“I swear my next project is going to be something really simple and focused and minimal.” — Baz Luhrmann

Posted on September 17, 2023 by sheila

It’s his birthday today.

“I think what I’m saying is, when you get to where I am in your journey, you just have to start to accept that there’s something inside you that you’ve been trying to get out and will try to get out for the rest of your life, and you don’t even understand it yourself. For some reason, I am compelled towards these tragic romances, the issue of love and all its variances, and also in a kind of cinematic language that now even I have to accept. I’ve tried to get rid of it but I can’t.” — Baz Luhrmann

I know, I know, Elvis is the elephant in the room. Last year was the summer of the Elvis movie – it opened in June and it was still in many theatres in September. Almost unheard of now. Aside from Top Gun, I can’t think of any other movie still around months after it was released. That kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore – or it rarely happens – and it happened with Elvis. For the month of July it was playing at the 100-year-old movie palace literally a 20-minute walk from my (old) apartment. Just down the street. Soooo … I’d be bored and be like “Yeah whatevs, let’s go see it again.”

I’m a fan of Baz Luhrmann, and I recognize – and acknowledge – the reasons why people are put off by him. That’s fine. Critical consensus doesn’t exist for Luhrmann. I, however, think this is a good thing. I distrust consensus. Many critics snark and complain about him – and they complain about the things that are his main strengths. This is so often the case! They want him to NOT be Luhrmann. They use terms like “excess” and “over the top” and “bloated”, etc. But it’s his EXCESS that makes him HIM, and – newsflash – excess is not utilized carefully and cautiously. Otherwise it wouldn’t be excess, now would it.

It’s fine if he’s not your cuppa, but not being your cuppa is … not indicative of anything. Would you “give it to him” if he directed a quiet family drama? Would you then tip your hat to him and acknowledge he knows what he’s doing? It’s ridiculous. At a certain point, personal taste is irrelevant – particularly when you’re a critic. I include myself in this, of course. I have to set my own SELF aside sometimes to see what a movie is doing and why it might be doing it. I still might not LIKE it but I gotta give it up. (Then, of course, there are things that are objectively bad/incompetent. I’ll call it out.) At a certain point you have to just admit, “People get a lot out of this, but it’s not my thing.” Baz, though, gets all this weird commentary … it’s like critics think he should be doing something OTHER than what he is doing with his talent. Why should he try to please YOU, personally? Artists have to please themselves, first and foremost, do I have to do everything around here? On a side note: Baz Luhrmann comes from theatre and opera and it SHOWS. I am speaking as a former Drama Club Nerd, and Theatre Kid, who took tap dance lessons and did jazz hands wearing dorky costumes while performing some horrible “revue” in the high school gym. And then jumped up and down with excitement and adrenaline with all my fellow Drama Club Nerds afterwards. People like this are always mocked – because pure enthusiasm is so embarrassing (and not just in Teenage Land, adults pull the same shit).

If you think of Baz Luhrmann as a grown-up Drama Nerd, it all makes sense. I completely recognize his kind. Stop wanting him to be a different kind of artist.

Moulin Rouge had a huge impact on me, so huge that I distrust my response to the movie. I watched it – on VHS – over and over and over. I can’t even remember what year. 2002? A bad year. I watched it every day. Sometimes twice a day. I don’t know what I saw in it, I don’t know why I clung to it. I did find this really REALLY old piece where I tried to express it. 2005! Damn, I’ve been writing here a long time. It might be interesting to revisit Moulin Rouge – now that the fever passed – and attempt, again, to put into words what I “got” from it, and how it may or may not have changed. I have a feeling it wouldn’t have the same impact. A lot has changed.

Critics pooh-poohed The Great Gatsby. Again, there were complaints about Luhrmann’s “excesses.” Did these people not read the damn book? The whole book is about the excesses of the Jazz Age. We saw where a respectful “non-excess” approach got us with the 1974 version (i.e. NOWHERE). Gatsby is NOT a realistic novel, OR a melodrama. It’s a fever dream of excess. So again: you may not like Luhrmann’s style, but if you complain about his “excesses” then you need to ask yourself: Is the excess in the service of something equally excessive? Critics always talk about form and content. Well, in the case of Gatsby, (and in the case of Elvis), Luhrmann married form to content. It’s the same damn thing.

I was so irritated by the critical dismissal of The Great Gatsby. Fine, don’t like it. But don’t DISMISS it, or pooh-pooh someone for having their own style. You sitting behind a desk who’ve never created something from your guts/heart. Try to understand what he’s doing and why. At the very LEAST. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to be doing?

So I did what you’re supposed to do when you’re irritated: I wrote a huge piece about Gatsby for Bright Wall/Dark Room:

Riotous Excursions: Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby

I think the movie makes some mistakes, which I also get into (Luhrmann loves framing devices. Sometimes they work – sometimes they do not) – but in general Luhrmann’s film is a far more “faithful” adaptation to the book than the 1970s film.

Interestingly enough, my Gatsby piece was completely ignored by the majority of critics, if judging by the Subtweets on Twitter, and the lack of ANY engagement with what I actually wrote. Crickets, in other words. I am not ashamed to say I am proud of the piece: I laid out an argument – just like I was taught to do in 10th grade English when we learned how to write a term paper – and I backed it up with examples from the book and from the movie. I would have loved to have discussions about the piece, people actually reading it, and maybe even entertaining the possibility that I was onto something. If someone I think is a good writer makes an argument, I entertain it. I don’t take it on blindly, but I like playing around with ideas, if they are compelling, or if they hit a blind spot. I don’t like complaining about this stuff – in general I don’t – but the Crickets response to the Gatsby piece was an extremely instructive moment for me. Oh. Okay. Discussion isn’t actually a part of “the discourse”. The consensus has been formed: Gatsby is bad and Luhrmann is ridiculous – and me “sticking up for him” just revealed how credulous and susceptible I was.

Luhrmann understood Fitzgerald’s book on a deep level. He understood its symbolism, and he MAGNIFIED the symbolism as opposed to try to present it in a subtle way. It’s not subtle in the book. The “green light” is not subtle. AT ALL.

Here’s a wonderful quote from Luhrmann’s interview with Interview magazine:

“When I was very young, I grew up in a totally isolated place, in a very small town. I always win the bet with anyone who says, “I lived in a small town”—I grew up in a town with 11 houses, and that was the big part of town. We lived on the outskirts. But the thing is, my dad ran a cinema for a short time and I went to a tiny little Catholic school. There were only three rooms in the school and there were nuns, and I would go up to the library and there would be a bookshelf with about 10 books on it. One of them was called The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare, and I opened it and went, “I will never be able to understand that as long as I live.” And a nun named Sister DeChantl said something like, “Oh, he’s one of the greatest writers of all time!” I sort of struggled with Shakespeare for a bit, but when eventually I ran away to the city, there was a guy called Neil Armfield [the Australian film and theater director], who is one of our living treasures. He did a production of Twelfth Night. People were giving out drinks and it was like we were in a Club Med in the Caribbean. There was music and dancing and there was a flash of light, and an actor called Robert Grubb came on in a white suit and said, “If music be the food of love, play on!” The band struck up again and I don’t remember what happened, except I understood every single word of it, and the lights came up and I went, “What was that?” So someone did that for me with Shakespeare and I became a mad Shakespeare nut and quite a bit of an academic on it. I studied it very, very heavily at drama school, and I worked with the greats. But I wanted to do that for a cinematic audience. How would Shakespeare go about making a movie? That’s how Romeo + Juliet was born.”

Posted in Directors, Movies, On This Day, Theatre | Tagged Australia, Baz Luhrmann, Ewan McGregor, Leonardo DiCaprio, Nicole Kidman, The Great Gatsby | 9 Comments

“When you lose everything, and I mean everything, you sit there in this empty room in the dark, and the only person who can get you out is you.” — Mickey Rourke

Posted on September 16, 2023 by sheila

It’s his birthday today.

It’s hard to express what he meant to actors coming up at a certain time. It’s hard to express it without sounding hyperbolic. But he was an enormously meaningful figure. His work was so exciting we all just wondered what he would do next. I was obsessed with him, his gestures, the subtlety of his emotions, his soft voice, the ways he found to dig into scenes (the sugar in Diner!), his devotion to the things we all cared about: truth, story, living believably in imaginary circumstances. There were other figures who came up at around the same time, people who also brought with them excitement. River Phoenix comes to mind. But River was a child. Rourke was a man.

When word of The Wrestler started percolating, I felt an almost unbearable mix of longing, anxiety, and excitement. Listen, you don’t get into acting by being an apathetic person. And the people who mean something to you, mean something to you in the deepest most personal sense. He was one of those guys.

I wrote about Mickey Rourke at House Next Door, right before The Wrestler came out. This is the first piece I wrote that got real attention. Real journalists linked to it, shared it. Real film critics reached out to compliment me. IMDB put a link to it on its homepage, and it stayed there for weeks, until The Wrestler hype died down. The piece took on a life of its own. I still get emails about it. That kind of attention has happened to me since (hello, Elvis), but Mickey Rourke was the first. Which seems appropriate, since my love of him goes back to the moment he emerged, and we watched him unfold in real time. All of those feelings are in the essay – which is why I think it hit people so hard.

Gone Away, Come Back: Mickey Rourke

A couple years ago, I wrote a piece literally years in the making, about movie scenes where men look at themselves in the mirror. If you’ve been around here since the beginning, you will remember me posting in, say, 2005, 2006, “I should write about this one day!” Well, I finally did, for Oscilloscope Laboratories. Mickey Rourke’s “mirror moment” in Johnny Handsome is included – it’s not only a great example of the device, but it’s one of Rourke’s finest moments.

Posted in Actors, On This Day | Tagged Mickey Rourke | 6 Comments

“I’ve always felt that work – learning from people who know more than I know – is what keeps you going.” — Lauren Bacall

Posted on September 16, 2023 by sheila

It’s her birthday today.

This was the magazine cover that started it all.

Howard Hawks was looking for a protege, a girl he could mold into his perfect idealized woman – the ideal foil for the men in those fabulous macho movies he made. He wasn’t interested in traditional gender roles. He was bored at the thought of a “traditional” woman, however sexy or pretty or appealing she might be. His interest was so specific it could almost be called a kink: He wanted a full-on woman with a capital W, but a woman who wasn’t silly or romantic or easily flustered: he wanted women who could keep up with the boys, who kept her cool, who held her own counsel – but was never “mannish”. A Howard Hawks woman was tough but not hard. If you watch his films in chronological order, you can watch him attempt to create what he saw in his head …. but he never quite got it right until … Lauren Bacall arrived. She was young and almost totally inexperienced; therefore, she was a blank slate, and completely brilliantly mold-able.

Howard Hawks’ wife, “Slim” Hawks – who, for real, was the living embodiment of what Hawks desired and wanted to create onscreen – saw 19-year-old Betty Perske on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar. It stopped her dead in her tracks and she immediately showed it to her husband. i.e. Look at this girl. Look at how she stares at the camera. Is this kind of the girl you’ve been looking for? Hawks saw what his wife saw. He had the teenage Betty brought out to Hollywood for a battery of nervewracking screen-tests. She traveled with her mother. She had some acting training but nothing to the level required of her here. She just did what Mr. Hawks told her to do. He dressed her a certain way. He made her hold her head down to keep her chin from trembling – this would become her signature look. He made her keep her voice low and steady (this took a lot of control on her part: nerves make your voice go high.) He made her read the lines a certain way.

At the same time, Hawks was developing a picture with Humphrey Bogart called To Have and Have Not, based on an Ernest Hemingway story. He needed a girl. A girl to play a thief, a love interest, a girl who gave as good as she got. Hawks’ dream-girl was “insolent”, the word he kept whispering in Bacall’s ear, a girl who could be AS “insolent” as Bogart was. Howard Hawks didn’t like silly women. He REALLY didn’t like prudes and prisses. Bacall made it through all of the tests, and Hawks cast her in To Have and Have Not. She was re-christened: “Lauren Bacall.”

Bacall wrote in her wonderful autobiography By Myself:

One day a couple of weeks before the picture was to start, I was about to walk into Howard’s office when Humphrey Bogart came walking out. He said, “I just saw your test. We’ll have a lot of fun together.” Howard told me Bogart had truly liked the test and would be very helpful to me.

Truer words …

Her debut in To Have and Have Not is one of the best film debuts in film history. It made her an instant star. Her first entrance is unforgettable. “Anybody got a match?” She, a virgin at the time, had almost no experience with men, and yet here she was playing a role where she oozed knowing confident sensuality.

This is very important to keep in mind: Bacall was not drawing on her own experiences. She followed Hawks’ instructinos, learning how to act on the job, and gave an incredible performance. Not everything has to come from a place of “lived experience”. It was an unforgettable first impression.

Bacall was able to channel her nerves, her fear, into a cool coiled character, sexually knowing, unflappable, with a sizzling hot interior. This is how strong she was: it also showed her total trust in Howard Hawks: but if you’re going to obey a Maestro, like she did, then you have to REALLY do it, you have to commit to it 100% – and that’s what she did. She didn’t fight his influence, she didn’t resent him telling her what to do, she wasn’t like “stop telling me what to do, Svengali.” He WAS a Svengali, and she participated willingly, fully. He knew what he had. She had no idea what she had. But he saw it. Slim Hawks saw it. They knew, just from looking at that magazine cover: she was a star.

And she remained so, for 70 more years.

One more thing: about that Harper’s Bazaar cover: If you look at Bacall’s deadpan straight-on expression, you see the future of modeling. The smileless future of modeling, where models stalk down the catwalk, with flat uningratiating faces. The future of modeling was the opposite of “come hither”. Bacall was an emissary from the future.

Posted in Actors, Movies, On This Day | Tagged Howard Hawks, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, To Have and Have Not | Leave a comment

This Could Be A Total Bust, or Mickey Rourke Inside The Actor’s Studio, by Brendan O’Malley

Posted on September 16, 2023 by sheila

My talented brother Brendan O’Malley is an amazing writer and actor. He maintained a blog for many years (he doesn’t blog anymore) -in 2020 I posted links to his 50 Best Albums essays, as well as all of his music essays – shows he’d seen, artists he loved, etc. Today, though, I’m posting what he wrote about Mickey Rourke – in honor of Mickey Rourke’s birthday. I am tangentially involved in this story. Many years back, it was announced that Mickey Rourke was being interviewed by Jim Lipton in Los Angeles for “Inside the Actors Studio.” I am on the mailing list for those interviews, and I went to all of the interviews in its early seasons, held at the New School for Social Research. (If you watch early seasons, and you see a red-haired woman wearing a black beret in the audience – that’s me.) I got complementary tickets due to my association with the Actors Studio. I would have obviously gone if Mickey Rourke’s interview took place in New York, but this one was being filmed in Los Angeles. I emailed Michael instantly – old-timers know all about Michael – one of our bonds was – and still is – Mickey Rourke. I asked if he wanted to take my ticket. He was busy, so I texted Bren. Thankfully he was able to go! And he gave a full report. Here it is.

This Could Be A Total Bust, or Mickey Rourke Inside The Actor’s Studio

We sat in the plush velvet theater seats waiting for Mickey Rourke to come out and have his ass kissed by James Lipton. The evening was supposed to have started at 7PM and it was now pushing 8. Our seats were right next to the two cameramen set up in the audience to film Lipton and Rourke. We heard their conversation…

“He’s not even here.”

“What?”

“Rourke. He ain’t here. This could be a bust.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Just heard it on the headset. He isn’t here. This could be a bust. I mean, a total bust.”

This could be a total bust. With Mickey Rourke, who was briefly on top of the mountain, there is always the chance that he might just decide, “Ah, fuck this noise.” And disappear forever.

But all of a sudden there he was.

He was wearing what appeared to be some sort of a seersucker suit with a sheer tight long sleeve muscle shirt underneath open to his navel. His tri-color hair was in a set of mild dreadlocks and he wore blue velvet shoes without socks that looked like they could have been worn by Kirsten Dunst in a scene from Marie Antoinette. A fedora/hat-you-wear-to-bet-on-horses was pulled down over a pair of shades which sat atop an impish mustache/goatee triangle. In short, he looked fucking crazy.

Lipton asked about his parents’ divorce when he was young and he mumbled that Lipton was going to make him smoke sooner than he thought. He then pulled out a Zippo attached to a watch-fob and lit up the first of what seemed to be a thousand cigarettes.

In a moment of behavior reminiscent of the kind he uses to such wonderful advantage in his film portraits, he became frustrated by the smoke billowing out of the coffee mug he’d been ashing into so he took the pitcher from the side table and poured a dollop of water in to quench the ember.

The movement was delicate, refined, the kind of thing an aristocrat would do if they were holding a meeting with a visiting dignitary. When you combine that kind of grace and precision with the body and fashion sense of a Miami pimp with a Gatsby fetish … well, let’s just say you wind up with Mickey Rourke.

I won’t go into all of the amazing anecdotes he shared. You can watch the Inside The Actor’s Studio broadcast for that.

Melody (my girlfriend) is younger than me by just enough that she missed Mickey Rourke’s moment in the sun. She has a memory of seeing 9 ½ Weeks in high school and knowing it was naughty but she was too young to really identify with Mickey Rourke as an actor. She’d seen Barfly in college but couldn’t really remember it. His charm is pretty much disguised in that movie anyway. We went to see The Wrestler which capitalizes on his past but she really hadn’t been subjected to the full weight of what had been LOST.

So we watched Angel Heart to get ready for the big event. It was very interesting to watch someone experience Rourke for the first time in all his glory. He is truly astonishing.

(Side note: they didn’t talk about this film AT ALL which is such an oversight that there must be an actual reason for it, either Rourke refused to talk about it or Alan Parker wouldn’t give permission for the clips. There’s a story there that I’d love to know about.)

As we watched Angel Heart I primarily watched Melody. Since I know what is coming next in each scene, I vicariously witnessed her being buffeted about by the story, by Rourke’s easy charm and rumpled elegance, by the existential dread that he effortlessly embodies. This carried over to the night of the Inside The Actor’s Studio taping and by the time we left she admitted that she was “a little in love with Mickey Rourke.”

And isn’t that what is happening with the whole world right now? And isn’t that great? The whole world is saying, “Hey, Mickey Rourke! We are a little in LOVE with you.” It isn’t just normal box-office bullshit, media-created marketing blitzes telling us that Josh Hartnett is sliced bread’s next incarnation.

Nothing against Josh Hartnett (who I actually like), but the powers-that-be tried to treat him like he was Johnny Depp before anyone had gotten a look at him. He was like a minor league phenom touted as the next big thing. Then he gets to the big leagues and it just doesn’t happen. And conversely, can you imagine reading that Josh Hartnett had given up acting and was pursuing boxing? That he had had it with the stinking quagmire of Hollywood and rejected the whole kit and caboodle?

There was an organic quality to Mickey Rourke’s rise to stardom that is hard to explain to people now. There was no internet. There wasn’t even cable TV on a widespread basis. Nope. This guy hit the screen for 5 minutes in Body Heat and that was all it took. The audience responded and he was off and running.

I hit college just as he hit his stride and we college actors were all on the Mickey Rourke band wagon. We didn’t just want to see his movies. We wanted to BE him.

And this was when things started to go haywire somehow.

I remember going to see Johnny Handsome in the movie theater. For the first half hour I was convinced that Rourke was going to win an Oscar. He plays a disfigured criminal whose deformation has created a kind of anti-social violence in him. He then is given the opportunity for a radical kind of facial reconstructive surgery. The moment when he removes the bandages to see that his face has been transformed into that of Mickey Rourke is one of the more astonishing moments of acting that you WILL EVER SEE.

And then, the movie, like the next 15 years of Rourke’s life, quickly de-volved into a bad cliché. I remember being highly disappointed that the story and film had let Mickey Rourke down, that he was simply TOO good for the material. And in listening to him talk to James Lipton, I think it was that very sense that destroyed him. He could not reconcile the fact that his talent could NOT BE MATCHED in any significant way. His standards set the bar so high that he needed a Coppola or a Scorcese or a Polanski EVERY time out of the box or there wasn’t really a point to it.

Now a certain level of this is bullshit. He was out of control. He was difficult to work with. He seems to have been incapable of respecting the talents of other people, finding it easier to hide behind his own as a defense mechanism. But I don’t think this has anything to do with him as an ACTOR. If he’d continued digging ditches in Miami he’d have been a prima-donna ditch digger with anger management issues and an ego so finely developed that it becomes unhealthy.

This is why the story of his personal journey is so fascinating to us. Normally I don’t care a hoot about the personal life of an actor. In fact, it bores me to tears. I care about what happens once the credits roll and that is about it. But in this case, the relationship that he has developed with the public is so personal that his story has become part of his onscreen persona. And this is a change from the beginning of his career when he seemed to crave a kind of anonymity and mystery, even in the parts he played. He craved anonymity and mystery so much that in fact, he became anonymous and a mystery.

But on this night, anyway, Mickey Rourke deigned to grace us with his presence.

We’d gone from “This could be a total bust” to Mickey Rourke surrounded by fawning young artists hoping to touch one of their heroes. And the most amazing fact was that he’d shown up at all. That he’d turned off the voice in his head that said that evenings like this were bullshit, they weren’t what it was all about. We love Mickey Rourke because in some way we AGREE with him that that stuff is bullshit. But we’re still glad he showed up for it.

Look out world. Mickey Rourke has finally arrived.

Posted in Actors, Movies, On This Day | Tagged family, Mickey Rourke | 3 Comments

“I’m trying to get people to see that we are our brother’s keeper. Red, white, black, brown or yellow, rich or poor, we all have the blues.” — B.B. King

Posted on September 16, 2023 by sheila

WHAT a performance. And WHAT an audience. The mood – the back and forth – the communication going on – not just from up on the stage, but coming back at him from the crowd – is what live performance (and the blues) are all about.

Today is the birthday of legendary bluesman B.B. King, who died in 2015 at the age of 89. He had a six-decade career. He toured constantly, almost up until the very end.

Here’s one of my favorite live clips. Watch how King builds it. And listen to that guitar. One of the most eloquent guitars ever.

B.B. King was interviewed for the PBS oral histories “American Roots Music,” and it’s a goldmine. He was asked about Bo Diddley and Elvis and Little Richard and what these people meant for him and other blues musicians. His response is eloquent.

I never thought of it that way because, see, Little Richard played some blues; Elvis — believe it or not — played some blues; all of these guys. And I wondered why they called them rock and roll. The only reason I could see was because they were white. I couldn’t see any other reason why they were rock ‘n roll, ’cause a lot of the black guys was doing the same thing they were doing. So the only difference was sort of like the records when we first started making records. They would have “race records,” you know, if the dude was black. That’s a black one right there. If it’s pop, that’s a white one right there, and that was the difference. But when rock ‘n roll started, in my opinion – I said in my opinion – Little Richard had been doing some of the same things I heard the Rolling Stones doing. Fats Domino had been out – his way, his style – but he was doing the same changes and progressions that these guys were doing. The only difference I saw was white and black. I don’t know if it was done because of prejudice. I didn’t think of it that way, but I thought of it “Okay, that’s a white guy there; he’s rock ‘n roll. That’s a black guy over there; he’s playing the blues.” ‘Cause they hadn’t, for some reason, thought of soul at the time. These guys obviously didn’t have any soul. They called guys like me rhythm and blues, so somewhere along the line I guess I lost my rhythm! [And I] wind up here – just the blues, you know. To answer your question, I didn’t think anything other than we had more [people] on the scene. The more, the merrier – especially when you started having the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and many guys like that. Would you believe that the Beatles helped open a lot of doors for blues players like myself?

Here’s BB King and Elvis, in December, 1956, backstage at Memphis’ Ellis Auditorium at a fund-raising event hosted by WDIA radio station, a black-owned and black-run radio station.

The funds raised went to “needy Negro children.” Presley was there that night to support, and it was a moment almost unthinkable in that day/age. The symbolism was lost on nobody there. By December 1956, Elvis was the biggest name in the country. He had a hit movie to his name. He was a millionaire.

BB King wrote in his autobiography:

The entire black community turned out. All the DJs carried on, putting on skits and presenting good music. When Elvis appeared, he was already a big, big star. Remember this was the ’50s, so for a young white boy to show up in an all-black function took guts. I believe he was showing his roots and he seemed proud of those roots. After the show he made a point of posing for pictures with me, treating me like royalty. He’d tell people I was one of his influences. I doubt whether that’s true but I like hearing Elvis give Memphis credit for his musical upbringing.

And because my site is what it is, here is a lengthy quote from a 2010 interview with BB King about Elvis, and the persistent accusations of Elvis’ racism. Let’s listen to what BB King had to say about all that.

Let me tell you the definitive truth about Elvis Presley and racism. With Elvis, there was not a single drop of racism in that man. And when I say that, believe me I should know. All of our influences had something in common. We were born poor in Mississippi, went through poor childhoods and we learned and earned our way through music. You see, I talked with Elvis about music early on, and I know one of the big things in heart was this: Music is owned by the whole universe. It isn’t exclusive to the black man or the white man or any other color. It shared in and by our souls. I told Elvis once, and he told me he remembered I told him this, is that music is like water. Water is for every living person and every living thing. Water from the white fountain don’t taste any better than from the black fountain. We just need to share it, that’s all. You see, Elvis knew this and I know this.

Many people make the mistake of being wrong about all of this. If you ask anyone, I’m talking about people from all kinds of music – Blues, Soul, Country, Gospel, whatever – and if they are honest with you and have been around long enough to know—they’ll thank Elvis for his contributions. He opened many doors and by all his actions, not just his words, he showed his love for all people.

People don’t realize that when ‘That’s All Right, Mama’ was first played (by Dewey Phillips in July 1954) no one had ever heard anything like that record. It wasn’t just country. It was Rhythm and Blues. It was Pop music. It was music for everybody. This is important.

I was barely 11 years old, when one of the greatest influences of my life, Robert Johnson, was recording just across the street from this theater recording his first ever songs. Johnson came from the same dirt Elvis and so many of us did. It was the world of sharecropping, and to survive that hard work bending over all day long, there would be plenty of singing. Elvis’ momma and daddy did their share of it – both the picking and the singing. It was called survival. It was called life. It was just as important to us as water. It was as important to those of us who had it in our souls as the water.

The other big influence was Jimmie Rodgers. Some people want to say he was the Father of Country Music, but like Elvis, he was more than that. He was a big influence on not just me. I used to listen to my aunt’s records of Jimmie Rodgers and that was a real treat. I liked that ‘Mississippi Delta Blues’ and to listen to him yodel. I never did yodel, but Jimmie Rodgers could sure yodel. He was very good at it. But yes, he influenced more than country music, he influenced Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters as much as he did Merle Haggard or Willie Nelson. See, Elvis did that too, but only much wider. Elvis influenced everybody’s music and it was for the good of all of us.

Now, where did Jimmie Rodgers learn his music from? He learned it working alongside the black railroad workers and hobos. Elvis lived and played with black children back in Mississippi. He told me that when he was just a baby and his mama had to work, he was cared for sometimes by his grandmamma, but mostly by a neighbor black lady.

People today will say things about Elvis they just don’t know about. They want to say this is black music, this is white music, this is country music. But when Elvis came along all that was suddenly washed down the drain.

Back in ’72, Elvis helped me get a good gig at the Hilton Hotel while he was playing in the big theater. He put in a call for me and I worked in the lounge to standing room only. Elvis fans came in different colors but their love of good music was all the same. They were always a good audience.

Many nights I’d go upstairs after we finished our sets and go up to his suite. I’d play Lucille and sing with Elvis, or we’d take turns. It was his way of relaxing.

I’ll tell you a secret. We were the original Blues Brothers because that man knew more blues songs than most in the business – and after some nights it felt like we sang every one of them. But my point is, that when we were hanging out in the Hilton in the 70s, Elvis had not lost his respect, his “yes sir,” his love for all fields of music. And I liked that.

If anyone says Elvis Presley was a racist, then they don’t know a thing about Elvis Presley or music history.

B.B. King had so many fruitful collaborations with other artists. In closing, I love his stuff with Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Posted in Music, On This Day | Tagged Elvis Presley | 6 Comments

“If a man is not faithful to his own individuality, he cannot be loyal to anything.” — poet Claude McKay

Posted on September 15, 2023 by sheila

“I am a black man, born in Jamaica, B.W.I., and have been living in America for the last years. It was the first time I had ever come face to face with such manifest, implacable hate of my race, and my feelings were indescribable…Looking about me with bigger and clearer eyes I saw that this cruelty in different ways was going on all over the world. Whites were exploiting and oppressing whites even as they exploited and oppressed the yellows and blacks. And the oppressed, groaning under the leash, evinced the same despicable hate and harshness toward their weaker fellows. I ceased to think of people and things in the mass. [O]ne must seek for the noblest and best in the individual life only: each soul must save itself.” — Claude McKay

Claude McKay was born on this day in 1890 on the island of Jamaica. He grew up poor, but he was exposed to literature through an older brother. It got him going. He loved English literature, he loved all the Romantic poets. As a young man, McKay met Walter Jekyll, an Englishman who had come to Jamaica originally to be a planter. Unlike a lot of other imported-planter-types, Jekyll immersed himself in the local culture, becoming fascinated by the Afro-Caribbean world and its people, its folklore, its language. In 1906, Jekyll published a collection of the tales he had heard. Jekyll felt it was important to capture these stories, since they came from an oral tradition. The meeting of McKay and Jekyll was crucial, because Jekyll encouraged him to start writing in his own dialect, using his own language. There were examples from the past of those who had done this – those colonized by England, not just politically and socially, but linguistically. Someone like Robert Burns (my post about him here) rejected writing “in English,” instead he wrote like the people he knew, he wrote in dialect. McKay was very inspired by Robert Burns: he wanted to do for Jamaica what Burns did for Scotland.

McKay’s first book was called Songs of Jamaica, published in 1912. Walter Jekyll wrote the introduction.

That same year, McKay published another book called Constab Ballads, drawing on his experience as a police constable. McKay won a prize for these books, and moved to America that same year to study at the Tuskegee Institute. He then attended Kansas State College. He moved to Harlem in 1914. (He became an American citizen in 1940). In moving to Harlem when he did, he stepped into a seething vibrant literary culture.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of McKay’s life, however, is his almost restless and constant travel. Jamaica. Kansas. New York. He moved to England for a couple of years, right after WWI. He met important people who loved what he was doing. He wrote for Sylvia Pankhurst’s radical feminist newspaper. McKay’s “reach” widened exponentially. After his time in England, he went to Russia. The Russian Revolution fired him up with excitement and he wanted to see what was going on. This was 1922, the era when the Revolution – which had filled so many with so much hope – started coalescing into … well, the monstrosity it became. Nevertheless, McKay continued to “believe” in the ideals behind the revolution. (Socialist writer Max Eastman wrote the preface to McKay’s book Harlem Shadows.)

The wandering continued through the early 1920s: McKay moved to France. He lived in Morocco. Then he returned to America, and over the next decades he got the memo, in re: Communism, and he renounced his beliefs. Still caring about the plight of mankind, he devoted himself to Catholic causes. He was famous. His work was famous. He did not suffer in obscurity. For example, “If We Must Die” (printed below), was written in response to the 1919 race riots, or “race riots”, quotation marks necessary. Those riots were really part of a “Red Scare” – the first of many in America. “If We Must Die” may be McKay’s most famous poem. Henry Cabot Lodge read it into the Congressional Record at the time. If you watch The Man in the High Castle, you will recognize the poem.

McKay’s main innovation and gift was bringing the rhythms of Jamaican speech into American poetry. He was hugely influential on the Jamaican and Afro-Caribbean poets who came after.

Harlem Shadows was published in 1922, one of the most important years in 20th century literature – high modernism arrived with a vengeance, sweeping away the dead leaves of the past. Ulysses was published in 1922. As was T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time was appearing piece by piece. Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt. Anna Akhmatova’s final collection of poetry appeared in 1922, before the decades of suppression of her work began. Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. Siddhartha. The Beautiful and the Damned. Harlem Shadows is a part of this literary revolution, not to mention being one of the opening bells of the Harlem Renaissance.

McKay often used “old” forms, i.e. traditional European forms, like the sonnet – and this juxtaposition between form and content created startling effects when combined with his vocabulary, language, and subject matter. For example, his devastating poem “The Lynching” is in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet.

The Lynching

His spirit is smoke ascended to high heaven.
His father, by the cruelest way of pain,
Had bidden him to his bosom once again;
The awful sin remained still unforgiven.
All night a bright and solitary star
(Perchance the one that ever guided him,
Yet gave him up at last to Fate’s wild whim)
Hung pitifully o’er the swinging char.
Day dawned, and soon the mixed crowds came to view
The ghastly body swaying in the sun:
The women thronged to look, but never a one
Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue;
And little lads, lynchers that were to be,
Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.

Breakthroughs like this extraordinary sonnet open doors for other artists, shine light where there was no light before. Not just in subject matter, but in form. McKay’s breakthrough signaled to others around him and to those who came after: The long tradition of English literature, created/written by white people, was not just “FOR” white people, and the beautiful perfect literary forms of the so-called white tradition were not barred to those who had been colonized by the countries from whence that tradition sprung. This was then and remains somewhat controversial, because indigenous forms were wiped out by colonization, and much of 20th century literature was a re-claiming of the indigenous forms. Anyone who came from a colonized culture understood that their natural tradition and language and customs had been wiped out or at least so co-opted as to have dissolved totally. (James Joyce was all about this. The Irish language had been stamped out. The clearest example of Joyce’s feelings on is the famous “tundish scene” in Portrait of the Artist).

McKay writing a sonnet about lynching is such a daring innovation in form: He claimed that white tradition as his own. Now, there may be bars for entry in terms of such work being accepted – people may not like what you are doing, may not accept you “using” a “white” form to tell your story – but the people who reject you are stuck in the past while you are the present and the future. (Countee Cullen’s work – my post on him here – has similar qualities. He was a 20th century Black man, writing in the Romantic Keats-ian tradition. McKay and Cullen both loved the Romantic poets, and both revered the sonnet.) One of McKay’s primary inspirations was William Wordsworth (my post on him here). McKay used Wordworth’s rhythms and sensitivity to nature to plunge readers into Jamaica. McKay’s Caribbean atmosphere could not be further away from the landscape that inspired Wordsworth. But love of nature is love of nature, no matter where you are.

McKay was not the first poet to use Jamaican English in poetry, but he was the most successful, cracking open poetry to include new voices, different sounds and different prosody. His influence on future generations cannot be measured.

After his death, he was declared the national poet of Jamaica.

Here are a couple of his famous poems.

If We Must Die

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Harlem Shadows

I hear the halting footsteps of a lass
In Negro Harlem when the night lets fall
Its veil. I see the shapes of girls who pass
To bend and barter at desire’s call.
Ah, little dark girls who in slippered feet
Go prowling through the night from street to street!

Through the long night until the silver break
Of day the little gray feet know no rest;
Through the lone night until the last snow-flake
Has dropped from heaven upon the earth’s white breast,
The dusky, half-clad girls of tired feet
Are trudging, thinly shod, from street to street.

Ah, stern harsh world, that in the wretched way
Of poverty, dishonor and disgrace,
Has pushed the timid little feet of clay,
The sacred brown feet of my fallen race!
Ah, heart of me, the weary, weary feet
In Harlem wandering from street to street.

America

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate,
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.

QUOTES:

James Weldon Johnson:

Claude McKay, although still quite a young man, has already demonstrated his power, breadth and skill as a poet. Mr. McKay’s breadth is as essential a part of his equipment as his power and skill. He demonstrates mastery of the three when as a Negro poet he pours out the bitterness and rebellion in his heart in those two sonnet-tragedies, “If We Must Die” and “To the White Fiends,” in a manner that strikes terror; and when as a cosmic poet he creates the atmosphere and mood of poetic beauty in the absolute, as he does in “Spring in New Hampshire” and “The Harlem Dancer.” Mr. McKay gives evidence that he has passed beyond the danger which threatens many of the new Negro poets–the danger of allowing the purely polemical phases of the race problem to choke their sense of artistry.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

Along with southern blacks, Caribbean migrants were among those moving north, including Claude McKay, later declared the national poet of Jamaica. Arriving in the United States in 1912 and abandoning the Jamaican English of his early verse, McKay was politically the most militant if prosodically among the most conservative of the new African American writers. In Harlem Shadows (1922), he preferred the sonnet among European lyric forms, but if the genre was traditional, McKay’s use of it – dislocating its norms of intimacy to express racial fury and estrangement – was not. Living mostly in France and Morocco for eleven years after 1922, he inspired francophone poets such as Leopold Sedar Senghor–African and Caribbean poets of the Negritude movement, who beginning in the 1930s asserted black pride and resistance to colonial assimilation.

Arthur D. Drayton, “Claude McKay’s Human Pity”:

McKay does not seek to hide his bitterness. But having preserved his vision as poet and his status as a human being, he can transcend bitterness. In seeing … the significance of the Negro for mankind as a whole, he is at once protesting as a Negro and uttering a cry for the race of mankind as a member of that race. His human pity was the foundation that made all this possible.

Robert Bone:

These first two volumes [Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads] are already marked by a sharpness of vision, an inborn realism, and a freshness which provides a pleasing contrast with the conventionality which, at this time, prevails among the black poets of the United States.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

The sonnets “America” and “The White City” compact intense ambivalence toward white society in muscular syntax and violent images. The tension between McKay’s strict form and molten subject parallels the intense racial alienation represented in some of his poems. “Outcast” registers the poet’s sense of permanent estrangement from African culture. The figure of “The Harlem Dancer,” though idolized and exoticized, reflects the poet’s alienation: “looking at her falsely-smiling face, / I knew her self was not in that strange place.”

Jean Wagner:

Along with the will to resistance of black Americans that it expresses, [“If We Must Die”] voices also the will of oppressed people of every age who, whatever their race and wherever their region, are fighting with their backs against the wall to win their freedom.

Alan L. MacLeod:

That he was able to capture a universality of sentiment in ‘If We Must Die’ has been fully demonstrated; that he was able to show new directions for the black novel is now acknowledged; and that he is rightly regarded as one of the harbingers of (if not one of the participants in) the Harlem Renaissance is undisputed.

The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:

The year 1922 saw many important tendencies in modern writing put into motion. It was the year of The Waste Land, of James Joyce’s Ulysses (published in Paris), and, at the start of the Harlem Renaissance, of Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows and James Weldon Johnson’s The Book of American Negro Poetry.

Robert A. Smith, “Claude McKay: An Essay in Criticism”:

Although he was frequently concerned with the race problem, his style is basically lucid. One feels disinclined to believe that the medium which he chose was too small, or too large for his message. He has been heard.

Posted in Books, On This Day, writers | Tagged Harlem Renaissance, James Weldon Johnson, poetry | Leave a comment

“A vast amount of rubbish is published in the name of art. A man should let his work talk for him. ” — Charles Dana Gibson

Posted on September 14, 2023 by sheila

It’s his birthday today.

Old-timers will remember when my blog-design was Gibson-Girl inspired. My favorite haughty Gibson Girl was in the blog banner for years!

What a goddess. She is gorgeous and she does not give af.

The only vestige of the Gibson Girl origin-story of this site is in the email address attached to the blog.

The Gibson Girl caught my eye back when I was in high school. I like to try to re-trace my steps in terms of these long-term influences but this one I’m not sure about. I was very into the Betsy-Tacy-Tib books, particularly the four books covering the high school years – these books had illustrations, and all of the teenage girl characters were rendered with Gibson-Girl silhouettes. I used to obsess over these illustrations, the swooping curves of the skirts, the pompadours … And somehow, the “Gibson Girl wallpaper” came into my life. I had a postcard of it, and it stayed taped up beside my mirror for years. So much so that I took the wallpaper – and the Gibson Girl – for granted, and never gave it a second’s thought. I still don’t give my love of these elegant haughty ladies too much thought. I just know I have loved them all of my life. Self-projection? I don’t think so, although of course they are aspirational in a way.

Charles Dana Gibson used his wife and her sisters as his models. He was surrounded by powerful women, women who had their own world going on, separate from the men in their lives – this seemed to fascinate him. And maybe because of his close platonic/familial relationships with women, he was able to gain access to women’s private lives in a way that other men – who were caught up in pursuing said women – couldn’t. Gibson knew how women talked about men when men weren’t present. And instead of being upset about it, he made witty illustrations celebrating the power of women.

Yes, the “Gibson Girl” was an “idealization”, and idealizations are always limiting …. but damn, in his point of view women were … going to the beach, attending fancy balls, snickering about men, tormenting and toying with men – OR bored out of their minds by men … His “idealization” was not domestic, and this is KEY (maybe key, too, to why I loved them so much. Domestic partnership and domestic life wasn’t going to be my destiny either, even though I always wanted it.) His starry-eyed view of women had nothing to do with seeing them dressed up in aprons, standing in kitchens, holding babies. In fact, the Gibson Girl was the opposite. In the world of the Gibson Girl, men are weak, either puny or boorish – not at ALL worthy of the goddesses among them – in some cases they are tiny in stature … completely inconsequential. The Gibson Girl strolls on by, nose in the air. So if this is an idealization then … doesn’t sound too bad. You could certainly do way worse.

It’s also amazing to me that all of this is made with just long slashes of a pen. Look at all of the slashes making up the piles of her pompadour-ed hair! It’s so intricate-looking – and there’s a perfect illusion of the hair having shine, of picking up the light in its curves and swoops. He does it so simply, but look at the effect.

Years ago I came across a giant art book filled with Charles Dana Gibson’s illustrations – in a second-hand store, I think, maybe a flea market – I can’t remember, it’s been years and years. This was Pictures of People, first published in 1896 – my edition says “1901” on the title page. The book was in fairly good shape except for the binding and the stains on the cover. It’s HUGE. For a long time I’ve never had enough space to display it, and so it sat in a box or on a shelf … which defeats the purpose. This is a book to take some time flipping through, enjoying the illustrations. Finally now I have a free surface where I put the book, and so now I feel like it’s back in my life again. These things are meant to be shared. It’s a huge book.

Gibson’s stuff appeared in Life magazine and other publications: it was the heyday of American illustration. While he is remembered for the “Gibson Girl,” there’s a lot of variety in his work, and often the captions comment on the illustration in a way that cracks open the image, adding layers of irony, wit, illumination. (See “The Cabinet Meeting” below. That’s the most dramatic example.) His stuff is funny! It’s not just haughty ladies strolling by with parasols. There’s a lot of social commentary here. And again, it’s great to see this book since the images are so huge, you can really fall into the cross-hatching slashes making up the hair, the clothes, the skin of the illustrations. How did he DO that? It’s amazing.

Here’s a little tour of Pictures of People, proudly on display in my study area. Make sure to read the captions!

Posted in Art/Photography, Books, On This Day | Tagged art, Charles Dana Gibson, Gibson Girls | 15 Comments

“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” — H.L. Mencken

Posted on September 12, 2023 by sheila

“You know what H.L. Mencken said one time about religious people? He said he’d been greatly misunderstood. He said he didn’t hate them. He simply found them comical.” – Kurt Vonnegut

Today is the birthday of one of the greatest cranks in American letters – and the best writer of them all – the sage of Baltimore, H.L. Mencken.

He’s probably most famous for the quote in the title line, but also for his righteous enraged dispatches from the Scopes trial, collected into a book with the non-inflammatory title A Religious Orgy in Tennessee: A Reporter’s Account of the Scopes Monkey Trial, a high watermark of journalism as activism. These articles are incandescent with rage. He hated quacks and fads and trends. He hated stupidity, he hated the credulous, he hated organized religion. The mere THOUGHT of chiropractors drove him bananas. And nuttery like creationism fired him up with evangelical zeal to reveal those ignoramuses for what they were: dangerous, misguided, and to be beaten at all costs.

I read Terry Teachout’s excellent biography (The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken), which helped contextualize him. He was one of THE authors of the “Jazz Age,” which is really interesting when you look at how he lived his life, in the most non-Jazz-Age-y way as possible. He lived in the house he grew up in. He lived with his mother. He didn’t marry until he was in his 40s. He occasionally played piano in burlesque houses, and things like that, he enjoyed cigars and alcohol … but he wasn’t a trendy “bright young thing.” At all. But you can’t get more successful than Mencken was in the 1920s. As the 1930s heated up with fascism all over the world, Mencken often found himself on the wrong side of history. He admired German culture so much, he “wrote off” Hitler as a goof, a sideshow. (He was not alone in that.) He became crankier with age. (Don’t we all. Or, I’ll speak for myself.) He was “out of touch” with the times. But during his heyday, he helped launch American letters into the stratosphere.

He was a snob. He didn’t try to keep up with the culture. He could not care less. He barely gave the movies any thought at all. He was highly suspicious of consensus. Maybe this is why I love him so much. He helps keep you sharp, he helps you interrogate your own responses to things, and you also interrogate your response to HIM. He’s fun to argue with. I read his In Defense of Women just this year and some of his blanket statements! I go, “COME ON NOW.” He could be brutal about women, yes, but that’s nothing … NOTHING … compared to his views on men. He thought American men were the worst. He felt sorry for American women for having to put up with the slobs. And Mencken put into words – over and over again – something I have felt and sensed my whole life: that men are more romantic than women, that men are more sentimental than women, that women are practical, because they have to be. Men get swept away. Generalities, yes, blah blah, but much of this has been reflected in my own experience. It’s almost a conspiracy, the assumption that women are these fluttery romantic nincompoops – when I have found the exact opposite to be true.Mencken can be a tough read, you have to have a very thick skin, which I do, and besides: anyone who can write as well as he can is worth the time.

I really love his unexpectedly tender essay on Rudolph Valentino, which – weirdly – is an unofficial obituary for Valentino, a sex symbol who died shortly after his bizarre meeting with Mencken. Valentino had reached out to Mencken for advice – this blows me away. The two men did not know each other. Mencken did not think the movies were a worthwhile subject. Two more unlikely people you could not imagine. Mencken dismissed most popular culture, he despised the new, any “fad,” anything the majority of people flipped over he thought was probably useless. And yet here he was, summoned to a meeting with a man who was famous in a field Mencken thought vulgar, a man whose movies he never saw. (I wrote about this beautiful essay here, with an excerpt.)

The Valentino essay stands out in its affection and baffled tenderness. But in general, why I treasure Mencken is his vinegar-y contempt and outrage at stupidity, ignorance, anti-science bullshit, credulous people, etc. Yes, some of his sentiments wouldn’t fly today, but that’s not the measure of something’s worth. When he goes after the anti-science attitudes behind the Scopes trial, he takes no prisoners. Think of the anti-vaxxers today. Think of Marianne Williamson’s disgusting comments on illness, AIDS, hurricane trajectories. This kind of stuff will always be with us, and Mencken destroyed those who hold such views. His contempt rollicks forth in non-stop hilarious broadsides.

There is a small pantheon of mean obituaries. The top 3 mean obituaries are, in chronological order:

1. Mencken’s obituary for William Jennings Bryan (“He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity.”)
2. Hunter Thompson’s obituary for Richard Nixon
3. Christopher Hitchens’ obituary for Mother Teresa.

When Mencken is NOT contemptuous, i.e. his essays on Schubert, Beethoven, Ring Lardner, Poe, Mark Twain, his tone of unqualified celebration and admiration is intense.

Here’s an excerpt from his essay on the “artist” in society, and how all great artists are – in many ways – AGAINST the society from which they sprung.

“It is almost safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist. The special quality which makes an artist of him might almost be defined, indeed, as an extraordinary capacity for irritation, a pathological sensitiveness to environmental pricks and stings. He differs from the rest of us mainly because he reacts sharply and in an uncommon manner to phenomena which leave the rest of us unmoved, or, at most, merely annoy us vaguely. He is, in brief, a more delicate fellow than we are, and hence less fitted to prosper and enjoy himself under the conditions of life which he and we must face alike. Therefore, he takes to artistic endeavor, which is at once a criticism of life and an attempt to escape from life.

So much for the theory of it. The more the facts are studied, the more they bear it out. In those fields of art, at all events, which concern themselves with ideas as well as with sensations it is almost impossible to find any trace of an artist who was not actively hostile to his environment, and thus an indifferent patriot. From Dante to Tolstoy and from Shakespeare to Mark Twain the story is ever the same. Names suggest themselves instantly: Goethe, Heine, Shelley, Byron, Thackeray, Balzac, Rabelais, Cervantes, Swift, Dostoevsky, Carlyle, Moliere, Pope – all bitter critics of their time and nation, most of them piously hated by the contemporary 100 per centers, some of them actually fugitives from rage and reprisal.

Dante put all of the patriotic Italians of his day into Hell, and showed them boiling, roasting and writhing on hooks. Cervantes drew such a devastating picture of the Spain that he lived in that it ruined the Spaniards. Shakespeare made his heroes foreigners and his clowns Englishmen. Goethe was in favor of Napoleon. Rabelais, a citizen of Christendom rather than of France, raised a cackle against it that Christendom is still trying in vain to suppress. Swift, having finished the Irish and then the English, proceeded to finish the whole human race. The exceptions are few and far between, and not many of them will bear examination.”

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Posted in Books, On This Day, writers | Tagged H.L. Mencken | 8 Comments

“Poetry in my opinion must be honest before anything else and I refuse to be ‘objective’ or clear-cut at the cost of honesty.” — Irish poet Louis MacNeice

Posted on September 12, 2023 by sheila

“Self-assertion more often than not is vulgar, but a live and vulgar dog who keeps on barking is better than a dead lion, however dignified.” — Louis MacNeice

Born in Belfast on this day in 1907, Louis MacNeice went to public school, and then attended Oxford. When you read reviews of MacNeice’s stuff from other poets, the opinions are wildly divergent. Some are annoyed, some are enthusiastic – there is not a consensus. He was a brilliant scholar of the classics, and did many translations. His background was public-school all the way, and Oxford set him free. He went on to work for the BBC, producing radio plays (which he often also wrote). In fact, this job would end up causing his death. After recording a radio play in a damp cave, he caught pneumonia and died.

His generation – and the poets/writers who were his contemporaries (Auden, Stephen Spender, all people he knew personally) – had to deal with the giants of the generation immediately preceding it. You know, little-known folks like Yeats and Eliot. Their influence was so total it was impossible to ignore. You could barely even define yourself against these figures. It’s like deciding to go after Ali or Tyson’s crown: you had BEST know what you are doing first, and choose your approach beforehand. You can’t just declaim it and have it be so. The poets of MacNeice’s generation took different individualized approaches to these challenges of influence, everyone struggled in different ways.

MacNeice lived most of his life in London. He supported Home Rule for Ireland. I don’t think he ever thought of moving back to Belfast, but he never felt truly English. I think that sensation of separateness was exciting for him as an artist. It put him in a state of almost constant duality: here but also there, here and also not-here. He loved living in London, but he was very proud of his Irish-ness. He lived in the “between” state of the exile. And his poems take on Irish subjects, he speaks of Ireland repeatedly. MacNeice’s nostalgia was tempered by realism. This makes for a very interesting tone.

This poem has always killed me:

Autobiography

In my childhood trees were green
And there was plenty to be seen.