There are different organizations around the world who put together “one day choirs”. Anyone can sign up. You show up, you are handed a piece of music, you are separated into different parts, you rehearse, and then you perform. The results are often extraordinary. This one came across my feed yesterday and I found myself in tears watching it. I watched it again. The tears continued to flow. Maybe because of the lyrics, universal always, to everyone, anyone who feels they don’t fit in, who feel hurt and rejected. I love the stunning arrangement of this extremely well-known song – if you don’t know “Creep” then you’ve had to choose to not be aware of it: it was – and continues to be – a global phenomenon, for 30 years and counting. This group of people worked on it for maybe 3 hours and here is the result. All different types of people. Putting aside their lives and the outer world to create this thing together. Strangers. Collaborating. The sound of voices swelling through the warehouse, diverse voices, everyone playing their part in creating the breathtaking whole. To me, this is what a Utopia looks like. I distrust Utopias, but not something like this. People coming together for no other reason than to work together to create something. I signed up for the Gaia Music Collective’s newsletter yesterday. I want to participate in one of these.
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“When growing up, my bunch of friends would have thought of ourselves as anti-unionist because we were anti-establishment. We would have been vaguely all-Ireland republican socialists. But then, when theory turned into practice, we had to decide where we stood and I never did resolve it for myself. Marching for civil rights was terrific, but bombs and killing people? I never put a name to my own position and I still can’t, which suits me fine. From time to time you get a kick from some critic for not being sufficiently political, or for being a closet unionist or a closet republican. There was a time when people – much more English people than Irish – would ask, ‘Why don’t these Ulster poets come out more explicitly and say what they are for?’ But there is all this ambiguity. That is poetry. It is the other thing that is the other thing.” — Derek Mahon
Popular Northern Irish poet Derek Mahon died in 2020 at the age of 78. Today is his birthday.
A poem he wrote some years back – “Everything Is Going to Be Alright” – came back into public consciousness when it was read on an Irish news program in early March 2020, once it became clear the pandemic was spreading and a lockdown was imminent. People shared the poem endlessly on social media. It was what people needed to hear.
Everything Is Going to Be Alright by Derek Mahon
How should I not be glad to contemplate
the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?
There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.
The poems flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart;
the sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.
Art can disturb, enlighten, reveal. It can also console in dark dark times. This is why we need artists.
“[Seamus] Heaney is a Wordsworth man and I’m a Coleridge man. I love the poetry, and the trajectory of his life has always fascinated me. His Biographia is a complete mess, but is still full of the most wonderful stuff.” – Derek Mahon
Born in Belfast, Mahon “came up” at the same time as other great Irish poets Seamus Heaney (one of my many posts about him here) and Michael Longley (post about him here). They all burst onto the literary scene in the late 60s. The accepted narrative is: this group of poets represented something new in Northern Ireland, a new burgeoning literary scene to support and pay attention to. The fact that all this new poetry came from a war zone was even more startling, more reason to celebrate it, and etc. Mahon rejected this interpretation. He insisted Belfast had ALWAYS had a great literary tradition.
You often hear these Mahon/Heaney/Longley mentioned in the same breath. They talked about one another a lot as well. They were good friends and rivals. Here is a story told in The Guardian in 2006:
In September 1963 Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley visited the County Down grave of the great Northern Irish poet Louis MacNeice, who had died a short time before. Longley, writing recently in the introduction to a selection of MacNeice’s poems, recalled that as they “dawdled between the graves” all three then-unpublished poets were silently “contemplating an elegy”. When they next met, Mahon read them “In Carrowdore Churchyard”: “Your ashes will not stir, even on this high ground / However the wind tugs, the headstones shake”. Seamus Heaney started to read his poem but “then crumpled it up”. Longley says he decided not even to attempt the task. “Mahon had produced the definitive elegy.”
Lovely.
Heaney, Longley and Mahon saw themselves as part of a tradition, not as something brand new. They dedicated their poems to poets from the Irish past, Patrick Kavanagh (post about him here) or Louis MacNeice (post about him here). Heaney/Longley/Mahon were hugely influential on the new generation, perhaps even holding more sway than Yeats. Such is tradition: it’s a continuum.
[Derek Mahon’s] investment in “something larger” is not so great as [Geoffrey] Hill’s: his imagination has been released from the demands of an informing culture. As a result he turns rather too readily toward his reader, wry, shrugging his shoulders, as though it is too late to find the big theme his skills might be equal to. — Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets
Derek Mahon grew up in an Ulster Protestant family. He attended Trinity College in Dublin. His viewpoint was never local. He loved French literature and went on to study at the Sorbonne. He translated many great French authors into English. He published a prize-winning collection of poetry in the mid-60s. (Just recently, for the third time, he won the Irish Times Poetry Now award.) He traveled quite a bit, including in America. Hart Crane was a huge influence on Mahon (my post about Crane here), as was Elizabeth Bishop (post about her here). Mahon was reviewed books, taught in schools. His lifestyle divorced him from the upheavals of Northern Ireland, although he remained interested in all of it, of course. But politics/war was not the wellspring of his art, as it was for some of his contemporaries.
Listen to this.
Dejection
Bone-idle, I lie listening to the rain,
Not tragic now nor yet to frenzy bold.
Must I stand out in thunderstorms again
Who have twice come in from the cold?
After years of traveling, he finally settled down in Kinsale. (Notice he did not return to settle down in Belfast. Unsurprisingly, he caught flak for this.). He looked in on Ireland from the outside (see his thoughts above on Irish exile, even internal Irish exile); his outsider status gave his work strength and scope. You can’t say he doesn’t have a “sense of place”. So-called “outsiders” often see their homes in a clearer fashion than those who live there. James Joyce understood this all too well.
Every Irish person knows the following poem:
A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels.
—Seferis, Mythistorema
(for J. G. Farrell)
Even now there are places where a thought might grow —
Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned
To a slow clock of condensation,
An echo trapped for ever, and a flutter
Of wildflowers in the lift-shaft,
Indian compounds where the wind dances
And a door bangs with diminished confidence,
Lime crevices behind rippling rain barrels,
Dog corners for bone burials;
And in a disused shed in Co. Wexford,
Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel,
Among the bathtubs and the washbasins
A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.
This is the one star in their firmament
Or frames a star within a star.
What should they do there but desire?
So many days beyond the rhododendrons
With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud,
They have learnt patience and silence
Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood.
They have been waiting for us in a foetor
Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,
Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure
Of the expropriated mycologist.
He never came back, and light since then
Is a keyhole rusting gently after rain.
Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew
And once a day, perhaps, they have heard something —
A trickle of masonry, a shout from the blue
Or a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane.
There have been deaths, the pale flesh flaking
Into the earth that nourished it;
And nightmares, born of these and the grim
Dominion of stale air and rank moisture.
Those nearest the door grow strong —
‘Elbow room! Elbow room!’
The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling
Utensils and broken pitchers, groaning
For their deliverance, have been so long
Expectant that there is left only the posture.
A half century, without visitors, in the dark —
Poor preparation for the cracking lock
And creak of hinges; magi, moonmen,
Powdery prisoners of the old regime,
Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought
And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream
At the flash-bulb firing-squad we wake them with
Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms.
Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,
They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.
They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!
‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say,
‘Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
We too had our lives to live.
You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
Let not our naive labours have been in vain!’
Oana Sanziana Marian wrote:
His most famous poem, “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford,” digs, too, but instead of turning soil, as in Heaney’s earthbound rural scene in (maybe his most famous poem) “Digging,” Mahon gets underneath “a burnt-out hotel / Among the bathtubs and the washbasins” and – but who would see this coming? – commemorates forgotten victims of Treblinka and Pompeii through the perspective of a thousand mushrooms crowded around light passing through a keyhole.
And oh, how I love his beautiful poem “Achill”. Achill Island is a big island off the west coast of Ireland. My family spent some time there years ago, when my parents yanked us all out of school and took us to Ireland. I was 13 years old, so my memories of Achill are often mortifying to read now (while on Achille, Easter came, and I was mainly upset I hadn’t brought my curling iron to Ireland, because I wanted to curl my hair for Easter mass, because that’s an extremely important thing to be thinking about in a foreign land), but despite the journal entry, Achill Island remains vivid in my mind: the windy wildness of it, the smell of the peat fires, the impromptu soccer games among the sheep, the itchy wool sweaters, the freckled girls on bicycles with head scarves tied under their chins, the beautiful bleakness of the landscape.
Achill im chaonaí uaigneach nach mór go bhfeicim an lá1
I lie and imagine a first light gleam in the bay
After one more night of erosion and nearer the grave,
Then stand and gaze from the window at break of day
As a shearwater skims the ridge of an incoming wave;
And I think of my son a dolphin in the Aegean,
A sprite among sails knife-bright in a seasonal wind,
And wish he were here where currachs walk on the ocean
To ease with his talk the solitude locked in my mind.
I sit on a stone after lunch and consider the glow
Of the sun through mist, a pearl bulb containèdly fierce;
A rain-shower darkens the schist for a minute or so
Then it drifts away and the sloe-black patches disperse.
Croagh Patrick towers like Naxos over the water
And I think of my daughter at work on her difficult art
And wish she were with me now between thrush and plover,
Wild thyme and sea-thrift, to lift the weight from my heart.
The young sit smoking and laughing on the bridge at evening
Like birds on a telephone pole or notes on a score.
A tin whistle squeals in the parlour, once more it is raining,
Turf-smoke inclines and a wind whines under the door;
And I lie and imagine the lights going on in the harbor
Of white-housed Náousa, your clear definition at night,
And wish you were here to upstage my disconsolate labour
As I glance through a few thin pages and switch off the light.
1 A desolate waif scarce seeing the light of day (from a poem by Piaras Feritéar, 1600-1653, as translated by Thomas Kinsella).
I love Mahon’s poem about J. Bruce Ismay, the managing director of the White Star Line, who, famously and infamously, survived. Much to his enduring shame. Most employees were manly enough to go down with the ship. Not Ismay. The scandal dogged him the rest of his days.
After the Titanic
by Derek Mahon
They said I got away in a boat
And humbled me at the inquiry. I tell you
I sank as far that night as any
Hero. As I sat shivering on the dark water
I turned to ice to hear my costly
Life go thundering down in a pandemonium of
Prams, pianos, sideboards, winches,
Boilers bursting and shredded ragtime. Now I hide
In a lonely house behind the sea
Where the tide leaves broken toys and hatboxes
Silently at my door. The showers of
April, flowers of May mean nothing to me, nor the
Late light of June, when my gardener
Describes to strangers how the old man stays in bed
On seaward mornings after nights of
Wind, takes his cocaine and will see no one. Then it is
I drown again with all those dim
Lost faces I never understood, my poor soul
Screams out in the starlight, heart
Breaks loose and rolls down like a stone.
Include me in your lamentations.
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.
“What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory?” — Emily Dickinson
I came to George Eliot late. As in, during the lifespan of this blog. I read Middlemarch (more like devoured it) in 2005, and wrote posts about it as I went. After hearing about her, and absorbing her via osmosis for decades, I experienced her first-hand and had one of those gratifying moments of delayed realization: “Oh. Okay. This is why she is considered one of the all-time greats.” It’s instantly apparent. Her domination, her sheer ballsiness – the way she draws back almost cinematically into a God’s eye point of view – perched on a cloud, looking down at humanity … Normally, statistically, this is considered a male “thing”, as in: Only men have the AUDACITY to stand far back and proclaim on the human condition. Women only concern themselves with their small domestic circle. This is reflected in the writing, the kinds of books celebrated by men, the kinds of books celebrated by women. This kind of bullshit is still present, in ways books are marketed, reviewed, etc. And women participate in this. George Eliot is a novelist, but she is also a philosopher.
I’ve said it before: I rarely “see” myself in literature. I see parts of myself, but then the rest isn’t “right”. There are exceptions (Harriet the Spy). The unnamed narrator in Mating (written by a man, unsurprisingly) is another. I don’t see myself in Dorothea Brooke so much as I get the sense – very uneasily – that I very much could have been Dorothea Brooke if I had been born in another time, and another era (and weren’t Irish Catholic in origin). Dorothea Brooke is a dark mirror. She represents my worst fears. That characterization is so acute, so specific, so on point, I was haunted by her AS I was reading it. I guess I don’t “see myself” so much as I see the plight of all women of a specific stripe – intellectually aspirational and voracious, yearning to be SEEN, trapped by convention, etc. – and this is George Eliot’s great and intimidating gift. Her characters are real AND they are representational. I don’t know how she does it. Comparisons are odious, they really are, but I’ll just throw this into the mix: Dickens was Eliot’s contemporary, and to compare the two is ridiculous mainly because they are very different kinds of writers. Dickens’ characters live, breathe, feel, proclaim – sometimes they are caricatures (exquisitely drawn), although they feel no less alive – but they aren’t particularly representational, except in broad pantomime. This isn’t true across the board, but for the sake of argument … Eliot is both down in the dirt with her characters, and circling the earth like an eavesdropping satellite … and so she sees things as representational, and as indicative of larger societal, social, and cultural upheavals. E.M. Forster is one of her heirs. Whereas John Irving is Dickens’ heir. Very different kinds of writers.
Dorothea Brooke is unique. Some quotes:
Most men thought her bewitching when she was on horseback. She loved the fresh air and the various aspects of the country, and when her eyes and cheeks glowed with mingled pleasure she looked very little like a devotee. Riding was an indulgence which she allowed herself in spite of conscientious qualms; she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it.
Look at what Eliot does there in the last phrase after the comma. She leads you towards it, she “bewitches” you with the images, she lulls you into a sense of complacency and pleasure, and then draws you up short. This type of paragraph structure is constant with Eliot: her work is overwhelming in its philosophical richness.
Here you can really see George Eliot’s “God’s-eye” point of view:
Her mind was theoretic, and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own rule of conduct there; she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; likelyl to seek martyrdom to make retractations, and then to incur martyrdom, after all in a quarter where she had not sought it. Certainly such elements in the character of a marriageable girl tended to interfere with her lot, and hinder it from being decided according to custom, by good looks, vanity, and merely canine affection.
We’re getting to the crux of it.
It had now entered Dorothea’s mind that Mr. Casaubon might wish to make her his wife, and the idea that he would do so touched her with a sort of reverential gratitude. How good of him — nay, it would be almost as if a winged messenger had suddenly stood beside her path and held out his hand towards her! For a long whilte she had been oppressed by the indefiniteness which hung in her mind, like a thick summer haze, over all her desire to make her life greatly effective. What could she do, what ought she to do? — she, hardly more than a budding woman, but yet with an active conscience and a great mental need, not to be satisfied by a girlish instruction comparable to the nibblings and judgments of a discursive mouse. With some endowment of stupidity and conceit, she might have thought that a Christian young lady of fortune should find her ideal of life in village charities, patronage of the humbler clergy, the perusal of “Female Scripture Characters,” unfolding the private experience of Sara, under the Old Dispensation, and Dorcas under the New, and the care of her soul over her embroidery in her own boudoir — with a background of prospective marriage to a man who, if less strict than herself, as being involved in affairs religiously inexplicable, might be prayed for and seasonably exhorted. From such contentment poor Dorothea was shut out. The intensity of her religious disposition, the coercion it exercised over her life, was but one aspect of a nature altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually consequent: and with such a nature, struggling in the bands of a narrow teaching, hemmed in by a social life which seemed nothing but a labyrinth of petty courses, a walled-in maze of small paths that led no whither, the outcome was sure to strike others as at once exaggeration and inconsistency. The thing which seemed to her best, she wanted to justify by the completest knowlege; and not to live in a pretended admission of rules which were never acted on. Into this soul-hunger as yet all her youthful passion was poured; the union which attracted her was one that would deliver her from her girlish subjection to her own ignorance, and give her the freedom of voluntary submission to a guide who would take her along the grandest path.
I won’t speak on how this resonates with me because it’s too embarrassing to admit. Besides, why do I need to admit anything, when George Eliot has already done it so perfectly? This is the heart of Dorothea’s great mistake, and it’s a mistake “women like her” make, and it’s specific to “women like her” and “women like her” are rarely served fully in literature because nobody else has the perspective to actually GET “women like her”. Except Eliot. Who WAS a “woman like her”. I speak from the inside on this one, you’ll just have to trust me.
I love when Eliot stops everything – the narrative, the plot, the description – to sum things up, to provide a universal. Here’s just one example from Middlemarch:
We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, “Oh, nothing!” Pride helps; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts — not to hurt others.
And let’s not forget humor.
Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and investigated by science.
Watch her character development here. It takes such confidence not just to write like this, but to to THINK like this, to believe you have insight into how human beings ARE. Character development like this is way WAY out of style now (and maybe that’s for the best, because God save us from people who AREN’T as insightful as George Eliot proclaiming they understand everything):
Mary Garth, on the contrary, had the aspect of an ordinary sinner: she was brown; her curly dark hair was rough and stubborn; her stature was low; and it would not be true to declare, in satisfactory antithesis, that she had all the virtues. Plainness has its peculiar temptations and vices quite as much as beauty; it apt either to feign amiability, or, not feigning it, to show all the repulsiveness of discontent: at any rate, to be called an ugly thing in contrast with that lovely creature your companion, is apt to produce some effect beyond a sense of fine veracity and fitness in the phrase. At the age of two-and-twenty Mary had certainly not attined that perfect good sense and good principle which are usually recommended to the less fortunate girl, as if they were to be obtained in quantities ready mixed, with a flavor of resignation as required. Her shrewdness had a streak of satiric bitterness continually renewed and never carried utterly out of sight, except by a strong current of gratitude towards those who, instead of telling her that she ought to be contented, did something to make her so. Advancing womanhood had tempered her plainness, which was of a good human sort, such as the mothers of our race have very commonly worn in all latitudes under a more or less becoming headgear. Rembrandt would have painted her with pleasure, and would have made her broad features look out of the canvas with intelligent honesty. For honesty, truth-telling fairness, was Mary’s reigning virtue: she neither tried to create illusions, nor indulged in them for her own behoof, and when she was in a good mood she had humor enough in her to laugh at herself.
Amazing.
One last thing: Middlemarch includes one of the most perceptive – and harrowing – descriptions of what it feels like to be in debt up to your ears I have ever read. It’s excruciating. Nothing was beneath her notice. Religion, economics, technology, psychology … all of it was in her grasp, none of it was irrelevant, everything was connected to everything else.
Please enjoy, unfurling below, all of the quotes I have gathered from writers about George Eliot, from Byatt, to LM Montgomery, to Zadie Smith, to Christopher Hitchens:
QUOTES:
A.S. Byatt, “George Eliot: A Celebration”:
So I came to George Eliot late, in the days when I was teaching the modern English novel in evening classes and trying to find out how to write a good novel myself. Meeting any great writer is like being made aware of freedoms and capabilities one had no idea were possible. Reading Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda I learned several primitive yet crucial lessons about writing novels – and these lessons were also moral lessons about life. It is possible, I learned, to invent a world peopled by a large number of inter-related people, almost all of whose processes of thought, developments of consciousness, biological anxieties, sense of their past and future can most scrupulously be made available to readers, can work with and against each other, can lead to failure, or partial failure, or triumphant growth.
A.S. Byatt, “George Eliot: A Celebration”:
One of the technical things I had discovered during the early teaching of Middlemarch was George Eliot’s authorial intervention, which were then very unfashionable, thought to be pompous Victorian moralizing and nasty lumps in the flow of “the story.” I worked out that on the contrary, the authorial “voice” added all sorts of freedom a good writer could do with. Sometimes it could work with firm irony to undercut the sympathetic “inner” portrayal of a character. Consider this early description of Dorothea:
Her mind was theoretic, and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own role of conduct there; she was enamored of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractions, and then to incur martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it. Certainly such elements in the character of a marriageable girl tended to interfere with her lot, and hinder it from being decided according to custom, by good looks, vanity, and merely canine affection.
There is so much in there, in the style. The magisterial authority of a Greek Chorus, or God, who knows Dorothea’s fate before her drama has really begun. Sympathy, in the author, towards the character’s ambitions, and a certain wry sense that, unfocused as they are, they are doomed. And then, in that last sentence, which is biting social comedy, the choice of the crucial adjective – “merely canine affection” – to disparage the kind of “love” thought adequate by most planners of marriages, not only in the nineteenth century.
L.M. Montgomery on Adam Bede:
It is a great novel in spite of its inartistic ending. I could have pardoned the marriage of Adam and Dinah, however, if it had not been brought about in such a hurried and artificial manner. Mrs. Poyser is a delightful creature in a book. Out of it she might not be so agreeable. The character of Hetty Sorrel is wonderfully analyzed. Dinah is just a little bit too good for ‘human nature’s daily food.’ Yet there are such people — and the rest of us are not fit to untie their shoe-laces. Nevertheless, Dinah does not enlist our sympathy or interest. We don’t care a hoot whether she ever gets a husband or not. But our hearts go out to poor, pretty, vain, sinning, suffering Hetty. After all, it is the sinners we love and pity — perhaps because they are nearer to ourselves and we recognize so many of our hidden weaknesses in them.
L.M. Montgomery on Romola:
Read Romola again. Oh, truly, there were giants in those days in literature. My books seem so trivial and petty compared to those masterpieces.
L.M. Montgomery on Adam Bede:
Adam Bede is a cup of mingled pain and pleasure … It is a powerful book with an inartistic ending. Her delineation of character is a thing before which a poor scribbler might well throw down her pen in despair.
Joyce Carol Oates:
My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, entry on Emily Dickinson:
The standard works she knew best and drew on most commonly for allusions and references in her poetry and vivid letters were the classic myths, the Bible, and Shakespeare. Among the English Romantics, she valued John Keats especially; among her Englishc ontemporaries she was particularly attracted by the Brontes, the Brownings, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and George Eliot.
Jeanette Winterson:
Who should the poet serve? Society or the Muse? This was a brand new question and not a happy one. If the woman poet could avoid it, the male poet and the prose writers of either sex could not. Of the great writers, Emily Brontë chose well. Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot continually equivocate and the equivocation helps to explain the uneven power of their work.
from “Letter to Lord Byron”
By W.H. Auden
You’ve had your packet from time critics, though:
They grant you warmth of heart, but at your head
Their moral and aesthetic brickbats throw.
A ‘vulgar genius’ so George Eliot said,
Which doesn’t matter as George Eliot’s dead
Christopher Hitchens, “The Dark Side of Dickens”:
If offered the onetime chance to travel back into the world of the nineteenth-century English novel, I once heard myself saying, I would brush past Messrs. Dickens and Thackeray for the opportunity to hold speech with George Eliot. I would of course be wanting to press Mary Ann Evans on her theological capacities and her labor in translating the liberal German philosophers, as well as on her near-Shakespearean gift for divining the well-springs of human motivation. When compared to that vista of the soul and the intellect, why trouble even with the creator of Rebecca Sharp, let alone with the man who left us the mawkish figures of Smike and Oliver and Little Nell, to say nothing of the grisly inheritance that is the modern version of Christmas? Putting it even more high-mindedly, ought one not to prefer an author like Eliot, who really did give her whole enormous mind to religious and social and colonial questions, over a vain actor-manager type who used pathetic victims as tear-jerking raw material, and who actually detested the real subjects of High Victorian power and hypocrisy when they were luckless enough to dwell overseas?
Charles Dickens, note to George Eliot about Scenes of Clerical Life:
If [the sketches] originated with no woman, I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself, mentally, so like a woman, since the world began.
Joan Acocella, “After the Laughs”:
But [Dorothy Parker’s] unique contribution was her portrait, in the stories, of female dependence. This was a central concern of nineteenth-century women writers – Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes – and also some of the men, notably Thackeray.
Zadie Smith, The Guardian, 2008:
In her intellectual and personal life, Eliot demanded continuous and varied food – and she conceived of many things. One of these things was Fred Vincy, a commonplace young man who would seem more suited to a penny-farthing romance. But it’s worth looking again at the facts, which means, in the world of Middlemarch, the emotional facts. Fred is in love with a good girl; a girl who does not love him because he is not worthy; Fred agrees with her. Maybe the point is this: of all the people striving in Middlemarch, only Fred is striving for a thing worth striving for. Dorothea mistakes Casaubon terribly, as Lydgate mistakes Rosamund, but Fred thinks Mary is worth having, that she is probably a good in the world, or at least, good for him (“She is the best girl I know!”) – and he’s right. Of all of them Fred has neither chosen a chimerical good, nor radically mistaken his own nature. He’s not as dim as he seems. He doesn’t idealise his good as Dorothea does when she imagines Casaubon a second Milton, and he doesn’t settle on a good a priori, like Lydgate, who has long believed that a doting, mindless girl is just what a man of science needs. What Fred surmises of the good he stumbles upon almost by accident, and only as a consequence of being fully in life and around life, by being open to its vagaries simply because he is in possession of no theory to impose upon it. In many ways bumbling Fred is Eliot’s ideal Spinozian subject.
A.S. Byatt
When I was younger it was fashionable to criticise Eliot for writing from a god’s eye view, as though she were omniscient. Her authorial commenting voice appeared old-fashioned. It was felt she should have chosen a limited viewpoint, or written from inside her characters only. I came to see that this is nonsense. If a novelist tells you something she knows or thinks, and you believe her, that is not because either of you think she is God, but because she is doing her work – as a novelist. We were taught to laugh at collections of “the wit and wisdom of Eliot”. But the truth is that she is wise – not only intelligent, but wise. Her voice deepens our response to her world.
Virginia Woolf on Middlemarch:
“The magnificent book, which with all its imperfections, is one of the few English books written for grown-up people”.
George Eliot, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”:
“Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well-dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original tongues.”
^^^ Ouch.
One of George Eliot’s most perceptive contemporary “fans” is A.S. Byatt. You can tell the influence Eliot has had on Byatt’s work. (I wish I could track the quote down, but in a review of one of Byatt’s novels, the critic said that Eliot “writes as though James Joyce never existed.” lol It’s so true though.) I’ll point you towards this wonderful piece by Byatt in the Guardian about Middlemarch.
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“There were so many things I wanted to say, stream-of-consciousness things, designs and patterns while listening to music. I felt I might be able to say [them] if I had an unending canvas.” pioneering experimental animator Mary Ellen Bute
If ever I was born to write a piece, it’s this one: For Film Comment, I wrote about experimental animator Mary Ellen Bute, and her 1966 adaptation of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”. She was a pioneer. Way out in front.
As I wrote, a lot of her work is difficult to see – meaning, not accessible, holed up in archives – so you have to keep your eyes peeled for retrospectives of her work. But some of it is on YouTube, and you can get a sense of what she was about watching these shorts:
Synchromy No. 2 (1936)
Parabola (1937)
Synchromy No. 4 (1938)
Tarantella (1940)
Spook Sport (1940; collab. with Norman McLaren)
This one is funny!
Mary Ellen Bute
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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.
It’s her birthday today. She’s not my favorite actress in the world although I admire her journey, which – if you think about it – is quite exceptional. Consider the other child actors who dominated in the ’70s. Who has had her journey? None, that’s who. I will say she was “there” for me early, when I too was a little kid, and dressed like a Times Square hustler in, now that you mention it, Taxi Driver. I dressed like I could have been an urchin-pal of Jodie Foster’s character, another neglected kid-adult grown up too fast in the city streets, under the umbrella of Travis Bickle’s psychopathic concern. “Shouldn’t you be in school, kid?” “No, man, making too much bread out here.” Of course I didn’t see Taxi Driver while I was strutting around in my long leather jacket. But I did see Candleshoe, and it made an enormous impression. You could have even said that I was a little-kid cross-dresser. I was wearing full-on men’s suits in high school. I stopped short of wearing a fedora, even though Bugsy Malone had an early impact. In my 20s, I did wear an old-fashioned black derby like I was a Cockney villain in a 1930s movie – I wore it almost every day. With fancy dresses. With flannel. Always. I lost that hat somewhere along the way but almost every picture of me in my 20s I was either wearing 1. a blue bandana wrapped around my head or 2. the black derby. As a kid, I “saw myself” in little boy characters like the Artful Dodger and Huck Finn, and my biggest fantasy was dressing up as a boy, and “passing”, the way Shakespeare’s cross-dressing heroines did. So many of my favorite stories involved little girls disguised as boys. One of my favorite books as a kid was Jane Langton’s radically-titled book The Boyhood of Grace Jones. No, not THAT Grace Jones. MY Grace Jones (wrote about her here) was a little girl growing up in the 1930s, alienated by the expectations placed on girls, and carving out her own path by pretending to be a boy.
The only thing I’ve really written about Jodie Foster was a piece years in the making – on the great “tomboy films” of the 1970s. She was its leading light, its guiding star. I didn’t run around with a gang stealing hubcaps, but independence and freedom was my goal, my fantasy world, and so all those little girls in the 70s, untouched by conventional aspirations or yearning for the status quo of stereotypical gender roles were huge for me. I don’t think of them as influencing me, I think of them as reflecting what was already THERE in me. We didn’t “buy in” to all that stuff. We had other role models. I’d been wanting to write that tomboy piece for a long long time. The word “tomboy” may be out of fashion now, considering today’s discourse, but … if you are going to write, you cannot care about being out of fashion. Tomboys matter. And thankfully the tomboys showed me early what it looked like to not care what the world thought of you, to just be you, to thumb your nose at the prudes and snobs. They’re just scared. Wear a long leather jacket when you’re 10 years old. You look dope. The Artful Dodger is as valid a role model to a girl as Anne of Green Gables, even though he is a thief. Or maybe even BECAUSE he is a thief. The great thing about the 70s tomboy-kids is that the typical roles usually assigned to boys … suddenly moved into Girl Land. And I’m just glad it was mainstream popular culture when I was so young and impressionable.
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.
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.
My first boyfriend was super into Graham Parker, and basically introduced me to his music. He was a constant in our (super unhappy and stressful) “household”. It was my brother, though, as always, who contextualized Parker for me, who got into Parker in an intellectual way, a let’s-break-it-down way, because when you are obsessed with something, you want to know why, you want to find the words.
In 2019-2020, I posted my brother Brendan’s music essays from his old blogs. It started with his 50 Best Albums list. I’d post one entry every Monday. #4 on his very interesting list was Graham Parker’s 1979 album Squeezing Out Sparks. (Those words always make me wince, considering what they mean in the context of the song of the same name.)
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I just want to point you towards a recent remarkable profile of Wilson in Esquire, the cover story. The writer – Ryan D’Agostino – really knows what he’s doing. It’s a beautiful piece of writing filled with interesting observations. Wilson even spoke of his 2007 suicide attempt, which he’d never done before, except for “Please, media, let me be cared for and healed” public statement at the time.
I find Owen Wilson funny, but I also find him touching. Maybe my own life of near-constant mental struggle means I recognize these things in him, even with how funny he is, there’s a strain of sadness underneath even the whimsy. It’s why he’s such a good writer. His sense of joy is hard-won.
In 2013, I wrote an essay about Owen Wilson – his melancholy, wistfulness and humor – for Rogerebert.com.
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… (which I kind of love. It’s completely bonkers). But anyway …
I am 100% not the first person to notice this, but it’s fun to point it out anyway:
Megalopolis (2024)
Night of the Hunter (1955)
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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.
I saw him just before Grace was released. The groundswell had started, which was why we were there. He basically hit the following month. We saw him in the moment before.
I will never EVER forget that night.
Jeff Buckley at the Green Mill
On a rainy night in Chicago many years ago, my friend Ted and I went to go see a singer I knew little about at The Green Mill. His name was Jeff Buckley. He had a couple of tiny albums out, recordings of live shows. His voice was crazy. We bought tickets and went.
It is, to date, the most memorable live show I have ever seen.
Ted and I still talk about it.
A lot of people were pissed off at Jeff Buckley that night. Ted and I were enraptured. Buckley was there, at the bar, mingling, hanging out. We did a shot of whiskey with him at the bar, and told him how much we loved his songs. He seemed freaked out and morose, and we were saying to him, encouragingly, “You’re great, have a good show!” – not at all expecting that a young up-and-coming rock star would be so openly anxious, and telling this to the audience who was just about to watch him play.
In looking back on it: I can clearly see that he knew stardom was about to hit. He knew his life was about to change. The tour bus parked outside was indicative of what was about to happen. But he seemed so small, dwarfed by the bus, by the circumstances approaching him. He had just given an interview to Rolling Stone and had apparently said wildly inappropriate things to the reporter. He told us this! Don’t we all want success? Well, sure, but what success actually means, in the reality of day to day life, is another thing entirely. It’s intimidating, it’s a lot of attention, it’s REAL, and artists oftentimes are people who have trouble with reality. That’s why they’re artists. Stardom comes with responsiblity, with lots of “have-tos” and obligations, not to mention a painful loss of anonymity. Goldie Hawn wrote in her memoir about how she used to go to a little bar in Malibu before she was famous, have a glass of wine by herself, sit staring out at the waves, and write in her journal. It was a beautiful ritual for her. Stardom was a great blessing to her, and she is appreciative and thankful, but she still mourns that anonymous self, the person who could go have a glass of wine alone, write in her diary, and not have someone take a picture of it, sell it to a tabloid and have it appear on the newsstand the next day: GOLDIE HAWN DRINKS ALONE LOOKING LIKE SHIT. Fame is a sacrifice. Not for some, but for many it is a soul-crushing experience. Jeff Buckley was in that latter category.
So there he was, doing shots at the bar, talking with us, but, you could sense things shifting. He wasn’t “normal” anymore, he wasn’t “one of us”, he was not anonymous. He had been playing shows at Cafe Sine, a tiny joint in New York where the musicians sit out in the audience, guitars propped up against the wall, and then just walk up to the “stage” when it’s their turn. The blending of audience and performer. Comfortable.
That world was receding for Jeff Buckley on the rainy night at the Green Mill.
I’m talking about this like I sat down and had an in-depth conversation with Jeff Buckley about his thoughts and feelings. I did not, but it is what I gleaned from his behavior that night, the brilliance of his performing, his obviously self-destructive tendencies, but also his urgent need to connect. It was life or death to him that he break through his anxieties and connect to us. SO many performers do whatever they can (through choreography, lights, flash, impenetrable persona) to AVOID the anxiety of whether or not they are connecting to their audience. But for Buckley there seemed to be no other way, and all of it was happening at the same time, and all of it went into his performance.
I have never seen anything like it.
When he was up there, NOTHING was excluded. A polished performance excludes many things. It excludes nerves, moments of doubt, embarrassment, insecurity. You put those aside so you can do your work and show up for the audience. Jeff Buckley INCLUDED all of that. He didn’t judge any of his own emotions as “inappropriate”, whatever they might have been – fear, anger, sadness, excitement. If he felt it, he let it out. People with decades of experience have a hard time doing that. Some can NEVER do it. Young Jeff Buckley did it automatically. Like Judy Garland. No matter what came up in Judy Garland, it was of use to her as a performer. She did not censor herself. That’s why she is like a raw nerve. Buckley was up there, and he was struggling, struggling to enter into his own life, into the performance, into his own music. He felt outside of it, and he let us see his struggle. For him there was no other way.
Like I said, a lot of people were pissed off at him that night because they wanted a conventional show. They wanted him to just play the damn songs they wanted to hear. They didn’t want him to talk in between sets about how freaked out he was, they didn’t want him to suddenly stop a song, mid-lyric, and announce, “God, that sucked. Let’s start it over again …” and then …. start the song over again … from the top. Judging from comments below this post from other people who were there that night, Ted and I were not alone in being absolutely riveted by him, but it felt like there were more people who wanted a straight show. Buckley couldn’t have given a straight show if you paid him a million dollars.
He grappled with himself. In front of us. It was inspiring to watch how private he was in public – something almost no one can do, something actors go to school to learn HOW to do, to shed our social selves, the social self that inhibits us from being, from admitting the darker parts of ourselves. Ted and I, both in theatre, actors/directors, understood what we were seeing, it was what we tried to do, it was what happens in rehearsals or class. You grapple with yourself to GET OUT OF YOUR OWN DAMN WAY, so you can get to work. That’s what Buckley was doing. His voice is otherworldly, as good live as on the album, but he was in a state of dissatisfaction and anxiety. The record company had obviously funded this tour and paid for the tour bus, and were probably trying to iron Jeff Buckley into some kind of appropriate persona. Because let’s not get it twisted: Buckley was dropdead gorgeous. Not handsome really, that’s not the word. He was soulfully beautiful. Like James Dean or Alain Delon. It seemed that success would be a slam-dunk. To look like that and have a voice like that?
But you could feel that Buckley wasn’t interested in ANY of that. Buckley seemed to feel this enormous institution behind him, he felt the pressure of it, and as he rambled on, and stopped songs, and confessed his feelings to us, he kept waving his hand at the wall – because he could FEEL the tour bus on the other side of that wall. He kept mentioning that damn bus, he hated it, it was too much.
The show was chaotic. He was heckled by the increasingly annoyed crowd. People were yelling at him in frustration. “SHUT UP – JUST SING THE SONG!” It was a constant chorus. There was a lot of hostility in that club. Buckley didn’t fight back, he didn’t bristle or snap, “Hey, fuck you, man, I’m up here doing my thing”. No. His ego wasn’t like that. Instead, he apologized profusely. He’d say, “You’re right, I’m so sorry.” He kept saying things like, “I suck … I’m so sorry … I just suck …”
Buckley said at one point, “I want to give everybody their money back … I am so sorry about the show tonight … I suck so bad …”
This sort of self-deprecation can be annoying. However, with him you could tell it came from a deeply true place. He was genuinely pained.
He was also drunk. He was drunk when he arrived, or at least seriously soused. He announced to us, at one point, with huge floppy gestures:
“You guys, I’m so sorry, but I am drunk. D – U – R – N – K. DRUNK!”
Did he mean to misspell drunk? Was he really that drunk? Was he kidding? Ted and I burst out laughing, and we still say that to each other. “The woman was drunk. D-U-R-N-K, ya know what I mean?”
He started to sing “Halleluia”. But … but … you could just feel (that’s the other thing: he was emotionally transparent just standing there. If you were paying attention, as Ted and I were, you could FEEL everything he was feeling.) So he started “Halleluia”, but … it didn’t feel true to him … you could tell … so he stopped the band impatiently: “Stop stop stop stop …” It was like he was in pain, far away was he from his own ideals. I am thinking of Clifford Odets in Hollywood, experiencing spiritual death. What Ted and I saw (and we went out and talked about it all night afterwards in a diner down the street as the rain splashed against the windows) was a man trying to imagine himself, work himself, push himself closer to his own ideal in his head. He wanted to transcend. And if that meant starting a song over, even though there was a whole crowd there, a whole crowd who was dying to hear him sing “Halleluia”, so be it. What we were seeing was not a finished product. He would not BE a ‘product’. He was in process.
It was self-indulgent, yes – but any artist’s process MUST be self-indulgent. How else will you know what works, what failure feels like? You have to GO there. Art is worthless if the artist isn’t willing to pay the price, to have it cost them something, to put ALL of it out there.
After the “Halleluia” debacle, he sang “Lilac Wine” and you could have heard a pin drop in that dark club. His voice made the hair rise up all over your body. He went to another place entirely, a private place of fantasy and creation. You were afraid to move, you were afraid to break the spell.
I watched Buckley up there, alone by the mike with that beautiful face, the innocence of his face, but also the wildness, and how he would throw his body up towards those high notes, his neck flung back, launching his voice up into the octaves above, eyes closed, body slack and open, letting it happen, letting it come … he seemed to be not just a singer but a CHANNEL: he just had to open up to let that other thing – his GIFT – come pouring through. I watched him and I remember so clearly thinking: God, what is going to happen to this boy. This special wild boy. This is not just retrospect talking, I want to make that clear. The whole night was like that. Buckley kept talking about the interview with Rolling Stone, he seemed to be having a nervous breakdown almost about the impending fame. It made him far away from himself. He was trying – in front of us – to get back into alignment with himself.
We would be among the last people to get to see him in a small club. He was going somewhere else now and Buckley felt the loss.
He handled the heckling with grace but he didn’t change his approach. He didn’t “pull himself together”. He started to sing one song and for whatever reason he felt like he needed to sit down, so he crossed his legs, and sat down with his back to the audience. He sang the entire song in that position. Beautifully, by the way. He needed to shut us out in order to do his thing.
His band was amazing. They went wherever he went. If he stopped a song, they stopped. When he wanted to start over, they started over.
They started to play “So Real”. Like I said, I didn’t know Buckley’s music well at that point. But I loved the song, and his voice pierced through me. Ted and I stood there, lost in it (many of us were lost in it, hecklers be damned) and maybe after a verse and a chorus, Buckley said, in this drunken “oh, fuckitalltohell” tone, “God, stop stop stop … ” He seemed like a little boy, hurt, because his mom interrupted his make-believe game of knights and dragons with the prosaic request that he set the table. He was BUMMED that he wasn’t being transported like he wanted to be, that his song wasn’t taking him where he wanted to go.
So he stopped the song, which had sounded FINE to me, BETTER than fine. He was openly in pain: “God, that sucked … we SUCK … ” (more heckling – which he acknowledged) “I know, I know, you guys … I’m so sorry … Let’s start it again …”
They started the song again. And almost immediately you could tell what had happened. It was like night and day, the performance before the interruption and the performance after. The performance before was a rough draft, or like a dancer “marking” the steps so as to conserve energy. And Jeff Buckley realized that, he realized he wasn’t IN it – and so he needed the break to clear the deck. He needed to FOCUS so that he could “go there” in the song. And that’s what happened after the interruption. The band almost blew the roof that tiny club. Buckley was a shaman, a madman, an angel but a fallen one, wailing to the skies, catapulting his voice up, up, up, his gestures fearless, uninhibited. When he “pulled himself together”, by stopping the song and starting over, when he cleared the deck of everything extraneous and unnecessary to his performance, the power, the passion, that came pouring out gives me goosebumps to this day. I’ve seen a lot of live performances and nothing else comes close.
I was so sad when he died. I imagined him swimming in the current, drunk, stars wheeling by overhead, communing with Bacchus, with God, lost in his dream of himself. I can’t say I was surprised, though, because his wildness was so apparent, his yearning towards the edge, his openness and vulnerability. You could sense it all in the room.
To me, Jeff Buckley was always that pale-faced boy doing shots at the bar on a rainy night in Chicago, many years ago, with a gigantic tour bus looming outside. Change coming, change coming fast … and yet … in the moment, there was just him … on stage … trying to transport himself into the world he imagined.
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.
