*sigh*

Posted on by
(14 october 2006)

i love france, marie antoinette, and swashbuckling. thus, i’m rather ashamed to admit it took me twenty-five years to discover a french novel about swashbucklers rescuing marie.

for weeks i’ve wanted to articulate the terrible beauty that is alexandre dumas’ the knight of maison-rouge, but there are no words. so i loaned it to a friend in the hope that she would be able to express it. but the words failed her as well and we were reduced to swapping emails of *sigh* and oh! the lovely.

KMR is the literary equivalent of tilapia. try it. it will blow you away. but beware, its charms are subtle. this is not the greatest novel in the world. there’s some plodding. some really, alexandre, where are we going here? moments. and since it involves the french revolution and miss marie, there’s a nagging sense that the majority of the characters are going to lose their heads. but the final pages. The Final Pages.

the first time a book made me cry was the third grade. sweet valley high #40, ON THE EDGE. regina (the deaf one, no less) got mad at her jock boyfriend, went to a crazy party, took a line of cocaine and died. at sweet valley high, we had battled steroid addiction with regina’s jock boyfriend and covered reckless partying with jessica wakefield, but no one had died. the moral “deaf girls gone wild wind up dead” did not escape me. it was shocking. nightmarish. i wept for three days.

i can’t remember the last time a novel has affected me quite so much as #40. where i put it down and was left in a funk by fictional characters. biography bowls me over almost without fail, and KMR is historical fiction so perhaps the history lent it some added emotional thrust. but whatever it was, KMR is the new #40.

regina died in a coked-out haze of juvenile prose that had me sobbing about the unfairness of mortality. KMR left me wide awake, repeatedly turning on the light, wiping away the tears, and taking in the terrible beauty again. reading them again. The Final Pages. words- i have none.

“i’m not ready. i have no makeup on… but things are getting better!”

Posted on by

(21 may 2006)

three nights ago, after much hoopla and an unprecedented “very very long wait” on netflix, i made some fry rye, kept the diet cokes coming, curled up on the red couch and prepared to be dazzled. at long last i saw grey gardens. and now i know: this is the film they show in hell.

it’s a “cult classic.” apparently people in artsy circles laugh over and love this movie. in the special features, there’s todd oldham beaming as he joyously recalls his first 15 viewings. but beneath the camp, lie extremes of familial desperation and devotion on a tragic, alarmingly intimate scale that nearly sapped my will to live. as the mayles brothers’ cameras follow little edie’s fishnet clad legs up the darkened, trash-filled stairwell- the cats scattering out of her way- it’s hard not to remember but for a twist of fate, this could be your grandmother, your aunt, you.

i don’t exactly relish stark portraits of explicitly female eccentricity- most especially in documentaries. we’re supposed to laugh and be charmed but it’s not particularly charming or funny. feminine regret is even worse. it’s fatal. everything you live through makes you you, as you are today. even the accidents, the bad choices, the things you did as well as the things you didn’t. everything. it falls together into you.

grey gardens is an unflinching hour and a half of two women trapped alone together in regret. obsessive, oppressive, life-long, inescapable regret. a dramedy unfolding within a decaying mansion drenched in cat pee. fun times.

big edie was once a gorgeous singer. now her voice is scratchy, her glassy blue eyes are dulled by cataracts. little edie wanted to be an actress, a dancer, a star. now she’s little more than a zany caretaker. big edie says little edie made the choice to return to her, while little edie makes it clear she’d rather be anywhere else: “in here i’m just, you know, mother’s little daughter.” out there, who knows what she might have become.

just tacking up a picture, little edie concludes: “i’ve got the saddest life.” it’s supposed to be evidence of her cutting wit, but in light of her self-consciousness- the constant tugging on her headcovering and checking of her cleopatra make-up and primping of her painted-on eyebrows- it isn’t funny. we’re watching a thwarted actress acting her heart out. yet, because she looks incredibly uncomfortable in the camera’s glare, it doesn’t seem like acting. it seems real. which is terribly sad.

but the edies love one another and despite her fierce anger, little edie admits that the woman who just told her “everything is perfectly disgusting on account of you,” is actually “a lot of fun.” she says, “i hope she doesn’t die.” we know she died less than a year later. we know that edie would live on for 26 years. alone. and even with music, art, and dance, in little edie’s words, “raccoons and cats become a little bit boring. i mean for too long a time.”

so just for a glimmer of a moment, grey gardens kind of scared me. i thought: i have a cat! i could easily have 27! i think raccoons are cute! i wear florals with plaids! i’m single! i love my mum! am i doomed? i know i’m not. but the next morning, just after stepping out of the shower and donning pink leopard-print houseshoes, a red kimono, and wrapping my hair in a lime green towel, a telemarketer called. he cheerily inquired, “ma’am, may i please speak with the male head of the household?” alarmed by this unexpected discrimination, i indignantly replied- a little too loudly and in an unexpectedly spitfire tone- “i’m the only head in this household!” and promptly hung up.

i stood there, a staunch woman in a revolutionary outfit, laughing. my cat smiled. in the end, it’s probably worth the very very long wait.

well shucks, norman mailer

Posted on by

(4 april 2010)


norman mailer and i do not get along. i’m just not that into him.

but after reading THIS (and THIS and THIS), i’m re-evaluating.

and yes, he may or may not have been married to three women simultaneously and undoubtedly stabbed one. and he did a biographical hatchet job on my dear marilyn. and he justified adultery as “literary research” and on top of that he was a horrible misogynistic bastard. yes, yes, yes. i get all that.

but then there is this: “the night would end on the floor of her living room. he promised to write…”

this makes me kind of love norman mailer. partly because the man knew how to end an evening, but more so because he promised to write. and, really, that’s all a girl needs. the promise of writing. who even cares if it comes true.

my dear norman mailer

Posted on by

(10 november 2007)


my dear norman mailer,

you’ve died.

and i don’t quite know what to make of this other than the fact that it makes me kind of sad.

yes, you held some beliefs that were total bunk. you exploited marilyn as a biographical sex-toy. you crusaded against the women’s liberation movement. you participated in a literary smackdown with gore vidal. you had nine chidren and six wives, the second of which you stabbed.

as if this weren’t enough of a biographical legacy, in your neediness and contrivance towards the hemmingway masculine ideal, you cultivated a belligerent literary machismo that was debilitatively seared across everything you ever wrote.

despite the feigned nonchalance, you so obviously wanted to be remembered. you so obviously needed to be a big deal. the footfall of your every stomping sentence gave you up.

you never seemed quite real. you always were a bastard.

but i’m a girl who likes bad boys and if they have a way with the pen, that’s better and better.

60 years ago, you emerged as the enfant terrible of the american literary scene and set out to write The Great American Novel. perusing your obituaries this morning, it seems to be the general consensus that you never did. but does that really matter?

in graduate school, my biography class covered the lost art of obituaries. the first line is crucial. you can fumble your way on the rest, blithely romping through schooling and careers and wives and honorary doctorates, but you can’t fake that first line. that first line is a bitch.

it’s a bitch i think you, norman mailer, would’ve enjoyed slapping around. and i think even you- the combative tease, the unremitting bombast, the cocksure grump with dialectic derring-do- would be satisfied with the title history has bestowed upon you.

the macho prince of american letters.

well played, norman mailer, you bastard you.

norman mailer + me

Posted on by

(17 may 2007)


lee harvey oswald is of little concern to me beyond the fact that he became a political assassin at the age of twenty-four (a historical fact all too often obscured by a receding hairline). i believe oswald killed kennedy, that he did it alone and that the grassy knoll is a load of bunk. and i abhor oliver stone for ever convincing me otherwise.

so i’m not quite sure what compelled me to pick up oswald’s tale. because norman mailer and i don’t really get along. he’s played dirty with my girls and you can’t just forgive a guy that. but still… a girl does like to forgive.

i have this suspicion that good old norman mailer isn’t really a bastard. he’s just a guy who was unfortunately born after ernest hemingway and who has spent his entire career trying to strut a literary machismo of equivalent value. and that’s tough. as norman mailer has illustrated.

norman mailer so desperately wants to be a bastard. his neediness is discomfiting. you can see it right there on the page. in the way he swaggers about, cocksure in his dialectic derring-do. strutting his syntactical anarchy. it’s in the laziness of his transitions, the ballast of his phrasing, the sly jabs of his judgments.

he comes off as the kind of guy that slaps his women and keeps a rifle by the nightstand and boxing gloves on the bedpost. or at least he comes off as being the kind of guy who wants to come off as that kind of guy. norman mailer wants the world to believe he is a bastard. his every word is a naked testament to this need.

which is kind of sad. and which, once we got past the honeymoon period, has annoyed me on nearly every single page of oswald’s tale. i want to say, norman mailer, stop being a bastard.

because norman mailer is being a bastard. and honestly, i don’t know if norman mailer is telling the truth anymore. if he’s really being norman mailer and norman mailer really is a bastard or if he’s writing as he thinks Norman Mailer Writing As A Bastard & Great Masculine Writer of the 1950s would write. and that, in turn, makes me doubt whether norman mailer actually spoke to all the people he says he spoke to and whether he actually has any clue what happened with oswald in russia and, in the pits of untrusting despair, i can’t help but wonder whether this whole 719-page pulitzer prize winning masterwork is the figment of a deranged historical revisionist, which makes me want to throw down the mammoth thing and scream norman mailer, you bastard you.

because this bastard can write. it’s just that his writing is wrapped up in brawn and testosterone and spit. it’s a splashy cocktail of aggression that leaves me longing to put on a diaphanous gown and marabou shoes and drink daquaris in feminine rebellion. because really, deep down, i think it’s all a pose.

i think secretly norman mailer rises early in the morning to make pancake breakfasts for his unfortunately named wife norris. that he has a persian cat named fifi whom he worships and who stars in the occasional short story he pens for his grandchildren who call him “paw-paw.” that he secretly gets a kick out of wearing pink argyle socks. that he licks the lids of his jell-o swirl pudding snacks and separates the chocolate 2/3s from the vanilla. that he’s fearfully afraid of needles and slugs and that they make him squeal like a little girl and that he’s fearfully afraid people will find that out.

i don’t think norman mailer is a bastard. because i don’t think men who dedicate books to their wives can be bastards. at least not real ones. no, i think he’s lying to us all. norman mailer, you bastard you.

required writing

Posted on by

(4 march 2009)

there are times when i feel required to write about something.

for example, whenever a kennedy runs into a road block, runs for office, runs for… well, anything. it seems at those times, as the resident Group Keeper of All Kennedy-Related Things, i should have a rush of analysis at the ready. or whenever anyone in any way vaguely-related to the tv, film, or theater of my childhood, a first family, or tabloids dies. i’m there with the eugoogley. hell, i am the girl who has blogged about every email i’ve ever received regarding the dvd release of the mary tyler moore show. because these are terribly important things.

and the release of the new u2 album yesterday was a terribly important thing. but then, it really wasn’t.

i should preface this with the fact that i love u2. i counted down to every single/album/show, downloaded every findable bootleg, read every book, condemned every writer of a bad review, dissected every lyric. i believed the nonsense that all that you can’t leave behind was a step forward. i thought the endless stream of greatest hits drivel was a musical boon.

but, if we’re being honest, the only emotion i felt this past december upon hearing that u2 would finally be releasing a new album (their first in 5 years) was dread. unadulterated dread.

i didn’t really think about it much then. now, i think i didn’t think about it then because i was afraid i would wind up thinking what i’m thinking now.

which is that maybe u2 will never be u2 again. at least not my u2.

yes, they’ll be the big stadium act that puts on the same two-hour show night after night (a gimmick i’ve defended for years though deep in the pits of my heart it pisses me off). bono will keep running around the heart/circle/square during “streets.”

adam will always be stage left. edge will always be stage right. at one point during the evening, like foreign dignitaries deigning to visit the poorer nation next door, they will each saunter over and briefly acknowledge the fans on the opposite side of the stage before returning to their respective corners.

u2 will always do an encore. and in that encore, bono will always pull a girl up on the stage during “with or without you” and all us sad-saps in the audience will always be thinking, oh my God, bono just pulled that girl up ON THE STAGE and now he’s going to SING TO HER!!! to us, this will seem shocking though it is something he has done in every performance since 1989.

that is u2.

but that is not my u2. and, sadly, i’m fast coming to the realization that perhaps my u2 has died.

what we are left with is a sad, scared u2. a u2 that takes 5 years to produce an album that sounds curiously similar to the 2 albums they put out in the 5 years before that.

they have set up camp in a dead end.

this realization has left me strangely bereft. longing for the u2 that could form a band before they knew how to play their instruments. that could make four videos for a song called “one.” that could make “with or without you” run 10 minutes long. the u2 that could close an album with a song so against where they were that it could only be sung by johnny cash.

for the most part, everybody seems ok without all that, with this new u2. the guardian declared this their “greatest studio album ever.”

seriously. people. what the hell?

maybe everyone else reached the point of lowered expectations in advance of me.

or maybe this is just the normal process of realizing the heroes of your youth have become old men.

take this tangle of conversation and turn it into your own prayer

Posted on by

(22 january 2007)


in the midst of everything, there is u2. because there’s always u2. they’re my home base. we may go some days or months without each other, but i always come back.

recently, it has been nothing but pop, an album i’ve always appreciated for its jarring incompleteness. the band got rushed and didn’t have time to relentlessly perfect and dope it down. as a result, pop is a raw spiritual undoing splashed in enough glitter that it can almost masquerade as a party.

it’s an odd juxtaposition, and it can be hard to take it all in. u2 albums are legendary for their cohesiveness. listening to pop is like reading a book of short stories when you were expecting a novel.

it’s a tangle of chatter and tight spots and fast escapes and sudden shifts. the pop in the title isn’t just pop music. it’s the pop that comes after the exhilaration and freedom of achtung baby and zooropa. it’s the bubble’s burst.

to me, it’s as though the protagonist has found himself at a strip club in the middle of the day, and it suddenly hits home how far he’s wandered. in “mofo” he pleads with his dead mother to show him how to get out of the mess he’s in. and that’s pretty much the high point. you wind up with him on his knees, speaking directly to Jesus, pleading, wake up, dead man– with someone talking in the background all the while, as if to emphasize his insignificance.

this sounds terribly depressing, but i swear it’s not. because of all u2’s albums, i think this is the most honest. it captures them in a weird moment- on a bender in southern france struggling with the pressures of their art, their addictions, their women and their past. it’s not all pretty (“miami” is an ugly, ugly song), but it’s there. it’s their bullshit. it’s real.

this past week i listened to pop day and night, over and over. and for the first time, it wasn’t jarring or incomplete. it was just a glitzy little exhausted naughty mess. unapologetically so. and that’s rather beautiful. what a pity the boys have been apologizing for it ever since.

while you can stand there, you could move on this moment

Posted on by

(30 september 2006)

ie. reading u2


achtung baby has always been my favorite album and i didn’t ever really understand why. it’s not an unconditional affection. i would argue it hasn’t held up quite as well as the much-maligned pop, which- though it’s a far less solid album- has such an avant garde sound that it could be released tomorrow and floor everyone. am also not a fan of the album version of “who’s gonna ride your wild horses.” the temple bar remix was better. but narratively speaking, achtung baby is without flaw. and we know how i love to speak narratively.

as a writer, i have to “read” everything- music, novels, poems, etc. and i know we’re not supposed to read anything but biography as biography, but- and this could be why i’m a biographer- i think it all is. so while i can think of achtung baby as not necessarily being bono’s journey, i can’t see it as just a random collection of great songs. as with a book, there’s a cohesive plot. however unintentional or haphazard, there is a story.

as though it were sweet valley high, i can no longer read u2’s oeuvre as anything but a continual narrative. because it so obviously is a continual narrative. the continental american tour of the joshua tree and rattle & hum leaves the protagonist dazed and exhillarated, stumbling about the berlin subway system in the opener of achtung baby. he’s done with the past and he’s frantic for something new. he screws it up and it takes him thirty-four songs to recover. you could love “mysterious ways” without ever having that context. but, to me, u2 is an important band because of that context.

reading the complete u2- ie. playing their albums in a chronological cycle- my favorite chapter comes between pop and all that you can’t leave behind. when the page is turned from the defeated, exhausted plea of “wake up dead man,” where the protagonist is literally on his knees begging for the second coming, to the total euphoria of “beautiful day.” obviously to get to the beautiful day, you have to plod through a whole hell of crap. lyrically, u2 spent all of the 90s doing this and i’d never before realized how that pulled together to make a central point.

in the grim little trip of achtung baby, there’s infatuation, adultery, manipulation, desperation, treachery, forgiveness, euphoria, resignation, love, hope, and a phone call from hell. it’s about taking a risk and getting burned and wounding everyone around you. it’s no accident that the protagonist continues reassuring himself with the line “it’s alright.” the ticking bomb in “love is blindness” leaves him paralyzed, numbed- by images, the past, the future- in the hypnotic zooropa. for nine tracks, he is “faraway, so close!” yet he cannot let go. he wanders away and doesn’t even have the heart to sing the last song himself. instead he hands it over to johnny cash and winds up in the discotheque of pop, the glitzy tangle of conversational tidbits born from a month-long bender in the south of france.

the narrative cohesiveness between these albums has fascinated me ever since all that you can’t leave behind was released. all the critics said u2 were “getting back to their sound.” what resonated with me was that their protagonist, after falling and crawling and pleading and running and wandering, had finally dragged himself to the ledge and made the jump. the jump that is laid out in “zoo station” when he says he’s ready for what’s next. when he repeats that he’s ready for the push.

and we believe him and we think achtung baby is that jump but it isn’t. listen to “mysterious ways” and you hear the line while you can stand there, you could move on this moment, follow this feeling. he wasn’t ready for the push in track 1 and he stayed put through track 9. achtung baby and the two albums after are all the scary shit that happens when you don’t jump, when you hold back, when you run away, when you try to throw your arms around the world. it’s only with the final plea of “wake up dead man” that he at long last takes the leap (i swear he’s gliding through the air in the last 40 seconds). and it’s only in “beautiful day” that he realizes the leap wasn’t so scary after all. that after the flood, all the colors came out.

i do not want this

Posted on by

(20 november 2007)

i have this little thing for alexandre dumas. little isn’t quite the right word. enormous literary crush is probably more appropriate.

but i do not want this.

i’m supposed to be having a torrid, raging love affair with mr. shelby foote. we’re fighting the “wawah.” have been since april 2006. having learned nothing from the johnny rebs, i said i’d be through in a couple weeks and the years have dragged on and on and on and we aren’t even to perryville yet. mcclellan’s still sitting on his ass and hundreds more bazillions of men have to die before shelby and i are rid of each other. and that’s only volume 1.

this seemed kind of awesome in the beginning. what with the “rebellion” and the “rebels” and the “war of aggression,” it was all very star wars and there were all these people with fancy names toting sabers, taking hills and commanding cannon-bearing boats. kind of hot. but now, not so much. war’s fine and all, but, really, it lacks glamour. glamour and velvet. and a girl really needs glamour and velvet from time to time.

you know who has glamour and velvet ALL THE TIME? yep. that good old boy dumas. but i can’t be having enormous literary crushes nor dalliances with dumas. shelby foote holds my keeping for volumes 1-3.

but still…

shelby’s dead so he’s not producing much these days, which is only to be expected. most authors cease writing after they die. most authors are mortal. but then most authors are not dumas.

as if it weren’t enough, as if it weren’t plenty that i have this enormous literary crush, dumas couldn’t be content with that. no, he had to go and write another book. from the grave. never mind the fact that he’s been dead for centuries, he had to go and have a long-lost manuscript (because, i ask you, what on earth is sexier than a long-lost manuscript?!) suddenly unearth itself as if by magic. obviously, specifically to torture me.

as was to be expected, it was an enormous manuscript that was subsequently published in an enormous hardback book. and that’s kind of a dealbreaker.

i do not want this.

there are so many reasons why this is not feasible, why this absolutely will not work. why we are doomed- dumas and i and his big-ass book. chief among them the many reading-related injuries i would sustain attempting to balance a 750-page hardback while standing amidst a crowded, careening train.

i do not want this.

but that hasn’t stopped me from visiting it (and we shall have to call it “it” for now because the name is so enrapturing i swoon at the bare mention) in various bookstores across our fine town, just to caress its spine and flutter its pages, teasingly savoring the aura of the anticipated awesomeness therein (because it’s dumas- it will be awesome). it didn’t prevent me from dragging multiple friends over to genuflect before barnes & noble’s dumas section.

nor did it keep me from reading the black tulip and the three musketeers as a distraction, which, in turn, intensified my lust and sent me scouring reviews so that i stumbled across this sentence: “it’s full of melodrama and coincidence, shamelessly studded with every possible romantic cliché and period flourish.” because melodrama and coincidence are one thing, but oh to be studded with romantic cliché. throw in some glamour and velvet and be still my heart.

but i do not want this.

i can live, i must live without meeting the last cavalier: being the adventures of count sainte-hermine in the age of napoleon, though the title make me weak in the knees. i can content myself with shelby. i can wait it out. the interminable 12-17 months before the count sainte-hermine deigns to make his appearance in paperback. that’s plenty of time in which to fight a wawah. i can do this. i will do this.

i do not want this book.

but, by God, isn’t it the sexiest thing you’ve ever seen?