Woody Allen Interview 1995

Woody Allen, The Art of Humor No. 1

Michiko Kakutani

Paris Review

Fall 1995

As New Yorkers know, Woody Allen is one of its more ubiquitous citizens—at courtside in Madison Square Garden watching the Knicks, at Michael’s Pub on Monday evenings playing the clarinet, on occasion at Elaine’s Restaurant at his usual table. Yet he could hardly be considered outgoing: shy on acquaintance, he once expressed an intense desire to return to the womb—“anybody’s.” In fact, his career is one of prodigious effort in a number of disciplines—literature, the theater, and motion pictures. “I’m a compulsive worker,” he once said. “What I really like to do best is whatever I’m not doing at the moment.”

Allen’s career in comedy began as a teenager when he submitted jokes to an advertising firm. In 1953, after what he called a “brief abortive year in college,” he left school to become a gag-writer for Garry Moore and Sid Caesar. In the early 1960s, his stand-up routines in the comedy clubs of Greenwich Village gained him considerable recognition, and eventually several television appearances. In 1965, shortly after he produced three successful comedy records, Allen made his debut as an actor and screenwriter in What’s New, Pussycat? His 1969 film, Take the Money and Run, was the first project that he not only wrote and starred in, but directed as well. Though many of his early films (Bananas, Sleeper, Love and Death) were critically acclaimed, it wasn’t until 1977 and the release of Annie Hall, which won four Academy Awards, that Allen was recognized as an extraordinary force in the American cinema. Fifteen of his motion pictures have appeared since, which works out at almost a movie a year. He has also written several Broadway plays, the most successful of them, Don’t Drink the Water and Play It Again, Sam, were also made into films.

Allen has written three collections of short pieces, many of which first appeared in The New Yorker: Getting Even, Without Feathers, and Side Effects.

The major portion of this interview, much of which was conducted by Michiko Kakutani over dinner at Elaine’s Restaurant, was completed in 1985. Since then, the editors—by correspondence and conversations with Mr. Allen over the phone—have brought it up to date.

INTERVIEWER
Do you think the humorist tends to look at the world in a slightly different way?
WOODY ALLEN
Yes. I think if you have a comic perspective, almost anything that happens you tend to put through a comic filter. It’s a way of coping in the short term, but has no long term effect and requires constant, endless renewal. Hence people talk of comics who are “always on.” It’s like constantly drugging your sensibility so you can get by with less pain.
INTERVIEWER
That’s very unique, don’t you think?
ALLEN
It’s one way of dealing with life. People think it’s very hard to be funny but it’s an interesting thing. If you can do it, it’s not hard at all. It would be like if I said to somebody who can draw very well, My God, I could take a pencil and paper all day long and never be able to draw that horse. I can’t do it, and you’ve done it so perfectly. And the other person feels, This is nothing. I’ve been doing this since I was four years old. That’s how you feel about comedy—if you can do it, you know, it’s really nothing. It’s not that the end product is nothing, but the process is simple. Of course, there are just some people that are authentically funny, and some people that are not. It’s a freak of nature.
INTERVIEWER
Who were the writers who made you first want to write?
ALLEN
I remember the first person I ever laughed at while reading was Max Shulman. I was fifteen. I have a couple of old books of his. The one that I found the funniest was The Zebra Derby . . . funny in a broad sort of way, though you have to appreciate the context within which it’s written, since it’s about veterans returning here after World War II, returning to the land of promise. Then I discovered Robert Benchley and S. J. Perelman, two other very funny writers who were truly great masters. I met Perelman at Elaine’s restaurant one night. I came in with Marshall Brickman and a waiter came over and gave me a card. On the back it said something like, Would love you to come over and join me for a celery tonic. I figured, Oh, it’s some out-of-town tourist, and I threw the card away. About an hour and a half later, someone said, You know, it’s from S. J. Perelman, so I retrieved the card from the floor. It said “S. J. Perelman,” and I raced around to where he was sitting around the corner and we joined him. I’d met him before and to me he was always warm and friendly. I’ve read he could be difficult, but I never saw that side of him.
INTERVIEWER
When did you start writing?
ALLEN
Before I could read. I’d always wanted to write. Before that—I made up tales. I was always creating stories for class. For the most part, I was never as much a fan of comic writers as serious writers. But I found myself able to write in a comic mode, at first directly imitative of Shulman or sometimes of Perelman. In my brief abortive year in college I’d hand in my papers, all of them written in a bad (or good) derivation of Shulman. I had no sense of myself at all.
INTERVIEWER
How did you discover your own voice? Did it happen gradually?
ALLEN
No, it was quite accidental. I had given up writing prose completely and gone into television writing. I wanted to write for the theater and at the same time I was doing a cabaret act as a comedian. One day Playboy magazine asked me to write something for them, because I was an emerging comedian and I wrote this piece on chess. At that time I was almost married—but not quite yet—to Louise Lasser; she read it and said, Gee, I think this is good. You should really send this over to The New Yorker. To me, as to everyone else of my generation, The New Yorker was hallowed ground. Anyhow, on a lark I did. I was shocked when I got this phone call back saying that if I’d make a few changes, they’d print it. So I went over there and made the few changes, and they ran it. It was a big boost to my confidence. So I figured, Well, I think I’ll write something else for them. The second or third thing I sent to The New Yorker was very Perelmanesque in style. They printed it but comments were that it was dangerously derivative and I agreed. So both The New Yorker and I looked out for that in subsequent pieces that I sent over there. I did finally get further and further away from him. Perelman, of course, was as complex as could be—a very rich kind of humor. As I went on I tried to simplify.
INTERVIEWER
Was this a parallel development to what you were trying to do in your films?
ALLEN
I don’t think of them as parallel. My experience has been that writing for the different mediums are very separate undertakings. Writing for the stage is completely different from writing for film and both are completely different from writing prose. The most demanding is writing prose, I think, because when you’re finished, it’s the end product. You can’t change it. In a play, it’s far from the end product. The script serves as a vehicle for the actors and director to develop characters. With films, I just scribble a couple of notes for a scene. You don’t have to do any writing at all, you just have your notes for the scene, which are written with the actors and the camera in mind. The actual script is a necessity for casting and budgeting, but the end product often doesn’t bear much resemblance to the script—at least in my case.
INTERVIEWER
So you would have much more control over something like a novel.
ALLEN
That’s one of its appeals—that you have the control over it. Another great appeal is that when you’re finished you can tear it up and throw it away. Whereas, when you make a movie, you can’t do that. You have to put it out there even if you don’t like it. I might add, the hours are better if you’re a prose writer. It’s much more fun to wake up in the morning, just drift into the next room and be alone and write, than it is to wake up in the morning and have to go shoot a film. Movies are a big demand. It’s a physical job. You’ve got to be someplace, on schedule, on time. And you are dependent on people. I know Norman Mailer said that if he had started his career today he might be in film rather than a novelist. I think films are a younger man’s enterprise. For the most part it’s strenuous. Beyond a certain point, I don’t think I want that exertion; I mean I don’t want to feel that my whole life I’m going to have to wake up at six in the morning, be out of the house at seven so I can be out on some freezing street or some dull meadow shooting. That’s not all that thrilling. It’s fun to putter around the house, stay home. Tennessee Williams said the annoying thing about plays is that you have to produce them—you can’t just write them and throw them in the drawer. That’s because when you finish writing a script, you’ve transcended it and you want to move on. With a book, you can. So the impulse seems always to be a novelist. It’s a very desirable thing. One thinks about Colette sitting in her Parisian apartment, looking out the window and writing. It’s a very seductive life. Actually, I wrote a first draft of a novel in Paris when I was doing Love and Death. I have it at home, all handwritten, lying in my drawer on graph paper—I’ve had it that way for years. I’ve sort of been saving it for when I’m energyless and not able to film anymore. I don’t want to do it while I still have enough vigor to get out there early in the morning and film. It’s a good thing to look forward to a novel. I know one day they’ll either pull the plug on me for filming and say, We don’t want you to do this anymore, or I’ll get tired of doing it. I hope the novel’s all right. I mean, it’s no great shakes, but it’s a novel, a story that could only be told that way. I’ve thought at times of taking the idea and making it into a play or a film, but oddly it doesn’t work that way. If it works at all, it’s a novel. It happens in the prose.
INTERVIEWER
How did this novel come about? Had you thought about doing it for a long time?
ALLEN
Not really. I started on page one. It’s an old habit from writing for the stage. I can’t conceive of writing the third act before the first, or a fragment of the second act out of order. The events that occur later—the interaction between characters, the development of the plot—are so dependent on the action that takes place in the beginning. I can’t conceive of doing it out of sequence. I love the classic narrative form in a play. I love it in the novel. I don’t enjoy novels that aren’t basically clear stories. To sit down with Balzac or Tolstoy is, in addition to all else, great entertainment. With a play, when the curtain goes up and people are in garbage cans, I know I may admire the idea cerebrally, but it won’t mean as much to me. I’ve seen Beckett, along with many lesser avant-gardists, and many contemporary plays, and I can say yes, that’s clever and deep but I don’t really care. But when I watch Chekhov or O’Neill—where it’s men and women in human, classic crises—that I like. I know that it’s very unfashionable to say at this time, but things based, for example, on “language”—the clever rhythms of speech—I really don’t care for. I want to hear people speaking plainly if at times poetically. When you see Death of a Salesman or A Streetcar Named Desire you’re interested in the people and you want to see what happens next. When I had an idea for the play I wrote for Lincoln Center—The Floating Lightbulb—I was determined that I was going to write about regular people in a simple situation. I deliberately tried to avoid anything more elaborate than that. In film, oddly enough, I don’t feel as much that way. I’m more amenable in film to distortions of time and abstractions.
INTERVIEWER
A lot of writers find it very hard to get started on the next project, to find an idea they really want to work on . . .
ALLEN
Probably they are casting aside ideas that are as good as the ideas I choose to work on. I’ll think of an idea walking down the street, and I’ll mark it down immediately. And I always want to make it into something. I’ve never had a block. I’m talking within the limits of my abilities. But in my own small way, I’ve had an embarrassment of riches. I’ll have five ideas and I’m dying to do them all. It takes weeks or months where I agonize and obsess over which to do next. I wish sometimes someone would choose for me. If someone said, Do idea number three next, that would be fine. But I have never had any sense of running dry. People always ask me, Do you ever think you’ll wake up one morning and not be funny? That thought would never occur to me—it’s an odd thought and not realistic. Because funny and me are not separate. We’re one. The best time to me is when I’m through with a project and deciding about a new one. That’s because it’s at a period when reality has not yet set in. The idea in your mind’s eye is so wonderful, and you fantasize it in the perfect flash of a second—just beautifully conceived. But then when you have to execute it, it doesn’t come out as you’d fantasized. Production is where the problems begin, where reality starts to set in. As I was saying before, the closest I ever come to realizing the concept is in prose. Most of the things that I’ve written and published, I’ve felt that I executed my original idea pretty much to my satisfaction. But I’ve never, ever felt that, not even close, about anything I’ve written for film or the stage. I always felt I had such a dazzling idea—where did I go wrong? You go wrong from the first day. Everything’s a compromise. For instance, you’re not going to get Marlon Brando to do your script, you’re going to get someone lesser. The room you see in your mind’s eye is not the room you’re filming in. It’s always a question of high aims, grandiose dreams, great bravado and confidence, and great courage at the typewriter; and then, when I’m in the midst of finishing a picture and everything’s gone horribly wrong and I’ve reedited it and reshot it and tried to fix it, then it’s merely a struggle for survival. You’re happy only to be alive. Gone are all the exalted goals and aims, all the uncompromising notions of a perfect work of art, and you’re just fighting so people won’t storm up the aisles with tar and feathers. With many of my films—almost all—if I’d been able to get on screen what I conceived, they would have been much better pictures. Fortunately, the public doesn’t know about how great the picture played in my head was, so I get away with it.
INTERVIEWER
How do you actually work? What are your tools?
ALLEN
I’ve written on legal pads, hotel stationery, anything I can get my hands on. I have no finickiness about anything like that. I write in hotel rooms, in my house, with other people around, on matchbooks. I have no problems with it—to the meager limits that I can do it. There have been stories where I’ve just sat down at the typewriter and typed straight through beginning to end. There are some New Yorker pieces I’ve written out in forty minutes time. And there are other things I’ve just struggled and agonized over for weeks and weeks. It’s very haphazard. Take two movies—one movie that was not critically successful was A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. I wrote that thing in no time. It just came out in six days—everything in perfect shape. I did it, and it was not well received. Whereas Annie Hall was just endless—totally changing things. There was as much material on the cutting-room floor as there was in the picture—I went back five times to reshoot. And it was well received. On the other hand, the exact opposite has happened to me where I’ve done things that just flowed easily and were very well received. And things I agonized over were not. I’ve found no correlation at all. But, if you can do it, it’s not really very hard . . . nor is it as tremendous an achievement as one who can’t do it thinks. For instance, when I was sixteen years old I got my first job. It was as a comedy writer for an advertising agency in New York. I would come into this advertising agency every single day after school and I would write jokes for them. They would attribute these jokes to their clients and put them in the newspaper columns. I would get on the subway—the train quite crowded—and, straphanging, I’d take out a pencil and by the time I’d gotten out I’d have written forty or fifty jokes . . . fifty jokes a day for years. People would say to me, I don’t believe it—fifty jokes a day and writing them on the train. Believe me, it was no big deal. Whereas I’ll look at someone who can compose a piece of music—I don’t know how they ever begin or end or what! But because I could always write, it was nothing. I could always do it—within my limitations. So it was never hard. I think if I’d had a better education, a better upbringing, and perhaps had a different kind of personality, I might have been an important writer. It’s possible, because I think I have some talent, but never had the interest in it. I grew up without an interest in anything scholarly. I could write, but I had no interest in reading. I only played and watched sports, read comic books; I never read a real novel until I was college age. Just had no interest in it at all. Perhaps if I’d had a different upbringing, I might have gone off in a different direction. Or if the interests of my parents, my friends, and the environment in which I was raised had been more directed towards things I was later responsive to, maybe things would have been different. Maybe I would have been a serious novelist. Or maybe not. But it’s too late, and now I’m just happy I don’t have arthritis.
INTERVIEWER
Can you remember one of the jokes you wrote hanging on a subway strap?
ALLEN
This was typical of the junk I turned out: Kid next to me in school was the son of a gambler—he’d never take his test marks back—he’d let ’em ride on the next test. Now you see why it wasn’t hard to do fifty a day during rush hour.
INTERVIEWER
Agreed. But you mentioned this novel . . .
ALLEN
I’m not sure I have the background and understanding to write a novel. The book that I have been working on, or planning, is amusing but serious, and I’ll see what happens. I’m so uneducated really—so autodidactic. That’s a tricky thing, because there are certain areas the autodidact knows about but there are also great gaps that are really shocking. It comes from not having a structured education. People will send me film scripts or essays or even a page of jokes and they’ll say, Is this anything—is this a short story? Is this a comedy sketch? They’ll have no idea if it is or isn’t. To a degree, I feel the same way about the world of prose. When I brought something into The New Yorker, I didn’t know what I was standing there with. Their reaction could have been, Oh, this is nothing. You’ve written a lot of words, but this isn’t really anything, or, Young man, this thing is really wonderful. I was happy to accept their judgment of it. If they had said, when I first took those pieces into The New Yorker, We’re sorry, but this isn’t really anything, I would have accepted that. I would have said, Oh really? OK. I would have thrown the stuff away and never batted an eyelash. The one or two things they’ve turned down over the years, they were always so tentative and polite about; they always said, Look, we may publish something else a little too close to this, or something tactful like that. And I always felt, hey—just tear it up, I don’t care. In that sense, I never found writing delicate or sacred. I think that’s what would happen if I finished the novel. If the people I brought it to said, We don’t think this is anything, it would never occur to me to say, You fools. I just don’t know enough. I’m not speaking with the authority of someone like James Joyce who’d read everything and knew more than his critics did. There’s only one or two areas where I feel that kind of security, where I feel my judgment is as good and maybe even better than most people’s judgment. Comedy is one. I feel confident when I’m dealing with things that are funny, whatever the medium. And I know a lot about New Orleans jazz music even though I’m a poor musician. Poor but dedicated.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you start out writing comedy?
ALLEN
I always enjoyed comedians when I was young. But when I started to read more seriously, I enjoyed more serious writers. I became less interested in comedy then, although I found I could write it. These days I’m not terribly interested in comedy. If I were to list my fifteen favorite films, there would probably be no comedies in there. True, there are some comic films that I think are wonderful. I certainly think that City Lights is great, a number of the Buster Keatons, several Marx Brothers movies. But those are a different kind of comedy—the comedy of comedians in film stands more as a record of the comedians’ work. The films may be weak or silly but the comics were geniuses. I like Keaton’s films better than Keaton and enjoy Chaplin and The Marx Brothers usually more than the films. But I’m an easy audience. I laugh easily.
INTERVIEWER
How about Bringing Up Baby?
ALLEN
No, I never liked that. I never found that funny.
INTERVIEWER
Really?
ALLEN
No, I liked Born Yesterday, even though it’s a play made into a film. Both The Shop Around the Corner and Trouble in Paradise are terrific. A wonderful talking comedy is The White Sheik by Fellini.
INTERVIEWER
What is it that keeps a lighthearted or comic film from being on your list of ten?
ALLEN
Nothing other than personal taste. Someone else might list ten comedies. It’s simply that I enjoy more serious films. When I have the option to see films, I’ll go and see Citizen Kane, The Bicycle Thief, The Grand Illusion, The Seventh Seal, and those kind of pictures.
INTERVIEWER
When you go to see the great classics over again, do you go to see how they’re made, or do you go for the impact that they have on you emotionally?
ALLEN
Usually, I go for enjoyment. Other people who work on my films see all the technical things happening, and I can’t see them. I still can’t notice the microphone shadow, or the cut that wasn’t good or something. I’m too engrossed in the film itself.
INTERVIEWER
Who have had the greatest influence on your film work?
ALLEN
The biggest influences on me, I guess, have been Bergman and the Marx Brothers. I also have no compunction stealing from Strindberg, Chekhov, Perelman, Moss Hart, Jimmy Cannon, Fellini, and Bob Hope’s writers.
INTERVIEWER
Were you funny as a kid?
ALLEN
Yes, I was an amusing youngster. Incidentally, people always relate that to being raised Jewish. It’s a myth. Many great funnymen were not Jewish: W. C. Fields, Jonathan Winters, Bob Hope, Buster Keaton . . . I never saw any connection between ethnicity or religion or race and humor.
INTERVIEWER
Were you asked to perform at school functions?
ALLEN
I didn’t perform a lot, but I was amusing in class, among friends and teachers.
INTERVIEWER
So it wasn’t the sort of humor that would upset the authorities?
ALLEN
Sometimes it was, yes. My mother was called to school frequently because I was yelling out things in class, quips in class, and because I would hand in compositions that they thought were in poor taste, or too sexual. Many, many times she was called to school.
INTERVIEWER
Why do you think you started writing as a kid?
ALLEN
I think it was just the sheer pleasure of it. It’s like playing with my band now. It’s fun to make music, and it’s fun to write. It’s fun to make stuff up. I would say that if I’d lived in the era before motion pictures, I would have been a writer. I saw Alfred Kazin on television. He was extolling the novel at the expense of film. But I didn’t agree. One is not comparable with the other. He had too much respect for the printed word. Good films are better than bad books, and when they’re both great, they’re great and worthwhile in different ways.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think the pleasures of writing are related to the sense of control art provides?
ALLEN
It’s a wonderful thing to be able to create your own world whenever you want to. Writing is very pleasurable, very seductive, and very therapeutic. Time passes very fast when I’m writing—really fast. I’m puzzling over something, and time just flies by. It’s an exhilarating feeling. How bad can it be? It’s sitting alone with fictional characters. You’re escaping from the world in your own way and that’s fine. Why not?
INTERVIEWER
If you like that solitary aspect of writing, would you miss the collaborative aspect of film if you were to give it up?
ALLEN
One deceptive appeal of being out there with other people is that it gets you away from the job of writing. It’s less lonely. But I like to stay home and write. I’ve always felt that if they told me tomorrow I couldn’t make any more films, that they wouldn’t give me any more money, I would be happy writing for the theater; and if they wouldn’t produce my plays, I’d be happy just writing prose; and if they wouldn’t publish me, I’d still be happy writing and leaving it for future generations. Because if there’s anything of value there, it will live; and if there’s not, better it shouldn’t. That’s one of the nice things about writing, or any art; if the thing’s real, it just lives. All the attendant hoopla about it, the success over it or the critical rejection—none of that really matters. In the end, the thing will survive or not on its own merits. Not that immortality via art is any big deal. Truffaut died, and we all felt awful about it, and there were the appropriate eulogies, and his wonderful films live on. But it’s not much help to Truffaut. So you think to yourself, My work will live on. As I’ve said many times, rather than live on in the hearts and minds of my fellow man, I would rather live on in my apartment.
INTERVIEWER
Still, some artists put such an emphasis on their work, on creating something that will last, that they put it before everything else. That line by Faulkner—“The ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.”
ALLEN
I hate when art becomes a religion. I feel the opposite. When you start putting a higher value on works of art than people, you’re forfeiting your humanity. There’s a tendency to feel the artist has special privileges, and that anything’s okay if it’s in the service of art. I tried to get into that in Interiors. I always feel the artist is much too revered—it’s not fair and it’s cruel. It’s a nice but fortuitous gift—like a nice voice or being left-handed. That you can create is a kind of nice accident. It happens to have high value in society, but it’s not as noble an attribute as courage. I find funny and silly the pompous kind of self-important talk about the artist who takes risks. Artistic risks are like show-business risks—laughable. Like casting against type, wow, what danger! Risks are where your life is on the line. The people who took risks against the Nazis or some of the Russian poets who stood up against the state—those people are courageous and brave, and that’s really an achievement. To be an artist is also an achievement, but you have to keep it in perspective. I’m not trying to undersell art. I think it’s valuable, but I think it’s overly revered. It is a valuable thing, but no more valuable than being a good schoolteacher, or being a good doctor. The problem is that being creative has glamour. People in the business end of film always say, I want to be a producer, but a creative producer. Or a woman I went to school with who said, Oh yes, I married this guy. He’s a plumber but he’s very creative. It’s very important for people to have that credential. Like if he wasn’t creative, he was less.
INTERVIEWER
When you’re writing, do you think about your audience? Updike, for instance, once said that he liked to think of a young kid in a small Midwestern town finding one of his books on a shelf at a public library.
ALLEN
I’ve always felt that I try to aim as high as I can at the time, not to reach everybody, because I know that I can’t do that, but always to try to stretch myself. I’d like to feel, when I’ve finished a film, that intelligent adults, whether they’re scientists or philosophers, could go in and see it and not come out and feel that it was a total waste of time. That they wouldn’t say, Jesus, what did you get me into? If I went in to see Rambo, I’d say, Oh, God, and then after a few minutes I’d leave. Size of audience is irrelevant to me. The more the better, but not if I have to change my ideas to seduce them.
INTERVIEWER
Film’s not the easiest art form in which to do that; it involves a lot of people, requires a lot of money.
ALLEN
There are certain places like Sweden, where you’re partially state subsidized. But in the United States, everything’s so damned expensive. It’s not like painting or writing. With a film I have to get millions of dollars—to make even a cheap film. So attached to that is a sense that you can’t get along without a big audience. Therefore it’s a bit of a struggle, but I’ve been lucky—I’ve always had freedom. I’ve been blessed. I’ve had a dream life in film—from my first picture on. It’s been absolute, total freedom down the line. Don’t ask me why. If I decided tomorrow to do a black-and-white film on sixteenth-century religion, I could do it. Of course, if I went in and said, “I’m going to do a film about monads,” they’d say, “Well, we’ll give you this much money to work with.” Whereas if I say, “I’m going to do a big, broad comedy,” they’ll give me more money.
INTERVIEWER
What sort of development do you see in your own work over the years?
ALLEN
I hope for growth, of course. If you look at my first films, they were very broad and sometimes funny. I’ve gotten more human with the stories and sacrificed a tremendous amount of humor, of laughter, for other values that I personally feel are worth making that sacrifice for. So, a film like The Purple Rose of Cairo or Manhattan will not have as many laughs. But I think they’re more enjoyable. At least to me they are. I would love to continue that—and still try to make some serious things.
INTERVIEWER
Was it Interiors that if anybody laughed during its making you took that part out? Was that so?
ALLEN
Oh no, no, not true. Good story but totally untrue. No, there are never any colorful stories connected with my pictures. I mean, we go in there and work in a kind of grim, businesslike atmosphere and do the films, whether they’re comedies or dramas. Some people criticized Interiors, saying that it had no humor at all. I felt that this was a completely irrelevant criticism. Whatever was wrong with it, the problem is not that it lacks humor. There’s not much humor in Othello or Persona. If I could write a couple of plays or films that had a serious tone, I would much prefer to do that than have the comedy hit of the year. Because that would give me personal pleasure—in the same sense that I prefer to play New Orleans jazz than to play Mozart. I adore Mozart but I prefer to play New Orleans jazz. Just my preference.
INTERVIEWER
But when you’re writing a script and humor surfaces you grasp it with pleasure, no?
ALLEN
Yes, it’s always a pleasure. Usually what happens is that there are a number of surprises in films, and usually the surprises are the negative ones. You think you have something funny in a joke or a scene, and it turns out not to be funny, and you’re surprised.
INTERVIEWER
And you’re stuck with it.
ALLEN
Or you throw it away. On the other hand, once in a great while you get a pleasant surprise, and something that you never thought was going to be amusing, the audience laughs at or howls at, and it’s a wonderful thing.
INTERVIEWER
Can you give an example of that?
ALLEN
When I first made Bananas years ago, I was going over to the dictator’s house—I was invited for dinner there in this Latin American country. I brought with me some cake in a box, a string cake from one of the bakery shops. I didn’t think much of it at all, but it consistently always got the biggest howls from the audience. What they were laughing over was the fact that my character was foolish enough to bring some pastries to a state dinner. To me it was incidental on the way to the real funny stuff—to the audience it was the funniest thing.
INTERVIEWER
It seems as though when an artist becomes established, other people—critics, their followers—expect them to keep on doing the same thing, instead of evolving in their own way.
ALLEN
That’s why you must never take what’s written about you seriously. I’ve never written anything in my life or done any project that wasn’t what I wanted to do at the time. You really have to forget about what they call “career moves.” You just do what you want to do for your own sense of your creative life. If no one else wants to see it, that’s fine. Otherwise, you’re in the business to please other people. When we did Stardust Memories, all of us knew there would be a lot of flack. But it wouldn’t for a second stop me. I never thought, I better not do this because people will be upset. It’d be sheer death not to go through with a project you feel like going through with at the time. Look at someone like Strindberg—another person I’ve always loved—and you see the reaction he got on certain things . . . just brutalized. When I made Annie Hall, there were a lot of suggestions that I make “Annie Hall II.” It would never occur to me in a million years to do that. I was planning to do Interiors after that, and that’s what I did. I don’t think you can survive any other way. To me, the trick is never to try to appeal to a large number of people, but to do the finest possible work I can conceive of, and I hope if the work is indeed good, people will come to see it. The artists I’ve loved, most did not have large publics. The important thing is the doing of it. And what happens afterward—you just hope you get lucky. Even in a popular art form like film, in the U.S. most people haven’t seen The Bicycle Thief or The Grand Illusion or Persona. Most people go through their whole lives without seeing any of them. Most of the younger generation supporting the films that are around now in such abundance don’t care about Buñuel or Bergman. They’re not aware of the highest achievements of the art form. Once in a great while something comes together by pure accident of time and place and chance. Charlie Chaplin came along at the right time. If he’d come along today, he’d have had major problems.
INTERVIEWER
Don’t you think that as serious writers mature they simply continue to develop and expand the themes already established?
ALLEN
Each person has his own obsessions. In Bergman films you find the same things over and over, but they’re usually presented with great freshness.
INTERVIEWER
What about your own work?
ALLEN
The same things come up time after time. They’re the things that are on my mind, and one is always feeling for new ways to express them. It’s hard to think of going out and saying, Gee, I have to find something new to express. What sort of things recur? For me, certainly the seductiveness of fantasy and the cruelty of reality. As a creative person, I’ve never been interested in politics or any of the solvable things. What interested me were always the unsolvable problems: the finiteness of life and the sense of meaninglessness and despair and the inability to communicate. The difficulty in falling in love and maintaining it. Those things are much more interesting to me than . . . I don’t know, the Voting Rights Act. In life, I do follow politics a certain amount—I do find it interesting as a citizen but I’d never think of writing about it.

A word about this interview. It was hard for me because I don’t like to aggrandize my work by discussing its influences or my themes or that kind of thing. That kind of talk is more applicable to works of greater stature. I say this with no false modesty—that I feel I have done no really significant work, whatsoever, in any medium. I feel that unequivocally. I feel that what I have done so far in my life is sort of the ballast that is waiting to be uplifted by two or three really fine works that may hopefully come. We’ve been sitting and talking about Faulkner, say, and Updike and Bergman—I mean, I obviously can’t talk about myself in the same way at all. I feel that what I’ve done so far is the . . . the bed of lettuce the hamburger must rest on. I feel that if I could do, in the rest of my life, two or three really fine works—perhaps make a terrific film or write a fine play or something—then everything prior to that point would be interesting as developmental works. I feel that’s the status of my works—they’re a setting waiting for a jewel. But there’s no jewel there at the moment. So I’m starting to feel my interview is pompous. I need some heavy gems in there somewhere. But I hope I’ve come to a point in my life where within the next ten or fifteen years I can do two or three things that lend credence to all the stuff I’ve done already . . . Let’s hope.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1550/the-art-of-humor-no-1-woody-allen

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #307

Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and some plums...

Last night's set lists

At The Habit,York:-

Ron Elderly: -
Make You Feel My Love
(Ain't It Funny) How Time Slips Away
Tell Me
You Better Move On
Dock Of The Bay

Da Elderly: -
For Free
I Don't Want To Talk About It
You've Got A Friend
Tell Me Why
Teach Your Children

The Elderly Brothers: -
All I Have To Do Is Dream
Things We Said Today
When Will I Be Loved
Then I Kissed Her
Medley: Sweet Caroline/Hi Ho Silver Lining
Bring Me Sunshine
I Saw Her Standing There

What looked like being a very quiet night at 9pm turned out to be a most enjoyable one, with an enthusiastic and appreciative audience. Surprise song of the night, performed by a visiting musician from Lincolnshire, on a 12-string guitar, was Kate Bush's Babooshka! Yours truly threw in another Habit first with Joni Mitchell's For Free from 1969's Ladies of the Canyon.

Henry Mancini, Johnny Mercer and the Story of Moon River

The history of Henry Mancini's Moon River

Jane O'Brien
9 June 2015

Most of the score of one of the 20th Century's most popular film tunes, Moon River, was never written down, but a painstaking restoration is about to make its debut in London.

Moon River was made famous by Audrey Hepburn in the 1961 movie Breakfast at Tiffany's, in which she played the part of New York socialite Holly Golightly.

But Hepburn was not a trained singer and initially Paramount film-makers thought they would need to dub somebody else's voice. But the composer Henry Mancini persevered in composing something she could manage.

"Henry was at home one night and we were watching Funny Face in which Audrey Hepburn sings How Long Has This Been Going On," recalls Mancini's widow Ginny.

"He went to the piano and started playing it, and knew she could sing something in that range.

"It took him about a month and a half before he put down the first three notes. It sounded promising and in half an hour he had written the melody of Moon River."

Mancini asked Johnny Mercer to write the lyrics. But much of the film's musical score, including Moon River, was never written down during the editing process.

Now, after months of careful restoration, audiences will be able to hear it performed for the first time during a special screening at London's Royal Albert Hall this week.

What's more, a demo tape recorded by Mancini and Mercer has been released to the BBC by the Mancini family. It has not been made public before.

Mercer wrote three sets of lyrics, his favourite version inspired by the full moon over a river near his childhood home in Savannah, Georgia, says Ginny Mancini.

"Many songwriting teams sit down together and work out a strategy for a song, a way it's supposed to go. Henry and Johnny never sat down together. They discussed what it should be and what the lyric had to say, but once Henry had the melody nailed, he would just send it to Mercer."

Mancini was rehearsing for a benefit concert at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Los Angeles when Mercer turned up with lyrics in hand.

Henry and Ginny Mancini 

"They sat down in the empty ballroom and Henry played Moon River while Johnny sang the lyrics. Johnny was a wonderful singer and I loved to hear him sing. They were two of the best," Mrs Mancini recalled.

Shortly after that they recorded a demo for the studio and, as Ginny Mancini put it, the song was a "slam dunk".

But Moon River was almost cut from the final edit because the first screening of Breakfast at Tiffany's was too long.

"As legend has it the head of the studio said, 'We'll just cut the song'. I saw Henry go pale. We were all stunned, totally stunned. We were quiet for a minute or two and then there was a barrage of reasons why it should stay in the film and cuts should be made in other areas."

Audrey Hepburn herself intervened and in the end, Moon River remained, earning Mancini and Mercer an Oscar in 1961 for best original song and today ranking fourth in the American Film Institute's list of top film songs.

But in spite of its popular success, Moon River was not Mancini's favourite composition.

"That's not to say he didn't love it - but Two for the Road was his favourite," says Mancini.

On 12 June, Moon River will be sung by Henry and Ginny Mancini's daughter, Monica, in a world premiere at the Royal Albert Hall. The performance by the Philharmonia Film Orchestra and the Philharmonia Chorus will be conducted by Justin Freer, who restored the musical soundtrack.

"Henry was so well versed in jazz that sometimes in his scores he would just write 'Latin percussion rhythms.' Instead of writing out the rhythms, he would just write the words," Freer says.
"He basically composes on the spot, telling people what to play, how to voice things, what rhythms they should play. And a lot of that was never recorded physically by hand or on paper.

"So I had to transcribe it all, figure out what the orchestrations were, voicing, basically creating a new version of the score that didn't exist because the original notation didn't match what was ultimately recorded."

Freer has restored other movie soundtracks including The Godfather and Gladiator, and he's currently working on It's a Wonderful Life.

But Breakfast at Tiffany's has a particular significance because he trained at the Henry Mancini Institute, a college for gifted musicians.Henry Mancini at the piano

"It's very much a full circle," he says. "The Mancinis have been so supportive of me since many years ago and we are now able to present what is easily Henry's most well-known score. It's very special."

"Henry would be so pleased," says Mrs Mancini. "I guess the scholarship paid off."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-33058351

Returning to J. D. Salinger's Hapworth 16, 1924

Hapworth Revisited: On J.D. Salinger’s Most Inscrutable Short Story

Christian Kriticos

11 June 2015

Fifty years ago this month, The New Yorker published a bizarre short story by J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye, written in the form of a 28,000-word letter from a seven-year-old child at summer camp. No one could know it at the time, but this story was to mark one of the longest and most fascinating silences in literary history. Shortly after the story appeared, Salinger retreated into his reclusive rural New Hampshire home, and never published anything again in his lifetime.

The story, titled “Hapworth 16, 1924″ in a disorienting merging of date and location, remains something of a baffling enigma: branded as unreadable by critics, and never republished, only the most dedicated Salinger devotees bother to track it down and slog through it. Indeed, the negative reaction to the story is thought to have been the catalyst for Salinger’s retreat from publication, even though he personally believed it to be “a high point of his writing.”

“Hapworth” is the final story (although the first chronologically) in Salinger’s Glass series, a sequence of short stories revolving around a family of hyper-intellectual New Yorkers. Despite, the swift ascension to the status of American classic for The Catcher in the Rye (just five years after it was published it was being compared to everything from Homer’s Odyssey to Ulysses and The Great Gatsby) Salinger’s reputation gradually declined as he began to focus on the Glass stories, losing more and more fans with each subsequent publication.

One of the most common criticisms leveled against the Glass stories was that Salinger was writing them purely for himself, at the price of alienating his readers. Salinger even admitted as much, stating “I write just for myself and my own pleasure,” and “there is a real enough danger, I suppose, that sooner or later I’ll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods.” Thus, “Hapworth” came for many to represent the culmination of this, and the ultimate in insufferable self-indulgence, with its endless verbosity and preposterous length. Even within the story, Salinger appears to acknowledge this, with his narrator warning us that “This is going to be a very long letter!” and later urging the reader “Please, please, PLEASE do not grow impatient and ice cold to this letter because of its gathering length!”

This length is perhaps the greatest obstacle for readers aiming to tackle “Hapworth.” However, it is not just the practical side of reading such a long story filled at times with impenetrable language and incoherent structuring, but more the implications that come with the fact that we are told this letter has been authored by a seven-year-old.

The narrator, Seymour Glass, is frequently held up as bastion of human intelligence in the earlier Glass stories, and even as something approaching an enlightened spiritual guru. But “Hapworth” takes this concept to a level well beyond the far-fetched, endowing its child protagonist with the power to accurately predict the future, recall past lives, and write with the vocabulary of a PhD candidate. One of the most critically derided passages of the story takes up around a quarter its length and consists entirely of Seymour’s absurd and entirely age inappropriate list of requested reading material: “the complete works again of Count Leo Tolstoy […] any thoughtful books on human whirling or spinning […and] both the French edition and Mr. Cotton’s wonderful translation of Montaigne’s essays.” Likewise, Seymour’s request to his father to share any “imaginary sensual acts [which] gave lively, unmentionable entertainment to your mind” has proved another source of eye-rolling disbelief for readers, leading many to the assumption that “Hapworth” is simply some kind of curious in-joke between Salinger and his imaginary Glass family.

However, such an interpretation, though valid, is simplistic, and with so little having been written on “Hapworth,” it seems that the 50th anniversary offers a chance to reexamine the story, and see if the overwhelmingly negative critical consensus is not somewhat hyperbolic.

When “Seymour: An Introduction” (the immediate predecessor to “Hapworth” in the Glass series) was published in 1959 it attracted more negative reviews than any of Salinger’s previous stories, but since then some critics have argued that Salinger was well ahead of his time, including Eberhard Alsen, in his A Reader’s Guide to J.D. Salinger, suggesting he in fact “anticipated by a decade the self-reflexive trend in American postmodernist fiction.” Roger Lathbury, who attempted to republish “Hapworth” in 1997 and even met and exchanged letters with the reclusive author, posits a similar theory for “Hapworth,” arguing that Salinger was “trying something new, arguably something different than any other American writer: to reconcile non-material (Eastern) ways of transcendence with the particulars of American daily life.” Lathbury contends that this accounts for its unusual style — “a letter that is not a letter” — and that to write what Salinger wanted to write necessarily required “a seismic shift in sensibility.”

Salinger addressed this exact concept in an earlier story entitled “Teddy,” which also takes a child prodigy with spiritual gifts as its protagonist: “It’s very hard to meditate and live a spiritual life in America.” Likewise, the form of “Hapworth” is recycled from an earlier unpublished story, “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,” which is also presented as a letter written home from summer camp. Thus, one might hypothesize that”Hapworth” represents an attempt by Salinger to readdress his earlier fiction, and more radically alter his style, moving away from the traditional structures of the American short story to reflect his spiritual Eastern-influenced themes.

This would explain “Hapworth’s” rambling and meandering style: rather than forcing his story into a conventional linear structure, it follows the contours of the mind. However, unlike the modernist form of stream-of-consciousness, “Hapworth” is both internal and external at the same time: in addressing his letter to his family, Seymour the narrator is communicating externally; but, at the same time, large portions of the letter seem to be directed at himself. And perhaps the same could be said for Salinger: through “Hapworth” he is addressing both the reader and himself.

Amid all of this, however, the story does have a strange kind of structure, though it is one of circularity. Moments from the beginning have their corresponding counterparts at the end, and yet nothing is really tied up neatly. For instance, in the letter’s opening, Seymour expresses his belief that it is every individual’s moral duty to act kindly without hope of reward: “without examining […the recipient of a good deed’s] face or combing it for gratitude;” and just before signing off he mentions an acquaintance’s need “to see the grateful recipients’ faces in person when he does them a favor.” Here Salinger is trying to reconcile the moral ideal with the imperfection of human nature. And indeed, despite Seymour’s almost superhuman abilities, “Hapworth” reveals a “humanness” in the character that is rarely glimpsed in the other Glass stories.

However, the presentation of such “humanness” is arguably Salinger’s undoing. By revealing too much of Seymour, who had previously been conspicuously physically absent from most of the Glass stories, Salinger shatters the enigma, and reveals the man behind the curtain. It is clear this was his intention, as the story revolves around the conflict between the spirit and body, but for many devotees of the Glass saga, uniting the saintly Seymour of the previous stories with the angry and pretentious Seymour of “Hapworth” is too great an ask.

Still, Salinger fans will find plenty of interest in “Hapworth,” not least the familiar upbeat style — a balance of the intellectual and the colloquial — complete with the trademark tautology and adjectival listing that came to define much of Salinger’s later work. And one could also argue that while revealing Seymour’s imperfection — “Do not think me infallible! I am utterly fallible!” — spoils the mystery of the character, it also opens up new enigmas, such as the possibility that the letter is inauthentic, and is in fact authored by Buddy, Seymour’s younger brother.

Buddy’s voice is apparent via a brief introduction before the letter begins, in which he assures us twice that he intends to type up an “exact copy,” which is what we will read. This over-assurance is immediately suspicious, and the opening line, in which Seymour states “I will write for us both,” might also serve as evidence. Inconsistencies in the text, such as Seymour’s not knowing the address his parents are staying at, reinforce this hypothesis, but, once again, there is no concrete proof, only further and deeper mystery.

This is the crux of “Hapworth” — it defies interpretation, and in this way stands as Salinger’s ultimate embodiment of the Glass family’s ideals. Just four years earlier he had admitted that Buddy was his “alter-ego,” blurring the lines between fiction and reality, and here we see him bringing the ideals of his fictional world into the reality of his work as a writer. In Franny and Zooey, Salinger quotes at length from Swami Prabhavananda: “You have the right to work, but for the work’s sake only. You have no right to the fruits of work.” “Hapworth” can be seen as a culmination of this ideal, as it represents Salinger writing purely for himself, and for the pleasure of the work. The fact that he continued to write for the rest of his life, but ceased publishing, also meant he was rejecting considerable “fruits:” Franny and Zooeyspent 25 weeks at the top of The New York Times fiction bestseller list in 1961-1962, for instance.

Whether or not any of this was intentional on Salinger’s part is purely speculative, but one cannot deny that he took considerable risks with “Hapworth,” and that, as Roger Lathbury has argued, “For refusing to repeat his popular successes, Salinger deserves respect and honor.” Thus, ironically, the very complaint critics had of his later work (that it was becoming too self-involved) is the very thing that makes it unique — no other American writer ever created so complete a retreat into his or her fictional world.

The story itself remains ambiguous, and a thorn in the side of Salinger fans and scholars alike. Nonetheless, the exaggerated critical drubbing it received should not put new readers off, and it remains, undeniably, a true original. Within “Hapworth 16, 1924,” J.D. Salinger praises this very quality — “Close on the heels of kindness, originality is one of the most thrilling things in the world, also the most rare!” — suggesting perhaps that this was his primary goal. In that sense, at least, he succeeded.

“Hapworth 16, 1924″ was published in The New Yorker on June 19, 1965 and has never been republished. It is available to read in The Complete New Yorker.

All quotations by Roger Lathbury are from personal email correspondences.

http://www.themillions.com/2015/06/hapworth-revisited-on-j-d-salingers-most-inscrutable-short-story.html

James Tate RIP

James Tate, Prolific Pulitzer-Winning Poet, Dies at 71

William Grimes

10 July 2015

James Tate, a poet whose offhand style, ingenious wordplay and wild flights of surrealism won him a devoted following, a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, died on Wednesday in Springfield, Mass. He was 71.

His wife, Dara Wier, said he died after a long illness.

Mr. Tate burst on the poetry scene in 1967 with the collection “The Lost Pilot,” selected for publication in the Yale Series of Younger Poets while he was still a graduate student at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Julian Symons, in The New Statesman, greeted Mr. Tate as “an ironical, original, self-absorbed poet who glances with amusement at love, humanity, himself.”

A prolific writer, he turned out one collection after another, none of them slim. “The Ghost Soldiers,” published in 2008, contains nearly 100 poems. He won a wide following, especially among younger readers attracted by his colloquial style, his gift for making unexpected connections, and his ability to extract humor from dark places. John Ashbery, one of his most ardent admirers, called him “the poet of possibilities, of morph, of surprising consequences, lovely or disastrous.”

James Vincent Tate was born on Dec. 8, 1943, in Kansas City, Mo. His father, Samuel Vincent Appleby, was killed while flying a bombing mission over Germany in 1944. His death inspired his son’s poem “The Lost Pilot.”

Mr. Tate took the surname Tate after the remarriage of his mother, the former Betty Jean Whitsitt, a secretary.

An indifferent student, he enrolled in Kansas State College in Pittsburg (now Pittsburg University), where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1965 and, in an idle moment in his dormitory, wrote his first poem.

“The thing that was magic about it was that once you put down one word, you could cross it out,” he told the poet Charles Simic in an interview for The Paris Review in 2006. “I figured that out right away. I put down ’mountain,’ and then I’d go, no — ‘valley.’ That’s better.”

After graduation, he drove to Iowa City with several poems in hand and presented them to Donald Justice, one of the university’s most famous poetry teachers. He was accepted into the writing program on the spot.

Over the years, Mr. Tate perfected a style of poetic narrative that, with disarming simplicity, led readers down strange byways and mined the comedy in bleak situations. In “Like a Scarf,” the speaker enjoys a picnic lunch on the grounds of a lunatic asylum when the inmates begin wandering through the woods around him:

“Who could eat liverwurst at a time like this?/But, then again, what’s a picnic without pathos?”

Fear and dread stalk poems like “50 Views of Tokyo,” a spiraling vision of displacement and disorientation, whose narrator intones:

I was a wild animal
without a soul or a home or a name.
And now I see it wasn’t a stage I was
going through.
That stage, that stageless stage, was
my home
and my name and my soul.

In other poems, Mr. Tate pursued random comparisons, or swapped vocabularies, with hilarious results, as in “How the Pope Is Chosen,” where the language of the dog show intrudes:

Popes are very intelligent.
There are three different sizes.
The largest are called standard Popes.
The medium-sized ones are called miniature Popes.
I could go on like this, I could say:
“He is a squarely built Pope, neat,
well-proportioned, with an alert stance
and an expression of bright curiosity,”
but I won’t.

Describing “The Ghost Soldiers,” Mr. Simic wrote, “Just about anything can happen next in this kind of poetry, and that is its attraction.”

In his Paris Review interview, Mr. Tate said, “I like to start with the ordinary, and then nudge it, and then think, ‘What happens next, what happens next?’ ”

Mr. Tate was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for “Selected Poems,” culled from nine volumes of his poetry, from “The Lost Pilot” through “Reckoner” (1986). The collection “Worshipful Company of Fletchers” won the National Book Award in 1994, the judging panel praising it as “often hilarious without losing the nervous edginess that makes it such a profoundly unsettling experience.” The next year he was given the Wallace Stevens Award by the Academy of American Poets.

His many other poetry collections include “Hints to Pilgrims” (1971), “Absences” (1972), “Viper Jazz” (1976), “Riven Doggeries” (1979), “Constant Defender” (1983) and “Return to the City of White Donkeys” (2004). With the poet Bill Knott he wrote a novel, “Lucky Darryl” (1977), and his short stories were collected in “Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee” (2001). In “The Route as Briefed” (1999), he offered up a smorgasbord: essays, interviews, memoirs, super-short stories and a recipe for squirrel brains in black butter.

Mr. Tate taught poetry at several universities, including the University of California, Berkeley and at Columbia. Since 1971 he had taught at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where his wife also taught poetry and where they lived. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a half sister, Terri Sowers, and two stepchildren, Emily Pettit and Guy Pettit.

Shortly before his death, Daniel Halpern, Mr. Tate’s editor at Ecco Press, gave him a finished copy of “Dome of the Hidden Pavilion,” his new collection of poems. It is scheduled to be published in early August.
Correction: July 12, 2015

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/books/james-tate-prolific-pulitzer-winning-poet-dies-at-71.html?_r=0

The Cowboy

Someone had spread an elaborate rumor about me, that I was
in possession of an extraterrestrial being, and I thought I knew who
it was. It was Roger Lawson. Roger was a practical joker of the
worst sort, and up till now I had not been one of his victims, so
I kind of knew my time had come. People parked in front of my
house for hours and took pictures. I had to draw all my blinds
and only went out when I had to. Then there was a barrage of
questions. "What does he look like?' "What do you feed him?" "How
did you capture him?" And I simply denied the presence of an
extraterrestrial in my house. And, of course, this excited them
all the more. The press showed up and started creeping around
my yard. It got to be very irritating. More and more came and
parked up and down the street. Roger was really working overtime
on this one. I had to do something. Finally, I made an announcement.
I said, "The little fellow died peacefully in his sleep at 11:02
last night." "Let us see the body," they clamored. "He went up
in smoke instantly," I said. "I don't believe you," one of them
said. "There is no body in the house or I would have buried it
myself," I said. About half of them got in their cars and drove
off. The rest of them kept their vigil, but more solemnly now.
I went out and bought some groceries. When I came back about an
hour later another half of them had gone. When I went into the kitchen
I nearly dropped the groceries. There was a nearly transparent
fellow with large pink eyes standing about three feet tall. "Why
did you tell them I was dead? That was a lie," he said. "You
speak English," I said. "I listen to the radio. It wasn't very
hard to learn. Also we have television. We get all your channels.
I like cowboys, especially John Ford movies. They're the best,"
he said. "What am I going to do with you?" I said. "Take me
to meet a real cowboy. That would make me happy," he said. "I
don't know any real cowboys, but maybe we could find one. But
people will go crazy if they see you. We'd have press following
us everywhere. It would be the story of the century," I said.
"I can be invisible. It's not hard for me to do," he said.
"I'll think about it. Wyoming or Montana would be our best bet, but
they're a long way from here," I said. "Please, I won't cause
you any trouble," he said. "It would take some planning," I said.
I put the groceries down and started putting them away. I tried
not to think of the cosmic meaning of all this. Instead, I
treated him like a smart little kid. "Do you have any sarsaparilla?"
he said. "No, but I have some orange juice. It's good for you,"
I said. He drank it and made a face. "I'm going to get the maps
out," I said. "We'll see how we could get there." When I came
back he was dancing on the kitchen table, a sort of ballet, but
very sad. "I have the maps," I said. "We won't need them. I just
received word. I'm going to die tonight. It's really a joyous
occasion, and I hope you'll help me celebrate by watching The
Magnificent Seven," he said. I stood there with the maps in my
hand. I felt an unbearable sadness come over me. "Why must
you die?" I said. "Father decides these things. It is probably
my reward for coming here safely and meeting you," he said. "But
I was going to take you to meet a real cowboy," I said. "Let's
pretend you are my cowboy," he said. 

James Tate

The Wrong Way Home

All night a door floated down the river.

It tried to remember little incidents of pleasure
from its former life, like the time the lovers
leaned against it kissing for hours
and whispering those famous words.
Later, there were harsh words and a shoe
was thrown and the door was slammed.
Comings and goings by the thousands,
the early mornings and late nights, years, years.
O they've got big plans, they'll make a bundle.
The door was an island that swayed in its sleep.
The moon turned the doorknob just slightly,
burned its fingers and ran,
and still the door said nothing and slept.
At least that's what they like to say,
the little fishes and so on.
Far away, a bell rang, and then a shot was fired.

James Tate

Harper Lee - Go Set A Watchman - review

Review: Harper Lee’s ‘Go Set a Watchman’ Gives Atticus Finch a Dark Side

Michiko Kakutani

10 July 2015

We remember Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s 1960 classic, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” as that novel’s moral conscience: kind, wise, honorable, an avatar of integrity who used his gifts as a lawyer to defend a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in a small Alabama town filled with prejudice and hatred in the 1930s. As indelibly played by Gregory Peck in the 1962 movie, he was the perfect man — the ideal father and a principled idealist, an enlightened, almost saintly believer in justice and fairness. In real life, people named their children after Atticus. People went to law school and became lawyers because of Atticus.

Shockingly, in Ms. Lee’s long-awaited novel, “Go Set a Watchman” (due out Tuesday), Atticus is a racist who once attended a Klan meeting, who says things like “The Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people.” Or asks his daughter: “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?”

In “Mockingbird,” a book once described by Oprah Winfrey as “our national novel,” Atticus praised American courts as “the great levelers,” dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.” In “Watchman,” set in the 1950s in the era of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, he denounces the Supreme Court, says he wants his home state “to be left alone to keep house without advice from the N.A.A.C.P.” and describes N.A.A.C.P.-paid lawyers as “standing around like buzzards.”

In “Mockingbird,” Atticus was a role model for his children, Scout and Jem — their North Star, their hero, the most potent moral force in their lives. In “Watchman,” he becomes the source of grievous pain and disillusionment for the 26-year-old Scout (or Jean Louise, as she’s now known).

While written in the third person, “Watchman” reflects a grown-up Scout’s point of view: The novel is the story of how she returns home to Maycomb, Ala., for a visit — from New York City, where she has been living — and tries to grapple with her dismaying realization that Atticus and her longtime boyfriend, Henry Clinton, both have abhorrent views on race and segregation.

Though “Watchman” is being published for the first time now, it was essentially an early version of “Mockingbird.” According to news accounts, “Watchman” was submitted to publishers in the summer of 1957; after her editor asked for a rewrite focusing on Scout’s girlhood two decades earlier, Ms. Lee spent some two years reworking the story, which became “Mockingbird.”

Some plot points that have become touchstones in “Mockingbird” are evident in the earlier “Watchman.” Scout’s older brother, Jem, vividly alive as a boy in “Mockingbird,” is dead in “Watchman”; the trial of a black man accused of raping a young white woman, while a main story line in “Mockingbird,” is only a passing aside in “Watchman.” (Interestingly, the trial results in a guilty verdict for the accused man, Tom Robinson, in “Mockingbird,” but leads to an acquittal in “Watchman.”)

Students of writing will find “Watchman” fascinating for these reasons: How did a lumpy tale about a young woman’s grief over her discovery of her father’s bigoted views evolve into a classic coming-of-age story about two children and their devoted widower father? How did a distressing narrative filled with characters spouting hate speech (from the casually patronizing to the disgustingly grotesque — and presumably meant to capture the extreme prejudice that could exist in small towns in the Deep South in the 1950s) mutate into a redemptive novel associated with the civil rights movement, hailed, in the words of the former civil rights activist and congressman Andrew Young, for giving us “a sense of emerging humanism and decency”?

How did a story about the discovery of evil views in a revered parent turn into a universal parable about the loss of innocence — both the inevitable loss of innocence that children experience in becoming aware of the complexities of grown-up life and a cruel world’s destruction of innocence (symbolized by the mockingbird and represented by Tom Robinson and the reclusive outsider Boo Radley)?

The depiction of Atticus in “Watchman” makes for disturbing reading, and for “Mockingbird” fans, it’s especially disorienting. Scout is shocked to find, during her trip home, that her beloved father, who taught her everything she knows about fairness and compassion, has been affiliating with raving anti-integration, anti-black crazies, and the reader shares her horror and confusion. How could the saintly Atticus — described early in the book in much the same terms as he is in “Mockingbird” — suddenly emerge as a bigot? Suggestions about changing times and the polarizing effects of the civil rights movement seem insufficient when it comes to explaining such a radical change, and the reader, like Scout, cannot help feeling baffled and distressed.

Though it lacks the lyricism of “Mockingbird,” the portions of “Watchman” dealing with Scout’s childhood and her adult romance with Henry capture the daily rhythms of life in a small town and are peppered with portraits of minor characters whose circumscribed lives can feel like Barbara Pym salted with some down-home American humor. And it reminds us that “Mockingbird,” the novel, was more concerned with the day-to-day texture of Scout and Jem’s lives and the world of Maycomb than “Mockingbird,” the movie, which focused more closely on Atticus and Tom Robinson’s trial.

The advice Ms. Lee received from her first editor was shrewd: to move the story back 20 years to Scout’s childhood, expanding what are flashbacks in “Watchman,” used to underscore the disillusionment Jean Louise feels with the present-day Atticus, now 72. (“I’ll never believe a word you say to me again. I despise you and everything you stand for.”) Scout’s disillusionment in “Watchman” oddly parallels that of Jem in “Mockingbird,” after Atticus fails to get Tom Robinson acquitted, and Jem realizes that justice does not always prevail.

Another pivotal difference between the two books concerns the decision to make Scout (“juvenile desperado, hell-raiser extraordinary”) the narrator of “Mockingbird” — a decision Ms. Lee executed with remarkable skill, managing the stereoscopic feat of capturing both the point of view of a forthright, wicked-smart girl (who is almost 6 when “Mockingbird” begins) and the retrospective wisdom of an adult.

Somewhere along the way, the overarching impulse behind the writing also seems to have changed. “Watchman” reads as if it were fueled by the alienation a native daughter — who, like Ms. Lee, moved away from small-town Alabama to New York City — might feel upon returning home. It seems to want to document the worst in Maycomb in terms of racial and class prejudice, the people’s enmity and hypocrisy and small-mindedness. At times, it also alarmingly suggests that the civil rights movement roiled things up, making people who “used to trust each other” now “watch each other like hawks.”

“Mockingbird,” in contrast, represents a determined effort to see both the bad and the good in small-town life, the hatred and the humanity; it presents an idealized father-daughter relationship (which a relative in “Watchman” suggests has kept Jean Louise from fully becoming her own person) and views the past not as something lost but as a treasured memory. In a 1963 interview, Ms. Lee, who now lives in her old hometown, Monroeville, Ala., said of “Mockingbird”: “The book is not an indictment so much as a plea for something, a reminder to people at home.”

One of the emotional through-lines in both “Mockingbird” and “Watchman” is a plea for empathy — as Atticus puts it in “Mockingbird” to Scout: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.” The difference is that “Mockingbird” suggested that we should have compassion for outsiders like Boo and Tom Robinson, while “Watchman” asks us to have understanding for a bigot named Atticus.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/books/review-harper-lees-go-set-a-watchman-gives-atticus-finch-a-dark-side.html?src=me

FRIDAY NIGHT BOY COOL #306

Omar Shariff RIP

Omar Sharif dies at the age of 83
The star of Doctor Zhivago, Funny Girl and Lawrence of Arabia died of a heart attack in Cairo on Friday, according to his agent

Benjamin Lee
Friday 10 July 2015

Omar Sharif has died at the age of 83. The Egyptian actor, best known for roles in Doctor Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia, suffered a heart attack in Cairo on Friday, his agent Steve Kenis said.

In May his son revealed the star had been suffering from Alzheimer’s. His son, with ex-wife and fellow actor Faten Hamama, and two grandsons survives him.

He grew up in Cairo and, in an interview with The Independent in 2012, said his mother would play cards with King Farouk and dole out regular beatings.

“By night she would play cards, by day she would give me the slipper,” he said. “She hit me on my backside every day till I was 14. She was an extraordinary woman – she lived till 1998. I was very close to her, even though she beat me all the time!”

Sharif was Oscar nominated for his role in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia and went on to win a Golden Globe for his performance. It was his first English language role, after appearing in over 20 Egyptian films.

He spoke about the film to The Guardian in 2012: “When I made this film I thought: “This is a crazy thing. There are no girls, no very famous actors at that time, only men and no action, not a lot of action. Not a lot of fights, not a lot of ...” It was so good because the director was a brilliant man. That’s the truth. David Lean was a great, great man. Great man.”

He soon became a star in Hollywood and followed his breakthrough performance with roles in Behold a Pale Horse alongside Gregory Peck and Anthony Quinn and in the 1965 epic Genghis Khan, playing the title role. In the same year, he reunited with Lean to star in Doctor Zhivago, a role that brought him another Golden Globe.

Sharif also starred alongside Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl and sequel Funny Lady. His decision to work with Streisand angered the Egyptian government given Streisand’s support of the State of Israel.

He admitted to The Guardian in 2004 that not all of his films were favourites. He referred to three as “really bad” since 1972. “To learn bad dialogue is so difficult and so boring,” he said, “and to work with a stupid director who tells you to do the wrong thing, etcetera, it’s just unbearable.”

Sharif worked less in recent years and his last role was in the 2013 drama Rock the Casbah. He has one film still to be released: a short called 1001 Inventions and the World of Ibn Al-Haytham.

In 2003 he was given a one-month suspended prison sentence and a 1,500 euro fine for headbutting a policeman in a Parisian casino. In 2005 he was ordered to attend anger management classes and served two years probation after assaulting a Beverly Hills parking valet. He was caught on video in 2011 apparently slapping a journalist after she attempted to take a photo with him at the Doha international film festival.

Sharif, as well as being an unlikely supporter of Hull City Football Club, was also a world-renowned bridge player, and recently developed an iPhone app. In November 2005, Sharif received UNESCO’s Sergei Eisenstein Medal in recognition of his significant contributions to world film and cultural diversity.

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jul/10/omar-sharif-dies-at-the-age-of-83

Omar Sharif: 'It is a great film, but I'm not very good in it'
It is 50 years since 'Lawrence of Arabia' came to the silver screen. Here, one of the two actors who achieved stardom in the film talks about the anniversary celebrations, his life spent in hotels, his love of liberty, cards, horses and women. 

Rachel Halliburton
Sunday 18 November 2012

The girl who came to seduce Omar Sharif in Dallas carried a small revolver with a mother-of-pearl grip. Dressed in green, as drunk as she was determined, she forced her way into his bedroom and ordered him to take his clothes off. But an essential part of his anatomy, understandably, refused to respond to the threat of a bullet. "Using her free hand," he recounted, "she sought to encourage me. In vain. As it would have been with anyone from Errol Flynn to Johnny ['Tarzan of the Apes') Weissmuller."

On Friday, the 50th anniversary restoration of Lawrence of Arabia was released on Blu-ray. And later this week, Sharif arrives in London to attend a party for the film's costume designer to be held at the V&A. It was the film that launched him as a leading actor and sex symbol – in the ensuing decades, his name would be linked to a string of women including Barbra Streisand and Anouk Aimée – yet when I recount the tale of his fan from Dallas, those famous eyes scrutinise me in mock horror, while the long fingers curl round the first whisky of the evening.

There's no doubt that it's true – it's described in detail in his autobiographical Omar Sharif's Life in Bridge. However, when we meet in the exclusive hotel in Paris where he currently lives, he exclaims: "Darling, I've slept with fewer than 10 women. I don't remember this. I hardly remember what happened last week." Does whisky help his memory at all? "We'll see." He holds his glass up cheerfully. "Let's have a go."

It's a potential game-over moment. But then the stories start to flow. Despite his protests, there's clearly an impressive resilience about the mind and, indeed, the body that first came into the world in Alexandria, Egypt, in April 1932. As an octogenarian, Sharif still possesses that lean, almost angry beauty that marked him out first as a promising Egyptian film star, and then, following his discovery by David Lean, an international screen idol.

All the attributes that were there in his youth remain: the cheekbones like ridges along cliffs, the taunting imperfection of the gap-toothed smile, those eyes whose glittering fury was captured so strikingly by Lean in the scene from Doctor Zhivago where he watches the Cossacks slaughter peaceful demonstrators. I don't need to rhapsodise about the hands, as he does so himself. "See these hands?" He holds them out in front of me. "They are old. But they are soft. Only good for caressing." He carves a suggestive curve in the air.

It takes a certain arrogance to pull off this statement at any age, and Sharif certainly isn't lacking in self‑belief. But despite skating dangerously near the dirty-old-man line, his complex mercurial personality cannot be reduced in this way. There's a mischievous flash in his eye as he says it, the spark of someone who's spent his life seeing what he can get away with. Not least in those trips that he and the Lawrence of Arabia star Peter O'Toole used to take to Beirut, in the short breaks they had once a month when filming in the Jordanian desert.

"We'd drink without stopping for 48 hours … we went hunting girls in every bar, every nightclub," he declared in The Eternal Male, his unashamedly chauvinistic Seventies autobiography. Their hard-partying lifestyle almost put a kibosh on the Hollywood premiere, when they were arrested the night before in the company of Lenny Bruce as he shot up with a hypodermic syringe. "[The producer] Sam Spiegel got us out of jail," Sharif tells me. "He arrived with six lawyers. Of course we were completely terrified."

Despite the rebelliousness and towering ego, Sharif seems extremely malleable when it comes to those he respects. Take the famous – some might say defining – moustache, which wasn't his idea at all, but David Lean's. "I was taken in a plane to the desert to meet David," he relates, "and as we came in to land we could see him sitting all by himself. We landed right next to him, but he didn't move one step. When I got off the plane, he didn't say 'hello'. He simply walked round me to see my profile. Finally, he said 'That's very good, Omar. Let's go to the make-up tent.' I tried on a moustache, and it was decided I would grow one. I've shaved it off for a couple of films, but otherwise I've had it ever since."

At some points, to hear him talk you'd think life began for Sharif only once Lean took him out of Egypt. Yet the man who was born Michael Shalhoub has always lived at the heart of the action, even in his own country. His father, a prosperous timber merchant, increased his wealth when he salvaged barbed wire left behind by the British during the Second World War in the desert, and turned it into nails. As a result, the family moved to an area in Cairo where they soon came to King Farouk's attention.

"My mother used to play cards with King Farouk," Sharif declares. "He believed she brought good luck to him – she was his mascot. He often came round to our house. I was around 10 years old at the time – if I came home and realised he was there, I would just sneak into bed. My mother used to sit up all night." He laughs. "By night she would play cards, by day she would give me the slipper. She hit me on my backside every day till I was 14. She was an extraordinary woman – she lived till 1998. I was very close to her, even though she beat me all the time!"

Certainly the love of cards, despite the beatings, has proved a central dynamic in Sharif's life. Famously, he was one of the world's top 50 bridge players – the Omar Sharif Bridge Circus played exhibition matches all over the world – and he once received a late-night invitation to play with the Shah of Iran and his wife. Does he play now? "No," he says soberly. "I stopped six years ago when I stopped being good enough." He still enjoys his other extravagance, racehorses: "Early next year, I'm taking a horse to Saigon. It's one of the best racehorses in Europe."

Following his meteoric start, the latter part of Sharif's life has been an enigma to his fans. After his marriage to the Egyptian movie star Faten Hamama collapsed during the filming of Doctor Zhivago – "She was the love of my life," he asserts – he has lived what has seemed, especially in recent years, to be a solitary, unsatisfactory existence. "From the age of 31, I have lived in hotels," he says.

He has also cheerfully acknowledged that he has made a lot of films he wasn't proud of to help finance his bridge habit. Though when I ask him which movies he is not so proud of, rather than naming something like Che! (the 1969 flop in which he played Che Guevara), he talks about Lawrence of Arabia.

"I think it is a great film, but I am not very good in it. I also never thought anyone would go to see the film – three hours and 40 minutes of desert, and no girls!" Then there's the unavoidable subject of the recent physical assaults: in 2003 he was convicted of head-butting a police officer in a Paris casino, and last year he apparently hit a female journalist at the Doha Tribeca Festival in Qatar. Of the latter incident, he declares: "I have a small remembrance of this." Of the former, he says: "I said to him 'Vous êtes un con!' They put me in jail for a whole night. It was awful."

It strikes me that Sharif is not so much lonely, as someone who wants to be at liberty to be a loner. He is a law unto himself – though he tells me happily that he's going to see his family (he has one son, and a number of grandchildren) in Cairo at the start of next year, and he's had many strong friendships throughout his life, not least with Hosni Mubarak's wife, Suzanne. "I thought it was right that Mubarak went," he says, "but I always found his wife very intelligent and interesting to talk to." He emphasises that this is a personal and not a political judgement – "I get in trouble when I talk about politics."

His refusal to be pinned down by anyone or anything is exemplified perhaps most clearly by his attitude to religion. Born a Catholic – "I used to go and make confession to the priest. I told him I masturbated. How can that be a mortal sin? Every boy masturbates" – he converted to Islam in order to get married, and technically remains a Muslim to this day. He denies rumours that he recently converted to Kabbalism, but says, "Everyone should have something to believe in. I won't say anything bad about any religion. But your life is your life," he frowns at me, belligerently. It's the most vehement he's been. Then the glare relaxes. He raises his glass and takes a sip of whisky. "All that matters is being happy."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/omar-sharif-it-is-a-great-film-but-im-not-very-good-in-it-8326440.html

Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots at Tate Liverpool

Jackson Pollock review – this is art as nervous breakdown ... and it's majestic
This revolutionary new exhibition is proof that Pollock’s life after 1950 was not, as has previously been painted, just one long alcoholic crisis

Jonathan Jones
Monday 29 June 2015

This is the saddest story you will ever see. In 1950, the great American painter Jackson Pollock stood at the peak of his achievement. His dripped and poured and flicked galaxies of colour attain a majestic beauty in such paintings from that year as Lavender Mist, One: Number 31, 1950 and Autumn Rhythm. Pollock was painting at this moment like his contemporary Charlie Parker played sax, in curling arabesques of liberating improvisation that magically end up making beautiful sense.

Portrait and a Dream, 1953

There is a grace in this art that belies its radical method of creation. Putting canvases on the ground and throwing paint at them seems a recipe for anarchy. Pollock, however, insisted that his art contains “No chaos, dammit!”

It was a brief perfection. Pollock was addicted to alcohol for most of his adult life. It was only after marrying fellow painter Lee Krasner, moving out of New York and finding a doctor who could help him kick the drink that he entered his golden period. But by the end of 1950, it was over. Krasner blamed the sudden death of the doctor he had relied on. Pollock hit the bottle and his painting went to hell.
Number 5, 1952

Or did it? Tate Liverpool has looked into Pollock’s darkness to reveal undiscovered shades. Its important, in fact revolutionary, new exhibition concentrates not on Pollock’s glory days but his years of supposed decline, from 1951 to his death in a car crash in 1956. After an opening room of “classic” drip paintings, it plunges into a heartbreaking journey among the black, blotted, semi-figurative paintings that are usually seen as symptoms of his tragic decline.

Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1952

In 1951 Pollock, tortured and stumbling in his private life, shocked and disappointed the New York art world with an exhibition of matted, ugly paintings in an oily black squirted from turkey basters and thickly brushed on to raw canvas that blotted the monotonous blackness. Out of the morass emerge fragments of imagery. Distorted faces, floating breasts, an anguished confrontation of male and female bodies – these paintings tell of a terrible crisis in his life. They are drunken monuments to pain and self-pity.

Yellow Islands, 1952

What this exhibition reveals, to my surprise, is that they also happen to be absolutely terrific paintings, great shattered ruins as wondrous as lost cities. Pollock never had entirely rejected meaningful imagery, even at his most apparently abstract. His early art is dense with mythology and Jungian archetypes. In a rare work that opens this show, he drips paint over a photograph of a mother and child. “I choose to veil the image”, as he put it. In other words, the image is there – meaning is there – always. And in his later paintings it breaks out like a sickness.

Man and woman, love and loathing, sex and death – the themes of these scary nervous breakdowns of paintings are stark. Pollock did not really return to traditional figurative art in 1951. Rather he invented a new kind of drawing, as grandiose and free as the abstract swirls from which it takes shape. His crude faces look as if they were drawn by Frankenstein’s monster with a thick felt-tip pen.
Number 14, 1951

There are no second acts in American lives, claimed F Scott Fitzgerald. But Pollock’s life turns out to have a defiant second act. He lost the jazz player’s grace but found instead the ripeness of the blues. In his big, broken painting Portrait and a Dream, his own face contemplates the fleshy sufferings of his dream life. The chaos takes over, and he watches himself lose.

Number One, 1950 (Lavender Mist)

This exhibition casts a brilliant new light on an American tragedy. It is proof that even as Pollock drifted into the swamp of self-destruction, he plucked the strange fruit hanging from its tangled trees.
Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots is at Tate Liverpool until 18 October 2015

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jun/29/jackson-pollock-blind-spots-tate-liverpool-review-art-as-nervous-breakdown

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-liverpool/exhibition/jackson-pollock-blind-spots