Parade's End

 

I have just finished reading all four books of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End.  The Vintage Classics edition is 906 pages long.  I started losing steam when went off on the tangent of Tietjens' brother and his French mistress in the last book, The Last Post.  But up to then, I simply loved it.  I have read many American and British novels about World War I, even some of the poetry.  In fact, I've read so many I'm not certain how I missed this.   It's better than Siegfried Sassoon's trilogy, or Robert Graves' Good-bye to All That.  Having seen the HBO miniseries, I have renewed respect for Tom Stoppard's adaptation.  Amazingly good, of a totally nonlinear, multiple streams-of-consciousness work.

An Accidental Autobiography

I've spent the last ten days reading Barbara Grizzuti Harrison's autobiography, written in 1996.  I read her book about Italy, Italian Days, a few years ago.  There is a lot of truly terrific writing in it.  A wonderful section on women and their perception of their bodies.  An appreciation of Charles Rennie Mackintosh.  Another of Red Barber.  Fascinating descriptions of places she'd lived (India, Tripoli).  Her terrifying Brooklyn childhood (her mother was deeply crazy, and her father sexually abused her for years).

But the descriptions of the love of Harrison's life, who she calls "Jazzman," really made me wonder about her own sanity.  I am well aware that a. love makes people do stupid things (and I have done many); and b. I've become  more empathetic as I'm aged.  So to read that this intelligent, experienced, articulate woman, well past 50, is doing things like calling Jazzman's wife and harassing her, really pulled me up short.  I was embarrassed for her.  It made me uncomfortable.  And the rest of my experience of reading the book was not only trying to justify her behavior, but trying to match up that Harrison with the Harrison that the rest of the book implied, the Harrison who could write like this.

Harrison bought a carved monkey with a hole in its center in Bali.  "When I kept my monkey on a table surface, it used occasionally, in the night, to change position, and I would see it in the morning staring in a direction opposite the one I had last seen it in.  I am fully aware of the fact there are no inanimate objects.  Tired of the monkey's willfulness, I hung it on a wall, where now it seems content to be."

Happy Birthday, GCT

It may not be my favorite public space in Manhattan, but it's way up there.  Grand Central has turned 100 years old.  It has its own website:  http://www.grandcentralterminal.com/  There were multiple articles in the New York Times about it. 

There was also a very cool "10 Things You Didn't Know" piece in Time Out New York by Nadia Chaudhury.  My personal favorite trivia bit is that Track 34 (because unlike the other tracks, it doesn't have columns) was the location of Fred Astare's dance up the ramp in The Bandwagon. 

Alec Guinness

I lifted this off of Richard Toscan's recent LinkedIn post: 

Alec Guinness said, "There are three ways, I suggest to deal with critics. The first, most sensational, slightly dangerous but highly successful if carried out with sincerity, is to hit them." 

Sounds just like him.

Brecht in America

I have spent the last few days skimming Bertolt Brecht's FBI file.  Some parts have been redacted, but there is still plenty to read.  It's about 300 pages long, and covers 1941 to 1947.  The FBI was quite exhaustive in their surveillance, both visually and electronically.  

The link to part one is here:  http://vault.fbi.gov/Bertolt%20Brecht%20/Bertolt%20Brecht%20Part%201%20of%204/view

There are plenty of people that you've heard of mentioned in the file:  Brecht; his wife; his mistress; his musical collaborator Hans Eisler; his children, Barbara and Stefan; Peter Lorre; Heinrich Mann; Charles Laughton; Elsa Lancaster; Elisabeth Bergner; etc.  I think the only one of them still alive is Eric Bentley. 

I'm not sure why the FBI chose Brecht's file to highlight.  Most of the informants' names are blacked out-  the only one that I recognized was Mrs. Robert Siodmak (we'd watched "The Killers" a few nights before). 

Swann's Way

The past few weeks I've been reading Swann's Way (Lydia Davis' 2002 translation).  I felt like not having read Proust was a gap in my education.  I'm not that well-read in French fiction, that's for certain, aside from Flaubert, Hugo and Balzac. 

So I finished reading Swann's Way.  I have no great desire to read the rest of In Search of Lost Time.  I really enjoyed Part I:  Combray, and the following two (Swann in Love and Place Names:  The Name) less and less.  A few years ago I knew a playwright who was trying to dramatize Swann in Love, and that still makes no sense to me.

Here's a quotation from the first part of Combray:
"I find the Celtic belief very reasonable, that the souls of those we have lost are held captive in some inferior creature, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, effectively lost to us until the day, which for many never comes, when we happen to pass close to the tree, come into possession of the object that is their prison.  Then they quiver, they call out to us, and as soon as we have recognized them, the spell is broken.  Delivered by us, they have overcome death and they return to live with us."

My Trip to Kansas

Back in October and November, I did a residency at the William Inge Theatre Festival (Peter Ellenstein, Artistic Director) in Independence, Kansas.  I shared Inge's birthplace with Adam Szymkowicz, who was working on a new musical about pan-sexual female pirates.  Adam was an excellent housemate!

Peter  took the beautiful photograph of the combined casts and creators of "My Dark and Scurvy Heart" (Matt Sherwin, lyricist, is sitting next to me; and Adam Szymkowicz is behind Forrest Attaway's head) and my play, "The Benders," which is set in southeastern Kansas.  Our shared actors were the wonderful Joe Gomez (the man with the mustache) as Johnny; Hannah Joyce-Hoven (next to Joe) was Actress #1 (who was so good I wrote more for her); Forrest Attaway (next to Hannah) was Actor #1; the lady in green was our beloved director Tamara Fisch; I'm in between her and Matt Sherwin; Sean McDermott (so funny, and so much menace, played Pa); Cady Huffman (yea!) played Ma, and Nellie McKay played Kate.

There is a zoo in Independence which I did not get to on my previous trip.  But Tamara and I made an effort to visit it this time.  It is, as Cady Huffman describes it, "a zoo with a door."  It is free.  There are monkeys on an island.  There are burros who tried to follow me.  And there were some pretty fine looking swans (this is my artistic photograph of the swan and its reflection