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.
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.
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 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.
I finished Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine last night. I have seen the movie and have to admit I put it down as another Bette Davis potboiler. Maybe it is the times, maybe it's in the reading, maybe both, but there is a bit more here than a anti-Nazi propaganda.
Like Little Foxes, those who stand by doing nothing while evil occurs are condemned.
Another three act play, no character like Regina Hubbard of Little Foxes, a message play wrapped in a thriller, a little drawing room comedy and a couple of anti-Nazi speeches that actually work in the context of the plot, but I wondered how it would eork nowadays. Turns out it has been revived several times in the past decade:
Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine opened less than a year before the U.S. entered World War II, so there's no denying that her anti-fascism drama – really more of a drawing-room thriller – was timely and relevant to her audience. Here we are 76 years later staring down a coproduction of the play from the Guthrie Theater and Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and Watch on the Rhine has aged pretty darn well. The 1941 play will remain resonant, it seems, as long as there are power-wielding people in the world who, as described by one of the characters, are smart, sick, and cruel.
The character of Teck DeBrancovis is not an aberrant human being. He is not an ‘evil’ man. To describe him in such terms is to miss the point of the play. It is Teck’s self-interest and his amorality that are his downfall. Left unchecked, his brand of cynicism can undermine the very foundation of the society we hold so dear, NOT to take arms to fight against this is abhorrent. In the play, it is Kurt Muller who steps in to save innocent lives; a person with rock solid ideals. Where are such men in 2015?
It might be tempting to write off any play written 76 years ago as dated and not relevant to contemporary America. But one of Hellman's main concerns in Watch on the Rhine is with the role of immigration to the United States. One of her characters strongly emphasizes how valuable Americans believe immigration to be. And the play primarily pits simple, honest people against a vicious criminal who insinuates himself into a family that values only straightforwardness and truth. It reminds us that the issues of honesty, morality, and immigration are still so very relevant today.
In rehearsal, are you all making a conscious effort to draw parallels between what happens in this play and current events outside your door in Washington, D.C.?
I don't think we even have to try. Kurt, the German anti-Fascist character, talks about how "the Fascists came in on the shoulders of the big business men that were legends." My character also makes an interesting statement to him when we first meet. I ask him if he's a "radical," which you could totally substitute with, "Are you a terrorist?" The resonance is really extraordinary. Lillian Hellman is in the halls of those wonderful playwrights like Inge and O'Neill and Miller. All we have to do is say it clearly and focus on what's important and it'll be there.
But just so no one thinks all is sweetness and light, back to Chicago:
...But the play hasn't held up as well as some of her other work. Clunky plots have that tendency, but Hellman always knew her way around a good line. "I don't think he likes his own taste, which is very discriminating of him," goes a zingier bit of dialogue."
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.
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.
The Hubbards represent the beginning, in 1900, of the industrialization of the South. Birdie and Horace represent “good families” in decline, the planters, ruined by the Civil War. It is hard to think of Regina and her brothers as Southern. They differ from Faulkner’s Snopes family in that there is little of the rural in their nature or in their cunning....
What struck was some similarity to Mae West's plays that I wrote about here. They share use of a three act structure and lies about sexuality. Unlike West where the melodrama ends in murder, Hellman has a suicide.
But reading this play made me think of Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Both have a spiteful teenaged female sparking the action. Hellman got there first and maybe done a better job. It's been an age since I read Miller'd play but my feeling is it might be too identified with McCarthyism to escape stodginess.
I felt a bit of satisfaction finding another connecting Hellman and Miller. Steve Cohen did it back in 2015 in his review Children’s Hour, an adult play.
The review also indicates Hellman is not completely forgotten. Some other productions turned up by Google:
Okay, the last time I wrote up any of Hellman's plays was The Searching Wind and it was May 8. I have since read four more, just finishing The Lark tonight.
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.
This one is stranger than her first play. Think a mix of Dashiell Hammett and Ibsen. Strikebreakers and domestic turmoil mixed together. I do not think the play as bad as its reputation. I do not think it great. It is interesting.
There have been some recent productions with the Mint Theater having the most reviews:
Nothing I have read about Hellman's plays has said anything about The Searching Wind. It is in two acts. It is an anti-fascist message play, the characters find themselves present at Mussolini's march on Rome, a Freikorps riot in Berlin, and Paris just before the Munich Conference and are ineffectual in opposing fascism's rise. It is also a play about a love triangle.
Like Watch on the Rhine, the play has some comedy. This play has fewer speeches.
What I cannot find through Google is any revivals. With fascism rising again, I would think there would be interest in a play showing "the good people" putting their comfort above opposing fascism.
There is a movie version. I had not heard of this one.
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.
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:
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.
Monday I got a good workout at work. More goods from China needing immediate unloading. I thought I would blow out my elbows.
I went to Dollar General to make some purchases and did not know if I could make the walk back to the room. I am getting old.
I piddled a little. I ate a little. I should have called KH. I should have read the next Hellman play. I did some revising of "Death and a Kiss". Chapter 8 will be ready tomorrow. I listened to part of WMBR's Backwoods show. I went to sleep early.
Today, another group session and I need to find out the status of my CPAP mask replacement and finish my story revisions and read Hellman.
BTW, "Death and a Kiss" is up to 405 reads as of this morning. Up from 394 yesterday.
I overslept yesterday. I set the alarm on the phone but forgot to change the day. I still had time to mu k about online, checking out my reads on Booksie and starting a post for this blog. Lucky the Mall bus runs early in Saturday. I take it down to Centennial and walk over to Wheeling. It was a pleasant morning.
Busy at the restaurant. The back pain was better thanks to Ben-Gay. Knees do not bend well.
After work, I got the bus up to Payless. Cashed my check. Bought some food. Called KH. He is not so happy with Chapter 7 of "Death and a Kiss". I called E on the trip from bus station to room.
I ate dinner. We had a bit of a thunderstorm:
My attempt at video of the same thing:
Spielberg has nothing to worry about.
I listened to The Many Moods of Ben Vaughn and a Sonic Bloom show on MixCloud while doing some posts for here and cleaning out my email. That kept me busy till time to sleep.
Since tired seems to be me nowadays, this will be my new theme song:
Sunday I tried riding the bike to work. The lungs need more exercise. Coming back it was more the legs and the four liters of RC Cola dangling from the handlebars that caused problems. My solution was to walk.
I did get a story idea riding to work. An idea I have had for years without being able to figure out a plot popped up as I was thinking about Lillian Hellman. Now to find the time to flesh it out.
I stopped off at Dollar General for super glue. My shoes are falling apart. We will see if my repairs work.
Back at the room I got kind of accosted by another resident, a twenty-something female. I think she may have been tipsy, she wanted to know what was my favorite drink. She followed me up to the office ss I got ice. She certainly needed someone to talk to. I got rid of her by claiming a need for dinner and a shower. The only contact with anyone outside of work. Not anyone I would have messed with in the days of a wild hair sprouting out of my posterior.
I did my SSI appeal. I finally figured to just google the process rather than wait any longer.
This blog has had 657 views since I had to give up . I.am not sure what to make of having only 156 views this month.
Yesterday, I got to work late. I went off without my umbrella to be faced with dark clouds. I decided if it started raining, then I would call in and catch the 9:15 #3 bus. I got to Elm and Centennial and there were raindrops on the bus window. I stayed on the bus. There was no more rain. Another poor choice on my part. More proof of why no wants to take me to the racetrack.
I had a bright idea on Friday that I acted on yesterday. I work with college students and I thought they might know someone who typed. One waitress looked utterly befuddled when I asked if she knew a typist.
I came home directly from work. I had thought about going to the Lahody butcher shop except I was tired snd did not want to miss the 3:45 #5 bus.
Good thing I came home when I did. I tried the milk, it tasted like my late mother's salmon patties. I dumped the milk; I put the butter on ice; I put the cheese in the iced up freezer section; then I started defrosting the freezer. I also did my laundry. I finished Hellman's Autumn Garden.
I got an email from DM extolling "Death and a Kiss." As of writing, my story has had 600 reads.
I moved slowly stiffly this morning. I coated my back with Ben-Gay. I listened to a podcast here with Ta-Nehisi Coates talking about history and writing. I am trying to get into podcasts. If more were like this one, I listen to more.
The restaurant was as busy as.Mother'd Day. I was tired when I walked back. I did have good news. I may have found a typist. I will know tomorrow night.
K called me as I walked up Granville. We talked until I got back to my room. We talked whether marrying A- would have made me respectable. She thought it unlikely I would have ever been respectable; that respectable would be too boring for me.
I called KH after I finished talking to K. Just to see how he was foing and just chat.
I was supposed to go to the CVS and make sure it was set up to get my prescriptions. I thought, too of getting groceries. My feet hurt. I went, instead, to McClure's for food. CVS tomorrow.
I called my sister. I read my email. I put away my laundry. I did some research on Lillian Hellman. I wrote this and another post. The fridge is working properly. Now I am ready to call it a night.
Oh, yeah here is the video from Friday night:
She did have interesting things to say about writing.
Since K told me this is Victoria Day here are The Kinks:
I kind of overslept. I am a little stiff from hauling too many packages that were a little too heavy. I am old.
I have 30 minutes tops to do this before I must dress and get the bus and spend the day hauling plates.
I spent last night cutting down my play "Masque of the Red Death" for a contest. In two days, I started Thursday, I cut about 30 pages. KH asked if it was cogent. I sent him the revised play and am awaiting word on if I am right about cogency.
I finished Lillian Hellman's play "The Searching Wind" and was really impressed. I will post later why I was impressed. Planning on the post-work day will be me reading Hellman.
I got a text from the group therapist. I was too tired to call her. I about fell asleep on the bus. It was an effort to get groceries but being tired insured I did not dawdle at Payless.
While carrying packages Thursday, I concluded the group is meant to test my patience. It is a test I am failing. I had come up an idea Wednesday morning to just lie, make a false confession of my motivations, to just stop the inquisitorial feeling I get from the counselor. Yesterday, before the text, I decided the order to leave meant not to return, also.
I think I will poke around BSU's psychology department for an alternative. My supervised release order says I need treatment. I am not ready to make my return to Fort Dix at this time.
My sister was sent my final part to my petition to modify. I have not heard from her.
I watched a bit of FX's "Atlanta" on Thursday. Brilliant, brilliant show. So was Friday's "The Blacklist."
Still more to say but it is 7:59. I will let The Who entertain you. After all, they inspired my title.
Thursday morning at work waiting for a forklift driver to move pallets so we can get a truck.
I slept away last night. I do not recall much after 7 pm. I did wake up once and it was raining. After leaving work yesterday I did make it to Bracken Library. Mae West stayed there and I came back with Lillian Hellman.
I cannot believe we looked as young as the current crop of college students. I am also certain we dressed more tastefully.
Yesterday morning before work I posted the latest chapter of "Death and a Kiss". That was my other accomplishment yesterday.
I did have time to get some dates and chips at the downtown market. Too expensive but they did turn out to be last night's dinner.
No word on my cpap mask. No call from my PO.
4:53 pm and waiting on a bus. I missed the #12 bus twice and I did not see the #3 at 4:45. I need groceries, so I need the #3. I think the hauling of students screws up the schedules.
I have a headache. My nose stopped a.box of cutlery. Quite glad it was not heavy.
I was thinking of CC as I waited for my bus that took me back downtown. How to pay back a debt owed.to someone who does not know me any longer and I assume has no memory of ehat I owe her. I decided I must do as I do for the debts I owe to the dead: to do better with my life, to live up to their expectations rather than run away from those expectations. What cannot be discharged must be borne and the memory as of what can never be repeated.
One part of the factory had a pitch in dinner. I managed too pieces of sugar cream pie. My taste buds were so happy. The East Coast does not have sugar cream pie.
The bus station and its environs this afternoon:
The #3 is here.
Back at the room by 6:30. Tired. Shopping had a problem - the chicken was not on the ebt list. That got fixed..
I will be staying in except to get ice. Hellman is here to read. Federal tax return needs go out tomorrow.
Probably not to be expected but this I like living like this. No crazy people, me not just doing things to see what might happen, no more experiences just to have them regardless of the damage to myself, and it feels like freedom. Sanity feels good.
