I will always be glad that I was assigned to review The Last Movie Star (2018), Reynolds’ final film, because it meant I got to pay tribute to him – not just his performance in the movie, but to HIM IN GENERAL – while he was still with us. So often I write about people who are already dead. But it’s wonderful to pay tribute to people while they are still here. I put my heart into that review. Not every review requires it. But that one – and Reynolds – I felt, did. Don’t just write off the film. Don’t focus on what’s wrong. In so doing, you are rejecting the enormous gift of a man like Burt Reynolds. He’s a figure who deserved – and deserves – serious critical appreciation … and if you DIS Last Movie Star and then write a heartfelt obit when he dies a couple of months later … well, okay, you do you. But I judge you for missing what’s really important. Here we were, with a film designed for him, written for him, prioritizing him, placing him at the center. Stop being so goddamned stingy.
Who in their right mind would look that gift horse in the mouth? Turns out, many critics did. And my heartfelt review brought me so many emails, some of the nicest emails I’ve ever received. I share this not to say “Look how great I am” but to say “Look at how much Burt Reynolds mattered to people that they would write me emails like this.” That’s what matters.
I’m going to share an email I received about my review. I’ve removed the name of the sender. It’s the most extraordinary email I’ve ever received, and I’ve received some truly amazing letters – but this email speaks to the love people have for Mr. Reynolds. This person wrote it to me after seeing the film, so Reynolds was still alive, and out there promoting the film still. This person wrote to me in frustration with the other reviews, with critics who were dismissive of the film, treating it as not worth their serious attention. This person was CORRECT to be irritated by that.
I just saw “The Last Movie Star” and was in tears I was so overwhelmed and moved. I read your review yesterday and was just floored. It was absolutely wonderful to read. I read it after being wildly frustrated by Ben Kenisberg’s review. Sure, he doesn’t have to like Burt Reynolds or the movie, but he wrote like he didn’t give a crap and I was so put off by his laziness and by the Times for publishing such crap. It’s disheartening as a fellow writer and lover of film, and for sure, as a lover of Burt Reynolds. Your writing not only told your audience you give a crap, but that you care about the context, you care about the bigger meaning, you took the time to share the wonderful and profound and ridiculous nuances in the film, in Burt’s career.
I met him a couple weeks ago after a screening of Deliverance and I grew up with him but when I got to meet him I found that I was so overwhelmed. It’s like not until that moment did I even understand how much his Joie de vivre and the joy of that laugh and how it brought my family together—it’s like it wasn’t until that moment that I registered that impact. I told him how much I loved his work and that I grew up with him, and the man took my hand in his and kissed me on the cheek. It was one of the most magical moments in my life.
Some friends think I’m kidding around because I am still talking about him, but my love is unironic. And I can even see how someone reading this could think I’m nuts. But I can see the bigger pieces, the indelible stuff that is larger than life, that is life.
I don’t know why at 35 all of this is hitting me so intensely now, and I type this rapidly on the subway because your writing, your review, it’s life, it’s the dirt, the sun, the rain, the wind, the scent, the sky, it’s the plants getting trampled and starting over, it’s blooming, the ebb and flow of the seasons. It so movingly captures and shares the film’s essence, his essence, and the fact that you give a shit.
Let me tell you something. I hear from a lot of people. I hear from Cary Grant fans, Elvis fans, John Wayne fans, Kristen Stewart fans, because of this or that thing I’ve written. Many wonderful emails from passionate fans, who really really care about the thing that they love.
But that email about Reynolds? That’s something else entirely. And it speaks to what I was getting at in the review: the love of him was something unique to him, and something far far more intense and passionate than “admiration” for his talent, or “appreciation” of his acting. It was HIM. People loved HIM. PERSONALLY. As I wrote: agents and marketing people and studios wish they could figure out a way to manufacture what Burt Reynolds had. They try. They fail. Because what he brought to the table was his and his alone. It can’t be manufactured.
Nobody said it better. Happy birthday, Burt.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
The problem with Elvis is like the problem of, say, the sun. The sun blots out stars. The sun creates heat waves. The sun is a good thing but there’s a hell of a lot else going on besides the sun. There might be a star behind the sun we’d love to know more about but the damn sun gets in the way. It’s a stupid analogy but if you spend enough time hanging around in the weeds of 1953-1957, not just skipping alongside Elvis, but hanging out with ALL of them, then you definitely get a sense of how much was going on – before Elvis, and “after” Elvis – but it’s just hard to SEE because the light is so blinding. Kind of like other playwrights doing good work in late 1500s England. Like, who cares, right? History doesn’t care. Or how you have to bodily move James Joyce out of the way in order to see what other Irish writers were doing in the 1920s. It just is what it is. You can bemoan how unfair it is but you’re participating in the least interesting part of the conversation.
Gene Vincent was a HUGE figure in the first wave of rockabilly, and he was extremely important in influencing the next wave – the boys coming up right behind, particularly the British invasion boys, who were stunned by him. Everyone was stunned by Elvis, but Elvis was a little bit otherworldly. His rise was so unprecedented you couldn’t even really ASPIRE to it. But Vincent’s level seemed much more achievable.
A couple things about Kim Stanley, who only appeared in 4 films, but was a hugely influential figure in theatre, live television, and Method acting. I mean, she’s the goddess. Jon Krampner’s 2006 biography of Kim Stanley is called Female Brando. And that’s how everyone talked about her. She inspired a generation. She holds the status of Laurette Taylor in the generation before. It’s so worth your while to track down the shows she did in live television (many are on Youtube). She was a sensation because of these performances. She went deeper, farther in her work than other people did.
When I interviewed my Actors Studio mentor Sam Schacht, Kim Stanley was a huge topic of conversation. Her work knocked him out as a young striving actor in New York of the 50s. (I quote Sam in the Film Comment piece too.)
Her four films are The Goddess (based loosely on the life of Marilyn Monroe), Seance on a Wet Afternoon (for which she was nominated for an Oscar), Frances (where she was terrifying as Frances Farmer’s mother) and – the role for which she is most well-known, because the film itself is so iconic – Pancho, the bar owner in the desert in The Right Stuff.
But this is not where you get the full Kim Stanley. Much of her good stuff can not be seen at all, since it was performances on Broadway in the 50s. You have to take the word of people who were there, who saw her in action.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
A couple of years ago, during a lengthy conversation about many different stars, Mitchell and I discussed Burt Reynolds. I recorded the whole thing. It was a game we played: I would throw a name at Mitchell, ask him to boil the person down into one word, and then elaborate. Here’s the transcript of the Burt Reynolds conversation. I knew it would be good and insightful – because it’s Mitchell – but our chat surpassed my wildest dreams.
ON BURT REYNOLDS
SHEILA: One word.
MITCHELL: Charisma.
Burt Reynolds had that thing that you can’t define. He was likeable. In a way, he’s sort of like the stars of today, who are learning to act on our time. They’re beautiful so they get some movie roles, and then we have to suffer through watching them learn to act if we choose to see movies that they’re in. Burt Reynolds was like that. He was so physical and so he could start in Westerns and those sorts of things, it didn’t require that much acting, but he could sit and he could study and he could watch. Burt Reynolds did one of those little TCM bios about Spencer Tracy.
MF: Spencer Tracy was his idol, his ideal. You never caught Spencer Tracy acting. Burt Reynolds was one of those people who took his charisma and took his opportunity and then became an actor. My favorite performance of his is in Starting Over with Jill Clayburgh. I think he’s wonderful in it. It was written by James L. Brooks, and Alan Pakula directed it. My point is that Burt Reynolds took his charisma and learned how to act. He took it seriously, he wanted to be good at it, and he did it. He was good in Deliverance, he was good in Starting Over.
I know we both hate the expression “guilty pleasure” but a movie that I love that isn’t great is him and Goldie Hawn in Best Friends.
The thing I want to say about Burt Reynolds has less to do with acting and it has to do with the way that he was as a person and it has to do with the kind of men that I have in my life. You know, I love a dude. I love a guy who’s a guy and is a big goofball of a guy.
MF: Look at David. Pat and Sam and all the guys in my life. They’re dudes. And Burt Reynolds was such a dude, and other dudes loved him, and dudes wanted to hang out with him, and yet one of his best friends for his entire life was Charles Nelson Reilly so he’s also the kind of dude that I like, who is not a homophobe, in a world where it would have been very easy for him to be one. This is part of Burt Reynolds’ personality that I have always really liked. I think that shifted as he got older.
My favorite Burt Reynolds was when he used to be on Carson. I have this whole thing about people who have the ability to be a talk show guest.
SOM: It’s like Neil Patrick Harris doing a magic trick on Jimmy Fallon.
MF: Yes. Neil Patrick Harris has it, Hugh Jackman has it. Joseph Gordon-Levitt has it. They have a charisma that shines through, they have a personality. They have prepared something smart and a schtick and something that’s going to be cool to listen to, not like Robert Pattinson who is boring and feels like he has to pretend to have lucked into a movie career, which I think is bullshit. Or Kristen Stewart who has the personality of wet toilet paper, although I think she was good as Joan Jett. Talk shows now are all about selling a product and my point is that Burt Reynolds had that thing where he was so funny “on the couch”.
MF: I want more people to be funny “on the couch” today. He had that stupid laugh, he was rakish, he used that persona, he used it in the Smokey and the Bandit movies. Charles Nelson Reilly and Dom DeLuise were his best friends? I mean, that’s fucking funny.
SOM: And he and Cary Grant were very good friends. They would go to the track, and do the guy things, but Grant also advised him on how to be a movie star, certainly.
MF: And then something happened. His personal life took over. When the tabloid era really kicked in, and he split with Loni Anderson, we ended up knowing too much about him and he seemed a little bit bitter, like time had passed him by. And then he got sick, people thought he was dying of AIDS, but it turns out he had this whole issue with his jaw and he couldn’t eat.
MF: It’s a little bit like that Lanford Wilson play, Serenading Louie. There’s nothing worse than an aging high school jock. I think he sort of let that get the better of him. I am sure he is a very charming man but there’s a desperation there that is the flip side of charisma.
SOM: The anxiety of losing your looks.
MF:P.T. Anderson gave him that amazing gift of Boogie Nights and he was so good in that.
MF: In Boogie Nights, Burt Reynolds is the fully realized potential of everything he had in his entire career. He’s masculine, he has a gravitas that goofy Burt Reynolds as a kid didn’t have, except for his size and his sheer athleticism, but he was also very warm, very real. He became a patriarch. And it’s a shame that there weren’t more opportunities to follow that up. It would have been interesting to have Burt Reynolds to do something like a television show. LIke Sally Field doing Brothers and Sisters. She can occasionally be in a movie and be very effective, but she’s also very effective on TV. Burt Reynolds had that sitcom, and it was all charm and charisma. It wasn’t the greatest show in the world, but he was very good.
SOM: He was the biggest male star in the world for …
I’d also like to mention…as Ronny has said too… that women get this movie much quicker than men. Women also understand. You know, for so many years men threw the word rape around and never thought about what they were saying. And I think the picture makes men think about something that’s very important, that we understand the pain and embarrassment and the change of people’s lives.
That’s a huge admission, I think.
MF: I think it is too. In some way, it says a lot about his persona, when he was younger, because he was very attractive. He was famously in the first famous cougar relationship. He dated Dinah Shore for many years. He was with Dinah Shore, who was his elder, and very beautiful and very famous and very respected and was in everybody’s living room every day. And on some level he was seen a little bit as a Boy Toy. But he was so confident in his masculinity and his sexuality, he didn’t sweat that. You never heard him apologizing for being on the arm of this older beautiful woman.
MF: It also makes you think what a hottie she was, too. Dinah Shore and Burt Reynolds in the 70s? You go get it, girl. She was even more wholesome than Doris Day because she didn’t have the chance to play any roles, she just really was this cheery beautiful woman who aged gracefully in front of us and scored the hottest hunk in Hollywood. The original cougar was Dinah Shore. Forget it.
SOM: One of the things I love about him is I always got the sense that he loved women. Not just as sex partners, but he thought they were hilarious and adorable and fun to be around. He got to be the person he wanted to be most with women.
MF: It’s interesting, right, because the male companions we know that he hung out with were not the most masculine of fellows. Charles Nelson Reilly and Dom DeLuise.
SOM: A lot of young male stars, who are on that sex symbol level now, have a difficult time relating to women, at least onscreen. I think it’s partly because women don’t have the place in films that they had when Burt Reynolds was coming up. Like, he had to get it up for Jill Clayburgh, he had to get it up for Goldie Hawn. These were powerful contenders on the screen. He would have been a wonderful screwball star in the 30s. There is nothing more awesome than a gorgeous guy who doesn’t give a shit and falls on his face.
MF: That’s true of William Powell and Cary Grant and so many of them.
SOM: It’s when John Wayne gets to be befuddled with Katharine Hepburn … “this woman is TORMENTING ME” – and because it’s John Wayne – yes, there is that male privilege thing that can be annoying – but we get to relax because we get to see John Wayne crack a little bit, and that’s always good. That’s what we want to see of these really powerful male stars.
MF: Glimpses of their vulnerability. I do think Burt Reynolds is one of those people, though, who did not always make good choices. Doing Lucky Lady with Liza, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Or doing At Long Last Love with Peter Bogdanovich. He often missed out. He’d be like, “That’s a good director, Liza Minnelli is Liza” and Lucky Lady did not work out, know what I mean? In between his successes, were a lot of dismal choices.
He often succeeded when he was the lead and he was a rogue. Smokey and the Bandit, Semi-Tough, The Longest Yard, Cannonball Run – as stupid as that movie is. His duet with Dolly Parton in Best Little Whorehouse. They are so adorable together, I don’t even care the movie is bad.
MF: And in the movie she sings “I Will Always Love You” to him, which, of course, is perfect.
MF: It’s that Robert Redford thing with his female co-stars. Reynolds isn’t standing in Dolly’s way. He’s letting Dolly be powerful, so he looks even more manly and successful.
You know who I think today has the Burt Reynolds charm is Ryan Reynolds, and it’s not just because I saw him do Celebrity Autobiography, and he read Burt Reynolds’s autobiography and he did a brilliant Burt Reynolds imitation. Ryan Reynolds read Burt, Sherri Shepherd read Loni Anderson, and Rachel Dratch read Burt Reynolds’ assistant. Ryan Reynolds did it AS Burt Reynolds. It was twofold: A, that was brilliant and his last name is Reynolds. But also, Ryan Reynolds walked into this very small space that this show takes place in. And Ryan Reynolds the movie star walks in, and he had to walk in through a very tight crowd from the back of the house because there’s no backstage. His charisma, his sexual charisma, his athleticism, his muscles, made the room blush.
MF: You can feel the sexual charisma of Burt Reynolds. And Ryan Reynolds has that. He also has that thing where he is very masculine, but also funny and self-deprecating, and also very charming with women.
SOM: I’ve enjoyed him very much. I like him in interviews too. He’s got some miles on him. He’s been around.
MF: And he’s done a lot of work already.
This is a total tangent. One of my favorite things as a kid was a very short-lived sitcom. It starred Eve Arden and Kaye Ballard. It was called The Mothers-In-Law.
MF: It was very short-lived and my brother and I loved it so much and there’s an episode of it on right now. Eve Arden’s daughter married Kay Ballard’s son. They live next door to each other and so they are constantly trying to meddle in their kids’ lives, and getting into trouble. It’s very Lucy and Ethel. These two brilliant comediennes. I haven’t seen it 30-something years and there are four episodes on today. Eve Arden is another interesting character. She set a precedent that people are still trying to reach. There’s a high watermark in her comic delivery that has yet to be matched. It’s the lost art of delivering the one line with a withering look and a gesture and an exit. Exemplified in Mildred Pierce.
MF: You want to study comic timing? Watch Eve Arden.
SOM: It’s deceptively simple. Otherwise more people would do it.
MF: You can’t really catch her doing it. It has to do with so many things that people take for granted now. Like, the study of voice. Back then, you didn’t even get famous unless you had a voice. She started out in radio, she studied. She worked on the freeing of her natural voice that the Brits do so brilliantly. For example, if I were to play for you tape recordings with your eyes closed, of James Mason, Vivien Leigh, Olivier, Kenneth Branagh, Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, you could tell me who they were instantly. This isn’t true of some of our best American actors. Nobody sounded like Eve Arden. She had her own show, a very successful radio and television show for years where she played the school teacher – Miss Brooks – and it was the misadventures of this lady who was unlucky in love but everybody loved her.
SOM: I just love these people who are in it for the long haul. That’s a casualty of being someone like Burt Reynolds. It’s not that I think he wasn’t in it for the long haul, but becoming that big a star is going to be a challenge for anyone, obviously.
MF: It’s almost easier for someone like Eve Arden to have a late-in-the-game success. Because she wasn’t so famous. One of the very few major movie stars who is continuing to do really interesting work is Catherine Deneuve because she is not denying what made her a movie star in the first place.
SOM: And that was what was interesting in how P.T. Anderson used Burt Reynolds in Boogie Nights, or used Tom Cruise in Magnolia. This is what the old studios used to do so brilliantly which we don’t do so much now: casting people because of what they remind us of. It’s like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation. We bring to it so much emotion already and he’s messing with the persona, but also deepening it. It’s been a whole second wave of his career. And for Burt Reynolds, that didn’t happen. Of course he was a sex symbol in a way that Bill Murray wasn’t. And it’s very challenging to grow old as a sex symbol.
MF: I think he did get caught up in that. The whole idea of using people for their persona: It’s not the greatest movie although it is a very successful movie, but when Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand did Meet the Fockers. I can take or leave that movie, but their scenes in the movie is why that movie worked.
MF: And part of it is that we are bringing to it our emotions about them both. We are excited to see her, we are excited to see him. It’s Benjamin from The Graduate and it’s Tootsie and it’s Funny Girl, and it can be very very effective. The movie itself, blah blah, but that’s an example of how that can work. Figure it out, Hollywood.
SOM: It’s hard because film captures you in time. There are very few men who are as gorgeous as Burt Reynolds was during his prime. In Deliverance, the vest with the arms. When you’re captured at your prime on film like that, you have to have, I imagine, some sense of courage to get up there when you don’t look like that anymore. Because people are vicious. And I don’t know Burt Reynolds, obviously, but perhaps that is painful for him.
MF: With all of his charisma and confidence, and I don’t mean this in a stereotypical way, but I’m saying it in a stereotypical way to make a point, I think he does suffer from a woman’s vanity. He’s suffering from the same thing that has happened to the women of that era. Google pictures of him right now. He has had so much surgery. He is seemingly suffering from a level of vanity about his looks that is, for better or for worse, very feminine.
He was a sex symbol. He was a transition for us as well in how we viewed men and their sexuality. Men now are so happy to be objectified. Ewan McGregor‘s like, “Look at my cock” and all of the Twilight boys are like, “I will be shirtless til the day I die”, whereas men didn’t used to do that so much in the same way back then. But Burt Reynolds was the transition. He did that whole Cosmopolitan spread where all he did was cover his dick.
MF: There’s his hairy gorgeous body. That was a big deal. Men didn’t set themselves up in that cheesecake way. It’s a cheesecake photo as opposed to a beefcake photo. I mean, you can see his pubic hair in that Cosmo spread. Robert Mitchum was not showing his pubic hair.
SOM: And we are all the poorer for it.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
You could call [Josh White] the minstrel of the Blues, except that he is more than a minstrel of the Blues… Josh is a fine folksinger of anybody’s songs — southern Negro or southern white, plantation work songs or modern union songs, English or Irish ballads — any songs that come from the heart of the people…Josh White sings with such ease that you never feel like he is trying. This is the secret of true folk singing — for the folk song never tries to get itself sung. If it doesn’t ease itself into your soul and then out of your mouth spontaneously, to stay singing around your head forever, then it isn’t a folk song. And if the singer tries too hard and gets nowhere with such a song, that singer isn’t a folksinger. . . . From Blind Lemon to Burl Ives, from Bessie Smith to Aunt Molly Jackson, there runs a wave of singing easy. Josh White also sings easy.
— Langston Hughes, liner notes to Josh White Sings Easy (1944)
Last summer, sitting out on the porch at the lake house in New Hampshire, my mother somehow started reminiscing about Josh White, and the impact of his music. Mum grew up, came of age, in the folksinger era of the 1960s, and she remembered vividly his voice, his almost otherworldly guitar playing (Mum plays guitar, and gave guitar lessons all through my childhood). I started pulling up Josh White clips on my phone and we watched some of his live performances, and listened to some of the recordings. Mum was in tears. It was a beautiful bonding moment for us, and I was happy to be there with her as she walked down memory lane through the music of this artist.
It’s Josh White’s birthday today. When he died in 1969, the tributes poured out. Lena Horne counted him as a mentor. So did Eartha Kitt. He influenced generations of singers, across every genre. He merged “hillbilly” and blues, he merged gospel and blues, he brought jazz into the picture. He did it all, and often he did it first. Elvis loved him. When he died, Harry Belafonte put out a statement:
“I can’t tell you how sad I am. I spent many, many hours with him in the years of my early development. He had a profound influence on my style. At the time I came along, he was the only popular black folk singer, and through his artistry exposed America to a wealth of material about the life and conditions of black people that had not been sung by any other artist.”
January has lasted four months. What a terrible month. I mean, good stuff happened but the stress and dismay is constant. It’s been really cold – colder than it’s been in years – and we had two big storms in January and one big storm this past weekend. So here’s some of what happened in January.
Geese in an icy field near me. It took me a while to even see them. I pulled over because I liked the bleakness of the scene, and then squinted at the black-ish cluster way out there, and suddenly saw the 100s of geese. What are you all even doing out there!
I met Jafar Panahi at the NYFCC dinner, where we gave him the Best Director award for It Was Just an Accident. I can’t even believe it. I talked to him, through his interpreter, about 20 seconds after the first picture I took below. I am not one to go up to celebrities and try to talk, even at events like this, and I definitely don’t ask for a photo. I’ve never done that. And going into this awards dinner, I said to myself, “I have to make an exception for Jafar Panahi!” But in the moment, I didn’t feel like it. It was enough to have had a moment to speak to him, to thank him, etc. He was lovely and friendly, even though, of course, his home country is in total SOS-mode, which he spoke about in his speech. (Not to mention the fact that the Iranian regime put out a call for his arrest – AGAIN. He is going to go home though. He is not afraid. It is his country. His friends are being imprisoned. Thousands and thousands of people are being killed. It’s incredible that he is here – it’s been over two decades. In our short conversation he said to me, through the interpreter, “Your group has given me awards three times and this is the first time I’ve been able to attend.” I said, “I’m so happy.” I told him I wrote an essay about him when we gave him the special award and that it was so good to see him in person. I never ever thought I’d get to meet him. Not with the life he’s lived for the last 15 years.
Waiting for Charlie to come meet me. It was a cold day in New York, it’s been cold all month. I don’t know what I’ll do if this joint ever closes (knock wood). I’ve been hiding out there on cold days since I moved to New York for grad school. It’s not a big place, there are bigger tables in back, but you can sit at these teeny tables by the window. And if it’s not busy, they aren’t in a hustle to get you out of there. I was early. I love their Bloody Marys. I’ve been devouring the work of war correspondent Marth Gellhorn.
Met up with my friend Luisa to sign her copy of my book. But also just to catch up (I saw her at my book signing but it was a madhouse). We live so near each other but we are both buried in work. I want to see her more. We had to meet up really early (we are both early birds), and it was just so good to be together and support each other.
After being home for a bit, I headed back down to New York. Why did I move again? Then I headed down to the Jersey Shore (memories! God, the flashbacks on the GSP were intense, and not entirely positive. There were times when I was working at Martha Stewart and I would get up at 4 in the morning – no shit – drive to Avon (my regular beach) – it was an hour to get there, an hour to get back. I’d sit on the beach with my coffee, watch the sunrise, and then drive home. Put on my work clothes, get on the bus, and go to work. (Martha wasn’t a remote job.) Anyway: I spent so much time on the Jersey Shore – by myself – driving around, pulling up to some old beach motel, and checking in. Off-season. I mean, it all sounds so lovely, and it was but it was like the worst time in my life.) But my friends Sheila and Mike live down there and Sheila organized for me to come visit her book club to talk about Frankenstein. I met so many nice people. Mike does chalk drawings all over town – he is known as “Chalk Man” – and he decorated the sidewalk in front of the bookstore. I met so many nice people at this book club. They all read Mary Shelley’s book, and saw the movie, so we had an amazing conversation about both, and questions of adaptation, but also just Mary Shelley hereself and who she was. The “moderator” was a high school teacher for 30 years, and she taught Frankenstein every year. She knew everything, which was so fun. I loved talking with all these people who came out on a cold school night to talk about books. It was lovely.
I stayed down in New Jersey for a while with my friends. We sat around talking all day. It was cold, Mike kept a fire going, the dogs kept coming over to me “showing me” their toys. It was so adorable. The ceiling looks like this. It made me feel peaceful to look at. Sheila’s artist friend did it for her.
And then came the snow. I got home just in time, because I honestly couldn’t really go anywhere for the next couple of weeks, since we got a lot of snow. I had a couple of hair-raising drives. I made a judgment call to drive home from my sister’s and the plows hadn’t come out yet and it was so stupid. I was skidding all over the road, but there was this treacherous hill out of my sister’s area and I didn’t want to turn around and have to drive down it. I made it home, but it was scary. The plow was late to my neighborhood. It was pretty wild to see a totally un-plowed road. My neighbor came over with his little snowplow and plowed out our driveway which was so helpful. It would have taken us hours to do it ourselves.
The temperature never rose enough for the snow to melt and then came another snowfall. My neighborhood actually must be the last on the list to be plowed. It’s not great out there, and you really don’t want to be driving when it’s not plowed! Last weekend we got another snowfall, over 10″, but I was in New York, watching the storm approach, and worrying about train delays as well as my car sitting in the lot, being snowed in. A mound of white. I do love a good snowfall though. I stocked up on food for us, cooked a bunch of stuff, and waited it out. The wind, too! The wind was crazy.
Quonset huts in snow. I want to live in one of those.
My aunt Regina was in a production of The Boys from Syracuse at the Goodspeed Opera House, which we were taken to as kids, and it was my introduction to Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare’s shortest play. Plautus’ Menaechmi is the source material, except Shakespeare added another set of twins to add to the confusion. Comedy of Errors plays like a bat out of hell. You don’t even need to do it WELL. The play works, whether you are competent at comedy or not. When you do it well, of course, it’s anarchy and the audience doesn’t have a moment to breathe (preferable, because the play is absurd and if an audience is given time to think, they can poke holes in the entire premise). The device is artificial. Two sets of twins. Identical twin brothers who have servants who are also identical twins. And not only that, but they all have the same names. What are the odds!! ALSO, the Abbess who lives in seclusion isn’t who she says she is!
The whole thing is preposterous! It’s even funnier because … you’d think after the first couple times of misidentifcation you might put it together, like “wait … maybe my identical twin is here and she thinks I’m him?” But no! Antipholus of Syracuse is bombarded by an angry wife, an angry goldsmith, all kinds of people running up to him and shouting condemnations – and he has no idea who these people are or what the hell they are talking about. And he puts it up to sorcery, witchcraft, etc. When you READ it, it might get a little tiresome but when you see a good production of it, the joy of it is in the anticipation, and the accumulation of these misunderstandings. You are, at all times, WAY smarter than everybody else onstage – and this is one of the keys of really good comedy.
So by the time you get to Act IV, the MOMENT the angry goldsmith comes onstage, you alREADY start laughing, because you know he’s mad at the wrong person, and shit’s about to get even funnier.
All that being said: the words “doom of death” appear in the 2nd line of the play, which is not only a comedy, but a comedy where the word “comedy” is in the title. DOOM OF DEATH!! In the first scene, the father speaks for, my God, 10-15 minutes, laying out the entire story of his wife, his twin boys, the twin servants, the storm at sea, the ship cracking apart, the poor wife strapped to a mast with one baby – the other baby strapped to the other mast – which puts really unfortunate vivid pictures in your mind – horrifying! We need this information, yes, but again, this ridiculous comedy is haunted by death and destruction. Shakespeare’s themes are always present, even in early plays and the sonnets: the two constants are time and death. The two, of course, are connected. In The Comedy of Errors, there’s actually a deadline written into the script: everything is going to come to a head at five o’clock!
In one of the books I read, it’s mentioned that Comedy of Errors is the only play where Shakespeare mentions “America”.
The other thing I got in my reading is the importance of St. John’s Letter to the Ephesians. Probably deliberate of Shakespeare to set his play in Ephesus? His audience would recognize immediately. And then there’s all the “wives obey your husbands” talk. What’s interesting though is there is an ancient Greco-Roman atmosphere/environment: Syracuse, Ephesus, the names, the source material! But laid on top of it is Christianity. In the time gap between Plautus and Shakespeare … Jesus happened.
And so I guess Shakespeare was doing this consciously, so as not to write something completely pagan. I mean, I’m just speculating. It’s all speculation. The Christianity here feels super super-imposed, in other words.
I’ve seen this Shakespeare play probably more than any other. It’s un-breakable. You really cannot fuck it up.
Charles Lamb was friends with everyone. He knew Coleridge from childhood, Wordsworth, William Hazlitt (great writer and portrait painter – Hazlitt did the painting above), Lamb met Keats, he was inner circle with these guys. He was different, though. He had a job, first of all. He worked as an accountant clerk for 30 years before deciding to retire. He was given a severance, enough to live on. He wrote essays regularly, and had a column for many years. He wrote a couple of essays about over-indulgence in food, and the stories about him – and his behavior – are legendary. He shows up in so many other peoples’ memories, their letters and journals, his drunken playing around, etc.
I figure he was owed a little fun because his personal life was absolutely horrific. His mentally ill sister Mary stabbed their mother in the heart, killing her. Mary was institutionalized, but eventually came out, and she and Charles lived together for the rest of their lives. Charles had to care for her. It was not easy. They also collaborated together, coming out with an edition of Shakespeare’s plays for kids, I think. Charles himself was supposedly institutionalized for a period. Information is sketchy. But he clearly understood mental struggle and this shows in his writing. He is such a HUMAN person. Like he told this anecdote of attending William Hazlitt’s wedding and barely being able to hold back the laughter during the service.
I actually just read his collected essays for the first time last year. But I felt like I already knew the guy, since I’ve been such a fan of Hazlitt and Coleridge. Everyone talks about him all the time! It was so fun to “meet” the original. I loved his essay on Hobarth. It’s a classic. His essays on Macbeth and Coriolanus are amazing. Then there’s the personal stuff: his love of food and eating too much. He was a pleasure-hound! Did he have romances? I think maybe one? But other than that …
He struggled. But he survived. He did things his way. He felt so cramped by having this job he finally went to his bosses to complain. They were like, “You have worked here 30 years, why don’t you stop, we’ll give you a severance, enjoy the rest of your life.” The best possible response, one which surprised him because he had been dreading the confrontation. Again, he was just such a human person. I love Coleridge but … he’s not exactly human-sized!!
You’ll see what I mean below: everyone had something to say about Lamb.
Very glad to have “met” him. He leaps off the page. You can practically hear his voice. Here are some excerpts:
The Sound of Falling (2026; d. Mascha Schilinski)
It took me a couple of days to shake off the effect of The Sound of Falling. I saw it at a screening room on 29th Street. I knew very little about the film going in. I made plans with someone after, because I hadn’t checked the run time. Yeah, those plans had to be canceled. The movie is long! I emerged from the screening room, all caught up in the world of the film and the spiritual/philosophical elements addressed … I felt haunted. I walked back to the hotel, kind of wrung out. It’s so good. I reviewed for Ebert.
Death Is a Caress (1949; d. Edith Carlmar)
The Criterion Channel is streaming a number of film noirs from Norway. This one is kind of like Postman Always Rings Twice: there’s a car mechanic, there’s a lady married to a man she doesn’t love. Sparks fly. Handsome mechanic has a nice appropriate girlfriend, and suddenly he’s lying to. her, he’s nowhere to be found, she’s getting hurt. 1949, man. 5 years after the end of the war.
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943; d. Maya Deren)
Maya Deren is one of the pioneers of American experimental film-making. Her name comes up all the time, as a wellspring and inspiration for the generation that came after. A fascinating woman, she lived in Hollywood, collaborated with her husband, they made these surreal movies at their house. She was only 44 years old when she died. Meshes of the Afternoon is haunting and mesmerizing, with a woman (Deren) falling asleep – perhaps? – at her house, and getting recurring strange images of a cloaked figure with a mirror face (scary) – time loops and loops, she pursues but can never catch. The camera angles are filled with meaning (Lynch, I am sure, knew her work well), and there’s violence in the air, in the juxtaposition of images.
In Cold Light (2026; d. Maxime Giroux)
I like Maika Monroe, I’ve reviewed a bunch of her films, so I’m happy to keep that up with her latest, In Cold Light. I reviewed or Ebert.
Possession (1983; d. Andrzej Żuławski)
I haven’t seen this in years. But it is burned into my brain forever. The subway-tunnel scene will never leave me and exists as an apex, of sorts, of a kind of raw acting you rarely see on film, or anywhere else. You can’t even believe what you’re watching. She is extraordinary. The film is a fever-dream of marriage. It flat out would not work if Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani weren’t so completely authentically FERAL.
Predators (2025; d. David Osit)
What a strange disturbing watch. I have very mixed feelings about the whole thing. Worth a watch, especially if you ever watched To Catch a Predator.
Somewhere (2010; d. Sofia Coppola)
A windy empty masterpiece. Her best. Her most uncompromising. There’s nothing to grasp onto. It makes Lost in Translation look plot-heavy. But it’s the FEEL. It’s a film from another time, a freer time. It feels contemporaneous with Five Easy Pieces or Two-Lane Blacktop: a confrontation with emptiness. Not too many people can take it. American film, in general, REALLY can’t take it.
“So broken was my father’s family, that it felt to me like a catastrophe you could live with only if you kept it quiet, let it die down of its own accord like a dangerous fire … I felt we lived in an empty space with a long cry from him ramifying through it. At other times, it appeared to be as cunning and articulate as a labyrinth, closely designed, with someone sobbing at the heart of it.”
That’s the voice of the narrator in Seamus Deane’s Booker-shortlisted first novel Reading in the Dark: A Novel, published when Deane was 57 (this fact gives me hope).
Seamus Deane, a Catholic poet and novelist, was born in Derry, Northern Ireland, on this day. (He died in 2021 at the age of 81.) He was good friends with the OTHER Seamus. Deane was born into the thick of politics in Northern Ireland. He was a poet and critic and editor for years, and was one of the world’s pre-eminent Joyce scholars. His first novel, Reading in the Dark, was published to almost universal acclaim, and no wonder. It is a haunted story about Northern Ireland, as filtered through a young boy’s vivid mind. Tough and well-trod terrain. Perhaps because he understood his influences so well, having incorporated them so much into the whole of his work, he doesn’t suffer from intimidation (something I have written about before). He didn’t feel he needed to re-invent the wheel, or somehow push Joyce to the side – a problem many Irish writer face, male or female (but mostly male). Especially writers who attempt to write about male childhood, which Joyce pretty much owns. Deane didn’t let Joyce silence him. I really like Andrew O’Hehir’s words in his review in Salon (link no longer works, damn the Internet, but I’ve saved some excerpts):
But there’s a sense in which Deane is ideally positioned to tackle Joyce on the great modernist’s home ground. For one thing, Deane couldn’t conceal his debt to the Irish literary colossus if he tried; Deane is one of the academic world’s leading Joyceans, and even edited the Penguin edition of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” For another, he has grown old enough to lose the fear of Joyce all young Irish writers must feel, old enough to write a very different kind of autobiographical novel.
Deane’s book is the warmly compassionate, painstakingly gorgeous work of a mature man who wishes to memorialize the dead without yielding to sentimentality; Joyce’s is a younger man’s literary tour de force, intensely self-involved, concerned above all else with the interior world of a consciousness coming to fruition. Stephen Dedalus’ creator believed that Ireland’s three bonds — family, nation, church — were imprisoning him like a seabird in a cage. Seamus Deane understands that Ireland’s endless ability to spin stories, to tell lies, to make tragedy into comedy and history into drama, is its all-in-all, both the prison and the key.
Although he was a patriot, Deane’s vast perspective of history saved him from jingoism. But he couldn’t help but ponder how badly things usually work out, especially for nationalist causes, and why should Ireland be any different? This troubled him. Reading in the Dark is all about that, and it was published smack-dab in the middle of the hope-filled “peace process” in Northern Ireland. Deane didn’t say what people wanted to hear in the moment. He saw the present-day hope, and he couldn’t help but look back on the times when similar statements were made by similar types, followed by another round of disaster and betrayal. I like hope without optimism. lol Pessimism is helpful. Not fatalism. People confuse the two. It’s more like realism. We need pessimists. We need realists. Deane was a realist.
Along these lines: the following poem shows Deane’s pessimistic side as well as the scope of his vision. One can feel the budding novelist here. “Coals ripening in a light white as vodka” … isn’t that good?
History Lessons for Ronan Sheehan and Richard Kearney
‘The proud and beautiful city of Moscow
Is no more.’ So wrote Napoleon to the Czar.
It was a November morning when we came
On this. I remember the football pitches
Beyond, stretched into wrinkles by the frost.
Someone was running across them, late for school,
His clothes scattered open by the wind.
Outside Moscow we had seen
A Napoleonic, then a Hitlerite dream
Aborted. The firegold city was burning
In the Kremlin domes, a sabred Wehrmacht
Lay opened to the bone, churches were ashen
Until heretics restored their colour
And their stone. Still that boy was running.
Fragrance of Christ, as in the whitethorn
Brightening through Lent, the stricken aroma
Of the Czars in ambered silence near Pavlovsk,
The smoking gold of icons at Zagorsk,
And this coal-smoke in the sunlight
Stealing over frost, houses huddled up in
Droves, deep drifts of lost
People. This was history, although the State
Exam confined Ireland to Grattan and allowed
Us roam from London to Moscow. I brought
Black gladioli bulbs from Samarkand
To flourish like omens in our cooler air;
Coals ripening in a light white as vodka.
Elections, hunger-strikes and shots
Greeted our return. Houses broke open
In the season’s heat and the bulbs
Burned in the ground. Men on ladders
Climbed into roselight, a roof was a swarm of fireflies
At dusk. The city is no more. The lesson’s learned.
I will remember it always as a burning
In the heart of winter and a boy running.
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, published when Deane was 57 (this fact gives me hope).
