I had a website for a teaching business, Richard Thomas JD LLC, Ethical Presence Consulting. http://www.richardthomasjd.com. I created that website in 2019. I’ve changed. I’ve terminated the LLC and rewritten the website for what I am about now, harvesting what is still relevant, reframing what items mean, editing out what I don’t want anymore (if I ever did). I’m letting the Wix GoDaddy website expire and using this blog post if I ever want to send someone a resume or someone asks for one. This is also creative writing.
Richard Thomas, Writer and Writing Teacher* (It’s not really teaching.)
Richard Thomas writes and teaches writing.
“Let us dare to read, think, speak and write.”
JOHN ADAMS
Life Experience, Jobs Where Richard Thomas Developed Craft, Practiced Art, Transcended and Outgrew, Paid Him and Gave Him Time So He Could Write Badly, Honed Imagination and Critical Thinking; Places Where He Was Himself In Spite of Everything and Happy to Leave. The Greatest Things Richard Took Away From These Positions Owe Nothing to the Positions Themselves, and Everything to his Unconscious Mind, Listening to Himself and the World and Work on the Method of his Art — Which Will Not Be Like Yours. Richard’s Writing is Done his Way, and He Merely Wants to Help You Develop Your Way, Not By Giving You Rules, but Rather by Giving You Caring and Intelligent Attention. A Lot of the Time, the Jobs Documented Sucked, and the People Involved Were Idiots and Assholes. But That is What a Writer Need. You and Richard Don’t Have Anything Besides Your Soul and Your Experience of the World. Don’t be Impressed or Disdainful of Yourself, or any Place or Experience You’ve Ever Been or Had. Use All of It! You and Your Life are Where Your Writing Is. Richard Thomas Teaches Writing by Writing. He’s Always Writing. He’s Always Been Writing. All These Jobs are Just Places He Wrote. Richard Thomas is So Glad that He No Longer Has Anything to Do with Notre Dame, Second City, Practicing Law or Teaching in Higher Ed. He is Also Glad He Did All of Those Things. A Writer Has To Wander. Richard Thomas is Loaded with Craft, Art and Human Experience. These are His Credentials to Write and Teach Writing. He’s Had a Lot of Teachers, and He Knows that His Only Teachers are Richard Thomas and Life Itself. If Richard Thomas is Your Teacher, He Promises Not to Teach You. If You Read Richard Thomas’ ‘Creative’ Writing, Your Reading Will Help You ‘Create’ Yourself Always as a Human Being, and for Some of You, as an Artist.
2020 – Adjunct Faculty, Business Ethics, in the Graduate Program of the Loyola University Chicago Quinlan School of Business
2013 – 2018, Clinical Assistant Professor in the Professional Development Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) College of Business Administration
2006 – Present, Lawyer (Inactive). Practiced primarily as a litigator in the field of ethics and professional responsibility at the Illinois Registration and Disciplinary Commission
Alumnus of the resident company of Chicago’s Second City Theater
Illinois State Bar Association Master Teacher in Communications Skills
BAR ADMISSIONS: Illinois State Bar, Member• Northern District of Illinois Bar, Member
Taught improvisational acting classes at Second City, the Victory Gardens Theater and independently
Member of Second City Chicago’s resident acting company; well-reviewed by many publications’ critics including Frank Rich of The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/1984/03/02/arts/revuew-second-city-comes-to-first-city.html and John Simon of New York Magazine; received Obie and Joseph Jefferson Award nominations for ensemble acting; performed in Second City’s 50th Anniversary Alumni Show; co-wrote and performed in Second City Revues: Exit Pursued by a Bear, Glenna Loved It!, and Orwell that Ends Well; directed Second City’s National Touring Company developing young talent including Chris Farley, Stephen Colbert and Amy Sedaris
Free-lance writer for Saturday Night Live and Sesame Street
Performance Artist and Comedian at Second City ETC Theater, New York’s Improv Comedy Club and West Bank Café; wrote and performed one man shows The Rick Show and Good Times praised by Second City Founder Paul Sills and West Bank Café’ Founder Lewis Black
Led improvisational acting workshops and performed for the Young Presidents Organization and an audience that included former President Jimmy Carter. Currently writes, performs and produces his one-person show at various venues.
CV
You know what never goes on a CV? Periods of unemployment, loneliness, confusion, alienation and illness. But man, are those hard times mother’s milk for a writer.
Adjunct Faculty, Business Ethics, in the Graduate Program of the Loyola University Chicago Quinlan School of Business 2020 – Present
Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Business School (UICBusiness) 2013-2018
Lawyer. Practiced primarily in the field of ethics and professional responsibility 2006-Present
Alumnus of the resident company of Chicago’s Second City Theater Professional presence & development & ethics professor.
B.A. in Communication Arts from Notre Dame; J.D. from Loyola Law School (Chicago)
BAR ADMISSIONS: Illinois State Bar, Member, 2006 • Northern District of Illinois Bar, Member, 2006
CERTIFICATE: Washington State University Global Campus, Excellence in Online Teaching, 2017
CERTIFICATE: National Institute of Trial Advocacy, Trial Practice Skills, 2011
EDUCATION Loyola University School of Law, Chicago, Illinois Juris Doctor; Taught “Street Law” at Wells High School in Chicago, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana Bachelor of Arts, 1977, American Studies &Communication Arts ; Dean’s List; Resident Assistant, Keenan Hall
Clinical Assistant Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago College of Business Administration, Chicago, Illinois, August 2013-2018. Courses:
Managerial Communications Professional Presence I, II, III
Business Ethics
Corporate Sustainability and Social Responsibility
Assessment of College-wide Student Writing and Oral Presentation Skills
Creating and Presenting Improvisational Workshops re: networking, team-building and presentation skills at Liautaud Graduate School of Business Orientation & Transfer and Honors Students Boot Camps and Intensives
Coaching Intra- and Inter-Collegiate Case Presentation Teams
Presenting Improvisational Workshops and Publicly Speaking for incoming students for the College’s recruiting and admissions initiatives
Speaking to student organizations re: Professional Development topics
Working on team curriculum development projects for Professional Development initiatives; Led intensive seminar re: public speaking, teaching and presenting for UIC Business staff
GRADUATE ADVISING — DISSERTATIONS Dissertation Committee Member, Sean Clayton, PRINCIPAL EVALUATION: A QUANITATIVE STUDY ON THE ALIGNMENT OF THE ISLLC STANDARDS, Educational Leadership, Chicago State University, 2016-2017
Presentation: SPEED CASE: An Introduction to Creating Case Analyses like a Lawyer and Presenting them like an Actor, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business May 8-10, 2016. Indianapolis, Indiana
Master Teaching Scholar (MTS), University of Illinois at Chicago, The Learning Center of the Office of Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs September 2015 – August 2016
Spring 2016 Formal Advancement of Teaching Events — FINDING AND EXPLORING YOUR TEACHER VOICE Teaching Skills Workshop for UIC Faculty Campus-wide Teacher as Artist
Guest Lecturer, Loyola University School of Law, Department of Experiential Learning, Chicago, Illinois, October 21, 2014 “Professional Presentation Skills: In and Out of the Courtroom, Classroom or Boardroom”
Adjunct Faculty, Department of Justice, Law and Public Safety Studies, Lewis University, Romeoville and Oak Brook, Illinois, January 2012-August 2013.
Legal Research and Writing
Interviewing and Investigating
Rights, Civil-Liability and Administrative Actions
Ethics and Professional Responsibility
Torts and Personal Injury Law
Judge, American Bar Association Law Student Division Appellate Advocacy Competition– Quarterfinals, Chicago, Illinois, April 5, 2013
Guest Lecturer, Loyola University School of Law Career Services Office, Basic Communication Skills for Attorneys, Chicago, Illinois, March 12, 2013
Visiting Faculty, Southern Illinois University School of Law, Carbondale, Illinois, March 1, 2013 Professionalism Program, Communication skills needed by attorneys.
Master Teacher CLE, 2012 -2013: Southern Illinois University School of Law, Carbondale, Illinois; Arkansas State Bar Association; Forensic Expert Witness Association, Chicago Chapter, Communication Skills for the Expert Witness, Chicago, Illinois; National Asian Pacific American Bar Association Midwest Affiliates (“NAPABA”); Goldberg Weissman Cairo, Chicago, Illinois, Improvisation for Lawyers, Basic Communication Skills for Trial Practitioners
Adjunct Faculty, Trial Practice Intensives, Loyola University School of Law, Chicago, Illinois, 2013
Trial communication skills instructor
Master Series and Faculty Development Teacher, Illinois State Bar Association), Improvisation for Lawyers CLEs, Chicago, Illinois, 2012: Basic Communication Skills for Attorneys; Ethics & Professionalism; Basic Communication Skills for Trial Practitioners; Teaching, Public Speaking & Presenting Skills
Acted as liaison to various stakeholders to facilitate development of amicus briefs for client association
Wrote and researched memos on various topics for example: the culture of the state of Connecticut (to advise on jury selection)
Drafted pleadings
Re-wrote portions of a practice guide relating to attorney/client and work product privileges
Participated in group which considered innovative ways of using demonstrative evidence in complex litigation
Illinois Attorney General’s Office Gang Crime Prevention Center, Chicago, Illinois Director of Marketing; Legislation and Special Assignments, 2001-2003
Wrote advisory memos for various stakeholders, for example: whether or not smaller municipalities should adopt legislation similar to Chicago’s (2002) Gang Crime Loitering Ordinance
Wrote Hearing Voices an examination of international approaches to encouraging nonviolence
Produced Cable Access television talk show about the Center’s activities in Rockford, Illinois
Marketed and performed outreach for statewide conference on gang crime prevention to various stakeholders including law enforcement personnel, judges, attorneys, community leaders, clergy, educators and citizens
Vocational Economics Inc., New York City, New York and Louisville, Kentucky Attorney Liaison, 1999-2000
Devised marketing strategy for and marketed expert witness services of vocational rehab professionals and economists to personal injury and employment discrimination attorneys relating to lost earning capacity issues
Greatly expanded firm’s New York and Chicago operations; introduced firm to thousands of attorneys
Course book: ISBA’s Law Ed Faculty Development Series: The Art of Effective Communication INTRODUCTION TO IMPROVISATION FOR LAWYERS: Basic Communication Skills for Public Speaking Teaching and Presenting, Illinois State Bar Association, September 20, 2012 (copy available on request) https://www.box.com/s/ur4yu04d0g4nfjsxhhi6
Course book: INTRODUCTION TO IMPROVISATION FOR LAWYERS: Session One: Basic Communication Skills for Attorneys, Illinois State Bar Association, September 21, 2012 (copy available on request) https://www.box.com/s/sk7891mh0njbvqf2lstc (see session one)
Course book: INTRODUCTION TO IMPROVISATION FOR LAWYERS: Session Two: Basic Communication Skills Needed to Effectively Comply with the Illinois Rules of Professional 12 Conduct, Illinois State Bar Association, September 21, 2012 https://www.box.com/s/sk7891mh0njbvqf2lstc (see session two)
Focuses specifically on Rule 1.4 of the Illinois Rules of Professional Conduct
Course book: INTRODUCTION TO IMPROVISATION FOR LAWYERS: Session Three: Basic Communication Skills for Trial Practitioners, Illinois State Bar Association, September 21, 2012 https://www.box.com/s/sk7891mh0njbvqf2lstc (see session three)
Discussion of creative career development strategies in a changing market
National Organization of Bar Counsel, Reporter for Midwest Region, 2009
Wrote disciplinary case summaries for nine states that are published on the NOBC website
Wrote Case of the Month analyses for NOBC website including:
September 2008: Improper Litigation Management and Improper Oversight of an Inexperienced Subordinate Attorney Warrant Discipline
October 2008: Flat fees should initially be deposited into a trust account but must be transferred to an operating account as soon as fees are earned with reasonable promptness
November 2008: Disbarment is an appropriate sanction when a lawyer fails to conform his behavior to his large law firm’s culture of ethical practice, notwithstanding attention deficit disorder, sleep apnea and severe personality problems
December 2008: Advertising describing attorneys as “Super Lawyers,” “Best Lawyers in America,” or similar comparative titles may be protected commercial speech
January 2009: The constitution and immigration laws do not entitle an alien in removal proceedings to relief for a lawyer’s mistakes, but the Department of Justice may as “a matter of administrative grace” reopen removal proceedings where an alien shows he was prejudiced by the actions of private counsel
February 2009: The goal of the lawyer disciplinary process is to protect the public and it is not the duty of a licensing Court to engage in psychological analysis as to why a lawyer has engaged in acts of neglect, but rather to remove that lawyer from practice where warranted
March 2009: A public defender’s office may not necessarily be considered a “law firm” in determining whether client confidences should be imputed to all public defenders serving in that office
April 2009: A federal prosecutor’s personal animosity leading to a collateral investigation of an opposing defense team warrants sanction
May 2009: A lawyer may be subject to reciprocal discipline in a jurisdiction where that lawyer is not licensed
June 2009: The Board of Immigration Appeals and Immigration Judges must once again follow Lozada guidelines when reviewing motions to reopen removal proceedings based on claims of ineffective assistance of counsel
July 2009: A Judicial Regulator’s Inappropriate Tactics in Dealing with a Judge who may have engaged in Judicial Misconduct may not Necessarily Rise to the Level of a Due Process Violation ARDC website reporter, 2009 including the following articles (no longer on website):
Important News Re: FDIC Coverage of IOLTA and Low Interest Client Trust NOW Accounts in 2009
Recent Developments: Dowling
Theater Arts Experience
Second City Theater, Performing Arts, and Non-Professional Teaching, Directing and Writing Experience, 1981-present, New York City, New York and Chicago, Illinois
Free-lance writer for Saturday Night Live and Sesame Street
Performance Artist and Comedian at Second City ETC Theater, New York’s Improv Comedy Club and West Bank Café; wrote and performed one man shows The Rick Show and Good Times praised by Second City Founder Paul Sills and West Bank Café’ Founder Lewis Black
Led improvisational acting workshops and performed for the Young Presidents Organization and an audience that included former President Jimmy Carter.
Part of Richard’s process has been a process of elimination. Improvisers stop on the first step of the creative process. Lawyers argue too much. Higher ed teachers concentrate too much on subject matter than their students. Writing is just right. Below is video of the last time I stepped on a stage in the middle of my last year as a college professor and seven years after I stopped practicing law. I don’t include it as an example of great performance or writing. But it was when I started to write exclusively. I’ve always been a writer, but this show was the moment after which nothing else mattered. It’s a crude video poorly done on an iPad. I love the unprofessional presentation. On this evening, nothing mattered but the words.
A big chunk of my experience was as an improviser and improvisational acting teacher. In the 1980s, Paul Sills said I was the greatest improviser who ever lived. Several years ago I was unceremoniously erased from membership in the Second City Alumni Association. I outgrew improvisation and I dislike many people I know who improvise. I’m rewriting a website I wrote in 2019 when I was completely clear about what was happening inside and outside of me. I was offering myself as an improvisation teacher among other things. Now I teach* writing. Read the piece below in that context and apply it to writing first drafts, if that’s the way you approach writing.
Improvisational Training
Steven Spielberg is nauseous every time he starts to film a new scene. Muhammad Ali was terrified in the moments before every fight he ever fought. Fear is good. It makes us intensely aware of ourselves and everything around us. Adaptation is a necessity whenever we deal with unknown factors, and when interacting with others there are always unknown factors. Improvisation is not only for comic actors. It is a tried and true method of turning anxiety into creative action for EVERYONE. Hint: anxiety becomes positive energy when one is immersed in focused action.
BEING HUMAN
This is an art book. The late, great actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman said this when he was promoting his great performance in the film Capote: “I think no one deserves sympathy and everyone deserves sympathy. I don’t think that there is any one on the planet if looked at closely enough is worthy of being judged. And everybody on the planet if looked at closely enough is worthy of being loved with the most love you can ever give. I think that is human. I think that’s human nature. I think that is everybody.” The greatness of art can be defined by the degree of its possession of two great characteristics: unflinching — and at times even brutal — honesty and accuracy in perception — if looked at closely enough — and intense, generous compassion — love with the most love you can give.
The great attributes of art do not only belong to great creative geniuses like Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Art is simply a divine awareness and expression of, as Hoffman put it — human nature – everybody. We all have moments of great clarity and expansive love in our lives. What if we decided to commit to living that way all of the time? What actors, writers, teachers, lawyers, business persons, brothers, daughters, spouses, parents — humans — we would be.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman was a brilliant genius in his observations about humanity; he was a brave and sweet mensch-hero who suffered for all of his characters — us. He reached beyond himself and gifted us with abundant art in the form of an astounding body of work as an actor. He was also a drug addict. He couldn’t bear looking as closely as he did at the horrors of existence. Those looks were a requirement listed on his job description. So he escaped. Judgment would say he betrayed his family, his audience and most importantly himself because he couldn’t control the addictive aspect of his nature. Can you say that you love him for all that he gave to you AND you love him for all that he suffered and lost? Can you love the incredible actor and the self-destructive junkie? If so, we can get started because — I think that is human. I think that’s human nature. I think that is everybody.
Full life is a paradox: diligent work to excel in our roles and pursue perfections rarely obtained; and an affectionate, accepting embrace of our individual and collective weakness, folly and even sin.
Let’s talk about the human/art side of the life equation first — in this case improvisation. We can discuss approaches to doing the jobs later, once we are confident that we will be doing them as human beings.
HOW ARTISTS LOOK AT ART
When you look at any art, including this book, do not engage as mere audience. View art like a magician trying to understand another magician’s tricks. Audiences respond only to what is expressed in a piece and how it makes them think and feel. Their focus is on the effect not the method. Artists look for more. They have a deeper interest in how and why the piece was made. We artists learn (a continuous and lifelong process) from experience, observation, and our reflection on that experience and observation; and by the actual application of our takeaways from those processes to the making of our own creations. All of our creativity is our response, a part of a constant dialect that we have with other human creation and the natural world.
ANXIETY
If you don’t feel anxiety before and when you improvise you are a recreational improviser and you came to the wrong place if you came to see me. In improvisation — as opposed to an artsy- craftsy bowling night situation the struggle is everything. No one truly builds confidence by executing simple tasks and engaging in a circle jerk of congratulation with their clique of friends. Real improvisational work offers more than diversionary excitement; rather it is a process of real challenge and satisfaction.
TO HAVE A VOICE IS TO STRUGGLE
We are all Bertie, the King of the film, The King’s Speech. Bertie was abused as a boy. He suffered a terrible speech impediment, a real disability. He didn’t want to be king. He assumed the throne when his older brother abdicated. He was called to speak to the British people in their darkest hour near the beginning of World War II. He worked diligently to tame his stammering and derived some satisfaction in doing so. When his time came to speak to the nation, he moved slowly and courageously into the challenge and gained confidence with each word. He did his job and raised the morale of his nation. His words were more effective because he had been beaten and scarred. Everyone sensed that he had authority to speak because he had met a terrible challenge that was not of his choosing like his audience, the British people who had just been forced into war. He did what we all have the potential to do — speak in service of ourselves, others and the highest values of mankind.
HI, IT’S REALLY ME
There is a difference between narcissistic worried self-involvement, which is rightly dismissed in improvisation and other arts classes as being “stuck in one’s head” and real consciousness of one’s ACTUAL thoughts and emotions. The failure to make that crucial distinction leads to the instruction “DON’T THINK “that leads to scenes, written pieces etc. without THOUGHT.
YOU (and ME), in our most consciously authentic versions, aware of and expressing our truest and deepest thoughts and emotions through exquisitely detailed word and deed are the great gifts to ourselves that we are called to re-gift to the world.
I have noticed an emergence of the word “I” in MY recent writing. It initially concerned me. Who would care? I came to three conclusions. It is liberating, joyful and empowering to write about oneself. Our thoughts and emotions even when, as they often are, other-directed are still OUR thoughts and emotions. Jesus (divinity, mythic figure, literary character or historical figure, take your pick) said a lot about other people and did a lot for them always with the awareness that HE was the Son of God. Everything we say and do is about US. We are the most specific element in all that we create. If I write about improvisation, for example with optimism and frustration I am ultimately writing about what I want from improvisation for myself and other people. I count. I am in the frame of the scene AND the point of view of the scene..
Secondly, to effectively write about oneself I have to do so with contemplative depth leading to the exquisite detail I mentioned above. Diary, journal writing and the initial exploratory moments of improvisational acting are processes that lead to this detail. It is important for me to recognize the difference between that process and the resulting deep writing as an aspect of MY PERSONAL craft.
If I (notice my shifts from WE to I) share myself with artfully communicated truth, I avail myself of the opportunity to truly connect with fellow artists on page or stage and audience. This leads me to my third conclusion and the relevance of the Campbell quote above. I don’t write or act or teach or direct to please ANY particular audience. I tell my workshops to “let YOUR audience find you.” We are not meant to connect with everybody. What I (we) sacrifice in shallow popularity I (we) gain in REAL ENGAGEMENT with an equally PRESENT other. If one is abnegating oneself, pretending, performing, or persuading such engagement is impossible because one is not really there.
Campbell and Carl Jung before him married Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. The East connects us to the ALL. The West is a tradition that connects us to our individual destinies. The East gives a sense of participation in all of creation. The West gives us focus. We are limited in our existence. We can only love a finite number of people, places and things in our finite lives AND we can see the limitless universe in our necessarily limited view.
If I can straddle time and narrow location and eternity and the vastness of all that is in the same creative observation and insight in my writing, teaching and directing, I’ve had a good day.
Ego is not egotism.
THE POINT OF CONCENTRATION
The Point of Concentration is a base concept of improvisational acting that is widely misunderstood by many “improv” (a horrible term that denotes a surface and abbreviated understanding of the art) instructors. The instructors much like fundamentalist religious leaders in relation to Biblical text consider the concept in an overly material and concrete manner. Students are taught to respect the integrity of an imaginary object, an orange, a softball, a piece of wood for example and discouraged from allowing contemplation of the object to inspire exploration of broader, deeper and more important feelings and ideas inspired by the object. The resulting scenes, both in the immediate workshop and in the players’ subsequent careers are superficial and lack meaningful content. Audiences are inflicted with scenes considering the stitching on a baseball instead of, say, a meditation on the role of sports in American culture.
Take that improvisational acting staple, the relationship scene in which the point of concentration is the connection between (or lack thereof) two players in a scene. An excellent early example of this type of scene, from the 1960’s and directed by Paul Sills, explored the relationship between two women played by Barbara Harris and Zohra Lampert. The scene used the tension and warmth between the players as a starting point that evolved into an emotionally harrowing and intellectually provocative consideration of date rape at a time when such a topic was rarely even broached on a popular comedic stage. Compare this meaningful engagement with the audience with the current deluge of dating relationship scenes which either come to sentimental conclusions of love found or cynical comments about the acceptance of loneliness and the futility of even trying to establish intimacy with anyone. Audiences walk away with no insights that they didn’t enter the theater with, and at best a few forgettable laughs.
This sorry state of affairs could be traced to the lack of general education of the instructors themselves. Their intellectual laziness leads contemporary improvisational practice into the shallows described above. (This piece is not a blanket criticism of all teaching in the improvisational theater. Some excellent work is being done, usually in obscure and out of the way places.) Paul Sills and Viola Spolin, the artistic and theoretical forces behind all that was and remains good about improvisational theater, had a general knowledge of sociology, educational theory and practice, history, economics, theology, philosophy, world theater, journalism, literature, political science and “all the actions and passions of life about” as Mark Twain would say. So do I and some others. Much of current improvisational instruction is overly incestuous (a cabal of teachers “know” the form, share that limited “knowledge” as a means of undeserved self-affirmation, and marginalize anything that challenges their illusion of expertise) and commercialized. Students leave “improv” classes filled with excitement related to the freeing aspects of play (that benefit of Sills and Spolin’s work seems indestructible no matter how badly it is mishandled) and with an in-group sense of superiority that shrouds the mediocrity of their efforts—to them anyway.
Improvisational instructors should particularly be interested in all of the arts. What is true about creative process is true in every artistic form and genre. I am very interested in the form of the personal essay. The essayist typically uses a singular focus, a point of concentration if you will, as a jumping off point for a discussion of wider matters. One random example of such an essay is Gore Vidal’s piece on Tennessee Williams’ memoirs, Some Memories of the Glorious Bird and an Earlier Self. The writer Phillip Lopate said that Vidal uses Williams’ work “as a point of departure for a wider meditation on the subject.” Lopate continues, “Often (Vidal) will bring in personal experiences that bare on the public figure or the topic…he (Vidal) reveals a good deal about his life and character.” Advanced improvisational practice can reach the same heights in personal, existential, cultural, political and communal exploration as writing does when it is executed with a deep understanding of craft and its theoretical basis by the best writers. It’s been done before by Paul Sills, Viola Spolin and many of the players that they taught and directed.
It pains me to see so much of a revolutionary theatrical art that has achieved so much and is still in its infancy, be reduced to parlor games that serious people do not view as anything of importance. Much of current improvisational instruction exploits a valid aspiration in the uninitiated. Good work can be done. Sills and Spolin have shown us how. Improvisational artists have a responsibility to revere the concepts and foundations that they gave us, and bring the form forward as painters, writers and other artists have done for their forms for centuries. What we have mostly now are fading Xerox copies of work done in middling sketch comedy revues with shallow new pop culture references filling in the blanks.
I offered services in 2019 teaching ‘professional’ communication and connecting skills. I’m not particular good at ‘professional’ communicating and connecting. I don’t communicate. I write and I have deep conversations. This was something misguided in 2019. I was trying to merge art and professionalism. Never the twain shall meet. I thought I could relate to lawyers and the like as artists. They aren’t artists. They shouldn’t do exercises to be more emotionally intelligent and creative. They should read and go to movies and concerts and museums. They should spend time with their families and friends and learn how to be human beings.
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In 2019, I taught Storytelling and Case Making. That’s pieces of writing craft. I learned more about writing as an improviser and trial lawyer than I ever would have in an MFA program. Pardon the straining here and elsewhere to connect with prospective clients and to frame what I was doing as being about professionalism. It was all about writing! It’s always been all about writing!
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We tell stories because that is the way people connect with one another. Learn how to tell more purposeful stories. We make cases — advocate for ideas — in order to promote positive understanding and change. Learn the skills of thoroughly and clearly presenting FACTS (relevant stories in a work context), raising ISSUES AND QUESTIONS, ANALYZING those issues and questions in an INFORMED AND EDUCATED manner using CRITICAL THINKING and APPLYING HIGHER LEVEL THOUGHT demonstrating one’s knowledge and expertise in order to MAKE CREATIVE RECOMMENDATIONS AND DECISIONS in professional contexts.
Sample writing on “Storytelling and Case-Making” with Ethical Presence:
The practice of trial law is an art.
Trial lawyers are storytellers. Trials are competitions between at least two stories. The stories of a trial have strict technical and legal limitations imposed upon the manner in which they are told, of course, including adherence to the rules of evidence and procedure, the necessity to address the elements of the applicable substantive law, and the requirements of the mechanics of the lawyer’s many tasks at trial such as delivering opening statements and closing arguments, eliciting witness testimony and introducing other evidence. A trial lawyer must pay great attention to these demanding limitations without forgetting that her fundamental task is to tell her client’s story. She must nimbly deal with the law’s requirements while at the same time connecting with the other people in the courtroom on a human level with wisdom and sensitivity.
A trial lawyer is engaged in the same basic art, storytelling, as a novelist, a screenwriter, a playwright, an actor (improvisational or otherwise), a comedian, a theater or film director, a journalist, or a grandparent passing down family lore to a child. From the beginning, human beings have always told stories, particularly when they wanted to understand, clarify or heal. At the first trial two people involved in a factual dispute told their respective stories to a third party in the hope of finding a resolution. The law evolved from that simple and primitive starting point, as has the art of the trial. This course book and its complementary class consider some of the skills needed to create trial art.
The world often does not demand that a storyteller tell her stories honestly and artfully, in fact it may at times encourage the opposite, but as an artist and professional, a trial lawyer must adhere to a higher standard. Some storytellers strive for verisimilitude (accuracy and authenticity in description) in order to lead and teach their audiences, and some are snake oil salesmen who simply say what they believe the suckers want to hear in order to cunningly achieve an undeserved outcome. The latter group enjoys quite a bit of success. As Mark Twain said, “A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Dishonest stories are toxic waste in the stream of public consciousness. They promote delusion, ignorance, prejudice, ill-conceived value systems, the destruction of attention spans, the demise of critical thinking and other maladies of the heart, mind and community. Triers of fact can be manipulated like any other audience by the razzle-dazzle of pulp advocacy. Such shenanigans when in engaged in by an attorney adversely affect the legal profession and the public at large.
As responsible professionals, trial attorney/artists who are learning their trade (a never-ending process) should work to discern which TV shows, movies, journalistic pieces, advertising and political campaigns, novels, and narratives presented by other lawyers at court, tell honest stories, and which are attempts to manipulate others. True stories are closely observed and fair in their telling. True stories artfully told have a point of view communicated through the interpretation of facts, not their distortion. Being able to distinguish a good story from a bad one makes a lawyer a more capable storyteller, and more aware of dishonesty in other lawyers when she sees it.
A lawyer isn’t allowed to lie under any circumstances. Some may roll their eyes and claim to be of the “real world,” but the Illinois Rules of Professional Conduct is pretty clear on the matter. See Rules 3.1, 3.3, 3.4, 4.1 and 8.4(c). 8.4(c) is especially direct, “It is professional misconduct for a lawyer to engage in dishonesty…” In practice of course attorneys aren’t disciplined for every white lie that they tell, but conscientious and professional lawyers make every attempt to be scrupulously honest. Trial lawyers have another motivation to be truthful. They work in a tough and often unforgiving arena, and can face very harsh sanctions for dishonesty. Trial lawyers always have to know, believe, or have reason to believe that what they are saying is true. (Criminal defense attorneys, of course, need only argue a reasonable hypothesis of innocence. They cannot tell lies when presenting the story of that hypothesis.)
Lying is not only unethical, it is inartful as well. Truthfulness in storytelling is not an abdication of an attorney’s duty to provide a client zealous representation. The contrary is true. A good storyteller knows that there is not only one story for every set of facts. The great Japanese film director, Akira Kurasawa famously illustrated this point about point of view in his 1950 masterpiece, Rashomon, whose brilliant conceit is in the telling of different stories from the perspective of four witnesses to the same events.
As a practical matter, the determination of pure objective truth is beyond the reach of mortal men, even trial lawyers. No one has the single perspective from which all truth can be observed. Absolute truth is a theological concept of faith, not one of civil society. Believers accept that incontrovertible reality is revealed by a divine being from his perfect unobstructed vantage point. No mortal has that vantage point at the courthouse on a Monday morning. Our communal lack of godlike perspective is why we need trials and other stories and why we need the human qualities of empathy, honesty and the desire for justice.
How a storyteller places emphasis on the various facts that she has to work with in large measure shapes the story. A film director may take an extended close up of a small child. The child is seated on a floor next to a closed door. His parents scream at each other off camera in the next room beyond the door. The director is not telling a story in which the details of the parents’ argument are relevant. The child’s reaction to the conflict is what the director sees as important. A good trial lawyer presents some facts as primary in the story she is telling and argues that some facts are not relevant and/or important. The storytelling director and the storytelling trial lawyer’s tasks are the same except their respective mediums require different technical knowledge and skills to shape their stories from the available facts.
A trial lawyer narrates and summarizes her client’s story. She also functions as an emcee, introducing witnesses’ testimony and other evidence to the fact finding audience. She is a prominent actor with many lines and actions in a show that unfolds before a judge and jury. Theater directors spend a great deal of time casting and costuming every role in a play because even the least prominently displayed actor can greatly affect the tone of an entire production. A tragedy can unintentionally become a comedy or vice versa pretty quickly when an actor starts to, say, laugh or cry uncontrollably during a funeral scene.
Trial counsel must make sure that the tone she sets in court serves the point of view of her client’s story at all times. Recently, a lead prosecutor made a tonal error in a trial involving a former police officer accused of killing his wife. He argued in part that the defendant, a former police officer, was an insider of the criminal justice system who knew how to manipulate the evidence at a murder scene. The defendant’s tone at trial was cocky and defiant. He seemed to
enjoy the risk of competing in a high stakes game. The defendant’s manner appeared to say, “I’m smarter than you. I know the system. You’re going to lose.” The lead prosecutor took the defendant’s bait. He also affected a hyper-confident and even flamboyant attitude. He wore an expensive suit to trial every day. His silver hair was slicked back. He looked like he was trying to one-up the defendant and show that he, the prosecutor, was the actual master of the system. He would have been wiser to wear a cheaper suit and un-greased hair, like an average middle class working guy with a wife and kids. The judge and jury would then be more likely to view the prosecutor as a good guy doing a tough job instead of as the defendant’s rival. The prosecutor might not be able to convincingly act in a self-effacing manner, if he is not humble by nature. It is inadvisable for a trial lawyer to act in an inauthentic way in court, unless she possesses excellent acting ability and formal training as an actor. Perhaps another more down-to-earth seeming lawyer should have been assigned to the case. The prosecutor might still prevail in the matter in the future, but he has diminished his probability of victory with his flashy style.
A witness is not an advocate, but he is called by a party to tell a story that is intended to help that party at trial. Good trial lawyers use items from a film director’s toolkit when preparing witnesses to be calm and convincing on the stand, and to deliver their testimony with clarity andcompleteness. Mike Nichols, the great American film director, was known as an “actor’s director.” One reason that actors loved to work with Nichols was that he created a warm and hospitable environment on his movie sets. Actors who worked on most films rarely were in the same room as the entirety of the rest of the film’s cast. Normally an actor only is on the set when it is time to shoot the scenes that he is in. He only meets other cast members who are in those scenes. Nichols’ films are different. Nichols’ invites the entire cast to be together for the reading of the script from beginning to end. Actors are able to see their scenes within the context of the arc of the entire story. Food and drink is provided. The atmosphere of Nichol’s read through is one of a working party. Nichols use of this method allowed his cast to calmly naturally and knowingly weave the very small stories of several minor characters in support of the larger narrative of the main character played by Meryl Streep in 1986’s Heartburn.
The trial lawyer/director should create an atmosphere of hospitality and team work for her witness/actor. A witness/actor who comes to a lawyer’s office should be greeted with real hospitality, not just a perfunctory offer of water or coffee in a conference room. The witness/actor should be introduced to all of the lawyers and support staff that he will be interacting with during the trial’s preparation and at the trial. Lunch together might be a good way to let people chat and get to know each other on a personal level. The trial lawyer/director should answer any questions the witness/actor has about the case when such disclosure doesn’t violate considerations of confidentiality or other legal or strategic considerations. This is not a waste of time in a busy law office. This sets the ground for working with the witness/actor on his testimony and it builds his commitment to working on the team effort of telling the story of the trial.
In the give and take of witness preparation, a trial lawyer is also like a theater director working with an actor on a one man show. She must communicate to the witness/actor what chapter of her client’s story the witness/actor is being called to tell. She takes the witness/actor’s own version of that part of the story from a deposition or interview(s), and instructs the witness/actor on which of the facts of that version are needed to prove elements of the controlling law of the case. A theater director patiently listened to the eighty pages of written material that the star of the pending one man show had written. The director then began an editing process. He suggested removing certain passages from the material that were unpersuasive. He gently explained to the star why the material didn’t work. The star trusted the director’s knowledge and judgment because the director had built a personal relationship with the star. He wanted a “third eye” to review his material and help him select the best sections so that his show would be a success. The director’s process of going over prior raw material with a star, analyzing that material, selecting the best parts, and rehearsing the material with the star is directly analogous to the process of the trial lawyer/director preparing the witness/actor.
A smart trial lawyer/director may arrange for a cosmetic makeover for a witness/actor (having a gang member get a haircut and put on a suit, for example), but would never encourage a witness/actor to be inauthentic and pretend to be someone other than who he is. A good trial lawyer/director would never attempt to hide a personal or demographic characteristic of a witness/actor in an attempt to please a jury/judge. Rather the trial lawyer/director would instruct the witness/actor to proudly embrace his own authentic nature. Very few people have the ability to transform their personalities for public consumption. They are called professional actors. Successful performances by untrained actors involve the relaxed expression of their own persons. Harold Russell won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 1946 for The Best Years of Our Lives. He played a recent World War II veteran who lost both of his hands in that war. He was, in fact, a man of the same general description. People generally, and particularly when they hold a great responsibility such as being a judge or juror, admire a person who is respectful of them and humble, yet unapologetic and confident as well.
When a good trial lawyer conducts a direct exam she resembles a supporting actor. Tom Hanks won a well-deserved Best Actor Oscar for the 1993 film Philadelphia. His co-star Denzel Washington was not nominated for Best Supporting Actor. He did his job too well. In one pivotal scene, Washington gives to Hanks what a good trial practitioner gives to her witness on direct examination: focus and empathy. Washington provides space for Hanks to tell his story. He silently asks Hanks to continue at each transformation in the story’s narrative arc. He stands in for the audience as a sympathetic observer. Washington is personally transformed by the experience of listening to Hanks’ story as is the audience, who identifies with Washington. Hanks is wonderful in this scene, but Washington’s work integrated Hanks’ monologue into the totality of the film’s story and helped Hanks win the Academy Award. A trial lawyer might draw an objection for allowing a witness to speak as long as Hanks’ monologue without intervening questions. If one substitutes verbal questions for Washington’s silent ones however, Washington’s work is precisely analogous to a good trial lawyer’s point of view when directly examining a witness.
On cross examination a trial lawyer, not the witness, is the star and the storyteller. A successful cross-examining attorney tells a part of her client’s story to the fact finder through questions posed to an opposing witness. There is a game played in the improvisational theater called Questions Game. The players can only address each other in the form of a question. A rule of improvisational theater says that a player must communicate “yes, and” to the other player in a scene. In this way what has already happened in the scene is affirmed and used as a foundation for what comes next in the scene. “Yes, and” allows improvisers to spontaneously create a narrative together. The questions that work in the game are leading ones that get a silent affirmation of the preceding question and lead to a follow up. The questions then take on a rhythm which help builds an easy-to-follow narrative structure. Lawyers often struggle with question formation and pace on cross examination. Playing Questions Game can help them hone those skills since the wording of the questions that work in the game is also just what is needed on cross examination, as is the musical rhythm and pace used in the delivery of the questions.
The moral theme of a trial story, as opposed to a party’s legal theory of the case, is not something that must be proven to a fact finder. Great storytellers move their audiences. Clarence Darrow, the famous and great trial lawyer, placed his legal work within a larger social and humanist context. He used the legal process as an instrument of existential healing. His trial work was a tool to help individuals and change society. His concerns were larger than the law. Darrow’s wise and compassionate perspective made him a master of communicating the moral theme of a trial story. In Darrow’s closing argument at the Leopold and Loeb trial of 1924. Darrow argued, on social and metaphysical levels, against capital punishment and against a retributive instead of rehabilitative criminal justice system. Darrow’s eloquence in articulating a moral theme was not a mere trick of the trade. Darrow rather found his eloquence in the sincerity of his plea for the expansion of mankind’s capacity for mercy. If an attorney does not as sincerely believe in a moral theme as Darrow did in the Leopold and Loeb case, it is not advisable that she bring it up at trial.
Prior to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney asked their advisers to provide them with “a moral argument” to present to allies of the United States. They came up with the Bush Doctrine of “preventive war.” The advisers argued that when a nation represented a threat to a second nation, the second nation had a right to attack the first nation in self-defense before the first nation would inevitably harm the second. This cynical attempt at a contrived “moral argument” was widely reviled in the court of international public opinion. Pope John Paul II said that the argument was specious and immoral. Most nations saw Bush’s invasion of Iraq as an act of aggression, not self-defense. The moral theme of a trial story must always come organically out of the trial lawyer’s true thoughts and feelings. If it is added as an insincere afterthought and sales pitch, it will not be persuasive. A lawyer’s enunciation of a moral theme at trial is a public litmus test of that lawyer’s integrity.
An opening statement must be non-argumentative, engage the fact finder’s imagination and tell a story. A non-argumentative telling of a story that uses colorful nouns and active verbs more than adjectives and adverbs will capture the fact finder’s imagination. Nouns and verbs show the listener what happened. Adjectives and adverbs tell the listener what to think. The rule against arguing in an opening statement is actually an opportunity for more effective advocacy. A rule of the improvisational theater is show, don’t tell. People would rather be shown something than have it described to them. In telling the storyteller is merely opining about what she imagines.
A good trial lawyer/storyteller gives the fact finder theater, not an op-ed piece. In the opening number from Stephen Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Comedy Tonight, Sondheim and his collaborators show the audience what the evidence of the play they are about to see by introducing who is involved in the story (characters), where the story takes place (setting) and what the characters do (plot). Sondheim and company don’t argue that the audience is about to see is a comedy. It is apparent it is a comedy from simply showing the elements of the story. The filmmakers captivate the audience. The audience wants to look at the elements of the story in greater detail.
The character of Pseudolus is a bold storyteller. He doesn’t read notes. He can be heard. He isn’t afraid of making large physical gestures. Another story might require a more soft spoken style, but this is a broad comedy. A good trial lawyer/storyteller will adapt the intensity of her tone to the story she is telling. Pseudolus connects. He performs a jiu-jitsu trick of speaking directly to the audience and creating an illusion that he is speaking to each audience member individually. He is having a conversation with each audience member and inviting their silent positive responses.
In the film version of Forum, Richard Lester, the director, finds concrete images that match the lyrics. A trial lawyer/storyteller would be well served to imagine such images while she makes her opening statement. Film actors think while they say and do. Movie audiences actually go the theater to watch actors think. The thoughts affect the delivery of words to the listener, and the movement of the body to the viewer. By imagining internally while he speaks, an actor subtly and indirectly leads the imagination of his audience. The great actor, Spencer Tracy said, “Say your lines and don’t bump into the furniture.” What he naturally left out is, “and be thinking of images to match your words and actions at all times.” It was the thinking that made Tracy a great actor. A good trial lawyer/actor will use her imagination in front of the fact finder when delivering an opening statement, not tell the fact finder what to imagine.
There is obviously no prohibition against argumentation during the closing argument at trial. A good trial story culminates with a subjective re-telling of the story by the trial lawyer/storyteller. A great closing argument/story is told with unapologetic bias, by an advocate who is passionately confident that she has shown the fact finder, over the course of the trial, a narrative arc supported by concrete evidence of the existence and nature of the characters, settings and events of the story. A closing argument asks the fact finder to do something specific, and explains why it should be done. Stanley Kramer was a film director who was popular in the 1950’s and 1960’s. He often worked with Spencer Tracy. Kramer was a polemicist. He didactically told stories to make social and political statements. Where Stephen Sondheim is nuanced and clever, Stanley Kramer is insistent and direct. Stanley Kramer is a good artist to think about when writing and delivering a closing argument. 1967 was one year before Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. At that time, white America in particular was polarized and sharply divided in its reaction to King’s crusade. Stanley Kramer was an impassioned liberal who challenged conservatives in the name of decency and justice, and exhorted liberals to live with more conviction. His films spoke for what he believed was right. The scenes preceding the final scene of 1967’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner were strong evidence that set up a memorable and effective closing argument delivered by Spencer Tracy at the movie’s end. The film was very successful commercially and helped foster the imperfect and gradual progress in white American attitudes about race that were happening at that time. Parenthetically, the monologue was the last speech Tracy ever delivered on film. He died shortly after filming it. It was a moving valedictory by a great actor and liberal lion of that era. The speech was also Spencer Tracy’s closing argument as to what he wanted people to do in light of his acting career and why they should do so.
When using electronic visuals at trial, a good trial lawyer is a master of her content, her delivery and any technology that she uses to aid in that delivery. A good trial lawyer is aware when the fact finder is looking at her and when it is looking at visual information that she has displayed. Projected images should never be allowed to take so much of the fact finder’s attention that the lawyer’s attendant commentary is ignored. She should also be sure that the technology is in good working order and that she and her team know how to operate it properly. This course book and complementary class only begin to explore the nexus between the art of storytelling and trial practice. A trial lawyer who has engaged in the improvisational games of the class, and has considered the storytelling examples above has begun to discover the power of effective storytelling, and to develop her own unique manner of relating stories in the service of her clients.
At a certain point the storytelling and case making becomes second nature.
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In 2019, I taught Career Discovery and Advocacy. What I do has nothing to do with Career. Writing is Self Discovery and Advocacy. Remove the professionalism, marketing and teaching tones from what’s below …
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We are all the authors of our own careers and lives. Learn how to understand what directions your voice is directing you to take through writing and speaking about YOU, THE WORLD AND ANY OBSTRUCTIONS, internal or external that are blocking you from understanding your heart’s desire and how others wish to use your heartfelt work in order to serve clients, organizations and any other people or entities that need you
Sample Career Journal Entry
What follows is my personal career journal entry from 11/28/18. Note that career journal entries often do not reflect final points of view. As one experiences life and work one’s understanding of life and work, and all of their details, changes. Career journaling is a process of self- overhearing. The objects of career journal entry are to lay out what you think and feel in the moment, live the questions related to those thoughts and feelings and follow the progress of the
journalist’s inner life as related to career. It is very important to write in an uncensored way. Just put down what you really feel, don’t worry about political correctness or any other concerns of what other people think. Your changing opinions and values are the path to career clarity. Each career is the responsibility of the individual pursuing it. No one can make your decisions for you. No one size fits all. To go forward is to go into the unknown, and career journaling charts the map to the new.
I teach career/life journaling as part of my course. The assignment is to regularly write about yourself, the world, and any internal or external obstructions between yourself and the world.
The uninitiated see obstructions as negatives. Obstructions are opportunities, useful directional arrows. I don’t know how anyone exists without periodically making a career/life journal. Life is an art form. You can be Picasso or paint “Dogs Playing Poker.” This phase of The Rick Blog which started in October 2018 is a career/life journal. I see that this morning. I didn’t set out go down this path. I don’t control what I write, I follow my soul and the world.
(I looked at my blog as a whole this morning. I don’t know why I did that. I’m glad that I did. I am very happy with it. In its totality it is a fine piece of work and can be viewed here.)
In my last entry, I wrote that I was going to teach independently and continue to self-publish on the blog. I said that I would teach at a school or other entity, and get a publisher that shared my values and respected my autonomy. If no such people and organizations exist, I’d keep working on my own.
No one really works on their own, even if they are freelance independents. Realizing that I reached out to an old friend who offers training to attorneys. I love this guy. I trust him. My meeting with him was very helpful. He gave me a great name for my course. He made some suggestions which led me edit the text book that I have written for the course and to systematize my lesson plans. My course and the text book are improved because I spoke with him. He also spoke to me with a friend’s love. It is always a gift to be in the presence of someone who cares about you.
I make my own decisions however, and there are three suggestions that he made that I cannot act upon. I am pretty sure that he will be critical of my choices. I accept that. When you chart a course that goes against more conventional wisdom, you set yourself up for criticism.
I am sure that my friend will think that my choices make me unemployable. I know that he is wrong. His three suggestions would set me up for failure. I know that because I have made similar errors in the past. I also am not critical that his suggestions reflect choices that he has made. In work and life, one size does not fit all.
Suggestion 1: Write your blog under an assumed name. My friend fears that law firm management would never hire me because of the political and social comments that I make on my blog. That may very well be true. If that is the case, my course will not be offered under the aegis of law firm management.
This morning MSNBC reported that the Trump Administration has discontinued FBI background checks for workers in detention camps for refugee children. The entire refugee and immigrant policy at our southern border is immoral and inhumane. Family separation is child abuse. Trump is ruining these children’s lives through his abuse. Now, the danger of other child abusers being hired to “care” for these children is adding a high risk of physical and sexual abuse to be added to the psychological abuse that is already devastating these children.
If my opposition to this grotesque Presidency offends some major domo at a Big Law firm, so be it. I emphatically associate my name to every word that I have said about Trump.
I am not a prominent man, but one thing that the 2016 and 2018 elections show is that we are a democracy. What every person believes matters. I believe in the power of citizenship. I believe that we have a moral obligation to stand up for right against wrong everywhere, particularly where we work — even when our work is looking for work.
Trump is the zenith of a political, social and cultural degradation that has been building in our country since the first settlers came to North America.
So I also sign my name, Richard Thomas to every other word that I have written spelling out the truth about other immoral aspects of our society that have nothing to do with Trump.
I do not arrogantly say that I am right about everything that I have written in my blog. But I proudly say that I have pursued the truth and will continue to do. I am a writer and a teacher and that is my job.
Which leads me to the second rejected suggestion …
Suggestion 2: Go to iO and see if they will accept the idea for my course. Let iO promote the course and work out some kind of 60/40 or 70/30 split with the tuition money. This suggestion is a harder one to write about. I have friends that teach at iO, and they are certainly not immoral people. The same is true of the Second City Training Center. I would never want to work in association with either place however.
I think “improv” training in Chicago is superficial. “Classes” are like cooking classes or wine tasting where people go to find dates, spouses and lovers. Or to go forward into careers in show business, a pursuit that I think is an unworthy one. Art is about the pursuit of truth. Entertainment is a sub-division of sales. We need more artists and fewer salespeople. I don’t do what iO or Second City does.
Professionals go to the Second City Training Center and iO to get better interpersonal and communication skills to apply to their work. I have written a lot about the superficiality of the program I used to work alongside at UIC (I never participated in UIC’s approach — in that sense I was never in the program). Apply all that I have written about UIC to SC and iO. These “improv” classes are selling professionals a bill of goods.
I know what real improvisation is, and I know what real professionalism is. I will not betray the truth.
Which leads me to the third rejected suggestion …
Suggestion 3: My friend tells me that my text book and course has too much content. He was very nice about it. He says that I am trying to save people. I am not. I’m trying to tell the truth.
My friend thinks that most people do not want the depth that I go into in my teaching. I think he is right. I know that some people do want that depth. Those are the people that I will teach.
I have no interest in playing party games with people and conning them that they learned something. The learning process is messy and painful — frustration leading to growth. I want my students to be truly satisfied, not distracted. My classes have the objectives of having the students and the world reach their full potential. Art is about the expansion of the consciousness
of individuals and society. That may sound grandiose and Pollyannish. It is not. It’s the truth.
My friend also misnames my artistic process as undisciplined, unedited and disorganized. Art’s first step comes in the chaos of the moment. Editing and organization come later. Discipline means seeing things through to the end. It does not mean settling for a quick and inaccurate fix and rigidly conforming to it because it is profitable.
Some additional comments:
I have worked on what I do my whole life. I lost my job last June, but I never stopped working. I require respect from those that I work with. This is not the howl of a fragile ego. It is a necessity of protecting the integrity of my work. I am not deferential to anyone who has more money than me. They are insecure and are keeping score on a scorecard that I have never signed on to. Big law firms for example have to have their egos punctured in order to truly improvise and truly be professional. Ethics and creativity are the same thing looked at from different points of reference.
If everyone took my course, we would save the world. That’s not going to happen, so I do what I can. What sounds self-aggrandizing here is not. This is what we all should be doing in our own ways.
Character is what matters.
All men are created equal.
Real work brings livelihood, honors the soul and serves others. One last thing:
I have written extensively about my love of Paul Sills and David Shepherd. I had the great good fortune of knowing two of the great artists of the Twentieth Century. Their example has served as a lodestar for me.
To a point.
But my art is my own.
I have created and am creating a new thing.
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In 2019, I taught Applied Ethics. The error, again was placing what I am in a professional and/or academic context. I’m really talking about writing. Creativity is writing.
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Thought and education related to practical “applied ethics”, in concert with thought and education related to creativity and personal presence, and in concert with thought and education related to reason and organization, are foundations of all applications of the Ethical Presence TM process. Ethics, AND personal presence and creativity, AND rational and substantive action, work IN UNITY in the most effective action when working with Ethical Presence TM.
Such action can lead to work which feeds the soul, right and prosperous livelihood, and service to others. Ethical Presence TM is about being effective, doing good while doing well, and feeling satisfied in one’s conscious authenticity while doing it.
Richard Thomas can help you and your organization create ways to live and work with more Ethical Presence TM.
“Applied Ethics” Skills Training and Coaching are applications of the Ethical Presence TM process.
Excerpt from Richard Thomas’ Ethical Presence “
It is not enough to understand mere rules of professional conduct. It is necessary to have the life skills to comply with them. I worked as a litigator at the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission. When I was there, I noticed that many lawyers didn’t need to be disciplined. They needed to be educated about the vast potential of their own humanity. I subsequently saw that was true for lawyers was true for business professionals and academics — and any other person who works in a professional setting. Creativity, empathy, self-expression, critical thinking, conscience and other qualities falsely identified with talent are simply aspects of being human. They require no special talent. They can be accessed. They can be developed to greater depths. They can be practiced in order to strengthen facility in their application to the events and purposes of work and life.
The Rules of Professional Responsibility for Attorneys, and any formal or informal code of conduct for any profession, address these fundamental aspects of personal character:
Competence
Diligence
Communication
Honesty (Don’t lie)
Honesty (Don’t steal)
Civility
These aspects of character are also necessities of creativity. Picasso became more than competent at drafting and naturalistic painting before he innovated new forms. Anyone who has ever seriously practiced writing, music, acting or any other creative art knows how important diligent and sustained work is to achieving creative excellence. Art IS communication in a variety of forms. A good writer, visual artist, comedian — you can fill in the form — is honest — attentive to detail, and willing to face hard truths. Artists who collaborate need the virtue of civility — the emotional intelligence to be able to understand their own emotions and unconscious fears and desires, and the emotions and unconscious fears and desires of other people.
There is a unity in action that leads to ethical and creative behavior, and professional effectiveness and excellence. That unity is what Ethical Presence TM is all about. Ethical Presence TM is found where art and ethics meet. Note that Ethical Presence TM is not the study of art per se. It is the practice of making art, a very practical art which tends to the material needs of the world and the souls of all involved. My personal experience showed me that my background as an improvisational actor and writer informed my practice of law and informs my teaching; and that my background as a lawyer and teacher in a business school informs my writing and improvisational acting. Life, work and art are different perspectives regarding the same action.
Ethical Presence TM cannot be learned in the abstract. It can only be learned experientially. The values of Ethical Presence are universal, but each individual and each situation require that they be applied in specific and unique ways.
This book, and its companion course, are created to help foster the skills of Ethical Presence TM. Ethical Presence TM, when competently and diligently practiced, helps the individual care for her material needs, be of service to others, and meet the soul’s requirements for personal peace, happiness and satisfaction. Those may sound like big claims, but they are not. All that a book and course can do is orient your thinking. You have to do the hard work. I look forward to seeing that work in our class, and hearing about the service, success and personal satisfaction that you will create in your own special way through your work in the turmoil of the world.
Read that. It’s not just a blog. I share my writing there. Read the blog. It will tell you everything you need to know about Richard Thomas, Writer and Writing Teacher* (It’s not really teaching.)
After that submission and rejection and rejection and rejection …
Drinking …
Publishers were bullshit. Schools were bullshit.
The army rejected him!
He became a bum or working low level jobs.
For ten years.
Previously …
His father beat him.
His acne was so bad it put him in the hospital.
When you are slapped down repeatedly you get real.
He developed his poetry like Steve Jobs developed the iPhone. He redefined American life.
He almost died in the process. After a big scare, he went back to the typewriter. And got a job.
He hated the job. Never went postal. He wrote.
If a writer hasn’t gone through shit and bullshit, they should skip it. That academic stuff … is unreal … attention on aesthetics and office politics, and not what the writer is saying.
Bukowski was discovered at age 50. A publisher named John Martin came across Bukowski’s work and thought he was a major writer. He paid Bukowski $100 a week and published what Bukowski wrote every night.
Bukowski wrote to stay sane and alive.
And for the money. Even when there was no money, it was for the money.
He took what he had to do, what he had no choice but to do, and demanded that it make money. His demands fell on deaf ears forever until …
John Martin.
When do I get my fucking John Martin? My father never beat me. I never had to be hospitalized with acne. I wasn’t a bum. I’ve never been a drinker. Bukowski is not my hero. There are things I admire about him, but he’s not a favorite.
But I’ve been shit on plenty. And I see myself as an equal to the world. If the world has its say, I have mine. I had wage slave jobs and I had steady work. I saw that people are awful on jobs and in neighborhoods and in social groupings. I know social conformity is inhumane. I write to stay sane and alive. I know academic writing is boring as hell. I want to talk to the people who want to be human. I know that there are a lot out there. I know a few.
I know the inhumans are never going to let me in. I don’t want to go in. And I’m so sick of listening to them. I can’t stand it. I love when I tell them to fuck off and just walk away.
I once read a book called ‘How to Become a CEO.’ Today I read Bukowski, and I’ll read someone else tomorrow as I look for the answer. Like I read about Ulysses S. Grant.
Introvert is a sanitized word for what I am. Society says oh, an introvert is someone who is happier alone than with other people. Society is constantly kissing its own ass. I have no problem spending time with human beings, but I can’t stand being around the other ones. Mean and stupid.
Where’s my John Martin!
I’ve paid my dues. When do I get to give talks and take trips and get money for sharing my words. I know I’m fucking good.
Bukowski is the opposite of Major Jackson, the corporate poet who condemns scribbling and smiles for the birdie.
Second City and Notre Dame and UIC and ethics law were the post office.
Unemployment was being a bum.
Wage slave jobs were wage slave jobs.
I’ve matriculated. Where is my fucking corner office!
No matter what you do for the inhumans, it is never good enough. They always have a comment, a slight, a betrayal, a fucking lie …
Where’s my John Martin!
I’m now far away from the inhumans. They can’t reach me here. Where are the fucking humans!
John Martin was an outsider.
Martin did it for the money too.
Major Jackson also does it for the money. Bukowski actually earned it. Humans actually want to read him. Jackson’s poems are like the original paintings that hang in the reception areas of white shoe law firms. No one looks at them, the lawyers just want to say that they have them.
When Bukowski got money, he settled down. When he got money, the literary world embraced him. They invited him to speak at their shitty schools. They wished they could publish him, but John Martin beat them to it.
Once Bukowski got money, he enjoyed all of the benefits of membership in the middle class. Everyone becomes respectable when they have money. That’s all that matters. If you have money you are godly, you are suitable for marriage, shop clerks laugh at your jokes … the dirtbag became a gentleman …
Even humans say his writing was best then after he made it. That was curious but it makes sense. Bukowski said … don’t worry, the pain never goes away.
I’ll testify too. I have money now. I’m happy … but the wounds are still inflamed … that’s human … and the more comfortable I am, the better my writing. The immediate suffering is a first draft.
I am the man who has everything … including a past … now where are the humans!
Beau is Afraid is a true story. The writer/director Ari Aster had to experience this narrative himself. It isn’t possible that he imagined it. He imagined the telling. He likes horror movies. He likes perverse comedy.
This is anxiety beyond the norm. This is an artistic rendering of some condition catalogued in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association.
The film’s universality is in its odyssey. We journey into ourselves. Beau is afraid but he is also courageous.
On the level of ordinary experience, the events of this movie are preposterous. Yet, they are emotionally harrowing. The picture is like music. It suspends thought and engages feeling. It is a song of anxiety legitimately provoked by inner and outer causes.
Life is terrifying but it always works out. Even in its darkest moments there are grace notes — people who are at least temporarily compassionate, art beyond therapy that heals or at least soothes the wounds … life enables you to persist at living …
Beau is a coming of age story for the mother bound soul. Incest and violence are initiations, trials to endure and learn from on the way home.
Beau is Afraid reminds me of the Bible. Eden and family and oppression and lust and love and false accusation and plagues … paradise found and lost … mania and depression …
I break from the movie for a second … if you love your fate, fortune will not desert you … even misfortune becomes good, even death is the right thing when it comes … the world and your soul are one thing … you change and so does all else …
The ancients understood that there was just one story.
Aster shows how redemption and misery vacillate in psychology and history, and suggests to me that a person must transcend reaction to stimuli and act with agency to choose to be redeemed, a choice that also changes everything and everyone else.
In the old man scenes Joaquin Phoenix looks like King Lear and King Lear looks like God, a personification of all wisdom, love, responsibility and madness.
The past is the present is the future. There is only one moment that we live and contemplate and wonder about for eternity.
Someone once told me, ‘We are not philosopher kings.’ He was wrong. We create our world and we give it meaning.
We are here and we are not here. Being and nothingness coexist.
I’m a monkey typing a Bible. The one out of a billion Bible out of so many tries is not random. A creative intelligence informs everything. Yours and the world’s. You and the world are made of the same stuff.
Another teacher told me that I was ‘an easy person to love.’ I was 68 before I realized the love guy was a better teacher than the philosopher king guy. This movie is about figuring things out.
Love is fear transformed … a fortune cookie from a philosopher king.
Procreation is a drive to immortality. So is creation. We live on in a linear way in everyone we become part of … we are eternal immediately in our one moment lives.
The virtue of madness is that it obliterates denial.
A dream is the truest memory.
A Jungian movie …
It refuses to show things easier than they are …
I place this in a category with May December and I’m Thinking of Ending Things.
This movie is like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. An artist painted everything seen and unseen. No wonder I’m bored by the news. Same shit different day as opposed to … look … remember … dream … reflect …
The answer to the perception of the world as chaos is harmony, not abstract organization and structure.
Ignore the dark waters of the unconscious at your own peril.
The movie ends happily. (No spoiler … I reveal nothing here.) Suicide is necessary several times in a life. Just don’t be literal about it.
8/10/23: Memories, Dreams and Reflections; Barbenheimer; Moving to Nashville
We moved to Nashville a couple of weeks ago. I’ve taken to unsuccessfully repeating what has become a prepared line, ‘I’ve come to Nashville to die.’ I kid myself that the line has my signature provocative charm — ‘it’s funny, but it makes you think!’
In actuality, it’s not particularly funny. Or thought provoking for most of those that I impose the line upon.
It makes me think though. In the line I admit how old I’ve become — 68, that’s 476 in dog years, and I pretend to admit a clear sense of my own mortality. The fact is that I am not entirely convinced that I ever will die. It hasn’t happened yet. And I am full of piss and vinegar. Full of ambitions and plans. I have all of the energy that I had when I was thirty except for fewer hours a day.
I accept age, and ignore death. I like being old. You can do and say whatever you please and people give you a pass.
I don’t deny death. I read Ernest Becker years ago and got the point. If you deny death, you live like an asshole. No, I ignore death. It’s easy to be brave when you are young and you don’t know that you are going to die. You think you have centuries of second chances ahead of you.
But when death becomes a real thing, not just intellectually, but as the ultimate existential threat, then I think its best to ignore it.
In one sense, I read Carl Jung’s “Memories, Dreams and Reflections” when I was far too young. It’s an old man’s book. My mother, when in her nineties, would study family photo albums. Her life in those years, much simpler than Jung’s of course, was about reviewing her life. Life is one thing after another, until you add meaning.
In another sense, I was born old. I have always been disposed, since I was a small child, to attempting to find meaning in the events of my life. My life has always been a dialogue between what I experience and what my sub-conscious mind thinks and feels about that experience.
Artists are born not made. Artists die in time, and live forever in eternity.
I like being an old man. It suits me. My body has caught up to my soul.
I won’t be capable of liking to be a dead man, but I like the idea of leaving a trace. My life, like all other lives, will leave a trace on the course of human and beyond events … forever.
The ‘sub’ in sub-conscious is very important. I don’t manufacture ideas or feelings about my life. I live my life and am periodically seized by epiphanies that tether my being to the rest of the world.
And to all time.
Art’s a lot like religion except you cut out the middle man.
Once I was hospitalized for hearing voices. I still do, but it doesn’t seem to bother anyone anymore. I just don’t bring it up. I now understand that the voices are speaking on another plane, that can’t be heard in the three dimensions most easy to perceive. Cosmological forces are leading us all the time if we let them. They are telling us what our next rational steps are in the field of eternity. (Those steps often look irrational in the field of time, but not always.)
It used to be so tiresome to pretend that an unseen consciousness didn’t exist and therefore was not the most perceptive and powerful thing of all, in concession to the fear and ignorance of other people. Today, no pretense is required. I’m apparently old in others’ eyes, and the apparently old are mercifully marginalized. We are indulged in what is perceived as our illusion that we are preparing for another world.
We aren’t preparing at all. We are truly living in this one.
When Jung was old, he was ‘beyond achievement and success’. As a young man, I envied him. I longed for that point in life when I could abandon trying to be successful and could just be who I am, freely and out loud.
I kind of just lived freely and out loud anyway, and always chose the natural over the calculated pursuit of achievement. I had a great life, but felt pain and shame for not doing what I was supposed to do.
A life beyond achievement and success is so much better than a life spent pursuing and sustaining those things.
A life spent pursuing achievement and success, may not be a life at all.
If everyone listened to their subconscious whispers from eternity, the world and the individual souls that inhabit the world, would be in perfect harmony.
Artists are born not made. Emphatic acceptance of who we were born to be is what helps the world and makes us happy.
Religion often tells us, ‘Faith without works is dead.’
I don’t need faith. I have experience. I don’t have to believe in God. I know him or her or it or them … personally. I know that there is a creative intelligence that orchestrates everything. It’s obvious.
I don’t need works. I have the authentic and tangible expressions of who I am. It is those expressions that serve me, and other people and the cosmological forces that many personify as a character called ‘God’.
All other action that we call ‘work’ is just a misguided struggle, doomed to failure at its inception.
Barbenheimer
7/31/23
Saw Oppenheimer again last night. I have no idea why I returned. Saw a whole new level in it. A myth I take personally. Very clarifying and instructive. Really important to me.
I’m sure that story is personal to Nolan. To all of us of his general type.
And enthralling for the masses …
Giving yourself to the world is the greatest gift you give. I know that from personal experience.
8/5/23
Bernie Sahlins called me a martyr back in the day. I never understood it until now, close to 40 years later.
I’m Oppenheimer (O). Kitty, O’s fiercest ally, and Lewis Strauss, his nemesis, each call him a martyr.
In my case, I was just being myself. I was oblivious (I’m using that word often lately) to Bernie’s perspective. I wasn’t going to whore out my work, be mean … all the rest on the dark side of show business. Bernie had that darkness, so he was Lewis S.
But he wasn’t all bad. He was also Kitty. He told me once “you don’t want to do shit. You’re an artist”.
He wanted me to fight. Like Kitty.
I’m a lover, not a fighter.
O and I weren’t passive. We had nothing to gain from the competition. I didn’t and don’t want what the crowd desires.
Martyrs are instinctive and unconscious dissenters. We don’t set out to alienate anybody. We get crucified because our actions are heard by the crowd as if we are calling them out. We are a natural challenge to the lousiness of the way things are. We were born that way. It doesn’t even occur to us to go in the gutters.
And this is why I was erased from the book of places. I did it my own way —- with joy not sanctimony, and they thought I was attacking their way with moralistic pomposity. I wasn’t, it wasn’t about them (Lewis), I didn’t even think of them much until they showed up with pitchforks and torches; now that I understand their dark hearts I can speak to that darkness from the outside. The only perspective from which to actually see it. If you are in contest with them, you can get close but not have detachment and objectivity.
It’s so interesting that O kept working after his exile. He didn’t need them. He learned that.
O thought he did good when he accepted the Fermi award. It wasn’t for him. It was for them. At least they could recognize his excellence and values even if they were beyond them.
I’m not so sure. With the award , they said he is the best of us. But he was something different than them. It was a false and self aggrandizing gesture to give O the award.
Maybe it’s both. Nolan is a master of ambiguity.
O had great friends, wife, brother. He had his work … leading elite people to creative discoveries, and he had a romantic sense of home.
He chose places, Los Alamos and St. John’s where he could be in solitude, and a place like his Princeton institute where he could collaborate with others of his caliber.
He couldn’t be with them.
This is a big reason I am so happy at the moment. They seem millions of miles and hundreds of years away.
And I have no animus towards them. I see this aspect of human nature. They play their role in the consciousness of man, and what they misname as martyrs play another.
I feel blessed ( by cosmological forces?) to be on this side of the equation.
O’s mentor was Einstein. As brilliant as those two guys were , it took them lifetimes to understand the nature of human relations in this sphere.
So I am even spared regret. My learning curve regarding this is right on schedule.
That O at the blackboard analogy … I do feel like that’s what I am up to …
8/5/23
Bernie said I was ‘too competitive.’
That’s not how it felt to me.
The first line I ever said as The Rick was ‘I am the Rick and I’m better than you.’
I still believe it —- present company excepted!
I was better than my contemporaries everywhere I went, not just performing, because I was engaged in a higher pursuit than they were. In recent years I call that pursuit art.
It’s not competition, it’s transcendence.
I started to watch more Nolan last night —- Interstellar, but fell asleep. Nesting is rugged! I did notice that he got an unmannered performance out of McConnaughey —- however you spell it.
8/6/23
More on martyrdom in Oppenheimer…
After Bernie sold SC to Andrew, he was still directing the resident company in Chicago.
I was still around doing The Rick Show which was the talk of the SC community.
The cast Bernie was directing included Bonnie Hunt as I recall. They asked me to direct.
I declined, it felt disloyal to Bernie.
Lewis Strauss said of Oppenheimer (O) that he wanted it both ways. That he wanted to build the bomb and be known for opposing proliferation. He said O positioned himself as the most important man in the world.
Jesus didn’t want power. His being disarmed power.
I was too influential. People were responding to what I was doing. Bernie was threatened.
In my last year in the resident company , SC provided the hosts for the Jeff Awards, the Chicago theater prizes. I was the leader of the company. Bernie didn’t pick me.
People told me I was Bernie’s favorite — ever. When I started he went on a trip to Egypt and brought me back an expensive vase. His brother was an anthropologist. It was a mark of high affection.
He introduced me to the big cigars
But I opposed him. Like a favored son. I criticized his keeping a revue up too long. I fought him on several scenes and often won.
Once he called me in to his office and said SC had a floor of intelligence but we couldn’t go father than the audience. He often complained that I was preaching to the converted
I ignored him and did whatever I pleased.
He cooled on me when we came to the Village Gate but needed me.
After I left the company he said I was a talent like Harold Ramis and asked me to help write his new show.
Lewis S. admired O. Judas admired Jesus. But they felt like they lost power in the holy presence.
Don’t be a martyr. Be who I want you to be.
Downey is so good in the movie. In the affectionate scenes, he’s a lot like Bernie.
I saw Bernie shortly before he died. He asked to perform in some parlor theatricals he was doing —- in his 90s. They never happened. The last time I saw him was with a group of people. He shook his head. He finally gave up on me.
I was the one who got away. He loved me the most, but I wanted to be something else, who I was.
Bernie wanted it both ways. Business and art. He was often accused of being a dilettante, and there was something to that. He made his money like Lewis S, selling tape recorders.
He didn’t have an art at the multiplex vision. He wanted the multiplex and the pose of art.
I am something much more than Harold Ramis.
Bernie was a contradiction. His daughter was a visual artist. His brother was an intellectual.
He knew what those things were.
He saw the art and intellect in me, but like a father wanted me to be what he was.
So that he could once again claim he was an artist and intellectual. It was his reason for being.
My father wanted me to be what he wished he was.
A success, whatever that was. Power. In charge.
Bernie wanted me to be him.
This is the first time I see it. The cigars, the vase.
He rightly got pissed at me when I made fun of opera one night it hurt him. He loved opera. He thought I was acting in a manner unworthy of his protege.
I disappointed two fathers. Hah!
A martyr because I sacrificed what I didn’t want!
An old shrink was right. When you get old the witches make you laugh.
Note: everyone that called us failures were actually whimpering because we were kicking their asses.
Jesus made out better than the Romans and the Pharisees. They have power. We have the hearts of the people.
They disappear. We live forever.
Havel: The Power of the Powerless … what a title …
8/7/23
I get some direction from yesterday’s epiphany about Bernie.
I sense a tonal change in my writing, a deeper perspective. I think some epic book project may be brewing , that will be relevant to many people, especially younger ones. (Who isn’t ? Hah!)
It will be a remake of the blog, from a fresh point of view.
But my life needs another stanza too. I’ve got my friend, family and my Oppenheimer Beach, my new and eternal home, Nashville. I also need a new way to participate in the world. A place where no Bernies obstruct. A place of others who would wisely, adeptly and bravely turn the page.
That place will be the setting of the final chapter of the book.
Nashville —- which I am enjoying very much —- is the penultimate chapter. It’s a progressive and young place with the gentle aspects of Southern culture.
It can embarrass as I drive down River Plantation Dr, or Robert E Lee way or Jefferson Davis Pkwy. Older folks are suspicious of Yankees and quickly warm when they see I mean no harm.
It’s a beautiful … I don’t want to say City … it’s a quilt … you drive though horse farms and then skyscrapers appear over the horizon … gated communities quickly turn into something resembling Tobacco Road … two lane no shoulder roads turn into parkways … some parts are congested and some parts are wide open spaces … there is no grid … it’s a spaghetti bowl of roads … the only way to get anywhere is to meander … it’s a courtly place … ladies and gentlemen in casual clothes … it has the unassuming charm of a beautiful young person …
We saw Barbie yesterday. Great. Entertaining. Thoughtful. Even moving. Art at the Ziegfeld. Barbenheimer is a very hopeful development for the possibilities for your work. The money guys can see profit in meaning even in a mass market, as long , of course, that entertainment value is there too.
That Bernie memory is rich. It gives the art a tether to the world. I’ve been looking for that my whole life.
My art has matured. My life has matured. I am connected to the world. Now I want my art connected to the world.
There’s a way to do that. I know it.
8/8/23
I got my Oppenheimer Beach. I’ve come to Nashville to die. I never want to move again.
The last piece —- the only part that lacks peace—- I’m yours in puns —— is a remake of the Bernie situation —- work with others where the higher road is the point.
It’s rare and more rare from where I come from and my time of life , but I believe in miracles.
The epic book would be a rewrite of the blog from a deeper perspective. A character might joust with the idiots and assholes, but the narrator will be omniscient.
I saw Bernie in a way I never did before. I think I see life differently now. It’s been a gradual transformation, but I’m a bit different in Nashville.
That’s all I got on next projects right now. I wait for further instructions from my subconscious.
I might post online again. I need to do it for balance. I think some people really read me there. And I write my way to writing. If I write there, I think a book might break out.
I’m like a guy working in a little theater who knows he is destined for Broadway. He doesn’t stop the off off off work while waiting for the inevitable big show.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
8/17/23: Father Bill O’Malley and the Pharisees
Hopefully my last comment on success and fame: Father Bill O’Malley meant a lot to a lot of students and others. He died at 92 under a cloud of scandal. A former student naively asked the Jesuit provincial for a memorial where those who didn’t believe the allegations and accusations could honor and remember Bill. He was rebuffed of course.
O’Malley is being erased from Jesuit history as if he were Stalin and the order was the Politburo.
Old Jebbie prep boys are getting together to decide a response. Do they protest and assert their rights? Why is it important to them that Bill is officially remembered? Is it to associate themselves with the actor/priest from the Exorcist in reflected glory? Maybe a little for some, but mainly it’s because they loved the guy and appreciated what he meant in their lives.
I believe they are in the process of wisely deciding to walk away. Even if Bill’s contributions are erased by the Jesuits, it doesn’t mean he didn’t make them. He still influenced all those people. Wrote all that he wrote.
I imagine that Bill spent little time thinking of achievement and success. He was too busy working with intelligence and discernment. For people with eyes to see. And what influence he’s had on thoughtful readers, students and conscientious lay men and women. He wrote of a ‘Living God’. He taught that living a good life requires critical thinking, and diligence. That we must desire and try to be all that we were created to be. We couldn’t just blindly follow authority or our own base impulses. Bill’s god spoke to us through our minds and our emotions, and we had to work to hear him through all of the competing noise. It was our joy and responsibility to live godly lives, said Bill.
Bill wasn’t big on rules or conformity. He didn’t suffer fools, but his criticism was always well intended, and he could be affectionate a moment after being critical.
Anyone who knew him in their formative years encountered a large opportunity whether they knew it or not.
Does it matter that many other Catholic people will never know that he ever counseled, taught and wrote as a result of the official purge of his biography?
Freud: love and work are all. No one, no matter how important they claim to be, can eliminate the positive influence that Bill had on eternity and more prosaic human affairs.
The Jesuits’ treatment of O’Malley’s friends is why people leave the church. The Jesuits, above all priests, should be able to teach that all accusations aren’t always true, that the memory of Bill could be burdened by others’ malice instead of his own wrongdoing, that even if some or all of the charges against him are true, it doesn’t negate all the good he did, and that it is cruel to obstruct the desire of those who loved him and wish to mourn his death and celebrate his life.
I spent much of a lifetime revering the Jesuits and the Church. I now realize my love and respect was for Bill and others like him. Individuals. The institutions of the Church and the religious orders are nothing but abstractions making false claims of holiness and power.
Real goodness and genuine community lie in work and truth shared by people who love what we call God, each other and the world. Like the original Christians, before all the corporate bullshit concerned with public relations and legal liability, and giving fuck all about human beings or what great religious leaders — like Jesus for example? — taught.
Bill was closer to Jesus than the Jesuit management team that treats him and his friends so poorly.
Bill O’Malley was better than the Jesuits and the Church. They rejected him. I choose him and reject them.
Christ was betrayed by the world, died to it, and returned with something better.
I suggest we do the same.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
8/21/23: Jerry, Andy and Gene Die to the World, and Come to Birth From Within; J. Robert Gets Trapped Behind
Note: Jerry, Andy and Gene all got further than J. Robert Oppenheimer. It was so unfair that he didn’t reach the Promised Land. The world persecuted him using his frailties against him, infected him with self-doubt. He assumed his enemies’ mean and ignorant perceptions of him. His promethean clarity, insight and imagination that perceived the nature of so much of creation, did not extend to understanding himself, or the motives of those who destroyed him. Powers of the world told him that he was a bad and failed man, and he believed it. They went after his fragile self-esteem and he surrendered it. Artists and thinkers of genius can be gaslit as easily as any other person.
Art and genius are divine qualities that inhabit some flesh and blood humans, eternal power adjacent to vulnerability and mortality.
Sadly, Oppenheimer wasn’t capable of preserving his genius and advancing it to its highest and deepest levels.
I think I get Salinger.
He started out writing just as he pleased. He was protected by the war. He wanted ‘success’. He was rejected but he knew he was great. He hung in there and the success he achieved was phenomenal.
But he kept his integrity, always honoring his own inspirations.
He achieved what few do —- success completely on his own terms. It wasn’t calculated.
He and times changed as a person and times always do.
In the 60s his writing was poorly reviewed. He was being cast as a narcissistic has been. It was only a moment and he could have fought back and success would have come back around.
But he saw through success itself. He realized he had always been motivated by fulfilling the capabilities of his own voice. His writing had been recognized by the world and yet he knew there was something much more than even such deserved recognition.
‘What profits a man if he gains the world and loses himself?’
He wrote every day after he left. I’m sure of it. He engaged the world when he felt like it. I think he was mostly happy and very much at peace.
There’s another level, another gear …
O’Neill wrote his greatest plays after he won the Nobel Prize. He achieved the greatest acclaim and decided not to be published or produced
I don’t think it was secrecy. I think it was privacy. He knew he could only do the monumental work ahead of him if he was separate from the largely adoring distractions of the crowd.
Andy Warhol was a shrewd outsider. He said the he himself was ‘uninteresting’. His work masqueraded as being impersonal. He loved Campbell Tomato Soup as a kid.
It was all deeply personal.
His work was at once ambiguous and ironic. He played the consumer, the star … and he actually wanted money and fame … but he also knew that they were illusions and he used the appearance of his life in order to honor who he truly was.
My adversaries saw me more clearly than I did myself.
The fact that I did what I wanted put me in conflict with them. They wanted that power. To say what was success . To demand that I work for their recognition.
Or more precisely for the forces they unhappily worked for.
The ironic satire of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, The hero cheerfully calculates ascendance to the hell at that top of the stairs.
The charade and bullshit of it all. A game show life winning ultimately worthless prizes for valueless trivial activity.
I think O’Neill and Salinger are stories of transformation. Not in who they were. But in knowing who they were. They observed themselves and surgically separated themselves from all that was incompatible with their true nature that surrounded them.
The surgery took a long time.
I think Warhol knew from the beginning. He had the advantage of being discriminated against. This strange , perceived to be unattractive gay boy wasn’t supposed to be successful. He cunningly put on a show of working so hard at the factory to honor their values. But in actuality he lived completely on his own terms.
The artist has no choice in the matter. He can only be who he is and do what he does.
The struggle with the world only occurs while the artist isn’t fully aware of his true nature.
The Last Temptation of Christ is about such an artist. It’s a story of liberation. The Autobiography of Malcolm X is another such story,
I always felt great peace and joy in what I was doing. This freedom and satisfaction inspired great resentment and praise.
The pages in Spolin that stay with me are the ones about avoiding approval and disapproval.
Success is a distraction. Any action to win it is a dead end. All that matters is the life and the work.
To change the world one must be outside of it.
The world finds you when it nearly catches up to your understanding. That’s the world’s job. The artist doesn’t have to worry about it.
I notice I have always been on the outside. Warhol knew he was and tricked the world. O’Neill and Salinger were fair haired boys who had to reject the world to get something more.
Middle class white boys pf genius have to learn this. Those rejected from birth transcend it without a second thought as a matter of survival.
Middle class white boys have to figure out that they must let go.
The world will carry them away with illusions of success and failure if they let it.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
8/22/23: my stream of consciousness viewing ‘Birdman of Alcatraz’ (1962) — escape from prison, brave life in the face of death
Who knows? My Uncle Nello died pretty much alone. Emphysema. Everyone was in Chicago. He was in Rochester. I don’t think it was horrible. He was an introverted guy, never married, few friends. But I think he was in a nice place and the staff was kind to him. He had friends there. He had comfort and peace.
Rewatched ‘Birdman of Alcatraz’. What a hero. Imprisoned and aging … one foot after another he grew as a person and created. He did it not for success… he was barred from success; he did it to be fully human. He ended up doing a lot for a lot of people, but he did it for his own existential well being.
I don’t know if the story is entirely true, but it ought to be.
Burt Lancaster was inspired in the role.
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A portrait of humanity.
Robert Stroud (Lancaster) starts out mad at the world. He’s smarter and better than everyone around him … inmates, wardens, guards.
Stroud believes his mother is the only person who loves him. Is all genius born mother-bound? She ultimately betrays him, which was his good fortune.
Stroud makes peace with the idiots and assholes of the world, his anger subsides and is replaced by wisdom. He frees himself from his co-dependence with his mother. These two transformations freed him to work to the potential of his genius, regardless of environment and circumstances, and open himself to true interdependent love with wife and friend.
Stroud’s love of work and significant others unleashed an agape love, a sagacious empathy for the whole world.
Stroud was a murderer who became a spiritual leader. He inspired millions with his intellect and character. And yet all of that influence arose from his independence. More than any character that presently comes to my mind, Stroud embodies self-reliance.
Revolution starts and ends when a person is alone in his room. The luckiest break a genius can receive is to be forgotten by the world. Stroud had a third grade education, and with the gift of time, enforced seeming idleness, he became a world authority on avian studies, and eventually a great intellectual on my topics, a dazzling generalist.
How many people have been shamed, punished and rejected, only to greatly improve and transform the world? All of them?
Lancaster himself had little formal education, but it is said that he read a book a day. He made so many great films. Stroud may be his finest role, the part most like who he really was … much more so than the lasciviously grinning Elmer Gantry (another great turn) that won him an Oscar.
We are born to learn. That’s all we are meant to do. Learn about ourselves. Learn about the nature of things. All things we do happen naturally as the product of our learning.
Stroud couldn’t be motivated by any reward. He was denied all rewards. He was forced to live for process, and he learned that process is all there is.
Lancaster, the great action hero, the acrobat, the sex icon making love on a beach, gives a performance of such stillness.
A man studying a sparrow … what an image of true action and real adventure.
Movies aren’t art mostly. They show people what they want to believe is true. In 1962, people wanted to believe in the greatness of Robert Stroud. I find that encouraging.
*******
Stroud learned how to defend himself without aggression. His journey involved going from murderer to mensch. He stopped arguing and began asserting. He transcended injustice. No one could steal his dignity. His life changed the lives of those he knew them more than any conscious reform ever could.
The Catholic Church says “Faith without works is dead”. They’ve got it wrong. Works without faith is dead. There are plenty of people who have wings of hospitals named after them that burn in hell, if there is one. There are plenty of murderers who change and make the world a better place.
You want to change the world? Change yourself.
Do you think you got a raw deal? Maybe you have, but you can live a great life in Alcatraz.
The only prisons are in our minds.
Narrator: “Stroud developed a world in microcosm with his birds.” This is our great potential. We can actually create a world. I hope AI frees mankind from work. Then all of us can concern ourselves with art and science instead of survival, and maybe we’ll have peace.
Stroud lived a life of abundance. A life sentence was also an endowment, a gift from the gods, to allow him the freedom to work on his natural interests.
To take very little and do something fine is one of the most satisfying parts of being alive.
The temptation is to say that this Stroud character was a saint. That’s too easy. He was a man.
The temptation is to say Stroud is what we should be. That’s self-defeating. He is what we could be, what we are if we commit to doing the work.
You have to be patient. Wait until the light goes on. Grace is a real thing. Once it does, you can get started.
***
Stroud was blessed by people who saw who he was — no longer the murderer of two men. This movie thinks I want to believe in redemption, and wise and benevolent men and women, and it’s right.
We all need redemption. We’ve all done horrible things. Remember my Uncle Nello? I hurt him badly. I was close to him when I was a boy, and when he was dying he called my mother and asked if I could give him a call. As I said, he was alone and gravely ill. I was busy on trial, and I was immaturely resentful of things he had said. I don’t even remember what they were. I never called him. He died a couple days after he spoke to my mother.
I eventually had so much remorse for what I did, it changed my life. My gravest sin was the impetus for a new life.
We sin and descend into the ugly precincts of the world, jails and prisons of one kind or another. We have a chance to be liberated while in our cells.
Stroud lost all bitterness. In his tiny austere room with a small barred window he gained a broader view of the world.
His anger turned into a kind of grounded sorrow. He still told the truth, and still defended himself, but without rancor. He knew the consciousness of mankind is currently divided. All enlightenment and love, all ignorance and hate, and every compromise in between, is found in the collective hearts and minds of men and women.
We are all sentenced to a bittersweet life.
Age and solitude gives us this wisdom.
These old actors, now long gone, are so good. How they connect their story to the unspoken dimensions of the lives of all persons. Existentialism and popcorn.
Stroud’s every set back, each cruel act against him is defied and defeated in his very person. The holy fool strides forward with nothing but a small napsack and his wits and heart.
He learns the final lesson. Even death is nothing to fear.
He followed his dissatisfaction to true greatness.
When he died, I am certain he was satisfied …
if the story is true …
and if it isn’t, it should be.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
9/1/23: Woody Allen and the Ambition to Write a Masterpiece
I just read that Woody Allen regrets never making a masterpiece. He feels he let himself down. He said he had ‘all of the advantages’ which he listed ( a short list ) —- money and complete artistic freedom.
I agree with him. Many good movies, no masterpieces. I don’t know if he had it in him.
He needed to work too much. For a long time, two movies a year. His work resembles my blog —- revisiting themes from different angles. (But he kind of jumps around … he samples points of view, searches and try things. I got all of that wandering out of my system before I started writing. I drill what is there. I dig deeper mines. I don’t go looking for anything else.)
I think Woody was young for a long time. He had another opportunity — to delay growing up. The world wanted him to stay young — sexually, intellectually. That Dorian Gray opportunity became a liability which frustrated his highest artistic ambitions.
The greatest facility of a master is the ability to change.
I’m struck that I have his two stated advantages — money and creative freedom. I don’t need a job, and I can write whatever I please. I’d be thrilled if I wrote one great masterpiece with the time I have left.
This is a useful thing for me to wonder about … what would the ambition for my masterpiece specifically look like? What would I try to do? How can I elevate what I do to something very fine in an extraordinary way?
Even if I never get there, that clear desire would fuel my work to be the best that it can possibly be.
Ten years ago I set out to be a writer. I’ve achieved that. I guess that I’m announcing today that my new dream is to be a great writer. There — I said it.
It sounds like an immodest claim to a part of me (isn’t just writing your best enough?), but it is actually modest. I know how extraordinarily hard it is to be a masterful writer, and I know that I only have a sense that it’s what I can be.
I’ve spent my life proving to myself that I can do and be different things.
Now I want to prove that I am a master to my audience of one — me. Ultimately, my opinion is all that matters. The legends of mankind starting as legends in their own minds. Masterpieces are not written on assignment. I have to define what greatness is, and do it. Woody clearly has a sense of what his masterpiece is. And he didn’t do it. I want to clarify my sense of mastery, and I want to achieve it.
One thing I’ve already noticed. The more consciously human I become, the better my writing.
I think I have another advantage that eluded Woody — no celebrity. His broad celebrity hurt his art. ‘Stardust Memories’, ‘Celebrity’ … those movies and others demonstrate that he thought about and wrestled with celebrity a lot … but he couldn’t get away from it.
I think that is what Pacino envied in my good friend. He thought, ‘Look at this guy who is as talented with me and is unencumbered by all of this bullshit.’
Greatness doesn’t have a chance when crowded by expectations. One thing that gives me a shot at greatness is my refusal to please others intentionally — my natural tendency to self-determination.
Allen’s general audience can’t distinguish between a good movie and a masterpiece. The guy who wrote the article where I saw the quote said he thought ‘Hannah and Her Sisters’ was a masterpiece. No way. It’s a very good movie. It didn’t change the world.
I think Woody Allen wanted a masterpiece that was recognized by others. He valued the praise of intelligent people. I want to say to myself that I’ve written a masterpiece. I know some others will eventually agree. And some others never will.
The bigger I get the more I want from my writing.
I don’t even want to name the masterpieces of great writers as examples here . They’re irrelevant as to my personal art. At this point, the biographies of great artists are more useful to me than their works. They are life exemplars, not artistic models. Woody Allen openly imitated the works of great artists like Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams and others, even fairly late in his career. I’ve never done that. I’ve received great praise and criticism in the same comment from different people: ‘I’ve never seen anything done that way before.’ I think that’s another quality that positions me for greatness. I don’t struggle for originality, but because of my sincere authenticity, I’m an original.
Woody Allen was conscious of his popularity … first with stand up audiences and later with a more sophisticated crowd. I’ve been conscious of my lack of popularity and just went with it. Hah! To like yourself and be confident when people are shitting on you reaps great benefits for an artist.
What will my writing and my life look like when I elevate them beyond greatness? Some people die complete. I’d like to be one of them. I’m shocked that I feel this morning like I’ve already done better in life and art than Woody Allen.
I’ve never let myself down. I’m already pleased with my writing, and the kind of man I am. I want to be even better, much better. I want the remainder of my life to be for all time.
When I worked for Woody those few days, I had a nagging sense that I didn’t want to admit to myself, that I was smarter than him. I felt that there was more to life than what he saw.
I’ve been smarter with my life than he has too. It can also be true for my body of work too. I think I’ve surpassed him already, but that’s not nearly far enough.
We all learn things at different times. I think at 87 he is realizing that his romanticism was juvenile.
Ultimately, it’s not about the artist. It’s about reality. The masters completely disengage from ego. I have done that and I can do that even more fully.
I think Woody is wishing he was more honest with himself. Honesty with oneself brings more clarity about the world.
That voicemail tape in ‘Allen v Farrow’ where he threatens Mia … around the time he released ‘Deconstructing Harry’ which I think is one of his best … the pain of that time … if he mined it more … stuck with it … let it change him … he might have become the master he aspired to be.
On the set of ‘Bullets Over Broadway’ he told his co-writer, Doug McGrath, after spending a morning in court with Mia … and … ‘now let’s work on our little bauble.’ The finale of ‘Everyone Says I Love You’ seems consciously beneath him in the same way — a stylish homage to Groucho at an upper crust soirée. That scene even seemed dilettantish.
What is beneath me? What is just me saying what I did on my summer vacation? What is me merely expressing pleasure about my entitled life?
Woody liked to celebrate his life … he had a lot to celebrate … but he could’ve gone a lot deeper.
But that would involve giving up a lot of it at times … or at least giving up his pleasure in it …
Woody Allen’s greatest contribution to me was in the realm of life instead of art. He did as he pleased. He got what he wanted. He is a great example in that regard.
But at some point, he lost touch with what he wanted. He had no bosses except his old dreams.
The college dropout became a sophisticated New York intellectual …
But at some point he had to let that go, and become an artist in full …
I don’t feel manic or elated. I have that grounded feeling that I like when I write.
I’m amazed that I am saying this to you today.
Solitude and simplicity …
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
9/11/23: my stream of consciousness viewing ‘Adaptation’ (2003)
My friend wondered how I would write the ending of this movie. Let’s see …
The tension is to be cool without being un-commercial.
Art and commerce, yadda, yadda, yadda …
Nic Cage (I pretentiously call him Nic because it’s easier to type than Nicolas) doesn’t play a character. He plays an aspect of Charlie Kaufman’s psyche. It’s a righteously cartoonish portrayal. An unintegrated personality is two-dimensional.
He plays another aspect of his psyche. Subset of Charlie and Donald (another subset of Charlie).
Kaufman dramatizes the act of writing with a theater of the mind.
Chris Cooper and Meryl Streep’s characters, and all the supporting roles, and the orchids are outside of Charlie.
Everything interesting and beautiful and ignorant and ugly are outside of Charlie.
I relate. Our relationship with all aspects of ourselves plus our relationship with all aspects of the world.
The unobserved life is never lived.
Introversion and extroversion in equal measure.
I can’t believe how much I think like this guy. Everything in nature does it’s part and creation endures and thrives. Nature tells us to how to live.
Our obstructions free us. That’s me, not Charlie. Our fear and neurosis motivates us to understand. They lead to the point of surrender. We struggle and work to face the reality of who we are, and what everyone and everything else is.
We then proceed in harmony.
I think therefore I am.
Reflection is the ultimate action.
Consciousness makes us real. Without it, we are just protoplasm that is observed by conscious living beings.
Without observation and thought, we are inanimate.
It is so different to watch a creature cognizant ot laboring to be cognizant of meaning, as opposed to one that is not.
‘Adaptation is a profound process to figure out how to thrive in the world.’
Catastrophe rains random destruction. The lesson: fate is not determined when fortune deserts you.
Your fate is determined by the quality of your observation and reflection.
You’d think he is writing a section about passion. But he’s good. And a part of the outer world becomes part of Charlie. Susan Orlean, Streep’s character inhabits Charlie. The fantasy that links them is sex.
The individual and the world are in constant intercourse, in an unending orgasm. Until death of course. ‘Passion whittles down the world.’ So does mortality.
Charlie writes to transcend fear. Doesn’t everybody?
“I’m only qualified to write about myself.’ Aren’t we all? Ourselves and the world. That’s all there is. Isn’t it enough?
It better be.
Writers looking to be fully alive. Chris Cooper’s character is committed to be fully alive, and that is heroic because his passion expanded after tragedy.
The cliche of the writer is that he or she is scared and passive. Those who can’t, write about it.
That cliche is half-true. Everybody’s scared. The writer admits it and finds their way to courage.
My friend wondered why Charlie had Donald help him. Charlie is art, and Donald is commerce, right? Speaking of cliches — ‘selling out’ is a cliche. One person’s sell-out is another person’s immersion into reality.
‘Bigger than screenwriting choices, about my choices as a human being,’
The life is the writing.
Brian Cox playing a real life screenwriting guru, Robert McKee, talks like a fortune cookie. Characters have to go through honest changes. They must transform. There must be drama in a script. Things have to happen! There must be desire and drama.
I disliked plot and I liked transformation. They are the same thing.
This movie was written by a guy morphing out of TV sitcom writing and becoming an artist.
I’ll say what McKee and Charlie are getting at. The action for its own sake of TV dramas … car crashes and fucking for the sensation of it, is bullshit. But the transformation of the human soul and the external world in congress with one another, is sublime. Now that’s a fucking plot.
‘Change is not a choice …. ‘
You don’t plot out change. You watch it happen.
Charlie Kaufman is one mystical dude. He is not saying one thing I don’t already know.
He … resonates. Resonate. I love that word. We are born knowing how to live. We have to figure out how to go back and retrieve what we knew.
We come from Paradise and we eat from the tree of knowledge and are cast out and then return to Paradise. We change every step of the way back.
The book and the screenplay become less important with each succeeding frame of the picture. Life is the point.
Art for life’s sake.
The process of art is the process of the integration of the personality followed by communion with the rest of the world.
Oh I love this climax. Kaufman turns the picture into plot driven drivel. The soundtrack goes cornball, like a 70s police procedural.
Kaufman shows us what he thinks really happens in the world, and what is purely manipulative pseudo-story.
You always think you are watching a movie while you watch this movie. Charlie Kaufman (the writer not the character) is doing all he is qualified to do. Tell us what he thinks and feels about himself and what he thinks and feels about the world. He doesn’t just make it up. He observes it.
Florida looks like Eden and a jungle at the same time. The writer sees everything everywhere all at once.
McKee’s conflict is all in Charlie’s mind. The world is as imagined as Charlie and Donald. The images of real people fight with the writer’s images of himself. The illusions die.
My stated purpose for writing The Rick Blog was the integration of my personality. Aspects of ourselves are destroyed and then merged into one being. The process of individuation.
Fairy tales acknowledge the violent nature of reality. So do works for adults.
Fundamentalism plays out the violence in the material world. Art imagines it.
‘I want to be a baby again. I want to be new.’
Psychological pain leads to existential insight leads to new life.
Charlie (the character) kisses a girl.
‘You are what you love, not what loves you.’
Charlie (the character and writer) is no longer afraid.
Who Charlie loves, loves him back.
That happens a lot too.
What Charlie loves, loves him back too.
That happens a lot also.
Well, my friend, I love this ending and wouldn’t change a thing
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
9/18/23: Losing Winning Time
Winning Time on HBO got cancelled. A casualty of the writer’s strike. I was sorry to hear it. I found it highly entertaining. Not art —- but fun and interesting and exciting.
Sadly, it confirmed something I mentioned here recently. Even went beyond it. The money guys are figuring out that they don’t need writers.
If they don’t want to pay for real professional craftsmanship like Winning Time , why would they care about whoever comes up with Jimmy Fallon’s stupid games —- or the supposed art of writing a comedy monologue or sketch, that is rarely as engaging as witty talk or banter?
Some readers were offended when I simply pointed to simple realities. Capitalism will dump you if they can get the same return on a cheaper investment, And a current SNL sketch or talk show monologue has no intrinsic value. Most of this crap isn’t even clever anymore. It’s ad copy. The shows sell the lifestyle that sells the products advertised on the show.
One TV writer in particular resented my comments. It was a case of attempting to kill the messenger. He has facts to face. He is on the ass end of a business that could care less about him, and is not a sustainable source of support for his art or livelihood …
His impulses to create art, and I believe he has true artistic potential and aspiration , will never be satisfied writing that banal garbage for hire which is designed simply to divert people’s attention so business can put its hands in dim and drowsy people’s pockets when they aren’t looking.
He told me I know nothing of art and should stick to law. He didn’t hurt my feelings. He’s confused.
I’m the one who escaped. I’m the one who actually lives a creative life, and is free.
Some liars say I never played the game. Some just don’t understand. The Rick Blog is a bigger achievement than SNL or any talk show. And it’s more important than Winning Time.
Observation, imagination … personal transformation … independence and autonomy … these are the building blocks of art.
9/18/23: Writing THOMAS by Thomas while reading GRANT by Chernow — Introduction
I dedicate this book to my readers, who must give a shit about me personally to take the trouble to listen to all of this. And who probably give a shit about themselves while writing THEM by THEM while reading ME by ME.
Humanity’s cosmic paradox: we are most exalted in our ordinariness. Poetry sees God and more than God in the routine, mundane and prosaic stuff of our existence. The great personages of history are our reflections. We get a haircut and make a dollar and when circumstances permit have opportunities to free the slaves.
I wondered why I was so taken with Eugene O’Neill and J. D. Salinger’s withdrawal from the world. She had a ready response. ‘Probably humility. And privacy.’ Grant refused to be a self-promoter. He felt such bragging was undignified. So do I. He preferred to let his work speak for itself. So do I. He wrote his memoirs out of necessity. I face no personal crisis that motivates me to publish. I want to share my words with those that are meant to read them. Ideally every person meant to read them. I sense that’s good for me, good for them, good for God, and good for the rest of the world. I haven’t even begun Chernow’s book proper, and I suspect Grant did all he did with the same intent.
A person larger than the inevitable fluctuations of fortune will never have fate desert him. Character truly is destiny.
I enjoy framing my life in an epic and operatic way. I was bored two days ago. Today everything fascinates me.
I fascinate myself. My interest is the opposite of narcissism. I see the universe in the mirror.
Grant learned how to write by meticulously composing wartime orders. I learned how to write improvising for the stage and drafting legal pleadings and briefs.
Grant killed himself smoking cigars. I probably stopped in time. I’ll die some other way. We all have the same story. Only the details vary.
Grant wrote in an overstuffed chair with his legs propped on another chair. I write in a recliner.
Grant suffered pain that would have been completely unbearable for less courageous men, as he wrote his memoirs while he was dying. Physical pain is my biggest fear. I write now in the happiest and most comfortable chapter of my life. I don’t think I need such heroism to fulfill my duty to my fate. Grant and I are the same in essence, but not in scope. I am not called upon by the gods to save a nation. Maybe just myself, and anyone who overhears me and says, ‘Oh yeah.’
I was proud that I churned out around 260,000 words of what I considered decent prose in nine years. Grant came up with 336,000 words of a literary masterpiece in a year — while he was dying! Yes, I identify with Grant, but in many ways I suspect that he is a dream I want to achieve. To write as if you have a year to live, to sustain and serve people you love while serving posterity and the body politic … in Grant I see my finest ambition.
Yes, I am Grant. That’s just the beginning. We have to live up to who we are.
Grant was cool in crisis. Me too. I’m nervous at all other times that interrupt my solitude, the trajectory of my bliss, and my homely and ordinary daily routines. I freak out at a challenge and then usually calm down, adapt and meet it.
I see Grant as a much better man than I am, but also as the same man.
Mark Twain was impressed by Grant’s output of worthy words. I have felt a little embarrassed by my pride in being prolific, but apparently it’s a thing with others who write seriously. It certainly was with Twain and Grant.
I resolve to write more. And I write a lot now.
My intuition led me to great inspiration in this biography of Grant. The greatest task of a writer is to develop his character. The more a person perfects himself the better the prose. Grant dictated a 9,000 word description of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox without repeating himself or making a correction. A man in full sharing a memory of another moment when he was alive in his fullness resulted in literary perfection.
How I Came to Chernow’s Book — a Letter to my Friend
McKay’s Used Book Store is big . The books are inexpensive. The aisles are well organized. It’s a second hand Barnes and Noble. Serves my middlebrow tastes I didn’t embark on any study of contemporary lit there. I chose books that I might want to write about. Ron Chernow on Grant. Woody’s 2019 autobiography. Nine Stories to revisit and follow up on our conversations. Any mind expansion will have to be ordered from Amazon. I now know why I was so indifferent to my Kindle. Those letters vibrating on a gray screen . Sigh.
I walked through the store like I had never been in a bookstore before. And maybe I haven’t. I wonder in ways that the unkind would find to be moronic , but that I know are profound.
What’s the difference between Nine Stories and a limited series on a steaming service? Will Chernow give me more on the page than on a YouTube video from the 92nd Street Y? Does my lifelong interest in Woody represent some kind of siren call of the mediocre in all of us?
McKay’s is not the Strand. Nashville is not New York. I used to like going to the bookstores in New York and browsing and then invariably a book would capture me. It would seem backlit on the shelf. It grabbed my attention like the girl in a crowded room that I was most attracted to.
McKay’s is ordinary. The Strand is adventure.
New York ( for me —- not a general statement) was a time when I could be anything. Chicago was a time when I came to grips with who I am. Nashville is a time when I accept all of it
I bought the kids some books. I don’t know what’s new for children , so I picked some old reliables. Shel Silverstein was too pricey so Dr. Seuss. For the older girl I picked a book about a princess in the same way I’d pluck something for her off of the marquis at the multiplex.
I’m feeling something like that Strand kind of pull to Grant. I think we have similar stories.
I was bored two days ago. Today everything fascinates me.
******
“I didn’t embark on any study of contemporary lit there.” Maybe not contemporary, but I am getting more of a sense of the essence of what it means for something to be literary while reading Chernow on Grant (and Twain).
‘Explain it to me like I’m a two year old.’ Fresh eyes. A respect for mystery. And how much I don’t know.
Twain and Whitman and Chernow see the greatness of Grant. He was so maligned in other quarters. I was taught in school that he was one of our worst, if not the worst, President. If intelligent people admire you while superficial and ignorant people show you scorn, you are ahead of the game.
Grant could be awkward and unsure of himself in business and politics. I can relate. It is disorienting to be a fine person in the company of others who aren’t even aware that it is possible to be fine, or that fine people exist. The person of decency and genius is often cast as a fool, or as a miscreant or even a criminal. James Joyce wrote of ‘Christ consciousness’ … in literature, in life, it comes with the territory.
Grant, contrary to popular belief, hated war. He had the soul of anything but a butcher. Grant, however, did what was necessary. There are no decisions in life. We ultimately do what we must do. Grant, a sensitive and poetic man, faced grim things like armed insurrection and cancer, and saved his country and his family. His example, like the examples of all great people, saved mankind.
Grant was so much more than Patton, who was useful and needed at the time, but not transcendent because his animating concern was his own glory.
Chernow makes clear early that one his great objectives is to defend his subject with his book. I have the same goal for my book. Grant’s critics of his military and his political careers are primarily engaged in justifying themselves. This is my conclusion. Chernow’s analysis is more nuanced I imagine, but I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t fundamentally agree.
Grant, like Thomas, did not set out to be revolutionary, but he was revolutionary by nature. As a general, he reinvented warfare and thereby created modern warfare. As a politician he led America’s first great experiment in democracy, equality and civil rights. As a memoirist, he fashioned a great man’s recollections into a literary work of art. He did all these works of vision and genius in spite of his humble beginnings, and with a modest, unassuming, and to most, at least initially, unimpressive bearing.
I’ve been underestimated, at least initially, and later reviled by reactionaries everywhere I’ve ever gone. Every place is different because I’ve been there.
It’s my belief that Grant always knew he had greatness about him, no matter how often he was frustrated by obstructions, delay and failure. I know I have. I suspect this deep seated confidence is a matter of natural law. I’m also certain Grant didn’t always look like he knew. He never doubted himself. It was harder to have faith in other people. They surprised him with their meanness and selfishness. Then they turned around and laughed at him because it never occurred to him to be as lousy as they were, and was slow to recognize when they took advantage of him.
Some people are too good for the world, but they help the world anyway. Thank God.
Grant was a failure. The greatest people always fail. Success is for mediocrities. Failures further mankind. Successes maintain dead things that eventually have to be incinerated and replaced by chaos. Grant was a forefather of modern America. The fact that what he fought and died for has still not been achieved is not his fault.
Greatness is ahead of its time. Artists touch eternity and live in the future. They are benevolent monsters and ghosts, pursued by the fearful with torches and pitchforks.
Mediocrity is smug and greatness is humble.
Grant wasn’t perfect. The famous scandals did happen. Thomas isn’t perfect either — no scandals, but many failings.
But on the great matters of his day — and ours — the union, democracy, human rights and race — he was right, strong and committed.
And I’ve been right on vocation over career, honesty instead of fraud —the importance of ethics, art over propaganda and sales, kindness over meanness … I’ve been right in my commitment to humanity when so many are trying to dismiss the human as a joke. Human beings are demeaned as profit centers to exploit, and vulnerable competitors for resources to dominate. To clearly reject, resist and fight against the forces of dehumanization is always a non-conformist way to live. All societies are evil because they are all inspired by fear, and are primarily interested in maintaining the power of its established individuals and institutions. The hero stands for something that transcends society, His or her very assertion of that stance changes society forever. It is only natural for the hero to inspire passionate hate and love. Those who suffer adore the hero. Those who fear losing their security because of any expansion of the rights, and nurturance of the potential of humanity, vilify him.
Grant and Thomas were wounded but never deterred by our attackers and detractors. They never abandoned their project, and Thomas still hasn’t abandoned it.
This book will first and foremost be about what it means to be a person of character.
Is it Grant’s fault that the nation retreated from the lofty aims of reconstruction? Thomas also was blamed for the selfishness and short-sighted stupidity of other people. Just do right, and in the long arc of history your actions will be vindicated. I don’t know how many jobs I’ve had where I was initially lied to, and later asked to do something immoral. All of them? I never did. I never lied to anyone. I never was mean. I never hurt anyone in the name of my career. I was fired and I thrived. That’s an interesting thing about Grant too. His reputation was unfairly sullied during his life and after his death, but otherwise he did well. He had financial problems at different times in his life, but always got out of them. He got to do what he was good at — war, leadership and writing. He loved his wife and had friends and admirers, and he never retreated from his life dedicated to helping to form a more perfect union. There is another natural law at work here. There is a divine abundance that aids and sustains you when you further the aims of life instead of the dark heart of society and its desperation to hold fast and keep life’s bounty for a few.
Life itself will care for you. There is no reason to make deals with the Devil, and every reason not to. Grant’s and Thomas’s antagonists were and are full of shit.
Grant was and is criticized as a drunkard. His alcoholism was and is used as false evidence of a failing of his character— ‘self-indulgence and moral laxity’. What really bugged his accusers was his fierce, relentless and indefatigable authenticity. He could not be deflected from his life project. I’m honored that I have been tarred with the same slander. The most moral people are portrayed as sinners, their human frailties and sheer uncompromising persistence used against them. The most prominent example of this phenomena in my part of the world is what happened to Jesus. Of course people who scheme to oppose the recognition of the equality of all men and women feel compelled to undermine the people who give all to further it.
Grant attained ‘mastery over alcohol in the long haul” and this as much as anything is indicative of the nature of true character. We are not born perfect and we get confused. We make mistakes and succumb to temptations. But over time we learn how to manage who we are, our assets and liabilities. We take responsibility for our virtues and vices and diligently fulfill our destinies in the world. I’ve been praised by how honest I am about myself in my writing. That honesty is essential. Our character is who we are. It is not merely a collection of our strengths and weaknesses. Character is beyond all of that. We figure out a way to make something out of what we have been given, and what we have not.
Next: Part One, Chapter One
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
You don’t use those things in an ad agency.
Some things like Winning Time serve a more thoughtful audience, but are limited in the strain of their pursuit of popularity.
You can’t create until you are completely honest with everyone, most of all yourself … and don’t give a damn who likes it.
Big shots like to be important . They like to be in charge. But the only thing they are in charge of is profit.
I’ll defer to them on the subject of the money they make.
And then I’ll point out that it has nothing to do with me.
The insulted TV writer interests me because he is caught between what I am, and what the business says matters.
I wish him an accentuation of the positive, an elimination of the negative and no further acquaintance with Mr. In Between.
There’s a wonderful world outside of the crass market.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
9/20/23: Writing THOMAS by Thomas while reading GRANT by Chernow — Part One, A Life of Struggle; Chapter One, Country Bumpkin
Look at the Table of Contents.
Part One: A Life of Struggle
Part Two: A Life of War
Part Three: A Life of Peace
Part Four: A Life of Reflection
One thing I’ve noticed about most of my old school chums — high school, college and law school, and most of my old theater colleagues, now that we have reconnected later in life, is how much they haven’t changed. Conformity robs people of destiny. They were good boys and girls, governed by what their bosses and peer groups demanded that they do, and it is almost like they have never lived at all. Thoreau said most men live lives of quiet desperation. I think it’s worse than that. Most men, and women, exist in near life in a state of negation of the constant opportunity to embrace the experience of living. A life is a created thing. It doesn’t just happen except on a biological level. Transformation is the heart of creativity. We die each night in sleep and awaken as a new being — reanimated.
Author. Authority. We are the authors of own lives, and the authority of our own actions. Authorship is not invented. It is discovered. We observe ourselves and learn who we are. Authority doesn’t dictate. Real authority is truth. There is a true thing to do … the true thing is the only thing, and there are all of the false options. Concern for the opinions of others, and fear of failure, desperation for success are the usurpers that rob freedom and authenticity from the hearts of men and women.
Grant and Thomas, the great men, changed and change. Perhaps, great is a synonym for human. The human is born with a static essence that is paradoxically dynamic at the same time. We are microscopic reflections of the entirety of the universe — the eternal constant that is in continual flux. Even the masses who live more like ants than human beings change. They get old. They die. They ignore and suppress the genuine impulses of their beings which direct their unclaimed destinies, but the impulses remain nonetheless. Most people are alienated from themselves, each other and the world.
What we call greatness is simply the act of being consciously and fully alive. Life is a matter of pain and triumph. Grant’s writing of a literary masterpiece while suffering in the excruciating pain of oral cancer is an exquisite metaphor for it. It is human to focus on the times of ease and victory, but the suffering and hardship is just as essential. The duality of success and failure is a lie. There is no success and failure. There is only life. You can either live it with your eyes open, or sleepwalk through it.
Grant was delivered by a doctor who was an abolitionist. Who says God isn’t a poet? He weighed in at ten and three quarter pounds, designed to make a big impact on the world. Hiram Ulysses Grant. Grant eventually dropped Hiram, but Ulysses … the name of Homer’s hero was selected by humble settlers of the then American West in 1822.
Abolition. Size. Heroism. Poetry. The world tells us who we are and what we are meant to be all the time. It’s up to us to listen.
Grant was raised by his mother to respect women and dislike gossip. I find these to be wonderful qualities in a man. They demonstrate a disposition to truth and decency. She also taught Grant to trust people which is a double edged sword. Innocence is essential to living the character driven life. How can you follow life’s mysteries if you know everything, and are suspicious of everyone? But our greatest attributes can also be our greatest vulnerabilities. As important as it is to be initially naive — ‘explain it to me like I’m a two year old’ it is also very painful. It’s a great risk to trust others, to say that you don’t know, to try something new … to be a noble fool. That is what humanity requires however. Every humiliation is redeemed by every requited love.
Grant ultimately became a more complete person than his mother, and that is what we are supposed to do. She was repressed and didn’t express warmth or emotion. That is very understandable. Her trusting and stoic nature surely led to many wounds that she left unacknowledged to herself. She instinctively held herself back. Grant had that constipated reserve through much of his life, but later he was very expressive of his feelings with his family and others close to him.
(I’m writing about Grant here, but it’s all about myself. I am not exactly like him, but I feel I totally understand how he felt, and how he changed.)
Grant was quiet and undemonstrative as a child. I once wrote some remarks when my father was being honored at a sports dinner. They were well received. The sports anchor from a local TV station said in astonishment, “I didn’t think he could talk!’ I felt a pressure to be out front more, but I realize now it was not my deep nature. When later I was acting, I was really writing. Practicing law, writing. Teaching, writing. I was good at all of them, but also oddly out of place. Grant, the general and Grant, the president, may have just been preparations for his truest nature and calling, Grant, the writer. Grant’s greatest contribution to the world may be the words he gave us at the end of his life.
Grant stood apart from the other boys lost in thought. Life is found in solitude, not in compulsive busyness. Life is an alternating current of introversion and extroversion, but if I had to pick one, I’d take introversion.
An inner life should be kept secret and revealed in a thoughtful way, in the manner of writing and art, science and other creative pursuits that utilize imagination, depth of feeling and reason.
I do not share Grant’s aversion to vulgarity and profane stories. Nobody’s perfect. I mean Grant.
Grant never started a fight, but wouldn’t back down when bullied. Ditto for me. He had an aversion to the pain of others, including animals, and refused to hunt. Grant was enraged by the sadistic abuse of the innocent, the weak, the poor, the unhappy. The quiet poet became an avenger when a fierce response was required. Smaller boys took to him as a protector. Note to any assholes who have read this far (I doubt it) … beware the man who doesn’t like to fight. When we have to, we become the toughest brawlers on the schoolyard.
A bullying father is an opportunity for a human boy. Finding strategies to resist the old man’s autocratic demands develops capacities needed later when the broader world tries to force you to be something less than who you are.
Young Grant had no great visions for his future. The words solitary and ordinary sufficed. Dreams were not needed. We are born great and greatness is thrust upon us. There is no need to conjure greatness for ourselves, and if we do so, we won’t come up with anything real. He was bad with money most of the time because he was above such a petty ambition. He was good with money when he needed it for practical and spiritual reasons.
So much for the acorn of Grant’s childhood … off to West Point …
Next: Part One, Chapter Two
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
9/20/23: Writing THOMAS by Thomas while reading GRANT by Chernow — Part One, A Life of Struggle; Chapter Two, The Darling Young Lieutenant
I never lacked maternal affection. Grant wanted even a little. I felt smothered by it. There was one advantage to being an object of my mother’s adoration. I never felt that I had to earn anyone’s love. I thought I deserved it.
A clerical error at West Point created U.S. Grant. I’m far from the first to mention that fate continued it’s poetry, naming the man who would win the victory in the fight to preserve the nation, the United States.
My name was coined by a clerical error as well. At Ellis Island. My father arrived in America as Augusto Tomasso, and entered America as August Thomas. I was born an American. My first generation status was erased. My father spoke Italian and French and refused to allow my brother or me to learn how to speak those languages. My parents introduced me to things Italian as they would to any other American. I enjoyed the food and art and design etc, but with a sense of appreciation instead of ethnic pride. I am 100% American. I was willed to be so by my parents, and by the nation itself. My father never wanted to return to Italy for even a visit, and I have never been curious to go there. I’d go of course if my wife wanted to make the trip, but I would enjoy it as she would, as a non-Italian.
Grant and Thomas. Two American stories.
Grant and I were both unprepossessing as young men. No one would vote us most likely to succeed. Nevertheless we both had a sense of destiny. There was nothing grandiose about it. It wasn’t a matter of ambition. We both knew that we were different and meant to live unusual and extraordinary lives.
We simply saw reality. The world tries to beat that out you. ‘Who do you think you are?’
Thinking has nothing to do with it.
It sounds like the academics and other demands of West Point came easily to Grant. He didn’t put much effort into school and got by. He was naturally intelligent and naturally of strong character. The basics came relatively easily. He seems to have had little interest in mastering what was hard for him. Same here. I was always a good student in most subjects, excluding science, math and foreign languages, until I reached law school which featured a curriculum for which I had no interest. I’ve never excelled at anything that I am not interested in beyond the introductory and intermediate levels, and most often I never even got that far. I actually get physically ill when faced with the prospect of doing something which is not in harmony with my personality. I didn’t choose to be drawn to the subjects that interest me. I simply noticed that I was — and when I wasn’t.
Genius is a self made affair. School is just socialization. You learn a few useful things in school, but your experience in the world is what teaches you all about everything. The biggest advantage to college is not having to work, Grant and I were both that lucky. Doing nothing, free time, is where real action begins. Duties and assignments prescribed by others keep you away from what you are meant to be.
Grant didn’t have the heart or stomach for pleasing superiors. He did the bare minimum and was not hungry for their praise. He had no passion for the dictates of external authority. It bored him. This might seem strange for a man who became a general and President, but he was never driven to be in charge. His energy was engaged by fighting for equality for himself, and most importantly for others.
No great man was ever fixated on being the boss, or in listening to him.
Grant had no fear of death. He was practical and knew it could come at any time. If he was depressed, it was because he was in a moment when he was obstructed from fully living his finite life, not because he feared he would lose it and all would end.
No great man hesitates in what is true and right for him because he fears losing his life. No great man works for a final result. He simply does what is true and right for him no matter the consequences.
Grant didn’t do well in military subjects in school, but when the nation needed him, and he personally needed a chance, he of course showed mastery in those topics. I was a mediocre law student who didn’t sit for the bar exam immediately after gradation. But 25 years later when I was flat on my ass and needed work, and also needed meaning and something to respect myself for, I scored on the 88th percentile of the bar exam and went on to practice trial law.
Character.
Grant was highly sensitive to ridicule. Men of our type are thin skinned not because of ego, but because we are programmed to chafe at injustice. Every jibe and every wound stings. We can sometimes forget that we sting the world back with more ferocity than it can wound us. We don’t have to mock and humiliate. We shame the world with our very presence.
Nothing disturbs the envious more than excellence. Excellence endows the most humble men with charisma and power. Naturally. The man’s substance is his form. He doesn’t have to try to be respected. It’s good the barbs of the unworthy bother him. It keeps him focused on his mission to work to change the world.
As a young man, Grant misunderstood his gifts. I was way off the mark. I thought I wanted to act in situation comedy. Eventually we learn. Great men can’t avoid being who they are.
Grant and Thomas both endured a prolonged period of adolescence. An older generation alternately held out high degrees of hope for their advancement and were harshly critical of who they were. Mothers thought the boys were special creatures endowed with many talents and virtues. Fathers thought that they were impractical dreamers, not savvy or tough enough to make their ways in the world. Grant married at the usual time so he got a double dose of infantilization. Thomas married at 55, after his father had died and his mother had lost her power. Grant’s father was an abolitionist. His father-in-law was a slaveholder. Those two men hated each other. Grant and his wife Julia (nee Dent) were caught in the middle.
It takes what is great longer to mature than what is common.
Grant loved Julia because she boosted his confidence and gave him affection that was missing in his cold Protestant home. They married as an escape from their respective family dramas. I don’t think they were meant for each other beyond that psychological relief, which is no small thing. Julia lived in a romantic fantasy world. She never really changed her rose-colored view of slavery even after her husband’s military career and Presidency. This amazes me. She was unfailingly supportive of Grant however, an antidote to many of his doubts.
I was luckier than Grant in love. I married long after my family drama had ended. My wife is more than a comfort. She is a full partner in all that I do, and vice versa. Some of this good fortune is because I married late in life. Some of it is because women have an opportunity to be emancipated now, a far cry from the 1840s.
I hesitate to write about Grant’s marriage. It’s impossible to know what really goes on in a marriage unless it is your own, and as to my own —- I will never tell you anything of real importance. There is a modesty and a privacy related to marriage. It is simply none of your business.
So my comments about Grant’s marriage seem speculative. I don’t feel that way about anything else I’ve written about him. I feel I know because it mirrors my own experience.
One fact contradicts what I’ve already guessed about Grant’s marriage. He felt lost when she wasn’t around. Something in that pained silence may say all that matters about General and Mrs. Grant. Grant was good at making more perfect unions. Of course — his marriage was an unbreakable bond between North and South. Fate is poetic once again.
Grant’s father-in-law blocked his marriage to Julia for several years.
Great men are always obstructed by lesser men who secretly know that if the superior person is given his due, the inferior man, who has nothing on the hero except leverage, will look puny in comparison.
The narcissist must look big to maintain their delusions of power. Great men make all that is wrong in the world look small.
Next: Part One, Chapter Three
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
9/21/23: Writing THOMAS by Thomas while reading GRANT by Chernow — Part One, A Life of Struggle; Chapter Three, Rough and Ready
In 1844, young Grant opposed the annexation of Texas, silently, in his mind, as a strategy to further the western expansion of slavery. He didn’t resign his commission or speak out about it. He knew Texas’ entry into the union would eventually lead to an unjust imperial war against Mexico. He said later that he served in a cause that he knew was wrong.
In 1976, I would blurt out opinions that were progressive and radical from time to time, and voted for Gerald Ford. I was a middle class conservative Catholic school boy in appearance, dedicated to success and stability in the professional classes, in full denial of my progressive and counterculture tendencies. I was an artist and fierce social critic and didn’t know it.
Grant regretted his early lack of moral courage. I have no regrets. I did the best I could given where I started. Grant should have felt the same way. It’s not where you start. It’s where you finish.
I did so many things that were stupid or even immoral as a young man, and I was better than most. The Catholic Church teaches a mortal sin is done intentionally, and a venial sin is done unknowingly. That’s a serviceable rule of thumb even for a former Catholic like me. I committed many venial sins in my twenties that would have been mortal sins in my fifties.
Self flagellation or its opposite, self justification, are wastes of time. The road to wisdom is paved with excess, as the poet says. Perhaps the greatest sin is never being mistaken. We are born knowing what right and wrong feels like, but along the way we get confused. We have to struggle to regain our unobstructed perception. The fact that Grant and Thomas were troubled by acts done or not done, shows their capacity for living as men of strong character. The fact they changed as they acquired experience and gained wisdom shows that they fulfilled the promise of that capacity.
I don’t judge others based on the perfection or imperfection of their personal histories. I consider the earnestness of their journeys.
A moderate is willing to compromise his soul and accept the security of membership in the system. A reformer has faith that he can make the system better and retain his status within it. A revolutionary knows he must leave the system entirely and create something new.
Men and women evolve into revolutionaries as they matriculate through the frustrations of moderation and reform. Eventually the issue is clear. Will you become a good person or remain safe? What begins as a matter of social criticism becomes a matter of personal conscience.
Young Lieutenant Grant saw war as a lark as the Mexican-American conflict loomed before him. Experience, of course, taught him otherwise. After I graduated from college I expected life to be a breeze. I had pretty much received whatever I desired since my senior year of high school. I was a handsome boy, smart enough, who could make people laugh and had a natural empathy and charm. Some of the awkwardness of my earlier years remained, but rarely got in my way.
Life informed me that things would get harder than I ever imagined, and for longer periods of time than I thought was possible.
Grant respected and admired General Zachary Taylor and followed him as an exemplar in several ways. A terse, concise direct writing style. A humble down to earth demeanor, not given to showy uniforms or excessive formality. Strong Whig political views. Stern. A frankness in speech. Leniency toward vanquished foes. A good storyteller.
I admired a few older men, none more than Paul Sills. I had the good fortune to know that great American artist, when I was in my twenties and thirties, who revolutionized the American theater. I got my own ideas as I grew older, but I had someone, Paul, to model for me what an artist is.
Exemplars are sometimes also mentors in that they recognize who you are. Taylor saw Grant’s qualities as a military officer. Sills saw mine as an artist.
Peers told young Grant and Thomas that they were kind. The post-graduates were establishing dominant characteristics of their maturing personalities.
War and life sobered each of our heroes. Their high spirits became much less consistent and were tempered by long intervals of depression, disappointment, shame for their respective communities, a wounded-ness, and a lingering sense of betrayal.
Grant and Thomas were imbued with magic. In their respective theaters of war, and well, theater, they performed feats of daring and brilliance. Their actions echoed lion hearts of the past and foreshadowed more monumental works in the future.
I fear this chapter is not up to snuff to what I have already written. Sorry. (OK, maybe it is.) I am so taken by the delight of reading Chernow’s book. I appreciate the research and imagination. I’m currently distracted from my general theme by the colorful descriptions of Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott, and the Machiavellian machinations of President James Knox Polk …
The violent Apache dance between decency and power, serious men and vanity. The character of Grant, the character of Thomas … and … the American character. The world is a symphony of destinies, sprawling galaxies and molecules … one soul comprised of countless souls … collective and solitary consciousnesses … the Self, the One, the All … an eternal moment of music … the richest harmony of an infinite number of chords … captured by a biography of literary value … where distraction once lived is now occupied by full participation … to be part of this pageant! … how could I have ever spent a moment of my life being bored …
Thank you … back to the thrust of this project …
Young Grant was bitter that the only promotion that he received as the result of his service in the Mexican War was from second to first lieutenant by dint of seniority. I was bitter for years that I didn’t receive recognition that I knew I was due. Sills worried to a friend that I might not get what I deserved. (Don’t worry Paul, I did but not in the way or from the people that you envisioned.) Robert E. Lee was promoted repeatedly in Mexico, and some still think he was a better general than Grant, the historic record not withstanding. Grant knew better. He could see the difference between reputation and character.
The capacity to recognize someone or something for what they are is the ability to see what is real. How many people can really see? I learned two things about recognition. First, it says more about the recognizer than the recognized. Grant was overlooked by many people, but Abraham Lincoln saw his value. It takes one to know one, and the rarer the person is, the fewer ‘ones’ exist to say amen. What do the others know? The second thing about the recognition of anyone, besides the best people and oneself, is that it doesn’t matter. I’ve been much happier, productive and effective since I simply stopped caring about the opinions of others, and just doing what I thought was right.
Grant drank when he was idle and lonely. I enjoy solitude and doing nothing. Was he codependent with Julia? He drank less when she was around. I used to feel guilty for periods of inactivity, but now I see that they are natural. So much is going on when nothing is doing. That is when all that is real begins. Sleep, pregnancy, winter … cycles of natural growth … Grant eventually conquered his drinking. As an older man he must have learned what I learned when I was older — the blessing of fallow time …
Next: Part One, Chapter Four
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
9/22/23: Writing THOMAS by Thomas while reading GRANT by Chernow — Part One, A Life of Struggle; Chapter Four, The Son of Temperance
On August 22, 1848, Grant got married. I don’t want to write about his wedding day or mine. I don’t want to write about all of the character traits that I share with Grant. Not tonight.
I want to write about Justin Fields, the Bears quarterback who in late September of 2023, as I write this evening, is going through a young man’s dark night of the soul. Fields is supremely talented and naive to the ways of the world. I wrote the following this morning:
9/22/23 Baffled by the Bears
What happened?
I thought Justin Fields was a once in a lifetime talent. Like Devin Hester was a quarterback. Better than Lamar Jackson or Michael Vick. Great runner, tremendous arm.
I still think so. Fields, if given the chance, could be a transformational player. His talent actually changes the game.
I thought Matt Eberflus was a good coach who knew how motivate his players and put them in position to win. How could he look so good last year with a far less talented team , and put out the lethargic disorganized mess this year with an improved roster? I don’t get it.
I thought Luke Getsy was a savvy offensive coordinator. Last year he unleashed the Justin Fields the previous coach , Matt Nagy couldn’t see. I thought Getsy did what great coaches do, design their systems to get the most out of their players’ specific talents. Not this year. He’s denying Fields his creative inspiration and forcing him to play a conventional game. A conventional game that’s poorly designed at that. A game plan around constant screen passes? What? When you’ve got a player who can throw the long ball beautifully and you hvae decent receivers? No rolling pockets when you have a quarterback who can move like a Hall of Fame halfback? What?
I thought Ryan Poles was a fine young general manager, a breath of fresh air , with new ways of assessing talent and finding a good team chemistry with the culture of today’s players. Why did he oversell how good this team was? Why create high expectations?
Is Eberflus losing the team? The mystery about the defensive coordinator’s resignation reveals real problems. Players say no one has told them about what happened. That might be necessary in a corporate office, but that won’t work with a football team. The players depend on coaches to use them correctly not only for the team’s success, but for their personal success as well. The Bears smell of disharmony and confusion.
Justin Fields seems to be what they call ‘a great kid’. I think he should be a little less nice. Even defiant. I don’t think he’s wired that way. It’s a shame it’s what needed.
Justin! Their egos and stupidity can run you into the ground. You have to take control of your own art. Getsy thinks he’s more important than you. There are many who do what he does. There is only one you.
D. J! Support Justin and work out plays with him. Don’t compete with him as to who is the bigger star. Your fates are linked.
Eberflus — get on Getsy’s case. Tell him to write up plays more suited to Fields. And talk to the defense about what happened with Alan Williams, the defensive coordinator. You have to talk to them about it
McCaskeys (owners) —- give them a few weeks to look like an NFL team again. If not fire the coaches mid season. I know it’s not your policy. Change it. If it stays this way, no one could do worse. Keep Poles as GM. His ideas about personnel have to be given a chance. For god sakes keep Fields! And find someone who can coach him.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
OK, now a couple of revisions. Eberflus might not be able to tell the players about Alan Williams by order of a prosecutor somewhere. That situation might just be horrible luck for the coach and the team.
D.J. Moore is another elite player on the Bears who is more experienced and naturally more savvy about the ways of the world than Justin Fields. He should be kinder to Fields and show him the ropes instead of simply criticizing him for not knowing the ropes. Moore said something very smart. You have to execute structured plays and spontaneously add your individual quality at the same time.
Fields, like Grant, like I once was, IS too nice. Envy, malice and stupidity runs rampant around excellence. It is an initiation of genius, maybe the final one, to avoid destruction by the forces of nihilism. Fields should jettison his reverence for authority, and his fantasy that everyone is his potential friend. He should stop being solely a team player. D.J. Moore gets that. He serves the team by being all about his art. He keeps the coaches mollified, but what he does on that field is his own creation. Last year when the authorities asked Fields to improvise he excelled. This year they aren’t asking him to do so. Now Getsy wants his system to be called ‘genius’. Justin, saving your career is the best thing for your team.
If you really want to help the world pursue your highest enthusiasm. No one can coach Justin Fields as to how to play quarterback. No one has ever played quarterback the way Justin Fields does.
Grant and I struggled for so long because we were like Justin Fields is tonight for so long. We were too deferential to all that wished to keep us down. I wondered why I was taking this sports drama with the Bears so seriously. That’s why.
I don’t like reading about Grant getting the shit end of the stick for years, and being cheated left and right. It arouses bad memories. My life got better when I got pissed off. It got better again when I recognized who I was. It got better even more when I resolved to never do anything I didn’t want to do. It got still better when I stopped giving a shit what anyone thought. It became a near Paradise when I rejected the concept of bosses — I made contracts, I wouldn’t take orders, and I rejected wasting time with social connections that weren’t true friendships.
Life gets simple. It’s all about one’s authentic work … the work that comes from inside of you, and people you genuinely love. All the demands of subservience masquerading as duty, and all the people who wish you ill, have nothing to do with your destiny. They are irrelevant.
All the people who underestimated Grant — his father-in-law, his rich cousin, right now … the lieutenant who stole his quartermaster job and pushed him into a nothing frigid assignment in upstate New York … fuck them. They are worthless and unimportant. They did nothing in their lives but temporarily block what matters.
That’s it for tonight. It’s 7:23 on a Friday night and I had a frustrating day. Necessary but chickenshit tasks kept me away from writing chair. I was dogged by a memory of a … oh it doesn’t matter … it was about a negative person I knew … past tense … there is nothing more to learn about this guy … I’ve been done with that process … now it’s just a matter of discipline …
I’m stopping only 5 pages into this chapter. I’ll pick it up later, but the writing strategy for this work is changing … this book that I am writing is moving far beyond the Civil War … and even me (is that possible?)… I don’t know where I am going … but I am sick of the chapters about greatness suffering through adversity.
I want the chapters where greatness blooms.
I wonder why Chernow wrote this book. What drew him to Grant? Did he identify with him? Know someone like him? Why does he want to defend him?
I feel like I’ve been painting traditional portraits and I just started throwing streams of paint at the canvas …
I don’t want to edit a word … I don’t want to copy edit this text in this section …I want to paint a storm … I want the process to be bare, because that’s the truth of it … it’s not a straight line
What is my life like while I’m reading this book? That piece interests me — tonight.
I know one thing. I’m not going to catalogue every time Grant got screwed, and how the same thing happened to me, until things got better for both of us …
I want GENIUS IN BLOOM …
John Cassavetes so rough … down and dirty … when it comes precisely that’s fine too … how does your mind work? Your soul? Like a short story? An essay? A screenplay? I don’t think so.
I want to post this unwieldy incomplete rough draft …
I hope Justin Fields plays on Sunday the way I wrote this piece. It’s far from perfect and it’s not great, but it’s far from constipated. Perfect and great can come later.
Yeah I rewrite and will later, but I’m trying to rewrite myself. The nervous system revolts and provokes me to shake things up …
I don’t care if you think this is sloppy, crazy, aimless, incoherent or if you think it’s brilliant (but thank you) . I care that I do what my writing calls for … I’ll grow doing this OK … I’m learning about something I don’t know … sorry, can’t worry about you right now …
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
9/24/23: My Life (Past, Present, Future), Life in General, and Things I Notice About the World while reading GRANT by Chernow, pages 67 – 76
So this Life of Struggle Part One of Chernow’s book … what was Grant’s essential struggle? Lack of confidence? Low self-esteem?
Self doubt vs. self assurance?
That struggle doesn’t matter. It hurts. It can make you drink. You can be seen as a loser. You can be frustrated financially, socially, psychologically, spiritually and emotionally.
But you don’t stop being you. It’s impossible to stop being you. You are always there, no matter what it looks, seems or feels like — to you, the people who love you, the people who despise you, and the indifferent mass that doesn’t give a shit. Grant wasn’t a big fuck up and then woke up one morning with the character and intelligence of a great general. He was working. He was learning. He was growing. Even when he belittled. Even when he was drunk.
Intelligence, like ignorance, is character. To love something is to want to know.
It takes passion to figure something out.
Truth destroys illusion. Art replaces illusion with reality.
Status is illusion. What is recognized or not recognized are not always properly assessed. The number 3 team beats the number one team. Oops.
I’m not proud of who I am and what I’ve done in my life because I have a positive mental attitude. I’m proud because I have the tangible evidence. A body of work. A history. Truth.
I am what I am. No bad luck or malicious tongue could ever change what I am. The good times are easier, but the bad times make you fiercely assert yourself.
The person is the equal of the world, and the power of your fate is stronger than your temporary fortune.
Everything that happens to you is useful. Everything that happens is meant to be. Regrets are useless. Self pity is useless. Embrace all of it. Accept all of it. Process all of it. Use all of it.
Listen to this old man who has been through it, who lives in peace, who has been more than successful … an old man who has been alive.
Avoid the trap of bemoaning what life is. Accept it! Love every minute of it, especially the shitty minutes.
There is so much more than what you were supposed to be.
There is this tiny power cell in your chest. No one can see it, but it’s there. It’s who you are. It tells you how to be, what to do. Listen to that cell and nothing else. It will make you behave irrationally in almost everyone’s eyes. Grant looked like a fool as a young man. A troubled fool. No one knows what your destiny looks like. You don’t. They don’t. You have to trust that power cell.
I don’t know how many things happened to me that I thought were awful that became, in retrospect, some of the best moments of my life.
… and moments that I considered joyful and triumphant at the time, that I now see as mediocre and unimportant. I got more out of a nervous breakdown than passing the bar exam. Out of writing an obscure blog than performing Off Broadway … out of years of solitude more than being the most popular boy in my high school senior class.
My good and bad memories have often traded places over time.
What each person was born to value has a subjective quality. But what makes something essentially valuable is not a matter of taste.
Grant struggled because he kept incorrectly identifying his home. All great people go through this quest. Searching, searching, searching … finally letting go and letting it come to you …
Your truth is a matter of grace … you don’t invent it … I used to think you discovered it … now I know you simply wait for it … when you are young, you boldly and persistently experiment … you are meant to learn … but when you are old, you wait for opportunities to share what you have learned … and if those opportunities never come, you just live …
The very presence of a person who has perfected themself redeems the world …
Perfection doesn’t mean life without mistakes … it means being in harmony with life that is teeming with mistakes …
Chernow does a nice job of showing what a mixed bag the experience of living is. Grant was ‘a relaxed and playful parent’ in one paragraph, and had a problem not with ‘the amount or frequency with which he drank’ but with ‘the dramatic behavioral changes induced’ in the next.
Gifts and burdens.
Grant knew he had a drinking problem. He diligently worked on it and with all of his adult life. He managed it. It never made him deficient in his work or with his family.
Even when antagonists claimed that was the case.
Chernow sees that Grant’s sense of justice was intimately connected with his tendency to be ‘proud, moody, hypersensitive’ and his consistent refusal to be bullied. Joseph Campbell famously said ‘follow your bliss’, but that is only half of his teaching.
Sacrifice and bliss is Campbell’s prescription in full. Grant didn’t just say, ‘I am just’ and ride into the sunset on a white horse. His high minded-ness was the result of his processed suffering.
Can the people who do everything ‘right’ ever be great? If you aren’t human enough to feel both polarities of existence … to be bi-polar? — can you ever know life at all, or add anything worthwhile to it?
Lincoln was clinically depressed. In his day, his condition was identified by the more poetic term, ‘melancholia’. Perhaps we should start thinking more poetically about our maladies again.
So much shame and misplaced pity is associated with the weaknesses and injuries that make us human beings.
It is the consciousness of our pain, and what we turn that studied suffering into, that makes us human. And endows us with the potential to be noble if given the chance.
When I think of my life story, I wouldn’t change a thing.
I embrace every moment of rage and sorrow and humiliation and injustice …
Every time I wasn’t listened to …
Every time that I was falsely accused …
Each time I was misunderstood …
unfairly punished …
Cheated …
Sick …
Unemployed …
Slandered …
Destitute …
Lost, confused …
Fearful …
At the same time … I was brilliant, courageous, confident, fulfilled … God’s golden child …
I always knew I was great. I was created to be great. I always knew things would be better. I know I would figure things out. Or more precisely, I would hear the answers. I knew I would be with people who loved me, and who cared about was important.
I knew that I and the world were much better than we looked.
I pity anyone who was never considered pitiable by someone who was clueless.
Grant suffered ‘loneliness, ennui, frustration, inactivity’. Those feelings made him drink. He recognized that he had a problem, and joined the temperance movement. He talked freely about his problem and encouraged others to face theirs.
As FDR’s polio inspired him to fight to free others from economic injustice, Grant’s alcoholism inspired him to fight to liberate unfairly imprisoned people, and later as President to fight to sustain the recognition of their freedom and equality.
Grant in the 1850s had pipe dreams of great wealth, and conversely was a keen observer of human nature who read life like a novelist. A great man has to learn how to dream, and how to deeply observe the nature of reality.
Note: I wondered how to write a long form book. The truth is that every book has its own process and structure. I wrote earlier segments of this project that I feel are written in a some superior ways to this one …
But I feel like something is breaking through … I have to be willing to write less well to write more well …
I’ve always been that way … I try shit …
I no longer identify with Grant’s anxiety in the years before the major achievements that we know him for. I used to often be very anxious when I was in my thirties and forties. Now I know that nervousness is a function of how much one cares.
And that everything always works out for the best. Everything. Even horrible tragedies and illnesses. MLK said the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. Yes, and the universe in general bends toward perfection. Things work out.
Always. In the long run.
I can’t believe how beautifully my life has turned out to be. I don’t have to. I can see it.
Of course I’m going to die. That’s perfect too. It’s the way it is supposed to be, and there is a right way to do it.
I’m just trying to say you can reach a point where it all is wonderful … without sugar coating all of the bullshit.
There’s an alchemy that turns bullshit into gold.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
9/25/23: My Life (Past, Present, Future), Life in General, and Things I Notice About the World while reading GRANT by Chernow, pages 76 – 81
Grant spent a lot of time alone. He was depressed in his solitude, because he was a good person. What decent person wouldn’t be depressed given his grim personal prospects which were unfolding against the backdrop of a disintegrating society destroying itself by reason of its own depravity?
Over time, Grant grew comfortable and even content in his solitude. He worked, assisted by a kind of divine providence to improve his own circumstances, and to mitigate his nation’s corrosive evil.
When I write Grant, I mean me.
At this point, I don’t think Chernow’s book is literary. (It makes a modest claim to be.) It seems more a sprawling research project coupled with an impassioned defense of the value of its subject. It reminds me more of legal writing than literature, a massive brief attempting to persuade a certain disposition of a case, rather than a novel.
I read Chernow. I supply the art to the experience. Art’s not Chernow’s thing. I wonder why he was motivated to so passionately defend Grant. I examine Chernow’s speculations regarding what Grant was thinking or feeling in particular moments, and wonder if I agree. I often do, and I often don’t. This 1000 page tome is a massive piece of work and endurance. But I don’t feel that Chernow has any more insight into the inner life of Grant than I do. I believe we each see ourselves in Grant, so naturally we see different things.
I watched a video of a reading by the poet Major Jackson a few months ago. Surprisingly, I didn’t find that to be literary either. It seemed to follow a prescribed method of writing that was taught to Jackson by someone else. Jackson’s writing style wasn’t personal. The themes of the poetry were worthy progressive political and social points of view that I agree with, but his content wasn’t personal either.
Someone tried to teach me that good writing is never personal. I believe the opposite. Good writing is always personal. Oddly, Chernow’s work is more personal than Jackson’s. I at least could wonder about the motivations of the narrator. Jackson wrote in what is purportedly his own voice about his own experience and I have no idea who he is — or more precisely, I don’t have anything to hang onto so I could access who I would perceive him to be. Just institutionalized ideas following an institutional style manual.
The theater director Peter Brook wrote that he never knew what his approach to interpreting a play would be on the first day of rehearsal. He had to go into the theater and find his understanding. Writing a book is the same thing. No one knows how to write a book artfully. There are no rules that you can bring to competently structure and execute a plan for a novel or other literary form.
One of the things I’m doing with this Grant project is defining what literature is — for myself. It has to be that way. The filmmaker William Friedkin said he never would refer to himself as an artist. He preferred the word professional. He was a storyteller, and his craft simply involved tried and true methods of telling an effective story. You can have rules about something like that. His movies are a kind of fictional journalism. Friedkin’s ‘The Exorcist’ for example is pulp fiction reduced to documentary. I enjoy his films, as I enjoy Chernow’s writing. But neither are of the same genre as what I do. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a genre that approximates what I do. I see partial resemblances in other works, but what I do is really it’s own thing. I’m proud of this fact. Being one of a kind has its challenges, particularly in finding where you fit in, but it’s worth it. I am an artist. I am not doing a professional job. I am doing a personal job. (I don’t care how I am repetitively using that word. I like that word.) I meet experience and describe what it tells me. I write to myself. I’m not worried about your expectations about the requirements of a story or anything else. I write the way I live. I put myself out there. I’m open to anyone who comes to me. I’m not trying to be effective for those who are only marginally so inclined. I don’t do this out of any ego or defiance. A cornerstone of my art is the recognition that we truly serve the world by following our highest enthusiasms. I’m not worth a damn to you if I am trying to give you what you think you want or need. If we are meant for each other, neither one of us needs to compromise, manage or adjust. I want the beat of my heart to resonate with other hearts that beat the same. Conversely, everybody’s not meant for everybody.
Chernow uses a technique where he identifies one of Grant’s character traits, then collects anecdotes as evidence showing that aspect of his nature. The book is 1000 pages in part because he painstakingly includes all of these related stories in chronological order. I imagine (I have no idea really, this is just my conjecture) Chernow had a big bulletin board with all caps headings DRINKING, BAD IN BUSINESS, HORSEMANSHIP, RACIAL SENSITIVITY, OUTRAGE ABOUT INJUSTICE, FIDELITY IN MARRIAGE etc. Then he collected incidences from Grant’s life on index cards and arranged them on a vertical timeline. Later he separated a horizontal general timeline into chapters. He collected the anecdotes from each vertical theme and placed them in their proper horizontal order in their proper horizontal chapter. In this way he created a detailed portrait of Grant and could play the themes in counterpoint to each other in interesting ways within chapters and across the entire arc of the book. For example, on page 77, Chernow is recounting how gullible young Grant was in business dealings, an easy mark for con artists. This fallibility of course was a foreshadowing of major theme later on in Grant’s Presidency and the last years of his life.
…
Just about 30 more pages of Part One, Life of Struggle … I’m looking forward to getting to the action — Big Grant and Big Thomas when the struggle ends (personal problems can be solved, growing pains find relief) and dynamic life begins…
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
9/27/23: My Life (Past, Present, Future), Life in General, and Things I Notice About the World while reading GRANT by Chernow, pages 88 – 96
At age 32, as he said farewell to the military on the threshold of civilian life, Grant still had enough self-confidence, after being relentlessly, bullied, cheated, unfairly obstructed in normal life progress, physically ill and battered by the early ravages of alcoholism, to know that his early body of work did not measure up to the stores of talent inside of him.
Confidence is easy when everybody else is applauding. To be called on to believe in yourself in adversity, when your name is often mud, is a gift. Confidence stops being an issue. Integrity becomes your focused concern. You know you can do right and you know you must do it.
Bullies turn into trash as they mature and assume leverage over others in less advantageous circumstances, by dint of their own free will, so far from the quality of the bullied that the competitive comparisons that the bullies trade in are ridiculous. The bullied are susceptible to abuse because of their hypersensitivities. But those sensitivities are talents as well as vulnerabilities. No act of genius or decency was ever achieved by an insensitive person. Bullies compete for trophies representing distinction, but never create real substantive achievements. The bullies rule when the people are given enough crumbs to survive and can withstand the neglect and abuse. When the shit hits the fan, the bullied save the day.
Only a bullied person would have had the wherewithal to bring to heel the men who chose to be monsters and force others to be slaves.
Only the bullied person reaches the finest attributes of conscious freedom, equality and authenticity.
Grant was nearly homeless on the streets of San Francisco. I was nearly homeless on the streets of New York. ‘Nearly’ meaning seedy, begging for food, sleeping on a friend’s couch. George Orwell referred to such experiences as being ‘in the kitchen’. In later years when I reconnected with college friends, lawyers and actors that had never been poor in the kitchen, never faced such insecurity, never lived with the harsh realities that so many accept as ordinary life, I noticed that they had a callow and juvenile immaturity, and a lack of empathy, kindness and basic understanding of human nature and human suffering, well into their 50s and 60s. Many of these people are leaders in different sectors of society, and we, of course, know the mess they’ve made.
In the kitchen, one also learns about the kindness in human nature as well as the hard heartedness. John Steinbeck wisely said something like … if you are in a tough spot ask for help from a poor person. Grant was saved many times by the kindness of far from affluent strangers. So was I.
Grant. Orwell. Steinbeck. Me. I have, as I’ve previously mentioned, set out to define literature fro myself. I’ll ask the question — why write? Why bother? I write to understand human nature. I share my fallible findings. And with that understanding I try to encourage what is best in our nature and discourage what isn’t. That’s my purpose here. Not to get rich. Not to get famous. Not fashion a well regarded aesthetic. Not to be considered cool. Or a guru. To reach my highest potentials as a person, and maybe indirectly help you in your quest to reach yours.
Grant was dependent on his parents and in-laws in his thirties. They offered land use (not ownership) and financial support, and played tunes that he had to dance to … this was the next ring of hell for Grant. He was denied the military career that his talent and hard work deserved, and, in the aftermath of his discharge, his humiliation was compounded instead of relieved.
I remind you once more, Grant is me. All of our lives are fulfillments of different recurring myths. Grant and I are archetypes of one another. Reading Chernow’s biography is an emotional experience. So why write my story of just reading Grant’s story? I’ll wait for an answer from the gods. My glib and immediate answer — because I want to.
Oh! The gods have answered quickly. My story isn’t over. By retracing Grant’s steps, I determine my own. Writing is about the future. I write to consciously know who I am naturally turning into. Chernow says Grant had four lives. How many lives do I have (left)?
Julia Grant affirmed Grant’s destiny. When her husband was struggling financially on the little farm he appropriately named ‘Hardscrabble’, Julia told friends that she had a dream that ‘Ulysses was elected President’. Another Julia, the writer Julia Cameron, wrote that artists need intimate relationships with people who lovingly serve as ‘believing mirrors’. My life improved exponentially when I married my positive and supportive wife, reconnected with my greatest friend, reactivated the powerful brotherly love between me and my only sibling, and expelled the naysayers and bullies from my conscious and unconscious life and mind. Chernow doubts Julia Grant’s optimism, wondering if she was shrouding denial behind her rose colored glasses, but I see that she was right about everything. All that she predicted happened. She married a great man and she knew it. It’s not a fantasy if it’s right. Pipe dreams and prophecies look alike. Rational discernment only goes so far. Faith is a powerful thing.
Grant was bookish. Why do I write? Because other writers and people of consequence need me.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
9/29/23: My Life (Past, Present, Future), Life in General, and Things I Notice About the World while reading GRANT by Chernow, page 96
As I’ve said repeatedly, I am Grant. I don’t mean I’m like Grant. I don’t mean that I identify with Grant. I mean I am Grant. There are certain archetypes of humanity, and all persons of a type live the same life, over and over again, in different bodies and different places and different times. The same outer experience. The same inner experience.
I feel precisely what Grant felt. The world and other people treat me exactly how they treated Grant.
There is no grandiosity in my observation. I know my life is not of the same scale as Grant’s. I will never fight to liberate an oppressed race, at least not in such a massive way that it can’t be ignored by historians. But we are the same.
Our differences are superficial. We are metaphors for one another. Some of you who are reading this are Grant, and you are me too. Others have aspects of me and Grant in your characters, but participate in another archetype. For example, I was affected, like so many, by the recent interest in J. Robert Oppenheimer. I related but I didn’t identify. Christopher Nolan, the director of the recent film about Oppenheimer IS Oppenheimer. Nolan tells his story through Oppenheimer’s. Nolan was never cancelled you say? Yes, he was. He’s an artist. We always get thrown out of the bar. We go to our rooms and create a new world. That’s why I relate to Oppenheimer (and Nolan). I got exiled too. But the specifics of my type follow the path of Grant and others like him, not Oppenheimer (or Nolan).
We resume Chernow’s recounting of Grant’s (my) story …
Grant returns home after being unfairly pushed out of the military, where he never received his due as a man or an officer anyway. He was in his early thirties.
I was the best person who ever worked on the stage at Second City. Not the best actor and not the best comedian. Or comedy writer. But I was the smartest and the deepest person. I moved improvisation from a method of training entertainers and socializing and networking into an art. As I often have mentioned, Paul Sills said I was the greatest improviser that ever lived. He knew. The artists among improvisers knew. My great friend knows. But the entertainers and socializers and networkers had to get rid of me. Because if I was recognized as the best or even good, they were nothing.
Grant was the greatest young officer in the military of his era. A few quietly knew. His person was exceptional, his official record was a little less than ordinary. People like me and Grant never get the conventional credit. We are silently insubordinate. The mediocre can see that we know they aren’t very good. We are completely focused on substance, too sincere to climb the ladder. When Grant came home after his discharge, unprepared to take care of himself in civilian markets since the army was all that he had ever known, he sold wood in the Ohio streets. It was a very humble occupation. Someone recognized him and was shocked. ‘Grant what are you doing?’ Grant in his worn clothes shouted back, ‘Being poor!’
The same thing naturally happened to me. I had no shame or guile about reduced circumstances. I didn’t try to hide my difficulty. Fools held it against me.
Grant achieved so many things. His achievement of rising from poverty, overcoming his depression and taming his alcoholism are as great as any of his accomplishments recounted in history books.
The fact that I overcame poverty and mental illness and (with the help of several loving people) returned solvent, sane, a lawyer, a professor, a writer, a good friend, happily married and a warm family man, is a major feather in my cap. Actually, it’s a head dress of feathers.
But my former state of poverty and depression is seen in a vacuum by the smugly ignorant and self-conscious bourgeoise class that I was born into. I can never live it down with them. First, they don’t see the value of such adversity. It’s good to be poor for a time, and good to lose your mind. You learn so much when you make it to the other side. Second, they feel superior because they never seemed to suffer. Of course, they did suffer. Everybody does. But you aren’t supposed to admit it. And when you do admit you are a threat because the next step is to critique the circumstances that caused your pain. We can’t have that. More on that a little later.
Let’s talk broadly about some of Grant’s more obvious achievements.
Grant invented modern warfare. Was the victorious general of the Civil War. One of our most progressive and noble Presidents regarding the issue of race, perhaps the greatest challenge our nation has ever faced and faces. Wrote one of the greatest literary memoirs in history.
Again, my life hasn’t had Grant’s scale. But I have excelled at many things in my life evidencing my talent. Intelligence, hard work and character.
But once you go off the grid, the conventional Babbittry never forget it. Grant drank. I had a breakdown. We both had hard financial times. Once that happens, the middle-class white conformists, the fanatics of the American Dream, always doubt you. You had troubles so you are weak. You don’t work hard. You aren’t disciplined. They condemn your character. The truth is that their characters are deficient. They use your sincerity and kindness against you. You are a fool if you won’t put on airs to get ahead. You are a sap if you think being present for others in their capacity as persons instead of merely as consumers, workers and investors is a productive way to live. They resent your humanity. They resent humanity. They resent your decency. They resent decency.
Of course they won’t recognize you. You aren’t like them.
Every one of Grant’s accomplishments were unrecognized.
Lee was supposedly the better general. The facts say otherwise. It was not even close.
The North won the Civil War because of superior resources, it had nothing to do Grant’s acumen. Oh yeah? If anyone could lead the North to victory on the battlefield, why didn’t McClellan do it?
Grant was one of our worst Presidents; his administration was ruined by corruption. Grant was naïve about business, and his personal and political lives were damaged by bad actors who cheated him and the country. But Grant was one of our finest Presidents regarding what is most important — equality, human rights and justice. On the issue of race, he is in the Pantheon with Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson.
Grant’s memoirs were actually written by his publisher, Mark Twain. Bullshit. Twain strongly denied this insult and Chernow proves it is not true.
I’ve never been given credit by the Babbitts for all I’ve done either. (I repeat myself for a reason.)
There is another reason that people like Grant and me never get any credit from the Babbitts. The Babbitts never give awards to the nominal honoree. They only give plaudits to themselves. Immediately after the Civil War, Grant was lionized. The Babbitts celebrated themselves as winners. From the end of his Presidency, until turn of the 19th into the 20th century, Grant was considered one of the greatest Americans who ever lived. They built his monumental tomb. Americans wanted to see themselves as a shining city on a hill. But when the Confederacy and other forces of racism and economic oppression stealthily re-emerged through nefarious deals like the premature end of Reconstruction, and the reentry of the evil ethos of the Confederacy in movements like the second coming of the Ku Klux Klan, Grant’s reputation had to be destroyed. The very memory of Grant was a threat to the oppressions that he fought so valiantly, brilliantly and successfully.
How could I get recognition for my success from people who I surpassed without participating in their personal lousiness?
They can keep their awards. Grant and I don’t need them.
We are richly recognized.
By ourselves.
By people not of the Babbittry.
And strangely and wonderfully … by children and animals. Innocence immediately recognizes what matters.
Also … one more thing …
The bad times never were that bad. Grant had wonderful times with his children and horses, intelligent people of great character, and simple people of fundamental decency.
Ditto for me.
Oppenheimer is not my archetype. He was of the patrician class. He was born into a world that had regard for intellectualism and poetry. His tribe was already rich. They weren’t like the Babbitts that Grant and I had to deal with (notice the past tense. I’m free of the Babbitts. The Babbitts are very concerned by the size of your wallet and in their mutual applause. They aren’t serious people. They don’t do anything real. They destroy a lot.) But Oppenheimer had to be cancelled like me and Grant too, when he spoke against nuclear proliferations and the Babbitts wanted to proliferate. (There was money in it. And they could strut. It was a big thing. Those missiles were monuments to the pretenders who claim they are masters. So the Babbitts used Oppenheimer’s intellectual prowess and artistry to destroy his influence. They had to lie about the best of humanity to get rid of him. I knew I had become a writer when the Babbitts ridiculed me for it.
I love it here in Nashville. I love the progressive South. People here care what happens to other people. They value kindness and friendliness. They appreciate when people take time for themselves. It’s not a mistake that so many great writers come from the South.
My wife wonders why I’m so happy lately. Easy answer. No Babbitts around. They are such a burden.
Sometimes a Babbitt would think they were being kind and ask me why I am so unhappy — why I go to dark places. I’m not unhappy and I am not overwhelmed by darkness — obviously. I’m alive so I participate in light and dark.
It’s never been that bad. They want me to be a villain or a sad sack. I have and have had a great life. I wouldn’t change a thing.
None of the Babbitt conception of Grant is true. He certainly was so much more than the view of his detractors. It’s also true that his life wasn’t so horrible either. It was pretty wonderful all the way through.
My years being poor and healing my mind were great years. I had a lot of joy in those years. I love my fate. I am a much happier, smarter and wiser person because I had those blessed adversities than if I would have had conventional middle-class success when I was young.
And I was given everything the Babbitt path promises without being mediocre or mean. I have the money, the wife, the family, the friends, the house …
I ended up with the American Dream without the American Nightmare.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
10/7/2023: Detours
My recent writing feels like a breakthrough on a personal level.
‘My Grandfather Loved Me ‘was a memory about being recognized for who I was when I was young. That recognition is a particular kind of love that we all need. Parents don’t usually provide it. They have another role. In maturity, this love is the province of committed life partners and true friends.
‘The Cure for Bullying’ was good on several levels, but the biggest thing for me personally in the piece was the answer to my question of why I’ve been bullied so much. I realized that everyone is bullied a lot. Most people are either oblivious to bullying or just take it for various reasons. I was just more aware of the bullying than is the norm, I didn’t like it, and I wouldn’t cooperate with it. There was nothing special in me that attracted bullies. This realization was a relief. It wasn’t my fault in any way. I would hate (I mean to use that word — in this case self hatred) a life narrative that portrayed me as a naive sap who constantly offered himself to ignorant brutes as a whipping boy. That always nagged at me. I’m brave enough to recognize unpleasant aspects of who I am. If I had to undergo a major transformation, I’d be up for it. Thankfully this hypothesis wasn’t true. All victims of traumatic abuse blame themselves, at least unconsciously for the harm that was done to them. If I only said this. If I only chose that. If I only walked away then. The bully wants you to doubt yourself. Bullying is attempted murder. The bully wants to destroy you and steal your lunch money. It’s not you. It’s part of life. No gets through life without being attacked by bullies.
I got to know bullies better than most people, because I identified them clearly and fought back in real time. My hypersensitivity told the bullies that I was on to them. They perceived my vulnerability as aggression. (It’s always about them.) It shamed them. My refusal to bow made them want to retaliate against me with even more harsh abuse.
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And now I don’t have to deal with them at all. More on that later.
‘The Receding Relevance of Recognition’ removed any last vestige of the need for a certain kind of acclaim. Conventional success is a poor substitute for the love that comes in mutual recognition. ‘Success’ is achieved by doing well on the job. You get the position and you please the boss and/or market. The type recognition represented in the story of my brother’s football heroics and my creative accompaniment, and our complimentary appreciation of each other is so much bigger than success. Life is best lived joyfully, accepted and enjoyed, and not as a struggle. I’d rather be me than Bob Oedenkirk.
Each piece leaves me with a new mystery. ‘Recognition’ left me wondering about Swartz. Did I stand up for myself? Did I lose other relationships because of his malice? The answer came to me as an old fashioned epiphany. No reasoning required, served on a platter from my unconscious. I can’t have it. I just can’t. I can’t have Swartz (or any of the many Swartzes in my past) in my life or in my mind. I can’t write and love my life with Swartz in it. Period. If the others he turned against me are meant for me, they’ll find their way back. I don’t have to say or word to Swartz or the others. I don’t care if they understand. I have more important things to take care of. My undivided attention is on my writing, and the people I love, and those who do understand. The bullies and the clueless can be characters in my writing, but not in my life.
And with that, and not as a matter of discipline , Swartz disappeared.
An addendum to recognition … I’ve written about how David Shepherd wasn’t included on a panel of founders at an anniversary celebration at Second City when the place was his idea. I wondered why. Was it because he wasn’t successful in show business and the other founders were? Then I thought about how I wasn’t recognized at an anniversary of the Keenan Revue at Notre Dame when that was my idea. My co-founder was recognized. He’s not more successful than me according to the bullshit conventional concept of success.
The reason David and I weren’t recognized had nothing to do with our conventional success or lack thereof. It was because people only give awards to themselves. We had different values than our former peers, and the purpose of the recognition of others is the celebration of themselves.
Bullies are irrelevant and conventional recognition is meaningless. Real recognition, in life and art, exists when hearts resonate together. Bullies are best ignored to make room for everyone who will love and respect you.
This all may or may not sound obvious to you, or even corny, but to me these words are a song of freedom. I’ve been free for years, but recently I’ve reached another level of Paradise. And I see the future.
I know exactly what I would do with the rest of my life. It’s simple.
Love my friends and family,
Explore writing, as an art, as a craft, as a thing in the world …
Love and work
Respect and real recognition …
########################
I’m 100 pages into Chernow’s ‘Grant’. I have been detoured. I find I prioritize my own writing to anyone else’s. My own pages always come first.
I am revving up for a return to the ‘Grant’ project. As a matter of fact, I’ll include the ‘Grandfather’, ‘Bullying’ and ‘Recognition’ pieces in my Grant book. They fit. The book is about my stream of consciousness while reading Chernow’s book.
I get what Chernow is doing as a writer. I see his MO. His book reminds me of what investigators gave me when I did trials. They provided the facts. Then I made the case. I appreciate his meticulous research. He is a bit repetitive in his insights. He’ll use many biographical narratives about Grant’s drinking for example to point out that Grant drank out of loneliness and homesickness for his wife. I would try to find some nuance on that theme in all of the drinking stories. Chernow really says in his introduction what he thinks about Grant, and it’s quite insightful and interesting. Then he recounts every fact he knows about Grant in the book proper. It’s like a tight essay with 1000 pages of footnotes.
I’m going to keep doing this … looking at writing as if I never saw a thing in print. Looking at everything as if I never saw anything. Observing the writer’s work and trying to see how and why he did it. Observing life as if I was born yesterday.
Intelligent innocence.
I suspect that every worthwhile writer is a genre unto himself.
Here are the recent detours:
10/1/23: My Grandfather Loved Me
My maternal grandfather loved me. My parents always had problems with whatever I wanted to do. This started when I was a kid.
Once, in high school, I got named to some group that was going to the UN. All expenses paid. I was thrilled. My mother was afraid . I couldn’t go.
My father had disdain for my interests. I was in some county choir for high school kids. A two week thing. He scoffed. He had disparaging comments about my then favorite professor when I graduated college.
I always felt a disapproval for neutral things from my parents. It’s not like I wanted to be a drug dealer. I wanted to sing Or read a book.
Years after high school , my mother told me my grandfather said to her, ‘Let Ricky do what he wants.’ No that’s not it. He called me Rick.
He loved me. He gave me my first car, a green Olds Omega. He took all of my old paperbacks and read them. I’d go to his apartment and he’d be in his over stuffed chair reading ‘The Once and Future King’.
I woke up this morning still dreaming about going to see little Ezra 12 years from now, as he played in a band or played baseball or whatever, as I stood off to the side, smiling.
The benevolent presence. My grandfather saved me. It’s so important that we have people who love who we are, not who they think we should be.
I was lucky in that my parents disapproved of me, but also loved me unconditionally. I never feared that they would turn on me. They also were hapless authoritarians. They never successfully stopped me from doing anything. The UN trip maybe. But after I was just a bit older, I was beyond their control.
They did form a pattern in my relationships that I’ve only recently broken. I’ve had a lot of pain in my life being around people who didn’t respect me as my grandfather did. Who criticized me for neutral things. Whatever I wanted to do was somehow unworthy for them. They cast me as a fool or a villain for just being me. Those people didn’t love me unconditionally like my parents but they were equally hapless authoritarians.
That pain never stopped me from doing one thing. It was unreal in a way. I’ve lived with an imaginary burden. All in my mind. In the meantime I’ve been enjoying every minute of my life. I wouldn’t change a thing. What a wonderful life I am having.
My parents didn’t know any better. And neither did the people who replaced them in my psychology for so many years. They all provided a service. It’s important to have something to push against in order to bring who you were born to be into being. We are conceived with the kernel of who we are. We are nurtured by our families and then society, but finally we have to finish the job. We have to raise ourselves.
The memory of my parents is peaceful and warm. I have no resentments or regrets. I wouldn’t change a thing.
I am blessed in a different way by Grandpa. An old Italian tailor. A tailor is like a writer … following seams where they take you. I wish I had a picture of him to share with you. I don’t . He looked like Harry Truman, but didn’t act like him. My father and mother were more like Truman, too concerned with things like haberdasheries. Business people are a little dim. They are needed and important. But there is more to life than paying the electric bill. Grandpa knew that.
Oddly, my parents unconsciously knew it too. They were pretty lousy at business and spent a lot of time and energy doing what they loved. My father was passionate about soccer, for one example. There was no money in it at all. It cost him money.
They foolishly wanted something ‘better’ for me.
Grandpa knew what better actually looked like.
A toast to everyone I’ve ever known … those who loved and admired me, those who loved me and were disappointed in me, those who disrespected me and those who downright hated me.
They are all facilitators of the stuff that dreams are made of, and midwifes who assisted in making all of my dreams come true.
And one more thing —- when you do what you want you get the money! You don’t have to be all afraid and worried about it! Life supports life. It’s all right there. Everything you need is right there! Use all of it —- including those who don’t get it! There are no mistakes or bad breaks.
Amor fati!
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
10/4/23: The Cure for Bullying
How pervasive is bullying? It’s everywhere. Most people eat shit daily and don’t even know it. Some internalize it. They believe the bullies and determine they have no worth. Some people figure they just have to tolerate it in order to survive. Many feel a false sense of relief by identifying with the bullies, vicariously rooting for a Trump or Gotti or Bonnie and Clyde.
Others decide to be bullies themselves. They become that which damaged them the most. They think they relieve their pain by inflicting pain. They only make it worse.
I wondered why it always happened to me. Well, it happens to everybody. I just was hypersensitive to it. I could be clueless about many things, but I always knew when I was being shit on.
I know the cure for persistently being bullied. Don’t give in or give up. Walk away. Create something. No one can make you feel bad about yourself unless you let them. No one can stop you from doing anything. Never have a boss. Never conform to a group. Always say yes to love and respect whenever it’s offered. Tell the truth. Be big about it. Don’t descend into petty wars with bullies. Be a warrior against Bullying writ large. Be different. Don’t bully or be bullied. Create something.
The biggest cure for bullying is in your person. Your greatest creation is yourself. Let your very being be a weapon against all that is false and low.
A former Miss America is a lawyer who heads a professionalism commission in Illinois. She sent out a mass email about bullying. She told a story of how she was bullied. I replied with the letter I include below.
She wants to take on bullying, Bravo. The whole culture has to change, The way we educate, do business, are entertained, practice law … everything has to change … we have to be different, do different, talk different and create a new world …
I was bullied constantly. Almost everywhere I went. It actually became traumatic. The main reason was that I am different. I take no credit for it. God makes some people who aren’t wired like everyone else. I just don’t give a damn about what the bullies think is so important. I don’t want to be in charge. I don’t want to win. I don’t want to look down on anybody, I just want to be free and creative and love my family and friends and people in general. Eleanor Roosevelt, Grant, St. Francis … peace, integrity, freedom, equality, art …The people who love those things love me. The ones who don’t hate me.
You fight a war for justice in your head. When you win that you fight it in your life. When you win that you fight it for all time.
Mankind has a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. The devil says be a bully, or says ‘you are nothing, the bully is right’. The angel says you are equal and free, the world is wonderful and you get to do your part for yourself and other people.
This conflict will never end until the consciousness of every person gets beyond the misery, for the bullies and the bullied, of Bully Culture.
I think that day of universal high consciousness will one day come. Every time George Bailey sees that it’s a wonderful life, an angel gets its wings.
Here’s that letter to the Miss America lawyer —- pretty good recovery from bullying!
10/3/23
Dear Erika,
My name is Richard Thomas. I’m an (inactive) Illinois lawyer. I’m now a writer, recently moved to Nashville Tennessee.
One of the themes that I’ve explored in my writing is bullying. I was bullied quite mercilessly in my years as an active attorney in Illinois.
My brother is retired Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, Bob Thomas. That was one strike against me. Many bullies used superficial and unfair analysis to conclude that I didn’t deserve anything on my own merit.
I was tarred as a nepo sibling. (Did I just coin that term?)
I became an attorney at age 50. I also suffered age discrimination. Apparently since I had other things to do previously I had nothing to offer the profession. I was held back because of an ignorant attitude related to the application of transferable skills to the practice of law. I used them anyway.
My first job in the law was at an insurance coverage firm where I suffered merciless hazing. If I left the door of my office open, I was insulted constantly by lawyers passing by. If I closed the door, they banged on the walls and shouted at me. At one meeting with out of state attorneys one partner made a point to say that I was there to get them coffee. The visiting lawyers commented how rude that was when the partner left the room.
It felt like there was a conspiracy to make my life miserable. There also were many lawyers who were very encouraging and recognized my experience and skills. They made the experience worth it.
Insurance coverage really wasn’t a good fit for me and eventually I became an ethics litigation counsel at the ARDC. I taught myself a lot about the law there, and I’m grateful that they gave me that chance. But I was harassed even at the ARDC as well — again by some, not all of the attorneys and staff.
I had one very senior attorney (not of the ARDC but a highly influential Illinois lawyer), who of course was very well respected in the legal community, go on a campaign against me saying the only reason that I had my job, which was a very junior position commensurate with my few years as a practicing attorney, was as a result of (again the false accusation) nepotism. At the first deposition that I ever conducted as a trial lawyer, the opposing attorney told me that I was only there ‘because of (my) brother’. The senior attorney supervising me was shocked by that treatment.
It was the norm. Every day that I spent practicing law was a gauntlet of insults.
I did eight trials as a litigator at the ARDC and won on every issue that I presented before the Board. I was a promising young (if not chronologically young) attorney.
But I couldn’t take it. I was denied a deserved raise after I achieved every goal that was set for me to receive that raise. No explanation was given. It was another way to diminish my self-esteem. It didn’t work. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I became a college professor.
I thought I could fare better in a job where the identity of my brother wasn’t even a consideration. Unfortunately, I didn’t. The bullying that you are fighting is a cultural problem — check that — an American problem, and a human problem, that goes far beyond the law.
I returned to my Second City roots and found this bullying even in what purports to be an arts organization.
There was bullying even in my college alumni group.
It’s endemic to American life. As is excellence. My experience was far from rare. I think it’s likely the norm. One thing that I’ve noticed is that bullies are, without exception, mediocrities. The best lawyers, and I got to meet quite a few of them, don’t need to bully. They are a joy to be around. Exciting. Brilliant. Funny. Energizing. Ditto the best educators, writers and actors and even college acquaintances.
There is a silver lining to bullying. I am currently writing a book length personal essay where I reflect on my life while reading about Ulysses S. Grant. Grant was bullied for much of his life. But that gave him the skill and strength to oppose oppression masterfully later on, and to create — in his case a more perfect union. It sounds like you have a similar story, as do I.
What do bullies do actually? They try to block creativity. Why? Because they are scared and lack confidence in themselves. Because they envy joy. Of course, they would go after a future Miss America when in their lives they only see ugliness.
A big problem is that we let them get away with it. That’s one thing I admire about Grant. He didn’t retaliate against bullying in a personal way. He fought the whole concept of inequality.
That’s what you are doing.
You can’t persuade people of this mentality. First you have to stop them. Then you have to encourage their healthy shame. Germany renounced its Nazi past and subsequently flourished. White supremacists in the United States don’t admit the evil of their ways and descend into madness and squalor.
It’s better for bullies if they change their ways. And of course, better for the bullied, and the overall population. How many great legal, educational and artistic careers never happened because of bullying?
How much money does bullying cost us? How many lives are destroyed because of it?
If I might add one suggestion, it is great that you are using social research data in the fight against bullying. Perhaps you should also employ art. Grant was a great writer. His memoirs are considered a literary masterpiece. I think lawyers should share their stories about the human dimension to the practice of law. Democracy is an art. Lawyers have a responsibility to look beyond the business of law.
It was not my intention when I began this letter to pitch you anything, but I might be of service, so I will offer that service. I have developed a method of teaching that I call Ethical Presence. It is described in full on my website, www.richardthomasjd.com. I use writing exercises to encourage personal journal writing and other exercises related to critical thinking and case making. Then participants merge the two. I’m retired from all employment except my writing, but I would be happy to teach if there is a need. I also could share my writing with lawyers. That can be found on the blog tab on my website and also at The Rick Blog,www.richardsteventhomas.wordpress.com. My writing isn’t about law. It’s about life from the perspective of someone who happens to be a lawyer among other things. I have a lot of pieces about bullying for example.
At any rate, thank you for listening, and thank you for your leadership in opposition to, and to grow far beyond, bullying.
Sincerely,
Richard (Rick) Thomas
##########
I’m going to include this next letter to my friend … a little sausage making. It’s notes … brainstorming, but it does look at some of the mechanics of bullying. There are so many levels of understanding of why it exists. I do a back of the napkin survey here …
10/3/23
One reason I am working on Grant is to find out why it happened to me so often. Really everywhere. Chernow says Grant was repeatedly bullied because of hypersensitivity. That’s me too. I could see that vulnerability. Grant was naive about other people’s motives. That was true of me too.
The I Ching says that great possession in lowly places is in danger. I think that was true too. If you are a powerful person without powerful position, you are vulnerable.
I’m wondering if a large part is I would never be what they wanted. I’d do what they told me if the agreement was they’d tell me to do things. I always did my job. But I wouldn’t bow. They wanted me to defer to their persons and I wouldn’t.
I always suspected the ring leaders had power. They either were bosses or stars in their ecosystems.
But it is amazing that I could never get away from it no matter where I went. That’s interesting to me, and I don’t think I have a satisfactory answer yet.
I never had a problem with a person of excellence. I did have problems with otherwise sympathetic people being turned against me. That troubled a lot back then. Now I see that they don’t make the cut either.
I do see one purpose of being bullied in the sweep of my life. Part of my work, and person, is being clear and objective about bullies.
As I mentioned Grant knew many of the Southern generals from West Point. Some were friends. Some beat him out of rank and status. Some were jerks. He never made it personal with them,
Thanks for encouraging my reconnecting with the world. I’m doing it in a different way than ever before. For example that Ethical Presence teaching was never offered in the way that I recently offered it to the authors and writers. I was always trying to fit in a little, and that might have been a problem. I never did fit.
Also —- dealing with people from the past in a new era? They never changed and felt betrayed that I did?
Maybe. This is a pain free exploration, None of this upsets me anymore. I think all the Second City idiots and assholes writing processed this sac of feeling for many different chapters in my life.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
10/5/23: The Receding Relevance of Recognition
I used to care so much about being recognized by other people. Over the moon when I was. Frustrated and angry by the injustice when I wasn’t.
Now not so much. Two things happened.
I aged.
And I recognized that I was an artist.
The older I get, and the more I understand who I am (I’m made out of art) the less I care about the recognition of others.
When I take my last breath, I’m certain I will exhale out the last molecules of what other people think of me once and for all.
I get wiser as I get older, and one unintended consequence of that is that I notice how dumb other people can be. I don’t just expose my own illusions. I smile at the caprices of others.
Take Swartz. He was one of my college roommates. He never liked me. I felt sorry for him because he came from a screwed up family background.
When Swartz and I were freshman at Notre Dame, my brother Bob was a senior and was the placekicker on the football team that won the 1973 National Championship. Swartz didn’t like Bob either. He was jealous of him for being a Big Man on Campus and jealous of me for being the brother of a BMOC.
In 1972, Anthony Davis of USC scored six touchdowns and destroyed Notre Dame in their big rivalry game. Notre Dame’s team and student body looked hopefully forward to revenge in 1973. (I know it’s kind of ridiculous what we felt was important, but we were still kids and having fun.)
Bob was a very accurate placekicker. He later had a long career in the NFL, but at that stage of his development other guys on the team could kick off farther.
But Bob kicked off in the big USC game. The strategy was to use accuracy instead of strength. Bob was instructed to kick away from Anthony Davis, who scored on kick returns in his six TD explosion the previous year. Bob played a perfect game that day. Davis didn’t touch a kickoff, and Bob kicked three field goals, the nine point difference in a 23 -14 victory.
Ara Parseghian, the ND coach, referred to my brother’s kickoffs as ‘spot kicks’.
I innocently used that term in my celebratory conversations with my roommates after the game, and I praised my brother’s accomplishment. He’s my big brother. He always looked out for me. I loved him then and I still love him. He’s a wonderful guy.
Envy makes people dumb, and Swartz said some very stupid things about spot kicking. He accused me of making excuses for my brother’s weak leg (it was strong enough for the NFL) and teased me for days about spot kicks.
Envy can be useful if it isn’t deployed as a weapon against the object of envy. If you envy that someone has something, it’s might be an indication of your own desire, (or what you think you desire). You should pursue that desire, (or the misguided illusion that you must explore to later reach your true love) not try to tear down the person that you envy. I’ve seen Swartz later in life. It seems he has a nice family. I’m happy for him.
Swartz is a college professor now, but he is still stupid on the subject of envy. I forgot about all of his ‘spot kick’ nonsense and innocently made a comment about my brother’s kicking fairly recently, several months ago. He told me to shut up. (We roommates visited his home in Sharon, Pennsylvania which is currently Trump country. Sharon might be the ‘shut up’ capital of the world. Surly people who think the world is a factory — and I’m on the assembly line!) He told my other roommates that I was ‘indulgent’. I have no idea what he was referring to, it was the kind of vague ad hominem attack that can put doubts about you in the minds of other people if they aren’t paying close attention. He successfully did that with my roomies.
He has disrespected me in many other ways both in the past and in my present time of life. In school, I ran for Hall President and he tore down all of my signs. In our sixties, he has ignored me in groups, not returned calls, and interfered with my relationships with other friends besides my roommates.
For most of my life, none of this bothered me. In the college years, as I said, I pitied him. In the middle years, I was oblivious to him. In the later years, when I finally woke up to his long term animosity toward me, I didn’t care.
Why?
Because Swartz, on the topics of Rick Thomas (and ‘spot kicking’) is quite stupid.
I don’t care if stupid people don’t recognize who I am. When I was a comedian, I had a line I used sometimes after a joke didn’t go over. ‘I don’t care if you don’t like me. ‘Laverne and Shirley’ is the number one TV show in America, and Reagan is President. What do you know?’
Also … ‘indulgent’? What? I think he is a professor of psychology. Research, I think. I’m a writer. I was a lawyer. I don’t make superficial comments. I try to back up what I say up. Look at this writing about Swartz. I don’t just say he’s ‘jealous’. I tell you a story. I make a case. I back what I say up with logic and detail. Does it mean I’m right? Not necessarily. Sometimes I reverse myself with new thought and information. But I don’t sound stupid. It’s a matter of personal and professional pride.
The ‘spot kick’ thing is telling. Swartz is a big alumnus booster of Notre Dame football. Doesn’t he want to sound like he knows something about football? I’m no coach, but when I observe any person, place, thing or action, I can get to the level of comprehension of something as obvious as trying to keep the ball away from a dangerous player on the other team.
Alright, so age and art have taught not to trust others’ perceptions more than my own. If I deem somebody smart, I listen. If I deem them dumb, I don’t. I’m inoculated from the lack of recognition of my greatness by the envious and/or dumb.
One never has to worry about the recognition of fair and intelligent people, they are always ready to share acknowledgment with what they know is worthwhile.
Which brings me to my brother.
Notre Dame’s 1973 National Championship Team continued a long- held school tradition of having the different units of the team (offense, defense, prep squads etc.) compete with each other singing funny song parodies on the Friday before each game.
My brother and the punter, Brian Doherty, who was also Bob’s holder on placements won that spirit contest almost every week. Ara gave first place to other players occasionally for purposes of team morale, but all the players and coaches and managers acknowledged that Bob and Brian’s songs were always the best.
Well, Bob and Brian had help. They had a ringer. Me.
I pretty much forgot about the song parodies until recently. Notre Dame is honoring the ’73 team on the fiftieth anniversary of their title at this year’s USC game. Bob called me and asked me to write another parody 50 years later. I told him it was like asking Hemingway to write a dog food commercial, but I’d do it. We laughed and I got to work. To give you an idea of my handiwork, here is what I wrote for next week.
To the tune of the Beatles’ ‘Yesterday’:
Yesterday
We won every time we went to play
Now we limp and we’re all bald and gray
But we were studs just yesterday
Suddenly, my car keys aren’t where they used to be
I now concentrate when I go pee
Oh yesterday came suddenly
Why’d we have to age
I don’t know, God didn’t say
We did nothing wrong yet we long for Yesterday
Yesterday
You guys made it so much fun to play
And to see you all on this fine day
Today’s as great as Yesterday!
Bob felt unnecessarily guilty. He asked me if I wanted him to give me credit for that song, and the ones I wrote in 1973 at the reunion of the team.
My first reaction was for him not to bother. It is far from a big deal for me. I have far grander designs for my life, art and writing.
Then he told me a few things. Coach Parseghian credited the songs as a big factor in the chemistry of the team, and therefore a major contributing factor in winning the title. He also said that one of the songs, the one I wrote for the USC game, was printed in a national publication.
I still didn’t care about the recognition even if a Hall of Fame coach, and big -time reporters liked what I did. I’m an artist. I want to write on par with J. D. Salinger and Eugene O’Neill. I’m not impressed that I penned some clever doggerel for football practices when I was a kid.
But there were other considerations.
I understood more why my friend Burt, who lived in my dorm and was a student manager on the team (Burt often ran my handwritten scripts over to Bob and Brian at practice), was upset that I never got a mention for what I did. I now knew what those ditties meant to Burt, my brother and Brian.
And I loved that team. And my brother’s time with the Chicago Bears. I liked hanging out with all those players and the staff people around the teams. They were nice to me, and funny. They were all like my brother. What they do is really brave and really hard. I view them as artists. I still admire them as I did as a young guy, and I hope I never lose that. I don’t think I will.
The artist in me doesn’t have to forgive my brother. He did nothing wrong. It was better that he got the credit then. It was good for him and the team. The poetic side of me is happy to be a part of this. And it works creatively for me to get a mention now. I’m glad I’m an Easter Egg to be revealed in the golden memory that will be celebrated a week from now. Not for any acclaim (the local hero archetype never resonated with me) but for the life. My brother always included me in his football life. He took me to parties. I spoke at sports dinners with him. I performed comedy routines at Halas Hall for the Bears. He brought people to see me at Second City. We always were each other’s biggest fan.
The happiest times of my life were when I was performing and Bob was playing football at ND and in Chicago, McQuaid High School because the Jesuits were so cool, the first few years I lived in New York City, and now in Nashville with my wife and family and emerging friends.
There were other important times in my life that I am so grateful for (all of them actually), but I wouldn’t describe them all as happy.
None of these happy or important times had anything to do with recognition. They all involved making art and being with people I loved and who loved me. And if that seems saccharine to you, you are a dumb jackass and I don’t care what you think. Hah!
I want nothing to do with strategizing how to get my name in the paper. No one reads the paper anymore anyway. My world has become democratized in every way. I can print and publish my writing on my blog. I don’t need the recognition of a critic or to be certified by a school. I don’t need a MacArthur Genius Award to be a genius. I don’t have to claim to be a genius. I can just be one or not. Who gives a shit?
I want to write. I work at it. Let it be whatever it is. That doesn’t mean I don’t have standards. To the contrary, I work my ass off on these words. It’s not easy.
But the standards are my standards.
I saw the ubiquitous Bob Oedenkirk on Morning Joe today. His frequent and unwanted appearances on my TV screen used to be problematic.
When I was in my early thirties, I did a one man show on Friday nights at Second City. I was popular with the other improvisers. They looked up to me for a minute. Oedenkirk went out with me after my show one night. He had a very earnest and vaguely mean conversation with me doubting what I was doing. I forget what he specifically said. The content was too far out there? It was too risky without a script? The bottom line was that he didn’t think it would be successful, and in one sense he was right. I wasn’t doing one thing on that stage designed to get me a job. Brian Doyle Murray, a nice and good actor who came up at Second City, admired what I was doing, but also knew that it had no prospects in the business that he and Oedenkirk were in, and that I naively thought I was a part of. Brian sighed and said, ‘That’s the way it should be.’
I didn’t know I was an artist at the time. I can’t do anything except my own thing. (That should have been a clue.) Brian Doyle Murray knew what an artist is, even if he feared what might happen to such a creature, and Oedenkirk didn’t, he was so focused on his career that he couldn’t see anything else in the world.
For years I was in conflict with what Oedenkirk said. Never with Brian Doyle Murray. Oedenkirk chastised me, Brian was kind.
It took me until just the last few years to get over a usually unexpressed animus about Oedenkirk. Of course, I know now it was all about me and he was just like an unpleasant figure in a dream.
Bob Oedenkirk has nothing to do with me.
I was envious and dumb.
I envied Oedenkirk’s success. My internal monologue roiled my equilibrium when the corporations imposed his image on me against my will, like MSNBC did this morning. I had reason to assume I wouldn’t see him on that station!
I used to think: I’m smarter than this guy. I’m more talented than he is. I’m a better person. I’m funnier. I’m a better actor. I sure as hell am a better writer. What was his book title? Drivel, Drivel, Self-Promotion, Drivel? I’m even better looking for God sakes. Southern Illinois University and Glen Ellyn, Illinois. Not exactly the Bloomsbury Group or the Sorbonne. And he has all this success, because he is a cunning and efficient careerist … and he doesn’t deserve those jobs!
And you know, I wasn’t wrong when I thought all of those things. They are true but there is more. Finally, I listened to myself. Underneath all of the Oedenkirk resentment was the true Rick. I get to be the artist. He gets to have a career in show business. We don’t do remotely the same thing.
Oedenkirk was on MSNBC promoting a children’s book. He wrote it, with apparently a slight assist from his absent son. His daughter did the illustrations. She’s really good.
If they did a Word Cloud of Oedenkirk’s and his daughter’s responses to questions on the show, the two biggest words would be INTENSE and JOB. He’s a hard worker (I am too. He can’t see it. He’s dumb about that type of thing), and he pleased his bosses and climbed the ladder. Good for him. I’ll give him The Most Obsessed to Succeed Award. I just hope he gets out of his daughter’s way, because she is an artist, unlike her father, and an artist can never be an employee.
It’s grand to be old and an artist. I get better every day at recognizing reality and understanding why reality recognizes and doesn’t recognize me.
A reader wondered if I was selling something. No way. But am I open to meaningful connections, every opportunity to love and be loved and work on my art? You bet your ass. We are recognized by another person who takes our breath away and the feeling is mutual. We are recognized when we share or view art, and have that same love experience. I loved when Roberto Benigni got the Oscar and told everybody that he wanted to make love to every one of them. (I repeat the word love. I can’t get enough of it. Does that make me ‘indulgent’? Hah!)
All that sublimated fucking is what life and art are like on the other side of caring about the recognition of others.
Hah!
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
10/9/93: Myths are Maps — Grant and My Grandpa
Myths and life itself are maps to the creation of new myths and new life itself. Life is a myth and all true myths are life. We experience and we fashion images of our experience in the same motion. Life/myth, myth/life. Our images, songs and stories and our existences twist around each other like strands in DNA, inseparable from each other. Obviously, my memories of my grandfather are personal to me. And instructive to me, now that I am older and a figure in little children’s lives. Less obviously, my current preoccupation with Ulysses S. Grant is extremely personal as well. Studying Grant’s life is not an escape that diverts me. It connects me to the present and the real. It connects me to myself. It helps me understand where I have been, and gives me clues as to where I might be going. The myths aren’t only helpful in helping me clarify how I think and feel, and in providing guidelines for my words and actions. Even more useful to me is how the myths aid me in understanding, and navigating, the world’s responses. My personal myths help me accurately view other people. I turn those people into characters in myths. They enrich my psyche, and my life pulses with a dynamic of ever changing meaning emanating from a constant source.
This is very important to me at the present time. I really want my writing to be useful to the world. I want it to reach more readers than my current lovely little cohort of sincere and kind readers. Those existing readers are a template for the audiences that I wish to reach. As my regular readers know, I have no ambition for acclaim. I just want to do my best to get to the truth, and do my best to get it out there to inform, validate and encourage people who are trying to do exactly the same thing.
Art is just a big conversation. How can we be most human? — that is the question. My words and my life are about that. That’s it. Trying one’s best to be as consciously human as possible. Anyone who reads me is on the same quest. You wouldn’t be interested if you weren’t. We are all myths to each other. Some of us are like my Grandpa, a meaningful reverberation for a few people alive decades after his death. Some of us are like Grant. We are called to a bigger stage. Our resonances have more fame.
Of course, from a cosmological perspective, Grant’s myth has little, if any, more impact on overall humanity than my grandfather. Grandpa will never have a bestselling 1000 page biography written about him. But any of our influences, anonymous or amplified by celebrity, are exponential in their impact. Grandpa touched me and I touched everyone I’ve known, and everyone I’ve known touched everyone they’ve known and so on. So all of us are connected to all of humanity for all time. To be human is to be enormously influential. For good or ill.
Yet, I sense that I have been created to be on a bigger stage. Yes, to be like my grandfather. Grant was an excellent father type just like my grandfather. But I, like Grant, also have a way of seeing, and a way of expressing what I see, that can be useful to a wider less intimate immediate audience than the cozy hearth of family and friendship.
I never wanted to be such a big personality. I didn’t choose it. I just am. What I recognize in myself is the opposite of grandiosity. I prefer a more retiring life. But I have this presence. I always get attention. I’m just different. It inspires admiration and antagonism. I feel a responsibility.
My grandfather was a quiet and simple person. I’m like him. So was Grant. But Grant and I are also the future. We are not only kind and decent in the present circumstances. We are the bringers of the new.
A big caveat. I am claiming no kind of infallibility. Grant and I try. That’s all a human can do. Humanity progresses by trying. We try to understand our highest potentials and we try to apply them to our concrete realities. Of course, there are mistakes and failures and setbacks, but over time we move forward.
My task is to live out the myths of Grandpa and Grant. Yours may also be both, or you may live from just one or the other. I’m excellently living the Grandpa myth right now. I am Grandpa! My friend and family life is wonderful. I’m doing well on the Grant myth as to how to know myself. It’s the world navigation piece that is my current challenge at the seemingly (but not really) advanced age of sixty-eight. From a young age I had a sense that I had to do something important in the world and I still feel that way. That something has nothing to do with success. It has nothing to do with ambition. It is a vocational pull. I don’t feel a pressure to achieve out of some sense of social obligation either. It’s not about other people’s opinions or any kind of duty. It’s just who I am. The world will be a better place if more people are exposed to me. That’s what my soul tells me when my mind isn’t thinking.
I’ve tried writing about this before. Writing about this topic is elusive to me. I’ll try again. We are born with this kernel of who we are. We don’t grow up. We grow down. Part of my kernel is that I influence people naturally. Some like me. Some hate me. They always seem to notice me. My kernel also has a deep strain of introversion. I observe. I reflect. And I’m a talker. Words. Words. Words. I wonder about things and like to talk about what I wonder. Being me helps people. Not as the fountain of all truth and knowledge, but as a guy looking at the fountain and occasionally drinking from it.
I’m every person who ever lived. Like every person, I have a universal aspect, and I have peculiarities. We are all part of a common organism — the collective unconscious? the Mystical Body of Christ? And we are all species unto ourselves. The specifics of who I am involves talking about my life out loud. Living it in front of other people — like Grant. Grandpa is me in other ways.
Here’s the thing about my grandfather … he never said or did anything. He was simply a benevolent presence. He smiled. And gave looks of approval.
I practiced the quiet grandpa skills a couple of days ago. Paula got a new bed for the kids for sleepovers, a queen size for the girls, and a trundle beneath for little Ezra. She was discussing the use of the bed with the oldest, Zahava, who is seven. They talked about where the computers could be plugged in … whether it was wise for Eliana to sleep by the window (she tends to kick a little when she sleeps). Zahava said Eliana should probably sleep on the side away from the window and spoke approvingly of the computer situation and enthusiastically about control of a TV dedicated to her choices.
Zahava was being a very big girl. I just stood in the doorway and smiled. I made one comment to them. ‘This is a very nice conversation.’
Zahava went to the bathroom. Paula hugged and kissed me. I said, ‘That was very cute.’
The upshot was that I became incrementally closer to both of them. Not in some dramatic way. The equivalent affect of one sweet kiss, or the squeeze of a hand.
That’s what Grandpa did. Nothing. He just loved. I could see the bed scene in a movie. I love those type scenes. I love how Anthony Hopkins plays them. Obviously not only sweet interactions … but those quiet ways that people vibrate toward and repel each other.
Fleshing out the Grant myth and the Thomas remake …
I processed Grant’s period of struggle. Like Grant, I got beyond being bullied and care for the recognition of others (as regular readers know.).
Then Grant worked at his father’s store in Illinois. I got regular work as a lawyer. We both resolved issues of practical self-sufficiency. A necessary step.
Then Grant returned to army duty as a supply officer at the outset of war. I got a job at UIC College of Business that involved teaching improv. Each of us took humble positions related to our respective arts.
Grant was then elevated to military command. I was invited by Dan and Deb from ‘The Simpsons’ to attend the PlayProv retreat on Cape Cod.
Grant won at Fort Donelson and Shiloh. He emerged as the most aggressive Union general when such generals were in short supply. I was brilliant on Cape Cod. And asked to do a one man show in Chicago and LA.
Grant said he just wanted to put down the rebellion and promote freedom and go home to his family and friends. I just want to make writing that’s helpful to good people and be with my family and friends.
A jealous and competitive superior took Grant off the field and took over command. Grant’s career was hurt initially by the fact that he left the Army and came back. Envious mediocrities outranked him. Michael and Jeffrey, and later Jane, turned popular opinion among improvisers against me because my work was too influential in the past, and they feared it was becoming that way again. (I write about these people without antagonism or resentment. It’s just what happened. I am not conflicted about writing about them critically. I don’t feel compelled to fictionalize them. They said what they said about me. I have a right to my narrative. It’s just how it looks from my perspective. I think they were competitive. I think they cling to a kind of petty power. I think they pose as know-it-alls to cover up a deep seated insecurity. I believe they are damaged by an abusive business. They stand next to people of outwardly greater success and they feel inferior. They resent that I carry myself with a confidence and feel no need to be validated by producers and casting agents. They got scared in New York and L.A. and retreated to a small clique and rose in a meaningless hierarchy within that clique. Their careers on the lower rungs of show business destroyed whatever potential they had as artists. Jane could have been a good actress if she could have figured out the recognition equation. Instead she gets giddy if she goes to a party and sees Conan O’Brien. Jeffrey could have been a good reporter. He’s not much of a playwright. Michael, I am afraid, has no talent for acting or teaching. His conservatism borders on chronic constipation. Dan and Deb were moving toward real artistry in their work, but they followed Michael as a svengali, and that was that. Improv has a tradition of self-serving gurus who create a pseudo-religious atmosphere that keeps all involved down.)
Grant was unfairly labeled an habitual drunk. I was slandered as lazy, a failure, ‘not great’, a ‘novice’, boring … all the canards familiar to my readers — the usual competitive bullshit exploited by otherwise unimportant people with leverage. (I hope I am communicating that I have no ill will towards these people. This is simply truly what I see as to what they did and why they did it. Grant was famously cool in battle. I didn’t used to be. I am now. I survey my battlefield and I see no enemies. I see opponents. And allies. Difficult and advantageous terrain. I am determined. I just get up in the morning and work. Unfazed by good or bad fortune. Every day. Grant and I now are on the same page. I can now say that we each see clearly through the fog of war. Grant had a horrible day at Shiloh. He told his officers, ‘We’ll get them tomorrow.” He did. That’s how I live now. With cool faith in pursuit of ever higher purpose. All that happens is for the best.)
Grant was resurrected by Lincoln. Lincoln needed Grant. The great man saved the great man. As I say, true recognition is connection. Only the great can see the great. The great lift up the great, and the general population is lifted up. Lincoln and Grant elevated a political conflict about whether the federal government or the individual states had primacy in America, and turned it into a supremely important and never ending crusade for human rights, equality and freedom. They made true the claim that America ideally, when it achieves its highest potentials, represents the last best hope of mankind. What they did wasn’t merely an American project, it furthered the possibilities of all people everywhere and for all time. Now when I say that I am like Grant, I am not saying I was born to do something so large, but I was born to further the same kind of transformation. Humans are the animals who can create themselves. We can be so much more than fear and lust and an urge to domination of others.
So the great Lincoln restored the great Grant’s command …
And the rest is history …
Grant reinvented modern warfare. I stopped considering myself an improviser and recognized that I was a writer. Grant became something different than the generals who tried to keep him down.
Grant then defeated the greatly skilled but immoral Lee. I’ve begun this job but I am not finished. Grant never finished either. His gains at war and in reconstruction were attacked and they still haven’t been solidified today. Perhaps this job will take thousands of years to complete.
Who will be my next Lincoln? My friend Rob was the Lincoln of my life and work. He reconnected with me at a most fortuitous time , bringing the intelligence and consideration that I needed when the nonentities attempted to destroy me and my art. Who will be my Lincoln that gives me my next opportunity in the world? Who fulfills the promise of the PlayProv Retreat and allows the brilliance to shine with a toehold in the world once and for all. To shake down Lee from his undeserved perch on Olympus and promote freedom? Paul Sills worried that I wouldn’t get what I deserve. That was very kind and almost right. It’s not about what I deserve. It’s about what I was born to do. Who will provide me a position where I can fully share myself with the world …
for my good, for the good of other people, and for all time?
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
10/10/23: Bummer of an Evening with Major Jackson
Spent a couple hours in a class … it wasn’t advertised as that, but that’s what it was … a class … with Major Jackson.
The good news (at first blush) was that he wasn’t the stiff I thought he was . He was human and lively and his poems were OK.
But he was middle class. A son of black working people, he matriculated to success. He talked about how that success was not what life is all about and it was in the poems he shared too … but he didn’t talk about it as well as I do. I’m just a much better writer. He spoke about life in a conventional way. Young people apparently write a lot about love. Old people write poems of praise. Regrets expressed brings one close to readers. His frame of reference was the cohorts his taught — undergrads, the old folks home … instead of great writers. I don’t really give a shit about what the average 68 year old white guy writes about. I’m not the average blah blah blah …
His class was disorganized. First he asked us to talk to each other. Then we had to report on when we knew we weren’t young. Ice was broken. But then he gave four writing prompts we didn’t get to write or share. He read us a few poems and finally told us to use the last 15 minutes to meditate.
He told us we could take his prompts to write a poem or essay but if we got it published to give him credit. Hah! I happened to write about some of the topics recently in a much more layered and interesting way. Grandfathers. Success. Transitions.
I’m glad I went. Parking was expensive.
My big takeaways. I knew both already but now they are underlined in my book of life. No one can teach me how to write. No one will show me a path to publication, I have to figure that out for myself.
##############
Two hours later …
I thought about it more. This night wasn’t so benign.
Major was in charge. Katie from the Porch who suggested this class in an email to the Over 40 Meet Up group that referred to him as a ‘big shot’ and a good guy.
He seemed all right to a point. But he’s in charge. I’m not in the market for a boss. Katie is a founder of the Porch. Major is a star on the board. The chair of the Vanderbilt MFA in Creative Writing Program. Published in all these august publications. Good for him on the one hand. On the other hand I could give a fuck.
Major started to pass out handouts of his poetry. He handed them to Katie in a manner that treated her as his assistant. She passed them out with a cleverly cowed expression. I don’t know how conscious she is that she feels that this pecking order is undignified. But it is. I went to what she calls the Over 40 Meet-Up and she was much better at creating a developmental space for writers than Major Jackson. And it is very possible she is a better writer than Major Jackson because judging from the poems he passed out, he’s not all that much. He’s OK. I need something more than what everyone is feeling. I want some wisdom.
I’ve always disliked hierarchies. Anywhere, but especially in the arts. I remember when Bob Mooney was in his position with John Gardner’s MFA program at SUNY Binghamton. I thought (sadly) at the time, ‘Bob fetches the poet’s water.’ Artists running around being gophers for their supposed betters. It’s not right. And it’s bullshit.
Major liked me at first. He said I got right to it . He asked when did midlife start for you. I answered, ‘It was late I was 34 and I had a nervous breakdown. It was a great thing but hard at the time. I feel sort of silly bringing it up to a group of people decades later, but it is the answer to your question.’
But he turned when he put up a slide with a stocky gray haired white man on a motorcycle. He apologized for the stereotype. ‘It looks like you, Rick.’ I spontaneously said —- good comic timing unconsciously took over — ‘That’s me!’ I got a laugh. He looked concerned. Oh no. Red alert. Confident person in the room. His position of being the person who lets people know if they can be true to their authentic impulses or not was in danger.
When we paired off I was paired with this ridiculous guy who contradicted everything I said. I asked him ‘Are you a lawyer?’ He said yes and didn’t ask how I knew. Curses . Foiled again. I knew because he had a good vocabulary and he liked to argue. Over every small point to put sand in the gears of getting anywhere.
I said to this guy who previously spoke for 15 minutes about ice cream with his friend … another woman who reflexively does what the man says … (man, have I become a feminist. Loving women does that to you. I’m sick of seeing men give women orders and poor women who can’t or won’t tell them to fuck off) …that I start with the personal and write to the universal. I don’t remember what we were supposed to be discussing but it fit. The lawyer said there was a rule that writing shouldn’t be personal. He seized on the word personal as if he was going in for the kill at the Court of Appeals. J’accuse! You are new to me. You must know nothing. Bow to me and be supplicant to your process. You are too cocky in your use of declarative sentences and free exposure of your personality. Show some respect to your betters!
Major listened to this exchange. He later looked at me and sternly said writing shouldn’t be personal. He himself earned personal writing however. He had poems about his relationships with his father, his sons and what he would be if he were a product in the super market.
I know for certain that I won’t do anything at Vanderbilt or with Major Jackson. I’m not sure about The Porch. Probably not.
Maybe I am suffering from what I couldn’t do years ago … my friend Rob’s feat of making a living and forming a network of friends in New York. The writers’ groups he’s described would be good for me. But here in the hinterlands , it’s big fish in small ponds otherwise populated by people trapped on the lower levels of arbitrary hierarchies.
I saw this group thing at Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Binghamton back in the day, Second City of course and tonight. It’s oil and water with me. I have no tolerance for it.
I’m more than OK emotionally. Not really upset. Just wondering, I have to protect my writing and my happiness. I love both of them, and could give a rat’s ass about this bullshit.
Major complained that as an editor he sees so much work that draws on no life experience and therefore is not interesting, He betrayed a resentment for his students and the community groups he works with. Yet if he is in the presence of a real artist, it scares him.
Not a person in that room interested me , including Major. Maybe Katie. She is really the only person that I’ve seen at The Porch that might be a real connection that would be positive for my writing.
Major spoke glowingly about shame and regret. He said when people feel those things they feel separate from their communities. Writing about them makes people feel better. Let’s them know they are not alone. I feel the exact opposite. I feel separate from my community because I feel proud and accepting of my person and my fate. I don’t believe in getting stuck in sin or mistakes. The only shame is the failure to transform. We all do wrong and commit errors, why should be ashamed or regretful of them? It’s part of being a human being. We just should learn from our bad judgment and apply that learning to our future endeavors. ‘The road to wisdom is paved with excess.’ William Blake. Blake was a good poet from what I understand.
Major thinks we have different voices at different stages of life. I see that as so limiting. I found married love at 55. I found a version of paternal love at 68. I have been disposed to a life of reposed contemplation like the one I have now since I was in my twenties. We live every stage of life in every moment. That’s why little kids love old people. I see them watching. They are learning how to be old. They’ll forget what they learned and call it out when they need it. They really are full people, born with a universe inside of them. They can be being babies and then say something of real mature insight or consideration. These observations have something to do with eternity, which is what I thought poetry was about. ‘Eternity is in love with productions of time.’ William Blake again. Major doesn’t talk about eternity. He seems concerned with demographics.
Major’s poems are the prayers of ordinary people. He feels failure at his divorce for example. Great — now what did you learn from it, Major? Not what you can teach us about it so you can be the boss. What did you learn? Share yourself, Major. Be personal. Or don’t. But I know that’s what I do and want to do.
Major did an amazing thing. He leapt from the black working class to academic success and distinction. But art isn’t academic. He could just as easily be the department chair in Sociology as an artist leading an MFA program. I think he knows it too. He says you can have success, financially and with social status, but still be dissatisfied.
I hear him. I know what he wants.
He wants to be a poet.
#############
I correspond a little with my friend, Rob, and then I write this.
All I want is to further develop my writing, and be exposed to lines to publication. I don’t need this bullshit.
My next decision is whether to continue with The Porch itself.
I wonder if I want to be exposed to anything about literary concepts from anybody except Rob or someone like Rob, if they exist. I’ve been enriched when he’s shared his knowledge of literary criticism. In lesser hands those books he has read are turned into manuals, the way fundamentalists turn the literature of the Bible into an inhuman and ridiculous rule book. I’m interested because I see the intellectual dissection of art mightily serves Rob’s art. It’s tremendous. But I have a different process. I’ve fed my mind a lot of ideas, and I continue to do so. But my writing all comes from my unconscious. I’m always surprised by what I say. It’s not an intellectual process.
And it must be personal. I share with the reader my transforming truth. It’s not an absolute truth. I chart who I am day by day. If it doesn’t fit in literature that’s OK. Then where does it fit? Because it is what it is. I get better at it by being more aware of what it is, not by conforming it to any arbitrary standards.
When Major told me to stop scribbling like I was writing in a journal , it was very insulting. He doesn’t know my writing, and he doesn’t know me. He has no idea how I work. He’s always done the right thing, which in matters of creativity is the wrong thing.
There’s so much that goes into helping an artist do her or his art. Rob is a genius at it. I never was as good at it as he is. . I just showed up and shared myself and was open to them. It was very useful and different than last night. Rob does that plus … he knows how to coax people to themselves. It is a tremendous gift. The highest form of … teaching? No that isn’t a proper word for the arts. Facilitate sounds too corporate . I don’t have a word right now. What I’m describing is a rare thing.
The exploration goes on. I don’t feel wounded … I pulled away in time, but I’m bruised. I am going to protect my art and my happiness without withdrawal from the world. I’m doing something new.
I appreciate your good wishes, but I am far from certain such a group exists here. But if they don’t I will find another way to get what I need. I don’t regret that I couldn’t hang in New York. (Sorry Major) I couldn’t. I wasn’t equipped. I accept everything. It’s my destiny to do it another way.
Sigh. Just more people afraid to get beyond their unhappiness and codifying their illusions as the way it is.
#############
Finally, my last letter to Rob in our correspondence on this particular topic. We write each other all the time. Oh yeah … before that … another epiphany … I don’t give a fuck about aesthetics … is it making you think and feel? … I don’t care if it’s rough … sometimes its comes out literary … sometimes it comes out raw … I don’t give a shit … I’m doing something more important than all that interior decorating … I get more and more pissed off by Major’s insult about me just scribbling a journal. An ignorant comment by a man who felt threatened in his status as the cock of the walk. He has no idea the sweat and feeling and pain that I endure to do my work. I put the same effort into what I do that he has put into university politics.
Here’s the letter …
Katie is the only one I’ve met at The Porch who may be advanced and she may be partially blocked. I can’t tell. But I like her vibe and her take on writing.
Last night was a Porch event. The people of the Porch were at Vanderbilt. Major was slumming. The only reason the Over 40 Meetup was nicer was because Katie set the tone. I wasn’t turned on by the women at Major’s feet last night. I should be. I’m turned on by my blog. It’s sexy. I was jazzed by the movie Oppenheimer. I’m jazzed by Paula (of course) . the kids. You. I’m enervated by this class and these people, who I like. The women looked mousy and bedraggled, like people who were being beaten down on the job. That arouses concern, not passion.
I was never looking for a teacher. They sometimes say coach but act like teachers. Paula is a coach. Her sessions with in her case academics resemble our letters. She’s a lot like you. I just want to develop my writing further — and it’s its own thing. I don’t give a shit where it fits, I just want to get it there. I love hearing when you speak about literary criticism because I see how it informs your art. It’s part of your fantastic process. I have a different process. I went to McKay’s and picked up books. I wanted to observe writing and grow. Become a reader again. And I have sort of. But every morning my unconscious comes first. If something is eating at me, I have to write. It takes a lot out of me. Then I still work but in a less energy taxing way. I relax and let things perk. Then the next morning I’m at it again.
I don’t know … do I only want to be around masters? Maybe that’s a good word. If someone isn’t really good I don’t want to be bothered. But I think my yearning for community is falling away. I have wonderful connections in life. You, Paula, my brother, Bob and my family here … and I’ll make more friends as I go forward. But you and I didn’t meet under formal circumstances. You call your writers of your books by their first name. There is a whole community across the sweep of human history for me to be edified by and enjoy. I’ve grown much closer to Ulysses S. Grant recently.
I was thinking I would go to the Over 40 group tomorrow and be honest about the Major experience and see where it goes. Give Katie a chance . She very well could be worth it. But now I think I won’t go. She’ll follow up if there is anything there. To say my piece in front of those people sounds like quicksand to me. I don’t want to be a change agent in their community. I just want to develop my writing and find paths to publication. I repeat in order to keep my eye on the ball.
I don’t learn in classes. I don’t believe in teaching actually. Education is something that happens between people. We share and explore together in these letters. We show ourselves to each other. I learn more here than anywhere else. Ever. I’d love to talk with Hemingway for hours and have him tell me what he personally feels about writing. I don’t want to go to a class and listen to him lecture about it.
Acting is very different. It’s interpretive and collaborative. You accept boundaries on your art and then make it limitless within that frame. This is what the writer said. This is how the director interprets it. This how she wants the actor to interpret it. Then he interprets within those specific parameters. It’s an amazing art form. How many actors have I seen transcend their directors and the writers! How many times have I seen actors save the directors and writers asses! In most commercial movies and TV, the actors are the superior element in the piece, far exceeding the writing and direction. Great actors are my metaphor for how to be in the world. You don’t argue with a director. You take something mediocre and make it fly. That’s what I saw you do in that movie. What a performance … far superior to everything around it, but also elevating everything around it, and making it better than it was. You justified the whole movie. You turned a cliche into art. You brought complexity where most other actors would have brought stereotype.
Sure, we learn from everyone we know. I learned from Major and the ice cream asshole. We observe and we reflect and we decide and we apply. Adults don’t learn like kids. Kids are pushed around for the sake of socialization. I disliked teaching many college students. It’s nothing like interacting with an artist that wants to grow. I also disliked teaching people who solely wanted tips to get the job. I liked the ones who wanted to be great at the job and let the getting take care of itself.
I’m deciding through the educational experience of these letters. I have to figure out matters of my growth as a writer and lines of publication on my own. I am more satisfied doing things as I have been doing than in getting involved in these formal approximations of real connections that always disappoint.
I am ‘invulnerable, witty, wise and right’ … and I love you for saying it … but the ‘class’ also hurts. I look forward to the hurt. I write and live to burn away pain. The pain goes away when I am in the clear. But will return when there is another level to find in it. I’m in the process of writing about last night and publishing it on the blog. That same process expanded my writing and separated me from Second City and Notre Dame.
I get a little giddy thinking about it. I peeled away Vanderbilt and now The Porch. I’m getting baby steps closer. to pay dirt. I’ve learned a tremendous amount in a short time at the Porch. The biggest resource the experience gave me is my own reactions. I dig into them and chart a few more miles of my road.
Per usual … you end with pithy brilliance.
‘Keep one ear open, and proceed as usual. ‘
Will do, Professor!
#######
I am much better writer than Major Jackson. I have a big advantage. I’m not loaded down with all the school bullshit. Oh I spent plenty of times in schools, but they never could control me. And I didn’t have a drive to succeed, even if I fell into success from time to time. I just want to be me and say my piece. It’s my truth. Not the absolute truth. Major wants to pose as an authority, which is kind of pathetic. I don’t see how someone like him who is burdened with obscure laurels can ever get out from under them. It’s hard to give back the key to the city.
I don’t want the fucking thing. I just want to write.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
10/11/23: More Fallout from the Bummer with Major Jackson
My take … your aha moments were provided by the experience of being taught. The credit is not to the teacher.
Say you coach two actors. You are brilliant with each. One soars. One sucks. Very similar external experiences. Very different internal ones.
Sure a book or a teacher or anything is great. But you brought the meaning.
‘Humility and privacy’. That’s what Katie McDougall told me when I wondered why I was so drawn to Salinger and O’Neill’s reclusive periods. What a wonderful response.
Major Jackson was arrogant and ice cream asshole* was invasive of my process.
*Major Jackson and Ice Cream Asshole are characters in my previous piece, ’10/10/23: Bummer of an Evening with Major Jackson’ which I include below.
O’Neill and Salinger had huge achievement one might say.
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Who is to say I haven’t?
I think of Sharon Olds telling me to dig and I get sick. Or Stanley Kunitz circling perceived problems with my prose.
You know I think about what I write down. It’s there for a reason. If anybody is going to make any changes to it, it’s me.
The professionals maintain the world. The artists change it.
They can write the way you’re supposed to write. I’m discovering a new way to do it.
#############
I was looking for someone to help me be even more me. I found him. Me. I was looking for a path to publication. I needed a cartographer. I found him. Me.
I often go somewhere and discover something other than my stated purpose for going. I was looking for community. I found it where it has always been — in all that interests me.
Yeah, Major Jackson writes charming poems. To me that’s not much. And yes, you roll over one in an improv before breakfast. I know much more about life than Major Jackson. And that charm is such a small part of it. I can be witty, but the wit is in service to something greater.
I’m confused by all the literati. What is this bullshit? I’m not crying. I’m asking. Is it elitist? Harvard? What the fuck is it? I was condescended to on Monday and I didn’t like it. It was the same feeling I felt in a corporate law firm. Or when I worked catering when I was an actor in New York at a 1% party. I think I went to hear Major Jackson to see this. To see that I am not remotely connected to this literary bullshit either. You told me after I was rejected by Vanderbilt that I would hate it there. I knew you were right. I guess I had to experience that inherent hate to know what it was in the particular.
But then I was thrown by your admiration for these literary types. And then curious by the fact that I am unmoved by them. That’s not a general criticism. They just don’t speak to me. They aren’t on my map. I read a little Kunitz. Nothing. Major Jackson. Zip.
So then the question of publication changes. I was looking to see if my work could live in their journals and publishing houses. The answer is no. No more than I belonged in a corporate law firm. Sure they were great lawyers. Some were good people. But their persons and work left me cold. That’s what I felt on Monday.
A person can be an accomplished intellectual and still not know much. Major Jackson bores me. His life is conventional. He says don’t get personal but yet he takes his own experience and narcissistically says it’s universal. I take the personal and dig into it to get to deeper meaning that eventually could apply to anybody. The deeper I go the more useful it is to others. But I am not doing it to be useful to others. I am doing it to understand it for myself. The generous thing is to share it.
I just unearthed another level of my feeling of insult. They resented that I talked and acted like a writer. They liked me when they thought I came to catch their pearls of wisdom in a cup.
I don’t care about their notions of what constitutes good writing. I have my own. I’m thinking about life, not that aesthetic bullshit.
I have decided to go to The Porch tonight. Katie might say another ‘humility and privacy’ line. That was worth it. And it’s kind of a writer’s support group. Katie will ask what I thought of Major Pain in the Ass, and I’ll tell her. Not to reform the Porch. But maybe I’ll learn how to deal with these interactions that feel like I’m being ambushed.
I think my writing is great. I don’t feel it has to be improved. I’m way beyond that. My writing tracks my transformation as a person. That’s how it gets better. not by fiddling with whether it’s personal or not or some other subjective standard. I could give two shits for semantic preciousness. Sometimes it comes out sounding literary and intellectual. Sometimes it sounds like a Mike Royko column. If I were critically reading my own work I would point out that the shifts in tone are important. When I am measured and reasoned?. When am I profane? When do I use wit? When do I chant? Etc. I know what I am doing and it is there for a reason.
I was a great improviser and a talented trial lawyer. These literary people don’t have anything to tell me about craft. I have one superior to theirs. I didn’t do everything right like Major Jackson. He never slept on your couch and begged on the streets and brilliantly and crazily scribbled —- that bastard! — on looseleaf notebooks. He never pushed it. So he sings songs about mediocre middle bland life. And looks at life like a sociologist. He doesn’t know any more about life than a partner in a law firm. I’ve seen more of what’s out there. Like lawyers, they rely on jargon to create a priesthood and have control. But they control ephemera. Lawyers control the levers of money and power at least. Something concrete.
All of the above has to do with why he’s not much of a writer. It’s not just that he’s a bad teacher. He was a bad writer in that classroom. His observations were inaccurate. His conclusions were lame.
###########
We decide meaning for ourselves. No one can impose it on us.
Stanley Kunitz circling problematic passages in my writing wouldn’t save me time editing. He’d slow me down. I’d have to spend too much time addressing him in my mind instead of just looking at the object I am making. Maybe some people aren’t good at that. But I look and listen. I don’t need someone to point it out to me. I think teachers work on their own process when they are teaching. It is more humble, and true, to say ‘this is the way I do it’ instead of ‘this is the way it’s done.’
A pro can be a gem. Humble and smart. A pro teaching you useful technical knowledge. Not life or writing. Bingo.
I like a technical pro a lot better than Major Jackson. He is humble because he really has something. Technical things must be taught. Being an engineer is taught. Being a human is a different story.
I don’t think you’d be more yourself if you did fill in the blank. You’ve done plenty. I’m not a regrets guy. Everybody should have bought Apple when it went public. Every choice you thought you made had to happen and it made you, and that’s pretty damn good.
There is so much more than what Major Jackson thinks he knows. A great poet can distill something huge in a few lines, a mediocre poet can just give you something small. The sizzle of a cheesesteak. Thanks for nothing.
I don’t just want to be published. I want to be published in the right place. I want to like where I am published. It has to be the right people. The right publishers. The right audience. It has to be better than what I am doing now. I have autonomy. I have readers. Really just more of the same, I guess. I’m doing it. It just could reach many people in the way I reach a few now.
I went to The Porch to start this new phase of my writing and new exploration of its place in the world. I went to see Major Jackson to learn that the literary establishment is not a good fit for me. I’m working toward something.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
10/10/23: Bummer of an Evening with Major Jackson
Spent a couple hours in a class … it wasn’t advertised as that, but that’s what it was … a class … with Major Jackson.
The good news (at first blush) was that he wasn’t the stiff I thought he was . He was human and lively and his poems were OK.
But he was middle class. A son of black working people, he matriculated to success. He talked about how that success was not what life is all about and it was in the poems he shared too … but he didn’t talk about it as well as I do. I’m just a much better writer. He spoke about life in a conventional way. Young people apparently write a lot about love. Old people write poems of praise. Regrets expressed brings one close to readers. His frame of reference was the cohorts his taught — undergrads, the old folks home … instead of great writers. I don’t really give a shit about what the average 68 year old white guy writes about. I’m not the average blah blah blah …
His class was disorganized. First he asked us to talk to each other. Then we had to report on when we knew we weren’t young. Ice was broken. But then he gave four writing prompts we didn’t get to write or share. He read us a few poems and finally told us to use the last 15 minutes to meditate.
He told us we could take his prompts to write a poem or essay but if we got it published to give him credit. Hah! I happened to write about some of the topics recently in a much more layered and interesting way. Grandfathers. Success. Transitions.
I’m glad I went. Parking was expensive.
My big takeaways. I knew both already but now they are underlined in my book of life. No one can teach me how to write. No one will show me a path to publication, I have to figure that out for myself.
##############
Two hours later …
I thought about it more. This night wasn’t so benign.
Major was in charge. Katie from the Porch who suggested this class in an email to the Over 40 Meet Up group that referred to him as a ‘big shot’ and a good guy.
He seemed all right to a point. But he’s in charge. I’m not in the market for a boss. Katie is a founder of the Porch. Major is a star on the board. The chair of the Vanderbilt MFA in Creative Writing Program. Published in all these august publications. Good for him on the one hand. On the other hand I could give a fuck.
Major started to pass out handouts of his poetry. He handed them to Katie in a manner that treated her as his assistant. She passed them out with a cleverly cowed expression. I don’t know how conscious she is that she feels that this pecking order is undignified. But it is. I went to what she calls the Over 40 Meet-Up and she was much better at creating a developmental space for writers than Major Jackson. And it is very possible she is a better writer than Major Jackson because judging from the poems he passed out, he’s not all that much. He’s OK. I need something more than what everyone is feeling. I want some wisdom.
I’ve always disliked hierarchies. Anywhere, but especially in the arts. I remember when Bob Mooney was in his position with John Gardner’s MFA program at SUNY Binghamton. I thought (sadly) at the time, ‘Bob fetches the poet’s water.’ Artists running around being gophers for their supposed betters. It’s not right. And it’s bullshit.
Major liked me at first. He said I got right to it . He asked when did midlife start for you. I answered, ‘It was late I was 34 and I had a nervous breakdown. It was a great thing but hard at the time. I feel sort of silly bringing it up to a group of people decades later, but it is the answer to your question.’
But he turned when he put up a slide with a stocky gray haired white man on a motorcycle. He apologized for the stereotype. ‘It looks like you, Rick.’ I spontaneously said —- good comic timing unconsciously took over — ‘That’s me!’ I got a laugh. He looked concerned. Oh no. Red alert. Confident person in the room. His position of being the person who lets people know if they can be true to their authentic impulses or not was in danger.
When we paired off I was paired with this ridiculous guy who contradicted everything I said. I asked him ‘Are you a lawyer?’ He said yes and didn’t ask how I knew. Curses . Foiled again. I knew because he had a good vocabulary and he liked to argue. Over every small point to put sand in the gears of getting anywhere.
I said to this guy who previously spoke for 15 minutes about ice cream with his friend … another woman who reflexively does what the man says … (man, have I become a feminist. Loving women does that to you. I’m sick of seeing men give women orders and poor women who can’t or won’t tell them to fuck off) …that I start with the personal and write to the universal. I don’t remember what we were supposed to be discussing but it fit. The lawyer said there was a rule that writing shouldn’t be personal. He seized on the word personal as if he was going in for the kill at the Court of Appeals. J’accuse! You are new to me. You must know nothing. Bow to me and be supplicant to your process. You are too cocky in your use of declarative sentences and free exposure of your personality. Show some respect to your betters!
Major listened to this exchange. He later looked at me and sternly said writing shouldn’t be personal. He himself earned personal writing however. He had poems about his relationships with his father, his sons and what he would be if he were a product in the super market.
I know for certain that I won’t do anything at Vanderbilt or with Major Jackson. I’m not sure about The Porch. Probably not.
Maybe I am suffering from what I couldn’t do years ago … my friend Rob’s feat of making a living and forming a network of friends in New York. The writers’ groups he’s described would be good for me. But here in the hinterlands , it’s big fish in small ponds otherwise populated by people trapped on the lower levels of arbitrary hierarchies.
I saw this group thing at Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Binghamton back in the day, Second City of course and tonight. It’s oil and water with me. I have no tolerance for it.
I’m more than OK emotionally. Not really upset. Just wondering, I have to protect my writing and my happiness. I love both of them, and could give a rat’s ass about this bullshit.
Major complained that as an editor he sees so much work that draws on no life experience and therefore is not interesting, He betrayed a resentment for his students and the community groups he works with. Yet if he is in the presence of a real artist, it scares him.
Not a person in that room interested me , including Major. Maybe Katie. She is really the only person that I’ve seen at The Porch that might be a real connection that would be positive for my writing.
Major spoke glowingly about shame and regret. He said when people feel those things they feel separate from their communities. Writing about them makes people feel better. Let’s them know they are not alone. I feel the exact opposite. I feel separate from my community because I feel proud and accepting of my person and my fate. I don’t believe in getting stuck in sin or mistakes. The only shame is the failure to transform. We all do wrong and commit errors, why should be ashamed or regretful of them? It’s part of being a human being. We just should learn from our bad judgment and apply that learning to our future endeavors. ‘The road to wisdom is paved with excess.’ William Blake. Blake was a good poet from what I understand.
Major thinks we have different voices at different stages of life. I see that as so limiting. I found married love at 55. I found a version of paternal love at 68. I have been disposed to a life of reposed contemplation like the one I have now since I was in my twenties. We live every stage of life in every moment. That’s why little kids love old people. I see them watching. They are learning how to be old. They’ll forget what they learned and call it out when they need it. They really are full people, born with a universe inside of them. They can be being babies and then say something of real mature insight or consideration. These observations have something to do with eternity, which is what I thought poetry was about. ‘Eternity is in love with productions of time.’ William Blake again. Major doesn’t talk about eternity. He seems concerned with demographics.
Major’s poems are the prayers of ordinary people. He feels failure at his divorce for example. Great — now what did you learn from it, Major? Not what you can teach us about it so you can be the boss. What did you learn? Share yourself, Major. Be personal. Or don’t. But I know that’s what I do and want to do.
Major did an amazing thing. He leapt from the black working class to academic success and distinction. But art isn’t academic. He could just as easily be the department chair in Sociology as an artist leading an MFA program. I think he knows it too. He says you can have success, financially and with social status, but still be dissatisfied.
I hear him. I know what he wants.
He wants to be a poet.
#############
I correspond a little with my friend, Rob, and then I write this.
All I want is to further develop my writing, and be exposed to lines to publication. I don’t need this bullshit.
My next decision is whether to continue with The Porch itself.
I wonder if I want to be exposed to anything about literary concepts from anybody except Rob or someone like Rob, if they exist. I’ve been enriched when he’s shared his knowledge of literary criticism. In lesser hands those books he has read are turned into manuals, the way fundamentalists turn the literature of the Bible into an inhuman and ridiculous rule book. I’m interested because I see the intellectual dissection of art mightily serves Rob’s art. It’s tremendous. But I have a different process. I’ve fed my mind a lot of ideas, and I continue to do so. But my writing all comes from my unconscious. I’m always surprised by what I say. It’s not an intellectual process.
And it must be personal. I share with the reader my transforming truth. It’s not an absolute truth. I chart who I am day by day. If it doesn’t fit in literature that’s OK. Then where does it fit? Because it is what it is. I get better at it by being more aware of what it is, not by conforming it to any arbitrary standards.
When Major told me to stop scribbling like I was writing in a journal , it was very insulting. He doesn’t know my writing, and he doesn’t know me. He has no idea how I work. He’s always done the right thing, which in matters of creativity is the wrong thing.
There’s so much that goes into helping an artist do her or his art. Rob is a genius at it. I never was as good at it as he is. . I just showed up and shared myself and was open to them. It was very useful and different than last night. Rob does that plus … he knows how to coax people to themselves. It is a tremendous gift. The highest form of … teaching? No that isn’t a proper word for the arts. Facilitate sounds too corporate . I don’t have a word right now. What I’m describing is a rare thing.
The exploration goes on. I don’t feel wounded … I pulled away in time, but I’m bruised. I am going to protect my art and my happiness without withdrawal from the world. I’m doing something new.
I appreciate your good wishes, but I am far from certain such a group exists here. But if they don’t I will find another way to get what I need. I don’t regret that I couldn’t hang in New York. (Sorry Major) I couldn’t. I wasn’t equipped. I accept everything. It’s my destiny to do it another way.
Sigh. Just more people afraid to get beyond their unhappiness and codifying their illusions as the way it is.
#############
Finally, my last letter to Rob in our correspondence on this particular topic. We write each other all the time. Oh yeah … before that … another epiphany … I don’t give a fuck about aesthetics … is it making you think and feel? … I don’t care if it’s rough … sometimes its comes out literary … sometimes it comes out raw … I don’t give a shit … I’m doing something more important than all that interior decorating … I get more and more pissed off by Major’s insult about me just scribbling a journal. An ignorant comment by a man who felt threatened in his status as the cock of the walk. He has no idea the sweat and feeling and pain that I endure to do my work. I put the same effort into what I do that he has put into university politics.
Here’s the letter …
Katie is the only one I’ve met at The Porch who may be advanced and she may be partially blocked. I can’t tell. But I like her vibe and her take on writing.
Last night was a Porch event. The people of the Porch were at Vanderbilt. Major was slumming. The only reason the Over 40 Meetup was nicer was because Katie set the tone. I wasn’t turned on by the women at Major’s feet last night. I should be. I’m turned on by my blog. It’s sexy. I was jazzed by the movie Oppenheimer. I’m jazzed by Paula (of course) . the kids. You. I’m enervated by this class and these people, who I like. The women looked mousy and bedraggled, like people who were being beaten down on the job. That arouses concern, not passion.
I was never looking for a teacher. They sometimes say coach but act like teachers. Paula is a coach. Her sessions with in her case academics resemble our letters. She’s a lot like you. I just want to develop my writing further — and it’s its own thing. I don’t give a shit where it fits, I just want to get it there. I love hearing when you speak about literary criticism because I see how it informs your art. It’s part of your fantastic process. I have a different process. I went to McKay’s and picked up books. I wanted to observe writing and grow. Become a reader again. And I have sort of. But every morning my unconscious comes first. If something is eating at me, I have to write. It takes a lot out of me. Then I still work but in a less energy taxing way. I relax and let things perk. Then the next morning I’m at it again.
I don’t know … do I only want to be around masters? Maybe that’s a good word. If someone isn’t really good I don’t want to be bothered. But I think my yearning for community is falling away. I have wonderful connections in life. You, Paula, my brother, Bob and my family here … and I’ll make more friends as I go forward. But you and I didn’t meet under formal circumstances. You call your writers of your books by their first name. There is a whole community across the sweep of human history for me to be edified by and enjoy. I’ve grown much closer to Ulysses S. Grant recently.
I was thinking I would go to the Over 40 group tomorrow and be honest about the Major experience and see where it goes. Give Katie a chance . She very well could be worth it. But now I think I won’t go. She’ll follow up if there is anything there. To say my piece in front of those people sounds like quicksand to me. I don’t want to be a change agent in their community. I just want to develop my writing and find paths to publication. I repeat in order to keep my eye on the ball.
I don’t learn in classes. I don’t believe in teaching actually. Education is something that happens between people. We share and explore together in these letters. We show ourselves to each other. I learn more here than anywhere else. Ever. I’d love to talk with Hemingway for hours and have him tell me what he personally feels about writing. I don’t want to go to a class and listen to him lecture about it.
Acting is very different. It’s interpretive and collaborative. You accept boundaries on your art and then make it limitless within that frame. This is what the writer said. This is how the director interprets it. This how she wants the actor to interpret it. Then he interprets within those specific parameters. It’s an amazing art form. How many actors have I seen transcend their directors and the writers! How many times have I seen actors save the directors and writers asses! In most commercial movies and TV, the actors are the superior element in the piece, far exceeding the writing and direction. Great actors are my metaphor for how to be in the world. You don’t argue with a director. You take something mediocre and make it fly. That’s what I saw you do in that movie. What a performance … far superior to everything around it, but also elevating everything around it, and making it better than it was. You justified the whole movie. You turned a cliche into art. You brought complexity where most other actors would have brought stereotype.
Sure, we learn from everyone we know. I learned from Major and the ice cream asshole. We observe and we reflect and we decide and we apply. Adults don’t learn like kids. Kids are pushed around for the sake of socialization. I disliked teaching many college students. It’s nothing like interacting with an artist that wants to grow. I also disliked teaching people who solely wanted tips to get the job. I liked the ones who wanted to be great at the job and let the getting take care of itself.
I’m deciding through the educational experience of these letters. I have to figure out matters of my growth as a writer and lines of publication on my own. I am more satisfied doing things as I have been doing than in getting involved in these formal approximations of real connections that always disappoint.
I am ‘invulnerable, witty, wise and right’ … and I love you for saying it … but the ‘class’ also hurts. I look forward to the hurt. I write and live to burn away pain. The pain goes away when I am in the clear. But will return when there is another level to find in it. I’m in the process of writing about last night and publishing it on the blog. That same process expanded my writing and separated me from Second City and Notre Dame.
I get a little giddy thinking about it. I peeled away Vanderbilt and now The Porch. I’m getting baby steps closer. to pay dirt. I’ve learned a tremendous amount in a short time at the Porch. The biggest resource the experience gave me is my own reactions. I dig into them and chart a few more miles of my road.
Per usual … you end with pithy brilliance.
‘Keep one ear open, and proceed as usual. ‘
Will do, Professor!
#######
I am much better writer than Major Jackson. I have a big advantage. I’m not loaded down with all the school bullshit. Oh I spent plenty of times in schools, but they never could control me. And I didn’t have a drive to succeed, even if I fell into success from time to time. I just want to be me and say my piece. It’s my truth. Not the absolute truth. Major wants to pose as an authority, which is kind of pathetic. I don’t see how someone like him who is burdened with obscure laurels can ever get out from under them. It’s hard to give back the key to the city.
I don’t want the fucking thing. I just want to write.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
10/11/23: More Fallout from the Bummer with Major Jackson
My take … your aha moments were provided by the experience of being taught. The credit is not to the teacher.
Say you coach two actors. You are brilliant with each. One soars. One sucks. Very similar external experiences. Very different internal ones.
Sure a book or a teacher or anything is great. But you brought the meaning.
‘Humility and privacy’. That’s what Katie McDougall told me when I wondered why I was so drawn to Salinger and O’Neill’s reclusive periods. What a wonderful response.
Major Jackson was arrogant and ice cream asshole* was invasive of my process.
*Major Jackson and Ice Cream Asshole are characters in my previous piece, ’10/10/23: Bummer of an Evening with Major Jackson’ (see above).
O’Neill and Salinger had huge achievement one might say.
Who is to say I haven’t?
I think of Sharon Olds telling me to dig and I get sick. Or Stanley Kunitz circling perceived problems with my prose.
You know I think about what I write down. It’s there for a reason. If anybody is going to make any changes to it, it’s me.
The professionals maintain the world. The artists change it.
They can write the way you’re supposed to write. I’m discovering a new way to do it.
#############
I was looking for someone to help me be even more me. I found him. Me. I was looking for a path to publication. I needed a cartographer. I found him. Me.
I often go somewhere and discover something other than my stated purpose for going. I was looking for community. I found it where it has always been — in all that interests me.
Yeah, Major Jackson writes charming poems. To me that’s not much. And yes, you roll over one in an improv before breakfast. I know much more about life than Major Jackson. And that charm is such a small part of it. I can be witty, but the wit is in service to something greater.
I’m confused by all the literati. What is this bullshit? I’m not crying. I’m asking. Is it elitist? Harvard? What the fuck is it? I was condescended to on Monday and I didn’t like it. It was the same feeling I felt in a corporate law firm. Or when I worked catering when I was an actor in New York at a 1% party. I think I went to hear Major Jackson to see this. To see that I am not remotely connected to this literary bullshit either. You told me after I was rejected by Vanderbilt that I would hate it there. I knew you were right. I guess I had to experience that inherent hate to know what it was in the particular.
But then I was thrown by your admiration for these literary types. And then curious by the fact that I am unmoved by them. That’s not a general criticism. They just don’t speak to me. They aren’t on my map. I read a little Kunitz. Nothing. Major Jackson. Zip.
So then the question of publication changes. I was looking to see if my work could live in their journals and publishing houses. The answer is no. No more than I belonged in a corporate law firm. Sure they were great lawyers. Some were good people. But their persons and work left me cold. That’s what I felt on Monday.
A person can be an accomplished intellectual and still not know much. Major Jackson bores me. His life is conventional. He says don’t get personal but yet he takes his own experience and narcissistically says it’s universal. I take the personal and dig into it to get to deeper meaning that eventually could apply to anybody. The deeper I go the more useful it is to others. But I am not doing it to be useful to others. I am doing it to understand it for myself. The generous thing is to share it.
I just unearthed another level of my feeling of insult. They resented that I talked and acted like a writer. They liked me when they thought I came to catch their pearls of wisdom in a cup.
I don’t care about their notions of what constitutes good writing. I have my own. I’m thinking about life, not that aesthetic bullshit.
I have decided to go to The Porch tonight. Katie might say another ‘humility and privacy’ line. That was worth it. And it’s kind of a writer’s support group. Katie will ask what I thought of Major Pain in the Ass, and I’ll tell her. Not to reform the Porch. But maybe I’ll learn how to deal with these interactions that feel like I’m being ambushed.
I think my writing is great. I don’t feel it has to be improved. I’m way beyond that. My writing tracks my transformation as a person. That’s how it gets better. not by fiddling with whether it’s personal or not or some other subjective standard. I could give two shits for semantic preciousness. Sometimes it comes out sounding literary and intellectual. Sometimes it sounds like a Mike Royko column. If I were critically reading my own work I would point out that the shifts in tone are important. When I am measured and reasoned?. When am I profane? When do I use wit? When do I chant? Etc. I know what I am doing and it is there for a reason.
I was a great improviser and a talented trial lawyer. These literary people don’t have anything to tell me about craft. I have one superior to theirs. I didn’t do everything right like Major Jackson. He never slept on your couch and begged on the streets and brilliantly and crazily scribbled —- that bastard! — on looseleaf notebooks. He never pushed it. So he sings songs about mediocre middle bland life. And looks at life like a sociologist. He doesn’t know any more about life than a partner in a law firm. I’ve seen more of what’s out there. Like lawyers, they rely on jargon to create a priesthood and have control. But they control ephemera. Lawyers control the levers of money and power at least. Something concrete.
All of the above has to do with why he’s not much of a writer. It’s not just that he’s a bad teacher. He was a bad writer in that classroom. His observations were inaccurate. His conclusions were lame.
###########
We decide meaning for ourselves. No one can impose it on us.
Stanley Kunitz circling problematic passages in my writing wouldn’t save me time editing. He’d slow me down. I’d have to spend too much time addressing him in my mind instead of just looking at the object I am making. Maybe some people aren’t good at that. But I look and listen. I don’t need someone to point it out to me. I think teachers work on their own process when they are teaching. It is more humble, and true, to say ‘this is the way I do it’ instead of ‘this is the way it’s done.’
A pro can be a gem. Humble and smart. A pro teaching you useful technical knowledge. Not life or writing. Bingo.
I like a technical pro a lot better than Major Jackson. He is humble because he really has something. Technical things must be taught. Being an engineer is taught. Being a human is a different story.
I don’t think you’d be more yourself if you did fill in the blank. You’ve done plenty. I’m not a regrets guy. Everybody should have bought Apple when it went public. Every choice you thought you made had to happen and it made you, and that’s pretty damn good.
There is so much more than what Major Jackson thinks he knows. A great poet can distill something huge in a few lines, a mediocre poet can just give you something small. The sizzle of a cheesesteak. Thanks for nothing.
I don’t just want to be published. I want to be published in the right place. I want to like where I am published. It has to be the right people. The right publishers. The right audience. It has to be better than what I am doing now. I have autonomy. I have readers. Really just more of the same, I guess. I’m doing it. It just could reach many people in the way I reach a few now.
I went to The Porch to start this new phase of my writing and new exploration of its place in the world. I went to see Major Jackson to learn that the literary establishment is not a good fit for me. I’m working toward something.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
10/14/23: ‘You’re Too Sincere to be an Actor’
Paula and I chat in bed early in the morning. So at 4 am, Paula starts talking about RFK, Jr. He’s only worth $15 mil. Less than I supposed. There are a lot of Kennedy heirs, I guess. His name is his biggest financial asset. He’s running for President to make some money. Of course, I knew this went on. A lot.
It made me think of Major Jackson — again. Why was he there at that purported ‘class’ on Monday night, and how did he approach it? He’s on the board of The Porch. That fulfills the service requirement of his academic appointment, at least partially, at Vanderbilt. That’s what he got out of it. It was something he had to do for his job.
How did he approach the occasion? Not as an adult education class, even though he slapped one together. Not as art. He concocted some bullshit ideas he thought lesser people might relate to, but he wasn’t trying to enlighten or provoke or inspire anybody.
He brought along printed copies of a few of his poems, but in essence he was making a personal appearance. He obliquely mentioned, ‘if you have the poems in my book, all the better.” He had fans in attendance. He was selling star power and charm. Spend an hour forty-five with the great poet.
Branding . Making money off the asset. In this case indirectly. He appeared last Monday might in Nashville. the way that the Lone Ranger appeared at the openings of car dealerships in Rochester when I was a kid.
In my 20s, I did some work for WTTW-TV, PBS in Chicago. The producer was John Davies, who was the show runner of the original Siskel and Elbert movie review show, ‘Sneak Previews’. He ran into me downtown a few months later, and kindly and gently told me, “You’re too sincere to be an actor, Rick.” Forty years later, I’m starting to have a slight glimmer of what he meant.
My friend raised the question of whether I’m a better writer than Major Jackson. I claimed that I was. It’s a false debate. We don’t do remotely the same thing. There is nothing to compare. I work in a higher form. I’m not an amateur, but I’m not a professional either. I’m an artist. I have the love of my work of an amateur, combined with a professional level of skill and craft, but I don’t make decisions in my life or art related to market demands, ambitions or necessities. In other words, I don’t do branding.
I must admit I am judgmental regarding branding related to personalities purporting to be in important fields like education , politics or especially the arts. It’s one thing to sell yourself as a master at doing window treatments or as the host of America’s Funniest Home Videos. It’s another if you are addressing what it is to be a human being.
Not to pick (any more) on Major Jackson as an individual. He certainly isn’t alone. But it’s just not right. The suckers thought they were in for a special transformative experience in Nashville last Monday, and they were handed a sample bottle of cologne at the mall.
The branding concerns are why he insulted me too. He sensed that I didn’t belong there, and he had to deal with it. He couldn’t let someone bigger than he is in the frame.
Major’s professional branding requirements limit him as a writer. You can’t keep both eyes on the line when one is on the bottom line.
I believe sincerity was one big factor as to why O’Neill and Salinger withdrew.
When I saw the documentary, ‘Allen v Farrow’, I was more interested in what a canny self-promoter Woody Allen was than his scandal.
He portrayed himself as being above commercialism and artistic completion. Playing his clarinet at Michael’s Pub on Oscar night.
But he was masterful at public relations. Frightening in his intimidation of Mia Farrow in an effort to protect his reputation. And then I saw it in his work too. I used to think ‘Deconstructing Harry’ was one of his best pictures. I watched a bit of it again recently. It’s a screed of self – justification.
He seduced me into thinking he was an artist, independent of the pressures of the world. He was more accurately a professional with fierce powers of compartmentalization. He could make two movies a year, and handle shrewd public relations, making commercials in Asia unbeknownst to the fans of his false purity in Europe and America, and salacious lawsuits.
I don’t do what Woody Allen does either.
I’m too sincere to be an actor … too sincere to be a professional anything … too dedicated and skilled to be an amateur …
What will the rest of my life look like now that I clearly see I am a sincere and accomplished writer?
I feel a quiet excitement. I’m on to something on the edge of mystery.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
10/16/23: Beyond Recognition
It’s Sunday night, and we put on ‘Billions’. It’s a bad show, but perfect for vacating the mind. The pretty people — actors who look like the New York actors that they are … and who I wouldn’t believe for a second that they work in a hedge fund … even though I have no idea what those hedge fund people are like, but I have seen New York actors, on and offstage … I have a sense of what they are like, and the characters on ‘Billions’ are like those actors — I’ve given up even getting an approximation of what life is actually like at a hedge fund on ‘Billions’), the hip sounding music (How would I know what is actually hip? I’ve never cared … but I like the sampler of hip curated by people who seem to give a shit … I like being mildly aware of what I don’t care about when I want to relax … no intellectual challenge, no emotional response … ahhhh …), the anachronistic pop culture references (It’s kind of like watching certain ‘Jeopardy’ categories … Actors and Their Roles for a billion, Alex …), the so awful it’s kind of good histrionic dialogue — a stylization of language that doesn’t resemble words put together by any speaking human being — not stylized writing like Mamet, or even Neil Simon or iambic pentameter (!) where the style is kind of at least part of the point … just these entertaining empty caloric declamation competitions …
Yes, ‘Billions’ sucks, but it serves my purposes. So you can imagine my surprise when there was a moment of actual writing in last night’s episode.
A young woman character, a brilliant and high earning trader, has a speech where she reveals her desire to be ‘beyond recognition’. She said the phrase, and the words appeared in my mind, all caps, in neon lights.
BEYOND RECOGNITION
She didn’t want to have to please anymore. She was sick of proving herself. Sick of making an impression. She just wanted to be in charge of her own life, the author of her own destiny. I’ve always felt and lived that way.
She believed she could be an autonomous person if she only could make partner. The ambition to make partner was her big error, an error that ‘Billions’ will surely never explore. Whichever staff writer who was assigned this character, and uncovered this deeper yearning of the highest level of performers in any field, was either directed to avoid the impulse, or decided themselves that the standard soap opera plot of the pursuit of a promotion in a dog-eat-dog business environment would be more interesting to the general audience, which is true enough. Most of the audience isn’t beyond wanting the money and status that accompanies being a big wheel in some job that they think is glamorous.
The President of Northwestern University had an ‘epiphany’ that he should fire his football coach. He didn’t know what he was doing. No administrative leave to give the university time to investigate. No due process set up in which the coach could defend himself. Just an ‘aha’ moment.
The President made ‘partner’ in a ‘Billions’ world. He was a made man. No one could tell him what to do. He was beyond pleasing anyone else. Or was he? He likely will cost the university $100 million or some other astronomical number in damages in a wrongful termination labor lawsuit.
It’s only a matter of time before the President is fired.
The President won money that he can keep resulting from his skillful navigation to the top. Besides his sizeable past earnings, he has risen to a position in life where he always can get a good paying job if he wants one. But he will never have the authenticity and self-determination the young hedge fund trader desired by dint of his career advancements.
The only place where freedom and living out one’s destiny exists is beyond recognition. Eugene O’Neill won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The epitome of recognition.
However, he was a genius. He knew that there was something more. He wasn’t satisfied with making ‘partner’. He didn’t think he had it made, and could do whatever he pleased. O’Neill realized that the thing that could hold him back most from his highest achievement was his partnership.
O’Neill didn’t withdraw because he felt insulted or hassled by the rat race of maintaining success as a playwright. He was celebrated. Far from disrespected. He was recognized to the nth degree. No greater recognition was possible. Everyone who mattered said that he was the greatest American dramatist. He recognized (the only recognition that matters is one’s own of oneself) that he didn’t have the time or the energy to deal with all the requirements of partnership. He was getting older and he wasn’t well. He didn’t need to be certified by any external authority to write the masterpieces that he had inside of him.
I recently wrote about ‘real recognition’. I am evolving in my understanding of the nature of ‘real recognition’. What I called ‘real recognition’ is more simply described as love. People who love me encourage, support and admire what I do, or at least that I try to do it. By calling love ‘real recognition’ I was looking for a substitute for what I didn’t get at times, or got but wasn’t satisfied by, in what I thought was the pursuit of partnership.
The good news for me was that I have never pursued partnership. I may have thought that I was, but I’ve always followed my inner impulse rather than the demands of the powers that be. I’ve never made a choice to get ahead in the hopes that then I could finally do what I wanted. I’ve known since I was very young that when I die no one else is going in the grave with me. I’ve always done what I wanted.
What it took me longer to understand is that most of the people that I dealt with professionally and in other communities, didn’t believe that I, or anyone, particularly themselves, had a right to that freedom.
My recent negative experience with Major Jackson and the Ice Cream Asshole was a repetition of a pattern. I’ve told the story many times … with the lawyers, at UIC, with Second City, with Notre Dame … and now with The Porch and Vanderbilt MFA.
The Ice Cream Asshole caused the trouble. I’m glad he did. He was a retired (I’m guessing) lawyer who I had the immediate misfortune (and long-term good fortune) to be paired with at Major Jackson’s Razzle Dazzle bummer last Monday night.
I imagine the Ice Cream Asshole was a prominent lawyer in a prosperous corporate law firm. He stopped keeping up with his subject matter years ago, but kept going into the office, haunting the corridors, bullying young associates and weighing in on who would make partner at Management Team and other committee meetings.
His objective wasn’t to merely insult me at Razzle Dazzle. He wanted to establish himself as a gatekeeper. If I wanted to make partner as a writer, I’d have to go through him.
I made great progress in my understanding of my response to the Ice Cream Asshole’s interpretation of an antagonist that has repeatedly bedeviled me in many venues. Perhaps all of these assholes are one person — the Devil! — shapeshifting to roil my spirit and cause disquiet.
My great revelation — I am not hurt by, or angry at, the Ice Cream Assholes of the world (or Hades?). I just don’t like being told what to do. It’s about boundaries.
I think it is actually more important to me to not deal with any more Ice Cream Assholes than it is to write itself.
I simply don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to be partner, and I don’t want to be bothered by their bullshit. It makes sense that I prioritize driving these moneychangers from between my temples. To do my greatest writing they have to go.
Bernie Sahlins and Paul Sills thought I was great. But each or them wanted me to improve in some way. They helped me back in the day. But I don’t want that either now.
I’m supremely confident in my writing. I have a process and it progresses and transforms. I don’t need anyone pointing out to me where I should go next. I’ve got it. The direction reveals itself in due time. Growth is built in. My unconscious runs the show. Not gatekeepers.
Sills said he wanted me ‘to get what I deserved’. He wanted me to make partner. I don’t want to make partner.
Major Jackson kept talking about being an editor, but he didn’t discuss helping a piece become more itself. It was just more gatekeeping. He spent a lot of time thinking about who — not what piece, but who — got into a journal or accepted into a school.
I don’t need to be validated by a publication or school or job. When I approach one of those entities, I am looking for a place to do what I want, not to do what they think is worthy. I want a mutuality of work with like-minded people … not matriculation up a pecking order.
I show up as a friend and peer and I am often mistaken as an office seeker. Because most everyone around me is, on every tier of the organization or whatever group I’m dealing with …
I don’t want to deal with that misunderstanding any longer.
I guess my overall strategy now will be to emulate Eugene O’Neill and his third wife, Carlotta Monterey. I shall channel them both. O’Neill left the partner track to write his masterpieces. His intention was that his last plays would be published and produced decades after his death. Monterey supported O’Neill in every way, practically, physically, emotionally, spiritually … When O’Neill died, Monterey did not honor his wish. She delivered to the world his greatest works. There was no reason to wait. The collaborators and audiences existed who could appreciate and be edified by his uncompromised work.
It has nothing to do with recognition. It is the work itself, and the honest and dignified sharing of that work, that matters.
My antagonists never took anything important from me. The more benevolent types who recognized me ultimately gave me nothing of great value either beyond their treasured affection. Recognition is not what has mattered. What matters is that I never stopped working.
I get better at writing, and improve at how to live life as an artist, and gain more savvy as to how to relate my life and work to the world, all the time.
And now my creative impulse is telling me to include this piece I once wrote about Frank Sinatra. I don’t know why, but yes, sir!
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
7/4/22: “My Way” — I Want to Speak My Truth and Heal the World with My Mere Presence — Hah! #poetry
I want to speak my truth and heal the world with my mere presence — Hah!
Come with me won’t you, to a sweaty Las Vegas main stage in the 1970s, in the thrall of the main attraction, who is inspiring men in pastel colored polyester suits, with fat knots in their ties, and fat necks in their over starched shirts, sporting elephant collars, and drinking hard liquor, filling the room with fatalistic smoke and eating big plates of red meat with a side of some pasta Alfredo, showing off their capacity as earners to their women, who are all decked out with piles of lacquered hair rising to the stars like stately pagodas, their prettiness turned into something hard by layers of makeup transforming them into something almost inanimate, something hard and inanimate, the words hum like the drone of the air conditioning system creating an atmosphere that gave an illusion of comfort in the middle of a desert … the women disappeared, and objects, possessions unveiled … not even trophy wives, just trophies … their bodies tormented by the uncomfortable bondage of their too tight sequined gowns, their tits attempting and failing to achieve escape … a strained display of cleavage designed to arouse their masters’ desire … vaginas doubling as house niggers …
The main attraction was unfazed by the crass oppression beyond the footlights. He profited from it, and participated enthusiastically in its sensual, if deadly, gratifications, indulging in the cannibalistic consumption of broads, and the sexual pleasure of dominance that he felt as a companion of criminal hoods.
But life is complicated …
for the main attraction was also a poet … he couldn’t help it …
Poets are born, not made …
Sinatra compensated as a tough guy, and with braying laughter at insult comedians,
but Sinatra concealed many misty eyed glances and knowing smiles …
until he started singing.
Frank Sinatra didn’t like the song, “My Way”. He thought it was corny schlock, and I agree.
But Sinatra knew that it was also a song of the moment. And he sensed, even if he was not consciously aware, that he was a shaman. His actual life was the stuff of his audience’s dreams. Their true selves wanted to be friends with Sam Giancana, and fuck Ava Gardner. Frank could do the singing. They wanted to be the song.
The best part of Sinatra was inaccessible to his fans’ minds, but touched their hearts. He knew them and he loved them because he was them. He gave them truth but not insight.
He didn’t have the insight, or if he did he knew that they would rise from their seats and tear him apart while carrying pitchforks and torches if he shared it.
If you want people to adore you, tell them truths that they understand. If you want people to hate you, tell them truths that they don’t understand.
If you want people to adore you, let your presence validate them. If you want your presence to redeem people, live among them in your authentic nature.
Let them see what a human being actually is in contrast to all of their foolish experiments.
Sinatra had an inkling of this. he lamented to his family that he wished he were an opera singer … something less accessible and strange … something that exposed his own madness, and therefore everyone else’s … something that expressed something more than pathos and loneliness, but also the agonizing torment of self-discovery, and the ecstatic rapture of oneness with his (and their) divine impulses …
Life has so much more potential than the bullshit in a casino! We wade through shit, that we naively and then ignorantly think is important, until we get to something special and universal … our calling to conscious existence …
and then we return to the casino, because there is nowhere else to go …
on the visible planes of existence anyway …
but we come back different …
we know something …
even if we don’t know that we know …
Sinatra was like that …
Anka’s lyrics were shit
But Sinatra found the gold nuggets in the shit with his impossible-to-be-anything-other-than-authentic rendition
So now I give you the lyrics of “My Way” with my parenthetical annotations in bold, giving the tune all the respect I’d give to a worthy opera* …
*I rarely listen to opera … I was very impressed by Peter Brook’s chamber version of “Carmen”at Lincoln Center in the eighties … that’s the exception that proves the rule … I entered opera through the mediations of a great theater director, in its purest form it is something beyond me, or maybe, more precisely, something not meant for me. Sinatra learned something from Pavarotti much as he learned breath control from Tommy Dorsey, or swing from Duke Ellington and Count Basie … I learn from Sinatra and Peter Brook …
And now, the end is near And so I face the final curtain (The song opens with an acknowledgement of death, not bad for a saloon song … the paying customers are mollified with the sentimental morbidity, that makes their struggles for trivial money and status seem heroic … Frank subversively is aware of their orientation but sneaks in an equal sentiment that he is thinking about the meaning of his life. This song has aided the self- justification of libertarians and Donald Trump and millions of other assholes, the scions of the ownership society, but it also points to the process of actually being alive. The importance of a song is in how you hear it. My words are only for those who are willing to hear them. That’s not snobbery. It’s reality.)
My friend, I’ll say it clear I’ll state my case, of which I’m certain
(Certainty. Yes. I am not certain of my life’s details. I figure out those happenings after the fact. But I am certain of what it feels like to me, and what it feels like when I am not me. Those feelings are my rudder. Everything always makes sense later.) I’ve lived a life that’s full I traveled each and ev’ry highway
(Right. I’ve always honored my deepest impulses to their natural conclusions. I’ve been fearless in this regard.) And more, much more than this, I did it my way
(I didn’t do it my way. I don’t live from my ego. I listen for divine inspiration and follow instructions. My life is a prayer. Many times I’ve abandoned what I thought that I wanted because I knew it wasn’t right. I was blessed with a benevolent and chronic illness. I get physically ill whenever I attempt to engage in self-betrayal. It’s not my way, because I get to know myself as if I were another person. I didn’t choose who and how I am. I honor what I was given.)
Regrets, I’ve had a few But then again, too few to mention
(I don’t regret anything. The song wants to say that there is nothing to regret, but doesn’t get there. Everything that happens to us or that we do is an opportunity. What doesn’t work out in its intended way, works out in another, even tragedies.) I did what I had to do and saw it through without exemption I planned each charted course, each careful step along the byway And more, much more than this, I did it my way
(I plan, but I don’t always see it through without exemption. That’s a Viet Nam War mentality. “This much money and American life went into this project, we have to see it to the end, no matter how much death and destruction we rain upon ourselves and others.” I like John Lennon’s line better, “Life is what happens when we are making other plans. Maybe Sinatra didn’t like this song because he sensed that no one is the author of anything. We create only to the extent that we are instruments of creation. This song can be taken as an anthem to the man who forces his will upon the world. But we are here to fulfill our purpose in the world, not believe that we know more than nature.)
Yes, there were times, I’m sure you knew When I bit off more than I could chew
(Yes. If you aren’t making mistakes, you aren’t trying.) But through it all, when there was doubt I ate it up and spit it out I faced it all and I stood tall and did it my way
(Yes. The point is not to never have doubt. The point is to not succumb to it. There is no shame in fear. There is no bravery without fear.)
I’ve loved, I’ve laughed and cried I’ve had my fill, my share of losing And now, as tears subside, I find it all so amusing
(All creative people learn that failure is part of the process, and that real love and work are beyond emotion. Emotion is important, but it is part of a deeper process.) To think I did all that And may I say, not in a shy way, “Oh, no, oh, no, not me, I did it my way”
(Artists and other humans may be shy in personality, but are bold in the ground of their being. The real person stings the world. Some real people lean toward introversion, and some lean toward extroversion but ultimately the distinction is one without a difference. I’ve been very shy and very brash in different periods and in different moments of my life, but ultimately the world responded to my inner truth and not to how I presented myself. You can’t not touch who you are meant to touch — no amount of avoidance prevents the inevitable, or be accepted by those who can’t understand you, or who despise you — no amount of persuasion moves what is immovable. Authentic life is all that is. The rest is just ideation.)
For what is a man, what has he got? If not himself, then he has naught To say the things he truly feels and not the words of one who kneels The record shows I took the blows and did it my way!
(If you tell your truth, you will take the blows … but what’s the alternative? If you can’t say and do what you feel is right, why bother? If you aren’t trying to live an authentic life, are you alive at all? Thoreau talked about people “living lives of quiet desperation”. The caveat here is to live out your place in nature unapologetically, not gain an illegitimate confidence by dominating nature with some forced and tragic triumph of your will.)
Yes, it was my way.
Finis
Copyright 2022 Richard Thomas
10/18/23: What is Poetry?
The world and unconscious provides answers.
The query —- what is poetry?
I don’t look for my answer in a book or from a teacher or even from a poet herself. I don’t look for my answer at all. The question wells up within me. I don’t think it up. I am comfortable not knowing. The world — life itself — and the part of my brain that dreams, the thoughts I have when I don’t know I am thinking tells me everything. To know poetry is to not only look at poems. It is how to look at how poetry operates in the world, and how it operates within me.
I just happened to see a poem about grief by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Posted by a Facebook friend whose husband died four years ago. My oversimplified take on the thrust of the poem is that time doesn’t heal all wounds. It just makes them different in character. It was moving to read Edna’s poem next to my friend’s remembrance, and to read my friend’s testimony regarding the relentless intensity of her continuing pain that never goes away and only changes in how it manifests itself, never in degree.
Edna’s (I’ll use her first name — poets are ordinary people like the rest of us — that’s part of the point isn’t it? Shared humanity?) poem reminded me of what the poet Major Jackson said, at his ‘Razzle Dazzle’ event last week, about sharing one’s regret and shame in one’s poetry, so that readers don’t feel alone. His observation is that when people experience regret and shame, they feel excluded from community. Part of his mission as a poet is to let people know they are still human, suffering in ways that we all do, so as to bring them back into community, the fellowship of men and women.
I think Major got too specific. It’s just woundedness. His wounds may involve regret and shame. But there’s all kind of hurt.
I was asked to leave The Porch, the organization that sponsored Major’s event because although I was entitled to my opinion in my piece ‘A Bummer of an Evening with Major Jackson’, my writing and presence didn’t foster ‘the community and good will’ that The Porch is trying to achieve. I was then kindly complimented on the quality of my writing. There are many levels as to why I separated from The Porch, just as there are many levels underneath any union and disunion between people. Perhaps the deepest level is in the category of the famous ‘creative differences’. I see poetry as something different than what The Porch and Major think it is. I didn’t know that I had this contrary point of view when I went to ‘Razzle Dazzle” but as I noted above, life, the world and my unconscious showed me the way.
Edna’s poem was more obvious in its poem-ness than Major’s writing. Her poem made me see what his poetry is. I have a poetic strain in my work, but it’s far from exclusively poetry. My poetry has little to do with Major’s poetry. It is a different form.
Major’s observations are contradictory to the writing of Joseph Campbell. Campbell said art burns the pain away. Major said in a poem that he wanted the poetry to solve his problems, but he knew it wouldn’t. Here’s Major’s line: ‘ Tragically, he believes he can mend his wounds with his poetry.’ I’m with Campbell. I want to find paths out of the pain. Edna’s grief won’t go away with time, but it will with understanding. Understanding comes with insight and imagination. I’ve seen a lot of performers, musicians — and now poets … get trapped in their pain. Be rewarded for their pain.
I know the truth of two truisms. Everything happens for a reason. All happens for the best. I don’t see my past through lenses of shame, sorrow or regret. I see a field of mystery. I am not downplaying human suffering or coldly saying get over it. You must go through it. My friend the widow is going through it. She has grieved for four years and is likely not through. But there is a light at the end of the tunnel. My parents were immigrants and they persisted through all kinds of losses and hardships. Their endurance, faith and introspection made them larger than they were before each tragedy and disappointment. Yes, suffering leaves a tenderness and a scar. But loss makes you bigger. The widow will become aware that she is a master a love. She’ll see that the love she gave and received from her husband is still alive in everyone and everything else she loves. All of our losses are on the visible plane of existence. On the invisible plane, in eternity, true love never dies. My friend and her husband’s love conquered death. She can’t see it now. It’s easy for me to say. But she will eventually see it. I don’t know her that well, but I’ve seen enough to be confident of that. And it’s important that she goes through every awful moment of grief, because that grief is teaching her the difference between illusory despair and eternal life.
I see my past as a mystery. Not as a field of shame and regret. Major and Edna are compassionate in the face of the suffering of others. They share there own parallel suffering. Their is generosity and kindness in their words. But there is another level of compassion. A second gear. A higher level of poetry.
William Blake is a poet of the second gear. ‘I go to my death singing.’ Blake accepts life’s loss and pronounces it wonderful. James Joyce is. ‘God is a shout in the street’. Joyce sees the eternal dimension to the homely facts of everyday life. He acknowledges our commonality. ‘Here Comes Everybody’. The poetry of everyday speech; ‘It’s all good” . (Some may quibble as to whether Joyce is a poet. And they’ll snort with derision if I say I am. But a poet is not a thing to be. Poetry is not a specialization. It is an aspect of being an artist and/or a certain type of human being. Everyone can’t see the invisible. Some are called to tell the world about it. Others are called to say, oh yeah! Poets open the third eye of mankind. Non-poets can see for a second. Poetry helps for a moment or two. Then the civilians must return to the poetic types to be refreshed again.) The Blakes and Joyces find the way out. Not with illusion (BEWARE SNAKE OIL MASQUERADING AS POETRY!), but with an understanding of the truth.
The world and life are made of joy and wonder. Poetry, writing it and reading it, is drops we use so that our dry eyes can see. Poetry is more than sympathy for your bad tooth. It’s a trip to the dentist. Compassion you can use.
My Facebook friend says she has lost her direction in life since her husband died. I can only imagine how hard it is. But she can incorporate her loving memory into her life purpose going forward. She will do it. She mentioned gratitude. That sounds like a good start,
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
10/22/23: It’s Good to be Home and Know it
Until yesterday I always had a trace of self pity. I managed it, even prevailed over it, but it was always there. I thought it was a chronic condition with no cure.
Why would I go almost anywhere and be attacked and assaulted? Even a poetry event! Why couldn’t I be like everybody else?
My relief came in a realization that I resisted because I conceived of myself as a nice Catholic boy, charitable and understanding of others. I haven’t been nice or Catholic for a long time. And my writing has revealed to me that my feelings for others is more complicated than charitable.
I had to admit to myself that I was better than the envious, stupid and malicious people that I often found myself sitting next to …
Better … a better person, a better writer, kinder, more clear eyed, more serious, more accomplished , smarter …
I’ve noticed this before but yesterday I really owned the feeling of it for the first time.
Their meanness and insults feel like compliments now. Their envy feels like an affirmation. Their inane criticisms and dismissals feel like I just received the National Book Award.
All of my hurt feelings turned into great memories at around three p.m. in a shopping center parking lot. I became glad I knew these lesser beings —- what interesting subjects for my writing they are, and glad my association with them is past tense.
I was simultaneously reminded of all the people I’ve known that are as good as me, and how good it feels to be with them in the present, and in memory. I’ve been blessed to be with people who not only really love me, but also have brain power and values and generosity that make life interesting and productive.
Discernment is a skill that I have been acquiring over many years. It didn’t come easy for me. Writing taught me to not be so nice, Leaving Catholicism taught me that I don’t belong in the pews with the mouth breathing laity listening to incomplete men who claim they speak for God. I have left so many churches, most of them secular. I needlessly suffered in the company of dim and timid masses, terrified that they might not survive (no one ultimately does!), mumbling over their prayer books in something resembling unison, willfully ignorant of reality like a man who avoids going to the doctor hoping his heart palpitations will go away on their own (conformity is the easiest way to deny death and life, ceding self determination — conformity is the most accessible method to avoid being a human being, which is something one must choose to be), and chafed at the false authority of frauds who cling to petty power, certified by cynical and hypocritical systems that claim idealism while striving for nothing beyond maintaining their own influence in order to sustain their capacity to make money in perpetuity.
Hallelujah that I am free of The Porch (it’s not as dark an institution as what I describe in the last paragraph, but give it time. The Politburo was once a startup.) and my separation was nearly pain free. I am so grateful that I don’t have to read any more of Major Jackson’s poetry. I see how limited that is. I am giddy that I can just gently say fuck you to the ice cream assholes and walk away from them without bitterness or even condemnation, or surprisingly, even sadness. As my self pity evaporated, so did my pity for them. They are what they are. I can’t save them. They have work to do before they even can be tragic. I can’t animate the inanimate like Dr. Frankenstein. These people aren’t even monsters yet. They are just bodies on slabs. If something jolted them to life and they came to me, I’d welcome them with open arms.
I saw a great movie yesterday —- the new Scorsese. I got a new book to read. I corresponded with my brilliant and big hearted friend. I spent the day with my warm genius wife. My first class readers read my blog. I communicated with my smart, loving and decent human being of a brother. My writing gets better and better, far from the madding crowd … coming from a place that surprises me, unfettered by connection to all that is less than me.
I am grateful and I want more of same. So … the people and things beneath me have to go to make room. The nice Catholic boy that I thought I was, thought it was ungrateful to be dissatisfied. ‘You have so much. How can you want more?’ The real me is very grateful and more dissatisfied than ever. It is the opposite of selfishness to want more meaning and productivity in your life. I want more of everything. It’s not greedy and it takes nothing from anyone else. That’s what the knuckle draggers think. When someone is love, when someone is smart or wise or decent … when someone writes something great or builds something useful … when someone is of value! — there is more good in the world … not less.
Enough of the failures who malign my successes that they don’t have the brains, confidence or guts to create themselves. They foolishly try to kill the real creator and steal what they incapable of making. They fail every time, even in their villainy. They can’t even destroy what is good, let alone originate anything of quality. They make fools of themselves in the process, protesting their impotence as virility far too much. False claimants, believed only by suckers, fellow con artists, and wannabe criminals.
Sure there is an ignorant dark place where many potential humans live, but there is also an evolving paradise for those intrepid, good and tough enough to climb to the heights and fulfill our individual and mutual destiny (the social, the personal, the psychological, the existential, the spiritual are all on interconnected gears … we are a world, we are the world). So many of us have been there without even knowing it, distracted by the almost people fearful of the journey.
That changed for me once and for all yesterday. Now I knew. It wasn’t a sitcom happy ending after 23 minutes or an epiphanic bolt out of the blue. It was the final line of years of writing, and a life of, work.
I’m just going to sit for a second and say ah.
It’s good to be home and know it.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
10/24/23: Criticisms of Criticisms of ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’
I saw ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ on Saturday. It is a masterpiece. I’d love to write one of my ‘stream of consciousness’ pieces related to it, and I will, but not yet. I hope you have a chance to see this great American work of art, unimpeded by any influences, including enlightened influences from such sources as The Rick Blog. I tried to see it with as little exposure to any publicity, feature stories, interviews, cast and crew profiles, or film reviews as possible. Scorsese and company deserve our fresh eyes and complete attention. This movie honors us with its skill and concern. ‘Killers’ is more important than even most other great movies, and works of art. It’s beyond art. It’s an elegy, a prophecy, a State of Humanity Address. It shouldn’t be treated as a diversion, or a thing to be consumed. We should listen to this picture, take it to heart, and resolve to change ourselves and the world. In this moment. For all time. We all wake up every morning in 1920s Oklahoma.
When Scorsese was very young, he wanted to be a priest. He later realized that the Church was an illusion. Spirituality should be in the streets, not confined to mere make believe rote ritual in a sanctuary, but as the title of one of Scorsese’s earliest films told us, the streets are mean. He has suffered, for all of us, those ‘Mean Streets’ in contrast to the potential of participation in a very real divine aspect that is part of our ordinary existence, since the moment of his insight into the failure of the Church, and that failure’s relation to the cruelty of our everyday lives.
We’ll talk about the movie at a later date after, most of you, I hope, get a chance to see it.
Today, I would like to address three wrongheaded criticisms of this movie.
Criticism One.
It’s too long.
I have some suggestions of how it could be longer. There could be a prologue documenting the history of the genocide of indigenous peoples in the settlement of the American West. This could demonstrate how the crimes of the low class ‘killers’ of the title, was prefigured by mass murder sanctioned and executed by the American government for the profit of American business.
There could be several epilogues. Histories of genocides all over the world. Stories of Holocaust denials and other whitewashes of horrible crimes. Detailed studies of how murder and theft has been bureaucratized, legalized and made legitimate in degenerate societies (most famously the Nazis and the Confederacy) … how respectability is often the handmaiden of the greatest evils. Tales of the way that militarization in imperialist wars brings the weapons of war, and the psychology of war, back to a homeland. Chapter after chapter of school shootings.
Scorsese could adapt and add The Rick Blog to the screenplay and show how man’s inhumanity to man extends to misdeeds of a far lesser degree than murder, but that nevertheless, all of the sins of humanity, mortal and venial, are connected. The Killers of the Flower Moon, and the Osage People are a relational dynamic found in every moment and venue in human history, and are sure to continue to be found in much of our future, until higher consciousness of the likes of Martin Scorsese’s is absorbed by the rest of us. Bums everywhere scheme to destroy and plunder those who they envy for materialistic gratifications that don’t ultimately satisfy the lust and gluttony of their dark hearts. The story of Major Jackson and the Ice Cream Asshole at The Porch could be included. The Idiot and Asshole Bullies of the Second City. The Petty Dullards of The University of Illinois at Chicago. The Cruel Conservative Competitors of the Illinois Bar, whose main objective in life is to win, or short of that, put on airs as if they have.
The people who complain about the length of movies remind me of people who speed and tailgate and cut me off on the road. Where are they going that is so important? If they were doing something extraordinary I might have some sympathy for their impatience. Unfortunately they usually turn into fast food restaurants or outlet malls.
People should spend more time listening to artists like Martin Scorsese, not less. One critic said that the plot was predictable. He wasn’t surprised after the first hour and a half. He implied that the ‘boring’ second half of the movie was superfluous. Scorsese isn’t trying to surprise us. He is trying to show us something essential to our survival and wellbeing that we must understand. That critic should wean himself off of his addiction to being excited, and train himself to contemplate important insights about what it is to be a human being. Scorsese’s camera is so sincere and honest. He should appreciate and be grateful the way this man addresses us with so much love and respect. He is offering wisdom. He is not trying to get a rise out of us. ‘Killers’ is a story that would have been easy to sensationalize. Scorsese could have made a shorter whiz bang picture. If he would have done so, he would have been the latest exploiter of the Osage. He would have been a killer himself. This movie is not just an indictment or an entertainment. The movie itself is an alternative to the evil that it looks at so clearly.
Criticism Two.
The Osage people are portrayed as helpless and without agency.
First off, the Osage people had no agency in this story and history. That is a literal fact. A matter of reality. White people were their legal guardians. They had to ask permission to spend their own money or make other life decisions. That was the law. It was a grave injustice that they had no agency, but they didn’t.
It goes without saying that indigenous people, and all other people have a right to self-determination in their own affairs as all human beings do. Of course good people are pained to see the Osage portrayed as largely helpless. That pain is a large part of the experience of watching the movie. I say the Osage were largely described as helpless because there were a few moments in the movie when the Osage defended themselves, but they mostly were relentlessly beaten down until they were destroyed. The Osage are not portrayed as largely helpless because they were weak. They were largely helpless because they were oppressed. It’s a big distinction.
The Osage culture is more evolved than White European culture in many ways. Most clearly evident in the movie is the Osage’s superior humanity and spirituality. Their streets were not mean. But the white man had leverage. White culture was more developed technologically. White society had more complexity in its institutions. The Osage were much closer to nature, and therefore much more innocent and pure. White culture was much more corrupt.
Evil’s advantage over good is related to one of good’s greatest attributes … it’s innocence. Evil treats good as a sucker, and over time, if it has good fortune, good gradually loses its naivete’ and realizes that everyone isn’t as well intentioned as good is. Good comes naturally. Evil has to introduce itself. The movie shows this story. The education of the Osage involved a bloody and ugly experience with evil. This is related in a much more major key to what John Davies meant when he told me I was too sincere to be an actor. He saw how my purity was exploited by those only interested in the spoils of acting, and who really cared nothing for the beauty of the art itself. He knew the thugs of show business would try to destroy me and rob my proverbial corpse.
All good people start out helpless and without agency. We trust authorities and cede our security and judgment to them. They betray us. We wake up. Hopefully, we get out of the trial alive — sadder, wiser and bigger, and then we dedicate ourselves to democracy and art. Scorsese lays out a blueprint in this film of how evil and good operate in relation to each other. He gives the Osage and the rest of us agency and proper power, if we bother to listen. Scorsese is saying this is what evil is, and this is what you can be in the face of it. We better listen. Very few of us are never confronted by evil.
‘Killers’ is more than a cautionary tale. It’s a contemporary one, and sadly an eternal one until we break the cycle. It doesn’t merely tell us of a tragic past. ‘Killers’ lays out our existential responsibilities. What will you do when evil comes to call?
Criticism Three.
Brendan Fraser gives a jarringly horrible performance in his seven minute supporting role, which stands out in relation to the uniformly great performances in the rest of the movie. How did Scorsese let Fraser’s performance stay in the final cut?
Brendan Fraser is great in this picture. He portrays a character expert in one of the well worn tactics of evil — bad acting. He is filled with exaggerated bombast and faux outrage. He seethes with eye rolling resentment at nonexistent victimization. He plays an obvious liar, hamming it up, mendaciously and ridiculously declaiming bitter projections of his own people’s sins upon the very people they sin against in the very way that they sinned against them. He bleatingly and falsely complains that his victims harmed him and his confederates. Fraser yells out his lines, demanding that the listener believe that the exact opposite of reality is what is true. His performance is a tour de force rendering of what a criminal and authoritarian purveyor of bullshit looks and sounds like. Check out a YouTube clip of Lindsay Graham blowing up a Senate Judiciary Supreme Court Confirmation Hearing when credible accusations were leveled at his favored nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Fraser channels Graham and the scores of criminals, fascists and con artists (there are many more than Graham active today) who have employed these techniques since people first started killing, and stealing from, other people.
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I’ve seen other criticisms too. One person wrote that this movie doesn’t have an idea in it. I can only conclude that the person has never been exposed to an idea.
People outraged at ‘cancel culture’ ironically want to cancel this movie. They feel that it disrespects American Exceptionalism. This is an exceptional country, superlative at many things, including its capacity for evil.
Some believe that a movie dealing with this subject matter should not be directed by a white man. No worries. It isn’t. When an artist the caliber of Martin Scorsese is creating a work of this level of achievement, he or she or them is creating from something within all of us that is beyond race, ethnicity, gender, any type of orientation, religious faith or any demographic classification that currently or in the future will exist. All people, no matter what their external characteristics, are potentially the source of artistic works that speak to our common humanity. It just happens that this great work came from an eighty year old formerly Catholic Italian-American from the Bronx who grew up to be a citizen of the world through his love of film and literature.
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Go see this movie. Do it for yourself, and for the rest of us.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
10/25/23: Back to GRANT by Chernow — very near Part Two, A Life of War, which in Grant’s case was a prominent life in art
So important. So simple. Sometimes so hard. Just write and live. Don’t care what others think. Don’t compare to how others are doing.
Somehow the writing gets read …
Grant was a good man who felt a pressure to be a careerist, but thankfully, it just wasn’t in him.
A good man develops himself when there is nothing to do. Grant read and did his best at ordinary life. He liked Dickens, and indulged his wife and children and horses.
Grant was a sucker. An innocent. An easy mark. These are faults of an open hearted and generous person.
Grant gave his children moral instruction but was not a disciplinarian. He was an artist. So strange that an artist who aspired to no power other than that of influence, would become a commanding general and a President. But that is the nature of society’s relation to art. The artist is an obscure voice in quiet places, but in times of crisis, he emerges to save society’s ass. Like Grant. Like Winston Churchill, who won his Nobel Prize for Literature, not for the Peace he secured with the defeat of Germany. Prior to World War II, in the 1930s, Churchill was known more for his words, than his deeds. He didn’t get an opportunity to do much in those years, and his words were dismissed as unimportant more often than not. Before he was Prime Minister, Churchill gave unheeded, and often ridiculed, speeches warning of Hitler’s existential threat to Great Britain. When his country was facing complete annihilation, he was called upon to save more than its King. After he did, he was sent home.
An artist is like a fireman. You sit and wait. You quietly do your work around the firehouse, also maintaining yourself, the people immediately around you, and your instruments. Then … when the alarm is sounded, you spring into action, prepared to give everything and save the day. In an instant you go from obscurity to being an important person. When the fire is put out, you return to your quiet and productive existence at home.
The greatest artists are not careerists. If they are needed they rise to prominence. If not they just keep quietly working away from the spotlight. Some artists start as careerists. Martin Scorsese was very ambitious in the beginning, but that initial desire turned into something purer as he went on. The status he acquired in his years of ambition, provided him useful resources to make his later art.
You can do your solitary art for your entire life for a small audience, or you can be on that path and be pulled by circumstances onto a larger stage, or you can start out looking for success, and then transcend that success later on …
Grant’s failure at everything he tried except the arts of war, politics and writing, demonstrates two things. Artists not fortunate enough to be born into artistic or otherwise privileged families endure many trials as they struggle to ascertain their place in the world. And … society has a general antagonism toward art in prosperous and non-violent times. The artist rocks the boat. Artists see how catastrophes can be averted. Their warnings fall on largely deaf ears. Enlightened individuals listen, but not communities as a whole. Society is so ready to dismiss the gifts of an artist until it desperately needs them. Truth is beauty, beauty is truth and people need healthy helpings of each every day, not just when they are in trouble. But society always lets things fall apart. Society runs itself down to moments of crisis. Then it turns to the artist.
Careerism is inappropriate in an artist. Grant detested the self-promotions of the first Republican candidate for President, John C. Fremont in 1856. It was the natural reaction of an artist. You can’t find the truth if you are trying to make an impression. Scorsese wondered if he was ‘too ambitious’ in the beginning. He decided that he wasn’t, but I could tell he changed. He was great in the beginning, but he wasn’t what he is now. In retrospect, Scorsese’s stunning early films, demonstrating his massive talent, as good as they are, only show the promise of what he has created in his maturity, a maturity in which he transcended careerism. Scorsese has nothing to regret about his life path. The world benefits from his early winning a large reputation by dint of his great ability and agitated desire for success. What he has done subsequent to gaining that notoriety, as he gained inner peace and discarded ambition like outdated articles of clothing, is what makes his status a gift to us all.
On the other hand, Woody Allen never got there. He made a big name, but at 87 regrets that he never made a masterpiece. Scorsese has made several.
Many are called but few are chosen. Art requires more than facility of expression. Art has a spiritual orientation. An artist who makes films is a different being than a filmmaker. I’m a better writer than Major Jackson. We each have a facility of expression using language, but my work is animated by a higher value.
While Grant was repeatedly failing at business, he was thinking critically about how military campaigns in Europe were conducted. While he was getting routinely swindled, he was bristling at the institution of slavery and the growing tendency of traitors to openly express their disloyalty to the union. He was working at his arts. He was large and great when he appeared to be nearly destitute.
Coming up … a nation in distress calls out and a public Grant emerges …
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
10/26/23: Lily Gladstone, Human
Why do I have the balls to call myself an artist? Because I am interested in what it is to be a human being. It’s all I’ve ever cared about since the day I was born.
Why do I think art is so goddamn important? Because I see that art will save the world.
Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio were in a panel discussion about the masterpiece that they star in, ‘Killers of the Flower Moon”, at the Cannes Film Festival. Leo was talking about their process in making the film. He said that they eventually were ‘anthropologists’ studying the Osage people.
Lily contradicted him. Lily, quite literally, has balls. Leo is the established big star. Lily is the newbie. Lily doesn’t give a shit about who is a star and who is new. She was fed up with anthropologists and others who came and ‘studied’ her people. She told Leo that he, and they, were better than that. They came as human beings. They actually came and loved, and earned trust, with the Osage. They told the Osage story and they told their story of what it was like to tell the Osage story.
I’ve written about the Northwestern Med School shrinks who were visited by a traveling troupe of actors reading the last act of O’Neill’s ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’. Instead of listening to O’Neill tell them about humanity, they played a game of spot the diagnosis with the characters. The shrinks missed the point entirely. O’Neill could teach them how to be human beings while they were being doctors.
Leo DiCaprio is like a lot of actors that feel a little silly. They think they play dress up. The toy department. They think the anthropologists change the world. Academics and professionals are necessary but their work is on the penultimate tier of the pyramid of essential human activity. They are mechanics. The artists design the cars.
This is why so many professionals and academics are pompous and arrogant. They foolishly think they have all of the answers. No one does of course. Life itself holds the answers, and it is the artists who collect life’s findings and report back to everyone else.
My bummer night with the so-called poet Major Jackson, and his enforcer the Ice Cream Asshole is another example of the rejection of the human for the academic and professional. Major’s schematic of who writes what at what age — teens write about love, the elderly write about gratitude — is an ignorant tyranny. And anti-poetic.
I’m told I’m a certain age and I have to follow expectations. I’m a man — I have to be man-like. I’m Italian-American, that defines me. You identify me by my age, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, faith? Then fuck you. I’m Rick. I’m not your classifications. A human takes the time and effort to learn about another human being. We want to know about what we care about. Classifying is a way of not having to care.
We are all species, genders, nations … unto ourselves. We are all mysteries. We are all individual and we all the universe in microcosm. That wonder is of higher intellectual and spiritual value than expertise
People self-identify now. That’s a step in the right direction. Lily identifies as non-cisgender. I don’t understand these classifications yet, they are new to me, but I want to learn about them out of respect for the people who they are important to …
Lily , like so many people, places and things … and activities … fascinates me. I love looking at her in awe … who and what is she? I revere the human. No conclusions. Just discoveries.
On its basic level, art is a simple thing. You look at reality with new eyes. You observe closely. You try to understand. You have no expectations or demands that a person be or do one thing or another.
One of the challenges and glories of love is that the object of your affection is always changing. Your love of someone or something is a commitment to roll with, accept and embrace those changes.
Of the many gifts of ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ is the introduction to a broader audience, of this fabulous human, Lily Gladstone who is so much more than a good actress with a good performance who checks off a diversity box at the Academy Awards. She is more than an indigeneous person, more than a woman, more than any way you or even she identifies her. She is a fantastic human being, whose very presence brings us closer to the meaning of life.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
10/28/23 (from 2/10/23): Delighted by Joy — Notes on Incomplete Improv, Work vs. Jobs, and How I Learned to Write #poetry
The segment below was published near the beginning of the year. It predicted exactly how I feel at the the end of the year after my side trip into the world of Major Jackson and the Ice Cream Asshole at The Porch, and the disapproval of my former mates on the Notre Dame Alumni Zoom. It is the celebratory answer to my question, ‘Why me?’ Why all the blowback for being who I am? Now I know, and knowing changes nothing and everything.
I am not meant to be fed with the others. I am not meant to listen to orders of any kind. Community, advancement in the world, and progress in my work have different meanings for someone like me than they do for anyone who listens to the dictates of a so-called superior or a so-called group.
Conformity is not community and authoritarianism isn’t mentorship or a source of constructive criticism.
I’ve been independent and open to, and participating in, interdependence for years. I’m simply fully conscious of those facts now. The insults and orders of Major Jackson, the Ice Cream Asshole and the Sons of Notre Dame don’t wound me at all, or engender any bitterness or hard feelings. I don’t care anymore, and they can figure out meaning on their own time or never at all. No one else determines who I should be, or how I should live or work. I’ve got processes that can’t allow that interference. (If anybody is thinking that I should understand all of this by now, you just don’t see what being an artist is.)
This is not to say that I don’t question and challenge myself and change and grow. I am not a know-it-all. I am a completely self-determined being. I assess myself and my interaction with the world and act accordingly. As I say, I have been this way for years, maybe my entire adult life. This understanding doesn’t change my past, present and future at all, but this understanding makes me feel better about it all. I have no conflict or doubt about my being or my actions. Zero shame, or regrets. I am happy. I happen to have a photo of me and Paula and Blake Shelton (hah!) that was taken just yesterday. I offer it as documentary evidence of how much I am enjoying my life — the life I have now, the life I’ve had, and the life and death to come. I offer my writing in part, as evidence of how much I am jazzed by my work. I go to my death singing. (The poet William Blake).
I’ve never felt better in my life. I’m not bragging. I’ve been gifted with an awareness of joy. And I think to myself what a wonderful world. (The poet Louis Armstrong).
This is not personal. This is my Ode to Joy. (The poet Beethoven). Writing is the greatest thing that I have ever done. Writing has endowed me with a perception of a dimension of life that belongs to us all. I’ve been a miserable asshole too, maybe of a different flavor of misery than Major or the Ice Cream Asshole, probably more like the good little obedient speak when they are spoken to boys of the Notre Dame Zoom … but the miserable asshole life is a figment of our corrupted imaginations and if we can get out of it — and thank the writing gods I have — life becomes a tour of the Northern Lights, a chance to inhabit a Jackson Pollack painting … a participation in the soul of the likes of Blake and Armstrong and Beethoven.
Here (immediately below) is the piece that I wrote in February that prepared me for the condescensions of Major Jackson, and the Ice Cream Asshole, and the tsk tsk of the Notre Dame Zoom in October:
Improv is just a rough draft. It is just part of the creative process, not a full fledged art on its own. Good improvisers easily access their spontaneous freedom, but any creative person does that, right? We’ve talked about this before, the dialogue between spontaneity and logic and structure. Both are required. Some start with reason, some start with impulse, but all who create reconcile the two.
I feel like my process has gotten to the point where I use both simultaneously. I credit improv and law as where I learned the two functions, but I think I would have gotten here no matter what I did.
I always felt pulled down by all but a few improv partners. I just wanted my own voice. I never cared about any other aspect of it. I was often aggravated and bored by their lame initiations, or tired of elevating the proceedings, and then getting a kick in the ass afterwards for my trouble.
I always started jobs with great energy and commitment. They all taught me something. But I always outgrew them. Writing is the only thing big enough for me.
Beyond exhausting the creative possibilities of a job, there were two other factors that ended them.
I always thought I was going to work on the side of the angels, but each job revealed itself to be corrupt. I never did the immoral thing requested. It’s not in me.
My first law job wanted me to work as a lowly associate in support of a representation of the insurance company of a for profit blood bank that gave people AIDS tainted blood. They were trying to screw widows and orphans out of their wrongful death insurance money. I couldn’t do it. That was that.
The Gang Crime Prevention Center wanted me to lobby the state legislature for a law that heavily fined the parents of truant high school students. I told my boss that I couldn’t do it. It was a war against poor people . He demanded that I to do so. I answered that was “like ordering a Catholic doctor to perform an abortion”. I was predictably fired.
At the Attorney Disciplinary Commission the director wanted me to punish a schizophrenic attorney who acted out in a court room. I told him that the woman.was sick. He was in charge of the disposition of the cases. I wouldn’t budge. I quit soon thereafter.
I have integrity. I never did something that someone ordered me to do that would interfere with my ability to sleep at night.
There were other compromises that I resisted in every field I was ever part of. In higher ed they pushed students on a conveyer belt and didn’t really teach. If I did what they wanted it would have been like working at the DMV. Just certifying ignorant people to prepare them for immoral jobs.
Marketing of course is a joke. As soon as I saw that I was manipulating people to do what I artfully suggested, and obstructing them from exercising their self-evident rights to self determination, I was out. It was a creepy job, encouraging uncritical thinking and weakness in people. I couldn’t do it.
In entertainment I always got push back for being smart — and decent — and always felt held back, like in improv.
The second element in my job odyssey was the refusal to accept the insults and disrespect that I found in every workplace, without exception. I wouldn’t put up with it, and that ended jobs.
For years I thought that these conflicts were my problem, but now I see them as systemic.
I thought if I found the right field and the right people, I’d finally be home.
But now I think the immorality and lack of civility and respect is universal.
I read an essay by Vaclav Havel about post-totalitarian society. The Czechs were in this condition as the Soviets were losing power and starting to recede. As I read, I thought he could just as well be talking about America. He was talking about my experience.
We made great progressive strides in America but the ghosts of exploitation and inequality dog us everywhere.
I learned that you can’t find what I was looking for in society. It has to be within you.
My critics think I was frustrated and couldn’t stick with jobs. The opposite was true. I held on too long. I dreamed an impossible dream.
But the ultimate result was perfect. I often get to these points where I think I should have regrets, and I always on reflection feel grateful and proud.
My jobs journey taught me about life —- forced me to experience what is going on. One writer worked as a waitress to write about wage slavery. But she had a book deal waiting. I worked wage slave jobs, ate in soup kitchens, lived the life of an attorney and professor and even brushed with stardom. I didn’t know I was writing a book, and I didn’t have a book deal. I think it’s much better this way.
My journey developed my craft as a writer. It was better to learn writing through improvisation and the law (and in many other ways) than in a writing program or in apprenticeship in a professional writing situation, as useful as those things could potentially be.
Critics mistakenly saw me as a lost soul, or an unambitious child just playing around, or a bum, or a leech, or a fool … critics from my many walks of life. What they have in common is a tolerance for meanness in and around them, and a capacity to endure personal humiliation, that I don’t share.
My jobs weren’t distractions. They were necessary. If I didn’t have my hard road, I think my writing would be trivial. I have seen people I knew decades ago in recent years. They are, for the most part, sadly the same. They have the same values and same level of understanding about life that they had when we were young. Doing what you are told for years stunts your growth. Your soul and reason calcify into stagnation. They did well. or are disappointed that they didn’t do well, at activities not worth doing. They don’t have a clue as to what is worth doing. If someone they granted power tells them that they are a success or a failure, they dimly and meekly accept it.
I wouldn’t change a thing. I have cared too much what people think, but I’ve never let their barbs stop me. Their ignorance serves me. They wound me, and the pain forces me to pursue deeper understanding. I viscerally know they are wrong, and then I discover the words to describe why. Writing is thinking only better. (David McCullough).
One criticism of me was that I reinvent wheels. Not true. I make new wheels. I was born the authority of my own life. I’m lucky. I get physically ill doing anything that is against my own deep impulse. This has caused me a lot of good trouble. The people who have shouted orders at me about how to do it, aren’t going to be lowered into my grave with me. I’ll do it my way.
Even on the jobs I decided what I’d do. I always did what I agreed to do. When they broke their word and changed the job description the split was set in motion.
I’m a writer because I’m a person with a story to tell.
A person’s jobs is not their work. I have been very committed and dedicated to my work since high school.
I am blessed. I feel compassion for my critics and I love my past, present and future life. I don’t know why nature chose me for this charmed life, but I know it wants me to continue to struggle to sustain what’s important … not for only myself …
But for all creation.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
11/7/23: ‘It’s Got to be Perfect’
“It’s a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.”
W. Somerset Maugham
‘Wear your character as lightly as a hat or coat.’
Paul Sills
Follow your bliss or Captain Ahab? When does self-determination become hateful obsession? The pursuit of excellence become fanaticism?
Polarities. Campbell was contradictory (or paradoxical) regarding work and teaching. Work and play should be the same thing. For Campbell, teaching felt like work. The two aspects of teaching, for example , work and play … Sigh. There are so many things that are demanding and joyful. Bliss isn’t always fun. How could it be fun for you to step back and be forced to explain what you know. But it gives you a deeper satisfaction. Campbell spoke of sacrifice and bliss. I love my grandchildren with the full force of my heart, They adopted me as a grandfather. I am not their blood. The wonderful shock that I have these beautiful little spirits in my life is a fountain of immense joy and satisfaction in my heart. I’m also always happy when the tots leave. They are a lot of work. Their incredible energy challenges me. Trying to keep up with them is good exercise, but I race to my recliner for a period of recovery once they are out the door. Campbell’s formula — every ounce of bliss is accompanied by an ounce of sacrifice. I dislike going to the eye doctor, but I need my eyes. When the juice isn’t worth the squeeze, that’s when something has to go. My eyes and my grandchildren aren’t going anywhere. (I struggled with this passage. My writing is my bliss and my sacrifice. I love doing it, but often I’d rather listen to sports radio. It’s doubly hard with my grandchildren. I am being an important figure in their nascent lives, and I am listening to my unconscious for clues as to life’s meaning at the same time, because that is what I always do. I’m always writing. I’m taking every moment of my life and turning it into a story. Fortunately, Huxley reminds me of something that I usually do — keeping it light. I live mostly in a state of good humor, with digressions into nervousness, agitation and shyness. Life, my life anyway — and I am certain yours — is a paradox and a contradiction. I don’t write Hallmark cards. Sentimentality isn’t my beat. Love of children or anyone else is not sugar and spice and everything nice. It is being there with them in total when they are present and when they aren’t. I cherish and enjoy those little ones and I worry and care about them. Love is exhausting. As one ages, one learns to be graceful in struggle. It’s OK to be awkward, and nervous and overcome by warm affection and fatigue. It’s life. I’m glad I am no longer a comedian, and glad that I was one — not for the artful jokes, but for the attitude. Life is tragicomic. Writing is looking at something very complex with simple eyes. Love is about what is. Fairy tales are for children, because they are too small to absorb it all. That care with which they must be treated is fatiguing too. )
Huxley writes of an over seriousness about matters of depth. He prescribes lightness as he describes the eternal. Not just sharing regret … but showing the transformation … how cruel to self and others it would be to create a world where sins and errors can’t turn into wisdom by feats of practical magic … Huxley’s former humorlessness led to his final light approach to things that go deep …
I love love love what he says about dying … and how the substance of what he says is embodied in the lack of pretense in his words …
The warning of the danger of being sucked down into darkness …
Writing that shows life’s nature and wisely shows how to live it …
An expression of the man … earned words …
Writing is work and play … oh no I have to think about this pain again? And ah! That’s why I went there.
I see my friend (he turned me on to Huxley) the acting coach (among many other things) strenuously pushing a big stone up big hills called actors, and then getting the release of seeing great people discovering their greatness, and being ready to share it with the world. The joyful satisfaction of such wonderful influence.
Two classes and two coaching sessions today. And a changed world.
In my last segment I wondered ‘what about me made me have so many toxic interactions from early ND and Second City to Major, the lawyers, the educators, and everything in between. I understood the work-that-you-enjoy-part. I’ve always done what my inner impulse told me. Sometimes it was hard to figure that out, but I never wavered. I didn’t understand the need for positive relationships. Or more precisely how to position myself to receive them.’
Campbell said life will provide you the experience that you are destined to have. You choose whether you receive that experience in the positive or the negative. I’d like to say a few words on behalf of the negative. (I’m not sure that I chose the negative. You do the best you can. First misunderstanding. Then wisdom. The easy stuff is not your field of action. You really get to know about what comes hard. What’s natural requires no effort.) Mean people taught me what kindness is. Stupid people helped me appreciate genius. Discovering that wolves in sheep’s clothing were assholes, showed me a way to discern mensches in ordinary people without disguises.
You just have to listen. Life provides clues and answers in all of its moments, from bullshit to grace.
Another friend who is a very prominent, older and established lawyer, called yesterday morning. He reports changes at the firm where he gets paid for his gravitas as much as for what he is assigned to do.
My friend contemplates career changes. How about you? Career? Friendship? Romance? Productive interdependencies? Ascent to pacts of mutually assured self-destruction?
All the bankruptcies, terminations of employment, divorces, crimes of passion, betrayals, murders …
And the times when it works … is the sperm that fertilizes the egg, lucky or an agent of natural selection?
Life finds a way …
‘It’s got to be perfect,’ says my distinguished friend.
Values. Money. Location. Culture. Workload. Fill in the blank …
Warmth. Kindness. Intelligence. Wisdom …
Good work. Good money. Good intentions. Good people. Good times.
OK, my friend is a made man. An older man. He doesn’t have to take a job if he doesn’t want the job. His fate is good fortune. But … he struggled to get there. Even with all of his entitlements and advantages. No one gets there without suffering and hard work. (Work is a wonderful fact of life. Work is our field of meaning. On the other hand, a job can be a perverse abstraction. Even a good job in service of right livelihood frustrates a person’s natural instinct for self-determination to some extent. We just aren’t meant to have our lives structured by other people.)
Does anybody have to have a job? We need work and we need to survive until the moment of our fated demise. But a job? What problem has a shit job ever solved? What benefit ever came from a codependency with an asshole person or organization?
Every decent job is a temp part time job. My father delivered meals on wheels for golf money. I worked summers in a bank for spending money at college. I worked as a lawyer so I could write. I never worked for anybody. I agreed to do something for somebody to get things for myself. Often individuals and organizations wanted more. They asked for more time. They offered less money. They tried to diminish me in ways that could have damaged my confidence as a person and an artist. I never allowed them to do that. This pattern became who I was. I would honorably agree to do work another person or entity wanted to do. I did my part of the bargain. They would renege on theirs. There would be conflict and eventually I would leave. I never betrayed myself as a person or artist. They were not going to steal my life from me. Was I Ahab or following my bliss? They accused me of being Ahab but I was on Campbell’s hero’s journey.
But things changed. Sometimes our journey is not an inward matter but instead is guided by outer circumstances. Sometimes those circumstances are benign. I no longer need the bosses. I have an independent income. I don’t need activity. People get jobs partly to have something to do. I’ve always had plenty to do. I am well occupied without any directed assignments. What was more tricky to understand is that I no longer need relationships with people like the bosses and the competitive co-workers. I’ve experienced some of those since I stopped ‘jobbing’. (I have retired from jobs, not work.) How many unhappy marriages and pseudo-friendships have the character of the capitalist workplace? It’s just the way people largely act in this culture, but not entirely.
A light went on yesterday. I’m in the same circumstance as my friend, the super lawyer. I have a documented body of work, writing and otherwise, and … my writing speaks for itself. Like it or not, it is what it is. My life has settled into its place in the world. I never wanted to be in charge of anything or anyone but myself. I wanted to get where I am right now. My work finds and will find its place in the world, and one rule guides its progress:
It has to be perfect.
I never was climbing the ladder. I was working to get to the point where I could say, ‘It’s got to be perfect’.
I necessarily hung with people nowhere near my level of spiritual and intellectual excellence to get stuff … a law license, money so I could write, stages, chances for time and resources to develop my writing. experience with the idiots and assholes as some of my subjects. And more. I was developing myself, my art and understanding of the world. Now I have all of those listed and unlisted things.
I WAS positioning myself to receive ‘positive relationships’. I see that clearly now. (Hey Major — every time I try to regret something reality won’t let me do it. Everything is as it should be. Experience is USEFUL. Experience ‘positions’ us for peace, clarity, joy and love. Sorry again, Major. I am 68 and I write about love. Love: it’s not just for teenagers anymore. I’m so glad I met you, Major. You taught me so much in the negative. And then Huxley shows up and I think — he’s perfect. It’s got to be perfect. I can’t spend my time reading Major when Huxley gives me what I need.)
‘The road to wisdom is paved with excess.’
William Blake
‘Yes I am wise, but it’s wisdom born of pain.’
Helen Reddy
I’ve made it. Now it can only be perfect. I know how to pluck the gold nuggets out of the shit stream.
I know this is repetitive and obvious. But it is good to hear on the cusp of a new chapter.
I wasn’t hurt or mad in the bad old days of misery because I wasn’t given opportunity. I was hurt and mad because my success wasn’t recognized. But it was (ironically), is (happily) and will be (wonderfully) recognized by the perfect people. It can’t be any other way.
I get perfect now. I never wanted to be in charge. I wanted to get where I am right now.
My lawyer friend does due diligence , looks for the users, knows who he is and what he wants and needs. He is going into the unknown. He doesn’t know what is coming, but he’ll know it when he sees it.
So do I.
I’m free of the anxiety that the negative stuff will happen again. It won’t. (But I also hear Huxley … you have to keep an eye out for quicksand. You can make it negative if you stumble on your sidestep.)
I’m not critical of myself for going to the lower levels for awhile. I was learning how high I’ve risen. It’s good to learn it that way. I trust my self assessment.I’m somewhat surprised by the strength of my current position. I would think I shouldn’t be, except what else could have thought when I didn’t know it’s got to be perfect. I stopped wanting validation a long time ago. I want what I want. I knew it’s got to be perfect, but I didn’t know I knew. It’s a new world.
I didn’t like being assessed in my jobs. Not because I didn’t want to hear constructive criticisms. Their expectations were an imposition on my work. I am my own evaluator.
I’ve never been blocked. I’m proud of the strength in that.
The hero ignores the always disappointing crowd and accomplishes his task. Alone in the public indeed. But that’s not me anymore. I’ve graduated to the future. My work is being and becoming the new thing. I was a sage on a hero’s path. There were many people who were moved by my example. It was really art. I often heard I never saw anyone do or say that before. It wasn’t because I was so innovative. I was different among them. Some saw that it didn’t have to be that way.
My entry point was as one among many and that isn’t my reality anymore. So how do I relate to the world now? It’s going to be different. I have all the abstractions Equality. Interdependence. Etc. But what will it look like? I’m so satisfied in everything in my life and work except the dissemination of my work—- the participation of my work in the world. I cherish the flame of dissatisfaction.
We saw ‘The Last Waltz’ in a theater Sunday night. I’ve never seen it, and I knew almost nothing about The Band. What artists. They toured America and came back with art. An amazing feat. Yes, they dealt with disappointing humanity and sometimes sang about it. But they found each other and their other friends.
Robbie Robertson had to get off the road. He said it killed so many greats. Buddy Holly etc. He had to go home. The Band played on. They just no longer toured. They remained there for each other and their work.
I don’t feel lonely. Like when I married. I wasn’t lonely, I wanted intimacy.
Sure the bullies are out there, but doing and being what I love and being with others who do, are and love the same thing … that’s perfect. The Band was perfect. ‘The Last Waltz’ was perfect. Everything … every influence, every movie, every social interaction, friendship, sharing of my writing … everything has to be perfect. I never found the perfect by searching for it. The perfect came to find me. Paula suggested ‘The Last Waltz’. I didn’t know it was playing. I knew all of the songs but I didn’t know who sang them. That’s where the perfect is … in the song you know in a place you didn’t know.
*The perfect is not perfectionism. Perfectionism is ego. The perfect comes as you lightly work on matters of depth in an open manner.
Talk about poets. Those guys in The Band were like Walt Whitman and de Tocqueville. They did these impressions of the American world. They didn’t merely ignore the bullies and assume their forlorn positions. They radically did what they wanted. They knew they weren’t like the bullies. They were something new. They were the prophets of the New America that MAGA wants to destroy.
The Band had an advantage over me. The system gave them nothing and they knew it. They made their own thing. If they didn’t make it, they weren’t going to have it. The system conned me. It gave me something then tried to control me. Fool’s gold. My story is different than The Band’s. Now I know I don’t need the system. A new way of writing and sharing it, and new people (and old people really born again in something far bigger than the despotism of religiosity).
Yes, our story is different. Funny the bullies reappear at the end of this segment.
Never let perfection be the enemy of the good. But when confronted by evil … let perfect kick that real enemy’s ass.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
11/9/23: Back to Chernow’s Grant as the great man comes into his own
page 113 … ‘the unpleasant truth that Grant had been a failure, battered by life at every turn’ … I break here with Grant and Chernow. No person is a failure. Failure is a thing that happens not an identity. Failure is a good and admirable thing. It is part of the processes of creativity and personal transformation. Success and failure are pressures ideas that exile us from ourselves. Grant’s humiliation and rejection by society had as much to do with his life as a liberator and great writer, as FDR’s polio prepared that great man to lead a nation through a depression and to a victory over fascism. No one says that FDR was a failure because he got sick.
Grant’s success came and went as well. In 1900, he was regarded as one of the greatest Americans who ever lived. That’s why he got that enormous tomb. I was taught in elementary school in the 1960s that he was one of our worst Presidents. As our culture has become more progressive in recent years, his reputation has been rehabilitated.
What does status and reputation really mean anyway? Status, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. The shifting opinions about Grant reflect changes in the overall American character, not his. The only thing we can do is earnestly live our truth. Concerns about success and failure just muddy the waters, and keep us from ourselves.
page 114 … ‘he (Grant) retained a self-esteem despite the vagaries of recent years.’ I always knew. At my lowest moments. When I was vilified, sick or unemployed — I knew. Those who thought less of me misunderstood the nature of life itself. How many brilliant people I have met who have unimpressive jobs, or are broken mentally, emotionally or in some other way. If I would have always been well regarded, I would have never learned a thing. Character is formed in a cauldron of solitude. If you conform to the world you never live at all. To live is to confront the world with a new thing. Grant brought to the world a new iteration of justice. Of course the world dismissed it for years.
Nothing matters but the truth. Live in truth, that is all that matters. Sometimes the world catches up to you. Sometimes it never will until many years later, and then it will vacillate regarding it. It doesn’t matter. Live your truth.
page 114 … “Fred Grant describing his father’s mental state in 1860: ‘He was a sensitive and retiring man , but behind his modesty was a fair estimate of his own worth. He tolerated no disrespect and was most determined.” You see why I am drawn to this guy. Ditto. I am Grant.
Grant worked steadily in 1860. He earned a living, a necessary step for the naturally spiritual man. He had to descend to practical life so that he could meet the mundane requirements of ascending to the stars. His work as a Galena store clerk was a necessary preparation for his destiny of emancipating human beings. Lincoln emancipated slaves in the law. Grant did it in the fields.
I am Grant. I hope I am leading us further into our freedom. Writing emancipates minds, beginning with the mind of the writer. The changed minds change lives. The changed lives change the world.
I read about Grant’s life to refresh my recollection of my own.
In a way, my writing is in part my answer to the world’s preoccupation with success and failure. I’ve been considered by one group of people or another a success or failure my entire life. I reply to those foolish assessments with my truth. I am sometimes praised for being an honest writer. Some of what I say about myself might inspire applause. Some is confessional. It’s just life. There is nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to regret. I accept all of it. I love my fate. The cliche is true, life is what we make it. Take all of it and turn it into something.
Grant, the quintessential man of action, was a great storyteller, conversationalist and overall talker. Paradoxically, he was also shy. He was a highly disciplined man who struggled with alcoholism. We are contradictions, a cacophony of inner voices that we are made to harmonize.
Grant’s opportunity did not arrive while he was searching for it, or through office seeking. His decision in 1860 to move from Missouri to Northern Illinois to work in his father’s store, created his chance for his born again military career which far exceeded his first tour of duty which ended in disappointment. That’s how it goes. Everything (important), as the saying goes, happens for a reason, and that reason is not of our conscious design. I didn’t choose to be a writer. I discovered I am one. I came to Nashville to be with Paula. I had no idea of the many other gifts the city offers. I feel more at home here than I did in any other place that I have ever lived. If you told me even two years ago that I would enjoy living in the South, I would have thought you were crazy. I love the South. I love how cordial everyone is. How everyone has time to chat. I love the more gentle pace. I love the space. I love the office I have in our house. Where I am sitting right now. I needed this office and I am going to write in it until I die. I love how I can live anywhere. I can share my life and writing with anyone in the world. There isn’t a book or movie that is not within my reach. We work at our lives and we have culminations, which are always better than what we expect. It’s not wise to set your mind on one thing. What do you know? It’s always too small. There is a creative intelligence that will provide all that you need to be who you are. Our unconscious runs the show and our unconscious is not only within us. It is outside of us too, and it reaches out and in to unite itself with itself. Every once in awhile there is a day when my inner being is in full congruence with my outer being. Today is that kind of day.
page 122 … ‘Suddenly Grant was fired by a mission, a clear sense of purpose … He was now wide awake.’ Purpose is something we discover. We don’t make it up. Vocation is a far more powerful impulse than mere career ambition. Grant had no idea where his resurgent military career would take him personally. He was very clear about what he had to do. Do the true thing persistently every day, one thing leads to another, and see what happens.
Grant was fiercely against the evils of slavery and secession, and fiercely committed to democracy and freedom. My friend noticed that I am at times condemnatory. He’s right. I am. Some people are evil because they get off on it. The Confederates knew slavery and what they were doing to to our country was wrong. Grant was a sword of justice, and a poet of truth and beauty.
Grant broke ranks with all who had previously held him back, including his domineering father, and his Confederate father-in-law, when he entered the ranks of his destiny in the Union Army. We slough off authoritarians the way a snake writhes out of its now dead skin and is born again. Revolution is certainty without arguing. Once the light goes on we can’t go back to all who put us down and tried to tell us what to do.
Grant never romanticized war. He was a democratic warrior. He led a people’s army. He saw himself as equal, not superior. His role was determined because of his talent, skill and knowledge. I think of the movie “Paths of Glory’. In that film, mendacious generals fill ordinary boys’ minds with idealized visions of grand adventure, and lead them to their deaths. Grant had no illusions about how hard war, and the rest of life, can be. More lessons from his tough times. He never lied to his men about the hardship and suffering they would endure. They followed him anyway. Many can manipulate people to do what they want. A rare and chosen few show the true way. Anyone meant to do things of real significance never follows the mediocre precepts of conventional failure and success. Fame and money disappear. The truth is eternal. The words and deeds of the artist resonate for all time. They even redeem the past.
page 128 … ‘However much he (Grant) may have preferred his talents lay elsewhere, he came startlingly alive within the daily, sometimes hourly challenges of a military world.’ We don’t choose who we are. Other people told me who I should be. I told myself what I wanted to be. The reality is that I could only be who I actually am. The world and our soul work in concert and create our destiny.
On page 129, I encounter events in Grant’s life that have not happened to me yet. I have not received the call from the man of influence who sees that I have something that will fulfill the world’s need. I know it will happen. I can’t be sure of the size of the hole I will be called to fill. Grant wasn’t either.
Grant wanted to be recognized solely on the basis of his merits. There was nothing of the self promoter within him. Even when he had his sponsor, he had to wait for his commission. He suffered the outer indignity with inner dignity. Grant was passed over because he had no ‘Napoleonic ambitions (page 131)’. He wanted to do his part. He did not envision himself as supreme commander. There are times when the real thing is the only thing that will do. Those times are when the artist has his day. Grant and I share more than our artistic natures. Some great artists shamelessly self-promote. Grant and I are sincere artists. The sincerity is more a function of our humanity than our art. We don’t only live out our destinies, but we live them out in a specifically destined way. How I get something matters to me. The ends do noy justify the means. I could never compromise my nature. If I did all would be lost. Grant and I are strangely uncompetitive. We don’t win anything. We accept what belongs to us, in our hearts, and in the world.
Once back in the army, Grant was frustrated by his underemployment in assignments far beneath his experience and abilities. He said, ‘This is no work for a man of my experience. I’m going home'(page 131)’ . See my segment from earlier this week, ‘It’s got to be the best.’ As Maugham said, ‘if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you often get it.” Grant. at that moment of rejection of every way the world could low ball him, he received an unexpected break.
Fortunately, I don’t share Grant’s depression when the world gives me nothing worthwhile to do. I write. I never have to sacrifice my feeling of forward motion. Grant wrote much later when he was asked to, when he and the world needed it. Nobody asked me to write. I just started doing it. No one can stop me now. But I would like my words to have greater reach. I know many more people would find them useful. I appreciate all of my kind and intelligent readers now. How many more peop[e like them, around the world, would enjoy my writing? This is the cause of my greatest, and perhaps only, dissatisfaction.
Like an actor, a teacher or a lawyer, a military man has to be called into action. Grant had to wait to be himself in full, dependent on the understanding of strangers. I only depend on someone else to bring me to larger audiences. I can write and publish myself and I do.
I too await my unexpected break, if more limited purposes. I can’t see how it won’t happen. You stand up and people, ideas and things come to you. What is meant for you is drawn to you and vice versa. You can’t market sincere art.
Grant got his chance on page 132.
I can’t wait to see what happens or happened next …
Coming up … Chapter Seven …
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
11/12/23: Back to Grant by Chernow — Chapter 7 … on the cusp of public life
There are only three motivations that animate adult action …
Being ordinary … doing what is necessary to have a family and/or friends, a place in a community … food, shelter and a little fun …
Being important … gaining status … gaining money. power, position, leverage … to be looked up to (and be empowered to look down on?) in whatever group or groups that you belong to …
Being great … creating masterpieces in your field … dedication to the cause of humanity … a life of promoting that which is fine and good in mankind and fiercely opposing what is not.
Each path is challenging. To review what we have seen so far, Grant struggled with sustaining ordinary life, but got there. He didn’t really care about being important. Sometimes he made noises about it, but it wasn’t in him. He was about democracy, justice, empathy and compassion, human dignity … he naturally was drawn to the path toward greatness.
Grant wouldn’t tolerate disrespect. He most often stubbornly refused to be underemployed. He was fierce in his opposition to traitors and slaveholders. He passionately pursued his fields of endeavor —- public policy, military strategy and the written word.
What’s next?
page 133 … Grant’s rebel father-in-law tried to convince him to fight with the Confederate army, and to send his wife and children to live with the father-in-law in Missouri. Grant would have none of it. There is a moment when those who bullied you become your adversaries instead of your oppressors. When the time is ripe, your stoic integrity in the face of unjust abuse turns into a controlled fury unleashed. What was a long trial to be endured, becomes a split rending any former bond between tyrant and subject. I love that Grant punished the South, not with rancor, but rather as a fair disciplinarian. You can’t own people. You can’t betray the nation that you pledged allegiance to … you took an oath … and you know that you are wrong … morally and humanly wrong …
My dignity is not a matter of debate with you. No! Grant grew militant against the unfairness and condescensions of slavery because he knew what it was to be treated unfairly and condescended to … Of course, he suffered nothing the magnitude of what enslaved African-Americans went through, but he knew the character of the sin against them if not the degree. Grant was forever changed by the insults and mistreatments he was subjected to for many years. He would no longer merely deal with that pain internally in order to live a dignified life … now he would avenge it, and he would do it not for himself but for other people.
Grant wanted no part of those who once rejected and reviled him. Now he would stop them from doing that which they had no right to do. His other qualities assured that their would be no revenge or even anger in his actions. There was nothing selfish in what he was about to do. He knew his enemy intimately. He knew their strengths and their vain insecurities.
Creativity and destruction are the two sides of the artist. The artist elevates the human and eliminates the inhumane.
The formerly bullied becomes a warrior.
It has been quite awhile now since I have felt wounded by my past oppressors. I now want nothing to do with them, and want to replace what they represent with something righteous. Grant was better than all of the Southern army officers that attempted to diminish him. He had a better vision for his life than that which his disapproving father and father-in-law imagined for him. He was better than the insincere business manipulators that took advantage of his honest and generous nature. He would not turn into a cunning profiteer. He was a public servant. Grant was superior in intellect and character to those who denigrated his kindly bookish ways.
Grant, like all artists was a man of the future. The world of his time couldn’t maintain the course it had set upon. The world had to be better or it would descend into cruel anarchy. Grant was the better the world had to be. The time had come when character, intelligence and humanity had to prevail. It did so in the person of Grant.
Grant’s story is not the story of a man of failure who had an awakening at the right time and became a big success. Grant’s story is about nothing as unimportant as success. Grant’s story is a recurring one involving the survival of mankind. There are times when the world cries out ‘ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! there must be a better way!’ The artist mirrors that fed up emotion, ends the misery and begins life anew.
page 134 … Grant never looked the part. He didn’t have time for that aesthetic bullshit. He dressed simply and plainly in inexpensive clothing.. He treated everyone, regardless of rank or station, the same. He was all substance, and his substance was his form. The world is always in crisis. The great artist is called upon in the blatant times when the world is aware of its precarious state. No one gives a damn about theatricality when everything is on fire. Grant’s troops liked him. He knew what he was doing, and he cared about them. Competence and compassion shows up showmanship the door when the shit hits the fan.
page 135 … Grant suffered personally when not offered the jobs he deserved. In times of standstill the people in charge who should further the fortunes of superiorly endowed people for the collective good, shirk their duty and the individual and everyone else suffers. There is nothing the great artist can do but wait. I’ve been there many times. You can’t collude with those who disrespect you, and you can’t allow yourself to be used as a tool. You go without rather than lose your dignity and integrity. You have to get your chances in the right way. It has nothing to do with ego. If you allow yourself to be used, you are serving a lower and undeserving master than the one for which you are intended.
Grant wasn’t above sometimes soliciting for a job out of desperation. He never received a response. Nada. Crickets. There is a major lesson there. Do not seek it. Develop yourself by your own measures and be ready for opportunity when it comes, if it does. Regular readers may remember the letter I sent to the head of the Illinois commission on attorney professionalism, in response to her anti-bullying initiative, regarding the bullying that I received as a lawyer, and the course that I created, Ethical Presence, to address that and other matters of professionalism and civility. I heard nothing back. I resolved it was the last time that I would ever send such a letter. All of my writing is now confined to my blog. If anyone wants to publish me, or have me teach or speak, or do anything else that makes sense, they are going to have to come find me. The same silent treatment happened to me with the Notre Dame rector program and the Vanderbilt MFA in Creative Writing Program. I did get a response from The Porch literary group in Nashville after several attempts. They eventually asked me to leave. Just as Grant split with his tormentors, an interesting transformation occurred related to these so-called rejections by omission (Actually they didn’t even bother to reject me, I mean … they didn’t even bother to send me a rejection letter.) For my part, I would want nothing to do with any of them. Unlike Groucho Marx, I want no part of any club that would NOT have me as a member. Notre Dame is way too conservative and possessed of a religious fanaticism, and lacking in basic courtesy. The Illinois attorneys are an embarrassment for in large part. Petty and rude. Of course, there are many exceptions, but there are also many members of the bar of surprisingly slow wit, and mean spirited and arrogant character. They aren’t up to my speed. I’ve talked a lot about Major Jackson and by extension, the Vanderbilt MFA program. Come on, they aren’t near my league either. The Porch had one nice person and everyone else seemed either cold or passive. Going as far back as my sojourn with the Second City alumni a few years ago, I ask you to compare my writing to any of their shows. You can’t really. I’m just so much better. Ditto the UIC business school. I was such a better teacher than the rest of them, I didn’t belong there. I’m not writing with bitterness or bravado. I’m not even writing with emotion. I’ve knocked on the doors of mediocrities and now I’m through. How could the people who couldn’t recognize the talents of U.S. Grant be worthy of soliciting for opportunities? It just doesn’t work that way. Only someone on your level can see who you are. You will meet them in equality. There is no office seeking involved.
This is an important development in my idiots and assholes theme. Where there was once a wound, there is now a split. I don’t want to join them. I’m replacing them. Ultimately, it was Lincoln who gave Grant his biggest break. It takes one to know one.
On page 136 … Grant miraculously got his first ‘crack in the wall’ as Campbell would say … out of the blue … to be a colonel leading the Twenty First Illinois Regiment. The titan that grew in Grant’s soul was about to emerge into the world. One of the greatest creative careers in the history of the world had begun its public life.
This is a good place to stop. Next … Grant gets a chance to do something.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
1/22/23: F for Fake (1973) — Is art a lie that tells the truth?
“We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.”
Pablo Picasso
Art is the truth from a particular perspective. No one possesses absolute truth. All artists are necessarily limited in their point of view. We can only see from one place at one time. There is no need to lie to present another person with a strange truth that we are given to understand. Every person’s experience of the world is strange to another person, and also a metaphor for every other person’s experience of the world. I can’t tell you why I know it, but being is a universal state exactly the same for all who live except in detail. One person lives for a minute, another for one hundred years. Each was alive. In any time window communication is possible. We can communicate with one another because we share this ineffable life quality.
Picasso also said that all art is autobiographical. Yes. Fiction is a fiction. There is no possibility of an artist serving as an omniscient narrator of any story. All an artist can do is describe their experience in a particular moment.
Every moment of life is an opportunity for insight into human nature. Life is a constant teacher. The artist shares those insights. What is not experienced in the positive is experienced in the negative. Truth can be found where it is betrayed, Beauty can be found where it is despoiled.
The artist should never attempt to convince anyone of anything. Don’t perform, pretend or persuade. Don’t play act, lie or argue. Look and be simple. Be honest about what you see.
The mature artist finds that artifice drops away. A great stage actress chose, late in her career, to never wear a costume in any role, and to never wear stage makeup, no matter what character she was asked to portray. She wore her own street clothes, and her own drug store makeup. In Orson Welles’ final two films, he plays himself in the penultimate, and John Huston plays a character based on Welles in the last. At its height art is simply telling one’s truth. An artist may look at a complex subject, but their view is clear, direct, honest and uncomplicated.
A liar has an agenda. An artist has no motive other than to determine what is.
An artist turns lies into truth. It isn’t the artist who lies. Artists reveal the mendacity of their subjects when they are mendacious, and honor the truths of their subjects when they are truthful.
When an artist does take on a role, they are transparent within that role. Jack Lemmon, used every role he played, even in his worst pictures like execrable Airport ’77, to reveal what he saw in, and thought and felt, about being human.
Orson Welles in F for Fake has a certain slippery and theatrical charm which might be characterized as false, and is consciously affected, but also serves a genuine affection and empathy for other human beings. Welles is what he is regardless of his subtle affectations, a genius and a good man. He engages in trickery. He is a constant trickster, but the truth of his sleights of hand is his intention to delight his fellow man, woman and child.
Fraud is a strategy of the perversions of fearing failure and lusting for success. Society is the liar. Art is truth. Clifford Irving couldn’t sell his fiction. So he created his hoax biography of Howard Hughes. Society just wants to win and avoid the indignity of losing. Art wants to actually achieve something. All social victories are pyrrhic ones. Ron Howard won the Oscar for directing A Beautiful Mind. He beat Robert Altman and David Lynch. The two old artists stood in the side of the auditorium and shook their heads. They realized that they gained real achievement, and that they would never get the prize.
What did Ron Howard do to win the award? He lied. He took a painful story and made a sentimental and false equivalence between mental illness and genius. The liar tells people what they want to hear in order to get what he wants. The artist tells them the truth. It is up to the audience to figure out what is real and what is not. It is up to them to accept the challenge of art. Do they want the fool’s gold of their illusions presented in the manipulations of charlatans? Or do they want eternal life?
Picasso was the most successful artist that ever lived. Richer than a captain of industry. He lied to tell the truth in order to win socially, and have the real achievement of art simultaneously. Times change. Fakery has now lost its charm. Salesmen have taken over the world, and many thirst for truth. They need truth. The skills of advertising and propaganda have been unmasked. Yes, the innocent, ignorant and dim are defenseless in the face of all kinds of mind control that rob them of their money, agency and freedom.
This is a new age of unapologetic authenticity. The people cry out. Give us un-compromised facts, sincerely expressed with integrity and authenticity. Competence. Empathy. Give us intelligent people who have pure intentions.
Even the old fashioned mendacious practitioners of mass entertainment fictions make claims that their tales are BASED ON A TRUE STORY. Their lie is emblematic of what the people want. They want the real. The con artists claim they are giving them just that while they spin masturbatory fantasies of virtual wish fulfillments that will never become actual or true. It’s cruel. People throw their lives away as they go all in, forgoing their destinies, addicted to the lies.
Art is truth masquerading as a lie? I might accept that. Art masquerades as a lie to the extent that it participates in society at all. The honest filmmaker works in the same form as the dishonest one. The truth teller employs the same language as the salesman.
No. Why bother? Just live life and contemplate its mysteries. Art can be truth masquerading as a lie. Or once was. But now? Again … just live life and contemplate its mysteries. The faking is just about getting past the experts, the gatekeepers who can bestow success on an artist. Fuck ’em.
Did Welles know that he was beyond the pursuit of success when he made this movie? I think so. His fakery was not to steal some success. He shares nothing with Ron Howard. Like a magician he wanted to distract the audience to fool them into seeing something real. He encourages the audience’s imagination. I don’t care to encourage anyone. The other has to decide to read me. Their salvation is not my responsibility. I’m here to help but they have to ask for it.
Welles tells a story about a tryst between Picasso and Oja Kodar. It never happened. He tricks the audience that it is watching something like a documentary when its really a fiction. But then he explains his trick. Where is the lie? Welles is an honest man. He has fun with all of his practical joking. That’s true too. It’s part of who he is.
There is a different between being a trickster and being a liar.
I’ve watched this movie several times. I’m sure I don’t fully get it yet. Just because it challenges my understanding and puts me to work to unlock its mysteries doesn’t make it a lie.
Picasso’s quote and Welles movie challenge me. I despise the word LIE. And I despise the requirement that I have to convince anyone of anything. I sing my song and allow it to have its influence unaided or obstructed by me.
I think Orson and Pablo were singing their songs. I love them both. I refuse to see them as liars.
Life has no meaning. Art brings meaning to it. Are Orson and Pablo calling their creations lies out of true humility in the thrall of divine inspiration?
I’m not interested in Orson’s self conscious acting in this movie. (Best self conscious acting ever.) I am interested in the substance of what he is saying. I don’t care about Pablo walking barrel chested on the beach in his virile old age. I care about the natural wonder of his paintings. I saw an exhibition at the Met in New York once and it was more awe inspiring than the Grand Canyon. I don’t care about Picasso’s hugely acknowledged success and Orson’s (staged?) struggles for recognition late in his life. I care about all they say about being a human being.
Has my whole consideration here been a matter of unimportant semantics? To me a lie requires bad intentions. A white lie has petty intentions merely to avoid inconvenience. Creating an illusion to fool an audience into seeing previously unseen truths is not a lie in my book.
The orientation of the execution of my art is very different than Picasso’s or Welles’, I use no misdirection plays. I simply report what I see moment to moment.
Welles was far beyond his prospective audience when he made this picture. I think he still is. This is a Finnegans Wake of a movie. It has insights that are inaccessible to me now, some that I will comprehend later, and some I never will. F for Fake is Welles talking to himself, and there is nothing more honest than that. I caught on to The Other Side of the Wind more easily. Each film is something more than a movie. Welles deconstructed documentary and fictional narrative filmmaking in his last two outings, and replaced them with something new.
I’d like to think if Orson had lived, he eventually would have discarded all fakery from his work as well. In a sense he did. He did a lot of talking in his later years, and more at the end of his career. His talk show appearances — just Orson and his mind and facility to express himself in words was enough. I don’t need plays about Picasso and Oja Kodar. I just need Orson telling me what he sees in both of those objects of his loving gaze
Just as I tell you what I see.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
11/23/23: Indulgent Scribbling on Thanksgiving
Happy Thanksgiving … may today and every day be your movable feast.
Gratitude and abundance.
Here’s to scribbling. It’s an antidote to writing that is precious and constipated. Today I am writing for the fun of it. Maybe I’ll find a pearl in the stream of joy.
Waiting for the guests after most of the prep is over is a dead zone of boredom. Boredom as a tradition. I feel most alive when I am writing … and viewing and reading and thinking and being irritated while being bored … oh shit … I’ve never felt more alive … oh my God .
I’m too indulgent today and proud of it. I get indulgences in Purgatory for being indulgent to friends and family. I’m going to eat a lot today. I took a long hot shower. I love smothering my wife with corny jokes. I like to get nervous about nothing and then celebrating when everything worked out because nothing was really wrong. I am free of tight assed prigs. There isn’t one in sight. No people who don’t think everyone should get their student loans forgiven. I am so thankful that these negative parsimonious hypercritical … conservative … yes, conservative in all sorts of ways … in politics, art, personal morality, socially … in every way … I am so glad the stick up the ass people are out of my life … I am grateful that I grew … the separation is amicable, at least on my part.
The Guardian movie critic panned the new movie Saltburn as ‘indulgent’. It apparently broke all sorts of rules … the movie is ‘unhindered by concerns such as character coherence, logic, and in particular, pacing’. I can’t wait to see it this weekend. It’s good to know the movie is a miss with a writer who has the soul of a frustrated high school English teacher. The critic hasn’t learned how to take creative work on its own terms. You can’t learn that if you make it your business to keep everyone in line for arbitrary reasons. The critic doesn’t realize that the writer/director learned all of those rules that the critic harps on; the writer/director learned the rules and then forgot them — it’s the formative experience of working with the rules that matters — not the rules themselves, while critic has been stuck in neutral afraid to even get started.
I am thankful for everything and everyone that encourages people to go for it — to fully consciously and proudly be themselves, to gift the world with who they really are, to leave the snowflake fingerprint legacy we are all born to leave, to face the world and roar and take all the world’s blows and feel invigorated — and for my relatively newfound ability to distinguish the lovers who indulge abundant truth and life from the shut up who do you think you are that’s not allowed chorus in the fear section.
I’m thankful for Orson Welles. I wrote this to my friend this morning, following up on my recent Welles segments:
Fake is ahead of its time and ours. It’s very playful and very deep at the same time. It seems like a lark on the surface, but its soul is profound. Orson contemplates Picasso. He is at least Pablo’s equal.
Orson is a great artist and a great philosopher of art. I started by wondering about his last years as a time of decline and worrying about his dignity in Hollywood, and I found two of the greatest movies or pieces of art of any kind that I’ve ever seen.
And I love him as a person. What purity and humility. I’m now thinking his self promotion for Wind was performance art. He was showing Hollywood its pretensions and its potential. I’m sure some museum has collected all the unfinished work he made in the final years. All the boring talk of funding. Those fragments are treasured works of art. He used that girl watching sequence from ‘quite a different movie’ in the beginning of Fake. Also the clips with Laurence Harvey. The meditation on Chartres. These pieces stand on their own.
Fake is where we watch him think. Wind is where we watch him look.
These pictures help me understand my own work more. He just was in a state of making art 24/7. He obliterates the very idea of form and paradoxically comes up with something more coherent than any form he destroyed.
He always thought life was the important thing. He said that art is a fancy word for truth.
I thought he was great and he’s greater than I imagined.
I thought I was free and I feel freer after studying him.
He was the greatest Hollywood director and he tossed it aside to be something more. He was the most highly self educated genius and he tossed that aside for more.
He cared nothing for recognition. As with everything else, he used making a living as a medium to express to the world what he thought about it. Everything in life is art.
Vaclav Havel offered the example of Living in Truth, So did Orson.
He encourages me and he is an exemplar. A great person influences the world whatever their outward circumstance.
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I am so thankful for my readers, not only for what you do for me but for who you are in the world. You are open hearted and look for truth and beauty in obscure places. When I communicate with any of you — without exception, I get a sense that you take people for who and what they are. We all need that.
I am grateful that I am doing something right because I attract readers like you.
Here’s some scribbling for you … I want to say something common and corny … I don’t want to worry about making elegant phrases that express nothing but stunted development as a human being — I am not a corporate poet.
Here’s the Hallmark card … we get a limited time to be on the earth. We should spend every second with people we love, and doing what we love. Period.
Any poet or teacher or critic or anyone else who claims status or authority or even just has one person who listens to them has a responsibility to encourage individuals to consciously be precisely who they are and to be happy and proud about their authentic destiny.
I’m sorry for all the hand wringing I’ve ever done. Those moods always arrive when I am noticing how my life is developing and it makes me nervous. I feel like I must write or I’ll go mad. It scares me when I think something will separate me from my words.
But nothing ever does. Everything that happens feeds my words and feeds my life and I am grateful … thankful.
The world is wonderful. Humanity can be whatever we want it to be.
Here’s the truth. I am having a great time.
I want a big indulgent hug with everyone of you, and to scribble kisses all over your faces.
Copyright Richard Thomas 2023
1/27/23: What I Did on my Thanksgiving Vacation
Letter to my friend
You feed yourself so well. Your life in all its grand and granular details. You live the way you read.
I’m up at 4 a.m. with something like acid reflux. I haven’t had this in a long time. I brought it on myself. This is an inheritance from my mother —- both the biology and the psychology. I wrote approvingly of indulgence this week, and I mean what I say!
I’ll bet you’ll like aspects of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon. The battle scenes must be virtuoso filmmaking that will be as meaningful to you as they are lost on me. Joaquin Phoenix makes an interesting acting choice that I didn’t think sustained the movie. World conquest shown as passive aggression.
I knew next to nothing about the actual historical figure going into the film, I googled and streamed around after … Even that cursory look revealed things that I thought would have been interesting in the movie. He wrote a romance novel based on an affair he had pre Josephine. That could have opened more layers of his passionate dynamic with Josephine. Beethoven really admired him until he crowned himself emperor. That would have dramatized the debate about him … did he invent modern Europe or was he a precursor to Hitler? That seems to be the biggest discussion among historians. I think it would be an interesting theme in the movie.
Ridley wanted to do the state of the art battle scenes, and Joaquin fixated on one observation about power, and I think both doubted if the audience would be interested in what more broadly interested them. I suspect they were as intrigued by various facts (or in my case at least, factoids) in the historical record as I was. They are probably right. I’m not in their business, I don’t know.
Saltburn is an art film until near the very end, and then it explains itself to the audience. Emerald Fennel has such an unusual way of looking and she seems to work hard to do her art then button it with commerce so she can film another day. She better be careful though. She might wind up with neither.
Watched Band of Brothers with one of our guests. Four episodes. So well crafted. As in the Napoleon movie, the battle scenes felt repetitive . Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen used a lot of dance numbers, but they always kept the story moving. It might be that basic. Each battle scene had to externalize a change in the soldiers themselves or it didn’t work, no matter how masterfully put together it was.
I read this weekend that 84% of people are victimized by emotional abuse. When I googled more I found many articles that had no tolerance of it in romantic couplings , and many implied that it had to be tolerated to a certain extent in the workplace. It’s a crazy confusion. Everyone takes their work home with them. It’s impossible to compartmentalize one’s nature.
As always, the answers come from the exceptional and not the crowd. Warren Buffet and his fellow nonagenarian partner, Charlie Munger agreed on two things. They had never met a kind person who was unhappy in old age. They knew plenty of rich ones that were. And Charlie added his biggest piece of advice. Get away from toxic people and do it in a hurry.
I had a brush with a narcissist this weekend. I just stepped away, I don’t even remember what happened. I may have joined the 16% who are not afflicted.
Our guests talked about toxicity in the world, unprompted by me. Mike said a very insightful thing. He said his son was victimized in school because he was always in a bigger place than the room that he physically inhabited.
Maybe I’ve always been part of the 16%. Oddly, Mike’s son was being picked on, but that was actually an indication that he had transcended his tormentors. They were wrong of course, and they never took anything away from him.
I’ve felt that too. I have no frustration for what they think they denied me. I had something much better. Mean and envious people say dumb things … I never thought that they were right. They have nothing I would want.
So why did it hurt? It doesn’t any more. They never stopped me. They just made me feel bad. But in real time, or close to it, I saw what they were. I was critical of what they were doing (they were without exception mediocrities at their work, and lousy human beings. In my experience people of excellence and real achievement are usually kind and decent. The mean dumb ones may sometimes have success and status, but they still aren’t very good at what they do … and they are insecure and they know it …) , and I always walked away. There was such pain in the separations and now there is none at all.
I used to care that they would trash me to others because that’s what they do when you leave. They are afraid you’ll call them out. I started doing just that and learned that they can have their narrative and I can have mine, and other people can choose one or the other.
Once again, they never had power to harm me in anyway. The only person they can influence to harm the victim of abuse is the victim themself.
I felt I was split person. The happy creative and productive one and the wounded angry resentful depressed not confident one. The shadow side was an illusion. Meanwhile, back in reality, they never stole a moment of my life from me. The only thing I lacked was a unitary happiness.
They still stress me out in the moment they come near me. It’s like a feeling of jumping out of the way of an oncoming car. A healthy fear and a fierce boundary rises up. Once the danger is averted I catch my breath. And then I forget about it.
Thanksgiving is over. Back to regular hours — writing, dreaming and thinking in my office. I wrote a few pieces even with all of the holiday activities. I’m proud of that. The beat went on. I feel a little more detached from those prosaic tasks too. I tend to the necessary, and necessarily trivial, and my important wheels keep spinning with no distraction.
Writing has over time made me more aware of who I am. I noticed myself during the feasts. I am more comfortably introverted . I like deep interactions and real humor between people. The rest is boring or worse. I can’t be where I don’t belong. It’s impossible now. When I’m with people on a different wave length I prefer not to engage with them. I used to feel unrecognized in such situations. Now I just politely withdraw. I heard an awful lot about local politics in a synagogue on Friday, and I just went to my happy place. I did my time with Catholics and non denominational Christians . I’m not going back there. Same shit. Different theology. Zero regarding spirituality — which does interest me. God is in the street not the house of worship. There was no difference between what they were discussing and conversations I heard in the break areas of telemarketing boiler rooms. Petty unimportant wrangling about imaginary power in places where there isn’t any actual power at all. Insecure posing. They give themselves grand titles —- on the board, chairman, President … and they count folding chairs. They play act at being officers of a major corporation … the house of worship is Barbie’s dream house for business majors who never achieved those silly business major dreams —- Barbie made more sense. She was about actively being who you are. Of course there was an undercurrent of competition and condescension in the business school religiosity. I guess that bothered me until I processed it. Once I did, I disappeared. When I was younger I wanted to argue about religion and politics at Thanksgiving, I was that guy. Now I see that it wasn’t about religion or politics at all. I’m delighted by all of the changes of life … how much bigger can I get before I die? When I practiced law I learned the essential futility of arguing, My person and my writing say what I have to say to the world. I don’t have to go tit for tat.
I connected with two of our guests and didn’t with others. There is a difference between toxic people and people who are just there. It’s OK if they don’t recognize who I am. I’m open to anyone who comes to me, and respectful of anyone who just wants to walk on by. I’d like to help the ones that don’t see me, but I know I can’t. So why fight them? An honest life influences the world in more quiet and far reaching ways than focusing just on one person or event.
I am alone in the public. My community is not limited to the present moment or the immediate vicinity. People and other potential influences are like waves and deeper currents. You stand in the water and the waves splash against you. They dissipate as they run to ground. And every once in awhile a deeper current takes you out to sea on an adventure — when you are ready for it.
And that’s what I did on my Thanksgiving vacation.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
1/27/23: Grant Goes to Work
page 137 … Once Grant assumed command, he changed. He became ‘energized, alert and self-confident.’ Once I started writing every day the same thing happened for me. Maybe even earlier … when I became a lawyer at age 50, I regained a confidence and personal power that I had when I was younger. That confidence matured into a kind of mastery over myself that started when I began to write. I began to criticize a man in his forties today for being a kind of dope. I then reminded myself of my own hard times. Our destiny is not only determined by our character. Grant and I were always of high personal character, and I believe the man that I was unfair to (thankfully only in my own thoughts) is of good character as well. I still haven’t figured out the mystery of adversity. Personal hardship during times of standstill does pay dividends when opportunity finally arrives. I’m not sure how or why this happens. Yes, struggle can tame anger. It can ground a person. But there is much more. I’ve written much more of my difficulties after I came to my power, than of my time when I was in exile from my power.
page 139 … Grant needed external validation to bloom. I relied on self validation. He blossomed when he was out of business and in the military where he belonged. I had a rolling emergence. Lawyer … warm … teacher … a little warmer … improviser … hot and cold …. writer … just right. Grant’s fate did not depend on his fortune. If external validation ignited his rise, external conditions were irrelevant to the formation of his character or destiny. Once a person has the chance to be oneself in full, they can handle anything life throws at them. Positive or negative, it doesn’t matter. Authenticity is a match for triumph and tragedy. Success and failure is for people in exile from themselves. Triumph and tragedy are for people who know who they are, and commit to that knowledge. We don’t really decide to be a general or a businessman. We follow a feeling. We know when something is right, and when it’s wrong. We process our interactions with the world and discover ourselves in that process. The Civil War is a good metaphor for how it always is. All of that death and the actual birth of an actual nation, the United States not the false Confederacy. We are born to glory and suffering. Fools avoid it … but those who are aware and fully alive, wouldn’t have it any other way. Grant knew a war would have to be fought to end slavery long before the Emancipation Proclamation. He understood what would have to be done to right that grave injustice. Grant realized that something more profound than preserving the union was going on. This insight came from a man who was repeatedly humiliated and swindled in business dealings just a couple years before. A wise man is treated as a fool by fools. A large man is treated as small by small men. And then clarity is restored. Where there was frustration, there is progress. It doesn’t become easy. It becomes right.
page 140 … Grant was an honest man. He’d admit that he was scared. How unusual for a military leader. That younger man that I judged too harshly as a dope triggered me because he seems to always be putting a happy face on unhappy circumstances. I don’t know him well enough to know if this is true, but that was my impression. There is no way to wholeness if you lie, even if you white lie to merely save face with dumb people.
Fear was the impetus of Grant’s ‘mastery of the psychology of war’. Fear sharpens one’s powers of observation and insight. Anger is the father of integrity. Depression brings clarity. Melancholy is the beginning of the end of illusion. Doubt presages humility. All of the so called negative emotions are valuable resources in the hands of a master. In order to lead out of darkness, you must first go into darkness without a lamp or a map.
page 142 -143 … Unbeknownst to Grant an influential benefactor secured him a promotion to brigadier general before Grant had engaged a single battle. Grant had not asked for the promotion. His commission as a colonel came out of the blue. Now his ascent to power happened in the same. He began his return to the army with a refusal to be underemployed, and an intolerance for insult and disrespect. He learned to not self promote since it was a humiliating activity that bore no fruit. I never got a thing by searching. Happy and bad Fortune always comes looking for me. I am sure I’ll see her again.
page 147 … Even as a general, Grant was not recognized by many for all that he was. Wide approval is a fairy tale. It comes and goes. What matters is that you know who you are and you are working.
page 151 … Grant made friends slowly and had a small circle of friends. Deep connection mattered more to him than social popularity. Meaningful relationships, meaningful work — these are the fields where person who knows themself fulfills the potentials of their existence.
Next ,,, Grant goes to war
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
11/28/23: I Diverge From the Grant Archetype
Regular readers know I have been tracking Ron Chernow’s biography of U. S. Grant partly as a way to follow Grant’s life journey as a Jungian archetype that I could apply to my own. My inner life and Grant’s were congruent for over 150 pages. Now my road deviates from the great general and President and goes in another direction.
If you have any interest you can read the previous Grant segments to see how I identify with the inner life of the great hero (In kind but not in scope and degree. This hasn’t been an exercise in grandiosity.)
I was with Grant step for step until he received his commission as a colonel at the beginning of the Civil War.
Grant made several inner decisions which prepared him for his great opportunity that I share with him.
He would not tolerate any personal disrespect.
He would not accept under-employment. He would do work worthy of his capacities or none at all.
He learned that self-promotion was not dignified. He would not seek it.
When Grant returned to the army, he was externally validated. He had the opportunity to do what he was born to do because he had a patron Congressman who knew Abraham Lincoln, and because the Union side of the conflict had a dearth of military leaders, so a man who left the Army in the early 1850s under questionable circumstances (as a result of the malice and dishonor of others) could get a chance.
I am self validated. I received my metaphoric military commission when I committed to be being a writer. I got my great opportunity when I didn’t have to have a job any more, and I could dedicate myself to my calling in total and without distraction.
I am a colonel. I have not reached Grant’s status as a general. Grant was very ambitious in his work and so am I.
And now I leave him. Grant had a career. I am an artist. No one is going to pluck me out of the internet and install me as the leading writer. I chose the photo and me and my wife Paula, because the progress of my art will happen in the field of my personal life and not as a career.
Grant broke into society after suffering an exile. He was a great general when he was selling wood in the street. He thought about it every day. A crisis created his way back in to social power. I am never going back in. I am at least 30 years past my time of selling wood in the street (metaphorically). I eventually succeeded in society beyond what Grant had achieved on the eve of the Civil War. He went from being a store clerk to being a general in less than two years. It was a miraculous advance. I was a trial lawyer and a college professor. I achieved social status. I just wasn’t fully doing what I was born to do.
I finally knew that I was a writer when I was 50. I considered law and higher ed as day jobs facilitating my life in art. They worked, providing money and knowledge. I might suggest that anyone who wants to write should be a lawyer and an improviser. (I won’t. Your path is your own.) Even my misbegotten and painful return to the improv world served me. The stages were simply a way to share my writing. Improv was a place where I could engage my spontaneity. Law was a place to enhance my talent for structure and critical thinking. Teaching gave me my best sense of audience when the goal isn’t to entertain. By the time I was working in higher ed, I was committed to writing every day. Writing every day is the way anyone finally learns to write in the manner that they were born to write. (It has to be your way. No one can tell you how to do it.)
I’ve been seriously writing on my blog for about ten years. My writing has improved as I removed the careers that were once part of my identity … first lawyer, then teacher and finally as an improviser.
So I am a colonel. I’ve made it to my army, but I have greater ambition. I don’t write on my blog by choice. I want more. I’d like a much bigger footprint and the challenge of different opportunities and forms. I don’t want to work exclusively alone all of the time.
When I say that my writing is not a career, I don’t mean that I am doing it as a hobbyist. I am not a retired man who likes to paint in a nice little studio in his house between visits from the grandchildren. I am always writing, 24/7. If not at the keyboard, I’m thinking, dreaming … feeling.
I am not going to fulfill my ambitions on a careerist path. That’s not how what I want happens. The people who work with me on various projects, and want to publish me will be my friends — people who I know personally. It won’t work if we don’t love each other.
Personal not professional:
Grant did things his way serving other people’s objectives. I do things my way serving my own objectives.
Grant received professional respect. I require (and receive but want more) human respect.
Grant was employed. I don’t work for anybody.
Grant got his breaks as bolts out of the blue. I get and will get mine by nurturing loving relationships.
Grant was a hero, and I am a sage. He changed the world through action. I change the world by example. Artists leave documents of themselves. They bring new ways of seeing reality. A hero and a sage basically do the same thing. The only difference is a material and practical one. Grant participated. That’s what a great career does. It transforms the world through participation. A sage does not participate. He or she lives in the future. Every artist is ahead of their time. Every hero puts the world on their shoulders and carries it into the new time.
No one is going to reach out to me and offer me a great job. I can’t apply for a job to do what I am already doing. What will happen is that my art will grow … in its breadth and depth and in its reach. Naturally.
Grant had to wait to be anointed leader. That’s how it is with careers. I just have to live my life the way I write. I follow my unconscious.
I never thought I’d marry Paula. I never thought I’d live in Nashville. I can’t even imagine where my writing is going. Who will I connect with? What will my future writing be like? I’ve seen it go through many changes up until this point.
You can’t strategize your way into the unknown. You just have to go there.
This all may seem obvious to some of you. I don’t know. It’s a bit of a breakthrough for me. A piece of me has wondered every day for years. How do I get this writing to more people? How do I get some money for it? I’d like the stimulation of new people and projects. How do I get that?
None of my answers can be found in a business or professional school. They don’t exist in businesses or professions.
I am engaged in something better than business or a profession. I am humbled that I was picked by nature to make art.
Nature will lead me where it wants to go. It would be folly to control it any way.
I must add this — I think my writing is really good, and I sense that it has a destiny. I don’t know what that means, but I think its important.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
11/30/23: Yorgos Lanthimos, More Opie, Charlie Munger — Evil Under the Sunny
Yorgos Lanthimos runs to darkness as fast as Ron Howard runs away from it. Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer goes under the surface. Opie stays worthlessly on top. Sacred Deer involves favored and less favored children (one gets Mommy and one gets Daddy) , a man who’d rather masturbate about his wife than penetrate her, cold courtesy covering up real animosity, black magic exposing the limits of science, vengeance, brutal pagan justice in Cincinnati; Lanthimos’ The Favourite is a competition — who is using who, and the crowning of an unlikely winner. Lanthimos remakes and makes new Greek tragedies. Opie hasn’t grown since The Andy Griffith Show. Genial, kind, polite and promoting evil … Ronnie Reagan denies he is the son of an alcoholic father, calls us back to the days that never were on the lot at Warner Brothers, when a lady writes about hard times he sends her a personal check from the Oval Office as homeless people freeze to death in the streets. Reagan’s torch was passed to Opie as well as many others … The siren song of the sanitized fairy tale. (Pure fairy tales show the nightmares. The ones that sell toys not so much.) Goodness shines light into the dark. Evil says the dark isn’t there. There is no morality if we don’t acknowledge how bad we can be. We can’t be great if we stuff down underground everything that keeps us from greatness. Things get out of hand and we start killing each other. That’s part of what Lanthimos sees. We’re all fucked up and we have to get to our sweet spot. We have to sort out the blessings and curses of nature and nurture. We’re not so wonderful. We have the potential to be wonderful. The first step is to get real.
Letter to a friend
11/29/23
I think he’s fascist, lacks creativity and stupid. It’s not the politics it’s the evil.
Sen. J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy is a fascist.
Fascism is just how middle American hicks do evil.
Evil is always stupid and unimaginative.
You have spent more time with Shakespeare than Ron Howard to your great advantage.
I feel like the asshole is my roommate. I figured out why I look at this tripe. I’m writing about where I come from.
Maybe he’s not a Nazi. Maybe he just sympathizes. Is there a difference? I think there a lot of fascists in America and always have been. A lot of the idiots and assholes I’ve written about are fascists. Some vote for Democrats. You lie and bully for money and power … that’s a fascist ( to the tune of That’s Amore).
Wilford Brimley in Cocoon … ‘we are going to a place where you never grow old and you never die’. If not the denial of death then a sentimental childish promise of eternal life like they do at a Church in Oklahoma. These unpleasant white trash hicks. Wilford Brimley … his brand was bullshit ‘authenticity’. .
All this shit does real harm. Opie has the genial smile and the net result is meanness and ignorance … and pride … Trump is the climax of this shit … I wanted to say culmination but he has successors now.
‘Maybe lack of intellect is sooner or later fascism.’ Yes!
We discussed ignorance I think. We debated what the word meant. Ignorance is a lack of character. You love literature you read. Anything or anyone you care about you give attention. You are humble before your subjects and respect their mystery. You do everything you can to understand and support. You are the opposite of ignorant. Because you have character.
You have a powerful IQ but it’s what’s in your heart that makes you so not ignorant.
A smart person can be ignorant. Like JD Vance. Instead of helping people he manipulates the suckers and steals whatever he can . If someone dies why should he give a shit?
Nothing is more stupid than evil. It’s ultimately all destructive and self destructive.
These people have all the answers and it’s all based on self aggrandizement. mediocrities claiming to be good people. Condescending and attacking anyone different … that’s evil.
Yes, red state but not just red state. I saw a lot of hatchet faces at the New School. Your friend who reflexively goes after white men . Etc
A good thing about Saltburn is that Fennel doesn’t skewer the rich, she includes the middle class. It’s the materialism not who owns what.
Cinderella Man could have been really interesting. He raped that story.
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From another letter to my friend:
11/30/23
I have always looked for the art in the schlock … the gold nugget in the shit gumbo … I’ve found it most often in the great performance… poor actors … they usually elevate material not as good as they are … di Palma includes a visual poem about mortality … the great line here or there … I’m hungrier now for the stuff where the whole thing works … because that’s what I want to do.
The better it is, lately at least, the more challenging. I really had to think and gestate about the late Welles movies. I watched ‘The Killing of a Sacred Deer’ yesterday. I woke up understanding Lanthimos a little better. The good stuff is like getting to know admirable and interesting people. The commercial stuff with a nugget here or there is like seeing potential or admiring what someone can do given their limitations. Of course it’s more satisfying when there are no limits beyond those required by the art itself.
Opie grew up in the business. He’s interested in craft and being a pro. He learned emotional intelligence with cast and crew in Mayberry. He’s had a great career.
But he’s average. Mediocre. I saw just a glimpse of a doc he did on Pavarotti. I thought that you would shoot it in such a different way. He showed a captivated crowd. They could have been listening to Taylor Swift. The shot was a hymn to popularity. How people loved the singer. You would have focused on the truth or lack thereof in the song.
Scorsese showed truth that had been covered up in Flower Moon. Opie hoorayed bullshit that is said a thousand times a day in Cinderella Man.
Figure out what they want and give it them. In a slick professional way.
I’d rather see something crudely put together that is honest than bullshit in a pretty package.
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A Business Management book talks about dealing with toxic people in the workplace. That’s kind of like talking about dealing with racists without recognizing systemic racism. The workplace is toxic. Period. The whole concept of having a boss is toxic. The idea of competition between co-workers is toxic. The value of being profit driven is toxic. Every decision considers selfishness. Quality is something to fight for in the workplace, not a non-negotiable goal. When people love each other they don’t claim authority over each other. They don’t fight to claim superiority. Money is a secondary consideration for those who care. The first consideration is the welfare of all of the stakeholders involved. Business is not an evil unto itself. It becomes evil when it is given primacy. Good business is a way of tending to the practical aspects of creating and caring for people and things. People and the stuff of nature and mankind’s creative impulse are more important than money.
Charlie Munger knew that. He knew darkness and he knew light. He encouraged the latter. Charlie Munger gave this sage advice:
-don’t sell anything you don’t believe in
-don’t work for anyone you don’t admire
-don’t work with anyone you don’t enjoy being with
I’m not a businessman but I translate to my situation.
Rick says:
-don’t compromise what you write
-write for people who are worth it; don’t even think about those who aren’t
-if you collaborate do it with people you enjoy; spend the moments of your life with people you enjoy as much as possible
I watched Sacred Deer to cleanse my pallet after watching Ron Howard. Lanthimos’ movie is odd; weird; different (to me). I can’t stand any more pandering regurgitating mirroring daydreams of the mediocre …
The Banality of Evil (Hannah Arendt). The Mediocrity of Evil, my contemporary update of a phrase. People never reflecting upon anything. Living meaningless lives of nothing but sensation … the bass booming out of the adjacent car, the Muzak Christmas tunes in the men’s room, the car crash sounds bleeding into my tiny auditorium at the multiplex, the yammering of talk radio, the Chicken Little repetitive alarms of the news, chitchat gibberish … idle people, compulsively busy people, snoring on benches or running around like the final jerky motions after some persons die …the stupid furrowed brow of annoyance at any observation that contradicts the bumper sticker that expresses what the morons by choice think about any topic, the lack of curiosity, the fear of the unknown, the belief that education is only relevant to earning a living …
If someone is in a forest and never noticed that they were alive, would they be alive at all?
The unexamined life is not only not worth living. It never gets lived..
Evil is negation. There is nothing more nihilistic than ignoring darkness because it ignores half of what life is. We have to deal with our nature and the nature of the world in full.
Every time there is the dissemination of some sentimental claptrap, a demon gets its wings.
It’s not only Ron Howard. He’s just a good example.
Is evil beyond individuals? Mankind living like an asshole, a big asshole at the center of the universe. A few individuals break away. I have. You may have. Probably if you read this far. But the dummies haunt us. Our type wants to save them. But we can’t.
Some of this consideration can be filed under enlightened self interest. We imagine the world. I’m fed up of sitting with the remedial class. That impatience is a good thing.Something has to change. Something has to give.
I reject all of the night crawlers that have rejected me. I don’t feel hurt or wounded. It would be like being offended by a mosquito. I’m not defensive or getting back at anybody. I’m not justifying myself. I’m not telling them off. I don’t admire one of them. Not in whole. Not in part. I don’t envy them. Are you kidding? Pity is more like it. I’m not angry. They are too far away now to make me mad. I’m overwhelmed by what a mess they’ve made. Of their lives. Of other lives. Of the world. I’m not going to call them evil. Ron Howard isn’t evil. I don’t want to dehumanize anyone. They embrace evil. They play in the fields of evil. They do nothing. Some have many activities, but none have action. Trivial. A black hole of nothing. Wasting time until the Apocalypse. Selling other people on being the walking dead.
Nothing can be accomplished with these wretches writhing on various rings of hell. Deliver them from evil? They know not what they do? They should start thinking about what they are doing. But they won’t. They just won’t. Some of them will but fresh idiots will rush in and assume their positions. There are so many people who care about nothing that matters. You can’t do anything for them. They either pull themselves out of it or they drown in their own vomit.
I’m not disappointed. I’m proud. And grateful. If I die tonight, I’ll die complete. I made it out alive.
I am where I want to be, on the far side of the cavalcade of chaos. Immune from the tragicomic condescensions of Zombieland. Sorting out dark from light.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
12/2/23: May December (2023) — Truth and Mystery
Seen on the supermarket wall: Just Smarter.
Years after scandal, there is, apparently, blissful striving. A lovely home on the water in Savannah, Georgia. The real life protagonist of the real life scandal was the daughter of a right wing John Bircher, and the sister of a platoon of right wing radical brothers. One was a soldier of fortune with the mercenary corporate criminal, Blackwater. Many years after seven years in jail, and with her husband that she met when she taught him in the seventh grade, she lived surrounded by inherited affluence. The movie wisely doesn’t mention her fascist upbringing. It just shows the attendant money she received because of it, through its fictional, not based-on-a-true-story, story. Fiction reveals the actual perverse consequences of her exposure to evil. We join her after she is used to her freedom from want, and humiliation and hardship have disappeared from her daily existence, but darkness lurks in subterranean regions far beneath the surface. It just shows the uses of blood money, in its fictional, not based-on-a-true-story, story. Fiction reveals the actual perverse consequences.
An actress character played by Natalie Portman, appears in the true make believe. She’s researching the fictional sex offender portrayed by Julianne Moore, and her world, decades after the crime. Husband, children, ex-husband, friends, former co-worker — are all touched by what happened.
A friend of Moore’s character tells the actress to, ‘be kind’. The actress has no intention to do so. She has an artistic ambition — THE artistic ambition — to get to the truth. She studies tabloids and looks to elevate their salacious malice to complex literature. Who is the human who wears the scarlet letter? The actress will make her into a fool, a villain, a heroine — a combination of all three, something else, or — whoever. She just wants to get it right, even if her initial inclination is to condemn her. She desires to break out of episodic TV to do more interesting projects, but her true ambition is far deeper than that. She is drawn to a story, and she wants to make art out of it. She doesn’t know why she is a moth to the felon’s flame. She is quite sure of her ability to make something out of her odd impulse. The actress think she is secure. We think we are all sorts of things.
The score is from the Joseph Losey movie, The Go -Between. Palme d’or at Cannes, 1971.
Some reviews of the film say it makes the audience uncomfortable. The observation is intended as praise. The filmmakers challenge social attitudes about pedophilia that are generally considered too taboo to doubt or question. I wasn’t uncomfortable. I am disgusted by pedophilia. That crime is nearly murder. It erases lives. But … it wasn’t that long ago, maybe in my great-grandparents’ era, that 12 was a marrying age. History is filled with child brides that merged kingdoms, human sacrifices that formed empires. The beloved family musical, Fiddler on the Roof features a loving father who almost gives his young daughter’s hand in marriage to an old man. She is saved by the onset of modernity. In the 1950s, old men like Bing Crosby and Gary Cooper were cast with young ingenues like Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn in big screen romances. Creative men like Charlie Chaplin, and Woody Allen were admired in not so distant futures by many for having very young wives.
This formerly permissive attitude towards older men’s sexual involvements with mere girls, has rarely extended to older women and mere boys. One of May December’s director, Todd Haynes’, major influences, Douglas Sirk, subversively paired a mature Jane Wyman, and a young man, hardly a child, Rock Hudson, in his classic film, 1955’s All that Heaven Allows. That movie focused on harsh societal disapproval for an older woman in love with a younger male. Todd Haynes, addressed forbidden liaisons in his retro melodrama Far From Heaven in 2002, a story of gay and interracial couplings, and their attendant social condemnations, in the 1950s.
Portman’s character wonders why the predator (Is she a predator? ) feels no shame, but that query is only narrative exposition. This movie is much smarter than that. It’s up to something far more interesting. (Smart art is so much more engaging than dumbed down entertainment. Meanwhile over on Max, The Gilded Age has a sister avoids estrangement with her closest living relative and friend. On another Max series, Julia, older people have great sex. Those happy things happen. They are commonplace occurrences, and true enough. Those shows don’t court evil like Ron Howard’s lies — (see my most recent past segments), but they don’t interest me anymore, and haven’t for some time. I don’t want to be pacified. Are you as bored by the happy talk as I am? It’s not just because I want to jazz things up. I want to see the world as it is. Nothing real happens when we avoid the darkness. We all have to deal with our own, and if we love the world we have to look at it in other people too.)
Side note: I read that this movie is funny. I don’t find that it to be funny at all, but I don’t doubt that people with a different cultural experience than mine find this show campy and hilarious.
Shame and camp are not what May December is actually about, however. They are ultimately side attractions. The movie is about boldly, diligently and fearlessly observing a subject with a full commitment to the truth, and painstakingly looking for nuances, complexities and gray areas. It’s about learning that you never can comprehend the whole truth; and that the farther you go into your explorations, the deeper you go beyond truth into mystery.
The actress character was unconsciously attracted to the sex offender because she was attracted to the felon’s power to use and dominate others. Moore’s character ended up controlling the Portman’s as she controlled everyone else in her life. Her right wing bullying father and brothers taught her to rape (in the broadest sense of that word) by example.
This was the surprise revelation of the actress character’s project. She thought she could exploit the situation. She assumed that she was smarter and more powerful than the exhibitionist sucker, the tabloid patsy. The actress wound up being more manipulated than the supposed mark that she targeted to mine for provide raw material to use in the construction of a brilliant character.
For her part, the sex offender reveals to the audience, if not to anyone else in the story, that she may be, at least unconsciously, tiring of her predations calculated to get what she thought she wanted. but what are actually a mad reaction, for and against, what her father wanted her to desire.
Portman’s character is told that the sex offender was molested by her brothers. She later learns it wasn’t true. The criminal woman’s life was ruined by far more subtle abuses. (I speculate, but I’m pretty sure this is the way it was: the fascist violence and condescension that she was raised with … the paternal and fraternal messages that she should have power over others, were offered in tandem, with the contradictory, and often simultaneous, demand that she adhere to strict limitations on what a woman is allowed to do with her power … her reactions to these demented demands condemned her to her freakish destiny.)
It’s a little harder than condemning the crazy, the sinful and the anti-social, isn’t it?
It’s complicated, nuanced and you’ll never fully understand.
The consequences of not trying to understand? To not attempt to elevate our individual and collective destinies? Collateral damage.
Character is destiny, and some of us have a more difficult road to personal decency, but everyone is complicit in all of the indecency of the world.
Truth and mystery.
The seventh grader never grew up to be a man. A life of free choices was stolen from him. He’s never been loved. Portman’s actress leads him on and then quickly drops him to research what its like to make love to someone in middle school and get away with it. Moore’s actual predator doesn’t want to address the panic and depression of her man boy husband, in other words love what he has become and is becoming, as it dawns on him that he was used as a tool in her pathology and never experienced love or even real attraction.
No work of art is ever finished. No relationship with another person is ever defined. This movie gives answers, then yanks them away. Answers are always temporary. Each answer is a plateau from which to reach higher to the next question.
No spoiler alerts are needed here. You will see a different picture when you watch. I will see a different one the next time that I do.
There was one thing I said when I was a teacher that I like. ‘There are no tendencies.’ It’s not so much about being able to define who we are, it’s just living out that feeling where we are who we are. There are a lot of surprises. And constant change.
Up next — The Go Between.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
12/4/23: More on ‘May December’ (2023)
New insights:
Director Todd Haynes used Michel Legrand’s 1971 score to The Go-Between because of its insistent sense of melodrama. It’s a major reason why so many people think this movie is, among other things, hilarious. For example, the music indicates impending doom, and then Julianne Moore intensely states that her family doesn’t have enough hot dogs for a barbecue they are hosting. Shortly thereafter we see long lines of hot dogs on a grill.
I understand why I didn’t sense humor on the first three viewings. Haynes choice of the Legrand score works on many levels. He satirizes the whole idea of melodrama while also seeing it as a major descriptor of the emotional lives and psychologies of his characters. Those hot dogs were totems, like so many other things and actions in the film, of Julianne Moore’s defiant demand that she dominate her world until it submissively believed that she is normal and enjoying a successful life on her and society’s terms, in spite of the humiliation of her tabloid infamy and her years in prison.
I am just going to refer here to the characters of May December by the names of the actors who portray them. As the film, through its score and otherwise, accomplishes melodrama and satire in the same moment, it also points to the individuals who lived the actual scandal, the fictional characters in the screenplay, and the actors playing the fictional characters in the screenplay, including one, Natalie Portman, who is an actor playing an actor playing a fictional character inspired by a real life person.
The movie is, in part — it is about many things that it explores broadly and deeply — a meditation on art, specifically the art of acting. Natalie Portman uses a trained and intelligent acting method while attempting to accomplish her objective of creating a true, complete, and complex portrait of Julianne Moore. The story uses that process to say much more than observations about the nature and essence of what it is to act in performance on film or TV or in the theater.
But it does say truth about what it is to act. We see Natalie Portman act the part of a mature actor and in so doing reveal that character as a human being. Her human limitations are her limits as an actor as well. Real life — a fictional story — acting the fictional story — being limited in that acting by human limitations — acting being limited by human limitations … The actors in their real life persons are the outer shell of something like Russian nesting dolls …
I noticed these layers in all the actors of this superlative cast. Maybe because Charles Melton is new to me, I saw it first in him. Todd Haynes said that Melton played his role like an old man and like a little boy at the same time. Einstein wrote, ‘For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion … ‘ The same is true for this person who believes in art. And … art and physics are just different languages exploring the same meaning.
Actors create specific characters by virtue of their ability to access the universe in all of us.
More Einstein: ‘A human being is part of the whole called by us universe; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and his feelings as something separate from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of consciousness.’
The players in Hamlet, Hamlet’s ghost, ‘to be or not to be’ … optical delusions of consciousness, illusions of past, present and future … May December, me writing about May December, and Shakespeare and Einstein … acknowledging that we are the universe, and that we have a deluded consciousness of being that is limited by our perspective in time and space, a paradoxical sense of existing as one being and all being at the same time. The identities that we lavish so much attention on are works of art — fictions. We are just points in an infinite expanse and even the concept of a ‘point’ is illusory.
Artists, and physicists, speak for the universe with the awareness that we don’t have the powers of perception to comprehend all that there is — so we make our art (and physics) out of the illusory stuff available to our make believe limited perspectives in order to toss ourselves and others out of ourselves and others to experience the All. We can’t comprehend the All. It’s not even meant to be comprehended. But we can experience it. When we fully experience the All, that experience is the inspiration for our illusions — our art, our lives, and the art of our living.
Shakespeare again: ‘We are the stuff that dreams are made of … ‘ Where do those dreams come from?
My writing, and all art, comes from my (or your or the) unconscious, something beneath the optical delusion of consciousness.
May December comes from the unconscious. No one could reason themselves to putting all of these pieces and their many layers together.
Einstein said, ‘I am enough of an artist to draw freely on my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.’
That great work of imagination, the Bible, deals with the limited delusion of knowledge. It’s the major theme. Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge and fall from Paradise, and then the rest of the epic involves mankind trying to get Paradise back.
Life, as the truism goes, is what you make it. The world has no meaning. It has the meaning we give to it. All of the characters of May December, the real life people that inspired the characters, and the actors who play the characters and the other filmmakers who created the characters with them — writer, director and more, and the audience members who saw the movie, and you and me — we all know our conscious optical delusions. Those delusions determine our perceptions of our experiences, not our experiences themselves. The unconscious speaks to our imaginations and our imaginations create new illusions that are closer to the universal truth. The more our delusions near congruence with universal reality the more fulfilled we are.
We take the stuff of what we think are our lives, and fashion life rafts back to Eden. Or we drown in our minds and get back there without being aware that we made it home. It doesn’t make any difference at all, except to how we feel about ourselves and how we make other people feel as well.
Natalie Portman’s actor character wound up in the same less imagined place as Hamlet. Natalie Portman, the actual actor arrived where Shakespeare and Einstein’s minds are.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
12/6/23: Life After Healing From The Trauma of Repetitive Bullying
After healing from the trauma of being bullied repetitively … when you are healed and safely far away … when your thoughts rarely visit where the pain used to be … you stand before a new void …
The healing takes a long time … the memory of the trauma slowly fades away … you are watching TV and a character says something that brings you back to a moment of excruciating humiliation or betrayal or slander …
That type thing happens over and over again … the bad memories gradually become less vivid … the intervals between when the wounds reopen become longer and longer …
Then finally you can’t remember much at all. If someone innocently brings up a reminder of a formerly nasty episode, you have to work at refreshing your recollection to know what they are talking about.
You’ve lost your internal monologue. You are happy to have this selective amnesia …
You are happy to have amnesia. You aren’t lonely. But your life has been far more than just being bullied. You have a big vacancy inside you where the bullies used to be.
Come on, boy or girl … you know what is good for you, and what good feels like … you have it now … your greedy in a noble way … you want more!
Freedom from being bullied and transcending its after effects is like getting an inheritance … you have more soul capital to invest … how do you do it?
Who to relate to and how to relate …
The unconscious whispers …
You have a little more to learn about being bullied.
A bullying episode triggers something like a divorce that is resting on legitimate grounds for the disillusion.
Not a no fault divorce. A divorce where one side harmed the other.
The other party was at fault. You did nothing wrong. It wasn’t your problem. The time for empathy and argument is long over. Their envy and insecurity, their craving for unjust power, were reasons for their cruelty, but you don’t care anymore. It’s not a choice. Nothing to do with your will. It’s a fact. You feel nothing … positive or negative. You can’t change them and you can’t control them. You can’t even judge them. Karma is a bitch. They’ll get what they deserve. Even if they see the light and give up bullying, it’s over between you and them. You are too many degrees of enlightened beyond them for them to ever be a good fit for you again. You now want something much more than even an improving they could ever be.
The maliciously betrayed ultimately reject the bullies who playacted rejection of the superior person. The bully is never the one who leaves. They wanted you to stay so they could make you suffer and use you to seem powerful. They wanted to live in your head. When they disappear from your thoughts, the bullies disappear from your life forever. They don’t contact you. You don’t run into them. You don’t hear about them from people you know who know them. You’ve moved to a world where they don’t exist.
Two aspects to a righteous divorce. The plaintiff was mistreated
And the situation was untenable.
There is no real loss in divorce. The partnership wasn’t right anyway. (Don’t tell me about time. Live in eternity. You can’t lose a person or thing that belongs to you. If somebody didn’t love you, someone else will. If the bully turned people against you, the ones who are meant for you will be back. If you were blocked from writing your book, you’ll get every line you have inside of you down before you die … and if you don’t you’ll inspire someone else to carry the torch on … you were living in full every moment the bullies made you miserable … you just didn’t know it. Love is there whether you know it or not.)
(Regrets are illusions.)
After divorce is rebirth. The baby smiles in its crib. Who to connect to? (It’s a precocious baby! A savant! Yoda!) You meet a couple of new-to-you abusers and remove yourself before damage is possible. You’ve learned your lessons well, Grasshopper. You meet a few people who are fine.
Fine isn’t good enough.
Fine people are fine, but they don’t rock your world. And that is the clue. If the partner (and all you do — your art, your job, the way you live your life ) … if every person place and thing trying to occupy space in the passionate section of your being, doesn’t fly you to the moon … don’t bother.
The people who are fine deserve your respect and kindness. Be a good neighbor, citizen, do your civic and civil duty.
But you need, must have, more than just fine. Fine isn’t your life. It’s just a way of going around town without drawing unwanted attention to yourself.
Your life must be lived with who and what turns you on.
Knowing the abuse has stopped and more importantly that the old match was far from heaven happens, and then you wake up from the dream of history —- you are past the past … and open.
You switch from eHarmony to Match … or however special people meet in 2023 … you go where the progressive partners are …
You do it by being yourself. The thing about those old school dating sites: You didn’t search. You didn’t sell. If you chose to be honest —- and if you want to get anything and anybody worthwhile you better be honest … every step of the way —- you just put yourself out there … your true self … and you saw the other’s true self … and you connected …
Bullies punish you for being yourself … people who love each other celebrate each other …
The story of the good marriage after the bad one, or the right livelihood after doing what your parents wanted you to do, or making art after suffering in advertising or entertainment, is the story of transcending bullying,
Being bullied was never your fault. It was your opportunity to learn more about yourself.
After bullying is the time when you finally find yourself (fully) in the world. (You have been in the world. Only now you know it all the time. The time when you were bullied is part of who you are. It’s beautiful. It’s useful. The fact you went through it makes you know how to be even better at loving others, and even better when they love you.)
What’s next?
!
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
12/8/23: Something resembling PTSD, a gift to the writer and reader
I wrote to my wise, brilliant and kind friend that I thought I might have PTSD, or something resembling it — I mean I googled around, what do I know from a clinical point of view. But I do know from the perspective of just feeling something is not right.
My friend the genius basically told me or reminded me that all art involves something like PTSD. Art processes pain, and magically and counter-intuitively that process brings peace and joy. I am not going to directly quote him here because the passage in his reply email was so good, and said so much more than I am sharing here, that he could disseminate it widely if he so desired.
One brief letter from my friend, and I realized that I don’t need a therapist. The current work is about writing, not effectively functioning otherwise in the world. This is a job for Art, not Medicine or Social Work.
As I have recently summarized, and over the years have described in great detail, I have been repeatedly bullied in several venues. The cumulative affect of all the slanders, betrayals, insults, humiliations — of all the times I’ve been treated as if I were invisible, all the moments that I have been told to shut up and/or been unjustly criticized, cheated out of what I earned, condescended to … has created a sense of near constant abuse for years of my life.
I am far from alone. Every artist has suffered great trauma. Every person has as well, but all people don’t have the capacity to express what they’ve gone through in some creative form. All people, can however be healed and transformed through engaging art as audience.
It might not be from bullying, but we all suffer in individualized ways. Art is actually superior to psychology in dealing with these wounds. The concept of PTSD for example is too generalized, at least for my purposes and maybe yours. Everyone has their own pain, their own gifts, their own one of a kind natures, and their own difficulties. We tell each other our stories and get comfort from not being alone, and also share wisdom with one another.
I feel that an artist must be a person of the future. That’s a major tenet in my personal philosophy of art. It is my job to try to be an example for better times and for better lives. For this reason, I don’t fictionalize my writing. It doesn’t seem honest when I try it, for one thing. I enjoy fiction as an audience member, but it isn’t my way. Who would I be kidding? My life is imagined, I don’t need to give you imaginary characters. My writing is a document of my life in all its internals and externals, and I am not conforming to the general misery that we call society or the economy or the Homeowners Association or the YMCA.
Of course my righteous refusal to conform is one of the biggest reasons that I have been bullied so often. The herd doesn’t tolerate difference. The autocratic idea is to clump together in a mob for safety and for God sakes don’t stand out. Mob rule or Fearless Leader, the effect is the same.
A related big reason is my transparent vulnerability. I tell my story. Someone asked me recently why I share everything on the blog. They worry too much about what other people think. I think differently than many other people, and for me to make any contribution to the world, I have to live in that difference — for the other people like me, just like all the great artists and friends that have shared themselves with me, and quite literally saved me, like my friend who stepped in at a dark moment last night.
Even though I don’t care what anyone uninterested in the better future thinks, I still have suffered from their assaults and batteries.
In my last segment, I came to the realization that I had fully processed all of the many occasions that I have been battered by bullies. Every one of them. I made art about each instance, or at least each instance in the last twenty years. I could go back before that in my story, and I might if its appropriate, but, for example, I got to the bottom of my relationship with my father through many experiences that I had in the world of work.
I was unpleasantly surprised that the next morning I had agitating thoughts about some abuse I took from a person that I know is a loser. I use that word purposefully. He is a failure in society’s eyes which means nothing to me, and he is a failure as a human being. Instead of looking at himself and propaganda that he has been fed that misrepresents what life and true achievement is, he is a mean sniping little shit, trying to drag others to his level, or better yet, lower than his level so he can feel like a big man. I know all this. So why am I upset still again?
My thoughts could have gone to this person or many others. The wound is beneath the specific example. It’s all the same wound. It is as if I had been physically beaten over and over for years, and now I had a permanent sharp pain that flared up when I moved a certain way. I noticed last night that I may never have had a day in my life that I didn’t suffer the agitation I had when I thought about that loser.
That pain is never going to go away. I can cope with it. I can let it not dominate my life or deny me happiness. But I will always have this suffering arise when triggered by one otherwise innocuous event or another. And even when I don’t actively feel the pain, it will be unobtrusively aching in the background.
Writing is a process of leaning into pain and finding release. I’m not wise. I don’t understand. I work for wisdom and understanding. You overhear me talk to myself. You talk to yourself while you read. Separately and together we work on life.
PTSD came to my mind yesterday, because for me the time of being bullied is over. The trauma has ended, but the stress phase began long ago.
Here’s the letter that I wrote me friend before he quickly came to the rescue. He was out having a nice evening with his wife and he responded faster than a paramedic. I’ve added some parenthetical comments today. I understand a bit more this morning than I understood last night:
12/7/23
I think I might be suffering PTSD from the repetitive bullying and I have been suffering PTSD for a long time with periods, sometimes long periods, when I get it together. (My friend showed/reminded me that my condition didn’t need a clinical approach. When I think about art, my balance returns. I don’t need therapy — he didn’t suggest anything one way or another on that, but I know. Nothing is ever going to relieve this chronic pain. Damage has been done, but that damage is a great gift. It’s one of my great assets as a person and as a writer. The suffering is a big part of what I have to offer the world. Someone told me, uncritically and in a spirit of acceptance, that they thought I was interested in being alone with myself and had little concern for other people. The opposite is true. I write all of this for other people. I think writing and other arts does more for the world than all of the social workers and do-gooders combined. Art is where we learn how to live life. Art has a pedagogical function far more advanced than any teaching. Often I feel like I’d like to put the writing aside and just live. It always pulls me back in. This isn’t art therapy. I’m coping — therapeutic word — with the challenge of being fully alive. Writing keeps me sane and it, on a good day, leads the world to greater sanity.)
I’ve put on weight. It started with the holidays but it’s depression. (Oh how honest … my weight fluctuates (up) when I get depressed, and that is not that infrequent of a circumstance. Why do I reveal so much? It just gives an opening to the bullies. Oh the big bad bullies. And what about the people that I could impress as being constantly happy and successful? The ones who always smile for their professional headshots or with their kids or friends in a restaurant or at a waterpark. Why am I depressed? Because we are mostly finished setting up our new house in Nashville. I love it. I’m happy with the family. But I am stuck sharing my writing on Facebook. I love my readers but I want a bigger venue. I’ve been doing it for ten years. Much of my depression is just self pity. I’m very fortunate. I have gotten all sorts of financial, emotional, spiritual and intellectual support for my writing. I sit hoping for a big break, which is stupid. Fat and stupid. How do you like me now? I know what to do. Keep writing and keep spying for open doors to get my writing out there. Many of those attempts haven’t worked. Sometimes there have been bullies behind those doors. So what … I just have to keep going. I’m a tough and resilient son of a bitch, and I’m blessed by people like my friend that are gifted at triage whenever I stumble.)
I read an article online, hardly a basis of a diagnosis. But it’s a toe in the water to explore. (Yes — and when you explore you never know what you are going to find. I thought I might be looking for a head-shrinker today. Instead I found a new gear of writing.)
I persistently re-experience events. At first I said I was digging. But there is nothing else there. (I dug to the bottom of each attack.) Just bad memories. (It’s not the memories. They’re focused on the trauma and that’s over. Now I’m dealing with the stress. Every memory ends in the same feeling. The bullies changed me forever. I am no longer who I was born to be. That kernel of true nature has been changed by nurture and assault. The pain of being bullied can be very useful. It makes me more than I would have been if it never happened. Well, the bullying itself doesn’t make me bigger. It’s what I do with the experience.)
The article says heightened startled reactions are a symptom of PTSD. I’m jumpy. More than a little. I get irritable quite a bit. I don’t have panic attacks but I get nervous and then calm down. (PTSD? These behaviors are also symptoms of the creative process. It takes balls to create. It’s an act of aggression. When I have to write I have to push the bullies out of my way. I get pissed. I refuse to stay quiet and feel bad — which is just what they want. Of course I am aggravated. I’ve had a lifetime of being called a lazy failure, by people who don’t come close to me in terms of hard work and achievement. And I am pissed at, and distrustful of the world for good reason. I don’t deserve a bigger readership? When I see all of the tripe that’s out there? And then it’s my fault that I haven’t delivered my gifts to a wider audience? Please. In arrogant times, people who have an obligation to bring real leadership to people fail to do so. They are impressed with everything that doesn’t matter. But I see a lot of good stuff out there, and that inspires me to keep trying.)
I do some strategies. Mindfulness and meditation. Yes. Part of my writing process. (Most of my writing process is meditating and being mindful. The tapping of the keys is the last step.)
Finding meaningful relationships. I try. (I am blessed with great meaningful relationships and I’ve developed a bullshit detector that warns me about fool’s gold.)
Live in a safe and supportive environment. I have that. (I’m materially blessed. Abundance of love and all of my needs are met. I really didn’t start rolling as a writer until these needs were met. One bully tactic is to try to push me back down there. They lie about me like I was a homeless person. They want to show me as unable to care for myself. And I am far better off than they are. This is a way that they like to destroy people. Again I see it. That trauma is over, but I still have residual stress from that particular ugliness.)
Finding meaning in a ‘career. ‘ I got meaning from my writing for a long time but now I want more out of it. (See above.)
I’m thinking of therapy but I’m leery. I want to get a good one. (I am no longer thinking of therapy. I’m leery of everything. Now a lesser therapist might say that I am isolating myself from people. Not so. I let relationships develop. I know how they can bless and how they can harm. I try to avoid lousy books and movies. The same is true for people I associate with. I’ve done therapy in the past . Got some OK ones, got some bad ones. But I don’t need a bad one fucking with my writing. Or being the tsk tsk of the collective when I’m looking for the future. A good therapist helps lead you to yourself. A bad one tries to have you get with the program of the rotten system. I don’t need either one of them. Art is bigger than good therapy, and bad therapy is just another bully.)
Getting in shape and getting a handle on putting my writing or something meaningful in the world would do as much. (I want a next step for my writing. I want to lose weight. Nothing magical about these issues. One day at a time. Work.)
Thanks for listening. I’ve been in a dark time since the house was set up and I haven’t known it. (See above.)
For all my writing, I don’t think I’ve known how bad what I’ve gone through was. It was really bad. Nothing small. (I didn’t recognize until the last night the severity of my injuries.) It’s over , but the PTSD is still here. (No it isn’t. Just the ‘S’.) I haven’t admitted to myself how much I’ve been hurting. Some things I’ve done have been healthy. Some have just been coping mechanisms. Some things have been destructive. (That’s life.)
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
12/9/23: Bingeing ‘The Morning Show’ Season One
This is an entertaining show.
All of these people should’ve quit this network in the first episode.
Innocent people get molested. Trauma ensues. Mortal sin— doing wrong and knowing it’s wrong — abounds.
Mitch thought he could fuck whoever he pleased because he was powerful. Then society changed the rules on his watch. ‘So unfair,’ says Mitch, but he knew he was hurting people. That didn’t stop him. The rules mattered. Kindness did not. Inhumane business. Capitalism is falling in the same manner that Communism did. Indecent transactions of the economy infect the comings and goings of relationships between human beings. The pursuit of success impedes the pursuit of happiness. Every increase of money and/or power for its own sake diminishes every individual’s humanity and the general wellbeing. Mitch’s ersatz sexual conquests were as forced and manufactured as his big corporate birthday party. Affection or even lust had nothing to do with it. Gratification as currency, transaction, office political maneuver. Sad and pathetic Sex without desire or interest of the other parties. Ejaculation as a corporate perk. Copulation as an expression of insecurity Contempt for his partners. Intercourse as condescension. Everybody isn’t interested in anybody, not even themselves. All are human sacrifices to their trophies. Fulfillment isn’t the point. The Culture of Nihilism. Everything of value is expendable in order to possess the upper hand for a moment. The capitalists claim to want power and relevance in order to serve. Service is always thrown under the bus for condescension.
Mitch doesn’t want to see himself as a sexual predator like his pervert friend, the movie director. The possibility of that awful self-image troubles his ego first, and then awakens his conscience (a little). The conscience is only heard when it is useful for the ego’s purposes. Mitch traded his intelligence and decency for a dim amoral superficiality that gave him money, power, status and an unlimited supply of servile ass. One woman thinks that they love each other, but that’s her illusion and error. Mitch’s capacity to love atrophied long ago. And she wanted it both ways. She wanted the status and the love to tie for first place. It doesn’t work that way. After his fall from power, Mitch’s biggest concern at first was losing his professional reputation. His second biggest concern was losing his self image as a white knight journalist — the appearance of service. He says nothing to or about her. He never thinks of her. He does nothing for her. Mitch can be sentimental and charming, but he doesn’t even consider love in his daily life. He doesn’t love his wife, his children, his work (he wants what it gives him, but he compromised it for fame, wealth and power), and he certainly doesn’t love his sex partners. The many women are oddly unimportant to him. They are a perk of his elevated position in his ‘industry’. I don’t think he even enjoyed the sex.
Should I have sympathy for Mitch? If so, not for his loss of popularity, dominion and even agency, leading to his lonely pariah status in his Italian villa. His suffering began during his illusory stay at the top of the world. He tells one of the junior women executives that he consumed, ‘I’m important and you are an assistant to an assistant. What else would I want from you but sex?’ He even lost at being a cruel asshole. The naive low status woman was far superior to him. She was vulnerable and inexperienced, but she understood that that people could be attracted to other people as human beings, and the consummation of that true feeling could make them happy. In spite of Mitch’s failure, she killed herself. Cause of death … taking the condescensions of a fool to heart. Mitch didn’t want that, and he felt bad about it. Mitch wasn’t ultimately malicious. He was reckless.
A large part of the entertainment value of this show is the pathetic glamour. I want to write the word pathetic in every sentence about The Morning Show. The celebrity, the money , the big living spaces , the clothes, the attractive people … Success porn … the makers and viewers share the same delusion … it’s all a mirage … I enjoy it in a different way … it reaffirms all of my choices … the lousiness of everything about these people … for art as opposed to this entertainment, I prefer ‘The Sweet Smell of Success’, made at a time, 1957. when there was no sympathy for perversion … That movie doesn’t wonder about what the villains are going through, it wonders about what they are. One louse wakes up to his humanity and changes his ways, and the other sleeps in his own vomit, which is par for the course.
Everyone involved in the making of this show should quit show business. They should quit all business. The real life bosses and stars of the production should stop bossing and starring because they blew the lid off of the terrors and horrors of bossing and stardom. These intelligent and talented people see what time it is. They should apply that insight to their lives instead of this admittedly diverting soap opera. Exploit, manipulate, compete — for what? Yes, some of them get big karmic blowback … punishment for their sins in this world, before they get to the next.
But wait there’s more. Not only does success ruin the soul. It’s not worth it for the body either. The so-called rewards suck. The house in Malibu, the penthouse apartments, the clothes, and excitement … who needs them? Who wants them? Fools. Worse than fools. Addicts. They aren’t addicted to stuff. They need the fear of living that manifests itself as boredom, and many of them need to look down on others because deep inside they suspect that they aren’t that much.
I prefer to look at The Morning Show as a vehicle to appreciate my own life in the alternative. My life indicts theirs. I had no intention to indict them. I am just living. But I de facto indict. My very being is my suit of armor. Who I am protects me from being one of them. I couldn’t waste my life as they waste theirs if I tried. They consistently want me to bow and be a serf in their fantasy world. But I know that I am a king in my own. it infuriates them that I don’t curry their favorable assessment of who I am. They should worry about what I think of them.
I love our little house, and our little family and my little blog with my little segments. These shinier characters are nasty and sad and feel guilty. They paradoxically are loaded with acumen, how cleverly and fiercely they play their game, but they weren’t smart or brave enough to forego the game altogether.
I’m not being competitive. My life is better and my work is better. I’m happier and smarter and yes, more talented than they are. No brag, just fact. My way is better than theirs … by a mile. I’ve heard a lot from them my whole life. My last ten years of writing and counting is my turn. I’m right. They’re wrong.
Success is a pig in a poke. That’s one of my themes —- the life and death denial of success. I’ve said a lot on the subject, but I may have buried the lead. Success isn’t any fun.
Cory thinks all humans are disappointing, there is no use leaving a toxic situation, it’s just same shit different place down the road. He convinces others to wallow in the nihilistic muck where he feels like he thrives.
He’s wrong. All of life in The Morning Show world is PTSD, until … you realize that there is a whole world without trauma. You get to that world and stress disappears eventually too. I write a lot about being bullied. I am writing to understand the pseudo-world that I retreated from a long time ago. Sure the residual effects haunted me for awhile, but they’ve now gone away. A miraculous thing happens. The remnants of stress disappear too.
I got away from the bullies because I always honored my heart. I never played their game. I did what I wanted from the beginning. All troubles begin when people ignore the dictates of their own hearts and follow the siren call of seduction, or capitulate to the demeaning violence of coercion. Buddha saw it. Fear and desire screw everything up. None of the characters of The Morning Show are who they were born to be. If they read about Buddha, or anyone or anything like him (maybe The Rick Blog?) they didn’t get it. They call reflection weakness because introspection scares the shit out of them. So they sign their lives up for a reverse mortgage. The truth lives in the shadows, the lie shows itself in the glaring light. They can’t run from the truth of who they are. Success culture is a ride in a white Ford Bronco. They can run, but they can’t hide.
I binge watched this show last night with no negative ideation over past slights, no irritability and nervousness. There are gradations to freedom, I thought I was very free and I was right, but I reached still another level while I watched The Morning Show. The show ultimately had nothing to do with it. I experienced a final letting go when I didn’t even know that I was holding on to anything to let go of … I released my illusory connection with people who have ruined all of the potential of their lives, and I discovered more appreciation of the great life that I have. We all have great lives. But we have to turn around and see those lives that are right in front of us, and then decide to live them.
I have a great advantage. All of my life I’ve been disgusted by the culture of success, even when I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t wallow in the fetid culture and then extricate myself. I do not come to my freedom through reform. They came after me. Their aggression taught me who I was and what I had to do. They would have been better off leaving me alone.
The truth whispered in obscurity is more powerful than a lie amplified by the loudest microphone.
I misdiagnosed myself in the last segment. I thought my occasional depression. irritability and nervousness was stress similar to later phases of PTSD. They weren’t. I’m irritable when I think I’m going to be contaminated by anything resembling Morning Show world, and I’ll have to defend myself. I’m nervous when I feel that I have to prepare to defend myself from Morning Show world , and I have to be certain I’m properly equipped. I’m depressed when I’m in a creative gestation period and new purpose slowly fried inside me and thoughts of unhappy times return in my waiting room. I’m fine and raring to go. Little dark naps of the soul come with the territory.
Went to a Chanukkah family thing to watch kids open presents —- and I felt sedated. And older somehow. Insight is like soaking in a hot bath at a nice spa. Pass the bath salts and pipe in the New Age music. Relaxation is key in writing and living. When nothing seems to be happening, everything is actually happening. A day in repose and then the light went on.
The PTSD metaphor on The Rick Blog worked for a day. The Rick Blog is in constant evolution. The word for today is revolution. The inner and outer kinds.
I think I am having a shamanic experience with the bullying theme (one of many). The general illness has played out in me and I am called to show the way out.
In summation:
The answer to all of life’s riddles … don’t be part of any of the many Morning Shows. They aren’t fun. Stay away from people who are part of the Morning Shows. They’ll make you miserable. You can watch The Morning Show when you know, really know, deep down … not know like its a meme on Facebook or a Hallmark card … but know with certainty that you were never part of it, you never thought it was desirable … that you thought the Morning Show people rejected you, but you actually rejected them … that you didn’t play their games and they humiliated you in their bizarro world, where what is admirable is ridiculed and what is disgusting and less than second rate is lionized. You can watch The Morning Show when you aren’t mad or hurt anymore. That’s what the Morning Show people wanted you to be — mad, hurt and paralyzed. When you feel bad about what they said and did you are assuming your menial position on a very low rung of their ladder in hell … or maybe the top rung because that ladder only goes down and you were ready to go upward before you stepped on it. When you are fed up, you are on your way. Then life begins.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
12/11/23: Bingeing Ted Lasso season 3
It’s pablum, but it’s my kind of pablum.
It’s commercial, but its popularity shows that many people want something kind and decent and real.
I understand this season was lambasted by some critics that praised the first two seasons to the skies. It’s my favorite of the three seasons that I’ve watched. The critics punished the creators for leading with their hearts, and I cheer the impulse.
Ted Lasso is the type writing that Major Jackson, director of the Vanderbilt MFA in Creative Writing Program disdains. Ted Lasso is anti-shame and anti-success as a reason for being. The series is an unabashed motivational speech. Major hates motivational speeches. He accepts shame as a given. Major advises writers to show the readers that they are ashamed too, as if to feel shame is to be human. He is paradoxically and simultaneously insecure and arrogant in his person and writing, his regrets are the cornerstones of his illusory success. It’s ridiculous. Major is mistaken in life and art. His errors got him the job. Congratulations. Major smiles for a professional headshot and wedding photo as poses of fulfillment. Jason Sudeikis plays the titular character with a warm grin of acceptance of whoever he is relating to … Ted would look at Major with sad eyes, and an understanding, and compassionate smile.
I looked at Major with anger (see below). I still saw what I saw. I just feel differently about it.
Ted Lasso has a simple message. Your greatest gift is your humanity, and you are deserving of respect and love, regardless of achievement, whether you are up or down, winning or losing, at your best or at your worst.
Random line: ‘He was tortured by demons, but it didn’t stop him from making beautiful music.’
The character of Ted, and the show writ large is about getting out of your own way, and accepting that the process of living partly involves getting out of your own way.
The makers took a comedic premise — which is beyond the fish out of water American coaching a sport he knows nothing about, that was the germ of the show’s idea, not the idea itself — the real premise involves an athletic coach who never looks at the scoreboard — an incarnation of the Dalai Lama born in middle America …
and the coach’s adventures as a human being saves himself and the other characters from lives of envy, lust, bitterness and frustration …
Every conflict is an opportunity … everyone grows …
While Ted Lasso wrestles with his identity on earth, he mirrors the cosmos as he dances with the stars … Like another spiritual sports figure, he knows that existence ‘floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee’ …
Major Jackson and The Morning Show (see below) accept Success Culture as the way it is, nothing you can do about it. Ted Lasso knows that there is something better, something more. The Morning Show and Major Jackson are a stories of success won and denied. Ted Lasso is about something much more wonderful and important.
Major Jackson also said writing shouldn’t be personal. That’s true and not true. Writing should not be mere subjective opinion. That’s true. To say that writing should not be a field of endeavor where one works on their person, and the world, is not true.
Ted Lasso deals with who he and everyone else is. He accepts reality. If Major means writing shouldn’t bleat co-dependent angst, I agree with him. But … personally, my writing is about everyone in the frame, me included.
Jason Sudeikis went through a breakup in his personal life fairly recently. The split was reportedly amicable, then contentious, and then amicable again. Kids were involved, so the stakes were very high. He seems to be working through some things, that are on one level real personal to him, in his acting and writing for his imaginary show. Sudeikis doesn’t appear to bring his troubles at home to Ted Lasso in a solipsistic way. He knows his struggles are the struggles of mankind. There isn’t a viewer who has not suffered disappointment and loss. Understanding that is the gig. It’s what artists do. It doesn’t mean Sudeikis is all wise. It doesn’t mean he’s saintly. I’m sure there was some pettiness and meanness given the stress of the situation. Sudeikis isn’t admirable because he is perfect, he is admirable because he works at being an artist and a human being. From a distance it looks like he made a lot of progress in his relationships, as did his former partner, Olivia Wilde. Ted Lasso is a personal triumph about universal themes. To not be of Success Culture does not mean that you’ll never have success. Ted Lasso is a hit. Sudeikis got the mature dissolution of their relationship that he and Olivia Wilde desired. He moved on and found love again with someone else. His life sounds like a Ted Lasso story arc. He lived through turmoil as an imperfect and caring human being, and not as something less than human, exclusively dedicated to alleviating its own feelings of insecurity through maniacal and complicated rituals of self-justification.
Yes, Ted Lasso is pablum. It is comfort food. It makes money because it makes people feel good. But it doesn’t sell people a bill of goods. It shows a legitimate way to happiness. And gently acknowledges the pain involved in the process of becoming human. Season 3 includes allusions to Joseph Campbell, the Beatles, Carl Jung, Vincent van Gogh, Japanese culture, and Eastern Philosophy. (There’s more … those are just the ones that come to mind.) These people have been doing there homework.
Hah! I’m a little embarrassed. I think this show that started as an ad for Premiere League Soccer on NBC, is quite good.
I wonder what the set of Ted Lasso is like. The character, Ted, is a non-hierarchical leader. His talent is to encourage the other characters to connect to their true and best selves, and then combine their authentic abilities into a harmonious community. If they win games, all the better. I suspect life mirrors art. Sudeikis may have joined the ranks of other great comic leads, like Jack Benny, Carol Burnett, and Mary Tyler Moore, who surrounded themselves with many good people and then let them shine. If that’s true, Sudeikis has hit a trifecta of humanity, art and good business. Jack Benny was once asked why he gave so many good lines to his supporting players instead of grabbing more laughs himself. Benny said that when everyone got laughs, he got the credit the next day.
I love all of the pop culture references in this show. For one of many examples, it connects Van Gogh with the theme music from the movie, The Great Escape and a mention of The Blue Collar Comedy Tour.
Soccer … art … philosophy … real personal experience … pop culture … everything … using everything …
Life (and art) are things that teach you how to do them while you are doing them …
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
12/12/23: bingeing season 2 of ‘The Morning Show’
When I was a kid my aunt yelled at me for reading comic books. “Pick up a novel!’ She was trying to help. How could she know that crap is one of my principal subjects? If I were a photographer, I’d take pictures of garbage dumps. Trash culture is a representation of the soul of the masses … the people without faces all think alike. My inner monologue brings the literary quality to reading The Fantastic Four … I mean watching The Morning Show.
Mitch, like his audience, looks to bosses and the faceless masses, the mob rule of marketing data and media, social and otherwise, to tell him right from wrong. His problems are: that the mob is fickle and irrational, and that as a result of his reliance on the mob’s external conscience, any ability that he ever had to think for himself regarding matters of ethics or personal values has atrophied. Mitch has lost his existential center of gravity — as has his audience. If you aren’t the author of the stuff of your life, do you even exist?
The Success Culture corrodes ethical decision making. It tells us what to do and how to do it. It can make like virtue is sin, and sin is virtue. It can take what is morally neutral and make it scandalous. When we don’t have agency over questions of personal morality, we lose individuality in relation to everything that matters. The pursuit of success is narcissistic. We only value what others value in us. The purpose of our lives in Success Culture is nothing more than getting applause. It is farcical to venerate the approval of others that we objectify to be nothing more than sources of approval that temporarily calm us, or sources of disapproval that terrify us. Love is absent from all factors in the equation. We don’t love ourselves, love other people, or love what we do to get the approval of those we don’t love. And then we watch soap operas like The Morning Show to explore how we feel about not knowing who we are instead of figuring out who we are. Indulging feeling is what the comic books my aunt despised do. Wondering about what it means to be alive is the focus of her novels.
I say ‘we’ in the previous paragraph because I don’t want to revoke my membership in society just yet, but I am registered as inactive. Unlike Mitch, and the viewing audience, I never wondered if I was a good person or not based on the views of others. I never asked them to teach me how to be better. I got angry because they judged me and tried to tell me what to do. How dare they? I got annoyed that I had to decipher their criticisms as a matter of due diligence. I decide my values, but I have to be open to incoming messages to see if there is some direction in them. The opinions of most people are inane or worse. The perspectives of worthwhile voices have been nuggets of gold in a sewer … something in me wants to prospect in the sewer.
I had to examine so much trash, sifting for treasure, it became part of who I am and what I do.
I see a man in his mid-forties drowning. He feels he is unsuccessful. He envies me because I worked at Second City a hundred years ago. If he only knew how I see that experience. It was far from positive, and nothing, thank God, resembling success. I never had a career in show business. I didn’t want it. Then I was punished for not valuing that awful life. I valued the warm connection, the freedom, the opportunity to express myself, the art. And this young man, and he is very young … doesn’t honor who he actually is. He is a gourmand. A loving husband and father. An activist. A wine connoisseur. A podcaster — hah! But there is something wrong with him, according to Success mission control. He doesn’t have enough money. He isn’t serious enough. Social issues and art aren’t serious enough. He should be selling something or being in charge. Somewhere the ghost of Sylvester Stallone is beating up St. Francis of Assisi.
I’m like who the young man is. I’m not who he thinks I am. If he were thinking for himself, I might be an affirming presence in his life, and not a cause of envy. Success culture does nothing for anyone. It is a particular anathema for artists. I regret nothing. I do what I am meant to do. I assess my life on my own terms. Today, at 68, I’ve sifted through a lot of garbage. I haven’t seen it all but I know its texture when I come across it.
Mitch had Success approved by the home office and then he didn’t. So did I. Well, I did, I didn’t, I did, I didn’t and so on. In a way, I had it worse than Mitch. I never did anything objectively awful like being a sexual predator. I just made decisions based on my inner beacon instead of what was expected of me as alms to the Success goddess. Punishments ensued. Hah!
It’s really a binary choice. You either have a self determined life or you go through the collective motions. I listen to an authority as religiously as the followers of Success Culture listen to theirs. I don’t invent and reinvent myself. I discover myself. I am as surprised as anyone else is at what transpires.
My authority is as unseen as the Bully Success Culture is seen. Success yells. It hurts your eyes. My authority whispers. I often hear it when my eyes are closed. Success Culture gives orders. My authority speaks in riddles.
I’ve had such a good life. And I am far from done. Mitch was a human sacrifice. I spent and spend my time wondering about who I was and am, not just how I felt and feel.
Okay, I didn’t binge. Time to rifle another garbage can.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
12/13/23: ‘Radical Wolfe’ — Fact and Fiction
Who, what, when, where and sometimes why: that’s fact. The meaning of all that? That’s fiction.
We imagine the meaning of our lives. Our possibilities are only limited by the limits of our imaginations. The poor and meager, or extravagant and rich, facts of our lives provide equal chances for profundity.
If a person is not the author of their own life, they aren’t fully alive.
‘The truth is always revolutionary’.
Tom Wolfe
Revolutionary imagination always destroys a perception, and replaces it with something bigger or smaller. Facts rise and fall. Dreams tell us what those facts actually mean.
I started reading Wolfe in high school. Was assigned some of his books in college.
Literary Journalism. Later he wrote journalistic literature. His non-fiction was informed by reporting. His fiction was informed by reporting. He got the facts and then laid on a superficial layer of meaning.
Meaning is discovered not made in an often agonizing process, the so-called dark night of the soul,
I never liked the white suits, even back then. Self promotion offends my sense of meaning. I didn’t like his take on things. It was too conservative. Conservatives don’t see facts that I see. They leave out realities which would challenge how they think of themselves. Wolfe avoided being identified with one ideology or another, but the regard he had for each side offends my meaning as well. He used his Southern background to energize his role as an iconoclast in the New York literary world. He had convenient blind spots for which he was materially rewarded. It’s easier for a person to see where others can’t see than to admit that their own vision is incomplete. That subtly willful ignorance serves one at times and for that we should be sorry, and try to do better. Wolfe was a nice man, nicer than most, but I don’t suspect he was ever sorry. He had supreme confidence which is a negative thing in a writer. Writers are supposed to live on the frontiers of the human spirit, discovering the future soul of mankind. Wolfe was not a man of the future. The film thinks Wolfe will be read years from now. I don’t think so. Already his books look like cultural artifacts. I browse them like old Life magazines, to reminisce about what it was like to be alive in the 1970s. He coined phrases like ‘The Me Decade’ and ‘The Right Stuff’ that encapsulate another time, not all time. He could be surprised by libertine astronauts but not by strategic poor people.
Many of his topics seem unimportant now. The LSD culture. Shallow wealthy liberals who mix activism with glamour. The maverick nature of test pilots. The destructive vanity of the pursuit of money and power in a metropolis. These explorations were interesting in a more innocent and entitled time. He wrote for people secure that they lived in a democracy, who never knew want and felt that disasters happened on the other side of the world, white, upper middle class, spoiled, safe and bored, looking for excitement, and playing around with what they would do with their lives. Wolfe provided sensation when what the customers needed was some pathway to meaning. He couldn’t provide that because he wrongly perceived that reporting was enough.
Back in the day, I liked the way he used words. I liked how his turbo stylized writing didn’t seem to pretend. I thought that engaging way of speaking was an authentic voice. It wasn’t. Now I prefer sincerity in a writer. I don’t like academic preciousness or Wolfe’s pyrotechnic alternative. The writers who testify their admiration in the film all think they are praising Wolfe as an artist. They actually laud his professionalism. He was an exemplar for each of them, the first who figured out how to make money using words in a certain interesting way. The movie itself is very conventional. Little about the man, much about the career. What could they do? He didn’t leave much of himself to see. I studied literary journalism in college. I was an avid fan. Now I can report that I find the format to be trivial, and that change in me did not happen by dint of my reporting. The facts of Tom Wolfe are the same. What changed is their meaning. I changed. The world changed. Not Wolfe’s words. The changes didn’t happen through relationships or events. They came from somewhere else.
Wolfe’s white suits didn’t make sense to me. Why the selling? My hypothesis —- for the money. Hah! This documentary is hagiographic. I wish they’d examine his self-promotion more. They make it seem like the suit was a creative expression. It was branding. Brazen. He sold more books than anybody. He said he was a writer and not a publicist. That’s partly true. He was never a publicist for his subjects. He exposed their self interested intentions when he saw them, but he embraced the role of publicist for himself. I don’t think his true self was flamboyant at all. The clips from interviews show a performer. He didn’t share his true personality much in those settings. The best form is the substance of the thing itself. Well that’s the best form in art. Business is another story. Wolfe used his public manner as a branding strategy for profit, and as a disguise, for self protection. I see flashes in the footage of who he really was. Wolfe and the biopic seem to want it both ways. Claims that his work was literary art and massively successful business. I used to think it could work that way. It can’t. It is very hard to be an artist, and it is very hard to a successful business man. You can’t do both at once. Sometimes real art becomes very popular. That is something that happens. The artist can’t devote energy and focus to self promotion and then turn a switch and tell the truth. Trying to sell the work becomes part of the work. Business decisions are made regarding actual content. It’s unavoidable.
Wolfe was a businessman in full. He chose subjects that he knew would arouse public interest. Wolfe had a great businessman’s gift of sensing the zeitgeist of his audience. He knew what they’d want to hear about before they did. He knew he could write what he thought about those topics in a sensational, engaging and entertaining style. His great insight was that his readers didn’t have to agree with them. It was enough for the box office, that he was provocative. His purpose was not to influence, it was to entertain. Wolfe didn’t want to change the world. He wanted to stir the pot.
Real writers to find the, or at the very least, their, truth. Wolfe elevated journalism to something like art, but didn’t quite make it.
Major literary figures amplified their criticism of Wolfe (they never accepted him) especially when he moved from Literary Journalism to journalistic fiction. He dismissed the criticism as a knee jerk reaction against his commercial success. He said novelists should work like journalists. He believed that fiction writers and academics had an inferior creative process to reporters. Who says something isn’t art because it is newsy, accessible and it sells? Wolfe smilingly resented the elitist pedigrees of the literary establishment. It’s true that can exist anywhere, and pedigrees and lack thereof are irrelevant.
Wolfe saw economic opportunity in the conflict and enjoyed the fight. His fiction heavy hitters antagonists, Irving, Updike and Mailer, got the same benefits from the feud as Wolfe, whether they admitted as much or not.
But the real writers were giving Wolfe constructive criticism that he only exploited in the public feud to sell books. He never elevated his reporting to art as he claimed. Sure all writers start with observation, but real writing goes inward. Writing is an existential act. Reporting is the sharing of information. There is a point of congruence where investigated facts, personal relation to those facts, and some ineffable never fully captured universal truth converge. Wolfe said we only know ourselves in relation to other people but that is far too limiting. We observe ourselves in relation to others , but we discover ourselves in solitude. Wolfe could easily have been a very courtly, charming, shrewd, brilliant and highly competent Southern lawyer. Norman Mailer wrote a book about writing, ‘The Spooky Art’. There was nothing spooky about Tom Wolfe’s writing. Wolfe radically changed the writing business. He was reactionary in relation to the writing art. Reporters are eyewitnesses to the seen. Poets magically see the unseen. I’m looking for magic in Tom Wolfe, and I can’t see it. I see a man claiming that the unseen isn’t there.
There are many clips from mass media in this film. Tom Wolfe was more media figure than writer.He said that everyone’s identity is formed by their relation to the world. That’s an incomplete observation. Our identity is found in our impressions of the world and our impressions of ourselves. This movie is not even about Wolfe’s relationship to the world. It’s about his relationship to the media.
‘Your soul is your relationship with other people’.
Tom Wolfe
There is so much of the soul that Wolfe couldn’t see for all of his reporting. He advocated extroversion as way to all truth. It isn’t. He may have been mistakenly ashamed of his own introversion. Someone told him once that he had to make an impact on the world. On second thought, the white suits may have been more than marketing tropes. He may have felt inadequate. He felt that he must be seen. His whole life may have been running away from his true nature. Wolfe’s story may be a tragic one. He might have been a great novelist like his namesake but he sold it all for thirty pieces of silver. He might have written the definitive novel about the 1979s instead of just giving the decade a catchy title.
I end drifting to Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Great Gatsby and Death of a Salesman … works that did more than report what was going on in America, but exposed its hidden damaged soul ….
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
12/17/23: Poor Things Solved
It is the spooky art.
So I’m wondering about the reaction, old v young v mine, to Poor Things, and l think maybe I can just read my way to an answer instead of write my way. I break with my usual practice and read about the thing I’m looking at.
I come across this young woman on Literary Hub. At first blush, I think ‘She’s a better writer than I am.’ She isn’t though. Then I think she’s way more educated. She had broad first class references happening. Then I realize just educated in a different way. She is a Columbia PhD who is published but not prominent. Just starting out. That depresses me for a second until I touch back on the values I’ve discovered and made conscious in the last ten years. I catch my breath, I’m OK. I’m not in her game. I’m not trying to fit in. I’m open to where I fit.
Then she unlocks poor things for me. She doesn’t want to come out and say it, but she thinks Poor Things is simplistic. And thinks Lanthimos is mostly that way. And I think … goddam she’s right … but it’s encouraging in a way because I’ve grown since I unreservedly loved The Favourite. That was just about using people, and the shifting status positions in the dance of exploitation. The good person in the triangle loses entirely but is ironically better off for it. Maybe she doesn’t know it, but we should. Simplistic.
And she nails why young people love Poor Things. It’s about a human being developing completely naturally with no societal restrictions at all. The heroine is a free transforming person. Of course, young people love that. They want it desperately whether they can articulate it or not.
Then I’m thinking this girl’s got something. So I read more of her stuff. Her trick is that she makes pseudo-metaphysical claims for pop entertainment. It’s her thesis and career strategy. I’m the opposite. I look for the existential point that a show biz piece echoes to pull an audience … like a commercial uses art or jazz to draw attention to detergent. I get my mojo back! Oh no … I’m a way better writer than her. I don’t write about the movie. I write about the thing the movie superficially treats. Or occasionally thing and movie when both are good. My focus is on the elusive truth. The thing observed is a medium used to explore that truth.
Then I read she thinks Bob Oedenkirk can do no wrong and now I’m doubting my original hypothesis that she was any good at all … she may be … but man there’s a lot she doesn’t know.
Then I put together that show biz and academic letters are part of the same Art Industrial Complex. Vanderbilt MFA and Second City are fruits of the same poisonous tree …
And next I’m logically wondering for the umpteenth time where do I belong?
Next … I know what I think and feel about Poor Things … it is simplistic and I wrote much better about the same theme on The Rick Blog
And then I put my finger in the socket thinking about past slights again and I sense it’s finally really over … I don’t want to go back to any of it … and after having my Poor Things wondering solved and noticing a few other things along the way, I have no specific questions … just a big ‘what’s next?’ And that makes me anxious and then excited for a second because it’s a great place to be.
In other news, the Bears are still alive in the playoff chase and I love being a grandpa figure and my new phone … so I still have concrete tethers to the ground as I experience the unbearable lightness of being.
I really wanted Poor Things to be more. I wanted more from the young woman. I wanted more from the Art Industrial Complex. I got what I wanted from myself.
Now what?
*********
Something’s brewing. I want change in my diet of art and thought. I may be an angel trapped in hell but I’d like to fly to heaven more. I fear for this young writer. I think she’ll be stunted. The education and art complex restricts people. Learn on the outside! Theater. Literature. All of it! Broad and deep experience AND exposure to what’s great. Magnificent intuitive taste. Avoid the institutions! They never stunted me because I am naturally contrary and oblivious, was always an outsider within their walls (and treated like it) until I’m writhing in pain (always followed by expansive relief).
Today I am spending my time with the Bears. Delightedly so. It’s who I am. But I’m bored. I was watching this Bill Maher PR piece yesterday on HBO, an anniversary special and I thought I could write something … people like Larry David and Martin Short were selling Maher unconvincingly as smart, funny and courageous. David said that’s what you need to be a good comedian. Rick Blog grade: D minus. I think Maher lacks nuance in his thinking , is occasionally funny (the only area where he was awarded any points) and is calculating—- not brave. A caricature of provocation. Shocking for dollars. I also think David and Short were just doing business, and didn’t believe or care much about what they were saying..
But then I thought, I wrote about all that already. I’m sick of looking at these fools (both in the funny and misguided sense). It’s all so tired and obvious.
I want to look at great stuff. I’ve got to do better than McKay’s Bookstore and the movies and streamers — as useful as they are.
More!
I am happy but also perpetually dissatisfied.
I am not discouraged at all. I know I got it going on.
I am a good generalist. I can access just about anything. I’m confident that I can get a lot out of Godard. I just want to change something. Why have I spent less time with Godard than with Mikey Day!
I think it is a sign of intelligence to be humble in the face of all there is to know. You are always curious and learning.
I’ve thoroughly examined crap, maybe it’s time to look at gold.
I’m always just working on myself. How do I sense what’s better? Part of my poor initial taste has helped me. I’ve hit good writing about it. My travails with lilliputians. I’ve wanted that for some good unconscious reason. Now my pull is somewhere else.
Final maybe unrelated thought but it did come up today so it probably has relevance …
Life isn’t conventionally fair, and I’ve been blessed with more than I ever could have expected or deserved — from a conventional point of view. I know some great people who did everything right. Made a lot of money doing something worthwhile. Loved their children. Not happy. Estranged from grandchildren. My step grandchildren are one of my great joys. I wasn’t supposed to get married. Have money. Have a nice house. Have a loving family! Have a great friend! A life purpose! I broke every middle class rule. Did everything ‘wrong’. And now my biggest problem is that I am greedy for more exposure to art and ideas … to look at and work with the things I love all the time.
I didn’t get a damn thing from the economy or any stupid job I ever had (I always left every job I had because I was looking for places to continue my real work … they stop you from working when you have a job and then you have to go) … my security and appearance of success even to dim middle class eyes comes from being so loved in my life … such goodness alighted upon me from the hearts of other people … and by not doing what I was told. We should all depend on the kindness of strangers, because let’s face it, everybody’s strange … and people who don’t acknowledge that are a problem.
Conservatives are the source of all problems. Misers and bad cops. People with children should be handed lots of money. Pay now instead of investing in jails later. Abolish lotteries and give all the poor saps who buy lottery tickets lots of cash. Everyone in the world should be a spoiled child.They should all get a big office in their house where they can think and read and watch movies like me. They should laugh a lot and never have anyone humiliate them or tell them what to do.
Your friend, with gratitude and dissatisfaction,
Rick
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
12/19/23: More Poor Things
Every word I write is an exploration of myself. That’s true of all writers. The world is a mirror. Sometimes it’s a funhouse mirror. Writing is an ultimately satisfying struggle to make my inner and outer reality congruent. Life and writing hurt when my heart and the people, places and things of the external world aren’t in harmony. When I understand, I’m at peace. If I am critical of a movie for example, it really means —- this is not what I want. It’s not an assessment of intrinsic value. I’m strangely non judgmental. I just want everything in its proper place.
To the extent I have disappointing interactions , they are caused by a lack of self knowledge. Or more positively, are part of a process of discovery.
I saw a video of Stone, Lanthimos and Ruffalo discussing Poor Things. They didn’t hurt at all while I was watching. I’m just beyond it. Stone is into doing what scares her. She celebrates newly discovered levels of technical virtuosity as an actor in real time. Her performance is the sheer joy of being great at something. She reminds me of an elite athlete. Ruffalo is exhilarated by a return to acting. He comes out and says it. He left acting for Marvel movies and now he’s back. That’s his perspective , not mine. I haven’t looked at his situation specifically. He was first scared (a theme of the conversation) and then had a blast playing a character bigger than a comic book.
I thought Lanthimos might give me what I’m looking for. But, quite surprisingly, he didn’t seem in charge. Stone drives this show. He busied himself with creating external manifestations in the film that accompanied and enhanced Stone’s expression.
Younger people love the movie because they love Stone. They are turned on watching one of their own come into her full power. Stone reminds me of me doing the Rick Show 35 years ago. She’s at that stage. She’s an ecstatic, thrilled at being amazing … working with (slightly) controlled abandon. (I know that’s a contradiction.) The point of the performance is that she is fully alive. She’s not in the meaning phase as I am now. She’s in the being phase.
There comes a time when that exhilaration ends. It’s a state that doesn’t connect with others. They cheer because you embody what they dream of being. But they aren’t really with you. You’re objectified,
And then, you must be alone. It’s not just being who you are. It’s being who you are with meaning. It’s interesting that Stone’s character is a study in self exploration but that isn’t what she is doing at all. She is unapologetically herself in full … running and jumping with great joy.
Ruffalo is recapturing that joy. He’s returning to who he was before he left acting for a career in business. He reminds me of me when I went back onstage a few years back —- at least at first. I had this rush of excitement at the PlayProv week on Cape Cod . There was no rust at all. I was young again. I don’t even have interest in that type performance now. I awoke a dormant talent but was pulled in a direction of using it in service of something bigger. I get a sense of evolution in Ruffalo. He’s not through. There are other steps. He had doubts that he could do Poor Things. He had doubts he’d ever be allowed to do it too. He is grateful and surprised and it shows in his performance.
Lanthimos is just working, The star, Stone, has the power and he is content to lay his craft in service of her vision. Maybe his movies are simple because he needs a comment, but what really matters to him his plying his craft.
Good for all involved, but I’m going somewhere else and I don’t know what I’m doing which is how it should be. I’m going somewhere beyond all of the above. I’m going where people are doing what I’m starting to do now.
I felt fear and anxiety last night and that is welcome too. I was disappointed in Poor Things but now I see it was the perfect movie at the perfect time. It’s no longer for me. That’s good to know. It means something now. I sifted gold from my prospecting pan and threw away the rest. The uses of the past, and what to let go of …
######
Phases of getting bigger.
First a naive sense of connection. Maybe it’s initially real, but one outgrows it.
Then there is the split. Hurt. Pain. The realization of what’s going down. Your work and your assessment of their work and upset as a person.
Then anger.
Next not conflict but a calling out. A resolve to not being part of what once was, that’s self betrayal, and a clarity about what happened.
Then you leave. That’s it. The dissolution has occurred.
Then you have negative ideation about the past pain
You then decide that you’d rather not have anything to do with it/them.
Next you are vacant and open wondering what’s next.
Then you have imagined connections —- people, places, activities. You desire a bigger world.
Now you are on the dawn of the new era. You have no idea what you are doing or how your dream will exist beyond your being in the greater world.
You are in the creative stance … standing before the unknown and wondering.
You’ve already leaped. Now you are in free fall
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
12/20/23: Maestro (2023)
There is no limit to what can be said about this mysterious topic. Art. I was wondering if Maestro would tell me something I don’t know. I suspect that there is nothing in this movie that I don’t know. So I’ll play spot the insight. It’s not an entirely useless pursuit. Bradley Cooper made a piece that contemplates art from many perspectives. The qualities of how art is made, the life of an artist, the life of people close to the artist. Bradley made the movie because he is considering these matters in his own life. Like every other piece made by every other artist, it is personal, and it is also universal. Art gets to the essentials of things. What is true for Bradley is true for me. Our differences are on other planes not the dimension of art. It’s not that we say the same thing, it’s that we are the same thing. This is a picture about what art, people intimate with artists, and artists are. I’ve done the same thing as Maestro does on The Rick Blog. Cooper has the same concerns that I do. All artists do. Bradley and Rick don’t take classes in art appreciation or read books or hear lectures about how to make art. Or if we do, they don’t matter. We make art, in this case, about art. We look at art, itself, and artists themselves, and how art operates through us and through the people around us. Bradley and Rick are concerned with how art and life affect one another. I watch this film as a checklist. I’ve spent a lot of time on this constellation of questions. It’s nice to chat with Bradley.
Bradley’s an earnest filmmaker. He learns how to direct by directing. Good for him. That’s how you do it. Make art, live life, and they teach you how to do it in real time. It seems Bradley still imitates at times. My influences aren’t as conscious, but they are there.
Is all creation fast? Bernstein composes at the same pace that I write. Fast. Trying to get all the unconscious is firing at us at the speed of light. We might revise later, but we are only editing out errors in the transcript we made while we were taking dictation. Artists are stenographers.
Yes, fast. The soundtrack is wall to wall Bernstein music, which is natural and appropriate. My mind is wall to wall Rick words. Ditto.
Creator Bradley Cooper is contemplating art, in the artist and his immediate world, the life of an artist, and the size of the artist. The power and fame of the successful well known artist is hit lightly. I really appreciate that. Bernstein had no inner or outer issues with his ego or the ‘system’. He lived in a great city with great people who wanted great art. He was too intelligent and of too high character to not serve art with his prodigious talent even though he needlessly worried about whether he would throughout much of his life. I had a harder time. I wasn’t situated so fortunately. The inner is easy for me. The outer was tougher, and now is serene.
It’s a mistake to underestimate the contributions of others in the fulfillment of the potential of Lenny’s genius. Might be the biggest theme of the movie?
Bradley is more ambitious than Lenny. Bradley would love to be propelled in life as Lenny was, by the fierce and pure impulse to create. His strategy is to get there by gaining power as a filmmaker. I hope Bradley gets there. I just take it. My life is guided by that Lenny impulse. I’m not asking for permission or certification. Bradley earns chances from an establishment, and moves forward. I make my own chances. If they come they come, but no one can stop me from writing.
Some movies make me wonder. This one doesn’t. I listen to it as if it is conversation from someone I’m close to … I’ll hear new things, but I know who he is. My question is, how deep is Bradley going to go?
Lenny is open mouthed innocent, enthusiastic and naive. Right.
Lenny wants a thousand things. Right.
Carey Mulligan gets top billing? The movie says its main theme is about what it is like to love an artist. The artist themself has to be drawn in detail to study the wife protagonist.
Felicia loves Lenny just as he is. That love involved sacrifice and suffering. That’s part of what love is, in general and in loving and artist. Right.
Lenny, the artist defies classification. Right.
Composer v conductor: Creative person sits alone. Performer is public. Grand inner life v grand outer life. Lenny had both personalities. Artists are as big and as contradictory as the world. Right.
Lenny is vulnerable. The middle class is stupid. And lousy. The movie doesn’t directly say this, but all art is an indictment of the middle class. Lenny lives in a very real dream world. New York is a place for artists, where they can work and live and love who they desire. Lenny is depressed for the state of the world, but he himself lives in its most paradisal regions. Bradley goes silent on the middle class disparagement. I shout it. The Rick Blog won’t be playing on Netflix or the multiplex. Scorsese challenges the audience with Killers of the Flower Moon. The challenges are in what he says and how he says it. Nolan is so excited by the brilliant Oppenheimer, that the audience is also excited while he accurately portrays a poet, scientist, intellectual and political exile. Cooper wants to give them a love story, and hang insights about creativity on that traditional genre like ornaments on a Christmas tree. He succeeds in that, but would have gone further if the movie itself was art. I wasn’t confused for a second in this movie. Or made to feel uncomfortable about how I am living my life. Oppenheimer humbled me — so much I don’t know. Flower Moon indicted me for my complicity, and chided me for my insufficient curiosity. That powerful combination of what a work of art is saying, and how it is told.
I don’t like Sarah Silverman and I don’t want to know why. I could find out. I don’t want to go into it. I don’t think she is good in this picture. Too broad and crude as ever. She plays Lenny’s sister. It’s a distraction. She’s so self-conscious and forced. She breaks the illusion of pure artistry. I smell the career making in this, or any, Hollywood production, because it’s always there. The great movies hide it. I see Silverman and I see all the agents and publicists. Bradley picked her because he’s on the make too (it goes with the territory), so Silverman’s quality doesn’t bother him. Unfortunately, her ambition is all I can see in her. What is the blind spot of many artists regarding entertainers? Orson Welles cast Rich Little. Huh? What’s up with that? Bradley should have got an actress. Someone no one would notice either because if her lack of notoriety or ability to disappear into a part. He may have included Silverman to amplify the theme of Lenny’s performer side. I could go along with that, but even in pure performance mode it was impossible for Lenny to be a hack.
Lenny is straight and gay. A family man and a libertine. A performer and a creator. A classical musician and a pop artist. Shy and confident. Self-involved and compassionate, warm and generous. He’s the world. The bigger the artist, the greater the artist. Right.
I didn’t notice the shift from black and white to color on first viewing. I’ll pay attention second time through.
Bradley uses interviews as exposition of Lenny’s career. He’s not doing a show business biopic. He’s interested in the private Lenny, but we never see it. I prefer Bob Fosse’s Lenny, about Lenny Bruce. I really felt like I spent time with Lenny Bruce when I watched that picture. Bradley tries to get close, but misses. Bradley doesn’t fully create Lenny Bernstein as a character. Bradley’s Lenny is a representation of what Bradley thinks about him. It’s such controlled work. Too controlled. Bradley’s acting and writing never break through from what Bradley reasons about Lenny to what he discovers about Lenny. In himself. Did Bradley discover anything about Lenny? I want to hear it. He seems to be pointing to a contradiction between depression and inspiration. I want to see it in action.
Back to the checklist … Bradley’s true notes on Lenny (from here on in we are back to Lenny meaning Bernstein, Bruce was an aside that is now over …) and art … that never become Lenny or art …
Lenny is joyful and dissatisfied. Right.
Cooper thought ‘contradiction’ when he embarked on this project. He opens with a quote about contradiction. You got to let that top spin, Bradley. Your movie dramatizes your intellectual conclusion. Art is bigger than that. Bradley is a hard worker that I admire, but that’s just the beginning. Bradley, the actor does a perfect accent, and I am always aware of it. Dick Van Dyke did his famously awful Cockney accent in Mary Poppins and I stopped thinking about it immediately. Dick embodied that Bert the chimney sweep character, and the whole world of Mary Poppins communicating all of its essences. He found the fairy tale in Dick Van Dyke. Bradley is too well schooled. Every teacher he ever had said, ‘Well done, Bradley!’ The greatest artists disappoint their teachers, or don’t have any. Where are you Bradley? Where’s Lenny? Where’s that depression/inspiration thing you talk about?
Lenny is depressed who self medicates with his work ethic. He’s depressed as Lincoln was. He knows rhe state of the world. The artist goes against the nihilistic grain, knowing what they can do is very small, and also everything. Right.
Bradley hasn’t told me anything I don’t already know yet, and I don’t think he will, at least in Maestro.
Felicia is the one who changes. Lenny just is. He ages, but he is basically the same. I think it would have been more interesting to see Lenny’s changes, but I’m Lenny, not Felicia. Bradley is Felicia. He’d love to be Lenny. Imitation is a very early step in artist’s progress.
Lenny struggles to compose. The family man and performer interfere with the artist’s exploration of his inner life. Felicia blesses his creative introversion, his performance and family life are acceptable sacrifices to his gift . OK, so we see how choices must be made by the artist. You can love the world in all its details, but you can only manifest that love in manners limited by time and opportunity. I was forced to my computer. My writing leapt forward when I no longer performed or taught or engaged in outer community. My life is very tightly prescribed now. My wife, family, friends (a select group — intimates, not social acquaintances), and my writing. That’s all (and everything).
Anger drives Lenny’s art. Felicia tells him that with anger of her own, but it’s true. Anger is a force within art. Art is an aggressive and destructive thing. Art is a revolution. Conventionality, the societal manifestation of fear and its exploitation by authoritarians, and the ego’s arrogance or lack of confidence, has to be brought down by inconvenient truth, so freedom, beauty and love can reign.
Felicia more than accepted Lenny’s art. She knew it came first. It worked out for her because it made her happy to the same degree as he was compelled to do it. She felt he had an obligation to create. She took no ownership. She simply loved. His love affairs were what were beyond her human endurance. She knew that was what Lenny was like sexually going in too, but she thought she could handle it. She was brilliantly self-aware and she saw what was happening before, during and after it happened. Knowing the way it was didn’t make it hurt less. Life, love and art are hard. Lenny was working to keep creativity alive in the world. The promiscuity — no, wrong word, Lenny wasn’t promiscuous until maybe when he was old, he was born to love myriads of people and things — that pansexual reality was a truth of Lenny’s authenticity and part of the well from which his creation came. Felicia knew this too. The middle class thinks that love is a reward, a gift. Love bestows sweet presents, and painful demands, but the demands can be sweet too. We don’t choose who we love, just as we don’t choose what we create. We can’t help what we love, and we can never let go of it. To be very obvious, Felicia and Lenny had no toxicity in their lives. They created greatly with an equally great burden of a difficult love of each other and art and the world. Authors, composers … contradictions … solitary visions accomplished by two or more people …
This has been too easy to write thus far. I’ll playfully blame Bradley.
There’s an epilogue. Felicia dies. Lenny descends into male menopause. Artists are not immune from middle class mediocrity. Fame and success seduce the greatest hearts and minds to descend into mediocrity, and the greatest hearts and minds die like everyone else. The last shot is a flashback to Felicia, and the title ‘Maestro’ is superimposed on the screen. Bradley ends the movie like Mr. Holland’s Opus, honoring the silent art of those who intimately love artists. Lenny married Felicia for the same reason he, or any artist does anything — to free the potential of his life and art. Felicia was an artist in her own right, an actress, but her masterpiece was Leonard Bernstein. And he knew it. Thank you, Bradley. Your ending is great. You laid out something I have sensed but never fully articulated. Framing Felicia’s death and the final image with Lenny masterfully conducting with her support was more than brilliant. You moved moved and touched me. You told me something I don’t know.
And then Bradley leaves me with a question with two answers. In the last shot Felicia smiles for Lenny for several beats and then turns away. One answer is that Felicia left Lenny. The other answer is she never did.
My answer, which I am sure is true, is that we are always one with those we love, and also always separate. Life is a contradiction. We live in holy union with the people closest to us, and in divine solitude as well. We meet intimately in our solitudes.
For my wife Paula, my friend Rob and my brother Bob.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
12/21/23: La La Land (2016)
Speaking of art … and Emma Stone …
The middle class manhandles artists. The inner life offends those who are willfully ignorant of its existence. Performing artists desire the heart’s desire and external validation. The middle class exploits this and sets up some hunger games. Performing artists inhabit gladiatorial spirit and aching longing.
Hacks are a different story. They are middle class people who amuse other middle class people. Can masturbation involve more than one person? The artist is a monk or cloistered nun forced to work in a strip joint to get the money for baloney sandwiches.
Synchronicity. An artist learns not to rely on the middle class. Security and support comes from somewhere else. It all works out … by magic.
A performing artist is an artist second class. A composer, a writer … that’s an artist. The middle class hates a first class artist even more than a performing artist. ‘It’s you every time. It’s brand new every night.’ The middle class can’t have that, but they have no choice if you do it. You’ve got to get away from them. Run away! Run away to your private island and write everything on your blog. Audience will scurry to you smiling like the forest animals in Snow White. Sweet, unconditional love. No longer a commodity, you are now a person. You are an avatar of post-capitalism.
The soul battles the economic machine and wins. The middle class is a mass of cogs. The soul is nature. All of it. Life finds a way.
I wouldn’t want to be back with the middle class even if they apologized. I want to be with the people who already know how to love.
Rebellion. Romance. Floating above the middle class cesspool into the stars. Why would you ever leave the stars for the shit? Commitment.
They’d have to do more than apologize. They’d have to change.
Why is joy accompanied by pain? The middle class is a buzz kill to be assiduously avoided. Why is it a constant choice to refuse the wet blankets covered in smallpox and put on your own splendid garments?
‘How you going to save the world if you are such a traditionalist? Jazz is revolution. How are you going to save jazz if no one listens to you?’
Do I believe that?
How does anyone listen to you if you change what you say so they’ll listen? Isn’t it the middle class who told me I was just on Facebook? The middle class, who was doing improv karaoke night to lost children on the way to Palookaville?
The movie agrees with me. Wage slavery is a middle class trap and so is success. Screw what they demand order insult say bribe … why does that need to be a constant reminder?
The middle class is an invasive species like non-indigenous carp ruining a lake. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Whether they bully you or seduce you, it’s same shit different day.
I was a monk and I auditioned and I did wage slave jobs and I couldn’t pay the rent and I went home and licked my wounds and I succeeded on middle class terms and I had them keep coming after me and I broke down and I backslid and I got beat up repeatedly and I dropped out and I found love and I got happy and I started writing on my own terms and I integrated my personality and I felt agency and made decisions and got proud of my life, every second of it … I went through everything Ryan and Emma did and more … and I’ve made it … achieved everything that I ever wanted … … …. and I keep wanting to achieve new things …
I have no might have been …
‘Here’s to the ones who dream … here’s to the fools … crazy … poets, painters … hearts that break … mess that they make …’
It’s unfair to call this romance. It’s life. The rest is death too soon.
How dare they! How could you not …
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
12/22/23: Babylon (2022)
More speaking on art, and life … and Damien Chazelle
Damien Chazelle ends La La Land with a dream of what might have been. But what he says to me is much more interesting than his one theme about how romance turns into an initiation for those other bigger things: life, art, family and friends. I am jazzed by his true assertion that those are the bigger things.
Love and work. From God’s mouth to Freud’s ears. It’s really that simple. Who you love and what you love to do. Life, art, family and friends. The rest is distraction. Career? No one cares on their death bed. It’s all about love and work. Status and money? Well, money you can do something with … that counts … but it’s not the money itself, it’s what you do with it. Status comes and goes. If they think you’re great or think you stink, it really doesn’t matter. What stays is what you actually do.
Most of The Rick Blog is about defusing bombs. Just love who you love and do what you love to do, and tune everything else out.
In the debauched hedonistic world of Babylon, it’s the work for hire in order to facilitate work for love, and the romantic attraction that facilitates true love with the object of desire or someone else, that gets things started.
‘Movies are better than life.’ An escape, says one our heroes. I don’t watch movies to escape life. I watch them to reflect upon life. Entertainment is an escape. Art is a means to more conscious living. This movie is art. I converse with it. When a movie is only entertainment, I rewrite it. We can’t escape the essences of life even when we try to run away from them. It’s always love and work. If you think being limited to those two topics is boring, you’ve never lived at all.
Post-capitalist society. Not in the movie. In Chazelle. He returns to a La La Land theme. Dreamers and dolts are used by the system. Success and exploitation are the same thing. Our country isn’t conservative and liberal. It’s capitalist and post-capitalist. One pole says people are objects of use. The other says people aren’t fully human until they are free to love and work in that Freudian way.
It ain’t art if it isn’t distinctive. No one does it like Chazelle. Bradley Cooper tries so hard. If you have a boss, or career ambition, or you care what people think, you can’t get to art … or life or love or work (if art isn’t your work already).
This movie romanticizes movies, but, like its older sister La La Land, it doesn’t stop there. It’s not the movies. Just like this piece isn’t the words. It’s that thing you can’t describe. They say that music is the most perfect art, and that makes a lot of sense. But I never took piano lessons. I only have words. And Chazelle can do so many things well he can’t help himself.
I love this movie. It’s so good. A lot of times these directors become big deals and they get carried away. It happens. Capitalism and ego fuck them up. Success and hubris and they lose their mojo. Not Chazelle. He got really big and knew he could do these huge set pieces … masterful technical filmmaking … but he was consistently … in every frame … animated by the truth … his truth? … what’s the difference? His truth is the truth as seen from where he is standing.
Of course, the market and the critics punished Chazelle for it. Hah! I hope he doesn’t give a shit. I pretty sure he doesn’t. He says in his movie what he thinks of the assessments of capitalism and the crowd. I can’t be completely sure however. Sometimes art is wiser than the artist. I did some really brilliant things when I was younger and I completely missed the point. It’s easier to keep track now.
I love spending time with artists. It’s not an escape. It’s home. I’m not just getting away from all that has oppressed me. I’ve left it forever. This movie is not about show business. It’s about art changing business into humanity.
We don’t have to live in their world. We can make our own.
‘We have a higher calling.’ Yes! We are better than priests. We don’t just touch the divine in a sanctuary. We do it in the street. Everywhere. We witness to God in Babylon. It’s faith, not good works. If there is God in it, it doesn’t matter what we do. We won’t hurt anybody. That’s a given. So if we get swept away by the excesses of Babylon and come out on the other side wiser for it, we’ll be good. Bad only exists when God isn’t there. The capitalists and the narcissists talk about God day and night, but God lives inside those who love and work, and follow the path God’s reveals to them, not what the bosses and crowds tell them to do.
High art v low art? Who gives a fuck where you are from? It’s not a love and work question. The characters fight for relevance, but love and work doesn’t care. You do it somewhere else. High viz, low viz … what’s the difference? The only respect that matters is of those with eyes to see. In Babylon you needed no certifications in order to create at first. Hollywood was founded, and populated by outcasts, in the beginning. It was a dog show for mongrels. Per usual, the rich want a piece when they see money in it. Then the high art pretensions arrive. The rich went to college. It doesn’t mean the pedigree stuff isn’t good. Some of it is great. The answer isn’t ‘no room for the upper crust’. Let a thousand flowers bloom. It’s the exclusion of the lower. Capitalism isn’t about greed. It’s about condescension.
Sometimes the seductions and punishments of the capitalist narcissists pull the love and work people down into oblivion, and it’s the saddest thing in the world.
What the capitalist narcissists call morality is only a show of morality. Right and wrong are levers of control to them, not an interest in public and personal well being or the will of God. Their sins are always worse than those of the people of love and work, who usually only hurt themselves and harm no one else with their excesses.
Wealth, education, phony morals, race, gender, preference, ethnicity … what else? … the condescensions of idiots and assholes that don’t know we are all one …
and none of that matters … if we don’t give them power, they don’t have any … I don’t write these words as a revenge of the real … I write them because the capitalist narcissists don’t exist? Love and work and ignore? … no not ignore … accept! that they exist and make love and work anyway. They want you to think that you need them and they are withholding. You don’t need them, and the fact that they withhold from you is the greatest thing that ever happened to you.
One of the heroes just walks away. Hallelujah! He could create in Babylon. He couldn’t in the racist corporate religious fascist fanaticism of what replaced the manic indulgent chaos of freedom. He leaves the lot but his love and work is left behind to live in eternity. And he’ll create more eternal music at his next stop.
Capitalist narcissism turns into murderous criminality after the music leaves. Without art, everything deteriorates.
Another hero kills himself. He lost faith when the music changed. He mistakenly thought it went away.The heroine refuses to leave. She dies young, a martyr to Babylon.
The last man standing gets away. He knew that love and work transcended place and circumstances. He incorporates the eternity he made in his time in Babylon and carries on.
We, the people of love and work, are given almost everything … but we must figure out how to avoid oblivion.
Same ending as La La Land, the eternal in what might have been, but what precedes the ending shows the darker alternatives when faith is lost.
Movies aren’t an escape. They touch that invisible thing more real than the three dimensions.
If you let them.
You got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative … and don’t mess with Mr. In – Between.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
Saltburn (2023)
Letters to my friend
12/24/23
Merry Christmas!
It’s 65 in Nashville. My kind of Christmas!
When Bradley Cooper makes the biopic of my life he will pretentiously and ponderously call it, ‘The Great Naif’.
‘Even as a teen I knew that (Tom) Wolfe was only making toys.’ Not me. As a teen I read him and the other new journalists in awe. Later, I earnestly listened to the professor of my New Journalism class in college, collecting the pearls that dropped from his lips into a plastic knockoff chalice. I thought the new journalists were artists.
Cooper’s film of my life begins with a black and white shot of a constipated me struggling on the toilet and then at the moment of release shouting … ‘It was Wolfe’s decision to give primacy to reporting that prevented him from making art!’
And then I’d leap off the toilet and run to my laptop while the music … all drums and horns … blaring and throbbing.
I’m with you and your brother. Maestro is a bad movie. (My friend admired much about it. His brother hated it. I misread.) A stiff (as in lacking spontaneity) consideration of what it is to be an artist. I reached for Chazelle to get the taste out of my mouth, what a contrast! How alive. Cooper is still looking up to people …
Paula and I were talking about how much I have changed in the last 13 years. The unconscious conflict when I felt something was great when in actuality I was something much different.
I’m glad I’m naive. I get good writing out of it.
Someone read a piece from last December, the Cracker Barrel piece. So I read it again. At first I didn’t like it. I thought it read like a journal entry. Then I thought it was OK, but I’d cut the first couple paragraphs. Then I saw what I was doing and thought it was fine … but not as good as what I’ve written this December.
I’ve even changed in that period of time.
And even my own work is a mystery to me …
A reporter follows the cultural zeitgeist. A writer follows her soul. You can’t have it both ways.
Spielberg said a truism the other day that resonated. ‘Every time I start a movie I ask the question who am I?’ That’s how I feel.
I think I’d have liked Wolfe. He seems like he was classy and nice. I also think he would have bored me.
I don’t know if I’d get along with Chazelle but we are very similar personalities. I’d like Bradley Cooper. He’s earnest and intelligent and we have similar interests. But I don’t see that pop … that abandon which is so important.
‘I get carried away’ … touching coming from Bradley …
Happy New Year!
12/25/23
Have you heard this story about Leonard Bernstein and Mike Nichols? They were friends and it was the time after An Evenjng with Nichols and May and before Mike’s directing career. Lenny says to Mike, ‘Oh, Mike you are so good , but so good for what?’ Apparently Lenny was speaking for himself too.
That was a wonderful time when high art and pop art converged. You are a throwback to that time.
Mike said that directing Spamalot was the same job as directing Angels in America. That’s so great. He made it that way.
Frank Loesser was their grubbier street wise cousin of the same era. His family had several members who were classical musicians. They always looked down on what he did and he tried to please them with Most Happy Fella and they weren’t impressed. It was a sad and dumb conflict.
I think a failing in Bradley’s movie is that it is too stodgy. I think the real tone of that time was sexier and funnier . Bradley gets the idea ‘I’m reigning myself in!’ But not the tone. Amadeus might be more like it.
Is On the Town a lesser work than Mass? Says who? Why? They come from the same source. It had nothing to do with being commercial or not. It was about the nature of what the artist was compelled to say. And who they were speaking to and for.
Thinking of Quincy Jones. He could and would do anything. It was all music to him. From the most sophisticated jazz to Sinatra to Michael Jackson … Lenny to Ed Murrow … ‘I’m a musician, anything to do with music.’
Movies are personal. I’ve mentioned before I don’t really critique them. Primarily, I guess my response is … I’m this and not that. Movies are self exploration.
I watched Maestro a few times and not for Bradley Cooper at all. I wanted to write about art.
I read your notes and I see a different picture.
I saw each of Chazelle’s episodes in Babylon as an essay. He was passionately speaking about experiences he had.
We can’t help but tell our story 24/7.
What do you think of the way Cooper shot the movie? I felt like I was looking at Mount Rushmore. I saw what he was doing when Snoopy floated by. No mystery. I was turned off by the opening. I didn’t like the excited running down the hall.
Why the stable one shot in the Thanksgiving argument? Why not more cuts in general. Why black and white? That made him seem less alive to me.
With the exception of the conducting scene, his acting seemed less natural to me than he’s been in other things.
I loved the ending … I would have loved to see more of that ambiguity in the rest of the picture. Also how did she help him besides encouragement?
I liked the scene at the end when he’s with the young man in the disco. Why not more life in the other scenes?
I’m not arguing. I get a lot out of your contrary view.
12/25/23
I suspected that he is a winner endowed with enough talent and character to win the right way. A positive force. A good person made that movie. And a top flight professional. But you say it so well. My instincts about him are confirmed.
I had no problem with the prosthetic nose, and I liked his thinking on display. I wrote about that.
But you’re right, he’s not an artist. Yes. Not everyone is. He brought everything to the movie except art.
Great letters!
12/25/23
It’s not, for me, about the technique —- it’s the feel. That Tar scene in the class was much more immediate to me than the Maestro Thanksgiving argument.
Tar had that ambiguity … the whole thing about positive or negative is an error to my way of thinking.
Maybe Maestro was so well put together there was no room for surprise. I felt Cate Blanchett in Tar was out on the edge in her performance. No one knew what was coming next, including her.
I’ve seen a lot if stuff where it’s just a stationary camera on the actors and I’ve loved it. I can’t fault the acting in the Thanksgiving scene. What’s missing?
This opens another lovely can of worms. An old bugaboo. The relation between art and craft. For me art leads. I have something to say and I find a way to say it. I’ll learn new craft if I need it. But mainly I just dial up craft and let it come out already entwined with what I’m saying.
I shuddered when you spoke of fashion related to cutting (scenes in movies). Or anything else. Distinctiveness matters not as a matter of originality but as a matter of authenticity.
Directness leads to mystery. When something is fully explored the explorer always winds up in the unknown.
A child learns language because she wants to say something. That never changes.
My craft, such as it is, grows without me knowing it, Then every once in while I notice I used a new tactic
12/25/23
You are so great. How nice.
‘Art? You just do it.’
Martin Ritt
End of letters
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Emerald (Fennell the director of Saltburn) makes a world and then yanks us back with her clever (but still contrived?) plot. (I saw this picture before.) I just like looking at her world. I don’t need the satiric horror movie strategy (do I?). Emerald’s world is horrible enough. She has this weirdness that I don’t only enjoy. I find it to be mandatory.
Nothing is as it seems in Emerald’s world. That’s good. Great even. Did she trust her insight enough? (I think so.) Nothing is as it seems, is more than a gimmick. It’s the way things are.
When I know the plot in full, I can just watch the characters. (Who are they? Who am I?)
Gene Wilder, in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, had a strategy so the audience wouldn’t know if his character was lying or not, at any moment. Saltburn hides the ball. A middle class boy claims he is poor to provoke sympathy and ingratiate himself with the rich. But we have no reason to believe he is lying until much later. Emerald is fucking with us. She is playing with our predilection to distrust the rich and ascribe a certain pitiable martyrdom to the poor. She wants us to think in terms of the stereotypes we have been conditioned to believe. Her game is to pull the rug out from our biased suppositions. She shows the faux poor boy as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but his prey are not exactly sheep either.
I’m almost clear re the grifter, not quite. Who are these rich people? They are all bored and most are dim. What else? Why does the con man, who is so much smarter, want what they have? (Maybe not so clear … )
Is Emerald saying something profound? This rich thing … it’s not only a sickness for those who have it, it’s even worse for those who want it.
Oliver, the villainous protagonist, is the only character with agency. The rich characters have all the time and money in the world. They are beyond desire. So they busy themselves with their manufactured problems. They have nothing ironically beyond wrestling with what their own self image(s). Why would Oliver who is so smart want to steal nothing from people who have nothing of any existential worth? To have everything is to have nothing. To identify with material wealth is to negate life itself. Wealth is means, not meaning. The envious criminal is a nihilist, as are his marks. Is that what Emerald is saying or is it only what I am seeing?
When Oliver celebrates his stolen fortune — alone — what is he celebrating exactly?
This fantasy about the revenge of the excluded … Emerald did Promising Young Woman … she does revenge fantasies … in Promising Young Woman we were meant to sympathize for the oppressed woman who was at once serial killer and feminist hero … but Oliver is unsympathetic … a middle class sociopath boy who wanted what he thought was everything, and was willing to destroy two families in order to get it.
Emerald doesn’t make it easy. Oliver had a nice, normal bourgeoise childhood. He wasn’t abused. There is no psychological reason for who he is. He was most likely evil from birth. Rosemary’s Baby all grown up. His evil is met by the cast(e) of Clueless. Oliver introduces death to people who had forgotten it existed.
No death … no imagination … not critical thinking … alienated from their brains and hearts … sub-human by choice? … like animals in the zoo … everything is taken care of, except the maintenance of their true natures … they are dead already …
and Oliver wants walking death … he is a life hater …
it’s not that they were mean to him or indifferent … we see at the end that it wasn’t revenge at all … he wanted what they had … Oliver is a necrophiliac who masturbates on the dead bodies of the dead rich until he is the last one left and then he makes love to his own corpse … he’s not haunted by ghosts, he becomes a ghost by story’s end …
Emerald started with a personal experience … how the unimportant little person can bring down a bigger more important person … and then uncovered how the moment of vulnerability is when the formerly important one got rich … succeeded … got everything they ever wanted or needed … and then began to recede …
Life and art require a flame of dissatisfaction. Oliver brags that he knows how to work and they don’t, but he will forget soon enough.
Oliver celebrates work … but his work is as evil as their riches … because it is done to steal the wealth from them … the sin isn’t the theft … it’s in the envy and desire …
Love and work … work for those you love doing what you love … not the coveting and usurpation of valueless valuables …
Great movie.
I don’t know if that is what she was going for, but that is what she said to me. Artists don’t know what they are doing. They just do it.
Art.
Copyright 2023 Richard Thomas
12/29/23: American Fiction (2023)
Been there, done that.
The writer says he’s angry. The movie says so too, but he accepts disappointment with a strain of detached fatalism. Anger fights — conversely, the writer accepts everything with a not unjustified sense of superiority. (He knows it’s a double negative. Rules don’t apply to those who transcend them.) He doesn’t want to be accepted into any dim club that won’t have him as a member. His mother (and the screenplay) says he is depressed, but he’s not depressed. The writer is grounded by his reasonably low expectations in most human beings. The mother says says all geniuses are lonely, but he has no problem with being alone, it’s his fate, and there is no evidence offered in the script that he is a genius. He’s smarter than everybody else, but that’s a low bar. They flatter themselves when they confer titles of genius.
Oh what fools these mortals be …
The unwashed masses see him as a reminder of their failure. (Deep down, they know they aren’t much.) They can’t celebrate their inflated accomplishments at all while the real thing broods in the corner. They love to banish him. Mothers and the like think we suffer these slings and arrows of these not so outrageous fortunes, but after the initial shock, we leave each forced exit bigger than we were before. Lilliputians make claims of power. For us such displays are unnecessary.
We are power. We don’t have to try or prove it.
I was never unhappy. I just sometimes thought I was. The same is true for Monk, the protagonist writer of the movie. It’s a blessed fate to not be like, or with, the others.
Of course, the institutions of higher education, publishing and Hollywood disappoint. All institutions disappoint. The world always disappoints. Everywhere. The world doesn’t want to know what its reality is. If it can be comfortable in its illusions it is satisfied. The world is all about money and ego, and the easy way out. If the world arrives at an illusion of clarity about itself, it doesn’t ask too many questions.
A writer constantly questions, and this incessant and insistent curiosity is viewed as insubordination by the willfully ignorant hordes.
Monk’s brother tells him that there are people who want to love him as he is, and advises that he be transparent. ‘Show yourself and let those who want to love you love you.’ It is a radical suggestion, but why not? Monk tried impossibly to be in the world on its terms, and true to himself at the same time, but of course nature always overwhelmed his efforts.
The film has three endings … two are false. In the last, the world incredibly murders Monk body and soul. Nevertheless he makes a fortune and he knows he’s part of the problem. In the second he finds a woman, romantic love and personal happiness. He cashes in and gets warmth and affection and shuts the door of his happy home on the world and its injustice and suffering. In the first ending, he shares his writing and his person with the world and blackout! We don’t know how the world will respond. The ambiguity is true.
Does it matter? Hope is more real than optimism. It is not the writer’s job to change the world. They simply must give it the option.
Just say your lines and don’t bump into the furniture.
I never had faith in the world. Not really. Even at the high point of my socialization I knew it was all a lie. The world couldn’t betray me. I’m from somewhere else. Monk is frustrated that the world isn’t good enough for his writing. That frustration indicates to me that he is not approaching genius, or something better, yet. (I’m not saying that I am. It’s unseemly. Wondering about whether you are a genius strikes me as very un-genius thing to do. Genius is an honorific bestowed by the world, that diminishes something very important into a matter of petty ego. I am made of different cloth than the world, I know that much.)
Maybe, I felt like Monk at one time, but I never was like him. His story rings a bell of past resentment, but I can’t remember resembling him in any detail. I feel so far beyond this picture. I was born beyond this picture.
The world is irrelevant. What it does with real writing is its own business. Individuals are a different story. Certain individuals form a community of the future. Their love and work are the means with which humanity progresses.
Real writing will not live in the academy or the publishing industry or Hollywood. Or the world at large. Yet it will live in the world (contradiction), for the world and beyond the world. The world will be redeemed by aliens from the outside.
Or it will end.
In the future, the business world that tormented Monk will not exist. Higher ed won’t sometimes use political correctness as a weapon to purge difficult minds, publishers won’t often look for pablum to pacify infantile readers, and Hollywood won’t usually patronize the public’s illusions. Business itself won’t exist. AI and universal base income will obliterate all of Monk’s problems. We will have nothing to do but make art that we share with and for ourselves and each other. Fear of death and an instinct for survival will atrophy. Most people will want to learn, or opt for a state of suspended animation. No one will teach. Education will occur between people. Artists will give all of their attention to the pursuit of truth, and audiences will listen intently to what they have to say. All others will devolve into lower animal species and eventually become extinct.
I live in the future.
Does ‘American Fiction’ have interiority? Is it more than social commentary and family drama? Does the protagonist confront issues related to his very existence? Beyond politics and psychology?
Reality: he doesn’t belong in higher ed, publishing or Hollywood. An artist, a genius (that ridiculous word!) doesn’t care about the concerns of any of those activities.
If you want to see the world, you can’t be of it. Selfies aren’t art.
The writer says he’s angry. The movie says so too, but he accepts disappointment with a strain of detached fatalism. Anger fights — conversely, the writer accepts everything with a not unjustified sense of superiority. (He knows it’s a double negative. Rules don’t apply to those who transcend them.) He doesn’t want to be accepted into any dim club that won’t have him as a member. His mother (and the screenplay) says he is depressed, but he’s not depressed. The writer is grounded by his reasonably low expectations in most human beings. The mother says says all geniuses are lonely, but he has no problem with being alone, it’s his fate, and there is no evidence offered in the script that he is a genius. He’s smarter than everybody else, but that’s a low bar. They flatter themselves when they confer titles of genius.
Oh what fools these mortals be …
The unwashed masses see him as a reminder of their failure. (Deep down, they know they aren’t much.) They can’t celebrate their inflated accomplishments at all while the real thing broods in the corner. They love to banish him. Mothers and the like think we suffer these slings and arrows of these not so outrageous fortunes, but after the initial shock, we leave each forced exit bigger than we were before. Lilliputians make claims of power. For us such displays are unnecessary.
We are power. We don’t have to try or prove it.
I was never unhappy. I just sometimes thought I was. The same is true for Monk, the protagonist writer of the movie. It’s a blessed fate to not be like, or with, the others.
Of course, the institutions of higher education, publishing and Hollywood disappoint. All institutions disappoint. The world always disappoints. Everywhere. The world doesn’t want to know what its reality is. If it can be comfortable in its illusions it is satisfied. The world is all about money and ego, and the easy way out. If the world arrives at an illusion of clarity about itself, it doesn’t ask too many questions.
A writer constantly questions, and this incessant and insistent curiosity is viewed as insubordination by the willfully ignorant hordes.
Monk’s brother tells him that there are people who want to love him as he is, and advises that he be transparent. ‘Show yourself and let those who want to love you love you.’ It is a radical suggestion, but why not? Monk tried impossibly to be in the world on its terms, and true to himself at the same time, but of course nature always overwhelmed his efforts.
The film has three endings … two are false. In the last, the world incredibly murders Monk body and soul. Nevertheless he makes a fortune and he knows he’s part of the problem. In the second he finds a woman, romantic love and personal happiness. He cashes in and gets warmth and affection and shuts the door of his happy home on the world and its injustice and suffering. In the first ending, he shares his writing and his person with the world and blackout! We don’t know how the world will respond. The ambiguity is true.
Does it matter? Hope is more real than optimism. It is not the writer’s job to change the world. They simply must give it the option.
Just say your lines and don’t bump into the furniture.
I never had faith in the world. Not really. Even at the high point of my socialization I knew it was all a lie. The world couldn’t betray me. I’m from somewhere else. Monk is frustrated that the world isn’t good enough for his writing. That frustration indicates to me that he is not approaching genius, or something better, yet. (I’m not saying that I am. It’s unseemly. Wondering about whether you are a genius strikes me as very un-genius thing to do. Genius is an honorific bestowed by the world, that diminishes something very important into a matter of petty ego. I am made of different cloth than the world, I know that much.)
Maybe, I felt like Monk at one time, but I never was like him. His story rings a bell of past resentment, but I can’t remember resembling him in any detail. I feel so far beyond this picture. I was born beyond this picture.
The world is irrelevant. What it does with real writing is its own business. Individuals are a different story. Certain individuals form a community of the future. Their love and work are the means with which humanity progresses.
Real writing will not live in the academy or the publishing industry or Hollywood. Or the world at large. Yet it will live in the world (contradiction), for the world and beyond the world. The world will be redeemed by aliens from the outside.
Or it will end.
In the future, the business world that tormented Monk will not exist. Higher ed won’t sometimes use political correctness as a weapon to purge difficult minds, publishers won’t often look for pablum to pacify infantile readers, and Hollywood won’t usually patronize the public’s illusions. Business itself won’t exist. AI and universal base income will obliterate all of Monk’s problems. We will have nothing to do but make art that we share with and for ourselves and each other. Fear of death and an instinct for survival will atrophy. Most people will want to learn, or opt for a state of suspended animation. No one will teach. Education will occur between people. Artists will give all of their attention to the pursuit of truth, and audiences will listen intently to what they have to say. All others will devolve into lower animal species and eventually become extinct.
I live in the future.
Does ‘American Fiction’ have interiority? Is it more than social commentary and family drama? Does the protagonist confront issues related to his very existence? Beyond politics and psychology?
Reality: he doesn’t belong in higher ed, publishing or Hollywood. An artist, a genius (that ridiculous word!) doesn’t care about the concerns of any of those activities.
If you want to see the world, you can’t be of it. Selfies aren’t art.
When Bradley Cooper makes the biopic of my life he will pretentiously and ponderously call it, ‘The Great Naif’.
‘Even as a teen I knew that (Tom) Wolfe was only making toys.’ Not me. As a teen I read him and the other new journalists in awe. Later, I earnestly listened to the professor of my New Journalism class in college, collecting the pearls that dropped from his lips into a plastic knockoff chalice. I thought the new journalists were artists.
Cooper’s film of my life begins with a black and white shot of a constipated me struggling on the toilet and then at the moment of release shouting … ‘It was Wolfe’s decision to give primacy to reporting that prevented him from making art!’
And then I’d leap off the toilet and run to my laptop while the music … all drums and horns … blaring and throbbing.
I’m with you and your brother. Maestro is a bad movie. (My friend admired much about it. His brother hated it. I misread.) A stiff (as in lacking spontaneity) consideration of what it is to be an artist. I reached for Chazelle to get the taste out of my mouth, what a contrast! How alive. Cooper is still looking up to people …
Paula and I were talking about how much I have changed in the last 13 years. The unconscious conflict when I felt something was great when in actuality I was something much different.
I’m glad I’m naive. I get good writing out of it.
Someone read a piece from last December, the Cracker Barrel piece. So I read it again. At first I didn’t like it. I thought it read like a journal entry. Then I thought it was OK, but I’d cut the first couple paragraphs. Then I saw what I was doing and thought it was fine … but not as good as what I’ve written this December.
I’ve even changed in that period of time.
And even my own work is a mystery to me …
A reporter follows the cultural zeitgeist. A writer follows her soul. You can’t have it both ways.
Spielberg said a truism the other day that resonated. ‘Every time I start a movie I ask the question who am I?’ That’s how I feel.
I think I’d have liked Wolfe. He seems like he was classy and nice. I also think he would have bored me.
I don’t know if I’d get along with Chazelle but we are very similar personalities. I’d like Bradley Cooper. He’s earnest and intelligent and we have similar interests. But I don’t see that pop … that abandon which is so important.
‘I get carried away’ … touching coming from Bradley …
Happy New Year!
12/25/23
Have you heard this story about Leonard Bernstein and Mike Nichols? They were friends and it was the time after An Evenjng with Nichols and May and before Mike’s directing career. Lenny says to Mike, ‘Oh, Mike you are so good , but so good for what?’ Apparently Lenny was speaking for himself too.
That was a wonderful time when high art and pop art converged. You are a throwback to that time.
Mike said that directing Spamalot was the same job as directing Angels in America. That’s so great. He made it that way.
Frank Loesser was their grubbier street wise cousin of the same era. His family had several members who were classical musicians. They always looked down on what he did and he tried to please them with Most Happy Fella and they weren’t impressed. It was a sad and dumb conflict.
I think a failing in Bradley’s movie is that it is too stodgy. I think the real tone of that time was sexier and funnier . Bradley gets the idea ‘I’m reigning myself in!’ But not the tone. Amadeus might be more like it.
Is On the Town a lesser work than Mass? Says who? Why? They come from the same source. It had nothing to do with being commercial or not. It was about the nature of what the artist was compelled to say. And who they were speaking to and for.
Thinking of Quincy Jones. He could and would do anything. It was all music to him. From the most sophisticated jazz to Sinatra to Michael Jackson … Lenny to Ed Murrow … ‘I’m a musician, anything to do with music.’
Movies are personal. I’ve mentioned before I don’t really critique them. Primarily, I guess my response is … I’m this and not that. Movies are self exploration.
I watched Maestro a few times and not for Bradley Cooper at all. I wanted to write about art.
I read your notes and I see a different picture.
I saw each of Chazelle’s episodes in Babylon as an essay. He was passionately speaking about experiences he had.
We can’t help but tell our story 24/7.
What do you think of the way Cooper shot the movie? I felt like I was looking at Mount Rushmore. I saw what he was doing when Snoopy floated by. No mystery. I was turned off by the opening. I didn’t like the excited running down the hall.
Why the stable one shot in the Thanksgiving argument? Why not more cuts in general. Why black and white? That made him seem less alive to me.
With the exception of the conducting scene, his acting seemed less natural to me than he’s been in other things.
I loved the ending … I would have loved to see more of that ambiguity in the rest of the picture. Also how did she help him besides encouragement?
I liked the scene at the end when he’s with the young man in the disco. Why not more life in the other scenes?
I’m not arguing. I get a lot out of your contrary view.
12/25/23
I suspected that he is a winner endowed with enough talent and character to win the right way. A positive force. A good person made that movie. And a top flight professional. But you say it so well. My instincts about him are confirmed.
I had no problem with the prosthetic nose, and I liked his thinking on display. I wrote about that.
But you’re right, he’s not an artist. Yes. Not everyone is. He brought everything to the movie except art.
Great letters!
12/25/23
It’s not, for me, about the technique —- it’s the feel. That Tar scene in the class was much more immediate to me than the Maestro Thanksgiving argument.
Tar had that ambiguity … the whole thing about positive or negative is an error to my way of thinking.
Maybe Maestro was so well put together there was no room for surprise. I felt Cate Blanchett in Tar was out on the edge in her performance. No one knew what was coming next, including her.
I’ve seen a lot if stuff where it’s just a stationary camera on the actors and I’ve loved it. I can’t fault the acting in the Thanksgiving scene. What’s missing?
This opens another lovely can of worms. An old bugaboo. The relation between art and craft. For me art leads. I have something to say and I find a way to say it. I’ll learn new craft if I need it. But mainly I just dial up craft and let it come out already entwined with what I’m saying.
I shuddered when you spoke of fashion related to cutting (scenes in movies). Or anything else. Distinctiveness matters not as a matter of originality but as a matter of authenticity.
Directness leads to mystery. When something is fully explored the explorer always winds up in the unknown.
A child learns language because she wants to say something. That never changes.
My craft, such as it is, grows without me knowing it, Then every once in while I notice I used a new tactic
12/25/23
You are so great. How nice.
‘Art? You just do it.’
Martin Ritt
End of letters
############
Emerald (Fennell the director of Saltburn) makes a world and then yanks us back with her clever (but still contrived?) plot. (I saw this picture before.) I just like looking at her world. I don’t need the satiric horror movie strategy (do I?). Emerald’s world is horrible enough. She has this weirdness that I don’t only enjoy. I find it to be mandatory.
Nothing is as it seems in Emerald’s world. That’s good. Great even. Did she trust her insight enough? (I think so.) Nothing is as it seems, is more than a gimmick. It’s the way things are.
When I know the plot in full, I can just watch the characters. (Who are they? Who am I?)
Gene Wilder, in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, had a strategy so the audience wouldn’t know if his character was lying or not, at any moment. Saltburn hides the ball. A middle class boy claims he is poor to provoke sympathy and ingratiate himself with the rich. But we have no reason to believe he is lying until much later. Emerald is fucking with us. She is playing with our predilection to distrust the rich and ascribe a certain pitiable martyrdom to the poor. She wants us to think in terms of the stereotypes we have been conditioned to believe. Her game is to pull the rug out from our biased suppositions. She shows the faux poor boy as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but his prey are not exactly sheep either.
I’m almost clear re the grifter, not quite. Who are these rich people? They are all bored and most are dim. What else? Why does the con man, who is so much smarter, want what they have? (Maybe not so clear … )
Is Emerald saying something profound? This rich thing … it’s not only a sickness for those who have it, it’s even worse for those who want it.
Oliver, the villainous protagonist, is the only character with agency. The rich characters have all the time and money in the world. They are beyond desire. So they busy themselves with their manufactured problems. They have nothing ironically beyond wrestling with what their own self image(s). Why would Oliver who is so smart want to steal nothing from people who have nothing of any existential worth? To have everything is to have nothing. To identify with material wealth is to negate life itself. Wealth is means, not meaning. The envious criminal is a nihilist, as are his marks. Is that what Emerald is saying or is it only what I am seeing?
When Oliver celebrates his stolen fortune — alone — what is he celebrating exactly?
This fantasy about the revenge of the excluded … Emerald did Promising Young Woman … she does revenge fantasies … in Promising Young Woman we were meant to sympathize for the oppressed woman who was at once serial killer and feminist hero … but Oliver is unsympathetic … a middle class sociopath boy who wanted what he thought was everything, and was willing to destroy two families in order to get it.
Emerald doesn’t make it easy. Oliver had a nice, normal bourgeoise childhood. He wasn’t abused. There is no psychological reason for who he is. He was most likely evil from birth. Rosemary’s Baby all grown up. His evil is met by the cast(e) of Clueless. Oliver introduces death to people who had forgotten it existed.
No death … no imagination … not critical thinking … alienated from their brains and hearts … sub-human by choice? … like animals in the zoo … everything is taken care of, except the maintenance of their true natures … they are dead already …
and Oliver wants walking death … he is a life hater …
it’s not that they were mean to him or indifferent … we see at the end that it wasn’t revenge at all … he wanted what they had … Oliver is a necrophiliac who masturbates on the dead bodies of the dead rich until he is the last one left and then he makes love to his own corpse … he’s not haunted by ghosts, he becomes a ghost by story’s end …
Emerald started with a personal experience … how the unimportant little person can bring down a bigger more important person … and then uncovered how the moment of vulnerability is when the formerly important one got rich … succeeded … got everything they ever wanted or needed … and then began to recede …
Life and art require a flame of dissatisfaction. Oliver brags that he knows how to work and they don’t, but he will forget soon enough.
Oliver celebrates work … but his work is as evil as their riches … because it is done to steal the wealth from them … the sin isn’t the theft … it’s in the envy and desire …
Love and work … work for those you love doing what you love … not the coveting and usurpation of valueless valuables …
Great movie.
I don’t know if that is what she was going for, but that is what she said to me. Artists don’t know what they are doing. They just do it.
More speaking on art, and life … and Damien Chazelle
Damien Chazelle ends La La Land with a dream of what might have been. But what he says to me is much more interesting than his one theme about how romance turns into an initiation for those other bigger things: life, art, family and friends. I am jazzed by his true assertion that those are the bigger things.
Love and work. From God’s mouth to Freud’s ears. It’s really that simple. Who you love and what you love to do. Life, art, family and friends. The rest is distraction. Career? No one cares on their death bed. It’s all about love and work. Status and money? Well, money you can do something with … that counts … but it’s not the money itself, it’s what you do with it. Status comes and goes. If they think you’re great or think you stink, it really doesn’t matter. What stays is what you actually do.
Most of The Rick Blog is about defusing bombs. Just love who you love and do what you love to do, and tune everything else out.
In the debauched hedonistic world of Babylon, it’s the work for hire in order to facilitate work for love, and the romantic attraction that facilitates true love with the object of desire or someone else, that gets things started.
‘Movies are better than life.’ An escape, says one our heroes. I don’t watch movies to escape life. I watch them to reflect upon life. Entertainment is an escape. Art is a means to more conscious living. This movie is art. I converse with it. When a movie is only entertainment, I rewrite it. We can’t escape the essences of life even when we try to run away from them. It’s always love and work. If you think being limited to those two topics is boring, you’ve never lived at all.
Post-capitalist society. Not in the movie. In Chazelle. He returns to a La La Land theme. Dreamers and dolts are used by the system. Success and exploitation are the same thing. Our country isn’t conservative and liberal. It’s capitalist and post-capitalist. One pole says people are objects of use. The other says people aren’t fully human until they are free to love and work in that Freudian way.
It ain’t art if it isn’t distinctive. No one does it like Chazelle. Bradley Cooper tries so hard. If you have a boss, or career ambition, or you care what people think, you can’t get to art … or life or love or work (if art isn’t your work already).
This movie romanticizes movies, but, like its older sister La La Land, it doesn’t stop there. It’s not the movies. Just like this piece isn’t the words. It’s that thing you can’t describe. They say that music is the most perfect art, and that makes a lot of sense. But I never took piano lessons. I only have words. And Chazelle can do so many things well he can’t help himself.
I love this movie. It’s so good. A lot of times these directors become big deals and they get carried away. It happens. Capitalism and ego fuck them up. Success and hubris and they lose their mojo. Not Chazelle. He got really big and knew he could do these huge set pieces … masterful technical filmmaking … but he was consistently … in every frame … animated by the truth … his truth? … what’s the difference? His truth is the truth as seen from where he is standing.
Of course, the market and the critics punished Chazelle for it. Hah! I hope he doesn’t give a shit. I pretty sure he doesn’t. He says in his movie what he thinks of the assessments of capitalism and the crowd. I can’t be completely sure however. Sometimes art is wiser than the artist. I did some really brilliant things when I was younger and I completely missed the point. It’s easier to keep track now.
I love spending time with artists. It’s not an escape. It’s home. I’m not just getting away from all that has oppressed me. I’ve left it forever. This movie is not about show business. It’s about art changing business into humanity.
We don’t have to live in their world. We can make our own.
‘We have a higher calling.’ Yes! We are better than priests. We don’t just touch the divine in a sanctuary. We do it in the street. Everywhere. We witness to God in Babylon. It’s faith, not good works. If there is God in it, it doesn’t matter what we do. We won’t hurt anybody. That’s a given. So if we get swept away by the excesses of Babylon and come out on the other side wiser for it, we’ll be good. Bad only exists when God isn’t there. The capitalists and the narcissists talk about God day and night, but God lives inside those who love and work, and follow the path God’s reveals to them, not what the bosses and crowds tell them to do.
High art v low art? Who gives a fuck where you are from? It’s not a love and work question. The characters fight for relevance, but love and work doesn’t care. You do it somewhere else. High viz, low viz … what’s the difference? The only respect that matters is of those with eyes to see. In Babylon you needed no certifications in order to create at first. Hollywood was founded, and populated by outcasts, in the beginning. It was a dog show for mongrels. Per usual, the rich want a piece when they see money in it. Then the high art pretensions arrive. The rich went to college. It doesn’t mean the pedigree stuff isn’t good. Some of it is great. The answer isn’t ‘no room for the upper crust’. Let a thousand flowers bloom. It’s the exclusion of the lower. Capitalism isn’t about greed. It’s about condescension.
Sometimes the seductions and punishments of the capitalist narcissists pull the love and work people down into oblivion, and it’s the saddest thing in the world.
What the capitalist narcissists call morality is only a show of morality. Right and wrong are levers of control to them, not an interest in public and personal well being or the will of God. Their sins are always worse than those of the people of love and work, who usually only hurt themselves and harm no one else with their excesses.
Wealth, education, phony morals, race, gender, preference, ethnicity … what else? … the condescensions of idiots and assholes that don’t know we are all one …
and none of that matters … if we don’t give them power, they don’t have any … I don’t write these words as a revenge of the real … I write them because the capitalist narcissists don’t exist? Love and work and ignore? … no not ignore … accept! that they exist and make love and work anyway. They want you to think that you need them and they are withholding. You don’t need them, and the fact that they withhold from you is the greatest thing that ever happened to you.
One of the heroes just walks away. Hallelujah! He could create in Babylon. He couldn’t in the racist corporate religious fascist fanaticism of what replaced the manic indulgent chaos of freedom. He leaves the lot but his love and work is left behind to live in eternity. And he’ll create more eternal music at his next stop.
Capitalist narcissism turns into murderous criminality after the music leaves. Without art, everything deteriorates.
Another hero kills himself. He lost faith when the music changed. He mistakenly thought it went away.The heroine refuses to leave. She dies young, a martyr to Babylon.
The last man standing gets away. He knew that love and work transcended place and circumstances. He incorporates the eternity he made in his time in Babylon and carries on.
We, the people of love and work, are given almost everything … but we must figure out how to avoid oblivion.
Same ending as La La Land, the eternal in what might have been, but what precedes the ending shows the darker alternatives when faith is lost.
Movies aren’t an escape. They touch that invisible thing more real than the three dimensions.
If you let them.
You got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative … and don’t mess with Mr. In – Between.
The middle class manhandles artists. The inner life offends those who are willfully ignorant of its existence. Performing artists desire the heart’s desire and external validation. The middle class exploits this and sets up some hunger games. Performing artists inhabit gladiatorial spirit and aching longing.
Hacks are a different story. They are middle class people who amuse other middle class people. Can masturbation involve more than one person? The artist is a monk or cloistered nun forced to work in a strip joint to get the money for baloney sandwiches.
Synchronicity. An artist learns not to rely on the middle class. Security and support comes from somewhere else. It all works out … by magic.
A performing artist is an artist second class. A composer, a writer … that’s an artist. The middle class hates a first class artist even more than a performing artist. ‘It’s you every time. It’s brand new every night.’ The middle class can’t have that, but they have no choice if you do it. You’ve got to get away from them. Run away! Run away to your private island and write everything on your blog. Audience will scurry to you smiling like the forest animals in Snow White. Sweet, unconditional love. No longer a commodity, you are now a person. You are an avatar of post-capitalism.
The soul battles the economic machine and wins. The middle class is a mass of cogs. The soul is nature. All of it. Life finds a way.
I wouldn’t want to be back with the middle class even if they apologized. I want to be with the people who already know how to love.
Rebellion. Romance. Floating above the middle class cesspool into the stars. Why would you ever leave the stars for the shit? Commitment.
They’d have to do more than apologize. They’d have to change.
Why is joy accompanied by pain? The middle class is a buzz kill to be assiduously avoided. Why is it a constant choice to refuse the wet blankets covered in smallpox and put on your own splendid garments?
‘How you going to save the world if you are such a traditionalist? Jazz is revolution. How are you going to save jazz if no one listens to you?’
Do I believe that?
How does anyone listen to you if you change what you say so they’ll listen? Isn’t it the middle class who told me I was just on Facebook? The middle class, who was doing improv karaoke night to lost children on the way to Palookaville?
The movie agrees with me. Wage slavery is a middle class trap and so is success. Screw what they demand order insult say bribe … why does that need to be a constant reminder?
The middle class is an invasive species like non-indigenous carp ruining a lake. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Whether they bully you or seduce you, it’s same shit different day.
I was a monk and I auditioned and I did wage slave jobs and I couldn’t pay the rent and I went home and licked my wounds and I succeeded on middle class terms and I had them keep coming after me and I broke down and I backslid and I got beat up repeatedly and I dropped out and I found love and I got happy and I started writing on my own terms and I integrated my personality and I felt agency and made decisions and got proud of my life, every second of it … I went through everything Ryan and Emma did and more … and I’ve made it … achieved everything that I ever wanted … … …. and I keep wanting to achieve new things …
I have no might have been …
‘Here’s to the ones who dream … here’s to the fools … crazy … poets, painters … hearts that break … mess that they make …’
It’s unfair to call this romance. It’s life. The rest is death too soon.
There is no limit to what can be said about this mysterious topic. Art. I was wondering if Maestro would tell me something I don’t know. I suspect that there is nothing in this movie that I don’t know. So I’ll play spot the insight. It’s not an entirely useless pursuit. Bradley Cooper made a piece that contemplates art from many perspectives. The qualities of how art is made, the life of an artist, the life of people close to the artist. Bradley made the movie because he is considering these matters in his own life. Like every other piece made by every other artist, it is personal, and it is also universal. Art gets to the essentials of things. What is true for Bradley is true for me. Our differences are on other planes not the dimension of art. It’s not that we say the same thing, it’s that we are the same thing. This is a picture about what art, people intimate with artists, and artists are. I’ve done the same thing as Maestro does on The Rick Blog. Cooper has the same concerns that I do. All artists do. Bradley and Rick don’t take classes in art appreciation or read books or hear lectures about how to make art. Or if we do, they don’t matter. We make art, in this case, about art. We look at art, itself, and artists themselves, and how art operates through us and through the people around us. Bradley and Rick are concerned with how art and life affect one another. I watch this film as a checklist. I’ve spent a lot of time on this constellation of questions. It’s nice to chat with Bradley.
Bradley’s an earnest filmmaker. He learns how to direct by directing. Good for him. That’s how you do it. Make art, live life, and they teach you how to do it in real time. It seems Bradley still imitates at times. My influences aren’t as conscious, but they are there.
Is all creation fast? Bernstein composes at the same pace that I write. Fast. Trying to get all the unconscious is firing at us at the speed of light. We might revise later, but we are only editing out errors in the transcript we made while we were taking dictation. Artists are stenographers.
Yes, fast. The soundtrack is wall to wall Bernstein music, which is natural and appropriate. My mind is wall to wall Rick words. Ditto.
Creator Bradley Cooper is contemplating art, in the artist and his immediate world, the life of an artist, and the size of the artist. The power and fame of the successful well known artist is hit lightly. I really appreciate that. Bernstein had no inner or outer issues with his ego or the ‘system’. He lived in a great city with great people who wanted great art. He was too intelligent and of too high character to not serve art with his prodigious talent even though he needlessly worried about whether he would throughout much of his life. I had a harder time. I wasn’t situated so fortunately. The inner is easy for me. The outer was tougher, and now is serene.
It’s a mistake to underestimate the contributions of others in the fulfillment of the potential of Lenny’s genius. Might be the biggest theme of the movie?
Bradley is more ambitious than Lenny. Bradley would love to be propelled in life as Lenny was, by the fierce and pure impulse to create. His strategy is to get there by gaining power as a filmmaker. I hope Bradley gets there. I just take it. My life is guided by that Lenny impulse. I’m not asking for permission or certification. Bradley earns chances from an establishment, and moves forward. I make my own chances. If they come they come, but no one can stop me from writing.
Some movies make me wonder. This one doesn’t. I listen to it as if it is conversation from someone I’m close to … I’ll hear new things, but I know who he is. My question is, how deep is Bradley going to go?
Lenny is open mouthed innocent, enthusiastic and naive. Right.
Lenny wants a thousand things. Right.
Carey Mulligan gets top billing? The movie says its main theme is about what it is like to love an artist. The artist themself has to be drawn in detail to study the wife protagonist.
Felicia loves Lenny just as he is. That love involved sacrifice and suffering. That’s part of what love is, in general and in loving and artist. Right.
Lenny, the artist defies classification. Right.
Composer v conductor: Creative person sits alone. Performer is public. Grand inner life v grand outer life. Lenny had both personalities. Artists are as big and as contradictory as the world. Right.
Lenny is vulnerable. The middle class is stupid. And lousy. The movie doesn’t directly say this, but all art is an indictment of the middle class. Lenny lives in a very real dream world. New York is a place for artists, where they can work and live and love who they desire. Lenny is depressed for the state of the world, but he himself lives in its most paradisal regions. Bradley goes silent on the middle class disparagement. I shout it. The Rick Blog won’t be playing on Netflix or the multiplex. Scorsese challenges the audience with Killers of the Flower Moon. The challenges are in what he says and how he says it. Nolan is so excited by the brilliant Oppenheimer, that the audience is also excited while he accurately portrays a poet, scientist, intellectual and political exile. Cooper wants to give them a love story, and hang insights about creativity on that traditional genre like ornaments on a Christmas tree. He succeeds in that, but would have gone further if the movie itself was art. I wasn’t confused for a second in this movie. Or made to feel uncomfortable about how I am living my life. Oppenheimer humbled me — so much I don’t know. Flower Moon indicted me for my complicity, and chided me for my insufficient curiosity. That powerful combination of what a work of art is saying, and how it is told.
I don’t like Sarah Silverman and I don’t want to know why. I could find out. I don’t want to go into it. I don’t think she is good in this picture. Too broad and crude as ever. She plays Lenny’s sister. It’s a distraction. She’s so self-conscious and forced. She breaks the illusion of pure artistry. I smell the career making in this, or any, Hollywood production, because it’s always there. The great movies hide it. I see Silverman and I see all the agents and publicists. Bradley picked her because he’s on the make too (it goes with the territory), so Silverman’s quality doesn’t bother him. Unfortunately, her ambition is all I can see in her. What is the blind spot of many artists regarding entertainers? Orson Welles cast Rich Little. Huh? What’s up with that? Bradley should have got an actress. Someone no one would notice either because if her lack of notoriety or ability to disappear into a part. He may have included Silverman to amplify the theme of Lenny’s performer side. I could go along with that, but even in pure performance mode it was impossible for Lenny to be a hack.
Lenny is straight and gay. A family man and a libertine. A performer and a creator. A classical musician and a pop artist. Shy and confident. Self-involved and compassionate, warm and generous. He’s the world. The bigger the artist, the greater the artist. Right.
I didn’t notice the shift from black and white to color on first viewing. I’ll pay attention second time through.
Bradley uses interviews as exposition of Lenny’s career. He’s not doing a show business biopic. He’s interested in the private Lenny, but we never see it. I prefer Bob Fosse’s Lenny, about Lenny Bruce. I really felt like I spent time with Lenny Bruce when I watched that picture. Bradley tries to get close, but misses. Bradley doesn’t fully create Lenny Bernstein as a character. Bradley’s Lenny is a representation of what Bradley thinks about him. It’s such controlled work. Too controlled. Bradley’s acting and writing never break through from what Bradley reasons about Lenny to what he discovers about Lenny. In himself. Did Bradley discover anything about Lenny? I want to hear it. He seems to be pointing to a contradiction between depression and inspiration. I want to see it in action.
Back to the checklist … Bradley’s true notes on Lenny (from here on in we are back to Lenny meaning Bernstein, Bruce was an aside that is now over …) and art … that never become Lenny or art …
Lenny is joyful and dissatisfied. Right.
Cooper thought ‘contradiction’ when he embarked on this project. He opens with a quote about contradiction. You got to let that top spin, Bradley. Your movie dramatizes your intellectual conclusion. Art is bigger than that. Bradley is a hard worker that I admire, but that’s just the beginning. Bradley, the actor does a perfect accent, and I am always aware of it. Dick Van Dyke did his famously awful Cockney accent in Mary Poppins and I stopped thinking about it immediately. Dick embodied that Bert the chimney sweep character, and the whole world of Mary Poppins communicating all of its essences. He found the fairy tale in Dick Van Dyke. Bradley is too well schooled. Every teacher he ever had said, ‘Well done, Bradley!’ The greatest artists disappoint their teachers, or don’t have any. Where are you Bradley? Where’s Lenny? Where’s that depression/inspiration thing you talk about?
Lenny is depressed who self medicates with his work ethic. He’s depressed as Lincoln was. He knows rhe state of the world. The artist goes against the nihilistic grain, knowing what they can do is very small, and also everything. Right.
Bradley hasn’t told me anything I don’t already know yet, and I don’t think he will, at least in Maestro.
Felicia is the one who changes. Lenny just is. He ages, but he is basically the same. I think it would have been more interesting to see Lenny’s changes, but I’m Lenny, not Felicia. Bradley is Felicia. He’d love to be Lenny. Imitation is a very early step in artist’s progress.
Lenny struggles to compose. The family man and performer interfere with the artist’s exploration of his inner life. Felicia blesses his creative introversion, his performance and family life are acceptable sacrifices to his gift . OK, so we see how choices must be made by the artist. You can love the world in all its details, but you can only manifest that love in manners limited by time and opportunity. I was forced to my computer. My writing leapt forward when I no longer performed or taught or engaged in outer community. My life is very tightly prescribed now. My wife, family, friends (a select group — intimates, not social acquaintances), and my writing. That’s all (and everything).
Anger drives Lenny’s art. Felicia tells him that with anger of her own, but it’s true. Anger is a force within art. Art is an aggressive and destructive thing. Art is a revolution. Conventionality, the societal manifestation of fear and its exploitation by authoritarians, and the ego’s arrogance or lack of confidence, has to be brought down by inconvenient truth, so freedom, beauty and love can reign.
Felicia more than accepted Lenny’s art. She knew it came first. It worked out for her because it made her happy to the same degree as he was compelled to do it. She felt he had an obligation to create. She took no ownership. She simply loved. His love affairs were what were beyond her human endurance. She knew that was what Lenny was like sexually going in too, but she thought she could handle it. She was brilliantly self-aware and she saw what was happening before, during and after it happened. Knowing the way it was didn’t make it hurt less. Life, love and art are hard. Lenny was working to keep creativity alive in the world. The promiscuity — no, wrong word, Lenny wasn’t promiscuous until maybe when he was old, he was born to love myriads of people and things — that pansexual reality was a truth of Lenny’s authenticity and part of the well from which his creation came. Felicia knew this too. The middle class thinks that love is a reward, a gift. Love bestows sweet presents, and painful demands, but the demands can be sweet too. We don’t choose who we love, just as we don’t choose what we create. We can’t help what we love, and we can never let go of it. To be very obvious, Felicia and Lenny had no toxicity in their lives. They created greatly with an equally great burden of a difficult love of each other and art and the world. Authors, composers … contradictions … solitary visions accomplished by two or more people …
This has been too easy to write thus far. I’ll playfully blame Bradley.
There’s an epilogue. Felicia dies. Lenny descends into male menopause. Artists are not immune from middle class mediocrity. Fame and success seduce the greatest hearts and minds to descend into mediocrity, and the greatest hearts and minds die like everyone else. The last shot is a flashback to Felicia, and the title ‘Maestro’ is superimposed on the screen. Bradley ends the movie like Mr. Holland’s Opus, honoring the silent art of those who intimately love artists. Lenny married Felicia for the same reason he, or any artist does anything — to free the potential of his life and art. Felicia was an artist in her own right, an actress, but her masterpiece was Leonard Bernstein. And he knew it. Thank you, Bradley. Your ending is great. You laid out something I have sensed but never fully articulated. Framing Felicia’s death and the final image with Lenny masterfully conducting with her support was more than brilliant. You moved moved and touched me. You told me something I don’t know.
And then Bradley leaves me with a question with two answers. In the last shot Felicia smiles for Lenny for several beats and then turns away. One answer is that Felicia left Lenny. The other answer is she never did.
My answer, which I am sure is true, is that we are always one with those we love, and also always separate. Life is a contradiction. We live in holy union with the people closest to us, and in divine solitude as well. We meet intimately in our solitudes.
For my wife Paula, my friend Rob and my brother Bob.
Every word I write is an exploration of myself. That’s true of all writers. The world is a mirror. Sometimes it’s a funhouse mirror. Writing is an ultimately satisfying struggle to make my inner and outer reality congruent. Life and writing hurt when my heart and the people, places and things of the external world aren’t in harmony. When I understand, I’m at peace. If I am critical of a movie for example, it really means —- this is not what I want. It’s not an assessment of intrinsic value. I’m strangely non judgmental. I just want everything in its proper place.
To the extent I have disappointing interactions , they are caused by a lack of self knowledge. Or more positively, are part of a process of discovery.
I saw a video of Stone, Lanthimos and Ruffalo discussing Poor Things. They didn’t hurt at all while I was watching. I’m just beyond it. Stone is into doing what scares her. She celebrates newly discovered levels of technical virtuosity as an actor in real time. Her performance is the sheer joy of being great at something. She reminds me of an elite athlete. Ruffalo is exhilarated by a return to acting. He comes out and says it. He left acting for Marvel movies and now he’s back. That’s his perspective , not mine. I haven’t looked at his situation specifically. He was first scared (a theme of the conversation) and then had a blast playing a character bigger than a comic book.
I thought Lanthimos might give me what I’m looking for. But, quite surprisingly, he didn’t seem in charge. Stone drives this show. He busied himself with creating external manifestations in the film that accompanied and enhanced Stone’s expression.
Younger people love the movie because they love Stone. They are turned on watching one of their own come into her full power. Stone reminds me of me doing the Rick Show 35 years ago. She’s at that stage. She’s an ecstatic, thrilled at being amazing … working with (slightly) controlled abandon. (I know that’s a contradiction.) The point of the performance is that she is fully alive. She’s not in the meaning phase as I am now. She’s in the being phase.
There comes a time when that exhilaration ends. It’s a state that doesn’t connect with others. They cheer because you embody what they dream of being. But they aren’t really with you. You’re objectified,
And then, you must be alone. It’s not just being who you are. It’s being who you are with meaning. It’s interesting that Stone’s character is a study in self exploration but that isn’t what she is doing at all. She is unapologetically herself in full … running and jumping with great joy.
Ruffalo is recapturing that joy. He’s returning to who he was before he left acting for a career in business. He reminds me of me when I went back onstage a few years back —- at least at first. I had this rush of excitement at the PlayProv week on Cape Cod . There was no rust at all. I was young again. I don’t even have interest in that type performance now. I awoke a dormant talent but was pulled in a direction of using it in service of something bigger. I get a sense of evolution in Ruffalo. He’s not through. There are other steps. He had doubts that he could do Poor Things. He had doubts he’d ever be allowed to do it too. He is grateful and surprised and it shows in his performance.
Lanthimos is just working, The star, Stone, has the power and he is content to lay his craft in service of her vision. Maybe his movies are simple because he needs a comment, but what really matters to him his plying his craft.
Good for all involved, but I’m going somewhere else and I don’t know what I’m doing which is how it should be. I’m going somewhere beyond all of the above. I’m going where people are doing what I’m starting to do now.
I felt fear and anxiety last night and that is welcome too. I was disappointed in Poor Things but now I see it was the perfect movie at the perfect time. It’s no longer for me. That’s good to know. It means something now. I sifted gold from my prospecting pan and threw away the rest. The uses of the past, and what to let go of …
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Phases of getting bigger.
First a naive sense of connection. Maybe it’s initially real, but one outgrows it.
Then there is the split. Hurt. Pain. The realization of what’s going down. Your work and your assessment of their work and upset as a person.
Then anger.
Next not conflict but a calling out. A resolve to not being part of what once was, that’s self betrayal, and a clarity about what happened.
Then you leave. That’s it. The dissolution has occurred.
Then you have negative ideation about the past pain
You then decide that you’d rather not have anything to do with it/them.
Next you are vacant and open wondering what’s next.
Then you have imagined connections —- people, places, activities. You desire a bigger world.
Now you are on the dawn of the new era. You have no idea what you are doing or how your dream will exist beyond your being in the greater world.
You are in the creative stance … standing before the unknown and wondering.
Richard Thomas Writing Blog 