A strange brew is this, and not all of it is pretty. Partially a record of a crackup and partially a tale of rising from that crackup back into a useful life; and part of that is how I decided writing was necessary to my life and recovery; and another part is just keeping a record of where I have been and what I have learned. You can see the topics I cover the sidebar. The hope is to help others; the purpose is figuring out where I am going. Thank you for dropping by. Feel free to comment.
Movies still rank high in my list of interests, so I have been checking movie related videos on YouTube.
This one became a too long an exposé of Cool Hand Luke -a favorite I assume is trending towards obscurity - but it did have some bits I did not notice when I watched it decades ago for a film class at Ball State University.
This one has The Sand Pebbles, a move that always seemed to be on TV when I was young, and never quite made sense to me. It is interesting to see which one were flops that we saw continuously on TV. It might be that these were more influential than, say, Blow Up.
No, I do not think anyone seriously wants to remake these movies - unless it is to preserve a copyright.
I have always wondered why Hollywood - since it seems bent on remakes and sequels - has not reached back to solid stories that got mangled by the Hayes Code, or even to Pre-Code movies that could survive an update. Which brings me to this article from LitHub by Michael Koresky, Sodom and Gomorrah on Celluloid: How the Hays Code Took the Sex Out of Hollywood. It has a brief history of Lillian Hellman in Hollywood, and mentions her The Children's Hour; which has never been faithfully adapted to the screen. That would be a movie I think needing remade.
Hong Kong gangster movies! I got into them with John Woo's The Killer thirty years ago. The following describes how the style evolved.
I admit giving up on this one - the audio was too low, but since I saw The Lady From Shanghai before I saw another Orson Welles film, it has a special place in my heart.
This may seem light, even a foolish addition for anyone except a true Trekkie (which I am not), but I think it is a quick, clean explanation of acting and directing.
Some stuff that is more fun (?)
Adapting a novel to Netflix:
I would like to adapt Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op stories to Netflix. I just cannot see anyone letting me do that - I am the epitome of bad PR.
Maybe you can get some practical use out of that last video.
For another take on how to write screenplays, this time relying on David Lynch.
Our world is, obviously, ending. Oceans and carbon dioxide levels are rising with alarming, historically unprecedented swiftness; whole ecosystems are collapsing; authoritarian regimes are seizing power across the globe; borders are hardening; alienation and isolation have become commonplace; future pandemics beckon. Amid this jarring hurtle toward the abyss, slow motion has become not merely ubiquitous on screen but also a shorthand to express, or even a lens to view, our reality. “Slow motion,” writes Goble, “is what modernity looks like as it is dying.”
I woke up rough - the heater too efficient now (why are the afternoons so cool in here?) and having some crazy dream. Breakfasted on cinnamon rolls and milk before checking the email. Out of the email, I came to read the following:
An ex of mine asked once if she were crazy before she met me, or if I drove her crazy. This morning I sent her a couple of videos from Alice Jayne and Imelda May. I said they do not answer the question, but she could use them as a soundtrack. Now I am sharing with the world:
Thinking someone else will have some fun with these.
I completed a post for here out of my pretrial notes. Then I checked my email, The Guardian newsletter showed up.
I read most of I have a loving wife and child, but I feel I don’t want to exist, recognizing the sentiment. I could not read it all, it sounded too much like my old days, and the piece recommended what I have learned from experience is necessary: get treatment.
When proposals for the largest solar plant ever conceived for US soil started to gather pace – a plan that involves spearing several million solar panels into the flat farmland of northern Indiana – something in Connie Ehrlich seems to have snapped.
Ehrlich, 63, is part of a longstanding farming family in Pulaski county, the site of the new solar project, but doesn’t live in the county and previously only rarely dabbled in its usually somnolent local politics. She has carved out a comfortable life in a sprawling mansion set on 10 acres (four hectares) of land, just outside the city of Lafayette, and is known locally for her donations to medical research and her small fleet of deluxe cars with personalized license plates.
But to Ehrlich the idea of transferring 13,000 acres of prized farmland to solar energy production seems to have been so unthinkable that it demanded an extraordinary response. Within months of the project being proposed she had mobilized her wealth to fund a flurry of lawsuits, spearheaded a sometimes-vituperative pressure group and spent $3m buying new plots of land, including a cemetery, on the fringes of the project.
I ground my teeth a bit at some of the presentation of Starke County, but I kept going until I ran into this paragraph:
To Welker, solar is an evolution of farming rather than a betrayal of
it. He already harvests the sunlight for his crops, he reasons, and
considers fears of food shortages by taking land out of production
overblown given that 40% of all US corn is already mashed up for another
form of energy – ethanol, which is added to gasoline. Farmers are also
routinely paid by the federal government to keep tracts of land free
from crops, in order to bolster the price of corn.
I am for solar. Anything that gets the Saudis away from our short hairs is a good thing. I still do not understand why we cannot use rooftops in the cities for solar panels.
Numbers have steadily increased since, now rising
to a daily total of 849 references, prompting fears over the movement’s
trajectory following a series of terrorist attacks linked to online
misogynists.
The incel – or “involuntarily
celibate” – movement is an online subculture in which a misogynistic
worldview is promoted by individuals who blame women for their lack of
sexual activity.
Incels have been linked to violent extremism
and are classified by the government’s anti-radicalisation strategy,
Prevent, as having a “mixed, unstable or unclear” ideology.
Maybe they should shower, clean their clothes, brush their teeth, and learn to speak in complete sentences before they start blaming women for their social distress.
Just thought of this bit of advice from Hank Williams, Jr.:
On the other hand, this group of idiots is not breeding and passing along their genetic material.
It is 9:28. I am going down to McClure's. The sky is gloomy.
It is 1:14, and I have knocked off three more posts for this blog. Look for them in December. I finished with WFMU, and moved over to Dave's World on WXPN.
We were talking about Jamie Lee Curtis at work on Friday. I offer this bit of silliness (and proof there is everything on YouTube!):
Almost 40 years old! Where does the time go? Except for the dream sequence above, I recall it as an interesting movie. I do not think I have seen it for decades.
When you accepted the National Book Award for Distinguished
Contribution to American Letters, you gave a speech defending popular
fiction, and you listed a number of authors who you felt were
underappreciated by the literary establishment. Then Shirley Hazzard,
that year’s award winner in fiction, got on stage and dismissed your
argument pretty flatly.
KING
What Shirley Hazzard said was, I don’t think we need a reading list
from you. If I had a chance to say anything in rebuttal, I would have
said, With all due respect, we do. I think that Shirley, in a way, has
proven my point. The keepers of the idea of serious literature have a
short list of authors who are going to be allowed inside, and too often
that list is drawn from people who know people, who go to certain
schools, who come up through certain channels of literature. And that’s a
very bad idea—it’s constraining for the growth of literature. This is a
critical time for American letters because it’s under attack from so
many other media: TV, movies, the Internet, and all the different ways
we have of getting nonprint input to feed the imagination. Books, that
old way of transmitting stories, are under attack. So when someone like
Shirley Hazzard says, I don’t need a reading list, the door slams shut
on writers like George Pelecanos or Dennis Lehane. And when that
happens, when those people are left out in the cold, you are losing a
whole area of imagination. Those people—and I’m not talking about James
Patterson, we understand that—are doing important work.
So I’d say, yes, Shirley Hazzard does need a reading list. And the
other thing Shirley Hazzard needs is for someone to say to her, Get
busy. You have a short life span. You need to stop this crap about
sitting there and talking about what we do, and actually do it. Because
God gave you some talent, but he also gave you a certain number of
years.
And one other thing. When you shut the door to serious popular
fiction, you shut another door on people who are considered serious
novelists. You say to them, You write popular, accessible fiction at
your peril. So there aren’t many writers who would take the chance that
Philip Roth did when he wrote The Plot Against America. It was a
risk for him to write that book because it’s an accessible novel that
can be read as entertainment. It is involving on a narrative level.
That’s a different book from Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire—which, by the way, is a damn good book. But it’s not the same thing at all.
INTERVIEWER
Is there really much of a difference, then, between serious popular fiction and literary fiction?
KING
The real breaking point comes when you ask whether a book engages you
on an emotional level. And once those levers start to get pushed, many
of the serious critics start to shake their heads and say, No. To me, it
all goes back to this idea held by a lot of people who analyze
literature for a living, who say, If we let the rabble in, then they’ll
see that anybody can do this, that it’s accessible to anyone. And then
what are we doing here?
Why? Because I bloody agree with him. Because finding one's own views coming out of the mouth of someone like Stephen King, it is very good for one's vanity!
The Return of Jerry Lee Lewis, which I understand he had a hand in doing:
Looking at the calendar, I was to get some submissions made. That will be next after making some more calls.
I called KH. I think Gabb must time calls. We talked a long time and as with DM it shut down.
Then I read an article on Google Drive, so I spent some time fiddling with that. Looks like I now have an online backup for my writing. I will not call this wasted time.
I submitted "Colonel Tom" to jmww. Then I checked out Necessary Fiction by reading The Cabinetmaker’s Apprentice by Curtis VanDonkelaar. This is the kind of hair-raising story I like, what I call horror. Very good stuff, but I am not sure what I have that might be interesting to them. I finished reading Vanishing Act by Raluca Balasa, which won the 2021 ServiceScape Short Story Award. I submitted "Problem Solving" to this contest.
Last night, after I was supposed to knock off, I read Go to Hellman,written by Terry Teachout and published by Commentary. What I learned from Wikipedia on both Teachout and Commentary, he was a conservative and the magazine started out with an anti-Stalinist agenda. I make these points because Teachout does not think much of Hellman as a playwright (and about any other way possible, but I am not interested in those).
But Hellman went on to say on the same occasion, “I think that is
only a mistake when it fails to achieve its purpose, and I would rather
make the attempt, and fail, than fail to make the attempt.” And make it
she did, most elaborately in The Little Foxes, a frontal
assault on capitalism in which the members of a family of exploitative
nouveau-riche tradesmen claw one another’s eyes out over a business
deal. Here as elsewhere in her work, the characters are so broadly drawn
as to border on the operatic. (Indeed, the composer Marc Blitzstein,
who shared Hellman’s hard-left political views, turned The Little Foxes into an opera, Regina, in 1949.)
For all its obviousness, The Little Foxes
is a consummately well-crafted piece of theater—every corner of the
plot is neatly tucked in—that packs the emotional punch of a
good B-movie. Small wonder that Hellman and William Wyler later turned
it into a successful screen vehicle for Bette Davis. But despite its
undeniable effectiveness, The Little Foxes is the theatrical
equivalent of a hellfire sermon, one whose villains are all
mustache-twirling monsters. Conversely, Hellman puts her mandatory
summing-up in the mouth of a self-consciously noble black servant who is
no less a caricature than the stone-hearted characters of whom she
speaks: “Well, there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people
on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who
stand around and watch them eat it. Sometimes I think it ain’t right to
stand and watch them do it.”
When Dashiell Hammett read the manuscript of The Little Foxes,
he advised Hellman to “cut out the liberal blackamoor chitchat.” Her
unwillingness to do so says everything about her artistic limitations as
a playwright.
When Hellman died, Robert Brustein declared in the New Republic
that “it may be that her life, with its strong loyalties, combative
courage, and abiding hatred of injustice, will eventually be considered
her greatest theater.” That is, of course, a polite way of saying that
even though her plays weren’t very good, she was still a great woman....
###
One may take leave to doubt that history will judge Hellman so kindly. But even if it should be as forgiving as Alice Kessler-Harris is, it is hard to imagine that Hellman will ever again be seen as anything other than a very minor playwright. The truth is that she was nothing more—or less—than a savvy craftswoman who knew how to keep an audience on the edge of its collective seat. Such talent is by no means to be despised, but neither should it be praised beyond its due, and when the power to entertain is enlisted in the service of propaganda, it is legitimate for the critic to look closely at the ends that are being served.
In Lillian Hellman’s case, those ends were at best naïve, at worst despicable. Except in The Autumn Garden, her uneven but sincerely felt 1951 homage to Chekhov, she was not a dramatic poet but the theatrical counterpart of a political cartoonist, and the not-infrequent brilliance of her draftsmanship should never be allowed to obscure the fact that she freely placed her art, such as it was, in the service of the darkest of masters. Let that be her epitaph.
Not quite the opinion I had of her after reading her plays. Teachout wrote his piece in 2012. I thought differently and found opinions quite different from Teachout, which I put in my posts on Hellman.
Went down to The Dollar General for ice cream and Ben-Gay. It was a drizzly walk, my knee rebelling at the distance. Back here, I ate the ice cream, spread the ointment on my knee, and started working on submitting my stories.
I passed on Half and One after reading the following:
Half and One is a space for cartoons and comics, journalism and narrative non-fiction, poetry and fiction. At Half and One, we produce original, quality and off-beat written, audio and visual content.
###
Our content is fun, informative, interesting, wide-ranging, diverse, and thought provoking.
Pretty sure nothing I am writing right now is fun. I would like to think it is interesting and thought-provoking, but so far not enough to attract any takers.
What to do? I want to go to Minnetrista and see the Farmer's Market. I need to get groceries. I did get to McClure's for a 2 liter of Coke. I am all ready to go, and 2 hours after getting up, I do not feel any enthusiasm. The solution seems to be to skip the Farmer's Market, get the 9:45 Whitely bus, and go to Payless for the weekend's eats, and then back here to start on the pile of pretrial detention notes.
Sounds like a plan. Considering how the past week's plans have gone, I will probably get run over by the 9:45 bus.
His significant recordings were now behind him, but for the rest of his
life he could always pull a crowd, always share a stage with Johnny Cash
or Bruce Springsteen or Keith Richards. When Dennis Quaid played him as
a wild-eyed loon in the 1989 biopic Great Balls of Fire, Lewis said “I
just thought it was bad. It just wasn’t right, it wasn’t Jerry Lee
Lewis.” Basically, it wasn’t about the music. The soundtrack album, as
if to prove Lewis right, sold a million copies, and became his all-time
best seller. Though there would be more near-death situations, more
run-ins with the IRS, more issues with the state of his liver and his
finances, he would always remain a stylist. “When they look back on me, I
want them to remember me not for all my wives, although I’ve had a few,
and certainly not for any mansions, or high-living money I made and
spent. I want them to remember me simply for my music.”
Do we all not want to be remembered more for the beauty we tried to create than for ourselves?
I did not get the 9:45 bus as I was still diddling with blog posts. I missed the 10:30 Mall bus because I had other things on my mind and was hanging out where I was to meet the Whitely bus. I had started walking towards where I would have picked up the Mall bus, and I kept walking. Walked through the Mall all the way to Panera where I got a bagel. Then back to the Mall to get the bus. That bus showed up, and I rode along until I got downtown, to the bus station, where I picked up the Northwest Plaza bus. That bus got me to Payless and then back downtown. I did not want to wait another half hour for the Whitely bus, so I took the Mall us back to where I started buses. I ate lunch and started up the computer.
One site pointed me to Proper Manuscript Format, Modern Edition.
This being the second time I have seen this reference, I decided to
give it a look, and then I decided to get some writing done.
Seems like all I have done the past 3 hours is 2 posts that will see the light of day in December. I did listen to a Jerry Lee Lewis album, and I am listening to the Many Moods of Ben Vaughn. Here it is 5:19, and I am going to have dinner.
More typing after dinner. I called my niece and got voicemail. My cousin Paul did not answer. I kept working on my posts about Raymond Chandler. I did some email with T2. I did some research along with my Chandler posts.
Listening to Backwoods on WMBR. Another Halloween show.
It is 9:52 PM and I just finished reading an article on Lillian Hellman. Is it my curiosity or procrastination that finds so much else to read? Does it matter? My eyeballs ache. This is the end of my Saturday night.
An old favorite, there is no "she" waiting for me to come back, but it still feels appropriate:
Lillian Hellman aspired to be that rare thing, even in her time: a serious Broadway playwright. From the beginning she wanted to move beyond the domestic dramas typical of women in her day and write plays that spoke to prevailing issues of values and political life. And she wanted her words to reach Broadway audiences—popular audiences—who sought entertainment rather than education. These two seemingly irreconcilable goals explain both her spectacular success and her failure to achieve greatness.
***
But to attract audiences, she resorted to the kinds of tactics that could make critics shudder: the unlikely plot twist, the sharp-tongued and shrill character, and especially the melodramatic turn. Together these provided the spice that led to Broadway success but ultimately undermined her larger goals.
***
While she could and did resort to artifice to raise her voice above the competition, she insisted that her voice remain true to her principles. If she reached audiences with theatrical devices that stirred their imaginations, she never backed off her goal of writing plays designed to illuminate the issues and problems that troubled her world. When her ideas no longer resonated, she stopped writing plays, and turned instead to essays and memoirs, in which her ideas needed no improbable twists to come across.
...Although Hellman based the character of Lily’s mother, Albertine (Joanne Camp), and her relationship with a black servant named Henry (Robert Colston) on certain details from her own past, the dramatization of their illicit connection is pure Williams—“Desire and the Black Masseur” meets “The Rose Tattoo.” In a sense, “Toys in the Attic” is Hellman’s Tennessee Williams play, right down to the setting in his beloved adopted city.
But New Orleans was her hometown. She wrote before Tennessee Williams. Is not Als putting cart before horse? Could it not be that Hellman is asserting her influence on Williams?
I want to try something different with Toys in the Attic. I start with the views of others about the play. I am jumping over most of the plot - all the articles provide a better plot. Brother obtains a lit of money and tries to buy happiness for his family but that scares them and his younger wife thinking he is leaving her sets in motion a terrible event. I do think the play worth reading and would like to see a good production.
Hilton Als did not see like the play in his 2014 review A FAMILY AFFAIR.
Lillian Hellman’s penultimate play, “Toys in the Attic” (now in revival at the Pearl Theatre Company), first produced in 1960, is as creaky as an old four-poster bed. Though it can be pleasant to rest for a moment in its carefully embroidered sheets—if only to be reminded of the familiar scents with which Hellman sprinkled her most autobiographical work: incest, miscegenation, and camellias—the play’s charm is musty and, in the end, tiresome. In fact, “Toys in the Attic” is so thin that you may find yourself supplementing the onstage drama with the real family history on which it is based. Hellman’s father, Max, who was Jewish, was doted on by his two spinster sisters. After the shoe business that he’d established in New Orleans with the help of his wife’s money went under, Max became atravelling haberdashery salesman. (The Hellmans spent part of every year in New York until Lillian was a teen-ager.) According to Hellman lore, Max’s sisters, who ran a series of boarding houses, were thrifty and repressed, dour and witty. It’s interesting to note that the only significant invention in “Toys in the Attic” is the dialogue, which, as Joan Mellen points out in “Hellman and Hammett,” her eminently readable 1996 study, was helped along by the writer Dashiell Hammett, Hellman’s companion for many years, who also suggested part of the plot.
***
...To be fair, Hellman’s stage directions, and the play itself, are such a mishmash of different attitudes, influences, and ideologies that it takes a brave actor and an even braver director to get to the heart of the meanness that she wants to explore, and which Jane Bowles characterized as the incredible strength of the weak. By the end of the play, we should be recoiling in horror from Carrie and Lily. Instead, we just want to forget the entire evening.
...Family life is a stifling affair in Hellman’s work, the relationships among siblings founded on a will to emotional cannibalism. They replace love with possession, and from the fruits of ownership no happiness is ever squeezed.
This idea supplies the profound heart of “Toys in the Attic,” Hellman’s last play and the subject of Austin Pendleton’s excellent revival, a production of the Pearl Theater Company, which opened on Sunday night. Written in 1960, 21 years after “The Little Foxes” explored the destructive enmity of the Hubbard siblings, Hellman’s final theatrical effort offers an even more dismal evocation of the 20th-century family.
***
Mr. Pendleton situates many of Albertine’s scenes on the Berniers’ porch, which consumes the right side of the stage (the rest of it is taken up with the family’s tattered living room); we are figuratively outside, as if to suggest that the only hope for a vaguely fulfilling life is to conduct it outside the confining parameters of traditional domesticity.
“Toys in the Attic” is a play that has no patience for nostalgia and nothing but judgments for the obsessive attachments of family. It yearns, remarkably, for room and reason.
Theater Mania provides Brian Scott Lipton's Toys in the Attic, also a more positive review.
Variety's Toys in the Attic takes a middle way with a 2000 Berkshire Theater Festival production.
...On the plus side, the play is never dull and often wittily surprising. On the minus side, Hellman overexplicates her plot and themes to the point where they can become unnecessarily obvious. The play could have used one more round of editing and polishing.
Charles Sabel's Toys in the Attic in the November 18, 1967 Harvard Crimson is another dismissive review:
Leland Moss's production of Toys in the Attic is a willful distortion of a medicore play. But by the mysterious calculus of such things, the distortions hide what should be hidden, muffle the play's mechanical grinding, and render it one of the finest dramas I have seen in some time.
Theatre director Robert Brustein once said, "Lillian's major subject was money, how it is made, how it changes lives and what people do to acquire it--in Toys in the Attic money is stroked as if it were a domestic animal." The money at the heart of Toys that is sought after, adored, loved, and loathed is certainly no small amount: $150,000 in 1957. The equivalent cash value today is almost a million dollars.
I think the Tennessee Williams comparisons a little facile. Sex is what I think of with Tennessee Williams, not money. Hellman's play centers on money. Maybe the Williams connection runs in a different direction - from her to him.
I thought of Hellman's big influences - Ibsen and Anton Chekhov - filtered through a Southern woman with far left politics. Jacob H Adler's Miss Hellman's Two Sisters from Theatre Journal 15 of 1963 leaves me thinking I am onto something here.
Along with money, I thought Lily the innocent and idealistic wife falling under the spell of the sister with sinister intentions towards the brother/husband dramatized the corruption of idealism by those with selfish goals. Again, a possible autobiographical theme? In a production, I would hope to see the horror I read on the page.
For what else I have written about Hellman, click on the "Theater" link below where it says Labels.
Moving slow this morning. I do not want to go to work. My shoulders ache. My eyes do not want to focus.
I checked in at the sheriff's. I got there before the rain. That started as I walked out.
Then I returned Hellman to Bracken Library. I am not sure why but the library was promoting vampires.
The rain stopped.
Waiting for the bus, I got the email for the guy at Hook's who may be able to get me a new cpap mask. I have not ben sleeping well. Not at all good last night.
Back at the room for dinner. The rain hit again. We had a tornado warning. Had high winds. A downpour. Sorry, no photos. I listened to this C-Span lecture on Lillian Hellman. I wrote two posts on Hellman - they are scheduled over the next three days. That took the rest of the night.
Well, I cannot afford to be late again. Need to work, replenish groceries, call the polygraph guy.
The highlight of my Tuesday was my PO showing up for work.
His concern was the counseling. I told him of the problems I had with the counselor. He told me I could not pick my own counselor. I told I assumed he would have final choice as I had in my email (see Thursday and Trouble Comes Knocking). I got the impression he had not seen the email. He asked me for the information on Meridian Health. He also took the name of my other counselor.
My concern was the laptop. He said I could have the laptop or the phone. I said there had been no problem with two devices back in October. He nows has 50 people and it will be too much work if all wanted two devices. He suggested a Gabb phone. So, I opted for the laptop and the Gabb phone. I hope to have that along with my first polygraph.
The polygraph will take place in Carmel. I need call about that today. My PO thought the polygraph might be in July.
He told he I could use the computers at WorkOne. Thing is WorkOne closes at 4:30. Impractical.
It was the best interaction we have had.
Work tired me out. My feet went numb.
While waiting for the bus, I called about my CPap mask. Got cut off. I need to call about that today. The mask needs replacing because it leaks but because it leaks the sd card gave information that my use was insufficient. By the time I got home, it was too late to call.
I did this email to my PO (edited somewhat):
This is the info I have from last email regarding sex offender counselor:
Laura E****s
laura.e****s@merg
All parties have completed Please DocuSign: Reg Packet Revised 06182020.pdf, Patient Financial Packet 07012020.pdf, Consen....
Scott W****f is who you will need to let the intake therapist know you need to see.
That was May 23.
I found this in an email I sent to you on 2/24/22
The counselor is T**** M**** at Meridian Health Services. The number in his voicemail is 765-288-****.
Sam Hasler
So, he had the info on my other counselor since this past February.
I did my laundry. I called K and KH and E. My sister called me at 10.
Dishwashing went well. I was off at 3. I walked down to Lahody's Meats. I wanted to see it when it opened and I figured I had time before the 3:15 bus came up Wheeling.
What a surprise it was.
The place makes me wish I had a kitchen or even a charcoal grill.
Then it was to Payless for some staples. I called my niece. From there it was downtown to the bus station. Downtown was having a car show. I got to see my first Packard and Shelby Cobra. I also learned how hard it is to take photos while carrying two grocery bags.
Up early this morning, breakfasted on yogurt and an apple, and walked over to work. One of the waiters gave me a ride back. I ate a late lunch. Then I napped. Out of Coke, so I went to McClure's.
Nothing on TV. The western channels were doing an Audie Murphy weekend. I cannot do that any more. Music was my choice. I wrote up some more posts from my notes. I finished off Hellman's Candide and wrote Lillian Hellman's Candide.
I found a new-to-me rockabilly band by the name of Restless. That was yesterday and from them cones the day's song.
I just finished Lillian Hellman's adaptation of Candide. A rough patch here - Lillian Hellman doing a musical feels like a stretch. Doing Candide feels even more of a stretch to me who thinks there are no characters in the original only philosophical puppets manipulated by Voltaire.
I overslept. Birds were chirping when I finally woke up. I rushed around like a chicken missing its proverbial head gone missing. With age has not come serenity and wisdom only the repetition of old foolishnesses with more pain. Birds do not chirp like The Sex Pistols at 5 am.
So I was late to work. Turning off the phone I noticed that the PO had called. I assumed he had not seen the email I sent Thursday. (See Thursday and Trouble Comes Knocking).
Lunchtime I dealt with my upcoming colonoscopy. IU Ball Memorial still had the Indianapolis CVS as my pharmacy. Got that fixed. I can expect a trip to pick up a system cleansing beverage in the next few days. The thing itself is not till the 23d. Ah, the things to look forward to in this life!
I left a little early. I had my petition to modify in hand. I walked down to Cowan Road to pick up the bus. I do not understand why the 3:15 #12 bus is always a problem. We got to the station just late enough to miss the #3 bus. Good thing about that, I had forgotten to call the court to get my case number. I got that done.
I also managed to call K by accident. I was talking to her, waiting for the #3, drinking a Coke from The Barking Cow, when KH called. I then started talking to him. I was talking to him when the #3 arrived, I was talking to him when I almost missed the #3. That driver was bound to be on schedule
I had planned going to Staples to copy the petition. I had to stop at Dr Tavel first. I had bent my glasses when I did not get out of the way of a falling box. The fellow there got them straightened - the world had been askew unto the point of making me nauseous and giving a low-grade headache. While there this kid behind me said, "Grandpa, those look like Jeffrey Dahmer glasses. " I asked the guy helping me with my glasses if those glasses came with a free meal.
I got my copies made. I also found out Staples did not have stamps. By now the downtown post office would be closed. I knew only one place to get stamps. The #3 approached as I walked out of Staples.
I called K back. Got caught up with her. She hangs tough. I am embarrassed that I ever cracked up when I hear what she deals with.
I took the number 6 up to Walgreen's. I thought about walking to the room from there. I might have if I had known of a mailbox en route. I caught the #6 on its return.
Downtown, I walked over to the post office. I guessed at postage, slapping probably too many stamps.
But they went into the mailbox.
I got back here, ate dinner, and called the woman who will be doing some typing for me. Until the PO approves the new laptop, I must find some way to skin the cat of all this paper lying around my room. I meet with her next Saturday.
I tried reading Hellman (Candide is rough going.), talked to KH for a few minutes, and then could not keep my eyes.
I go dishwashing soon. I see "Death and a Kiss" has now had 708 reads. KH thinks this is good.
I wonder why my PO never answered my email.
Song for this morning is for KH who never has time for such silliness.
I thought to read more of Hellman's Candide. No such luck. My sister sent me the petition to modify my supervised release. Wrong petition. She sent me the tax forms. Wrong ones. I call her. My phone disconnects. Then we are texting. Time goes by. Not much in the way of reading accomplished. Looks like this will be the sole post of the day.
As I was about to leave for work, I saw to the north a young woman carrying a door on her back.
I did not take the time to ask why they were moving a door before sunrise. Why spoil the sheer weirdness of life with a prosaic explanation?
I did get in my 8 hours at work. Lower back still hurts
I got a message to call the counselor, Karri Byrd. I did. I got voicemail. I left a message.
I also visited the attorney about Dad's estate. He has a draft petition. I told him about the counselor's message, how we needed to get things moving.
From there I stopped at the bank, deposited my paycheck, before going to the bus station.
At the bus station, I got another call from Ms. Byrd. She started off talking about setting up a polygraph. Okay, I thought. She did ask when I last spoke with my PO. March, maybe, was my answer. I may have mentioned by this time of my contacting another counselor. Anyway, she started on me getting back to the group, how I interrupted people, how I had disrespected one of the other members. I disagreed with her about the disrespect. I did not mention how I had been interrupted when trying to comply with her command to tell my story. I told her I thought her telling the group I thought myself smarter than them had burned me with the group. No response from her. What I definitely said now was that I had left a message on her voicemail that I had made contact with another counselor. She had not listened to her voicemail. She told me she would contact my PO that I had been terminated from group. I told her I expected that. Actually, I was surprised she had not noticed my absence and terminated me already.
I will be charitable and not think she missed my $40. I am not so charitable I will not say paying $40 a week (plus time lost from work) to watch her eat potato chips was a bit steep. I still do not the therapeutic purpose of her methods. Oh, well, so it goes.
I slept terribly last night. The cpap mask is close to a disaster. I will try to sleep after watching Mayans.
Two posts I would like to note: A Natural Right to Health? and Celibacy as Freedom. Written before date of publishing but being different labels than Supervised Life, I doubt you have read them.
I expect to hear from PO in the next few days. I feel he subcontracted out his supervision to the counselor. I suspect he has been waiting for something like this so to file a petition to revoke my supervised release. If so, I leave you with this, the inspiration for this post's title
I went to work. I went to the grocery. The sd card was put in a mailbox at Payless. I came back to the room. Tired and not sure what I did except maybe some writing on the blog. Hellman went untouched. I started working on a writing grant.
I got this:
Dear Samuel,
Thank you for sending us "Colonel Tom." We’re sorry this submission wasn’t right for us, but we are grateful to have had the opportunity to consider it and wish you the best of luck in placing it elsewhere.
Sincerely, Madeline DeLuca Fiction Editor Mud Season Review
Sunday:
I went to work. I walked back. I ate. I fell asleep. I walked down to Dollar General. I made a purchase there. This is how I celebrated Memorial Day:
KH cleaned up my story "Passerby" for the grant submission. Other than work, he was the only person I spoke with all day. I was too tired to finish the application last night.
Monday:
Tired when I woke up. Woke up fast when the grant site would not take my writing sample. Again, KH saved my behind.
I did some reading online. I took a nap. I wrote some stuff for the blog. I did my laundry. I made two trips to McClure's for bottles of Coke. I submitted "Colonel Tom" to 7 magazines and "Passerby" to one. I texted with my sister.
I could just as easily stay here. If it were not for work, I would just stay here. The zoloft does not seem to change this. I have had my first legit day off in months. I have to admit I am tired and got back pains and not sure how much longer I can keep doing 7 days a week. I am learning how old I am.
Hellman adapts another French play, Jean Anouilh's The Lark. Nothing I have found online explains why Hellman took up adaptations in general or specifically why this one about Joan of Arc. Yes, there is the theme of idealist coming up against authority but that theme is common enough.
What results in two acts is a rather interesting play. Those two acts consolidate St. Joan's life along with discussions of church authority and freedom of conscience.
I read George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan somewhere around 40 years ago. In my mind, The Lark is easier to read, it is lighter on its feet, and also constructed in a more interesting way - memory slides in and out by presenting itself with characters onstage. As with the other Hellman plays (click on the label Theater below to find these pieces), it is worth reading.
For what else I have written about Hellman, click on the "Theater" link below where it says Labels.
Not willingly, not happily, but I did not go to work yesterday. I woke up queasy. I thought it was something I had eaten but I also had pressure on my ears. I walked luke I was drunk. I went back to sleep. I put peroxide in my ears. I was tired and decided against going in late. I started writing. I napped again, paid rent, and ordered a pizza from Greek's and blew my budget. I did walk down to McClure's. That was much as I felt like walking.
I fear I am getting too old.
In an hour and a half I heard out to the dishwashing job. I hope to keep it through June. I need to get to Payless for the weekend's groceries. I need to get the sd card in the mail. I need to finish reading Hellman. I have a grant to apply for. Wish me luck.
I did not get much sleep last night. I was pretty tired from work and then by writing a very long post - Hellman's Autumn Garden - when I got sn email from T2. I called her and got her voicemail. I went to sleep. I did what I have been doing lately - conking out hard for an hour, then waking up to go to the bathroom - and did not hear the phone ring. I saw her call when I got back to bed. I called. We spoke for about an hour.
Before that I had stopped at Target. I had a letter from Anthem I had to there to make sure the CVS in the store would still be handling my prescriptions. I also got dome groceries.
I did not go to group today. I have not heard from Ms. Byrd. I cannot see with her telling the group I look down on them, group therapy will benefit me.
I did come back here and fell asleep with the TV on.
That was the first strange thing of the day. Second strange thing was the mass murder of elementary students in Texas. I am thought of as a danger to children; in reality the Second Amendment threatens American children.
But the last strange happened as I sat on the porch finishing up my post Bob D's Birthday when I hear water spattering on the porch. I look up to see my neighbor urinating from his doorway. I told him he had a bathroom inside. He daid he was paying the rent. Drunks... Such good company.
I got an email from a woman who might do some typing for me. I have to answer her.
I sent two more emails to T2.
I have not heard from my PO, or read any more of Hellman. I did get sd card for the cpap machine. Maybe a new.mask this year? It is affecting my sleep.
I might watch The Mayans. I might read Hellman. I certainly will be getting a shower. I hope for a better tomorrow.
Since it is Bob Dylan's birthday and since Americans fearing their government must amass more guns than there are citizens, because gun nuts continue shooting down children rather than tyrants, since drunks feel it necessary to expose themselves, I offer up this song:
I have almost got notes caught up with my reading.
Let me suggest that Lillian Hellman'sAutumn Garden is both a more interesting read than her earlier plays and probably not representative of her plays. It is not melodramatic. It is not political. Ibsen's ghost may have hovered over her shoulder with The Children's Hour and the Hubbard plays; Bertolt Brecht may have been whispering to during The Searching Wind, Watch on the Rhine, and Montserratt; but Anton Chekhov feels to behind Autumn Garden.
Old friends meet, find out neither they nor their lives are what they wanted, and leave.
Maybe my being 62, the life I have led, leave me feeling an emotional attachment to Hellman's characters. Performances too languid might miss the quiet, steady emotional connections. Its music seems to me more Blood on the Tracks than Highway 61 Revisited.
...The problem with the play, which meanders along for three hours, is that you are never sure whether the characters are prey to the enervating romanticism of the American south or are victims of some larger, national malaise....
...But what was then scandalous and capable of ruining a life is now common place and generally considered acceptable. With the shock value removed, what you have left in The Autumn Garden are the characters, and they remain fully-formed and interesting....
It does, admittedly, go on a bit, but Hellman has a skilful way when it comes to the sly deceptions of the human heart. Happiness, if it comes at all, is deeply compromised – but that feels like a true, if tough, conclusion.
...It eschews the moralistic lessons, narrative drive, and tidy resolutions that Hellman is known for in favor of a character-oriented ensemble play that vaguely recalls the works of Anton Chekhov. A surprisingly unsympathetic portrait of middle-aged Southerners coming to terms with the emptiness of their lives during a weekend gathering at a summer resort, "The Autumn Garden" offers incisive characterizations. Yet the diffuse script isn't entirely satisfying. Fortunately, two superb alternating casts in director Larry Biederman's intelligent rendition provide compensation for the three-hour opus's somewhat unfocused quality.
For anyone wanting to check out how the play sounds, here is a short clip:
Constance has a warm relationship with regular summer visitor Ned Crossman (Rufus Collins). The friendship has never flamed into passion, partly because Constance is still mourning the lost love of her youth -- dashing painter Nick Denery (John Benjamin Hickey), due to arrive this very evening -- and partly because Ned is committed to a numbing routine involving massive nightly influxes of alcohol. (It's as if Hellman had divided the persona of her beloved, Dashiell Hammett, neatly in twain.)
I think this ought to inform any interpretation of this play.
For what else I have written about Hellman, click on the "Theater" link below where it says Labels.
The play occurs in 1812 during Spain's occupation of Venezuela. A Spanish captain, Montserrat, concludes that the occupation is wrong and switches sides to support Simón Bolívar revolution for independence. Monserrate is captured by the Spaniards, and Colonel Izquierdo uses cruel tactics in an effort to compel Montserrat to reveal Bolívar's location. The tactics include taking six strangers from the street and telling them that if they fail to persuade Montserrat to talk the information, they will be killed. In the second half of the play, each of the six strangers pleads his case and is executed.
Nor does it seem all that popular. Kenneth Tynan does not seem to have liked it (but did like Richard Burton):
...The alarming point is that Miss Hellman sees no need to defend her hero's callous taciturnity. To her mind the end is well worth the means, and her childish assumption that we shall accept Montserrat, without further argument, as a'sympathetic and honourable idealist made my spine prickle with frustrated rage. Montserrat, which was adapted from the French of Emanuel Robles, belongs to the sealed-room type of post-war Parisian drama, to the tradition of Sartre and Camus. Dealing with the responsibilities of the hopelessly trapped, it often becomes so absorbed in its debating points that opportunities for effective and practical action go by the board....
I thought it much like Watch on the Rhine without an interesting hero - the clash of idealism and power with those without ideology and/or power caught in the middle.
It is an interesting read. Hellman's dialog remains good. The play does not seem to have been revived but maybe the times have caught up with the play? I wonder if it would be a bad experience to see the play in this era of Putin and the rise of autocrats.
