The Sheila Variations

Have a lot of writing to do, plus my day job, which I already do remotely (so hanging around in my apartment with my cat is not all that big an adjustment), although having three weeks of perishable food lined up in my kitchen is a new development … However, many of my upcoming activities (all screenings, for one, including multiple film festivals, from the TCM Fest in Los Angeles (it would have been my first time going: sad!) to Ebertfest- have been canceled. I need to occupy myself so I don’t go insane. Here are the things I am reading: a little bit of each one a day, just to shake it up.

— H.D., the life and work of an American poet – by Janice S. Robinson. This is FASCINATING. H.D., one of those who launched Modernism, and certainly the driving force and – Muse of many others – behind Imagism (Ezra Pound started “his” movement by promoting her work.) Here’s my H.D. birthday post. Always wanted to learn more about her. Briefly engaged to Ezra Pound (he was the first person to kiss her), she then had an affair with D.H. Lawrence, before shacking up with novelist Bryher (the pen name of Annie Winifred Ellerman) basically for the rest of their lives. They lived in Switzerland mostly, and raised H.D.’s (illegitimate) daughter – conceived during H.D.’s marriage to poet Richard Arlington – he was not the father. H.D. got around, although her goal was always a kind of spiritual marriage with one simpatico person. H.D. was involved in multiple romantic “triangles” throughout her life. It seemed to be how it worked for her. Anyway, I am learning a lot. This book was published in 1982 or something like that, and it’s refreshing to read a biography that is also really a work of literary criticism WITHOUT the annoying alienation of all that post-modern criticism, which I just can’t get into, mainly because I have no training, and it seems like the thing where you need training. No thank you.

— Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts, by Clive James. I can’t believe I’ve never read this TOME before. I started it before I quarantined myself, reading a little chapter a day: each chapter is on another figure, arranged alphabetically (I love the structure, you never know who is coming next), and I have already added to my reading list based on this book. He’s also a wondrous writer.

— In Search of Lost Time, Vol. II: Within a Budding Grove, by Marcel Proust. Finally tackling this. I finished Part 1 in January. Nobody told me this book was funny. Often laugh-out-loud funny. The insanity and despair of a teenage crush. A couple pages a day. This is gonna take me forever. But I’ve got time.

— The Nick Tosches Reader – compiled by the man himself: a lifetime of writing. One of my favorite writers of all-time, for his prose filled with incandescence and darkness, back to back. Light and dark, not so much competing as co-existent. Very few people can even bear it. He could. His writing makes me want to faint. Or go to church.

— American Poetry : The Twentieth Century, Volume 1 : Henry Adams to Dorothy Parker: the Library of America volume. For years now, I start off my day reading poetry. It’s a thing. It started with the year I worked my way through Stephen Booth’s extraordinary edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets (wrote about it here). His footnotes are so extensive I decided to just do one a day. One of my favorite reading experiences ever. I highly recommend it. At that link, I wrote about why Stephen Booth is so special. Again, none of this post-modern deconstruction nonsense. Sorry if anyone’s into that. Good for you. I am NOT. I didn’t go to school for English, maybe that’s why. I was a big reader in high school, and my Humanities classes in high school were pretty straightforward grappling with the text. But that’s the only “training” I had. Approaching literature (or any art) through the lens of a theory is completely foreign to me. Booth’s line by line analyzing of language, on the other hand, is right up my alley. So anyway: that experience was so pleasurable and meditative – a half hour every morning – I got a little addicted to it. I have all these anthologies lying around, so I started on those. And also “collected poems” of various poets, so last year I read the entire work of Frank O’Hara (just one example). I do just a little bit a day, because my brain can’t really absorb too much at one time. I love this whole period: the bridge of the two centuries, the explosion that occurred, the shattering, and what grew in the aftermath.

— Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery, by Robert Kolker. Excellent true crime book written by a man who has done his homework. Intensely researched. I believe this has been turned into a Netflix series, which I’ll get into once I finish my Babylon Berlin re-watch.

— Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell – it’s just extraordinary, this lifelong correspondence between two poets, lifelong friends. Lowell’s yearly hospitalizations for mania are quite frightening, and you can feel it ratcheting up in his letters, and it goes on such a pattern I find myself thinking, “He’s headed for a crash.” Because Elizabeth Bishop lived in Brazil for so long, while Lowell lived in Boston/New York – they wrote constantly. If Bishop had moved to New York, we wouldn’t have had this correspondence. It’s quite long, this book, so it’s been taking me forever to get through it. I read a couple pages before going to bed.

I kind of rotate through all these different books, switching it up.

I have books lined up for when I finish the ones I’m reading. I also feel quite determined to keep my mind active during this enforced isolation and not spend all freakin’ day online (I say that as I sit here, writing on my website). Still: reading this much is nothing new. I went to college but I was an acting student. My education in OTHER subjects stopped then. So I have always been on a lifelong process of learning about shit I don’t know. So much so that my bookshelves are lined with books about revolutions and counter-revolutions (to everyone now clamoring for revolution: I guess you haven’t learned from history that revolutions always bring counter-revolutions? Which, in general, you do not want). I want to learn about antiquity. The Cold War. The late 19th century. Wars. I want to know about every war. I want to “bridge the gaps” in my knowledge – patching up the holes in whatever I missed. That includes poetry. Of which I have always been a big fan. That being said, here are some books raring to go as I finish the others:

— Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union, by Scott Shane. Slightly amazed I haven’t run across this book before, since Russia, Stalin, Communism, Brainwashing, Tyranny, etc. have been overriding obsession ever since I read 1984 in high school. At any rate, Clive James recommended it in a throwaway line in the book listed above and I bought it immediately. We learn about the present from knowing about the past, even if it is a lesson of what NOT to do (especially if that’s the lesson). Eventually, we will need to dismantle the utopias fogging the minds of our fellow citizens. And since we now, apparently, are way beyond the possibility of a “Have you no decency” moment, information will be the only way to crack through the brain-fog. (Once a leader – or a potential leader, as it were – “goes after” a Gold Star family – relentlessly – for weeks – and nobody seems to mind, especially Republicans who have acted superior about their pro-military stance, using it as a cudgel against “anti-American lefties”, lording it over them for DECADES – you know we are LOST. When the person who has treated our military heroes with such contempt and disrespect wins the nomination anyway, and becomes the actual leader of the nation? NEVER AGAIN. I will NEVER allow myself to be lectured by a Republican EVER again about my “lack” of patriotism. If you as a Republican watched that Gold Star debacle and said nothing, if you were not critical of you know who – I don’t want that asshole’s name on my site – you have lost any as-you-perceive-it moral high ground. PLUS. The whole RUSSIA thing. You with your Cold War obsession for YEARS and now you kowtow to Russia? At least I’ve been consistent in my support of the military, for which I have gotten non-stop shit from irritated lefties. Y’all need to get your stories straight. I can’t keep up with all your flip-flops depending on who’s in office.) At any rate, I look forward to reading this book.

— Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968, by Heda Kovaly. Look at those dates. Ominous dates. (Side note: I am so relieved that I, through sheer osmosis and reading and listening to people who are older than I am, have the timeline of the 20th century in my head. Automatically. I don’t know everything, far from it, but I know the basic chronology. I had an exchange with a younger critic on Twitter, who theorized that a certain Surrealist filmmaker’s films had such an impact because they happened during a “sunnier time.” #1: There is literally no such thing in history as a “sunnier time.” What was “sunny” for one group was “cloudy” for another. Politically, historically, “sunny” doesn’t exist. This woman makes money writing about film. Sunnier time? When exactly would that be in the TWENTIETH CENTURY? Are you kidding me? Generations were lost in unimaginable carnage from start to finish. Two World Wars? A worldwide economic depression? The rise of fascism overtaking democracies? The destruction of Europe? Twice in 20 years? The Holocaust? I’m sorry. This woman may be smart about some things, but she’s also an idiot. I went easy on her in my response. She said, “I guess things are so bad now every other time seems sunnier.” I get it. She’s young. When I was young I knew not to call the 1930s and 1940s a “sunnier time”, though. What the fuck is going on. So now I know what I’m dealing with when I deal with her). At any rate: this is another recommendation from Clive James’ book. He spoke about it so strongly I bought it immediately. But it’s not exactly readily available. It took weeks to get to me. I read the first paragraph and it was so intense I had to put it down. She was decimated by the Holocaust. And then decimated again by the Communist regime following. It’s a slim little volume. I … “look forward” to reading it (if you can look forward to reading one long howl of anguish).

— Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp, by Jozef Czapski, a writer and painter who did a series of lectures on Proust while he was in a Soviet prison camp during the Second World War. Since I’m reading Proust right now, I thought this might be a good accompanying book. Humans are amazing. You’re in the gulag, and to keep you sane, you give lectures to other prisoners about Proust’s 6-volume book, and of course you’re doing it all from memory, because you don’t have your books in the gulag.

— The World of Yesterday, by the monumental Stefan Zweig. A man who watched his world vanish. Watched the rise of brutality. Killed himself with his wife after fleeing Vienna post Anschluss to Argentina. Devastating. (His book Beware of Pity is one of the great novels of the 20th century. Wrote about it here.) And of course his work inspired Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. But I discovered him long before that movie came out (and glad of it). He is one of THE chroniclers of the end of the Hapsburg empire – which, good riddance, I suppose – but for the Jews of Vienna, that empire gave them a modicum of peace. Enforced uneasy peace. But that was more than they got elsewhere. When it embraced Hitler, it was a crushing blow. This book is a memoir. I haven’t read it.

Looking at all of these together, all I see is war and worlds ending. This is nothing new, though. I’ve been reading books about war and the end of different worlds since high school. It’s prepared me, honestly. Nothing that is happening now is new. The only new thing is social media/the internet and an American president who is a treasonous Russian asset. Other than that, it’s same ol’ same ol’.

I think that’s enough to keep me occupied, along with all the stuff I have to watch, since the writing gigs continue!