Recently on This Recording

In Which Elizabeth Bowen Lives In Windowless Rooms

2010-09-02T14:25:00Z

Don't Bat An Eyelid

by JANE HU

I bussed down to New York City this past week in hopes of extracting some form of a mini-break before the start of school. The city posed as a welcome escape from my summer of windowless offices and libraries, where I scoured databases and watched films in unventilated screening rooms. On the ride over, between fantasizing about the parks I would breeze around, I sent my professor an e-mail: "I just wanted to let you know I'm in NYC for this week. If there's anything I can do here in relation to Bowen, etc. let me know!"

I am writing my thesis on Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen and, wherever I go, she always haunts the back of my mind. Incidentally, there were manuscripts to be found at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, which was precisely where I spent the majority of my mini-break.

A lover of archives, I was seven when I received my first diary and have kept one ever since. I recall years when I wouldn’t sleep without logging an entry — the day could only end after my written acknowledgement. Past my bedtime, crouched under the covers, I would blindly scrawl out notes of apparent insignificance. "My piano test is over and I’m very happy." "I just came home from Bingo! Tonight I did not win anything but oh well." "Something is wrong with my watch." I’ve always believed in documenting life and perhaps Bowen said it best: "Those without memories don’t know what is what."

Born 1899 in Dublin, Bowen spent the first seven years of her life migrating between Bowen’s Court, her large family house in County Cork, and her home in Dublin. Growing up, the Bowens kept a close eye on Elizabeth’s development: she was never to drink too much milk; she was always to wear gloves to avoid freckling. Elizabeth was also not allowed to learn to read until she was seven since it was common knowledge that Bowen’s overworked their brains. Part of this may have held some truth for her father, a lawyer, suffered a mental breakdown from which he never recovered. Elizabeth was around five when he took for the worse, yet she arose nearly unscathed: "I had come out of the tension and mystery of my father’s illness, the apprehensive silence or chaotic shoutings... with nothing more disastrous than a stammer." Perhaps it was this stammer that contributed to Bowen’s inimitable style — a use of inverted syntax that never includes a single unnecessary word.

Bowen's densely psychological narratives carried the sensibilities of nineteenth-century realism into modernism, where her twisted sentences emphasized the uncanny aspects of daily existence. My favorite prose of hers is found in her 1935 novel The House in Paris, where Karen delivers an internal monologue on her already thwarted future. Bowen exposes Karen’s conceptual twists of time and memory in labyrinthine sentences that you cannot help but indulge in:

These hours are only hours. They cannot be again, but no hours can. Hours in a room with a lamp and a tree outside, with tomorrow eating into them. The grass sprang up when we took our hands away. The maid will make this bed and fold back two corners of eiderdown like they were folded back when I put my hat on it.... I cannot see him to see what a child would be like. Though there will not be a child, that is why I want to see him. If a child were going to be born, there would still be something that had to be. Tonight would be more then than hours and that lamp. It would have been the hour of my death. I should have to do what I dread, see them know. There would still be something to dread. I should see the hour in the child. I should not have rushed on to nothing. He would be the mark our hands did not leave on the grass, he would be the tamarisks we only half saw. And he would be the I whose bed Naomi sat on, the Max whose sleeve I brushed rain off: tender and guardable.

Following Henry James, whom she frequently emulated, Bowen believed in "the treatment of an incident, crisis, or, situation which the writer feels to be of greater importance than its apparent triviality might show." Because she valued tradition and good manners, readers often judge her as a snobbish conservative. These critics miss Bowen’s acute sense of empathy, which evince her open progressiveness. On the declining institution of the Irish manor, she reveals her social intuition:

Or is it the fear that, if one goes into the big house, one will have to be ‘polite’? Well, why not be polite—are not humane manners the crown of being human at all? Politeness is not constriction; it is a grace: it is really no worse than an exercise of the imagination on other people’s behalf. And are we to cut grace quite out of life?

If you’ve heard Bowen’s name, it was most likely from an encounter with her 1938 novel The Death of the Heart or 1949's The Heat of the Day. Both energetically plotted and cohesive narratives, these two works have grown to become her most well known. In the latter, Bowen registers the violent shifts experienced in the two world wars, the Troubles, and the Irish Civil War. Her war fiction portrays sleepwalkers who, although not dead, were neither fully alive. Aside from her novels, which are read less than they should, Bowen is also one of the most underrated short story writers of this century. Whereas longer narratives allow for full-length character development, Bowen used the compressed quality of short fiction to create more fantastical and metonymic worlds. Her prominent ability to create an atmosphere of tension and tautness cuts most clearly in the shorter works. Here, the quiet ghosts and haunted figures of her novels emerge as full-blown, speaking phantoms.

All romantic notions aside, Bowen viewed herself as a professional writer who worked steadily at her desk throughout the day. On top of writing fiction, which Bowen equated to living life, she also published numerous essays and articles. Responsible for both her London house in Regent’s Park and the inherited Bowen’s Court, Bowen needed her writing to earn a profit.

bowen court

By the late 1930s, Bowen had reached an international reputation that continued to grow into the 1940s. Although her essays produced a significant amount of her income, Bowen nonetheless felt her journalism as subordinate to her fiction. Even late in life, she rejected her status as a critic: "I do not really consider myself a critic – I do not think, really, that a novelist should be a critic; but, by some sort of irresistible force, criticism seems to come almost every novelist’s way. I write, at intervals, for The New Statesman, The Listener, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar; and do request articles, from time to time, for papers too diverse to enumerate."

Since her death in 1973, interest and scholarship in Bowen has waned, although there seems to have been a revival this past decade. Victoria Glendinning’s foreword to her excellent biography on Bowen properly states, "She is to be spoken of in the same breath as Virginia Woolf, on whom much more breath has been expended." Glendinning goes on to acknowledge that Bowen is what came after Bloomsbury. "She is the link which connects Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark."

My first Bowen novel was The Death of the Heart, where I met the intelligent orphan Portia in all her sixteen years of bright innocence. Nineteen myself at the time, I encountered Portia’s utter artlessness with uncomfortable familiarity. Having already fallen for the female protagonists of Edith Wharton and Henry James, who, for me, exemplified heartbreaking innocence, it was clear that Portia belonged to the same breath as Daisy Miller, Isabel Archer, and Lily Bart. Portia was fragile and stubborn, hopeful and despairing, curious while asking all the wrong questions. Similar to how I felt at sixteen, Portia was full of an unself-awareness that simultaneously melted with her own self-importance. So overwhelmingly innocent, she could not perceive the mess she made for those around her.

Portia keeps a saccharine diary that gets covertly passed between adults and which consequently lands under the reader’s eyes too. I cringed through each of these entries in a way that only happens when one encounters oneself caught off-guard; I might have been rereading my own not-so-distant maudlin thoughts. Portia is mistakenly — but predictably — in love with a cad named Eddie and she writes, “He says he had lunch with Anna and that she was nice. He says he did think of ringing me up, but he did not. He does not say why. He says he feels he is starting a new life.” And like many young girls, Portia finds sweetness in the mundane:

After supper, I sat on our rug in front of Thomas’ fire. I thought some of the things that Eddie had told me on this rug.
His father is a builder.
When he was a child he knew pieces of the Bible straight off by heart.
He is quite afraid of the dark.
His two favourite foods are cheese straws and jellied consommé.
He would not really like to be very rich.
He says that when you love someone all your saved-up wishes start coming out.
He does not like being laughed at, so he pretends he wants people to laugh at him.
He has thirty-six ties.

Although she goes on painfully for pages about the undeserving Eddie, Portia’s diary reveals glimpses of the discerning woman she will become: "Thomas said he did not know what had put this into his head and after that he gave me a sort of look when he did not think I was looking."

In A.S. Byatt’s introduction to The House in Paris, she asserts "that Elizabeth Bowen has got Henrietta right. Adult readers are given to saying, of children like Henrietta, that ‘real’ children are not so sophisticated, so articulate, so thoughtful. What I remember with absolute clarity from this reading was a feeling that the private analyses I made to myself of things were vindicated, the confusions I was aware of were real, and presumably important and interesting, since here they were described." Bowen’s words reassured me that a sixteen year-old girl’s perspective and opinions mattered. While her fiction was forever concerned with young girlhood, her journalistic work included portraits on the emerging population of "teenagers." While this rising community struck many adults as tragic and foreign, Bowen strove to understand them. Her novels are evidence of her success.

Since The Death of the Heart, I have read both Bowen’s fictional letters and those she wrote in real life to Eudora Welty, Virginia Woolf, May Sarton, Charles Ritchie, and many others. She was a voracious letter writer and would easily send out a dozen before the lunch bell rang. Writing between the two world wars, Bowen lived through a time of enormous upheaval as gramophones, typewriters, and cinema rose in ubiquity. Not surprisingly, she often viewed the idea of immediate communication as a threat to privacy and society: "The motor car demolishes distances, and the telephone and wireless keep the house knit up, perhaps too much, with the world."

Wherever Bowen travelled, she contemplated the force of memory and the past. "In Rome I wondered how to break down the barrier between myself and happenings outside my memory. I was looking for splinters of actuality in a shifting mass of experience other than my own. Time is one kind of space; it creates distance." As I read her letters in the Berg Collection and hold the pages she once touched, I feel a similar collapse of distance between me and the writer I love. I embrace the honeyed corniness and romanticism of the whole scenario and, suddenly, Bowen feels present. Somewhere along her nearly-illegible cursive, I see both the vulnerability of Elizabeth Bowen, Portia, and myself.

I have kept a diary for fourteen years now and, maybe because I am less innocent or more “sophisticated,” "articulate," and "thoughtful," I no longer tear out pages that present me in an undesirable light. Other times, in a bout of inspiration, I will flip out my stationary, thumb through the drawer for stamps, and pen a few cards until my hand begins to cramp and my thoughts start to drift. At this point, I’ll pull out To the North, which features my favorite Bowen lady, Emmeline. She is the magnetic character Bowen believed every story required — the one with whom we’re supposed to fall in love. Needless to say, I fell.

Bowen’s young women "play in a foreign language of which they know not one word," all the while discouraged by laughably smug boys to "Lock everything up; hide everything! Don’t bat an eyelid ever." This faulty advice never works. Bowen’s guileless girls write as a way of becoming. Late one night, Portia cries about the adults who dictate her life, "They would forgive me if I were something special. But I don’t know what I was meant to be." I'm twenty-one now and with each passing day, I don't relate less to Portia, but more.

Jane Hu is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Montreal. This is her first appearance in these pages. She tumbls here and twitters here.

"Hard to Please" - The Weepies (mp3)

"Hummingbird" - The Weepies (mp3)

"Be My Honeypie" - The Weepies (mp3)

In Which School's Out Forever, School's Been Blown To Pieces

2010-09-01T14:24:00Z

September Song (or, Twenty Years Of Schooling & They Put You On The Day Shift)

by MOLLY LAMBERT

Here comes September to cut into the sweaty, humid, unemployed, depressed cake that was August before it weeps any more pink frosting onto the dirty kitchen floor!

I grew up fetishizing cold weather, because it was not a thing we really have in Los Angeles. Years of exposure to books set in prep schools or written by Johns Updike and Cheever cultivated in me the strong Jewish/Catholic lust for east coast WASPs and their culture. I especially fetishized fall, with its scarves and coats and coziness.

Fall is when school starts, it's when the new TV season traditionally begins, and summer popcorn movies are replaced by Oscar-bait movies. Magazines get thick again (or they used to) and all of the new products are suddenly "pumpkin" or "plum."

September for me has always meant my birthday, which talk about your buildup to a non life-changing event. Nothing changes on your birthday. Nothing especially changes on New Year's. So why do we expect so much from our Septembers?

Well for one, September is when kids go back to school, which implies the return of structure to where there was none. Even if you went to camp or worked all summer break, August was about the antsiness building up for something new to happen.

We spend the bulk of our youths, a ridiculously long amount of our lives, on a strict calendar whose organizing principle is school starting in the early fall. It is not hard to imagine that vestigially we still feel like we are going back to school every September.

Until I lived on the east coast during college, I had no idea that scarves served an actual function (keeping your neck warm). I also knew nothing about the secret undertow of autumn's nostalgia, which is DREAD. The trade-off for the beautiful natural spectacle of New England autumn is that it becomes New England winter.

In California the fall crispness is just a prelude to more of the same during winter, but in most other places it acts as foreshadowing that within a couple of months it'll be too cold to keep your eyes open outside. Fall nostalgia has a morbid undercurrent. The leaves are beautiful but they are dying. Back to school's second self is Halloween.

It's like we subconsciously internalize the seasonal change. Studies have shown that external stimulants like sounds and smells have a huge impact on influencing human behavior. Is that why everyone freaks the fuck out at the end of summer even though they are no longer going back to school? Something about seeing all those pencils and backpacks just triggers the deep desire we all have to hit the reset button on our lives.

Most of the people I know are freelancers in one sense or another, and their career paths involve amorphous to-do lists and shitty day jobs or erratic work. Because I have nothing else to compare it to, it is hard for me to feel like being in your twenties right now is any different than being in your twenties at any point during the last century.

The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both. And so the flip side of anticipation is dread.

You can anticipate good things happening with the seasonal change, but because you absolutely cannot predict in advance them there is also endless dread of worst case scenarios, even though the chance of every situation playing out nightmarishly is low.

You might not have a decent job or an apartment or whatever right now, but that doesn't make you the kind of person who is incapable of having those things. It just makes you someone who doesn't happen to have all of them right now, which is most people at most points in most of their lives. It's not a comment on your true self.

The thing about external factors beyond your control (like the horrible economy and its many attendant trickle-down woes) is that they do change unexpectedly and in a way that is impossible to always predict accurately, much like the weather.

In the meantime all you can do is stay as positive as possible, keep putting in work, and maybe eat some pumpkin bread in a scarf and coat by a duck pond around dusk.

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She tumbls here and twitters here.

"Nobody's Hero" - Stiff Little Fingers (mp3)

"Straw Dogs" - Stiff Little Fingers (mp3)

"No Change" - Stiff Little Fingers (mp3)

In Which We Burn Down The House Just To Watch It Burn

2010-08-31T14:31:00Z

Nothing's Shocking

by JESSE KLEIN

Ex-Drummer

dir. Koen Mortier

90 minutes

It’s getting pretty hard to find something that’s taboo. At this point, you have to remove Charlotte Gainsbourg’s clitoris, and even then… Well, most films have the requisite number of shots of the upper-division of the female torso and, increasingly, the upper-division of the lower-division of both women and men. You don’t even have to watch a movie with subtitles anymore to see special parts, or, even, special parts touching. At this point, something needs to be removed for it to register as racy, or the special parts need to have originated from the same special part and then touch. Then Ex-Drummer was made.

Ex-Drummer, a Belgian film directed by Koen Mortier and recently released in the US on DVD by Palisades Tartan, is post-taboo. It’s not immoral. It’s not amoral. It’s post-moral. There is no compass. No cause and effect. In some scenes, there’s not even gravity. It is as if Murphy’s Law and the Peter Principle were brothers, got married, and adopted.

The premise: Three ‘handicapped’ Flemish guys (they’re not handicapped in the more traditional, actual sense of the word) need a drummer. One of their Moms (a Mom who is now bald after losing her hair instantly upon catching her teenage son masturbating, a son who is now instantly paralyzed in his right arm, the arm he was using to… well, that’s his handicap) recommends a famous writer. This writer cannot play the drums. Has never played the drums. This is his handicap. He agrees. They decide on ‘The Feminists’ as their band name because four handicap guys are "about as useful as a group of feminists." It’s onwards and upwards from there.

The writer, Dries, agrees to join the band believing that these new relationships will inspire his writing. But Dries doesn’t write at any point in this film, at least not literally; he writes with the other characters, he creates the events that take place. He is God-like, though more like God’s confrere. Dries creates something from nothing, a band where there were four ‘handicapped' men, music where there was only noise, hatred from inertia; he shows us how easy it is to fall, how good it can feel. Dries (played by Dries Van Hegen) is smart, sexy, familiar yet totally foreign. We relate to Dries and then feel shame for having done so.

The ‘handicapped’ band member with the paralyzed right arm, Jan, is the only character with a family. His family is Ma and Pa Verbeek, Ma the aforementioned bald matriarch, a foul-mouthed woman—well, really just foul in general — and Pa, a man confined to his bed where he lies in a straitjacket for undisclosed, though presumably legitimate reasons. In one scene, Jan sits next to his father on the bed, cleaning him as they chat, a moment that is civil, familial, almost tender. Before exiting, Jan leans down to his father, their noses touching and whispers, "Loser," and exits. This scene is typical of the film: no justification of character’s actions, no internal logic on why anyone does anything. In Ex-Drummer, people change their minds, do things devoid of logic, hurt each other, hurt themselves. For no reason. The traditional motivations and inherent logic that govern most characters, and people, are absent; instead lies randomness, meaninglessness, chaos.

Yet somewhere amidst the violence and depravity is humor. The absurdity, the sheer impossible madness of it, forces us to laugh. In Samuel Beckett’s Watt, Arsene talks about the three laughs: ethical, intellectual and mirthless. The "bitter laugh laughs at that which is not good" is ethical. The "hollow laugh laughs at that which is not true" is intellectual. But the mirthless laugh "is the laugh of laughs, the risus purus (pure laugh), the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs . . . at that which is unhappy." There is no mirth to be found in this movie, and yet we laugh. Not at or with, but because of, or in spite of. Maybe it’s all three. We start to laugh because we know it’s not good. Then because we can’t believe it to be true. And then, finally, because we know it is. We laugh because we know a world this depraved could exist. Because we know it does.

An example. There’s a character named Big Dick. When Dries asks if his name is due to literal or metaphoric endowment, he calls in his wife. Then, after the mandatory nuptial name-calling, they are in her vagina. Standing there. Admiring his handiwork. Then, they’re back at the table in his trailer as if he and Dries had just taken a tour of the place. We laugh (or I laughed) at such a moment because what other reaction is appropriate? Such absurdity can only be met with laughter, a timid laugh, like when you’re reading an inappropriate book on the subway, but a laugh all the same.

The other two band members, Koen (handicap: bad lisp) and Ivan (deaf), complete The Feminists. Koen, the lead singer, is nihilism incarnate; he "specializes" in assault and is aroused by Ma Verbeek, the obese woman twenty years his senior — he later tells her she has a "sexy stomach" in an attempt to woo her (read: he says this while taking her clothes off while she fervently resists). He’s also the one who lives upside down. Koen lives to destroy; he does not differentiate between people, property, friendships, or himself. They’re just things he can break, can enjoy breaking, can move on to new things to break after having broken them. It’s Ivan, the bassist, who has a smack of compassion; he is the only thing the audience can recognize as human. He’s married, though his wife and he engage in little more than abuse of various sorts (verbal, physical, drug et al).

Due to blind neglect, their daughter dies, echoing the death in Trainspotting of Sick Boy’s daughter. But in Ex-Drummer though characters suffer, feel pain, they don’t change. This extreme and absolute misery is par for the course; they accept it as if they knew it would happen all along, as if it’s supposed to.

Ex-Drummer is compared to Trainspotting though the similarities are skin-deep; like saying two paintings are alike because they both have apples in them. Trainspotting is slick, often quite funny, but does not disturb, or resonate, to the same extent. In Trainspotting, people do despicable, deplorable things because they are addicted to drugs, because they feel they have no choice. In Ex-Drummer, people do bad things because they can. Because it’s better than not doing them. At the end of Danny Boyle’s film, we see Darwin triumph with a knowing smile on Ewan McGregor’s face. Ex-Drummer concludes with what can only be called a complete demolition, an apocalypse. Dries aside, no one gets out in one piece, Big Dick included. With seductive music as accompaniment, we see these people destroy each other, then, once dead, reflect on the vapidity of their lives with a cool, detached tone. It leaves its few surviving characters in their original state, a world of fear and stupidity.

Reviewers and audiences have called Koen Mortier’s film morally repugnant— Variety labeling it "a new low in post-modern smug superiority", Slant claiming it is "just another unpleasant picture with awful people doing awful things to one another, in the service of empty shock" — but this rejection only underlines the film’s resonance. The film unsettles, because it works, because it’s good. It’s often hilarious, at times heartbreaking, and together seldom beautiful. It shows how beautiful destruction can be. And that’s what makes it scary. Ex-Drummer killed taboo. That’s why it’s worth watching.

Jesse Klein is a contributor to This Recording. This is his first appearance in these pages. He recently completed his first film, Shadowboxing.

"Manifest Destiny" - Zola Jesus (mp3)

"Soeur Sewer" - Zola Jesus (mp3)

"Sea Talk" - Zola Jesus (mp3)

In Which Life Is Like A Bowl Of Life Cereal

2010-08-30T12:39:00Z

Let's Get Liberated

by MOLLY LAMBERT

In a totally premeditated ballsy move, this week's Mad Men was about the CLIO awards and aired the same night as the Emmys. Matthew Weiner definitely cares about winning awards, so if this episode was his attempt to defuse industry gossip that he is an insane egomaniacal credit-hungry Pete Campbell of a showrunner, it didn't work.

But if there's anything we know about Mad Men, it's that Pete Campbell is the secret (male) hero of the show. The only thing younger people envy about older people is their jadedness, and you don't even know that's what you are envious of until you get there, by which point you don't give a fuck whatsoever because you are jaded too.

What was the craziest backstory revelation from this episode? That Don was just some schmuck working in a fur coat shop when he met Roger? That Joan and Roger's fuckmance predates Don and Roger's bromance? That Peggy Olson can control rogue boners with her mind like Matilda? That Sookie Stackhouse is a human-fairy hybrid?

This episode had some of the best reaction shots in Mad Men history. I demand GIFs of the following: Don's face after he falls asleep while getting blown and then wakes up next up to the ugly waitress. Pete Campbell's face when Lane tells him they're going to bring Ken Cosgrove (ACCOUNTS) on. Don's wasted lean in to smell Dr. Faye's neck.

The hand holding. Peggy's face when that douchebag congratulates her on winning the smuggest bitch in the world award. Pete's face when he tries to stop Don from drunk pitching the LIFE cereal people. Don's entire drunk pitch to the LIFE cereal people.

Speaking of Don's drunk pitch, seriously, it's like they just can't not let Jon Hamm be funny anymore. Sure Don Draper's unfuckable coolness quotient has been nullified through silliness but who cares? Mad Men has been considerably slap-happy this season and it just leads to me dying of laughter several times each episode.

Jon Hamm's portrayal of Don Draper this season has occasionally reminded me of (his BFF) Paul Rudd in Wet Hot American Summer. Just the ways in which straight male peacocking can be hilariously flamboyant and veer into behaving like a petulant child.

Don's attempt to hit on Dr. Faye was so cartoonish and basically completely accurate. There's nothing like a swing and a miss rooted in misplaced beaming drunk confidence. It's a thin line between attractive self-assurance and arrogant buffonery.

The big twist tonight was learning that Don Draper bluffed his way into Sterling-Cooper and then Buellered his way through the rest of the late fifties/early sixties. When Alex Carnevale found me and I got him drunk and hired myself for This Recording I was more or less working at a fur shop (oF thE MIND, INcePTioN!)

Don's ancient secretary is beginning to remind me of the rotating secretaries on Murphy Brown. I know a lot of people hate her hijinks and find it too hacky and broad, but I'm sure she'll be disposed of with a riding lawnmower in the near future.

Peggy's daughterly relationship to Don is being ruined by the fact that Don is a pretty fucking terrible dad. He likes the praise that comes from bestowing favors and the occasional compliment, but he will never show up for your proverbial recital. He might even have some real sounding excuse but it won't make you feel any better.

Peggy is also starting to resent that part of the reason she is generally tolerated by her male peers is because they are so totally unthreatened by her sexuality. The flip side of this of course is Joan Holloway Harris, who is praised and noted constantly for her sex appeal and appearance but never for her impeccable workwomanship.

There's an old saw about telling smart girls they're hot and hot girls they're smart, but the real point Peggy was making was that women getting compartmentalized into those categories, which are always enforced by the likes of Douchebag Art Director Guy, has absolutely nothing to do with what they are really like as human beings.

Unfortunately it seemed like Peggy's attempt to demonstrate that the Madonna/whore construct is a falsehood/duality didn't exactly go over/make a dent in that guy's thick skull beyond giving him a confused and unattended to erection. Let's just say that sometimes it's hard to have arguments about serious things with total idiots.

Peggy is getting increasingly sick of the glass ceiling, the corporate ladder, and all the bullshit associated with both. She is starting to realize that Don's approval is not worth what she once thought it was. Like Roger she is sick of doing Don's below the line work for him and then not getting any credit. She is sick of not being recognized.

Roger knows he inadvertently created a monster, even if he doesn't realize that he is also a monster (and a child). The chapter on Roger's childhood keeps getting bigger as he keeps getting older and weirder. The theme of aging as return to the pure id expression of childhood came up a lot towards the end of The Sopranos.

I love Roger's memoirs. I would like to see some webisodes just based around Roger dictating his memoirs. He and Kenny Powers are the two fictional characters whose autobiographical audiobooks I would actually really like to listen to. Yo and how about when Joan and Roger and Don almost did the Human Centipede under the table.

I certainly can't complain about the idea that we'll be getting to see more of Ken Cosgrove, magnificent flaxen haired prince of the people, in the future. You just know he's going to slam dunk the fuck out of the Mountain Dew account (and my heart).

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She tumbls here and twtters here.

"The Needle and the Damage Done (Neil Young cover)" - Laura Marling (mp3)

"Ohio" - Neil Young (mp3)

"My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)" - Neil Young (mp3)

In Which We Change Diapers And Collect China

2010-08-29T12:24:00Z

On Being A 'Woman Writer'

by MARGARET ATWOOD

I approach this article with a good deal of reluctance. Once having promised to do it, in fact, I've been procrastinating to such an extent that my own aversion is probably the first subject I should attempt to deal with. Some of my reservations have to do with the questionable value of writers, male or female, becoming directly involved in political movements of any sort: their involvement may be good for the movement, but it's yet to be demonstrated that it's good for the writer.

The rest concern my sense of the enormous complexity not only of the relationships between Man and Woman, but also of those between other abstract intangibles, Art and Life, Form and Content, Writer and Critic, et cetera.

Judging from conversations I've had with many other women writers in this country, my qualms are not unique. I can think of only one writer I know who has any formal connection with any of the diverse organizations usually lumped together under the titles of Women's Liberation or the Women's Movement. There are several who have gone out of their way to disavow even any fellow-feeling, but the usual attitude is one of grudging admiration, tempered with envy: the younger generation, they feel, has it a hell of a lot better than they did. Most writers old enough to have a career of any length behind them grew up when it was still assumed that a woman's place was in the home and nowhere else, and that anyone who took time off for an individual selfish activity like writing was either neurotic or wicked or both, derelict in her duties to a man, child, aged relatives or whoever else was supposed to justify her existence on earth.

I've heard stories of writers so consumed by guilt over what they had been taught to feel was their abnormality that they did their writing at night, secretly, so that no one would accuse them of failing as housewives, as "women."

These writers accomplished what they did by themselves, often at great personal expense; in order to write at all, they had to defy other women's as well as men's ideas of what was proper, and it's not finally all that comforting to have a phalanx of women — some younger and relatively unscathed, others from their generation, the bunch that was collecting china, changing diapers, and sneering at any female with intellectual pretensions twenty or even ten years ago — come breezing up now to tell them they were right all along. It's like being judged innocent after you've been hanged: the satisfaction, if any, is grim.

There's a great temptation to say to Womens' Lib, "Where were you when I really needed you?" or "It's too late for me now." And you can see, too, that it would be fairly galling for these writers, if they have any respect for historical accuracy, which most do, to be hailed as products, spokeswomen, or advocates of the Women's Movement. When they were undergoing their often drastic formative years there was no Women's Movement.

No matter that a lot of what they say can be taken by the theorists of the Movement as supporting evidence, useful analysis, and so forth: their own inspiration was not theoretical, it came from wherever all writing comes from. Call it experience and imagination. These writers, if they are honest, don't want to be wrongly identified as the children of a movement that did not give birth to them. Being adopted is not the same as being born.

A third area of reservation is undoubtedly a fear of the development of a one-dimensional Feminist Criticism, a way of approaching literature producing by women that would award points according to conformity or non-conformity to an ideological position.

A feminist criticism is, in fact, already emerging. I've read at least one review, and I'm sure there have been and will be more, in which the novelist was criticized for not having made her heroine's life different, even though that life was more typical of the average women's life in society than the reviewer's "liberated" version would have been.

Perhaps Women's Lib reviewers will start demanding that heroines resolve their difficulties with husband, kids, or themselves by stomping out to join a consciousness raising group, which will be no more satisfactory from the point of view of literature than the legendary Socialist Realist romance with one's tractor.

However, a feminist criticism need not necessarily be one-dimensional. And — small comfort — no matter how narrow, purblind and stupid such a criticism in its lowest manifestations may be, it cannot possible be more narrow, purblind and stupid than some of the non-feminist critical attitudes that have preceded it.

There's a fourth possible factor, a less noble one: the often observed phenomenon of the member of a despised social group who managers to transcend the limitations imposed on the group, at least enough to become "successful." For such a person the impulse — whether obeyed or not — is to disassociate him/herself from the group and side with its implicit opponents. Thus the Black millionaire who deplores the Panthers, the rich Quebecois who is anti-Separatist, the North American immigrant who changes his name to an "English" one; thus, alas the Canadian writer who makes it, sort of, in New York, and spends many magazine pages decrying the provincial dull Canadian writers; and thus the women with successful careers who say, "I've never had any problems, I don't know what they're talking about."

Such a woman tends to regard herself, and to be treated by her male colleagues, as a sort of honorary man. It's the rest of them who are inept, brainless, tearful, self-defeating: not her. "You think like a man," she is told, with admiration and unconscious put down. For both men and women, it's just too much of a strain to fit together the traditionally incompatible notions of "woman" and "good at something."

And if you are good at something, why carry with you the stigma attached to the dismal category you've gone to such lengths to escape from? The only reason for rocking the boat is if you're still chained to the oars. Not everyone reacts like this, but this factor may explain some of the more hysterical opposition to Women's Lib on the part of the few woman writers, even though they may have benefitted from the Movement in the form of increased sales and more serious attention.

with her father in Northern Quebec in 1942

A couple of ironies remain; perhaps they are even paradoxes. One is that, in the development of modern Western civilization, writing was the first of the arts, before painting, music, composing, and sculpting, which it was possible for women to practice; and it was the fourth of the job categories, after prostitution, domestic service and the stage, and before wide-scale factory work, nursing, secretarial work, telephone operation and school teaching, at which it was possible for them to make any money.

The reason for both is the same: writing as a physical activity is private.

You do it by yourself, or on your own time; no teachers or employers are no involved, you don't have to apprentice in a studio or work with musicians. Your only business arrangements are with your publisher, and these can be conducted through the mails; your real "employers" can be deceived, if you choose, by the adoption of the assumed (male) name; witness the Brontes and George Eliot. But the private and individual nature of writing may also account for the low incidence of direct involvement by woman writers in the Movement now.

If you are a writer, prejudice against women will affect you as a writer not directly but indirectly. You won't suffer from wage discrimination, because you aren't paid any wages; you won't be hired last and fired first, because you aren't hired or fired anyway. You have relatively little to complain of, and, absorbed in your own work as you are likely to be, you will find it quite easy to shut your eyes to what goes on at the spool factory, or even at the university. Paradox: reason for involvement then equals reason for non-involvement now.

Another paradox goes like this. As writers, woman writers are like other writers. They have the same professional concerns, they have to deal with the same contracts and publishing procedures, they have the same need for solitude to work and the same concern that their work be accurately evaluated by reviewers. There is nothing "male" or "female" about these conditions: they are just attributes of the activity known as writing. As biological specimens and as citizens, however, women are like other women: subject to the same discriminatory laws, encountering the same demeaning attitudes, burdened with the same good reasons for not walking through the park alone after dark. They too have bodies, the capacity to bear children; they eat, sleep and bleed, just like everyone else.

In bookstores and publishers' offices and among groups of other writers, a woman writer may get the impression that she is "special;" but in the eyes of the law, in the loan office or bank, in the hospital and on the street she's just another woman. She doesn't get to wear a sign to the grocery store saying "Respect me, I'm a Woman Writer." No matter how good she may feel about herself, strangers who aren't aware of her shelf-full of nifty volumes with cover blurbs saying how gifted she is will still regard her as a nit.

We all have ways of filtering out aspects of our experience we would rather not think about. Woman writers can keep as much as possible to the "writing" end of their life, avoiding the less desirable aspects of the "woman" end. Or they can divide themselves in two, thinking of themselves as two different people: a "writer" and a "woman." Time after time, I've had interviewers talk to me about my writing for a while, then ask me, "As a woman, what do you think about — for instance — the Women's Movement?" as if I could think two sets of thoughts about the same thing, one set as a writer or person, the other as a woman. But no one comes apart this easily; categories like Woman, White, Canadian, Writer only ways of looking at a thing, and the thing itself is whole, entire and indivisible. Paradox: Woman and Writer are separate categories; but in any individual woman writer, they are inseparable.

Margaret and siblings in a log cabin in Quebec, 1952

One of the results of the paradox is that there are certain attitudes, some overt, some concealed, which women writers encounter as writers, but because they are women. I shall try to deal with a few of these, as objectively as I can.

Reviewing and the Absence of An Adequate Critical Vocabulary

Cynthia Ozick, in the American magazine Ms., says, "For many years, I had noticed that no book of poetry was ever reviewed without reference to the poet's sex. The curious thing was that, in the two decades of my scrutiny, there were no exceptions whatever. It did not matter whether the reviewer was a man or a woman, in every case, the question of a 'feminine sensibility' of the poet was at the center of the reviewer's response. The maleness of male poets, on the other hand, hardly ever seemed to matter."

Things aren't this bad in Canada, possibly because we were never fully indoctrinated with the Holy Gospel according to the distorters of Freud. Many reviewers manage to get through a review without displaying the kind of bias Ozick is talking about. But that it does occur was demonstrated to me by a project I was involved with at York University in 1971-72.

One of my groups was attempting to study what we called "sexual bias in reviewing," by which we meant not unfavorable reviews, but points being added or subtracted by the reviewer on the basis of the author's sex and supposedly associated characteristics rather than on the basis of the work itself. Our study fell into two parts: i) a survey of writers, half male, half female, conducted by letter: had they ever experienced sexual bias directed against them in a review? ii) the reading of the larger number of reviews from a wide range of periodicals and newspapers.

Niagara Falls, 1953

The results of the writers' survey were perhaps predictable. Of the men, none said Yes, a quarter said Maybe, and three quarters said No. Half of the women said Yes, a quarter said Maybe and a quarter said No. The women replying Yes often wrote long, detailed letters, giving instances and discussing their own attitudes. All the men's letters were short.

This proved only that women were more likely to feel they had been discriminated against on the basis of sex. When we got around to the reviews, we discovered that they were sometimes justified. Here are the kinds of things we found.

Assignment of reviews

Several of our letter writers mentioned this. Some felt books by women tended to be passed over by book-page editors assigning books for review; others that books by women tended to get assigned to women reviewers. When we started totting up reviews we found that most books in this society are written by men, and so are most reviews. Disproportionately often, books by women were assigned to women reviewers, indicating that books by women fell in the minds of those dishing out the reviews into some kind of "special" category. Likewise, woman reviewers tended to be reviewing books by women rather than by men (though because of the preponderance of male reviewers, there were quite a few male-written reviews of books by women).

The Quiller-Couch Syndrome

The heading of this one refers to the turn-of-the-century essay by Quiller-Couch, defining "masculine" and "feminine" styles in writing. The "masculine" style is, of course, bold, forceful, clear, vigorous, etc; the "feminine" style is vague, weak, tremulous, pastel, etc. In the list of pairs you can include, "objective" and "subjective," 'universal" or "accurate depiction of society" versus "confessional," "personal," or even "narcissistic" and "neurotic." It's roughly seventy years since Quiller-Couch's essay, but the "masculine" group of adjectives is still much more likely to be applied to the work of male writers; female writers are much more likely to get hit with some version of "the feminine style" or "feminine sensibility," whether their work merits it or not.

The Lady Painter, or She Writes Like A Man

This is a pattern in which good equals male, and bad equals female. I call it the Lady Painter Syndrome because of a conversation I had about female painters with a male painter in 1960. "When she's good," he said, "we call her a painter; when she's bad, we call her a lady painter." "She writes like a man" is part of the same pattern; it's usually used by a male reviewer who is impressed by a female writer. It's meant as a compliment. See also "She thinks like a man," which means the author thinks, unlike most women, who are held to be incapable of objective thought (their province is "feeling"). Adjectives which often have similar connotations are ones such as "strong," "gutsy," "hard," "mean," etc. A hard-hitting piece of writing by a man is liable to be thought of as merely realistic; an equivalent piece by a woman is much more likely to be labelled "cruel" or "tough." The assumption is that women are by nature soft, weak, and not very good, and that if a woman writer happens to be good, she should be deprived of her identity and provided with a higher (male) status.

In Cambridge, 1963

Thus the woman writer has, in the minds of such reviewers, two choices. She can be bad but female, a carrier of the "feminine sensibility" virus; or she can be "good" in male-adjective terms, but sexless. Badness seems to be ascribed then to a surplus of female hormones, whereas badness in a male writer is usually ascribed to nothing but badness (though a "bad" male writer is sometimes held, by adjectives implying sterility or impotence, to be deficient in maleness).

"Maleness" is exemplified by the "good" male writer; "femaleness," since it is seen by such reviewers as a handicap or deficiency, is held to be transcended or discarded by the "good" female one. In other words, there is no critical vocabulary for expressing the concept "good/female." Work by a male writer is often spoken of by critics admiring it as having "balls;" ever hear anyone speak admiringly of work by a woman as having "tits"?

Possible antidotes: Development of a "good/female" vocabulary ("Wow, has that ever got Womb..."); or preferably the development of a vocabulary that can treat structures made of words as though they are exactly that, not biological entities possessed of sexual organs.

Domesticity

One of our writers noted a (usually male) habit of concentrating on domestic themes in the work of a female writer, ignoring any other topic she might have dealt with, then patronizing her for an excessive interest in domestic themes. We found several instances of reviewers identifying an author as a "housewife" and consequently dismissing anything she has produced (since, in our society, a "housewife" is viewed as a relatively brainless and talentless creature). We even found one instance in which the author was called a "housewife" and put down for writing like one when in fact she was no such thing.

For such reviewers, when a man writes about things like doing the dishes, it's realism, when a woman does, it's an unfortunate feminine genetic limitation.

Sexual compliment put-down

This syndrome can be summed up as follows:

She: How do you like my (design for an airplane/mathematical formula/medical miracle)?

He: You sure have a nice ass.

In reviewing it usually takes the form of commenting on a cute picture of the (female) author on the cover, coupled with dismissal of her as a writer.

Panic Reaction

When something the author writes hits too close to home, panic reaction may set in. One of our correspondents noticed this phenomenon in connection with one of her books: she felt the content of the book threatened male reviewers, who gave it much worse reviews than did any female reviewer. Their reaction seemed to be that if a character such as she'd depicted did exist, they didn't want to know about it. In panic reaction, a reviewer is reacting to content, not to technique or craftsmanship or a book's internal coherence or faithfulness to its own assumptions.

(Panic reaction can be touched off in any area, not just male-female relationships.)

Interviewers and Media Stereotypes

Associated with the reviewing problem, but distinct from it, is the problem of the interview. Reviewers are supposed to concentrate on books, interviewers on the writer as a person, human being, or, in the case of women, woman. This means that an interviewer is ostensibly trying to find out what sort of person you are. In reality, he or she may merely be trying to match you up with a stereotype of "Woman Author" that pre-exits in her/his mind; doing it that way is both easier for the interviewer, since it limits the range and slant of questions, and shorter, since the interview can be practically written in advance. It isn't just women who get this treatment: all writers get it. But the range for male authors is somewhat wider and usually comes from the literary tradition itself, whereas stereotypes for female authors are often borrowed from other media, since the ones provided by the tradition are limited in number.

writing The Handmaid's Tale in Berlin, 1984

In a bourgeois, industrial society, so the theory goes, the creative artist is supposed to act out suppressed desires and prohibited activities for the audience; thus we get certain Post-romantic male-author stereotypes, such as Potted Poe, Bleeding Byron, Doomed Dylan, Lustful Layton, Crucified Cohen, etc. Until recently the only personality stereotype of this kind was Elusive Emily, otherwise known as Recluse Rossetti: the woman writer as aberration, neurotically denying herself the delights of sex, kiddies and other fun.

The Twentieth Century has added Suicidal Sylvia, a somewhat more dire version of the same thing. The point about these stereotypes is that attention is focused not on the actual achievements of the authors, but on their lives, which are distorted and romanticized; their work is then interpreted in the light of the distorted version. Stereotypes like these, even when the author cooperates in their formation and especially when the author becomes a cult object, do no service to anyone or anything, least of all the author's work.

Behind all of them is the notion that authors must be more special, peculiar or weird than other people, and that their lives are more interesting than their work.

The following examples are taken from personal experience (mine, of interviewers); they indicate the range of possibilities. There are a few others, such as Earth Mother, but for those you have to be older.

with Dolly Parton at the Ms. Magazine Awards

Happy Housewife

This one is almost obsolete: it used to be for Woman's Page or programme. Questions were about what you liked to fix for dinner; attitude was, "Gosh, all the housework and you're a writer, too!" Writing was viewed as a hobby, like knitting, one did in one's spare time.

Ophelia

The writer as crazy freak. Female version of Doomed Dylan, with more than a little hope on the part of the interviewer that you'll turn into Suicidal Sylvia and give them something to really write about. Questions like "Do you think you're in danger of going insane?" or "Are writers closer to insanity than other people?" No need to point out that most mental institutions are crammed with people who have never written a word in their life. "Say something interesting," one interviewer said to me. "Say you write all your poems on drugs."

Miss Marty; or Movie Mag

Read any movie mag on Liz Taylor and translate into writing terms and you've got the picture. The writer as someone who suffers more than others. Why does the writer suffer more? Because she's successful, and you all know Success Must Be Paid For. In blood and tears, if possible. If you say you're happy and enjoy your life and work, you'll be ignored.

with her agent

Miss Message

Interviewer incapable of treating your work as what it is, i.e. poetry and/or fiction. Great attempt to get you to say something about an Issue and then make you into an exponent, spokeswoman or theorist. (The two Messages I'm most frequently saddled with are Women's Lib and Canadian nationalism, though I belong to no formal organization devoted to either.) Interviewer unable to see that putting, for instance, a nationalist in a novel doesn't make it a nationalistic novel, any more than putting in a preacher makes it a religious novel. Interviewer incapable of handling more than one dimension at a time.

What Is Hard to Find is an interviewer who regards writing as a respectable profession, not as some kind of magic, madness, trickery, or evasive disguise for a Message; and who regards an author as someone engaged in a professional activity.

Other Writers and Rivalry

Regarding yourself as an "exception," part of an unspoken quota system, can have interesting results. If there are only so many available slots for your minority in the medical school/law school/literary world, of course you will feel rivalry, not only with members of the majority for whom no quota operates, but especially for members of your minority who are competing with you for the few coveted places. And you will have to be better than the average Majority member to get in at all. But we're familiar with that.

Woman-woman rivalry does occur, though it is surprisingly less severe than you'd expect; it's likely to take the form of wanting another woman writer to be better than she is, expecting more of her than you would of a male writer, and being exasperated with certain kinds of traditional "female" writing.

One of our correspondents discussed these biases and expectations very thoroughly and with great intelligence: her letter didn't solve any problems, but it did emphasize the complexities of the situation. Male-male rivalry is more extreme; we've all been treated to media-exploited examples of it.

What a woman writer is often unprepared for is the unexpected personal attack on her by a jealous male writer. The motivation is envy and competitiveness, but the form is often sexual put-down. "You may be a good writer," one older man said to a young woman writer who had just had a publishing success, "but I wouldn't want to fuck you." Another version goes more like the compliment put-down. in either case, the ploy diverts attention from the woman's achievement as a writer — the area where the man feels threatened — to her sexuality, where either way he can score a verbal point.

Personal Statement

I've been trying to give you a picture of the arena, or that part of it where being a "woman" and "writer," as concepts, overlap. But, of course, the arena I've been talking about has to do largely with externals: reviewing, the media, relationships with other writers. This, for the writer, may affect the tangibles of her career: how she is received, how viewed, how much money she makes. But in relationship to the writing itself, this is a false arena. The real one is in her head, her real struggle, the daily battle with words, the language itself. The false arena becomes valid for writing itself only insofar as it becomes part of her material and is transformed into one of the verbal and imaginative structures she is constantly engaged in making. Writers, as writers, are not propagandists or examples of social trends or preachers or politicians. They are makers of books, and unless they can make books well they will be bad writers, no matter what the social validity of their views.

At the beginning of this article, I suggested a few reasons for the infrequent participation in the Movement of woman writers. Maybe these reasons were the wrong ones, and this is the real one: no good writer wants to be merely a transmitter of someone's ideology, no matter how fine that ideology may be. The aim of propaganda is to convince, and to spur people to action; the aim of writing is to create a plausible and moving imaginative world, and to create it from words. Or, to put it another way, the aim of political movement is to improve the quality of people's lives on all levels, spiritual and imaginative as well as material (and any political movement that doesn't have this aim is worth nothing).

Writing, however, tends to concentrate more on life, not as it ought to be, but as it is, as the writer feels it, experiences it. Writers are eye-witnesses, I-witnesses. political movements, once successful, have historically been intolerant of writers, even those writers who initially aided them; in any revolution, writers have been among the first to be lined up against the wall, perhaps for their intransigence, their insistence on saying what they perceive, not what, according to the ideology, ought to exist.

Politicians, even revolutionary politicians, have traditionally had no more respect for writing as an activity valuable in itself, quite apart from any message or content, than has the rest of society. And writers, even revolutionaries writers, have traditionally been suspicious of anyone who tells them what they ought to write.

The woman writer, then, exists in a society that, though it may turn certain individual writers into revered cult objects, has little respect for writing as a profession, and not much respect for women either. If there were more of both, articles like this would be obsolete. I hope they become so. In the meantime, it seems to me that the proper path for a woman writer is not an all-out manning (or womaning) of the barricades, however much she may agree with the aims of the Movement.

The proper path is become better as a writer. Insofar as writers are lenses, condensers of their society, her work may include the Movement, since it is so palpably among the things that exist. The picture that she gives of it is altogether another thing, and will depend, at least partly, on the course of the Movement itself.

Margaret Atwood is one of Canada's finest writers and critics.This essay appeared in Women in the Canadian Mosaic in 1976, and you can buy Atwood's collection Second Words here.

"Kandi" - One Eskimo (mp3)

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In Which Fairfield Porter Makes Us Proud

2010-08-27T14:23:00Z

The Great Spruce

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Use your ego as much as possible for creative efforts because though love is mostly ego, much more than it is sex, right now you are frustrated egotistically in the love direction, so you have to find some substitute. It will not make you any happier, for sublimation is not possible, but it will count in the future.

- Fairfield Porter, letter to Larry Rivers

This summer, the Michael Rosenfeld gallery exhibited a few of Fairfield Porter's paintings of places surrounding his family's summer home in Great Spruce Head, Maine. It was a little underwhelming. For I have always thought that beneath Porter's ostensibly placid paintings lurks something more, evidence of his greatness in the form, if you know the right places to look. Although literature is often easy to enjoy without knowledge of its author, visual art is a different story, and Porter lived passionately in an interesting time and place.

The Roofs of Cambridge, 1927

He was born to a great American family in 1907. Despite the fact that half of Harvard was related to him by blood, Porter ignored his studies during his years there. He resented the introductory art class that allowed him to move on in the field, complaining to his mother that the course "was all theory about colors and so forth and we do silly little painting exercises like making circles of gray, red and blue, etc, varying in value and intensity. And I had to buy $16 worth of apparatus for even that."

with his mother in 1910

That he was failed by our country's educational system doesn't make Porter an iconoclast. Most genuises do terribly in American schools, no matter their background. Nevertheless, he continued his art history education, and near the end of his time at the school decided to become a painter.

Later he reflected on that decision, saying, "When I decided to study art, art was considered of peripheral importance; the artist or poet was thought to be outside of the mainstream of life. I remember a neighbor whom I respected very much, who was disturbed by my decision, and told me so. This man was a businessman, and at the same time an inventor and a poet. He told me that his first reaction to anyone's wanting to be an artist was the thought that this meant deciding in favor of triviality. Then he thought of the Vatican Torso, the piece of antique sculpture which Michelangelo said was his master. Triviality meant to him decorative objects."

After school, Porter immediately went to Greenwich Village. He met many influential figures in the art world, but soon grew tired of so many poseurs. Coming from a distinguished, upper-class family, he had no need to limit himself to pretending that's all he was. Fairfield was also shy. The woman who was to become his wife described first meeting her future husband:

I liked him. He was very simple and direct. Very unaffected. Most Harvard boys talked about how many beers they could hold; Fairfield and I talked about Dostoyevsky. I remember he had a penknife and he was using it on the table, working at it, trying to make the table fall apart. I remember I got on the other end to see if I could do the same. Not to be destructive, just to see if it was possible to make the picnic table fall apart.

Anne Channing also came to be disgusted by higher education, in her case, life at Bryn Mawr. She transferred to Radcliffe and finished her studies there near her parents' Wareham home.

Meanwhile, Fairfield explored the edges of his sexuality on an extended trip through Europe. He always considered himself bisexual, and many of his later friends would be homosexual poets. His first emotional love relationship with a man was with the athletic, fit Oxford student Arthur Giardelli. Much later, he wrote Giardelli reflecting on their time together in Florence:

I think of you very often. You meant a great deal to me, and it means much to me that you remember and write. I don't think that I will write more now. I would like to, but I have lost the sense of who and what you are, and any letter in such a case is like a message in a bottle. You get it - but who are you - now - and did I ever know who you were? Does one ever know another person?

And the doubt must be greater when there is such an inarticulate intimacy as we had; we were shy with each other. I think our importance to each other came from something each of us had to give in the way of support that the other needed and had not really found before. For instance I, as an American, had no interest whatsoever in the social concerns you could not avoid as a poor boy, a scholarship student at Oxford, where as you told me your grandparents' humble origin would have made a curiosity of you if your friends knew it. And what you gave me was something equal and opposite; if you had been an American I would have been afraid of you and considered you beyond me because of your good looks and ordinary athletic abilities. I hadn't such a friend as you at home; but suddenly I had one in Florence, the unattainable became simple. For this I am always grateful. These things count, I hope you know, and I hope what I say will not seem strange to you. I loved you, and I think you loved me.

For Porter to write of this experience endured in his youth again in 1957, says that a part of him never really changed. And, indeed, Porter's combination of callousness and concern for others lasted throughout his life. He hated small talk, and received much from his intellectual equals, including the woman who would become his lifetime companion.

During his travels through Europe, Porter continued to write to Anne. He fell in love with her through her letters, and perhaps his experience with Giardelli helped in allowing him to truly empathize with another for the first time; especially one outside his social class. He was also coming into his own. A young painter named Frank Rogers recalled a chance remark of Porter's made on the high speed train: "Don't you sometimes feel that you're just wonderful? I do. Sometimes I'm so wonderful I want to tell everyone; they ought to know it. It isn't right that they don't."

In May of 1932 Porter returned to New York. He attempted to feel closer to Anne, but soon after they spent a few weeks together he told her "we aren't clicking at all." Nevertheless he proposed to her later that summer at his family's compound, in a rather annoying way. Anne recalled him asking, "Do you think if we got engaged they'd let you stay all summer?" As they pulled away from their September wedding, the car stalled.

Porter's artistic career began in earnest soon afterwards. It was the middle of the Depression, a fact that kept down their rent and buyers away from Fairfield's early paintings. Anne suffered a miscarriage, and was surprised at how little sympathy her husband showed her. Eventually the Porters found they were happier, for a time with Anne in New England, and Fairfield freer to express himself sexually and artistically in New York.

A young Trotskyite, Porter affiliated himself with various associations of artists, but when he was not in the studio, he tried to instruct himself in painting by copying the classics in the Met. Two years after their wedding, Anne had a child, John, and Fairfield was a father for the first time. Although Porter was initially attached to the child, the boy's sickness involved excessive crying, and it drove him out of the house, into various leftist political causes. Among his friends, Fairfield was a rarity - married with child while other bohemians constantly fucked around. The young family moved to the Chicago suburb of Winnetka because of their son's health situation, which would torment the family throughout his schizophrenic adolescence, and even after that.

Porter's first artistic successes came about primarily because of his mother Ruth's influence. His early work in political murals had started to give way to watercolor, however, and his development reached a turning point when he saw the work of Edouard Vuillard.

A 1938 exhibition of Bonnard and Vuillard had a tremendous effect on Fairfield. Porter later told Paul Cummings that "I looked at the Vuillards and thought...Why does one think of doing anything else when it's so natural to do this? ... When Bill was first influenced, you know, by modern art, it was Picasso he was emulating. With me it was Vuillard."

In Justin Spring's fascinating biography of Porter, he describes how the artist also felt a similar kinship with the work of Pierre Bonnard: "They say it's too nice. What do they meant by that? They mean it's too pretty. They might mean it's saccharine. They might also mean that they can't approve of the emotion it gives them." Porter's paintings began to focus on bringing out that same kind of emotion.

In 1940 the Porters returned to New York, now with two children in tow. Anne had thought herself unable to conceive again as a result of Malta Fever, but she became pregnant again. Fairfield was less than pleased by this development, finding the responsibility of the children interfered with his work. Then Porter met the beautiful, flirtatious Ilse Hamm. Hamm was a younger, more exciting version of his wife - they even looked alike. Porter never entered in serious romantic congress with Hamm, but nevertheless told his wife he loved her. (Anne was pregnant at the time with their son.) Hamm enjoyed Porter's attentions, but had no desire to sleep with him.

Fairfield's relationship with Hamm was a precursor to the many nonsexual - and sexual - intimacies he created outside of his marriage. Unexpectedly, Anne Porter and the Jewish refugee Hamm bonded as outsiders to the Porter family, and when Fairfield went to California the following summer, Anne wrote to Ilse and asked for her help with the children. Ilse Hamm later married Fairfield's friend Paul Mattick, causing Porter to slash his own portrait of Mattick with a knife. Fairfield's plan to live with Anne and Ilse "in a triangle way" had died, and then his mother Ruth did, too.

Anne and Fairfield settled into a new life at E. 52nd Street, in a three story house. She began sleeping with another man, and Porter began pursuing the philosophy of free love. He rented an apartment in Chelsea to serve as his studio/getaway. The couple let out the upstairs rooms of their Midtown house to two black students, and the Porters began to lose some of the trappings of their previous lives, as Fairfield's interest in Communism died the true death. For a time, the house was a kind of commune.

Porter took a few lessons from the Belgian painter Georges Van Houten, but his latest inspiration was the paintings of Diego Velazquez. Of the Spanish master, Fairfield commented, "I admired what might be called understatement. Although I don't like that word, really.... He leaves things alone. He is open to it rather than wanting to twist it. I think there's more there than there is in willful manipulation.... I used to like Dostoyevsky very, very, very much. Now I prefer Tolstoy, for the same reason."

By the time Porter was 40, he and Anne were together again in spirit as well as body, for they never stopped having sex even during his affairs. A lack of recognition in the art world bothered him, but he was reassured by the attitude of his friend Willem de Kooning, who dismissed fame as the caprice of idiots and sycophants. Porter tremendously admired de Kooning and purchased many of his paintings, as well as writing the first reviews of his work that would appear in print.

At the end of the forties, the Porters moved to Southampton, buying a seven bedroom home for $25,000. The house met Fairfield's aesthetic approval and would become the scene of many famous paintings. Porter's political views and bohemian lifestyle during his youth had amounted to a rejection of his patrician background, but now he seemed to be making a move towards the bourgeois. As a nod to his former lifestyle, he rarely repaired the house or kept up the substantial grounds. As an artist, he still felt like an utter failure.

Fairfield kept an apartment on Avenue A, and began to integrate himself into the next generation of poets and artists. His attraction to the young gay poet James Schuyler verged on romance, and Fairfield began to explore his bisexuality. The younger crowd looked up to Fairfield and admired his work, and Elaine de Kooning recommended him to Art News, where he began his second life as a critic. Fairfield's politics had influenced the faux working-class realism of his first paintings, but the attraction of the art world to Abstract Expressionism was, in part, a rejection of those communist ideas. Now the painter began creating a new critical vocabulary similarly absent from political value.

Already nearing his late 40s, Fairfield was still pursuing a doctrine of free love, but in this case his target was (for a short time) the poet John Ashbery. Encouraged by his new buddies, Fairfield began writing poetry again, penning the following about Ashbery:

Young man with the narrow waist and thin
Arms, and heavy beautiful thighs of youth,
Whose green eyes under a foxy brush of
Fair hair regard me with insolent love

Porter's friendships with Ashbery and the painter Jane Freilicher would last through his life, but it was the schizophrenic Schuyler who would become a part of Fairfield's young family.

Fairfield enjoyed having the young clique at Great Spruce Head, and his children were particularly fond of Frank O'Hara. With Fairfield's six-year old daughter Katharine, Frank composed the following poem:

They say I mope too much
but really I'm loudly dancing.
I eat paper. It's good for my bone.
I play the piano pedal. I dance,
I am never quiet, I mean silent.
Some day I'll love Frank O'Hara.
I think I'll be alone for a little while.

James Schuyler became a particularly constructive/destructive figure in the life of the Porters, in some ways playing the identical role than Ilse Hamm had filled in the family. The proverbial honeymoon was lovely, but the impoverished poet eventually took advantage of Fairfield, manipulating his affections for financial and emotional gain. Despite other people's opinions of Schuyler, the Porters continue to welcome him as a guest in their many homes.

breakfasting with schuyler in 1942

When Fairfield had an important opening at Tibor de Nagy in March of 1959, O'Hara and Schuyler didn't even show up. Porter responded to this snub by approaching Frank later and telling him, "You're a shit," according to a letter Freilicher wrote to John Ashbery.

Like Frank O'Hara, the Porters were eventually turned off by the 'sleazy' Schuyler's need for control, although he returned to their good graces later in his life. This partial disillusionment with the poets who had been his friends seemed to force a change in Porter's life. He stopped reviewing for Art News in favor of writing for The Nation (they paid twice as much), and began to teach. He sold a few of his de Koonings for a small fortune.

Schuyler's first mental breakdown in 1960 brought him closer together to the Porters for a time, but it would ultimately only set him on a more destructive path. After leaving his New Haven Hospital, Fairfield picked him up. They would get on tolerably well until Schuyler reviewed Fairfield's 1962 exhibition from a psychological perspective. No doubt he could not help it, seeing demons even in places of light that the paintings held. Porter responded to Schuyler's article in a letter: "There is always psychological content. The psychological content may be what it seems, or it may be the opposite. There is psychological content to a slap in the face, or a smile at a baby, but it does not follow from this that there is art." Of Porter's close relationship with his critics, Justin Spring writes that, "Had Porter been more successful during his lifetime, the question of influence might have been raised. But he was not."

Politically, Porter's growing hatred of government, borne out of the way European cultural institutions were treated during World War II, resulted in him refusing a commission from the Art in Embassies program. He was relatively hard up for cash at this point, what with his wife, four children and Schuyler to support, but as was his custom, he never let common sense get in the way of his convictions. He even declined a university appointment in Illinois because he didn't like the architecture of Carbondale.

When Anne came down with hepatitis in 1963, Porter's paintings moved indoors, capturing the play of light in the interiors of his home. These were the most successful paintings of his career, both financially and artistically, feeding off the influence of the artist Alex Katz, who he admired and had reviewed. His masterpiece The Screen Porch became one of his most famous works - in the Porter family it became known as "The Four Ugly People" - and it is a frightening painting, incredibly resonant in its emotional complexity and as revealing as a church confession, with his wife outside watching her children and Schuyler in an homage to Velazquez.

Though there was some critical blowback to what some believed was Porter's bourgeois subject matter, Porter's creative process was anything but lax. He burned so many of his paintings that he had a special incinerator built for the purpose in his backyard. This was something of a blessing to history; for it is only his best works that survive, those imbued with the quiet passion of a man who could set his art in order easier than he could his own family life.

By the end of the 1960s the Porters had their fill of Schuyler and Fairfield asked him to leave the house. (The poet demurred.) His wife felt increasingly uncomfortable around the poet's depression, and made plans to replace him with a golden retriever, Bruno. Walking the dog was recommended for the aging Fairfield's health, but he tripped over Bruno's leash in 1967 and broke his arm, which temporarily limited his ability to paint. At the same time, Fairfield was reaching a mental wall. Spring attributes his lack of new work to his success - he now had money enough to live without worry, and his reputation had to a certain extent "plateaued."

napping with Bruno

Schuyler's behavior became increasingly more erratic. While staying in Fairfield's Southampton home with the poet Ron Padgett, he threatened to kill the Padgett's young son. Friends committed him to the state mental institution, but it wasn't long before he had to be escorted back there, with John Ashbery keeping him company in the back of a patrol car. Ironically, Schuyler wrote some of his finest poetry during this period, but he also wrote savage letters to Fairfield and Anne, criticizing them in the harshest possible terms and then asking them for $5,000 for his married lover's "business."

As he transitioned into old age, Porter's interests became more eccentric. His wife had become a Catholic many years earlier, baptized on the Upper East Side, but, as a subscriber to Fate, Porter's new tastes verged more on the mystic and spiritual. He viewed the rise of technology with some concern, as most seniors do, and he became interested in the paranormal. Still his command of his interests remained fully within his intellectual control. Rather than blame himself for the troubled life of his first born, he blamed science!

The Harbor - Great Spruce Head 1974

And yet when it came to the visual arts, he found much to admire in his contemporaries, harboring a special appreciation for the work of David Hockney. He wrote to a confined, drugged-out Schuyler that "I have painted several sunrises, with the sun in the picture, from the rocks below the house, except one from the porch. It works, more or less. I was trying to emulate the David Hockney painting I saw a few years ago, that amazed me." During a walk with Bruno in September of 1975, Porter suffered a massive coronary and died immediately. He had looked so young for his age of 68 that it came as something of a shock to his friends and family. Schuyler didn't attend the funeral, just as he had not after O'Hara's death in car accident.

A Sudden Change of Wind, 1975

Fairfield's dual role as an artist and critic was something of a rarity. He was as talented a writer as he was an artist, and his collection of art cricitism, Art On Its Own Terms, has become a classic in its own right. His textured renderings of light approach and even exceed the grasp of his Abstract Expressionist peers. His many admirers and friends, many of whom became more famous than he could have imagined at the time of his death, have helped burnish his reputation as an artist.

Even after Schuyler had done many, many unpardonable things to him, the Porters did much for the troubled poet. This is an impressive testament to their good nature; Anne Porter even earmarked money for Schuyler's medical care after Fairfield had passed, as did Kenward Elmslie and many others. In a way, the fashion in which the group treated Schuyler was an attempt to erase guilt that generation felt at living as they did.

Fathers improve with age, and Fairfield's later children for the most part fared better than his early ones. So it was with his painting. He got better at life over time, and this is no small thing to say about a person, let alone an artist whose talent ran against the grain of the non-representational work of the time in which he lived.

Yet calling Fairfield Porter a realist is off the mark. His work does the opposite of abandoning the spiritual, it embraces the mystical, in the everyday expressions and places of his life. He had no other. So many of the finest painters of Porter's generation were immigrants from Europe who became impressive Americans. Despite not having to strive, he strove, working towards a recognition he would achieve only in death.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here and twitters here. He last wrote in these pages about Louis CK.

ashbery and schuyler at Great Spruce Head, 1966

"Brothers (Caribou remix)" - Hot Chip (mp3)

"Hand Me Down Your Love (Todd Edwards Micro Chip remix)" - Hot Chip (mp3)

"Take It In (Osborne remix)" - Hot Chip (mp3)

Back row, from left: Lisa De Kooning, Frank Perry, Eleanor Perry, John Bernard Myers, Anne and Fairfield Porter, Angelo Torricini, Arthur Gold, Jane Wilson, Kenward Elmslie, Paul Brach, Jerry Porter, Nancy Word, Katharine Porter, unidentified woman. Second row: Joe Hazan, Clarice Rivers, Kenneth Koch, Larry Rivers, Miriam Shapiro, Robert Fizdale, Jane Freilicher, Joan Ward, John Kacere, Sylvia Maizell. Sitting and kneeling in front: Stephen Rivers, Bill Berkson, Frank O'Hara, Willem de Kooning, Alvin Novak. Photo by John Jonas Gruen.

In Which Jealousy Among Writers Is A New Phenomenon

2010-08-26T14:10:00Z

We Have To Get Out Of This Country

by ELISABETH DONNELLY

Reprise

dir. Joachim Trier

105 min.

The Norwegian film Reprise, the debut feature from Joachim Trier (distantly related to Lars von Trier, also a former skateboarding champion of Norway), is one of the rare films that nails the uncertainty and bravado of being twentysomething, struggling and flailing on the road to wisdom. Its greater achievement, however, may be that it is the rare wonderful film about writers and writing that isn't hampered by the conventions of a completely uncinematic alcohol-soaked biopic.

Nearly leaping off-screen with Trier’s jagged, French New Wave fracture of a narrative, Reprise follows two twentysomething writers, Phillip (Anders Danielsen Lie) and Erik (Espen Klouman-Høiner), in the flush of youth and ambition as they mail off their first manuscripts in a big red mailbox. "Do I really want to expose the world to this?" Erik, the blonder and cuter of the two, muses. Trier jumps into a fantasy, introducing the effectively literary Jules et Jim-esque detached narrator, where everything goes right for the writers – their books are published in quick succession, they become beloved cult writers with impeccable critical credentials, and end up inspiring revolution in Sierra Leone.

But that’s not the way it happened. Not at all. Erik is quickly rejected, and Phillip is published in the fall. And even though Phillip achieves the dream, he’s a sad young literary man who's written a critically acclaimed piece of work, it does him no good. Phillip has a mental breakdown.

We really get to know Phillip after the crackup. After the broken glass, the suicide attempt, a bloody shirt, and a grin that signified the sinister slip of madness. His psychosis is never quite explained, left empty and scary, a weighty burden. Yet it resonates because there’s something truly unsettling about seeing a beautiful youth – a writer, for god’s sake – cross the line from sanity to something darker.

Freed from the mental institution, Phillip reunites with his ex-girlfriend, the beautiful gamine Kari. They started innocently; he made her laugh until she cried, teased her about looking goofy, making her laugh all the harder. But despite their initial joy, lust, and innocence, their relationship was integral in tearing Phillip apart, and pushing him over the edge. To watch them attempt a reprise is heartbreaking. "Remember when I tricked you into falling in love, in Paris?" he asks, and he takes her there a second time, trying to repeat every experience, making sure that he takes the same risqué and sexy picture of her in the same public garden to the point of humiliation.

Over the course of the film, the greatest insight to the workings of Phillip’s mind comes from the narration, when it’s revealed that that every time he counts to ten, he is trying to change his life. At ten, he hits on Kari for the first time when they meet at a punk club, he takes crazy, suicidal risks like driving his bike into a car, standing on train tracks looking at an oncoming train - and this dancing on the razor's edge is all for the sake of a temporary reprieve. Phillip can’t escape his brain chemistry, the cruelest fate of all.

Phillip has the flashier role, and by the time he has come and gone as the authorial flavor of the week, Erik – who has mostly been worrying and caring for his friend - finally gets a deal for his soggy-sounding manuscript, called "Prosopopoeia" (a Greek term where a writer is speaking in another voice, ie, "if so and so was alive today, he'd be..."). On the book’s release, he makes a fool of himself on TV, air-quoting away his nerves, describing his work as "searching for the absolute language, a language that can grasp all the world’s nuances, and that is a madness of sorts." His girlfriend breaks up with him because he never "sees" her and in a neat trick, it's true - she's not allowed to be a character in the film, not allowed to have a voice. She's simply a silhouette.

But Erik has something on Phillip - he has his sanity. And his ability to worry and care for Phillip, who he loves and resents in equal measure. Their literary rivalry and ambitions cast a shadow over the film; they’re the elephant in the room. The two are united in their staggering literary ambitions. in their idolization of Norwegian writer Sten Egil Dahl, in their shared history and shared visions of a bright future. But talent, luck, and timing do their worst to separate the two. It’s a common affliction for literary types – you start off young and full of ambition, and then all of a sudden you’re trying to make rent writing about other people’s work while your best friend is on book number five. You have to be dead not to have flare-ups of jealousy, wanting what the other writer has; and Trier gets those feelings, however ugly and self-absorbed, on screen.

And while Phillip and Erik are grappling with issues of life, jealousy, and how, exactly, to define your goals, their group of tight-knit friends offer goofy advice on girls and the endless balm of punk rock, reflecting the artistic ideals of the young aesthete. The most basic characters in the film, they’re the ones who provide “the poetic details of boy culture,” to quote Trier in a New York Times interview, who goes on to hope that the film casts a spell that could be like the boy version of Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides. And the Diner/Breaking Away lineage of the friends you have in your youth, this gang of guys, has a wonderful payoff - a glorious scene where the guys crash a party and liven it up by hijacking the iPod station with Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon,” and boom, instant dance party.

Then, all of a sudden, the film turns, hard, and it's up to the audience to interpret what, exactly, it means. It could be straightforward storytelling, or a brilliant deconstruction, like Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. But Trier sets up two sides - the literary genius who can't write, the diligent writer who maybe can - and asks the audience to decide where Phillip and Erik go, and whether it’s a tragedy or triumph.

joachim trier

Trier takes familiar tropes of youthful idealism and ambition, but he manages to spin the story in a vital new way. Credit goes to the exuberance of his fast-cutting French New Wave technique, which playfully jumps around in time. The cast is full of fresh-faced non-actors - Anders Danielsen Lie, who has the difficult role of Phillip, is also a doctor and a musician - serving a perfectly written script, infused with ideas and not one wasted word, where twentysomethings are allowed to speak openly and honestly and without inarticulate likes.

Reprise has the sort of Great Film, reaching-for-the-bleachers aim that puts the nearest American equivalent (mumblecore, with its likes, uhs, improv, and endless roles for Justin Rice? Reality Bites? Michael Chabon book adaptations?) to shame. You leave the film with a greater understanding of what it means to be to be young and to be a writer. Bittersweet and hopeful, Reprise suggests that we outrun the past, the present, and the minutiae of our lives, constantly carving them into something solid and real. And maybe, when it comes down to it, that's the real art that we create - the utter, unknown art of youth.

Elisabeth Donnelly is a contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find her previous work on This Recording here.

"Lifeline (Barefeet version)" - Citizen Cope (mp3)

"A Father's Son" - Citizen Cope (mp3)

"Keep Askin' (acoustic)" - Citizen Cope (mp3)

In Which We Are Feeling A Lot More Solipsistic Than Usual

2010-08-25T14:29:00Z

No Room for Muses

by KARINA WOLF

Where else can you be paranoid and right so often?

All of Manhattan is Woody Allen’s Manhattan: the reservoir, the restaurants, the skyline, the shrink’s office, the horse and carriage, the modern art, Central Park, Minetta Lane, the Great White Way, the Pierre, and Elaine’s. Most of all, and most importantly, the patois.

New York is a solipsistic, humanistic kind of village. Despite his singularly white and wealthy cast of characters, Woody Allen’s work reflects the way we live and speak. His post-9/11 short, Sounds of the Town I Love, is illustrative: in one-sided phone chats, New Yorkers are narcissistic, petulant, self-serving (the comedy often masks the aggression), hypochondriacal and high-handed. They’re also survivors, with a measure of warmth that keeps them human. They’re all of us.

It’s the idiom that makes Allen believable — that grasping, uncertain mode of talk. When it works, his dialogue is spot on, full of latent aggression and open insecurity. For actors, his words are perfect storms of contradiction. And the delivery, tossed off, half-recalled, is probably the element that allows people to conflate Woody Allen the actor with his characters. His words sound like him, how could this be fiction?

But Allen is a more complicated talent than his hapless schnook act suggests. He’s a comic workaholic, a tireless spinner of jokes, gags, sketches, sex comedies, murder mysteries, chamber pieces, ensemble dramas, fictional biopics, false documentary and ragtime jazz. He’s been at it since he was 15 and commuted from Brooklyn to churn out punch lines for $40 a week. His is a formidable discipline: writing, directing, exercising, practicing the clarinet, going to bed and rising on a precise schedule. Woody Allen leaves no room for muses.

According to Allen, many of his films are unsuccessful in some sense or another, but the work is his goal. Just as his characters seek a meaningful experience of the universe, Allen finds purpose through creativity. He explains why he continues to make films (his latest, Whatever Works, is his 40th): “You don’t think about the outside world, and you’re faced with solvable problems, and if they’re not solvable, you don’t die because of it. And then, if it’s the right film...for several months, I get to live with very beautiful women and very witty men.”

He writes for his limited range as an actor – he says he can play only low lives or intellectuals – but it’s a broad canvas for film: bank heists, mysteries and magic acts for the comedies; adulterous love and morality plays for drama. If he returns to certain motifs, he is a kaleidoscopic innovator. If the wind-up to the jokes seems wordy or his sense of drama derivative, there’s still the inescapable: he’s created a vocabulary for the urban American.

Allen’s art has progressed in leaps – he was dismissed from NYU film school in the 50s, then immediately employed writing for TV. When he moved to filmmaking, he received an on-the-job apprenticeship with some of the world’s finest technicians. Ralph Rosenblum, the editor who cut Annie Hall, taught Allen about shaping a story; Gordon Willis, who lit The Godfather, instructed him in framing a shot. Then Allen moved on to simpatico collaborators who matched his on the fly approach: cameraman Carlo di Palma, for example, who’d arrive on set without knowing the day’s shot list.

With these artisans, Allen created the signatures of his filmmaking: the long takes with little coverage, the amber glow that makes his actors beautiful and his interiors romantic. He claims his aesthetic is borne of practicality. Husbands and Wives, composed with a handheld camera, mid-scene cuts and equally jagged exposures of the human heart, was the result, says Allen, of ‘laziness.’ He didn’t want to be bothered with the formal niceties of American films.

"Can one’s work be influenced by Groucho Marx and Ingmar Bergman?" he ponders in a remembrance of the Swedish director. Allen’s idols are the somber giants of world cinema, and when he stretches himself, it’s because he wants to make the kinds of films that fulfill him: the stark emotional landscapes of Bergman or Kurosawa, the family melodramas of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. This attitude may be forged (just as his view of Manhattan was) in the traditions of Hollywood, where comedy is a jester and drama is artistic king. As Eric Lax says, for Allen, the comedy was never disparaged but it certainly was considered a route to drama.

Woody Allen’s descendents are numerous – what contemporary filmic romance doesn’t owe something to Annie Hall? But his movies often subvert the laughs, with Allen supplying happy endings when they disturb and less sanguine ones when they’re hoped for. When a man gets away with murder—and goes unpunished, and feels fine—here, you see his darker view of human nature. “Your mind will never be able to give you a convincing justification for living your life, because from a logical point of view, if your life is indeed meaningless — which it is — and there’s nothing out there, what is the point of it?”

But whatever his diagnosis of humanity, his comedy has healing powers. In a way, the 2002 Oscar ceremony was the world’s reconciliation with Woody Allen. The heart wants what it wants, says Allen, but punishing judgment was passed upon the direction of his desire when he left Mia Farrow for Soon-Yi Previn. More than a decade later, the couple was still together and Manhattan falling apart; the world needed Woody.

His appearance at the Oscars, after he’d so frequently refused to show, was a gesture for survival. Allen introduced some clips about New York and brought the audience to their feet. “I said, 'You know, God, you can do much better than me. You know, you might want to get Martin Scorsese, or, or Mike Nichols, or Spike Lee, or Sidney Lumet...' I kept naming names, you know, and um, I said, 'Look, I've given you fifteen names of guys who are more talented than I am, and, and smarter and classier...' And they said, 'Yes, but they were not available.'" He was transformed from a polarizing figure to a reassuring one. And by remaining recognizably himself, he made New York itself again.

When I saw him perform at the Carlyle, there was a similar elation in the audience. I’ve never felt the same lift as when Woody came out: good will, excitement, childish thrill. The Café Carlyle is café-sized. Every seat was a good seat and from where we perched we could see that Woody was suffering a cold. He stared fixedly at the floor, as a friend who’s worked with him had warned, and he slumped through the beginning of his performance, but roused himself to play the tunes of Jelly Roll Morton. His balding piano player sang “Because My Hair Is Curly,” one of Sam’s comic songs from Casablanca (this, even though Allen has confessed that he doesn’t much like the classic film).

Geoffrey Rush stood at the back, spattered with rain, just in from his Broadway performance of Ionesco. The maitre d’ was unerringly hospitable as we shuffled a wad of dollars to pay the daunting dinner bill. It was a packed house: tourists and Upper East Siders and locals like ourselves, who arrived at Bobby Short Way to listen to the jazz we hear in his films and share a bit of his time. He played for two hours, and left the crowd wanting more: “That’s all folks. I’m going home.” And he wove through the tables, nodding at a few, disappearing, perhaps, to his planned, early bedtime.

Some will say that Allen doesn’t speak for them, or that his films are no longer relevant, no longer funny. But what he’s done is create a consciousness: some of his works shape how we perceive places, people, even feeling. Some of his lessons are so persuasive that you want to be a part of them. In Manhattan, his character constructs a convincing list of things that make life worth living. As viewers, we have the pleasure of adding to that list the films of Woody Allen.

Karina Wolf is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here and twitters here. Her book The Insomniacs is forthcoming from Penguin Putnam.

"If It's True" - Anais Mitchell (mp3)

"Why We Build The Wall" - Anais Mitchell (mp3)

"Our Lady of the Underground" - Anais Mitchell ft. Ani DiFranco (mp3)

In Which Fate Is The Fool's Word For Chance

2010-08-24T14:16:00Z

Mountebanks and Misfits

From his difficult childhood under the tyrannical rule of an abusive stepfather to his young ascendancy to the heights of American theater, David Mamet is one of America's greatest talents. As he aged he began to produce essays about his dark past, novels about his relationship to his Judaism, and even poetry whose subject is too bizarre to describe. Mamet's ideas about how people talk to one another are evident in every corner of American television and cinema, where his rapid-paced style perfectly fit the limitations of a generation with a short attention span. In 1997 he sat down with the film critic Barbara Shulgasser in front of a San Francisco audience to discuss his ideas about Hollywood, acting, and why he writes. What follows is the first part of that interview. - A.C.

with second wife rebecca pidgeon

BARBARA SHULGASSER: You've said that, if you hadn't found the theater, you probably would have become a criminal.

DAVID MAMET: Yeah, I think that that's probably true. I knew a lot of criminals. I used to live with criminals.

BS: How do you mean? Literally in a house with criminals?

DM: No, no I used to spend all day playing poker with them. And then I sold nonexistent real estate for awhile with people who were basically criminals.

BS: Preparation for Glengarry?

DM: Yeah, well, that's what it turned into. And I was one of those kids who was always told that he probably possessed a great intelligence, but why must he act so stupidly? And so I never did very well at anything. So, I figured I was going to end up in prison somewhere.

BS: Uh-huh. What was your response when people asked you why you must act so stupidly?

DM: Well, it took me thirty years to find out that every rhetorical question is an attack.

BS: Yes. I won't ask any.

DM: Oh, good.

BS: Have you had to fight a lot of idiocy in your work in Hollywood?

DM: Only my own.

BS: Your own?

DM: Sure.

BS: Well, that's very modest of you, but I'm sure that's not true.

DM: Well, it says in the Bible, "What is he who conquers a city compared with him who overcomes his own nature?" So the thing about Hollywood is: there it is. I mean there's nothing hidden about Hollywood. It's what it is. And —

BS: Well, I think a lot of people go there with that attitude and hope that they can overcome but find it's just an avalanche of one form of moron telling you how much they love your work when they buy it and then how much it has to change in order to be made into a movie.

DM: Yeah, but to try to change Hollywood is like someone who goes out to work for the Ford Motor Company and says, 'You know, we should really invest in public transportation because it makes a lot more sense."

the verdict

BS: I see your point. Let's talk a little about your early screenplays. I love The Verdict. How did you get that job?

DM: I got the job for The Verdict...I was hired by Zanuck and Brown to write a movie based on a book by Barry Reed, a lawyer in Boston, Mass. And it's based on an actual case. They had me write the movie, and they didn't like it. They were very polite about it. They paid me. They said, "We just don't like it, and, if you'd like to write it again, we'd pay you again." They did. I said, "That's very flattering, but I couldn't write anything differently."

And so the project went on, and they hired several other well-known writers, and I became morose and sent a copy to Sidney Lumet, who I knew in passing, just to get someone else's opinion, hoping he would praise it. And the good fairy descended. The director, who was going to be, I believe, Robert Redford, dropped out of the project when they were committed to making the movie, and they sent the scripts they had commissioned — not mine — to Sidney Lumet. They never sent him my script. And coincidentally, that same week I'd sent him my script, and he called them back and said, "I'd love to do the movie. I'm just going to do Dave's screenplay." And, lo and behold, the day was saved.

BS: Wow.

DM: You know, one time in thirty years, what the hell?

BS: Well, the difference between movies and theater, as far as writers are concerned, is the difference between a medium that values the writer and one that kind of undervalues the writer. I'm wondering, since there has to be some kind of adjustment for a playwright who gets to write the way he wants to when he goes to Hollywood, how that changes the writing.

DM: Well, it's a completely different medium. One of the fascinating things about writing is that, when you write for radio, radio is different from stage, and stage is different from television, television is different from movies. They're all different. And it's like the poker player who says, "I sat down at this game, and they were playing deuces wild. And you had to trade in a one-eyed Jack on another card. I can't play that game." Well, if you can't play the game, you shouldn't play the game.

The point for the poker player is to understand the rules of the game, and for the writer to understand the essential nature of the medium — if he or she can — because each is very, very different. Writing movies and writing plays are extraordinarily different endeavors. Application and study would probably help anybody understand them a bit, but to say, "I don't know why they don't like my plays when I wrote movies well," is like saying, "I don't know why I'm not winning at indian poker when I can play five-card stud." You got to understand the rules of the game.

BS: I thought after I saw The Postman Always Rings Twice and The Verdict - I lived in Chicago and saw quite a lot of your work — that in your writing movies and having to fulfill dictates of a much more market-oriented medium, which Hollywood turns out, there would be more plot, there would be more structure, and that it might change your plays as well. And I thought it did. Did you?

DM: I think it absolutely did. Thank you. When you write a movie, when one writers a movie, that's all a movie is, is plot. All that you and I care about when we watch a movie is what happens next. And it's told with pictures. And the pictures go by at twenty-four frames a second. And we get the idea pretty damned quickly. There's nobody here who can't come into a movie or television show at any point and understand in a tenth of a second what's happening. And so what moves a movie along is plot. What happens next. "Oh yes," the audience says. "Oh my God, now he or she has gotten into an even worse scrape. Let me sit here a little longer and figure out what happens next." So, when I start writing movies, I had to really feverishly apply myself to understanding, to learning, how to write a plot. And I think it very much affected my plays for the better.

BS: Tell me. Was there an enlightening moment when you first realized that the theater had some power, had something that you wanted to be a part of?

DM: I think that moment was the moment when I first realized that it wasn't work and that people could go there and never work. I figured out that I had found the circus and I just wasn't going home. And I found it very young. My Uncle Henry, who lived out here for a while — and his wife, my Aunt Esther, still lives out here with that part of the family — was a producer of radio and television in Chicago for the Chicago Board of Rabbis. And he gave me jobs as a kid and my sister jobs as a kid, portraying Jewish children on television and radio. And through him I got into community theater in Chicago.

BS: It was a stretch —

DM: What?

BS: — portraying Jewish children.

DM: That's right.

American Buffalo

BS: Isaac Bashevis Singer was once asked if he believed in free will and he said, "Yes, I have no choice", which sounds like something from one of your movies. You seem to believe in fate. No matter what your characters do, they seem bound up in a fate that's decided already by their class and by what neighborhood they're from and their childhoods. I'm wondering if you think very much much in those terms when you're writing these characters.

DM: No, I never think about fate because, as we all know, "Fate is the fool's word for chance." Right? No?

BS: And why wouldn't that enter into your writing?

DM: Nobody saw that movie? Oh my God, where are you people from? Yeah, The Gay Divorcee. Eric Blore. Fred Astaire. "Fate is the fool's world for chance." Oh my God, where am I? No, Aristotle, used to say —

BS: You used to hear him say this?

DM: That's right. Aristotle used to say, until someone would tell him to shut up, he used to say that character is fate. So tragedy is about character, which is about the capacity for the human being to make choices. And Don Marquis, who wrote Archy and Mehitabel, said — and I think Isaac Bashevis Singer may have been cribbing from him — that the ultimate reconciliation of the doctrine of free will and predestination is we're free to do whatever we want and whatever we choose is going to be wrong. And that's what tragedy is about.

BS: Well, religion seems to be another circumscribing factor for your characters. In The Old Religion, Leo Frank. And in Homicide, the movie that you wrote and directed Joe Mantegna plays a police offer who's kind of forced to face his Judaism, something he's apparently denied or ignored. You've recently returned, or stopped —

DM: Yeah, I think that's a fairly accurate description, sure.

BS: And how did that change things for you?

DM: Well, it made me happier.

BS: Really?

DM: Sure.

BS: How?

DM: Well, in very many ways. It's a great thing to be able to put down the intolerable burdens of, if one happens to be me, of arrogance, egoism, and self-absorption for a while.

BS: All that from Judaism?

DM: Sure. I have this great rabbi — his name is Larry Kushner — who has this magnificent congregation in Sudbury, Massachusetts. And on Yom Kippur he said, "The bad news is you're going to be here all day. The good news is you've got no place to go."

BS: So, he's a comedian. But how does this help you overcome arrogance and those other burdens?

DM: Well, there's two answers to that question. A-ha, right? And one of them is that the rabbis would say, "Whoever rises refreshed from his prayers, his prayers have been answered." And other equally nonresponsive answer is that the rabbis would say, "put on teffilin, put on tallis, hold a prayerbook in your hand. Now, sin."

BS: It's better that way. So, that's what you've been doing?

DM: Yeah, sure.

BS: Well, good. Was it a surprise to your children?

DM: I don't think so. No. After growing up with me, I think very little surprises them.

BS: Oh, I see. In Homicide the Bobby Gold/Joe Mantegna character says, "There's so much anti-Semitism these last four thousand years. We must be doing something." Did you feel that way?

DM: No, certainly not. But I heard people say that one. I heard Jews make a similar comment. the book I wrote, The Old Religion, is about the Leo Frank case. Leo Frank was lynched in 1915. He was falsely accused of a crime that was fairly evident he didn't commit. The city of Atlanta and the state of Georgia and much of the South imploded in a one-man pogrom and identified Frank as this demon and decided he was a demon because he was a Jew.

And it was the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, which had died out after the Reconstruction, and also the birth of the Anti-Defamation League. It was a show trial, and one of the many "Crimes of the Century.' It was called the "American Dreyfus" case. And I wrote a book about my imagined interior monologue in the persona of Leo Frank, a man who goes to work one day and comes home to find out he's a monster that the world wants to kill and the process he goes through trying to find out why that is true. It's a book about race hatred. And of the things that he experiments with in an attempt to explain to himself a world gone mad is that, perhaps, there is some rectitude in the libels of his accusers. I think that that's something many abused people — children, for example — adopt to deal with intolerable injustice. So, no, that's not something that I feel.

BS: I'm wondering how aware of your Judaism you were as a child growing up. Because it's another kind of outside, and you ended up becoming a writer.

DM: Well, I was pretty aware of it. As I said, my Uncle Henry worked for the Board of Rabbis. My grandparents all came from the Old Country, from Russian Poland. We were fairly Episcopal Reform as far as religious practice went. And the kids from the other side of the tracks used to come over once in a while and hit us on the head, call us all sorts of derogatory terms. But I didn't see a lot of upside in the proposition until I got older.

BS: I wanted to talk a little bit about your book about acting, True and False.

DM: Sure.

BS: The most staggering thing to me that you say in the book is this tip to the actor: If the audience enjoyed the play, you have done a good job. That just sounds like pandering to me. Does this mean that The Bridges of Madison County is a good book?

DM: That very well may be. I haven't read it.

BS: Trust me on this.

DM: If the audience enjoys the play, the actor has done their job, because the audience pays to come to enjoy the play. See actors, as another maligned subspecies of humanity love to flagellate themselves, because it takes free-floating anxiety and transforms it into a yummy little phobia: that it's not the world is bad, it's not that my teachers are worthless, that the critics are mannerless swine, it's not that the plays are no good, but, rather, that I am insufficiently prepared. And, if I just try harder, everything will come out well, and there will be no tears before bedtime.

BS: You don't know actors that use those other excuses, too?

DM: What other excuses?

BS: Those ones that you said it's not.

DM: I'm saying that most actors use those excuses. I've very seldom met an actor — and I've worked with the greatest actors in the world and am greatly privileged to do so — who didn't say, at one time or another, when you said, "Jeez, you were great," "Naw, I wasn't very good tonight." It's a terrible thing to say. It's an insult to the person paying the compliment, and more important, it's an insult to yourself. The audience comes to hear the play. If they had a good time, you did your job. If you know who to do something better, do it better tomorrow night.

BS: But isn't it possible for people to enjoy something that really isn't any good?

DM: Sure, I do. Don't you?

BS: Yes, but we're talking about what a good actor is.

DM: If the audience enjoyed the play, the actor did their job because the jobs of the actor is to communicate the play to the audience. The job of the actor is not to obtain some magical, mystical state of perfection in him — or herself. It's nothing but self-consciousness. It's heresy. And it's the heresy of people who've been exposed to just a little too much education and haven't had enough time trying to earn their living by it.

BS: Well, you talk about a formal education not only being useless to an actor but harmful. You say that it generally ruins a young actor.

DM: That's right. That's absolutely right. For several reasons. The first is, show business smiles on early entry. That the things you can do when you're sixteen and seventeen and eighteen because you have a lot of time on your hands; you don't need a lot to live; you can't do when you're twenty-eight and twenty-nine and thirty. You should be out there getting your teeth kicked in and learning something and meeting some people and working hard.

Scott Zigler, a great, great director, directed my play The Old Neighborhood that Carole Hays produced, which just opened on Broadway last night, and he also teaches at Harvard. He's a great, great teacher. he says to the kids, "Get out there. And if you go to work for nothing in the movie business, if you do two movies for nothing" (he's talking about on the technical end), "you can be gainfully employed for the rest of your life." And it's true. The movie business particularly smiles on people who are reliable, dedicated and hard-working.

BS: But not necessarily good.

DM: But why should they be good? Why should anybody be good when they're sixteen, seventeen and eighteen? You gotta get out there and be bad.

BS: Yeah, but sometimes they don't get better.

DM: Well.

BS: Isn't that possible?

DM: Yes. But they're not going to get better in school, and here's the reason why. Acting is something that's done for a paying public. It's not something that's done for school administrators and for teachers. the skills needed to please an acting teacher, a casting agent, a school administrator, are those that are completely opposite from the skills needed to please an audience. The audience — just like you and me- comes to the theater to be delighted, to be surprised, and to give everyone the benefit of the doubt because they want to have a good time. The teacher, the administrator, and the casting agent come to the session as if to greet a thief who's going to be underprepared and rob them of their time.

An audience isn't judgmental. That's why they come. That's why I come. That's why you come. There's nothing one is going to learn in school except to pander to authority. And the learning to pander to authority not only wastes the individual's time but ill equips the individual to deal with the authority of the greater world that is going to continue to exploit him or her. The casting agent, the fraudulent teachers, the people who take the headshots, the unskilled teachers of voice who are going to say, "Sit still and stay in class for the next million years, and I will tell you when you're any good." It's an absolute fraud.

BS: But that pandering to authority, isn't that to the detriment of anybody who wants to do anything, not necessarily be an actor?

DM: Not if they want to be a teacher.

BS: There's one.

DM: I've got some very good friends who are home schoolers, and they say the benefit of spending enough time in an institution is that eventually you get to be one of the guards.

BS: Another thing you say about actors, you tell them not to interpret. You say that to create the illusion the actor has to undergo nothing at all.

DM: That's right.

BS: What if you're a shy person trying to play a bore? Is there some kind of mock transformation that you have to go through in order to muster up whatever?

DM: No, you have to say words.

BS: And that's it?

DM: That's it.

BS: From this point of view, how can you tell a good actor from a bad actor?

DM: A good actor is one whose performance you enjoy. I mean, if you want to get more technical, I would say a good actor to me is one whose performance I enjoy because I find it truthful. Which is to say, I enjoy the performance.

BS: Well, that's not necessarily the most truthful performance. That's just the one you enjoyed.

DM: It's the most truthful performance to me. To whom else am I going to refer to it? If you're making love to someone, you say, "Jeez, I feel great." They say, "Yeah, I'm going to do better next time."

BS: Well, if you're playing to an audience of sadists and you really screw up in front of them, they'll enjoy that.

DM: The objections that you're raising, they're moot points. You can't argue them. But at the end of the the theater is a profession of mountebanks and misfits, much like myself, who've come in through the back door because no one else would have them and learned to find a place in society by getting up on a stage and doing plays that people need to hear and doing them well in an interesting, provocative, and unusual manner. Who haven't had the life bred out of them.

I've been teaching off and on since I was a kid, in many, many institutions, in the English departments and the drama departments, and all that I can tell you is — only I alone am escaped to tell thee — it's a big shock. You want to learn to act, go act. Go start a theater company. Go apprentice yourself. Go carry coffee. Go take voice lessons. And get up on the stage. You're going to be bad for the first x years anyway. You might as well be bad from sixteen to twenty rather than from twenty-eight to thirty-five.

BS: You also talk about how you're very much against interpretation of the text. In another book I was reading, you refer to a rabbi who points out that as one studies the Torah, the same portions at the same time of year, year after year, that one sees in them a change. But, as they do not change, it must be you who is changing. And that made me think that, isn't that another way of saying that the text has a depth that reveals itself through studying and interpretation?

DM: If one is studying the text. On the other hand, for an actor, the text reveals itself to the audience through the juxtaposition of the uninflected words, which the author wrote, and the moment-to-moment truthfulness of the actor. I don't want to hear some actor's good ideas. I and you and everyone here has the capacity to go to the library and understand what the author meant. What the actor can contribute, which is a great contribution, is the organic moment-to-moment, back and forth, the Ping-Pong game of the unforeseen.

What does it mean of somebody of whom we say they have a great technique? Of a chef of whom we say they have a great technique? It means you didn't enjoy that dinner.

BS: Why?

DM: Why? Whoever said that of a dinner they enjoyed? What we say of a dinner we enjoyed is "Yum." And what we say of a performance we enjoyed is, "Gol-ly!" We don't say, "What technique." We say "What technique' when we have been defrauded of anything more enjoyable. So we appreciate our own ability to appreciate.

BS: So, you would call a performance by Meryl Streep doing one of her accents or Dustin Hoffman in Rain Main or De Niro doing Awakenings —

DM: First of all, I'm not going to name names because it's not my job, and my taste is not the point. Everyone has his or her taste, and they're entitled to it. That's what you're entitled to when you buy a ticket. You're there to see the show. You get to make up your own mind. Let me ask you a question. What is the line, "I never want to see you again." What does that line mean?

BS: It depends.

DM: Exactly. That's exactly correct.

BS: Thank you.

DM: It depends on what's happening in the moment. It can mean any number of a million things. And just so, when the line is spoken on stage, it can mean any number of a million things. As I say in the book, for any actor to prepare what he or she thinks the "character is going through" and then bring that onto the stage is an error of the same magnitude for the basketball team to say, "We're going to go out, and we're going to perform these plays irrespective of what the other team is doing."

BS: Well, what about Horowitz interpreting Chopin? is that any different from an actor interpreting Mamet?

DM: Well, it depends. It's a very good example. There are some pianists whose technique is so good they just bore you to death. One would rather hear a twelve-year-old who wanted to play the music. And I would, too, of the actors. I would rather hear somebody who wanted to get on stage and mix it up a little bit than someone who's going to share with me his or her good ideas about the text.

It's not the actor's job to be interesting. It's the actor's job to be extraordinary brave and forthright. And, when I was a kid growing up, we used to say the best thing you could say about an actor was that he or she was dangerous. That's what people want in the theater. You know, we look at early performances of Brando. You look at something Joey Mantegna did. You look at Patti LuPone in this play on Broadway. You say, "Gee, where they hell did they come from? Man, I never could have thought of that." Exactly. you know, you see Whoopi Goldberg when she was doing her comedy on stage —

BS: I never could have thought of what?

DM: Whatever the actor —

BS: The way they were doing it.

DM: Yeah. And neither could they.

BS: Well, isn't that their interpretation?

DM: No, it's their performance.

BS: Could you elaborate on that?

DM: Yes. Stanislavski said there are three kinds of actors. There's the actor who's gonna be the hack actor and give you his or her version of what they think an actor would do in this role. They're gonna interpret other actors. And then there's the mechanical actor, who gives you their version of what they think their character would be like. They're gonna think it up. They're gonna practice in front of the mirror, and they're gonna bring it in. And then there's the organic actor, who's simply going to determine what is needed in the scene and then go on and do whatever they can to get that from the other person.

Now, a good example of this organic behavior is a child who doesn't want to go to bed. A lover who wants a second chance. A man or woman who wants a job. Somebody who wants to get laid. There's nothing that these people won't do. And that's called having an objective. Having an objective is just a fancy word for wanting something real, real bad. And when all of us — or any of us — are in these situations, there's nothing we won't do. All of our attention's on the other person. And we'll change horses in the middle of the stream to do anything to get them to give us what we want. Now, when you see that in an actor on stage it's awfully damned compelling. Because what the great actor's doing on stage is changing his or her tactics to get what they need from the other person on stage, rather than performing what they dreamed up at home.

William H. Macy in Oleanna

BS: Isn't that technique, though?

DM: No.

BS: It seems to me that it is for this reason: if you're trained, part of your training is to be constantly aware of your opportunities on stage, and one of them means, "I must change tactics when called for." Rather than going out there every time without any understanding of what may happen, you have the understanding already, and you're ready for it and can do it.

DM: One doesn't have to be constantly trained to be aware of all the opportunities on stage any more than one has to be constantly trained to be aware of all the opportunities in trying to talk a cop of a traffic ticket. We're born with this capacity.

BS: Some people are better at it than others, though.

DM: Exactly so. And some people are better actors than others. But it's an innate capacity to be imaginative. And what's needed in the actor is not these dull whips of authority with which we flagellate ourselves of concentration and discipline and technique. Who cares? What's needed is bravery and intelligence and imagination. And all of us have all of that we need.

BS: But, as you say, the addition of emotion and all that kind of stuff is not something you want to see in your actors.

DM: It's false. It's lying. There's nothing anyone can do to control his or her emotions. If there were, we wouldn't need psychiatrists.

BS: I wonder. I don't really agree with that. If —

DM: Did anyone ever tell you, "Cheer up"?

BS: Yes.

DM: What was your reaction?

BS: Let me ask you this. What if you, right now, were suicidally sad, but you decided for the hour and a half it would take you to promote your book on this tour that you could set that aside. And then, when you knew it was going to be over, you go back to your room and cry and shoot yourself or whatever. I think that —

DM: That's not manipulating emotions. That's having an objective. The two things are very, very, very different.

BS: Well, that's semantics.

DM: What?

BS: Certainly it's manipulating your emotions. I think that the theory that one can control one's emotions and urges for short periods of time is the basis of the philosophy of teaching children good manners.

DM: No, what they child controls is not what he or she feels. What they control, if they can—

BS: Is behavior. That can look like emotions.

DM: Well, it might look like emotions to you, but there's nothing a human being can do to control their emotions. Cults function by suggesting to a human being that this control is possible and then shaming them when they find that it's not. That's how a cult functions. And when psychiatry becomes a cult, as it can, or a religion, as it can, that's how it functions. Or an acting class or any kind of class.

To say to the individual, "I've asked you to do something. Now why can't you do it?" The individual gets the idea that he or she is bad, and the only cure for the inherent badness is to work harder, to, in fact, enslave themselves to, and in the case of acting schools, to the teacher. And I've seen it for thirty years, and it's a vast imposition on the acting student. And, it's a fraud. There's nothing that the human being can do, to control their feelings, to control their emotions. and it may be practiced unwittingly, and it may be practiced for the best of all possible reasons, but it, nonetheless, is a fraud perpetrated on the student.

"From the Mouth of Gabriel" - Sufjan Stevens (mp3)

"Heirloom" - Sufjan Stevens (mp3)

"Arnika" - Sufjan Stevens (mp3)

In Which I Don't Know What This Room Is For

2010-08-23T14:14:00Z

SALLY'S PSYCHIATRIST CALLED

by MOLLY LAMBERT

Who knew all it would take is divorce for the Drapers to finally develop onscreen chemistry? It's a real screwball comedy figuring out who's to blame for Sally's masturbation mishap. I've never enjoyed Jon Hamm and January Jones in an episode so much as I did in this one. They're a regular Ross and Rachel now! Too bad for Don that Henry Francis is kind of that dude. The dude who is normally that dude, Roger Sterling, was very much not that dude this episode. He was more like Walter Sobchak.

You know who else is that dude? Pete Campbell! Man I know he's a rapist and always acts like a snitch but he is kind of killing it on the regs this season! When he invoked his paternal responsibilities I gave him a LOL high five through the TV. Wouldn't it be cool if Pete ended up being like an awesome dad? I'm kind of thinking he will be. He's always been the most feminine friendly and forward thinking of the Mad Men men.

It's never not going to be slightly clumsy setting up new villains and love interests in an already established universe, but Mad Men is doing its damndest. I'm really starting to cotton to Focus Group Faye, who is clearly going to be Don's next romantic Donquest, especially once I realized she was the former Mrs. Christopher Moltisanti.

Cara Buono didn't get to do too much on The Sopranos, but that character never had a chance in hell following Adriana La Cerva. However, Dr. Faye might have some good odds on Rachel Menken, who let's face it wasn't even THAT great, we just think of her fondly in comparison to Bobbie Barrett and the grade school teacher.

Can't we just shut up and enjoy the sparks between Faye and Don? I mean, she's hot and smart and has a heavy New York accent and is obviously supposed to be his equal. They haven't even kissed yet, but they had a lot of heat sake bombing together. Just let it play out, okay? You know it's all going to go to hell sooner or later.

The new villain, Ted Shaw, is clearly a foil for Don meant to remind us of the "old" Don from the "old" Sterling-Cooper, the Don we are used to, the Don some people have been bemoaning the demise of this season. Brilliantly, by parodying what was annoying or has become rote about the "idea" of Don Draper the character, Shaw makes us no longer want to see Don be that guy. He's the Cy Tolliver to Don's Al Swearengen.

If anything, we now want Don to change even more because we are realizing that his greatest strength is that ability to change. No longer chained to being "Don Draper, Sixties Alpha Male" could be ultimately liberating for him, just like it will be liberating when Joan and Betty realize what Peggy already instinctively knows, that it's not that much fun to be Mrs. anybody compared to how nice it is to just be yourself.

What was more tone-deaf, those Clorox bleach ads that suggest using Clorox to get your mistress's lipstick off your collar (UR MISSING THE POINT) or the AMC in-house promos for Jerry Bruckheimer's Pearl Harbor? Who is more tone-deaf about Pearl Harbor, Jerry Bruckheimer or Roger Sterling? Wasn't Don's date with Bethenny Anna Newlin Van Nuys the best Benihana date scene since The Forty Year Old Virgin?

I can't believe Roger was such a racist dick in that Honda account meeting. It was obviously not just about Pete Campbell's chip or whatever. We know from his blackface exploits that Roger can be a racist dick but I thought he was just going to say something racist but wry (wrycist?) like "Japanese girls. Beautiful. Sideways vaginas."

Sally overshadows Bobby, but Meadow Soprano was also always more central to Sopranos plotlines than A.J., although I loved in the last seasons when A.J. came to the forefront and whiffed spectacularly at being the kind of man Tony Soprano is.

Real Talk though, what was Sally getting off to watching "The Man From U.N.C.L.E."? That one of the dudes kind of looked like Don? Or that they were tied up together? Is she into gay slash fic? Or was it just run of the mill masturbation out of boredom and horniness? I mean her friend was ASLEEP. It's not like she was masturbating ON her.

I enjoyed the whole Honda plot where they incepted the other ad dudes. I reference Inception so much lately that my friend tells me my references have no meaning. That's when I say "yeah exactly maaaaaaaaaaan" and hit the bong knowingly.

Actually I spent most of Inception trying to figure out what Leonardo DiCaprio's character's name was (Dom? Tom? Thom? Rob? Bob?) much like I spent this Mad Men trying to figure out what Don's new nemesis's last name is (Chaw? Shaw? Schaw?)

The song they played at the end was "I Enjoy Being A Girl" from Flower Drum Song, a song that figures heavily into my own personal mythology since I protested having to sing it in probably 4th grade on the basis that it was sexist. I got in trouble a lot in elementary school for arguing about radical gender politics (nothing has changed).

The important thing is, Don's going to get horizontal on a couch with somebody other than the whore who slaps him around. Soon Don will be forced to talk to a therapist about himself. And you know what? It will probably be good for him.

There is no change without acknowledgement. Maybe even Don is ready to admit that the "old" Don Draper, which was Dick Whitman's conception of a sort of ideal man, kind of fucking sucks. Since that life phase is over anyway, why not let go of it completely so that a better more zen Don Draper might emerge? It's like Inception.

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She twitters here and tumbls here.

"About a Girl (acoustic)" - Nirvana (mp3)

"Bad Girls" - Donna Summer (mp3)

"I Enjoy Being a Girl" - Tiny Tim (mp3)