Andy Nowicki's Blog, page 3
February 7, 2012
my latest interviews n' stuff
My interviews at Reason Radio Network: www.reasonradionetwork.com/tag/andy-nowicki
My interview with Micheal Kleen, publisher-in-chief of Black Oak, regarding my edgy romance novella: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0MV1MsecaM and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxwYToXNY24
Mike O'Meara's excellent review of UNDER THE NIHIL: www.counter-currents.com/2012/01/bright-lights-big-nothing-andy-nowickis-under-the-nihil
A transcript of my interview with Counter-Currents, detailing my disgust with the grusome Zeitgeist and my promiscuous intercourse with the lascivious Muses: www.counter-currents.com/2012/02/interview-with-andy-nowicki
Finally, don't forget these oldies but goodies:
Sexy Youtube promo for THE COLUMBINE PILGRIM: www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_SClpoYr8I
Writeup/overview of my first novel, CONSIDERING SUICIDE: http://www.consideringsuicide.blogspot.com/
More to come.... Stay tuned.
January 4, 2012
my new book for 2012: UNDER THE NIHIL
Would you become enlightened, or would you lose your mind?
UNDER THE NIHIL by Andy Nowicki, published by Counter-Currents, is now available....
To read a longer writeup/description of the book:
www.counter-currents.com/2011/12/under-the-nihil
To read an excerpt:
www.counter-currents.com/2011/12/into-the-nihil
To order via Amazon, in paperback, hardcover, or on Kindle:
www.amazon.com/under-nihil-andy-nowicki/dp/1935965239
August 23, 2011
The Doctor and the Heretic and Other Stories
For an excllent analysis and review of this collection, see www.counter-currents.com/2011/08/the-doctor-and-the-heretic-and-other-stories
To read an interview with yours truly, in which I pontificate mightily on the worth and value of this provocative set of stories, see www.blackoakmedia.org/main/2011/8/18/interview-with-andy-nowicki.html
Finally, to purchase THE DOCTOR AND THE HERETIC, see the range of options (including Nook and Kindle) here: http://blackoaktitles.wordpress.com/new-releases/the-doctor-and-the-heretic-and-other-stories
April 2, 2011
Youtube video promo for THE COLUMBINE PILGRIM
March 28, 2011
THE COLUMBINE PILGRIM by Andy Nowicki: now available on Amazon!
February 26, 2011
THE COLUMBINE PILGRIM by Andy Nowicki
.....Payback is a Bitch.
.....Revenge has never been so sweet, or so bitter.
THE COLUMBINE PILGRIM, by Andy Nowicki, a grim and hilarious novel of psychological horror, now available for pre-order:
www.counter-currents.com/2011/02/the-columbine-pilgrim
and while you're at it, don't neglect to find out about Andy Nowicki's debut novel, CONSIDERING SUICIDE:
www.consideringsuicide.blogspot.com
October 22, 2010
Andy Nowicki Interviews Himself on his Incredible Rise to Literary Stardom, With all of its attendant perks and hassles
****Dramatis personae: Andy Nowicki the obsequious interviewer, and Andy Nowicki the sexy, intense, tragically misunderstood artistic genius*****
Setting: the author's seedy, smelly, cluttered low-rent apartment
AN: (walks in smiling, clad in white short-sleeve button-up shirt with "wacky" tie featuring cartoon characters chasing one another, then coupling in various obscene positions: a wardrobe signifying simultanous emotional fragility and an ever-present, never-dormant desire to be thought of as a cool, hip guy) Hello there, sir!
AN: (shirtless, sullen, silent, lights match, looks at it, throws it down, crosses arms, smirks, grunts, picks up and eats a week-old french fry lying on the table, grunts again, looks at wrist, realizes he's not wearing a watch, smirks again, thinks, "two freckles past a hair," frowns contemplatively, becomes pensive, contemplates death, punches own crotch, cringes, doubles over, goes cross-eyed, smirks at his own mortality.)
AN: So... I hear you're rapidly ascending the ladder of success these days.
AN: Oh, that's good. Butter me up.
AN: (eagerly) Okay! (takes out a stick of butter, reaches over to rub it on AN's bare chest. AN knocks it down, and fixes himself with a smoldering glare-- an onanistically homoerotic moment). Sorry. Well, let's get down to it. What's in the ol' hopper?
AN: You know, honestly this self-interview thing is pretty gay. Do we have to do it like this?
AN: Sorry! I'm just a little bit starstruck... I've been wanting to meet you for a while now. So, (looks at notes, squints eyes, adjusts glasses) talk to me about your latest projects. I hear you wrote a book!
AN: Yep, and I published it too, with Nine-Banded Books.
AN: Really! What's it called?
AN: Considering Suicide.
AN: Man. Sounds like a killer.
AN: Ha! Good one.
AN: Really? You liked it?
AN: Yes, you're a very witty guy.
AN: Aw, thanks... coming from you, that means a lot... So, your book can be found at any local bookstore, right?
AN: (sneeringly) Hell, no. The ideas it engages are way too radical, controversial, and gutsy. Barnes and Noble and Borders and Waldenbooks and whatnot are too pussy to handle such a hot beef injection of ballsy provocation. But you can purchase it on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/considering-suicide-andy-nowicki/dp/0615263321 ), or direct from the publisher (http://www.ninebandedbooks ).
AN: So, your book has been out for (squints at notes again) a year now, right?
AN: And selling like the proverbial hotcakes. Well, bitter-tasting hotcakes laced with exotic but faintly odd-smelling spices and made from a rotten batter in an unclean pot. Not to everyone's taste. And if you're old, you'll struggle with the very small print. But still a post-modern classic. Hilarious and horrifying. To find out more, see http://www.consideringsuicide.blogspot.com/ . (Deja vu, no?)
AN: So, tell me about this new short story you're publishing. I hear it's a little racy, eh?
AN: It's called "The Poet's Wager," and it's set to appear in the December issue of Black Oak Presents (http://www.blackoakmedia.org/ ) . It's about a guy who---
AN: Let me guess.... a guy who's considering suicide!
AN: Yep.
AN: Killer!
AN: Only this time, he's got an attractive, rather sensual psychotherapist who tries to talk him out of it.
AN: Oooooh... Hot stuff. Does she succeed?
AN: You'll just have to read it and find out, big guy.
AN: Neato. We'll do that. If there's two things I love, it's suicidal patients and sexy shrinks.
AN: Not necessarily in that order, right?
AN: Right! Right! (snickers uncontrollably for several minutes in a manner that recalls Sheriff Roscoe's trademark giggle on "The Dukes of Hazzard") Ohhhhhhh. Gosh, you're funny. Oh, man! (rubs tear-stained eyes ruefully). So anyhoo, I hear you've also got an theological essay forthcoming?
AN: Yes, it's called "The Suffering God and the Culture of Death." It's set to appear in the next issue of Christendom Review (http://www.christendomreview.com/ ) due out in mid-November.
AN: And I'll just bet that it's about.... a guy who's considering suicide, right?
AN: Actually, no.
AN: WHAT?
AN: No, it's a piece I wrote about the problem of a good God and an evil world, and how well-- or conversely, how poorly-- this conundrum is resolved in the teachings of Christianity.
AN: Oh, wow. Sounds deep. (tentative pause) Uh, is it boring?
AN: No way! In fact, it's got a ton of sex, violence, and profanity. Haven't you ever read the Old Testament?
AN: (sheepishly) Well, just Leviticus. Oh, and a chapter or two of Micah. And Nephi.
AN: Nephi's in The Book of Mormon, you moron.
AN: Oh, yeah. Right. (makes note to himself, mutters) Nephi...in.. Book... of Moron... Well, before we conclude this scintillating conversation, let's look down the road. I understand you've written about (looks at notes again) Columbine High School... Just wanted to lighten things up a bit, huh?
AN: Well, we all need comic relief from time to time. Instead of writing about suicide, spiritual anguish and psychological pain, I thought I'd write about mass murder, suicide, spiritual anguish and psychological pain.
AN: Killer!
AN: I've got an alternative history short story that's set in a world in which the Columbine massacre never happened; you can read it free of charge at www.docstoc.com/docs/23306278/tears-of-the-damned . And right now, I'm looking to find a publisher for what I consider to be my opus--
AN: (writing this down) Oh...puss...
AN: --a novella called THE COLUMBINE PILGRIM.
AN: So, I'll bet it's about a guy who's considering suicide, right?
AN: I'm not going to talk about the premise of the story right now. I'm only going to say that it's the first thing I've ever written that actually freaked me out. It's not often an author gets to do that to himself. I read it over, and I thought, "That came out of me? Holy damn, I've got problems...
AN: All right! Anything else to say?
AN: Not really. Except maybe that I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercise, and indeed it goes so heavily with me that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you!-
AN: (looks) Ah hah!
AN: It appears no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapor... What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infintite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable.... In action, how like an angel, in apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet, what is it to me: this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me, no nor woman neither...
AN: Woah. You're right. You do have problems. You know, I'm starting to change my mind about you. I used to think you were so cool and intellecual and darkly mysterious and funny and stuff. But now, I don't know-- you seem like kind of a drag and a bore...I think I'll just see my way out...
AN: Not so fast, bucko. (reaches into crotch of his pants, whips out gun)
AN: (puts hands up) Hold on, now... What do you want? I'll give you anything...
AN: I need spiritual peace and security. I need financial independence. I need greater faith. I need to recover my whimsical, youthful sense of optimism. I need a return to a child-like mindset of whimsy and wonder. I need greater success! I'm gonna be forty, damnit! Give me success!
AN: (hands still raised) Sorry, pal. I can't help you with any of that.
AN: Bummer. (pulls trigger-- a BANG sign shoots from the barrel of the gun. Both ANs fall from their chairs, convulsing, and soon their too too sullied flesh melts, thaws, and dissolves itself into a dew. Curtain.)
September 6, 2010
Considering Suicide: The Melancholic Reactionary's Bible
www.consideringsuicide.blogspot.com
August 26, 2010
THE STREET HARDLY UNDERSTANDS: Groping for Transcendence In T.S. Eliot's Early Poetry
<?xml:namespace prefix = o />
(Andy Nowicki's novel, CONSIDERING SUICIDE, is available at www.amazon.com/considering-suicide-andy-nowicki/dp/0615263321 , or from the publisher, http://www.ninebandedbooks.com/ . He regularly writes a column for The Last Ditch ( www.thornwalker.com/ditch ), and also contributes to Alternative Right, American Renaissance, Occidental Observer, and New Oxford Review.... The following essay will eventually become part of his upcoming juicy tell-all memoir: MEIN KAMPF, BOOK TWO: A NOBODY GOES NAVEL-GAZING). Don't miss the delicious autobiographical scandal also recorded in the next post down, entitled "Me And Vinny Murphy."
A literary enthusiast is often brought to the love of his life through a dubious, or at least unlikely, source. Later, the enthusiast in question may cringe when he considers the body of markedly inferior work, which as an immature thinker he used to love, a body of work which, though unremarkable in itself, somehow functioned as a portal through which he later emerged to discover a first-class poet, novelist, or thinker. Or, if he is less of a snob, he may simply reflect that providence often works in mysterious ways, and that all forms, the "high" and the "low," have their merits and their moments. So it is that, without cringing or blushing or displaying any other kind of elitist scorn for my former self, I reflect that without my adolescent's love of the mysterious lyrics of Simon LeBon, lead singer of Duran Duran, I never would have discovered one of the literary loves of my life.
LeBon's lyrics were often so abstruse and weird as to be incomprehensible ("Shake up the picture/ The lizard mixture, with the dance on the eventide"; "Don't wanna be in public, my head is full of chopstick"), but their defects did not matter to me as a starry-eyed, moody teenager back in the mid 1980s. To me back then, they were pure poetry. I appreciated how they so thoroughly avoided the "I love you baby" adolescent doggerel so frequently found in the lyrics to popular music. Looking back today, I recognize the limitations of Duran Duran as art-- though I still enjoy their early music: everything up through, say, 1985, when the band's lineup changed and the overall quality of their craft went into steep decline. But though my fondness for LeBon as a "poet" has sobered since my youthful days, I still have him to credit for introducing me to a far superior wordsmith, whose influence in turn-- and far more importantly-- eventually led me to Christianity. God works in wondrous ways, including through new wave synth-pop 80s bands whose keyboard players wear rouge and bright lipstick.
I still recall holding a newly purchased book of Duran Duran's lyrics in my hands. In that book, LeBon reflected for a moment on his influences. He talked about Shelly and Keats, as well as war poet Wilfred Owen. He also mentioned "the obscure imagery of T.S. Eliot." I liked that latter description; it sounded cool, so I went to the local library and checked it out. Immediately I was struck, as I still am, by the early work of Eliot, particularly the poems contained in the original collection from 1917 entitled PRUFROCK AND OTHER OBSERVATIONS. Here is found the famous "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" with its inviting, yet strangely ominous opening lines: "Let us go then, you and I/ When the evening is spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherized upon a table." I read on, was hooked, and still am.
Thank you Simon.
*********************
Today, viewed from the perspective of a middle-aged English teacher, whose hair, like Prufrock's, is growing thin, I still find myself most captivated by Eliot's earliest work. As for "The Four Quartets," written later in Eliot's life and long after his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, they leave me cold. There is something about them that is too airy-fairy, too abstract. "The Waste Land," Eliot's most celebrated poem, has its moments of power, but I can't make head of tail out of much of it, and really, couldn't he have cut back on the abstruse literary allusions just a touch? (Those who call Eliot a pedant are no doubt mostly prejudiced against him for his political and social views, but honestly, the guy could lay on the references and footnotes a bit thick at times.)
In fact, while most things in my life have changed drastically since I first opened that book of T.S. Eliot's poetry as a 15-year old kid, one thing hasn't changed at all. My favorite Eliot poems are still the early ones, specifically the ones that comprise PRUFROCK AND OTHER OBSERVATIONS. Today, most of Eliot's fans are those who share, or are at least in substantial sympathy with, his beliefs, which were officially enumerated in 1927: "an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature, and a royalist in politics." Eliot's enemies tend to dislike him for the same reason his fans tend to like him: they think he is too conservative and too religious. As a teenager and a young adult, however, I was an ardent leftist; it always distressed me a little that I couldn't reconcile my opinions with those of my favorite poet. Yet Eliot spoke to me in ways that no revolutionary-minded, left-leaning poet ever had. It would have been easier for me if I could have said that Shelly or Byron or Walt Whitman or Alan Ginsburg was my muse, but such was not the case; it wasn't the innumerable wild-eyed, crazy-living, bearded bohemian bards who caught my fancy, but rather the buttoned-up, respectable, sober-eyed, middle-class banker Eliot whose literary style I wanted to emulate. It was a bit uncomfortable that I was an ostensible left-winger who loved the work of an ultra-conservative writer, yet at the same time it never occurred to me to "ditch" Eliot; instead, I endured the cognitive dissonance that comes from holding two irreconcilable positions at once. Of course, something had to give eventually, and what "gave" (after several years of gamely enduring cognitive dissonance) was my leftism and my agnosticism. Through the influence of Eliot (and, I believe, God), I came to see the value of orthodoxy and tradition; I soon followed his path to Anglo-Catholicism, before going one step further and dropping the "Anglo" prefix entirely two years ago.
It's often been intimated to me that, now that I'm a good believer in sacramental Christianity (though now of the "Roman" rather than the "Anglo" stripe), I ought to gravitate towards Eliot's later work, written when he was a good (Anglo) Catholic. Yet for some reason, it's Eliot's early work that still holds the most appeal. This is particularly true with PRUFROCK AND OTHER OBSERVATIONS, a collection of poems in which the speakers grope desperately for a sense of transcendence, for a connection with the divine in the midst of a world that they feel to be utterly drained of spiritual vitality. But why should this appeal to me more than the more "settled" and calm quality of Eliot's later works, like "Ash Wednesday" or "Little Gidding"? Perhaps because I'm still a moody teenager at heart, still restless in some ways, still searching.
*******************************************
PRUFROCK AND OTHER OBSERVATIONS contains what could be called four "major" poems: the famous "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and the lesser-known "Portrait of a Lady," "Preludes," and "Rhapsody on a Windy Night." Shorter poems are interspersed between these larger ones, including the wry "Cousin Nancy," about a sophisticated woman who "smoked and danced all the modern dances," and whose aunts "weren't sure what to think of it," as well as the satirical "Boston Evening Transcript," whose readers are said to "sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn." Here, I wish to consider mainly the four longer poems of the collection, and their collective meaning and effect.
It's quite fascinating that a man in his early twenties would feel compelled to write "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." It is, after all, about the travails of a middle-aged man, one who fears that life has passed him by and dreads the approach of old age and death ("I grow old... I grow old... I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat and snicker/ And in short, I was afraid.") It is, of course, always inadvisable to try to read a writer's work autobiographically, but I've always wondered to what extent Eliot could identify with Prufrock, even though by all accounts he wrote the poem as a newly-minted college graduate. (A few years later, the still young Eliot would follow with "Gerontion," about a decrepit old man reflecting upon the emptiness of his soon-to-end life.)
Prufrock's dramatic monologue sets the tone for the entire collection; as with every other major poem in PAOO, it is told from a first person point of view; as with the other poems, the speaker often lapses into curious, impressionistic, and rather gloomy descriptions of urban scenes-- here, we have the extended description of "yellow fog," which one suspects to be pollution; the fog is compared to a cat, and is said to "rub its back upon the window panes," "lick its tongue into the corners of the evening," and "curl about the house." We also hear that the speaker "has seen the smoke that rises from the pipes of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows." These descriptions help to reinforce a context of the speaker's feeling of anonymity in the midst of a harsh, smoggy, and unforgiving city filled with isolated, lonely men (who mirror Prufrock's own sense of isolation) and unobtainable, high-class women who "come and go, talking of Michaelangelo." The speaker is hesitant to approach these latter, much as he desires company, for fear that they will turn him down cold.
Prufrock fantasizes about fearlessly expressing himself in a very forthright manner, showing himself to be a powerful man, living an extraordinary life, but he isn't sure it's worth the risk, so he refrains:
Would it have been worthwhile, to have bitten off the matter with a smile
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question
To say, 'I am Lazarus, come from the dead, come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all...
If one setting a pillow and throwing back a shawl, and turning toward the window should say,
'That is not what I meant at all
That is not it, at all."
What Prufrock fears is the awful feeling of putting oneself on the line, making oneself vulnerable, only to have one's interlocutor reject what he has expressed as irrelevant or tiresome. Yet Prufrock's angst transcends the problem of being shy around the opposite sex. Ultimately, what he wants is a sense of connection, not merely on a romantic level, but in a more profound sense. "Prufrock" is not an explicitly religious poem, but its speaker clearly suffers from spiritual thirst-- he wants more than can be provided by the dry, sterile desert of a modern world he inhabits, where faith seems to have altogether evaporated. It is not by chance that Prufrock invokes figures like John the Baptist and Lazarus, comparing himself unfavorably to these great men who played such an important role in the origins of the Christian faith. Prufrock feels that he has suffered just as they have, but his suffering seems meaningless, because it hasn't been redeemed by the ability to believe in a transcendent realm, in a God who, in the words of the author of Revelation, "wipes every tear from our eyes." Prufrock has "wept and fasted, wept and prayed," and has even, like John the Baptist, "seen (his) head.... brought in upon a platter," but Prufrock, unlike the Baptist, cannot take the real step into martyrdom and faith, so he remains insignificant: "I am no Prophet," he mourns, "and here's no great matter."
Near the end of the poem, Prufrock walks along a beach and looks out to the eternally rolling waves of the ocean; this provokes a vision of a rather sensual spiritual realm, inhabited by "sea girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown," who "ride seaward on the waves, combing the white hair of the waves blown back." The mermaids sing to one another, he observes, before adding poignantly, "I do not think that they will sing to me."
In the last three lines, the first person "I" becomes the collective "we," signifying that Prufrock is not meant to be viewed as an isolated case, but rather as a microcosm of the universal state of modern man. Like Prufrock, we all "have lingered in the chambers of the sea," in a state of ecstasy (rendered in suggestively erotic terms through the imagery of the beautiful mermaids) that is, however, only a fantasy state; in reality, we have no faith, so we can only drown when we wake, and after dying, we cannot be raised, as Lazarus was, from the dead.
In the hyperallusive "Waste Land," a common motif is the depiction of impotence, joyless sexuality or lack of fertility as representative of spiritual emptiness. In "Prufrock," this same theme is rendered in reverse: the speaker's dreams and fantasies involve romantic and sexual success, but these dreams are in fact representative of Prufrock's unfulfilled spiritual urge for a connection to the divine. In both cases, Eliot uses sexuality as a metaphor for spirituality; Prufrock as well as the debauched characters in "The Waste Land" yearn for a meaningful union with God, but cannot access the faith that came more easily to their pre-modern forbearers, so they cannot succeed even at having a fulfilling physical union with their fellow human beings.
In "Portrait of a Lady," the second of the major poems in OBSERVATIONS, we again have a story in which a character seeks love and ends up unfulfilled; this time, however, the speaker, rather than being the one who fears rejection, is the one who does the rejecting.
The "lady" in question appears to be a well-bred, well-educated older woman approaching the age of spinsterhood; the speaker is a younger man who visits the lady occasionally for tea out of a sense of politeness, but secretly feels derision for her. As the lady goes on about the sublime nature of Chopin's music, the travails of middle-aged life and other subjects in a somewhat grandiloquent and pretentious manner, the speaker is bored, restless, and a little frightened. He observes that the Lady's tea room has "an atmosphere of Juliet's tomb," and that her voice resembles "the insistent out of tune/ Of a broken violin on an August afternoon." The speaker is aware that the Lady has designs on him; she is rather forward in her ladylike way, praising highly his sensitivity and kindness ("I am always sure you understand/ My feelings, always sure that you feel,/ Sure that across the gulf you reach your hand."), which is especially ironic, given the cruelty of the speaker's inner monologue regarding her. Later, the poem subtly indicts the speaker, who may well be a largely autobiographical figure, when the lady tells him that "youth is cruel, and has no remorse/ And smiles at situations which it cannot see" and the speaker responds by smiling, confirming the truth of her declaration.
The sport that the speaker has at the Lady's expense comes back to haunt him near the end of the poem, when nearly a year after his first meeting with her, the speaker returns to tell the lady that he is going abroad for an extended period of time. Shortly afterwards, the lady expresses her regret that they had not grown closer over the time that they had corresponded:
"I have wondered frequently of late...
Why we have not developed into friends…
For everybody said so, all our friends,
They all were sure our feelings would relate
So closely! I myself can hardly understand.
One has the impression that the speaker's conscience is pricked by this confession, but he does not repent for his callousness, nor does he pity her. Instead, he rather brutally imagines that if she were to die one day soon and leave him "sitting, pen in hand... Not knowing what to feel or if I understand," that this would mean that she would "have the advantage." The speaker is most upset, not by his own lack of gallantry, but by the notion of in some manner being one-upped. Once more, as with "Prufrock," there is a lack of connection, a failure to communicate, and the result is unfulfilled desire and resultant sterility; one imagines that the speaker was the lady's last chance at finding a mate; now she will grow old and die without having children.
The two final major poems in OBSERVATIONS are more impressionistic, telling less of a story than evoking a mood. "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" has a phantasmagorical element; one could almost call it "psychedelic," featuring as it does talking street lamps and other strange sights and sounds. Here, the speaker is walking the streets of a city at night, in a trance-like state. At midnight he hears street-lamps beating "like a fatalistic drum." Later, starting at half-past one, a particular lamp begins talking to him, pointing out various sordid sights, including a likely prostitute whose dress is "torn and stained with sand" and the corner of whose eye "twists like a paper rose."
At half-past two, the same lamp shows the speaker how a stray cat in the gutter has "slipped out its tongue/And devour(ed) a morsel of rancid butter." At half-past three, the lamp draws the speaker's attention to the moon, which the lamp characterizes as an elderly woman who has lost her memory and sits alone in the sky in a pathetic, geriatric stupor.
Each time the lamp speaks, its words cause the speaker to remember various things he has seen: first, inanimate objects which seem to have some somber significance, including "a twisted branch upon the beach/ Eaten smooth, and polished/ As if the world gave up/ The secret of its skeleton,/ Stiff and white," then a child stealing a toy with an impassive look on his face and a crab (recalling the famous "pair of ragged claws" from "Prufrock") clinging to the end of a stick. Humanity, in the person of the boy, is here depicted as animal-like, tenacious and remorseless, dwelling in filth, doing what is necessary to survive but having no apparent soul. The lamp's reference to the moon, curiously, brings to mind the heartless, dirty goings-on of the corrupt city, savoring of prostitution, drunkenness, and other vices: "female smells in shuttered rooms/ And cigarettes in corridors/ and cocktail smells in bars."
At four o clock, the speaker's phantasmagorical experience has come to an end; he is instructed by the street lamp to go to his apartment, open the door with his key, brush his teeth, go to bed, "sleep, prepare for life." Yet the reader gets no sense that anything has been gained from this unique night of visions and memories. Indeed, the lamp's final words are perceived by the speaker as being "the last twist of the knife." The speaker aches, in some inchoate way, for a sense of goodness and transcendence, but all he has been shown by the street lamp reeks of filth, corruption, and (in the "person" of the moon) pitiful decrepitude.
If the mood of "Rhapsody" is ultimately despairing, "Preludes" is more wistful; there is a glint of hope here, or possibly merely an expressed hope for hope. This poem is divided in four sections, the first two of which are impressionistic street scenes. The first section describes a city at dusk, with an unnamed person observed by the speaker as surrounded by "grimy scraps of withered leaves" and tossed-away "newspapers from vacant lots." It is, we are told, one of those "burnt out ends of smoky days." Again, there is pollution, and an understated sense of dreariness about an urban landscape.
The second section of the poem is set in the same place at morning-time, describing the urban population's mad stampede to work, what in later decades would be called a rush hour. There are "faint stale smells of beer," no doubt from excesses of the previous night, and "muddy feet" that "press to early coffee stands." At this point, the speaker's thoughts turn to "all the hands/ That are raising dingy shades/ In a thousand furnished rooms."
As in "Rhapsody," the sights and sounds the speaker sees and hears help to trigger his memory, and in the third section of the poem he returns to the "you" referred to briefly in the first section. The "you," we find, is someone who lay in bed (behind one of those thousand "dingy shades," no doubt) the previous night, probably a woman and likely one of dubious morals, who witnessed in a revelation "the thousand sordid images of which (her) soul was constituted." Having gained this unflattering self-knowledge, she is then afforded another vision when morning comes, one only described as "such a vision of the street/ As the street hardly understands."
The street, after all, as the speaker reveals in section four, only knows the everyday occurrences; it has no transcendent knowledge, such has been given the woman. The street only knows sounds like those made by "insistent feet/ At four and five and six o'clock," and the sight of "short square fingers stuffing pipes," and "eyes/ Assured of certain certainties." The speaker, however, inexplicably finds in these moments an exquisitely sad indication of "some infinitely gentle/ Infinitely s uffering thing."
With these lines, it would seem that the speaker and the object of his attention share a moment of knowledge, a connection. This notion, however, is nullified by the final three lines of the poem, in which the woman, apparently having awakened from her trance of the previous night, roughly and crudely rejects the speaker's sensitive insight:
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
This is another "That is not what I meant, at all" moment, in which an attempt at communication is harshly dismissed. Here, however, one gets the impression that the emphasis is less upon the rejection, and more upon the transcendent truth that is still no less true for having been rejected. What truly lingers in the mind of the reader of the "Preludes" are the lines about having "such a vision of the street" and getting a notion of "some infinitely gentle/ Infinitely suffering thing."
The latter is the first hint of a Christian sensibility on Eliot's part, a striking characterization that could be applied to Christ but also to Mary-- indeed, it represents a highly Catholic understanding of Christianity, one centered around the Passion, where suffering is in some manner redemptive, where one can claim the divine to be "infinitely gentle" and "infinitely suffering" without fear of being charged with blasphemy, since God himself in human form was scourged, mocked, and nailed to a cross, and did not retaliate against his attackers, but rather prayed for them.
Of course, this portion of the poem is only a hint, a clue that a reality exists beyond the mundane and sordid goings-on of the city. After all, the street itself "hardly understands" such profundities, and the same can be said for many of the street's dwellers, who are too focused on worldly concerns--sex, money, the daily routine-- to pay attention to such "fancies." For the speaker, however, these "fancies" are the one thing needful, pointing as they do to an answer to the "overwhelming question" referenced earlier by J. Alfred Prufrock, an answer, one gathers that the both the speaker in "Preludes" and Prurock desperately seek, because it represents a leap from the impermanent, with all of its wretched and meaningless "masquerades that time resumes," to the transcendent, represented here by a perpetually suffering, yet eternally loving, divine presence.
It is precisely this vague dissatisfaction with the state of things, this yearning for transcendence, that motivates the restless search undertaken by the diverse cast of characters assembled in PRUFROCK AND OTHER OBSERVATIONS. Eliot, in a later stage of life, may have felt that he had outgrown this phase; he is reported in his old age to have dismissed "The Waste Land" as part of a youthful "grouse against life." Chances are that he might have felt similarly about many of his pre-"Waste Land" poems, which are similarly bleak in tone. But what Eliot captured so well in these early poems were the very aspects of the godless life which cause a person to seek God in the first place-- the sense of emptiness, of despair, the sickening fear of impending death and decay.
If one is to be truly converted to belief in a transcendent realm, one must first be convinced that the world is a thing of naught. Thus there can be a thin line between black, suicidal depression and enlightenment, but often, perhaps always, one cannot access the latter without first enduring the former. This, in turn, is why I find it hard to conceive of Eliot's early poetry, with its emphasis on despair, as being distinct in theme from that of his later work, with its emphasis on faith. To me, it has always seemed like comparing two different points in the trajectory of the life of a Christian convert, two different sections of the same story. Poetry, like all forms of literature, must be true to every facet of life, including life's less savory or pleasant moments. In a very real sense, we are all still searching as long as we are alive; doubt and struggle cannot be wholly expunged from our souls until we are perfected in Heaven. Prufrock and the rest of the characters chronicled in OBSERVATIONS, then, speak to some part of us all, if we are honest enough with ourselves to admit it.
February 25, 2010
Me and Vinnie Murphy
VINNY MURPHY AND ME: REFLECTIONS ON SOME COLLEGE DRAMA
How do we begin to understand the very existence of the arts? Theater, music, dance, drawing, and literature (be it written or oral) have been around seemingly as long as man has walked the earth. The ubiquity of these institutions can, I think, be chalked up to the fact that man has always needed a kind of mirror to look at himself, to study his own condition, to examine the full extent of the perplexing, if not horrifying, predicament of being.
Given this truth, it is astonishing just how seldom one truly sees himself in any profound sense in a book, play, movie, painting, or sculpture. Alienation and indifference are much more common responses than identification, recognition, and engagement for the typical art-purveyor; he emerges from the experience thinking not "wow!" but "eh." He might not admit to his lack of enthusiasm, particularly if the art in question is widely thought of as great by those considered "in the know" about such matters; if such a one cares about his reputation, he will outwardly accede to this consensus, proclaiming his solidarity with the best and the brightest's shared adulation of a particular work, even if inwardly he must admit that it leaves him cold and uninspired.
Sometimes this honest reaction is the result of mere ignorance on his part; philistinism today, as ever, reigns supreme among much of the population who simply don't have any worthwhile aesthetic sense to speak of, and who will never care about gay, girly crap like "art appreciation" anyway. But at least as often, the problem is that the consensus among "right-thinking" critics and intellectuals is simply wrong. Intellectuals, after all, can be swindled and bamboozled just like everyone else-- they are particularly vulnerable to the "flattering unction" that accompanies the sense of feeling oneself to be among the cultural elite. If they hear their friends lavishly praise a particular "art" film, let us say, then they will not want to seem like they are one of those ignoramuses with no sense of aesthetics; they will then declare loudly and forcefully that they agree with their friends, unaware that these friends, in their heart of hearts, probably dislike the movie in question as much as they do, that their friends are just as caught up in the fraud, provoked by a desire to conform to the dictates of the "smart set," a group which, ironically enough, prides itself on not being mere slaves to public opinion.
Personally, I find that the intellectuals and the philistines both leave much to be desired; I have never especially cared for the company of either camp. At the same time, I have long looked to the arts for a sense of being and belonging with my fellow man, in no small part because of my exile (in part self-imposed) from the mass of humanity. Movies have a particular appeal to me, in that they provide a temporary relief from the the day to day ordeal of living inside my head, a unique affliction of the lonely exile who finds people trying yet craves human interaction, the simultaneous misanthrope and romantic, who is perenially disappointed with humanity (including himself), yet indefatigably hopeful about forging meaningful connections with the miniscule number of like-minded souls he cannot stop himself from believing are truly out there somewhere.
As an English teacher and literature afficiando, of course, I swear by the written word, but I must admit that no book has the same immediate power of a movie: the power, that is, really to take you on an intensely visceral journey that truly rockets you out of yourself, makes you forget your life for a short amount of time. While reading a book, no matter how fascinated you are with the material, you are never really wrestled out of your skin; you are ever aware that you sit in your comfortable chair, turning the pages. When at a movie, however, you can actually forget both where and who you are for a time. This isn't to say that movie-watching is superior to book-reading --God forbid!-- only that it is, by nature, a more intimate and hypnotic experience. Words signify things, but images are those things; a movie gives you a short cut to an artificial reality that seems quite actual, while a book only suggests such a place; it is up to the reader to use his own ingenuity and imagination to create its look and feel in his mind's eye.
Put another way, reading is harder work. Movie-viewing is in its very essence a more passive experience. It is only when one is totally passive that one can be most thrillingly ravaged, of course, which is why great movies make for such an immediate and enthralling experience, like a wild roller coaster ride or really good sex.
*****************************************************************************
I see a lot of movies, occasionally accompanied by others but mostly by myself, and most of the time I leave the theater disappointed. I go seeking a lot of things: an interesting story, pithy and witty dialogue, compelling acting and direction, cool visual effects. Sometimes I am impressed in certain ways, and let down in others. I acknowledge where it is good, and lament what it lacks, make a note in my movie log, and move on to the next feature.
But.. I also go to the movies for the same reason I read books-- to seek myself in others, to know that I'm not truly alone in this world, that people out there know the things I know, endure the things I endure, share the same hopes, fears, dreams and passions as me. It is a tall order, I know. Going in with such lofty expectations, with the bar set so high, one cannot help but frequently be crushed with disappointment bordering on despair. So it is. Yet I find that I cannot alter or modify my ideals any more than I could stop breathing. And in the rare cases where my ideals are actually met, it is a joyous and exhilerating occasion.
In the waning months of the 1990s, I saw "Fight Club" and felt shaken to my core; here was a film that, in many crucial ways, spoke to me. I saw myself, not so much in the actual details of the plot, but in the themes it relentlessly pounded home: alienation, discontent, the desire for a more authentic, fulfilled, meaningful life, the pleasures and pitfalls of surrendering to your dark side. It was a rare moment of feeling not-alone, of knowing a connection... seeing it made me feel like more of a person and less of a phantom. Ten years later, in the waning days of the "naughty oughts," in the midst of that dead week between Christmas and New Year's Day, I went to see a movie likely to keep a much lower profile in our popular culture: Richard Linklater's "Me and Orson Welles." Once again, I was rocked, rolled, shaken, and stirred. Only this time, I didn't just feel a thematic affinity; this time, my own memory was roused. I recalled certain events in my life during the waning months of the 80s, twenty years prior. Specifically, I remembered my own youthful experience with a talented and difficult theater director, an experience which in certain ways uncannily mirrored the storyline of the film.
*************************************************************************
The hero of "Me and Orson Welles" is Richard Samuels (Zac Effron), a teenage boy who dreams of making it big in the theater world. He doesn't exactly know what he wants to do (act? write? direct?), but he knows he "wants to be a part of it." Richard, we see very early, has a talent for scamming his way into an operation. Handsome, witty, charming, and well aware of being these things, he radiates a confidence that impresses up-and-coming director Orson Welles, with whom he is brought together one day by fate, chance, or luck. Welles immediately casts Richard in a small role in his ambitious Broadway production of "Julius Caesar," which has been in rehearsal for ages and is running dangerously overbudget.
Once he joins this theater troupe, this daydream-addled kid from the suburbs finds himself in way over his head. Movie critics have largely focused on Christian McKay's virtuoso rendering of Welles, but it is Effron's performance that forms the true emotional core of the movie. Effron is asked both to show the confidence and swagger of one wise beyond his years, and the angst and vulnerability of youth. It's a difficult tightrope to walk, but Effron pulls it off beautifully; the viewer at first admires his gumption, envies his luck, then grows to sympathize and even ache for him as the film races towards its exciting and bittersweet conclusion.
The pivot point of the conflict in the film is the complicated relationship between Richard and Orson. We see the latter primarily through the eyes of the former; he is at once a mentor and an antagonist, a source of admiration and reverence, as well as an object of fear and loathing. As played by McKay, Welles is many things: a brilliant, artistic innovator; a charismatic leader and manipulator; a blustering, temperamental, and irresponsible clown; and a ruthless, egotistical monster. Richard is at first entranced by the ballsy exploits of the larger-than-life director, who dares to improvise dialogue in the middle of a scripted radio play, and who had the effrontery to omit the "to be or not to be" soliloquy from a prior staging of "Hamlet," because he found it irrelevant to the plot. But the boy in time comes to see the black heart of this would-be father-figure; he grows to fear the older man's tyrannical orientation, and eventually comes to despise his total absence of moral scruples. Soon he faces a stark choice: should he countenance the legendary director's behavior in order to further his budding career, or ought he stand up to this sleazy, bullying asshole?
It's a question that many of us have faced at one time or another in our lives. Do we "go along to get along," and tolerate ill-treatment from those with power over us? Or do we confront our oppressors and tell them off, perhaps in so doing putting our careers and livelihoods in danger? It's a shame that this theme is such a perennial one in history; one wishes that power weren't so seductive, that there didn't exist so many authority figures who got off on it, and who so treasured their ability to lord it over their inferiors. But such is life, I suppose, and such is human nature. It would also be neat if pain, despair, and death weren't real, but for whatever reason that isn't the case either. That bullies exist-- and moreover often thrive-- in this world may be something additonal to hold against the world as it is constituted, but anger with the world does nothing to ameliorate the sufferings it afflicts upon us. Life doen't conform to our notion of justice; evil often wins, and good often loses. And a flawed but generally decent person, like Richard, often finds himself ruled by a hateful and despicable jerk like Orson Welles.
"Me and Orson Welles," it so happens, yanked my memory forcibly back to a time when I was close to Richard's age, and found myself in a very similar situation. Of course, in many ways I did not resemble Zac Effron's character; I didn't have half of his charm, and I wasn't a tenth as cute.
I was, however, young, cocky, insecure, and naive. If it sounds contradictory to describe myself as both "cocky" and "insecure" at the same time, remember again the enigma of youth. A young man can be sure of himself in a way no older man could (unless he were the sort who never grew up), yet his ego, swelled as it may seem, is filled mostly with hot air; like an overinflated balloon, it will burst with the merest prick from the tiniest of pins. As it happens, I was about to run into a rather large prick. His name was Vincent Murphy, and in 1989 he had just become the artistic director of the theater department of the college I was attending as a freshman. More on him in a moment.
**************************************************************************
Now that I am nearly 40 years old, how do I begin to comprehend myself at age 18? How does one process the tumult and roiling confusion of that era of his life? The gulf separating the 18 year old boy and the same boy five years prior is unfathomably great. I am now, at the age of 39, pretty much the same man that I was five years ago at age 34, eventful as the last five years have been for me. But between ages 13 and 18 were events that seemed almost catacylsmic in scope, miniscule though they were from anyone's point of view besides my own. I will treat of the specifics of this era in my personal history elsewhere in this account; for now, allow me to introduce myself-- my younger self, that is-- to you.
But prior to any introduction must come a disclaimer of sorts. I have always had a difficult time seeing myself, as it were, due I think in part to having been the sole member of my mother's brood, an "only child," as we have grown accustomed to calling such people. Most children, growing up, are able to obtain some type of understanding of their identities-- however true or false, and for good or for ill-- from their siblings. It is from his brothers and/or sisters that the typical boy is enabled to form an impression of himself, because at some point in his boyhood a boy's peers become the ones to whom he looks for assistance in self-knowledge. His parents, he comes to realize, are hopelessly biased and out of touch; of course they think he's the greatest kid on earth, but his peers, so he thinks, can give him a more realistic picture. (In reality, of course, his peers are just as deceived as his parents, just in a different way and for different reasons.)
For the only child, it is much harder to obtain this peer-driven insight. If he is naturally gregarious, the only child might be able to make a lot of friends, and draw out from them how he ought to see himself, but even in such a case the friends he makes aren't his brothers or sisters; they don't stand in the same relation to his own parents as he does. In any event, since I have always been temperamentally reserved, I was never able, nor especially inclined, to find any substitute brothers or sisters, even though a part of me truly wished to do so. The sure sense of being alone came early and often. It wasn't always an unpleasant feeling-- sometimes it felt quite satisfying, in fact, but it was a fact, just the same: I stood apart; I was on my own. Often I rather liked being alone and apart, and at other times I badly wanted to be "with" others, but regardless of what I wanted, facts were facts. I was different, and I soon found that the perils of seeking company very much outweighed the potential benefits in most cases. (I focus on this period of my life in a separate part of this memoir.)
By the time I hit age 18, however, my perception of myself and the reality of myself were often miles apart. In some sense, I knew this very fact, and it caused me a feeling of dislocation. That is to say, I had a faint impression that my perception of myself was faulty; I perceived the inadequacy of my self-perception. For instance, I liked to see myself as a rebel's rebel, as someone who did his own thing, who wasn't at all intimidated by authority or the tyranny of conventional wisdom. I'd cultivated and nourished this self-image during my senior year of high school, when I'd written a number of scorchingly-opinionated editorial columns for The Forum, the Paideia High School newspaper. Though very much a liberal at the time, I relished the notion of being a gadfly who occasionally took a radically conservative position just to shake up the complacent establishment. I argued that sex education ought to stress abstinence, and that alcohol ought to be made illegal again, as it was in the days of prohibition. On the subject of abortion, a veritable sacred cow at this most progressive of private high schools (a place where the custom was to call your teacher by his or her first name), I was evenhanded, proclaiming myself "bewildered" as to the ultimate question of permissibility; I conducted an impartial interview with both a staunch pro-lifer from Operation Rescue and an adamant pro-choicer from NARAL. My proclaimed agnosticism on this issue contrasted sharply with the orthodox liberal alarmist rhetoric about a slippery slope towards back alleys, coat-hangers, and women being kept down if the composition of the Supreme Court were to change.
On these matters, and others, I flattered myself on flaunting my independent spirit. But in my self-flattery I was wide of the mark, and partly well-aware of this fact, as I have tried to explain here. I must have appeared arrogant, cocky, and self-possessed to some, but anyone who truly saw me knew that I was actually beneath it all a bundle of quivering insecurities. I had intimately come to know humiliation and shame (these events recounted in juicy purple prose elsewhere), and I quaked before such memories in my not-too-distant past. I desperately hoped that such events and experiences would dissolve from my mind, and that similar ones would never occur in the future. And I had-- as I will likewise tell-- in my own naive way grappled vigorously with the riddle of mortality; in the words of J. Alfred Prufrock, I had "seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker/ And in short, I was afraid."
While I knew that I was hardly the person I pretended to be, I still pretended to believe that I was the person I wished I were. But in fall of 1989, during my first experience with "big time" stage acting, I endured a painful reminder of just how pitiful I remained at my core, all fiercely-worded editorials and occasional performance art antics aside.
****************************************************************************
It was a momentous time when it came to world happenings. Astonishing events greeted us on the news every night. The global paradigm we'd grown accustomed to thinking would last forever-- that of the USA and its allies facing off against the USSR and its vassal-states-- suddenly and forcefully shifted when the Communist bloc abruptly imploded under the pent-up pressure of seven decades of repression. Germans jubilantly danced on top of the Berlin Wall and tore out chunks of that long-hated symbol of tyranny; statues of Lenin and Stalin, casting long shadows, were likewise torn asunder.
Yet all of this hubbub, and all of these earth-shaking, history-making, unprecedented events taking place across the globe had but little effect on me at the time; it was all background noise. I was now a college freshman, and consumed with the implications of my new circumstances. The transition had been fairly easy; I hadn't spent much time laboring over college applications, fretting about SAT scores, wondering where I was headed. I knew early that I'd been accepted early to Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia-- a stone's throw from my house-- where my father was a faculty member in the Psychology department. No... I knew where I was going, but what was I going to do with myself when I got there? Like Zac Effron's character in "Me and Orson Welles," I knew I wanted to "be a part" of the artistic scene, but I didn't as yet have a beat on where I wanted to pour my energy. Did I want to act? Write? Direct? Compose music? I enjoyed the notion of doing all of these things, but I felt no urgency as yet to focus on one thing at the expense of any of the others.
I'd received some amount of recognition for my stage performances of late, having managed to land the lead role in the school play my senior year of high school. The summer between graduating high school and starting college, I'd enrolled in a Shakespearian acting workshop with a dozen or so young aspiring thespians of metro Atlanta. I enjoyed acting, and respected the craft of it, but I held back from the notion of totally embracing it as a career, because I found myself put off by the flightiness, flakiness, and self-absorption so frequently displayed by "actor types"; something in the behavior of "theater people" tended to irritate me; there was a pretentiousness, a phoniness, a forced and mannered giddiness and gaiety of spirit that grated on the nerves. The theater profession, I found, largely consisted of uptight and rigidly controlling personalities who tried to pawn themselves off as charmingly quirky and free-spirited; they tried too hard, and protested too much; they felt themselves to be remarkable, special people who wanted the spotlight at all times. True generosity was rare; ego abounded, ran amok, leading to personality clashes and abundant "drama" even behind the scenes.
Still, annoying as they could be, many actors were genuinely dedicated to their craft, and I found the notion of dissolving one's personality into nothingness and taking on the bodily mannerisms, manner of speech, and personality of a entirely different person to be a wonderfully thrilling challenge. While I never had the nerve to gain weight or do otherwise unhealthy things to my body in order to inhabit a role, I greatly admired a "method" man like Robert DeNiro,who wasn't afraid to put his physical well-being on the line for his art, as when he famously packed on layers of fat to play a middle-aged, washed-up Jake LaMotta in "Raging Bull."
I wanted to "be a part of" things, so upon the start of my freshman year, I tried out for a role in the new Theater Emory production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." It so happened that there was a new artistic director that year, who was planning a rather unique presentation of Shakespeare's famous magical-realist romantic comedy, a fantastic yet modern production to be staged on a tilted, oval-shaped platform before a surrealistic backdrop of Dali-melted clocks, a production which would feature characters transforming into animals, groping and pawing one another when they weren't twining together and orgasmically moaning beneath a thin, cotton blanket, the entire lurid procedings set to a 60s rock soundtrack. It was Shakespeare filtered through warmed-over baby-boomer era sexual libertinism, and in in the final analysis quite silly, but visually and conceptually arresting just the same.
I, of course, had no idea what I was stepping into when I entered Studio Annex B, the "black box" theater practice room on campus at the time, with an assigned monologue from Puck, the mischievous sprite of the forest fairies. My lines, I recall, were the ones Puck speaks to Oberon upon finding that Titania has been tricked into falling in love with the hapless Bottom, the pompous would-be leader of the play's working-class acting troupe. I knew next to nothing about the play at that time, but I remember playing up Puck's impishness, making him laugh hysterically at the line, "Titania waked, and straightway loved an ass," like it was all a terrific joke, one that he'd enjoyed immensely.
Vincent Murphy, newly-minted head honcho of Theater Emory, sat behind a table. It was the first time I'd ever laid eyes on "Vinny," as he preferred to be addressed. A roguishly handsome fortyish man of Boston Irish descent, Vinny apparently had a sterling background in the theater industry. With his full head of touseled hair and trademark scarf thrown round his neck, he cut a dashing, dandyish figure; it was easy to see why he was such a hit with the ladies, his crooked teeth and relentless coffee-and-cigarette breath notwithstanding. Vinny had, I was soon to learn, two very divergent personalities: the one he commonly shared with the outside world was charming, humorous, and self-effacing; the other, which he mostly showed in his capacity as a director, was intense, critical, hectoring, and cruel.
On this occasion, Vinny seemed mortally offended by my impromptu interpretation of the Puck speech. He told me to do it again, only this time with the awareness that it was an evil, atrocious thing for Titania to be abused in such a manner. He acted like I should really have known better, like my hysterically chortling version of Puck was an affront to all things decent. I found his self-righteousness on this point somewhat grating and obnoxious, but kept my indignation to myself, and duly delivered the speech in a chastened, mournful tone. Next, I was asked to read as Demetrius, a young man who had fallen in love with a girl named Hermia, but whose love was unrequited. In the process of reading, I was asked to transform into an animal. Not sure what to think of this bizarre task, but not questioning it, I became a howling wolf, braying "HEEERRMMIA! OOOOOOOOOWWWWW!" until I was red in the face.
Vinny seemed much more pleased this time, and sent me on my way with a faint smile. Later, I found that my wolf had landed its prey: I got the part of Demetrius.
************************************************************************
So there I was: a gawky, frizzy-haired freshman, carrying his long, lanky self with a heaping helping of faux-confidence; a fragile little 18-year old boy with big dreams, truckloads of energy and imagination, but no particular focus, waiting for life to give him a cue... And now I had a large role in a big-time Shakespeare play on a major college campus. It was all a bit much to handle. The stress that accumulated over the next few weeks was so dizzyingly intense, I'm not sure how I emerged from the experience without developing an ulcer.
First of all, as I soon found, Vinny Murphy's vision of Shakespeare was, you could say, SUBAR; that is, sexed-up beyond all recognition. As one of the play's young lovers, I was asked to fondle my stage-girlfriend Helena, and to groan and grunt sensually while under a blanket-like scrim atop the weird, disorienting tilted oval stage. Later, during the middle part of the play, when the two young tumultous couples run into the woods and come under the spell of the forest fairies, who cause untold havoc with their misplaced sprinklings of "love juice" upon the heads of dozing, interloping humans, we all were to end up rolling on the floor in a kind of orgiastic group-grope, during which it wasn't at all clear who was "with" whom. As an 18-year old male, at the mercy, not of fantasy-world love potions but of real-world hormones; and being at the time relatively, nay thoroughly sexually inexperienced, this circumstance was incredibly bizarre and uncomfortable. There was a thrill to it as well, of course-- I'd be lying if I claimed otherwise-- but mostly it was embarrassing; it made me feel vulnerable and exposed.
My stage "girlfriend" Helena, in real-life an odd but not unshapely senior girl, would insist on playing backstage improv games to get into character, which consisted of flirty interplay just before a scene, and then (even more so), just before the lights were dimmed before an actual performance. I will leave it to the reader's imagination to conclude how being in close proximity to moaning, undulating, wriggling females on stage can be a perilous situation indeed for a young man; thankfully, my costume was loose and baggy-- a lot of excitement could safely be hidden therein...
As though being thrust into the position of soft-porn Shakespearian thespian weren't enough, I also had to deal with being directed by Vinny, the pompous perv who'd dreamed all this crazy shit up to begin with. It is fair to say that I disliked Vinny from the very start, but this memoir isn't so much about Vinny's character flaws as it is about my quivering youthful cowardice, my failure to stand up to him. I, a fellow who'd long prided himself on doing his own thing, being his own man, taking crap from no one, standing firm on his principles and refusing to conform to social pressure or cave to authority-- I, of all people, allowed myself to be bossed and bullied by this effete, insufferable, scarf-modeling, self-important baby boomer. Why?
There is something in the very act of acting that entails a willingness to put oneself at the mercy of others. It follows that when one is vulnerable, he is also highly suggestible. Thus a director-- being, as he is, in charge of people who at times must empty themselves and tear away their own defenses for the sake of performance --has enormous power. It is power that, in the wrong hands, can be mightily abused, and unfortunately it often is, since those who seek positions of control often do so precisely because they enjoy lording their authority over others. This applies as much in the realm of the arts as it does anywhere else, and it's foolishly naive to believe otherwise; those drawn to the performing arts might think that they're somehow immune to these base motivations, since "art" itself is such an inherently noble and elevated endeavor, but any real experience working with "artsy" people will disabuse one of this at once pollyannish and snobbish notion. The truth is, the theater industry attracts as many scoundrels, charlatans, and manipulative, self-aggrandizing creeps as any other industry-- perhaps more.
However, my suggestibility is only a part of the explanation for my weakness back in the fall of 1989, while rehearsing "A Midsummer Night's Dream" as reimaged by Vinny Murphy at Theater Emory. I was young, new to the college setting, and eager to make a good impression. I wanted to "be a part of things" in the arts world, and I felt privileged and slightly bewildered at having been cast in a major role, having to memorize Elizabethan English I barely understood. Take all of these things together and stir: my tender age, my youthful insecurity (in plain sight under an unconvincing veneer of cockiness), the ordeal of performing in a large role in a high-stakes staging of a classic play, filled with sex, sex, and more sex, at a time when sexuality was still a vast and dangerous mystery; throw in an imperious and belittling director, and it's easy to see how I was helpless before a devastating "perfect storm."
***********************************************************************
Vinny, as I mentioned earlier, had two very different personalites. This Jekell and Hyde syndrome is, I think, a common trait among driven, savvy, and successful people. There was the "good" Vinny, which he showed the world--aimiable, affable, easygoing-- and the one he more often displayed to his underlings-- harsh, demanding, and abrasive. At public functions where he was the face of Theater Emory, Vinny smiled, joked, cajoled, and did the "nice guy" routine, taking humility at times to a striking if contrived extreme, as during his first ever appearance as Emory, when he laid on the floor and invited students and staff to "walk all over" him.
But during rehearsals, a very different V-man made himself known. One refrain I particularly remember from Vinny the director was when he would snap "DON'T LOOK AT ME! I'M NOT HERE!"We would be in the middle of working on a scene, usually involving some heavy petting and fondling, with me there in the middle of the mess, terrified of sprouting an erection and feeling sure that I was a fraud with no real skill among numerous paid actors with years of experience. Then it would get worse.
"Hold!" Vinny would shout. "Demetrius (he called us by our character name), what are you doing?" I would instinctively look up and be instantly, scornfully rebuked-- "DON'T LOOK AT ME! I'M NOT HERE!"-- and would duly look back down at the actress with her hand on my thigh. "Demetrius... you've GOT to use your stage savvy here! You've got to make an acting CHOICE! Right now, I'm looking at you, and I'm seeing NOTHING!" He spoke in a nagging, condescending tone, critical in the extreme, without giving much specific guidance, and certainly with no hint of reassurance. The point always seemed to be that you were wasting his and your fellow actors' time, that you were insulting Shakespeare, a great man who really deserved better, that your incompetence was galling, and that he (Vinny) was a prince for putting up with someone who knew so little about acting, but that his patience was wearing thin, and with good reason... after all, just look at you! You suck!
The worst thing was how he would call you out and expose what he felt were your faults in front of everyone else. You'd be in the middle of a scene with other actors, and you'd hear him shout "Hold!"... and your heart would sink. If you dared not freeze and stay "in the moment," facing your fellow cast members-- if, that is, you dared look up, even for a split second.. you'd be thundered upon again: "DON'T LOOK AT ME! I'M NOT HERE!" Then he would tell you just how poorly you were doing, how you clearly didn't get it, how you ought to know better and it was really inconsiderate of you to take up precious rehearsal time with your lack of preparedness...
I wasn't the only actor that Vinny picked on. I'm not claiming he had any personal vendetta against me. And I'm certainly not saying that my acting was anything close to perfection. I was largely a Shakespeare novice (my summer at the Oglethorpe workshop notwithstanding), and could indeed have used some useful direction, some constructive criticism on how best to recite lines in Elizabethan iambic pentameter while girls are grinding their crotches at you and sticking their tongues in your mouth. And I'm sure that my performance could stand to be vastly improved even if I weren't being forced to do "sensual Shakespeare for dummies."
Still, the manner with which Vinny delievered his critiques didn't invite reflection, only fear. The best directors, after all, challenge their actors without deprecating and humiliating them in front of their peers. Let's even say that the worst were true, that I (and the others whom Vinny made an effort to single out for barbaric ridicule) really did suck. If this were true, then 1) why did he cast me in this role?, and 2) how did I stand to improve if all I heard, in a general way, was that I sucked?
Looking back now, it becomes clear that Vinny's harsh words were obviously not meant to be instructive. Instead, his behavior was all about asserting power and dominance. Vinny was simply a bully who got off on making those beneath him feel lousy. Like all bullies, he never picked on those his own size. Indeed, I began to notice that union politics, of all things, played a role in the pecking order of which Vinny was the Alpha dog. One actor who continually got pummelled with invective, a very nice, stocky, balding guy who played Egeus, and whose name I don't recall, was a non-Equity actor. Students with little clout, freshmen like myself and some others, got lashed hard, while others who were juniors and seniors and who were officers in student theater groups on campus, were left alone. Meantime, professional Equity (that is, union) actors, were coddled, if anything. I do not recall Vinny ever daring to utter a single critical or discouraging word to Atlanta acting fixtures like Brenda Bynum (who played Hippolita/Titania) or Jeffrey Watkins (who played Thesus/Oberon). Of course, the experienced actors were probably less likely to need correction or criticism, but still, the inequality of abuse was nothing if not savage. Yet we all, without exception, endured it. What was our excuse? Why did we not stand up, if not for ourselves, then for each other?
The influence of the unionism in fact contributed greatly to the disagreeable aura of fear and dread that surrounded this show, in ways I hadn't at first imagined. I particularly recall an unpleasant moment with our stage manager, a squat queenly man with glasses and a beard. On a day of a performance, we had to check a box on a sheet that hung outside the dressing room, indicating that we were present. I was in a jocular mood one day-- God only knows why-- and instead of X-ing the box, I wrote "yo!" inside of it. Later that day, the bearded queen walked up to me with a stern, reproachful look, holding a clipboard (stage managers love their clipboards). In a scornful voice, he asked me, "Andy what do you call this?" He poked a chubby finger on my juvenile but harmless (or so I thought) "yo!" salutation. I grinned sheepishly, but his huffy countenance didn't alter one whit. I stammered something like, "Well, it's.... you know....it's just...how I signed in..." and he angrily interrupted: "Do you know that if this were an all-Equity show, that would be grounds for a fine??"
Oh, how I would love to be transported back to my skinny teenage body to relive this moment! I'd tell that mincing, scolding priss just where he could shove his threatened union fine! (Come to think of it, that reply may even have excited him a little...) Unfortunately, at the time, when it counted, I had no such gumption. Instead, I meekly apologized, and the drama queen lowered his schoolmarm's glare and ambled away, shaking his head.
*****************************************************************
Yet again, I am faced with the rude question: Why did I tolerate being lectured so vigorously over something so incredibly stupid? Again, I chalk my cowardice up largely to youth and inexperience, but I think there is something more to it. Because, to repeat, it wasn't just about me; others were getting knocked around and roughed up too. In the aftermath of the "yo" brouhaha, I remember my fellow cast member, Ted Denious, who played my stage rival Lysander, sulkily asking me if I'd gotten "yelled at" as well; it seems that he also had committed the unforgiveable sin of writing a cheeky greeting on the attendance sheet. Someone was always bitching somebody out about something, it seemed-- the powerful feeding on the weak, the weak "learning their place," learning that it was somehow (for some unspoken reason) out of line for them to fight back. No one intervening, no one taking up for themselves or for anyone else... it is a scenario that in my grizzled old age I have come to recognize as all too familiar.
Is it the natural order of the world, this tendency? And if so, is nature really such a great thing to emulate? Perhaps artificiality should be our guide instead.
********************************************************************
Whatever the case, my "nature" at that time made me stay the course, convinced me to keep my legitimate complaints to myself. I suppose there were some benefits to this choice. The abuse mainly ceased after several grueling weeks of rehearsal; our director became "nice guy Vinny" once the show opened; he palled around and joked with the very ones whose spirits he'd crushed and whose egos he'd stomped on just a few days earlier. I think we were happy to see this change; I certainly was-- I was so relieved, in fact, that I forgot I'd ever experienced Vinny's mean and cruel side.
And indeed, clever and crafty mean people-- be they psychopathic killers or just plain garden variety dickheads-- are never vicious bastards all of the time; going this route, they are aware, would only make them hated. Smart and canny self-centered sadistic manipulators know that, pleasurable as it may be to kick your lessers around, you also have to be nice to them sometimes; this way, you can make those stupid suckers actually like you. Weak and unpopular people, after all, crave the recognition of their rulers; it helps them to feel better connected in their sad, lonely world. Charismatic bullies become popular through empolying this very push-pull dynamic; they establish their dominance through fear and intimidation, then act like they are buddies with those they victimized, and in so doing convince their victims that it really wouldn't be fair to hold their bullying behavior against them. And their weak, spineless victims almost invariably go right along with it-- they are played like fiddles, jerked around like puppets, led to do the bidding of the very ones they ought to resist, manipulated into worshipping the tyrants who cause their misery.
As for myself, I would even act in another "Vinny" production as a sophomore (a significantly less sexed-up version of Moliere's "The School For Wives"-- heck, I guess even sex maniacs need to chill out with a post-coital cigarette every now and then...). I took some crap from Vinny during this production, but not nearly as much; I suppose I wasn't quite as ripe for the picking anymore. I had a pretty good run of roles in various plays at Emory until my senior year, when I abruptly decided to ditch theater for good. And in both "Midsummer" and "School" I was singled out for passing praise in an Atlanta newspaper article, which of course was exciting (since I still naively believed at the time that most critics know what the hell they're talking about).
Still... I cannot help but conclude that in staying the course and taking my lumps, I really screwed up quite badly. Indeed, if I had to be on that 1989 production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at Emory University again, I would make a radically different "acting choice": that is, I would have quit. I'd have interrupted one of Vinny's insulting tirades to inform him that he shouldn't talk to people that way, that he ought to treat his actors with respect, that having talent and an extensive repertoire is no excuse to be a jerk.
Oh well-- too late now. Over two decades have passed. Vinny himself, I hear, has retired. The Cold War paradigm, which ended with a bang in late 1989, is now ancient history. Most of the students I teach today go blank when I mention the Berlin Wall. Everything changes. The past recedes.
Then again, IS it too late? After all, pace William Faulkner, "the past isn't gone; it's not even past." Given this profound paradox (unearthed by a brilliant, if often incomprehensible Southern drunkard), is it ever really too late to correct a past mistake?
At age 18-- contrary to my grandiose self-understanding at the time-- I was a coward and a pushover. Now, as I near the start of my fifth decade on this earth, I have grown some backbone, sprouted some guts, achieved some level of testicular fortitude. And so I say, in a sense twenty-something years too late, but in a Faulknerian way right on time:
Fuck you, Vinny! Find yourself a new Demetrius, you overscarved, oversexed, mean, pretenious artfag. I quit.
So... DON'T LOOK AT ME! I'M NOT HERE! See ya. Peace out.
Andy Nowicki's Blog
- Andy Nowicki's profile
- 12 followers
