My saintly boyfriend has spent the better part of last night and some of this morning setting up the Wordpress Blog.
It really is vastly superior to blogger which is less complex and user-friendly but nowhere near as powerful or flexible. (Haha... I am starting to sound sort of computer literate, am I not, or at least less retarded.)
I have to go mail some things and talk to Saab re the fucked up registration but wanted to let everyone know that I would not be posting any more on The Random Review though we will leave it up. I didn't think I would change the name until I found the storefront, boarded up , in NYC: Victorian Chick.
Bob Fois in NYC said this ought to be the name for the blog and others agreed that The Random Review was not good, not reflective of my personality or the content of the blog.
There are categories: film, TV, music, theater, travel, schools (St. Augustine, Westlake School for Girls, Yale, UCSB), family, and of course lingerie..... (I won't post all the FB lingerie on to the blog, however, unless I have something substantive to say on the topic. I hardly ever buy lingerie: I just drool over pictures and I STILL have not bought the birthday baby blue silk vintage nightgown I found a few months ago... I have to find it on links and that is highly tedious...
I will be transferring about 150 essays from the FB Notes.. He will teach me tonight.
Forthcoming reviews: Ann Seymour's I've Always Loved You, James Strock's book on Reagan, Thomas Hill's Autonomy and Self-Respect, George Sand's Indiana, and Balzac's Seraphita and Louis Lambert. I hope to be a good girl and have those out in the next 6 to 8 weeks...
I look forward to meeting you all on Victorian Chick!
XOXOXO
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Monday, April 4, 2011
Too Excited to Think of Logistical Shit I Planned for Today: Luigi Dance Schedule for July Workshop Arrived!
I have to go to mail box, post office, rather, and deal with DMV and a few niggling but tiny bills... But who can think of such things when the Luigi schedule for July arrives. It is not that much and I can handle it but Mom encourages my dancing and I know she'll help.
Here it is!!
Monday-Friday: Workshop Intensive (Private): 10-10:50, Style Class: 11-12:30, Break (30 min), Intermediate/Advanced Class: 2-3:30, Repertory: 2:30-3:30
Monday: Technique 7-8:30, Thursday: Style Class, 7-8:30.
Optional for 13 bucks more: Technique Class 7-8:30, Tuesday and Wednesday.
Saturday: Workshop Intensive (Private): 10-10:50, Style Class: 11-12:30, Workshop Presentation: 12:30-1. Intermediate/Advanced: 1-2:30.
OH MY GOD. This is how I spent my summers from 8th to 11th grade. Of course I was taking buses and hitching rides before I was 16, though when I got sexually assualted at 15, by an asshole in a cream beat-up Chevy, which violated my rule of only hitch-hiking with women in BMW, Mercedes, or the equivalent, I stopped hitching for 9 months till I got my license on the morning of my 16th birthday, and drove the new Toyota Tercel coupe Grandma had bought me the month before, to Hama's 6PM class in Venice. His Jazz 2 which was very advanced.
I have to start going to the Studio City studio and will pull up the schedule. I have to start with some Jazz 1 and beginning classes as I can do a pathetic single pirouette and there is no way in hell I can do a respectable double.
Happy dance commencing presently!!!!!
(P.S: PSA for friends with girls. You have to drive them or give them cab money to their various activities. I took a ride on Sunset and Amalfi, close to Riviera Country Club where no house is under 5 million now. Reagan's ranch was up Capri all the way by Casale road, a few houses down from Abbie Schiller, a girl in carpool, whose dad Bob wrote I Love Lucy... Tommy Chong and Shelby , his lovely wife, live up there too and Shelby was in my dance class and gave me rides at times home to the Palisades.
So just hitching in areas with multi-million dollar houses is no guarantee of personal safety. I was late and there was just no time to take three buses. So I took a ride with this guy with a mustache--maybe this is where my hatred of mustaches originated--and within 45 seconds his penis was out doing peculiar things I did not understand. He pulled me toward him, tried to get me to touch it, and I started to scream in horror. The he sped up the piece of shit Chevy he was driving, chipped paint and big dents--and I screamed more. He pulled me over to him--no bucket seats in this old sedan in 1987--and I unleashed a torrent of words (I know that's a shocker): "If you don't let me out of this car right now I"m going to jump (no power locks), and then I'll get run over and I'll be killed and you will have it on your conscience that you killed a woman. Are you prepared to deal with that consequence??" He slowed down to about 3 or 4 mph , and I rolled out of the car with my dance bag. And then I limped back up to my parents house up the hill by the state part.
They were at the boat as usual. I lived alone at the house in the Palisades, while they were at the boat in the Marina from about 14 or 14.5 yrs old. And I never told them as I knew they would be very angry with me. I was pretty shaken up and just took a bath and went to sleep , obviously not making it to dance and I think my girlfriend Karin came over to spend the night, but perhaps I canceled our date.
I didn't really have a choice. My parents were at the boat. Public transportation sucks in Brentwood and Pacific Palisades to this day. Once you get to Santa Monica , it's fine, as the Big Blue Bus is frequent and runs along many main streets. I was okay but honestly, I think my aversion to the male organ which lasted well into my thirties, though of course intercourse did not bother me, originated in this unpleasant episode.
So really, if you have kids, part of the deal is either driving them to all the shit they have to do--dance, piano, band, tennis, debate, extracurriculars...--or paying someone to do so for you, even if that means just putting them in a cab. Especially if you have girls, it's very important to make sure they have safe and reliable transportation. If I had not taken a ride with this man, and kept to my rule of affluent women in luxury cars , it would have been fine. But a young girl should NEVER EVER take a ride with a man, whether he's in a Porsche or an old beat up Chevy sedan.)
Here it is!!
Monday-Friday: Workshop Intensive (Private): 10-10:50, Style Class: 11-12:30, Break (30 min), Intermediate/Advanced Class: 2-3:30, Repertory: 2:30-3:30
Monday: Technique 7-8:30, Thursday: Style Class, 7-8:30.
Optional for 13 bucks more: Technique Class 7-8:30, Tuesday and Wednesday.
Saturday: Workshop Intensive (Private): 10-10:50, Style Class: 11-12:30, Workshop Presentation: 12:30-1. Intermediate/Advanced: 1-2:30.
OH MY GOD. This is how I spent my summers from 8th to 11th grade. Of course I was taking buses and hitching rides before I was 16, though when I got sexually assualted at 15, by an asshole in a cream beat-up Chevy, which violated my rule of only hitch-hiking with women in BMW, Mercedes, or the equivalent, I stopped hitching for 9 months till I got my license on the morning of my 16th birthday, and drove the new Toyota Tercel coupe Grandma had bought me the month before, to Hama's 6PM class in Venice. His Jazz 2 which was very advanced.
I have to start going to the Studio City studio and will pull up the schedule. I have to start with some Jazz 1 and beginning classes as I can do a pathetic single pirouette and there is no way in hell I can do a respectable double.
Happy dance commencing presently!!!!!
(P.S: PSA for friends with girls. You have to drive them or give them cab money to their various activities. I took a ride on Sunset and Amalfi, close to Riviera Country Club where no house is under 5 million now. Reagan's ranch was up Capri all the way by Casale road, a few houses down from Abbie Schiller, a girl in carpool, whose dad Bob wrote I Love Lucy... Tommy Chong and Shelby , his lovely wife, live up there too and Shelby was in my dance class and gave me rides at times home to the Palisades.
So just hitching in areas with multi-million dollar houses is no guarantee of personal safety. I was late and there was just no time to take three buses. So I took a ride with this guy with a mustache--maybe this is where my hatred of mustaches originated--and within 45 seconds his penis was out doing peculiar things I did not understand. He pulled me toward him, tried to get me to touch it, and I started to scream in horror. The he sped up the piece of shit Chevy he was driving, chipped paint and big dents--and I screamed more. He pulled me over to him--no bucket seats in this old sedan in 1987--and I unleashed a torrent of words (I know that's a shocker): "If you don't let me out of this car right now I"m going to jump (no power locks), and then I'll get run over and I'll be killed and you will have it on your conscience that you killed a woman. Are you prepared to deal with that consequence??" He slowed down to about 3 or 4 mph , and I rolled out of the car with my dance bag. And then I limped back up to my parents house up the hill by the state part.
They were at the boat as usual. I lived alone at the house in the Palisades, while they were at the boat in the Marina from about 14 or 14.5 yrs old. And I never told them as I knew they would be very angry with me. I was pretty shaken up and just took a bath and went to sleep , obviously not making it to dance and I think my girlfriend Karin came over to spend the night, but perhaps I canceled our date.
I didn't really have a choice. My parents were at the boat. Public transportation sucks in Brentwood and Pacific Palisades to this day. Once you get to Santa Monica , it's fine, as the Big Blue Bus is frequent and runs along many main streets. I was okay but honestly, I think my aversion to the male organ which lasted well into my thirties, though of course intercourse did not bother me, originated in this unpleasant episode.
So really, if you have kids, part of the deal is either driving them to all the shit they have to do--dance, piano, band, tennis, debate, extracurriculars...--or paying someone to do so for you, even if that means just putting them in a cab. Especially if you have girls, it's very important to make sure they have safe and reliable transportation. If I had not taken a ride with this man, and kept to my rule of affluent women in luxury cars , it would have been fine. But a young girl should NEVER EVER take a ride with a man, whether he's in a Porsche or an old beat up Chevy sedan.)
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Where I Got the Literature/Philosophy Bug: My Father's Story as a UCLA English Major in his 70s
Dad came into his computer room today, where I have been most of the last two days, apart from the hours spent in bed, near tears, with hydrocolator on abdomen and legs, cursing the day I was born with a uterus. He said he wanted to talk to me and gave me a few documents: a play he wrote about Christianity in Beowulf, an analysis of the distinction between tragedy and pathos, and an attack on C.S. Lewis's reading of Chaucer's Troilus (with a particular emphasis on Criseyde's character).
He said he would like for me to read them and give him my opinion. This deeply touched me. My mother was an English major at UCLA, but she is not overly intellectual, not in an academic sense. She worked her way through UCLA as her father was out of the picture and poor, and her mother was not very healthy and certainly not able to help financially. So Mom worked a lot. She's brilliant, truly genius IQ, so she did well, but she was not a Phi Beta Kappa graduate, which she surely would have been if she didn't need to pay for school and also support herself the minute she moved into a studio to go to UCLA.
My father was also an English major but he never finished college. Indeed, he did not even finish half of college at UCLA. The war began and he left UCLA after his third semester, in December of 1942. My father always says my mother is the smarter of the two of them, but that he has more discipline and a more orderly mind. I would agree with this. My father thinks in outline form. He does not ask questions; he cross-examines. And he doesn't write letters; he writes memos. This greatly amuses everyone in my life. Whether he is happy or not, he will write a memo and put it in the mail (he does not use email) and there is always a header with to, from, subject, cc...
Growing up, he was enormously proud not only of my academic achievement, but my true intellectual passion, my articulate understanding of texts and my exuberance in relating this understanding. But my father fears chaos and ambiguity, far more then than now but still has an intense need for order and control, and there were times when I did not wish to communicate with him about my intellectual life because I felt that if I could not explain a messy concept, especially by the end of high school but absolutely by the beginning of college, he was frightened and even threatened. I also felt this overwhelming burden, which I have learned since then is not at all unusual among overachieving children (well, underachieving as an adult but unquestionably an overachiever in school), to "bring their parents along."
I remember the week after graduation, I went to say goodbye to Dick Brodhead, who had taken an interest in me after my long Emily Dicksinon and Stanley Cavell paper, writing my Mellon Fellowship recommendation. He was Dean of Yale, and had been at Yale all his life from undergrad to grad to faculty. He is now President of Duke, which is somemwhat bizarre. He would make a mistake his first year or two and say Bulldog when he meant Blue Devil! He told me he remembered the day when he realized he has "surpassed [his] parents [intellectually]." For him it happened, I think, soon after college. For me , it happened much earlier, because my father had not really gone to college, and studied Plato on his own during flight training for the Air Corps. He had read The Republic at UCLA, been moved by the idea of universal forms of understanding, and been thrilled to find a fresh, clean copy at the Washington State, which he writes about in glowing terms in his memoir about WWII. But I will never forget sitting with Dick Brodhead in his beautiful office in SSS, talking about family and parents (both vexed issues for me in those years and for many years thereafter).
I had an emotional episode at the end of the first term in college, fall of 1990, which my mother called a "stress reaction." It was a bit more than that , but that too is a story for another day. I was the only kid in Berkeley (my residential college) to receive four As, no minuses. The episode was at the end of the term, when I came home for Christmas, eager to chill out after having written over 14 papers (when I was not even in DS, Directed Studies, which required a paper every Friday about classics), which I meticulously revised until I was satisfied. My family was sailing to Mexico for the usual Christmas trip on which I never went after 9th grade, I think. They didn't go every year after the started in 8th grade I think, but they went a number of times, and that was just not my idea of much-needed "time off" from school, even in high school, where I worked every bit as hard as a kid at Andover or Choate. I ended up not returning to Yale, and took three semesters off for analysis as well as AIDS volunteer work, Meals on Wheels, and Wellness Center (the Santa Monica cancer center founded by Dr. Harold Benjamin, upon which Victory Partners in thirtysomething had been modeled).
After that, my father and I never really discussed my coursework in college. Then we were estranged in graduate school, when he retired from law, and eventually after 51 years of service, resigned from the CA Bar. I remember that philosophy, The Character of Philosophical Thought, taught by my college idol , Carol Rovane, gave me the most intense pain that first term. I contemplated dropping it and just taking an easy course, because for me history and political science were a breeze, with no emotional side-effects, but I hung in there. He thought I should drop it and said that philosophy would produce internal conflict in me.
He was right, but I adored it. I also had difficulty with Spenser's Faerie Queene, in my view the most difficult poem or text in the English language before modernism, which I have studied almost not at all. Perhaps Ulysses is this hard, but I never took English 129, Yale's legendary course in the English department on the epic. I took 125, Major British Poets. For the English major you only had to take one, though many people took both. 129 begins with the Iliad and ends, after two semesters, with Ulysses. Spenser's poem about Red Crosse Knight and Una is written in Spenserian stanzas, and this is a wonderful , difficult aspect of the poem. But it's not even easy to make out the plot, and in college my mind was frenetic and often chaotic, far more so than it is now, or than it was in graduate school and I struggled mightily with this text. But I was not alone. There is a joke at Yale among English majors, that one begins to have a nervous breakdown the second week of October, when one finishes Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and begins Spenser's FQ.
I hung on and went on to get an A in Rovane's class (I was in the writing intensive section and had a wonderful TA named Carol Freedman, who funnily enough, got her Ph.D. the year I graduated, which I knew because at Yale when you get your doctorate, they publish the title of the dissertation in the graduation pamphlet with everyone's name, how cool is that!)
My sister told me that it pained my father to be shut out from my intellectual life because of his three children, I was the intellectual one, though my brother went to UCLA and studied political science and economics and likes Shakespeare better than I do. But I was the one who had gone to private school from K to 12, while they had gone to public school. And I was the little scholar in the family from a pretty young age.
The difficulty with connecting with Dad about literature or philosophy is that he was afraid of ambiguity and demanded, as I experienced it, to have all concepts reduced to his intellectual system, which was impossible for me, and also, quite frankly, repugnant. So we didn't really talk about my papers. The other part, of course, was that Dad didn't really go to college, just three semesters at UCLA. And then the GI Bill paid for USC Law, and he went to work.
My sister has also told me that it deeply pained my father to be out of contact with me during his UCLA years. She said that the desire to talk to his estranged daughter about literature he could not even discuss with my mother was absolutely overwhelming. He earned an honorary B.A. and even got a diploma from the English department, which hangs over the fireplace in his living room. My father taped every single lecture and now has 16 binders, three-ring binders, with typed up transcripts from ALL lectures! It is a remarkable thing and he will certainly give them to me one day. He became friends with his professor, often taking them on the boat for what we used to call "sewer cruises," little powers around the Marina or perhaps, out of the breakwater for half an hour or so.
So it moved me, this morning, when he asked me to look over his documents. I read Beowulf in high school for AP British literature which I took as a junior because I had skipped ahead in English. I have not read it since, and I am so sad I lost a coffee table book given to me by this short , very sexy and handsome Jewish Yale School of Drama student , with a father who was VP at Paine Webber. I met him at an A and A party (Yale Art and Architecture school) and we dated for a couple months in the spring term of 1993. He later wrote for Single Guy, the Jonathan Silverman sitcom and he was a talented writer who probably made money in TV after SG as well. He bought me a Yale Press book of Beowulf, and that's the last time I have thought about this great Anglo-Saxon text.
I told him I remembered so little of Beowulf, and that of all of Chaucer (which is also quite fuzzy, with the exception of Wife of Bath tales (both the tale and the Prologue, and House of Fame, an early autobiographical poem about which I wrote an award-winning paper), the Troilus was the work I knew least. It was the last poem we read for the Robert Watson seminar which he held in his apartment on the top floor of Ezra Stiles College, and I didn't even read the Middle English. I just skimmed the modern translation and there was no final exam in the course. This is shameful but I will admit it: no one does all the reading for every seminar at Yale. I was in psychoanalysis for the better part of Yale and I will admit, that even for me, with what is acknowledged to be a formidable mind housed in a disciplined body, it was impossible to do all the reading, primary and secondary. (When I took six courses at UCLA in my senior year of high school, I did pretty much do all the reading. I am not sure how it is now. But back then, Yale was just a lot more work.)
He said it did not matter and I just thought it was so touching than he wanted me, his "kitty cat," to read his work. It is , with the exception of the play about Beowulf and Christianity all in outline form. One of the essays is twenty or thirty pages and it is all an extended outline with many footnotes. This is how my father thinks and he will be the first to acknowlege, I believe, it has to do with a profound need for order and control in all areas of life, a need which clearly originated with his mother who embodied chaos. He used to call her "the chaos that was Bebe." (This is the grandma, Jewish, who cut me out of the will, but that is a story for another day. The short version is that my half-brother and half-sister cut me back in, something I learned only last year. I call my sister my sister but she is not a full sister; we have the same father and (vastly) different mothers.)
I only skimmed a bit of it as he wanted to xerox it all for me. And then he found his essay on Wycherley's The Country Wife about which my father feels no more positively than The King's Speech or Julia and Julie (the first of these holds the title for the world's "longest, dullest fucking movie"). He wrote a scathing piece about this and it so impressed his professor , that he was asked to lunch to discuss it. Professsor Batten, I think is his name, said that Wycherley, along with Congreve, represents the very best of English dramatic comedy (I don't know if he was speaking of the whole tradition, or simply the post-Shakespearean comedies). Dad said, "Shaw represents the best of English comedy." And Batten, Dad has told me more than once, replied, "There never would have been a Shaw without Wycherley." I must say, I'll take Restoration comedy--Sheridan, Congreve, Wycherley--over Shakespeare's comedies anyday (or even Beggar's Opera, which I taught for my beloved professor at UCSB, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, and remember not at all).
My mother, quite honestly, hardly remembers all she studied in English at UCLA. My mother wanted to be an actress and only went to law school as a backup because she wasn't getting any parts. Her plan had been to enter entertaiment law and then work her way into the business that way. I don't know how many people think of doing this, much less how often this plan works, but of course, law turned out to be her calling and she never looked back. So my intellectual temperament and aspirations absolutely derive from my father, not my mother. And I am so blessed to be able to share this with him now, late in his life.
He said he would like for me to read them and give him my opinion. This deeply touched me. My mother was an English major at UCLA, but she is not overly intellectual, not in an academic sense. She worked her way through UCLA as her father was out of the picture and poor, and her mother was not very healthy and certainly not able to help financially. So Mom worked a lot. She's brilliant, truly genius IQ, so she did well, but she was not a Phi Beta Kappa graduate, which she surely would have been if she didn't need to pay for school and also support herself the minute she moved into a studio to go to UCLA.
My father was also an English major but he never finished college. Indeed, he did not even finish half of college at UCLA. The war began and he left UCLA after his third semester, in December of 1942. My father always says my mother is the smarter of the two of them, but that he has more discipline and a more orderly mind. I would agree with this. My father thinks in outline form. He does not ask questions; he cross-examines. And he doesn't write letters; he writes memos. This greatly amuses everyone in my life. Whether he is happy or not, he will write a memo and put it in the mail (he does not use email) and there is always a header with to, from, subject, cc...
Growing up, he was enormously proud not only of my academic achievement, but my true intellectual passion, my articulate understanding of texts and my exuberance in relating this understanding. But my father fears chaos and ambiguity, far more then than now but still has an intense need for order and control, and there were times when I did not wish to communicate with him about my intellectual life because I felt that if I could not explain a messy concept, especially by the end of high school but absolutely by the beginning of college, he was frightened and even threatened. I also felt this overwhelming burden, which I have learned since then is not at all unusual among overachieving children (well, underachieving as an adult but unquestionably an overachiever in school), to "bring their parents along."
I remember the week after graduation, I went to say goodbye to Dick Brodhead, who had taken an interest in me after my long Emily Dicksinon and Stanley Cavell paper, writing my Mellon Fellowship recommendation. He was Dean of Yale, and had been at Yale all his life from undergrad to grad to faculty. He is now President of Duke, which is somemwhat bizarre. He would make a mistake his first year or two and say Bulldog when he meant Blue Devil! He told me he remembered the day when he realized he has "surpassed [his] parents [intellectually]." For him it happened, I think, soon after college. For me , it happened much earlier, because my father had not really gone to college, and studied Plato on his own during flight training for the Air Corps. He had read The Republic at UCLA, been moved by the idea of universal forms of understanding, and been thrilled to find a fresh, clean copy at the Washington State, which he writes about in glowing terms in his memoir about WWII. But I will never forget sitting with Dick Brodhead in his beautiful office in SSS, talking about family and parents (both vexed issues for me in those years and for many years thereafter).
I had an emotional episode at the end of the first term in college, fall of 1990, which my mother called a "stress reaction." It was a bit more than that , but that too is a story for another day. I was the only kid in Berkeley (my residential college) to receive four As, no minuses. The episode was at the end of the term, when I came home for Christmas, eager to chill out after having written over 14 papers (when I was not even in DS, Directed Studies, which required a paper every Friday about classics), which I meticulously revised until I was satisfied. My family was sailing to Mexico for the usual Christmas trip on which I never went after 9th grade, I think. They didn't go every year after the started in 8th grade I think, but they went a number of times, and that was just not my idea of much-needed "time off" from school, even in high school, where I worked every bit as hard as a kid at Andover or Choate. I ended up not returning to Yale, and took three semesters off for analysis as well as AIDS volunteer work, Meals on Wheels, and Wellness Center (the Santa Monica cancer center founded by Dr. Harold Benjamin, upon which Victory Partners in thirtysomething had been modeled).
After that, my father and I never really discussed my coursework in college. Then we were estranged in graduate school, when he retired from law, and eventually after 51 years of service, resigned from the CA Bar. I remember that philosophy, The Character of Philosophical Thought, taught by my college idol , Carol Rovane, gave me the most intense pain that first term. I contemplated dropping it and just taking an easy course, because for me history and political science were a breeze, with no emotional side-effects, but I hung in there. He thought I should drop it and said that philosophy would produce internal conflict in me.
He was right, but I adored it. I also had difficulty with Spenser's Faerie Queene, in my view the most difficult poem or text in the English language before modernism, which I have studied almost not at all. Perhaps Ulysses is this hard, but I never took English 129, Yale's legendary course in the English department on the epic. I took 125, Major British Poets. For the English major you only had to take one, though many people took both. 129 begins with the Iliad and ends, after two semesters, with Ulysses. Spenser's poem about Red Crosse Knight and Una is written in Spenserian stanzas, and this is a wonderful , difficult aspect of the poem. But it's not even easy to make out the plot, and in college my mind was frenetic and often chaotic, far more so than it is now, or than it was in graduate school and I struggled mightily with this text. But I was not alone. There is a joke at Yale among English majors, that one begins to have a nervous breakdown the second week of October, when one finishes Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and begins Spenser's FQ.
I hung on and went on to get an A in Rovane's class (I was in the writing intensive section and had a wonderful TA named Carol Freedman, who funnily enough, got her Ph.D. the year I graduated, which I knew because at Yale when you get your doctorate, they publish the title of the dissertation in the graduation pamphlet with everyone's name, how cool is that!)
My sister told me that it pained my father to be shut out from my intellectual life because of his three children, I was the intellectual one, though my brother went to UCLA and studied political science and economics and likes Shakespeare better than I do. But I was the one who had gone to private school from K to 12, while they had gone to public school. And I was the little scholar in the family from a pretty young age.
The difficulty with connecting with Dad about literature or philosophy is that he was afraid of ambiguity and demanded, as I experienced it, to have all concepts reduced to his intellectual system, which was impossible for me, and also, quite frankly, repugnant. So we didn't really talk about my papers. The other part, of course, was that Dad didn't really go to college, just three semesters at UCLA. And then the GI Bill paid for USC Law, and he went to work.
My sister has also told me that it deeply pained my father to be out of contact with me during his UCLA years. She said that the desire to talk to his estranged daughter about literature he could not even discuss with my mother was absolutely overwhelming. He earned an honorary B.A. and even got a diploma from the English department, which hangs over the fireplace in his living room. My father taped every single lecture and now has 16 binders, three-ring binders, with typed up transcripts from ALL lectures! It is a remarkable thing and he will certainly give them to me one day. He became friends with his professor, often taking them on the boat for what we used to call "sewer cruises," little powers around the Marina or perhaps, out of the breakwater for half an hour or so.
So it moved me, this morning, when he asked me to look over his documents. I read Beowulf in high school for AP British literature which I took as a junior because I had skipped ahead in English. I have not read it since, and I am so sad I lost a coffee table book given to me by this short , very sexy and handsome Jewish Yale School of Drama student , with a father who was VP at Paine Webber. I met him at an A and A party (Yale Art and Architecture school) and we dated for a couple months in the spring term of 1993. He later wrote for Single Guy, the Jonathan Silverman sitcom and he was a talented writer who probably made money in TV after SG as well. He bought me a Yale Press book of Beowulf, and that's the last time I have thought about this great Anglo-Saxon text.
I told him I remembered so little of Beowulf, and that of all of Chaucer (which is also quite fuzzy, with the exception of Wife of Bath tales (both the tale and the Prologue, and House of Fame, an early autobiographical poem about which I wrote an award-winning paper), the Troilus was the work I knew least. It was the last poem we read for the Robert Watson seminar which he held in his apartment on the top floor of Ezra Stiles College, and I didn't even read the Middle English. I just skimmed the modern translation and there was no final exam in the course. This is shameful but I will admit it: no one does all the reading for every seminar at Yale. I was in psychoanalysis for the better part of Yale and I will admit, that even for me, with what is acknowledged to be a formidable mind housed in a disciplined body, it was impossible to do all the reading, primary and secondary. (When I took six courses at UCLA in my senior year of high school, I did pretty much do all the reading. I am not sure how it is now. But back then, Yale was just a lot more work.)
He said it did not matter and I just thought it was so touching than he wanted me, his "kitty cat," to read his work. It is , with the exception of the play about Beowulf and Christianity all in outline form. One of the essays is twenty or thirty pages and it is all an extended outline with many footnotes. This is how my father thinks and he will be the first to acknowlege, I believe, it has to do with a profound need for order and control in all areas of life, a need which clearly originated with his mother who embodied chaos. He used to call her "the chaos that was Bebe." (This is the grandma, Jewish, who cut me out of the will, but that is a story for another day. The short version is that my half-brother and half-sister cut me back in, something I learned only last year. I call my sister my sister but she is not a full sister; we have the same father and (vastly) different mothers.)
I only skimmed a bit of it as he wanted to xerox it all for me. And then he found his essay on Wycherley's The Country Wife about which my father feels no more positively than The King's Speech or Julia and Julie (the first of these holds the title for the world's "longest, dullest fucking movie"). He wrote a scathing piece about this and it so impressed his professor , that he was asked to lunch to discuss it. Professsor Batten, I think is his name, said that Wycherley, along with Congreve, represents the very best of English dramatic comedy (I don't know if he was speaking of the whole tradition, or simply the post-Shakespearean comedies). Dad said, "Shaw represents the best of English comedy." And Batten, Dad has told me more than once, replied, "There never would have been a Shaw without Wycherley." I must say, I'll take Restoration comedy--Sheridan, Congreve, Wycherley--over Shakespeare's comedies anyday (or even Beggar's Opera, which I taught for my beloved professor at UCSB, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, and remember not at all).
My mother, quite honestly, hardly remembers all she studied in English at UCLA. My mother wanted to be an actress and only went to law school as a backup because she wasn't getting any parts. Her plan had been to enter entertaiment law and then work her way into the business that way. I don't know how many people think of doing this, much less how often this plan works, but of course, law turned out to be her calling and she never looked back. So my intellectual temperament and aspirations absolutely derive from my father, not my mother. And I am so blessed to be able to share this with him now, late in his life.
Herb Morris, UCLA School of Law, Department Philosophy, Trained Analyst: Going with Mom Friday!
This man is amazing! Just wanted to give him a plug, because he has written so much on so many different things. He is a renowned philosopher of law, who has contributed both to our understanding of moral and legal philosophy. He is emeritus both in philosophy and law at UCLA.
He is also a psychoanalyst. My God, when did this man start to work? Or perhaps he's like my brilliant friend in NYC, real life and FB both, who went to college at 14 and powered through grad programs before a political career (not elected) and business success
The philosophical work focuses on "questions of moral emotions, responsibility, punishment," and his paper "Persons and Punishment" was a game-changer in writing about that topic.
His books include two literary works: The Masked Citadel: The Significance of the Title of Stendhal's 'La Chartreuse de Parme' (1968) and Artists in Evil: An Essay on Evil and Redemption in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (2009). Other books include: Essays in Legal Philosophy and Moral Psychology (1976), Guilt and Shame (1971) and finally, the seminal Freedom and Responsibility: Readings in Philosophy and Law (1961).
Mom knew him when she taught at her alma mater, UCLA Law, for one year between two government jobs. I loved it because it was the only time I saw Mom before 7 PM on weekdays and we went to get ice cream around 4 PM quite a lot. I loved that year and then she went "back to work," from my perspective, in 1981.
Professor Morris received his B.A. from UCLA, LL.B. from Yale Law and a doctorate from Oxford. I am unclear how he can be an analyst without Ph.D in psychology, which is now sufficient as long as you go through the rigors of the analytical institutes. For a long time, only M.D.s could be psychoanalysts. Big fussing as Dad would say between two major analytic institutes in LA over this, and indeed I think an old analyst whose wife was Ph.D, told me that one group within the main analytic institute in LA broke off and formed their own so that Ph.D.s could be let in. You don't need to understand everything about the human body to be a good shrink or analyst, totally absurd. And honestly, straight shinks learn almost nothing significant in med school. If they learn anything, it's in residency. And analysis is not just about meds, obviously, it's the last bastion of elite talk therapy, though of couse , you can find a smart and articulate MFCC or Ph.D. out there , if you try hard enough.
I cannot wait to hear Herb Morris, not sure if he and Mom were in school together. He's older , more like Dad's age but looks fabulous. If he published that big book in 1961, he has to be at least 8 or 9 yrs older than Mom, assuming he published it at 30. Mom was born in 1940 and would have been just 21 at time of publishing.
He is also a psychoanalyst. My God, when did this man start to work? Or perhaps he's like my brilliant friend in NYC, real life and FB both, who went to college at 14 and powered through grad programs before a political career (not elected) and business success
The philosophical work focuses on "questions of moral emotions, responsibility, punishment," and his paper "Persons and Punishment" was a game-changer in writing about that topic.
His books include two literary works: The Masked Citadel: The Significance of the Title of Stendhal's 'La Chartreuse de Parme' (1968) and Artists in Evil: An Essay on Evil and Redemption in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (2009). Other books include: Essays in Legal Philosophy and Moral Psychology (1976), Guilt and Shame (1971) and finally, the seminal Freedom and Responsibility: Readings in Philosophy and Law (1961).
Mom knew him when she taught at her alma mater, UCLA Law, for one year between two government jobs. I loved it because it was the only time I saw Mom before 7 PM on weekdays and we went to get ice cream around 4 PM quite a lot. I loved that year and then she went "back to work," from my perspective, in 1981.
Professor Morris received his B.A. from UCLA, LL.B. from Yale Law and a doctorate from Oxford. I am unclear how he can be an analyst without Ph.D in psychology, which is now sufficient as long as you go through the rigors of the analytical institutes. For a long time, only M.D.s could be psychoanalysts. Big fussing as Dad would say between two major analytic institutes in LA over this, and indeed I think an old analyst whose wife was Ph.D, told me that one group within the main analytic institute in LA broke off and formed their own so that Ph.D.s could be let in. You don't need to understand everything about the human body to be a good shrink or analyst, totally absurd. And honestly, straight shinks learn almost nothing significant in med school. If they learn anything, it's in residency. And analysis is not just about meds, obviously, it's the last bastion of elite talk therapy, though of couse , you can find a smart and articulate MFCC or Ph.D. out there , if you try hard enough.
I cannot wait to hear Herb Morris, not sure if he and Mom were in school together. He's older , more like Dad's age but looks fabulous. If he published that big book in 1961, he has to be at least 8 or 9 yrs older than Mom, assuming he published it at 30. Mom was born in 1940 and would have been just 21 at time of publishing.
Friday, April 1, 2011
From "Writing" to "Content": Reflections on LAT Editorial "All Work, No Pay" re Payment of Huffington Post Writers
As I wrote on Jeff's FB page, the LA Times may be regarded as a leftist rag with great derision by the right, but compared to the SB News Press, it represents the very best in journalism. The News Press makes the New Haven Register or Connecticut Post look like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, depending upon one's political persuasion and thus journalistic preferences.
Today's Op-Ed is by Michael Walker, a talented author who wrote "Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock-and-Roll's Legendary Neighborhood." (I loved that movie , by the way, with Frances McDormand and Kate Beckinsale, about a music industry mother of a doctor son, engaged to a beautiful but solitary scientist, slowly seduced by the world of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. There is an amazing scene where the son walks in on his mother and her boyfriend, as well as fiancee or girlfriend, not having a threesome exactly, but certainly having an interesting time....)
The dispute at the center of the article is between the Huffington Post, which does not pay its writers, and the slighted scribes, who feel exploited, and are very cranky at the moment. Arianna Huffington sold the paper to AOL for 315 million in February, so she isn't exactly hurting for cash. Last week, according to the LAT, the Newspaper Guild urged its 26,000 members to boycott, the equivalent of a "virtual picket line" until some sort of compensation is determined.
Huffington, a tough broad I am sure, though I do not know anyone who knows her, has taken her cue from a tough broad about whom I know a little bit, Mitzie Shore, the owner of the legendary Comedy Store on the Sunset Strip, which gave many luminaries in comedy their start (Leno, Letterman, Murphy, Crystal...) Shore did not pay her comedians because she regarded the Comedy Store as a "workshop" which also launched careers, careers that would prove to be lucrative. Like Shore, Huffington argues that she gives writers tremendous visibility and that this will lead to high-paying gigs. This may or may not be true, and I know a writer for the Huffington Post , Thomas Lipscomb, who wrote a piece in support of humanitarian aid to Libya. I have not spoken with him about this but will write him a private message this evening as he always has illuminating perspectives on a wide range of topics, whether I agree or more frequently, disagree.
The comedians, some of whom subsisted on "pilfered Saltines," while Shore reportedly pulled down some 20 grand a week, organized a strike and they prevailed. Huffington's position is if these writers want to strike, it's fine, because she'll just find new writers. In this era of blogging, FB, Twitter, she may very well be right.
What simultaneously interests and disturbs me is Walker's provocative penultimate paragraph: "The no-pay policy espoused by the Huffington Post is also the Web's fundamental underlying business philosophy--what the stand-up comedy business might have become had Letterman, Leno and the rest not thrown down the gauntlet. The reality is that the complicity of writers and entire publications in serving up endless freebies to the metaphorical Comedy Stores of the Web has gone a long way toward transmuting 'writing,' for which professionals have long received pay, into 'content,' which consumers expect to be free" (emphasis mine).
The comedians apparently never intended to work indefinitely for free, but having set that precedent , they gave Mitzie Shore (Paulie's mother), the opportunity to exploit them.
What I find most offensive about the idea underlying Walker's claim about writing and content is that true writing--whether in journalism or not--is desperately undervalued in our increasingly illiterate and sound byte-addicted culture with ADD. Now, "straight news," as opposed to editorials, is supposed to be , as Dragnet said, "Just the facts, Ma'am." I am not a journalist and a true journalist would quarrel with this simplistic and patronizing characterization of his work, which he may or may not claim, is an art form. I do believe that the writing of some great columnists--the Woodwards and Bernsteins of the world (or Charles Krauthammer or the comparable left-wing journalistic deity)--rises to art. At least, there is art to the writing, whether or not that writing itself should be considered an aesthetic object.
But certainly, the kind of tacky , neon-laden website that bombards a reader with facts , without any essential organization or finesse, is not the same as an orderly, integrated account of a given issue. I also find it upsetting that writers are always the low men on the totem pole, even (or especially) in Hollywood. SAG , I think, has more power and visibility than the WGA, and as I wrote on FB this week, besides the obvious fact that there can be no TV or film without the writers (there is never a shortage of actors, at least in LA and NYC), many a mediocre actor has been saved by a great writer.
And this may be a bit of a stretch--but it's my blog , so I can say anything I want--I think the failure to distinguish between content and style/form is a serious intellectual problem in our culture, particularly our literary culture. I was trained at Yale, as a critic, though I spent more years at UCSB, so I am of course on one end of the spectrum in my literary-critical leanings. I take exception to the rejection of the high/low culture distinction. Sue Grafton may be entertaining (I think other detective writers are better), but she is not Milton! While the levelling of the distinction between a philosophical and a literary text, as advocated or better, described, by deconstruction does not essentially bother me, the denial of a distinction between a poem and a newspaper article does. And I am not here even concerned with distinctions between fact or fiction, or with the complex notion of truth in life vs truth in art (versimilitude). I am merely talking about form and style.
Part of why I hated UCSB so much was the intense cultural studies focus of that department. As I wrote in my inaugural post from NYC, I don't want to focus on race, class, gender, sexuality, history, or politics in the study of literature . Of course Wordsworth talks about the French Revolution in The Prelude (Book 3 of the 1850 Prelude), but when Alan Liu (former chair of my ex-department of whom I was not a fan on any level, and he didn't think too much of me either but it did not matter as I took no courses with him), writes about the Imagination apostrophe (or the Crossing of the Alps, I don't have it here and it's been awhile) in terms of Napoleon, I get cranky.
If I wanted to study history or politics, I would do so. I like both, though I prefer history to political science. I chose to study English because I believe in the category of the literary; I believe that the analysis and understanding of literary langauge--whether in fiction , prose, or poetry--has value. I am a rhetorical critic or a proponent of rhetorical poetics (and I think deconstruction has much to teach us, though I think also that literature is essentially ethical, at least at its best, and that interpretation must move beyond the aporia, beyond indeterminate meaning or endless play of signifiers). That is, I think form is crucial and that poems and novels have rhetorical and narrative structures which demand our attention.
In short, literary texts are not simply about the what; they are about the how. And when we, as a culture, devalue writing and accept "content" as an acceptable substitute, we at once witness and preside over the demise of literacy and critical thinking. I am not pinning this heavy load on little Ms. Huffington. I am merely saying that apart from the issue of economic justice here, there is an in some ways even more insidious subtext: writing does not matter. And that does matter.
Today's Op-Ed is by Michael Walker, a talented author who wrote "Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock-and-Roll's Legendary Neighborhood." (I loved that movie , by the way, with Frances McDormand and Kate Beckinsale, about a music industry mother of a doctor son, engaged to a beautiful but solitary scientist, slowly seduced by the world of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. There is an amazing scene where the son walks in on his mother and her boyfriend, as well as fiancee or girlfriend, not having a threesome exactly, but certainly having an interesting time....)
The dispute at the center of the article is between the Huffington Post, which does not pay its writers, and the slighted scribes, who feel exploited, and are very cranky at the moment. Arianna Huffington sold the paper to AOL for 315 million in February, so she isn't exactly hurting for cash. Last week, according to the LAT, the Newspaper Guild urged its 26,000 members to boycott, the equivalent of a "virtual picket line" until some sort of compensation is determined.
Huffington, a tough broad I am sure, though I do not know anyone who knows her, has taken her cue from a tough broad about whom I know a little bit, Mitzie Shore, the owner of the legendary Comedy Store on the Sunset Strip, which gave many luminaries in comedy their start (Leno, Letterman, Murphy, Crystal...) Shore did not pay her comedians because she regarded the Comedy Store as a "workshop" which also launched careers, careers that would prove to be lucrative. Like Shore, Huffington argues that she gives writers tremendous visibility and that this will lead to high-paying gigs. This may or may not be true, and I know a writer for the Huffington Post , Thomas Lipscomb, who wrote a piece in support of humanitarian aid to Libya. I have not spoken with him about this but will write him a private message this evening as he always has illuminating perspectives on a wide range of topics, whether I agree or more frequently, disagree.
The comedians, some of whom subsisted on "pilfered Saltines," while Shore reportedly pulled down some 20 grand a week, organized a strike and they prevailed. Huffington's position is if these writers want to strike, it's fine, because she'll just find new writers. In this era of blogging, FB, Twitter, she may very well be right.
What simultaneously interests and disturbs me is Walker's provocative penultimate paragraph: "The no-pay policy espoused by the Huffington Post is also the Web's fundamental underlying business philosophy--what the stand-up comedy business might have become had Letterman, Leno and the rest not thrown down the gauntlet. The reality is that the complicity of writers and entire publications in serving up endless freebies to the metaphorical Comedy Stores of the Web has gone a long way toward transmuting 'writing,' for which professionals have long received pay, into 'content,' which consumers expect to be free" (emphasis mine).
The comedians apparently never intended to work indefinitely for free, but having set that precedent , they gave Mitzie Shore (Paulie's mother), the opportunity to exploit them.
What I find most offensive about the idea underlying Walker's claim about writing and content is that true writing--whether in journalism or not--is desperately undervalued in our increasingly illiterate and sound byte-addicted culture with ADD. Now, "straight news," as opposed to editorials, is supposed to be , as Dragnet said, "Just the facts, Ma'am." I am not a journalist and a true journalist would quarrel with this simplistic and patronizing characterization of his work, which he may or may not claim, is an art form. I do believe that the writing of some great columnists--the Woodwards and Bernsteins of the world (or Charles Krauthammer or the comparable left-wing journalistic deity)--rises to art. At least, there is art to the writing, whether or not that writing itself should be considered an aesthetic object.
But certainly, the kind of tacky , neon-laden website that bombards a reader with facts , without any essential organization or finesse, is not the same as an orderly, integrated account of a given issue. I also find it upsetting that writers are always the low men on the totem pole, even (or especially) in Hollywood. SAG , I think, has more power and visibility than the WGA, and as I wrote on FB this week, besides the obvious fact that there can be no TV or film without the writers (there is never a shortage of actors, at least in LA and NYC), many a mediocre actor has been saved by a great writer.
And this may be a bit of a stretch--but it's my blog , so I can say anything I want--I think the failure to distinguish between content and style/form is a serious intellectual problem in our culture, particularly our literary culture. I was trained at Yale, as a critic, though I spent more years at UCSB, so I am of course on one end of the spectrum in my literary-critical leanings. I take exception to the rejection of the high/low culture distinction. Sue Grafton may be entertaining (I think other detective writers are better), but she is not Milton! While the levelling of the distinction between a philosophical and a literary text, as advocated or better, described, by deconstruction does not essentially bother me, the denial of a distinction between a poem and a newspaper article does. And I am not here even concerned with distinctions between fact or fiction, or with the complex notion of truth in life vs truth in art (versimilitude). I am merely talking about form and style.
Part of why I hated UCSB so much was the intense cultural studies focus of that department. As I wrote in my inaugural post from NYC, I don't want to focus on race, class, gender, sexuality, history, or politics in the study of literature . Of course Wordsworth talks about the French Revolution in The Prelude (Book 3 of the 1850 Prelude), but when Alan Liu (former chair of my ex-department of whom I was not a fan on any level, and he didn't think too much of me either but it did not matter as I took no courses with him), writes about the Imagination apostrophe (or the Crossing of the Alps, I don't have it here and it's been awhile) in terms of Napoleon, I get cranky.
If I wanted to study history or politics, I would do so. I like both, though I prefer history to political science. I chose to study English because I believe in the category of the literary; I believe that the analysis and understanding of literary langauge--whether in fiction , prose, or poetry--has value. I am a rhetorical critic or a proponent of rhetorical poetics (and I think deconstruction has much to teach us, though I think also that literature is essentially ethical, at least at its best, and that interpretation must move beyond the aporia, beyond indeterminate meaning or endless play of signifiers). That is, I think form is crucial and that poems and novels have rhetorical and narrative structures which demand our attention.
In short, literary texts are not simply about the what; they are about the how. And when we, as a culture, devalue writing and accept "content" as an acceptable substitute, we at once witness and preside over the demise of literacy and critical thinking. I am not pinning this heavy load on little Ms. Huffington. I am merely saying that apart from the issue of economic justice here, there is an in some ways even more insidious subtext: writing does not matter. And that does matter.
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