“Teens always heard my music with their hearts. The beat was just happy. It didn’t have color or hidden meaning.” — Fats Domino

Posted on February 26, 2026 by sheila

You never hear a bad thing about him. There’s the famous moment at Elvis’ 1968 press conference in Las Vegas, where Fats Domino is standing off to the side, and Elvis puts his arm around him and says to the press, “This here is the real King of rock ‘n’ roll.” Domino was a front-runner, he wasn’t exactly a pioneer, or not how I think of pioneers. Someone like Blind Lemon Jefferson was a pioneer. Rosetta Tharpe was a pioneer. If you listen to Domino’s stuff … it puts the lie to the whole “the first rock ‘n roll record was ____” and it’s always something from 1951-1953. It’s like a totally manufactured demarcation line, and it cuts people out of the picture. Fats Domino was doing rock ‘n roll in the 1940s. Sam Phillips‘ place in history is secure, but stop it. Domino was the first to sell a million records and he did it in 1949.

Antoine Dominique Domino Jr. hailed from New Orleans from a French Creole family. Louisiana Creole was his first language. He grew up in poverty but his world was steeped in music. He always loved it. He seemed to be built different. He had happiness built into him. He started playing piano very young and was already playing out in clubs as a teenager. Humble beginnings. This roly-poly boy would go on to be one of the most successful recording artists of the 50s, recording songs which went on to sell millions and millions of copies (and still counting).

Cosimo Matassa ran a little studio behind his parents’ appliance store, and he worked as engineer on the very rudimentary equipment he gathered together (he came from a mechanical background, see “appliance store”) and band leader Dave Bartholomew recorded a lot of these New Orleans artists, capturing the local sound – the mix of cultures/styles unique to the area. Bartholomew put together an unofficial house band.


Fats Domino, Cosimo Matassa, and Dave Bartholomew

Domino was drawing in crowds to his shows, so Cosimo and Bartholomew had him in to record him. It was Bartholomew who put together the song that would become Domino’s signature song, “The Fat Man”, a sort of response to the very popular “Thin Man” radio series. It’s 1949-50. “Fat Man” is an incredibly important record.

“Fat Man” was his first monster hit, and it was a monster hit the likes of which the world had never really seen up until that point, or at least with the new technology of recording/radio/distribution. All of these were relatively recent developments in music. It sold millions. Domino got rich. He could have gotten rich just off that. But he kept going. He was second only to Elvis in sales in the ’50s. Think about that. He recorded hit after hit, dominating the 1950s – when it was a very HARD decade to dominate in, due to the Elvis factor.

I mean, “Blueberry Hill”.

Elvis covered this one, and not nearly as well – and he would probably have said the same thing as well. He name-checked Fats Domino from the beginning. I think he even called him out on the Louisiana Hayride show, his earliest captured live recordings.

Domino eventually was surpassed in sales by the Beatles, but there’s no disgrace in THAT. They surpassed everyone. Domino’s estate STILL makes money.

He also, thankfully, lived long enough to benefit from nostalgia, and generational waves of interest in him, plus being used in soundtracks, which brought him more money, more attention. He showed up on television, his live concerts were recorded, and you can spend hours on YouTube enjoying him live.

And stuff like this!

Domino was a remarkably stable man. He was married for 61 years. He lived in the same house he bought with his first million. (Sadly, he lost it in Katrina.) He is a national treasure. Or, at least, we should be very proud that even with all our ugliness, and the terrible legacy of racism, we still can produce someone like Fats Domino. It is a testament to us, sure, but more than anything it’s a testament to what he brought to the table, and his insistence that he deserved to be heard, and that he had joy he wanted – needed – COULD – spread to the rest of us. For generations to come.

 
 
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 Music, On This Day | 3 Comments

“Sometimes I am two people. Johnny is the nice one. Cash causes all the trouble. They fight.” — Johnny Cash

Posted on February 26, 2026 by sheila

Top-Ten-Johnny-Cash-Albums

It’s his birthday today.

Johnny Cash, singing “Man in Black” in Denmark:

Here he is on Tex Ritter’s Ranch Party, 1956 or so. Great guitar solo, too. He’s not just strumming that guitar. The guitar CHUGS along, with an irresistible beat. It’s almost percussion. This is what Keith Richards calls in his autobiography “the rhythm of the tracks,” and it’s present in every great recording of the era. To poor boys, trains were symbolic. They could get you OUT of where you were at. Somewhere ELSE. Freedom.

cash2

Tennessee Ernie Ford and Johnny Cash together. “Sing it pretty, Ern.” This particular kind of ease and grace and humor no longer exists (at least not in performance-style), it’s a lost energy, specific to another time and place, and it is all the more precious for that.

Here he is, in 1956, at a Sun Records Show, singing “I Walk the Line.”

In 1968, he gave his famed concert at Folsom Prison (one of the best concert recordings of all time). It shivers with a sense of danger, a sense of the tension in that room, in those men. The ROARS that greet him aren’t the polite roars of an appreciative audience. It’s something else.

Here he is, with wife, the legendary June Carter, singing “If I Were a Carpenter” in 1978.

I can’t get enough of this performance. I wrote an entire post about it. The “Class of 55” – Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis – pay tribute to Elvis Presley in 1977, after Elvis died. They sing “This Train” and it’s just too much. The belt buckles ALONE.

And now, fast-forward, to Cash’s absolutely devastating 2002 “cover” of Nine Inch Nails’ song “Hurt”. Trent Reznor wrote the song about his drug addiction, and was reportedly blown away by Cash’s rendition. It can’t even be called a “cover.” It’s almost like … Trent wrote this FOR Cash to do (subconsciously). Gird your loins. This is overwhelmingly emotional.

.
He was authentic.

Always.

cash

 
 
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 Music, On This Day | Tagged , , , , , | 29 Comments

Still no power.

Posted on February 24, 2026 by sheila

They’re saying tomorrow. UPDATE: now they’re saying Friday. FRIDAY??!!

I went and charged my phone in my nearly buried car. My laptop is on its last legs. I texted Mitchell to see how they were doing in Puerto Vallarta and within 30 seconds I received a video of a drag show they were attending. Cartels may wild out, but nothing can stop drag. What I texted to Mitchell though was “cartel shmartel”. It’s been really weird to have no power, but then I remember having no power for two weeks after Hurricane Sandy and having to walk up to a random Red Cross truck and ask the guy if he could give me some tampons. He did. It’s hard to express the chaos we were tossed into. Gas rationing. Streets blocked off for two weeks. I was working at Martha Stewart at the time as a freelance producer and the entire first floor of her building was underwater so I was out of work for weeks, which was hair-raising because I was BARELY paycheck to paycheck at the time. I was barely making it. Shopping in the bodega, pitch black, all the customers were holding up their phones with flashlights. I was also going through a breakup, which I never mentioned here, and so going through the hurricane totally by myself was really bad, since literally 3 or so days before, he was all in. People come and go so quickly here, as Dorothy says in Wizard of Oz. Humorously, even though the “relationship” only lasted a couple months it was intense enough that he had already gotten a tattoo “for me” (he was covered in tats, so this was just one more), and now he’s stuck with it – a tattoo for a woman he BARELY dated, and I think of that sometimes and it cracks me up. It’s funny now but it was NOT then. In a way the Sandy chaos was a welcome distraction – as awful as that might sound. The emergency situation focused me. I had to go to Dunkin Donuts down the street to charge my phone because they happened to have the only working outlet/electricity in my entire town. Everyone showed up there and took turns charging. Nobody flipped out in Karen-like fashion. We waited our turn. It was somehow comforting because things were getting real bad for me in 2012 – the crackup to end all crackups was coming, which would culminate in me by myself in Memphis for 10 days – because my tattooed guy – a huge Elvis fan – and I were supposed to be making the trip together, New Year’s Eve in Memphis! and even though the “relationship” vanished into thin air, I went to Memphis anyway. Alone. As my family back home organized the intervention that would save my life. Hurricane Sandy lingered for months and Rockaway – to this day – will never be the same. Even just writing all that out puts some perspective on having a couple days without power. I cooked a bunch of food the day before, I have plenty of stuff. I am working on literally three pieces at the same time and I am doing it old-school: by hand. I never really gave up writing by hand so I’m kind of digging it. And I’ve read three more Shakespeare plays, so I’m making good progress on my project. February has been eventful. I was basically gone from home for the first three weeks, then I come home and am immediately buried in snow, snow so deep I haven’t left my neighborhood since I got back. A month of extremes. More snow tomorrow – this is insane – but they’re saying it’ll just be a “dusting”. I have learned about Frankie that if I talk to him in a normal tone of voice, he gets scared and skittish. But when I talk in a cooing little baby voice, he comes over and cuddles and purrs. So he really has been traumatized in his life and I need to be mindful of that because if I just say “Are you hungry?” – because yes I do talk to him – he sits there and stares at me, waiting. A little tense. But if I say, “Hey little boy do you need more fooood?” in a little baby voice he comes over and starts weaving his body through my legs. He’s so dear. I type this by candlelight. We’re doing fine.

Posted in Personal | 21 Comments

Happy Twin Peaks Day to those who celebrate

Posted on February 24, 2026 by sheila

Posted in On This Day, Television | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Thundersnow, a pine tree on fire, and plumes of black smoke across the continent

Posted on February 23, 2026 by sheila

I just got back from Chicago, right in time for a blizzard whose “stats” beat the still-legendary blizzard of ’78, which brought Rhode Island to a halt for weeks. For once, the hysterical tone of the news before the storm actually UNDER-sold what was coming our way. We had whiteout conditions all day today, and I shoveled a bit, but the near-hurricane force winds made it a useless task. My car is behind a mountain of snow right now. I did lose power and WiFi, but I was prepared with bottled water and candles and all the other things. I did my grocery shopping and come on I survived Irene and Sandy and the Case of the Empty Shelves. It wasn’t that bad. The side of my house facing the South-east is completely covered in snow. I could step out my window and ski down the side. The winds have whipped up these massive mountains.

Meanwhile though … I was just in Chicago for a week, staying with Mitchell and Christopher. It was weirdly warm in Chicago. 60 degrees one day! It was almost ominous. All we did was watch the Winter Olympics. Let’s hear it for the US women’s hockey team! True champions. Let’s hear it for Alysa Liu’s lightness and effervescence on the ice. And the wonderful figure skater from Georgia (the country) who won the gold in one of the events, maybe the free skate, I can’t remember which one. He was superb. We watched whatever event was on. Women’s mono-Bobsledding. Snowboarding. Skiing. We got involved emotionally with the personal journeys of the athletes. Coming back from injuries, or whatever: we were deeply invested. And also we watched Daisy Kenyon one night. It was the most relaxing week ever. Well, it’s not all we did. I went to a reading of a new script one night and we also went to go watch Ru Paul’s Drag Race at a gay strip club I used to live near when I first moved to Chicago – my old neighborhood! (We used to go to it all the time when I lived in Chicago decades ago – it was a good place to meet up and have a drink before raging out into the city to wreak havoc) – and it has not changed at all – which I LOVE. I’m not against change, but I walked in and it felt like no time had passed at all and there’s something comforting in that. It’s a cozy little strip joint. (With Ru Paul on the telly).

My point is, Mitchell was wearing shorts that night. In Chicago. In February. Shorts. It just wasn’t RIGHT. We took a long walk one day and I was sweating in my winter clothes. I did not pack properly at all. I flew home on Friday, and stepped off the plane into the 35-degree weather. That’s more like it.

Right after I left, on Friday – three days ago – Mitchell and Christopher got on a plane to … Puerto Vallarta. On Sunday, they were at a rooftop bar and posted pictures of the plumes of black smoke rising in the city. We didn’t understand immediately the seriousness, but it quickly became apparent. And from then on, it’s been chaos. They aren’t staying in a resort, so there hasn’t been any food, and some of the women who work there have been cooking rice and beans for everyone. People are helping each other. As we do. Websites were crashing, and the WiFi was not good, so I was doing research on my end (in just 8 hours I would lose my WiFi). Alex and I were texting as all of this was happening, and I said, “I am on hold with the State Department right now.” Which I was. Alex said, I shit you not, “So is Chrisanne.” We were DYING. No wonder why neither of us could get through. Alex was like, “Of COURSE you two are calling the State Department at the same time. OF COURSE YOU ARE.” Listen, you’re supposed to be able to register with the State Department when you travel, so at least the consulate or whoever knows you’re there, and the website was crashing, because everyone was clearly trying to do it at the same time (and there were those on Reddit – vacationing in Puerto Vallarta – who had successfully filled out the form on the State Department website, so there was hope.. Mitchell tried for hours). So whatever, I called the State Department and I didn’t get anywhere. Chrisanne actually got through and she was told to download some app that was supposed to help in some mysterious way. As gas stations exploded below. Unbelievable. Thanks so much for your help.

I saw some congressman saying on television, “8 people in my district are in Puerto Vallarta so I am closely monitoring the situation …” This gave me the idea to message Mitchell and Christopher’s rep (whom Mitchell actually knows, due to years of collaboration with the Chicago Parks Department because of Mitchell’s involvement in the Midnight Circus, which he works every year.) It’s not that these people can DO anything but you want someone to know you are there.

A New York Times reporter reached out to Mitchell based on his social media posts and – to add to the surreal nature of all this – he was interviewed yesterday. It looks like maybe the flights will be back up and running by the time they want to leave but how to GET to the airport is the current question.

Tomorrow I’ll begin digging myself out of the mountain heaped up around my house. Sadly, and coincidentally, I bought a pull-out couch so I can have people over – finally – and it’s scheduled to arrive tomorrow which I seriously doubt is going to happen. We had to shovel out a narrow canyon from our steps to the driveway. Plus nothing is plowed. There’s not a snow plow in sight. The conditions were too hair-raising today for the plows. God forbid someone has a heart attack today or experienced some health crisis. So we’ll see about the sofa. The number of people who’ve lost power has broken records. Trees are falling from the weight of the snow. One fell into an electrical box and set the pine tree on fire: witnessed by my brother and his wife, who still don’t have power. Frankie is quite confused why he can’t see out of any of “his” windows. He sits there staring at the wall of white, occasionally glancing at me like, “…… wtf.”

Sending out love to everyone in Puerto Vallarta, my friends, and the locals, and also the brave hotel staff who have basically taken on the role of the Red Cross, and the ladies who took it upon themselves to cook up a small meal with what they had on hand to feed the people staying there. Everyone’s making friends with each other. Down here on the ground, people take care of each other. There’s nobody else but us. Like my neighbor with his small snow plow: he comes over and plows our driveway in the middle of the night, without being asked, saving us HOURS of time. Hoping for the best for all. .

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2026 Shakespeare Reading Project: Love’s Labour’s Lost

Posted on February 23, 2026 by sheila

My progress:
Shakespeare Reading Project
Henry VI, parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus
The Comedy of Errors

Love’s Labour’s Lost

It’s been a long time since I’ve read this one. My main memory is its symmetry and almost pageantry-style: a group of men declaim things from one side of the stage and an equal number of women declaim things from the other side. Almost like a game. You could stage it on a chessboard. It takes place in a single location. There are contests and games played, and it calls to mind later plays – like Midsummer, although I think they were written around the same time – but also things like As You Like It, where love is a game (or a “madness” as Rosalind says). The later plays, though, give us memorable characters with distinguishing characteristics. Rosalind is ALIVE. Bottom is ALIVE. Love’s Labour’s Lost seems stiff by comparison.

As I said, this is just my memory of it.

But in this recent re-reading, I fell in love with it! It’s ridiculous! And kind of radical too. It’s a comedy which doesn’t end in marriage. In fact, the women banish their beloveds to live in hardship and isolation for one year – tasting poverty and caring for the sick – and maybe when they come back, maybe then, and ONLY then, will these ridiculous men be ready – and worthy – for the love of the women. It’s wild! And the men agree and off they go. I can’t speak to the larger context of other comedies going on in the Elizabethan era, but methinks it’s pretty much a rule that tragedy ends in death and comedy ends in marriage.

So Shakespeare was up to something different here.

But what, exactly?

In reading about the play, I think I now have an idea.

Love’s Labour’s Lost is a play about words and language. There’s a sonnet contest at one point. There are performances and courtship rituals. Everything is very formal: the men declaim they are swearing off women and they sound very sure of themselves, their language is airtight, they’ve been listening to manosphere podcasts. Or reading Plato’s Symposium, which Shakespeare probably was, too. So they want to wall themselves off from women and devote themselves to airy intellectual pursuits, and blah blah. Naturally the moment the women show up they forget their vows of no-women. Sonnets are passed back and forth between the sex-segregated groups as are love notes. Everyone critiques the language of whatever note they receive. Nothing is really up to par: nobody is truly satisfied with the language at hand, the language of courtship and love.

This COULD be seen as the young Shakespeare’s withering critique of his contemporaries. Is he saying, “I have seen how you write love stories and, sorry, but I think it needs to be updated.” It’s a satire, not a comedy! He’s satirizing his peers? This is just a guess, but I feel like everything makes more sense if you read this as satirical and/or bitchy. He’s mocking people who declaim love in sonnet-form. Meanwhile, right around this time he himself is writing a series of sonnets which …. the world will never stop talking about.

So he knows of what he speaks, sonnet-wise.

But maybe the sonnet can’t contain the feelings. Maybe the sonnet is too limiting. You can sense behind his sonnets all the things he is NOT saying.

There’s speculation the play was written when all the theatres were closed due to the plague (1591), and the play was designed for a special production, maybe outside, or at some nobleman’s house. An audience of literate elites who would recognize the satire, knowing the joke was on them.

Love’s Labour’s Lost feels like an exercise, but an important one, if you go with the theory that Shakespeare – in this play – was basically “killing off” the sentimental-sonnet-love-language in vogue at the time, so that he could speak more forthrightly from that point forward.

Quotes on the play

Continue reading →

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“He is a good listener. When you have a good listener you have a good actor.” — Norman Taurog on Elvis

Posted on February 23, 2026 by sheila

American director Norman Taurog was born in 1899, literally during the first gasps of cinema. What an improbable journey. He was born into a world before cinema had even cohered into an artform … and he ended his career helming 9 “Elvis Movies”, all of which were hits. Taurog’s final film was Live a Little, Love a Little, a completely forgotten “Elvis film” and a wonderful film – I keep pounding the drum for its rediscovery. I wrote about Live a Little first for Jeremy Richey’s wonderful blog Moon in the Gutter (which I reprinted here), and then for in my piece for Film Comment about Elvis as an actor. I also discussed it – among other things – during my talk on Elvis’ movie career in Memphis.

 
 
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 Directors, Movies, On This Day | Tagged , | 9 Comments

February 22, 1980: “Do you believe in miracles? YES!”

Posted on February 22, 2026 by sheila

Member when Russia was our enemy? I miss those days. It is truly wild to watch certain people – whose identity for 75 years was opposition to Russia’s tyranny – flip-flop. The cognitive dissonance has to be insane. Or it should be. Not that we always need the same enemy but … Putin? Really? Now you’re going soft on it? Or quiet? Okay. I see you.

The “miracle on ice” story means a lot to me, not as a political fight but as an exciting sports story, as gripping as any cliffhanger. And all of the personalities involved! It’s really the ultimate underdog story.

FIRST UP: For my column at Film Comment, I wrote about Miracle, the 2004 film about the “miracle on ice” – which turns 41 years old today. It went up a year ago, for the 40th anniversary. Many many thanks to Film Comment for accepting what is, perhaps, aside from the piece on Elvis’ acting career, the most Sheila-esque pitch on the planet.

Al Michaels:

It was a sliver of the Cold War played out on a sheet of ice. Here you have a bunch of fresh-faced college kids taking on the big bad Soviet bear, in the United States, in the Olympics. The confluence of events was so extraordinary it can never happen again. It was the greatest sports moment of the 20th century.

John Powers, Boston Globe:

The Americans were always amateurs, college kids, some of them, or recent graduates, who still played the game but certainly not at the Russian level. There was no way they could be competitive. And the feeling going into 1980 was they really haven’t got much of a chance, even though it’s here at Lake Placid.

Jim Lampley, ABC sports:

This was a case where for a few hours at least a magical coach got a magical group of kids to believe that they could do something that they really couldn’t do.

More after the jump:

Continue reading →

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“I should like to make even the most ordinary spectator feel that he is not living in the best of all possible worlds.” – Luis Buñuel

Posted on February 22, 2026 by sheila

Today is Luis Buñuel’s birthday!

From Luis Buñuel’s autobiography My Last Sigh:

Connoisseurs who like their martinis very dry suggest simply allowing a ray of sunlight to shine through a bottle of Noilly Prat before it hits the bottle of gin. They claim that the making of a dry martini should resemble the Immaculate Conception, in which the generative power of the Holy Spirit is said to have pierced the Virgin’s hymen like a ray of sunshine through a window – leaving it unbroken. Another crucial recommendation is that the ice be so cold and hard that it won’t melt, since nothing’s worse than a watery martini. Let me give you my personal recipe, the fruit of long experimentation and guaranteed to produce perfect results. The day before your guests arrive, put all the ingredients – glasses, gin and shaker – in the refrigerator. Use a thermometer to make sure the ice is about twenty degrees below zero (centigrade). Don’t take anything out until your friends arrive; then pour a few drops of Noilly Prat and half a demitasse spoon of Angostura bitters over the ice. Shake it, then pour it out, keeping only the ice, which retains a faint taste of both. Then pour straight gin over the ice, shake it again, and serve. After the dry martini comes one of my own modest inventions, the Buñueloni, best drunk before dinner. It’s really a takeoff on the famous Negroni, but instead of mixing Campari, gin, and sweet Cinzano, I substitute Carpano for the Campari. Here again, the gin – in sufficient quantity to ensure its dominance over the other two ingredients – has excellent effects on the imagination. I’ve no idea how or why; I only know that it works.

Exchange from Whit Stillman’s great film Metropolitan:

CHARLIE: Do you know the French film, “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie”? When I first heard the title, I thought, “Finally, someone’s going to tell the truth about the bourgeoisie.” What a disappointment! It would be hard to imagine a less fair or accurate portrait.
SALLY: Of course, Buñuel’s a surrealist—despising the bourgeoisie’s part of their credo.
NICK: Where do they get off?
CHARLIE: The truth is, the bourgeoisie does have a lot of charm.
NICK: Of course it does. The surrealists were just a lot of social climbers.

From Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris:

GIL: Oh! Mr. Buñuel! I had a nice idea for a movie for you.
BUÑUEL: Yes?
GIL: A group of people attend a very formal dinner party and at the end of dinner when they try to leave the room, they can’t.
BUÑUEL: Why not?
GIL: They just can’t seem to exit the door.
BUÑUEL: But why?
GIL: When they’re forced to stay together the veneer of civilization quickly fades away and what you’re left with is who they really are. Animals.
BUÑUEL: I don’t get it. Why don’t they just walk out of the room?
GIL: All I’m saying is, just think about it. Maybe when you’re shaving one day, it’ll tickle your fancy.
BUÑUEL: But I don’t understand. What’s holding them in the room?


Luis Buñuel, by Man Ray, 1929

Posted in Directors, Movies, On This Day | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

“Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.” — David Foster Wallace

Posted on February 22, 2026 by sheila

“Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.” — David Foster Wallace

It’s his birthday today.

David Foster Wallace is hard to talk about. It’s painful. I say this as someone who did not know him, or have him in my life even in a peripheral way. I know a couple people who knew him/worked with him, in varying degrees of intimacy, and the anguish they feel is beyond words, so to talk about my pain as a reader/fan compared to the people who knew him makes me feel a little weird. But as a reader it’s hard not to get the feeling that something irreplaceable has been lost. He spawned many imitators. His writing was extremely commanding. He made huge demands on the reader. You must submit to his footnotes. They aren’t an interruption. They are the whole shebang. Stop trying to “get back” to the “main throughline”. There is no such thing.

I did not read Infinite Jest when it came out. I bought it but there it sat on my bookshelves, all 1200 pages of it, unread for years. Who the hell has the time for that? I didn’t even know what it was about, beyond something having to do with twelve-step recovery. Soooo THAT sounds like a barrel of laughs. I read his essays when I’d come across them, and then bought the collections.

But finally I read Infinite Jest. And, as so often happens, I discovered for myself what all the fuss was about. Poor Jonathan Franzen. Being Jonathan Franzen must be like Bing Crosby’s possibly apocryphal comment: “Frank Sinatra has a voice that comes along once in a generation, but why oh why did it have to come in mine?”

I want to point you to a really important piece by Christian Lorentzen, where he discusses DFW’s commencement speech that “went viral”, with all its pat little sayings of inspiration, and how this has made him a little bit more palatable to the mainstream. The commencement speech, though, is almost a false flag. It’s ANTI what DFW was normally about. Lorentzen’s piece is about who owns an artist’s legacy after they’re gone? The Rewriting of David Foster Wallace.

I consider DFW’s piece on David Lynch’s Lost Highway to be one of the best pieces of film criticism in the whole genre. It opened up possibilities for others: OH! We don’t have to do it like everybody else does it! We can write like THIS? Of course, we CAN’T “write like this” but his example still inspires.

Writing about books isn’t so much my thing anymore, but I had so much fun writing about Infinite Jest, and how Infinite Jest illuminated something for me about Marlon Brando – and I have spent decades pondering Marlon Brando – but Infinite Jest gave me an A-ha moment. A sort of, “My GOD, yes, that’s IT EXACTLY.”

So I wrote about Infinite Jest and Marlon Brando for Film Comment.

 
 
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 Books, On This Day, writers | Tagged , , | 4 Comments