“I disliked the term “poetry” for any but Chaucer’s or Shakespeare’s or Dante’s.” — Marianne Moore
T.S. Eliot felt Moore’s poetry was probably the “most durable” of all the greats writing at the time.
Sadly, I have no idea how to recreate what Moore’s poems LOOK like. WordPress irons out her jagged beginning lines. Half of the fun of Moore is what her poems look like on the page. The start of each line is staggered, like little steps, and so the reading of the poem becomes something almost experiential.
Moore was great friends with people like H.D. (more on her here) and Ezra Pound (more on him here) and she had many admirers. Her work as a critic was unfortunately cut short, due to the collapse of the literary journal she wrote for, but you can see her critical mind at work in her poems. She wrote a lot about poetry itself. She had many ideas: she wanted to let images talk to one another through the verse. Perhaps the connecting links were opaque to the readers, but this quality adds to the poems’ power, her poems are puzzles to decipher, they have been compared to Cubist paintings. Poetry is not meant to reveal all. What you leave out is almost as valuable as what you include.
“One of the most mysterious and potent figures in the history of the cinema … she was one of the first performers to penetrate to the heart of screen acting.” — David Thomson
Louise Brooks is one of the most enigmatic, charismatic, and hard-to-pin-down movie actresses. It even seems wrong to call her an “actress”, although obviously she was. But she was more like a walking talking shimmering fluid persona, open to the camera in a way that is still startling today. She is FREE. Whatever she is doing, it’s not what we normally think of as “acting”. She’s hard to discuss, because … what is she actually DOING? And what did she FEEL about what she was doing? She’s so unbelievably free on camera, she beckons you into her headspace, her world, it’s an extraordinary relationship with the camera. In fact, she often looks directly AT the camera which … you just don’t DO in film. But she did.
To my mind, the best thing written about her as a performer – the most insightful – is the chapter devoted to her in Dan Callahan’s book The Art of American Screen Acting, Volume 1. I interviewed him about the book, and we discuss Louise Brooks quite a bit.
Her career was not long. She had a lot of trouble during her heyday. Her talent was untame-able. She couldn’t “fit in”. She couldn’t “behave”. She was really set free when she went to Europe, and collaborated with the German master G.W. Pabst. She said he was the first director to treat her with respect, the first to “set her loose”. He wanted her emotionality to have free rein. All he had to do was point her in the right direction. The films she made with him were extremely controversial, and still can be somewhat shocking (because we may fool ourselves into thinking we have “progressed”, but we have not. Sorry.) Louise Brooks wrote: “So it is that my playing of the tragic Lulu with no sense of sin remained generally unacceptable for a quarter of a century.”
Her career did not last into the sound era, and she had a very rough road over the following decades. Poverty, obscurity. But eventually came the arthouse revival era of the 50s, 60s, 70s, and her star rose again. And she was still around. She lived to see her work celebrated, her memory revered. Not to mention the fact that she could WRITE, and her book Lulu in Hollywood is a classic. She turned herself into a wonderful writer and an amazing memoirist and anecdotalist. The book is filled with character portraits – of Pabst, of her good pal Humphrey Bogart, and more. She intersected with everyone. She is able to describe her own process, and how it developed. This is extremely valuable. Lulu in Hollywood is not just an actress memoir. It’s a book of cultural and social history unique in the canon. She was there. She lived it. Lots of people lived it, though. Not too many can also write. If you haven’t read Lulu in Hollywood, I urge you to pick it up.
And watch Pandora’s Box, first off. You can still feel “it”, whatever “it” was.
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.
P.J. O’Rourke’s sentences were masterpieces. Airtight. For example:
“Wherever there’s injustice, oppression, and suffering, America will show up six months late and bomb the country next to where it’s happening.”
Or:
“Sloths move at the speed of congressional debate but with greater deliberation and less noise.”
I don’t know WHY that is so good. Beyond the MEANING he’s conveying … even separate from the meaning – what I truly admire is the skill in execution.
There is an epidemic of people who THINK they’re funny because they think quoting Seinfeld episodes will fool the trapped listener. Or people who think saying, “Alllllll righty then” makes them funny, when really they are just quoting Jim Carrey. Or South Park. Or fill in the blank. Quoting somebody else’s humor does not make YOU funny. Snark also isn’t automatically funny. Comedy is a real skill. For the most part, you have to just HAVE it. It can’t be taught. Although if you do want to incorporate humor – rather than snark – in your writing, then you might as well learn from the masters.
People like P.J. O’Rourke. Or one of his idols, Evelyn Waugh. Both have an unholy mix of gimlet-eyed dissatisfaction with the world and everyone in it and a rampaging sense of hilarity. It’s hard to write funny. A lot of comedians rely on physicality to get the joke across but to do it in language is a rare gift. P.J. O’Rourke KILLED at one liners. They are so airtight it’s difficult to wiggle out of them even if you disagree with whatever sentiment he’s going on about. All you can really do is sit back and admire his dazzling skill. There’s a ba-dum-ching to a lot of it, his stuff is practically vaudevillian, similarly filthy-minded, eternally cranky, unimpressed, refusal to kowtow, with that rebellious National Lampoon mindset, so difficult to describe to people who don’t get it, mainly because National Lampoon has gone so mainstream it basically IS the mainstream – although considering the tenor of the current moment, National Lampoon has the subversive underground appeal it did at the outset.
Sometimes reading O’Rourke made you feel so bad. Not bad, like sorrowful, but bad like ashamed of yourself. I remember reading an essay he wrote about Haiti – I think it was in Rolling Stone – and it made me laugh so hard. Of course the situation in Haiti is not funny. And O’Rourke didn’t find it funny. But his LANGUAGE is funny. One of his eyes always squinted at the absurdity of it all. And absurdity does not mean “un-serious” or “funny”. Absurdity meant incompetence, stupidity, cruelty, bureaucratic fuck-ups (a redundancy, there) … “Absurdity”, i.e. human folly, led to people getting hurt, being trampled over by strong-men, treated unfairly, or ignored. So the stakes are high. O’Rourke’s tone skewered any self-serious person who may think they and only they were qualified to such-and-such. He hated the bureaucratic class. His most dangerous weapon was his humor. There’s a reason satirists are often the first on the chopping block of autocratic governments come to power by strong-arm means. You can’t have people walking around thinking they can make fun of you without there being repercussions!
O’Rourke was *brutal* on his own generation. There was a wry “takes one to know one” tone to his commentary on Boomers, which made it even funnier. Contempt doesn’t even come close to his attitude. You can see the influence of Evelyn Waugh here – who was a member of his own generation – of course, as we all are – but who was also separate from it, distanced enough to make some very cutting observations. O’Rourke’s eerily perfect sentences create little airtight pockets of rhetoric and humor from which you cannot escape. You can disagree with him – of course – but you can’t do so while the sentence is being read. He leaves you no inroads. There’s no way IN. O’Rourke carried the metaphors and analogies to their most absurd and/or satiric extremes. O’Rourke had a healthy sense of disrespect for everything, especially politicians and government, and I always found this refreshing. I’ve said it before: You will never – and I mean never – find me in the audience at a campaign rally, crying and cheering for some politician. Never. I was never like that, not even when I was a naive kid who had just started voting and felt passionately about the issues. I felt passionately about the ISSUES, not the person at the podium. I consider politicians to be a necessary evil. And THEY work for US. They aren’t celebrities. Hold them to account. Don’t stick up for your side if your side sucks. You True Believers are the worst. I am suspicious of all of them and I consider that to be a very healthy attitude, although it doesn’t make me any friends.
I remember being in college, sitting in the quiet library, and reading one of O’Rourke’s essays in Rolling Stone, a ruthless sendup of Congress’ machinations. His writing was so funny I was laughing out loud, so much so that I could not continue and had to get up and walk out. An essay about LEGISLATURE made me disturb the peace. Almost no one can pull that off.
His book Parliament of Whores is a classic: I put it in the company of Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail as one of the best books about the American political process. Nothing can really top Thompson’s, but O’Rourke’s come close.
My way in, with people like this, is always the writing. You can write about politics all you want, but if you can’t, you know, WRITE, then I won’t be reading you. Something about O’Rourke’s humorous contempt for all the boobs staggering around Washington resonates with me. But even aside from politics, O’Rourke was a funny personal essayist, too, and wrote books on “manners” and “being a bachelor”. He was also a VERY cranky traveler. He was so funny and occasionally mean about other nations. It reminds me a little bit of Paul Theroux’s travel books, which are … hilarious. A crankier traveler cannot be imagined. But they’re both so much fun to read. Mencken is like that too. I disagree with Mencken all the time! But he’s so much FUN to read.
Here are some O’Rourke sentences, plucked out at random. I will miss him.
— A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.
— Fish is the only food that is considered spoiled once it smells like what it is.
— With Epcot Center the Disney corporation has accomplished something I didn’t think possible in today’s world. They have created a land of make-believe that’s worse than regular life.
— In fact, safety has no place anywhere. Everything that’s fun in life is dangerous. Horse races, for instance, are very dangerous. But attempt to design a safe horse and the result is a cow (an appalling animal to watch at the trotters.) And everything that isn’t fun is dangerous too. It is impossible to be alive and safe.
— There are a lot of mysterious things about boats, such as why anyone would get on one voluntarily.
— To grasp the true meaning of socialism, imagine a world where everything is designed by the post office, even the sleaze.
— The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore. True, you can sit outside in Paris and drink little cups of coffee, but why this is more stylish than sitting inside and drinking large glasses of whiskey I don’t know.
— Bachelors know all about parties. In fact, a good bachelor is a living, breathing party all by himself. At least that is what my girlfriend said when she found the gin bottles under the couch. I believe her exact words were, “You’re a disgusting, drunken mess.” And that’s a good description of a party, if it’s done right.
— Nobody knows everything. Nobody even knows everything about any one thing. And most of us don’t know much. Say it’s ten-thirty on a Saturday night. Where are your teenage children? I didn’t ask where they said they were going. Where are they really? What are they doing? Who are they with? Have you met the other kids’ families? And what is tonight’s pot smoking, wine-cooler drinking, and sex in the backseats of cars going to mean in a hundred years? Now extend these questions to the entire solar system.
— Are we disheartened by the breakup of the family? Nobody who ever met my family is.
— It’s hard to come back from the Balkans and not sound like a Pete Seeger song.
“I have a double sense of things, but I tend to write about what’s under my nose. I write about here when I’m here and when I go back to Ireland I write about what’s there. I regard myself not as in exile, but as a migrant. That’s what attracted me, in some of my early poems, to birds. My becoming a poet—in this particular incarnation anyway—was not unconnected to someone giving me the present of a pair of binoculars.” — Eamon Grennan (who wrote a poem called “Sunday Morning Through Binoculars”)
Eamon Grennan was born in Dublin on this day. He has lived most of his life in America. He went to UCD, and moved across the Atlantic to Harvard to get his PhD. He has taught at Vassar for over 30 years. He returns to Ireland annually for what he calls a “voice transfusion”. His career has been long and fruitful, with prizes and National Endowment grants. His poems appear with regularity in The New Yorker. His connection to Ireland is clear in his work (you can hear the cadences of the Irish in his rhythms), yet he looks at things from a distance. It is an international perspective. He says he feels that all poems are “elegies”. Every poem is trying to capture something that has been “lost”. A memory, an image, a feeling. “Something is gone and that’s why you write,” says Grennan.
He is quite eloquent in interviews about language, and the particular problem of language when you are Irish. This is well-trod ground. When you speak English, you are speaking an imposed language. A language imposed with violence. This was most clearly expressed by James Joyce in the famous “tundish scene” in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (I discussed that here and elsewhere.) What happens when the language you use is not comprehensible to all readers? Do you adjust? But if you adjust your language to make it easier for those who don’t understand, are you not cutting yourself off from your own history? Grennan thinks about this a lot.
BH: [“Wing Road”] is a street in Poughkeepsie, New York, but “dustbin” is an Irish word.
EG: That’s right.
BH: I wonder if you use that word intentionally. I was thinking of Seamus Heaney’s remark that you should stay close to the energies of generation.
EG: Right. That’s right.
BH: Heaney was speaking of one of his poems where he used the word “flax-dam.” He said originally it would have been called a “lint-hole,” but later he had to explain “flax-dam” anyway, so maybe he should have stayed close to the energies of generation and used the original term. I wondered about that with your usage.
EG: Yes. I mean I’m sure there is something like that. I wouldn’t have formulated it so elegantly or eloquently, of course, but I think I used “dustbin” there because in another book, in “Incident,” for example, I say “garbage can.” In part, I think every choice you make has a whole set of tentacles attached to it. Right? When you’re writing a poem, you don’t know about them until after the fact.
When I look at the tentacles attached to “dustbin,” I would say: One, it’s a word that would come naturally to me. “Empty the dustbin” is what I would say. “Garbage can” is still a foreign word to me and “garbage collection,” too. I mean, I think of them as the dustbin men because that was what I thought of them as a kid in Ireland. And then, I’m sure I’m using “dustbin” here because when I hear the line “young man who empties our dustbin,” I’m hearing the sound of “young” and “dustbin,” so that is a bit of assonance at play. I’m sure I used it because “young man who empties our garbage can” would not have pleased my ear, so the other came more naturally.
BH: You use assonance quite frequently.
EG: Yes. It’s the old and probably Irish kind of nerve beating inside the verse, for me anyway. So I used “dustbin” for that, and then somebody decided I used it because “dustbin” has a slightly more eschatological, last-judgment kind of thing, and this is the last judgment, right; the thing is about the last judgment in some way as is the garbage collection, so “dust to dust” is evoked by dustbin [laughter]. So, in fact,” dustbin” is a more interesting word than “garbage can” in a certain sense, because of its connotations.
BH: That also suggests, perhaps, a religious context…
EG: That’s what I mean.
Amazing.
You can see what Grennan meant when he discusses the “tentacles” attached to every word choice. To James Joyce (and his alter ego Stephen Dedalus in Portrait), “tundish” was the word he would use. It was “tundish” or nothing else. You can’t suddenly call an “elephant” a “magnolia” and have everyone agree to it. There would be holdouts who still would see a great grey-colored trunked-creature and say, “Dammit, that is an elephant.” While “tundish” and “funnel” meant the same thing, the difference was as great as that between an elephant and a magnolia; so the English could call a “tundish” a “funnel” all they wanted, but the entire “tentacle” formation around each word was entirely different. This is a matter greater than just language. You cannot eradicate a language without doing damage to meaning and identity. Stephen Dedalus, confronted with the British Jesuit who says it is “most interesting” that the Irish call a “funnel” a “tundish”, thinks distractedly:
The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.
Nobody even comes close to what Joyce accomplished in that one paragraph.
But the problem remains, and Irish poets – whether living in Ireland or America – still face those issues.
Grennan has said of the poem I chose to excerpt today, “Men Roofing”:
I have a few poems about workers. The poem “Men Roofing” is another celebratory acknowledgement of a certain kind of work. I don’t know if it sentimentalizes it, but it certainly tries to celebrate it by turning it into art, not so much deliberately, but charging the language used to describe it with a kind of ceremony.
I love the poem. There is a sentimentality at work here, as he says, but it is of a poetic nature: a way of seeing and trying to “celebrate” what he sees. It is a prosaic act, putting on a roof, but what could it mean metaphorically? What could it show us about who we are, and the beauty of it? Eamon Grennan has often been compared to the American poet Elizabeth Bishop (one of my many posts on her here), and here, in this poem, it is obvious why.
Men Roofing for Seamus Heaney
Bright burnished day, they are laying fresh roof down
on Chicago Hall. Tight cylinders of tarred felt-paper
lean against one another on the cracked black shingles
that shroud those undulant ridges. Two squat drums
of tar-mix catch the light; a fat canister of gas
gleams between a heap of old tyres and a paunchy
plastic sack, beer-bottle green. A TV dish-antenna
stands propped to one side, a harvest moon, cocked
to passing satellites and steadfast stars. Gutters
overflow with starlings, lit wings and whistling throats
going like crazy. A plume of blue smoke feathers up
out of a pitch-black cauldron, making the air fragrant
and medicinal, as my childhood’s was, with tar. Overhead
against the gentian sky a sudden first flock whirls
of amber leaves and saffron, quick as breath, fine
as origami birds. Watching from a window opposite,
I see a man in a string vest glance up at the exalted
leaves, kneel to roll a roll of tar-felt flat; another
tilts a drum of tar-mix till a slow bolt of black silk
oozes, spreads. One points a silver hose and conjures
from its nozzle a fretted trembling orange lick
of fire. The fourth one dips to the wrist in the green sack
and scatters two brimming fistfuls of granite grit:
broadcast, the bright grain dazzles on black. They pause,
straighten, study one another – a segment done. I can see
the way the red-bearded one in the string vest grins and
slowly whets his two stained palms along his jeans; I see
the one who cast the grit walk to the roof-edge, look over,
then, with a little lilt of the head, spit contemplatively
down. What a sight between earth and air they are, drenched
in sweat and sunlight, relaxed masters for a moment
of all our elements! Here is my image, given, of the world
at peace: men roofing, taking pains to keep the weather
out, simmering in ripe Indian-summer light, winter
on their deadline minds. Briefly they stand balanced
between our common ground and nobody’s sky, then move
again to their appointed tasks and stations, as if they
were amazing strangers come to visit for a short spell our
familiar shifty climate of blown leaves, birdspin. Odorous,
their column of lazuli smoke loops up from the dark
heart of their mystery; and they ply, they intercede.
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.
To the Supernatural community we have created here, and I know many of you still show up on occasion, I have been informed of the very sad news that Paula – a regular commenter here – passed away this past August. Paula was also a writer of fanfic and I have been reading comments from other fanfic writers, sharing how supportive she was of their work, reading drafts, making suggestions, fully engaged with her own process, but also with others’ process. Paula was an important part of the very specific “vibe” created on this site, through those epiccommentsthreads, the threads which gave us all so much joy. She was smart and sensitive, open to others’ opinions, and able to share her own (without “bashing” anyone who disagreed). One of the unique things that happened here was how we collectively created a space where you could share what you felt without being criticized (or doxxed, or harassed, as we have seen elsewhere in other fandom spaces: The Supernatural fandom can be A LOT).
Paula was here from the beginning. I was looking through her old comments this morning, and so many memories came back! She felt things deeply, she shared her disappointment in later seasons, but was devoted enough to continue watching and – very important – see the good. I often couldn’t, because I was so disappointed, but she still engaged with the art she loved so much. Her comments often helped me calm down. I’d be like “THIS SUCKED”, and she’d show up and leave some eloquent long comment about the value she perceived, moments she pulled out that pleased her – and she did all this without making anyone feel bad who felt differently. I often went back for a second look, based on her observations.
She was a Sam Winchester Whisperer. She was hurt by what was done to the character in later seasons (I think we all sensed this, that nobody “over there” understood Sam or knew how to write him), and was eloquent in her explanations as to what was wrong, what was missing. She stuck up for Sam, she had his entire life in her head at all times – her memory!! – and so she could point out why what was being done was so egregious. I often leaned on her for those observations, since I tended towards Dean Whispering. I loved Sam, but Paula was Sam’s archivist and memoirist.
We were also connected on Instagram, and I loved to see pictures of her life, her family, her husband and dear son, her dogs, the happiness she seemed to find in the small things. Fandom sometimes has a bad reputation because it can get quite toxic and be unwelcoming to anyone with divergent views. Paula always did it right.
She didn’t just comment on Supernatural posts here. She also commented on reviews of movies she had seen, and any other topic that struck her fancy. Here’s a comment she left on a review I wrote of a film called Relic, a haunting horror film which was really about the struggles of caring for elderly relatives. It gives such a good feel for her writing, and the thinking and heart behind it:
A study of identity and guilt rolled up in a burrito of horror. First, the cinematography was beautiful especially in the first half. All that space and distance on the roads, in the forest and between the three characters was lovely and then the transition to claustrophobic both physically in the house and emotionally between the women. The final image of the three women really got me as well.
As a former caretaker for a relative with dementia, this really hit that experience on the head. The whiplash reactions, the stubborn independence, the paranoia and the guilt. The divide between the daughter’s practical taking-charge and the granddaughter’s empathy shows there is no easy answer how to approach it (in a haunted house, that’s a complication, lol).
The emotional journeys were nicely done in those moments where Sammy calling Kay mom and Kay inviting Gran home.
And yes on the horror! //go check into a motel// <<< This! Damn, ladies, get out – you have a car, use it! I constantly have these infinite house dreams (which interestingly enough in this context is a reflection of the search for self and identity) and this movie is nightmare fodder.
As you can see, she was a perceptive critic, open to everything a work of art was doing, its framing, its visuals, its atmosphere.
I no longer post about Supernatural but the community remains. I have said it before and I will say it again: I have written about many subjects and have found many “fellow travelers” for all these subjects. I value anyone who chooses to spend their time here. But the Supernatural crowd “hit different”. The hunger for frank and honest and friendly discussion of the show was insatiable. Paula was a huge part of helping to create the vibe we all cherished here. The rest of the world might be divided and rancorous, but at least we could come together here and talk about Henrikksen and henleys, coffee pots and Sam’s hair, the pros and cons of the bunker, and what the hell happened in Season 12.
Please keep her devastated family in your thoughts. I will add any links here (tribute/memorium pages, obituaries) if they become available. In the meantime, please consider making a donation in her name (Paula Brown Chapman) to Gilda’s Club Minnesota. (Thank you, Jessie, for the idea.)
Paula was a valued person in our community. I was happy to get to know her. We will miss her very much!
… my uncles and cousins, past and present, and of course Elvis – and to all who serve, thank you for your service. And special thanks to those who choose to serve even when their home country demonizes them or seeks to take away their rights as citizens. You are honorable and brave.
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 the birthday of Rock and Roll Hall of Famer LaVern Baker.
Her legacy is vast, so vast that it’s under threat of being forgotten. With the birth of a new style of music, a lot of huge forces are at play, forces simultaneously cultural/political/generational. Changing things up is never the job of one person, even though the history books iron things out that way, singling out individuals solely. There are of course individual humans who make a massive difference, who almost (almost) single-handedly steer everything to go in another direction. (But even there, other forces are at play. Nothing operates in a vacuum. The insane unprecedented unforeseen success of Eminem, for example, his radical merging of hip-hop and pop – he wasn’t the first to do it though! it was just the SCALE of his success that made it so notable – his mainstream success was weird, especially because of his very VERY un-mainstream attitude/persona – he was like the Sex Pistols – NOT for prime time viewing – how he then became a global phenomenon, introducing other cultures to hip hop – (I have a friend from India who told me, “Eminem is literally what introduced me to hip hop. It’s the same for most of my friends too. Eminem was the way in.” – all of this had to happen, numbers-wise, in order for hip-hop to basically replace rock ‘n roll as the primary music genre – to BECOME pop culture – HE did that. He was the person who did that. BUT – the ground was already set for something like that to happen. This is not to say it was inevitable. It still might not have happened. It had to be him who did it, for various reasons. And there are still many many people who wish it HADN’T happened. So be it. It did. I love Eminem but he was not inevitable. I think he came along at a brief crossroads moment where there was a VOID in the culture. I wrote about the void in my massive Eminem post. Very few people are big enough, talented enough, to fill a void like that – or sense a void, even. The same void was there when Elvis came along. There wasn’t a void in MUSIC: there was a ton going on in music, fascinating things, the OPPOSITE of a void. The void was in the larger culture, which – in America, at least – was experiencing a flattening-out of post-war prosperity sparked with terror of the atom bomb, more and more people with more and more leisure time, the erosion of class distinctions, informed by things like electronics/washing machines/indoor plumbing/radio/television – giving people more free time, developments like the GI Bill, which ushered people who otherwise wouldn’t have gone to college into higher education, the burgeoning civil rights movement, and also the generational phenomenon of a massive new demographic of teenagers running around wanting to have fun. There were more teenagers than adults in America. Crazy. All of THAT created a VOID that NEEDED to be filled.)
There were many many people who were crucial in developing the new sound populating the air waves, the raucous sexually adventurous must-be-danced-to sound: the desire “out there” for something DIFFERENT being reflected by the smart performers who felt the need. So there were people like Fats Domino, Sam Phillips, Wynonie Harris, Ahmet Ertegun, Little Richard, Carl Perkins … I mean, these people were all over the place, geographically and culturally, but they all felt the same restless desire to CHANGE. To open the damn windows and let in something NEW. LaVern Baker felt it too.
LaVern Baker was born in 1929. Her grandmother was a runaway slave. She grew up in Chicago, and there were a couple of successful female blues singers in her family, from whom she took great inspiration. She started performing when she was a teenager, as sooo many people who changed the world did. It takes teenagers to really feel what teenagers want. Baker was one of those rare people who felt the void, and had awareness of what was happening “out there” AS it was happening. She entered a trend by birth, the blues “trend”, but then expanded it, pushing it forward into the Now, into the Future. Art isn’t meant to be set in stone. Art that won’t change does exist but it remains niche, with a small audience. Rock ‘n roll was not going to be that. Little Richard called himself the “architect of rock ‘n roll” (and who’s gonna argue? Who wants to go toe to toe with Little Richard? I don’t.) Still: there were many architects. Baker was one of them.
Rhythm and blues was its own thing. I would even venture to say that, although it appealed to kids, it was FOR adults. But there were so many more KIDS “out there” in the early 1950s: something had to be done to satisfy THEM. They wanted to dance, and make out, and throw each other around. Old-school blues wouldn’t allow them to do that. But there were other strands, jump blues, blues shouters, etc. These pretty much rested solely in night clubs, some of it deemed too suggestive for radio play. It didn’t have a chance to spread nationally or to move out of the sub-culture within the culture. Out in the white world, there was boogie-woogie and big band music, where white teenagers were throwing each other around, working up a sweat. This was not music for a “Tennessee Waltz” type courtship. These powerful “trends” – jump blues, boogie-woogie, big band dance music – were already merging, HAD already merged, but it was about to go mainstream.
Baker was a blues singer when she was very young, and when she was 17 she was able to sing in bars and clubs. At first she was a novelty act, called “Little Miss Sharecropper”, where she dressed in raggedy blue jeans and a straw hat and sang the blues. There was pressure on her to adopt this persona by club owners, basically due to the limited success of another performer, Mildred Jorman, who adopted the name “Little Miss Cornshucks”. Baker was an urban Chicago girl. Her life had nothing to do with sharecropping. These were racist stereotypes, and they made Black performers acceptable to the white nightclub audience. It was also a dead end, artistically.
Nevertheless, Baker was more successful as “Little Miss Sharecropper” than Mildred ever was as “Little Miss Cornshucks”. Her family moved to Detroit in the 1940s, which put her in a burgeoning music scene where she didn’t need to pretend to be a simple sharecropping girl to make people sit up and listen. She started recording stuff, which did okay (not nationally, but locally) and she toured around the Midwest. 1953 in general seems to be a very very important year (I appeared on the Very Good Year podcast to talk about the movies in 1953!) 1953 was when the VOID in the culture got too big to ignore. People started pouring into the void, filling it up. (And in July, 1953, a 19 year old truck driver in Memphis slinked into Sun Records to “record a song for his mother”.) Baker signed with Atlantic, with her biggest fan Ahmet Ertegun, who also felt the void “out there”.
She had a minor hit with “Soul on Fire” and then struck gold with her next single, “Tweedle Dee”.
She’s singing with the Atlantic house band, a world-class operation: listen to the arrangement, and how it’s so carefully done to not overwhelm her performance. She’s the star of the track. Her voice is so powerful and flexible: strong as hell but with variety and shadings. You can hear her playfulness, her humor. She’s got that rasp too, but she can control it. She brings in the rasp as an emotional thing, it’s a vocal choice. And it’s thrilling. By no metric on earth is “Tweedle Dee” a great song. It’s barely a good song. But Baker obliterates those critical considerations since she is having so much fun and crushing it so hard!
“Tweedle Dee” launched her nationally. It was #4 on the r&b charts (“race” charts) but it was something like #13 on the POP charts. It was that all-important thing, a crossover hit, which was still almost unheard of in October 1954. White charts and “race” charts were two separate things, by design, but Baker crossed over. The kids – black and white – flipped over it. Elvis was just two months into his career in October 1954. He would be the one to obliterate the crossover “line”, but he was white. He dragged the white world along with him (although “dragged” isn’t the right word, because they all went willingly). But Baker got there first (in fact, Elvis sang “Tweedle Dee” on one of his earliest appearances on the Louisiana Hayride radio show in the fall of 1954. It’s a pretty weak showing, for him, but it speaks to how quickly the song infiltrated the national consciousness. Everyone knew it.)
I am so happy Baker performed the number on the Ed Sullivan Show so we can see her in action at the moment she “hit”.
“Tweedle Dee” was one of those game-changer songs. You can hear in it the boogie-woogie big-band influence, but you can also hear in it – and her voice – the deep well of blues influence. Baker wasn’t a teenager by this point, but she brought to her performance a lively sense of humor, a kind of insouciant “I want what I want” vibe, and she is not ashamed or coy. Listen to the lyrics. This was a woman singing about her needs. She’s blatant, she’s greedy (in the best sense): “Gimme gimme gimme gimme gimme all the love you got!” Go, LaVern! This was something the teenagers loved, found revelatory, a break with their parents’ conservative values.
It’s different when a woman sings “Gimme gimme gimme”. It just is. It’s inherently feminist, whether the people at the time would label it “feminist” or not. It brings women in to the story. It’s not just BOYS who want fun sexy times. Girls want it too. The whole world exploded with possibilities.
She had another hit with “Jim Dandy”, another sexually expressive song from a female point of view.
The lyrics are funny. There’s no euphemism really. Jim Dandy’s got it going ON and Baker is IN.TO. IT.
She toured Europe, she toured Australia with Bill Haley and Big Joe Turner. She was instrumental in spreading rock ‘n roll to the world. This can’t be measured. She appeared in rock ‘n roll movies, a new exploitation style of cinema, and this made her recognizable to the world.
Now comes the twist in the story and her name is Georgia Gibbs, of “If I Knew Your Were Coming I’d Have Baked a Cake” …. fame? Gibbs loved “Tweedle Dee”, as everyone did, but she put out a cover identical to Baker’s (she even hired the same back-up band and used the same arrangement, literally note for note.). The success of Gibbs’ version obliterated the original, in terms of sales and visibility, even with Baker’s Ed Sullivan Show performance. Baker was pissed. She didn’t mind people covering her songs as long as they put their own spin on it. The era of the singer-songwriter hadn’t happened. This was an era when everyone sang everyone else’s songs. There are like 10 versions of “Good Rockin’ Tonight” before Elvis came along. The IMPACT might be different, and there’s unfairness in that, yes, but it’s just a general unfairness. COPYING is different from COVERING. And Georgia Gibbs was a COPIER.
Unlike everyone else who was irritated at being copied (and watching the copiers get more success), Baker got loud about it. Ahmet Ertegun tells just one story: “We were at the airport, on our way to a record convention. LaVern stopped at one of those machines you get flight insurance from. She was a comedienne, you know, and she had that look in her eyes. She said, ‘In case something happens, do I make my beneficiary Georgia Gibbs?'” Meaning: if I die, Gibbs can’t copy me anymore, she’ll need the money. lol Baker didn’t stop there. She wrote an open letter to Georgia Gibbs:
Dear Georgia, inasmuch as I’ll be flying over quite a stretch of blue water on my forthcoming Australian tour, l am naturally concerned about making the round trip safely and soundly. My thoughts naturally turn to you at this time, and I am enclosing an insurance policy on my life in the amount of $125,000. This should be at least partial compensation for you if I should be killed or injured, and thereby deprive you of the opportunity to copy my songs and arrangements in the future.
She went to bat – taking great risks, and paying the price – for other artists. She was a star: everything she did generated publicity. She was queen of the Open Letter. She wrote another famous open letter to Charles Diggs Jr., the first Black man elected to Congress from Baker’s home state, Michigan, and a champion of civil rights. Baker asked him to strengthen or at least fortify U.S. copyright law to make such copying practices open to litigation.
In her open letter to Diggs, she wrote:
After an investigation of the facts, you might see some wisdom in introducing a law to make it illegal to duplicate another’s work. It’s not that I mind someone singing a song that I wrote or have written for me by someone, but I bitterly resent their arrogance in thefting my music note-for-note.
This made headlines. It brought the issue – with all its racist implications – into the mainstream culture. No laws were passed against “copying” but it became such an implicit no-no that Georgia Gibbs backed off trying to enter the r&b trend and stayed in her “baked a cake” lane (and, consequently, descended into obscurity). Baker’s loudness about this issue made “copying” so unpopular radio stations started refusing to play white note-for-note cover versions, and someone as famous and influential as Alan Freed stopped playing them on his broadcast.
Another important development adding to all of this: the white record producers/radio stations were behind the times. They assumed white kids would not buy records made by Black people. The older generation was wrong. Their ideas were outdated. White kids were buying Little Richard and Fats Domino and LaVern Baker records. They were into it. They heard this music on the radio. They didn’t need to actively seek it out anymore. It was right there in the air. There was no need for duplication. Baker helped bring this awareness out into the open.
This is a HUGE and important legacy.
I love her 1961 hit “Saved”, which Elvis ended up doing 8 years later on his 1968 comeback special. It’s a gospel rager.
What I love about “Saved” is how openly it admits sin. Smoking, drinking, doing the ‘hoochy-cooch” … there’s humanity in it, having faith is not about being perfect. Also, though, it makes sinning sound way too fun to give up. Kind of like how, despite all of John Milton’s efforts, Satan is the most appealing character in Paradise Lost.
You couldn’t get more mainstream at the time, the late 50s, than collaborating with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, a couple of Jewish boys who were also rock ‘n roll architects. Baker sang their “Whippersnapper”:
She had hits with all kinds of music, including ballads. In 1965, she did a FUNKY duet with the great Jackie Wilson called “Think Twice”.
They recorded an X-rated version too! Not for public consumption but we have it and it is raucous fun.
DAMN.
Listen to her DOMINATE.
Baker didn’t really have hits after that but she continued working, often mentoring younger singers coming up, promoting them, helping them. She toured Vietnam with the USO and then landed in the Philippines where she worked at a military base night club, not just performing, but booking the acts, basically running the place. She gave opportunities to young artists. She picked out talent and nurtured them.
“LaVern Baker looked out for us.” — Renée Minus White of the Chantels
She stayed in the Philippines. She liked the work. It put her in contact with artists of all generations and she seemed to relish the opportunity to help younger people. She was strong. She fought for the rights of artists, and was able to see the results. She returned to the United States 22 years later. She appeared on Broadway as Bessie Smith. She died in 1997.
Aretha Franklin was the first female solo artist inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. LaVern Baker was the second.
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.
“Destroy my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will follow you. You may say I’m not worth bothering with; in that case, I can say exactly the same to you. We are talking seriously. And if you do not deign to give me your attention, I will not bow before you. I have my underground.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground, 1864
I wrote a thing on Notes From Undergroundhere. Notes from Underground is so ahead of its time as to be damn near SPOOKY. That’s a 20th century book published in 1864.
He’s one of my favorite authors and I return to his stuff again and again. In fact, I just re-read Crime and Punishment last year. It’s my 4th or 5th time. I don’t really count the first time, which was in high school, although SOMEthing got under my skin back then. The book gets deeper and deeper each time I return to it. Also FUNNIER. It often makes me laugh out loud. Razmuhin! I love that character so much.
His humor is one of the things that startles me about Dostoevsky consistently. He’s funniest when his characters are at their most deadly serious. There is nothing funny about the situation in The Double at ALL and yet … it IS hiLARious. The lead character in White Nights is in DEADLY EARNEST but he’s so so funny! You want to tell him to please just put a cool cloth on his head and RELAX. Laughing “at” Dostoevsky’s characters is dangerous though – for me, anyway – because it’s like laughing at myself, laughing at vulnerability, laughing at people who are sensitive, who take things too hard. I finished Crime and Punishment this last time on the flight back from Utah, and I was in tears. I’ve read the damn thing like 5 times. And I’m still in tears. I take it personally. I think it’s impossible not to. He was just that kind of writer.
QUOTES
E.M. Forster’s lecture on the “prophetic novelist”, under which category he put Dostoevsky:
“Prophecy — in our sense — is a tone of voice. It may imply any of the faiths that have haunted humanity — Christianity, Buddhism, dualism, Satanism, or the mere raising of human love and hatred to such a power that their normal receptacles no longer contain them: but what particular view of the universe is recommended — with that we are not directly concerned. It is the implication that signifies and will filter into the turns of the novelist’s phrase, and in this lecture, which promises to be so vague and grandiose, we may come nearer than elsewhere to the minutiae of style.”
E.M. Forster:
In Dostoevsky the characters and situations always stand for more than themselves; infinity attends them; though yet they remain individuals they expand to embrace it and summon it to embrace them … Every sentence he writes implies this extension, and the implication is the dominant aspect of his work. He is a great novelist in the ordinary sense — that is to say his characters have relation to ordinary life and also live in their own surroundings, there are incidents which keep us excited, and so on; he has also the greatness of a prophet, to which our ordinary standards are inapplicable.
Dostoevsky’s characters ask us to share something deeper than their experience. They convey to us a sensation that is partly physical — the sensation of sinking into a translucent globe and seeing our experience floating far above us on its surface, tiny, remote, yet ours. We have not ceased to be people, we have given nothing up, but “the sea is in the fish and the fish is in the sea”.
Clifford Odets, journal entry, March 29, 1940
The man of genius walks, talks, sleeps, eats, loves, and works with a load of dynamite in him. If he carries this load carefully — balance — its power for good work and use is enormous — it can landscape a whole mountainside. Abuse — out of balance — is suicide and a bitter grave.
It is in this sense that the artist, if he makes a proper amalgam, is beyond good and evil, for everything in him is for creation and life.
For example, let us say that Dostoevsky had impulses of rape in his heart. See how a great artist held this part of himself within his recognition and acceptance of what he was. Its creative uses were enormous. It gave him work, tone, feeling, anguish, a wealth of feeling. Finally, it was just such “weaknesses” which gave Dostoevsky’s novels their religious ecstatic fervor.
In other words … inner contradictions are not solved by throwing out half of the personality, but by keeping both sides tearing and pulling, often torturing the self, until an AMALGAM ON A HIGH LEVEL OF LIFE AND EXPERIENCE IS ACHIEVED! For the artist there is not “bad”. He must throw out nothing, exclude nothing, but always hold in balance. When he has made this balance he has made and found his form.
H.L. Mencken:
The more the facts are studied, the more they bear it out. In those fields of art, at all events, which concern themselves with ideas as well as with sensations it is almost impossible to find any trace of an artist who was not actively hostile to his environment, and thus an indifferent patriot. From Dante to Tolstoy and from Shakespeare to Mark Twain the story is ever the same. Names suggest themselves instantly: Goethe, Heine, Shelley, Byron, Thackeray, Balzac, Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, Dostoevsky, Carlyle, Moliere, Pope – all bitter critics of their time and nation, most of them piously hated by the contemporary 100 per centers, some of them actually fugitives from rage and reprisal.
Dostoevsky by Charles Bukowski
against the wall, the firing squad ready.
then he got a reprieve.
suppose they had shot Dostoevsky?
before he wrote all that?
I suppose it wouldn’t have
mattered
not directly.
there are billions of people who have
never read him and never
will.
but as a young man I know that he
got me through the factories,
past the whores,
lifted me high through the night
and put me down
in a better
place.
even while in the bar
drinking with the other
derelicts,
I was glad they gave Dostoevsky a
reprieve,
it gave me one,
allowed me to look directly at those
rancid faces
in my world,
death pointing its finger,
I held fast,
an immaculate drunk
sharing the stinking dark with
my
brothers.
James Baldwin:
I read everything. I read my way out of the two libraries in Harlem by the time I was thirteen. One does learn a great deal about writing that way. First of all, you learn how little you know. It is true that the more one learns the less one knows. I’m still learning how to write. I don’t know what technique is. All I know is that you have to make the reader see it. This I learned from Dostoevsky, from Balzac. I’m sure that my life in France would have been very different had I not met Balzac. Even though I hadn’t experienced it yet, I understood something about the concierge, all the French institutions and personalities. The way that country and its society works. How to find my way around in it, not get lost in it, and not feel rejected by it.
William Styron:
Writers ever since writing began have had problems, and the main problem narrows down to just one word – life. Certainly this might be an age of so-called faithlessness and despair we live in, but the new writers haven’t cornered any market on faithlessness and despair, any more than Dostoevsky or Marlowe or Sophocles did. Every age has its terrible aches and pains, its peculiar new horrors, and every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what that same friend of mine calls “the fleas of life” – you know, colds, hangovers, bills, sprained ankles, and little nuisances of one sort or another. They are the constants of life, at the core of life, along with nice little delights that come along every now and then. Dostoevsky had them and Marlowe had them and we all have them, and they’re a hell of a lot more invariable than nuclear fission or the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. So is Love invariable, and Unrequited Love, and Death and Insult and Hilarity. Mark Twain was as baffled and appalled by Darwin’s theories as anyone else, and those theories seemed as monstrous to the Victorians as atomic energy, but he still wrote about riverboats and old Hannibal, Missouri.
Alexander Woollcott to Mrs. Otis Skinner, Aug. 2 1935:
[I have been] weeping steadily because once again I had come to the great healing chapter of The Brothers Karamazov. It always chokes me up and fills me with a love of mankind which sometimes lasts till noon of the following day.
Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint:
I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off!
John Gardner:
The theory of the superman is kind of interesting, abstractly. The question is, Is it right? Will it work? Can human beings live with it? So Dostoevsky sets up the experiment imaginatively. Obviously he doesn’t want to go out and actually kill somebody to see if it works, so he imagines a perfectly convincing St. Petersburg and a perfectly convincing person who would do this. (What student in all of St. Petersburg would commit a murder? What relatives would he have? What friends? What would his pattern be? What would he eat?) Dostoevsky follows the experiment out and finds out what does happen.
I think all great art does this, and you don’t have to do it realistically. Obviously Raskolnikov could have bee a giant saurian as long as his character is consistent and convincing, tuned to what we know about actual feeling.
Gabriel Fallon, Sean O’Casey: The Man I Knew:
Then Yeats ventured an opinion. He said that the play, particularly in the final scene, reminded him of a Dostoevsky novel. Lady Gregory turned to him and said, “You know, Willie, you never read a novel by Dostoevsky.” And she promised to amend this deficiency by sending him a copy of The Idiot.
Ralph Ellison:
Never mind, I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest. Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground is, among other things, a protest against the limitations of nineteenth-century rationalism. Don Quixote, Man’s Fate, Oedipus Rex, The Trial – all these embody protest, even against the limitation of human life itself. If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
Michael Schmidt:
Fyodor Dostoevsky is nearer to Poe in his fiction than any American successors.
James Baldwin:
I was always struck by the minor characters in Dostoevsky and Dickens. The minor characters have a certain freedom that the major ones don’t. They can make comments, they can move, yet they haven’t got the same weight or intensity.
From “A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle”: By Hugh MacDiarmid
(Gin Glesca folk are tired o’ Hengler,
And still need breid and circuses, there’s Spengler,
Or gin ye s’ud need mair than ane to teach ye,
Then learn frae Dostoevski and frae Nietzsche.
Rebecca West, letter to Sylvia Lund, 1917, written during air raids:
Talking of these nasty foreigners I cannot agree with you about Tolstoy. I wish I could. Twice have I read War and Peace and found nothing but stuffed Tolstoys, and such lots and lots of them. And plainly Anna Karenina was written simply to convince Tolstoy that there was nothing in this expensive and troublesome business of adultery and oh Gawd, oh Gawd, Kitty! And about Resurrection I cannot speak, but only yawn. And those short stories seem to me as fatuous as the fables of La Fontaine. But Dostoevsky –! The serenity of The Brothers Karamazov, the mental power of The Possessed, the art of The Raw Youth! Isn’t it awful to think that nothing can ever decide this dispute?
John Gardner:
Look, it’s impossible for us to read Dostoevsky as a writer of thrillers anymore because of this whole weight of explanation and analysis we’ve loaded on the books. And yet The Brothers Karamazov is obviously, among other things, a thriller novel. It also contains, to my mind, some pretentious philosophizing.
William Styron:
My God, think of how morbid and depressing Dostoevsky would have been if he could have gotten hold of some of the juicy work of Dr. Wilhelm Stekel, say Sadism and Masochism. What people like John Webster and, say, Hieronymus Bosch, felt intuitively about some of the keen horrors that lurk in the human mind, we now have neatly cataloged and clinically described by Krafft-Ebing and the Menningers and Karen Horny, and they’re available to any fifteen year old with a pass-card to the New York Public Library.
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 was my great honor to write and narrate a video-essay for The Criterion Collection about Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann’s collaboration – both separately and together – with Ingmar Bergman: Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson, Sisters in the Art
“She needed such a holiday to prepare for one of the most harrowing female roles the screen has presented: Nurse Alma in Persona (66, Bergman). That this masterpiece owed so much to Bibi Andersson was acknowledgement of her greater emotional experience. She was thirty now, and in that astonishing scene where Liv Ullmann and she look into the camera as if it were a mirror, and Ullmann arranges Andersson’s hair, it is as if Bergman were saying, ‘Look what time has done. Look what a creature this is.’ Alma talks throughout Persona but is never answered, so that her own insecurity and instability grow. Technically the part calls for domination of timing, speech, and movement that exposes the chasms in the soul. And it was in showing that breakdown, in reliving Alma’s experience of the orgy on the beach years before, in deliberately leaving glass on the gravel, and in realizing with awe and panic that she is only another character for the supposedly sick actress, that Andersson herself seemed one of the most tormented women in cinema.”
Indeed. I saw the movie in college when I was studying acting and felt a kind of swoon of despair/anxiety/desire: it’s like you’re shown “the bar” which others have set in the field you’ve chosen for yourself. And you may never be that good, but at least you recognize what there is to strive for. That’s what Bibi in Persona did for me. Her drunken monologue which remains, for me, one of the greatest single pieces of acting I’ve ever seen.
But there is so much more to her career than just Persona. She did 10 movies in total with Ingmar Bergman, and had a rich career elsewhere (although it is through those films with Bergman that she will be remembered: Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, Persona being the most famous, but there’s also The Passion of Anna, The Magician, The Devil’s Eye, Brink of Life … God, this collaboration. (Here’s a piece I wrote about Bergman’s work.)
She was one of the greatest actresses who ever lived. I was so in awe of her as a teenager after Persona that I stayed far far away from that film for some time. I needed courage in my own pursuit of acting, I needed to find my own way and her example was too daunting, too intimidating. (I had a similar thing with Gena Rowlands. The fact that, so many years, later, I would pay tribute to both Rowlands and Andersson for the Criterion Collection, having completely found another path for myself, hacking a writing career out of NOTHING all by myself … is a beautiful and strange dovetail, and I don’t quite know what to make of it.)
Bibi Andersson was flat out on another level, and I recognized it instantly. It is a level very few actors reach … but at least you know it’s there, at least you know the bar has been set.
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.
is so ahead of its time as to be damn near SPOOKY. That’s a 20th century book published in 1864.
