“Even though I’m writing about very dark material, it still feels like an escape hatch.” — Olivia Laing

Posted on April 14, 2025 by sheila

“As a writer, I am always trying to get past abstraction, the world of ideas, and putting actual objects in my writing — paintings, photographs — really helps with that. They’re beautiful tools with which to think.” — Olivia Laing

It’s her birthday today.

Laing is one of the most exciting writers to come along in a long LONG time. Every generation needs someone who plays by her own rules, who brings her unique perspective, interrogates/meditates on art in a voice that speaks to where we are, but also where we’ve come from, where we might be going. Susan Sontag. Or Ellen Willis. Dorothy Parker. I choose women because they are often “labeled” as speaking only to women, because the default is considered to be masculine. It is assumed men speak to everyone, and it is assumed women speak to women. This attitude requires constant combat. If I can read Clive James and thrill to his observations, not feeling at all “left out” because he is a man – if I can read David Foster Wallace or Lester Bangs or whatever – people who write from a male point of view – and still feel these writers have so much to say to me personally – then the obverse should be true. No arguments against this are valid.

More on Laing after the jump.

Continue reading →

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“It’s just one of the mysteries of filmmaking that sometimes you do something that you don’t even think it’s important, then it turns out to be.” –Lili Horvát

Posted on April 13, 2025 by sheila

It’s the birthday today of Hungarian director Lili Horvát.

I believe I made clear my love for Horvát’s Preparations To Be Together For An Unknown Period of Time, in a lengthy piece on my Substack.

It’s been a while since a film has grabbed me so deeply. I felt shaken up by it. I watched it three times in a week.

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“Ballet taught me to stay close to style and tone. Literature taught me to be concerned about the moral life.” — Joan Acocella

Posted on April 13, 2025 by sheila

Joan Acocella, longtime dance critic for The New Yorker, and regular contributor to the New York Review of Books died in 2024 at the age of 78, and I did not mark her passing. It’s her birthday today. Acocella brought a lot of great things into my life. I love dance, but I’m not at all learned in the subject. I would check out her columns to see what was going on. She was also a very elegant and pleasing writer. Her prose flows, and it’s filled with information, spiky with criticism (beautifully phrased). I come out of any Acocella essay better-informed. I am so glad I discovered her work.

I read a couple of things of hers before I put it together who she was. She wrote an enormous profile of Mikhail Baryshnikov for The New Yorker called “The Soloist”, where she accompanied him on his first trip back to the Soviet Union. I inhaled it.

Years later, I read an article about a biography of James Joyce’s daughter Lucia. I read the biography and believe I bitched about it here somewhere. This would be back in the early 2000s. Acocella went after the very concept of this biography, validating my own feelings about it. I don’t think I put together that “Joan Acocella” was the same one who also wrote the huge piece on Baryshnikov.

But then, somehow, I put it all together. Joan Acocella is a dance writer, primarily, and has written about almost every major figure in American dance in the 20th century, but she also has written many in-depth essays and book reviews, as well as introductions to re-issues of novels (like Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity). Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, a collection of all these articles, is essential reading. I give it my highest recommendation possible. It gives the full picture of Acocella’s power as a writer and thinker.

Her focus overall seemeed to be on writers in the early decades of the 20th century, particularly Austrian writers writing from the final days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and others. Once the Empire was gone, the Jews were on the run, no longer protected. In Acocella’s work on artists in general, the same themes emerge: where does genius come from? What does context add to our understanding of someone like Jerome Robbins? What does it mean to be an innovator? Her taste is eclectic, but with a motivating principle behind all of it. Perhaps all of her work will be collected in one volume. There’s so much of it.

She wrote about M.F.K. Fisher. Balanchine. Bob Fosse. She wrote about famous cases of writer’s block. She wrote about Martha Graham, Mark Morris, Suzanne Farrell. Stefan Zweig. Primo Levi. She wrote a book on the Victorian phenomenon of “hysteria”. All beautifully written. I learned so much from her.

Some excerpts:

On Ralph Ellison’s writer’s block:

We will not hear from Ralph Ellison. Ellison’s first novel, Invisible Man (1952), was also a best-seller, and more than that. It was an “art” novel, a modernist novel, and it was by a black writer. It therefore raised hopes that literary segregation might be breachable. In its style the book combined the arts of black culture – above all, jazz – with white influences: Dostoevsky, Joyce, Faulkner. Its message was likewise integrationist – good news in the 1950s, at the beginning of the civil rights movement. Invisible Man became a fixture of American-literature curricula. Ellison was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was not just a writer; he was a hero. And everyone had great hopes for his second novel.

So did he. It was to be a “symphonic” novel, combining voices from all parts of the culture. It grew and grew. Eventually, he thought it might require three volumes. He worked on it for forty years, until he died in 1994, at the age of eighty, leaving behind more than two thousand pages of manuscript and notes. His literary executor, John F. Callahan, tried at first to assemble the projected symphonic work. Finally, he threw up his hands and carved a simpler, one-volume novel out of the material. This book, entitled Juneteenth, was published in 1999. Some reviewers praised it, others cold-shouldered it, as non-Ellison.

On Rudolf Nureyev:

Almost everyone who describes Nureyev eventually compares him to an animal. They bore you to death with this, but it was true.

On Italo Svevo:

Beth Archer Brombert has produced a version of Senilita, called Emilio’s Carnival – Svevo’s working title – that is faithful in a way that de Zoete was not. Brombert’s language is very plain, and when she comes up against a knot in Svevo’s prose she does not try to untie it. (De Zoete did.) We have to puzzle through it, just like the Italians. The same rules seem to have guided the distinguished translator William Weaver in his new version of La conscienza di Zeno – Zeno’s Conscience. I do not like his title. The Italian conscienza, like its French cognate, means both “conscience” and “consciousness.” There is no good way to translate it, and de Zoete’s throwing up of hands, with Confessions of Zeno, was probably the best solution. But the title is the only thing wrong with Weaver’s boo. Its appearance is an event in modern publishing. In it – for the first time, I believe, in English – we get the true, dark music, the pewter tints, of Svevo’s great last novel.

On Simone de Beauvoir and Nelson Algren:

Beauvoir’s critics should read some history books. When The Second Sex was published, in 1949, Frenchwomen had had the vote for only five years. If Beauvoir’s mind, as her detractors claim, was swamped with “masculinist” ideas, those were the only ideas around at the time. If she omitted to tell her public about her lesbian experiences, to do otherwise would have been fatal to the reputation of any woman writer of the period. (Beauvoir’s critics should also take another look at her defense of lesbianism – a whole chapter – in The Second Sex. For 1949, that was brave.) It is possible that the best writers on social injustice – certainly the most moving – are those who grew up when the injustice in question was not viewed as a problem, and who therefore say things that get them in trouble, later, with holders of more correct views, views that the earlier writers gave birth to. I am thinking of Abraham Lincoln’s pre-Civil War statements on the inferiority of Negroes, so decried by recent historians. It is one thing to free a people whom you regard as equal. But what does it take to free a people whom you have been trained to regard as inferior, and who, by your standards, are inferior? It takes something else, a kind of imagination and courage that we do not understand.

On Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian:

Yourcenar regarded the average historical novel as “merely a more or less successful costume ball”. Truly to recapture an earlier time, she said, required years of research, together with a mystical act of identification. She performed both, and wrought a kind of transhistorical miracle. If you want to know what “ancient Rome” really means, in terms of war and religion and love and parties, read Memoirs of Hadrian. This doesn’t mean that Yourcenar, in her novels, conquered the problem of time. All she overcame was the idea that this was the special burden of the modern period. Human beings didn’t become history-haunted after the First World War, Yourcenar says. They were always that way.

A scathing review of Carol Angier’s biography of Primo Levi:

As for his life, the position she takes is roughly that of a psychotherapist of the seventies. She’s okay. We’re okay. Why wasn’t he okay? Why did he have to work all the time? Why didn’t he take more vacations? And how about getting laid once in a while? She records that as a teenager he mooned over various girls, but whenever he got near one he blushed and fell silent. “What was this?” Angier asks. “Can anyone ever say?” I can say. Has Angier never heard of geeks? They are born every day, and they grow up to do much of the world’s intellectual and artistic work. One wonders, at times, why Angier chose Levi as a subject – she seems to find him so peculiar. And does she imagine that if he had been more “normal” – less reserved, less scrupulous – he would have written those books she so admires?

On Joseph Roth:

One of the remarkable things about Roth’s early writing is its political foresight. He was the first person to inscribe the name of Adolf Hitler in European fiction, and that was in 1923, ten years before Hitler took over Germany. But what makes his portrait of the Nazi brand of anti-Semitism so interesting is that it was done before the Holocaust, which he did not live to see. His treatment of the Jews therefore lacks the pious edgelessness of most post-Holocaust writing on the subject…As for German nationalism, he regarded it, at least in the twenties, mainly as a stink up the nose, a matter of lies and nature hikes and losers trying to gain power. He was frightened of it, but he also found it ridiculous.

On the legendary collaboration between Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine, who created the New York City Ballet.

In truth, the two men who together founded New York City Ballet had very different notions of dance. Balanchine took his inspiration from music; Kirstein cared little about music. Balanchine’s idea of ballet was lyrical and visionary; Kirstein’s was visual and narrative. (Once, Kirstein recalls, he invited Balanchine to go to a museum. “No, thanks,” Balanchine replied. “I’ve been to a museum.”) As Balanchine went ahead with his idea, Kirstein was able to participate less and less in the making of the ballets. Soon, as he put it bluntly in his New Yorker interview, “There was nothing except what [George] wished.”

On the collaboration between Balanchine and Suzanne Farrell, but mostly about Farrell:

But when Farrell arrived Balanchine didn’t just change his style; he seemed to change his content. Before, in what might be called his classic years – from 1928 (Apollo) to about 1962 (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) – his ballets had addressed sex and religion, grief and fate, but those matters, for the most part, were bound in by classicism: tempered, formalized. Now they became pressing and specific. Many of the works that Balanchine made for Farrell in the so-called “Farrell years,” the 1960s, had a sort of jazz-baby sexiness. In these pieces, her costumes tended to be fringed; she tended to be partnered by Arthur Mitchell, the company’s one black man, a pairing that in the sixties had sexual implications. Some observers were taken aback by such directness. In time, the profane yielded to the sacred, and that was even more surprising. Now the supposed abstractionist was filling his stage with angels and gypsies, visions and confessions. Balanchine had embarked upon a “late period”, and it was Farrell who led him there.

On Mikhail Baryshnikov called “The Soloist”:

I asked Baryshnikov recently whether, after his mother’s death, ballet might have been a way for him to return to her. He paused for a long time and then said, “In Russia, dancing is part of happiness in groups. Groups at parties, people dancing in circle, and they push child to center, to dance. Child soon works up little routine. Can do a little this” – hand at the back of the neck – “a little this” – arms joined horizontally across the chest – “and soon make up some special steps and learn to save them for end, to make big finale. This way, child gets attention from adults.” In the case of a child artist, and particularly one who has suffered a terrible loss, it is tempting to read artistic decisions as psychological decisions, because we assume that a child cannot really be an artist. But, as many people have said, children are probably more artistic than adults, bolder in imagination, more unashamedly fascinated with shape, line, detail. In Baryshnikov’s case, the mother’s devotion and then the loss of her can help to explain one thing: the work he put into ballet. For the rest – the physical gift, the fusion of steps with fantasy, the interest in making something true and complete (“Toys become boys”), all of which are as much a part of him today as they were when he was twelve – we must look to him alone.

On Martha Graham:

Early Graham dances such as Heretic (1929) and Primitive Mysteries (1931) are remarkable, first of all, for their abstractions. They are an enactment, not a narrative. Other choreographers were experimenting with abstractions at that time, but what is striking about Graham’s early work is its severity, what people then would have called its ugliness. (“She looks as though she were about to give birth to a cube,” the theater critic Stark Young wrote.) Graham was part of the New York avant-garde of the twenties and thirties. In Blood Memory, she tells of sitting with Alfred Stieglitz and reading with him Georgia O’Keeffe’s “glorious letters” from New Mexico, including one “about her waking just before dawn to bake bread in her adobe oven.” The Southwest, the dawn, bread, adobe, by now it’s a cliche, modernism’s embrace of the “primitive”, the non-European. But it wasn’t a cliche then, and Graham turned it into something tremendous. Heretic was about society’s persecution of the nonconformist. Any would-be artist in downtown Manhattan could have made a piece about that, but who except Graham could have imagined the ensemble groupings she ranged against the heretic: great slabs and walls of dancers, wedges and arcs and parabolas?

On Bob Fosse:

If, today, you go to see a dance act in a night club, it may well start with a single light trained on the stage, a single white-gloved hand jutting out, a single rear end gyrating meaningfully, and, then, as the lights go up, a pair of eyes staring at you as if to say, “I know what you’re thinking.” If you switch on MTV, chances are you’ll see the same thing: the glove (Michael Jackson), the cold sex, the person eyeballing you as if this were all your idea. There is an imp of the perverse at loose in mass-culture dance, a spirit that has little to do with the blowsy cheer of old-time night-club numbers, not to speak of the innocent jitterbugging we used to see on television. One could say that this is just part of postmodern culture – its toughness, its knowingness. But it is also something more specific: the heritage of Bob Fosse, who was Broadway’s foremost choreographer-director during the late sixties and the seventies.

On H.L. Mencken:

But the key to Mencken’s popularity was his prose. His writing crackled with “blue sparks”, as Joseph Conrad put it. His diction was something fantastic, a combination of American slang and a high, Latinate vocabulary that sounds as if it came from Dr. Johnson. That mix, of course, was part of his polemic, his belief that Americans should get smarter and dirtier, go high, go low. Often, he pushed the formula too hard. In my opinion, the long passage quoted above is overwrought. It is from one of Mencken’s many volumes of collected essays, in which he habitually jacked up what he had put more plainly in his daily writing. I like his daily writing better.

On Dorothy Parker:

Even after women began to make their way economically in twentieth-century culture, they were still left with an ages-old inheritance of emotional dependency, the thing that marriage and the family, having created, once ministered to and now did not. If in the old days women were enslaved by men, they nevertheless had legal claim on them. Now they had no legal claims, so all the force of their dependency was shifted to an emotional claim – love, a matter that men viewed differently from women. Hence Parker’s heroines, waiting by the phone, weeping, begging, hating themselves for begging. This is a story that is not over yet. Parker was one of the first writers to deal with it, and she addressed it in a new way. Because, it seems, she identified with the man as well as the woman, she saw these women from the outside as well as from within, heard the tiresome repetitiousness of their complaints, saw how their eyelids got pink and sticky when they cried. She did not feel sorry for them. They made her wince, and we wince as read the stories – for, burning with resentment though they are, they are even more emphatically a record of shame. Female shame is a big subject, and for its sake Parker should have been bigger, but she is what we have, and it’s not nothing.

On M.F.K. Fisher:

Then came an experience, seemingly benign, that did almost break her. In 1949, her mother died. Her father now needed someone to run his house, and Fisher, his oldest child, decided she should do it. For four years, she remained in Whittier – a conservative town where she no longer felt comfortable – cooking, cleaning, running around after her daughters, and watching her father, who was dying of pulmonary fibrosis, hawk up phlegm and spit it into the fireplace. She had no one to talk to. She began having spells of depression and, if I read her correctly, severe anxiety attacks. She began seeing a psychiatrist. During this whole period, she wrote next to nothing, apart from columns, including her father’s, for the Whittier News. (This was part of the deal. As long as she was there to help with the paper, he didn’t have to sell it, though he was far too old and sick to run it.) She stopped thinking of herself as a writer. Rather, as she wrote to Norah, she was “a genteel has-been now and then asked to speak ten minutes at an arty tea.” This state of mind continued long past her father’s death, in 1953. She who had published nine books in twelve years brought out not a single new book in the twelve years after she moved into her father’s house. Those who lament the dissolution of the American family – kids with no way to get to Girl Scouts, aging parents put into nursing homes – should remember what it was that kept the American family together: women’s blood.

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“I trust contrariness. I simply rebelled at being commanded.” — Seamus Heaney

Posted on April 13, 2025 by sheila

heaney_seamus

It’s his birthday today.

Jean and I went to visit Siobhan in Ireland. Siobhan was in school, so while she was in classes Jean and I rented a car and drove across the country to Galway, and other Western points. On the way, we pulled off the road to go visit Clonmacnoise, a crumbling monastery by a river. We had gone there as kids. It was November, so there was nobody there but us. We wandered around in the frosty air, along the slopes with tilting lichened Celtic crosses as tall as we were and taller. The river there is low, the ground merging into the water, so the sky is reflected in often dizzying and strange ways. It’s a magical place.

There is a legend about Clonmacnoise. During the medieval era, when it was a working monastery filled with monks, a ship floated by in the air. It stopped above the monastery while the monks were at prayer. The anchor was caught below, and a sailor slid down the rope to free it. He lay there, gasping. The monks helped him back up the rope, and the ship floated off in the air.

If you go to Clonmacnoise, and you see the effects of light and water and air – how up is down and down is up – you can see how such a legend would be born.

Or … maybe it’s not a legend at all. Maybe it really happened.

When I came home to the States, I told Dad about our trip to Ireland, and I mentioned our magical stop-off at Clonmacnoise and how good it was to see it again after all those years. I told him how quiet it was, and how, on that wintry day, it was easy to imagine a ship floating by in the air.

Dad got up and went to his bookshelf. He pulled down a book. He always knew exactly where the right book was. He flipped through it until he found what he wanted.

Then he read out loud to me Seamus Heaney’s stunning poem:

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep
It hooked itself into the altar rails
And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
And struggled to release it. But in vain.
‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’

The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

Every collection of Seamus Heaney’s work that I own, the poems, the essays, were given to me by my father. When I read Heaney’s poems, I hear my Dad’s voice.

One of his most powerful poems:

Casualty

I

He would drink by himself
And raise a weathered thumb
Towards the high shelf,
Calling another rum
And blackcurrant, without
Having to raise his voice,
Or order a quick stout
By a lifting of the eyes
And a discreet dumb-show
Of pulling off the top;
At closing time would go
In waders and peaked cap
Into the showery dark,
A dole-kept breadwinner
But a natural for work.
I loved his whole manner,
Sure-footed but too sly,
His deadpan sidling tact,
His fisherman’s quick eye
And turned observant back.

Incomprehensible
To him, my other life.
Sometimes, on the high stool,
Too busy with his knife
At a tobacco plug
And not meeting my eye,
In the pause after a slug
He mentioned poetry.
We would be on our own
And, always politic
And shy of condescension,
I would manage by some trick
To switch the talk to eels
Or lore of the horse and cart
Or the Provisionals.

But my tentative art
His turned back watches too:
He was blown to bits
Out drinking in a curfew
Others obeyed, three nights
After they shot dead
The thirteen men in Derry.
PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said,
BOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday
Everyone held
His breath and trembled.

II

It was a day of cold
Raw silence, wind-blown
surplice and soutane:
Rained-on, flower-laden
Coffin after coffin
Seemed to float from the door
Of the packed cathedral
Like blossoms on slow water.
The common funeral
Unrolled its swaddling band,
Lapping, tightening
Till we were braced and bound
Like brothers in a ring.

But he would not be held
At home by his own crowd
Whatever threats were phoned,
Whatever black flags waved.
I see him as he turned
In that bombed offending place,
Remorse fused with terror
In his still knowable face,
His cornered outfaced stare
Blinding in the flash.

He had gone miles away
For he drank like a fish
Nightly, naturally
Swimming towards the lure
Of warm lit-up places,
The blurred mesh and murmur
Drifting among glasses
In the gregarious smoke.
How culpable was he
That last night when he broke
Our tribe’s complicity?
‘Now, you’re supposed to be
An educated man,’
I hear him say. ‘Puzzle me
The right answer to that one.’

III

I missed his funeral,
Those quiet walkers
And sideways talkers
Shoaling out of his lane
To the respectable
Purring of the hearse…
They move in equal pace
With the habitual
Slow consolation
Of a dawdling engine,
The line lifted, hand
Over fist, cold sunshine
On the water, the land
Banked under fog: that morning
I was taken in his boat,
The Screw purling, turning
Indolent fathoms white,
I tasted freedom with him.
To get out early, haul
Steadily off the bottom,
Dispraise the catch, and smile
As you find a rhythm
Working you, slow mile by mile,
Into your proper haunt
Somewhere, well out, beyond…

Dawn-sniffing revenant,
Plodder through midnight rain,
Question me again.

I love this piece on Seamus Heaney by Sven Birkets, written when Heaney died. Read the whole thing:

Auden wrote of the moment of Yeats’s death that ‘he became his admirers’, and I had the strongest feeling just then of what he meant. I conjured all at once, if this is possible, the idea, the emotional image, of all of those who knew and loved Seamus, or knew and loved his work — or both — and I felt inside the ghostly trace of a circuitry. That in this one moment all over the world, and of course most densely in Ireland, in Dublin, and most overwhelmingly on his own home ground in Sandymount, this same shock of incomprehension — not yet bereavement — was being registered. I pictured one person after another, dozens perhaps, and these were only the people who I knew who had a connection. Of course there were hundreds, many hundreds more.

When I drove down to the general store the next morning to get The New York Times and The Boston Globe, that sense was confirmed. There was massive front-page coverage everywhere — the biggest I’d ever seen for the death of a writer.

Here is Heaney’s first major poem. It is a declaration of self, of independence. Its words shiver with importance and newness, with the radical feeling of a young man carving out his own path. Dangerous, for reasons emotional, familial, cultural, political.

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground.
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

I went and heard Heaney read at NYU once. It was part of a poetry seminar, not a public lecture. I sat in the back. There weren’t that many people there, amazingly. It was the students and a couple of outsiders like me. He stood up front, with his white hair a wild nimbus around his head, and the way he spoke – the cadences but also his use of language – his storytelling gifts, his sense of seriousness but not lugubriousness, always leavened with a sense of humor … I went up afterwards and had him sign my copy of Opened Ground (given to me by Dad).

If you haven’t read it, take a moment – take 20 minutes – unplug – and read Heaney’s Nobel Prize Lecture.

Here are some of the things I’ve written about Heaney:

On his collection Death of a Naturalist.

On his collection Door Into the Dark.

On his collection Wintering Out.

On his collection North.

On his collection Oopened Ground.

I wrote a series of essays too, about his GORGEOUS essay collection The Redress of Poetry.

I miss him still.

“I wanted to deliver a work that could be read universally as the-thing-in-itself but that would also sustain those extensions of meaning that our disastrously complicated local predicament made both urgent and desirable.” — Seamus Heaney

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“I don’t think you go to a play to forget, or to a movie to be distracted. I think life generally is a distraction and that going to a movie is a way to get back, not go away.” — Tom Noonan

Posted on April 12, 2025 by sheila

Most well-known for playing supernatural-style “heavies” in movies such as Manhunter and Robocop 2, he got his start in the 1960s experimental theatre scene in New York City, and in many ways he’s never really left that scene. He established his theatre company in 1983, where he developed projects, produced plays, etc. That’s the background for his first feature film, a two-hander called What Happened Was… First developed as a play at his theatre company, where he and Karen Sillas played the two roles, he then shot it very soon after. What Happened Was… is one of the great films about loneliness (and that’s a very short list!)

In 2019 I wrote about What Happened Was… – in DEPTH – for my column at Film Comment.

What Happened Was… came out in 1994, won a couple of pretty big awards (at Sundance and elsewhere) and then lapsed into cultural obscurity mainly because it was never released on DVD. All that changed last year. Oscilloscope stepped in and supervised a restoration of the film, and then released it (virtually), with a DVD/Blu release following in June. More info here. I was tapped to write the booklet essay – not a repeat of the Film Comment piece, but another one. That’s included with the release.

And after THAT, I was honored to be asked to interview Karen and Tom for the Film Forum’s premiere (virtually) of the restored film. I’d been obsessed with this film and these two performances for 20+ years and I finally got to ask everything I wanted to ask. The walls/curtains DID change color over the course of the film. Oh my God!!

It’s been an exciting time to be a fan of the film! This whole thing was a major moment for me, as a critic – especially since it wasn’t my intention (consciously) to bring the film back into the public’s consciousness – or, no, I DID want to highlight this special film – but I had no ulterior motive. But it felt like the piece started a conversation that then led up to what happened next. In fact, Noonan himself told me my piece was a huge part of why the film returned and was restored. So I’m proud of that.

Tom Noonan’s career has been diverse and fascinating and What Happened Was… is just a small part of it, but this is an important film, one of my favorites, and I’m so excited to have lived long enough to watch it come back into the landscape, and be widely available so more people can discover it.

New Oscilloscope trailer for the film: the trailer back in 1994 made it look like a romantic comedy/erotic thriller – complete category errors. This is more like it:

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

Posted in Actors, Directors, Movies, On This Day, Theatre | Tagged , | 5 Comments

“If you don’t see the book you want on the shelves, write it.” — Beverly Cleary

Posted on April 12, 2025 by sheila

“I think children want to read about normal, everyday kids. That’s what I wanted to read about when I was growing up. I wanted to read about the sort of boys and girls that I knew in my neighborhood and in my school. And in my childhood, many years ago, children’s books seemed to be about English children, or pioneer children. And that wasn’t what I wanted to read. And I think children like to find themselves in books.” — Beverly Cleary

Beverly Cleary, beloved children’s author, died in 2021 at the venerable age of 104.

Like so many other children, then and now, Beverly Cleary’s books were huge to me growing up. I read all the “Ramona” books, and also all the “Henry” books. My favorite was Ramona Forever (I still remember that moment with the mirror – haven’t read the book since I was a child). It’s so touching to me to see my nieces and nephews also falling in love with her books.

The obit on NPR is really good and this part struck me:

In her autobiography, A Girl From Yamhill, she wrote about clamping around on tin can stilts and yelling “pieface!” at the neighbor. She was an only child, who grew up in Portland during the Depression and still remembered when her father lost his job.

“I was embarrassed,” she recalled. “I didn’t know how to talk to my father. I know he felt so terrible at that time that I just — I guess I felt equally terrible. And I think adults sometimes don’t think about how children are feeling about the adult problems.”

Cleary used her crystal-clear recall to capture the tribulations of young children exquisitely in her books.

What a fascinating and complicated memory, a child understanding the pain of her father, and absorbing the pain, but not knowing how to say “I know you’re hurting, Dad” because you are a child.

Cleary’s books are filled with insightful moments like that. In fact, when you read them as an older person, outside the realm of childhood, the adults start to take on more shape. You begin to see that THEY are having complicated full lives too.



One of the interesting things is the cross-generational aspect of this, at least in my family, but considering the tributes I’ve seen it’s true for others. She started publishing books for children in 1950. Long before I even arrived on the planet. But the Ramona and “Beezus” series were a staple of my childhood, and then down the line: I’d outgrow reading them and then my younger brother and sister would start them up and then they’d outgrow them and my youngest sister would start… Almost like a rite of passage. And now THEIR children love these books!

And now it’s so funny when my nieces start explaining Ramona to me, as though the books were published yesterday … I want to say “Believe me, kiddo, I know all about Ramona.” But of course I don’t because everyone has to discover those books for themselves.

Beverly Cleary started out as a librarian (so many writers begin this way and as a librarian’s daughter I am HERE for it), and she noticed a trend: little boys kept asking her where they could find books about boys – regular boys like themselves. There weren’t many out there (see the quote above), and so she decided to write one. She wrote Henry Huggins, which was published in 1950 and was an instant hit. People are still discovering this series and the Ramona series. It doesn’t matter that it takes place “back then”, because for a child it’s all the same stuff. Parents … friends … worries … problems … school … all seen through the perspectives of children trying to understand – or rebel against – the often incomprehensible behavior of adults. An eternal subject.

Cleary’s books have never gone out of print.

My niece is named Beatrice. Her little brother calls her “Beezus”. Beverly Cleary’s is a living legacy.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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Review: That They May Face the Rising Sun (2025)

Posted on April 11, 2025 by sheila

It seems fitting to have been assigned this one to review: a film adaptation of John McGahern’s novel of the same name. John McGahern is one of my favorite authors – I’ve written a lot about him – his Amongst Women is one of my favorite books of all time. McGahern connects me to my father: he’s the one who told me to read him. That They May Face the Rising Sun is McGahern’s final novel, about a small group of elderly people living on the edge of a lake in County Leitrim (where McGahern himself lived). It’s a “quiet” novel but it flattens you. I found a piece I wrote about it back in 2008. My father was still alive then. Hearing present tense mentioning of my dad makes me catch my breath. I wrote about the book when I finished reading it in 2007 and my dad commented on the post. I trip over his old comments occasionally and it’s such an eerie yet beautiful feeling. He called me “dearest”.

I loved this film. At a certain point, about 20 minutes from the end, tears started pouring down my face and … kept going until the credits rolled. I reviewed for Ebert.

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“For I am of the seed of the WELCH WOMAN and speak the truth from my heart.” — Christopher Smart

Posted on April 11, 2025 by sheila

“For in my nature I quested for beauty, but God, God hath sent me to sea for pearls.”
— Christopher Smart, from “Jubilate Agno”

Christopher Smart, born on this day in 1722, spent over 10 years of his life locked up in mental institutions (a kind term for what such establishments were back then). He seemed to suffer from some sort of religious ecstasy (although “suffering” is not the right word at all). He was overcome by the love of God. It made him tremble with happiness. To quote my Dad, “I see no problem.”

Smart was born in Kent. His father died when he was 11, and he was taken under the wing of the Vane family (his father was a steward at their home). The Vanes made sure he went to college, Pembroke. He became friends with Alexander Pope, and also somehow became acquainted with Dr. Johnson. He had problems right off the bat with drinking and money, being irresponsible with both. He was arrested in 1747 for not paying his debts. He moved to London. He worked as an editor. He got married. In 1756 he was sent to an insane asylum and stayed locked up until 1763. His wife left him during his incarceration, but in general he had not alienated his friends, and most stood by him, trying to help him out, financially or otherwise (he had two children by this point).

While Smart was in the asylum, he wrote A Song to David. It was published the year of his release. You can see in it Smart’s essential qualities, one of which is a love of lists. Lists/outlines seemed to organize his high-flying rapturous thought processes. He couldn’t BEAR how much he had to say about David, and so he tried to break it down, break David down into essences, which takes the form of a list. Exhibit A, Exhibit B, and so on. Smart’s language is startling, right off the bat. There is energy in the language. He was not lost in quiet contemplation. He was right up against it: he needed URGENTLY to speak.

Christopher Smart died in 1771.

His life was chaotic, but his confinement was almost a blessing in that it allowed him the space to write without the pressure of having to make a living (a struggle for most writers). I am hesitant of making a blessing out of madness, even when some good art comes out of it. Anyone who has experienced madness to any degree will know that nobody would ever choose it. (I think of David Lynch’s comments on Vincent van Gogh in his book Catching the Big Fish:

Right here people might bring up Vincent van Gogh as an example of a painter who did great work in spite of—-or because of—-his suffering. I like to think that van Gogh would have been even more prolific and even greater if he wasn’t so restricted by the things tormenting him. I don’t think it was pain that made him so great—-I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had.

In his most famous poem, the one most often quoted today, Christopher Smart sat and watched his cat Jeoffry stretching and playing in the sun, and became overwhelmed by God’s nearness and presence, obvious in every ripple of muscle in the cat’s body. The resulting poem is one of my favorites of all time: “Jubilate Agno, Fragment B [For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry]”.

Christopher Smart’s influence was local during his own time, but he has easily crossed the centuries following his death, and new generations of readers continue to discover his wonderful work. Allen Ginsberg spoke of him as a huge influence. In Smart’s poem about his cat Jeoffry, you can almost feel Christopher Smart “rapping” about the cat, riffing … a la the Beats of the 40s and 50s, with complete confidence in what Ginsberg, centuries later, would call “first thought best thought”. I don’t believe first thought is always best thought. Sometimes “first thought” needs to go through an editing process. But Smart’s sound – a voice murmuring over and over, turning around and around the same topic – can be heard in poets centuries later.

Smart’s lines don’t look like other poet’s lines (at least not in the 18th century). His lines look like the lines from poets in the mid-20th century. He often begins all lines with the same word, giving the verse an incantatory feel. His lines are long and conversational, they look like the lines of “Howl”.

And about his “cat poem”:

First of all, check out this gorgeous post.

Second of all: Hope was the living embodiment of Christopher Smart’s lines. Of course this is true of most cats. I’d just sit and watch Hope do her thing, enjoying witnessing her mind and body working to accomplish a goal, conquer a foe, get her needs met, whatever. And she’d do something, and I’d immediately think of this or that line from Smart’s poem. A continuum between Hope and Jeoffry. The world changes. Technology changes. Cats do not change.

I put together this post years ago when I started commemorating people’s birthdays. I used photos of Hope to illustrate. I miss her so much. She was the best. I love you, Hope.

For she can creep
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For every family had one cat at least in the bag.

For she is tenacious of her point.

For every house is incomplete without her and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.

For she purrs in thankfulness, when God tells her she’s a good Cat

For she is the tribe of the Tiger

For she can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation.
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For she counteracts the powers of darkness by her electrical skin and glaring eyes.
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UPDATE: and of course now Frankie has come into my life! Who, like Hope, evokes Jeoffry, in all his creepy-creeping ness, his stretching, his “wreathing his body seven times round”, the way he curls up in a perfect circle, the way he has a “witching hour” at around 6 pm when he goes absolutely BERSERK for a straight HOUR before curling up next to me … It’s also perfect that he is in love with what I call “Hope’s blanket”, made for me by my friend Maria, which Hope totally co-opted. Frankie took one look at it – probably smelled the whiff of Hope around it – and chose it.

A home isn’t really a home without a cat in it. Or, better put: “For every house is incomplete without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.”

For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.
For this he performs in ten degrees.
For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.
For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.
For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.
For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.
For fifthly he washes himself.
For sixthly he rolls upon wash.
For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.
For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.
For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.
For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
For having consider’d God and himself he will consider his neighbour.
For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying.
For when his day’s work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses.
For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation.
For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he’s a good Cat.
For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon.
For every house is incomplete without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.
For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats at the departure of the Children of Israel from Egypt.
For every family had one cat at least in the bag.
For the English Cats are the best in Europe.
For he is the cleanest in the use of his forepaws of any quadruped.
For the dexterity of his defence is an instance of the love of God to him exceedingly.
For he is the quickest to his mark of any creature.
For he is tenacious of his point.
For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For he knows that God is his Saviour.
For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest.
For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion.
For he is of the Lord’s poor and so indeed is he called by benevolence perpetually–Poor Jeoffry! poor Jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat.
For I bless the name of the Lord Jesus that Jeoffry is better.
For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat.
For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in music.
For he is docile and can learn certain things.
For he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation.
For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment.
For he can jump over a stick which is patience upon proof positive.
For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command.
For he can jump from an eminence into his master’s bosom.
For he can catch the cork and toss it again.
For he is hated by the hypocrite and miser.
For the former is afraid of detection.
For the latter refuses the charge.
For he camels his back to bear the first notion of business.
For he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly.
For he made a great figure in Egypt for his signal services.
For he killed the Ichneumon-rat very pernicious by land.
For his ears are so acute that they sting again.
For from this proceeds the passing quickness of his attention.
For by stroking of him I have found out electricity.
For I perceived God’s light about him both wax and fire.
For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast.
For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.

QUOTES:

Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, 1948 bebop collaboration:

“When I think of death
I get a goofy feeling
Then I catch my breath
Zero is appealing
Appearances are hazy
Smart went crazy
Smart went crazy.”

Dr. Johnson:

“I do not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as anyone else. Another charge was that he did not love clean linen, and I have no passion for it.”

Robert Graves:

[He] wrote A Song to David in a lunatic asylum, and when his collected poems were published in 1791, it was omitted as ‘not acceptable to the reader.’ This poem is formally addressed to David – Smart knew that he was no madder than King David had been, and a tradition survives that he scrabbled the versese with a key on the wall of his cell.

Christopher Smart:

The beauty, force and vehemence of Impression…[is] a talent or gift of Almighty God, by which a Genius is impowered to throw an emphasis upon a word or sentence in such wise, that it cannot escape any reader of sheer good sense or true critical sagacity.

Michael Schmidt, in Lives of the Poets, writes:

However [Song to David] was written, they remain a wonder and a mystery, begotten of the Bible, of broad and deep learning, and of some catalyst that made a confusion that poet resolved, against chaos as it were, to put in some sort of order.

For the word of God is a sword on my side – no matter what other weapon a stick or a straw.
For I have adventured myself in the name of the Lord, and he hath marked me for his own.
For I bless God the Postmaster general & all conveyancers of letters under his care especially Allen & Shelvock.
For my grounds in New Canaan shall infinitely compensate for the flats & maynes of Staindrop Moore.
For the praise of God can give to a mute faith the notes of a nightingale.

Is it nonsense? Yes. Is it nonsense? No.

Northrop Frye:

“[Alexander] Pope’s ‘Messiah’ is not musical, but Smart’s ‘Song to David’, with its pounding thematic words and the fortissimo explosion of its coda, is a musical tour de force.”

Peter Porter:

The purest case of man’s vision prevailing over the spirit of his times.

Richard Rolt, Westminster Journal, 1751, reviewing Smart’s Poems on Several Occasions:

[The poems have] all the glowing fire … that can enrapture the Soul of Poetry, and enliven the Heart of the Reader.

Thomas Percy, letter to Edmond Malone, October 17, 1786:

Poor Smart the mad poet.

Robert Graves:

It is not impossible that when Smart is judged over the whole range of his various productions – conventional in form as well as unconventional, light and even ribald as well as devotional, urbane or tender as well as sublime – he will be thought of as the greatest English poet between Pope and Wordsworth.

Harold Bloom, Best Poems in the English Language:

Of the significant poets of the later eighteenth century, sometimes termed the Age of Sensibility to distinguish it from the Augustan Age of Pope and Swift, a high proportion went mad. Like William Collins and William Cowpoer, Christopher Smart is rarely discussed without reference to his clinical insanity.

Fanny Burney, journal entry, September 12, 1768:

[Smart sent] a most affecting Epistle to papa, to entreat him to lend him 1/2 a guinea…How great a pity so clever, so ingenious a man should be reduced to such shocking circumstances. He is extremely grave, and has still great wildness in his manner, looks and voice–’tis impossible to see him and think of his works, without feeling the utmost pity and concern for him.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, letter to T. Hall Caine:

A Song to David [is] the only accomplished poem of the last century.

Marcus Walsh:

Smart’s Hymns are imaginative poetry, hymns only in name, making too few of the inevitable practical compromises to be acceptable in popular congregational use.

Christopher Hunter, Smart’s nephew:

[He was friendly, affectionate, and liberal to excess.

Michael Schmidt:

Smart’s originality is the product not of a candid, puzzled, anxious personality like William Cowper’s, nor the lucid, nostalgic and humane sensibility of a Goldsmith. It’s the product of a distinctly poetic imagination, using that term in a classical sense. Smart seldom composes verse: he is a poet rare in any age, most rare in the eighteenth century, a spiritual enthusiast and a consummate verbal artist. He might resemble Blake, only he has greater formal tact, a better ear, a better (that is, a less didactic) nature. His poems exist to celebrate God, not to cajole, instruct and persuade us.

Christopher Smart, on his time being locked up:

“For they work me with their harping-irons, which is a barbarous instrument, because I am more unguarded than others.”

From “With Christopher Smart”
By Robert Browning
Armed with this instance, have I diagnosed
Your case, my Christopher? The man was sound
And sane at starting: all at once the ground
Gave way beneath his step, a certain smoke
Curled up and caught him, or perhaps down broke
A fireball wrapping flesh and spirit both
In conflagration. Then—as heaven were loth
To linger—let earth understand too well
How heaven at need can operate—off fell
The flame-robe, and the untransfigured man
Resumed sobriety,—as he began,
So did he end nor alter pace, not he!
(full poem here)

John Butt on A Song to David:

The poem is unique amongst the lyrical poems of the century in its expression of religious ecstasy within the confines of the strictest formality.

Donald Davie:

The greatest English poet between Pope and Wordsworth.

Dr. John Hawkesworth, on visiting Smart after his release:

He replied very quick, ‘I cannot afford to be idle;’ I said he might employ his mind as well in the country as the town, at which he only shook his head.

Allen Ginsberg to students in a “Basic Poetics,” class, May 26, 1980:

“The reason I want to lay Smart on you now is (that) his line is basically the same line I used for Howl. I didn’t get the Howl line from Whitman and I didn’t get it from Robinson Jeffers or Kenneth Fearing, who are the American precursors of long line, nor from the 19th century British poet Edward Carpenter, who was also as a student of Walt Whitman, writing long lines – but from Christopher Smart. Kerouac’s long line comes somewhat out of Christopher Smart also. Smart is smarter than anybody else around. His language is smarter than Pope or Dryden. Their’s is very stiff, compared to the liquidity and intelligence and humor (of Smart), as well as classical scholarship involved, as well as a pure vernacular improvisation and contemporary quotidian reverence.”

Dr. Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, on Smart’s Universal Visiter, stopped because of his insanity:

I wrote for some months in ‘The Universal Visitor,’ for poor Smart, while he was mad, not then knowing the terms on which he was engaged to write, and thinking I was doing him good. I hoped his wits would soon return to him. Mine returned to me, and I wrote in ‘The Universal Visitor’ no longer.

Harold Bloom, Best Poems in the English Language:

Smart never could escape the stigma of madness, which prevented A Song to David and other later works from receiving the esteem they deserved. He died in debtor’s prison, a melancholy end that haunts me whenever I reread Jubilate Agno and A Song to David.

Christopher Smart, on gardening at St. Luke’s, October, 1762:

“Let Pink, house of Pink rejoice with Trigonum a herb used in garlands–the Lord succeed my pink borders.”

John Kempe, Gentleman’s Magazine (1823), remembering when Smart visited their home as a child, to listen to John play the flute:

I have often soothed the wanderings of his melancholy by some favorite air; he would shed tears when I played, and generally wrote some lines afterwards.

Michael Schmidt:

We readily assume that he wrote in madness, that what he wrote, in its forms and themes, partakes of his derangement. Or we divide the work into sane and “insane” and judge the parts by distinct criteria. But his madness can be seen not so much as a disorder as alternative order, his religious vision not as eccentric but as direct, comprehensive. To say an artist is “mad” is to say very little. What matters is what he makes of language. Smart makes passionate poetry.

He is not an imitator even in his translations, which hold the original in a form and language that make no concessions. He feels and conveys the force of the poetry he admires. His intution is attuned to a broad tradition, not caught in the rut of convention. Marcus Walsh calls Smart’s mature style “mannered, religiose and self-conscious” – and each becomes a positive critical term, for together they produce a “homogenous” style that “unifies” – the crucial word – “a number of divergent influences”. It is the paradoxical combination of influences, biblical and classical, and the disruptions his imagination registers, that make him outstanding and eccentric. Learning and accidents of biography delver him from the bondage of Augustan convention into the sometimes anarchic, vertiginous freedom of Jubliate Agno and the originality of the Song to David. He has few heirs.

Christopher Hunter, on his uncle’s breakdown:

Though the fortune as well as constitution of Mr. Smart required the utmost care, he was equally negligent in the management of both, and his various and repeated embarrassments acting upon an imagination uncommonly fervid, produced temporary alienations of mind; which at last were attended with paroxysms so violent and continued as to render confinement necessary.

Fanny Burney, Memoirs of Dr. Burney (1832)

[Smart alternated between] partial aberration of intellect, and bacchanalian forgetfulness of misfortune…[He was pious] though fanatical rather than rational.

Christopher Smart on Horace:

The lucky risk of the Horatian boldness…Horace is not so much an original in respect to his matter and sentiments … as to that unrivalled peculiarity of expression, which has excited the admiration of all succeeding ages.

Harold Bloom, Best Poems in the English Language, on “Jubilate Ago”:

The great chant from the Jubilate, “For I Will Consider my Cat Jeoffrey,” is superbly poignant, as it celebrates Smart’s asylum companion. At certain moments, here and elsewhere in Jubilate Agno, Smart becomes a precursor of William Blake.

Marcus Walsh, Christopher Smart: Selected Poems (1979):

[In Smart’s poems] every creature worships God simply by being itself, through its peculiar actions and properties…. The well-known lines on Smart’s cat Jeoffry, far from exemplifying a childlike naivety of vision, are an elaborate demonstration of how each closely observed act may be taken as part of the cat’s divine ritual of praise.

Donald Greene:

[Smart is] the earliest of the outright rebels against Newtonian and Lockean ‘rationalism’.

Christopher Smart:

“For there is no invention but the gift of God, and no grace but the grace of gratitude.”

Christopher Hunter, June 25, 1771, a month after his uncle’s death:

I trust he is now at peace; it was not his portion here.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“I prefer a national film to an international film.” — Jean-Paul Belmondo

Posted on April 9, 2025 by sheila

It’s his birthday today. I wrote about him on my Substack.

 
 
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.

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“Sometimes I can sing it when I can’t say it.” — Carl Perkins

Posted on April 9, 2025 by sheila

“The music was new, the kids were just eatin’ it up. They were claiming it as their own music. But I really think when the kids were comin’ to the sock hops and to the rock and roll shows, I really sincerely believe that mom and dad was home tryin’ to learn how to jitterbug to those same records. I never really thought that the kids were buyin’ all of those millions of records back then and I think time has proven that the older folks like it too. They just kind of rebelled against it a little bit because they first said it was bad music, they said it would entice our teenagers wrong, but it really wasn’t. It was music that made you feel good. They danced to it and I think time has proven that it was worth recording because it’s still around and never did leave.” — Carl Perkins

It’s Carl Perkins’ birthday today.

The guys who “created” rockabilly for the most part created it at Sun Studio – although there was definitely something “in the air”, in general. Sun Studio was just the place that devoted its energies to expressing it, whatever “it” was. There are multiple factors behind Sun’s supremacy in the rockabilly rise … mostly Sam Phillips, although I would put Marion Keisker in the pantheon as well (too often she is left out. Thank you, Baz Luhrmann, for recognizing her and including her!) One of the common denominators at Sun was economic hardship. This music was not made by people who had “enough” in any way, shape, or form. Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins … the Big Four, were all sons of sharecroppers, they spent their earliest years picking cotton, being hungry. Jerry Lee Lewis was shocked the first time he stayed in a motel. He had never been anywhere where the “outhouse” was inside. THAT’S “poor”. If you listen to all the early Sun tracks, no matter the artist, what you hear is economic want and hunger – hunger for validation/being seen and heard in an environment designed to ignore the needy – but also actual hunger. This actual hunger is a huge part of the sound – what we might even call “the Sun sound”, even beyond the slap-back echo (which no other studio could recreate, even with all the new-fangled bells and whistles).

There are stories about how Carl Perkins, who spent his youth picking cotton, learned to play guitar on a broom handle, and once he actually got a guitar, he could not afford new strings, so he would tie them and knot them if they broke. His distinct guitar styling was a result of him bending around the strings order to avoid the knot. The people who came after – who imitated Perkins – could buy as many guitar strings as they wanted. But they wanted that bendy awesome sound, a sound borne from poverty.

More, much more, after the jump:

Continue reading →

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