NYTimes Article on Nabokov

n a Sketchy Hall of Mirrors, Nabokov Jousts With Death and Reality

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

THE ORIGINAL OF LAURA

(Dying Is Fun)

By Vladimir Nabokov

Illustrated. Edited by Dmitri Nabokov. 278 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $35.

Given the shape of Vladimir Nabokov’s own life, it’s hardly surprising that death — and its cousin loss — permeated his fiction like a potent but noxious perfume.

Nabokov’s wealthy, aristocratic family was forced to flee Russia in the wake of the Revolution, and in 1922 his father, a liberal politician, was shot at a rally in Berlin, trying to protect another man from an assassin. The Nazis would later drive Nabokov and his wife and son from Europe to America, where they moved from sublet to sublet, motel to motel. Although he gave up his beloved Russian and reinvented himself as one of the great prose stylists of the English language, an exile’s detachment and nostalgia would always lurk beneath the surface of his playful, glittering prose, and a heightened awareness of mortality would create a powerful undertow in his novels and short stories.

Indeed, death comes to Nabokov characters with astonishing swiftness, variety and heartlessness. He famously dispatched the narrator’s mother in “Lolita” with a two-word parenthesis “(picnic, lightning)” and subjected other creations to death by fire, poison, ski jump, suicide, bus accident, strangulation, gunshot, assorted illnesses and firing squad.

In “The Original of Laura” — fragments of a novel that Nabokov left unfinished at his death and that his son, Dmitri, decided, after much agonizing, to publish against his father’s wishes — he imagines the death of his protagonist, a writer and neurologist named Philip, as a sort of Nietzschean act of will, as an exercise in self-erasure conducted body part by body part, beginning with his toes. It is the ultimate fantasy of a writer who wants to exert complete control over the narrative of his own life.

“The process of dying by auto-dissolution,” Philip asserts, “afforded the greatest ecstasy known to man.”

Philip’s grotesque story was sketched out by Nabokov on index cards, which, according to his son, he worked on “feverishly” during the last months of his life in a hospital in Lausanne, Switzerland; he left express instructions with his wife, Vera, that “Laura” should be burned if it remained unfinished at the time of his death.

Vera Nabokov (who had once saved “Lolita” from going up in smoke, when her husband became convinced that it would always remain a victim of incomprehension) failed to carry out this task, her procrastination due, her son writes, “to age, weakness and immeasurable love.” After years of procrastination himself, Dmitri decided that his father, who died in 1977, or his “father’s shade,” would not “have opposed the release of ‘Laura’ once ‘Laura’ had survived the hum of time this long.”

Was Dmitri right to publish “The Original of Laura: (Dying Is Fun)”? Do the index cards (reproduced with meticulous care by the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, in an ingenious punch-out format) represent, as Dmitri has said, “the most concentrated distillation” of his father’s creativity? Does this fragmentary manuscript constitute the makings of “a brilliant, original and potentially radical book”? Or does the unfinished manuscript — like works left behind by Ernest Hemingway and published after his death by his estate — simply feel like an embarrassing and unfortunate coda to the master magician’s oeuvre?

In many respects, the release of a rudimentary version of his last novel does a disservice to a writer who deeply cherished precision and was practiced in the art of revision. Just as “The Enchanter,” a precursor to “Lolita” that was written in 1939 and published after his death, reads like a crude, often flat-footed version of its famous descendant, so these fragments of “Laura” — so cryptic and sketchy — represent an incomplete, fetal rendering of whatever it was that Nabokov held within his imagination.

Yet, at the same time, these bits and pieces of “Laura” will beckon and beguile Nabokov fans, who will find many of the author’s perennial themes and obsessions percolating through the story of Philip, an “enormously fat creature” with “ridiculously small feet, ” and his wildly promiscuous wife, Flora, who seems to have been the inspiration for a fictional character named Laura.

Like the heroine of “Lolita,” Flora-Laura was a nymphet who attracted the attention of her mother’s lover — in this case an importunate Englishman named Hubert H. Hubert (bizarrely recalling Humbert Humbert in “Lolita”). And like so many of the author’s earlier heroes, Philip is a writer whose transactions with life and art mirror Nabokov’s own jousting matches with reality and his love of artifice and sleight of hand.

In these pages readers will find bright flashes of Nabokovian wordplay (“The potentate had been potent till the absurd age of 80”) and surreal, Magritte-like descriptions: “The street lights were going out in alternate order, the odd numbers first. Along the pavement in front of the villa her obese husband, in a rumpled black suit and tartan booties with clasps, was walking a striped cat on an overlong leash.”

They will also find some small, walk-on parts that read like parodic self-portraits: a tennis teacher “who had coached players in Odessa before World War I and still retained his effortless exquisite style”; a professor of Russian literature, “bored to extinction by his subject”; and an “old illusionist who is able to go behind a screen in the guise of a Cossack and instantly come out at the other end as Uncle Sam.”

Most hauntingly, given the circumstances of its composition, “Laura” explores the subjects of death and the otherworldly with contemplative urgency. Philip speaks of finding a way “to woo death,” of discovering “an element of creativeness” in the willful “process of self-obliteration.” And there are notes about how extinction can signify an “absorption into the divine essence” — notes suggesting that art affords an escape route from the chronological tyranny of time, and that death, like a caterpillar’s entry into a chrysalis, may only be a stage of transformation on the way toward rebirth as one of the author’s beloved butterflies.

The final irony concerning “The Original of Laura,” of course, is the fact that its very form — an incomplete manuscript — recalls a favorite Nabokovian device: the notion of a set of “strange pages” or imperfect scribblings found, edited or annotated by another character. This device — H. H.’s memoir edited and published after his death (“Lolita”), say, or John Shade’s poem, introduced and commented upon by a scholar named Charles Kinbote (“Pale Fire”) — was not only a clever, postmodernist frame deployed by Nabokov in his endlessly inventive pursuit of complication, but it was also a sort of metaphysical statement on Art and the Artist, a rumination upon the inscrutable mysteries of creation.

American Lit. Students/Final Paper Prompt

American Lit. Final Paper:

For your final project, you are free to tackle any of the main concerns/themes/literary trends we’ve discussed throughout the semester by constructing an analytical essay that discusses AT LEAST ONE text we’ve read in class. You are certainly welcome to include discussions of OTHER texts (and by texts I mean film, video, visual art, other literature, etc.) having to do with our focus) IN CONJUNCTION WITH your discussion of at least one of our texts.
The paper should pose an argument or a means of reading/viewing/thinking about the texts(s) with a well-developed thesis statement, textual evidence, and outside support. You may consider exploring a particular thematic issue or formal issue, and how, ultimately the text(s) under discussion relate to or deviate from mid-century American literature specifically, and American literature in general.
Consider going back over reading responses, quizzes, and midterms in order to find promising ideas you might want to explore further. You’re welcome to include discussions of Raisin in the Sun (the film), Imitation of Life, etc. as long as you include also, at LEAST ONE piece of literature from our readings.
If you have any concerns/problems settling on a topic and/or conducting research, PLEASE let me know so I can help. Also, PLEASE consider getting help from the writing tutor while drafting. I’m also happy to help if you have concerns about how to incorporate quotes and/or how to use the MLA format for citations.

Protocols:

6-8 pgs. double spaced
MLA format for textual citations AND works cited page
AT LEAST ONE assigned text for a primary source
AT LEAST TWO supporting sources (essays from academic journals, books, etc.)

Due for graduating seniors: 11/23
Due for all others: noon: 12/14

Screenwriting contest!

DREAM QUEST INTERNATIONAL SCREENWRITING COMPETITION

Opportunity Info
This year's international screenwriting competition has been developed to give recognition to screenwriters of all genres, anywhere in the world!

DETAILS

The Contest The 2009 Dream Quest International Screenwriting Competition is a screenplay contest developed by screenwriters for screenwriters. In an industry which seems nearly impossible to crack, a renegade band of like-minded screenplay aficionados have come together, to not only offer you a chance to succeed, but also a chance to have your script analyzed and critiqued by film industry professionals.

Each entry will receive a standard film industry scorecard. The scorecard will be used to evaluate the major elements of your screenplay. This standard script breakdown is a very useful marketing tool, which can be used when pitching your film script to agents and production companies.

ScriptVamp's ultimate goal is to make sure that each and every contestant who enters the 2009 Dream Quest International Screenwriting Competition comes away a winner. Whether by winning one of our many valuable prizes, or by receiving invaluable screenplay coverage, everyone who enters will come away satisfied with their experience.
Go ahead and see what all of the buzz is about for yourself and then enter your script today. Join the many satisfied screenwriters, whom we've helped, by taking part in this unique opportunity. What are you waiting for? Submit your screenplay now before it's too late! Don't let the sun rise on the contest's early deadline. Take advantage of the unbelievably low entry fees today... before they take flight and are gone forever!

For more information: https://scriptvamp.com/Dream_Quest.html

Deadlines:https://scriptvamp.com/Fees___Deadlines.html#Fees_and_Deadlines

Since Coleridge Came Up...

Check out this scene from the movie Pandaemonium--a movie I quite like, actually. 

What a Little Poetry Can Do For You

A Light in Winter

By ERIC G. WILSON

On March 16, 2002, when daffodils were swaying in the slowly warming wind of a North Carolina spring, I found myself in a snug hospital room with my wife and just-born daughter, only hours old, and I thought of ice.

A poem called “Frost at Midnight,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was on my mind. In this verse, written in 1798, Coleridge sits near his infant son, Hartley, on a winter night in England. He recalls events from his troubled life, one fraught with chronic miseries, ranging from melancholy to botched love to opium addiction to writer’s block. With a fervor usually reserved for prayer, the poet envisions a life for his son free of these problems — a vibrant, creative existence. Coleridge then asks nature itself to nurture his parental hope, invoking the potency of green summer but also, and especially, the winter’s “secret ministry of frost,” “quietly shining to the quiet moon.”

As a college professor, I had been teaching “Frost at Midnight” for years, and had decided, soon after my wife became pregnant, to read the poem to commemorate our baby’s birth. And so I did recite the poem to our girl — we named her Una — hoping, like Coleridge, that her life would be perennially blessed by leaves and ice alike, by summery days but also by the chilly periods when she would most need strength.

What intrigued and moved me about the poem was its curious suggestion that gloom and loneliness might actually cultivate a sort of luminous affection. Forlorn most of his life, Coleridge was acutely aware of the bliss of human connection. Had he led a life free of suffering he might have never realized the wondrous fullness that comes during a father’s watch over his child’s midnight sleep.

To be hollow with longing is to be suffused with love. The thirsty person best knows water. Wounded hearts realize the essence of healing.

These are Coleridge’s exhilarating and strangely hopeful conclusions. They are optimistic because they envision a world in which suffering, inevitable and pervasive as gravity, is not meaningless but rather a source of wisdom. Even in the darkest hell, there persists a consoling light, a light that pulsates all the more forcibly against its murky background. I held this hope high the day my girl was born, knowing that she, no matter how adept, would necessarily undergo failure, frustration, loss, and confusion.

Maybe these challenging episodes would push her to explore her life with more honesty, to assess with more rigor her strengths and weaknesses, and thus to discover useful truths unavailable in her more contented moments.

When Coleridge was nine years old, his own father, whom he very much loved, had died. His less-than-affectionate mother then basically orphaned him, sending him away to an inhospitable school for boys. By the time he matriculated to Cambridge, he was vacillating between anxiety and moroseness, discomforts he relieved through drinking and gambling. Perpetually distraught, he left college before receiving his degree and soon after, lonely and desperate for intimacy, married a woman he did not love. Their union turned out to be torment.

The birth of Hartley lightened his mood, but not for long. Calamity after calamity taxed his heart while also inciting a ghastly list of physical ills: insomnia, constipation, night terrors, neuralgia flare-ups, and, of course, the ill effects of laudanum overuse.

These psychological and physical afflictions pushed Coleridge into despair. As he confessed in his notebook, he was constantly beset by a “melancholy dreadful feeling” that reduced him to a catatonic state. No longer capable of conjuring stunning verses like those of “Kubla Khan,” he managed only “fruitless memoranda” on his “own Weakness.” His inability to do anything but dose on opium and jot complaints was to him “Degradation” worse even than suicide. Repulsed by his life but afraid of death, Coleridge drifted impotently between existence and annihilation, a kind of zombie. His harrowing conclusion: “We all look up to the Sky for comfort, but nothing appears there — nothing comforts, nothing answers us — & so we die.”

But if Coleridge made failure his vocation, he was very successful at it. In later life, he produced radiant descriptions of his funereal moods.

In another of his notebook entries, Coleridge compared his torment to that of fish dying on the shore, with the ocean only inches away: “The Fish gasps on the glittering mud, the mud of this once full stream, now only moist enough to be glittering mud/ the tide will flow back, time enough to lift me up with straws & withered sticks and bear me down to the ocean. O me! That being what I have been I should be what I am!”

Another time, he likened his wasted imagination to candle wax, once warm and flexible but now only stiff and dead. “The Poet is dead in me — my imagination … lies, like Cold Snuff on the circular Rim of a Brass Candle-stick, without even a stink of Tallow to remind you that it was once cloathed and mitred with flame.”

These striking images — a fish panting on lustrous muck, creativity reduced to cold tallow — arose from a mournful muse. Coleridge’s dejection begot these beauties.

This tension between grimness and genius marked the mature Coleridge’s most accomplished works: “Dejection: An Ode” (1802), “Limbo” (1810), and “Biographia Literaria” (1817). These works explore the distressing paradoxes — death is life, mystery is insight — that have driven me into my own fits of melancholy knowing.

Only months after that March day in the hospital, I sat in my study preparing for a class on Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and heard Una in another room gurgle and coo and then cry. I thought about how she would soon grow too old to play with me and then become too jaded to care about me and then leave home for somewhere else and only very seldom come back. I suddenly felt sadder than I ever had before. I felt the pain of losing her and the wonder of loving her. I adored her more for her imminent going. This wasn’t happiness, and it wasn’t pleasure. It was a more profound and durable experience, a moment encompassing both tragedy and euphoria, a child lost and a child found.

C.S. Lewis once claimed that the opening lines of “Kubla Khan” filled him with an unquenchable but rapturous yearning. He believed that such exultant aching is nothing other than joy: “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.”

The German term for this experience is, as Lewis tells us, sehnsucht, and it describes precisely what those instants when we are most alive: so sad we want to cry, so overjoyed that we weep. These antagonistic epiphanies, the inspirations of Coleridge’s genius, mark the transformative epochs of our lives.

I have been blessed by at least one such revelation, a marriage of verdure and frost. It keeps my fatherly affections as fresh as the spring, even though I know snow is never far. It holds me close to my girl as she walks into the cold distance. She is now seven years old and growing fast. She laughs as much as she cries.

Eric G. Wilson is Professor of English at Wake Forest University. He is the author of several books, including his most recent, “Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy.”

Larry Rivers/Frank O'Hara/1950's

LAST CHANCE | LARRY RIVERS: 1950S/1960S

Refurbished Reputation for a Nervy Painter

By HOLLAND COTTER

By his death at 78 in 2002 Larry Rivers had had a long and prolific career in art. Yet far from being the admired figure that his work of the 1950s seemed to promise he would be, he was regarded in the art world, to the extent he was noticed at all, as a has-been, a self-repeater working in an insubstantial, out-of-date mode.

People had forgotten how audacious his 1950s work once felt. At a time when heroic abstraction had a lock on the market, he was painting the figure, specifically the nude figures of his 60-something mother-in-law, Berdie Berger, and of his close friend and occasional collaborator and lover, the poet Frank O’Hara. And he was painting them with a fleet, Bonnardish realism that felt invigoratingly fresh and upbeat when set beside the turbidities of action painting.

He was also doing still lifes, not of fruit and flowers but of the stuff of everyday life: Camel cigarette packs, American flags, money. The result was Pop before Pop, but when that term was coined to describe a hot new movement in the 1960s, it was applied to other, slightly younger artists, not to Rivers. True, he insisted his art had nothing to do with Pop. But in career terms the association wouldn’t have hurt. By the end of that decade there was a sense that his big moment has passed, and maybe it hadn’t been all that big to begin with.

But the bubble reputation flits here, flits there. Figurative painting of Rivers’s urbane kind has come back into style in the last 10 or 20 years, and the time has lately seemed right to revisit him.

His 2002 retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington was a very mixed success. It was just too much of him at one shot, with the late work feeling noisy and gauche, kind of embarrassing. What had happened to the old, winning lightness?

But then a little surprise of a show of painting from 1952 to 1965 at the Guild Hall in East Hampton, N.Y., last year suggested that the buzz he had initially generated hadn’t been a fluke after all. And now a second show, “Larry Rivers: 1950s/1960s” at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in Manhattan, confirms that impression.

Rivers was a spark, in art and in life. Born Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg in the Bronx in 1923, he had a large and lasting ambition to be a professional jazz musician. He certainly had the requisite brains and drive. He studied composition and music theory at Juilliard, where Miles Davis was a fellow student, and through the 1940s played saxophone — and played well — in various New York bands.

Through jazz he met the painter Jane Freilicher, whose husband was a musician. She gave Rivers painting lessons; he developed a crush on her; and he decided that art was the way he’d go. Like everybody in the 1940s he studied a bit with Hans Hofmann, then with William Baziotes. He was very social. He circulated, hung out, mingled. He met people, among them Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, O’Hara and a dealer named John Bernard Myers, director of the new Tibor de Nagy Gallery, who offered him a solo.

Things happened fast. Clement Greenberg gave the show a rave. The Museum of Modern Art bought Rivers’s parodic version of Emanuel Leutze’s “George Washington Crossing the Delaware,” a picture that seemed very nervy at the time. In 1954 came the eight-foot-high O’Hara portrait, which really was nervy. It’s in the current exhibition along with several other terrific loans, including, from the same year, a portrait of a fully clothed Berger flanked by Rivers’s two young sons, both nude.

In 1958 Rivers and O’Hara collaborated on the series of lithographs called “Stones,” with the poet inserting verses among Rivers’s images. One piece from that series, called “Love,” is in the show, along with a study for another. They’re beautiful. You can see why these two fell in love: they’re so on the same wavelength. They share a metabolism.

Rivers’s painting from this time and on into the 1960s was getting ultrasketchy and semi-abstract. Everything looks a bit half-done, and that’s O.K. Casual was the look he was after, and it worked because his balances and tempos were right — when to push forward, when to rest. He was painting like a jazzman, and like someone who loved paint as paint.

In the 1960s, though, the art game was changing, and I’m not even talking about Minimalism. Pop had made flat, blank, hands-off, no-action painting cool. Warhol’s sardonically mute images of car wrecks, electric chairs and most-wanted men were redefining serious in new art.

In 1964 Rivers titled a painting of Napoleon “The Greatest Homosexual” and caused a stir. No one was yet saying the H word out loud in polite company. But by this point Warhol was already turning out a whole body of deeply queer art. Even Rivers’s most politically trenchant work, like a series of the mock-patriotic paintings called “The Last Civil War Veteran,” seemed mild-mannered and out of some larger ’60s loop.

Still, his early stardom, as I said, was real and earned. And the work holds up. The proto-Pop pack rat still lifes feel zesty and original despite all the consumer-theme work by other artists that succeeded them. The Civil War paintings — there are two in the show — are haunting little things. The nude O’Hara is an American classic: a homoerotic Statue of Liberty in combat boots, witty without being silly, tough without being heavy.

As to Rivers’s later output, and there’s a lot of it out there, that’s another tale, and a complicated one. Silly and heavy become big problems; at the same time we really don’t know what’s there. So someone should take a look and make a case, someone who basically believes in Rivers but is aware of his limitations and has astute editing skills. I nominate Tibor de Nagy Gallery. It’s doing an extremely convincing job thus far.

“Larry Rivers, 1950s/1960s” runs through Saturday at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue, near 57th Street; (212) 262-5050 tibordenagy.com.

Poets!

Hi All--

Sorry for the group/workshop confusion. Here they are:

1.

M Bridgmon

L Briedenbaugh

C Buskirk

B Cartensen

C Ciardelli

2.

S Clemente

A Collier

I Horn

A Knaack

J Lombardi

3.

C Rees

J Spangler

J Stamm

K Wetterer

Group 1 will distribute poems on Wed. 9/9 and we'll discuss them Friday 9/11 (and on from there as per the syllabus)

Also, FYI, Erica Dawson will visit us on Wed. 9/23. I know we've moved on to Intaglio by then, but I'll shuffle my

schedule around to accommodate the change. TBA. 

Tomorrow we'll discuss Big-Eyed Afraid. Please bring in your reading responses (remember I gave everyone a break this week

because of book trouble. And no more shall I). We'll have fun and play around with some exercises so be prepared to share!

For My Poets: The Power of Good Grammar

POEM

Golden Grammar

The unexpected pleasures of George Herbert's sentences.

By Robert Pinsky
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2009, at 7:00 AM ET

---

A sentence is like a tune. A memorable sentence gives its emotion a melodic shape. You want to hear it again, say it—in a way, to hum it to yourself. You desire, if only in the sound studio of your imagination, to repeat the physical experience of that sentence. That craving, emotional and intellectual but beginning in the body with a certain gesture of sound, is near the heart of poetry. For me, a great example of this principle is the first sentence of "Church Monuments" by George Herbert.

The sentence introduces a scene: a stop in the churchyard among headstones, a moment for sorting out body and mind before entering to pray. The grammatical energy that springs from these ramifying clauses—a packed syntax that would burst into a many-branched diagram on an English teacher's blackboard—expresses a corresponding energy of meditation:

While that my soul repairs to her devotion,
Here I entomb my flesh, that it betimes
May take acquaintance of this heap of dust,
To which the blast of Death's incessant motion,
Fed with the exhalation of our crimes, 
Drives all at last.

A great justification for writing in rhymes and lines is that they can help articulate this sort of intricate, forceful meaning. The pointers "while" and "here" and "betimes" and "to which" are clarified by their positions at the beginnings and ends of lines; the prolonged, nearly sprawling sentence gains shape by resolving with the concise "Drives all at last." Long ago, I learned this opening sentence by heart without intending to. Eventually, the entire poem entered my memory. Sometimes I recite it to myself during bumpy airplane landings or takeoffs.

Our ability to hear how grammar surges and twists through the sounds of a sentence, over and inside a span of lines in verse, can be developed. Musicians call a similar process "ear training." I think I learned something about poetry by asking myself to find the main verb in this sentence; "drives" does something notable, but "entomb" is at the core of that blackboard diagram. Entombing—that is, going among the tombs, temporarily and permanently—is the central action here, respectively, of the soul and the "dear flesh." The soul "entombs" itself for a few minutes of "repair" in a place that will be the flesh's eternal destiny.

I like how Herbert, in a later sentence of "Church Monuments," imagines the jet and marble headstones, with their genealogies and family names, as they "shall bow, and kneel, and fall down flat/ To kiss those heaps." The series of one-syllable verbs, describing the movement of those stone tablets over decades or a few centuries, also recapitulates the graveside actions of a distraught mourner.

Here's another grammar quiz this poem inspires me to give myself: Near the end, what is the referent of the pronoun "which" in "which/ Also shall be crumbled into dust"? Time? Dust? Glass? The hourglass or the sand in it or the time it measures? Clearly, all of the above.

The poet Yvor Winters, who first showed me "Church Monuments," emphasized the sentence shapes. He also made a great point of how little in this poem is explicitly Christian compared with most of Herbert's work. I remember Winters' voice reading the phrase "Dear flesh" in a way that made me feel both senses of "dear"—beloved and expensive. I find that pause, after the two vocative syllables, tremendously moving. Grammar, "Church Monuments" makes me think, is the soul of poetry.

"Church Monuments"

While that my soul repairs to her devotion,
Here I entomb my flesh, that it betimes
May take acquaintance of this heap of dust,
To which the blast of Death's incessant motion,
Fed with the exhalation of our crimes, 
Drives all at last. Therefore I gladly trust

My body to this school, that it may learn 
To spell his elements, and find his birth
Written in dusty heraldry and lines;
Which dissolution sure doth best discern,
Comparing dust with dust and earth with earth.
These laugh at jet and marble, put for signs,

To sever the good fellowship of dust,
And spoil the meeting: what shall point out them,
When they shall bow, and kneel, and fall down flat
To kiss those heaps which now they have in trust?
Dear flesh, while I do pray, learn here thy stem
And true descent, that, when thou shalt grow fat,

And wanton in thy cravings, thou mayst know
That flesh is but the glass which holds the dust
That measures all our time; which also shall
Be crumbled into dust. Mark here below
How tame these ashes are, how free from lust,
That thou mayst fit thyself against thy fall.

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@—George Herbert

A Note About Books

All the books I ordered for you ARE in print. Sometimes they're harder to find, especially in big-box stores like B&N's and Border's. They stock books that they know they can sell a lot of. Unfortunately that leaves out a lot of our best poetry. Robert Lowell, for example, is an interesting case. Lowell's complete poems came out just a few years ago, and boy would B&N rather you buy that expensive, hardback book as opposed to the wee little single edition of Life Studies! How evil, right? If you're having trouble finding your books, looking online is the best way to go. Either that, or head on over to OUR little text and supply store and they should all be available for you. That's why it's there. 

The point: Don't count on just hopping in your car and taking a trip to Borders to find your books. Think ahead and carefully consider how long it will take to receive your books, etc., so you can get your assignments in on time. 

For My Screenwriters:

Ben Stiller and Jerry Stahl

Posted: August 30, 2009 10:47 PM

Two Young (-ish, at the Time) Punks Attempt to Re-Write Schulberg

Read More: Ben Stiller, Budd Schulberg, Jerry Stahl, On The Waterfront, Permanent Midnight, What Makes Sammy Run,Entertainment News

I guess you could say that our relationship with Budd Schulberg was typical Hollywood: we met him, we liked each other, and in the end, we kind of broke his heart. But that didn't mean we didn't stay friends. In Hollywood, nobody will hurt you like your friends. It's a given. Sometimes it's intentional, Sammy Glick-style, but it's worse when it isn't. Which doesn't make it any easier to write about. We both ended up loving Budd and, given the shot, like many others before us, we couldn't get the movie of his classic, What Makes Sammy Run?, made. Why us? Why did we think we could do what others had not done for 60 years? Why not us, we thought at the time. Of course, here we are 13 years later, and not quite there. Okay, nowhere. And Budd, rest his soul, was a lot more gracious about our failure than his indelible Sammy would have been. As Al Manheim, Sammy's Boswell put it: "Sammy always made you feel that any confession of failure was on level with admitting that you had a yen for nothing but female dogs and ten-year-old corpses..."

Recently we sat down to fake interview ourselves about how it all didn't happen, or maybe just to commiserate -- not as much about not getting the movie made, but about how we had finally lost an unlikely friend.

Ben: In '96 I got a new agent right before The Cable Guy bombed. His first piece of advice was not to do anything for six months. He said I was in "movie jail." I had time to read. Billy Gerber and Gene Kirkwood, at Warner Brothers, somehow got the idea to give me a shot at greatness. They said why don't you direct and act in Sammy. I read the book and loved it. Sounded like a good idea to me, especially considering my incarceration. The financing for the movie I was waiting to play Jerry Stahl in -- Permanent Midnight -- was taking a while to come through (if ever, according to my agent/jailer), so I asked Jerry if he wanted to work on re-writing Budd's script with me in the meantime. Why did I ask Jerry? I knew he was a good writer and I was scared out of my mind to try to do it alone.

Jerry: Ben Stiller, fresh off Cable Guy, Jerry Stahl, fresh off a park bench in MacArthur Park. In retrospect, I can imagine how thrilled Budd Schulberg, the man who wrote On The Waterfront, must have been to have a couple of giants adapting the greatest work of his lifetime.

It was not like we were the first to tackle Sammy. The book has already shown up as a live television drama on Philco Television Playhouse in '49. It was revived in 1959 as a two-parter on NBC, with future Dynasty giant John Forsythe as Al Manheim and Larry Blyden as Sammy. Steve Lawrence starred in a Broadway musical version in 1964. (Weirdly, three years before Hair.)

Ben: In the nine months it took to get the financing for Permanent Midnight, we re-wrote Schulberg. Our idea was that there be might be a way to contemporize the story, without re-setting it in the present. Keep the flavor of the era, but give it a little more "edge"... We even started writing in a suite at the Chateau Marmont. I seem to remember a bit of Musso & Frank's time, as well. Just to get that deep "Old Hollywood" feel. When we were done we had a great (or so we thought) script. We sent it to everyone and came to our first meeting -- thought we didn't know Budd was going to be there.

Jerry: We met around a tanker-sized mahogany table at Warner Bros. that might have been put there in the thirties. Budd came in: a shock of white hair, pink-cheeks, his blue eyes slightly watery but almost supernaturally piercing. He took us in, stayed quiet for a moment, and then spoke up in his trademark soft, susurrus stutter, and let us have it. With good reason. Whoever had typed up the title page left off "based on the novel by Budd Schulberg." (I blamed Ben. Ben blamed an assistant.) When Budd brought that up, out of the gate, I kind of loved him for it. He might have been an Oscar®-winning, two-legged incarnation of Hollywood History, but he was pissed, the way any writer would be pissed. And he let us know. Once he took us to school for our heinous faux pas, however, he relaxed and voiced only mild objections to our stab at rendering his classic for the screen.

Not surprisingly, Budd had actually adapted Sammy for the screen before we ever rolled in. But nobody wanted to make his, either. Which may be one explanation of why he never leapt out of his chair screaming at the fact that he, the grand master, had to sit there and let two little pischers make carnival with his masterpiece. He was a gentleman.

There are good projects that don't get made all the time. Most aren't famous for not getting made. And most aren't written by an author who is Hollywood incarnate history, who literally penned one of the most quoted lines in Hollywood history, "I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am..." And which was what we felt like, after a while, for never being able to deliver what we knew would mean so much to Budd.

Ben: But still, we stayed in touch, years after there was any real talk of mounting the movie. Whenever I'd re-connect with Budd, he'd look at me with those alarmingly blue eyes, "Well...?" And I'd just sigh ... "Not yet, Budd, not yet." I had to get over the feeling that every time we saw each other we were both reminding ourselves of the unfinished business between us, and the frustration we both felt. I don't know if I ever did.

I gave him an award a couple of years back at some make shift film festival in Culver City. I dropped it off the podium, of course, and Budd just laughed. At some point he really could have just said, "Enough of you, Stiller, and your pseudo- Sammy crusade. You had my baby, and you didn't get it done." It would have been easy, even expected. But he didn't. Never. He always asked how my dad was, or how the project I was working on was going.

The last time I saw him was with his family at a little restaurant on the upper west side, a breakfast place. He looked dapper, as always. I could tell he was feeling a bit under the weather, a little rundown. He had a surgery, and was recuperating. We didn't discuss Sammy that last time.

Jerry: The last time I saw him, a week before his death, was in Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York. He had collapsed that morning and lost a lot of blood. But his eyes were just as intensely blue -- his cheeks still rosy. He seemed serene -- even as a frenetic parade of nurses, family and occasionally, an actual doctor stepped in to check him. I mentioned that I happened to be working on something about Hemingway, and at the sound of his name, Budd perked up. "He was a b-b-b-b-bully." Apparently the great man began to push and taunt young Budd from the moment they were introduced. "So, you think you're a writer, huh?" Eventually, Papa was unlucky enough to suggest a boxing match. He threw a punch at Budd. And Budd -- no stranger to the ring -- threw one back. That was that. "He didn't like it when you fought back," Budd said.

Everyone in the room listened with rapt fascination. It was a hell of a story.

Poetry Workshop Groups (for now)

Group 1: 

M Bridgmon

L Briedenbaugh

C Buskirk

B Cartensen

C Cardelli

Group 2:

S Clemente

A Collier

I Horn

A Knaack

J Lombardi

Group 3:

C Rees

D Shepherd

J Spangler

J Stamm

K Wetterer

Just Some Reminders...

We have to get through the obligatory first-day essays this week. Once we've accomplished this, we'll resume our regularly scheduled programs.

For lit. students: We won't start discussing Robert Lowell's Life Studies (Section II) till Tuesday of next week. If you haven't already, grab your copies and while you're at it, go ahead and grab your copies of the first few books on our schedule at least (The Crucible, The Bell Jar). You might consider beginning The Bell Jar. It's a novel (though a small one) and make take you a bit longer to get through. 

Your first reading responses will be due next Tuesday on Lowell's Life Studies (Section II). We'll discuss this in class tomorrow. 

For screenwriting students: We'll see how things go, but we probably won't begin our discussion of On the Waterfront today. However, keep reading, and we'll certainly get to it next week. 

For poetry students: Go ahead and get your copies of Creating Poetry and Big-Eyed Afraid at least. We'll discuss chapter 2 in CP on Friday and begin our discussion of Big-Eyed on Wed. of next week. Wed. will also be the day your first reading response is due. We'll discuss this in class today and/or Friday.