The Books: Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, ‘Marrying Libraries’, by Anne Fadiman

Posted on December 8, 2012 by sheila

On the essays shelf:

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, by Anne Fadiman

This slim volume has great sentimental value to me, and to my family. My father introduced us to it, and gave it to us all as gifts. On the front pages is an old-fashioned bookplate, with a space for a name. There, in my father’s handwriting is: “Sheila Kathleen O’Malley. From Dad.” I brushed my fingers over the writing this morning. I had forgotten he had written in it. We have a thing about bookplates in our family. I wrote about it here. My father loved this book, and passed it on to us, and you only have to look at the title to understand why. I had so much fun talking and laughing with my dad about these essays (Anne Fadiman can be hilarious). We related to it. It was a book made specifically for us.

Reading Ex Libris is how the marvelous Anne Fadiman came to my attention. Once you start looking for her, though, you’ll find her everywhere. She came from writer parents, and is married to a writer. She is young, but she has already had an illustrious career. She founded Civilization, the Library of Congress magazine, and she was also the short-lived editor of The American Scholar, one of my favorite literary magazines. There was some controversy surrounding her ousting, but she now is a Writer in Residence at Harvard. She writes, teaches, lectures, and I love her. Her writing flows, she is often laugh-out-loud funny, but can also be heartfelt and poignant. She is one of my idols, and one of my guiding stars in my own personal essays. If I have felt stuck in writing an essay, I often pick up Ex Libris and read one of hers, just to remind myself how it’s done, to get out of my own way. Her stuff appears all over the place, as I said, but she only has two collections of essays out, and one compilation that she edited. Ex Libris may seem esoteric but to the O’Malleys it described to us what life actually feels like, as a giant voracious lifelong reader. Fadiman doesn’t treat it preciously or pretentiously. She deals with the practical aspects of it. What it is like to be the kind of person who involuntarily copyedits restaurant menus. (Guilty as charged.) How about writing in books? She devotes an entire tortured essay to the different theories of defacement. How about placing a book face down, open? She shivers at the thought. These essays are memoir-based, often, and her parents emerge as very real characters, as does her brother. Books, books, books is the thing that holds us together.

I come from a family where after someone says, “How are you?” they ask, “So what’ve you been reading?”

And in the first essay in the book, she writes about getting married to another huge reader, and what it was like to have to merge their libraries.

She’s so funny. For example: “After five years of marriage and a child, George and I finally resolved that we were ready for the more profound intimacy of library consolidation.”

I suppose if you have a literal outlook, and therefore lacking in a sense of humor, you may be put off by that sentence. If so, you certainly aren’t my kind of person, because to me that sentence is hilarious. Merging libraries is a “more profound intimacy” than having a child or getting married. Funny. And it’s funny because to a book collector, there is a grain of truth in it.

Also, as someone who agonizes (literally) about book organization I relate to this essay! (Should Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad go in Non-Fiction, should it go in Travel, or should I just lump him in with his Fiction books? Putting “Innocents Abroad” next to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an imperfect solution, one that still bothers me. But I like to keep an author’s work together – and it is annoying when they write in many different genres. Joan Didion gives me a heart attack, with her novels and memoirs and essays. I finally just gave her her own damn section and be done with it. I get separation anxiety just looking at A.S. Byatt’s literary criticism placed an entire room away from her fiction. This is a problem that cannot be solved. Believe it or not, I have thought of buying multiple copies of certain books – so that they can live in BOTH sections. This way madness lies.)

There is one anecdote in the excerpt below about organizing books chronologically within an author, ie: publication date. Back in Chicago, Mitchell and I had a chaotic move to another apartment, and we were still young, so we had our friends helping us move. My friend Ann Marie was so much a part of our move, helping us pack, unpack, that by the end of the experience she decided to move herself. She said she went home after helping us move, to her apartment she had had no thought of leaving that morning, and looked around at her possessions, thinking, “Wonder how long it’ll take to box all this up.” She had helped me unpack my books. She is a cataloguist at heart. She asked me how I liked to organize. I said to separate out the fiction and non-fiction, and to alphabetize (naturally) by author. I hesitated to ask her to do the next part, but I knew I would just have to re-organize if I didn’t make my request. I said, “And in the cases where I have a ton of books by the same author – like Madeleine L’Engle or L.M. Montgomery–” Ann Marie finished the sentence, “Organize by publication date. Got it.”

I still have an image of Ann Marie surrounded by a mound of L.M. Montgomery books, flipping each one open to the copyright page to check the publication date. Glorious friends!!

Ex Libris is one of my cherished volumes, because it was a gift from my father, and it provided us with many hours of things to talk about. So thank you, Anne Fadiman.

Here is an excerpt from the first essay in the collection, ‘Marrying Libraries’.

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, ‘Marrying Libraries’, by Anne Fadiman

A few months ago, my husband and I decided to mix our books together. We had known each other for ten years, lived together for six, been married for five. Our mismatched coffee mugs cohabited amiably; we wore each other’s T-shirts and, in a pinch, socks; and our record collection had long ago miscegenated without an incident, my Josquin Desprez motets cozying up to George’s Worst of Jefferson Airplane, to the enrichment, we believed, of both. But our libraries had remained separate, mine mostly at the north end of our loft, his at the south. We agreed that it made no sense for my Billy Budd to languish forty feet from his Moby Dick, yet neither of us had lifted a finger to bring them together.

We had been married in this loft, in full view of our mutually quarantined Melvilles. Promising to love each other for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health – even promising to forsake all others – had been no problem, but it was a good thing the Book of Common Prayer didn’t say anything about marrying our libraries and throwing out the duplicates. That would have been a far more solemn vow, one that would probably have caused the wedding to grind to a mortifying halt. We were both writers, and we both invested in our books the kind of emotion most people reserve for their old love letters. Sharing a bed and a future was child’s play compared to sharing my copy of The Complete Poems of W.B. Yeats, from which I had once read “Under Ben Bulben” aloud while standing at Yeats’s grave in the Drumcliff churchyard, or George’s copy of T.S. Eliot’s Selected Poems, given to him in the ninth grade by his best friend, Bob Farnsworth, who inscribed it “Best Wishes from Gerry Cheevers.” (Gerry Cheevers, one of Rob’s nicknames, was the goalie of the Boston Bruins, and the inscription is probably unique, linking T.S. Eliot and ice hockey for the first time in history.)

Our reluctance to conjugate our Melvilles was also fueled by some essential differences in our characters. George is a lumper. I am a splitter. His books commingled democratically, united under the all-inclusive flag of Literature. Some were vertical, some horizontal, and some actually placed behind others. Mine were balkanized by nationality and subject matter. Like most people with a high tolerance for clutter, George maintains a basic trust in three-dimensional objects. If he wants something, he believes it will present itself, and therefore it usually does. I, on the other hand, believe that books, maps, scissors, and Scotch tape dispensers are all unreliable vagrants, likely to take off for parts unknown unless strictly confined to quarters. My books, therefore, have always been rigidly regimented.

After five years of marriage and a child, George and I finally resolved that we were ready for the more profound intimacy of library consolidation. It was unclear, however, how we were to find a meeting point between his English-garden approach and my French-garden one. At least in the short run, I prevailed, on the theory that he could find his books if they were arranged like mine but I could never find mine if they were arranged like his. We agreed to sort by topic – History, Psychology, Nature, Travel, and so on. Literature would be subdivided by nationality. (If George found this plan excessively finicky, at least he granted that it was a damn sight better than the system some friends of ours had told us about. Some friends of theirs had rented their house for several months to an interior decorator. When they returned, they discovered that their entire library had been reorganized by color and size. Shortly thereafter, the decorator met with a fatal automobile accident. I confess that when this story was told, everyone around the dinner table concurred that justice had been served.)

So much for the ground rules. We ran into trouble, however, when I announced my plan to arrange English literature chronologically but American literature alphabetically by author. My defense went like this: Our English collection spanned six centuries, and to shelve it chronologically would allow us to watch the broad sweep of literature unfold before our very eyes. The Victorians belonged together; separating them would be like breaking up a family. Besides, Susan Sontag arranged her books chronologically. She had told The New York Times that it would set her teeth on edge to put Pynchon next to Plato. So there. Our American collection, on the other hand, was mostly twentieth century, much of it so recent that chronological distinctions would require Talmudic hairsplitting. Ergo, alphabetization. George eventually caved in, but more for the sake of marital harmony than because of a true conversion. A particularly bad moment occurred while he was in the process of transferring my Shakespeare collection from one bookcase to another and I called out, “Be sure to keep the plays in chronological order!”

“You mean we’re going to be chronological within each author?” he gasped. “But no one even knows for sure when Shakespeare wrote his plays!”

“Well,” I blustered, “we know he wrote Romeo and Juliet before The Tempest. I’d like to see that reflected in our shelves.”

George says that was one of the few times he has seriously contemplated divorce.

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The Slow Burn of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Posted on December 7, 2012 by sheila

Taking place over one long 24-hour period, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, winner of the Grand Prize at Cannes, directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, tells the story of a police unit driving endlessly through the monotonous grandeur of the Anatolian steppe, looking for the dumping-ground of a murdered man. The headlights cut a beam through the black, revealing the vast surroundings. They carry the convicted murder with them, and it is he who is supposed to bring them to the spot. But everything looks the same out there, and it’s not even clear what “jurisdiction” certain areas are in, which causes much discussion between the cops, the Prosecutor, and the Army detail attached to the motorcade.

Borders are meaningless in such a landscape. They always have been in Anatolia, which has been a superhighway for centuries, millennia even, for various armies, rampaging hordes, and peoples on the move. It’s a giant land-mass that connects Asia to Europe. Here, in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, it is most definitely the main character in the film. There is something unknowable about such a landscape. It has seen much but it’s not telling its secrets. The policemen stare out into the waving grass, lit up by the headlights of their cars, searching for anything that might seem “off”, anything that might give a clue to where the murdered man lies. The waving grass and waving trees are almost confrontational in this context. They appear to be a living breathing entity, filled with withholding.

The pace of the film is slow. I do not say that as a criticism. I say that as an accurate assessment. I would also say that that is an accurate representation of the monotony of most police work. Police procedurals in film are often gripping thrillers, marked by A-ha moments, a crescendo of tension, and an explosive finish. But I imagine most policemen spend their days driving around, doing boring investigations, filing paperwork, and trying to get justice served to those who need it. The payoffs are few, the pace deadening. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia does not shy away from that.

We get to know the characters. There’s the hot-head Naci (Yilmaz Erdogan) who is in charge of the search, and irritated that they can’t find the dumping ground. It makes him look bad in front of the Prosecutor (the magnificent Taner Birsel). Naci fields hectoring phone calls from his wife, which embarrasses him, because he has to talk to her in front of his colleagues. He also needs a prescription filled, which he keeps mentioning to “the Doctor” (Muhammet Uzuner), the pathologist along for the ride for once they find the body. There is “Arab”, the cop at the wheel (Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan), who is a sounding-board for Naci, but has a deep well of something else going on, revealed in a giant closeup that shows tears coming to his eyes. There’s a soldier who clearly knows the area better than the rest, and answers questions about the borders (cutting through the middle of giant anonymous fields), but on some level you get the sense that in the hierarchy of the group, he’s seen as just a “grunt”, somewhat annoying because he doesn’t “know his place”. Another cop is married to a woman from a local village where they stop off to have a meal in the middle of the night. He appears to have feelings of shame about this and dislikes being teased about his wife.

Every man in the entourage brings his entire life experience to the search, and that experience is rarely expressed, but is there in the wind-filled eerie silence of the steppes. They all seem to be in communication with the landscape. It infuriates them, beckons them.

Firat Tanis plays the suspect, Kenan. Kenan is in handcuffs, in the back of the cop car, listening to the men banter about prosaic matters of the civilized world. He is a deeply shaken man. He seems to have emerged from Dante’s circle of hell. He has seen things that cannot be unseen. The film opens with a shot of Kenan, his sidekick, and the man who will eventually be murdered, laughing and drinking at a roadside garage. We don’t know what went down, what happened to change the laughing camaraderie into something catastrophic. Kenan has a sidekick, a blubbering fool who blurts out at one point that he was the one who did the killing. But Kenan is obviously the main suspect. There is a mystery here, one that will slowly unfold over the course of the film.



Mentioned in almost a throwaway (the camera isn’t even on the men conversing, but instead following the path of an apple bouncing down the slopes into a rushing stream), is the anxiety that this particular investigation is being watched by higher-ups and might inhibit entrance into the EU. Turkey’s status with the EU has been an ongoing controversy for decades. They made an official bid for membership in 1999, and negotiations and investigations have been ongoing ever since. It’s a complex issue, naturally, and in that one throwaway line (“This is the kind of stuff that will keep us from getting into the EU”), it is clear how the “EU thing” has seeped down into the national psyche. Even in a routine murder investigation, the progress of the entire nation appears to ride on how it all is handled. It’s on people’s minds.

Torture of the suspect is forbidden, according to the byzantine EU bylaws, and yet Naci can’t help himself, he wants to beat the truth out of Kenan (who is already bruised and battered from the beginning stages of the investigation).

Anatolia is a wild west environment, although less populated and wilder than the American wild west. Villages huddle in the crevices of hills, and the landscape feels post-apocalyptic and emptied out. Europe is crowded and urban comparatively. The investigators do their jobs, but there is the added anxiety of history pressing in on them, the history seeped into the ground of the steppe, a history of conquest, war, and endless parades of nations and peoples. Some lands are not meant to have borders. The petty bureaucracy of police procedure is a sign of modern life, of course, but what can it mean or signify when placed side by side with the history of magnificent Anatolia? Can it make a difference? And what difference, exactly? Once Upon a Time in Anatolia barely mentions these issues, and the one comment about the EU is what launched my own thoughts about it. It’s unbalancing, to be given so much time during a movie to think.

Slowly, almost by stealth, two characters step out from the pack. They are the Prosecutor (Taner Birsel) and the Doctor (Muhammet Uzuner). While the cops search the fields, these two stand back, by the cars, watching. Both are quiet men, watchful, focused. They do not make small talk like the others. Only when the body is found will they have a purpose here, and they know it. The long grass rustles in the night wind. The giant trees whip around against the black sky. The fields launch themselves up, in undulating hills, unmarked by street lamps of towns. Nothingness. Far in the distance, on a high hill, a night train goes by, and it is so remote as to be on the other side of the moon.

Seemingly to kill time, the Prosecutor tells a story to the Doctor, about a woman he heard of who predicted correctly the day of her own death. Death is on his mind, naturally, on a night like this one. The Doctor, a fox-faced man, still waters running deep, takes the story in. He thinks about it. He stares out into the night. He wonders out loud to himself if perhaps the woman had poisoned herself. There is a swelling of something else going on inside the Prosecutor. The Doctor’s words represent a difference in how one looks at life: Either events are random, or they are foreordained. The Prosecutor and the Doctor are on opposite poles of this philosophical debate. They keep coming back to the same conversation, with many interruptions, over the course of the film. The Prosecutor takes the story on faith, the Doctor treats it with skepticism and empiricism. There has to be a scientific explanation for this woman’s death.

Gradually, again as if by stealth, it becomes clear that this is the most important standoff in the film.

Meanwhile, the search goes on. At about 3 o’clock in the morning, tempers flaring high as the search reveals no results, the Prosecutor declares that they will drive to the next village and stop by the Mayor’s house to have a bite to eat.

There is then an extraordinary sequence when the search party, plus murder suspects, show up at the Mayor’s gated cottage, crouched beside a barn and a clothesline. Ercan Kesal plays Mukhtar the Mayor, and he is a comfortable-looking yet canny fellow, having his wife (who we never see) put out plates of food for the exhausted men, and honing in on the Prosecutor as the guy who could pull a few strings regionally in order to get the financing for a local morgue. Couldn’t the Prosecutor talk to someone? Surely he could. I loved Kesal’s performance because he does not grovel, he does not cower down before the big-city cops. He lives humbly, his home is a hovel, and he proudly offers what he has, but also has the smarts to know, “Well. As long as these guys are here, I better make my pitch.”

The electricity goes out. The Mayor apologizes repeatedly. The men gathered in the main room seem exhausted, depleted. Some of them nod off into naps. The Doctor sits by the window, staring out at the wild windy night.

Then, like a literal vision, the Mayor’s 14-year-old daughter (Cansu Demirci) emerges from the kitchen, holding an oil lamp and a tray of tea for the men. In a silent sequence, pregnant with unspoken feelings, she circulates through the darkness, the lamp lighting up her face, offering each man a glass of tea. One by one, they look up at her, and one by one, they are all startled out of torpor by the mere sight of her. It’s not her beauty. Or maybe it is. But there is more happening, and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia does not name what it is. Later, the Doctor says to the Prosecutor, in a tone of regret, how sad it is that such a creature would be stuck out here in the middle of nowhere, with no prospects, no future. But that can’t be all that is going on as one by one the men look up at this vision, of light, of sustenance, of youth and hope, and one by one, they are shaken up, they have to look twice, they stare up at her as though she has stepped out of a medieval triptych. Nobody speaks. She bears up under their gaze. She seems to mean something more than what she is: a young peasant girl in the middle of the steppe.

There are only two women who appear onscreen in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, the Mayor’s 14-year-old daughter and the wife of the murdered man, who shows up in the final sequence. Neither have any lines. They stand to the side of the action, and yet somehow they are central. The other woman in the film, the one we never see, but the one we can’t stop thinking about, is the one that the Doctor and the Prosecutor keep discussing, that supposedly hypothetical woman who predicted the day of her own death. When women are so noticeably absent, and noticeably silent, they grow in size and import. They are everywhere, and yet silent and withholding of their secrets. Like the landscape.

The murdered man is finally found and the motorcade heads back to town for the autopsy. Now, the Doctor can step forward in importance. Now he can assert his knowledge, and the superiority of science. He’s such a quiet man, though. He may be certain of what he knows, but his feelings about that certainty appear to be quite ambivalent.

The philosophical confrontation between The Doctor and The Prosecutor involving the ongoing parable about the woman who predicted her own death finally comes to a head, in a scene that is painful to watch, due to The Prosecutor’s leering rictus grin, covering up a universe of personal pain. There is no triumph in the moment for The Doctor. There is work to be done, a body to examine, a wife waiting to identify the body. The signposts of town (computer hookups, parking meters, drug stores), seem almost silly when compared to the insistence of the Anatolian steppe and the waving tall grass, the featurelessness of the grey fields.

James Joyce wrote, famously, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” These words are true for the Doctor, the Prosecutor, the tormented murder suspect, the young light-bearing angel, and indeed for everyone in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. It is that unspoken nightmare, never described, and the desire to be freed from it, that gives the film its slow agonizing burn.

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

The Books: Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, ‘Perfectly Frank’, by Joan Acocella

Posted on December 6, 2012 by sheila

On the essays shelf:

Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays by Joan Acocella.

Unlike a lot of poets, I feel that I know everything I need to know about Frank O’Hara by reading his work. He emerges, there, on the page, witty and deep and observational, his mind and heart moving towards tributes and celebrations, rather than complaining or angst. He was in New York City in the 50s, perhaps its Golden Age, and you can feel/hear the landscape clattering around his poems, the sense of brightness, possibility, life, bustle. Nights in the jazz clubs, days on 2nd Avenue, breakfast diners, and movie theatres. Frank O’Hara was not a native New Yorker, but he took to it. It made him possible. A gay man, who had been in the Navy, who had been a bit of a serious precocious prude growing up, he went to Harvard on the G.I. Bill. But he found it stifling, met a couple of other artists there, and eventually moved to New York.

New York set him free. He found his “tribe”. He hung out with painters, writers, dancers, musicians. Some were gay, some were not. But the fact of sexuality was less important in an artistic atmosphere. There, he could be free. He celebrated people. People valued his opinion. He had gotten a job as a cashier at MoMA and eventually (which speaks to his ingenuity and ambition) worked his way up to being a curator. He curated some very important shows there. This is a man who died at 41 in a freak accident on Fire Island. He crammed in a lot of life while he was here. And you can feel that voraciousness, that desire to live, that happiness to be alive, in his poems.

O’Hara wrote poems when he could. On his lunch break. At parties. He would forget where he put them. He would only have one copy. He died young, so after his death newly discovered poems started pouring in – he had given one to a friend, he had ripped out a page in his notebook and it was discovered somewhere – He treated poetry as part of the rhythm of his life . He was very conscious of what he was doing. He was not just a naive guy a-goggle at the wondrousness of life and the movies and jazz. He thought about what he was doing. He was highly read. He just thought that while you were here on this planet, you might as well enjoy yourself. This is not a pose that is respected amongst poets (and is one of the reasons why critics sometimes pooh-poohed him. They failed to see the seriousness behind what he was doing. Unless you wear your seriousness and misery on your sleeve, then your poetry isn’t “important”, or some such nonsense.)

O’Hara wrote:

Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don’t give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and [Hart] Crane and [William Carlos] Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies.

I love him.

I love him because he makes me happy. In somewhat dark days, he is a gentle spirit, he is not insistently happy in a way that seems alien or off-putting. It’s just that he enjoys the bustle of life, and he finds things that are absurd and points them out, he is always looking, thinking, laughing.

Michael Schmidt, in his Lives of the Poets, makes the interesting point:

His casual attitude to his poems tells us much about him and them: it’s not that he didn’t value them, but he didn’t worry much about them after they were written. He was not especially interested in a final permanent text … He preferred to work with galleries, as though the poems were entries in an exhibition catalog, an exhibition made of his daily life.

Schmidt also writes, comparing him to the Beats, who were his contemporaries:

O’Hara begins with a rather witty, spoken simplicity, the poems in the language he used with his friends, wry, light, a little naughty, but without the scatalogical grittiness of the Beats. Ginsberg may have affected some of his poems, “Second Avenue” in particular, but while Ginsberg is always comfortably unwashed and hairy of face, O’Hara is cleanshaven and unobtrusive, keeping his own rather than everyone else’s counsel. There is a reticence about the man and the poems. In many ways he is closer to Whitman than Ginsberg ever gets; and to Lorca and Mayakovsky because he understands Futurism and Surrealism, and when his poetry surrealizes it is with a knowledge of what he wants the surreal to do for the poem. He doesn’t blunder and risk like Crane, or rant like Ginsberg. His poems are busy in the world; they haven’t the time to stand back and preach or invent monstrous forms. He is the most New York of the New York poets.

As an example of O’Hara at his best, here is a poem he wrote in 1964 about the day Billie Holiday died. (Mal Waldron, referenced in the poem, was Holiday’s pianist from 1957 until her death.)

The Day Lady Died

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
in Ghana are doing these days I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

Marvelous.

Joan Acocella’s essay on Frank O’Hara is one of the best things I’ve read about him. She writes about a biography (really the first one of O’Hara) by Brad Gooch, one she does not appear to like all that much, although she gives credit where credit is due. As is often the case with biographies, Gooch does not seem to understand how to talk about “the work”. Because O’Hara died young, because he was gay, there is a lot of retrospective analysis going on. (“He knew he was going to die, he was a martyr”, etc.) O’Hara, too, was not gay enough for Gooch, and Gooch scolds him in the text. O’Hara slept with women sometimes too, and this was labeled “self-denial”, when maybe it was just that O’Hara was the type of guy who loved sex and intimacy and it was a different day and age, and who are you to scold him? O’Hara wasn’t politically correct enough – he got annoyed by “queers” – etc. and Gooch doesn’t like that. Of course O’Hara wasn’t politically correct because he was a gay man in the 1940s and 50s not now. He’s also more broad-minded and more inclusive than your snippy little comments, Gooch! (I haven’t read Gooch’s book. I don’t have a leg to stand on. But I am annoyed by this type of analysis, especially when it is an artist I love.) Acocella understands why the focus on ONLY O’Hara’s sexuality. In our day and age, we are in a corrective atmosphere. For too long, for centuries, gay artists had to hide who they were, and their sexuality could never be mentioned. Now, the pendulum has swung, and an important thinker and artist like Frank O’Hara is reduced to who he slept with and how many times. Hopefully, we will find some balance eventually in our critical evaluation. O’Hara’s work is not about sex, although there is a sexiness to his rhythms, really informed by his love of jazz and the ballet. With all the chattiness, he has a great lyricism, and great descriptive power. How much do I wish that I lived in Frank O’Hara’s New York!!

He sounds like a lovely man. Someone I would have liked to know. I can’t say that about too many poets. I mean, I love Milton too, but I don’t think, “Damn, he and I would have been besties.”

At O’Hara’s funeral, one of his friends said that there were about 60 people there who introduced themselves as “Frank’s best friend.” That says something. That says that this was a man who knew how to connect, he knew how to listen, to be there for people. He had a gift of friendship. It’s really too bad he died so young. It would have been interesting to see where his writing would have gone to, had he lived. But still: we have a ton of his stuff still to enjoy.

Here are a couple of posts by my friend Ted about O’Hara:

New York as muse

Because too much was never enough for him

Here is an excerpt from Joan Acocella’s essay.

Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays, ‘Perfectly Frank’, by Joan Acocella

What [O’Hara] loved, he fostered. Important though he was as a curator and writer, he was probably more influential in the art world simply as a hand-holder, an encourager. He would look at his friends’ work and tell them what it was, and how wonderful it was. As Kenneth Koch described it to Gooch, “they’d have all these wonderful ideas and feelings about themselves, and they’d say ‘Duh’, and Frank would say, ‘Yes, you put that green there. T hat’s the first interesting thing that’s been done since Matisse’s Number 267.'” Larry Rivers and Grace Hartigan notably thrived under his encouragement, and so did others. Edwin Denby, though he was twenty-three years older, said that O’Hara was a catalyst for him. “But then,” Denby added, “he was everybody’s catalyst.”

O’Hara’s fostering of other people’s work was all the more effective in that it was not, for him, a moral imperative, something he felt he should do, but something he did naturally. He was an instinctively generous person. At poetry readings, he routinely devoted large parts of his allotted time to reading the work of others – a rare practice. He was kind to the competition: of his circle of poets, he was practically the only one to hold out a hand to the Beats. On the few occasions when he went on record against another artist, it was usually for lack of generosity. He accused T.S. Eliot of having a “deadening” effect on modern poetry, primarily by laying down exclusionary rules: “saying you’re not supposed to read Milton, and so on … Which is ridiculous.” His widely quoted criticism of Robert Lowell, from an interview published in 1966, was aimed at the same fault: failure of goodwill. Commenting on Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” with its scene of the poet prowling in a lover’s lane, O’Hara said:

Lowell has … a confessional manner which [lets him] get away with things that are really just plain bad but you’re supposed to be interested because he’s supposed to be so upset … I don’t think that anyone has to get themselves to go and watch lovers in a parking lot necking in order to write a poem, and I don’t see why it’s admirable if they feel guilty about it. They should feel guilty.

O’Hara’s generosity toward the world sometimes has a certain proto-flower-power coloration: “Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!” one poem begins – but it is an early poem (1950). Over the years, his goodwill toughened, became more objective without becoming less good. Specifically, it was subsumed into what came to be the dominant attitude of all his mature writing, critical or poetic: attention. “Attention equals Life,” he wrote in his introduction to Denby’s 1965 essay collection, Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets. That was his praise of Denby – that he kept his eyes open – but the description fits O’Hara as well. And this amoral, almost anim al quality of attentiveness gives to O’Hara’s sweetness a sturdier character. What might have been sentimentality becomes large-mindedness, zest – a capacity for interest and enjoyment that can still, across the space of decades, suck us back into the minds-on-fire spirit of those years.

Posted in Books | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

“It’s a Beautiful Film, Beautifully Directed and Beautifully Written.” – Actor Giancarlo Esposito on Certainty

Posted on December 3, 2012 by sheila


Actor Giancarlo Esposito, director Peter Askin, screenwriter Mike O’Malley, NY premiere weekend of “Certainty”, at the Quad Cinema, Dec. 1, 2012

Certainty opened this week in New York City for a week-long run at The Quad cinema (purchase tickets here). It can also be purchased on iTunes, and is currently available on demand, and Amazon Instant Video.

The premiere was a lot of fun, with QAs following both screenings, on Friday and Saturday. Mike was there, as well as director Peter Askin, producer Will Battersby, production designer Dara Wishingrad, and actors Giancarlo Esposito, Tom Lipinski, and Kristen Connolly. They answered questions from the audience and the moderators. At one point during the screening of the film on Saturday, two people in the row ahead of me leaned forward at the same time. It was an intense moment in the film and it was a thrill to watch two random people engage so totally that they had to lean forward. Yes, you want to lean in to this film.

Look out when O’Malleys get tribal. I am very proud of my cousin Mike, he has worked so hard, and it’s a thrill to watch this film in a packed house and hear both the uproarious laughter from the crowd as well as the total silence of an audience engaged with this material.

There were two QAs, and I have put together some of the questions and answers tackled below. I hope you enjoy it, and please seek out Certainty!


Actor Tom Lipinski and Mike O’Malley, “Certainty” premiere at the Quad, Nov. 30, 2012

PETER ASKIN (director): Mike and I worked on it first as a play. We always thought it should be a film. It took a while to get through the process of adapting the play into a screenplay. A while being 5 or 6 years. Originally, we did a very small production of it in Los Angeles. We decided to take the script around to pitch it and that was interesting.

MIKE O’MALLEY: Yeah, you can imagine what the pitch for this story sounds like: “There’s this couple, and there’s a pre-Cana – do you know what pre-Cana is? There are 40 million Catholics in this country … then there’s a brother-in-law and he gets lost at the Javits Center …” It was a 45-minute pitch. It didn’t go well. We had an opportunity to sell it to Universal but Peter and I really enjoyed working on the play together and we knew that if we were to sell the script – we’d been around long enough to know that we wouldn’t have been involved at the end. The biggest part of the process was getting it adapted from the play into a screenplay.

PETER ASKIN: In some ways it’s harder when you have the script exist in a different form because you get locked into certain things. The play begins with the engagement and then jumps six months later to the pre-Cana. But we didn’t have the second act between the engagement and the revelation of Deb reading the journal. I’ve worked on enough screenplays by now to know that if something doesn’t work you’re going to find out in the second act. And it took quite a while to find out what the second act was.

MIKE O’MALLEY: In the play, there was no acting teacher, there were no other couples at pre-Cana, there was no mother in the play, and the Roddy character was a lot bigger. We so lucked out in getting Giancarlo Esposito to play the priest. Anybody who’s been around independent film knows that we had an immense amount of material to shoot and a very small amount of time. And many of the younger actors in the film are great but they hadn’t done movie after movie after movie. Now they’ve gone on, all of them, to do a lot more but I was very nervous because Peter and I had gone over every ellipses in the script, and I didn’t want any ad-lib, improvisation, or paraphrasing. And so Giancarlo shows up and is not blowing any takes, is not dropping any lines, not dropping any words – and it really put the other actors on their game. In a movie like this, you often have a lot of people goofing around, chit-chatting in between takes, but these actors really put their nose to the grindstone and it’s because of Giancarlo and the tone he set.


Giancarlo Esposito as Father Heery

PETER ASKIN: I had seen this material work onstage but it really wasn’t until we started shooting and Giancarlo had that opening scene in the chapel where there was a sense of relief that this would work as a film, too.

GIANCARLO ESPOSITO: For me, it’s always very important to honor what the writer has written and give that all of my heart and soul, to allow the writer and the director to hear a voice put to those words, to give them an opportunity to hear it and know if it works, before I take any liberty to try to put my ego into it, or my brain even into it. I had experience with the Catholic church, some good, a lot bad, in my growing up, but it was all truthful in the script. If it’s truthful on the page, then I know it will be truthful inside of me. Seeing the movie again tonight really moved me because we’re all on a journey to discover where we connect, not only through our spiritual or religious beliefs, but where we connect to ourselves. There is a deep connection that resounds in this film. I think it’s a beautiful film, beautifully directed and beautifully written.

MIKE O’MALLEY: I didn’t necessarily have the negative Catholic upbringing but you cannot have been alive in the last 15 years and not have a somewhat negative point of view for how much of the Catholic church has run itself and how it has behaved, all of their well-noted despicable behavior. That being said, you are raised in a certain faith, and it is the cornerstone of all you have experienced. So it was very important for me to have at the center of this film a character like Father Heery who was not unlike several priests that I knew, who got involved with the church because they had a religious experience, and their job was to help people in their struggles and to be there for people in their triumphs and losses. There are those people out there and I wanted to give tribute to those kinds of men. They’re still there nowadays, even though they’re painted with the brush that some of their brethren have been painted with, but they’re still showing up, trying to do their work, and live their beliefs. I just wanted to show a guy who was still trying to do that, trying to help people. I love in the film where he leans in to the couple and he says, “It’s okay to try hard and it’s okay to feel like you’re trying hard.” Ultimately, that is what the film is about and what I wanted it to be about. You’re able to say to someone, “Yeah, you’re having a tough time right now. That’s okay. Just because you’re having a tough time and you’re working hard on your relationship, don’t think it’s not worth continuing to work on it.” It doesn’t mean that everything should always be easy.

Audience: What was the inspiration for the script?

MIKE O’MALLEY: My sister went to her pre-Cana and she said, “You gotta write a play about this.” There’s a lot of inter-faith couples that go to Engagement Encounters so she was there at her pre-Cana with a couple – the guy was Catholic, the woman was not, and the woman was like, “What is with all the crosses? It’s creeping me out!” The pre-Cana takes place 2 or 3 months before a couple gets married and this woman doesn’t even know what a crucifix is. Maybe this is stuff you should talk about as a couple! I love the Awareness game in the film where it starts off with a question about how you squeeze the tube of toothpaste, but then it graduates to: “Would you be willing to move to advance your spouse’s career?” This happens all the time to couples: what is more important, the relationship or your work? And it always has to come down to the relationship. And sometimes somebody has to give and somebody has to take. That was the germ of the idea.

Audience: About the lighter elements coming in: How as writers, directors, actors – how do you navigate these moments of lightness, of humor, versus maintaining the integrity of this very critical issue that you’re dealing with, of love, of dedication, of faith?


Tom Lipinski and Adelaide Clemens at pre-Cana in “Certainty”

MIKE O’MALLEY: There are four different lines that are the essence of the story for me.
One of them is when Giancarlo says, “It’s okay to try hard and it’s okay to feel like you’re trying hard.”
Another one is the question that Betsy [Kristen Connolly] asks, “How do you go from a vow to a shrug?” It’s certainly a valid question and one I want to avoid in my own marriage.
Then there is also the fact that wanting love and wanting something that lasts and wanting something that’s true is a worthwhile yearning, it’s worthwhile to talk about, it’s worthwhile to talk to your friends about it, it’s not stupid shit, it’s not “angst”, it’s not bad to want to talk it out.
And then when Dom says at the end of the movie, “I don’t want to be the same old story.” I think that’s what all of us feel. We don’t want to be someone who allows anything that’s emotional in our lives to up-end our lives, or anything that’s adolescent or juvenile or not well thought-out to lead our lives to some self-inflicted mistake that if we just pasued a few minutes more, or paused a couple weeks and thought about it, our lives would be happier. The hardest parts about life as you get older are the self-inflicted wounds.

GIANCARLO ESPOSITO: How did we get to that from the comedy question?

Audience: That’s what I’m saying! You have this thing you want to tackle as a writer or a filmmaker and you go: “How do I do this? How do I put it in a context that’s palatable?”

PETER ASKIN: I know I certainly listen better where there’s humor. The best material, the most serious subjects, the most heartfelt things – the most effective way of delivering that material is often interlaced with humor. It gives you a chance to breathe through it. There are moments towards the end, like with the old lady in the physical therapy pool. That scene wasn’t there, originally. It came much earlier, but that moment with Dom and Deb is so relentlessly sad, in a way, that you can feel it in the audience. There is a palpable sense of relief when the old lady says, “Let’s get this shit over with.” Also, that’s where she is in her life as well. For young people, self-absorption or concerns for the future, is age-appropriate but as soon as you get to my age and older, you just want to get the exercise and live another day.
I want to mention something else about this material which has been here from the very beginning. There is something that I love about Mike’s material here which is the discussion about faith, and I’m not just talking about religious faith. There’s a secular faith where Dom asks Deb, “Why can’t you have faith in me?” Dom is someone who has given up on religious faith and built his own house of faith based on good works. If I try hard enough, if I can do enough good for other people, that should be enough. And what he finally learns, which is the most hopeful thing in the film, try as hard as he will, you can’t control other people’s feelings. So when he says at the end, “I don’t know”, it is probably the most hopeful thing he has said in the film. Maybe they will have a chance because he is going to stop trying to control everything.


Tom Lipinski as Dom

Audience: I thought that the cast was amazing and I just wanted to know a bit about the casting process, how you guys found all of these young people. They were awesome, everyone was awesome.

PETER ASKIN: Obviously, with someone like Giancarlo, you make the offer and you hope. Giancarlo’s involvement was a light shining on the production. But the rest of the cast were just auditions. Some people we know, as good New York working actors. The other people – like Tom Lipinski – we found through an audition. Adelaide Clemens, I saw a tape of something else she had done. Kristen Connolly and Will Rogers – again, auditions.

MIKE O’MALLEY: Doug Aibel cast it and Will Battersby is one of the producers, he’s here tonight, and he is a big big part of everything that has to do with this film.

Audience: One of the most awesome things about the film is that it’s funny, but it’s also poignant and profound, and I remember when I saw it – one of my favorite lines is when she says, “How do you go from a vow to a shrug?” There is a comedic element but at the same time it’s so profound. I wanted to ask you what your writing process was like with this film and how you were able to balance the profundity and comedy.

MIKE O’MALLEY: Peter did such a great job. I was only on the set for two of the days that we shot this film. You just picked out my favorite line. When I saw the dailies of Kristen’s performance of that line, it really struck me. At the heart of it, that’s really what I wanted to get at: How do you go from a vow to a shrug? It’s like when the priest asks the question at the beginning of the movie: “Who here has said ‘I love you’ to someone other than the person you’re getting married to?” And only one couple raises their hands. People yearn for marriage and companionship and long-term commitment with someone, and they love that feeling of being in love with someone. You go through your life and you’re going to be challenged, it’s going to be difficult. So I was thinking, If two individuals can’t make a commitment to one another, and if they can’t find a way to make that commitment work, then we’re screwed. Then the community can’t do that, the city, the country…. Peter is really really good at comedy and also getting to the root of what I was trying to get at. The cast is terrific. What was really nice about this screening today for me is – I’ve seen screenings of the film in different parts of the country, and there is a very East Coast way that people banter with one another, and the actors kept it so real. It’s a thrill.

Audience: Peter, can you talk a little bit about what made you decide this is the story I want to tell, and these are the people I want to tell it with.

PETER ASKIN: I think the thing for me what I like about Mike and his writing is the humanity. He tackles weighty subjects. But he does it in a very authentic way. Maybe Tom can speak to this. It’s easy for actors to say Mike’s lines, because it rings as authentic. There’s an argument that Dom and Debbie have, where Dom says, “Why can’t you have faith in me?” This distinction between faith and trust and truth has always come back to me as the heart of the film. You can see in their argument that they both have valid points of view. When I have watched screenings of this, and I watch audiences go out, you can see that there’s a conversation that’s gonna be had after this material has been seen. Dom is someone whose faith had betrayed him, so he constructed his own secular house of faith built on good works. He takes care of his sister, he gives her money for acting lessons, he gives his brother-in-law good advice, he worries about his mother, he gets a job helping people. Why doesn’t this add up for him as someone who is deserving to be trusted? There’s a lot in Mike’s work that rings really true in people’s lives.

Audience: Was that scary for you as actors? The words are fantastic and there is a great authenticity in them but when you’re an actor, sometimes portraying authenticity is scary. Can you talk a little bit about that?

TOM LIPINSKI: When we were filming this, I had been dating my girlfriend at the time for four years, and I am now married … to said woman. [Laughter] It wasn’t that far afield from what anybody our age, or anybody of any age really, goes through when they’re in a relationship. About what Mike said about how it was adapted from a play: I think that was what really attracted me to these characters and to the script. When relationship films are shot now, arguments are usually a one-liner here, one-liner there, and maybe some cuts of glowering – but this – the arguments are borne out and the issues are elucidated and you see all sides. Arguments aren’t one person’s right and the other person’s wrong. Certainty is more truthful in terms of what’s going on in these people’s lives. And that makes an actor’s job very easy.


Kristen Connolly as Betsy

KRISTEN CONNOLLY: There are so many scripts you read, especially as a young actor, about relationships, that are either really gross, or over-simplified, and that don’t give credence to what people are really going through or working through at this time in our lives. I grew up Catholic and when I read the script, a lot of it was very familiar to me. I was just so excited to see so many roles that felt so real and were treated so respectfully by the writer. It’s wonderful to see it onscreen. This is the first time I’ve seen it. When I read it I remember feeling, “Wow, this is a real movie about real people” and I was so excited to be involved in it.

Audience: (to Dara Wishingrad, production designer) Could you talk about how the script informed how you did the production design?

DARA WISHINGRAD: For me, it’s always about the characters and the story. That’s what drives me and inspires me. Working with the locations, and working with Peter and what his visual storytelling was about and how we would develop the characters – there were lots of happy accidents. The beautiful magic that happens, the synchronicity that happens with films.

PETER ASKIN: Dara had extraordinary challenges. When you talk about a house having to be beautiful, we couldn’t afford beautiful.

MIKE O’MALLEY: Dom’s mother’s house is out in Fort Totten. This house, when I walked into it – it was like –

TOM LIPINSKI: Baron van Helsing’s house.

MIKE O’MALLEY: Raccoons were living there. You cannot believe what Dara did with that house. She is spectacular.

Audience: I love the location stuff. How did you determine where to shoot it? Where was the church, the dormitories?

MIKE O’MALLEY: Our producer Will Battersby is the reason this thing got done. He can answer that.

WILL BATTERSBY: Basically I said to the line producer: we need one place where we can shoot Rhode Island, New York City, we can do Christmas, we need the house, we need the campus – and he actually said, “I know the perfect place.”The first place he took us to was Fort Totten, which is a Civil War army base in Queens. It’s a public park. There’s a church on the grounds, there are all the old officers’ houses. We gave Dara a derelict house to rebuild as the mother’s house. The hall Deb’s parents take them to was the basement of a building there. We had no money to move around and find different locations, so that’s how we did it.

Audience: My question is for Mike. You are a busy man, I can imagine. When did you have time to sit down with this idea and write the screenplay?

MIKE O’MALLEY: Between the time that we finished the play and the time that we started shooting the film – a 6 or 7 year period – my wife and I had three kids. So it was really just whenever I had time. It was hard. Peter was very patient. The problem with adapting a piece that you really care about is that it’s very hard for you to let go of material that you already know works. Roddy was a much bigger character in the play. As was Melissa. So their storyline was bigger. Now that I’ve written my first screenplay, it’s less hard to cut stuff, and I get it. I think the very difficult thing about writing is that until you’re given a hard deadline, really all the drafts mean is that you’re going to have to write it over again. It’s exasperating. Every time I pass a script in, I expect someone will say, “Great. Don’t change a thing!”


Mike O’Malley and his wife Lisa at the Los Angeles premiere of “Certainty”

Audience: How much cost-cutting happened – editorially?

PETER ASKIN: Quite a bit. We deconstructed the story. For example, as I mentioned, when Dom leaves pre-Cana, we had shot that scene with the old lady in the swimming pool. It came much earlier originally, it had been placed chronologically. But Mike had these glimpses written in, some of which were kept, some of which didn’t make it, and others which we moved around. A lot of it was about finding the rhythm. It can get pretty emotional, so at the end when Dom is on the bus, we cut back to the old lady, bringing her back in, and giving us a laugh at a point where we needed to breathe a bit. Also, there was this whole idea that Dom was infatuated with someone else and there we get a glimpse of what did or didn’t happen – after the fact, when it’s too late except for us to know emotionally what might be true. And once we had the structure of pre-Cana, we had the liberty of cutting away from it, and jumping back in time.

Audience: About Giancarlo’s performance. I did 12 years of Catholic school and my experience was not good. Any time I have to see any kind of treatment of the Catholic church my back goes up. This is the second time I’ve seen the film and Giancarlo, your performance was such a relief – it was such a relief to watch someone who was really in it for real. You got it. Were you brought up Catholic?

GIANCARLO ESPOSITO: I was. I was an altar boy at a young age. My father is from Italy and he eventually became an agnostic. I wound up going to the Vatican with him and he’s a great history buff and he told me all about the Swiss Guards, but he didn’t want to come inside. I said, “You gotta come in, I flew us both over, you gotta come to the Vatican.” He said, [thick Italian accent] “Oh Giancarlo, no, I’m not coming in …” He knew I had a great devotion to spirituality and religion all of my life but he had sort of dropped out of that. Eventually I did get him inside.
I’ve studied a lot of other faiths. I believe that they’re all connected. I believe we’re on one path. It was a breath of fresh air to play this character. I believe in the truth of these words and the truth of what was being passed on. I have observed, as we all have, what’s gone on in the Catholic church over the years, and it’s a great sadness to me, but it doesn’t take away the underlying lesson of connection that we get.
We’re all in different places in every moment of our life, every day, and today I got sucked in again because there was something for me, tonight, right now, that’s present in my life that I needed to see again. Some things that really resounded for me tonight in watching the film were moments that Mike has already mentioned. It’s okay if it’s hard, it’s okay, you don’t have to run from that. Part of me is a runner, part of me does not want to confront my own self, or being confronted with those big issues.
After that scene with the priest, Dom goes back up and gets that booklet again and starts over. Isn’t that what our lives are all about all the time? He hands her a booklet, he takes one, he starts all over again. That was really something that I am going to take away tonight. It’s okay to start over. It doesn’t mean you failed, it doesn’t mean you need to stuff it under the rug. It means that you can look forward again. I’m just telling you what I got from it and I’m in the damn movie! It’s pretty fabulous to me.
I believed in this material and I believed in the natural flow in which it is put out there. I also believe in the lighter element of what’s happening here. “How are we fucking up your shit?” the priest says to Dom. That’s a great moment, it gives a human-ness to us all that allows us to be available for each other. It’s displayed, it’s palpable onscreen. So this is one of my favorite movies of all time.

Showtimes for Certainty at The Quad Cinema.

Additionally, it can be viewed on demand, as well as purchased on iTunes. Or you can view it on Amazon Instant Video.

Here is my review of Certainty.

Here is my QA with cousin Mike O’Malley about Certainty.

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

Diary Friday: “17 says that a hearty laugh is equal to a 3-mile run. If that is so, then why am I not anorexic?

Posted on November 30, 2012 by sheila

Here’s one from my sophomore year in high school. It’s mortifying to share this. And being mortified publicly is what I’m all about.

JANUARY 7

J. came home with me today. I cannot explain the fun. [And then I proceed to “explain the fun”.]

17 says that a hearty laugh is equal to a 3-mile run. If that is so, then why am I not anorexic?

We watched GH [those initials should need no explanation] and almost cried when Noah hurt Tiffany. [hahahaha Noah!!!!]

We went up to my room and oddly enough we talked seriously for a long time. About prejudice and the Ku Klux Klan. [Like I said in the first paragraph – “I cannot explain the fun”: the FUN of discussing the KKK!] I am terrified of those men. I have horrible nightmares and I hate them so much. How — HOW can someone not like someone because – OF THE COLOR OF THEIR SKIN!!! Or their religion? It is totally unfathomable to me. And it makes me so mad. I could never put the feelings into words. It really really scares me.

We were called downstairs at 5:30 and I had 3 pieces of pizza!!! [Hence, the lack of anorexia.]

I am so ashamed.

We left right after for Tootsie.

Guess who was there? Mere, Beth, Michelle and Jayne! We all sat together. I think it was better the second time, because I knew what to expect – and none of the lines flew by me. When Bill Murray said, “You slut” – I swear, Mere and I were leaning over, holding our stomachs, and just LAUGHING. It was great.

When we got home, J. and I went into the den and – I revealed some deep secrets – and I could NOT believe that she did the same thing. I really must sound desperate but, at times, I do pretend that I have a boyfriend. When I’m alone, I act out imaginary scenes with him, and fights, and I turn on Barry Manilow music when we make up. [That is literally the funniest most embarrassing thing I have ever heard in my life.] I lie in bed and pretend that we’ve just made love. I swear, I am in need of a dildo. [I cannot BELIEVE I even knew that word. ??????? I am shocked at my younger self. But yes, Sheila, you should get one. Pronto. Trust me.]

We were laughing so hard though because we both do the SAME things and we never knew about it! I kept going, “I feel as if a great weight has been taken off my shoulders!” We compared stories and laughed endlessly because J. said, “Well, my purple pillow is my boyfriend,” and I said, “Well, my backrest is really good cause it sort of has arms.” We laughed about that for about 15 minutes. I tell you, I’m laughing now!!! J. kept saying it: “It sort of has arms!” I can’t believe that I actually told someone my deep dark secret and found that she did it too. We were lying on the floor in the den, ROARING. But of course we both laugh silently. If anyone had listened at the door, they wouldn’t have even thought we were in there.

At 1:00, we were still up – so we watched a Barbra Streisand movie that was on: “Owl and the Pussycat.” We were dying laughing at her outfit with the handprints on her boobs.

And now, the sun is “spitting morning” into my face. BYE!

Posted in Diary Friday | 9 Comments

New Yorkers (and Others): Certainty Coming to Town

Posted on November 29, 2012 by sheila

Some exciting news about Certainty, the film written by my cousin Mike O’Malley, starring Giancarlo Esposito, Valerie Harper, Bobby Moynihan and a host of others, is opening in New York City tomorrow night. You can check out the schedule at the Quad Cinema and purchase tickets. QA following the Friday and Saturday night screenings with Mike O’Malley, director Peter Askin, and actors Giancarlo Esposito and Tom Lipinski.

Additionally, it can be viewed on demand, as well as purchased on iTunes.

Here is my review of Certainty.

Here is my QA with cousin Mike O’Malley about Certainty.

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

The Egyptian Orwellian

Posted on November 28, 2012 by sheila

I have written before about my long and sometimes emotional conversations with cab drivers. I love them and look forward to them. A Sikh told me he loved me and our drive had been so satisfying and DEEP that I actually told him I loved him back. That’s the level we’re talking about and it happens to me all the time. Tonight was cold so I took a cab uptown. My driver was from Egypt and we spent some time chatting about Egypt – he had a beautiful thick accent – and he told me about his old home in Alexandria and how much he loves America. Then conversation inevitably turned to the Powerball Lottery which is currently at 550 million bucks or whatever. We started fantasizing about what we would do with the money. And we had the following word-for-word exchange.

He started it off with:

“The thing to do is to remain discreet.”
“Yeah, I agree.”
“People mess up all the time with this.”
“Or family members come out of the woodwork with hands out.”
“I would invest in a hotel. And make my whole family go to business school to run my hotel.”
“That sounds very high-maintenance.”
“I will say, ‘You go to culinary school’ and ‘You go to business school’–”
“What if someone wants to be a violinist?”

We start laughing. Then he said:

“Just put most of it away. Invest it.”
“That would definitely be the smart thing to do.”
“Don’t change your lifestyle.”
“See, I would be a horrible candidate for this Powerball thing.”
“Why, miss?”
“Because I would immediately travel the world and buy a bunch of vintage Cadillacs and stuff like that.”
“No, you can’t do that.”
“I won’t be able to help myself.”
“You should keep your job, miss.”
“If I win this thing, I would totally quit my job.”

More laughter.

“Just be smart and invest. Live off the interest. That’s what I would do.”

Then a radio show came on, with a financial advisor telling you what to do if you win: “Put most of it away. Invest it.”

He said triumphantly, “See? I don’t need their advice.”
“You sure don’t. Me? I’m buying a house in Ireland and a 57 Cadillac.”
“You can come work in my hotel.”
“I am so not coming to work in your hotel!”

Then there was a long pause. I asked, “So, you gonna buy a Lottery ticket?”
He replied immediately: “No. After I read 1984, I never bought a lottery ticket again.”

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Stuff I’ve Been Reading

Posted on November 28, 2012 by sheila

— Interesting article, considering all of the excerpts I have done recently from Joan Acocella’s essays. Acocella has written a slim biography (sort of) of Willa Cather, expanding upon a notorious piece she wrote in The New Yorker about Cather in which she basically excoriated post-modern lit-crit for ruining and marginalizing Cather’s vast sweep of work, which cannot be classified in a genre, or co-opted by special interest groups. One of my pet topics, so I am interested to read the book. But I really liked this observation about Acocella’s writing:

Perhaps because of her background in dance – she has written a wonderful book on Mark Morris and edited an unexpurgated version of Nijinsky’s diaries[*] – Acocella locates herself, figuratively speaking, at a kind of middle distance from her subjects: as if she were watching them from a well-placed seat (perhaps thirty or forty feet away?) in a spacious auditorium. This vantage point, it is true, allows for an occasional focus on individuals, but what come across far more strikingly are larger, more abstract patterns of movement – a choreography, so to speak, of human effects. Reviewing the history of Cather scholarship over the past seventy-five years, Acocella tracks the shifts of critical fashion almost diagrammatically – as a set of temporary formations, each with its distinctive advances and retreats, signature turns and obsessional gestures, all kinesthetically linked to social and intellectual changes in American culture at large.

— Good piece. And a resounding “Yup” to this:

A hundred and fifty years has not been long enough to throw off this association: of the masculine with the serious, the feminine with the frivolous. And it is this original schism — original sin — that simmers beneath every article extolling the virtues of print and lamenting the waning of its empire. For what was it that made magazines so good, anyway? What was their private and singular claim to the truth, and the authority to tell it? That they were not like the stuff women read, or wrote.

— John Banville on The Book of Kells:

Reading this, one’s deplorably feckless imagination wanders back through the smoke of the centuries to that frail little isle afloat in the wild Atlantic, where in a stone beehive hut a lonely scribe, hunched with quill in hand over his sheet of vellum, halts suddenly as he spots a mistranscription, claps a hand to his brow and utters whatever might have been the monastic equivalent of “Oh, shit!”

— A superb memoir-type piece about a neighborhood, the battered Rockaways in Queens. (Note to everyone: there are still areas in NY and NJ that do not have power, heat, or water. It is, as the article notes, completely under-reported – and in some cases un-reported. Why this is the case is irrelevant. Please consider donating, if you haven’t already. There are links at the bottom of that post, as well as – well, come on. You know what to do. People need help. Donate. This is a month of fund raisers. I am already attending two.) The Rockaways piece is long, but settle in, grab a drink, and go on his journey. It’s my kind of writing.

— I read Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl in a feverish 24-hour period. My mother had been reading it, and then I started hearing everyone talking about it, and so while I was home for Thanksgiving I borrowed it. Started reading it. And actually resented any social activity or obligation I had to fulfill at that time because it took me from away from finishing the book as quickly as humanly possible. It’s that kind of book. To say more would, indeed, be to ruin it. A superb thriller, psychological study, whodunit, featuring not just one, but TWO, unreliable narrators.

Posted in Miscellania | Tagged | 9 Comments

Beale Street’s Done Gone Dry

Posted on November 27, 2012 by sheila

It’s my birthday, and November is set in a minor key anyway. Memphis beckons again (I’ll be there in a month), so thought I’d share an excerpt from a wonderful book I’m reading, by Stanley Booth: Rythm Oil: A Journey Through The Music Of The American South. In the chapter on Furry Lewis, the author describes Furry Lewis’ job as a street-sweeper on Beale.

Furry Lewis, of course, was in the wave of first blues performers in the 1920s, who then were rediscovered, basically, with the advent of rock and roll in the 1950s. He lived for years in obscurity, except for the locals, who knew who he was, and Booth paints a riveting and haunting portrait of this one-legged guy, walking up and down Beale Street with his broom in 1966. There’s no tragedy here, except for far underneath, the deep strain of racism and oppression and poverty that runs through his tale. Furry’s attitude is not tragic. He is a survivor.

While the piece is about Furry, it’s really about the history of Beale Street.

Excerpt from Rythm Oil: A Journey Through The Music Of The American South, by Stanley Booth

Furry has been working for the City of Memphis Sanitation Department since 1923. Shortly after two o’clock each weekday morning, he gets out of bed, straps on his artificial leg, dresses and makes a fresh pot of coffee, which he drinks while reading the Memphis Press-Scimitar. The newspaper arrives in the afternoon, but Furry does not open it until morning. Versie is still asleep, the paper is company for him as he sits in the kitchen under the harsh light of the ceiling bulb, drinking the hot, sweet coffee. He does not eat breakfast; when the coffee is gone, he leaves for work.

The sky is black. The alley is quiet, the apartments dark. A morning-glory vine hanging from a guy-wire stirs like a heavy curtain in the cool morning breeze. Cars in the cross alley are covered with a silver glaze of dew. A cat flashes between shadows.

Linden Avenue is bright and empty in the blue glare of the street lamps. Down the street, St. Patrick’s looms, a sign, 100 YEARS WITH CHRIST, over its wide red doors. Furry, turning right, walks past the faded, green-glowing bay windows of an apartment house to the corner. A moving-van rolls past. There is no other traffic. When the light changes, Furry crosses, heading down Hernando. The clock at Carodine’s Fruit Stand and Auto Service reads, as it always does, 2:49.

The cafes, taverns, laundries, shoe-repair shops and liquor stores are all closed. The houses, under shading trees, seem drawn into themselves. At the Clayborn Temple A.M.E. Church, the stained-glass windows gleam, jewel-like against the mass of blackened stone. A woman wearing a maid’s uniform passes on the other side of the street. Furry says good morning and she says good morning, their voices patiently weary. Beside the Scola Brothers’ Grocery is a sycamore, its branches silhouetted against the white wall. Furry walks slowly, hunched forward, as if sleep were a weight on his shoulders. Hand-painted posters at the Vance Avenue Market: CHICKEN BACKS 12 1/2c LB.; HOG MAWS, 15c; RUMPS, 19c.

Behind Bertha’s Beauty Nook, under a large, pale-leafed elm, there are twelve garbage cans and two carts. Furry lifts one of the cans on to a cart, rolls the cart out into the street and, taking the wide broom from its slot, begins to sweep the gutter. A large woman with her head tied in a kerchief, wearing a purple wrapper and gold house slippers, passes by on the sidewalk. Furry tells her good morning and she nods hello.

When he has swept back to Vance, Furry leaves the trash in a pile at the corner and pushes the cart, with its empty can, to Beale Street. The sky is gray. The stiff brass figure of W.C. Handy stands, one foot slightly forward, the bell of his horn pointing down, under the manicured trees of the deserted park. The gutter is thick with debris: empty wine bottles, torn racing forms from the West Memphis dog track, flattened cigarette packs, scraps of paper and one small die, white with black spots, which Furry puts into his pocket. An old bus, on the back of which is written in yellow print, LET NOT YOUR HEART BE TROUBLE, rumbles past; it is full of cotton choppers: their dark, solemn faces peer out the grimy windows. The bottles clink at the end of Furry’s broom. In a room above the Club Handy, two men are standing at an open window looking down at the street. One of them is smoking, the glowing end of his cigarette can be seen in the darkness. On the door to the club, there is a handbill: BLUES SPECTACULAR, CITY AUDITORIUM: JIMMY REED, JOHN LEE HOOKER, HOWLIN’ WOLF.

Furry pushes the garbage onto a flat scoop at the front of the cart, then goes to the rear and pulls a jointed metal handle, causing the scoop to rise and dump its contents into the can. The scoop is heavy; when he lets it down, it sends a shock from his right arm through his body, raising his left leg, the artificial one, off the ground. Across the street, in a chinaberry tree, a gang of sparrows are making a racket. Furry sweeps past two night clubs and then a restaurant, where, through the front window, large brown rats can be seen scurrying across the kitchen floor. A dirty red dog stands at the corner of Beale and Hernando, sniffing the air. A black soldier in a khaki uniform runs past, heading toward Main. The street lamps go off.

When Furry has cleaned the rest of the block, the garbage can is full and he goes back to Bertha’s for another. The other cart is gone and there is a black Buick parked at the curb. Furry wheels to the corner and picks up the mound of trash he left there. A city bus rolls past; the driver gives a greeting honk and Furry waves. He crosses the street and begins sweeping in front of the Sanitary Bedding Company. A woman’s high-heeled shoe is lying in the sidewalk. Furry throws it into the can. “First one-legged woman I see, I’ll give her that,” he says and, for the first time that day, he smiles.

At Butler, the next cross street, there is a row of large, old-fashioned houses set behind picket fences and broad, thickly leafed trees. The sky is pale blue now, with pink-edged clouds, and old men and women have come out to sit on the porches. Some speak to Furry, some do not. Cars are becoming more frequent along the street. Furry reaches out quickly with his broom to catch a windblown scrap of paper. When he gets to Calhoun, he swaps cans again and walks a block – past Tina’s Beauty Shop, a tavern called the Section Playhouse and another named Soul Heaven – to Fourth Street. He places his cart at the corner and starts pushing the trash toward it.

From a second-story window of a rooming-house covered with red brick-patterned tarpaper comes the sound of a blues harmonica. Two old men are sitting on the steps in front of the open door. Furry tells them good morning. ‘When you goin’ make another record?’ one of them asks. ‘Record?’ the other man, in a straw hat says. ‘That’s right,’ says the first one. ‘He makes them big-time records. Used to.’

Furry dumps a load into the cart, then leans against it, wiping his face and the back of his neck with a blue bandanna handkerchief.

Down the stairs and through the door (the old men on the steps leaning out of his way, for he does not slow down) comes the harmonica player. He stands in the middle of the sidewalk, eyes closed, head tilted to one side, the harmonica cupped in his hands. A man wearing dark glasses and carrying a white cane before him like a divining rod turns the corner, aims at the music, says cheerfully, ‘Get out the way! get off the sidewalk!’ and bumps into the harmonica player, who spins away, like a good quarterback, and goes on playing.

Furry puts the bandanna in his pocket and moves on, walking behind the cart. Past Mrs. Kelly’s Homemade Hot Tamales stand, the air is filled with a strong odor. Over a shop door, a sign reads: FRESH FISH DAILY.

Now the sky is a hot, empty blue, and cars line the curb from Butler to Vance. Furry sweeps around them. Across the street, at the housing project, children are playing outside the great blocks of apartments. One little girl is lying face down on the grass, quite still. Furry watches her. She has not moved. Two dogs are barking nearby. One of them, a small black cocker spaniel, trots up to the little girl and sniffs at her head; she grabs its forelegs and together they roll over and over. Furry starts sweeping and does not stop or look up again until he has reached the corner. He piles the trash into the can and stands in the gutter, waiting for the light to change.

For the morning, his work is done. He rolls the cart down Fourth, across Pontotoc and Linden, to his own block, where he parks it at the curb, between two cars. Then he heads across the street toward Rothschild’s grocery store, going to try to get some beer on credit.


Beale Street, Memphis, January 2012

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Beannacht

Posted on November 27, 2012 by sheila

It is my birthday and my sisters and I are crammed into one of the late-night clubs in Dublin, where everyone flocks when the regular pubs close. We can barely move. We clutch our beers, taking teeny sips, avoiding the spills as the crowd jostles us.

Jean bought a little Irish drum called a bodhran earlier in the day. We haven’t yet gone back to Siobhan’s dorm room, so Jean is forced to bring the bodhran into the club. She is very embarrassed and keeps talking about it.

“I can’t believe I have a drum in a nightclub.”

“I look like such a loser tourist with this drum.”

She instructs Siobhan and me, “If anyone asks, tell them I bought it for my nephew.” Of course no one asks. No one even notices.

Finally, Jean feels so persecuted by the imaginary judgmental Dublin night-clubbers she has created that she exclaims to them, “Yeah?? So WHAT? Yes. I have a drum. Okay? I have a drum. You got a problem with that?”

Earlier that day, we had driven to see the spirals of Newgrange. They upset me. Everything of any importance or resonance has happened millennia ago. An abyss between then and now. An abyss between the present moment and my ability to experience it. I love my sisters with an intensity that hurts my heart, but I do not know how to express it. I feel very alone.

An Irish guy approaches. In striking up random interesting conversations with strangers, the Irish have no equal. He has barely introduced himself before Jean brings her shame out into the light. She blurts at him aggressively, “Hey! Ya like my drum???” She doesn’t want to give him a chance to silently think she’s an idiot. She wants him to know that she already knows. He grins kindly at her and compliments her bodhran, unfazed. We shout above the insistent house music. I have trouble listening, still surrounded by the ghostly spirals north of Dublin. He asks us our itinerary and tells us we must go to Clonmacnoise. Jean shrieks, “We went yesterday!!” He tells us about his years in Australia, his sister with Down’s Syndrome.

“I moved back ’cause I’d like to be closer to my brothers and sisters, y’know?”

His words cut me, standing as I am, beside my dear sisters, feeling light years away from them.

He references the Spanish Armada. He is politically sophisticated, understands how the system of checks and balances work in the U.S. government. I listen to him, the rest of the thrumping gyrating pounding world dissolving into quiet stillness. A bright spotlight from overhead shines down, and I alone stand in its pool. The Irish guy comments on this, taking me in with his eyes. “It’s a beautiful image, isn’t it?” he says to my sisters.

Up until this point, it has been a four-way conversation. Full of witty banter, and interruptions. But after seeing me in the pool of light, he turns to me specifically, and says, “Sheila. Do you believe in fate?” He isn’t asking because he already knows the answer, or wants to engage in an ideological debate. He is looking for something from me.

Suddenly I am very calm. I feel that I have something to say about fate to this man, this stranger. “Yes. I do believe in fate.”

There is a sadness within him, reaching out towards the sadness within me, the sadness that is my constant companion.

He says, desperately, “Do you believe? Really?”

Again, a wave of calm certainty rises. “Yes. I do. But I also believe that it is not immediately apparent, or obvious. Sometimes you have to wait. Only in retrospect does it become clear that something was meant to be.”” I shriek this in his ear.

My words seem to give him comfort. Something very private has happened between us. Later, looking back on it, I have a hard time believing that this exchange even took place. It seems like something out of a dream. We are in a deep cool pool of certainty, lit up by the beam of light above.

One of my sisters interrupts ourtête-à-tête, and informs him, “It’s her birthday today.”

I am not surprised when he gasps, looks at me, his hand going over his heart, as though this information affects him personally, and on a very deep level. There is also a tinge of hurt in his expression, as though I have been holding back on him. Suddenly, I know with clarity that if he said to me in the next moment, “Will you marry me?” I would say, “Yes.” He doesn’t propose, but he does lean down, puts his mouth right next to my ear, making the hair on my arms rise up, and recites something to me in Gaelic.

Go n-éirí an bóthar leat.
Go raibh cóir na gaoithe i gcónaí leat.
Go dtaitní an ghrian go bog bláth ar do chlár éadain,
go dtite an bháisteach go bog mín ar do ghoirt.
Agus go gcasfar le chéile sinn arís,
go gcoinní Dia i mbois a láimhe thú.

The words are guttural and soft, grounded in the earth, yet also airy, hard to pin down. Gaelic is mostly consonants, yet when spoken all you seem to hear are vowels. Or, come to think of it, maybe it’s the other way around. Jean comments, as we listen to the Gaelic radio station on the Aran Islands, “You can so tell that this is not a romance language.” If I shifted my consciousness by one degree I would be fluent in the language of my ancestors. I am sure of it.

He finishes, and straightens himself back up. I feel that something important just happened. An exchange of energy. Power flowing back into me.

I say, “What was that?”

He grins. “The Irish blessing.”

I think of that man now. I do not know his name. I barely remember his face. But he gave me a gift in that moment, one I will not forget. So I say to him in return, using my own admittedly inadequate language:

May the road rise to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
May the rain fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again
May God hold you in the hollow of His hand.

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