— Almost done with The Richard Burton Diaries
— Taking a road trip with friend Allison in a couple of weeks. It’ll be a short weekend away, but we haven’t traveled in a long time together, not since Ireland in 2006 or whenever that was. It’s easy to feel like you can’t step out of the flow of your schedule, not even for three days, but we decided to flee the coop together and I’m really looking forward to it.
— In the next two months, I will have two new nieces/nephews, and I still haven’t gotten used to Pearl, the newest niece, born in December! Pearl is the best! I held her for four straight hours at Christmas. Glorious. My siblings are procreating faster than I can keep up (we aren’t Irish Catholic for nothing) and I am proud and happy and very excited. So when we go on our family vacation next summer, there will be THREE new people with us.
— I had forgotten all about this dumb song but it came up on Shuffle the other day and now I am in a feedback loop of fun with it. It cracks me up. I like the blunt-ness of the lyrics, and I like the “nyah-nyah” bratty sound, it’s somehow cathartic. No redemption, no new understanding, no “we at least learned something from one another”. No. “She fuckin’ hates me. La la la la.” The guy from 2012 probably feels this way about me, when he thinks about me at all, although “hate” is certainly too strong a term now. Sure, it’s important to heal/forgive/grow. There are situations, though, that are so useless and such a waste of time that why even bother. Hatred is cathartic, too. To quote one of my idols Rebecca West:
“A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.”
Amen, sister-wife. (Of course she was talking about politics, not romance, but it can apply there too.) Everyone is not required to have a good opinion of you. That’s the breaks.
— I’ve exercised every day this week and I feel awesome. In case you were wondering. Oh well. That’s what snapshots are for.
— Getting together with two girlfriends tonight for dinner/conversation. I haven’t seen either of them in months, really, so I am looking forward to that. Writing is a pretty solitary career. I’m alone too much. And since I work from home, it can get rather isolating. I do have some tips on handling working from home, the main one being: do not sit around in your pajamas. Get up, have breakfast, take a shower, and put on some damn clothes, just as you would if you were going into an office. And make sure to leave the house. And exercise. And set an egg timer for when you are doing actual work. Isolate out that which is work and that which is life. And put on some damn clothes.
I just read Richard Burton diaries too! And more than once I thought of you when he was dissecting acting, theater, family, etc. I loved when he listed all the books he bought in one stop and the way he couldn’t wait to hunker down with the pile of them. Loved the Tito section – hilarious. Loved when someone said Burton and Taylor were fine but the entourage they traveled with was too much. Loved when he chastised someone for not being able to look great after being up all night (movie set?) when Elizabeth looked just “dewy” after a night without sleep. Though it was intriguing and sometimes titillating when she wrote it his diary, I also wished she hadn’t. I’m onto Patti Boyd’s memoir tonight!
I know, the poor guy just wanted to read all day long and instead he had to be a MOVIE STAR.
Wonderful stuff. I’m almost done – he’s back on Broadway now in Camelot.
Kate – how about the entry from Yugoslavia when they take that terrible helicopter ride, through the fog, dodging the mountain peaks blind? It was so well-written and awful – and at the end he says something about the experience was so rich and so filled with his thoughts/fears – life flashing before his eyes – that he could fill volumes with it all. Which then makes him want to go back and re-read ULYSSES.
Amazing.
Yes, that was harrowing and really stuck with me – how close we came to reading about them on the front pages and what strange and dangerous things famous people end up doing. But then, his intellectual and always very manly approach to everything! So many contradictions. Once an intellectual snob and then completely unpretentious. Such a loving father and then so hateful. I guess it was the drink. I loved that it was nonlinear and yet when he would talk about certain things suddenly, like Wales, I wanted more. How about his take on Paul Newman and his beautiful skin and non vain assessment of his own scraggly skin. Fascinating stuff.
Oh that Paul Newman moment was amazing, yes!!
I haven’t read Frank Langella’s autobiography yet – I’ve heard it’s great – but a friend of mine was telling me (we were talking about Burton’s diaries) that there’s a section where Langella describes being at a dinner party with Burton, who was drunk, and who never stopped talking, never let anyone else speak, went on and on and on even though everyone there was feeling bored and trapped – and Langella mused, “What would this man have been without alcohol?” or some similar tragic comment.
Burton’s self-awareness about all of that makes it worse. He knew he had to stop. He just couldn’t stop. Dammit!