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.)
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 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.
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.
… (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)
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.
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.
It will be a huge loss when this man goes. He holds up the torch for continuity of cinema history, and his breadth and depth of knowledge – which he is so eager to share – is an essential part of the movie-lovers’ world. I cannot tell you how many movies I have sought out because of his passionate advocacy. He knows everything. If you haven’t picked up a copy yet of my friend Glenn Kenny’s book Made Men, about the making of Goodfellas, I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Glenn interviewed everyone involved, including a lengthy sit-down with Scorsese (whom Glenn had interviewed before). It gives good context about the phenom of that film AND how it was rejected by a lot of people, because of the violence. (Same shit, different day.) Its reputation has grown to a towering height ever since, but it was one of those things where people didn’t quite recognize what they had when it first arrived. There was a lot of chatter about that movie. Maybe not as totally irritating as the ridiculous chatter around The Irishman, ranging from “This movie literally silences women” (there aren’t enough eyerolls in the world …) to “Scorsese only directs movies about gangsters” (I guess Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, New York New York, The Last Waltz, King of Comedy, After Hours, The Color of Money, Last Temptation of Christ, “Life Lessons”, Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence, Kundun, Bringing Out the Dead, The Aviator, Shutter Island, the George Harrison doc, Hugo, Wolf of Wall Street and Silence don’t count. He’s done more movies NOT about gangsters than movies about gangsters. And these people, some of them, actually write about film. In a way, they help me save a lot of time: I know who NOT to read now.)
One of the honors of my career thus far was to write and narrate a video-essay on the three central performances in Raging Bull, included in the special features of the Criterion Collection’s long-awaited 4k release of that masterpiece. That piece required a deep and concentrated dive into the Scorsese/DeNiro collaboration – one which I have already been invested in since I first became aware of movies as a teenager – but to do so in a deliberate way, with this focus in mind, was an intense joy. I am very very proud of that video-essay (not online: you have to be a paying member of the Criterion Channel and/or buy a copy of Raging Bull to watch it. Of course I highly recommend you do so, and not just because of my video-essay.
One unexpected result of my participation in Criterion’s release of Raging Bull was receiving a hand-written card in the mail.
I had to sit down on my front steps when I figured out what was going on, when I saw the masthead on that little note card. I am truly honored.
For his birthday, here are some other pieces I’ve written where Scorsese figures either prominently or peripherally:
— For my Film Comment column about watching movies in a theatre vs. watching them at home, I wrote about the quaalude scene in Wolf of Wall Street, and how differently it played in the two different contexts. It was fascinating!
— In 2013, which feels like it was a million years ago, I wrote about The King of Comedy for what was then Capital New York, and is now Politico. I love that bleak joyless movie.
— I wrote about Taxi Driveron the occasion of the film’s 35th anniversary. The film hasn’t lessened in power, not by one iota.
— For a feature at Ebert about the Best Films of the 2010s, the contributors all voted on their choices, and the editors tallied it up coming up with the final list. I lobbied – hard – to write about Wolf of Wall Street, which I did. I lobbied hard because:
1. I love that movie.
2. Women criticized the movie for its misogyny. I thought it would be cool to have a woman sing its praises, just to fuck with the accepted narrative.
One of my goals in life as a writer is to combat sexist assumptions – coming from men AND from women – about what women will and will not or should and should not like. If a woman disagrees with the so-called feminist status quo, she is shunned by so-called feminists as “not like us.” It’s happened to me practically all my life. It happened to me in high school, in college, and beyond. It happens to me now in the world of film criticism. The only way to deal with it is to not give a fuck. I already don’t give a fuck about sexist men. They’re everywhere. But women who buy into this “girls like different things from boys” shit? What is WRONG with you? Why are you reinforcing Victorian-era-1950s-era gender roles like this? Make it make sense. I address this in the piece.
And finally, and the biggest: I wrote the booklet essay for Criterion’s release of After Hours, his Beckettian-Surrealist-Kafka-esque (all of the above) New-York-cross-section movie starring Griffin Dunne. My involvement in the release led to a 45-minute phone call with the man himself, where I was nervous beforehand, and then not at all nervous during, because he was so nice. We talked about After Hours, yes, but so much else. He gave me a code-name the next time we meet in person, which we are bound to do: “Sheila-Raging-Bull-After-Hours” so he’ll know who I am. You know I will take him up on it!
I’ve seen Killers of the Flower Moon twice. It’s still in theatres: I highly recommend seeing it in a theatre. It’s different from his other films. There are very few cinematic flourishes, of the kind we associate with Scorsese. There’s one long shot, swirling through the rooms of a house, each room bustling with activity, one of those intricate shots Scorsese is so good at, an attention-getting camera move. But other than that, Killers of the Flower Moon is shot in a fairly straight-forward way, with lots of focus on the faces, on close-ups. Lily Gladstone gives a performance literally like no other – it’s an unprecedented role – but it’s De Niro I think of when I think of this film. This is unlike anything he’s ever done before – so exciting, and – quite honestly – one of his most frightening performances. But what’s going on goes even deeper than that. There are certain performances which are so psychologically acute – so insightful – that they actually explain how the world works. Not many performances are like this, because not many actors (or people, really) have that wide a lens. De Niro does. He had that wide a lens as a young actor too. It’s why he stands out. He’s beyond himself, he’s beyond a SELF. Travis Bickle explains something about how the world works, he explains a TYPE of alienation in the same way Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov explains the same thing. We need these people, these characters, these vessels – and when it “hits”, then forevermore we have it as an example. We can go back to Raskolnikov again and again. It’s not a character. It’s not even a mindset. It’s a psychological state of being: and we need artists who look at things with such a wide lens. Again, it will be rare. Because, in general, human beings are not very smart about why we do what we do, and how we do what we do. Otherwise why would we keep making the same mistakes over and over again? Robert De Niro’s performance is chilly, ice-cold, and perhaps it’s coldest when it’s warmest. If you’ve seen it you’ll know what I mean. Lily Gladstone represents the human cost of the evil perpetrated. De Niro is the evil. And evil doesn’t snarl and cackle like a villain. Evil is caring, evil speaks in a soft voice, reaches out with a soft touch. Evil HIDES itself. Robert De Niro, a pessimistic even nihilistic man – at least in terms of his psychological makeup – understands this. Even very good actors find a way to wiggle out of the psychological implications of what they are asked to play. Playing a villain LIKE a villain is one way actors try to escape, keep themselves safe, avoid complicity in what they are playing. They find ways to distance themselves. De Niro does not.
Seriously. It’s a major performance.
Seeing these octogenarians working, still upping their game, challenging themselves, going to newer deeper levels, and creating a work so personal it implicates ALL of us … this is reason to celebrate.
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.
One of the best films of the year. A surprise to me. I wrote about it on my Substack. Behind a paywall. Consider supporting my work if you like it. If not, that’s cool too. I appreciate that you’re here.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
— Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, by Christopher Hitchens
There are a couple of his collections of older pieces – pre 9/11 – I haven’t read before. Many of these pieces were put in later collections (Arguably, and the most recent collection, published earlier this year – A Hitch in Time: Reflections Ready for Reconsideration – of the book reviews he wrote for London Review of Books). Unacknowledged Legislations dates from the late 1990s, an eerie time, for sure, in retrospect. There’s another collection of his pieces published in the 1980s, the early 90s – and the political writing brings back such queasy memories. Iran-Contra! This collection is all literary: book reviews, and lengthy pieces on people like Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde (two of those), and then pieces on all of his faves. Do I really need to read another essay by Hitchens on Saul Bellow or Evelyn Waugh? Frankly, yes. I do. Percy Shelley said that poets were the “unacknowledged legislators of the world”.
— The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa.
I have no idea how I had never even heard of this book before. I love it when that happens. Someone I trust – in this case, my pal Therese, whom I met at Bloomsday 20 years ago – was in Lisbon and posting pictures of following Pessoa’s footsteps, sitting where he sat, walking his streets, like she has also done with James Joyce’s Dublin. She said The Book of Disquiet helped form her own thoughts on writing. I was like: WHAT. WHO IS THIS GENIUS. I am never ashamed of not knowing something. It’s exciting to get caught up to speed. Pessoa was a fascinating individual, creating an entire world of pseudonyms, although what he did moved way way beyond “pseudonym”. He created entire personalities, with biographies, astrological charts, addresses. The outer surface of his life was unchanging. He worked as a bookkeeper. He spent his time sitting in a cafe and writing his thoughts on dreams and reality and Lisbon. He had no relationships. He was solitary. I can’t read the book in large chunks. I have to take it in small doses. The design of it is meant for that kind of reading. You don’t have to read it in order. In fact, Richard Zenith, who wrote the introduction (as well as editing and translating), said Pessoa did have an order for his fragmentary “riffs”, but an ideal way to read the book would be to toss all of the numbered fragments in the air, scattering them, and read them at random. Sometimes Pessoa’s thoughts are so bleak you wonder how he survived the prison of his own mind. But then I think of how I thought before I got diagnosed, the truly apocalyptic visions in my head, the terror of the abyss, always yawning beneath my feet, it makes sense. I get it. I’m making my way slowly. But there are so many passages where I feel recognized, seen. He was brave enough to put it all down.
Some quotes:
• I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don’t know where it will take me, because I don’t know anything.
• I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me.
• If I write what I feel, it’s to reduce the fever of feeling.
• What is said endures. There’s nothing in life that’s less real for having been well-described. Small-minded critics point out that such-and-such poem, with its protracted cadences, in the end says merely that it’s a nice day. But to say it’s a nice day is difficult, and the nice day itself passes on. It’s up to us to conserve the nice day in a wordy, florid memory, sprinkling new flowers and new stars over the fields and skies of the empty, fleeting outer world.
• Everything was sleeping as if the universe were a mistake. The wind, blowing uncertainly, was a formless flag unfurled over a non-existent army post. High, strong gusts ripped through nothing at all, and the window-frames shook their panes to make the edges rattle. Underlying everything, the hushed night was the tomb of God (and my soul felt sorry for God).
• Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other’s presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical memory can define.
• They all have, like me, their future in the past.
• The consciousness of life’s unconsciousness is the oldest tax levied on the intelligence.
• The dreamer isn’t superior to the active man because dreaming is superior to reality. The dreamer’s superiority is due to the fact that dreaming is much more practical than living, and the dreamer gets far greater and more varied pleasure out of life than the man of action. In other and plainer words, the dreamer is the true man of action.
• Ah, no nostalgia hurts as much as nostalgia for things that never existed!
• My past is everything I failed to be. I don’t even miss the feelings I had back then, because what is felt requires the present moment — once this has passed, there’s a turning of the page and the story continues, but with a different text.
• Collective thought is stupid because it’s collective.
• I find myself partially described in novels as the protagonist of various plots, but the essence of my life and soul is never to be a protagonist.
• And behind all this, O sky my sky, I secretly constellate and have my infinity.
• Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel and not what someone has taught them to feel. Once I heard a child, who wished to say that he was on the verge of tears, say not, “I feel like crying,” which is what an adult, i.e. an idiot, would say, but rather, “I feel like tears.” And this phrase — so literary it would seem affected in a well-known poet, if he could ever invent it 00 decisively refers to the warm presence of tears about to burst from eyelids that feel the liquid bitterness. “I feel like tears”! That small child aptly defined the spiral.
• Everything stated of expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text.
• I know nothing greater, nor more worthy of the truly great man, than the patient and expressive analysis of the ways in which we don’t know ourselves, the conscious recording of the unconsciousness of our conscious states, the metaphysics of autonomous shadows, the poetry of the twilight of disillusion.
• Nothing happened, except in what I felt.
Reading all this, it’s easy to understand why Book of Disquiet is considered one of the masterpieces of Modernism. Every page is like that. Like I said, small doses. I think of Jorge Luis Borges, as an old man, blind, asking Christopher Hitchens to read Kipling to him. Hitchens obliged, and Borges stopped him, saying “Long sips — more slowly.”
— The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
When times get stressful, I take on big rigorous reading projects. This has been a year of big books that took me months to read. I did another reading of the complete Shakespeare sonnets. One a day. It’s maybe my 5th time doing this? So recommend. I read the Library of America collection of Thomas Jefferson’s papers. Again, it took me months. I have the Library of America collections of all of the founding fathers, and have only read the Alexander Hamilton all the way through (of course). I like reading these because there’s no accompanying commentary, and minimal footnotes. You’re on your own. It’s a direct encounter. I read the complete works of Edmund Burke. You know. This is challenging stuff, but I like it, because I do it first thing in the morning, it has nothing to do with anything in my life – it’s not work or even pleasure – it’s just this thing I like doing. Now, this volume is massive. It snaps shut if you try to leave it open. It’s huge. It has the books, stories, plays, poems, and essays. As should be clear, I am intimately familiar with this man. I’ve read Dorian Gray. Of course, I’ve read all the plays, forwards and back. And know his most famous essays – De Profundis – The Soul of Man Under Socialism. And his most famous poems, like Ballad of Reading Gaol. But there are book reviews in here, essays on actresses, on the life around him, on issues of the day – aesthetic and otherwise. I can’t wait. I am currently re-reading The Picture of Dorian Gray. I’m going to read (or re-read) every piece. Excited to re-read the plays!
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.
… with apologies to ELO … I am off Twitter because fuck Elon Musk. He made the platform useless – which wasn’t an accident. It was the point. Twitter was used as a way to get out information and a way to gather together. Revolutions were reported on Twitter, as were wildfire warnings from local fire stations. The misinformation was rampant, but there was also information – information these sinister people can’t control. They don’t WANT us to gather together and … say whatever we want. For all their bluster about “free speech” they actually despise it because they can’t control it. I had already weaned myself from it maybe 2 years ago. I would post on occasion but it was becoming too nasty and I could tell nobody was seeing my posts. I had a lot of followers and it was normal to put up a picture of Humphrey Bogart – without even commentary – and get 100s of “likes”. Because … it’s fun and supportive. Suddenly … crickets. Then it turned into X (so stupid and embarrassing), and suddenly it was all bots and porn and no engagement, and they didn’t want you to link to anything – like, what the hell is this place FOR then – and stopped you from posting Substack links altogether (or, you could post them, but they wouldn’t upload). The pettiness was stupid, but the motivation was sinister. I couldn’t justify my presence there. I didn’t deactivate yet but I will. The exodus happened last week, millions left, and signed up with Blue Sky, which my friends had been urging me to try out. I have missed the social aspect of this “social” media, and also the humor! Some things happened on Twitter that still make me laugh when I think about them. The huge snake disappearing from the Bronx Zoo and within hours someone had set up a Twitter feed for the snake, posting his adventures all over the city. It was so funny. If you were on Twitter during the “covfefe” day … then you remember what it was like, the explosion of humor. It was one of the funniest days not only in the history of my participation on that platform, but in the history of my participation in the internet. Period. I got to know Flaco on Twitter (speaking of animals escaping from zoos)! One of the things about these weirdo billionaires is they dislike humor – unless it’s nasty and gets “the libs” upset. Imagine living like this. They hate simple pleasures and people having fun. And then this same crew whines, “What has happened to humor? Everyone’s so woke now you can’t SAY anything.” Yes you can. People still say whatever they want. Louis CK sold out Madison Square Garden. He’s doing fine. You can’t be “canceled” and sell out Madison Square Garden. Being criticized isn’t the same thing as being thrust down Orwell’s memoryhole. I criticize the Left for doing this sort of thing too. I am amazingly consistent, because I don’t “do” loyalty, outside of loyalty to my family and friends. (Catch-22 and the famous “loyalty oath” scene secured me forever from the peer pressure to be loyal to a group or feeling like I must swallow every single thing if I agree with one thing. Nope. Anyone who demands lock-step orthodoxy – no matter what side of the aisle you are on – I resist.). I hate cults and I hate authoritarians. I don’t allow people like this in my “real” life so why was I tolerating it there? I don’t tolerate it here either. I got control of my comments section here a long long time ago.
All of this is to say you can find me on Blue Sky. It’s fun over there. And funny. So far. Not quite sure how it all works yet but it’s good to see my Twitter friends, and also the feeds I love, like the Louvre, and NASA.
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.
