all those hippies showed up in New York, rolling into town in their hand-painted bus, getting naked en masse, doing acid, shaking tambourines … he withdrew into himself, he felt old, he felt out of touch. He hated everything. He did not live long after that.
From novelist James Salter’s gorgeous memoir Burning the Days: Recollection. Both Kerouac and Salter attended Horace Mann Preparatory School. Kerouac was a glamorous untouchable upperclassman. Salter remembered him as a “swaggering Lowell boy”.
It was the field on which I recall Kerouac, in shoulder pads and cleats, stocky and hard-running in games against Peddie and Blair. In football uniform, short-legged, he seemed a kind of thug. He would drop back to handle punts and, catching them, go like the wind… Kerouac was only one of the postgraduate students, “ringers,” brought in every year to man the school teams. Older, less fine, with faces already showing the shadows of manhood, they were the heroes of the school and at the same time outsiders. I never spoke to any of them; there was nothing to say. A year or two ahead of us, they drank beer, carried their books carelessly in one hand, and knew how to drive. Kerouac astonished us by submitting stories to the literary magazine, for a ringer an utterly unconventional act. He never came to the magazine’s offices, however. That would have been too out of character…
Among those schoolmates who achieved some notoriety there is Julian Beck … I met Beck several times afterwards but the level was superficial; in a real sense he declined to talk. He had stepped over me and was unwilling to be confronted on the same level.
With Kerouac, though I never saw him again, it was the same. I recognized his photograph, sensitive down-turned face, in a bookstore window on the jacket of a thick first novel. It was THE TOWN AND THE CITY. I read reviews of it after, filled with praise. By then I had tried to write a novel myself and failed. His was lyrical and repetitive and, to me, crushing. What he had done staggered me.
In an interview read later I saw the side of him that had been so unsuspected. He was asked about haiku and enthusiastically said, Yes! Then, before one’s eyes, he proceeded, like a man peeling an apple in one unbroken strip of skin, to compress an incident – a leaf blown onto the back of a tiny sparrow in a storm – into three succinct lines through trial and error, crossing out words in midair, so to speak.
Author Robert Stone said:
I was in the right place at the right time to see that [the Beats]. It started out with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road when I was still in the navy. My mother recommended the book to me. I am probably the only person who had On the Road recommended to him by his mother. It is very hard to go back and think about what on the Road was saying to me. I pick it up now and all I can see is Neal Cassady. I got to know him. It was a wonderful rendering of him, but I don’t see much else in it Now it just reminds me of someboody writing on speed. That may be uncharitable, but frankly I find it very sentimental. As I say, I am not sure now what it was that moved me. I suppose there was that tradition of the American road. I can almost rmemeber what that was like… I didn’t know [Kerouac] well. And I didn’t travel on the bus. I saw the bus off and greeted the bus when it arrived on Riverside Drive. We went to a party where Kerouac and Ginsberg and Orlovsky and those guys were, and Kerouac was at his drunken worst. He was also very jealous of Neal, who had shifted his allegiance to Kesey. But Neal was pretty exhausted too. I saw some films taken on the bus – Neal looked like he was tired from trying to keep up with the limitless energy of all those kids. Anyway … Kerouac at that party was drunk and pissed off, a situation I understand very well. The first thing I ever said to him was, Hey, Jack, have you got a cigarette? And he said, I ain’t gonna give you no fucking cigarette, man, there’s a drugstore on the corner, you can go down there and buy a fucking pack of cigarettes, don’t ask me for cigarettes. That’s my Kerouac story.
In Rolling Thunder Revue, there’s a touching scene where Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg visit Kerouac’s grave, sit in the grass, and read poetry. Paying tribute to a man who had meant so much to both of them.
And here’s my review of Big Sur, the so-so film adaptation of Kerouac’s psychologically terrifying book, which sounds like it was written in the throes of delirium tremens.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
CLARE. [to Kip] I’m about to deliver a lecture to him on making concessions in art.
KIP. For or against?
CLARE. I think any kind of artist — a painter like Van Gogh, a dancer like Nijinsky –
AUGUST. Both of them went mad.
CLARE. But others didn’t, refused to make concessions to bad taste and yet managed survival without losing their minds. That’s purity. You’ve got to respect it or not.
Vaslav Nijinsky was born in the late 19th century and was recognized as extremely gifted very early on during his time at the ballet school in St. Petersburg. He was chosen by choreographer and ballet master Serge Diaghilev to be the lead dancer in his company, the Ballets Russes. (See the fantastic documentary, The Ballets Russes for the story of this legendary company.)
Nijinsky was only in his early 20s, but he was already creating his own work, in particular three ballets that one can say without exaggeration changed the world: The Afternoon of a Faun, Jeux, and The Rite of Spring. The Rite of Spring, with its score by Stravinsky, is the most famous: at the ballet’s first performance in Paris in 1913, the audience rioted in outrage. Literally. The performance caused a riot. The Rite of Spring was part of a much larger artistic “movement”, representing the avant-garde, the experimental, slowly infiltrating the art world. (1913 was also the year of the famous Armory Show in New York, another “and nothing was the same after that” event. 1913 was a big year). Old forms were breaking up, 19th-century traditions shattering. Literature, music, dance, art, architecture, fashion, social mores: all were going through massive upheavals. In 1913, Gavrilo Princip stands in the wings, waiting for his entrance.
Ballet is one of the most conservative artforms on the planet. Opera is probably a close second. This is not to say, a la Timothée Chalamet, that they should be retired as artforms because “nobody cares” about them. Such an ignorant thing to say! For ballet and opera, tradition has been key to its survival. And I’ve said it before: you ask any young ballerina about the history of her own artform, and she will be able to tell you. She will know about Margot Fonteyn and Anna Pavlova. This is UNLIKE, by the way, young actors, who can’t tell you who Spencer Tracy is or don’t understand why anything that happened before them is important. My overall point is: if tradition is important in ballet, then Nijinsky’s The Rite of Spring confronted tradition and pushed on past it. His ballet strolled into the future. It CREATED the future. The Rite of Spring came OUT of a tradition, but didn’t bow down before it. Hence: RIOTS.
Nijinksy and Diaghilev were lovers, and for a time it was a productive love affair. They were both working at the top of their forms. Their breakup was stormy and then Nijinsky married a woman named Romola, who sounds like a wretched human being. Nijinsky was fired from the Ballets Russes, and things really started to spiral out of control. Perhaps he had always been a little bit mad, but as long as he had the outlet of his art, and the protection of Diaghilev, his madness was used for creative purposes. Perhaps. These are the things people still discuss when it comes to Nijinsky. Was he mad? Could his tragic end have been prevented? So WHAT if he was a little bit mad? He was hospitalized repeatedly. The treatment in those “hospitals” was brutal. If you weren’t sick when you entered the hospital, you sure as hell were MADE sick during your stay. Romola would park her husband in a sanatorium and then travel the world, living it up, eating out on his name, lying to the press: “He’s getting ready for a comeback!” Meanwhile, Nijinsky was in a locked room, dozing off, his head drooping into his bowl of soup . He painted the walls with his feces. He was given hundreds of shock treatments and insulin treatments, which probably caused irreversible brain damage. It’s just a fucking devastating story.
His diaries were eventually published: The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky. I read them in high school with a sense of queasy curiosity. They haunted me. There were pictures of people visiting Nijinsky in the asylum and making him jump for them. It was so awful. His face is blank, he is an old stout-ish man, with a deteriorated mind, jumping in place to satisfy visitors he didn’t know. I consider his diaries a must-read: they are an extended rant about what it is like to be him, his hallucinations, his fantasies. He felt he was God-like, he was paranoid, he felt persecuted (understandable), and in moments of lucidity mourned all he had lost. The scariest part is he knew he was losing his mind.
Auden, in his great poem, “September 1, 1939”, writes:
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
The myth of Nijinsky is so gigantic – which is fascinating – since there is almost no footage of him dancing. ALMOST. There’s a rare clip of him from 1912 performing Faun.
You squint at the blurry image, trying to catch that flame of transcendence.
But most of his work comes to us through the myth of its reputation, the impact it had on those who were there. It’s like Laurette Taylor as Amanda Wingfield in the original production of The Glass Menagerie. There’s no footage of that performance. And so we must take people’s words for it, those who saw Nijinsky and had literally life-transformative experiences from it. They went out changed.
The words to describe Nijinsky by those who saw him dance, make one ache for a time machine. Professional writers struggle to find the words to describe his effect on audiences, and what it was he was actually doing. People talk about him being energy in the flesh, but also say that his persona onstage, and his ability as a dancer, touched the Gods. He is one of the greatest dancers of all time, and nobody alive today has seen him dance. Additionally, unless someone painstakingly wrote down all the steps, the actual ballets are lost to us. Attempts have been made to re-create his choreography, with varying degrees of success. Although he was classically trained, his ballets pushed the form towards modernism. The silhouettes were different, primal, flat, sharp-angled. He moved away from the flow and grace of ballet’s tradition. This was one of the things that was seen as so outrageous with The Rite of Spring (but, as Joan Acocella points out in her New Yorker essay about Nijinsky: the furor that erupted around The Rite of Spring is often presented as a reaction to Stravinsky’s score, which makes sense because the score still exists, we can listen to it, we can judge for ourselves. But the dance is lost. We only have eyewitness accounts as to what Nijinsky created, and tiny bits of footage. Important to remember that it was the music AND the dance that were controversial. Just because we can’t SEE something doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Of Nijinsky we have only one twelve-minute ballet, The Afternoon of a Faun. Still, it is a great ballet – a watershed – and, together with Nijinsky’s other, missing ballets, it influenced later choreographers, notably hi sister, Bronislava Nijinska, whose reputation has had a tremendous reflowering in the past decade, and who claimed that everything she did came out of his work.
Beyond the question of his place in ballet’s historical record, Nijinsky’s life commands our attention by the sheer romantic force of its events. What a story this is! An awkward young boy who practically overnight becomes a world-famous dancer, then creates three ballets that change dance history, then jilts the world’s foremost ballet impresario, switches sexual orientations, marries a groupie, and goes raving mad, not without leaving behind an account of his conversations with God and a thorough inventory of his sexual practices: no wonder Romola thought this should be made into a movie. (It was, after her death – Herbert Ross’ dreadful 1980 Nijinsky.)
Whatever Nijinsky was in reality, he is by now a legend, a major cultural fact, and not just because of his extraordinary story but because of the way that story ties in with certain critical issues in ballet. Ballet’s relationship to time – the fact that the repertory, unanchored by text, is always vanishing, just as the dance image on the stage is always vanishing – forms a large part of the vividness and poignance of the art. We are always losing it, like life, and therefore we re-create it, mythologize it, in our minds. Nijinsky’s life – his rapid self-extinction and the disappearance of his ballets – is like a parable of that truth. If dance is disappearance, he is the ultimate disappearing act. Accordingly, he is held that much dearer. If many people today still believe that he was t he greatest dancer who has ever lived, that is partly because there are so few records of his dancing. Until recently, there were no known films of him. (Ostwald says that a short 1912 film of Nijinsky dancing in The Afternoon of a Faun was recently televised in Russia.)
His ballets have likewise been mythologized in their absence. Who can say whether The Rite of Spring was in fact the great modernist masterpiece that it is now claimed to be? Perhaps it was something more like the shaggy, dull, pseudo-folkloric thing that we saw in the Joffrey Ballet “reconstruction”. Many of those who were disappointed by the Joffrey version simply concluded that its flatness was due to its having been put together from such scrappy evidence – in other words, that it wasn’t really Nijinsky. But who knows?
…
Nijinksy taps into a final myth, that of the genius-madman. He was tagged with this label long before he went mad, just on the basis of the contrast between his onstage mastery and his offstage ineptitude. Diaghilev’s friend Misia Sert called Nijinksy an “idiot of genius”. And after he went insane the formula was pumped for all it was worth. Some writers described him as a kind of Russian yurodivy, or “holy fool”, a man who, like Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, was incompetent in life because his vision of divine truth was too clear. Others invoked the moth-to-the-flame metaphor: Nijinsky was a man who tested the limits – in dancing, in choreography, in sex – and paid the price; he went farther out on the limb than the rest of us, and fell off; he died for our sins. The shadow of Christ – and of van Gogh, that modern avatar of Christ – hovers at the edge of all these images. As with van Gogh, the metaphor is reflexive: he went mad because he was a great artist, and he was a great artist because he went mad.
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.
Ezra Jack Keats was one of my authors when I was about six years old and his books were staples in my childhood. He is somehow looped in my head to Sesame Street, because the world being depicted in his classic tales (Peter’s Chair (Picture Puffins), The Snowy Day, Whistle for Willie, A Letter to Amy) was the same New York one as in Sesame Street, and it was so different from the turf farm slash beach town world of my upbringing. He made New York City look like a big wonderland – where kids lived, kids like me – with graffiti, and mounds of snow, and stop lights at intriguing brick corners. The illustrations are hypnotic – works of art.
Barry, my father’s best friend, was friends with Ezra Jack Keats, so we grew up feeling a strange personal connection to the man who wrote the books we loved.
Letter to Amy was my favorite. It tells the story of a little boy who is planning his birthday party, and everyone he has invited is a boy as well … but … but … what about his friend Amy? Even though she is a girl, they are friends. But how will that go over if a girl comes to his party? Will he be made fun of? He writes a birthday invitation to her. It is a thundery rainy day. The illustrations are phenomenal and evocative. I love rainy days anyway, and I loved them as a little girl too – and Ezra Jack Keats completely captures the watery reflective urban world of a rainy dark day. The whole journey of that book, of grade school angst, and friendship, and learning to be firm enough to like who you want to like, despite peer pressure, really touched me.
The illustration above tore at my 6-year-old heart. The gesture of despair and hurt. I remember feeling really devastated by it. I don’t think I was even going to school yet, so I didn’t have an experience of being hurt by a friend yet but … maybe I knew it was coming? Maybe it gave me a glimpse of what could happen? I understood it. I remember the feeling.
We also loved Whistle for Willie.
Ezra Jack Keats is best known for The Snowy Day, or maybe Whistle for Willie. In Snowy Day, the city shuts down in a snowstorm.
Some years ago, when we had a massive snowstorm, I was struggling through Times Square, through literally mountainous drifts, trying to get to Port Authority so I could get home – and the roads were completely shut down, no cars anywhere, and people were cross-country-skiing down Broadway. Snowball fights broke out in the middle of 7th Avenue. Sound gets muffled and also amplified by the snow, things get strangely quiet with no traffic, and the stoplights keep going – red, green, yellow, red, green, yellow … even though no cars can approach. The illustrations in The Snowy Day completely invoke that world: the strange quiet that descends over a bustling metropolis when there are mounds of snow.
Happy birthday to an American classic.
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.
Raoul Wash directed a number of great films (in a career as vast as his, the names stick out), but one also thinks of the great PERFORMANCES in these great films, often from actors who were just finding their footing, or trying to move from one level to the next: They Drive By Night (with Humphrey Bogart, George Raft, Ida Lupino – a star-making unforgettable turn), High Sierra (hugely important in Bogart’s development), Strawberry Blonde (Cagney), with White Heat, almost a decade later. When I think of Walsh, I think of actors. I think of performance. This is not to say that Walsh’s contemporaries – Ford and Hawks and the rest – skimped on the acting. Of course they didn’t. But Walsh’s films are built around performance. White Heat isn’t just a gangster movie. It’s a portrait of psychopathy and a vehicle for Cagney’s genius. I mean, that’s what you really remember. When I interviewed Dan Callahan about his book, The Art of American Screen Acting, 1912-1960, (Volume 1), he said as he was putting it all together, looking at each actors’ career, Raoul Walsh’s name kept coming up, making it clear (if it hadn’t been before) that Raoul Walsh was a very very good actor’s director. This is not something Walsh is really “known for” but it’s clear that he WAS. Many actors – already great actors – gave definitive or star-making performances under his direction.
There are a million stories about the filming of the great prison cafeteria scene in White Heat, when James Cagney’s Cody Jarrett flips out when he gets the news of the death of his mother (psycho killer as Mama’s Boy, a nice touch).
Pretty much anyone who was there on the day of shooting that scene gave their version of it. (It doesn’t really matter what’s the truth: all that matters is what is onscreen).
Legend has it that although, of course it was planned that Cagney was going to flip out in the scene, nobody – probably including Cagney – knew exactly how it would go. You’re only going to do the scene once, probably, and so you have to be ready for it. (This reminds me of Sally Fields’ memory of filming the scene in Norma Rae where Norma Rae is dragged by the cops out of the factory. The only thing director Martin Ritt said to her was, “Do not – under any circumstances – let the cops get you into that car.” But of course the scene required her to be put into the car. The end was a done deal. But Martin Ritt’s gentle reminder of her objective as a character just upped the stakes for Fields in playing it. I mean, look at her. They’re in the process of putting her into the car, they’ve “won,” but she is still playing the objective as hard as she can.)
In re: White Heat, Cagney wanted to make sure that the cameras kept rolling no matter what, because on some level he knew where he was going to go emotionally, and he knew it was going to be huge. Cagney knew his instrument, knew what would happen. He needed to be free to “go there” (of course he already felt free, because that’s the kind of actor he was), but he could only be as free as he needed to be if he trusted that the cameras would catch it.
In the scene, Cody sits in the cafeteria, and he gets the news. There’s a stunned disoriented moment. Then the event starts. Then it goes to the next level. Then it goes to the NEXT level. And then everything goes REALLY bananas. There is no limit to where it is going to go because there is no limit to where Cagney can go. Cagney is truly awe-inspiring. Watch, in particular, the actors around him.
As an extra or bit player, they know the scene is going to be big, they know Cagney is going to flip out. That’s the event. But they’re not sitting around rehearsing it beforehand, they don’t get a glimpse of what it will LOOK like and what it will FEEL like, to be present as it goes down. There’s a feeling of true shock and true fear in those around Cagney.
Raoul Walsh also directed Roaring Twenties, which includes my favorite death scene on film, also performed by Cagney: He is shot, and he stumbles/dances down the sidewalk, before crumbling into the church wall, clutching it. He then stumbles UP the church steps and then staggers and falls back DOWN, allowing gravity to take him down the steps, where he finally ends, lying sprawled out on his back, arms flung to the sides. Talk about awe-inspiring.
Cagney had a dancer’s understanding of how bodies move through space, what his body could do, and Walsh captures it all in one. You can’t make Cagney better than he is, you don’t tell Cagney what to do (not if you want to keep your job.) You as a director are not supposed to “help” Cagney give his performance (this reminder is mostly for director-as-auteur people). The only way you help Cagney is to make sure your camera is ready to capture whatever he does.
And Walsh did that.
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.
when I was a teenager myself, 15 or 16, browsing in the high school library. I have no idea why I would have picked it up: it was an old-fashioned looking book, a cartoon on the front. Maybe something in the 1950s-ish cover appealed to me. We were in a 1950s nostalgia boom. Happy Days was a hit. The Stray Cats were on the rise. Boomer nostalgia was everywhere. I Was a Teenage Dwarf is the chronicle of Dobie Gillis’ high school “woman”-izing.
!”
(amazing that they hadn’t already been published in full), and it was quite an event. It’s a lovely volume.
. Both Kerouac and Salter attended Horace Mann Preparatory School. Kerouac was a glamorous untouchable upperclassman. Salter remembered him as a “swaggering Lowell boy”. 
:
. I read them in high school with a sense of queasy curiosity. They haunted me. There were pictures of people visiting Nijinsky in the asylum and making him jump for them. It was so awful. His face is blank, he is an old stout-ish man, with a deteriorated mind, jumping in place to satisfy visitors he didn’t know. I consider his diaries a must-read: they are an extended rant about what it is like to be him, his hallucinations, his fantasies. He felt he was God-like, he was paranoid, he felt persecuted (understandable), and in moments of lucidity mourned all he had lost. The scariest part is he knew he was losing his mind.
, ‘After the Ball Was Over’, by Joan Acocella
, 
, 
, 
) was the same New York one as in Sesame Street, and it was so different from the turf farm slash beach town world of my upbringing. He made New York City look like a big wonderland – where kids lived, kids like me – with graffiti, and mounds of snow, and stop lights at intriguing brick corners. The illustrations are hypnotic – works of art.
, (Volume 1), he said as he was putting it all together, looking at each actors’ career, Raoul Walsh’s name kept coming up, making it clear (if it hadn’t been before) that Raoul Walsh was a very very good actor’s director. This is not something Walsh is really “known for” but it’s clear that he WAS. Many actors – already great actors – gave definitive or star-making performances under his direction.
