50 Best Albums, by Brendan O’Malley, #4. Graham Parker & The Rumour, Squeezing Out Sparks

Posted on December 2, 2019 by sheila

My talented brother Brendan O’Malley is an amazing writer and actor. He’s wonderful in the recent You & Me, directed by Alexander Baack. (I interviewed Baack about the film here.) His most recent gig was story editor/writer on the hit series Survivor’s Remorse. Brendan hasn’t blogged in years, but the “content” (dreaded word) is so good I asked if I could import some of it to my blog. He did series on books he loved, and albums he loved. I thought it would be fun to put up some of the stuff here. So we’ll start with his list of 50 Best Albums. I’ll put up one every Monday.

Brendan’s list of 50 Best Albums is part music-critique and part memoir and part cultural snapshot.

I have always loved these essays, because I love to hear my brother talk. I am happy to share them with you!

50 Best Albums, by Brendan O’Malley

4. Graham Parker & The Rumour – Squeezing Out Sparks

What if Salieri weren’t second-rate? What if Mozart’s shadow obscured an equal instead of an inferior imitator? Wouldn’t that be a greater tragedy?

Such a thing occurred in the late 1970’s. If you went looking for the best album put out by a bespectacled guitar-toting new-wave punk with a tight band roaring out of London, you’d probably wind up with Elvis Costello and the Attractions This Year’s Model or My Aim Is True from ’77 or ’78.

But the best album that fits that description from that time period is actually Squeezing Out Sparks by Graham Parker & The Rumour from 1979.

In one form or another, every album that is on this Top 50 List is, to my mind, perfect. They might be filled with mistakes, bad recording quality, even experimental music that fails. But they are perfect, either in the place they hold in my heart or an overall aesthetic.

This is a perfect album through either prism.

It opens with “Discovering Japan” which is about (in no particular order) the A-bomb, a Japanese woman brokenhearted by the callous attention given to her by GI’s, and the new American lover who is obsessed with her but can’t break through the cultural barrier.

It could also be about mankind hurtling toward a nuclear holocaust. Or hot Japanese schoolgirls. Basically all of the above.

Key lyric? “I shouted sayonara/It didn’t mean goodbye”.

So what do you do after you’ve been burned by an international relationship overwhelmed by the nuclear zeitgeist? You turn to “Local Girls”.

This provincialism leads Parker to ruminate, “You look all right in that cheap green dress / But every time you swish it round you make me disappear“. While the complications that arise from a globe-trotting lifestyle are vast and sexy in their impossibility, Parker winds up spitting to himself, “Don’t bother with a local girl / Don’t bother with ’em they don’t bother me“.

He then takes a step back to look in the mirror with “Nobody Hurts You” which contains the Dr. Phil-worthy bromide, “Nobody hurts you harder than yourself“.

Somehow coming from Parker it doesn’t feel trite or patronizing but rather a hard-fought grim determinate necessity.

So far, the album has been a sexy little joy ride, careening from girl to girl, lost in the ramifications of modern love.

You know that moment in a horror movie when a scene with a laughing crowd of teenagers goes on a wee bit too long? You have a small voice telling you the hit is coming, the fright is waiting, but you don’t quite listen fast enough so when the monster jumps out at you it is doubly frightening because you almost saw it coming?

“You Can’t Be Too Strong” is that scene in Squeezing Out Sparks.

The title of the album comes from a lyric in the song. It is hard to write about this song. It is a song about abortion. The voice of the song alternates from the voice of the mother to the voice of the unborn child. Now, I am a pro-choice guy. Read John Irving’s The Cider House Rules for a treatise on why.

This song makes me question my beliefs. I come out on the other end still believing in a woman’s right to choose but Parker does something extraordinarily brave with this song. I don’t even feel comfortable quoting the lyrics here, so perfectly married to the music are they.

The song has a dual effect. One: you cannot ignore the central question inherent in the song. You are forced to contemplate your beliefs without any barrier of myth or analogy. And in context, it pushes the album to a higher plane, one in which all human behavior is up for judgment, one where every action however slight can have disastrous consequences.

Hence the next song, “Passion Is No Ordinary Word”.

The singer struggles inside of a relationship where “The world is easy when you’re just playing around with it / Everything’s a thrill and every girl’s a kill / And then it gets unreal / And then you don’t feel anything“. The music throbs behind his moan and we sense his dissatisfaction in a visceral way. Plus, it rocks.

He then howls that “Saturday Night Is Dead” which is perhaps the most self-explanatory song title in the history of rock and roll.

His rage has boiled down to the finest point and the next song is the aural equivalent of throwing your hands up in frustration and anger: “Love Gets You Twisted”.

“Love Gets You Twisted” twists and turns like an old-time dance reel and ends in Parker repeating “Love gets you twisted / Screw yourself up/ Screw yourself up/ Screw yourself up up up“.

Here is where the shit starts to storm. The tension within the album has been building, like a tightening screw, like a tautening rope, and you get the sense that something will snap.

In “Protection” he opens with “So all of you be damned / We can’t have heaven crammed / So Winston Churchill said / I could’ve smacked his head” which is akin to Bruce Springsteen telling FDR to go fuck himself.

Paranoia has overrun his synapses and he begins to obsess on negative imagery, saying “It ain’t the knife through your heart that tears you apart / It’s just the thought of someone sticking it in‘.

In a minor impossible moment of levity he then sits and turns his attention to the sky in “Waiting For The UFOs”.

To give the song that little bit of absurdity it needs, he does not pronounce UFO as three separate letters but all as one word, Yufos. It is hilarious but chilling as we’ve witnessed his descent into madness until he can no longer relate to people at all but can only obsess about visitation. In what seems like an aside, he muses, “This new obsession is turning us alien too / Much more resounding my heart just stopped pounding for you“. The prospect of an invasion is the only thing that can kill his love.

In the finale “Don’t Get Excited,” what seems like an order is actually a description.

He can’t feel. The new girl doesn’t get it. She tries but his capacity for arousal has been stunted after what he’s been through. He croons, “You try to reach a vital part of me / My interest level’s dropping rapidly / It’s all excuses, baby / All a stall / We just don’t get excited.”

And that is the final fallout from the nuclear disaster which opens the album. How can you get a hard-on in the face of the devastation of the planet? How do you commit to a woman when she can’t stop the dead voices in her head? How do you have a good time when Saturday night is dead?

If you’d never heard of Elvis Costello, you’d listen to this album and say you’d found a Mozart.

— Brendan O’Malley

Posted in Music | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Review: Queen & Slim (2019)

Posted on November 27, 2019 by sheila

It’s epic. Great Thanksgiving movie. Lots of #feels. Here’s my review of Queen & Slim on Ebert.

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

50 Best Albums, by Brendan O’Malley, #5. The Broken Remotes, Tonight’s Last Stand

Posted on November 25, 2019 by sheila

My talented brother Brendan O’Malley is an amazing writer and actor. He’s wonderful in the recent You & Me, directed by Alexander Baack. (I interviewed Baack about the film here.) His most recent gig was story editor/writer on the hit series Survivor’s Remorse. Brendan hasn’t blogged in years, but the “content” (dreaded word) is so good I asked if I could import some of it to my blog. He did series on books he loved, and albums he loved. I thought it would be fun to put up some of the stuff here. So we’ll start with his list of 50 Best Albums. I’ll put up one every Monday.

Brendan’s list of 50 Best Albums is part music-critique and part memoir and part cultural snapshot.

I have always loved these essays, because I love to hear my brother talk. I am happy to share them with you!

50 Best Albums, by Brendan O’Malley

5. The Broken Remotes – Tonight’s Last Stand

I don’t know how to review this album.

Full disclosure. Jon Leahy is the creative force behind this band and he and I are close friends and collaborators. I played my first show in Los Angeles with an early incarnation of Jon’s band, he’s produced a good bit of my music, and he is basically an honorary O’Malley.

But it is not my closeness to Jon that renders this review a treacherous little ride. His music is unsettling while being deeply satisfying. His lyrics feel like that moment every kid has, standing in the dark of their room, hand stretched out to a closet door, willing themselves to get over the fear and just open the damn door already. Before you open the door what’s behind it is real.

His voice is quite often tucked around a killer guitar. He doesn’t insist that you hear every word. He is not hiding or mumbling, which many of his indie rock brethren do. But the music is so assured that he is confident of how it will land. So he’ll whisper, he’ll be restrained, he’ll let the crash of a drum or the drone of an organ do the talking for him. Until the moment strikes.

When Jon Leahy raises his voice something CONCRETE happens. There is a retroactive aspect to this. When you hear that roar you realize that he has been sitting on it. That he doesn’t feel the need to use it unless it is absolutely necessary. That his expression is deliberate.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been disappointed in singers when I feel them riding their favorite part of their voice. They aren’t concerned with the song or what needs to be said. They are concerned about sounding as good as they can. They are like big sluggers who can only hit fastballs. It’s all well and good until someone throws you a nasty curve.

The Broken Remotes write songs that are (to continue the baseball pitching analogy) filled with curves, splitballs, knuckleballs, high heat, brushback pitches, flat out beanballs, and even the occasional wild pitch that flies into the stands.

And like a Rubik’s cube one move from completion there is a sense of breathless anticipation to EVERY SINGLE MOMENT on this album. Like the kid outside of the closet. Like a man on a bridge. Like a car about to roll. Like a finger on a trigger.

Somehow they manage to maintain that tension without sending the listener over the edge into some sort of panic attack. Mostly ‘cuz the shit is fun to sing along to. Leahy’s voice has that deceptive quality all great singers have, in that you hear it and want to sing along. Then when you dom you are struck by how HARD he’s actually working, how difficult it is to be a real front man. Go listen to The Broken Remotes and it will help you clear all the posers out of your iPod.

The song titles have what I call totemistic qualities. They seem like physical things. They could be mantras. They have power.

“Shut Off The Machines”
“Stick With Me, Kid”
“Lose The Swagger”
“This Time Is The Exception”
“On The Take”

I could type each song on the album but I’ll let you discover those for yourselves. Just like you discovered that there was no monster in your closet. But if that’s so, why do you still get afraid?

— Brendan O’Malley

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James Joyce’s “A Painful Case” is very painful

Posted on November 24, 2019 by sheila

I am reading Dubliners, one story a morning. In order. This is maybe my 10th time reading it all the way through – although I pull out different individual stories to read sometimes. It’s a daunting experience. Especially when you remember James Joyce was 22, 23, 24, when he wrote these devastating brilliant stories filled with so much insight into the human condition.

I just … what … who … why …

In a beautiful essay on “The Dead”, Mary Gordon closes out with:

The vagueness of the flickering shades subsides. Gabriel sees the snow on ‘the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns,’ those singular sharp things asserting, inexorably, their individuality, their separateness from their fellows. But the snow that is falling generally falls on them all alike and muffles their sharpness, their distinctness. ‘His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.’

Consider the daring of Joyce’s final repetitions and reversals: ‘falling faintly, faintly falling’ — a triumph of pure sound, of language as music. No one has ever equaled it; it makes those who have come after him pause for a minute, in awed gratitude, in discouragement. How can any of us come up to it? Only, perhaps, humbly, indifferently, in its honor and its name, to try.

And he did it all when he was twenty-five. The bastard.”

That’s what I’m talking about.

There was an eruption of response to Dubliners, outrage, anger, Joyce was lambasted for … telling the truth, basically … etc. – poor George Bernard Shaw, I don’t think he ever recovered. Years later, when the Ulysses scandal was going on and books were being seized at custom houses across the world, Joyce said to his wife, “I have come to the conclusion that I cannot write without offending people.”

Yesterday morning I read “A Painful Case”.

Now, “The Dead” is emblazoned in my brain: all the events, all the characters, I know entire sections by heart. But “A Painful Case” is equally as devastating – although I somehow manage to always block it out. It’s not “in me” for some reason. There are some similarities to The Dead although – crucially – it doesn’t have anything like those final four paragraphs in “The Dead” – where Joyce turns the microscope of his eye into a telescope, lifting up above the landscape, floating over the world, looking down on it all, on us all. “A Painful Case” stays on the ground and maybe that’s why it’s so unbelievably, well, painful.

It has thrown me off. I was deeply unnerved by it. I’m still not quite back to normal.

The story seems a simple one. Mr. James Duffy – a bachelor, and a practical sedate man, whose life unfolds in a calm way with no dramatic events – has a love affair with a married woman. Eventually, he ends it. He feels he did the right thing. He is placid and complacent about the choices he made in life. They seem to him to be the right ones.

Then Joyce – that early-20-something man – writes: “Four years passed.”

Brutal. (And it occurs to me that the reason the story is so shattering – and complex – is because of those three small words “Four years passed.” If it had been “two weeks passed” you wouldn’t get the ambiguity, the MORAL ambiguity which spills over and fills the whole entire world by the end of “A Painful Case.” I’ll say more on this in a bit.)

One night, Duffy picks up a newspaper and reads an article about a woman who was hit by a train the night before and was killed. Turns out, it was his former love. He also learns that his former lover had gone off the rails after their romance. She became a drunk and a floozy, staying out all night in low-life drinking establishments – and she was a married woman with a child – scandalous in 1890s Dublin.

Because of that brutal “four years passed,” your brain struggles to reassure itself: “He didn’t do this to her by ending the romance. He didn’t force her to become an alcoholic and get hit by a train. It’s not a direct correlation. We are all responsible for who we are in the world and how we respond to things.”

Well, yes, that’s all very nice and very mature. I’m so happy for you if you are able to manage that.

But I can’t. And neither can Mr. Duffy, although he tries.

Because think about it: If it had been “two weeks passed,” then Joyce would have been making a clear connection, A to B. Romance ended. Woman throws herself in front of a train soon after. This is the stuff of melodrama. And it could be effective. It has been effective. Man realizes he has contributed to the misery of another human, is crushed. But “A Painful Case” is more difficult. Four years is a long time. Presumably, everyone has moved on enough, and life has gone on enough, that Mr. Duffy could conceivably reassure himself that “Oh my, how sad what happened to her, but it doesn’t have to do with me.” But that’s not what happens.

Suddenly, there’s this passage. Again, remember, Joyce is like 24 years old writing this. Some things cannot be sufficiently explained.

As he sat there, living over his life with her and evoking alternately the two images in which he now conceived her, he realized that she was dead, that she had ceased to exist, that she had become a memory. He began to feel ill at ease.

A pause to take note of the simplicity of his language. Nothing fancy. “He began to feel ill at ease.”

Reading it yesterday morning, circa 7:30 am, I, too, began to feel ill at ease.

Joyce goes on:

He had done what seemed to him best. How was he to blame? Now that she was gone he understood how lonely her life must have been, sitting night after night alone in that room. His life would be lonely too until he ,too, died, ceased to exist, became a memory–if anyone remembered him.

You have to be honest as a writer. So many people want inspiration, affirmation, Sunday School lessons. they want characters they can “relate” to – they want characters who make the right choices, or at least have the right responses to their choices. It’s fine if you want this. It’s fine if you don’t particularly want to read a story that makes you so uneasy (even though I think you are wrong.) But the thing about the story is – and all of his stories – is that they are airtight. You cannot wiggle out of them. You can try as you might, but you cannot escape them. This is one of the reasons why people resist him. His vision is too strong, and he is so good at setting it all up. I am unable to resist him.

After that passage comes:

It was after nine o’clock when he left the shop. The night was cold and gloomy. He entered the Park by the first gate and walked along under the gaunt trees. He walked through the bleak alleys where they had walked four years before. She seemed to be near him in the darkness. At moments he semed to feel her voice touch his ear, her hand touch his. He stood still to listen. Why had he withheld life from her? Why had he sentenced her to death? He felt his moral nature falling to pieces.

JESUS, Jimmy. You’re 24.

I’ve read the story many times but I always manage to block it out. It flattens me.

Posted in Books, James Joyce | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Tomboys: Supporting evidence

Posted on November 23, 2019 by sheila

Since I reference all of these great tomboys in culture in my recent article for Film Comment, I thought I’d provide the results of my research. This was a fun one.

My main focus was on Candleshoe.

Paper Moon was the more obvious choice, which is why I didn’t “go for it.” Also, I saw Candleshoe as a child. I’m not sure, but I am fairly certain it is the first movie I saw in the theatre as a child. It was the same year as Star Wars, which was the first time I saw a movie multiple times in the theatre. I did not see Paper Moon when it first came out. Too grownup. Candleshoe was “for me.” It was a Disney movie. I have not seen it since. The only image I remembered from it was children sliding across a slippery floor in a huge mansion. It was so much fun watching it again. It’s fantastic.

Then, of course, Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon. She’s almost as influential in the Tomboy Realm as Jo March in Little Women.

Tatum O’Neal again in Bad News Bears. GOD, she was so aspirational in that.

I followed her example. I was the only girl on my Little League team. There were no girls league, are you kidding me? I’m Gen X, baby. I was like, “Eff this, I’m joining the boys.” Give me 10 more years and there’d be girls’ sports leagues. But in the meantime, I made do.

Little Darlings deserves more space and discussion. I only referenced it briefly. But it’s so interesting, so deep – surprisingly deep. Tatum O’Neal, just three years before, was a scrappy pre-teen on a baseball mound. Here, she is full teenager, and now she has segued into more ladylike behavior, and she does NOT play the “tomboy” role, but the prissy romantic role. Kristy McNichol plays the teenage version of the tomboy, the tough-talking chain-smoking tough chick, even MORE aspirational than tomboy children. She is so so good in this. What a treat to watch it again.

Linda Manz is a huge figure in the Tomboy Hall of Fame. I didn’t see Days of Heaven or Out of the Blue when they came out. Again, I was a child.


Days of Heaven

But I DID see her in a television movie called Orphan Train, playing a child prostitute on the streets of 1880s New York, and she made a HUGE impression. I clocked her instantly as my “type.”

I loved Orphan Train so much I wrote a novelization of it. I posted excerpts here years ago.

I did supporting research on the history of the tomboy in American culture by reading Michelle Ann Abate’s Tomboys: A Literary and Cultural History. I had my own icons, and it was fun to see them all show up in this book, but boy she has done her research. It’s a deep topic, and she really gives a sense of how the culture treats “tomboys,” and how they are coded queer (it wasn’t about that for me, but I get it was about that for many), and how the queerness was submerged, coming out in pulpy ways in the conformist 50s, and the whole intense mind-fuck of female friendships. (I mean, they’ve never been mind-fuck-y for me. I have great girlfriends, and they are intimate important relationships in my life. But as an archetype, and as commentary on the culture, female friendships have taken on many different forms, and often there’s a buried lesbian subtext, which Abate gets into with some depth.) I am very grateful for all of her meticulous research and footnotes and examples. It really helped contextualize my own personal experience of these 1970s tomboy films. My concern, though, was how these tomboys “made it” as adults. Could my tomboy self still go on to have a normal dating/sex/romantic life – with men? Or … would I have to do like Olivia Newton-John in Grease? Jo March didn’t marry Laurie, her good pal. So … what happens to the straight tomboy?

Can’t she get the man she wants? Or is part of being the tomboy means being alone, singular? These were urgent questions to me as a girl. When my boobs started “coming in” I slept on my stomach, hoping that I could stop the development. I put an Ace bandage around my chest to flatten them down. I had so many boy friends. I loved playing with them. I knew how things changed when girls got older. I saw it all around me. I wasn’t ready to let that go and “become” a real girl. You see how deep these things go. I did make it through. I wore boy’s clothes – or, men’s clothes, really – in high school. I raided my dad’s closet for his big dress shirts, his blazers, which I would embellish with safety pins and Band-Aids (a strange trend at my school). I did my own thing. Eventually, in my 20s, I burst out of my chrysalis, during the riot grrrl years – a continuation of the tomboy thing really – only in an adult vein – where I wore basically baby-doll nighties in public, complete with gigantic combat boots. It was a good era. You could wear flannel, jeans, and Doc Martens and be considered sexy. I have never shaved my armpits. I didn’t give it a second thought then. Neither did M. (Window-Boy). I don’t even remember being anxious about it. But M. wasn’t squicky about anything having to do with a woman’s body. It was all good to him. (Bless him.) I wasn’t conscious of any of this at the time, really. I had my neuroses but “who I am in the world as a woman” wasn’t one of them. I lived a bohemian life, and I was not on the normal track for women. It wouldn’t be until much later that I questioned some of my choices, and regretted them. But still, I wasn’t like, “Oh, I miss my tomboy self.” I’ve always been independent and I am impervious to peer pressure. Harriet the Spy was ALWAYS my idol. I basically still dress like her.

A movie that addresses the tomboy segueing into adulthood is Gina Prince-Bythewood’s fantastic Love & Basketball. How fun it was to re-visit this one. You should see it if you haven’t. It’s so REAL. It’s COMPLEX and everyone gets to be complex. It’s so good, and Sanaa Lathan is a favorite of mine.

Where are we now with the tomboy? She’s still among us. I reference Olivier Assayas’ brilliant Personal Shopper, with Kristen Stewart as a very NOW type of “tomboy”. The word isn’t helpful anymore, I suppose, and she doesn’t identify that way. But she’s in flux, she’s in-between, she’s boy-girl. It’s a fascinating exploration of fluidity, with the perfect Patron Saint of fluidity, Kristen Stewart.

Final reference from the article: Emily Bronte’s wonderful clarion-call of independence, her poem “Often Rebuked.”

I absorbed these tomboy films. I was liberated by them. By Harriet the Spy, too. I started keeping a journal because of Harriet the Spy. She helped make me who I am today.

Posted in Movies | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Total Recall was trending on Twitter yesterday …

Posted on November 23, 2019 by sheila

… because of Tesla and that TRUCK, which looked like the car in Total Recall.

Which reminds me, a year or so ago, I was a guest on Jessa Crispin’s podcast “Public Intellectual”, and she was doing a whole Paul Verhoeven series, having on different guests to discuss each movie in his oeuvre. She had me on to discuss Total Recall. It was a hoot. We “had a moment” about Sharon Stone’s astonishing workout outfit.

For some reason, Jessa changed hosts for her podcast, so the old links don’t work – but if you’re interested in listening to our romp of a conversation about this movie we both loved – you can have a listen here.

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“But there is all this ambiguity. That is poetry. It is the other thing that is the other thing.” — Irish poet Derek Mahon

Posted on November 23, 2019 by sheila

“[Seamus] Heaney is a Wordsworth man and I’m a Coleridge man. I love the poetry, and the trajectory of his life has always fascinated me. His Biographia is a complete mess, but is still full of the most wonderful stuff.” – Derek Mahon

Born in Belfast on this day, great Irish poet Derek Mahon “came up” at the same time as other great Irish poets Seamus Heaney (one of my many posts about him here) and Michael Longley (post about him here). They all burst onto the literary scene in the late 60s, making it seem like something once again was “going on” in Ireland to support – the fact that it was coming from a war zone was even more startling. Mahon rejects that interpretation, insisting that Belfast has always had a great literary tradition, even in the 30s and 40s. But you often hear these three poets’ names mentioned in the same breath (and often by one another). They were good friends, from way back. Here is a story told in The Guardian in 2006; I really like it:

In September 1963 Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley visited the County Down grave of the great Northern Irish poet Louis MacNeice, who had died a short time before. Longley, writing recently in the introduction to a selection of MacNeice’s poems, recalled that as they “dawdled between the graves” all three then-unpublished poets were silently “contemplating an elegy”. When they next met, Mahon read them “In Carrowdore Churchyard”: “Your ashes will not stir, even on this high ground / However the wind tugs, the headstones shake”. Seamus Heaney started to read his poem but “then crumpled it up”. Longley says he decided not even to attempt the task. “Mahon had produced the definitive elegy.”

Lovely.

Heaney, Longley and Mahon saw themselves as part of a strong tradition. They often dedicate their poems to poets from the Irish past, Patrick Kavanagh (post about him here) or Louis MacNeice (post about him here). These guys were hugely influential on the new generation, perhaps even more so than Yeats.

Derek Mahon grew up in an Ulster Protestant family, and then went down to Dublin to go to college at Trinity. He was already interested in poetry, but his viewpoint was never purely local. He loved French literature so much he went on to study at the Sorbonne, and has translated many great French authors into English. He published a prize-winning collection of poetry in the mid-60s. (His work has won many prizes. Just this year, for the third time, he won Irish Times Poetry Now award for his latest book.) He traveled quite a bit, wandering around America. Hart Crane (my post about him here) was a huge influence, as was Elizabeth Bishop (post about her here). Mahon has had a peripatetic life. He was a book reviewer, and also a teacher. His sensibility divorced him from the upheavals of the political process in Northern Ireland, although he was very interested in all of it. But that is not the wellspring of his art.

Dejection
Bone-idle, I lie listening to the rain,
Not tragic now nor yet to frenzy bold.
Must I stand out in thunderstorms again
Who have twice come in from the cold?

He’s not “fancy”. There’s a real courage in expressing yourself that plainly, yet still with that much structure. It’s old-fashioned. Mahon is all about structure.

After years of traveling around, he now lives in Kinsale. He has not returned to live in Belfast. He is criticized for that. He looks in on Ireland from the outside; this gives his work a strength it wouldn’t otherwise have. You can’t say he doesn’t have a “sense of place”. So-called “outsiders” often can see their homes in a clearer way than those who live there. James Joyce understood this all too well.

There is this beloved poem.

A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford
Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels.
—Seferis, Mythistorema

(for J. G. Farrell)
Even now there are places where a thought might grow —
Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned
To a slow clock of condensation,
An echo trapped for ever, and a flutter
Of wildflowers in the lift-shaft,
Indian compounds where the wind dances
And a door bangs with diminished confidence,
Lime crevices behind rippling rain barrels,
Dog corners for bone burials;
And in a disused shed in Co. Wexford,

Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel,
Among the bathtubs and the washbasins
A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.
This is the one star in their firmament
Or frames a star within a star.
What should they do there but desire?
So many days beyond the rhododendrons
With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud,
They have learnt patience and silence
Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood.

They have been waiting for us in a foetor
Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,
Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure
Of the expropriated mycologist.
He never came back, and light since then
Is a keyhole rusting gently after rain.
Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew
And once a day, perhaps, they have heard something —
A trickle of masonry, a shout from the blue
Or a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane.

There have been deaths, the pale flesh flaking
Into the earth that nourished it;
And nightmares, born of these and the grim
Dominion of stale air and rank moisture.
Those nearest the door grow strong —
‘Elbow room! Elbow room!’
The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling
Utensils and broken pitchers, groaning
For their deliverance, have been so long
Expectant that there is left only the posture.

A half century, without visitors, in the dark —
Poor preparation for the cracking lock
And creak of hinges; magi, moonmen,
Powdery prisoners of the old regime,
Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought
And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream
At the flash-bulb firing-squad we wake them with
Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms.
Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,
They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.

They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!
‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say,
‘Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
We too had our lives to live.
You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
Let not our naive labours have been in vain!’

And oh, how I love his beautiful poem “Achill”. Achill Island is a big island off the west coast of Ireland. My family spent some time there years ago, when my parents uprooted all of us from school and took us to Ireland. I was 13 years old, so my memories of the place are often mortifying to read now (we were on Achill for Easter, and I was mainly upset that I hadn’t brought my curling iron to Ireland, because I wanted to curl my hair for Easter mass), but despite what I wrote down in my journal, Achill Island remains vivid in my mind: the windy wildness of it, the smell of the peat fires, the impromptu soccer games among the sheep, the beautiful bleakness of the landscape.

Achill
im chaonaí uaigneach nach mór go bhfeicim an lá1

I lie and imagine a first light gleam in the bay
After one more night of erosion and nearer the grave,
Then stand and gaze from the window at break of day
As a shearwater skims the ridge of an incoming wave;
And I think of my son a dolphin in the Aegean,
A sprite among sails knife-bright in a seasonal wind,
And wish he were here where currachs walk on the ocean
To ease with his talk the solitude locked in my mind.

I sit on a stone after lunch and consider the glow
Of the sun through mist, a pearl bulb containèdly fierce;
A rain-shower darkens the schist for a minute or so
Then it drifts away and the sloe-black patches disperse.
Croagh Patrick towers like Naxos over the water
And I think of my daughter at work on her difficult art
And wish she were with me now between thrush and plover,
Wild thyme and sea-thrift, to lift the weight from my heart.

The young sit smoking and laughing on the bridge at evening
Like birds on a telephone pole or notes on a score.
A tin whistle squeals in the parlour, once more it is raining,
Turf-smoke inclines and a wind whines under the door;
And I lie and imagine the lights going on in the harbor
Of white-housed Náousa, your clear definition at night,
And wish you were here to upstage my disconsolate labour
As I glance through a few thin pages and switch off the light.

1 A desolate waif scarce seeing the light of day (from a poem by Piaras Feritéar, 1600-1653, as translated by Thomas Kinsella).

I love Mahon’s poem about J. Bruce Ismay, the managing director of the White Star Line, who, famously and infamously, survived. Much to his enduring shame. Most employees were manly enough to go down with the ship. Not Ismay. The scandal dogged him the rest of his days.

After the Titanic
by Derek Mahon

They said I got away in a boat
And humbled me at the inquiry. I tell you
I sank as far that night as any
Hero. As I sat shivering on the dark water
I turned to ice to hear my costly
Life go thundering down in a pandemonium of
Prams, pianos, sideboards, winches,
Boilers bursting and shredded ragtime. Now I hide
In a lonely house behind the sea
Where the tide leaves broken toys and hatboxes
Silently at my door. The showers of
April, flowers of May mean nothing to me, nor the
Late light of June, when my gardener
Describes to strangers how the old man stays in bed
On seaward mornings after nights of
Wind, takes his cocaine and will see no one. Then it is
I drown again with all those dim
Lost faces I never understood, my poor soul
Screams out in the starlight, heart
Breaks loose and rolls down like a stone.
Include me in your lamentations.

QUOTES:

Derek Mahon:

When growing up, my bunch of friends would have thought of ourselves as anti-unionist because we were anti-establishment. We would have been vaguely all-Ireland republican socialists. But then, when theory turned into practice, we had to decide where we stood and I never did resolve it for myself. Marching for civil rights was terrific, but bombs and killing people? I never put a name to my own position and I still can’t, which suits me fine. From time to time you get a kick from some critic for not being sufficiently political, or for being a closet unionist or a closet republican. There was a time when people – much more English people than Irish – would ask, ‘Why don’t these Ulster poets come out more explicitly and say what they are for?’ But there is all this ambiguity. That is poetry. It is the other thing that is the other thing.

Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets:

[Derek Mahon’s] investment in “something larger” is not so great as [Geoffrey] Hill’s: his imagination has been released from the demands of an informing culture. As a result he turns rather too readily toward his reader, wry, shrugging his shoulders, as though it is too late to find the big theme his skills might be equal to.

Oana Sanziana Marian:

His most famous poem, “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford,” digs, too, but instead of turning soil, as in Heaney’s earthbound rural scene in (maybe his most famous poem) “Digging,” Mahon gets underneath “a burnt-out hotel / Among the bathtubs and the washbasins” and – but who would see this coming? – commemorates forgotten victims of Treblinka and Pompeii through the perspective of a thousand mushrooms crowded around light passing through a keyhole.

Derek Mahon:

“What’s the difference between an exile and an expatriate? It seems to me that an Englishman in France is an expat, but an Irishman is an exile.”

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For Film Comment: 1970s Tomboy Movies

Posted on November 22, 2019 by sheila

Yet another topic years in the percolating: On the great “tomboy films” of the 1970s. I feel so fortunate I grew up in an era where “scrappy tomboy” was the dominant model for little-girlhood. It was a brief era, but it had a huge impact on a generation. Who would later, in their 20s, forge the riot grrrl era. A direct link? Sure! Anyway, here’s the piece:

Present Tense: Tomboys

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Supernatural, Season 15, episode 6

Posted on November 22, 2019 by sheila

How we doin’? We good? I haven’t seen it yet.

Posted in Television | Tagged | 23 Comments

Happy birthday, Abigail Adams

Posted on November 22, 2019 by sheila

I grew up in a house where stories of the American Revolution were all around us. A living history. I grew up in a town where Washington actually slept. My family hails from Boston. I have cousins in Quincy. We’d drive past the Adams house on our way to Thanksgiving and it’d be like, “Oh, hey, there’s John and Abigail’s house” – as though they were our contemporaries, or family members whom we’d be seeing later at dinner. My O’Malley grandfather adored Abigail (my grandmother used to say she was jealous of only one woman, and that was Abigail Adams.)

So there’s the background. In the early years of my site, I wrote more about the Founders than I did about anything else. Our “current situation” is devastating to me, a betrayal of people like John and Abigail and all the rest of them, a trashing of what was so carefully set up, so ferociously fought for.

John Adams and Abigail Smith were wed in 1764. They were married for 54 years. They hailed from colonial Boston, spend most of the American Revolution apart, they lived in Paris, in London, and also in the brand-new muddy swampy capital of Washington D.C. They retired to Quincy after Adams’ disastrous term as the second President.

We should be grateful that these two extraordinary individuals were forced to spend so much time apart – as wrenching as it was for the both of them. The sacrifices they made in their marriage was – in terms of history – worth it, not just in terms of the events of the era, but because of the unprecedented and copious correspondence they left behind. Extraordinary in-the-moment historical document.

I’ve read their letters more times than I can count. Every time I go back to them, I find something new.

Their relationship breathes off the written page. Adams was a warm, temperamental, emotional guy. He poured his heart out to his wife. There was true intimacy between them. He is revealed here, in all his wounded vanity, his pettiness, his humor, his bawdiness. Adams in his letters is very unlike Thomas Jefferson who was much more reserved and formal in his correspondence. Jefferson wasn’t intimate with ANYONE the way Adams was intimate with Abigail. And so Jefferson remains sphinx-like (an “American Sphinx,” as Joseph Ellis calls him in the book titled American Sphinx), and Adams still feels very much alive.

In 1778, John Adams was sent as a delegate to France, to join Ben Franklin and Silas Deane. Ben Franklin was living the high life (John Adams describes in his journal – with haughty puritanical scorn – Franklin’s leisurely schedule). Adams was overwhelmed by the politeness of the French, and by how eager they were to please the Americans. On his second or third night in France, he was at a dinner – and had the following exchange with a French woman, who asked him a “brazen question”. John Adams blushed his way through the conversation, not being used to women who had such open and free airs, but his answer is a perfect description of sexual and romantic chemistry.

— John Adams’ Journal entry, 1778 April 1 Wednesday

One of the most elegant Ladies at Table, young and handsome, tho married to a Gentleman in the Company, was pleased to Address her discourse to me. mr. Bondfield must interpret the Speech which he did in these Words “Mr. Adams, by your Name I conclude you are descended from the first Man and Woman, and probably in your family may be preserved the tradition which may resolve a difficulty which I could never explain. I never could understand how the first Couple found out the Art of lying together?”

Whether her phrase was L’Art de se coucher ensemble, or any other more energetic, I know not, but Mr. Bondfield rendered it by that I have mentioned.

To me, whose Acquaintance with Women had been confined to America, where the manners of the Ladies were universally characterised at that time by Modesty, Delicacy and Dignity, this question was surprizing and shocking: but although I believe at first I blushed, I was determined not to be disconcerted. I thought it would be as well for once to set a brazen face against a brazen face and answer a fool according to her folly, and accordingly composing my countenance into an Ironical Gravity I answered her.

“Madame My Family resembles the First Couple both in the name and in their frailties so much that I have no doubt We are descended from that in Paradise. But the Subject was perfectly understood by Us, whether by tradition I could not tell: I rather thought it was by Instinct, for there was a Physical Quality in Us resembling the Power of Electricity or of the Magnet, by which when a Pair approached within a striking distance they flew together like the Needle to the Pole or like two Objects in Electrical Experiments.”

When this Answer was explained to her, she replied, “Well I know not how it was, but this I know it is a very happy Shock.”

I should have added “in a lawfull Way” after “a striking distance,” but if I had her Ladyship and all the Company would only have thought it Pedantry and Bigottry.

Lol.

John and Adam speak openly in their letters of yearning for one another. She lets slip at one point that she’s sick of living in a nunnery, and they have an ongoing joke about saltpeter (to curb their aching libidos). It’s amazing. Here are a couple of yearning excerpts from their letters:

— John to Abigail:

“Is there no way for two friendly souls to converse together, although the bodies are 400 miles off. Yes, by letter. But I want a better communication. I want to hear you think, or to see your thoughts. The conclusion of your letter makes my heart throb more than a cannonade would. You bid me burn your letters. But I must forget you first.”

— Abigail to John, 1793:

“Years subdue the ardor of passion but in lieu thereof friendship and affection deep-rooted subsists which defies the ravages of time, and whilst the vital flame exists.”

— John to Abigail:

“Your letter is like laudanum.”

— John to Abigail:

“You apologize for the length of your letters. They give me more entertainment than all the speeches I hear. There are more good thoughts, fine strokes, and mother wit in them than I hear in the whole week.”

— John to Abigail:

“I am warm enough at night, but cannot sleep since I left you.”

He found equilibrium when he was with her. When he was President, she remained back in Quincy for some time, managing their property, until finally he begged her to join him. He needed her there. (His colleagues and cabinet members also thought: Dammit, someone get Abigail down here, NOW. He’s LOSING IT without her.) Abigail, at home in Quincy as the war heated up, wasn’t just “keeping the home fires burning,” but living in considerable danger, and making sure their farm continued on in his absence so that they would not be left destitute.

— Letter from Abigail to John, August 19, 1774: John had left for Philadelphia for the First Continental Congress:

“The great anxiety I feel for my Country, for you and for our family renders the day tedious, and the night unpleasant. The Rocks and quick Sands appear upon every Side. What course you can or will take is all wrapt in the Bosom of futurity. Uncertainty and expectation leave the mind great Scope. Did ever any Kingdom or State regain their Liberty, when once it was invaded without Blood shed? I cannot think of it without horror.

Yet we are told that all the Misfortunes of Sparta were occasiond by their too great Sollicitude for present tranquility, and by an excessive love of peace they neglected the means of making it sure and lasting. They ought to have reflected, says Polibius, that as there is nothing more desirable, or advantages than peace, when founded in justice and honour, so there is nothing more shameful and at the same time more pernicious when attained by bad measures, and purchased at the price of liberty…

I want so much to hear from you. I long impatiently to have you upon the Stage of action. The first of September or the month of September may be of as much importance to Great Britan as the Ides of March were to Ceaser.”

— Letter from Abigail to John, October 16 1774:

Many have been the anxious hours I have spent since [the day you left for Philadelphia] — the threatening aspect of our publick affairs, the complicated distress of this province, the Arduous and perplexed Business in which you are engaged, have all conspired to agitate my bosom, with fears and apprehensions to which I have heretofore been a stranger, and far from thinking the Scene close3d, it looks as tho the curtain was but just drawn and only the first Scene of the infernal plot disclosed [She was right – it was only the first] and whether the end will be tragical Heaven alone knows.

You cannot be, I know, nor do I wish to see you an inactive Spectator, but if the Sword be drawn I bid adieu to all domestick felicity, and look forward to that Country where there is neither wars nor rumors of War in a firm belief that thro the mercy of its King we shall both rejoice there together.

— John to Abigail: Hartford May 2d 1775, on his way down to Philadelphia. Adams was hoping that the disaster in Boston would bind the colonies together. That’s eventually what happened, but at the time it was not at all a done deal. Listen to his final advice to her. The situation was dire.

It is Arrogance and Presumption in human Sagacity to pretend to penetrate far into the Designs of Heaven. The most perfect Reverence and Resignation becomes us. But, I can’t help depending upon this, that the present dreadfull Calamity of that beloved Town is intended to bind the Colonies together in more indissoluble Bands, and to animate their Exertions, at this great Crisis in the Affairs of Mankind. It has this Effect, in a most remarkable Degree, as far as I have yet seen or heard. It will plead, with all America, with more irresistible Perswasion, than Angells trumpet tongued.

In a Cause which interests the whole Globe, at a Time, when my Friends and Country are in such keen Distress, I am scarecely ever interrupted, in the least Degree, by Apprehensions for my Personal Safety. I am often concerned for you and our dear Babes…

In case of real Danger, of which you cannot fail to have previous Intimations, fly to the Woods with our Children.

— Abigail to John June 16 1775: Listen to her practicality in the last paragraph.:

“We now expect our Sea coasts ravaged. Perhaps, the very next Letter I write will inform you that I am driven away from our yet quiet cottage. Necessity will oblige Gage to take some desperate steps. We are told for Truth that he is now Eight thousand strong. We live in continual expectation of allarms.

Courage I know we have in abundance, conduct I hope we shall not want, but powder — where shall we get a sufficient supply? I wish we may not fail there.”

— Abigail to John June 18 1775, the day after the Battle of Bunker Hill begah. She and John lost a dear friend in the Battle:

The Day; perhaps the decisive Day is come on which the fate of America depends. My bursting Heart must find vent at my pen… Great is our Loss…

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but the God of Israel is he that giveth strength and power unto his people. Trust in him at all times, ye people pour out your hearts before him. God is a refuge for us. — Charlstown is laid in ashes. The Battle began upon our intrenchments upon Bunkers Hill, a Saturday morning about 3 o’clock and has not ceased yet and tis now 3 o’clock Sabbeth afternoon…

I cannot compose myself to write any further at present.

— John to Abigail July 7, 1775:

“Your Description of the Distresses of the worthy Inhabitants of Boston, and the other Sea Port Towns, is enough to melt an Heart of Stone. Our Consolation must be this, my dear, that Cities may be rebuilt, and a People reduced to Poverty, may acquire fresh Property: But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty once lost is lost forever. When the People once surrender their share in the Legislature, and their Right of defending the Limitations upon the Government, and of resisting every Encroachment upon them, they can never regain it…

I am forever yours —“

— Abigail to John October 1, 1775. This grief-struck letter brings tears to my eyes.

Have pitty upon me, have pitty upon me o! thou my beloved for the Hand of God presseth me sour.

Yet will I be dumb and silent and not open my mouth because thou o Lord hast done it.

How can I tell you (o my bursting Heart) that my Dear Mother has Left me, this day about 5 oclock she left this world for an infinitely better…

Blessed Spirit where art thou? At times I almost am ready to faint under this severe and heavy Stroke, separated from thee who used to be a comforter towards me in affliction, but blessed be God, his Ear is not heavy that he cannot hear, but he has bid us call upon him in time of Trouble…

You often Express’d your anxiety for me when you left me before, surrounded with Terrors, but my trouble then was as the small dust in the balance compaird to what I have since endured. I hope to be properly mindful of the correcting hand, that I may not be rebuked in anger. — You will pardon and forgive all my wanderings of mind. I cannot be correct.

Tis a dreadful time with this whole province. Sickness and death are in almost every family. I have no more shocking and terible Idea of any Distemper except the Plague than this.

Almighty God restrain the pestilence which walketh in darkness and wasteth at noon day and which has laid in the dust one of the dearest of parents. May the Life of the other be lengthend out to his afflicted and Your distressed Portia.

— Abigail to John November 27 1775: In this letter to John, Abigail lays out the the problems facing the Congress, and the nation in general. Also, she poses the two sides of the argument which years and years later would be the source of the debate between Jefferson and Adams: do we fear the “many” or do we fear the “few”?? At this point: it is the “few” we have to fear. The “few” have GOT TO GO.

I wish I knew what mighty things were fabricating. If a form of Government is to established here what one will be assumed? Will it be left to our assemblies to chuse one? and will not many men have many minds? and shall we not run into Dissentions among ourselves?

I am more and more convinced that Man is a dangerous creature, and that power whether vested in many or a few is ever grasping, and like the grave cries give, give. The great fish swallow up the small, and he who is most strenuous for the Rights of the people, when vested with power, is as eager after the perogatives of Government. You tell me of degrees of perfection to which Humane Nature is capable of arriving, and I believe it, but at the same time lament that our admiration should arise from the scarcity of the instances.

The Building up a Great Empire, which was only hinted at by my correspondent may now I suppose be realized even by the unbelievers. Yet will not ten thousand Difficulties arise in the formation of it? The Reigns of Government have been so long slakned, that I fear the people will not quietly submit to those restrains which are necessary for the peace, and security of the community; if we separate from Brittain, what Code of Laws will be established. How shall we be governed so as to retain our Liberties? Can any government be free which is not administred by general stated Laws? Who shall frame these Laws? Who will give them force and energy? Tis true your Resolutions as a Body have heithertoo had the force of Laws. But will they continue to have?

When I consider these things and the prejudices of people in favour of Ancient customs and Regulations, I feel anxious for the fate of our Monarchy or Democracy or what ever is to take place. I soon get lost in a Labyrinth of perplexities, but whatever occurs, may justice and righteousness be the Stability of our times, and order arise out of confusion. Great difficulties may be surmounted by patience and perseverence.

I believe I have tired you with politicks. As to news we have not any at all.

— Abigail to John, March 16 1776:

By the accounts in the publick papers the plot thickens; and some very important Crisis seems near at hand. Perhaps providence sees it necessary in order to answer important ends and designs that the Seat of War should be changed from this to the Southern colonies that each may have a proper sympathy for the other, and unite in a separation. The Refuge of the Believer amidst all the afflictive dispensations of providence, is that the Lord Reigneth, and that he can restrain the Arm of Man.

Orders are given to our Army to hold themselves in readiness to March at a moments warning. I’ll meet you at Philippi said the Ghost of Caesar to Brutus.

— Abigail Adams wrote the following to John, months before the Declaration of Independence was in existence:

A people may let a King fall, yet still remain a people, but if a King let his people slip from him, he is no longer a King. And as this is most certainly our case, why not proclaim to the world in decisive terms of our own importance.

Thank you both.

I am hoping we will not let you down.

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